Sister Emily's Lightship

by Jane Yolen

(click)

  Then God saw that it was good, and told the creatures to be fruitful and multiply

  (click)

  though He forgot to tell them how to stop multiplying, a rather more useful skill one would think. And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

  Then God said, “Let Earth bear living creatures, wild animals of every kind,” by which He meant creatures other than the great monsters, who were already overbreeding on the shores and polluting the seas with their monster bones.

  (click)

  So He brought forth cattle and serpents and herds of horses

  (click)

  (click)

  (click)

  and wombats, snail darters, and the chicken-eating frog. (clickclickclick)

  And God saw—though we may wonder why—that it was good.

  (click)

  And then God said, “Fuck it. I’m not going to make man in my image. I have total recall, both forward and back. I know what a mess he will make of my Earth. And just when I’ve gotten all my firmaments and Mares and snail darters and lights just right.” And He squeezed His fingers together

  (click)

  which made mush of the piece of clay he had been molding,

  (click)

  and threw it down in the middle of the central continent where it formed an odd ridge of mountains

  (click)

  which we today call God’s Pile.

  (click)

  And He made our lovely planet instead, ninth away from the sun.

  (click)

  Lights, please.

  Now, before I deal with the second part of my lecture, the scientific approach to creation, are there any questions?

  —for Salman Rushdie

  Allerleirauh

  HER EARLIEST MEMORY was of rain on a thatched roof, and surely it was a true one, for she had been born in a country cottage two months before time, to her father’s sorrow and her mother’s death. They had sheltered there, out of the storm, and her father had never forgiven himself nor the child who looked so like her mother. So like her, it was said, that portraits of the two as girls might have been exchanged and not even Nanny the wiser.

  So great had been her father’s grief at the moment of his wife’s death, he might even have left the infant there, still bright with birth blood and squalling. Surely the crofters would have been willing, for they were childless themselves. His first thought was to throw the babe away, his wife’s Undoing as he called her ever after, though her official name was Allerleirauh. And he might have done so had she not been the child of a queen. A royal child, whatever the crime, is not to be tossed aside so lightly, a feather in the wind.

  But he had made two promises to the blanched figure that lay on the rude bed, the woolen blankets rough against her long, fair legs. White and red and black she had been then. White of skin, like the color of milk after the whey is skimmed out. Red as the toweling that carried her blood, the blood they could not staunch, the life leaching out of her. And black, the color of her eyes, the black seas he used to swim in, the black tendrils of her hair.

  “Promise me.” Her voice had stumbled between those lips, once red, now white.

  He clasped her hands so tightly he feared he might break them, though it was not her bones that were brittle, but his heart. “I promise,” he said. He would have promised her anything, even his own life, to stop the words bleeding out of that white mouth. “I promise.”

  “Promise me you will love the child,” she said, for even in her dying she knew his mind, knew his heart, knew his dark soul. “Promise.”

  And what could he do but give her that coin, the first of two to close her dead eyes?

  “And promise me you will not marry again, lest she be…” and her voice trembled, sighed, died.

  “Lest she be as beautiful as thee,” he promised wildly in the high tongue, giving added strength to his vow. “Lest she have thy heart, thy mind, thy breasts, thy eyes…” and his rota continued long past her life. He was speaking to a dead woman many minutes and would not let himself acknowledge it, as if by naming the parts of her he loved, he might keep her alive, the words bleeding out of him as quickly as her lost blood.

  “She is gone, my lord,” said the crofter’s wife, not even sure of his rank except that he was clearly above her. She touched his shoulder for comfort, a touch she would never have ventured in other circumstances, but tragedy made them kin.

  The king’s litany continued as if he did not hear, and indeed he did not. For all he heard was the breath of death, that absence made all the louder by his own sobs.

  “She is dead, Sire,” the crofter said. He had known the king all along, but had not mentioned it till that one moment. Blunter than his wife, he was less sure of the efficacy of touch. “Dead.”

  And this one final word the king heard.

  “She is not dead!” he roared, bringing the back of his hand around to swat the crofter’s face as if he were not a giant of a man but an insect. The crofter shuddered and was silent, for majesty does make gnats of such men, even in their own homes. Even there.

  The infant, recognizing no authority but hunger and cold, began to cry at her father’s voice. On and on she bawled, a high, unmusical strand of sound till the king dropped his dead wife’s hand, put his own hands over his ears, and ran from the cottage screaming, “I shall go mad!”

  He did not, of course. He ranged from distracted to distraught for days, weeks, months, and then the considerations of kingship recalled him to himself. It was his old self recalled: the distant, cold, considering king he had been before his marriage. For marriage to a young, beautiful, foreign-born queen had changed him. He had been for those short months a better man, but not a better ruler. So the counselors breathed easier, certainly. The barons and nobles breathed easier, surely. And the peasants—well, the peasants knew a hard hand either way, for the dalliance of kings has no effect on the measure of rain nor the seasons in the sun, no matter what the poets write or the minstrels pluck upon their strings.

  Only two in the kingdom felt the brunt of his neglect. Allerleirauh, of course, who would have loved to please him; but she scarcely knew him. And her Nanny, who had been her mother’s Nanny, and was brought across the seas to a strange land. Where Allerleirauh knew hunger, the nurse knew hate. She blamed the king as he blamed the child for the young queen’s death, and she swore in her own dark way to bring sorrow to him and his line.

  The king was mindful in his own way of his promises. Kingship demands attention to be paid. He loved his daughter with the kindness of kings, which is to say he ordered her clothed and fed and educated to her station. But he did not love her with his heart. How could he, having seen her first cloaked in his wife’s blood? How could he, having named her Undoing?

  He had her brought to him but once a year, on the anniversary of his wife’s death, that he might remind himself of her crime. That it was also the anniversary of Allerleirauh’s birth, he did not remark. She thought he remembered, but he did not.

  So the girl grew unremarked and unloved, more at home in the crofter’s cottage where she had been born. And remembering each time she sat there in the rain—learning the homey crafts from the crofter’s stout wife—that first rain.

  The king did not marry again, though his counselors advised it. Memory refines what is real. Gold smelted in the mind’s cauldron is the purer. No woman could be as beautiful to him as the dead queen. He built monuments and statues, commissioned poems and songs. The palace walls were hung with portraits that resembled her, all in color—the skin white as snow, the lips red as blood, the hair black as raven’s wings. He lived in a mausoleum and did not notice the live beauty for the dead one.

  Years went by, and though each spring messengers went through the kingdom seeking a maiden “white and black and red,” the king’s own specifications, they came home each summer’s end to stare disconsolately at the dead queen’s portraits.

  “Not one?” the king would ask.
/>
  “Not one,” the messengers replied. For the kingdom’s maidens had been blonde or brown or redheaded. They had been pale or rosy or tan. And even those sent abroad found not a maid who looked like the statues or spoke like the poems or resembled in the slightest what they had all come to believe the late queen had been.

  So the king went through spring and summer and into snow, still unmarried and without a male heir.

  In desperation, his advisers planned a great three-day ball, hoping that—dressed in finery—one of the rejected maidens of the kingdom might take on a queenly air. Notice was sent that all were to wear black the first night, red the second, and white the third.

  Allerleirauh was invited, too, though not by the king’s own wishes. She was told of the ball by her nurse.

  “I will make you three dresses,” the old woman said. “The first dress will be as gold as the sun, the second as silver as the moon, and the third one will shine like the stars.” She hoped that in this way, the princess would stand out. She hoped in this way to ruin the king.

  Now if this were truly a fairy tale (and what story today with a king and queen and crofter’s cottage is not?) the princess would go outside to her mother’s grave. And there, on her knees, she would learn a magic greater than any craft, a woman’s magic compounded of moonlight, elopement, and deceit. The neighboring kingdom would harbor her, the neighboring prince would marry her, her father would be brought to his senses, and the moment of complete happiness would be the moment of story’s end. Ever after is but a way of saying: “There is nothing more to tell.” It is but a dissembling. There is always more to tell. There is no happy ever after. There is happy on occasion and happy every once in a while. There is happy when the memories do not overcome the now.

  But this is not a fairy tale. The princess is married to her father and, always having wanted his love, does not question the manner of it. Except at night, late at night, when he is away from her bed and she is alone in the vastness of it.

  The marriage is sanctioned and made pure by the priests, despite the grumblings of the nobles. One priest who dissents is murdered in his sleep. Another is burned at the stake. There is no third. The nobles who grumble lose their lands. Silence becomes the conspiracy; silence becomes the conspirators.

  Like her mother, the princess is weak-wombed. She dies in childbirth surrounded by that silence, cocooned in it. The child she bears is a girl, as lovely as her mother. The king knows he will not have to wait another thirteen years.

  It is an old story.

  Perhaps the oldest.

  Sun/Flight

  THEY CALL ME THE nameless one. My mother was the sea, and the sun itself fathered me. I was born fully clothed and on my boyish cheeks the beginnings of a beard. Whoever I was, wherever I came from, had been washed from me by the waves in which I was found.

  And so I have made many pasts for myself. A honey-colored mother cradling me. A father with his beard short and shaped like a Minoan spade. Sisters and brothers have I gifted myself. And a home that smelled of fresh-strewn reeds and olives ripening on the trees. Sometimes I make myself a king’s son, god-born, a javelin in my hand and a smear of honeycake on my lips. Other times I am a craftsman’s child, with a length of golden string threaded around my thumbs. Or the son of a dmos, a serf, ray back arched over the furrows where little birds search for seeds like farmers counting the crop. With no remembered pasts, I can pick a different one each day to suit my mood, to cater my need.

  But most of the time I think myself the child of the birds, for when the fishermen pulled me up from the sea, drowned of my past, I clutched a single feather in my hand. The feather was golden, sun-colored, and when it dried it was tufted with yellow rays. I carried it with me always, my talisman, my token back across the Styx. No one knew what bird had carried this feather in its wing or tail. The shaft is strong and white and the barbs soft. The little fingers of down are no-color at all; they change with the changing light.

  So I am no-name, son of no-bird, pulled from the waters of the sea north and east of Delos, too far for swimming, my only sail the feather in my hand.

  The head of the fishermen who rescued me was a morose man called Talos who would have spoken more had he no tongue at all. But he was a good man, for all that he was silent. He gave me advice but once, and had I listened then, I would not be here, now, in a cold and dark cavern listening to voices from my unremembered past and fearing the rising of the sun.

  When Talos plucked me from the water, he wrung me out with hands that were horned from work. He made no comment at all about my own hands, whose softness the water-wrinkles could not disguise. He brought me home to his childless wife. She spread honey-balm on my burns, for my back and right side were seared as if I had been drawn from the flames instead of from the sea. The puckered scars along my side are still testimony to that fire. Talos was convinced I had come from the wreckage of a burning ship, though no sails or spars were ever found. But the only fire I could recall was red and round as the sun.

  Of fire and water was I made, Talos’ wife said. Her tongue ran before her thoughts always. She spoke twice, once for herself and once for her speechless husband. “Of sun and sea, my only child,” she would say, fondly stroking my wine-dark hair, touching the feather I kept pinned to my chiton. “Bird child. A gift of the sky, a gift from the sea.”

  So I stayed with them. Indeed, where else could I, still a boy, go? And they were content. Except for the scar seaming my side, I was thought handsome. And my fingers were clever with memories of their own. They could make things of which I had no conscious knowledge: miniature buildings of strange design, with passages that turned back upon themselves; a mechanical bull-man that could move about and roar when wound with a hand-carved key.

  “Fingers from the gods,” Talos’ wife said. “Such fingers. You’re father must have been Hephaestus, though you have Apollo’s face.” And she added god after god to my string, a litany that comforted her until Talos’ warning grunt stemmed the rising tide of her words.

  At last my good looks and my clever fingers brought me to the attention of the local lord, I the nameless one, the child of sun and sea and sky. That lord was called Circinus. He had many slaves and many bondsmen, but only one daughter, Perdix.

  She was an ox-eyed beauty, with a long neck. Her slim, boyish body, her straight, narrow nose, reminded me somehow of my time before the waves, though I could not quite say how. Her name was signed from every man’s lips, but no one dared speak it aloud.

  Lord Circinus asked for my services and, reluctantly, Talos and his wife let me go. He merely nodded a slow acceptance. She wept all over my shoulder before I left, a second drowning. But I, eager to show the Lord Circinus my skills, paid them scant attention.

  It was then that Talos unlocked his few words for me.

  “Do not fly too high, my son,” he said. And like his wife, repeated himself. “Do not fly too high.”

  He meant Perdix, of course, for he had seen my eyes on her. But I was just newly conscious of my body’s desires. I could not, did not listen.

  That was how I came into Lord Circinus’ household, bringing nothing but the clothes I wore, the feather of my past, and the strange talent that lived in my hands. In Lord Circinus’ house I was given a sleeping room and a workroom and leave to set the pattern of my days.

  Work was my joy and my excuse. I began simply, making clay-headed dolls, with wooden trunks and jointed limbs, testing out the tools that Circinus gave me. But soon I moved away from such childish things and constructed a dancing floor of such intricately mazed panels of wood, I was rewarded with a pocket of gold.

  I never looked boldly upon the Lady Perdix. It was not my place. But I glanced longways, from the corners of my eyes. And somehow she must have known. For it was not long before she found my workroom and came to tease me with her boy’s body and quick tongue. Like my stepfather Talos, I had no magic in my answers, only in my fingers, and Perdix always laughed at me twice: once for
my slow speech and once for the quick flush that quickly burned my cheeks after each exchange.

  I recall the first time she came upon me as I worked on a mechanical bird that could fly in short bursts towards the sun. She entered the workroom and stood by my side watching for a while. Then she put her right hand over mine. I could feel the heat from her hand burn me, all the way up my arm, though this burning left no visible scar.

  “My Lady,” I said. So I had been instructed to address her. She was a year younger than I. “It is said that a woman should wait upon a man’s moves.”

  “If that were so,” she answered swiftly, “all women would be called Penelope. But I would have woven a different ending to that particular tale.” She laughed. “Too much waiting without an eye upon her, makes a maid mad.”

  Her wordy cleverness confounded me and I blushed. But she lifted her hand from mine and, still laughing, left the room.

  It was a week before she returned. I did not even hear her enter, but when I turned around she was sitting on the floor with her skirts rolled halfway up her thighs. Her tanned legs flashed unmistakable signs at me that I dared not answer.

  “Do you think it better to wait for a god or wait upon a man?” she asked, as if a week had not come between her last words and these.

  I mumbled something about a man having but one form and a god many, and concluded lamely that perhaps, then, waiting for a god would be more interesting.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “many girls have waited for a god to come. But not I. Men can be made gods, you know.”

  I did not know, and confessed it.

  “My cousin Danae,” she said, “said that great Zeus had come into her lap in a shower of gold. But I suspect it was a more mundane lover. After all, it has happened many times before that a man has showered gold into a girl’s skirts and she opens her legs to him. That does not make him a god, or his coming gold.” She laughed that familiar low laugh and added under her breath, “Cousin Danae always did have a quick answer for her mistakes.”