Sister Emily's Lightship

by Jane Yolen

  “Like you, my Lady?” I asked.

  She answered me with a smile and stood up slowly. As I watched, she walked towards me, stopping only inches away. I could scarcely breathe. She took the feather off the workbench where it lay among my tools and ran it down my chest. I was dressed only in a linen loincloth, my chiton set aside, for it was summer and very very hot.

  I must have sighed. I know I bit my lip. And then she dropped the feather and it fluttered slowly to the floor. She used her fingers in the feather’s place, and they were infinitely more knowing than my own. They found the pattern of my scar and traced it slowly as a blind child traces the raised fable on a vase.

  I stepped through the last bit of space between us and put my arms around her as if I were fitting the last piece of my puzzle into a maze. For a moment we stood as still as any frieze; then she pushed me backwards and I tumbled down. But I held on to her, and she fell on top of me, fitting her mouth to mine.

  Perdix came to my room that night, and the next I went to hers. And she made me a god. And so it continued night after night, a pattern as complicated as any I could devise, and as simple, too. I could not conceive of it ending.

  But end it did.

  One night she did not tap lightly at my door and slip in, a shadow in a night of shadows. I thought perhaps her moon time had come, until the next morning in the hallway near my workroom when I saw her whisper into the ear of a new slave. He had skin almost as dark as the wings of the bittern, and wild black hair. His nostrils flared like a beast’s. Perdix placed her hand on his shoulder and turned him to face me. When I flushed with anger and with pain, they both laughed, he taking his cue from her, a scant beat behind.

  Night could not come fast enough to hide my shame. I lay on my couch and thought I slept. A dream voice from the labyrinth that is my past cried out to me, in dark and brutish tones. I rose, not knowing I rose, and took my carving knife in hand. Wrapped only in night’s cloak, the feather stuck in my hair, I crept down the corridors of the house.

  I sniffed the still air. I listened for every sound. And then I heard it truly, the monster from my dream, agonizing over its meal. It screamed and moaned and panted and wept, but the tears that fell from its bullish head were as red as human blood.

  I saw it, I tell you, in her room crouched over her, devouring my lady, my lost Perdix. My knife was ready, and I fell upon its back, black Minotaur of my devising. But it slid from the bed and melted away in the darkness, and my blade found her waiting heart instead.

  She made no sound above a sigh.

  My clever fingers, so nimble, so fast, could not hold the wound together, could not seam it closed. She seemed to be leaking away through my clumsy hands.

  Then I heard a rush of wings, as if her soul had flown from the room. And I knew I had to fly after her and fetch her back before she left this world forever. So I took the feather from my hair and, dipping it into the red ocean of her life, printed great bloody wings, feathered tracings, along my shoulders and down my arms. And I flew high, high after her and fell into the bright searing light of dawn.

  When they found me in the morning, by her bedside, crouched naked by her corpse, scarred with her blood, they took me, all unprotesting, to Lord Circinus. He had me thrown into this dark cave.

  Tomorrow, before the sun comes again, I will be brought from this place and tied to a post sunk in the sand.

  Oh, the cleverness of it, the cleverness. It might have been devised by my own little darling, my Perdix, for her father never had her wit. The post is at a place beyond the high water mark and I will be bound to it at the ebb. All morning my father, the sun, will burn me, and my father the rising tide will melt the red feathers of blood that decorate my chest and arms and side. And I will watch myself go back into the waters from which I was first pulled, nameless but alive.

  Of fire and water I came, of fire and water I return. Talos was right. I flew too high. Truly there is no second fooling of the Fates.

  Dick W. and His Pussy; or, Tess and Her Adequate Dick

  ONCE UPON A TIME—I say that up front so you will know this is a fairy tale and not just another wish-fulfillment fantasy—there was a boy named Adequate Dick. Unfortunate, but true. His mother, being no better than she should have been, but a beauty nonetheless, named him after that which had brought her much fame though little fortune.

  When she saw that having a child narrowed her client base, she abandoned him. Simply dropped him off at the nearest dock: Whittington Pier. If she had dropped him off the dock instead of at it, this story would have been considerably shorter.

  Adequate Dick knocked about the port for quite some time, about fifteen years to be exact, eventually taking the dock’s name as his own, after much pier counseling. He was handsome; in that, he took after his mother. But in all other ways he was like his dad: adequate.

  At last one day he was hired by a kind merchant who was always on the lookout for cheap labor.

  “Will you come and work for me, Adequate Dick Whittington Pier?” asked the merchant.

  “I will,” said Adequate Dick.

  They shook hands but signed no papers. In those days no one could write, though most had handshakes down pat.

  Now, the boy quickly came to the attention of the merchant’s pretty daughter, Tess, who had a fondness for lower-class Dicks. She gave him money and considerable other favors, which Adequate Dick, being well named and handsome but not particularly favored in the brains department, took as a compliment.

  He took a few other things as well: her silver ring, a glass vase, a small nude portrait done on ivory. He didn’t take Tess’s virtue. She had none left for him to take.

  The merchant knew that cheap labor has a way of drifting, and so to keep his servants happy and at home, he gave them certain allowances. He allowed them once a year to give him something of theirs to take on his voyage, something the merchant might sell to make their fortunes. None of them ever got rich this way, of course. But, as if it were a sixteenth-century lottery, the chance of becoming millionaires overnight kept all the servants trying and at home. Very trying and quite at home.

  Adequate Dick had nothing to give the merchant but a cat named Pussy (and the things he had taken from Tess, but those he would not part with). But when it was his turn, he handed over his pet without a thought. “Pussy could make my fortune,” he thought, thereby proving himself his mother’s boy. The vegetable does not fall very far from the tree.

  Tess could have warned him that his chances for a fortune were slim at best. But she didn’t want him leaving anyway. “Why waste a perfectly adequate Dick?” was her motto.

  So far—I can hear you saying—this sounds like a folktale, what with the merchant and his pretty daughter, a servant and his cat. Or maybe it sounds like the plot of an eighteenth-century picaresque novel. Or a grainy, naughty black-and-white French film. But how can it be a fairy tale? It has no fairies in it. Or magic.

  And you would be right. Right—but impatient.

  Wait for it.

  The merchant’s ship ran aground on a small island kingdom and he was thought lost to the world. The household, like a boat, began to founder; the servants to look for other work. Adequate Dick, being last hired, was first fired, so he went off toward the familiar docks to seek his fortune. Without—of course—his Pussy. Either one.

  So what of Tess?

  She tried to take over her father’s firm. She was the merchant’s only child, after all. But the men who worked for her complained.

  “She has,” they said, “no Adequate Dick. And who can run a business without one?” It was true. Her Adequate Dick had gone back to his piers.

  Then a miracle!

  You must allow me a miracle.

  Surely miracles will do in a tale when magic is nowhere to be found. Miracles are magic processed by faith and a lack of a scientific imagination.

  The merchant returned home unexpectedly, but just in time it seems, with much gold in his ship’s hold. The i
sland kingdom where he had run aground had itself been overrun by rats. That he had Pussy to sell was a great fortune. Or a miracle. Or a serendipity. Or a fairy tale. Or the kind of luck a Donald Trump would envy. (Speaking of adequate Dicks.)

  So he sold Dick’s Pussy. But little did he know the consequences of such a sale. For miracles are not singular. They lean on one another, like art on art. No sooner was Pussy sold than Tess—far away in London—found herself changed beyond measure. That is, she could measure the change. It occurred between her legs.

  Was she surprised? Not really. It was merely form following function.

  The merchant returned home rich beyond counting.

  “Where is that Adequate Dick?” he asked when he entered the door.

  “Oh, Father!” Tess cried. “He has gone. But something rare has occurred. Something better than Adequate.”

  Her father did not listen. He was not a man to believe in the miraculous beyond the swelling of a purse. “Better get him back, then,” he said. “He has wealth and treasure.”

  “As do I,” thought Tess, pausing to spit accurately by the stoop. Then she ran down the road to call Adequate Dick home, crying: “Turn again, Whittington Pier.” She had never called him by his first name outside her bedroom.

  He heard her, and he turned.

  And returned.

  Now that he was rich, Tess could marry him, though, given the circumstances, she never slept with him again. He was no longer of the lower classes and he was—after all—only an adequate Dick.

  She had better.

  Become a Warrior

  Both the hunted and the hunter pray to God.

  THE MOON HUNG like a bloody red ball over the silent battlefield. Only the shadows seemed to move. The men on the ground would never move again. And their women, sick with weeping, did not dare the field in the dark. It would be morning before they would come like crows to count their losses.

  But on the edge of the field there was a sudden tiny movement, and it was no shadow. Something small was creeping to the muddy hem of the battleground. Something knelt there, face shining with grief. A child, a girl, the youngest daughter of the king who had died that evening surrounded by all his sons.

  The girl looked across the dark field and, like her mother, like her sisters, like her aunts, did not dare put foot on to the bloody ground. But then she looked up at the moon and thought she saw her father’s face there. Not the father who lay with his innards spilled out into contorted hands. Not the one who had braided firesticks in his beard and charged into battle screaming. She thought she saw the father who had always sung her to sleep against the night terrors. The one who sat up with her when Great Graxyx haunted her dreams.

  “I will do for you, Father, as you did for me,” she whispered to the moon. She prayed to the goddess for the strength to accomplish what she had just promised.

  Then foot by slow foot, she crept onto the field, searching in the red moon’s light for the father who had fallen. She made slits of her eyes so she would not see the full horror around her. She breathed through her mouth so that she would not smell all the deaths. She never once thought of the Great Graxyx who lived—so she truly believed—in the black cave of her dressing room. Or any of the hundred and six gibbering children Graxyx had sired. She crept across the landscape made into a horror by the enemy hordes. All the dead men looked alike. She found her father by his boots.

  She made her way up from the boots, past the gaping wound that had taken him from her, to his face which looked peaceful and familiar enough, except for the staring eyes. He had never stared like that. Rather his eyes had always been slotted, against the hot sun of the gods, against the lies of men. She closed his lids with trembling fingers and put her head down on his chest, where the stillness of the heart told her what she already knew.

  And then she began to sing to him.

  She sang of life, not death, and the small gods of new things. Of bees in the hive and birds on the summer wind. She sang of foxes denning and bears shrugging off winter. She sang of fish in the sparkling rivers and the first green uncurlings of fern in spring. She did not mention dying, blood, or wounds, or the awful stench of death. Her father already knew this well and did not need to be recalled to it.

  And when she was done with her song, it was as if his corpse gave a great sigh, one last breath, though of course he was dead already half the night and made no sound at all. But she heard what she needed to hear.

  By then it was morning and the crows came. The human crows as well as the black birds, poking and prying and feeding on the dead.

  So she turned and went home and everyone wondered why she did not weep. But she had left her tears out on the battlefield.

  She was seven years old.

  Dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.

  Before the men who had killed her father and who had killed her brothers could come to take all the women away to serve them, she had her maid cut her black hair as short as a boy’s. The maid was a trembling sort, and the hair cut was ragged. But it would do.

  She waited until the maid had turned around and leaned down to put away the shears. Then she put her arm around the woman and with a quick knife’s cut across her throat killed her, before the woman could tell on her. It was a mercy, really, for she was old and ugly and would be used brutally by the soldiers before being slaughtered, probably in a slow and terrible manner. So her father had warned before he left for battle.

  Then she went into the room of her youngest brother, dead in the field and lying by her father’s right hand. In his great wooden chest she found a pair of trews that had probably been too small for him, but were nonetheless too long for her. With the still-bloody knife she sheared the legs of the trews a hand’s width, rolled and sewed them with a quick seam. All the women of her house could sew well, even when it had to be done quickly. Even when it had to be done through half-closed eyes. Even when the hem was wet with blood. Even then.

  When she put on the trews, they fit, though she had to pull the drawstring around the waist quite tight and tie the ribbands twice around her. She shrugged into one of her brother’s shirts as well, tucking it down into the waistband. Then she slipped her bloody knife into the shirt sleeve. She wore her own riding boots, which could not be told from a boy’s, for her brother’s boots were many times too big for her.

  Then she went out through the window her brother always used when he set out to court one of the young and pretty maids. She had watched him often enough though he had never known she was there, hiding beside the bed, a dark little figure as still as the night.

  Climbing down the vine, hand over hand, was no great trouble either. She had done it before, following after him. Really, what a man and a maid did together was most interesting, if a bit odd. And certainly noisier than it needed to be.

  She reached the ground in moments, crossed the garden, climbed over the outside wall by using a turned tree as her ladder. When she dropped to the ground, she twisted her ankle a bit, but she made not the slightest whimper. She was a boy now. And she knew they did not cry.

  In the west a cone of dark dust was rising up and advancing on the fortress, blotting out the sky. She knew it for the storm that many hooves make as horses race across the plains. The earth trembled beneath her feet. Behind her, in their rooms, the women had begun to wail. The sound was thin, like a gold filiment thrust into her breast. She plugged her ears that their cries could not recall her to her old life, for such was not her plan.

  Circling around the stone skirting of the fortress, in the shadow so no one could see her, she started around toward the east. It was not a direction she knew. All she knew was that it was away from the horses of the enemy.

  Once she glanced back at the fortress that had been the only home she had ever known. Her mother, her sisters, the other women stood on the battlements looking toward the west and the storm of riders. She could hear their wailing, could see the movement of their arms as they beat upon their breasts.
She did not know if that were a plea or an invitation.

  She did not turn to look again.

  To become a warrior, forget the past.

  Three years she worked as a serving lad in a fortress not unlike her own but many days’ travel away. She learned to clean and to carry, she learned to work after a night of little sleep. Her arms and legs grew strong. Three years she worked as the cook’s boy. She learned to prepare geese and rabbit and bear for the pot, and learned which parts were salty, which sweet. She could tell good mushrooms from bad and which greens might make the toughest meat palatable.

  And then she knew she could no longer disguise the fact that she was a girl for her body had begun to change in ways that would give her away. So she left the fortress, starting east once more, taking only her knife and a long loop of rope which she wound around her waist seven times.

  She was many days hungry, many days cold, but she did not turn back. Fear is a great incentive.

  She taught herself to throw the knife and hit what she aimed at. Hunger is a great teacher.

  She climbed trees when she found them in order to sleep safe at night. The rope made such passages easier.

  She was so long by herself, she almost forgot how to speak. But she never forgot how to sing. In her dreams she sang to her father on the battlefield. Her songs made him live again. Awake she knew the truth was otherwise. He was dead. The worms had taken him. His spirit was with the goddess, drinking milk from her great pap, milk that tasted like honey wine.

  She did not dream of her mother or of her sisters or of any of the women in her father’s fortress. If they died, it had been with little honor. If they still lived, it was with less.

  So she came at last to a huge forest with oaks thick as a goddess’ waist. Over all was a green canopy of leaves that scarcely let in the sun. Here were many streams, rivulets that ran cold and clear, torrents that crashed against rocks, and pools that were full of silver trout whose meat was sweet. She taught herself to fish and to swim, and it would be hard to say which gave her the greater pleasure. Here, too, were nests of birds, and that meant eggs. Ferns curled and then opened, and she knew how to steam them, using a basket made of willow strips and a fire from rubbing sticks against one another. She followed bees to their hives, squirrels to their hidden nuts, ducks to their watered beds.