Imaginarium 3

by Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall (ed) (v5. 0) (epub)

  Rainer had two young sons, and one of them joined him on harmonica, while the other—little Peter, just five years old—pounded on a tambourine. His daughter Freya sang along. Lizzie and Mandy hung close—the older boy, James, would be a handsome specimen in a few years. At twelve, he already had his two young cousins hypnotized.

  If they were my daughters, I would have just pulled them away.

  But their mother, Janet, scarcely noticed them.

  She hung at the very edge of the lantern light. Her shoulders were slumped—her head bowed into one hand.

  I might have wondered if she hadn’t just heard about Gudrun—if she hadn’t some reason for mourning my elder sister. She seemed like a woman grieving. I might have gone to her, and put my hand on her shoulder, and said, there there, dear, the way that people are wont.

  As I watched, she stepped back from the circle, and moved off. At this, I pushed myself from my chair, and make to follow her. And as I did so—I did wonder.

  Could she have heard of Gudrun’s fate? Could someone else have seen my sister, slipped past the quiet kitchen as did I—and told Janet?

  Was that how it was to be? In spite of myself, I drew a breath, sharply. She climbed the steps to the porch, and cast about, as though looking for someone—as though making certain someone was not there.

  I should not have been there. I should have let matters unfold as they were laid out. A watched pot never boils, yes? But of course that’s not true. A flame will heat water, whether it’s eyeballed or not.

  She walked along the porch—peered into a dark window—ran her hands through her hair, as though making up her mind. As if it hadn’t already been made up, for her.

  I might have joined her on the porch. I might have told her how well she had planned the gathering—how beautiful the lanterns were, how the picnic tables were just right . . . how wonderful a touch were the privies, set so far from the old house that old Agatha had bequeathed us, when we all came here those hundred years past—with nothing but bad luck and worse debts.

  I might have told her how so very worthy she was.

  But I didn’t. I held back as she went back to the screen door, pulled it open, and went inside.

  I stood still on the dark lawn, as Rainer finished his song and a cheer went up. “Another one!” cried a child, and Rainer laughed and said, “Well, one more,” and started to pick at his guitar again, and a light went on in the window. Was William finished? It was difficult to tell, for there was no commotion that followed, as more lights went on—as Janet explored her new home . . . met her new master.

  I found myself humming along with Rainer’s song. It was a French song and I don’t speak French, but it had a happy tune. It was time to turn from the house, and I continued down the path—until I stood at the lookout. The music grew quieter, and I heard birdsong—the cool breeze rattling the branches of the trees down the deep slope.

  The wall here was high. It wasn’t meant to be easy to go over it . . . you had to really mean to clamber up, and launch yourself into the air off Agatha’s Perch. By the time you were up, you’d know whether you had reason to stay.

  I drew a deep lungful of the night air, and placed my hands on the round river rocks that made the wall, and I held that breath. It wasn’t long, although it seemed an eternity.

  When I exhaled, I turned and saw Gunnar. He stood tall, and shirtless—smeared with congealing grease and sweat, and gristle. The moonlight made hollows of his eyes. His mouth hung open.

  I opened my arms for him, and dutifully, he came to me. And he kissed me, my favourite grandson did, as I had always dreamed and wished and hoped.

  JAZZMAN/PUPPET

  Joan Crate

  The wooden box holds a jazz-man puppet.

  Felt lips on a papier-mâché head

  fold around the mouthpiece of a plastic sax.

  Wrists leak polyester stuffing and wire fingers

  coax out black liquorice notes—

  I saw you standing alone.

  A woman looks out the window

  at another time, watches with whisky vision

  brake lights bleeding on wet asphalt

  as she makes a stop in the past,

  Gentle in my Mind.

  She remembers the jazzman like it was yesterday

  or 30 years ago—an ’80s disco, glitter, ganja,

  his sax leaping over the keyboard

  to shoot golden notes in her eyes

  You are my shining star.

  A guitar calls the tune and the jazzman answers

  with a refrain that pours a Manhattan in a crystal glass

  on a 16th floor balcony overlooking the city.

  A breast nudges his arm, fireflies buzz his lips

  falling

  through time

  on mine.

  He studies the woman by the window,

  wants to call her name but his mouth makes music

  not words—

  silver scales and constellations

  shimmering through a puppet’s invented mind,

  his mouth seared by hot licks and a glue gun,

  and Smoke gets in my eyes.

  I watch him play, in love and lost

  in a world of pitch and riff, a young woman

  in an old body taken aback by a paper and wire man—

  a stage prop captured in a brain shot through

  with secret passages and trap doors, how

  I remember you.

  The gold front tooth of another sunrise

  fills dancers with early-morning ache.

  It’s late, very late.

  Musicians put down their instruments.

  Lovers and players slink out the door.

  Bye, bye love.

  Jazzman packs up his sax and waves later, y’all.

  On his way home, he’ll think of me

  lingering in a brass alley of dropped chords.

  He’ll open his mouth to speak, but there’s only

  echoes, only what once was and now isn’t,

  only upstairs to that charcoal sketch of a room

  with bills littering the table, flies on the sill,

  longing and a light bulb burnt out,

  only the blues.

  Daylight pushes

  her old refrain through the pane,

  cuts him in ribbons. Tears drip to my jaw.

  Cry Me a River.

  Jazz man closes his painted lids

  and drifts down a memory—

  nothing but music, nothing

  but an instrument, the idea of sound,

  a puppet animated and shoved in a wooden box—

  that long-ago room

  a reed of recollection

  swing of loneliness,

  loops of time.

  Tell me Jazzman,

  Do I ever cross your mind?

  USHAKIRAN

  Laura Friis

  The earliest movements she knows are not her mother’s movements but the sea rocking her mother, who lies unconscious on the ship’s deck, rescued. In that way, the sea can be said to be her mother.

  She is born under the morning star, and so is named Ushakiran. The surgeon delivers her into a world of storms and blood, of darkness and creaking wood, of a blanket wrapped close around her, cold arms that cannot hold her.

  She is fed on goat’s milk and honey by the surgeon, Jathe. She spends the first days of her life strapped to his chest while he works. She should not live, but she does.

  “When are you going to find that brat a home?” the Captain asks him every time they make port, and Jathe knows he should foster her somewhere; he knows, but he cannot.

  “Soon,” he says, and he thinks of wet-nurses and fevers, of tongue-blister, of drunkards and starving men, dirt, famine. He brings the baby back to the ship, every time.

  H
e has never married, never had a home since he was a boy. His life has been spent on the kelp routes, seeking out the raw fuel of a magic that builds cities and fights wars on land, that has never given him a single thing. He would have married Ushakiran’s mother if she had lived, just because she had nobody else.

  He knows that the baby’s odds of living to become a child are slim. She is never out of his sight. When the Currents fail, and the food runs out, he stands over her with a knife, watching the door for men who may remember that a child is meat, sweet and tender.

  The Captain stops asking him when the baby will be sent away. Ushakiran learns to walk, or rather to take two steps and fall; she learns to laugh. She has dark eyes like her mother did, brown skin, and she grows two pearly-white teeth that show when she tries to talk. The sailors who have been on the ship since her birth begin to say that she is their good luck. They fear her crying, which they say brings storms. No one is to make her cry. Newcomers are warned.

  Her toys are a doll sewn from old sailcloth, a top bought her by a sailor now dead, the feathers of circling birds, and knives.

  Jathe teaches her how to use the knives. She can help him, he says. She learns to bandage and clean, cauterise and cut.

  She is growing into a girl, six years old now and bright as morning, and he fears for her. He teaches her how to cut, quick and clean.

  When she is seven, two new recruits take her down to the hold when Jathe is distracted by a fever case. Nobody notices until they hear her scream. The day is bright, warm, but Jathe’s chest goes cold. His hands are cold. He throws down whatever it is he is holding and runs.

  A dozen men are there before him and Ushakiran is unharmed, seems untouched, but she will only say that they scared her. She is crying. Jathe has them take the recruits on deck and tie them down. He has no right to give such orders, but nobody has seen him like this before; he is the surgeon, quiet and calm, and now his eyes are stone and his hands are fists; they obey him by instinct. On deck, the Captain meets Jathe’s eyes, shrugs, and looks on.

  Jathe has one of the boys fetch his knives and give them to Ushakiran.

  “Like I taught you,” he says. She shakes her head.

  He speaks to her quietly. “The world is a cruel place,” he says. “Your mother learned that. Mine, too, a long time ago. Here.”

  He takes her hand to guide it, the way his mother guided his when she was teaching him to draw, forty years ago, and he helps her make the first cut. The man chokes. Her hand shakes, but she pulls it away to make the next cut alone.

  The next time it happens, he tells her to take the man’s eye first. This time the man is from Balera and speaks little of any known tongue; maybe he has a daughter or little sister at home, the Captain says, and just wanted to talk to the child, but Jathe will not take a chance. Word is spreading about the child living on the Day’s Eye; word is spreading that if you touch her they will tie you down and let her cut you; word is spreading that she likes seeing the blood.

  Newcomers have already heard her name.

  Nobody ever remembers, later, who decided she should not go ashore. At first it does not arise because she is too young. Jathe goes ashore rarely, and when he does he leaves her with Davin, the first mate, who has children of his own. Whenever she asks if she can come ashore with him he finds a reason why not—heat, sickness, rain, unrest. One day, when she is eight, he is going out into Kingsport for supplies and she steps toward the boat to go with him. One of the sailors puts an arm out to stop her, says, “She can’t leave. She’s our good luck.”

  Jathe looks at her. Since she was a toddler he has been telling her stories of the cities on land, of markets and palaces and everything in between. Her eyes are round, hopeful. He thinks of all the faces and reaching arms of a busy port, the snakes, the biting dogs; his eyes cannot be everywhere.

  “You’re our luck,” he says. “Don’t you want to keep us safe? How can you be our luck if you leave?”

  Her eyes fill with tears but she nods. He gets into the boat and walks around Kingsport all day feeling as if he has poisoned her. He makes up his mind that when she asks again he will take her ashore. But she never does, and secretly he is relieved.

  Ushakiran loves to run. Every day, at sunrise, noon, and sunset, up and down the length of the ship. Her friend Davin says he could tell the time by her dashes, if he could not by the sun. From the stern to the bow, jumping over hatches and pails, over the concave of the ship’s drum, swerving outwards to go along the rail and in again to the companionway, sun on her skin, the ship’s timber under her bare feet. She dreams that one day she will reach the bow at such speed that she will launch herself from it and fly.

  Her other favourite thing to do is to lean over the rail and watch the Currents that pull the ships around the Unfathomable Sea, and from which they dredge the kelp that they sell to magicians to power their magic. Sometimes if she screws her eyes up hard enough she believes she can see a Leviathan, one of the great monsters that are said to swim far, far down below and to create the Currents with their swimming and their own magic, but she knows that really she has never seen one. Sometimes she lies in the concave of the drum, where the kelp is collected, and puts her ear to the wood, and listens, and pretends that she hears the magic sing. She knows she does not. But when she rises to go about her day again she is sometimes dizzy, unsteady on her feet, and everything is brighter, sharper.

  Faces come and go on the Day’s Eye. Sailors die, they jump ship, and new ones take the places of the old. Some—Davin, the Captain, and Jathe—are family, others, like Beor the young ship’s cook, are friends; the rest are fluid. When Ushakiran is thirteen a woman is recruited, a scarred and heavy woman; her name is Haf, and she is stronger than most of the men. Her husband, Korvall, is recruited too, but he is small and older and people often forget he is nearby.

  “Who are they?” Beor asks her, the first time he sees them. He has come out to the drum to bring Ushakiran one of the cakes he has made. When she was littler and used to hang round the galley, getting under his feet and begging for food, he would bribe her to go away. Three lengths of the ship meant a spoonful of the honey she loved, five meant berries, ten, cake or extra bread. The habit has stuck.

  “Just people,” she says, when she has licked the last of the cake from her teeth.

  “Nobody’s just people.”

  He is watching them. Ushakiran looks too. She sees a woman in dun-colour, wearing a string of wooden beads, a man with a beard, losing his hair: nothing of interest.

  “They look like Arkislanders,” Beor says, leaning against the drum. “I went to Arkisland once; the trees are so thick you can hardly move, and the bears there are pure white. Like snow.”

  “Oh,” Ushakiran says, but she is not thinking about Arkisland, she is looking at Beor, his tanned face lined by the weather, and wondering if there is more cake. He shakes his head.

  “Don’t you ever wonder about the islands?” he says, “Or the cities, any of it?”

  She shakes her head, with perfect truth. She stopped thinking about the outside world when she was eight years old. He shakes his head again, reaches out as if to ruffle her hair and stops, and then goes back to his galley.

  “You should bind your breasts,” Haf tells Ushakiran one day. Ushakiran blinks at her.

  “I’ve seen you running,” Haf says. “You wobble. You can bet the men see it. Bind them down, it’s easier.”

  She shows Ushakiran how, and Ushakiran knows she should be grateful, but she knows she is growing, now, and she hates Haf for it, because Haf told her.

  She notices Haf watching her, often. Most often when she is at the rail, Leviathan-watching, or curled up in the concave of the drum, imagining the power beneath.

  “Where do you come from, girl?” Haf asks her one day, and Ushakiran, reluctantly, tells what little of her story she knows. Haf puts her head on one side, considering.

  “Have
you ever seen a Leviathan?” she asks.

  “Nobody has,” Ushakiran says.

  “How do you know that?”

  Ushakiran shrugs.

  “What about kelp? Have you ever eaten any? Touched it?”

  Ushakiran shifts slightly away from Haf, uneasy.

  “It wouldn’t do anything. It’s just for magicians.”

  “So it is,” Haf says. Korvall comes past then, and Haf nods to Ushakiran and walks away with him.

  The mutiny begins quietly, as such things do. Haf plants whispers in ears, and they grow. She tells the right people that spoils on the Day’s Eye are divided unfairly, that the surgeon is mad to keep a murdering witch-girl on board and the Captain is mad to let him, that she and Korvall could run things better. She has done this before. She says that men should not have to live in fear for desiring a woman who is dangled before their noses. She says that the men Ushakiran has killed are owed justice. She sees the girl go on as always, running her laps of the ship, smiling at the men, knowing nothing: a child. The harvest of Haf’s words is an indignation that grows like a rising wave. The Captain senses it as, after years at sea, he senses a change in the weather, but he only gives out more bread and spirits and lashings. Greed and fear rule everything out on the ocean; he has used them before, and he thinks they will serve him again. He is old.

  There are too many ships on the arms of the Currents these days. They dredge the kelp thin and the Currents fail more often, leaving the ships becalmed for days at a time until the Leviathan far beneath do whatever they do to replenish the kelp, and start the Current flowing again. The gleanings are smaller, too, and the drum, which would once have been heavy with kelp and rich with power, only hums a little, now. There is less profit to go around. None of this is the Captain’s fault and Haf cannot change any of it anyway, but it is easy to convince angry men that a change, any change, will improve their lot.

  She waits for her moment.

  The Halverling Current fails. The Day’s Eye is becalmed, with no Current to carry her forward, and no wind either to bridge the gap to the next Current. There is sickness on the ship and Jathe works through a scorching day and a black night and half the next day to save three of the youngest sailors, who are half and a third of his age, who should not die while he lives. He staggers out onto the deck, into a baking noonday, with the reek of death on him. He is growing old, he thinks. Everything is so hot and bright. The side of his face seems to slip away from the bone, and he staggers against the rail. That is when he sees Ushakiran on the companionway, talking to a young man, a sailor whose face he should know, but he does not. He hardly seems to know the ship any more either—it is a blur, as is the sky, around the only thing he sees: Ushakiran, the hands reaching towards her. Wrongness surges up in his chest, suffocating him. In an instant he is back in that moment of her childhood, long ago, hearing her scream, and he is cold, cold.