Imaginarium 3

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

  He tries to run, but all he can manage is a lurch, somewhere between running and falling. He cannons into the young man and gropes for his throat, but never finds it. His opponent shoves him against the rail and hits him, once, twice. He hears screaming. He feels the pounding of running feet in the boards of the ship underneath him. Everything goes black for an instant, and when his vision clears he sees Beor, the ship’s cook, his friend, dead on the ground, and his first ridiculous impulse is relief, that he recognises the man finally, that he is not losing his mind after all. Then he sees Ushakiran standing over Beor, her blade dripping with blood, and he sees the men running towards her, bearing down on her like a wave.

  They drag her away and then they come for Jathe. Before he dies, he hears, with an odd, faraway clarity, his old friend the Captain telling him that children cannot be kept like eggs, they will break out. That was many years ago and yet the words sound new to Jathe, as if he is hearing them for the first time.

  They murder the captain in his bed. The blood of the surgeon, who has tended them for years, who has shown them the closest thing to kindness that anyone knows on board ship, is spilled all over the deck. Yet it is no worse, Haf tells them, than the murder of Beor, a young man who had committed no worse crime than offering dried berries to a girl he saw as a sister. It’s touch and go, but by a stroke of luck—and she deserves some luck, for once—the Current surges back into life and begins to drag the ship forward just as she fears they are slipping away from her. The great dredgers start their work again, spooling kelp into the drum, and life steals back into the ship, the low hum of power in every dip and rise of the bow, in every board of the timber. Haf believes the sailors sense that, without knowing it, and it reassures them.

  Her own magic is not strong. However much kelp she eats or smokes or absorbs she will never be a powerful magician, but she knows one or two things. She knows the right stories to tell, and she knows trees. From the first shoot splitting a seed deep in the rich soil of her home island, to the polished beads around her neck, to the boards of a coffin or a ship. She knows enough to rid herself of Ushakiran. The sailors are afraid to kill the girl, afraid to keep her alive.

  “She’s our luck,” one of them argues, and “She’s a killer,” another. They bicker back and forth until Haf whistles for silence and snatches up one of the spears they keep for fishing in the shallows on land. She strides up onto the kelp-drum, down into the hollow of it. They are all watching her now. She raises the spear and brings it down, hard, and with a crack and a splinter the drum ruptures, and the kelp comes spilling out. She scoops up a handful of it and throws her head back, eats the kelp slowly, sloppily, feels the warmth of the power filling her body. Not enough power, never enough, but enough for now.

  No one makes a sound. She jumps out of the concave and goes to where two of the sailors hold Ushakiran, whose eyes are wide, not with fear, but with awe. She takes the girl’s face in her hands and closes her eyes. She thinks of the wood of the ship, sun-soaked, rain-beaten, wind-scoured, wood seasoned by age and hard use, trodden by the feet of these men and this girl, floating for years on the Unfathomable Sea. She feels soft skin harden under her palms, and when she opens her eyes there before her is Ushakiran in wood, honey-coloured and smooth-grained, eyes looking at something far away, one hand raised slightly in appeal. The perfect figurehead.

  “But our luck,” one of the sailors protests, feebly.

  “If she was lucky before, she is lucky now,” Haf says. She has them mount Ushakiran on the bow of the ship, staring out over the bowsprit, over the endless water.

  Ushakiran is blind.

  A wooden thing cannot see, and it should not hear either. It should be dead. She should be dead and gone, and yet here she is. She has plenty of time to think about why this is.

  She has what she always wanted. She flies over the bow of the ship, in the wind and the spray, as fast as the ship is fast. It isn’t like she imagined.

  She cannot see, but she hears with great acuity. She cannot really die on the Day’s Eye, she decides, because she has always been part of it. She has never left it since she was born. She lived on the ship as a flesh-and-blood girl and now that she is wooden she feels as a ship feels, because she is joined to the ship.

  She feels Haf, wherever Haf walks, as a low vibration of power.

  She feels feet on the boards, chairs scraped, shoulders leaning against walls, waves crashing against the side of her, fish as little irritations, barnacles as a constant, gentle torment. She feels the faded warmth of Jathe’s blood stained into the deck and if she could weep, she would.

  She feels the kelp in the drum the way she used sometimes to feel her heartbeat, only stronger, much stronger.

  As time goes by, she begins to feel other things. Whales, calling each other in the sea. Storms approaching. The presences of other ships, disturbances in the Current.

  She begins to sleep. To sleep as wood is so pleasant, is to fall into an easy, honey-coloured dream, to glow in the sun, to rock with the motion of the waves through the wind and under the rain. She is falling insensate, degree by slow degree, when a new sound wakes her.

  They are on the cusp of the Peret and Halverling Currents, and the men are raising sail to traverse between the one and the other, when she first hears it. At first she cannot place it for the life of her. Such a deep sound, so far down in the sea, and yet so huge it seems to shake the world. Leviathans. They are real, and she can hear them.

  For days she listens, and that is enough to keep her awake—trying to make out what they are saying to each other, if they are saying anything. Even that, though, palls, and by the time they are three days out along the Peret Current she has lost interest and is slipping away. Until she hears a single word.

  “. . . luck.”

  It is Korvall talking, as he climbs between decks.

  “They all believe that—” he says, and then he moves away from the wall, and she can’t hear him any more. Outside the wardroom he brushes the wall again, and he is saying “Reach Current. But maybe—” he walks out to the middle of the deck and she loses him again. A minute later he walks back and leans against the rail, but all she hears is “weevils,” and something about cabbage, and she gathers he is talking about his dinner.

  She stops listening to the Leviathans, and starts listening, with all her concentration, to what is going on within the ship. She hears so much, and yet so little of value. “The old Captain,” one sailor says, cheek against the wall—he is tired, perhaps. “Mother,” another says, leaning over the rail to look down at the waves whilst he talks, and “never,” says the man he talks to, before he straightens and turns away. A morass of whispers becomes a lullaby; this time she will not fight it, she decides, she will let the Day’s Eye take her, and then, from the tide of sounds, emerges one complete, perfect sentence.

  “If they want a child, let them have a child,” Korvall says. Ushakiran shivers; the ship shivers.

  “I turned their luck into wood,” Haf says, “I made it last forever.”

  She cannot work out where they are, that she can hear them so perfectly.

  “I saw, love. It was magnificent.”

  He kisses her. Ushakiran feels the touch for both of them—

  Korvall’s lips on Haf’s and Haf’s on Korvall’s. No one ever kissed her in her life of flesh, and now she is kissed for the first time, by these two.

  “We’ll go along Reach,” Korvall says, and he is kissing her again, in between words, “land on one of the Four Islands, find a child, and if they decide she’s not lucky they’ll probably find something else to do with her.”

  No, Ushakiran thinks, and the ship dips forward, and the sails snap though there is no wind. She feels Haf absent-mindedly stroking the wood of the ship and wishes she could kill them both—and then she realises where they are. At the base of the drum, where it curves into the hold, and the kelp inside the drum is catching their
words and conducting them perfectly upwards, through the timber, to Ushakiran.

  “Their child had power,” Haf says. “This one won’t. They’ll know.”

  “Sailors don’t know anything,” Korvall says, but Ushakiran is not listening to them any more, she is wondering. The child that had power. The child. Her.

  A tremor runs through the Day’s Eye. Men fall against the walls, onto the floor. A bottle smashes in the wardroom. Somewhere a bag of holystone crashes to the ground and splits, scatters.

  The sails catch and billow in the dead calm. The bow plunges down into the water. Ushakiran hears muffled and distorted cries, shouted orders, and Haf’s last, clear, whispered question, “What is that?”

  The drum splits with a thunder-crash and the kelp rushes out. It soaks into the wood, into Ushakiran, and, absorbed, it lights her like tinder. There is sight, now, there is sound too—screaming, and the roar of a fire that is not true fire but power going up like fuel. It is night, but the sea around Ushakiran glows green-gold. There are no shadows. She feels lives blinking out all along the wood of her, like little candles snuffed—Davin, dragged under the waves, Korvall, crushed under the broken drum, Haf, thrashing in the water until the cold turns her still. The men are jumping off the rail, into the water, anything to get away from the unholy pyre that, as they swim frantically away from it, upends and drives downwards, into the black water.

  The water swallows Ushakiran, goes through her as if it were her blood. Through the veins of her decks and rooms, drowning the men still trapped there and washing the stains of dead men’s blood away. Before the waters close above her she lets out a cry that is no human sound, not made by lips, nor throat, nor lungs, and there comes, from worlds away below the sea, an answering call.

  KSAMGUIYAEPS—

  WOMAN-OUT-TO-SEA

  Neile Graham

  I laugh at their games: those

  who trap my tale in words.

  When the brittle pages open

  voices appeal from them:

  the villagers chorusing: Woman-out-to-sea,

  do not harm our relative!

  Oh, give over. So what if I destroy

  all men who court me? Why not,

  for wherever I go there are more men.

  It’s like they want to be eaten.

  One kindly editor notes: vagina dentata

  theme omitted here. Thanks. I appreciate that.

  I appreciate, too, that my transformation

  is described so simply:

  until the best friend of the salmon prince

  takes her to wife, and subdues her.

  But I’m not so fond of the editor’s final dig:

  vagina dentata thwarted by love.

  Thwarted, ha! I was undone,

  every cell of my body broken

  to atoms, then rebuilt, remade,

  put together whole and wholly different.

  Her powers lost, she’s now

  eager for him, for life with him.

  So now I’ve changed. From cliché to cliché.

  That’s some magic. And true.

  But only launches the tale.

  Here is part two:

  I and my new husband, now we,

  take a blackfish canoe to visit my father—

  and passing my husband’s friend’s villages,

  the salmon people shout warnings.

  Listen to the salmon shout. Though I tell my father

  this man’s a keeper, he has his own plans:

  asks my love for sea-urchins, seal meat,

  the octopus, but my love, so clever

  captures them all, so father

  lets him take an abundance home, our home.

  So far so good. Deep breath.

  But this is part three:

  everyday my husband draws water

  for me to drink; I test it with a plume.

  But one day he meets a woman

  at the water hole and takes her

  before coming home to me.

  When I test it, I know I must

  return to my father. Goddam

  this wronged woman cliché!

  Though he follows, begging,

  twice I warn him: if you do not

  go back, I will look back

  and you shall perish.

  Don’t turn me to Orpheus,

  you bastard. I cannot sing.

  He takes no heed, so I look back:

  he sinks into the sea.

  The end? No, no but at least

  be patient—part four is the last:

  In my father’s house I am

  cliché again, tears and all.

  I love him. I want him back.

  I am so tired of the ends of men.

  Father fishes up my husband’s bones,

  reassembles, then covers them,

  jumps over them three times

  and they start to move.

  Uncovers them. My husband

  awakens. When I see him

  come back to life, I stop crying.

  I take him to my sleeping place, forgiven.

  This is the end.

  Or:

  we can’t find his shin bone

  and so we use that of an eagle,

  giving all people now their slender

  bird-boned shins. Still, I take him back.

  Ksampguiyaeps, I have

  cleverly re-made him as he only remade me.

  Oh, it’s love.

  Close the book now.

  FISHFLY SEASON

  Halli Villegas

  The bedroom was stifling. The ceiling fan’s soft sucking sound as it moved through the humid air only intensified her discomfort. Of course he was asleep beside her, not much kept him awake. He hadn’t wanted to put the air conditioning in yet, saying it was too expensive, that the nights were still cool enough for sleeping with windows open, that the fan would regulate the temperature. So here she was lying awake in their new home, a perfect centre entrance Georgian, hating him.

  They moved in a month ago and Marisol still didn’t believe it was real. They had left behind a small bungalow in the city, for this gracious home in a beautiful suburb along a lake, twenty minutes away from the city’s centre. The place where the rich used to have their summer cottages, where executives from the car companies that drove the city’s economy had their mansions on the cul-de-sacs and leafy streets, where the executive’s lawyers lived two doors away in mock Tudors and homes with French doors.

  It wasn’t a new suburb, like those terrible bedroom communities with the tiny yards and every house a replica of the next; this was old money, old Wasp wealth cocooning itself here. Every house different, each lawn perfect, two shopping areas, The Hill and the Village, with coffee shops and dress shops, hardware stores and the Village Market grocery store.

  Marisol was drifting now, floating in a sort of heat-induced stupor, watching as the soft black shadows in the corners of the bedroom, deepened and shifted, resolving themselves into a woman who walked towards the bed. A wide hair band held her hair back, and she wore a bright pink and green sleeveless shift, a strand of pearls around her neck. She skirted around the end of the bed and glanced once at Marisol whose eyelids were getting heavier, closing almost, and Marisol saw that the woman’s blue eyes were nothing but glass beads and that she hated Marisol.

  The next morning Marisol woke up to Neil singing in the shower. The white hydrangeas and pink bows on the wallpaper danced in the sunlight, the pale blue check curtains billowing softly with an early morning breeze. Both had been in the house when they moved in. Marisol had ditched the Guatemalan rugs and mismatching thrift store finds painted in bright colours that she had decorated their bungalow with and embraced the Sister Parrish style of decorating that their new home seemed to expect. The furniture from Neil’s parent’s estate
had helped, their four-poster bed, the sunroom wicker, the chintz-covered sofas all fit perfectly. Like the furniture, Neil belonged here. He had grown up in this suburb, and had always wanted to return.

  “Once a Grand Beach man,” he said, “always a Grand Beach man.”

  Small droplets of water fell on her cheeks. For a moment Marisol wondered if she was crying, but it was Neil, fresh from the shower, shaking his wet blond hair over her like a dog.

  She reached out for him but he moved away smiling with his perfect white teeth.

  “Get up lazybones, get up. Today we’ll run some errands in the Village, and drive by the lake, have lunch in the park. Sound good?”

  Marisol smiled and nodded. She got out of bed and walked to the bathroom. On the way there, buried in the soft pile of the rug, something hard bit into the ball of her foot. She bent down and felt for the object. She picked it up holding it on the palm of her hand. It was a small blue glass bead.

  The Village was very clean; there was no graffiti, no garbage. Each storefront had period details to make it look like an American colonial town. As Marisol and Neil got out of the car, a chattering group of teen girls, long legs, tan, clean sheets of blond hair, tiny cut off shorts and polo shirts, brushed by them. The girls were eating ice cream, their little pink tongues licking and darting, their gleaming teeth nipping at the cones. They stared at Neil for a moment, at his blond handsomeness and then swayed on. Marisol felt very small and dark, a blotch on the bright place they had come to. While she stared after the girls, she felt something land on her arm. She looked down at her arm and saw an insect she had never seen before. It had a mealworm like body, with two beady eyes and transparent wings that stood straight up. Marisol brushed at it with her hand, but it clung to her. She shook her arm, but still the thing hung on, staring at her with its caviar eyes.