Sword and Song

by Kate Story

  He’d probably made up that island stuff, too. Seen her longing, her penchant for fantasy, and used that to reel her in. Pretended to have an island, another place, just like her. Probably laughed inside as he did it.

  She thinks back, thoughts jumbled as her feet hit the wet sand, remembers leading him on with her longing, asking, How about the standing stones? It wouldn’t take a genius to play that image out, pretend to know all about it.

  Yet she thinks she remembers that it was him who first confessed to a childhood fantasy of being a knight.

  But she’s probably making that up, wanting to believe the best. She’d been the one to spill about recognizing the island on the map—this, she does remember clearly. Fed him everything he’d need in order to lead her on.

  But then how does Pim know this new name? Antilia?

  The ground trembles again and Ophelia stumbles.

  “It started again last night,” Pim says.

  “The volcano?”

  “Yes.”

  The beach curves abruptly to the right—north, Ophelia knows. She sees the red map, burning on the wall in Rowan’s house.

  The question of how he had that map—the island that she knows so well sitting on his wall—is one her mind jitters away from, like a frightened animal.

  In the distance, far off, the red roofs of Calabar show through green trees; tower upon tower, climbing up and up the steep wet green slope into the grey clouds.

  “There they are,” says Pim. “At last.”

  Ophelia thinks she’s talking about the city. But then she sees, far off up the beach, a group of figures.

  “Welcoming committee,” says Pim.

  Chapter Thirty

  So Horribly Real

  There is something just a little bit frightening in the way Pim says welcoming committee.

  A group of people emerge from a line of trees. Everyone is dressed in black and white and red. As they get closer Ophelia decides they look like a grotesque wedding party. The group is led by seven women in black robes edged in crimson, whipping against their bodies and streaming out behind in the wind: the Virgos. They look like a flock of wet black birds.

  Whenever Ophelia thinks of their name she feels an impulse to ask sarcastically, What, were they all born in September? but she curbs herself; Pim is serious, almost reverent, about the Virgos.

  Directly behind them is someone with a pointed white beard, one hand holding onto his top hat for dear life, the other carrying an old-fashioned doctor’s bag.

  A shudder, a memory. Two knights, one lying motionless on green grass. The knight is bleeding, he’s been stabbed in the chest. A Doctor, someone get a Doctor!

  Ophelia whispers, “Yes, there’s a doctor here at hand, who can cure your brother, champion. I can cure all things: itch, stitch, the ’pox, the palsy, and the gout! And if the devil is in him, I can root him out.”

  Pim gazes at her with excitement. “Is this a poem from your land?”

  “You might call it that.” The horse’s head, the head full of terrible teeth; it’s not here, is it?

  Behind the Virgos and the bearded man, a motley collection of people walk, hop, and crawl. Ophelia makes out a woman in an old-fashioned white cap, apron, and dress, with a large wooden spoon stuck in the waistband of her apron; she carries two naked babies, yelling at the top of their lungs, skins white as lilies.

  A bare-chested woman with a cow’s head has a broadsword in a scabbard, buckled around her hips.

  A lion. Yes, a lion. Its face is intelligent.

  Seriously? Aslan?

  A tall black man with a white face has hair growing stiffly over his head like a horse’s mane, a Mohawk, right down his back.

  And behind them all is a man with ram’s horns growing out of his head.

  Ophelia has seen people like this before in this place—from afar. Pim is the only person in Antilia she’s really talked to. She’s accepted the anatomically irregular denizens of her imaginary land; sure, half-animal people, people with tails, and everything else. It’s something quite, quite different, now that it feels so horribly real. Now that it looks like she is going to meet these people, and talk to them.

  These people are monstrosities. Freaks. A circus.

  The welcoming committee is close now. Murmuring, and the occasional bleat.

  They all stop and face Ophelia and Pim. They all reach up and grasp their own elbows then, in a curious gesture, drag their hands down their forearms and off the ends of their opposite hands, then shake their hands like they are disposing of something. All but the lion, who nevertheless pulls his forefeet through the sand, and the woman with the babies, who curtsies.

  The man with ram’s horns is very tall. He is wearing a tux jacket, and he is close enough now that Ophelia can see his legs, and they are the legs of a goat. The man is a faun. But he is not a sweet little panpipe-playing faun, he is not the familiar one of children’s books and dreams. He is hairy and muscular and seven feet tall, horns curling around in a spiral like a mountain goat’s, and between his legs, uncovered, is . . . Ophelia whips her gaze away, but not before seeing him smile: a dangerous smile, a beautiful smile.

  “Pim, who is that man?” she asks, turning her face away.

  “The doctor? Oh . . . you mean Gordon.”

  “Gordon?” How could such a creature have this mundane name?

  “Yes.” Pim giggles. “Most people call him The Gor.”

  “Do you think he could put some pants on?” Ophelia suddenly needs to sit down. She begins to giggle.

  “He doesn’t like pants,” Pim says doubtfully. “He is the Lord of Misrule.”

  “What about the lion?”

  “That is Leo.”

  “Leo? What an original name for a lion.” Not Aslan then.

  The wind swirls up, soaking the welcoming committee with rain. There are some other creatures there, behind The Gor—a troupe, six or seven, or maybe twelve or thirteen, it’s hard to tell. Horses, heads, jaws opening and closing, the glint and rust of nails, their mouthful of teeth.

  They are coming for her. The welcoming committee.

  Ophelia can’t stop laughing, weakly, helplessly. What is wrong with her? She feels the rain and the wind, the thump of approaching feet, the tremors that continually make the ground beneath them all shudder. All of it begins to spin in great, slow, concentric circles. Faster now. She slides over onto her side, onto the pale sodden sand. She’ll close her eyes, just until the spinning stops. Red of her eyelids, thump and swish of feet, the sea, so far away. The sea. It fills her ears, she is back in the water; she’ll have to be a seal again.

  She falls, down into the deep, deep blue.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It Is Her Memento

  Birds call. Gentle shadows flicker across her eyes. Is there a bird in the bedroom?

  She’s lying on something smooth and cool, and a scent hangs in the air, rich and strange. She can’t open her eyes. She is so comfortable.

  Something lands on the back of her hand—little claws. She opens her eyes, heavy, slow. A dark bird with yellow eyes, feathers black but they shimmer with peacock iridescence, indigo and blue and poison green. A grackle? Its tail is so long. It fixes her with a round sulphurous eye then launches itself into the blue air. Its tail flips around vertically like a splendid feathery rudder.

  Grackles can’t do that.

  Birdsong fills the air. Strange, strange songs.

  Ophelia sits up.

  Her stomach drops and her forehead beads with sweat.

  She’s not in the bedroom at home. The twins are not behind the little curtain, there is not a mean little apartment window overlooking other identical brick apartments.

  Ophelia is still in Antilia.

  She’s sitting on a big stone slab, cushioned by a silvery seal skin. The slab is in the centre of a kind of outdoor room roofed with a network of vines, leaves shifting in the faint breeze. Tall grey stone columns stand along the sides of the room. Between these
she can see green upon green, marching down, penetrated by red roofs, conical towers and square ones, warm stone walls. Below that, the blue sea and blue sky. She is in a tower on a hill, high above Calabar.

  The storm is over.

  The columns are carved with pictures. Women, men, beasts—bears, goats, birds, seals, whales. Others are strange. The bodies are twisted together, dancing, screwing—a lot of the images are sexual. And The Gor is there, or creatures like him. Horns curl around his head like a crown of bone and he consorts, laughing, with men, women, animals. Ophelia turns her face away.

  She swings her feet off the stone slab, and is rewarded by a sick, dizzy feeling.

  “Pim?” Her voice sounds strange, faint and high and girly.

  A figure emerges from behind one of the carved columns. It’s the doctor man, top hat askew, white beard pointed, mouth anxious. He walks quickly toward her, feet clicking on the stone. He has his big black doctor bag, he crouches.

  “You have returned.”

  His legs work backward, like an animal’s. His eyes are yellow with horizontal pupils. Like a goat.

  Pim comes swaying in from the shadows.

  Ophelia gasps with relief.

  “Hello, Ophelia.”

  She plucks at the seal skin. “Is this me?”

  Pim rolls her eyes. “No, of course not. You are wearing your skin.”

  Ophelia had wondered if her earlier transformation fit into some selkie legend: women who live beneath the sea, seals, who can turn into humans and become lovers of men. . . . Silly. Maybe in Antilia, it’s goat doctors yes, selkie legends no. The dizziness sweeps over her again. Just accept this, she tells herself. It will all end soon and you’ll be home. Roll with it.

  She’s known Pim all her life.

  She doesn’t know Pim at all.

  “May I?” The doctor is opening his bag. A small green lizard scurries out. “Shoo!” says the doctor, waving his hand. “Shoo!”

  “Ophelia, this is Doctor Capricus,” says Pim.

  “Pleased to meeeeet you,” says the doctor.

  Yeah, he’s a goat, Ophelia thinks. Roll with it. “Pleased to meet you, too.”

  She eyes the contents of his yawning bag. Literally, it’s yawning. It gapes wide, and wider still, sucking air into itself and producing a groaning sound.

  “Stop that.” The doctor slaps the bag. It closes up a little, grumbling. Ophelia catches a glimpse of a rusty saw, pliers, wire, and something that looks like a big, wriggling tongue.

  But he reaches in and pulls out what looks like a perfectly ordinary stethoscope, excepting the way it curls itself around his neck and puts itself into his ears. Its bell reaches eagerly for Ophelia’s chest, like a metal and rubber flower growing toward the sun. Ophelia shrinks back.

  “It’s fine,” says Pim. She is evidently trying not to laugh at Ophelia.

  Ophelia grits her teeth and lets the stethoscope settle lightly on her chest.

  “Good, goooood,” says the doctor. He takes her wrist, feels for a pulse. “How do you feel?” He peers into her eyes.

  “Hungry.” She hadn’t realized how hungry she is until she says it.

  Doctor Capricus smiles up at Pim. The stethoscope coils itself up and drops into the bag, which closes around it with a gulp. “Then we must get you something to eaaaaat. And then, you will meeeeet her.”

  “Meet who?”

  “The Mender, of course.” Pim blinks. “You haven’t made her acquaintance yet.”

  “She’s dyiiiiing to meeeeet you,” says the doctor.

  He and Pim burst into laughter.

  “You’re so bad,” gasps Pim.

  “Must laaaaaugh to keep from cryyyyying,” answers the goat doctor.

  “Oh, yes!” They both stop laughing at once, and embrace each other.

  Ophelia is so bewildered she gets angry. “What’s so friggin’ funny?”

  But they don’t care. “Gooooo get her some food,” bleats the doctor.

  Pim slaps his arm with the back of her hand and they both go off, laughing and wiping their eyes.

  —

  They seem to think she’s a goat, too, because the meal Pim brings her is all green leafy stuff, and fruit. Not a bit of bread or cheese or meat in sight. She eats though, filling her mouth and chewing. The mango is so good it’s like—the word comes—ambrosia.

  She is so hungry she manages to drip mango juice off her chin and onto the green sundress. She feels again the judgmental eyes of those parents in the cold kitchen. She dabs at the spot until it is gone. Rowan bought this dress for her, and despite everything she wants to keep it for-friggin’-ever. It is her memento, the last trace of whatever she thought existed between them. Ophelia tries to drive the feeling down into her body so she doesn’t feel it so much.

  “So you are feeling fine? No more fainting?”

  “I think so.”

  Pim leads her to the edge of the stone-paved courtyard, out between the pillars. The sun is beginning to sink down toward the horizon. The warm stone feels good on the soles of her feet. She can see right down to the beach here. Debris litters the white sand.

  “Did the big waves come into the city?”

  “No.” Pim shakes her head. “They licked at the walls, I am told, but they didn’t come up far enough to do any damage. And in any case, many people live outside the city walls now, in the forests.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, for so many years, the ground has been shaking. Things are not so stable. It feels safer in the forest. No stone buildings to fall on you.” She puts her hand on Ophelia’s arm. “But today, they have all come back inside. Today, we will hold the games, to celebrate your arrival.”

  “Celebrate my arrival?” Ophelia asks, but Pim is striding back through the courtyard, disappearing through a swinging curtain of vines.

  Ophelia stands for a moment, looking out. She can hear the soft sound of the sea beating at the sand, and the air rings with bird calls and rustling trees and vines. There’s a soft murmuring roar: voices, a crowd. A muffled clattering of wheels on stone. The sounds of people in the city that falls before her feet.

  Behind all that is a great silence. It takes her a moment to realize that this impression of silence is the absence of cars, planes, streetcars, all the many things she is used to hearing. Calabar is a city, but compared to the great wild background of the island and the sea, it is nothing, a drop. The island, she knows, is mostly uninhabited. There are no motors. Forest presses up against the city.

  If she goes still and listens to that silent background, she becomes small. Ophelia feels afraid.

  She scurries after Pim.

  Her friend is standing at the top of a broad staircase made of pale marble, ghostly pink. It is very steep and curves down, down into the city. There are cracks in the steps.

  “Look,” Pim says.

  That’s when Ophelia sees the people.

  There are hundreds of them. Their faces are raised up to Ophelia and Pim like flowers to the sun: brown faces and black, white, red, every kind of person in the world. Children and men and women and beasts, too, impossible to make them all out from up here. And they see her, and a murmur runs through them, growing to a shout. They are calling something, a word, it surges and booms.

  “What are they saying?”

  Pim raises her arms, and the chant swells. The tattoos on Pim’s arms are red now.

  “Your name. They are calling your name, Ophelia.”

  “Your arms . . .”

  The tattoos, if that’s what they are, no longer shift and change under her eyes. They are fixed. Identical dragons curl and coil up Pim’s forearms.

  “Yes. It is time.”

  Ophelia closes her eyes. Just get through this, until the slide back home. This will pass. Get through this.

  The chant from the crowd builds, rhythmically booming, like being swept under the ocean.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Out Of The Wind

  Wind and rain, an
d the hard, chill, yielding frame of the leather boat.

  Rowan lands on his back, soaked. Through his feet he can see Ari at the stern. The boat pitches wildly.

  Ari abandons the tiller and scrambles forward, grabbing Rowan’s shoulders, shaking him. “What are you doing here? Go back! Go back!”

  Rowan opens his mouth and gets smacked with a wave. He chokes, splutters.

  Ari darts back to the stern, grabbing the tiller. He hauls on it with all his strength. “Ah, this is bad!”

  Rowan clutches at the side. It’s just him on the boat, and Ari. Ophelia isn’t here.

  He wants to smash something.

  They are tossed amidst a bank of rain, reducing the visible world to a small pocket of heaving grey, wet and cold. Ari peers forward like a hawk into the rain and wind. “There!”

  Rowan gets a brief glimpse of grey cliffs. Close, much closer than the last time he was here. And behind them, five other ships, bearing down on them. They look like Ari’s boat, only bigger.

  “Who are they?”

  “Enemies.”

  “But you can give them the slip, right?” Ari can do anything.

  The rigging makes strange singing noises; the sails strain under the cold, cold wind.

  “The great wave pushed me too close to land. Too close. We need every inch of headway. . . . You see how we are sliding across the water? We point west but are nearly going south.”

  “That’s bad, right?”

  “I was going to let myself dash upon the rocks. Now you are here.” Ari throws himself into the tiller with an anguished groan.

  Dash upon the rocks . . . and die?

  Who are these pursuers? Rowan feels his guts go cold.

  The ships are gaining on them. The cliffs come closer. A white line shudders where water breaks against rock. The clouds are so low that the narrow passage between sky and ocean is like slipping down a tunnel in a nightmare. The cloud cover presses from above, the wind pushes the boat toward the cliffs, the teeth of the rocks foam white. Rowan tries to imagine what happens to a leather boat when it hits rocks.