Sword and Song

by Kate Story

  “Dim Dorothy, ship’s cook at your service,” she says, bobbing a curtsey and giggling.

  “Good to meet you, uh, Dorothy,” says Ophelia. Surely her name can’t be Dim?

  Then she remembers.

  “You were part of the welcoming committee, too!” The woman had been carrying twins in her arms. “You had two babies . . .”

  “Yes, my darlings. They are with my sister in Calabar now.” A tightness around her mouth tells Ophelia she is sad about that. Dorothy spreads out the checked cloth and places the fruit and cheese upon it, then disappears back into her galley kitchen.

  “Breakfast for our Chosen,” John Canoe says. God, that’s embarrassing.

  John Canoe and Ophelia sit cross-legged together on the deck and eat, and it’s the best damn meal Ophelia’s ever had. Despite his weird white face and the mane of hair down his spine, he makes her feel safe. She likes how he smells, and she loves his deep voice. It’s resonant, like a bow run across a standup bass. A couple of times she asks banal questions just to hear him speak, and he is always friendly, but does not, as Ophelia’s mother would say of a talker, go on; I thought me ears were going to fall off from overexertion.

  Her mother. Don’t think about home, not right now.

  “Where are we going?” she asks finally.

  He pauses for so long that she wonders if he doesn’t know the answer, or maybe isn’t allowed to tell her for some reason, but then he finishes chewing and swallows. “The great beaches run southeast, down from Doctor Bay,” he says. Ophelia nods. She can see the sands in her mind, on the map in Rowan’s hallway. The great, pale sands stream out into the blue sea like a long, hooked tail. “They shift and change with storms, the tide, centuries,” John says. He explains that they have to go a long way out to sea to avoid sand bars, and also there is a great coral reef apparently; Ophelia hadn’t known about that. So presently they are going south from Calabar, out to sea, then they will turn to the east and come around the tail of the island. Then they will head north.

  She remembers Rowan, standing tall on her right, pointing to things on the map. Remembers the heat running all down her body because he was standing so close; feeling a crazy bubbling feeling in her stomach and down her thighs, wanting to grab him and just start kissing him or something, the crazy feeling bursting up like joy.

  Thinking of Rowan reminds her of Pim’s phrase, close to the wind. It’s like Rowan is always with her, pressing on her skin, whispering through her clothes, fluttering on her eyelids—and yet at the same time he’s rushed on, ahead, insubstantial as air. Leaving her behind.

  Suddenly she doesn’t feel hungry any more.

  She is wiping her mouth with the back of her hand when down the deck she sees Pim emerge from the little cabin, stretching and yawning. She’s naked—God, that girl has no shame. Not that anyone’s looking; it doesn’t seem to bother anyone. In the clear morning light Pim’s tattoos stand out in dark relief against her ruddy forearms, dragons swirling from wrist to elbow. Pim flexes her fingers and looks around. She sees Ophelia and John Canoe, and does a weird thing with her feet; Ophelia realizes she’s jigging or something, a grin on her face.

  “Good morning,” she sings, jigging along the deck to them.

  “Good morning,” John and Ophelia answer simultaneously. Then John rises, and inclining his head, he disappears back into the small door.

  “You’re looking a lot better.”

  Ophelia nods. “I wanted to die.”

  “Isn’t John nice?” Pim folds herself down onto the deck with a plop. “He’s the nicest captain ever.”

  “Captain?”

  “Oh yes. This is his ship.”

  Ophelia’s mind races over her interactions with John Canoe. “The captain is putting cold cloths on my head and feeding me breakfast?”

  Pim grins. “You’re an important Chosen one. You’re the only Chosen one we have.”

  Ophelia makes a dismissive noise between her teeth. Then says, “He says we’re heading north, once we get around the tail.”

  “The tail?” Pim looks confused.

  “Although really it’s just the bottom of the neck, isn’t it?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Antilia. It’s shaped like a severed dragon’s head.”

  Pim stares at her, then grabs a piece of bread. “I guess you’re right. I never noticed before.”

  “How could you not notice? It’s totally a head!”

  Pim’s body goes still. There’s a sense that she’s coming to a decision, and she shrugs, long fingers picking at some crumbs of cheese. “You hardly left me anything,” she grumps.

  Ophelia’s about to press her, but Dim Dorothy comes out then with more food, including a meat leg of some kind, and Pim leaps up and falls on her with a delighted cry. “Breakfast!”

  “Off,” says Dorothy, patting Pim on the shoulder and leaving a floury handprint. “Just call if you need more.”

  Ophelia watches Pim’s voracious eating with some amusement.

  “Where’s the Mender?” Ophelia asks after Pim’s pace slows somewhat. She hasn’t seen the Mender or the Virgo yet; are they on a different ship?

  Pim points at one of the big ships, the one with the squid on it. “The Mender is with my mother.” She cuts around the circumference of an avocado with a little knife and twists it open, revealing its pit and creamy green heart. “It may be hard going once we round the tail, as you call it,” she says with her mouth full. “The prevailing winds are west, but they shift around a lot this time of year, often to the northwest. It would have been better to wait until spring for this.” She glowers over at the Virgo’s ship as she says it.

  Off to the northwest, the cloud that has been lying low spreads. It rises from the land, a column of darkness. By the end of that day, the sun glowers through it, red and heavy.

  The volcano is speaking.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Nancy’s Guilt

  Ophelia is getting singing lessons. Every day she is rowed over from the starfish vessel to the squid ship, then back again.

  She knows the Mender is on the squid ship. Sometimes, Ophelia asks Doctor Capricus about seeing her. He always looks sad. “She is iiiiindisposed.”

  Ophelia feels like saying, She’s always indisposed! but of course that would be rude.

  Once, as she stood on the deck of John Canoe’s ship, she was sure she saw the white-robed figure on the squid ship’s deck. But by the time she got there, both the white figure and the doctor were out of sight.

  Ophelia likes learning. In school she always had to conceal how much she enjoyed the more challenging classes—physics, history, math, philosophy—since it wasn’t really cool to be so into it.

  But here, she’s the only student. And there’s no system, no obvious goal. And often, other people sit around watching, like an audience. It’s beginning to get to her.

  All her life, Ophelia has thought she wanted singing lessons. She’s always loved singing, and mostly, she’s been praised. Solos in the choir, and Wow, you have such a beautiful voice!—and her family, they’ve always been her biggest fans. Come on, love, sing us a song, her mother says, and she and Darryl and the twins clap and clap every time. If only I could get lessons, Ophelia had thought, maybe I could be really good. Half-formed fantasies: a big recording contract, a chart-topping album that somehow also possesses artistic integrity; or sometimes, even though she knows nothing about opera, she thinks of being an opera star. Swishing around in gorgeous gowns and getting standing ovations from New York to Rome.

  And now she’s finally getting singing lessons, and they suck.

  Her ride to daily hell is in a dory rowed by a cow-headed woman, a great muscular creature named Paddy Whack. “How went the lessons today?” she always asks on picking Ophelia up, and every time, it’s like she really wants to know. And she’s hopeful. Her voice is in constant vibrato, words running up and down her throat. She’s kind, is Paddy Whack. Also she is Dim
Dorothy’s girlfriend, or wife.

  “Terrible,” Ophelia always says.

  The cow-headed woman rows, the great muscles of her back working under her skin. “You’ll be doing better than you think. Don’t worry.”

  And Ophelia tries not to worry. It’s terrible. She knows nothing, she’s failing at these lessons, and she knows Nancy is getting more profoundly disturbed by Ophelia’s failure by the day.

  The Virgo sings a note and Ophelia is supposed to match it. Low sustained notes, high trilling. And there’s some ephemeral quality the Virgo’s looking for that Ophelia never quite delivers.

  Ophelia remembers her own stories to the twins, the White Witch of Rose Hall. Remembers stuff she’s read that refers, slantingly, to a powerful practice: obeah. Even the word frightens her, and fascinates. The fear seems to come from some place deep within her. Back home, while telling the twins those stories, Ophelia had known that singing and power were linked.

  Her stories for the twins, she sees now, came in some indirect way from Antilia, even back then, a century ago when she still thought this land was imaginary. They came indirectly and filtered, twisted, but still drawing on some truth. Through a glass darkly.

  Had she sensed something true in her Rose Hall fabrications? Is Nancy practicing a form of magic with her voice?

  “Can’t we just sing some songs?”

  “Later.”

  All day today, Nancy has made Ophelia sing sustained notes at the Night Light, while she herself crouches over the copper lamp, hands spread, waiting for . . . what, Ophelia can’t tell.

  “Open your throat more. Louder. Softer. Feel like you’re singing from behind your heart. . . .”

  Whatever it is, it isn’t happening. Ophelia senses Nancy’s disappointment. It’s like she’s supposed to be using The Force, except no one tells her what for.

  No, it’s not the lessons that suck. She sucks. Her so-called beautiful voice, her gift, it’s a dud.

  Nancy sighs and abandons the sustained notes. She launches into a long, complicated explanation of the properties of the dead, and for the hundredth time Nancy makes the distinction between limbo—what Ophelia keeps feeling the terrible grey place with the tower was—and what it actually is.

  The wind is beginning to pick up, and dolphins skim and jump, clearing the waves and spinning before dropping sleekly back below the surface. A couple of the ships off to one side—starboard—have centaurs on board, and they’re acting like clowns, rearing up and doing horsey dances, thundering on the decks, competing with each other and making rude noises back and forth. The sky has stopped being perfect blue and clouds are coming in—the wind is fresh enough that she needs a blanket wrapped around her shoulders as she sits on the deck.

  And The Gor has come to watch the lesson today. It’s hard to think when he’s around.

  “All right, let’s try the notes again,” Nancy says.

  It’s too much, Ophelia can’t sing another living note. Desperately casting about for a diversion, she blurts out, “Why haven’t I seen any unicorns?”

  “What?” asks Nancy. “What do unicorns have to do with the progression of spirit?”

  Sometimes, Ophelia thinks that Nancy’s voice has a weird twang to it, like she’s from New York, a character in a Woody Allen film.

  “Nothing,” answers Ophelia truthfully. “I just . . . wondered, I guess.” I’m trying to change the goddamn subject, she thinks. I don’t want to think about the dead place. I would like to forget about it altogether. “It’s just that I’ve seen so many strange things— women with cow heads like Paddy, and, um, fauns—and then there’s the sort of reflection of the Zodiac. Centaurs, and Doctor Capricus, the Virgos. But I kind of thought I’d have seen a unicorn by now.” They are all looking at her. The Virgo is trying not to smile, Pim’s brow is wrinkled, Pest has stopped working on the frayed rope he’s repairing and looks a little scared, and The Gor—man, Ophelia wishes he’d go away—has that smile playing across his lips, and as always, his eyes are on her. Her stomach feels all tight and her heart goes faster when he’s around.

  “What are unicorns?” asks Pim.

  “They’re like white horses, except . . .” Ophelia stops, suddenly feeling very silly.

  “Go on,” says Pest, breathlessly.

  “They have a white horn sticking out of the centre of their foreheads. And they almost . . . emit light. Because they’re so pure.”

  “What is pure?” asks Pim.

  “You know . . .” Ophelia hears the incredulity in her own voice and stops, not wanting to be rude. “Without sin. Good. Clean.” They’re all just staring at her. “Virginal?” she adds cautiously.

  They all burst into laughter. Pest laughs so hard he falls over, rolling around in his rope and getting tangled, and The Gor picks him up, rope and all, and blows a raspberry onto his stomach; he shrieks with delight. Nancy has to sit down. Pim laughs so hard she cries.

  “Why is that so friggin’ funny?” Ophelia says.

  “Ophelia, I don’t know what you’re talking about half the time,” says Pim. “Are you saying these horses don’t fuck?”

  “Oh, God, come on.” Her face gets hot.

  “Are you saying virgin is the same as good?”

  “You have to be pure for them to show themselves to you, that’s all!” She wishes she’d never brought it up.

  “You mean, you have to be a virgin?” Pim’s lips tremble, and they all go off laughing again.

  “Yeah, that’s the story.” Ophelia tries to look dignified. “I don’t know why it’s so all-fired funny.”

  “What a silly idea,” says Pim.

  The Gor has put the giggling Pest down and is looking at her with a new, thoughtful expression. Great, now he knows I’m a virgin, thinks Ophelia.

  “Anyway, to return to the lesson,” says Nancy, wiping her eyes, “it’s actually somewhat relevant, what you’ve said.” She pauses, and Ophelia thinks she’s editing what she’s going to say. She often feels this way around the Virgo—that she’s deciding what to say, and when—strategizing. “This word you used, sin, isn’t really something we are familiar with here.”

  This is sort of weird. “But—you don’t believe in consequences for bad actions?”

  “Every act has a consequence,” says The Gor. His voice is like a gentle breeze, thrumming on the taut ropes overhead, winding through her ears.

  “Yes, but . . . what about people who act like that’s not true?” Ophelia persists. “What if you just go through life doing whatever you want, regardless of how it hurts people?” She says this straight to The Gor, like a challenge, but doesn’t know why.

  “Then no one will like you,” pipes up Pest.

  “The point is,” says the Virgo, “the place you witnessed is not punishment, nor is there some day of judgment when all will be released. It is a part of the natural movement of spirit. After a year, after the Blot, the spirits that are remembered become a stone in that place and stay there.”

  “Forever?”

  They all nod.

  “That’s horrible.”

  “They aren’t sentient stones,” Nancy says. “The liveliness—the consciousness, if you will—comes back here.”

  “You mean like reincarnation?” This is confusing. “Why do I have to understand all this?”

  “Because you alone can harness them, these half-dead!” Nancy’s voice cuts through the rising wind. “The natural order has been suspended. Too many spirits go unremembered, remain trapped between states. You alone can release them from their suffering!”

  Everyone gets quiet, and Ophelia lowers her head.

  She doesn’t want to go back to that place.

  “Ophelia,” says Nancy. “Your coming was necessary.”

  “But I . . .” Her voice comes out a whisper. “I can’t help these people. I don’t even understand what’s going on.”

  “There should not be so many in the place of the dead,” continues the Virgo, gently now. “You saw the Green
Knight.” Her voice changes, her face twists. “You saw Garda . . . the Dragon!” She is trying not to cry; it makes her face look hard, her eyes glitter. “They should have been Blotted. The wrongs need to be righted.” The grief in her voice is contorted by something else, Ophelia thinks. It takes her a moment to figure out what it is. Guilt.

  Why would Nancy feel guilty over all the Antilian dead?

  They sit under the cloudy sky, the boat moving beneath them, the wind blowing through their hair. Pest picks at his rope. He looks up and meets Ophelia’s eyes, and then he winks. He’s trying to cheer her up, Ophelia realizes, and this is so sweet that she takes a deep breath and tries to rally.

  She sings another damn note at the Night Light.

  And, just for a moment, all she’s doing is singing that note. Her mind, usually so busy, does that one thing, and that thing only. Singing one note, eyes on the lamp but in a sort of relaxed focus like she is looking not from the front of her face, but from the back of her skull.

  The bronze lamp begins to open, open out, like a beautiful metal flower.

  Ophelia senses everyone around her go still. Nancy’s body coils like she is about to leap.

  Ophelia keeps singing.

  The flame holds steady as the lamp unfurls. Inside, there are tiny, intricate interlocking clockwork creatures. They move in a circle around the flame. There are three pairs of people, Ophelia sees. Keep singing, she tells herself, keep breathing, keep your throat relaxed and open. Two people kissing: lovers. Two figures hold hands: they are identical, twins. And two larger figures, one holding a sword, the other a tiny replica of the Night Light itself.

  It tells a story, this tiny bronze tableau. Like the tapestries, she thinks suddenly, the tapestries in the stone room back in Calabar. But what is the story?

  Her note roots down into the deck beneath her, down into deep water, and soars up into the sky above. The Night Light’s flame burns steady, small and bright. The six small figures turn.