So it was Raven who tended as ever the sacred fire, and Raven who enlisted the frigate bird as his envoy to the material world, and it was Raven who told the fish eagles that they must now build a bigger canoe, so that they might gather the bodies of the newly dead on the far shore and bring them to the isle. The pelican continued to be kind and compassionate to all, and the cormorant continued the duties of a scholar-philosopher, and of a barrister when one was needed. It was the cormorant who discovered, through his scholarly perusal of the Minutes of the Mediterranean Society of Mind-Altering Potions, that feeding conaria to the Kiamah would keep him drowsy. And when Raven grew into his dotage, he gave to the crow the grisly duty of harvesting the conaria, and taking them to the Kiamah, and by doing so he made clear to all that the crow was still the lowliest amongst them.
And so the bodies came, and were burned in the sacred fire every night, so that the heat of the burning bodies would feed the Kiamah, and Raven ruled over the new order for a hundred times a hundred years, and a hundred days more than that. And in all that time the sacred fire had never gone out, nor had there been so much as a ripple of change in the nightly routine. The dead had obeyed Raven without question, his bearing being one of nobility. He spoke to the dead in reasonable tones, never raising his voice, and the three of them, pelican, cormorant, and crow, had ushered the dead from canoe to pyre without much fuss. A line of torches showed the dead the way, and when it was time for them to cough up their souls, they were told first that someday soon they would be reborn again, and that their souls would sleep happily and in comfort until that day came. Then Raven sang softly to them, cooing and cawing as if he were soothing his own chicks in a nest. If someone objected in any way, the pelican gave them a soothing cup of blue lotus tea. Most succumbed to its soporific effect, and anyone who still resisted was brought to Raven, who opened his neb and breathed a calmative breath into their faces, transporting them from agitation to acceptance.
Now the old traditions had changed. The crow’s song was harsh, as if he were berating forth the souls of the dead rather than coaxing them. The torches were gone and the soothing tea as well. The dead were arriving in ever greater numbers, and the crow wanted them moved swiftly to the pyre. He had always taken shiny bits of metal from the ashes, but now he took anything he fancied from the dead before their bodies were burnt. Raven had lived an austere life, never indulging himself by feeding on the dead, but not so the crow, who had been sneaking tasty morsels from the pyre for a long time before he usurped Raven.
Eternity was not supposed to be this hard—so thought the pelican. The savagery of the crow last night sickened her, and made her pluck at her feathers with worry. The only hopeful thing was the fisherman, who she hoped had been sent from the material world to restore the natural order of things. She should find a way to help him, that much was clear. Old crone that she was, she had no breast milk to offer, but there must be something she could do.
§
At dawn, high atop Mount Agung, Dewi Sri lay on her side, her eyes closed, the forest outside her palace awake with the buzzing and whirring of cicadas beyond counting, and the song and chutter of birds beyond number. She listened, as she often did when first she awoke, and felt both the familiar comfort of this, her home, and the nearly endless longueur of her life here. She had lived a hundred times a hundred years in this most beautiful of all places, and yet there were times when the beauty of it was tedious. She wondered if she were nearing the end of her long life.
When she opened her eyes, the frigate bird was beside her, sitting as he would sit to sleep in a nest. There was mischief in the way his head was cocked to one side, and she read the frigate bird’s desire for her in the ruffling of the red feathers of his throat pouch. Poor fellow, he could not help but reveal himself, for he wore his heart on his throat.
She had allowed him into her bed for her own pleasure, and he was a most welcome change from her usual paramours, this buccaneer, who took charge of the coupling, and showed her not one whit of deference, treating her instead like a bit of pirate’s booty he had captured for his own amusement. And yet he had also shown her how to ride his bill with her nether lips to the very heights of pleasure. He was a brigand, but he was generous in the arts of love.
When he caressed her bare bosom with his wingtip, looking to arouse her into continuing the frolic of the night before, she brushed it aside and sat up. The time for him to take liberties with her had passed, however welcome those liberties had been. She gave him her most serene smile, the smile of someone beyond desire, and the pleasures of the flesh.
He looked properly abashed for a moment, and at that she was pleased, though she gave no sign of it, for she was well-practiced at the theater of being a queen.
“I am at your service,” he said. His throat pouch collapsed, and she knew she had the better of him now.
“Are you?” said the goddess. “It might be prudent for me to count my treasures before you leave, for you are widely known as a thief.”
“You wound me, dear lady,” said the frigate bird. “You are yourself the only treasure I desire.”
She kept her gaze steady, for she knew full well which of them needed the other more. “You spoke last night,” said she, “of a favor I might do you, beyond the favors I’ve already shown you.” And here she let show, in the saucier curve of her lips, some of the lust she’d shared with him, and then, just as swiftly, returned her face to serenity.
“I am sent by the Turropsi,” said he, “to fetch you to their domain.”
“The Turropsi?” said she. “Who might they be?”
“They are the weavers of fate, my queen.”
“Ah. The Nasib, we call them here. And what do they want of me?”
“I am not privy to the whole of their design,” said the frigate bird, “but one ignores them at one’s own peril.”
“So have I heard,” said Dewi Sri. She rose from the bed and found her sarong, tossed aside the night before after she had made a delicious slow torture of unwrapping it from her shapely hips. Now she wrapped it round herself again, leaving her breasts bare as was her custom, and she thought of her ancestors. This was the call of her destiny, foretold by her dreams, and she must either answer it, or disgrace her family.
§
Dawn came with a qualmish light over the inlet, cast by a bilious green sun rising in the west, and in that light the fisherman’s skin was a bluer blue. As the sun rose the green faded from its light, and the blue tinge on his arms, which had started out as almost the same color as the cormorant’s eyes, became a pale hue, yet did not lose entirely its blueness.
The fisherman sat in the sand next to his fire, turning his new knife over and over, feeling the balance of it. It was a far better knife than the one he had lost when he was swallowed by the whale. The blade was larger, the steel well forged and hammered, and the keenness of its edge sufficient to split hairs, not that he had any hairs to split. Sharp enough that he might have shaved with it, but he had no need of shaving. Two days he had been here, and yet he had no stubble on his face, nor on his head, nor in his nether parts. Blue skinned and hairless, and would his beloved love him more or less for that?
He gave the knife an upward toss, and it turned once before it fell handle first into his hand. A well-balanced tool that would lend itself to many purposes. He would make a spear of it with a stout pole, and use it to spear fish. He would cut down branches and build himself a lean-to. And if it came to murder, this blade would make short work of slitting the crow’s throat.
He was rooting around in the forest, his beloved wrapped in the damp sarong at his waist, when he found a stout stick, of a length suitable for making himself a short spear. He came out of the forest, headed for his fire, and there the pelican was. She opened her bill and smiled her skew-whiff smile at him, and he smiled back. She was a strange friend to have, but he was grateful for her presence nonetheless.
“Ho, fisherman,” the pelican said. “How does the morni
ng find you?”
“Ho, pelican,” the fisherman said. “I am well enough, and you?”
The pelican squatted on her flat gray feet on the driftwood log by the fisherman’s fire, and the fisherman sat beside her. The pelican produced a fish from her pouch, a gift for the fisherman, and with his fine new blade he cleaned it with a few swift sure strokes, and spitted it over the flames to cook. He gathered the entrails on the blade of his knife, and he was about to toss them into the fire when the pelican said, “Oh, I’ll take those.” She opened her bill, and the fisherman dropped them in.
“To each his own,” the fisherman said. The pelican stretched out her neck and swallowed.
“How is your beloved?” the pelican asked.
In reply the fisherman produced his beloved’s clamshell from the sarong. The striations of blue and green had darkened to the blues and violets of twilight, colors that were the last to surrender to the black of night.
“Lovely colors,” the pelican said. “I’ve always been partial to deep shades of purple.”
“They keep changing,” the fisherman said. “Is that the usual way?”
The pelican considered for a moment, and then she hopped down off the log, and lay her bill alongside the clam and closed her eyes to listen. “Yes, I believe so,” she said. “Your beloved is dreaming of the night sky, just after sunset.”
The fisherman nodded. “She loved to watch the sun go down. We lived on a beach, where the sunsets were glorious.” The pelican’s striped bill lay in his lap, a thing of beauty. He stroked the neck feathers of his friend idly with a finger.
The pelican cooed. “How romantic,” she said. “She was the love of your life, was she not?”
“She was,” the fisherman said. “She came to me late, when my beard was already gray of whisker, and my pate thin of hair. I had long since decided that love was a young man’s game, and a foolish illusion.”
“Was she young herself?” the pelican asked.
“Oh no,” the fisherman said. “She was midway through her fourth decade, and I had begun my sixth.”
For a thousand times a thousand years the pelican had watched the dead arrive on the canoe, but she had not always understood what she saw in those brief interludes before their souls were harvested. This much she knew, that in death, love was often lost, and seldom found. She had never been paired with anyone in all her days, but the idea of romance excited her now as it never had, and here, in the fisherman, she had someone who could tell her how it all worked.
“You two had much in common?” the pelican said.
The fisherman nodded. “We were well matched in temperament, and in our love for a life lived close on to the sea.”
“How did you meet her?” the pelican said.
“I met her on the island of Ambon,” he began, “one of the spice islands, in an alehouse known as the Firefly. What started as a sailor’s dalliance with a comely barmaid grew straightaway into something greater, for we were quickly besotted with each other, and though we were not young, we were as eager as any pair of young lovers the world has ever seen.
“To prove my love, I spent the last coin in my purse to buy a silver chain from a sea captain, who claimed it was once an adornment of the Raha of Siam. I did not believe the sea captain’s story, but I gave the chain to my beloved, and there was delight in her eyes when first she saw it, and it was so finely made it lay like a silk cord against her skin. Every morning when she woke she touched it before she opened her eyes, and every evening she brought it to her lips before she gave herself to sleep.”
“This is that same chain?” the pelican said. She brought an eye close to the chain, and studied it well. “It must feel divine,” said she, “to have a lover who gives such a gift.” She lay her head back down in the fisherman’s lap and looked up at him. He ruffled her neck feathers, and then stroked them smooth again. “Do go on,” she said.
The fisherman shook his head ruefully at the foolishness of the next part of his tale. “For all the heat of my passion,” he said, “for all the adoration in her eyes, the sea still called to me. Not so much for the voyage itself, but because I wanted to live out my days with some hard coin to show for my years as a sailor. And there was coin to be had working the ships of the spice trade. I told my beloved I wanted to build her a proper house, to show her that she was my queen, and for this I needed some hard coin, for brass hinges. The rest I could make, but I wanted only the best for her, and brass hinges I could not make.
“She looked at me strangely then, as if I were some creature she had never met before. She told me she needed no house other than the house of our love. She was happy enough in her hut between the sea and her garden. Her voice grew louder with each thing she said. ‘For brass hinges you would leave me?’ she shouted, ‘for brass hinges?’ Only then did I know my own foolishness. I begged her forgiveness, and by evening we were back in each other’s arms.
“That night I lay next to her on a sleeping mat on the hard-packed ground, listening to the quiet rise and fall of her breath, and I thought I had laid my foolishness to rest. But my dream of sailing one more time, and of returning home with a purse fat with silver so that I might live out my days in a proper house, with a proper bed, that dream crept back into my thoughts like a thief and stole away my resolve. And so, a few weeks later, I sailed on a dhow carrying nutmeg, mace, and cloves to Malacca, a journey that took me away for a fortnight or two. She let me go, for she could see that my need was great, and we renewed our love when I returned.”
“I have seen the dead quarrel over money,” said the pelican. “It is a strange thing,” she said, “given that they have no more need of it once they arrive here.”
“There is much blood spilled over it where I come from,” said the fisherman. “And much heartache made for the lack of it.”
“As we see in your story. Please, do go on.”
The fisherman nodded his agreement. “I made several voyages on the dhow, earning a little coin each time, and each time, upon returning to my beloved, our love was the more fierce for my having gone away. She forgave me my absences, and I came to take her indulgence for granted.
“Some two years later a sailing ship arrived in the harbor of Ambon to take on cargo. The ship was bound for a great city on the North Sea, halfway around the world, where spices fetched a price to ransom a king. Those who signed on to sail her were promised a rich reward. I worked for days loading her with fresh water and spices, dried fruit and dried fish, and I made some coin. But it was not enough coin to satisfy my pride, and so I came to my beloved the night before the ship sailed, and I asked her to let me go.
“‘Two years,’ I told her, ‘and I will return, and we will live out our days in comfort.’”
The fisherman drew a spiral in the sand with the tip of his stick, circling inward. The striations in his beloved’s clamshell were turning to blues and jaundiced yellows, the colors of a bruise.
“And so began the quarrel that broke us,” the fisherman said.
“A quarrel?” the pelican said. She raised her bill from the fisherman’s lap and stood, flapping her wings before she settled herself again on the driftwood log next to him. “Surely a love so great would have survived a mere quarrel?”
The fisherman raised his eyes to the heavens and shook his head no. “That night we had a great row, and she told me that if I left I should never come back. I would not let her order me about so, for though she was the queen of my heart, she was not the captain of my actions. Or so thought I at the time. I turned my back on her and walked away. She came after me, I thought to wrap her arms round me and beg me to stay, but instead she clawed my back from shoulders to waist, and spat upon me, and cursed me as a sailor, who are the worst of all men. I walked away bleeding, and full of pride, and unrepentant for the wrong I had done her.”
“And so you set sail?” the pelican said. The fisherman nodded.
“I did, and I was well paid when we sold our cargo. My purse was heav
y with silver, and I kept it behind a hollowed-out plank above my bunk. And out of devotion to my beloved, I kept the fall front of my breeches closed, and stayed away from the bordellos and the temple whores. But on the return journey we sailed into a never-ending gale that forced us west by southwest for forty days and forty nights. The ship was pummeled, the sails stretched, our every effort to outrun the high seas useless. We were blown a thousand leagues off course into the southern sea, and we were on the wrong side of the world.
“In the end we were shipwrecked off the coast of a barren land. The last of the sails ripped from the mast, and the ship wallowed. The gales blew our ship onto uncharted rocks where it was battered apart. Most of the crew took to the boats, and they were promptly capsized and swept from sight. I watched the last jack sailor of them rise up the side of a great wave, cursing all the gods of the sea as only a sailor can curse. And then he was gone.
“I stayed on board the wreckage until the last, clinging to the remnants of the stern. What saved me was the lessening of the storm. The winds weakened, the rain let up, the seas grew less fierce. Pieces of the ship floated all around me on the waves. I made out a beach in the distance, and beyond it a line of trees. A large block of beeswax floated up from the hold, and I slipped into the water. I wrapped my arms round the beeswax and kicked my way shoreward.”
The fisherman shook his head as if he scarcely believed that he had survived. The pelican cooed at him, her bill by his ear, and he felt the soothing note of her voice where the soft skin of her pouch touched his shoulder.
“I was marooned on that barren shore. My purse, fat with silver, went down with the ship. I built myself a shack from the wreckage that washed up on the beach, and a sturdy little skiff with which I fished the local waters. I resigned myself to living out my days there, with nothing but my memories of her to keep me company.
The Alehouse at the End of the World Page 12
