“A charming story, your ravishment,” the crow said, “but We fail to see what it has to do with Us.”
“Patience, Crow, for you are about to hear what this story has to do with you. Ananta Boga was on his way to the palace when he met you, Cousin Crow, and you asked him where he was going, but he could not answer because he held the eggs in his mouth. And for failing to answer you thought him to be arrogant, and lacking in the proper respect, and you attacked him furiously. One egg fell from his mouth and broke, and Ananta Boga slithered off into the tall grass to hide, but you followed him, and again you attacked him in your fury, and again an egg fell to the ground and broke. And while you devoured the succulent contents of the broken egg, Ananta Boga escaped. He slithered off to the new palace with his last egg, which he gave to Batara Guru, who accepted the offer of this egg like a pearl of the greatest price, and Batara Guru decreed that Ananta Boga should nest this egg until it hatched. And Ananta Boga did so, and when the egg hatched, inside was a beautiful baby girl, and Ananta Boga gave this girl to Batara Guru to raise as his own. And this girl grew up to be the most beautiful of the goddesses, and that is who stands before you now, for I am the hatchling of that egg like a pearl.”
The goddess put her palms together in front of her forehead, and she bowed ever so slightly to the crow, and all who beheld her saw that her skin was radiant in the firelight.
“And now you have come here to accuse me of this aw-aw-alleged crime?” said the crow.
The goddess smiled serenely at the crow. “Speak not of accusation,” she said, “for I have come merely to thank you, crow, for you were a midwife to me.”
At this, the cormorant and the pelican clucked and chuckled, and the fisherman and the frigate bird joined in, all of them clucking and chuckling at the thought of the crow as a midwife, midwifery being that most joyous of the helping occupations, and the crow being the least helpful creature they knew.
“We are no midwife,” said the crow, “but We accept your compliment, dear goddess, though We must confess, We do not recollect this serpent of whom you speak, nor anything about devouring an egg. Be that as it may, We can’t help but notice that you have a child at your breast. Are We to understand that you have brought forth our friend’s beloved from her clamshell?”
“She has, Lord Crow,” said the fisherman. He bowed his head, for he felt it best to flatter the man-bird before him, but he kept his hand on the hilt of his knife. “As you have instructed. Friend.”
The crow kept his eyes on the goddess, not bothering to acknowledge that the fisherman had spoken. “A charming sight,” said the crow. “So maternal, so lactitious, so mammalian. You’ve come a long, long way to perform this act of mammary mercy. May We invite you to share our hospitality later? To grace us with your comely presence? We have a nightly bonfire, with singing and dancing and tasty morsels on which to dine. ’Tis what all the travelers come here to see.”
“So have I heard,” said the goddess. “But I fear I must decline this evening.” She wrapped the child at her breast more tightly within her winged arms. “For as you see, duty calls.” She offered the crow the serenity of her smile, and then, as if a mask had fallen from her face, her smile broadened, and her eyes sparked with a lust that was most unmotherly, and directed straight at the crow. The crow’s tongue licked the rim of his beak, and then just as swiftly, the mask of maternity was back on Dewi Sri’s face.
The crow gave her a lascivious wink. “Another time then,” he said.
“May it be so,” said the goddess. She returned his wink with one of her own, languid and knowing, and then she cooed at the baby at her breast.
The frigate bird puffed up his throat pouch and rattled melodiously from within it, but neither goddess nor crow paid him any mind. The crow backed away from the fire until the darkness hid him, and then he waved his arm in front of himself, and he flew off into the night.
§
All night long the goddess Dewi Sri nursed her charge, who grew and grew and grew, her legs lengthening and filling out, her hair sprouting and growing until it hung nearly to the ground. The tot became a child, and the child a maiden, and the maiden a woman, and the woman a matron. She nursed, and she slept, the goddess singing her lullabies to keep her settled and content. The fisherman slept only fitfully that night, anxious as he was to hold his beloved in his arms again, but whenever he awoke the goddess put a finger to her lips, and bade him not to stir. At first light he rose to feed his fire, and to stretch his limbs, and the goddess crooked her finger to bring him close. His beloved was sleeping, her lips edged with milk, her face older than when he had last seen her, but still the face he loved.
“Let her sleep,” the goddess whispered, “she’s worked hard all night. She’ll awaken soon.”
The fisherman nodded. He trembled, light-headed and giddy as a youth beneath the balcony of his first love. To distract himself he found a stout stick, and he began to whittle a handle for the felling axe he’d found in the crow’s hoard. He was soon to be with his woman, and they would need a proper way to shelter the night.
The cormorant and the pelican had long since wandered off to meet the incoming canoe, but the frigate bird was perched on a driftwood log, sleeping. In the blue light before the sunrise began he opened his eyes, spread his wings, which were a fathom and a half in length each, and shook the dew off them.
“Good morning to all,” he said. He stretched out his neck, and he gazed at Dewi Sri with what looked to the fisherman to be the light of love in his eyes. Completely smitten, thought the fisherman. Love makes fools of us all. The frigate bird’s throat pouch puffed up for a moment at the sight of the goddess, a flash of brightest red in the light of the dawn, and he uttered a rattling sound.
“Good morning,” the fisherman murmured. Dewi Sri offered the frigate bird a serene smile, and then placed a finger to her lips, and pointed with her lovely brown eyes at the woman sleeping in her arms. The fisherman set aside his whittling, and he headed down to the beach with the frigate bird at his side.
“The moment is almost come,” he said.
“For me too,” said the frigate bird. “She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
“The goddess, you mean,” said the fisherman. “Yes, she is a great beauty.”
“Huzzah to that,” said the frigate bird. The waters of the inlet were calm and flat, with gentle waves lapping the shore. They stood side by side, man and bird, both of them with hearts quivering. The frigate bird began to preen his wing feathers, lifting them one by one and straightening them.
“There was a temple for the rice goddess near where we lived on Ambon,” said the fisherman, “with a stone figure inside. But she is far more beautiful in the flesh.”
“Oh yes,” said the frigate bird. He puffed up his throat pouch until it was the size of a wineskin, and from within it, again he produced his hollow, rattling sound, as if a cat were purring inside an empty barrel. “I have reason to believe,” he said, “that she finds me in her favor.”
The fisherman nodded, unwilling to venture a guess as to what the goddess might feel for the frigate bird. The frigate bird let the wind out of his throat pouch, offering a sigh full of longing as he did so. He reached down with his beak and pulled on the grip of his pistola, loosening it from his belt.
“I shall have to kill the crow,” he said, “if he tries to seduce her.”
The fisherman, who had nothing but murder in his heart for the crow, nodded in assent. “You’ll get no argument from me,” he said. “But that weapon, is it more than merely a hashish pipe in the guise of a pistola?”
“The handle is weighted with lead,” the frigate bird said, “and with it I shall bash in his brains if the occasion arises.”
They stared into the water, side by side, enjoying together the thought of the crow’s violent death. A breeze from the sea rippled across the frigate bird’s feathers, and he lifted his wings away from his body as if to air them.
“I’v
e been meaning to ask,” the fisherman said.
“Yes?”
“You’re on the ground. I thought you had to fly from a perch. How will you get back in the air?”
“Oh,” said the frigate bird. A tremor of delight rose up his neck, and his head shook. “The goddess will carry me aloft on her back.”
“Oh,” said the fisherman. “She can do that?” He looked the frigate bird up and down. The creature was taller than he, with a body the size of a yearling lamb. “You’re not too heavy?”
“She’s done it before.” There was something dreamy in the frigate bird’s voice, the sound of a memory that clearly had him twitterpated. “Just yesterday when we left her palace she let me climb on her back, and together we rose into the sky above glorious Mount Agung.”
“She must be very strong,” said the fisherman.
“Well yes, I suppose. She is, after all, a goddess. But I’m not the burden you might think me to be. I’m mostly feathers, and my bones are hollow. In fact, my feathers weigh more than all of my bones put together.”
“Really?” said the fisherman.
“So I am told,” said the frigate bird. “Here, let me show you. Kneel down, and I’ll hop up on your shoulders.”
The fisherman knelt, and at a word from the frigate bird, dropped onto his hands and knees. The frigate bird flapped his great wings and hopped onto the fisherman’s back. The curved claws on his toes pricked his skin as the bird made his way to the fisherman’s shoulders.
“Go ahead,” the frigate bird said, “stand up.”
The fisherman did so, surprised at how little effort it took. The bird on his shoulders weighed no more than the feather-filled pillow of a lady-in-waiting.
“Now watch,” said the frigate bird. Again he flapped his great wings, letting go of the fisherman’s shoulders, and then he sailed out over the water, rising on a lift of air, spiraling upward with only the slightest toil. Higher and higher he rose, skimming invisible currents of air, his wings long and narrow, his body slender. He was a black silhouette with a forked tail, and there was something devilishly elegant about the figure he cut against the morning sky.
All his life the fisherman had watched the birds of the sea. When he was a boy, diving for the coins sailors threw from the decks of their ships, he watched the gulls wheel and soar and envied them their flight. What a fine thing it would be to fly as the frigate bird flew, soaring with scarcely any need to beat his wings against the air. To fly above all boundaries, and over any obstacle, he and his beloved together, to escape all that held them from going home.
The frigate bird circled the inlet, showing no sign of returning to the beach, and so the fisherman walked back to the fire. There he found his beloved awake. She sat on the driftwood log next to the goddess, who held her close with one arm. Her eyes were open, and she stared into the middle distance. She was wrapped in a sarong that matched Dewi Sri’s, though she wore hers over her breasts. The goddess’s wing feathers covered her shoulders in the cool of the morning. She took no notice of the fisherman, who stood before her, quivering.
“Cariña,” he said, his love-name for her soft on his tongue.
“Yes?” she said. She looked at him as if he were a stranger. “Is that how I am called?”
The fisherman nodded. The voice was hers, and the face was hers, the curve of her lovely high cheekbones as dear as ever to him.
“I have come,” said he, “as you have asked.”
She offered him a smile full of politesse, but no warmth, and then a tremble passed through her, and the smile faded. “I fear, good sir, that I do not know you.”
The fisherman stood still as a heron waiting for a minnow to swim by. Blink, blink, blink went his eyelids. He pressed the tips of his fingers into his forehead, wanting to alter this moment with the sheer force of his will.
“You wrote to me,” he said. “A letter. You bade me come to the Isle of the Dead to find you.”
“Did I?” she said.
She studied his face. Her eyes were the blue of the sea in the calm of a clear morning, and steady as a navigator’s hand holding the ballastella as he sighted the lodestar. The goddess withdrew her arm from the woman’s shoulder.
The fisherman pointed at the tattoo on his chest. “This is you,” he said.
His beloved took in the face inked on the fisherman’s chest, with its hibiscus flower tucked behind one ear, and she slowly shook her head. “That face is no more familiar to me than yours,” she said.
The fisherman shut his eyes for a moment as he held in a gasp of frustration. His hands went to the chain round his neck. “We lived together in your hut,” he said. “I gave you this silver chain.” He lifted the chain off his neck, and held it out to her.
She looked at the chain, which was still threaded through a pair of pitch balls, but she did not reach out her hand to take it.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I remember nothing of my life before I awoke on the shore of this strange land.”
He stepped forward, and he put the chain round her neck. He was close enough to put his hands on her shoulders. They were cold, and he offered her the warmth of his hands, but the look in her eyes bade him step back. The fisherman looked at the goddess, who pressed her lips together and shook her head ever so slightly, as if to say she had done all she could. He fell back a pace or two, and he dropped himself heavily onto the sand, where he sat cross-legged with his head between his knees. Had he looked up he would have seen his beloved’s furrowed brow, and the consternation of the goddess, and the shrugs the two women exchanged as they looked at each other, neither of them with the faintest idea of what properly should come next.
The goddess stood, and she put her palms together and touched the tips of her fingers to her forehead. “Perhaps you two would like some time alone,” she said. “With your kind permission, I shall take my leave.” The fisherman and his beloved murmured their consent, and with this the goddess left them, and walked down to the edge of the water.
The fisherman scooped a handful of sand and held it in his fist, letting it trickle down like an hourglass. He felt himself to be the empty carapace of his own life, a brittle husk drained of meaning, and bereft of purpose. His lips were dry and chapped.
“Dewi tells me you rescued me,” his beloved said. “She tells me that I’ve died, and now you’ve brought me back to life.”
“Yes,” said the fisherman. “It is so.” The cruelty of his fate was beyond belief. He drew a finger through the sand, making an aimless furrow zigging first this way and then zagging that.
“Then I owe you my thanks,” said she.
The fisherman nodded, his head still between his knees. He was nothing more than an entertainment for the gods, who treated him as a shadow puppet, fit only for their brutish amusement.
“This is a strange place,” his beloved said. “I thought the afterlife would be swathed in mist, and we would sip the nectar of the gods from golden cups.”
“It’s not what I expected either,” said the fisherman. “Nothing has turned out the way I thought it would. There’s nothing to drink here but water, and nothing to eat but fish.”
There was the softest of breezes coming off the shore. The sun rose high enough in the west to clear the cliffs, and a ray of light as yellow as the center of a forget-me-not fell on the two of them. The fisherman looked up, and as he did so, his beloved’s belly growled long and low, the borborygmus of someone who has not eaten in a very long time. She looked at her belly as if it were an entirely new thing to her.
“You’re hungry,” he said.
A smile of understanding spread across her lips. “A bite of fresh fish,” said she, “would do me a world of good.”
“All right,” said the fisherman. “I know a thing or two about fishing.”
The fisherman took up his knife, and he went into the woods and cut long strips of bark from a cedar tree. He returned to the fire, where his beloved was contemplating the silver chain she held in her
hand.
“This is a fine chain,” she said.
“The finest I could find for you,” the fisherman said.
She raised her eyes to his, her lower lip caught between her teeth, and in her gaze the fisherman saw sorrow and consternation, and not one whit of recognition. He sat next to her on the driftwood log and busied himself with lashing his knife to the stick he had been whittling for an axe handle. When it came time to tie off the ends of the cedar strips, his beloved put the silver chain round her neck again, and she reached for the spear he was fashioning.
“I know how to do this,” she said. He offered her the spear, and watched as she tied a strangle knot, her fingers nimble and sure of themselves. When she finished, she handed the spear back to him, and she stared at her hands as if she had never seen them before.
“I know how,” she said, “but I don’t know how I know.”
“Your father was a ship chandler,” the fisherman said. “And his father before him, and his before that. The work of sailors and the ways of the sea were familiar to you.”
Cariña turned this thought over in her mind, looking beneath it, behind it, and beyond it, for thoughts were new to her, and there was much to consider.
“Did you know my father?” she asked.
“I had not the pleasure,” the fisherman said. “When we met, your father had already passed on, and it was your brother who ran the family chandlery.”
“Ah,” she said. My mind is a dark place, she thought. Memories are what light it, and I have none. “Where was this?”
“In the Spice Islands,” he said. “On the isle of Ambon. On the far side of the world from where your father was born.”
“Ah,” she said. She had a family, even though she felt as if she had sprung from nothing. She had words, her mind was full of words. “And my father, and his father, and his father before that, are they all here?”
The Alehouse at the End of the World Page 15
