The Alehouse at the End of the World

by Stevan Allred

  “I cannot fathom,” he said, “how it is that my beloved can have a soul, and yet have no memories of her past life.”

  “An excellent question,” the cormorant said. There was nothing he liked better than to ponder such things, and he hoped that the fisherman would be a worthy interlocutor. “It takes us straight to the metaphysical, which, as it happens, is a particular interest of mine.”

  “Is it?” said the fisherman. “Then perhaps you can tell me, what exactly is the soul?”

  “Opinions vary,” said the cormorant, “but most of the scholars in the material world are entirely too speculative for my taste. To be sure, they haven’t had the advantage of coming here and seeing how the afterlife truly works. In a physical sense, the soul is a humming thing, a vibration so quiet it can scarcely be heard, but at the moment of death it congeals into that gob of mucous wrapped around your heart, the thing that the crow gets you humans to cough up with that cacophonous song of his. But in a metaphysical sense, the soul is something eternal. Only humans truly have one, and it is the part of them that precedes their individual lives and exists outside of those lives. It is the thing that gives self-awareness to a newborn babe, however rudimentary that self-awareness might be.”

  “I’ve heard such talk from scholars before,” said the fisherman. “But why does Cariña have no memory of herself?”

  “Hmm,” said the cormorant. “Yes, that is the heart of the matter, pardon my pun. Well, what happens here is that the soul is separated from the body and given a chance to renew itself before returning to the material world. There’s no need of individual memories for that to happen.”

  “Yet she remembers how to tie a knot, and how to skin a fish, and how to tend a fire. How is that possible?”

  “Another excellent question,” said the cormorant, who was delighted to be able to show off his scholarship. “Please understand, most of what I’m about to say is speculative on my part, but my theory is this: the memory of events resides in the mind, but the memory of skills resides in the body. It is her hands that remember how to tie a knot, not her mind. Her lips remember how to speak.”

  “And to kiss,” said the fisherman.

  “Just so. But once her soul had been removed from her, and her body thrown on the pyre, her mind was boiled away, and everything she once knew of her own history, everything she had experienced in the material world, boiled away with it. She no longer knows the story of her own life, and so she is reborn as a tabula rasa.”

  “A blank slate.” The fisherman looked at the cormorant then with great sadness in his eyes. “She will never again be the woman I once knew, will she?”

  The cormorant offered the fisherman what he hoped was his most sympathetic cluck. “Sic transit gloria mundi,” he said. “So passes away earthly glory. You cannot resist it.”

  The fisherman looked up at him, his suffering writ across his sorrowful face. But something else came into his eyes, a fierceness, a passion, a refusal to submit quietly to his fate.

  How he suffers, thought the cormorant. And, amantes sunt amentes—lovers are lunatics. They set such store by these feelings, which were all too fickle if the ancient scrolls were to be believed. Yet there was something ennobling about the way the fisherman suffered, as if longing sharpened his humanity.

  Perhaps, thought the cormorant, the fisherman’s service to a lost cause is the best part of him.

  BOOK TWO:

  THE CONGRESS OF CROWS

  And so it came to pass that romance bloomed on the Isle of the Dead even as, out in the Fetch, death and destruction grew ever closer. Both the fisherman and the crow were in the throes of love, and the frigate bird, too, was drunk with infatuation, though he had lost his place on the goddess’s dance card. But like the others, he kept his wounded heart soothed with the balm of toil.

  The fisherman, for his part, felled a cedar tree, and began the task of turning the fragrant wood into boards, loving them into shape with his hands. The frigate bird traveled from the spirit world to the material and back again, marshaling the implements the fisherman needed to build a home. Tools arrived in the hands of the dead, saws and planes, chisels and gouges, whetstones and files. Slowly a square room began to take shape, the proper house that the fisherman had long ago promised his beloved.

  Their days fell into a rhythm, with the fisherman spearing a fish or two in the mornings, and his beloved fetching water from the stream with a wooden bucket that had been in the hands of a laundress at the moment her heart gave out. His beloved took over the cooking and the tending of the fire, and the fisherman sharpened his tools while she readied the day’s first meal. He soon had a fine double-sided whetstone from the famed coticule quarry in the Ardennes, a better stone than any he’d held in all his years as a ship’s carpenter. His belly full and his tools finely edged, he set about the day’s work, and for her part, Cariña began a garden. She, too, was aided by the frigate bird, who caused seeds to be brought over, and by the pelican, who took a keen interest in her efforts to produce vegetables and grains. They discovered that a gobbet of the crow’s guano and a drop of the pelican’s blood mixed in a bucket of water made vegetables grow at a stupendous rate, and in short order they had potatoes and carrots, lettuces and maize, and wheat for bread.

  They were spent in mind and body by the end of the day, but they had the satisfaction of surveying the results of their labor before the sun set each evening. They slept apart, but so close together in the lean-to that neither of them could roll over without consideration of the other, for they were cautious about touching each other. In that region of his thoughts where words held sway, the fisherman was careful not to think of himself as having any special claim on her favors. But in his heart his yearning for her was fierce, and though he held his feelings in check with the forbearance of a deep-water sailor, his desire for her was as much a part of him as his ribs, or his hands, or the way he knew how to shape a plank to fit tight against the next plank.

  §

  The fisherman awoke to something nuzzling at his ear, as if his beloved were nipping gently at his earlobe, and tracing the curve of the auricle with a fingernail.

  “Cariña,” he murmured, scarcely daring to believe that his beloved was finally warming up to him enough to touch him. He brought his hand to his ear to caress her hand, but what he felt there was bony, and too thick to be a finger, yet too thin to be her hand.

  “Am I dreaming?” he said.

  “It’s me,” came the whispered reply.

  The fisherman opened his eyes to the visage of the frigate bird, who was leaning over him, the curved hook at the end of his bill scarcely an inch from his face. For a brief, nightmarish moment the fisherman felt as if he were about to have his eyes pecked out, but the frigate bird pulled away, and backed out of the lean-to. His beloved lay next to him, still sleeping. It was dark out, the middle of the night, and in the seaward distance the song of the paddlers on the canoe of the dead was approaching.

  “Come with me,” said the frigate bird. “We have need of your hands.”

  They walked together, man and bird, along the hard, wet sand, the canoe overtaking them as it made its way into the inlet. No matter how many times he saw it, the sight of the canoe, with the fish eagles flapping their wings in time with the paddlers paddling, and the sound of it, with the high-pitched keening of the fish eagles soaring over the massed voices of the newly dead, these sights and sounds filled the fisherman with awe. Beneath all that glorious sound, the Kiamah beast’s heart kept its own time, deeply thumping, deeply thumping, in a rhythm as old as blood.

  The canoe was beached, and its passengers were disgorging themselves from within it by the time the fisherman and the frigate bird joined the pelican and the cormorant. These two were greeting the dead, reassuring them that all was as it was supposed to be. The crow stood some distance away, waiting, the silhouette of his body sinister against the glow of the burned-down pyre.

  An old farmer jumped down from the canoe, a
nd he turned and reached his arms up. Someone dropped a full grain sack into his hands, and another, and another, and then a smaller and lighter sack, fragrant with a smell reminiscent of the hemp fields of Circassia, but with a hint of citrus on top.

  “Give him a hand,” said the frigate bird. “This cargo is ours.” He plucked a coin that was tucked into his belt and dropped it into the outstretched hand of the old farmer.

  A wheelbarrow was handed over the side, and the fisherman helped the farmer set it on the sand. Next came a cask, which was empty by the heft of it, but a well-made example of the cooper’s art. Then several more cloth sacks, very heavy, and a spade of good steel, with a thick tang embedded in an ironwood handle. Lastly, at the bidding of someone within the canoe, a stevedore by the look of him, the fisherman came aboard to help with a mortar and pestle. The mortar was as big around as a cart wheel, and the stevedore, with no more than a nod of his chin and a grunt, directed the fisherman to lift it with him. They brought it to the edge of the canoe, and the frigate bird yelled, “Stand back,” and they dropped the stone on the sand. The fisherman took note of the space beneath a thwart in the prow of the canoe wherein all this cargo had been stored. A space big enough for a man or two to stow away in, and in the darkness, if they were covered by a blanket or a tarp, they would likely not be seen.

  The stevedore dropped the pestle, the size of a small amphora, off the other side of the prow, and the fisherman jumped down and rejoined the frigate bird.

  “What is all this?” said the fisherman.

  “Barley,” said the frigate bird, pointing with a wing at the grain sacks, “and hops. You remember you once asked if there were an alehouse on the Isle of the Dead?”

  A broad grin grew slowly across the fisherman’s face. “I do.”

  “And would it please you to know that this scroll here”—the frigate bird indicated a roll of parchment tucked into his belt—“contains the recipe for making ale?”

  “It would,” said the fisherman. He picked up the sack of hops and smelled it. His grin stretched even wider, and he closed his eyes, overcome by the memory of the alehouse he had once frequented in Hav, where they hung their hops to dry from the rafters.

  And so they loaded up the wheelbarrow, and carried their goods back to the fisherman’s home.

  “These heavy cloth sacks,” said the fisherman, “these are not grain?”

  “No indeedy,” said the frigate bird. “That’s cement, the very best, made according to the ancient Roman formula.”

  Curious, thought the fisherman. He was a woodworker, and had never had much to do with masonry, but he had been to Rome, and seen the Colosseum, and the Senate, and the temples of the gods. Those buildings had stood for centuries, untouched by the ravages of time.

  “And what, pray tell, are we going to build with cement?”

  The frigate bird put a wing across his shoulders, and walked companionably beside the fisherman.“Something,” he said, “the likes of which the spirit world has never seen.”

  §

  The woman, for her part, saw each thing in the world in delicate detail. Her own hands were a newborn source of wonder, the way her fingers grew out of her knuckles, the flow of the lines across her palms, the one hand a mirror for the other. She was struck joyful by the play of light on the waves of the inlet, by the subtle shift in the shades of green in the boughs of trees as the sun made its transit across the sky. The rich, euphoric brown of the long tubes of kelp stranded along the beach made her smile, and she had no need to know why. To have dirt from her garden under her fingernails, to have smoke from a cooking fire scenting the air, to have the company of the pelican as they swam together in the inlet, this was all she needed of jubilation.

  Beyond the garden, the house the fisherman was building took shape, rising plank by plank from the ground, the boards covering the frame like skin on bones. The fisherman’s clever hands, his fingers covered with calluses and cuts from his tools, were a marvel to her, although she was careful not to let him see her staring at them. She liked the sound of him hammering away, or drawing a saw to cut through a piece of wood. She gathered the curled shavings from his auger and threw them on the embers in the morning for the simple joy of watching them take flame. He was a good man, she thought. There was no guile in his face, bereft as it was of eyebrows, and that, along with his blue skin, gave his countenance an innocence she found sweet. Perhaps it is true what he says, that we loved each other once, for surely he loves me still. She should go to him, and let him take her in his arms, the way he clearly longed to do.

  The light shifted as a cloud passed before the sun. Her garden was weeded, and it was not yet time to begin the evening’s meal. They had a year and a day to be together, so had he said. Time enough, she thought, for me to take my time. The moment might yet come when she felt drawn to him as he was to her. And he had assured her that she owed him nothing beyond the pleasure of her company at dinner each night, and that much she gave him.

  With a last look at the fisherman she let her feet take her where they would, and that was down to the water, away from him. The inlet was calm, and she took off her sarong and dove beneath the surface.

  §

  The crow, for all the thousands of years he had occupied his perch on the Isle of the Dead, was naught but an eager squab when it came to love. He believed, as all first-time lovers do, that no one’s heart had ever boiled over with such ardor as did his. He was the very avatar of romance, and there was no one to rival the goddess, with her scent as delicate as jasmine, and her skin as soft as the downy lining of a nest. He loved the colorful sarong she wore and the way the sunlight played upon her hair.

  “Oh, my darling,” she soothed, “such a fine bed you’ll build us. In it we shall scale the heights of passion, and I will make such a lover of you as this world has never seen.”

  The crow sighed. He had yet to begin the building of this bed she wanted, for he had not the slightest idea of how a bed was built.

  Dewi began to hum, and the crow’s head was filled with the clear ringing tones of gamelan. “I am exceedingly fond,” said she, “of carved bedposts.”

  Carved bedposts? To learn to carve something fit for a goddess would take a good deal of time. The thought of so much delay made his zibik wither. “Darling,” said he, “I fear I am no carver.”

  “Look at me,” the goddess said, and when he did so, a single note in his ears chimed, and the chime spread to his hands, the gaze of the goddess tuning him from the inside out. She brought his hands to her lips, and kissed the palms, and stroked each of his fingers with hers, and all the while his hands buzzed with the good, good excitations of the melody she hummed.

  “You are a carver now, my sweet,” said she, “for I have given you this boon.”

  The crow looked at his hands as if he had never seen them before. To be in love was to lose himself, only to find a better self in the eyes of his darling. “Kiaw!” he cried, “kiaw aw aw aw aw!” All he lacked now was a carving knife.

  The goddess reached for his breechcloth, and the crow’s zibik, ever ready, gave a quick throb and began to grow. At long last, the moment was come! But her hand drew forth not his meat whistle, but a carving knife that she had magicked into a belt of tools that hung from his hips.

  “You have everything you need,” said she, “now go forth and carve.” And she spun him round by the shoulders, and gave him a gentle shove in the middle of his back.

  My zibik is hard enough, thought he, that if I were to put an edge on it, I could carve this entire forest into toothpicks.

  §

  The pelican plucked weeds with her bill, and tossed them aside. She liked this new thing in the world, this gardening, and if she shifted into her old woman shape, she liked the crunch and the flavor of what grew here. Cucumbers she liked most especially, and raw potatoes, still in their skins, with the smell of the dirt fresh on them. And the flatbread that the woman baked on flat stones banked around the fire. Her feathers,
nourished by all this good new food, were growing back in the bald spot on her belly where she’d worried them away with her nervous bill. But more than gardening and eating, she liked having someone new to talk with, someone womanly like herself. And with the scandalous doings of Dewi Sri and the crow, there was plenty to talk about.

  “Did you see them yesterday?” the woman said, “staring into each other’s eyes? She’s got him turning backward somersaults at the flick of an eyelash.” The silver chain the fisherman had given her shone against her skin in the sunlight, and she felt the fine texture of its links. She had removed the last of the pitch balls so that it would lie flat. The fisherman, she knew, kept hoping that she would remember something of her past life, but there was no such longing within her, although the chain drew her fingers to it like no other object in the world.

  “Too true,” said the pelican, “and now he’s carving those bedposts for her, day and night. When the canoe of the dead arrives, he rushes them off without all that strutting and savagery he usually does. He doesn’t even bother to line them up, he just sings that awful song of his, and they cough up their souls, and then off they go in a big rabble to the pyre. He leaves the tending of the fire to the cormorant and me, and he goes back to his carving.”

  “Are they sleeping together?” the woman asked. The bedroom arrangements of one’s betters were eternally amusing, she thought, although she did not know how she knew this.

  “Oh no,” the pelican said. “She’s much too clever for that. She’s got him convinced that they can only consummate in a bed fit for a goddess. And he barely sleeps anyway since she arrived. He’s too busy carving, and rubbing her feet every time she sits down.”

  “Do you think they’ll have a wedding?” the woman asked.