The Alehouse at the End of the World

by Stevan Allred

  “They shall have,” said the pelican, “whatever Dewi wants.”

  §

  While the crow carved bedposts, Dewi Sri explored the Isle of the Dead. She flew over the forest, skimming the treetops and breathing in the tang of cedar and fir boughs. This forest was so different from the one where she lived, with its tumult of flowering trees, looping jungle vines, brightly colored snakes, and chattering, screeching monkeys. Here was only quiet, and the soft shush of tree branches moving with the wind. Moss grew everywhere, and hung from the trees like living shrouds.

  She invited the cormorant to accompany her on one of these flights, and together they circumnavigated the isle. They landed then on the peak of the highest mountain, at the center of the isle, and stood together on that rocky promontory. The sun was bright, and the cormorant’s spectacles seemed magically to have lenses of smoked glass in them.

  “I’ve never thought to come up here,” said the cormorant. “The view is phenomenal.”

  “’Tis strange,” the goddess said, “to see a forest so green and yet so empty of life.”

  “Strange?” said the cormorant. “I should think that it is only natural that the Isle of the Dead be full of lifelessness.”

  The goddess stood with her wings spread, the wind at the top of the mountain wafting through her feathers. “Where I come from,” said she, “there are rice paddies everywhere, and the land is teeming with creatures, and never silent. At night the fireflies gather above the paddies by the thousands, and the night is lit by their tiny lanterns.”

  “Of course,” said the cormorant. “For you are a goddess of life, while we here serve life’s antipode.”

  Far below, the waters of the inlet were a deep green, and a rainbow hung in the mists above the waterfall.

  “That canyon,” the goddess said, pointing with one of her elegant fingers at the cleft in the land beneath the rainbow, “have you been there?”

  “No,” said the cormorant, “I have not. Only the crow goes there.”

  “Oh?” said the goddess. “How interesting. I suppose you’ve known the crow a long time?”

  “Oh my, yes,” said the cormorant. “For eons.”

  “He’s a complicated fellow,” said the goddess.

  Blink, blink, blink went the cormorant’s eyes. “I suppose,” he said. “Things are different around here now. Not so long ago his elder cousin Raven was in charge. Back then the crow’s job was to make sure the sacred fire never went out. He was a lowly fellow, a humble scavenger who picked at the scorched bones as he banked the coals in the morning light. Nobody paid him much mind.”

  “He is strapping and sinewy, and not without a certain charm,” said the goddess, “and yet you ignored him.”

  The cormorant looked over the tops of his spectacles at the goddess, first with one eye, then the other. “In his man shape he is well-built,” said the cormorant. “But charming? He is a trickster and a scoundrel, and he is drunk with his newfound power.”

  “He has been making up for lost time, has he not?” the goddess said.

  “Hmmm,” said the cormorant, stroking the place where he would have a chin if he had a chin. “I suppose you’re right.”

  Dewi Sri folded her wings and leaned back against a boulder, sunning herself, her wing feathers softly nacreous in the bright light. “There is another side to him,” she said. “The crow in love is a crow you’ve not seen before. And as to being a scoundrel, surely a scholar such as yourself knows that women love a scoundrel, both for the way he excites them, and for the thrill of taming him.”

  “I am a scholar of many things,” said the cormorant, “but love is not amongst them.”

  “Then begin your scholarship of love by studying the story unfolding all around you,” she said. “The fisherman loves his beloved, who knows him not, so therein lies the tale of love unrequited. And both the crow and the frigate bird love me, and I shall play one off against the other, and therein lies the eternal triangle of love.”

  “It is an old story, I know,” said the cormorant, “yet not one we’ve seen in these parts.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot, and then spread his wings as if he might fly off. “Forgive me for making so bold as to say this, but it would seem that you are brewing trouble.”

  “Change can be troublesome,” said the goddess, “but this place is ripe for it. Be not afraid. Things other than trouble shall be brewed here.”

  The cormorant rattled his flight feathers to shake off the sense of impending doom he felt. The goddess meant to use her feminine wiles against the crow, that much was clear, and how could that mean anything but trouble once the crow realized her plot? And what of the Kiamah beast, kept drowsy with conaria for now, who would swallow the material world if he awoke? The goddess made no mention of that flagitious monstrosity, and instead advised him to study love, which seemed unwise, given the circumstances. Better he should study the arts of war.

  “There is an old curse,” said the cormorant, “that says ‘May you live in interesting times.’”

  “So there is,” said the goddess. “But there is an older wisdom that says each moment is the only moment you have. Take courage, friend. It is no accident that I am here, and you shall have a part to play in what comes.”

  The goddess stood and offered the cormorant her beatific smile. Then she spread her wings and flew off the edge of the precipice. The cormorant watched her grow smaller as her wings carried her aloft.

  “Auk,” said the cormorant. “That is precisely what I fear.”

  §

  The goddess looked closely at the bedpost she held in her hands. It was one of four that the crow had carved according to her most detailed instructions. Its foot was a turtle, and from the back of the turtle two snakes rose, entwined around each other. The crow produced, from the tool belt he wore round his waist, the magician’s glass he had schemed away from the fisherman, and she held it to her eye, the better to see his workmanship.

  “Marvelous,” she said, “so intricate.” She stroked his shiny beak, and kissed the flat feathers that covered his nostrils, and whispered her dulcet demand into his ear. “Although I wonder, O dearest one, why the snakes have no scales?”

  The crow’s heart fell at the hint of disappointment in Dewi’s words. The bedposts were taller than he was. It would take him days upon days to carve so many scales. But one look into her eyes was all it took for him to accede to her request, for here was yet another way to please her. Pleasing the goddess made the blood run hot to his zibik, and while the stiffening made him want to put his hands beneath his breechcloth, he was determined to save himself for her, and only her.

  “Only because, my angel,” he said, “I have not yet carved them.”

  §

  The goddess, having surveyed the canyon on the wing, announced that she would take the woman and the pelican there for an afternoon of womanly pleasures, and so she led her female companions to the waterfall. They brought with them baskets full of lettuces and snap peas, jicamas and spinach, romanescos and zucchinis, and smoked fish flavored with sage. They brought combs and soaps and blankets, they brought perfumes and unguents and kohl, things the frigate bird, ever eager to please the goddess, had ushered to the Isle of the Dead in the canoe. Out of deference to the woman’s lack of wings they walked through the narrow canyon to the waterfall, the pelican in her old woman shape, the goddess with her wings raised like a great parasol, to keep them from trailing in the stream, and the woman behind them, wading in water up to her thighs where the canyon walls fell too close to afford them a dry path.

  When they reached the rocky, steep-sided bowl at the end of the canyon, the goddess, arrested by beauty, flittered her wings and hovered in the mist from the waterfall, turning slowly to take it all in. Maidenhair ferns growing from rocky niches bobbed a greeting to her, and lichens brightened their colors in her presence. The woman and the pelican were rendered openmouthed and mute by the wanton beauty of the place. Sunlight glanced off the water and
danced on the canyon walls, and the air was edged with salt from the sea and tinged with the sweet and sour redolence of cedar sap.

  Dewi, for her part, found herself drawn to the waterfall, which, for all its misty cascade, bright in the sunlight, seemed to hide a dark presence. There was more here than met the eye, thought she, though she could not say what that might be. She was well out of her familiar surroundings back on Bali Dwipa, and she found the quiet of this place, its lack of animal sounds, unnerving.

  Perhaps that was all it was. She turned away from the waterfall, rejoining her companions, and they set down their baskets and spread their things on the sandy beach. Off came their sarongs, and the three women waded into the pool at the base of the waterfall, splashing one another and laughing. The sun was warm and the water cool, and the cascade from the lip of the rock bowl gathered rainbows of prismed light in honor of their arrival. The women swam for a time and then gathered on the shore to dry themselves, and to partake of their repast, and to talk.

  They sat together and ate, taking turns feeding one another, and Dewi Sri entertained them with the tale of how the War of the Gods began. She sat in lotus position atop a flat boulder with her back to the sun, drying her wing feathers. “I lived in the palace of Batara Guru, my foster father, he of the four arms and the ophidian neck, and I grew from a little hatchling doted on by all to a young woman who was desired by all. Even Batara Guru desired me, forgetting in his lust that I was his daughter, and he wooed me with lavish gifts. He ordered the other gods to build for me a palace, which is my home to this day, and he bestowed upon me these wings with which I fly.” Here the goddess stood and spread her wings, turning so that her audience might see their beauty.

  “At first I thought he was acting out of a father’s devotion,” the goddess went on, once again seated. “But he lured me to his bedchamber with the promise of a gift beyond all others, and there he showed me his great q’hram, and asked me to touch it, to prove my love for all he had done for me. I refused him, and fled to my brother Sedana’s palace. Sedana gathered many of the gods to a great council, and it was decided that Batara Guru must be killed for his attempt to corrupt me. But some of the gods did not believe my story, and they sided with Batara Guru, who told them it was I who had tried to seduce him, so that I might take his q’hram in my mouth and devour it, and thereby gain all his power for my own.” There was a furrow between Dewi Sri’s eyebrows, the only sign on her serene face that her tale troubled her in any way.

  “This was a foul lie, and further proof of Batara Guru’s corruption, for it is ever the case that power lies heavy on the soul of anyone who bears it. I wept for my father, who had lost his way, and I refused to fight against him and begged for a truce, that we might avoid the war. But Batara Guru, in his pride and in his shame, would have nothing to do with peace, and so the war began.” Here the goddess paused to take a sip of water from her teacup, and thus refreshed, she went on.

  “Now it so happened that at the same time there was also a great war in the material world, and the dead arrived on the shore by the thousands, waiting for the canoe to take their souls across. Sedana and Batara Guru made great speeches to persuade the dead to join one side or the other, and the hot breath they exhaled filled the dead with battle lust, so that even women and children became warriors. Fate decreed that the battles be fought at sea, and the two armies, Sedana’s and Batara Guru’s, they each built many warships, and they forged many swords, and they sailed their armadas out to where the water was deep. There they flung fireballs at one another’s ships with trebuchets, sinking some of the ships outright, and destroying the sails of others. They boarded these floating hulks and had at one another with their swords and their knives and their cudgels, bashing in skulls and beheading the bodies. They fought for forty days and forty nights, first one gaining the advantage and then the other. The killing never stopped until the sea was red with blood, until the bodies filled the sea and covered the waves, and one could walk from one shore to the other upon them.” The goddess stared off into the middle distance for a moment, and brought her palms together, and touched her fingertips to her forehead in remembrance of the dead.

  “The bloodlust that had consumed these fallen warriors sank to the bottom and gathered there like quicksilver,” said the goddess, “their twice-dead souls putrefying for a hundred times a hundred days, and it was from this evil, oily muck that the Kiamah birthed itself.” The pelican shivered at this, and murmured a prayer that they all might be delivered from evil, while the woman sat with her arms wrapped tightly round her body, chilled from within by visions of war. The goddess too was still for a moment, for the birth of the Kiamah was part of her family’s shame, and she was the heir to that shame even now.

  “The gods fought until they were exhausted,” the goddess went on, “until on the final day of the war, Sedana and Batara Guru met face to face, in the middle of the sea, where they stood on the bodies of the dead. They drew their terrible swords and laid into each other, and the sky turned black, and lightning flashed and thunder stormed each time their swords clanged. So caught up in their struggle were they that they did not realize that they were both slowly sinking into the sea, the bodies beneath them bursting and then collapsing after so many days in the water. When both gods were up to their necks they each thrust their swords into the other, and they slew each other, my brother Sedana and my father Batara, and it was only then that the war ended.”

  The pelican was weeping as Dewi Sri’s story came to a close, and the woman, too, had tears in her eyes. They sat in silence, the dark tale of the War of the Gods made darker by the brightness of the day, and the beauty of the waterfall.

  “Your beauty,” said the woman, “has been the cause of a great deal of woe.”

  “It is a kind of power,” said the goddess, “and like all power, when it is put to an ill use, it takes its toll. It is my saving grace that it was not I who misused this gift.”

  The pelican lay her head next to the goddess’s, and stroked her arm. “You must be so sad,” said she, “to have lost your family this way.”

  The goddess considered for a moment. “Once, I was,” said she, “but that was a long time ago, and in my grief I learned a great lesson, which is to let go the past, and savor the moment. And something else was gained, for now, in my kingdom, a woman rules instead of a man, and we are all the better for it.”

  “It’s an old story you tell,” said the woman. “I feel the shape of it when I close my eyes and watch the shadows within me. Men are forever playing with their knives, are they not, and speechifying about all the injustices they think they must remedy?”

  The women nodded in agreement, and they left off speaking of war, and they began to take turns with their unguents and perfumes, applying them to one another. The goddess produced a fine brush made of hair from the belly of a mongoose, and she brushed kohl round the woman’s eyes, black above, and green below. The pelican opened her bill and let show her woman face within, and round her eyes too the goddess brushed on kohl, and then pelican and woman took turns with the brush, each of them brushing kohl round an eye of the goddess. They found a still spot in the stream, where the light of the sun reflected back at them like a mirror, and they admired their handiwork, and they were well pleased. A dragonfly hovered over them, the iridescent blue of its body bright in the sunlight. It flew from one to another of the women as each of them spoke, pausing in the air as if to underline their words with the thrum of its wings.

  “So,” said the woman to Dewi Sri, “what will you do with your swain, the crow?”

  The goddess laughed. “The crow is but a child when it comes to romance, as eager as the rawest youth to prove his devotion to me.” She held out her hand, and the dragonfly hovered there, within her grasp, although she did not close her fingers round it. “What a beautiful creature,” she said. “How did you get here?”

  “It must have come across on the canoe,” said the pelican. “We have no such animals her
e.”

  “Then it is a rare creature indeed,” said the goddess, and she offered it the vaya mudra, the mudra of air. The dragonfly hovered closer, as if to kiss her fingertips.

  “The crow is dangerous,” said the pelican. “You have no idea of his savagery.”

  “I am well aware of his bad habits,” said Dewi Sri, “but he is not without his charms, for he is well-formed, and clever, although he is no match for me.”

  “Do tell,” said the woman. “And to what extent have you sampled those charms?” She cast a glance at the pelican, whom she could tell had not the nerve to ask the goddess what they both wanted to know. “Just how well-formed is he?”

  Dewi Sri raised an eyebrow and grinned at the woman. The dragonfly hovered a few inches from her mouth, marking her words with the buzz of its wings. “Well-formed indeed, if I may judge from the lump his q’hram makes in his breechcloth. He shall have to be schooled in the art of love, of course, for a man with a large q’hram so quickly thinks he already has all the answers to a woman’s needs.”

  “Is it so grand, this pleasure of coupling?” said the pelican. “The opportunity has never come my way.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the goddess. “So long as one’s lover knows the way of it. I shall lead the crow to his best self,” said she. “And along the way, I shall have the pleasure of mastering him in body and soul, and of bending him to my will. I shall hold his whirligigs in my hand, stroking his tenderest parts as he begs me to take his q’hram in my mouth, and I shall do so, but first, I’ll have him kneel before my southern face, and I shall take a randy ride on that beak of his, which has a purpose he has not yet dreamt of.” Here the dragonfly zoomed away, taking a turn around the inside of the rocky bowl before returning to the circle of women.

  “You speak like a common gill-flurt,” the pelican said.

  “A woman who understands the power and the pleasure is no gill-flurt, but a queen,” said the goddess. “And a man who will be both master and mastered in the act of love is no lecher, but a king. And should we not rule our own lives together, as king and queen, and thereby share the pleasure that our bodies are made to give one another?”