The Ape's Wife and Other Stories

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  In the tavern, Malmury, daughter of Lord Gwrtheyrn, managed to regale her audience with increasingly fabulous variations of her battle with the demon. But no one much seemed to mind the embellishments, or that, partway through the tenth retelling of the night, it was revealed that the troll had summoned a gigantic, fire-breathing worm from the ooze that carpeted the floor of the bay, and which Malmury also claimed to have dispatched in short order.

  “Sure,” she said, wiping at her lips with the hem of the barmaid’s skirt. “And now, there’s something else for your clam diggers to turn up, sooner or later.”

  By dawn, the stench wafting from the common was becoming unbearable, and a daunting array of dogs and cats had begun to gather round about the edges of the square, attracted by the odor, which promised a fine carrion feast. The cries of the gulls and the ravens had become a cacophony, as though all the heavens had sprouted feathers and sharp, pecking beaks and were descending upon the village. The harbormaster, two physicians, and a cadre of minor civil servants were becoming concerned about the assorted noxious fluids seeping from the rapidly decomposing carcass. This poisonous concoction spilled between the cobbles and had begun to fill gutters and strangle drains as it flowed downhill, towards both the waterfront and the village well. Though there was some talk of removing the source of the taint from the village, it was decided, rather, that a low bulwark or levee of dried peat would be stacked around the corpse.

  And, true, this appeared to solve the problem of seepage, for the time being, the peat acting both as a dam and serving to absorb much of the rot. But it did nothing whatsoever to deter the cats and dogs milling about the square, or the raucous cloud of birds that had begun to swoop in, snatching mouthfuls of flesh, before they could be chased away by the two sentries, who shouted at them and brandished brooms and long wooden poles.

  Inside the smoky warmth of the tavern – which, by the way, was known as the Cod’s Demise, though no sign had ever born that title – Malmury knew nothing of the trouble and worry her trophy was causing in the square, or the talk of having the troll hauled back into the marshes. But neither was she any longer precisely carefree, despite her drunkenness. Even as the sun was rising over the village and peat was being stacked about the corpse, a stooped and toothless old crone of a woman had entered the Cod’s Demise. All those who’d been enjoying the tale’s new wrinkle of a fire-breathing worm turned towards her. Not a few of them uttered prayers and clutched tightly to the fetishes they carried against the evil eye and all manner of sorcery and malevolent spirits. The crone stood near the doorway, and she leveled a long, crooked finger at Malmury.

  “Her,” she said ominously, in a voice that was not unlike low tide swishing about rocks and rubbery heaps of bladder rack. “She is the stranger? The one who has murdered the troll who for so long called the bay his home?”

  There was a brief silence, as eyes drifted from the crone to Malmury, who was blinking and peering through a haze of alcohol and smoke, trying to get a better view of the frail, hunched woman.

  “That I am,” Malmury said at last, confused by this latest arrival and the way the people of Invergó appeared to fear her. Malmury tried to stand, then thought better of it and stayed in her seat by the hearth, where there was less chance of tipping over.

  “Then she’s the one I’ve come to see,” said the crone, who seemed less like a living, breathing woman, and more like something assembled from bundles of twigs and scraps of leather, sloppily held together with twine, rope, and sinew. She leaned on a gnarled cane, though it was difficult to be sure if the cane were wood or bone, or some skillful amalgam of the two. “She’s the interloper who has doomed this village and all those who dwell here.”

  Malmury, confused and growing angry, rubbed at her eyes, starting to think this was surely nothing more than an unpleasant dream, born of too much drink and the boiled mutton and cabbage she’d eaten for dinner.

  “How dare you stand there and speak to me this way?” she barked back at the crone, trying hard not to slur as she spoke. “Aren’t I the one who, only five days ago, delivered this place from the depredations of that demon? Am I not the one who risked her life in the icy brine of the bay to keep these people safe?”

  “Oh, she thinks much of herself,” the crone cackled, slowly bobbing her head, as though in time to some music nobody else could hear. “Yes, she thinks herself gallant and brave and favored by the gods of her land. And who can say? Maybe she is. But she should know, this is not her land, and we have our own gods. And it is one of their children she has slain.”

  Malmury sat up as straight as she could manage, which wasn’t very straight at all, and, with her sloshing cup, jabbed fiercely at the old woman. Barley wine spilled out and spattered across the toes of Malmury’s boots and the hard-packed dirt floor.

  “Hag,” she snarled, “how dare you address me as though I’m not even present. If you have some quarrel with me, then let’s hear it spoken. Else, scuttle away and bother this good house no more.”

  “This good house?” the crone asked, feigning dismay as she peered into the gloom, her stooped countenance framed by the morning light coming in through the opened door. “Beg pardon. I thought possibly I’d wandered into a rather ambitious privy hole, but that the swine had found it first.”

  Malmury dropped her cup and drew her chipped dagger, which she brandished menacingly at the crone. “You will leave now, and without another insult passing across those withered lips, or we shall be presenting you to the swine for their breakfast.”

  At this, the barmaid, a fair woman with blondish hair, bent close to Malmury and whispered in her ear, “Worse yet than the blasted troll, this one. Be cautious, my lady.”

  Malmury looked away from the crone, and, for a long moment, stared, instead, at the barmaid. Malmury had the distinct sensation that she was missing some crucial bit of wisdom or history that would serve to make sense of the foul old woman’s intrusion and the villagers’ reactions to her. Without turning from the barmaid, Malmury furrowed her brow and again pointed at the crone with her dagger.

  “This slattern?” she asked, almost laughing. “This shriveled harridan not even the most miserable of harpies would claim? I’m to fear her?”

  “No,” the crone said, coming nearer now. The crowd parted to grant her passage, one or two among them stumbling in their haste to avoid the witch. “You need not fear me, Malmury Trollbane. Not this day. But, you would do well to find some ounce of sobriety and fear the consequences of your actions.”

  “She’s insane,” Malmury sneered, than spat at the space of damp floor between herself and the crone. “Someone show her a mercy, and find the hag a root cellar to haunt.”

  The old woman stopped and stared down at the glob of spittle, then raised her head, flared her nostrils, and fixed Malmury in her gaze.

  “There was a balance here, Trollbane, an equity, decreed when my great grandmothers were still infants swaddled in their cribs. The debt paid for a grave injustice born of the arrogance of men. A tithe, if you will, and if it cost these people a few souls now and again, or thinned their bleating flocks, it also kept them safe from that greater wrath, which watches us always from the Sea at the Top of the World. But this selfsame balance have you undone, and, foolishly, they name you a hero for that deed. For their damnation and their doom.”

  Malmury cursed, spat again, and tried then to rise from her chair, but was held back by her own inebriation and by the barmaid’s firm hand upon her shoulder.

  The crone coughed and added a portion of her own jaundiced spittle to the floor of the tavern. “They will tell you, Trollbane, though the tales be less than half remembered among this misbegotten legion of cowards and imbeciles. You ask them, they will tell you what has not yet been spoken, what was never freely uttered for fear no hero would have accepted their blood money. Do not think me the villain in this ballad they are spinning around you.”

  “You would do well to leave, witch,” answered Malmury, he
r voice grown low and throaty, as threatful as breakers before a storm tide or the grumble of a chained hound. “They might fear you, but I do not, and I’m in an ill temper to suffer your threats and intimations.”

  “Very well,” the old woman replied, and she bowed her head to Malmury, though it was clear to all that the crone’s gesture carried not one whit of respect. “So be it. But you ask them, Trollbane. You ask after the cause of the troll’s coming, and you ask after his daughter, too.”

  And with that, she raised her cane, and the fumy air about her appeared to shimmer and fold back upon itself. There was a strong smell, like the scent of brimstone and of smoldering sage, and a sound, as well. Later, Malmury would not be able to decide if it was more akin to a distant thunderclap, or the crackle of burning logs. And, with that, the old woman vanished, and her spit sizzled loudly upon the floor.

  “Then she is a sorceress,” Malmury said, sliding the dagger back into its sheath.

  “After a fashion,” the barmaid told her, and slowly removed her grip upon Malmury’s shoulder. “She’s the last priestess of the Old Ways, and still pays tribute to those beings who came before the gods. I’ve heard her called Grímhildr, and also Gunna, though none among us recall her right name. She is powerful, and treacherous, but know that she has also done great good for Invergó and all the people along the coast. When there was plague, she dispelled the sickness – ”

  “What did she mean, to ask after the coming of the troll and its daughter?”

  “These are not questions I would answer,” the barmaid replied, and turned suddenly away. “You must take them to the elders. They can tell you these things.”

  Malmury nodded and sipped from her cup, her eyes wandering about the tavern, which she saw was now emptying out into the morning-drenched street. The crone’s warnings had left them in no mood for tales of monsters, and had ruined their appetite for the stranger’s endless boasting and bluster. No matter, Malmury thought. They’d be back come nightfall, and she was weary, besides, and needed sleep. There was now a cot waiting for her upstairs, in the loft above the kitchen, a proper bed complete with mattress and pillows stuffed with the down of geese, even a white bearskin blanket to guard against the frigid air that blew in through the cracks in the walls. She considered going before the council of elders, after she was rested and only hung over, and pressing them for answers to the crone’s questions. But Malmury’s head was beginning to ache, and she only entertained the proposition in passing. Already, the appearance of the old woman and what she’d said was beginning to seem less like something that had actually happened, and Malmury wondered, dimly, if she was having trouble discerning where the truth ended and her own generous embroidery of the truth began. Perhaps she’d invented the hag, feeling the tale needed an appropriate epilogue, and then, in her drunkenness, forgotten that she’d invented her.

  Soon, the barmaid – whose name was Dóta – returned to lead Malmury up the narrow, creaking stairs to her small room and the cot, and Malmury forgot about sea trolls and witches and even the gold she had coming. For Dóta was a comely girl, and free with her favors, and the stranger’s sex mattered little to her.

  2.

  The daughter of the sea troll lived among the jagged, windswept highlands that loomed above the milky blue-green bay and the village of Invergó. Here had she dwelt for almost three generations, as men reckoned the passing of time, and here did she imagine she would live until the long span of her days was at last exhausted.

  Her cave lay deep within the earth, where once had been only solid basalt. But over incalculable eons, the glacier that swept down from the mountains, inching between high volcanic cliffs as it carved a wide path to the sea, had worked its way beneath the bare and stony flesh of the land. A ceaseless trickle of meltwater had carried the bedrock away, grain by igneous grain, down to the bay, as the perpetual cycle of freeze and thaw had split and shattered the stone. In time (and then, as now, the world had nothing but time), the smallest of breaches had become cracks, cracks became fissures, and intersecting labyrinths of fissures collapsed to form a cavern. And so, in this way, had the struggle between mountain and ice prepared for her a home, and she dwelt there, alone, almost beyond the memory of the village and its inhabitants, which she despised and feared and avoided when at all possible.

  However, she had not always lived in the cave, nor unattended. Her mother, a child of man, had died while birthing the sea troll’s daughter, and, afterwards, she’d been taken in by the widowed conjurer who would, so many years later, seek out and confront a stranger named Malmury who’d come up from the southern kingdoms. When the people of Invergó had looked upon the infant, what they’d seen was enough to guess at its parentage. And they would have put the mother to death, then and there, for her congress with the fiend, had she not been dead already. And surely, likewise, would they have murdered the baby, had the old woman not seen fit to intervene. The villagers had always feared the crone, but also they’d had cause to seek her out in times of hardship and calamity. So it gave them pause, once she’d made it known that the infant was in her care, and this knowledge stayed their hand, for a while.

  In the tumbledown remains of a stone cottage, at the edge of the mudflats, the crone had raised the infant until the child was old enough to care for herself. And until even the old woman’s infamy, and the prospect of losing her favors, was no longer enough to protect the sea troll’s daughter from the villagers. Though more human than not, she had the creature’s blood in her veins. In the eyes of some, this made her a greater abomination than her father.

  Finally, rumors had spread that the girl was a danger to them all, and, after an especially harsh winter, many become convinced that she could make herself into an ocean mist and pass easily through windowpanes. In this way, it was claimed, had she begun feeding on the blood of men and women while they slept. Soon, a much-prized milking cow had been found with her udder mutilated, and the farmer had been forced to put the beast out of her misery. The very next day, the elders of Invergó had sent a warning to the crone, that their tolerance of the half breed was at an end, and she was to be remanded to the constable forthwith.

  But the old woman had planned against this day. She’d discovered the cave high above the bay, and she’d taught the sea troll’s daughter to find auk eggs and mushrooms and to hunt the goats and such other wild things as lived among the peaks and ravines bordering the glacier. The girl was bright, and had learned to make clothing and boots from the hides of her kills, and also had been taught herb lore, and much else that would be needed to survive on her own in that forbidding, barren place.

  Late one night in the summer of her fourteenth year, she’d fled Invergó, and made her way to the cave. Only one man had ever been foolish enough to go looking for her, and his body was found pinned to an iceberg floating in the bay, his own sword driven through his chest to the hilt. After that, they left her alone, and soon the daughter of the sea troll was little more than legend, and a tale to frighten children. She began to believe, and to hope, that she would never again have cause to journey down the slopes to the village.

  But then, as the stranger Malmury, senseless with drink, slept in the arms of a barmaid, the crone came to the sea troll’s daughter in her dreams, as the old woman had done many times before.

  “Your father has been slain,” she said, not bothering to temper the words. “His corpse lies desecrated and rotting in the village square, where all can come and gloat and admire the mischief of the one who killed him.”

  The sea troll’s daughter, whom the crone had named Sæhildr, for the ocean, had been dreaming of stalking elk and a shaggy herd of mammoth across a meadow. But the crone’s voice had startled her prey, and the dream animals had all fled across the tundra.

  The sea troll’s daughter rolled over onto her back, stared up at the grizzled face of the old woman, and asked, “Should this bring me sorrow? Should I have tears, to receive such tidings? If so, I must admit it doesn’t, a
nd I don’t. Never have I seen the face of my father, not with my waking eyes, and never has he spoken unto me, nor sought me out. I was nothing more to him than a curious consequence of his indiscretions.”

  “You and he lived always in different worlds,” the old woman replied, but the one she called Sæhildr had turned back over onto her belly and was staring forlornly at the place where the elk and mammoth had been grazing, only a few moments before.

  “It is none of my concern,” the sea troll’s daughter sighed, thinking she should wake soon, that then the old woman could no longer plague her thoughts. Besides, she was hungry, and she’d killed a bear only the day before.

  “Sæhildr,” the crone said, “I’ve not come expecting you to grieve, for too well do I know your mettle. I’ve come with a warning, as the one who slew your father may yet come seeking you.”

  The sea troll’s daughter smiled, baring her teeth that effortlessly cracked bone that she might reach the rich marrow inside. With the hooked claws of a thumb and forefinger, she plucked the yellow blossom from an arctic poppy, and held it to her wide nostrils.

  “Old mother, knowing my mettle, you should know that I am not afraid of men,” she whispered, then she let the flower fall back to the ground.

  “The one who slew your father was not a man, but a woman, the likes of which I’ve never seen,” the crone replied. “She is a warrior, of noble birth, from the lands south of the mountains. She came to collect the bounty placed upon the troll’s head. Sæhildr, this one is strong, and I fear for you.”