by Tad Williams
She looked hard at him, but her hand stole up and brushed a curl of her dark hair away from her face, as if she remembered all the sweet words he had whispered to her only the previous spring. “Don’t try to honey-talk me, Matty Tinwright. What do you want? You do want something, don’t you?” Still, she seemed less angry. Perhaps there was something to be said for a simple, truthful apology. Tinwright wasn’t certain he wanted to make a regular practice of it, though. It would take up a lot of his time.
“Yes, there is something I’d like to ask, but it’s not just as a favor. I’d pay you for your trouble.”
Now suspicion returned. “The Three know that enough men come in here asking if I’ll do the honors for their sons, but I can’t say anyone’s ever come in asking on behalf of his great-grandfather. I’m not going to let your ancient friend poke me, Tinwright.”
“No, no, nothing like that!” It was too disturbing to think about, in fact. People Puzzle’s age were done with the sweaty business of love, surely. It would be indecent otherwise. “I need to find someone. A...a tanglewife.”
“A tanglewife? Why, have you got some castle servingmaid up the country way, then?” Brigid laughed, but she seemed angry again. “I should have known what kind of business would bring you back begging to me.”
“No. It’s not...it’s not about a baby.”
She raised her eyebrow. “A love potion, then? Something to moisten up one of those wooden-shod harlots you’re following around these days?”
He let out a long breath in frustration. Why must she make everything so difficult? Of course, she always had been a woman with her own mind. “I...I can’t tell you, not yet. But it isn’t the kind of thing you think. I need help to...to save someone a great deal of pain.” His heart stuttered for a moment at the enormity of what he was thinking. “And I have another favor to ask, too.” He reached into the sleevepocket of his shirt and produced a silver gull. He had needed to borrow money from Puzzle, money he had no way of paying back, but for once something greater than even his own self-interest drove him. “I’ll give you this now and another just like it afterward if you’ll help me, Brigid— but not a word to Conary. Bargain?”
She stared at the coin in real surprise. “I’ll not help you murder someone,” she breathed, but she looked as though she wasn’t even certain about that.
“It’s...it’s complicated,” he said. “Oh, gods, it is horribly complicated. Bring me a beer and I’ll try to explain.”
“You’ll need another starfish to pay for the two beers, then,” she said, “—one of them for me, of course!—if I’m to be getting that whole gull.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he had visited the neighborhood around Skimmer’s Lagoon in daylight—not that he had come here so many times. It was surprising, really, since the Mint, the tavern in which he had lived and spent most of his time, was only a few hundred steps away on the outer edge of the lagoon district. Still, there was a distinct borderline at Barge Street, which took its name from an inn called the Red Barge at one end of it: except for the poorest of the Southmarch poor, who shared the lagoon district’s damp and fishy smells, only Skimmers spent much time in the area. The exception was after nightfall, when groups of young men came down to patronize the various taverns around the lagoon.
Tinwright turned now onto Barge Street and made his way along it toward Sealer’s Walk, the district’s main thoroughfare, which ran along the edge of the lagoon until it ended in Market Square in the shadow of the new walls. There was no sun to speak of, but Tinwright was grateful for such light as the gray, late-morning sky offered: Barge Street was so narrow that he could imagine Skimmer arms reaching out to grab him from doorways on either side. In reality, he saw almost no one, only a few women emptying slops into the gutters or children who halted their games to watch with wide, unblinking eyes as he passed. There was something so unnerving about these staring children that he found himself hurrying toward Sealer’s Walk, a street he knew fairly well, and where he might find a few of his own kind.
Sealer’s Walk was perhaps the only part of Skimmer’s Lagoon that most castle folk ever visited, fishermen and their women to purchase charms—the Skimmers were said to be great charmwrights, especially when it came to safety on the water—and others to visit the lagoon-side taverns and eat fish soup or drink the oddly salty spirit called wickeril. Many though, especially from outside Southmarch, came for no purpose more lofty than to see something different, because Sealer’s Walk, the lagoon, and the Skimmers themselves were about the strangest things that anyone in the March Kingdoms could see this side of the Shadowline. Even visitors from Brenland and Jael and other nations came to the lagoon, because outside of the lake-folk of Syan and a few settlements in the far southern islands, the Skimmers of Southmarch were unique.
Their food came almost entirely from the bay and the ocean beyond—they ate seaweed!—and even wickeril tasted like something scooped from the bottom of a leaky boat. The long-armed Skimmer men wore few clothes above the waist even in cold weather, and although the women generally wore floor-length dresses and scarves wrapped around their heads, Tinwright had heard it was only for modesty—that they were no more susceptible to the cold than were their menfolk. In other circumstances, as with some female travelers he’d seen, even an occasional woman from Xand, bundled in secrecy to the eyeballs, he’d found the mystery quite appealing, but something about Skimmer women was different. He’d heard men boast of their exploits among the lagoon women—tellingly, though, never in front of Skimmer men—but he himself had never been particularly tempted. Even in the bawdy house behind the Firmament Playhouse, the knocking-shop Hewney and Teodoros had liked so much, Matt Tinwright had never found the Skimmer girls particularly interesting. They had cold skin, for one thing, and even bathed and perfumed they had an odor he found disturbing—not fishy, but with a certain undeniable whiff of brine. And even the naked faces of Skimmer girls were disconcerting to him, although he could not actually say why. The shape of their cheekbones, the size and slant of their eyes, the almost complete lack of eyebrows—Tinwright had always found them obscurely shuddersome.
Still, there were worse places to visit than Sealer’s Walk; Tinwright had even been looking forward to seeing it again. It had a vigor unlike any other part of Southmarch, even the exciting bustle of Market Square. When the catch came in each morning just before dawn, or the fishermen who went far out to sea returned at evening, the place was alive with strange songs and exotic sights.
Today, though, the district seemed much more subdued, even for the doldrums of late morning. The people were quiet and fewer were on the street than he would have expected. Most of the men he saw seemed to be gathered at the site of a recent fire, where a row of three or four houses and shops had burned. Half a dozen adults and twice that many children were picking through the blackened rubble; a few turned to look at him as he passed, and for a moment he felt certain that they were staring angrily at him, as though he had done something wrong to them and then returned to gloat.
As he passed a fishmonger’s warehouse, two other Skimmer men gutting fish with long, scallop-backed knives also stopped to stare at him, their heads swiveling slowly as he walked past. It was hard not to imagine something murderous in their cold-eyed, gape-mouthed gazes.
He came at last to narrow Silverhook Row and turned right as Brigid had told him, following its wandering length for a few hundred paces until he found the tiny alley that seemed to match her description. On either side loomed the windowless backs of tall houses, blocking out all but a sliver of the gray sky, but at the end of the short, dark passage stood the narrow front façade of another house, with a few steps leading down to the door.
Tinwright was about to knock, but stopped when he saw the long, knurled horn, as long as a man’s arms outstretched, hanging over the door. A superstitious prickle ran up his back. Was it a unicorn horn? Or did it come from some even stranger, more deadly creature?
“Plannin
g to steal it?”
He jumped at the unexpected voice and turned to see a short, lumpy shape blocking the entrance to the alley. Thinking of the Skimmer men with their scalloped blades he took a step back and almost fell down the stairs. “No!” he said, waving his arms for balance. “No, I was just... looking. I’ve come to see Aislin the tanglewife.”
“Ah.” The figure took a few steps forward; Tinwright balled his fingers into fists but kept them behind him. “Well, that would be me.”
“You?” He couldn’t help sounding surprised—the voice was so low and scratchy he’d thought it a man’s.
“I do surely hope so, drylander, otherwise I’ve been living someone else’s life this last hundred years.” He still couldn’t see much of her face, which peered out of a deep hood. He could see the eyes, though, wide and watery, yet somehow quite daunting even in the darkened alley. “Move out the way, you young clot, so I can open the door.”
“Sorry.” He sprang to one side as she shuffled past him. He felt uncomfortable watching her mottled hand reach out with the key, so he turned his eyes up to the great horn above the door. “Is that from a unicorn?”
“What? Oh, that? No, that’s the tusk from an alicorn whale taken up in the Vuttish Seas. Unless you’re in the market for a unicorn’s horn, that is, in which case I could be persuaded to change my story.” Her laugh was halfway between a gurgle and a hacking cough, and she emphasized it by leaning into him and jabbing him with her elbow. If this really was Aislin, she smelled to the high heavens, but he found himself almost liking her.
The door open, she went gingerly down the steps. Tinwright followed her inside and found himself beneath a ceiling so low he could not stand straight and so crowded with objects hanging from the rafters that he might have been in a hole beneath the roots of a huge tree. Dozens of bundles of dried seaweed and other more aromatic plants, sheaves of leathery kelp stems and bunches of flowers brushed his face everywhere he turned. Countless charms of wood and baked clay dangled between the drying plants, spinning and swinging as he or the tanglewife brushed them, so that even just standing in one place made him dizzy. Many of the charms were in the shape of living things, mostly aquatic beasts and birds, seals and gulls and fish and ribbony eels. Those not hanging from the ceiling had been set out on every available surface, including most of the floor.
Tinwright had to walk carefully, but he was fascinated by the profusion of animal shapes. Some even had little glass eyeballs pressed into the clay or glued to the wood, making them seem almost alive... “Ah, there you are, small bastard,” said Aislin suddenly, to no one he could see. “There you are, my love.”
The black and white gull, which had been staring back at Tinwright so raptly he had thought it only another particularly well-made object, yawped and shrugged its wings. Tinwright flinched back and almost fell over. “It’s alive!”
“More or less,” she cackled. “He’s missing a leg, my Soso, and he can’t fly, but the wing should heal. Still, I don’t think he’ll go anywhere—will you, my love?” She leaned down and offered her pursed mouth to the gull, which pecked at it in an irritated fashion. “You have it too good here, don’t you, small bastard?”
Aislin had taken her hood off and unwrapped her head scarf, freeing a bristling tangle of white hair. Her face showed the usual Skimmer features, eyes far apart, lips wide and mobile. Like other old Skimmer-folk he’d seen she also had a curious hard look to her skin, as though instead of sagging and growing loose as ordinary folk’s flesh did when they aged, hers had begun to turn into something thick and rigid. Even the curl of inky tattoos on each cheek and at the bridge of her nose seemed to be disappearing into the horny flesh like unused roads disappearing under grass and weeds.
“Will you have something to drink, then?” she asked. “Warm yourself up?”
“Wickeril?”
“That muck?” She shook her head. “Wouldn’t drink it. That’s for Perikali sailors and other barbarians. Black Wrack wine, that’s your drink.” She slid between dangling charms toward the corner of the little house where pots and pans hung from wooden pegs—the kitchen, you’d have to call it, Tinwright supposed. She was shaped like a brewer’s barrel, but without the heavy cloak she moved with surprising nimbleness through the confines of her crowded nest.
“What’s it made with?” he asked—“Black Wrack” didn’t sound all that promising.
“What do you think? Don’t you know what wrack is? Seaweed! Grandsire Egye-Var protect you, boy, what do you expect? You wanted a tanglewife—what do you think ‘tangle’ means? Seaweed, of course.”
Tinwright didn’t say anything. He hadn’t known—he’d thought it was just the word for an old woman who made healing simples and...and other things.
“What do they call someone like you in a place where they don’t have seaweed—or Skimmers?”
She chortled with pleasure, a sound like a joiner’s rasp. “A witch, of course. Now drink this. It will take the hair right off your chest.”
Aislin was frowning as she emtpied her cup. She clearly contemplated pouring herself yet another, but instead sat back in the room’s only chair with a sigh. Tinwright was balanced much more precariously on his stool, especially after finishing his own cup. He couldn’t remember how much of the smoky wine he’d drunk while trying to explain the difficult, frightening business that had brought him, but he had downed more than a few. The wine was almost as salty as blood but still quite refreshing, and his fear had receded into a general smear of unconcern. He stared at the old woman, trying to remember how exactly he had come to this strange place.
“It’s not that I have any scruples, boy,” she said. “And I’m not frightened of much of anything, which you can see by me letting you in here in the first place.”
Tinwright shook his head. Soso the gull gave him a baleful look and feinted toward his ear. The bird didn’t seem as fond of the poet as he was of Aislin, and he especially didn’t like it when Tinwright moved—he’d given him a few painful pecks on the ankles and hands already. “What do you mean, letting me in? I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Hurt me? Should say not—I’d pop you like a bulb of rockweed, boy,” she said with an evil, self-satisfied chuckle. “No, because you’re a drylander...what was your name?” She stared at him, blinking slowly. “Ah, never mind. Because you’re a drylander, and your kind isn’t much liked around here just now.”
“Why?” There was no resisting the notion, once it had crept into his head, that Aislin the tanglewife looked and sounded like nothing so much as a huge, gray-haired frog in a shapeless dress. It made conversation tricky. That last cup of wine wasn’t helping, either.
“Why? By the Grandsire’s soggy cod, boy, didn’t you see? Big piece of Sealer’s Walk burned down? Who do you think did that?”
Tinwright stared aghast at the goggle-eyed Skimmer woman. “It wasn’t me!”
“No, you fool, and be glad it wasn’t, but it was drylanders from up in the town, a gang of them, young and stupid and hateful. Three of our people were killed, one of them a child. Folk around here aren’t very happy.”
“Why did they do it?” Suddenly he understood the way some of the Skimmers had watched him and a chill swept over him. “I hadn’t heard anything about a fire.”
“You wouldn’t. We take care of our own, and what happens here doesn’t interest the ordinary run of castle folk—not unless the whole place went up in flames and threatened the rest of the town.” The tanglewife settled back again, waving her broad hands as though to waft away a foul smell. “It’s been bad ever since those Qar creatures crossed the Shadowline. We folk are different—they used to call us kilpies and sea-fairies, did you know?—so things go bad for us. It happened when they came the last time, too, in my great-grandmother’s day. Everyone was driven out of Southmarch by them, eventually, but our folk were driven out first—and by our own neighbors.”
“Sorry.” The cursed wine had fogged his brain—how had they started talking abo
ut this? “What’s...what’s a Kwar?”
“You’re not quite saying it right, but close enough for a drylander. Qar is another name for the Old Ones living beyond the Shadowline—the Twilight People.” She stared at him for a moment. “You’ve been sitting here much of the afternoon, boy. Better get up and going before it turns dark. I don’t think it’s going to be a good night for someone like you to be wandering around land-legged on Sealer’s Walk.”
“Right, then.” Tinwright stood up, sketched a somewhat uneven bow, and began to bob through the dangling charms in search of the door, doing his best to ignore the black and white gull pecking aggressively at his feet.
“What are you doing?” Aislin called. “Didn’t you come here to buy something from me?”
He stopped, a thought suddenly gnawing at his mind. “Ah. Yes.”
“You have no head for Black Wrack, boy, that’s certain.” She grunted as she lifted herself to her feet. “Let me get to my powders and potions. Don’t sit down again, you’ll fall asleep.”
After she had been gone for no little time (a span during which Tinwright and the gull eyed each other with feigned disinterest) she came back carrying a small stoppered glass bottle no bigger than a child’s thumb.
“This venom comes from an octopus out of the southern seas—a small thing you would never think to be so deadly. Dip a needle in it and use that one drop only. Just that, and her journey will be painless. But be careful with it or you will murder yourself. This poison knows no master.”
Tinwright took it and stared at the thing in his hand. It was hard to know for certain through the blue glass vial, but the fluid inside looked clear and harmless as water. “Careful...” he breathed. “I’ll be careful.”
