The sea was filled with fish of all sorts; some swam just below the water’s surface, others jumped and suspended themselves for a brief instant in the sunlight, and a few moved slowly underwater, vague shapes that intimated terrible splendor.
“Fish, fish,” the middle prince said, “Have you any words for me?”
The unexpected cacophony of responding voices caused the middle prince to almost fall overboard in surprise: gasps and gibbers and hurried exhalations, half-drowned gurgles and gill-slapping exclamations, bubbling, splashing, and rhythmic staccatos — innumerable voices, big and small and in-between. He could not understand any single one.
“Wait, wait,” he said, adjusting the turban under the helmet that had slipped down his head and caused him temporary blindness. “One at time, please. One at a time!”
And at once there was silence. It was as if the sea stopped moving and everything, every fish and cloud and wave, was fixed in time. Thousands of pairs of unblinking eyes regarded the middle prince.
“You would listen to us all?” a sinewy flash of silver asked suddenly.
“Why, yes,” the middle prince replied.
“To each one of us?” A pair of dun-colored eyes loomed from underwater.
“If it’s possible, I’d like to,” the middle prince replied.
“Are you sure you’re not looking for anyone specific?” a marlin asked gently.
“Not really. Well, unless only one of you has good advice to give.”
“We all have good advice to give,” another fish told him. “But not to just anyone.”
“I’ll listen to anything any of you is willing to tell me.” And the middle prince told them about the nature of his quest and how he had come to be in a one-man boat in the Celibate Ocean and how he felt that he was doomed to fail even if he listened to fish, which he still wanted to do.
One of the fish, a shiny bass, intimated that he had recently tried to assist a dark-skinned man in a similar boat, but barely escaped with his life when the man tried to skewer him; and how he'd had a better time with a kind young man who looked like old glass. To that man he’d given proper instructions to circumvent the hazards of the Deep Waters. To the cruel one, the fish had given directions that would bring him to the direst of perils.
The middle prince shuddered at the thought of his poor eldest brother’s destiny but was unsurprised by the success of his youngest brother.
“Well,” he told the gentle bass, “I am neither of my brothers. Will you help me?”
“Certainly,” the fish replied, “If you can tell me what it is you have there that smells so good.”
“Oh,” exclaimed the middle prince, suddenly embarrassed about his lifelong olive scent. “I have all sorts of food here for my journey. Would you like some?”
The bass happily nodded and the middle prince was about to give him an olive when he noticed all the other fish watching him.
“Would you all like some food?” he asked the assembled masses.
Once more, a chorus of dissonant cries greeted his words. The middle prince thought quickly, looked at all his stock, and determined that if he was left with nothing to eat, then he was left with nothing to eat — he was condemned to disappointment anyway. And if he was right, if he was kind and generous and selfless, then perhaps he had a chance to circumvent destiny.
With a smile and an open heart, he gave away every viand and fruit, every egg and nut and pastry, every wrapped, dried, stewed and pickled bit of food, everything he had, to the delight of every fish.
Within moments, all his provisions were exhausted, consumed by the disbelieving fish that were used to a certain paucity of comestibles. Each one, in turn, began to speak in its own clear and distinct voice, spouting prophecies and oracles, legends and secrets, maxims and ancient sayings, descriptions of things buried for thousands of years underwater and of things that fell in or drowned only hours earlier. They pronounced the names of every ship that had sailed the Celibate Sea, enumerated the lost loves that sailors pined for, and repeated every word of every poet, privateer, and passenger who had ever known the ocean, exhaling sighs and hopes and dreams and curses in the precise language in which it was first spoken.
The middle prince soon found himself unable to bear the weight of the fishes’ declarations, and clutched at his bleeding ears vainly in an effort to stifle the power of the multiple assertions. The last thing he remembered hearing before he lost his ability to comprehend the vision of thousands of coruscating mouths and slipped into darkness, was a voice that said: “There is nothing more precious than a love foretold, and nothing as equally damning.”
HE KNEW HE WAS DREAMING when he opened his eyes. He was in the royal atrium, surrounded by exotic flora — gifts of envoys and nuncios of faraway lands from the time before the distressing condition of the kingdom’s collapsing buildings.
He followed the sound of calamitous sobbing and found himself in the trapezoidal open heart of the palace. There he saw the Sultana, cradling a broken earthenware jar. Neither water nor wine but blood dripped from the container at an incautious pace, matched drop for drop by the tears of his hysterical mother.
When he woke up, his heart was as empty as his sea vessel, both oddly heavy and oddly light. There was not a single fish within his squinting span of vision, nothing but the unbroken jewel radiance of the Deep Waters — aquamarine, peridot, lapis lazuli, and the most luminous sapphire — beauty enough to sear a man's vision forever, loveliness enough to kill.
As he took off his helmet and wrapped his turban around his eyes to protect himself from the impossible brilliance, he thought about his brothers, his mother, the miserable quest, his vainglorious hope, the babble of fish, and of what it meant to be alive.
Thus blindfolded, the middle prince did not see the sad corpse that floated past, whose skin, formerly dark as earth on a moonless night, was dyed an inconsequential indigo.
He passed many days oblivious to many things. When he grew tired, he slept. When he grew thirsty, he extended his miraculous cup into the unseen waters and drank his fill of sweet water. When he grew hungry, he thought of nothing at all, except for everything all the fish told him.
Little by little, he began to unwind the turban, allowing his eyes to get used to the glare of the sea. He had decided to go on living, slowly becoming convinced that the failure of his brother was in no way his fault. It was part of the story that everyone was trapped in and someone had to fail first, after all. So he steeled his heart and sailed on, on his diet of converted water and piscine words.
When he found a mermaid (her hair the texture of the finest seaweed — a braid would pass through the eye of a needle) beached against a cruel finger of rock, he helped her free. He asked for no reward and was offered none (she was more frightened of him than of slow death in the sun).
When he came across a sea lion (his mane bristling with tiny crabs, each one no larger than a pin) weeping on a stationary azure wave, he did not react to its threats and howls but simply removed the painful urchin spine in its paw. The sea lion offered him a look of contempt before the wave started moving once more, enveloping the creature in its frothy embrace (it was more embarrassed than angry that a man had done what it was unable to do for itself).
When a sullen horse head (its eyes dim opals, covered with salt and cloudy with despair) came floating by, he took it on board for a night and listened to its tragic story. When the dawn came, the horse head whispered its thanks and turned into foam (it knew that some things, like a maiden’s trust, once lost, were lost forever, and wanted only a sympathetic ear).
It was in this manner that the middle prince remembered the advice of his mother’s Vizier and helped those he could. His arms and legs moved mechanically through the motions as he tried to ignore his small but growing suspicion that he didn’t truly care about the problems of mermaids and sea lions and misplaced horse heads.
HE FOUND THE UNMISTAKABLE ISLAND of the Coral Crone soon after. It jutted out of th
e sea like a jagged blade, calcareous and richly red. When he could go no further in his vessel, he took off his gem-sewn inner robe, threw it into the sea and watched it sink faster than a heartbeat. Satisfied at his caution, he placed his extraordinary wooden cup within his belt and dived into the water.
The beach was not red but white, marked by thousands of bones of mariners and adventurers misled by faith, hope, and love as much as by courage, conviction, and wonder. He chose his path carefully at first, respectful of the dead, but soon found it impossible to continue inland without stepping on the bleached remains. He muttered countless apologies under his breath as he navigated towards the red line where the coral was free of the bones that cut the tenderness of his feet.
Where the coral began, the middle prince came across an old woman, hideous to behold. Her face was a complex geography of every road that ever existed; her left eye was bloodshot and twice the size of the corrupted right one. A large swath of her mouth had been burned away, revealing four miserable teeth the color of cheerless ivory. She stared desolately at a small pool of brackish water beside her, her wrinkled skin hanging loosely over her sharp bony features, her breath tortured and shallow.
“Pardon me, good woman,” the middle prince said. “Are you the Coral Crone?”
“No,” the hag fixed her mismatched eyes at him. “No, I am not she. Perhaps I was, once. Perhaps. But no. No. Her tower stands some distance behind me.”
“Thank you, kind lady,” he said, as his eyes were drawn to the pool of stagnant water she had been looking at.
“Forgive me, but is this the water you drink?” the middle prince ventured with some hesitation.
“What if it is?” she asked him, thinking about how once she had longed for this line of questioning, the games, the riddles, the tests of wit and skill and craftiness, but no longer.
“Here,” he said, offering from his belt the marvelous wooden cup that converted any liquid into drinking water. “With this you can—”
“Thank you, but I already have one,” she interrupted, raising an identical cup in her trembling hands. “A young man of crystalline complexion took pity on me and gave me this not an hour ago, before heading off beyond where I sit. He lifted the curse that bound me here and freed me from this horrid place.”
The middle prince stared at her, wordlessly accepting the truth that sometimes kindness was redundant.
“I’m just resting a bit before I go off and see what is left for me,” she said, shuddering with anticipation. “If there is, in fact, anything left for me.”
The middle prince regarded the cup in her hands and the cup in his. He suddenly felt very tired, as if an inexplicable weight threatened to crush him where he stood. “Well, take it anyway,” he told her, laying his cup before her.
The old woman raised a finger but he cut her short with a weak smile before following his younger brother’s footsteps, his own feet tremulous on the irregular ground.
AT LAST HE FOUND the tower of the Coral Crone, an oddly smooth-faced and solitary structure stretching halfway to the clouds, with no obvious door and only a single window to break its unremitting evenness.
He saw his delicate brother suspended on an almost invisible gossamer cord halfway up the tower. On the youngest prince’s back, a young maiden dressed in seemingly endless rolls of unrelieved scarlet silk clung fearfully.
“Take us down, my prince,” he heard the girl cry faintly, as the pair swung in place, bedeviled by the winds that swirled around the tower.
In that moment, the middle prince understood two things: first, that they could proceed no further down because of a shortage of rope; and second, that they could not go back up because the diaphanous cord was growing thinner by the moment, its subtle filaments breaking against the weight of two people.
“Brother!” the youngest prince sang out when the middle prince came into view. “I seem to be in an uncertain circumstance.”
“Yes,” the middle prince replied, “Yes, you are.”
“Forgive my manners, brother,” the glass prince said melodiously as more of the insubstantial rope gave way. “This is the Coral Crone, on my back.”
The middle prince nodded to the woman once, betraying no sign of surprise at the startling youth of the Coral Crone.
“We would both welcome some opportune kindness,” his brother sang once more, as he and maiden suddenly dropped a breath-taking distance down the tower’s featureless face before stopping just as abruptly. His screams, robbed of melody, reminded the middle prince of the Vizier’s final bit of advice: to show kindness.
In his mind, the middle prince wrestled with a conundrum that wore down his exhausted heart. It was obvious to him that his brother had already succeeded in the penultimate part of the quest, which was to steal that which was most precious to the Coral Crone. Given the evidence of his eyes, he surmised it was the Crone herself. Now both his brother and the maiden were imperiled.
If he acted kindly, as he was both advised and requested to, and assisted them somehow, then he would lose the quest. The youngest prince would return home in glory and he, the middle prince, would suffer the fate that he wanted to resist.
If he did not act kindly, as was the unchanging and expected behavior of all older brothers in all the tales, then he would be punished in some manner and also lose the quest, because that was how things always were.
He understood that whichever action he chose, he would lose. All that mattered in the scheme of things was the youngest prince, and certainly the dubious situation involving the fraying cord would resolve itself as it needed to. But he didn’t want to risk watching his brother shatter into uncountable pieces.
As he stood there in silence, watching the erratic pendulum swaying of the two tiny figures, he thought about nature of stories and noticed his bleeding feet.
“Her scarlet robes,” the middle prince shouted against the wind. “If you tie them to your own cord, there should be enough length to get down to safety.”
“He’s right,” the Coral Crone said, blushing as she momentarily weighed the matter of propriety with the matter of sudden death. With a speed born of desperation, she and her glasslike rescuer began unraveling and knotting the swaths of her silken robes, as the malicious winds tossed them about.
Without a word, the middle prince turned his back to the predictable outcome of his brother’s situation. He took the same path he’d taken earlier and came to where the old woman sat with her two miraculous cups.
“Listen,” he said to her. “You mentioned you wanted to see if there was anything else for you. Well, I’m about to leave and I have a ship. It can accommodate both of us if you’re willing to endure some discomfort.”
“I’m used to discomfort,” the old woman said. “But what of your quest? What of your brother?”
“I think it’s done. He’ll be fine,” the middle prince shrugged. “I thought I could change things, but now, I don’t really know.”
“So where shall we go?” the old woman asked, idly scratching her swollen eye.
“I don’t know either,” the Middle prince said, extending his hand to her.
The old woman held his hand and stood with a grimace, and together they crossed the beach of bones, heedlessly crunching the bones of those that died without fulfilling their destiny, and swam to his vessel.
The middle prince tried thinking about quests and consequences but his careworn heart offered no answers and little solace. It was then that he decided that if he was going to be turned to stone or blinded by thorns, then it could happen now or tomorrow or a year and a day from the moment that he inhabited. And that he was not going to stop in his tracks and wait for the seemingly inevitable to occur.
“The island looks so small from over here,” the old woman said, shivering as the sea winds blew at her wet clothing. “And to think, it was once my entire world.”
“I know what you mean,” the middle prince said, with a sad smile.
And with nothing but the
pair of marvelous cups and the clothes on their backs, they sailed past the island of the Coral Crone, past the Deep Waters, and into the ocean beyond that had no name, beyond the reach of story or destiny or love foretold.
They sailed into the open waters without looking back, sharing a certain stillness and silence as the wind dispersed the dwindling scent of olives in their wake.
The New Daughter
WHEN THE BOY inevitably grew up, married, and moved away with his own growing family, the toymaker decided to make a girl. He did it this time in secret, afraid of what his neighbors would think, fearing the potential unjust accusation of prurience when all he wanted was someone he could talk to, whose conversation would eradicate the heaviness of his solitude.
He worked at night, carving wood with his spotted hands by the feeble light of low and fat candles he favored from his youth, recalling how he had watched his grandfather shape magic from wood, and humming a song whose words he had long forgotten. He worked from midnight until just before dawn for five weeks, struggling with the impatience that old men with erratic memory suffer, losing himself in the methodology of his craft, shaving wood to reveal the delicate limbs and the small torso of his waiting daughter. Then at last he reached the part he liked best: shaping the girl’s face, determining the contour of her cheeks, the ridge of her brow, the curve of her chin, the hollow of her eyes. For her hair he chose the color of burnished bronze, planting and pulling the strands in and out of her hard scalp. For her eyes he selected the color of the bluest sky, fitting the glass spheres with a precision that only a master toymaker possessed. Just before he finished, he covered her polished nakedness in muslin and lace, cutting and sewing the sleeves and the hems and the ruffs, just as the sun came up.
The toymaker straightened up and grimaced at the creak of his aching back and looked at his new daughter, reaching forward to gently put an errant lock back in place.
“Now we must be patient, you and I,” he told her. “If my son could come to life, then certainly so can you.”
The Kite of Stars and Other Stories Page 8
