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The seal heaved a sigh and squinted in the fog. “That is to be expected. I am always answered the same. I ran from her, and that is the truth. I do not deserve to find her again. I ran from the forest and the gold slanting through the oak and the yew and the birch and the pine, I ran from the giggling streams and the grapevines fat and purple, I ran from the hoof-worn paths and the mushrooms sprouting in the shade, I ran from the loam and the leaves, I ran from her. I said a great number of foolish things which seemed wise then and I clutched my skin to my chest, and I ran all the way to the sea, smiling and singing and my feet weren’t even tired, all the way to the sand and tide. I leapt into the froth and the wave, the sea beating me back, the waves pulling at my waist. I shouted to the wind and the pelicans, I was so full of salt and my skin was so slick and eager!
“It all seems rather silly now. As soon as I tasted the sea I knew it was no good. I had too much of her in me. It only tasted of tears. And one day a red ship sped by overhead and I knew it for her; I knew she was above me, stomping the boards with her hooves. I followed, but the ship was so fast. I followed all the way to the edge of the Boiling Sea, and there I could not go. But I am patient; I waited. I followed them to the Skin-Peddler’s Isle and I followed them into the icy seas where they were swallowed whole. And there too I followed. I beat the sea with my hands for weeks before the turtle-whale came up and gobbled me down with her. But his belly was so wide. I looked and looked among the old wrecks but I could not find her. I lay down on the liver of the beast and prayed to die. Time passed in the dark and I did not mark it. When the great fluttering of birds came and his mouth opened, I did not even look up, so far was I from those curtains of baleen. It was only when the awful old beast caught his belly on a reef and retched most everything in him up onto the tide that I escaped. I looked among the flotsam for the shard-planks of a red ship, but found nothing.
“But I have heard rumors of that ship in the harbors and ports again. I know she is alive; I know she crests the waves.” The seal smiled softly. “Who would have thought she would go to sea? If I had known, if I had been a cleverer beast, if I had been older, less silly, I would have built her a house on the shore, and fed her black bread and sardines, and we might have been happy. There are many ways of being happy. We might have found ours.”
“I am sorry.” I gently touched his face. “I have heard of no such ship, no such beast. Even the Boiling Sea has dried to a long, white, dry bed with no water in it at all now. We must steer around that wasteland, where shark skeletons litter the blasted seafloor.”
He nodded miserably. “Well I know it. But still I ask. There is no shortage of sailors flying off their boats like great ungainly albatrosses. One of them will be from her ship one day. I know it.”
THE TALE
ON THE FLOOR,
CONTINUED
“HE WAS A SELKIE,” OUR SAILOR FINISHED, “and a Selkie dare not approach the shore. He dragged me as far as he could, and pointed my body at the land, and told me to swim. But”—she coughed, and seawater sprayed from her mouth—“I have never been a strong swimmer. I sail; I do not swim. I swallowed the ocean, and deep in the dark, in the bottom of the bottomless dark, I heard my mother singing again. I heard her telling the baby in her arms to wake up.”
We looked at each other, blinking, perplexed. “Your mother is not here. Our mother is not here. This is a motherless place.”
Galien sat up with difficulty, propping herself on her elbows. “Of course she isn’t. You’re here. Didn’t you listen to me at all? You sing, and we hear. We hear everything we long for. Do you know how many of us have died diving into the brine after your voices? On every map your isle is marked as danger, as wicked, as a place never to dream of going.”
Nyd’s beak began to quiver. She tried not to cry. “That’s ridiculous,” Ashni said, stamping her bare foot. “We sing to each other. Every creature is allowed to sing. The songs were not for you. We did not go fishing for sailors, dropping our voices into the sea like barbed hooks. We push out our hearts and blood and marrow and breath—”
“You dash out our hearts and blood and marrow and breath on these desolate rocks, and no one survives your song,” the navigator whispered.
“But we did not mean to. We did not intend it. Our songs were for us alone,” Ghadir said, her face ashen.
Nyd fell to her knees, and her sobbing echoed over the shoals. She laid her feathered head on the rocks and cried over and over: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
We carried Galien home. In the tangle of our legs she flew as no woman has ever done, and in Ajanabh we left her, to collect her pay and buy her mother beer and see her old helmsman’s sister with her roasted chickens. Her eyes were bruised and her lips were broken and bleeding, and the high, thin air did not help her. She was hollow-eyed and bent when we set her down trembling on the red rooftops. Her navel-compass waved erratically, and she slapped it into submission.
“We will never sing again,” said Nyd, her voice shaking, as we stood with Galien among the chimneys and the steam pipes, the tiles and the pigeons’ nests. We held her between us, wing to wing, and the navigator’s eyes had no grace for us. “We will never speak again. This is our vow. We will call to no one, not even ourselves, and in years to come perhaps the drowned will call us forgiven.” Her black eyes overflowed with tears; her beak began an anguished clattering. “But I doubt it,” she finished.
THE
DRESSMAKER’S TALE,
CONTINUED
THE SIRENS STOPPED THEIR DANCE WITH THE three of them spinning in unison over the final characters. They were bathed in sweat, their feathers sticking wetly together like newborn butterflies’ wings. They panted, stretched their exhausted feet, mopped one another’s brow. The floor was black with writing, and I finished reading some time after they finished their dance. The one I presumed was Nyd was hitching her chest, nearly weeping again with the memory of it.
We never meant it, she wrote by herself in a small corner. How could we mean such a thing? We were just singing.
“I think,” I said hesitantly, “that a Siren sings as a cricket does.”
No one drowns in a cricket’s song, Nyd scribbled hurriedly.
Besides, wrote another of the sisters, the silence helps us to work. We see the world in our calligraphy now, and if we were forever squawking and cawing, we should not know the song of silent letters.
The sisters allowed that if I did not scurry too quickly, and therefore look to them like breakfast, I might be permitted to work on the marginalia. I stepped into their inkstone, wetting my feet in the black iron-gall, in the sepia, in the costly blue. I tried very hard, as hard as a spider may try. I danced masterpieces of tiny points in their corners and frontispieces. I wove my silk into pages so strong they might never tear, and they marveled at how soft the webbing was beneath their callused feet.
But I was not happy. I was often underfoot—a dangerous place for me—and they looked at me sidelong when supper was scarce. The silence clawed. I wished for the buzz of flies and the splash of water and voices, just a few harried voices to break the thick quiet. I did not feel that I was a weaver so much as a very poor painter, and the heights made my head hurt.
It seemed to me time to seek out a truer expression of the flies’ commandment. While the sisters slept, I dipped my legs in blue ink and spun in the margins of their latest manuscript a panorama of farewell against a calm and easy sea: sailor after sailor, standing safe on the shore, whole and singing.
In the Garden
THE BOY FELT HER EYES ON HIS BACK AS HE WALKED BACK TOWARD the Palace and a bed which had no snowflakes in it, no cold and no hardnesses. His vision was so full of her, full of her dark eyes dancing, full of the words he could now taste in his mouth like cakes.
