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The woman looked at me, her gaze roughly measuring me as if for some bizarre suit of armor. “She’s skinny and the hair will have to come off” came the judgment.
Bags rolled his eyes. “She needs to know about your thrice-damned Saint Sigrid so that she can decide, you salty old dog. And I can’t stay. We cannot keep the Papess waiting.”
At this the woman’s brusque expression softened and she dropped an elephantine arm around my shoulders.
“No, no, of course. You go—I trust it went well, or you wouldn’t be back. We all… appreciate what you’ve done, you know, Bagsy. I’ll tell skin-and-bones what she needs to know.”
Bags’s eyes filled with tears—but he hid it well, like a thief slipping a ring into his pocket. He hugged me as tightly as a bear shaking a tree for fruit, his furry face buried in my neck. He whispered a tight thank you and turned to go. I reached out to stop him.
“Wait, Bags! When I asked to come, back in my village, you said something strange to the others, something from The Book of Carrion. What was it? Tell me!”
Bags grinned, looking impossibly like a cat, and laid his finger aside his nose.
“And the wolf shall lead her astray, unto the edge of the sea, and there she will find the City of the Lost, where her skin will fall away, and the Beast will swallow her whole. Prophecy, love. Best hope it’s not you.”
When he had gone, the bald woman sat heavily on the snowy ground and gestured with a tattooed hand that I ought to sit beside her.
“He’s only teasing. That Book of Carrion is full of gibberish and dog-speak. Pay no attention—it means less than a flapping sail in a strong wind. I’ll tell you the way of things. I’m called Sigrid—we’ve all taken the name of the great Lady, in her honor. I don’t care in the least what your name is; it’ll be Sigrid if you want to sail with us, anyhow. Listen to this old deckhand, and I’ll tell you the tale of the Great Navigator…”
IN THE NAME OF THE MOTHER, AND THE MONSTER, and the Mast, Amen.
In the fifteenth year of the Second Caliphate, a child was born in the Blessed City of Ajanabh to a family of traveling spicers whose fingers smelled forever of cinnamon and coriander. Their barge stayed in the port of Ajanabh for many years, but they were not native to the city that witnessed the birth of the Saint. Where they came from in truth is lost to us now. Indeed, Ajanabh seemed not to recognize the Blessing of Heaven, and tried many times to expel the merchant barges, which were as great in number as flocks of sparrows in the autumn sky, from their Great Harbor, claiming that the families brought disease and sloth with them from notorious lands.
The child was christened Sigrid, and she was a great beauty even as a girl, with rich brown skin and thick hair the color of all her family’s spice stores milled into a shade of dark brown shot through with gold and red, and eyes the color of a lion’s paw. But she had been born with a strange deformity which brought a secret shame onto the backs of her parents. Her father wept and accused her mother of coupling with a demon; her mother suspected that their family gods had turned against them and delivered them a daughter with harpy blood.
For Sigrid was possessed of three breasts, and as she grew, this strangeness became impossible to hide. So each morning before taking her daughter to the spice market, her mother bound her breasts with lengths of rough cloth. Each morning, she patted Sigrid’s cheek and stifled tears as she wound the fabric.
When she became a woman, Sigrid performed this penance herself, crushing her small but plainly monstrous chest beneath straps of leather and buckles of lead.
After a long while, she stopped weeping while she did it.
When Sigrid had reached the age of sixteen—as all men know, this is the age at which such catastrophes of serendipity occur—a troupe of pirates attacked the floating city of harbor barges. This was not uncommon in Ajanabh, which was in those days altogether a raucous network of villain-strewn streets; an Ajan never touched a gold piece which had not been stolen at least thrice in its lifetime. But the barges were sacrosanct, bargers being themselves distant cousins to pirates. So when the Maidenhead sailed into the Great Harbor, her red sails billowing like dead moons in the night, the merchants simply rolled over in their sleep, thinking it would pass them by and ransack the city as such masted beasts had always done.
Instead, the pirates set fire to the skiffs and scows of the spicers and the tinkers, the cobblers and the armorers and the potters.
Sigrid, like her brothers and her parents, slept in her cot, breasts unbound, curled around herself like a snail’s shell. She awoke to a hand clamped over her mouth and a toothy hiss in her ear:
“Hush now
, precious. Wouldn’t want to wake Mama.” The voice’s owner scooped her up into its arms like a cat snatching the scruff of her kitten’s neck. In a whirl of smoke and flame, Sigrid found herself dragged across the barge of her birth and away—and thus did she exit a tale which surely would have comprised a life of derision and exclusion, ending in a cinnamon-and-coriander-scented corpse shoved overboard into the Bay of Ajan.
Instead, Sigrid was deposited by her abductor onto the deck of a shadowed ship, and entered another tale entirely.
In truth, her family was not sorry to see her go. They would never have been able to induce a man to marry her, even with sacks of musky saffron to barter. It seemed to them best to cherish their other, beautifully shaped children, and let their misshapen daughter go to whatever fate the Stars had ordained for her.
Whatever owned the strange voice had brought Sigrid to the Maidenhead, and once the crew had plundered, stolen, and kidnapped as they pleased, the ship relinquished the harbor as gracefully as a lord sheathing his sword, and unfurled her scarlet sails to catch the salt breath of the open sea.
There is nothing quite like the moment a sail clutches the wind and opens under it like the legs of a merry fishwife. The sound of it, the echoing billow as the air blows out the fabric, the surge forward and the spray in the teeth—it is the sound that heralds the beginning of new worlds, the birth of litters of wish-granting seals in a hundred secret grottos, the grinding of new rivers through mountains which witnessed the first flood and chuckled at their wet toes.
It filled Sigrid’s heart like wine into an oak barrel. She leaned over the rail and grinned into the sound, marveling at the ship that now carried her—the cannons were worked into the shapes of animal heads, mouths agape. Along one side screamed silent manticores, on the other, crocodiles gaped wide. The ship itself shone a rich red color—some strange wood she had never seen before. The mast was massive and tall, seeming to bruise the stars, and from its polished surface sprouted glossy green leaves and branches the size of children’s arms. It was a tree, a living tree drinking from the sea and sky, bearing the sails and lines with good nature. It did not seem to mind the salt or the rough wind, but opened its leaves like glad hands. Where the crow’s nest ought to have been was an explosion of branches heavy with leaf and orange fruit, thick enough to bear a lookout. The sails were deep red, and Sigrid wondered if this was not a very disreputable pirate ship to flout the sage tradition of black sails. The rails were curled and carved with arcane designs—it was unlike any ship she had ever seen in Ajanabh, and unlike, she suspected, any ship on the dark-waved sea.
The usual bustle of a ship under way streamed around her, for the most part ignoring the new passenger, as sailors are wont to do. But they were an unusual crew. Besides the standard complement of inhuman creatures galloping—yes, she certainly saw a Satyr and possibly a small-shouldered Centaur—or slithering—that woman struggling with a bag puffing yellow spices was surely a Lamia—across the decks, the ship appeared not to possess a single male occupant.
“How do you like her, my Ajan waif?” The strange voice sounded again from behind her, soft and hard altogether, like a golden hammer sheathed in fur. Sigrid turned and beheld a large part of her destiny: Long-Eared Tomomo, captain of the good ship Maidenhead. Tomomo was strange-looking for that part of the world, but not un-handsome—her eyes were dark and desultory, her hair long and black, straighter than a crow’s leg, her skin like oft-touched ivory, its shade having long since lost its white to the strokes of many fingers. Her dress was not garish, as the coats of pirates so often are, but simple stag-skin vests and trousers, and her hair bound in a long braid that brushed her thighs. Later, Sigrid would often hear her refuse the captain’s hat, with its bouncing peacock feathers and golden buckles, remarking that if she were to die—as she would surely draw attention of the murderous kind in that hat—they might never get the hideous thing off of her, and her gods would laugh at her when she met them in hell.
“The ship, ma’am?” Sigrid paused, unsure. “Sir?”
“Tommy is good enough for my girls and it’s good enough for you. Yes, the ship.” Tommy slapped the rail and rubbed it affectionately. “She’s my prize—a gift from a bird, a tree, and a Witch. Not a nail in her; the whole thing held together with breath and blood and starlight.”
