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“Oh,” I said, trying to bow in the brackish water, “I didn’t know you were a King. I certainly would have brought something.”
“Well,” he said, paddling past me to one of the rusted buckets and fishing something foul and greenish from its depths, nearly tipping the bobbing pail over in his enthusiasm, “mainly I’m King because I said I was, and nobody said any different. But this pier is as good as any throne room, and there are riches in every cage and pot. That’s how kings are made, my brush-tailed girl—they pick a place, shove a stick in it, call themselves King and wait to see if someone gets angry about it. No one has gotten angry so far, so that makes the otters mine.”
“I see.” I nodded, and wondered if this was entirely how the King of my own country began. “Well, I’m not sure what Majo means for me to do—”
“What are foxes good for? She means for you to steal something for me. It’s not an easy thing. I hope you’re up to the task—she sends me girls from time to time, but they are usually far too frail for thieving.”
I blushed a little, thinking of my tiny feet, hidden by the sea.
“What is it you want me to get for you?”
Rakko looked up out of the buckets, his furry face suddenly quiet and sad, water dripping off his long whiskers like rain from stalks of wheat. He rubbed at his round brown eyes as if he had not slept since the sea was a puddle, and the moon pulled at dry land. “It’s not for me”—he sighed—“not for me at all, but I need you to steal a Star…”
I REMEMBER THE SPLASH MOST OF ALL.
Sekka and I were diving—Sekka is the Queen of the Loons. She taught me the trick of saying you were Queen. But where I’m King-Under-the-Pier and even bratty girls don’t bring me so much as an urchin as tribute, once Sekka said she was Queen, the other loons saw just how black her head was, how vast her wingspan—for poor Sekka was born larger than any other loon, and suffered a great deal for it when she was a chick—how white her belly, and how haunting was her wail and cry, and immediately agreed that she should certainly be Queen, and right away. Unfortunately, she found out that this is a pretty inferior way of becoming a ruler, because it usually means you have to add responsibilities into the bargain, and not simply many, many buckets of delicious rotted fish. Her nest is the thickest and best-thatched of all the seabirds, but she has to visit all the hens during mating season, and she tries very hard, but loons are heavy fliers at best, and she rarely makes the full rounds.
It was not mating season when the splash came. Loons and otters are alike in love of diving—we puff out all our air and make our stomachs quite flat, and swoop to the deep, cold currents where the fat fish fly. Sekka and I are the best divers you could imagine, should you spend your time imagining how gifted divers can be. We raced; we played; we fished. It was night, and thin blue light shafted through the water like anglers’ hooks. The shadow of a passing ship flittered through the water overhead.
Just as I shot past her to pry up a clam from a deep rock, the whole sea lit up as though the moon had been dropped whole into the water. The currents flashed suddenly bone white, and I saw Sekka’s shape flare purple against them, and my own tail was washed in it, and my eyes were burned. I rubbed at them furiously, and when I pulled my paws away the light was dimmed, and there was a small boy floating down from the surface, sinking terribly fast into the blue-black deeps.
We dove after him like one animal, our chests burning with air-need, dropping like two stones after the spiraling body. I do not know now, when I think back, why we thought it was so important to catch that near-dead thing before it slushed into the ocean floor, but without thinking, we would have drowned in the dive if it meant we could have stopped his fall. In the end, it was Sekka who caught him, snatching a lock of his hair in her dark beak. I stroked through the last inches of water to grip him around the waist, and we drew him up to the surface hanging between us like a net of salmon—and you know, he was so heavy, so heavy, I thought then he must have been filled with silver weights.
When our three heads broke through the waves, I pulled him up onto my belly like a scallop shell, and he lay there, limp, holding his head in his hands, as the night threw shadows on his skin. Finally, after a long silence which left Sekka and me fretting like new parents over him, he coughed, and spat water onto my fur. Moaning, he lifted his head, still clutched in his hands. I noticed two things right away: the first was that there was a thin line running all the way through his scalp and head, which oozed with a kind of wet darkness.
The second was that he had two faces where his ears should be, and nothing but smooth skin where I expected to look him in the eye. It was this skin which was split by the black line.
He held his head on either side, his hands covering his noses and foreheads, leaving his wet lips open, and stringy hair covered his hands. When he spoke, he used both mouths, in chorus with himself, one high, reedy voice, a child’s, and one low and grave, a man’s.
“I’m alive,” he croaked.
“Matter of opinion, little drowned dear,” clucked Sekka, who had already pecked at the black stuff on his faceless face and declared it horrid. It was not exactly blood, but it was not exactly not-blood.
“Sekka,” I said softly, “what do we do? Float him back to shore?”
She stretched out her long black wings to cover him, and the white spots on her feathers glittered like stars. “Little lost thing. Can you swim? Perhaps if you let go of your poor head—”
“No!” the boy cried, awkwardly shrinking from her and almost toppling into the water. Both his faces looked sheepish as he cl
ung to me with his elbows. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t let go, I mean.”
“What happened to you?” Sekka prodded, nuzzling his ribs as she would a chick with a broken wing.
“I fell.” He sighed.
I AM NOT LIKE THE OTHERS.
I wanted the world. Even after, even after, when they all went into the hills, into the ground, into the dark, when people opened up deep stone wells of forgetting in their bellies and all the Stars dove in, I stayed. No different from when I first took that step, that long step down from the black, I wanted the grass and the salt and the hard, round cheeses and the houses with tiled roofs and the beach with countless, countless sands. I was happy here; I didn’t want to pull brambles over my head and pretend I heard nothing of the world going by.
So I touched everything, everything I could reach, to leech the light out of me, to bleed out enough that I could pass for a thing that had never been a hole in nothing. I touched men and women and children sleeping in tamarack cribs, I touched cups and plates and bushels of roses, I touched haywains and haystacks and the thick doors of prisons, I touched the grass and the salt and the hard, round cheeses, I touched houses with tiled roofs, and I let the countless sands run through my hands until my skin no longer glowed.
But my faces, you will say. Surely no one would mistake me for a man.
And I say that we all chose that which was most like us, and I could not decide. I looked at the grass and the salt and they were nothing like me. I looked at the hard, round cheeses. I looked at the tile-roofed houses and I looked at the countless sands of the beach. Nothing matched me like one shoe to another.
And then I saw children who had faces just alike, walking two by two, and these were twins; I knew that I also walked two by two, even though I had only one body. I split my face and became the Twinned Star, and though I would puddle out my light on the dry ground to fit in the cities of men, I would not change my nature. And why should I? The cities were always filled with monsters, and I could easily be mistaken for one of their number. I called myself Itto, and vanished into a noisy tangle of streets.
I lived, I ate, I worked, I walked two by two.
