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I watched the world forget what we looked like, and then pile up flowers on altars in our names. I shook my head.
I lived, I ate, I worked. I passed well for a monster, and men did not love me.
After a long while I took it into my head to try the ocean on my skin. I set out to build myself a ship, and bought a great quantity of wood in a seaside town—beautiful wood, like none I had ever seen, with a grain like veins filled with blood, deep red and glossy. I made a place for myself out of the way of the other shipwrights, who laughed when the freakish child came striding by, his arms full of their tools, and set to the keel with a hammer and his own callused hands.
It was not long before the shipwrights came to me and said: “Itto, that wood is too fine for your kind. By rights we should have it for our ships, for surely your stunted ship will be as misshapen and deformed as you, and spoil the wood.”
I did not want them to take it, of course I didn’t. But they held me back and gathered whatever of the red wood they liked. What could I do? We are not marvels; we do not have the strength of ten. When our light is spent, we are less, even, than a knot-faced, salt-shouldered shipwright.
When they had gone, I looked at what was left and said, “Very well, I cannot build a ship. I will build a canoe.”
It was not long before the shipwrights came again and said: “Itto, that wood is too fine for your kind. By rights we should have it for our ships, for surely your crook-beamed canoe will be as misshapen and deformed as you, and spoil the wood.”
I did not want them to take it, of course I didn’t. But they held me back and gathered whatever of the red wood they liked. What could I do? I had spent myself on the grass and the salt—I could not blight a man with a glance.
When they had gone, I looked at what was left and said, “Very well, I cannot build a canoe. I will build a raft.”
There was hardly enough wood left even to make a raft, but I lashed plank to plank, pole to pole, splinter to splinter. Before long I had a red raft, and it was sturdy and small, and I loved it. It was my own thing, a thing I made as the sky made me, and no less dear to me than if it had been a child.
It bore me on the purple waves as surely as a hermit bears his pack. I fished well from its edge, and my shirt was a poor man’s sail. It filled; my nets filled. I lay on the rough surface of the red wood and smelled its fibers, like blood and cinnamon prickling my nose. I spoke to it, and I thought, lonely as I was, that it answered, and its voice was smooth and dark as the sky. It pressed up under my back at night, and the dark washed both my faces with gentle hands.
When I returned to the city, I kept it folded away in long, oiled cloths, stained with fish skins, certainly, but as soft as I could afford. It leaned up against the meanest wall in the smallest boathouse on the docks. And one day, when I came to unwrap my raft and put out into the shallows, there was nothing leaning against the mean wall but filthy, stained cloths and a single broken plank of scarlet wood.
As I stood trying not to weep, a voice came from behind me. I turned—it was the scraggly, lanky son of one of the other shipwrights. He shoved greasy hair out of his eyes, which darted like a guilty dog’s between me and what was once a raft. “Itto,” he whispered, licking his lips, “that wood was too fine for you.”
He ran from the boathouse, leaving me to the remains.
I carried the broken plank away from the countless sands of the beach, away from any house with a tiled roof, away from the makers of round, hard cheeses, over the grass and past any place which salted its meat. Finally, I reached a forest wide of branch and root, and in the center of the forest I found a patch of deep earth, where I buried the shard of glossy red wood just as I would a child of my body. I wept into the grave, as bitterly as I have done any thing since I took my step down out of the sky.
I did not know what else to do; I returned to the city, to my wretched, shingle-shack home. The lanky boy was waiting for me. As if in apology, shuffling his feet and picking at his pimples, he offered me a place on his father’s ship. “If you want to sail, it is easier to serve on another man’s ship than to build your own, you know,” he said, as if he knew everything that could be known about the matter.
My raft was gone. One set of planks was like another. I went aboard the ship, and for weeks washed the sickly brown boards as they told me, stitched the thick sails as they told me, slopped tar in broad barrels as they told me.
And then one night, the shipwright’s son sunk an oar in my head.
“I SUPPOSE HE WANTED TO MAKE HIS FATHER proud,” the boy groaned, leaning heavily on my taut stomach. Truthfully, my back was beginning to ache from balancing him above the waterline, but it behooves a King to be patient. “I did the natural thing—my hands flew up to my head, while pain thrashed in me like a raft in a storm, and when he drew out the oar, I held myself together, somehow. The boy saw it, he saw that I still spoke, and staggered, and that what came out of me was not exactly like blood, and with his stringy arms he threw me over the side, my hands still clutching my head together like two halves of a cut peach and what light was left in me blanched the sea.” Itto turned up awkwardly, to look at Sekka with his left eyes. “But you see, if I let go I am sure I will perish, and I am afraid. So few of us have ever died. I am afraid.”
I didn’t know what to say. We floated there like pieces of a shipwreck, and the moon moved on his frail back.
“Where do you want us to take you? I’m afraid you wouldn’t like my pier very much.”
Sekka was very quiet. Her huge black eyes were fixed on the bedraggled boy. “You want to go back. Up there.”
“I don’t know,” he answered, but his voice hitched itself into a half-sob. “I couldn’t get back, even if I did. I let all my light out, or most of it, and I’m so weak, I can hardly heave myself off an otter’s belly. But I’m afraid. I don’t know what’s up there, if that’s where the dead go, if I can go back without dying. I don’t know anything. But it doesn’t matter; I can’t get there any more than a mouse can get up a mountain.”
Sekka fluffed her feathers lightly, making her look even bigger than usual. “Would a mountain do?” She turned her head to one side, like a rooster in the morning.
Itto took a long time answering. I felt his breath on me, light and fast, a little wing fluttering against my fur.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it would.”
RAKKO RAN HIS THICK PAWS OVER HIS BELLY AS IF in memory.
“Well, what happened?” I cried eagerly.
“Sekka took him up to the mountain, long years ago, and she can’t bring him back. He won’t come down. Poor Sekka circles the mountain and cries her long cries, but he doesn’t hear. I want you to bring him back for me, and for her, like a good little fox. Steal him from himself. Drag him. Throw him over your shoulder.” The King of the Otters frowned. “He shouldn’t be there all alone. I’ll share my buckets and my nets. Sekka would cover him with her wings for the rest of her days and let the nesting be damned. He doesn’t have to be up there alone.”
“And how am I supposed to get to the top of a mountain? I’m a fox, and I’ve only just discovered that much. I’m not an eagle.”
