“There isn’t a good enough trick played by the best of all tricksters to make me do that.” He sighed. “I’m holding vigil, and a vigil doesn’t vanish because one’s toes are frozen blue.”
“Why are you holding vigil?”
“Do you see those seven stars there?” he asked. I did, of course—there was little enough to look at but those glittering specks. “You might say those are my cousins. Of course, you might not.” He coughed and rubbed at his four temples with his fingers. “I came up here because I was afraid. I was afraid to let go of my head, afraid to die, even though I should be dead. I came up here to see if the seven stars in the sky were my cousins, who died so long ago I hardly remember what they looked like, safe home and no worse for death. If they were, if they were safe as rabbits in a hutch, then I wouldn’t be afraid, then I could let go of my head and drift up. This is the roof of the world, and you can almost touch the tiles. I wouldn’t have so far to go.”
He looked at my still-wet hands, just beginning to frost over, and I think if he could have he would have taken them in his. I reached up, as I imagined he wanted me to, I reached up on my toes to touch the sky—and I did touch it, I did; my fingers pressed into the black and oh, it felt like flesh! It felt like skin and a soft, glistening leg or belly behind the skin, and a diamond bone behind that. I could not guess whose skin it might be, but it was warm under my chilled fingertips, so warm. And when I touched it I saw the seven stars as he must have, and they were nothing like stars at all, but just seven troughs dug in the sky, pale as sea-bleached bones.
“They’re graves,” he whispered, “nothing but graves, and their light is nothing but a headstone, and they are not there, not there at all, the sky is a tomb and I cannot die, because I am still so afraid. Where do we go if not here? I am so afraid, and so alone, and all I have ever loved is a pathetic broken raft, and it is all that has ever loved me.”
Itto was weeping then, great hot tears from each of his four eyes, and they froze on his cheeks
as they fell.
I crouched on my knees before the Star and took his huge, misshapen head into my hands. I stroked his brittle, snow-crusted hair and pressed my face to his. I said nothing; I crooned like a bird, or how I thought a bird would sound, and I held him for a very long while. I did not know how to get him down, but I supposed that I did, in the end, know how to steal him from himself.
I wrapped my numbed fingers around his wrists and began to pry his hands from his faces. He stiffened and shrunk away. “No!” he gasped. “I can’t!”
“It’s all right,” I said, and I said it over and over. “It’s all right. You’re hurting your Sekka, who loves you like a raft, and would rather see you snug under the forest loam, safe and no worse for death, than alone on a crag feeling sorry for yourself. It’s all right, I’m here, and I know you’re too afraid to do it, but I’ll help you.”
His lips were dry against my arms as I pulled at his hands. “But couldn’t I stay like this, forever, in the freeze?” His doubled voice was plaintive as a child asking for a sweet and a man asking for a sweetheart—but he answered himself. “No, I am tired, so tired, and my arms ache from holding myself to myself.”
“I know a good trick, Itto,” I whispered, “a very good trick.”
He turned his head so that one of his faces could see me, his great dark eyes sweet and soft. I kissed him, very lightly, on each face and his lips under mine were cracked and torn as old paper. It was my first kiss, and my second, and they tasted of snow.
He went slack, and let me pull his hands from his head. I folded them in his lap. He stayed whole for a moment, and then his head opened into two halves, like an iris opening in the sunlight. Black fluid poured out of him, cold and ugly, over my hands and my robe, lumpish, dead stuff which had no scent at all. His body slumped forward onto me, and finally, after I had been soaked in his blood which was not exactly blood, two tiny silver drops of light squeezed out from the center of him, falling onto my hand like tears. I closed my fingers over them.
Sekka turned her head away when she saw my dress spattered black. She sent up a long, low cry, that strange loon-cry that makes the moon weep. She took me again on her back, and though she sang her funeral dirge to every passing cloud for all the days and nights it took to descend from the tiled roof of the world, there was a kind of happiness in it, a relief, sweet and soft in the lowest notes of her song.
And I must have done well, for she told me where the raft was buried just before we landed softly by Majo’s snoring form, her house-pack creaking in time to her grunts and snorts. She woke with a start and saw my fluid-stained dress clinging to my thighs, and nodded as if it was all no more than she expected. And Sekka left us, tottering down the beachhead to the long and lonely pier.
But I did not go to the forest that morning, or the next. I stayed with Majo, and nearly forgot about the plank of wood planted in the earth. I aged slowly, but when I asked, she only shrugged, grunting that each creature lives out its natural term. I learned much—though I was always hopeless with magic. I could no more fashion a charm than a horse could knit its own saddle blanket. My talent was in the hunt and the chase, and in the kill. These things Majo taught me with pleasure, and my skill grew great. I had too much fox in me, she would say sadly over countless night fires. I could perform only fox magic, which was ever the magic of stalking, invisible in the shadows, and the snatching of prey from the air. The truth is that there are many kinds of magic, and her kind, the magic of precisely ground herbs and charms bound at the right phase of the moon, lay in the human half, not the animal. What use a fox’s paws in the lashing of seven-knotted spells? It knows only the magic of hot blood and swift fur—and these are powerful, so powerful they need no little satchel of leaves to help them along. But the fox is not overfond of tools.
“We can be certain,” she would cackle, “that you would have been a most dull and tedious woman. It is the fox that saves you from total idiocy.”
But it was clear that Majo was not the guardian of my destiny. I wanted her to be; I wanted to be a good Witch and carry her cart for her over silver fields and slushing marshes in the early morning light. But I could never accomplish more than a simple tincture or poultice for a slashed ear. In her eyes I saw the truth: We would soon part. She would find a better student, and I would find a life that contained no carts or eager women begging for love spells.
The day we parted she showed no more emotion than the day we met; she was bemused, proud of herself, conspiratorial. She took me walking as we often did, and the sun was crisp as apple skin on my back. It was not long before we reached the edge of a forest, the very forest I had told her Sekka said contained the buried plank. I had forgotten, like the summer forgets the snow. Majo grinned. “You were always an absentminded girl. Try to work on that.”
She tapped my right hand with her finger and I opened it—lying on my palm were the two drops of silver light, shining like tears, which had long ago seeped into my skin and disappeared. I looked up at her, wonder written as plainly on my face as a tattoo. She gripped my hand in her withered old claws and tipped the palm so that the tears fell onto the earth, and then embraced me, I knew for the last time, as a kit always knows when it is time for her to catch mice by herself and not trouble the vixen any longer.
The two tears wet the rust-red soil beneath me, pooling there like rain in a cottage gutter. But they did not seep into the ground as they had once disappeared into my skin—they began to trickle away from me, faster and faster. I held Majo tightly for a moment, tears clouding my last vision of her face like the trunk of a great tree, and then, eyes dry, I chased after them with a cry of excitement.
I looked over my shoulder only once as I ran—and soon I was running as fast as I could go—to see Majo trundling away with her house on her back like some ridiculous turtle, and it seemed to me that there was a kind of light at her heels, silver as the old woman’s hair.
But the twin tracks of salt tears were swiftly disappearing into the distance, and perhaps it was only a trick of the sun. I rushed after them for almost an hour, ducking under bough, leaping over root. It was a marvelous hunt. Finally, they stopped and parted, each streaming around the trunk of an extraordinary tree.
At first, I did not even realize it was a tree. The drops of Itto’s light had grown as they flowed on, until they surrounded it as a knee-deep moat, rippling in the dim light. A tree rose out of that water which was not water, yet it was not a tree, either, but a menagerie of ship-shards, twisted together into the shape of a trunk, of branches, of roots arching into the moat of tears. Prows jutted angrily from the base, masts and keels winding around each other, chasing rudders and booms of colorful wood, ruddy and golden. An enormous oaken forecastle hung from one side of the tree, while smooth wheels spun lazily in the wind on high and low. There were only a few dusky green leaves hanging from the branches; instead, they were hung with lines and rigging, and sails half tangled in the crows’ nests that served as the topmost boughs. Lazy breezes filled them and left them sagging as they liked. The forest was filled with the sound of billowing sails and creaking wood. In the center of the trunk was a figurehead whose paint had been faded by sun and salt: a sea-goat with a curling tail and furry breasts, a wisp of a beard at her chin, her arms braced against the jumble of tree and ship, her large eyes cast heavenward, mouth agape.
The wood of the tree was a deep, glossy red, the grain of it like veins filled with blood.
As I gawked at the spectacle of the Ship-Tree, her eyes rolled slowly down from the sky, like a stone rolling across the mouth of a cave, and her jaw unlocked to speak.
“Is that you?” she said softly, her voice rustling like leaves, or sails.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think it is.”
“Oh.” The tree sighed. “It never is. I’m used to it by now. When I was a sapling I was sure he’d come any day. Is that… is that seawater?” she gasped, her timber-flanked body quivering with surprise. “The real thing? From a port full of drunkards and thieves and shipwrights’ sons? Drawn from a pier full of crab fishermen with nets like giants’ bracelets? Oh, is it?”