“No,” I answered, “it’s the last thing the Star left behind him: blood which is not blood, light which is not light, water which is not water.”
The masthead’s face became as soft as wood can manage, and tears of sap flowed down her face. She spoke to the moat around her.
“Itto? Itto? Do you see how big and tall I’ve become? I’m a real ship now, not a silly broken raft. Aren’t you proud of me?”
I thought, then, that I had done what I came to do, and that no one who knew the Star could have asked more. I turned to leave the Ship-Tree alone with the tears.
“Oh, please, oh, please wait!” The figurehead writhed towards me, and it seemed at any moment she would twist right off the tree and tumble into my arms. But the Ship-Tree moved with her, and the sound of creaking grew even louder, accompanied by the rusted squeaking of the hanging rigging. I climbed up a little onto a keel-root.
“I’m here.”
She blushed, her red wood becoming even darker and more crimson. “Thank you for the water,” she said.
“I would like to give you something too, even though you never rode me through the dark water—I would have done it for him, but I can still do it for you, I can bear fruit for you, just like all the other trees.”
I was immediately unsure. “What sort of fruit do you have, Ship?”
She smiled, her bright cheeks quivering with barely held tears. “It’s my present to you: the best dream of a lonely raft, everything I ever wanted to be when I slept wrapped in oilskin.”
The Ship-Tree seemed to bulge, and its groans vibrated through the forest. The sails twisted together, the rigging knotted itself into half-hitches and bowlines, the keels and prows clattered together like branches tapping against a window. The figurehead kept laughing, louder and more shrilly until I felt my ears would burst from the sound. The creaking and cracking of wood
was like a storm rolling across the wood, and all the while, the moat of tears was spreading and growing deeper, until I was trying desperately to swim as little waves sloshed over my chin. The tree was so large then that I feared it would engulf me entire, if I did not drown first.
But I did neither. From the topmost branches of the Ship-Tree, a thing began to take shape. A prow, a mast, a jib, then a hull, a keel. A bright wheel spun into being like a sunflower opening. A ship, full-grown, descended from the branches like an apple falling, and came to rest comfortably on the now swift-flowing river of tears. The figurehead quieted herself, and drew one of her huge wooden hooves from the side of the trunk, scooping me out of the still-rising water by the scruff of the neck.
“Don’t wreck her too quickly,” the figurehead said worriedly, and set me down at the new ship’s wheel.
When my feet touched the newborn wood of the decks, I felt suddenly at home. It was not a question of which line to pull taut or which sail to trim; the sleek schooner was as familiar to me as my own limbs. The ship was mine, made for my hand as surely as a child of my own womb.
And the river of tears, now deeper than the fruit-ship’s keel, moved gently away from the tree which was once a raft, flowing ahead of itself, carrying me along the forest floor in silence, save for soft ripples against the hull, like a child kissing her mother’s cheek.
And slowly, ever so slowly, it bore me past the edge of the wood, down through ripe fields of wheat, over grass and salt and the huts of the makers of hard, round cheeses, past houses with tiled roofs and the countless grains of sand on a pale beach, past a long, lonely pier and into the sea.
TOMOMO LICKED HER LIPS, THE FOX REFLECTION flicked its pink tongue over its muzzle.
“And that was how the Maidenhead was born. I named her for a thing I had long lost, and sailed her true. Who would have thought a fox could grow sea legs? As soon as I had mastered her I glided into the nearest port and took on sailors. At first it was not that I asked for women, or for monsters, to serve. But the men would not sail under a female captain, and women without our… unusual histories were clamped into their houses like fireflies in a glass jar, and had understandably never learned any seacraft. Thus the Maidenhead, with all her strangeness, became even stranger, and more wonderful. We are happy, we are free—you can be, too.”
Sigrid nodded, her eyes lit with joy like beacons on high hills. She had never imagined her life would be filled with anything but the measuring of cinnamon dust and the keeping of her father’s books. At that moment, her heart belonged to the black-haired Tomomo, and there was nothing she would not have done, if her captain had asked it.
Being the captain she was, Tomomo knew this; she knew the light in Sigrid’s eyes, she knew the eagerness of her posture. Many a girl before her had been enchanted thus, and not for the first time Tomomo thought that the magic of the hunt was not limited to the chasing of mice across a rain-wet field.
“Since you know nothing of ships yet, barge daughter, you will have to make yourself useful in other ways until you have learned. Go below: find a Satyr with green rings on her fingers—she will introduce you to our passengers, and you will see to their needs for the night.”
“Yes, Tomomo—I mean, Tommy!” Sigrid smiled, a smile which had never before touched her face, the deepest smile, which comes from the belly, and gleams with its own flickering light. She turned and instinctively ran towards the door which led into the innards of the scarlet ship, letting the door bang closed behind her with a merry clang.
In the Garden
“I MUST GO,” THE BOY WHISPERED, HIS HANDS ALREADY ILLUMINATED BY the blue-gold light weaving its way through the sky as the night died away from them. The girl said nothing. She stared at her hands as though she might read there some arcane method of freezing the sun in its ascent.
“Will you be here when I return?” The boy was sure she would not be, whatever she might answer. She had slipped from him, somehow, like a veil sweeping over his hands. When she had sat on his windowsill and told him of the death of the wicked King, and the flight of the bird-maiden seeking her cave, he had been able to touch her, to rest his head on her lap, to feel her warmth like a sparrow’s wing in the sun. Now, she seemed thin, transparent, and he feared that if he reached out his hand to her it would pass through her skin as though through a waterfall. All he could think was that he would steal her any feast, any cloak of feathers or fur, any flask of wine or even the jewels from Dinarzad’s fingers if she would only smile at him again, the way she had done that night, like the sun breaking over the first sea of the world.
He frowned at her, picking at a clump of dirt with his civilized hands.
“Meet me on the cypress path, where the stones are painted red. I will be there, I promise.”
And then she did smile, soft and wide as a river trickling through a secret wood.
He had not set down his second foot past the arching gate when Dinarzad’s voice cut cleanly through him like a hot knife in his stomach.