“I’m not angry, I’m not. I am sorry. Let me tell you what Sigrid found below the decks of the pirate ship…”
SIGRID DUCKED AND STEPPED GINGERLY ONTO THE first stair leading to the innards of the Maidenhead. The interior was dark as a belly, dusty and filled with strange noises—the knocking and creaking of a ship which Sigrid had not yet come to know as her own heartbeat. Suddenly, a face appeared out of the dark swirl of dust motes—wide and open, with a huge flaring nose and great green eyes the color of a deep-thatched forest. All around the grinning face were tight curls of deep brown hair, almost as tightly curled as the fleece of a sheep or the fur of a wild dog. The shaggy mane fell long past the chin, and Sigrid peered closer to see the body attached to the face floating before her like a lantern.
“Hullo!” it cried, and pulled Sigrid down into the ship by her forearm. She saw that the face belonged to the woman she had been sent to find—the curly hair bunched and knotted all the way to her waist, where she ceased to be a woman and became a strange goatlike creature. Her haunches were thickly furred in brown and red, tapering to delicate hooves that had clearly been polished to their current bronze shine. She kicked them against the floorboards for good measure.
“Satyr! Yew copse, to be specific—but then that won’t mean a thing to you. Welcome, little one! You’ve nothing to fear now. Eshkol’s got you clamped to her side and Tommy’s at the wheel. You’re safe as a vault! Now, you must make yourself useful and earn your board and at the moment you’re useless at anything the least bit nautical—so you and I are going to play nursemaid to our pigheaded passengers!”
Sigrid went along amiably, admiring Eshkol’s hooves. Indeed, they were shiny as mirrors, copper-colored and clearly strong as a mule’s kick.
“I admit I shine ’em up every morning,” Eshkol said with a laugh, “but at sea you tend to cling to little vanities. Besides, I can still kick a hole in solid silver with the blessed things! Now, the thing you must remember about passengers, paying or otherwise, is that they think they own the ship. They fret about this or that and snipe at us about the rigging, or the sail material, or the type of wood in the mast. Best to humor them if they’re paying, best to show them the plank if they aren’t.” The shaggy woman stopped and turned quickly to her charge. “Not that we have a plank, you understand! We just keep a good solid board below and tell folks it’s a plank to scare them into giving us some peace! If we wanted to kill them, we’d be proper about it and put a blade in their guts like any civilized crew.”
Eshkol led Sigrid through an astonishing labyrinth of rooms and stairs—so intricate that Sigrid could hardly believe they could still be on the Maidenhead. Finally, they arrived at a heavy wooden door from which issued the unmistakable sounds of a hearty dinner in progress.
“Part of the fun of it, you know,” Eshkol explained. “The Maid’s a bit bigger belowdecks than above. I don’t ask questions about that—I’m not a shipwright, it’s none of mine. Now, these are the ones directing our prow for the season—Arimaspians. They’re a bit frightening to look at and Lord knows I told Tommy it’s bad luck to have a man aboard, but they pay in gold and they keep to themselves, and that’s the best you can hope for from anyone. Now take this beer in and mind their needs and I’ll see you in the evening—you’ll bunk with me in the stern.”
Eshkol disappeared as suddenly as she had arrived, and Sigrid was left face-to-face with the thick door, a clay pitcher of frothing black beer in her hand. She did not quite fancy being a serving wench to whatever monsters lay on the other side, but she hoped that it would only be for the night, that in the morning Tommy would assign her to sew sails or some other thing which befitted a sailor. She slipped into the room and stood dumbly at the threshold, staring at the inhabitants.
At her entrance, six or so of them had scurried behind a seventh, clearly their leader. He was enormous as a bull elephant, shoulders and chest straining with muscle, and black—not the ruddy brown of Sigrid’s own people, but true black, the color of midnight and lightless rooms, as though he had been cut from a block of onyx. His hair was braided in complicated patterns and threaded with gold, falling down his back like a woman’s. His eye cut into her, no less black than his body—but he had
only one true eye. The other was an eye fashioned out of gold and set into his skull like a diamond into a ring. It was a perfect likeness; one almost expected it to blink. She could see that his companions also had but one eye each, though their artificial eyes were not of gold, but of silver and bronze and copper and crystal. Sigrid felt reasonably certain of her guess and curtsied before the mountainous man as she would before a King.
“I am Oluwakim, King of the Arimaspian Oculos. Who is this insect who presents me with drink as if she were fit to serve me?”
“I… I am Sigrid, my lord. Of Ajanabh.”
The King looked skeptically at her, his eye roving over her slight form like a hawk surveying the geography of a mouse’s haunch.
“Are you human? You look like a human, girl. I will not be served by humans.”
Sigrid stared determinedly at her feet. “I’m not entirely sure, sire. I see what you see when I look into the mirror, but I have a deformity—”
“Long-Eared Tomomo sends me mangled humans to pour my drink?”
“No, no, I am whole, it is only that I was born with three breasts instead of two. My parents were ashamed of me, Tomomo—Tommy—took me from the barges of Ajanabh.”
Oluwakim blinked with his one colossal eye—once, twice.
“That is a meager qualification. I suppose your provincial modesty would preclude you from showing me this miraculous breast, and so I must take you at your word. Yet who would dare lie in the presence of the Ocular? Very well, I accept you as a decent enough monster; you may pour the ale.”
He settled himself at the head of the table, a gesture that was not unlike a boulder settling onto a valley floor. His companions seemed to come to life and went about their business, ignoring Sigrid completely. She poured for the King and stood silently aside, waiting for him to finish his cup. He had finished three before he spoke again.
“Come, Sigrid. Sit.”
Obediently, she sat, a safe space away from the blue-black monarch.
“We have chartered the Maidenhead for our Hunt—you know what it is the Arimaspians hunt, do you not?”
“No, sire.”
“Ignorant Sigrid, your education does not befit the serving-girl of a King. We hunt the Griffin, the White Beast of the Hidden Isle…”
THE GRIFFIN AND THE ARIMASPIANS HAVE BEEN enemies since the birth of the World-Eye at the center of the heavens. For them, the World-Eye blinked three times: They received the strength of both Eagle and Lion, and the size of Elephant. For us, the World-Eye blinked four: we received the strength of Bull, the beauty of Wildcat, the skill of Spider, and the secret of forging the Great Ocular, which is the golden eye you see in my skull, the mark of the King and of the Oluwa clan, the magical iris which grants power beyond the dreams of little deformed girls. These other eyes of bronze and silver are merely fashion, imitations of glory. It is only the Ocular which confers power, only the Ocular which is the heart of our people, who come into this world one-eyed, in the image of the World-Eye which is our beloved parent.
The Griffin have always been jealous of the Fourth Blink.
We have learned through the ages to wage a civilized kind of war with them: In the spring, they steal our horses for their suppers; in the winter, we steal their gold to adorn our hair and to fashion the Ocular—for all Griffin love gold as they do their own lion-haunched chicks. Their nests are woven of the stuff, their beaks and talons are solid metal, they bathe in underground pools of liquid light. But though they love the sight of gold, they cannot eat it. Their favorite meal is horse—it is to them as chocolate and peppermint are to children. They snatch the beasts by the bellies and devour them in midair. A Griffin-Raid is truly a sight to see: The sky is alive with wheeling wings of red and violet and slashing paws of tawny yellow, stained with horse blood.
Our horses were the largest of chest and powerful of leg, great behemoths of horse-kind. Each of us possessed what the other desired. And so it went in this way, in the proper way, for century upon century. The Griffin were careful to leave enough horses for the next spring’s colts to thrive; we took only what gold we needed for our rites, for it is well known that when a Griffin’s gold is gone, it perishes of despair.