Amilcar thought this was very fine indeed, and was wise enough to know the ways of such fish. He agreed immediately.
“Vachya watches you, Amilcar, and besides being a sure sight better than a rocking chair full of old paper, she is a Lamia, and the gills of a Lamia are full of gold.”
The fisherman let loose his carp, and when he returned home that night, he played his flaming horn as he was accustomed, peering at the breasts of his paper-wife for his song. But just when he was playing so beautifully that even the tone-deaf eel was leaning out of the water to hear, he leapt from his chair with his horn in one hand, and with the other threw open the window, where Vachya was curled, her many-fringed tail as blue as dye, and her piscine eyes blinking in surprise.
“I have never seen a Lamia before,” said the fisherman. “Why do you come to my window?”
“I heard you, on the open ocean, where the ships break the spume like whales’ heads…”
THE TALE OF
THE BLUE SERPENT
DO NOT GO TO THE RIVER’S MOUTH, THE mother-Lamia say. It will gobble you up, and then where will you be?
On maps they always mark us, the hoops of our blue tails humping out of the sea, demarcating the places where you must not go. But who will tell us? The Lamia were born in the beginning of the dark of the world, when there was nothing but a great black sea. Some will say there was always green land, just as there was always black sea, but these are the lies of the landlocked, and we who breathe it know that the sea is greater than the land, ever and always, and cannot have been anything but the primeval blood of the world. The Lamia are old, older than salt. Our three breasts are called morning, evening, and midnight, and we encompass the heavens in our coils.
In the land of the Lamia, all things are blue. The waves lend their own color, and I cannot recall a time when blue was not the sum of my sight. Fields of blue coral where turquoise fins flashed, wavering fronds of cobalt seaweed and blue-black undersea mountains tipped in the last sapphire light where the moon pierced deepest into the water. The Lamia were the bluest of all blue things, our fins snapping bright, our skin like an ink spill, our lures glowing ghostly, blue light in the blue dark. When the tides were shocking and new, and the Lamia sucked the blood from the fat blue fish of the sea depths, my grandmother many times floated on the water, bathing in the moonlight, letting it turn her skin to silver and azure. From this vantage she saw a terrible thing, and her cerulean heart froze in her breast.
It was a ship, and it was bleached brown and white, riding high on the waves, and it was in no part blue. Fascinated, my grandmother followed it, her thick tail looping through the water. She spied on its decks creatures of no tail and no lure, whose skin was dry and salt-cracked. She followed until the ship wrecked itself, for if one watches a vessel long enough, one is surely to witness catastrophe sooner or later. And from the waves she pulled a single sailor, whose eyes were properly blue. Being a fish, she did not moon over his handsome features for too long before fixing her mouth to his throat and taking her supper. We are practical creatures, who live on the sea, and know that serendipitous food is to be savored, for it may not come again. In his thin blood she tasted the green land and sheer rocks which were new in the world, and shuddered.
She returned to the blue depths, and there, in the usual time, discovered that she was with child. She was disgusted and afraid: There are no male Lamia, and the old mothers, long-lived as they were, had given little thought to children. But when she was delivered of a happily wriggling sea serpent, the blue elders decided that it was the new blood, the rocky, grass-riddled blood, which had quickened her. Thus it was that ever since, when a Lamia felt the pull of daughters, she sought out a sailor and devoured him.
In this way was I born, from the slashed chest of a rum-wrangler.
Do not go to the river’s mouth, our mothers say. It will gobble you up, and then where will you be?
Do not go there. There are monsters there, their harpoons curving up out of the deep, black places. But I was young and foolish as a tad-pole. I rejoiced in the soft blue-black water, the cold at the ocean floor, the light of my lures glittering in my hair, drawing my luncheons to me. We are deep-water fish, the Lamia. We drink blood and eat sand, and our skin does not see sun. I was strong; my tail whipped through the water. When I was grown, I went before the oldest Lamia, who is crusted with barnacles so thick it is as though she is no flesh at all, but hoary rock. I sang to her as the young ones will, a recital to please our common grandmother, my voice filled the waves with quivering delight, with my desire for the river and the rock, my curious tail drifting toward their foreign currents.
The old Lamia yawned. Pieces of coral fractured off her jaw and floated up to the surface.
“Fine, fine,” she croaked, “but could you not sing something blue?”
Why should I not go to the river’s mouth? I thought to myself, furious, as I snapped away from her grotto. Why should I not see the grass and the clearer water, with pink fish and gold fish, and the sun like a great burning clam?
I went to ask my mother, who was sleek and so dark in her blue scales that she was nearly black, curling around a rock at the bottom of the world, gnawing on its stony roots: “I wish to see the river,” I said.
“Do not hurt your poor old mother so.”
“I am quite fierce enough to brave the river!” I cried.
Children must have been invented to vex and defy by turns. “Ask the swordfish, then; he will tell you where to go.”
I went to the swordfish, silver and blue, his horn glinting in the shallower sea.
“Swim until the water turns warm, and tastes of cod, and then seek out the carp,” he said.
I swam and swam, and finally the water became warm, and tasted light and flowery, like the white flesh of the cod. It was then that I heard the first thin, fiery tendrils of a song playing somewhere far off, like a beckoning. I sought out the carp, and found him chewing krill by an overturned galleon which had three sharks living in it.
“You must go until the water changes color,” he said. “It will become so many things other than blue, and it will be warm as an otter’s skin. That is the river. But I would not recommend it. There are monsters in the river.”
With a trumpet of glee I sought out the green water, and found it flowing into the sea like silt. I leapt into the green, rolled in it, my starry lures waving in their eddies. The song was so loud, then! I sang with it, exultant. I slithered onto the shore and left a long lock of my blue hair waving on the grass, to say that I was there; alone of Lamia I was braver than any forbidding map. The water warmed my flesh, and I found I was not so dark when the ocean did not chill me—I was turquoise and silver and cobalt, all at once, and this was delightful to me.
But then there was the singing, and I remembered what my mother had said about Sirens, but I could not help it. I swam upriver, through violet and gold currents, green and red and orange currents, and I played guessing games with the eels, and rhyming games with the osprey, and I tried to pretend no one sang. But each day I inched up the river, and each day there was singing rippling the water like a wind.
Until I came to this hut, and saw that no bird or Siren sang, but a horn, and the horn flamed white and red, its reflection gleaming golden on the water.
Do not go to the river’s mouth. It will gobble you up, and then where will you be?