It was covered in paper from wall to wall, fine, creamy paper soft as silk rugs, and upon it, with feet and wings which I could see now were dark not with mud but with ink, they had written:
But we find spiders delicious.
“I find many things delicious, but if I were to eat all of them I would be as big as a baker’s pan.”
The trio danced again, their beaks turned up to the ceiling and down, their wings whipping, snapping, flicking at the paper floor.
This is wise. But do you really think you could dance with us? Your penmanship would be so tiny, so intricate, only the very dedicated would wish to read it.
“I have been told it is proper and right for a spider to weave—either alphabets or dresses, the flies were unclear—and dresses are so very big.”
We have never heard of a spider-calligrapher.
“I have never heard of Sirens who do not speak.”
The women blinked again, one after the other, six eyes sliding closed and open again. And then they began to dance in truth, a swift, urgent dance that bent them close to the floor, their wings tapping and flipping at the paper, letters forming like shapes in water, long and lithe and exalted, their toes gently tipping an i here and a j there, their leaps elongated and graceful, sometimes spanning the room entire—but they never broke with each other, staying as close and tight as a flock of migrating birds, racing over the page, their movements alien and aching and radiant.
This is what they wrote:
THE TALE
ON THE FLOOR
WE SANG TOO LONG; WE SANG TOO WELL. WE are sisters in silence now: It is our vow and our penance.
Once we had a nest in the open wind, on the open sea—how gray was that sea of our youth! How soft and thick was that nest we built! How long ago it was, how long ago it seems to us now, how much we have seen since we walked on our spit of stone and called each other sisters! But we are old now, we are old, and there is no sand anymore between our toes. How long since we sang innocent ballads on the shore, sharp and well turned, how long since we opened our throats in the rain and called it harmless.
Our nest was then threshed of straw and juniper and loose, waving cotton flowers, driftwood and scallop shells and sandpiper bones. Long dune grasses crisscrossed themselves within, and there we slept in each other’s arms, heads tucked under our wings, and were warm, and were not wicked, no matter what they say.
And in our joy, as we picked our way among the tide pools, sucking the orange flesh from mussels and closing up the anemones with our wing tips, as our legs grew blue and goose-pimpled with the ocean spray, we sang. We sang dizzy waltzes about the moon who breathes so deeply that she draws the whole sea into her, and blows it out again. We sang dirges for our mother, buried at sea when we were chicks with pink toes. We sang dirges for our father, whom we never knew. We sang tarantellas and danced them on the coral boulders until our feet bled. We were happy together in those days, and knew nothing of the world, innocent as mice, slurping fish from their bones and looking at the sky through our joined feathers.
Do you know what it means to sing? Are there songs of the spiders, gossamer and glissand? It means to open up your mouth and unstop your chest and push your heart, your blood, your marrow, and your breath out of you like children. We opened up our mouths and unstopped our chests and pushed our hearts and blood and marrow and breath out of us, and the songs were all our nieces and daughters, lying among us and giggling at the wind.
Then she washed up on our spit of stone. How beautiful we thought her! How blue her lips were! How strange her skin, how odd her hair, seaweed-strangled! How we watched her, how we prodded, like a dolphin beached, our drownèd girl! She had a sailor’s clothes, her shirt torn open, and—we did not know humans were made so!—there was a large compass needle waving northward in her navel, pointing up toward her chin. There was rust at the tip, like blood. Her boots were full of water—there were barnacles on the heels, and we pinched her and nudged her and rolled her over, and we sang to her—how we sang to her! What did we not sing to the drownèd dear? Warm, skipping minuets, thrilling ballads of narwhal hunts and octopus cities under the waves, crooning lullabies of children well held and tears never shed, all those we had from our mother so-long-dead!
Wake up, girl! we sang, but blue she stayed.
The tide is coming in! Now is no time for sleeping! we sang, but cold she stayed.
Wake up, sailor-love! Ghadir has you, Ashni has you, Nyd will not let you drink the whole sea down! we sang, and she coughed, she groaned, she made the sounds a sailor does when it does not want to wake up. Her eyes opened, and they were miraculously blue. We had never seen anything with blue eyes, though Mother’s songs said that such things might exist very, very
far away. Her hair was black and plastered to her back, wet as a fish’s fin, and her face was ashen, tired, drawn as a crone’s.
“Why do you sing me back, you awful old cat-bait, when first you sang me down?” she croaked.
“What do you mean?” Ghadir chirped.
“It was your song I followed, your song that filled up my mouth with salt and sea…”
THE
NAVIGATOR’S
TALE
I STEER THE SHIPS BETWEEN AJANABH AND THE northern passage, I chart their way between the shoals, between the shallows and the deeps, between the sunlit sea and the darkest tide. I am their true beacon, a light house the ship carries with her, never trusting the shore to give one over when it is most needed. My sextant is their chapel altar while we are at sea, and at its brass wheels and at its inky angles they pray as fervently as they have prayed in all their days.
Which was never too fervently in Ajanabh.