It is easy work, now. We go north so often, to the floes and the fishing villages and the whales blowing the sea into a mist over their singing heads. I know the route so well, as well as I know my own body—and that I know as well as I know the sea, for it was mapped and charted like a peninsula buffeted by storms the day I became a compass.
There is a woman in Ajanabh who will do this sort of work. Her workshop is difficult to find, but I can navigate a street as well as a strait. And when I say she does this sort of work, what I mean is that you will tell her what you want to do, and she will tell you what to pay, and then she will grant your wish in the strangest way she can think of, usually having to do with cutting into some part of your body and fashioning you into the tool of your desire. This is how the mind of Folio clicks along in its way: better a golden limb than a flesh one which may fail.
What did I ask? The navigator’s prayer: that I should never be lost. Hers is a Djinn’s interpretation, I’ll grant you. What did she take from me in return? She listened at my navel for the first things my mother said to me while I lay in a cradle of ships’ prows—she said you can hear it like the ocean. I will never let you set foot in the sea, my mama had whispered, or you will leave me alone and crying, as he did.
And then the surgeon took my sextant, and the new compass in my stomach spun, unable to find north for shock and grief. My sextant was to me brother and lover and trusted guide, and it was gone, into her shop like a piece of junk metal.
I had another easily, but it was long and long before I liked it as well. I looked at it on my cabin shelf with disgust and suspicion, until it seemed no longer so alien and the scabs of my stomach peeled away, and then I took out my maps again.
It is easy work, as I have said. The immigrants are thick as oranges on the winter trees these days. They say the fields are failing, holding on to their green shoots like jealous bankers, and those who are wise will go. I am not wise, but the going and the leaving are my profession, and Ajanabh simply the port where my pay is held in my name.
We set out for Muireann-port two weeks ago, our hold full of rum and lemons and little books with pictures children ought not to see—and families, huddled and shivering-sick, who had never heard of a coat of fur, soft with southern sunlight. I have seen so many like them. Did one couple have a little daughter, wide-eyed and silent in the rocking waves? I am sure one did. Did another have a parcel of boys, wrists tied one to the other to keep them together? I am sure of this, too, but it does not mean I can remember their names.
My map covered my table like a dinner cloth, and all those continents and islands and fjords and bays were my salad and soup and supper and scallion, and I was well pleased, my stomach peaceably north-pointed, my sextant safe on its shelf. I had charted so safely and so well, my equations were neat as bride-clothes, and we would not go near the Sirens’ shoals, nowhere near.
Some few of the men talked of hearing those songs when we sat out on watch with the stars like a school of minnows overhead, and the creak of the boards and the splash of the sea against the old strong hull. We smoked pipes of silver, and baleen, and plain corncob, and played dice for the lemons and the rum rations. Sturgeon-sour, the first mate always lost, and had a head full of empty tooth sockets for his pains. But still he played, and still did I, and still did we all. And the helmsman said through his juice-sticky beard:
“Galien, I swear to you, I heard it once! I was a-mending the mast, and it came over the waves like the beam of a lighthouse, sweeter than nothing, singing of my sister and her new baby they all say looks just like me, toddling around with a wooden ship in his fat little hand! They were singing of the time my sister said she was proud of me, that even though our dad said I was a shame to him, what with me not being married and not being rich and not being sober and not being much of anything but an old rot holding a wheel, still I was no shame to her nor her boy, and every time I come home she’d have me a chicken roasted crisp, because I was her brother, and she loved me dear as diamonds. How do you like that?”
“I don’t like it, you lying fisherman. How did they know a thing about your sister?”
“How should I know? But I know what they were singing, and I’ll tell you more: It was my sister’s own voice come over the waves. I jumped after it—you can’t hear love singing on the wind when you’ve been at sea eight months and more, you can’t hear it and not go after it, your heart breaking like a jib mast all the while—I jumped after it and got my leg tangled up in the rigging, and hung there for an hour before Captain caught me out, and no rum for me for a week. But I heard them. I heard my sister singing and the chicken roasting at home, and I know what I know.”
“Boys,” I said, laughing, “I think I can say safe as salmon run that the helm is drunk and ought to be relieved of his lemons immediately.”
There was laughter of the kind that haunts ship decks after midnight, and the helmsman shook his hoary head.
“You got no soul in you, Galien. Take us close again, so I can hear my sister sing.”
“Your sister is teaching her son his numbers in a hearth-hot house. She’s not out here in the dark and wet, bless her.”
And so I charted well away from the shoals. But the sea is a funny thing, you know. Sometimes she wants you somewhere and it doesn’t matter what your maps say at supper, she’ll carry you where she pleases. And if you are not properly respectful of her, or call her names she doesn’t like, or give away your sacred tools like they’re scraps of paper, she’ll drop you at the very place your sextant was quite clear about having no desire to go.
The mist came up like a hand in our faces, and we could see nothing around us. I went up to the crow’s nest to try to get a clear sightline of the shore, but it was no good at all. I saw nothing but gray and the occasional gull—which told me we were not too far out—but beyond that I and my sextant were lost as children in a wood.
And then I heard it.
I heard my mother singing. I heard her hushing, quiet-darling voice, off-key as it had always been, lowered by pipes and beer. I heard a baby murmur in her arms, and I heard her rock it to sleep. I heard her sing about the sea, how blue and bright, how much like the body of a wife, and how all lovers leave when they see the whitecaps foam. I heard her sing about my father, who had red hair—imagine it! Red as a heart! Who would think such a thing existed in the world? About my father and his tall ship, and his sextant, and his lilies at the door, about the necklaces of coral and bone he brought her from savage lands, and about his salt skin under her mouth. I heard her sing about the empty dock and the empty bed and prayers for safe passage. I heard her sing about a ship that never came back, and a woman standing every day at the dock for years and more. I heard her sing about a daughter who would grow up to bake bread in a shop and never see the blue or the bright, a daughter who would hold her old gray head and tell her she had been a good mother to her all her days and nights.
I heard my mother weeping—I heard her—and you can’t hear your mother weeping and not go to her, you just can’t. I dove into the
water, well clear of the rigging, and the splash was like a hanging, so cold and so hard, and the fish scattered in horror at the woman dropped into them, hook-sudden.
I could still hear her, echoing and dim, under the water, under the mist.
“Mama!” I cried, and water stopped up my voice.
But there was an arm around my waist like a mother’s arm, and a hand on my hair like a mother’s hand, and a voice in my ear nothing like a mother’s voice, but sweet and sad and deep.
“Why do you folk always listen?” it said with a sigh, bubbling up to the waves above.
We broke the water far from my ship, fading in the distance, and a great, huge seal held me on his belly like an otter, looking at me with depthless black eyes.
“Let me go! My mother is calling, my mother is crying!”
The seal wrinkled its muzzle. “No, she’s not. She is drinking herself dizzy somewhere you cannot so much as guess. You are wet and pitiful and lost, and I have found you, but that is only luck, and luck rarely holds. Now, I will take you to dry land, for I am a kind seal and a good one. But you must answer me this, as I have been answered by every foolish sailor who finds himself overboard: Do you know of a Satyr who serves on a ship, with very big green eyes and curly hair?”
“No, friend, I have heard of no such beast.”