Midnights on the Bloor Viaduct | Sonnets Made of Wood | Apres Moi, Le Deluge
This originally appeared in the December 2004 issue of Realms of Fantasy.
by Leah Bobet
I.
It was an ill-luck marriage from the very first, and so nobody was surprised when the lady vanished.
She, a daughter of the waves and sea-foam, princess preeminent and favourite child of the sea-god who dwelt in grottoes deep. He, a prince powerful of the sun and earth, young ruler of a jutting peninsula country where the ships docked and departed, docked and departed on their way to more distant climes. The circumstances of their meeting were nothing to be discussed - a midnight song here, a glance there, a conversation and a kiss.
It was nothing new for a Sea-God's daughter to give up the moonlit ocean for legs and a husband: women lived in fisherman's huts, in traders' mansions, in palaces and shacks alike, each of whom had once slipped silent through the salty deeps and at night wept for the lost sensations of scales and speed. But one of her kin, a distant cousin some centuries back, had married into the same royal house. Nobody could in fact tell the truth of what had happened: some said she flung herself into the ocean, a jilted and tongueless lover, and became sea-foam; others persisted that the couple lived happily ever after in some secret cove sheltered from the winds.
So because they were royal, because he was handsome and she lovelier than the dawn, because she could sing down magic from the heavens, call birds, beasts, fish and flower to her bidding, it was considered an ill-luck match.
They were very happy together.
Until the day the lady vanished.
The morning after the great Traders' Ball, the Prince rises, and his lady is not beside him. He thinks little of it; at times she rises early, gazes over the harbour like a keening bird with the scream echoed only in her eyes. He is a good man, her Prince. He knows how much she has given up for him, has seen how she stands in the beautiful silken gowns he bought to clothe that half-divine form. Legs always together, nary a gap between them, pressed tight like a tail cloven in two. She sings like the greatest mages of the city, strong and powerful in one moment and then delicate and sure the next, but refuses to learn to dance.
She is not there, so he dines alone on eggs and smoked fish and delicacies from foreign lands. She is not there, so he sits on the double throne alone, and governs the country alone. She is not there, but it is only at noon that he starts to worry, real worry like a stone in the pit of his stomach. A few trusted individuals are sent to search the palace.
At sunset, they come back with nothing. Not a clue, not a hint, nobody who has seen her come or go. He gathers up more, sends them throughout his great city, instructed to scour every shimmering spire and basement room, every ship's deck in the harbour. It takes them until noon the next day, but exhausted, empty-handed, they straggle back one by one.
The Prince spends a sleepless night wringing his hands, sharpening his sword, practicing words of judgement and forgiveness and sorrow in turn as his mood shifts like the tides. By morning he is bleak and thin; by noon he has become the colour of sea-foam and just as restless.
A summons goes out for the harbour-master to bring his record-book: all ships entering and leaving port since the ball the night before. The Royal Navy is pulled out of tavern and wives' beds alike, the figureheads on the ships blessed anew for safe-journeying.
Somewhere in the bustle and hustle of the court's panic, a courtier the Prince has never seen before whispers something into his ear.
A halt; the harbour-master is dismissed, the Royal Navy sent back to their beds, the court pushed flying from the Prince's hall. For seven days, the ships dock and depart, dock and depart, and the Prince sits alone, brooding and silent. On the seventh day, he rises and proclaims to the city in a voice which does not shake: I shall set aside the sea-god's daughter and take a new wife.
Nobody understands it; rumours fly through the air, dive through the deeps, burrow into the cellars and workshops and mansions. The Prince loves his wife, however foolishly. She loves him in return, or as much as one of her kind can love.
But it is an ill-luck marriage, and so the city sits silent.
The night before this endless morning after, while the Prince dances at his ball and his lady stands silent in the corner watching, a tiny little speck of dust floats among the halls of the palace. It finds the Lady Prunella, an aged scion of a fading house, slathered with cosmetics that ill-become an ill face. She is rich beyond imagining: her family is one of those who carve the figureheads for the ships, an ancient practice passed down father to daughter to son. She can sing the magic into oak and pine to keep sailors safe during the long nights. But she is vain, vain to the core, and no longer has the smooth cheek to back up her airs.
The speck of dust alights on her shoulder, whispers in her ear:
You are a beautiful lady, the most beautiful in the hall tonight.
She colours, and smiles, and looks around for the flatterer. Someone appreciates her charms; after all these years, someone knows enough to see truth!
The speck of dust floats away: it knows the lady is not beautiful. It knows it has spoken a lie. But the lady has believed him, and so it is the tiniest bit bigger, the tiniest bit more powerful.
It circles through the ballroom, depositing sweet falsehoods with each powerful lord and honoured ship's master. Your ship is the fastest and fittest. You have the Prince's favour above all others. The hatred others show you is merely jealousy.
It grows bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and more easily believed.
By the time the night is over, it is man-sized and man-shaped, garbed in flash and glamour and pleasing to every eye. By the end of the next day, its tongue is silver and honey and charm and it is ready to be of service. Its master has given it a mission, a simple and delicate and crucial mission.
Noon comes around, and in the hustle and bustle of the court's panic, it sidles up to the Lord Prince and whispers something into his ear:
She has left you, and fled to her father in the ocean.
Then it dissolves into dust.
II.
Even in the popular mythology of the countries beyond the peninsula, where mermaids and the sea-god were just a fairy tale, none ever quite capture what it means to give up one's tail for legs. A tail is impenetrable, solid and armored with glistening scales, powerful enough to break the bones of one's enemies. It is freedom itself, unity, divine permission to explore the sea-god's realm. Citizenship and favour.
When a woman gives up her tail for smooth legs - and it is always women, never men - she also gains that which is between the legs. She must take in food and excrete it, where no nourishment was ever needed. She must bleed at every full moon, feel racking pains in her belly and thighs. She must suffer a man to invade her body, and only for a very few does that ever reach pleasure. A man can invade her body, and plant children inside of it like he sows the corn into the ground. This is intolerable in ways we can never understand: the sea is united always, one body existing without division or break or sever. On land, one is divided: between husband and children, sky and land, right and left, man and woman, home and the home you left behind. These are the things nobody is ever told when they pack their bags, kiss their sisters and cousins goodbye knowing they will never be able to visit or write. These are the things discovered later, when the pangs of birth and blood and loneliness shake the new, unfamiliar body to the bones.
But in the peninsula, women still flee the depths for dry land, for the hot glances of men which no ocean can cool. Men still seek them out, pretending to be unaware of the agony they cause but fully able to hear the tears of stolen wives at night.
Why?
At least one of these questions can be answered. In the taverns, in the back ways and the places only men will go at night, it is whispered that a child of the sea-god tastes sweet inside, sweet and like salt.
So this is what really happened:
There is a ship's captain, a man known only as Another, who has traveled to the peninsula for the Traders' Ball. He is a broad and hard man, dark outside and in, and he can sing magic although he hides it well. In his home city the mages take any child with a voice into their crèche, raise them to rules and forbid knowledge beyond what they themselves possess. Another's parents hid him in the house and warned him to silence, total silence; even when he speaks - and it is seldom - one can hear the music in his considered, ominous bass.
Because his voice has just that hint of magic, when he told the harbour-master he had journeyed to buy a figurehead for Ocean's Daughter, he was believed. Many travel from every corner of the world to the peninsula for this selfsame purpose. Even in the nations where the sea-god is just a story, everyone knows that sailors are damned, sinners and wrongdoers all. It is only the figure on the prow of the ship, the shape of a pure-hearted virgin or blameless beast, which keeps the sea-god from smashing it in his fists. The sea-god is tempestuous and easily changeable, but he is also a god of compassion: he will not sacrifice the innocent.
Another, like all visiting captains, is an honoured guest at the Traders' Ball. The peninsula venerates the waves, and even the cursed men who traverse them, if for nothing else than their boldness. He watches the couples waltz up and down the hall, samples food and drink. When the Prince and his lady arrive to applause and well-wishes, he plucks a speck of dust from his doublet and hums a soft melody, strange and seductive, under his breath. It is released into the air, and floats into the darkness.
The Princess does not dance, he notes, and halfway through the evening he approaches her. A bow and a smile: "My Lady."
She nods acknowledgement without a word; her eyes are all for her Prince, whirling like a dervish across the dance floor with another woman, deep in his cups but not deep enough to forget her leaning against the west wall alone.
"My Lady," he says again. "You do not dance."
A response without a glance, distant and cold as a sailor's grave. "All the nation knows I do not dance."
He moves around her, until she cannot but look at him. "In which case, I offer a riddle for your pleasure."
She notes him now, his darkness and hot eyes and fire. Another can see an interest in her impassive face; a spark of curiosity. It is curiosity that kills these women, drives them into the dry summer air. He has chosen his weapons well. "I would greatly enjoy an entertainment," she replies.
He smiles a smile which would send mortal women screaming. But the lady has swum with sharks before, and pays it no heed. "Why, My Lady, do the figureheads carved in this land for the prow of every ship, every vessel always have their mouths open to the wind?"
Her forehead crinkles, and she ponders. It is true: never sealed lips or a mysterious smile, never anything but mouth wide open. "They are singing, Milord," and she is satisfied with her answer. "They are singing the magic that is the safety of the ship."
His smile grows wider. "Wrong."
She is startled, and she steps back once, involuntarily. "What then?"
He offers his arm to her, elegantly swathed in black velvet. "I can show you the answer if you would like it."
There is a hint of music in his voice, and she can do little else but nod her assent. The same spur that drove her from the ocean, from the bosom of father and family, is at her heels again.
They leave the party, and nobody sees them go.
III.
Men are cruel. In the peninsula and all nations around it, this is what is whispered between women. Men are cruel. They will eat your heart up, lock it in a box, sleep beside you night upon night until you no longer smell like your own skin.
The women never stop going to them, and the men, kind or vicious in turn, are never collectively less cruel. Nobody ever asks why. Just like women, the men have their secrets.
When the first man tempted his wife from the ocean with words of love, with the promise of something dangerous and exotic and delicious on the tongue - something she could not get at home - he had a realization. Woman can be tempted away from father and mother and hearth; if he became commonplace and tired, if he allowed the corners to be worn off his memory until it was soft and comfortable, could she not also be tempted away from him?
Out of love, then, and out of fear and competition and instinct buried deeper than bone, men are cruel in the peninsula. They divide their wives and possess them; they leash them with promises of pleasures untasted. They arm themselves with guilt and kindness alike, and go to war for the hearts of their beloved ones.
Drunk on the danger, the excitement, the hint of tantalizing goodness they know exists within each man, the women call men cruel and never leave.
Unless someone crueler knocks on the door.
When they are shipboard, where the air is cool and the wind smells like homesickness, the man who calls himself Another turns to her. "You are certain that you desire the answer?"
She nods again, a little more impatient this time. The spray will ruin her silken gown: not that she minds this, but her maids will cluck their tongues and scold, her husband give her an injured look as if it is him the sea has spit upon, the courtiers talk and mutter like they do over every move she makes.
Another's hand on her back guides her to the prow of the ship, from which she can see the lights of all her city, the depths of her home. She looks at him in surprise. "There is no figurehead on your ship!"
He nods his assent, those coal-black eyes still steady on hers. "Indeed."
Fear sends a shoot into her bosom and she steps away from him, but too late, too late! Two snaps, and her arms are shackled to the prow in chains of iron, two more and her legs are bound as well. She screams, but the city is at festival: there is nobody to hear. Already the lines are cast off as the sailors raise the huge canvas which will bear them away onto the ocean. Orders are shouted and the timbers creak, and the midnight tide takes them farther and farther away from everything she knows.
When they are well at sea, Another returns to her, tall and proud and every inch a captain. She stares into his face, into his eyes, and finds nothing there to appeal to or attack. "You are a wicked man," she merely says, and despairs.
"I know," he replies. "That is why I have brought you with me."
Her startlement rattles the chains of her prison.
He paces the deck with the rolling gait of a man of the sea. "I am a wicked man," he says. "Wickeder than most. I can sing the black magics from sky and earth. I can sing destruction. And I am captain of a ship that has no figurehead to protect its passage."
"Then my father the sea-god will feast on your bones," she tells him, and believes it to be true.
He shakes his head, laughs gossamer notes that pierce her like arrows. "The sea-god will harm no ship blessed with the image of an innocent, be it man or beast or any creature that exists. I am a wicked man. I need especial protection from his wrath. Tell me, would the soft-hearted sea-god harm his own daughter?"
The lady starts to tremble. "You mean to keep me here forever."
"I do. Spirit of my ship, good-luck omen. You will not be taken from me. Even a daughter of the ocean cannot sing away iron shackles."
It is true, she cannot; but desperate, she tries another tactic. "And if my Prince gives chase? I forsook the waves for him not without difficulty; he underwent trials and labours to win my heart. He will not give it up so easily."
He draws the magic circle around her, neat and even in paint that dries quickly. "He will not find you even if he searches the world round."
Another starts to sing in his deep, rich voice, a song of slowness and time, of grains and polish and placid eternity so unlike anything the ocean's child has ever known. He sings and he paces, walking circles around her as she shivers trapped on his ship's prow. Hours pass, the stars start to fade, and still he sings. He does not fall silent until the sunrise, and then he vanishes to his bed as the sailors stir for the changing of the watch.
The dying night is chill, and as the air begins to warm, the lady, bedazzled by his magic, prays that the stiffness in her limbs is merely the cold.
On the second night he sings, and by morning, her feet have fused to the wood of the ship's deck. The chains have vanished, unneeded. She cannot move. She sings to the fish, to the creatures of the deeps, pleads to them for help and succour. They promise to carry messages to her father, to her family, messages of danger and despair.
On the third night he sings, and by morning, she can no longer feel her legs. They have joined together again, just like they were when she traversed the oceans, but hard and warm this time. There are no scales to protect her. When she looks down, she sees varnished mahogany where her fine gown once was.
On the fourth night he sings, and her hips are swallowed up by the magic. She cries for help again, begs the seabirds to carry messages to her Prince, to guide the Royal Navy to her prison and her plight. They do not answer: her voice is awkward and strange, her tongue heavy and stiff in her mouth, and they do not recognize her when she calls.
On the fifth night he sings, and her flung-back arms feel strange and solid. She can feel the rest of the ship now, feel it like it was her own body: the sailors' steps on the rigging and planking tickle her skin. Her mind is growing distant and faint, caught up in the details of wind and waves and the creak of ropes. Fish swarm about the hull, screaming of aid and a wild hunt through the waves, but she cannot hear them.
On the sixth night he sings, and it is up to her neck; only her head is free, and she cannot turn it. She wonders if this is such a bad thing after all: she transformed once before, a horrible, burning severance that left her weeping and weak and changed. She adapted. She lived on, and for a while was happy, even if she missed the things she had given up. She will continue again, perhaps, in the same fashion. Maybe she will be happy again.
On the seventh night he sings and sings, and she can feel the solidness, the paralysis moving into her face and mouth, turning her streaming hair to stone. The last thing she does is scream, scream into the wind where nobody can hear her anymore.
By sunrise, there is silence.
IV.
So what of the sea-maiden and her Prince? How does the tale end? When are all reconciled, the wicked punished and the strong and virtuous rewarded? Unfortunately, that is all the tale there is to tell: there is no moral lesson, no precept of wit, no wise warning to be had tonight. This is merely a story, simple and unadorned.
There is one more thing that can be said, however, of the sea-god's daughter and the Prince and Another, wicked captain made wickeder by his cunning and magic, singer of songs that turn flesh to wood and scale to flesh:
Eventually the man perished, old and no less wicked. The Prince had taken another wife, having given his up for fled, and from the day Another heard that news he stroked the figurehead of Ocean's Daughter every morning, whispered in its ear tales and news from lands afar. He died rich and mysterious as the day he was born, soul cast to the sea with his desiccated body.
His ship was given to a nephew from his home city, the city where magic was circumscribed and the sea-god's powers scorned. The nephew was not a seafaring man. Ocean's Daughter was sold for scrap, the figurehead fitted to another ship, and another, and another. Each owner commented on its remarkable beauty, the classicism of the style, the detail with which the traditional open mouth was rendered.
One night there was a shipwreck, the kind caused by poor piloting and too much drink and sharp rocks off a tropical coast. The ship was smashed into pieces, along with all her crew.
When the sun rose, the figurehead had washed up on the beach. A poet, wandering hand in hand with his wife, found it lodged on the sand. He stared into its salt-stained eyes and saw the ocean, the peninsula's golden parties, seven days and nights of transformation like a creeping disease. He saw the lines of her Prince's body and Another's hot coal-black eyes, the caress of the waves on her cheeks and felt pain and sadness like never before.
He looked into his wife's eyes, beautiful black-light eyes that had almost lost their spark in days gone by, and squeezed her hand tight.
When his kisses had dried on her body, the sand dried beneath her welcoming hips, he wandered off to his study murmuring lines to himself in pentameter, tested them for rhythm and scansion and the sweetness that had earned him his lady's love. He wrote sonnets every day and night for a hundred days after that, working in fits and starts and spotting the pages with tears shed in private. The very first of them he pinned to the figurehead, now propped up against the side of the beach house where he and his wife made love again through long nights.
Legends sprung up around the figurehead: all false, of course, because everyone knows that women carved of wood and scale and flesh do not truly speak. But despite that it was whispered that the poet's carved woman wept real tears every winter, and for seven nights of every year, if one knew enough to listen to the wind and waves, recite a story that began and ended with a sonnet:
Esta es la historia de la muchacha de madera.
This is the story of the girl made of wood.
