“I certainly thought everything in the world outshone me then, and Bags the brightest of all, until I met the next brightest of all, and the next…”
BAGS AGREED TO TAKE ME TO THE TOWER OF ST. Sigrid before the trio reported to the Papal Tower to finish their unsavory quest. All agreed that it was not appropriate for me to go with them—and no uncommitted youth could be given audience with the Papess. My farewells were made with Balthazar and Bartholomew. Secretly I was not so grieved to leave them as long as Bags was with me—they were both so fierce and serious. Bags was dear to me as a pup to her litter-mate, but his brothers frightened me sometimes, with their solemn yellow eyes and muzzles that seemed to cease their smiles when I turned away.
His rust-colored fur caught the late afternoon sun and turned it into a sweet, merry fire. The darkness of the Black Papess seemed to have slid from him like old clothes once he had crossed the threshold into Al-a-Nur, and his wolfish face wore a wide smile; he seemed to be breathing in the city as we walked.
“It’s all right that you’re not coming with us, you know. You might be… uncomfortable. Most of the Chrysanthemums are like me—if not Cynocephaloi, other half-breeds of various kinds. The Sigrids are lovely, despite what Bartholomew says. We don’t strictly have a deity like most of the Towers. We don’t really pay much attention to Stars, either way. The divine is present in the earth, in all growing things, all life and all death, and the Bough guides us through life, Carrion through death. That’s enough for me. Bartholomew looks down on some because they don’t have any sort of worship at all, like the Patricides, or because they idolize a person who couldn’t possibly be better than any other person—but I never met a Sigrid who wouldn’t steer her boat to your aid if you called her, and that’s the truth.” He giggled behind his brown, splay-fingered hand.
“Of course, they’re terrible at Lo Shen. They can’t help it—they lead with their Triremes every time.” Suddenly he stopped, and a shadow passed over his face like a cormorant’s wing. “I wonder if we’ll be allowed to enter our Tower again. I don’t think there is divinity to be found in the death we gave.” He snapped back to me as quickly as he had gone into himself. “Ah, here we are.”
The Tower of St. Sigrid was a mammoth spire made entirely of broken ships. Prows jutted out at all angles, long keels and tall masts wrapped the walls, rigging and sails like vines and veils hanging haphazard from every window. At the entrance stood a gargantuan ship’s wheel, warped and splintered with age, casting its long shadow towards the bolted door. The sentry was a muscular woman whose head had been roughly shaved. Her wide, flat teeth shone brightly. At the sight of her, Bags’s eyes lit like lamps on a midwinter night. She greeted my canine friend with an enormous embrace that would have cracked the bones of a musk ox.
“Bags, old mate! You whelp! You never come to see me anymore! Afraid I’ll take your God down a peg or two?”
“Not as long as you keep throwing your ’Remes around like they’re ten for a penny!” He clapped her prodigious back and rubbed her bald head happily. “I’ve got a recruit for you, Sigrid—we picked her up on the lichen flats up north. She’s a dear, eager little thing, but she hasn’t quite made up her mind as to a Tower yet. Likes her morning bacon a bit too much to come in with us.” He winked at me and I blushed deeply, ashamed at his guess.
The woman looked at me, her gaze roughly measuring me as if for some bizarre suit of armor. “She’s skinny and the hair will have to come off” came the judgment.
Bags rolled his eyes. “She needs to know about your thrice-damned Saint Sigrid so that she can decide, you salty old dog. And I can’t stay. We cannot keep the Papess waiting.”
At this the woman’s brusque expression softened and she dropped an elephantine arm around my shoulders.
“No, no, of course. You go—I trust it went well, or you wouldn’t be back. We all… appreciate what you’ve done, you know, Bagsy. I’ll tell skin-and-bones what she needs to know.”
Bags’s eyes filled with tears—but he hid it well, like a thief slipping a ring into his pocket. He hugged me as tightly as a bear shaking a tree for fruit, his furry face buried in my neck. He whispered a tight thank you and turned to go. I reached out to stop him.
“Wait, Bags! When I asked to come, back in my village, you said something strange to the others, something from The Book of Carrion. What was it? Tell me!”
Bags grinned, looking impossibly like a cat, and laid his finger aside his nose.
“And the wolf shall lead her astray, unto the edge of the sea, and there she will find the City of the Lost, where her skin will fall away, and the Beast will swallow her whole. Prophecy, love. Best hope it’s not you.”
When he had gone, the bald woman sat heavily on the snowy ground and gestured with a tattooed hand that I ought to sit beside her.
“He’s only teasing. That Book of Carrion is full of gibberish and dog-speak. Pay no attention—it means less than a flapping sail in a strong wind. I’ll tell you the way of things. I’m called Sigrid—we’ve all taken the name of the great Lady, in her honor. I don’t care in the least what your name is; it’ll be Sigrid if you want to sail with us, anyhow. Listen to this old deckhand, and I’ll tell you the tale of the Great Navigator…”
IN THE NAME OF THE MOTHER, AND THE MONSTER, and the Mast, Amen.
In the fifteenth year of the Second Caliphate, a child was born in the Blessed City of Ajanabh to a family of traveling spicers whose fingers smelled forever of cinnamon and coriander. Their barge stayed in the port of Ajanabh for many years, but they were not native to the city that witnessed the birth of the Saint. Where they came from in truth is lost to us now. Indeed, Ajanabh seemed not to recognize the Blessing of Heaven, and tried many times to expel the merchant barges, which were as great in number as flocks of sparrows in the autumn sky, from their Great Harbor, claiming that the families brought disease and sloth with them from notorious lands.
The child was christened Sigrid, and she was a great beauty even as a girl, with rich brown skin and thick hair the color of all her family’s spice stores milled into a shade of dark brown shot through with gold and red, and eyes the color of a lion’s paw. But she had been born with a strange deformity which brought a secret shame onto the backs of her parents. Her father wept and accused her mother of coupling with a demon; her mother suspected that their family gods had turned against them and delivered them a daughter with harpy blood.
For Sigrid was possessed of three breasts, and as she grew, this strangeness became impossible to hide. So each morning before taking her daughter to the spice market, her mother bound her breasts with lengths of rough cloth. Each morning, she patted Sigrid’s cheek and stifled tears as she wound the fabric.
When she became a woman, Sigrid performed this penance herself, crushing her small but plainly monstrous chest beneath straps of leather and buckles of lead.
After a long while, she stopped weeping while she did it.
When Sigrid had reached the age of sixteen—as all men know, this is the age at which such catastrophes of serendipity occur—a troupe of pirates attacked the floating city of harbor barges. This was not uncommon in Ajanabh, which was in those days altogether a raucous network of villain-strewn streets; an Ajan never touched a gold piece which had not been stolen at least thrice in its lifetime. But the barges were sacrosanct, bargers being themselves distant cousins to pirates. So when the Maidenhead sailed into the Great Harbor, her red sails billowing like dead moons in the night, the merchants simply rolled over in their sleep, thinking it would pass them by and ransack the city as such masted beasts had always done.
Instead, the pirates set fire to the skiffs and scows of the spicers and the tinkers, the cobblers and the armorers and the potters.
Sigrid, like her brothers and her parents, slept in her cot, breasts unbound, curled around herself like a snail’s shell. She awoke to a hand clamped over her mouth and a toothy hiss in her ear:
“Hush now
, precious. Wouldn’t want to wake Mama.” The voice’s owner scooped her up into its arms like a cat snatching the scruff of her kitten’s neck. In a whirl of smoke and flame, Sigrid found herself dragged across the barge of her birth and away—and thus did she exit a tale which surely would have comprised a life of derision and exclusion, ending in a cinnamon-and-coriander-scented corpse shoved overboard into the Bay of Ajan.
Instead, Sigrid was deposited by her abductor onto the deck of a shadowed ship, and entered another tale entirely.
In truth, her family was not sorry to see her go. They would never have been able to induce a man to marry her, even with sacks of musky saffron to barter. It seemed to them best to cherish their other, beautifully shaped children, and let their misshapen daughter go to whatever fate the Stars had ordained for her.
Whatever owned the strange voice had brought Sigrid to the Maidenhead, and once the crew had plundered, stolen, and kidnapped as they pleased, the ship relinquished the harbor as gracefully as a lord sheathing his sword, and unfurled her scarlet sails to catch the salt breath of the open sea.
There is nothing quite like the moment a sail clutches the wind and opens under it like the legs of a merry fishwife. The sound of it, the echoing billow as the air blows out the fabric, the surge forward and the spray in the teeth—it is the sound that heralds the beginning of new worlds, the birth of litters of wish-granting seals in a hundred secret grottos, the grinding of new rivers through mountains which witnessed the first flood and chuckled at their wet toes.
It filled Sigrid’s heart like wine into an oak barrel. She leaned over the rail and grinned into the sound, marveling at the ship that now carried her—the cannons were worked into the shapes of animal heads, mouths agape. Along one side screamed silent manticores, on the other, crocodiles gaped wide. The ship itself shone a rich red color—some strange wood she had never seen before. The mast was massive and tall, seeming to bruise the stars, and from its polished surface sprouted glossy green leaves and branches the size of children’s arms. It was a tree, a living tree drinking from the sea and sky, bearing the sails and lines with good nature. It did not seem to mind the salt or the rough wind, but opened its leaves like glad hands. Where the crow’s nest ought to have been was an explosion of branches heavy with leaf and orange fruit, thick enough to bear a lookout. The sails were deep red, and Sigrid wondered if this was not a very disreputable pirate ship to flout the sage tradition of black sails. The rails were curled and carved with arcane designs—it was unlike any ship she had ever seen in Ajanabh, and unlike, she suspected, any ship on the dark-waved sea.
The usual bustle of a ship under way streamed around her, for the most part ignoring the new passenger, as sailors are wont to do. But they were an unusual crew. Besides the standard complement of inhuman creatures galloping—yes, she certainly saw a Satyr and possibly a small-shouldered Centaur—or slithering—that woman struggling with a bag puffing yellow spices was surely a Lamia—across the decks, the ship appeared not to possess a single male occupant.
“How do you like her, my Ajan waif?” The strange voice sounded again from behind her, soft and hard altogether, like a golden hammer sheathed in fur. Sigrid turned and beheld a large part of her destiny: Long-Eared Tomomo, captain of the good ship Maidenhead. Tomomo was strange-looking for that part of the world, but not un-handsome—her eyes were dark and desultory, her hair long and black, straighter than a crow’s leg, her skin like oft-touched ivory, its shade having long since lost its white to the strokes of many fingers. Her dress was not garish, as the coats of pirates so often are, but simple stag-skin vests and trousers, and her hair bound in a long braid that brushed her thighs. Later, Sigrid would often hear her refuse the captain’s hat, with its bouncing peacock feathers and golden buckles, remarking that if she were to die—as she would surely draw attention of the murderous kind in that hat—they might never get the hideous thing off of her, and her gods would laugh at her when she met them in hell.
“The ship, ma’am?” Sigrid paused, unsure. “Sir?”
“Tommy is good enough for my girls and it’s good enough for you. Yes, the ship.” Tommy slapped the rail and rubbed it affectionately. “She’s my prize—a gift from a bird, a tree, and a Witch. Not a nail in her; the whole thing held together with breath and blood and starlight.”
Sigrid swallowed hard. “And you’ll be needing my blood to pay the Witch, I suppose?”
Tommy’s eyebrows arched like bows springing to fire. “I think not. The mess would be more trouble than it’s worth.”
“Then why did you take me, if not to kill me? I’m told that’s what pirates do. And besides, you must be the worst kind of pirate if you attacked the Ajan barges.”
The captain smiled and leaned into Sigrid’s face, her expression almost, but not quite, motherly. “We don’t really hold with tradition. We heard there was a monster-girl living on the barges. You’ll learn to trust one kind of rumor and laugh at the other when you live at sea—this was the kind you listen to. When the Stars speak, you listen. Look around; we like monsters here. It’s not easy to crew a ship with only women—girls don’t exactly study to be sailors these days. When we hear of some ghastly beast, we snap her up as soon as we can.”
“So, all of that, the fire and the raid, was for me?”
“Certainly not! We stole plenty of other things—just no other girls. You’re part of our crew now—you’ve been pressed into naval service, my little powdermonkey.”
Sigrid leaned over the rail and stared at the water running past the red hull swift as otters fleeing a hungry shark. She contemplated the loss of her family—which she did not feel greatly—and her new place as a monster among monsters. Though some of the sailors had appeared human, she began now to suspect that none of them truly were. And at that moment, Tommy leaned over the bar alongside her.
Tomomo’s reflection in the water was that of a woman’s body, but it was crowned, not with Tomomo’s smirking face, but with that of a bright-eyed fox, its fire-shaded fur buffeted by the wind.
SNOW LOOKED UP AT SIGRID’S WIDE FACE CAREFULLY as a deer nosing a blackberry bramble.
“I was born in Ajanabh, you know,” she said softly.
Sigrid nodded, but it was not precisely a confirmation that she had known. “Then you are blessed as a spring babe—though I’m told it’s no more than a shadow of the city it was. All cities are shades of what they were these days; even Muireann was once a metropolis, with towers of ice and silver and queens who sat on tuffets of whale fur drinking Ajan orchid-wine from cups of seal bone. It was the capital of the North, a thousand years past. Now it is a village, an outpost on the hostile sea. Only the Stars recall.”
The afternoon had grown fat and red-faced and the first thin wisps of twilight were waiting behind its jowls. Sigrid and Snow worked in unison now, like fiddlers plying their bows.
“Clearly you joined the Sigrids,” Snow remarked, keeping her eyes fixed on her friend’s prodigious elbows, “or it would be a great coincidence indeed that you are named Sigrid yourself.”
“Clearly.”
“Yet”—and here Snow blushed, flushing her colorless face with pink—“you don’t swear by Saint Sigrid, you swear by the Stars. I think it must have been a very strange road for you, from there to here.”
Sigrid’s smile crept away from her face like a cat through a door left ajar. She shut her eyes and for a moment Snow thought the hulking creature would cry. “I am not worthy to swear by her name,” she croaked, her voice like a hundred frogs lost in mourning. “I’ve failed too often, and too profoundly. I was supposed to accomplish a thing—the only thing, I once thought, I was ever meant to accomplish. I abandoned that when the wolves led me astray and into the City of Light. And there I dropped a second destiny from my hands as though it burned me. And now I’ve no destiny left at all, only these nets to tie off like umbilical cords.” Sigrid wiped her nose and shook her head like a horse discouraging flies. “So I lapse. I lapse into the faith
I happily held when I was young and I swear by the Stars, for I have yet to do much to offend them. Surely there is some Ajan god you whisper to in the dark?”
“I don’t really remember—my parents died before they could give me a god of my own. I have heard that the Ajans worship the Stars now, since the city died and all the monks left with their complicated new religions. But they also say that the Ajans eat caterpillar pies and fly on wings of horsehair and rose petals. I’ve stopped believing what everyone else says of my home. Anyway, I never heard of a saint being born on the barges.”
“That’s because she wasn’t a saint when she left Ajanabh. It was much later that heaven touched her head. It is rarely the places that birth us that see our true worth. Nor even,” Sigrid added with half a smile, “the places that adopt us. But you may whisper to Saint Sigrid if you like, when you are alone and the Stars are not speaking. She will not mind.”
She cupped the girl’s white head in her large, callused hand. “I had just gotten to Tomomo, had I not?”
“Yes,” Snow breathed. “Go on.”
SIGRID WAS CERTAINLY SURPRISED TO SEE TOMOMO with a snout and ears sporting tufts of cream-yellow fur. Yet she seemed to be a pleasant enough beast, and her graceful hands rested on the rail like carefully arranged flowers. In fact, when Sigrid looked up from the water, the captain appeared just the same as she had—her hair was bound as neatly and her lips, grinning merrily, were just as thin and chapped as before, as any seafarer’s lips would be. Only the water showed the fox head.
“So I, too, am a monster. Of course, I am almost never discovered, prettiest of all possible barge girls—only the sea’s reflection shows this face. I have a natural disguise. Whereas you”—and here Tomomo eyed young Sigrid’s chest meaningfully—“must make your own. Yet, like yours, my mother could never bear to look at me. She would not let her eyes meet mine, even when I was a baby; she said she could see an unholy thing moving behind the iris, something watching her which was not her daughter. They like to tell us we are unholy, Sigrid. It makes them feel as though we cannot harm them, for surely they are as holy as we are dirty and foul. But, of course, we can. Let me tell you how I first came to know that I was a monster…”