Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (3 page)

Beneath Abdel Jameela’s skin, tucked
between muscles, are tiny legs. Thin as spindles and hairless. Each folded
little leg ends in a minuscule hoof.

Unbidden, a memory comes to me—Shireen
and I in the Caliph’s orchards. A baby bird had fallen from its nest. I’d
sighed and bit my lip and my Shireen—a dreamer, but not a soft
one—had laughed and clapped at my tender-heartedness.

I slide each wet gray leg out from under
the flayed skin and gently unbend them. As I flex the little joints, the
she-ghoul’s voice returns.

What… what is this, learned one? Tell
me!

For a long moment I am mute. Then I force
words out, my throat still cracked. “I… I do not know. They are—they look
like—the legs of a kid or a ewe still in the womb.”

It is as if she nods inside my mind. 
Or
the legs of one of my people. I have long wondered how a mere man could
captivate me so.

“All knowledge and understanding lies with
God,” I say. “Perhaps your husband always had these within him. The villagers
say he is of uncertain parentage. Or perhaps… Perhaps his love for you… The
crippled beggars of Cairo are the most grotesque—and the best—in
the world. It is said that they wish so fiercely to make money begging that
their souls reshape their bodies from the inside out. Yesterday I saw such
stories as nonsense. But yesterday I’d have named 
you 
a
villager’s fantasy, too.” As I speak I continue to work the little legs
carefully, to help their circulation. The she-ghoul’s sorcery no longer guides
my hands, but a physicker’s nurturing routines are nearly as compelling. There
is weakness here, and I do what I can to help it find strength.

The tiny legs twitch and kick in my hands.

Abdel Jameela’s wife howls in my
head. 
They are drawing on my magic. Something pulls at—
The voice
falls silent.

I let go of the legs and, before my eyes,
they begin to grow. As they grow, they fill with color, as if blood flowed into
them. Then fur starts to sprout upon them.

“There is no strength or safety but in
God!” I try to close my eyes and focus on the words I speak but I can’t. My
head swims and my body swoons.

The spell that I cast on my poor
husband to preserve him —these hidden hooves of his nurse on it! O, my
surprising, wonderful husband!
 I hear loud lute music and smell
lemongrass and then everything around me goes black.

When I wake I am on my back, looking up at
a purple sky. An early morning sky. I am lying on a blanket outside the hovel.
I sit up and Abdel Jameela hunches over me with his sour smell. Further away,
near the hill-path, I see the black shape of his wife.

“Professor, you are awake! Good!” the
hermit says. “We were about to leave.”

But we are glad to have the chance to
thank you.

My heart skips and my stomach clenches as
I hear that voice in my head again. Kitten purrs and a crushed cardamom scent
linger beneath the demon’s words. I look at Abdel Jameela’s legs.

They are sleek and covered in fur the
color of almonds. And each leg ends in a perfect cloven hoof. He walks on them
with a surprising grace.

Yes, learned one, my beloved husband
lives and stands on two hooves. It would not be so if we hadn’t had your help.
You have our gratitude.

Dazedly clambering to my feet, I nod in
the she-ghoul’s direction. Abdel Jameela claps me on the back wordlessly and
takes a few goat-strides toward the hill-path. His wife makes a slight bow to
me. 
With my people, learned one, gratitude is more than a word. Look
toward the hovel.

I turn and look. And my breath catches.

A hoard right out of the stories. Gold and
spices. Jewels and musks. Silver and silks. Porcelain and punks of aloe.

It is probably ten times the dowry Shireen’s
father seeks.

We leave you this and wish you well. I
have purged the signs of our work in the hovel. And in the language of the
donkeys, I have called two wild asses to carry your goods. No troubles left to
bother our brave friend!

I manage to smile gratefully with my head
high for one long moment. Blood and bits of the old man’s bone still stain my
hands. But as I look on Abdel Jameela and his wife in the light of the sunrise,
all my thoughts are not grim or grisly.

As they set off on the hill-path, the
she-ghoul takes Abdel Jameela’s arm, and the hooves of husband and wife
scrabble against the pebbles of Beit Zujaaj hill. I stand stock-still, watching
them walk toward the land of the ghouls.

They cross a bend in the path and
disappear behind the hill. And a faint voice, full of mischievous laughter and
smelling of early morning love in perfumed sheets, whispers in my head. 
No
troubles at all, learned one. For last night, your Shireen’s husband-to-be lost
his battle with the destroyer of delights.

Can it really be so? The old vulture dead?
And me a rich man? I should laugh and dance. Instead I am brought to my knees
by the heavy memory of blood-spattered golden hooves. I wonder whether Shireen’s
suitor died from his illness, or from malicious magic meant to reward me. I
fear for my soul. For a long while I kneel there and cry.

But after a while I can cry no longer.
Tears give way to hopes I’d thought dead. I stand and thank Beneficent God,
hoping it is not wrong to do so. Then I begin to put together an acceptable
story about a secretly-wealthy hermit who has rewarded me for saving his wife’s
life. And I wonder what Shireen and her father will think of the man I have
become.

THE children of the shark god

~

by Peter S. Beagle

Once there was a village on an island that
belonged to the Shark God. Every man in the village was a fisherman, and the
women cooked their catch and mended their nets and sails, and painted their
little boats. And because that island was sacred to him, the Shark God saw to
it that there were always fish to be caught, and seals as well, in the waters
beyond the coral reef, and protected the village from the great gray typhoons
that came every year to flood other lagoons and blow down the trees and the
huts of other islands. Therefore the children of the village grew fat and
strong, and the women were beautiful and strong, and the fishermen were strong
and high-hearted even when they were old.

In return for his benevolence the Shark
God asked little from his people: only tribute of a single goat at the turn of
each year. To the accompaniment of music and prayers, and with a wreath of
plaited fresh flowers around its neck, it would be tethered in the lagoon at
moonrise. Morning would find it gone, flower petals floating on the water, and
the Shark God never seen—never in
that
form, anyway.

Now the Shark God could alter his shape as
he pleased, like any god, but he never showed himself on land more than once in
a generation. When he did, he was most often known to appear as a handsome
young man, light-footed and charming. Only one woman ever recognized the
divinity hiding behind the human mask. Her name was Mirali, and this tale is
what is known about her, and about her children.

Mirali’s parents were already aging when
she was born, and had long since given up the hope of ever having a
child—indeed, her name meant “the long-desired one.” Her father had been
crippled when the mast of his boat snapped during a storm and crushed his leg,
falling on him, and if it had not been for their daughter, the old couple’s
lives would have been hard indeed. Mirali could not go out with the fishing
fleet herself, of course—as she greatly wished to do, having loved the
sea from her earliest memory—but she did every kind of work for any
number of island families, whether cleaning houses, marketing, minding young
children, or even assisting the midwife when a birthing was difficult or there
were simply too many babies coming at the same time. She was equally known as a
seamstress, and also as a cook for special feasts; nor was there anyone who
could mend a pandanus-leaf thatching as quickly as she, though this is
generally man’s work. No drop of rain ever penetrated any pandanus roof that
came under Mirali’s hands.

Nor did she complain of her labors, for
she was very proud of being able to care for her mother and father as a son
would have done. Because of this, she was much admired and respected in the
village, and young men came courting just as though she were a great beauty.
Which she was not, being small and somewhat square-made, with straight
brows—considered unlucky by most—and hips that gave no promise of a
large family. But she had kind eyes, deep-set under those regrettable brows,
and hair as black and thick as that of any woman on the island. Many, indeed,
envied her; but of that Mirali knew nothing. She had no time for envy herself,
nor for young men, either.

Now it happened that Mirali was often
chosen by the village priest to sweep out the temple of the Shark God. This was
not only a grand honor for a child barely turned seventeen but a serious
responsibility as well, for sharks are cleanly in their habits, and to leave his
spiritual dwelling disorderly would surely be to dishonor and anger the god
himself. So Mirali was particularly attentive when she cleaned after the
worshippers, making certain that no prayer whistle or burned stick of incense
was left behind. And in this manner did the Shark God become aware of Mirali.

But he did not actually see her until a
day came when, for a wonder, all her work was done, all her tasks out of the
way until tomorrow, when they would begin all over again. At such times, rare
as they were, Mirali would always wander down to the water, borrow a dugout or
an outrigger canoe, and simply let herself drift in the lagoon—or even
beyond the reef— reading the clouds for coming weather, or the sea for
migrating shoals of fish, or her own young mind for dreams. And if she should
chance to see a black or gray or brown dorsal fin cutting the water nearby, she
was never frightened, but would drowsily hail the great fish in fellowship, and
ask it to convey her most respectful good wishes to the Shark God. For in that
time children knew what was expected of them, by parents and gods alike.

She was actually asleep in an uncle’s
outrigger when the Shark God himself came to Mirali—as a mako, of course,
since that is the most beautiful and graceful of all sharks. At the first sight
of her, he instantly desired to shed his fishy form and climb into the boat to
wake and caress her. But he knew that such behavior would terrify her as no
shark could; and so, most reluctantly, he swam three times around her boat,
which is magic, and then he sounded and disappeared.

When Mirali woke, it was with equal
reluctance, for she had dreamed of a young man who longed for her, and who
followed at a respectful distance, just at the edge of her dream, not daring to
speak to her. She beached the dugout with a sigh, and went home to make dinner
for her parents. But that night, and every night thereafter, the same dream
came to her, again and again, until she was almost frantic with curiosity to
know what it meant.

No priest or wisewoman could offer her any
useful counsel, although most suspected that an immortal was concerned in the
matter in some way. Some advised praying in a certain way at the temple; others
directed her to brew tea out of this or that herb or tree bark to assure
herself of a deep, untroubled sleep. But Mirali was not at all sure that she
wanted to rid herself of that dream and that shy youth; she only wanted to
understand them.

Then one afternoon she heard a man singing
in the market, and when she turned to see she knew him immediately as the young
man who always followed her in her dream. She went to him, marching straight
across the marketplace and facing him boldly to demand, “Who are you? By what
right do you come to me as you do?”

The young man smiled at her. He had black
eyes, smooth dark-brown skin—with perhaps a touch of blue in it, when he
stood in shadow—and fine white teeth, which seemed to Mirali to be just a
trifle curved in at the tips. He said gently, “You interrupted my song.”

Mirali started to respond, “So? You
interrupt my sleep, night on night”—but she never finished saying what
she meant to say, because in that moment she knew the Shark God. She bowed her
head and bent her right knee, in the respectful manner of the island folk, and
she whispered, “
Jalak...jalak
,” which means
Lord
.

The young man took her hand and raised her
up. “What my own people call me, you could not pronounce,” he said to Mirali.
“But to you I am no
jalak,
but your own faithful
olohe
,” which is
the common word for
servant.
“You must only call me by that name, and no
other. Say it now.”

Mirali was so frightened, first to be in
the presence of the Shark God, and then to be asked to call him her servant,
that she had to try the word several times before she could make it come clearly
out of her mouth. The Shark God said, “Now, if you wish it, we will go down to
the sea and be married. But I promise that I will bear no malice, no
vengefulness, against your village or this island if you do not care to marry
me. Have no fear, then, but tell me your true desire, Mirali.”

The market folk were going about their own
business, buying and selling, and more chatting than either. Only a few of them
looked toward Mirali where she stood talking with the handsome singer; fewer
seemed to take any interest in what the two might be saying to each other.
Mirali took heart from this and said, more firmly, “I do wish to marry you,
dear
jalak—
I mean, my
olohe—
but how can I live with
you under the sea? I do not think I would even be able to hold my breath
through the wedding, unless it was a very short ceremony.”

Then the Shark God laughed aloud, which he
had truly never done in all his long life, and the sound was so full and so
joyous that flowers fell from the trees and, unbidden, wove themselves into
Mirali’s hair, and into a wreath around her neck. The waves of the sea echoed
his laughter, and the Shark God lifted Mirali in his arms and raced down to the
shore, where sharks and dolphins, tuna and black marlin and barracuda, and
whole schools of shimmering wrasse and clownfish and angelfish that swim as one
had crowded into the lagoon together, until the water itself turned golden as
the morning and green as sunset. The great deepwater octopus, whom no one ever
sees except the sperm whale, came also; and it has been said—by people
who were not present, nor even born then—that there were mermaids and
merrows as well, and even the terrible Paikea, vast as an island, the Master of
All Sea Monsters, though he prudently stayed far outside the reef. And all these
were there for the wedding of Mirali and the Shark God.

The Shark God lifted Mirali high above his
head—she was startled, but no longer frightened—and he spoke out,
first in the language of Mirali’s people, so that she would understand, and
then in the tongue known by everything that swims in every sea and every river.
“This is Mirali, whom I take now to wife, and whom you will love and protect
from this day forth, and honor as you do me, and as you will honor our
children, and their children, always.” And the sound that came up from the
waters in answer is not a sound that can be told.

In time, when the lagoon was at last empty
again, and when husband and wife had sworn and proved their love in the shadows
of the mangroves, she said to him, very quietly, “Beloved, my own
olohe,
now that we are wed, shall I ever see you again? For I may be only an ignorant
island woman, but I know what too often comes of marriages between gods and
mortals. Your children will have been born—I can feel this already—by
the time you come again for your tribute. I will nurse them, and bring them up
to respect their lineage, as is right... but meanwhile you will swim far away,
and perhaps father others, and forget us, as is also your right. You are a god,
and gods do not raise families. I am not such a fool that I do not know this.”

But the Shark God put his finger under
Mirali’s chin, lifting her face to his and saying, “My wife, I could no more
forget that you
are
my wife than forget what I am. Understand that we
may not live together on your island, as others do, for my life is in the sea,
and of the sea, and this form that you hold in your arms is but a shadow,
little more than a dream, compared to my true self. Yet I will come to you
every year, without fail, when my tribute is due—every year, here, where
we lie together. Remember, Mirali.”

Then he closed his eyes, which were black,
as all sharks’ eyes are, and fell asleep in her arms, and there is no woman who
can say what Mirali felt, lying there under the mangroves with her own eyes
wide in the moonlight.

When morning came, she walked back to her
parents’ house alone.

In time it became plain that Mirali was
with child, but no one challenged or mocked her to her face, for she was much
loved in the village, and her family greatly esteemed. Yet even so it was
considered a misfortune by most, and a disgrace by some, as is not the case on
certain other islands. If the talk was not public, it was night talk, talk
around the cooking fire, talk at the stream over the slapping of wash on stone.
Mirali was perfectly aware of this.

She carried herself well and proudly, and
it was agreed, even by those who murmured ill of her, that she looked more
beautiful every day, even as her belly swelled out like the fishermen’s sails.
But she shocked the midwife, who was concerned for her narrow hips, and for the
chance of twins, by insisting on going off by herself to give birth. Her mother
and father were likewise troubled; and the old priest himself took a hand,
arguing powerfully that the birth should take place in the very temple of the
Shark God. Such a thing had never been allowed, or even considered, but the old
priest had his own suspicions about Mirali’s unknown lover.

Mirali smiled and nodded respectfully to
anyone who had anything to say about the matter, as was always her way. But on
the night when her time came she went to the lagoon where she had been wed, as
she knew that she must; and in the gentle breath of its shallows her children
were born without undue difficulty. For they were indeed twins, a boy and a
girl.

Mirali named the boy Keawe, after her
father, and the girl Kokinja, which means
born in moonlight
. And as she
looked fondly upon the two tiny, noisy, hungry creatures she and the Shark God
had made together, she remembered his last words to her and smiled.

Keawe and Kokinja grew up the pets of
their family, being not only beautiful but strong and quick and naturally
kindly. This was a remarkable thing, considering the barely veiled scorn with
which most of the other village children viewed them, taking their cue from the
remarks passed between their parents. On the other hand, while there was notice
taken of the very slight bluish tinge to Keawe’s skin, and the fact that
Kokinja’s perfect teeth curved just the least bit inward, nothing was ever said
concerning these particular traits.

They both swam before they could walk
properly; and the creatures of the sea guarded them closely, as they had sworn.
More than once little Keawe, who at two and three years regarded the waves and
tides as his own servants, was brought safely back to shore clinging to the
tail of a dolphin, the flipper of a seal, or even the dorsal fin of a reef
shark. Kokinja had an octopus as her favorite playmate, and would fall as
trustingly asleep wrapped in its eight arms as in those of her mother. And
Mirali herself learned to put her faith in the wildest sea as completely as did
her children. That was the gift of her husband.