Legenda Maris (27 page)

No
one in the village will tell you the story of the carvings and the boat, unless
you ask, and then Aelin will return and tell you. You will discover then that
Aelin has a blind dog that can nevertheless somehow see, or seem to, for it
knows everywhere so well. It will sit by his side, but if you wish it, it will
sit by you, and you will comb its coarse silk with your fingers, should you
want to, and maybe buy it a dish of the yellow ale, as you will doubtless want
to buy some drink for Aelin. The prices in the pub called
The Guest
are
absurdly cheap, and they employ the currency of the mainland. You may notice
that the locals do not seem to pay, but maybe an account is kept. If it
happened, as once it did, that you had lost your wallet or your purse, neither
would you pay anything, and some money would be found in your pocket or under
your glass, when you came back from the clean little pub latrine, with its
cracked white enamel wash-basin, and the large cake of amber soap. Even if you
had lied, they would do this. They would not care that you had lied.

Aelin will tell you, quietly and mildly,
in your own language, whatever that is, the tale of the boat and the carvings, which
is in the books, but there is no reason you should not hear it twice, and he
will tell it the best.

Two hundred years and more ago, the
boats went out each day, the five or six or seven of them, out to reap the
fishes from the sea. And sometimes it would be that a boat would not come back.
The women would wait upon the shore, wrapped in their shawls, cold even in
summer, looking to see if the boat their man was in would reappear at last. There
were some five men to each boat, and so the lost boat meant five lost men, and
five families of women, and too their children often enough, standing there at
the edge of the water. They would weep, or not, but the salt sea is made of
tears.

One summer the water was calm as blue
silk, and the boats went out at dawn, and all came back at sunfall but one,
that boat called
The Girl in the Blue Dress
.

It had been a long day, for the days are
long here in the summer, but down to the beach the five women came, and with
them four children, two with one woman, and one each with two of the other
women, while two women walked alone. They stopped at the fringes of the sea
that now was half red, as the sun burned out inland, and half the dark blue the
eastern sky was going.

Who has seen beyond the shore at night,
where no lamp or light can reach it, however bright, knows that it becomes
finally one with the sky, and then it cannot be found, the end of one, the
commencement of the other. Only the land is different from them both. But then
the moon rose, and made a silver road upon the sea, yet nothing moved on that
road. And when the moon had gone over, it left again the darkness, which was
void. Later came the sun, like a golden beast rising out of the water. But the
sun brought nothing either, though its passing was longer.

Some days and nights the five women
waited on the shore. Now and then other women brought them a little food, or
took the children away to sleep. At the entering and retreat of the tides, the
women moved back or forward like figures on a clock. One or two might lie to
sleep an hour on the stones, while the others watched. After about seven days,
the men came, and the priest, and took them softly back into the village. There
they cried and railed their anger and bitterness and pain. Others comforted
them who had themselves lamented in the same way, and others who understood
that they too might one day so lament. Presently they got up, the five widows,
from the rock of their grief, and took on their empty lives, where every moment
is like every other and, as before the passage of God, there is no sundering of
day from night.

A month or two passed, and it was
harvest time in the few fields between the hills. As the men and women worked,
they heard a strange note sounding in the sky, and in the village they heard it
too, and the women that were there came out of their doors.

The sky was clear as the blue eye of a
child. Nothing was in it, not a cloud, not a bird. And then there appeared a
tiny dot, which began to grow bigger, and soon those that looked saw how it
grew bigger since it fell towards the earth.

Slowly it fell, as if it had no weight,
or very little, yet directly down. And before it reached the earth, the
watchers saw plainly that it was a boat, a boat having one sail, and from her
sides floated out the rent nets like a web. And those that were close enough
saw too how on the curve of her side there was the painting of her name, a girl
with a blue gown and shells in her yellow hair.

She settled light as a leaf over the
third hill, and they went running to see, leaving their scythes in the fields,
and in the village the pots to burn.

When they reached her, they knew her for
sure. They were afraid, how not? But going near, they started to call out the
names of her crew. None answered. None were there. The boat was empty of
everything, all vanished but the spoiled nets, not a bucket, not a rope, and
nothing of the men, even when the villagers got up their courage and mounted
the deck, and stepped into the little cabin. All was gone, even the compass,
even the lamp. And of the crew not a trace.

The five widows had come up by then, and
the four children. It was one of these children that remarked on the odour of
the boat. It had naturally smelled of tar and of fish, and now it did not. Now
they did not know what it smelled of, although the child had said that it was
flowers.

The fifth widow, one of the two who had
no children, saw the small wooden things that lay under the wheel. They had
mostly gone back from the boat by then, but one of the men got over into her
again, and took the things up and brought them out.

Sometimes the fishers would carve in
wood, to pass time as        they waited on a still sea, or by night at home
before the fire. They recognised the carvings as their own, that is, the
carving of the men who had been lost, who had disappeared. They did not know
what the carvings meant, except, four of them. That is, the fish bearing the
boat, which was the sea, the roaring fish, which meant a storm, the upturned
cup which was the symbol of want, hunger and thirst, and the skull, which, to
most of the world, has always signified death.

The other carvings, the amalgam of
flying creatures, the sun, the man and woman who embraced, even the angel,
these perplexed them, while the abstract pattern made them uneasy. They carried
the enigmas to the village, and put them in the church, where the priest bent
over them and asked God for help.

At this point in the story, Aelin will
tell you that, when at last the carvings were set on the ends of the nine pews,
they were placed deliberately out of order. This is because their force is so
enormous, even in mere simulation, that it is considered best that it does not
run in the correct sequence. So it comes about you can never properly deduce
the tale merely by examining the carvings. You can only ever be told.

That night, the village slept restlessly,
yet sleep it did, for the sea’s sound induces sleep for those who have always
lived within hearing of it, the lullaby that is heard perhaps in the womb. And
the five widows and the four children slept, and they dreamed, each of them,
the same dream, and waking up in the darkest hours of morning, they ran out
into the street and stood there, those nine humans, as they had stood before at
the edge of the sea, looking for the boat that instead dropped down from
heaven.

They did not know which of their men had
carved the wood, or if all of them had done it, as maybe all of them had. But,
without the skill of writing, it had been their only method to reveal what had
gone on. And in their dreams the women and the children had seen these men,
each one her husband, or the child its father, and showing the carvings, they
had explained with care the nature of events.

They had sailed, the fishermen, on a
calm sea, which was the fish with the vessel on its back. But soon, they had
lost sight of the other boats, as might happen. Then without warning the sky
turned black, and a storm blew up—the roaring fish—worse than they had known on
such a morning. They rode it out as best they could, and eventually, the wind
sank, and the clouds melted, and the day was as before, blue and calm, and
still now as a thing deeply asleep.

They sensed that they were far from
land, and worse, most strangely, as if they had gone somewhere far from
everything that they had known. The boat could not sail, there was no wind.
They waited for the going of the sun at last, and for the sunset wind that
almost always rises. But the day did not alter, the sea did not, nor the sky,
and at length they must admit the sun itself did not move from the centre of
heaven.

One man had a pocket watch, and by this
thereafter they timed the days and nights. They drank the ale they had brought,
only a jug of it, and they had some bread to eat, but it was quickly consumed,
though they tried to make it persist. Nor did any fish approach the nets. The
sea was bottomless and lucid, and nothing was in it, and no bird crossed the
sky. Thus then, what they foresaw, the upturned cup, and so the ultimate
parting from their wives and children—that last embrace—and at the end the
skull of death.

They were not afraid, more dreary,
resentful, for they were all young men. They raged, they prayed, and some wept.
But then they were too weak for anything, and sat on the deck, their spines
against the sides of the boat, under the lovely, perfect sky. After this they
forgot to measure the passage of time.

Maybe they sank into a sort of trance or
faint. They woke as one, and everything was changed. Their weakness had left
them, each man felt refreshed as if from a fine meal, and a sweet slumber. They
stood up, and as they did so, an enormous light enveloped them, a light whiter
than snow, more brilliant than the heart of the sun, a light which should have
blinded and slain them, but it did not, no, it was like a balm, and they
laughed aloud. In the middle of the light they presently saw a creature that
they took for an angel, for it was very beautiful and had wings, yet there were
no features to its face, only two most wonderful shining eyes, and even this,
the form of it, its eyes and wings, they knew in those moments were more the
manner of their seeing, than the reality. Nevertheless, it touched them gently
with its hand, and all at once, the boat was lifted up into the sky, up with
the glory of the light, up and up and so to the place that now, speaking to
their wives and children in the dream, they were powerless to describe, and shook
their heads, smiling, and indicating the carving which had no form, was only a
pattern, and that not regular, or similar to anything. An inexplicable place—but
a place that was, to the world. Heaven.

In the dream then, the women had asked,
and the children had asked, would they not return, these men, since they still
lived? The men replied that this was not possible, now, but they had sent a
sign at least, and the sign should be heeded. Not as a promise or reward, but
as a certainty. Look at the final carving, which had attempted to show how
everything in the world grew wings and flew upward—save that these were not
wings, nor was it upward, though it might seem to be—all was not as it
appeared, yet better, much, much better, as a blind man who had imagined sight,
should he be able suddenly to see, or as true love is better than loneliness,
or children grow up into men and women, or summer comes after winter, and there
has always been a morning after night.

The village, Aelin will then say, stands
where it has always stood, and the boat lies between the hills, but the
carvings were attached to nine of the pews in the church, the nine pews that
remain.

He will not then argue or, shamed and
smirking, apologise for any foolishness, or what you might desire to call
whimsy. He will not try to answer any questions to do with religion or faith,
although he will be silent only in the most courteous way. If you ask him what
became of the five widows, he will say that he believes, in time, they
remarried. If you ask if he credits the story of the carvings and the boat, he
will nod.

Then you may stay drinking, and he will
stay with you if you request it, but no longer allow you to pay for his drinks,
but this is done so simply and in so friendly a fashion, it will not be a
rebuff, and is not a rebuff, not even if you have sneered and cackled, and said
he was an imbecile. He does not mind. Why should he mind? There is nothing to
mind about. Words are not always facts.

If you wish, you may sleep that night in
one of the three large herbal-scented beds at
The Guest
, and tomorrow he
will take you back across the sea. Or he will do so by night even, if you crave
for it.

Even he will go walking with you, back
to the church, and stand by as again you observe the carvings, or he will go up
the hills with you, and proceed with you about the boat. He will reply to such
questions as are pertinent—the vanished painting on the side, the type of birds
that fly over in the dark, singing, what he supposes might have been the
thoughts of those villagers two centuries off, after the dream was revealed,
how the carvings were fixed to the pews—with great ease, apparently—his age,
which is almost ninety, the names of the stars above.