by Alysha MacDonald
in Issue 101, June 2020
I was milking the goats and thinking of nothing but rhymesong when my two youngest came running up the mountain path with fish scales the size of pomegranates in their hands.
“Mammie,” they said, “A man came and killed the Carp.”
I kept milking until my skin went paler, then pale.
“Did you hear? Mammie. Did you hear?” They asked.
“Which carp?” I asked.
“Our Carp!”
They handed the scales over, one by one, and I placed them down atop a stump. They were gold under the evening sun and as thin as nails.
“Honestly, now. Why would anybody do a thing like that?” I asked.
My eldest walked over, chewing straw as the youngest scaled the scales by pressing their hands to them.
“Isn’t that good though?” My eldest asked. “The Carp was a monster and all.”
“The man who killed it, well, he said he was sent here by the gods. He said that he is half-god himself and he had to kill the Carp, because his father said so,” my youngest said.
“It was to prove himself,” the other said.
“Prove himself for what? To who?” I asked.
“His family; I don’t know. Why’s it matter? They’re having a feast, mammie. Can’t we go? Oh please, oh please?” My youngest asked.
I picked up the scales and gathered them close. I’d only ever been gifted one of these many years ago, back when I stood young by the lake and watched the great monster swim by. Where my sister ran in to her hips and I screamed for her to please please please come back, but she only returned after she found a shed scale. She’d said the scale was for me, just for me, this relic from our most evil monster and given to her most monstrous little sister. I went home and kept it in a basket under blankets. I took it out occasionally, only when I remembered it, and pressed it soft to my face thinking it was something great and gifted.
Now, I held a handful of scales. All of them identical to my old one.
The children talked of the stranger and the murdered Carp laid out in the town square. How they were roasting it whole and giving out bones, scales, and fins to anybody who asked. And how the stranger had smiled and invited all of us townspeople to a feast meant for heroes.
“I think we can go, yes. It wouldn’t hurt,” I said.
The four of us carried figs in hand-woven baskets while humming Gone the Day Gone. We smelled our Carp before we saw it. Bright white cooking smoke filtered through the mountain trail and left us breathing the pungent scent of cooked meat. It was nothing spiced or flavored. We were a poor town and seasoning was something passed in secret boxes to lovers or given as a cinnamon-painted kiss at one’s death bed.
Our monster smelled good, though plain.
We stopped on the trail and sniffed at the air.
The smell paled in comparison to all the pikes and bass I used to cook. Back when my husband used to bring them home after a long day of hobby fishing with our neighbors. I wondered what he would think of smelling our Carp searing. It never had a smell before. It only surfaced in the muddy lake water and gleamed up with a bright silver eye before sinking back down.
We were a town with a monster, perhaps, but a monster that killed only by starving us.
The Carp of Lake Lack was a hungry fish. It circled our rivers and our lake and ate everything it came across. Once it left us sufficiently poor, it sunk back to the bottom of the lake and slept. Sometimes for days; sometimes months. I never knew of it killing out of anger. It had upset boats and accidently drowned some, but never on purpose. Our Carp only lashed out when it was attacked. Like when we were three years into a bad harvest and so spiteful at its fatness that we stabbed at it with spears. I wonder if it laughed or if it was tired whenever we chased it in our rowing boats. Each time, it’d hit us with its great tail before settling back beneath the water.
There was something festive about those hunts. Most of us didn’t even sharpen the spearheads.
We loved taking out our anger on something bigger than us. My leg still limped when it was cold; my eldest’s front teeth never grew back from one excursion. But to attack to kill? To have been killed? For us to be misted by the smell of our giant Carp?
Once we reached an overlook, the children went running. They pointed and pointed. My youngest dropped his basket and the figs went thudding down the cliff face.
The town was dwarfed by the Carp. It was laid atop a burning pyre, blackened by the flames, and had its face twisted up at the moon. Its eye had bubbled then burst, leaving a great cavernous hole.
I watched it burn from over the edge, while my youngest clung to my apron and wept that he was sorry for dropping the figs.
I wiped my face, then his. Perhaps I was crying or perhaps the smoke was too thick.
“It’s no matter, my spidersilk. I don’t think anybody will care for our figs when we’ll have so much to eat,” I said.
“Okay,” He said.
My eldest watched the fire.
“How could one person kill a fish that big? It’s the size of a ship,” She said.
“He’s a hero, that’s why. He said he’s killed hundreds of witches and once a serpent made of lava rock. He said this was easy. That it didn’t hurt him at all,” my middle child said.
Our fish was no challenge?
“Oh I can’t wait for you to see him, Rosie. He’s really a god, I think. He said now our lake will be full of fish and there’s really no need to thank him. He’s only doing this for his father,” my middle child said.
My eldest and I said nothing. We looked to each other once, but I didn’t know what she was thinking. I wondered if, deep down, she felt disgust at this hero like I did. Or was she impressed? Charmed? Would they meet in town, link hands, and get whisked away in fairytale romance? The maiden of the lake and the hero with five or twenty tasks.
My eldest licked at the gap in her teeth, then sighed, “That’s a strange thing, isn’t it? A monster hunter.”
Of course, we hated the Carp.
Of course, we cursed its very existence. Of course, when my husband was dying and twisting with gut pain, I took out my hidden scale and ground it into tea. When that didn’t work; when the scale wasn’t golden and beautiful like I remembered, but rather brittle and thin; when he sipped it and nothing happened and he died anyways; why, of course I ran down to the lake and screamed at the water. Of course I said that the Carp of Lake Lack had no purpose and should die.
But not really die. Never actually die.
Our town crest was the Carp. It was mid leap out of the water with fangs and dragon wings, even though it had neither. When sailors came through, they didn’t pay too much attention to our poverty but instead sat out drinking on the docks while watching the water for any movement. They told tales of us. They said that we were a foolish people on a forsaken land and not worth the bother.
We had a day each autumn where we cursed and celebrated the Carp. We filled a giant woven Cornucopia with apples, grapes, and hay then set it on fire at the lake’s edge. I had once used it as an excuse to tell my husband that I was pregnant. Our faces painted with the lake’s red clay. The fire in our eyes. He’d dragged a thumb across my lips and kissed the red smear it made.
Now, there were no decorations. Everyone in town was gathered around hastily brought out benches and tables.
When I saw the Carp, I knew that no matter how much we ate that night, we would never be able to eat all of it. None of us owned salt. And so, what would become of its flesh? The Carp was cut into and distributed on grape leaves. It was seared black at the edges and too big to be deboned.
Our whale-sized behemoth. Our Carp with gaping mouth and exposed ribs. We ate of its flank.
I sat with my children among neighbors and held a cut of fish as thick as steak. It broke away in the easy flaking way a fish’s skin does. The flesh splintered as thick as needles. It tasted of our lake. I swallowed it down with watering eyes, for it was the sort of meat that gets stuck in one’s throat and only heavy gulps of wine can push it down.
My neighbors spoke of preservation strategies under nervous breaths. They whispered vinegar, salt, and smoke. I whispered with them – honey or the dark caves, perhaps.
At the head of our feast sat the hero. He sliced off flank after flank with the blade of a rubied shortsword. He drank hearty, laughed hearty, and sat before the dying embers of the pyre.
I had never seen a man so large; so Other.
He was two heads taller than the tallest of us. His muscles were thick as an ox’s and his skin was so gold that, in the fire, he seemed made of liquid amber. I knew it had only been him that’d killed our Carp, but I was expecting to see a crew surrounding him – women from the Marrow Fields, men from the Cerulean Coast, or the warriors of the Salt-Peaks. Instead, he sat alone. With his thick wild black hair and sharp-pointed beard. His eyes so blue they were like Forget-Me-Nots with his pupils yellow in the firelight.
He spoke with a voice of thunder. He had a laugh of splitting rock.
He demanded merriment and celebration and we did our best to provide it, truly. We were hospitable people. So, when he cried Music, music! with fish stuck between his teeth, my neighbors looked to me. I gave a shy smile and shook my head, but he stood and cried for the most beautiful voice, the most darling of men and maidens to step forward.
He said, “You are no longer of Lake Lack. You are what you once were, the proud People of the Crucian Lake. Friends, let us be merry! Let us laugh at monsters dead and rejoice for the prosperity to come. I have set you free and we shall dance until our feet are blistered. My journey ahead is long and fraught. Please, let us take a night to forget!”
I realized then, with his desperate eyes and voice too pleading, that he must be a lonely man.
My eldest took my hand and we stepped forward. He descended as a hawk upon us field mice and sent us twirling in dance. His hand thrice dwarfed mine. I felt as though, should he wish, he could crush my bones to powder with one squeeze. How strange it must be for this man to have to dance as though he were dancing among fragile moths. How restrained. How focused.
Others joined in. Soon, it was all clapping and bonfire blazes.
He gave me his lyre of gold and told me to play. He got us wine-drunk. We danced with red-faced dizziness and fell down whenever he stepped too hard, for his steps shook earth.
I sat playing, not drinking. I had never touched an instrument so fine. He said its strings were plucked of nymph hair. Its wood carved from the Giants of Oak and Cedar. I played and thought of this far-traveled lyre carried by this lonely murderer. Thinking of how, really, there was no point to him being here at all.
I realized he could not get drunk. I realized he was so Other that, when my villagers laid down dizzy and full, he stood ready to keep up the dance. He looked from person to person, eager to continue, but everyone was too tired. They wandered home. My eldest brought the youngest ones back. I stayed playing the lyre with bowed head.
I was surprised when it was only the two of us. I had lost track of time.
I only realized this when he firmly took the lyre from my hands and I sat up, blinking as though from a dream.
“They say that my lyre enchants mortal players,” he said, “And that they will play it into death.”
I looked at my sore and red hands. Would I have really played through days and weeks? Until I was a skeleton tugging at Nymph’s hair and humming with a collapsing throat? He played me an absent song. Even then, I could tell he was the best of players in all of the lands. That my playing had been a joke to his lyre.
“Everything you have seems god-touched,” I said.
He laughed, low and to himself.
“It is only natural. For, one day, I shall be among the gods.”
I wanted to ask why that should matter and what kind of family was worth having if it meant he had to toil most of his life to prove himself to them. I thought of molten honey and vistas of air, but I didn’t know if it was worth it. I folded my hands in my lap and looked up at our great fish. Who was now only peeling flesh and white-bone ribs.
“How many beasts have you slain for them?” I asked.
He was happy to tell me. He leaned close and spoke of the living wall of Cameroat, the crocodile of the Illusion Isle, and the Green Witch Breen. He showed me the keepsakes he carried with him, always small, for he was a solitary traveler. I held the finger bone of the witch and frowned.
“Then, what will you take from our Carp?” I asked.
“Your carp?”
I paused, then shook my head.
“This carp,” I said.
“I will take the tip of its barbel,” he said.
“And what will you use it for?”
“Now, that’s a secret for only the gods and for myself. Though I’ll tell you in a trade.”
“A trade?”
“What was that song you were playing near the end, the one that was long and sad. And why do you play it, my dear?”
“The song I was playing,” I repeated. I could not remember the song, though leaned forward and thought of the melody with closed eyes. I felt my fingers move without thought, then hummed the tune to myself, then breathed out long and slow.
“That was a song of mourning,” I said.
“But why? Why do you mourn on a night of celebration?”
I turned from him and the dying pyre. I looked out at the lake, now so blue in the moonlight, now so empty.
“Oh Great Hero, how could you ever understand?” I asked.
I played for nobody but our Carp. Our beautiful, murdered Carp.
I brought a hand to my face and wiped bitter, salty tears away.
I thought, how could you kill our Carp? It was ours, never yours.
“It was a pointless song to play,” I said.
Ever chivalrous, he brushed my tears with the palm of his hand and I hated every loathing second of it.
“The Carp wronged you, I’m sure,” he said, “That is why you play.”
“We never asked you to come, hero. We never asked you,” I said.
He did not understand. He smiled. “But aren’t you glad I came?”
I closed my eyes.
“It’s no matter. I’ll tell you what the barbel is for,” he said.
“No,” I said, “Please, tell me about the rest of the monsters you must kill.”
Because, hero, I needed to know.
I needed to see what monster I could be most like. Because once the fish respawn and we become prosperous just long enough for word to get out to other countries, before they come with their ships and conquer us, before us survivors flee to the forests and hunt them by the dead of night… I needed to know. What could I be for you? Just for you?
Would my children grow wiry and feral, then drown late night swimmers in the lake and sew fish scales into their flesh while whispering this was our home, ours? Would us survivors gather around a fire and curse the hero who destroyed us while I made them masks of clay and wood?
I watched the hero speak of beast after beast, trial after trial.
I smiled. He smiled back.
One day, I thought, we will show you what community and what family is. We will descend upon you as sharp-biting fish linked together by their misery. And you will die amongst a family you’ve always wanted but would never get to know.
But that night, we sang by the lake and I laughed with an eager, hateful heart.
©June 2020 Alysha MacDonald
Alysha MacDonald is a writer, birder, and New Englander living in Germany. This is her first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.