entirely outlawed. Though never visible from the shore, it was a large island, thick with black fir trees choked in swirling mist. It was the island to which the waters would either literally—or only symbolically—carry away her child.
And now the robed men set the raft down in the thin water that slurped around their ankles (they would take long purifying baths to cleanse themselves, later). All throughout the walk from the village, the infant had been quiet, had not fussed. Was he sleeping, or blinking up innocently at the churning gray skies, the faces of the strangers who bore him toward his fate? His name was John Sadness. The parents of the blighted were discouraged from naming these infants, when they were occasionally born. But Jane Thistle had named him secretly. Even her husband did not know his name.
But now, as if he knew he was to be sent to an obvious death, John Sadness began to cry. And so did his mother, who in a burst of anguish sought to rush to his side. Her husband held her back. He was afraid that if he didn’t, one of the constables behind him would do so instead.
Mayor John Stout addressed the distraught woman in a deep, oratorical voice that belched out steam into the chill air. “Madam, I have given the Word, in accordance with the laws of our Lord and Master, and upon the advice of Surgeon John Copper. But you need no surgeon’s eyes to see that your child is blighted, and must be sent from us to the place where his brothers dwell.”
“No other blighted children dwell on that island!” Jane Thistle cried, a vein standing out on her flushed forehead like a brand of disgrace. “You know as well as I that they all perish from the cold, or in the water…or if they do wash up on the island, that they are too young and weak to care for themselves!”
“We do not murder these children. They are the Lord’s children, howsoever malformed. We simply turn them over to the Lord’s hands. But the Word tells us that they must not live amongst us, to spread their polluted seed. Would you have every child born of our village to be as this child?”
In her pain and helplessness, Jane’s legs turned watery, insubstantial beneath her, so that she leaned more heavily into her husband’s restraining arms, however much she resented them at this moment. Her sobs increased as her child bawled more lustily. He wanted milk. He wanted his mother.
“He isn’t that badly off!” she rasped, only half believing her own lie. She had had to drip milk into his twisted mouth with a dropper. And she had screamed when first she saw his face—not only because she knew he would be sent away, but out of simple terror itself. “Couldn’t we castrate him, so that he won’t breed? He has two arms, two legs…he could support himself when he’s older…be of help to the village…”
“There are no exceptions. He would be sent away if he had but a cleft palate, a milky eye. It is the only way that the rest of us can be sure of our purity. We cast no blame on you, Jane Thistle. You did not ask for this curse, nor deserve it I am sure. But the Word is the Word. And we can delay the Lord’s decree no longer…”
“Please…please,” Jane husked, now nearly limp in her husband’s embrace, no longer struggling, “let me kiss his brow—one last time…”
But the holy men either did not hear her beaten whimper, or did not heed it, as they pushed the miniature raft out into the lake of liquid obsidian. There, it was rocked obscenely, if gently, like a cradle. Jane Thistle could see nothing of her son John Sadness upon that floating coffin but for the flowers, and his two small arms—deformed as they were—reaching up for the neck of his mother, or in an appeal to their God.
* * *
Jane Thistle wore only long black mourning gowns for the ten years that followed the exile and death of her child. Her husband did not try to discourage her. The black attire, snug around her slim waist but the skirts voluminous, complemented the severe beauty of her dark hair and eyes and her contrasting colorless skin. He was grateful that she would still bare that skin to him in its entirety, after the fruit their love had seeded. But there had been no further fruit, and that was no doubt why she permitted their love-making. The surgeon told her the child had probably damaged her womb in his birth. John Thistle felt his wife was relieved for this—that there would be no other children. But at the same time, he felt that her mourning garments were not only for their blighted son, but for her other children who would never be born at all.
Ten years had passed. Jane Thistle had been twenty then, was now thirty. In that time, other women had watched their infants sail out to the unseen island. Some had sobbed, as she. Some had watched in icy relief. In those ten years—as in all the years before—not one raft had washed back ashore. No flotsam of wood, no tiny fish- like bones. Only flowers…nothing more.
But one day, a cry went up. The whole village was gradually aroused. Some children casting rocks out into the ebony lake had seen something shadowy in the distant fog, and soon the constables were called to the water’s edge. Other townspeople joined them. John Thistle told his wife about it as he hurried to their barn, slipping into his jacket as he moved. There, he took up a pitchfork.
“I’m going with you,” Jane Thistle told him.
“They say it’s a ship, Jane,” John told her gravely. “At first, the boys thought it was a whale—some great beast. But it’s a ship…heading toward our shore…”
Jane pulled a fringed black shawl around her shoulders, the chill autumn breeze stirring her black curls about her face. “I’m coming with you.”
* * *
At the edge of the lake, a brisk wind snapped at Jane’s skirts. A grayer Mayor John Stout held a plump hand to his top hat’s brim to keep it from being dislodged. The constables had muskets in their fists.
The ship had already run aground by the time Jane and John Thistle arrived. Its prow was lodged in plowed- up mud. The vessel loomed; not even before craft had been outlawed from these waters had such a large ship sailed them. The villagers murmured how it resembled, in general outline and in size, an ocean-going vessel. But resemblances ended there.
The hulking ship seemed to have a skin of glistening scales (no doubt why the boys had taken it for a living thing). These scales, up close, proved to be a mosaic of glossy white tiles, perhaps ceramic. There were no sails, nor even masts. Several small structures up top were also tiled and without windows or portholes. Here and there were pipes of a brassy color, up top and growing out of the sides of the ship, and thick black hoses like veins running in and out of white flesh. Atop the huge craft, here and there, were clusters of brassy and silvery machinery, like boilers and furnaces, with shiny chimneys that belched no smoke, but seemed only to vent a thin steam. The machinery made no sound.
“This can’t be from the villages across the lake, and there are no rivers that connect with it,” John Thistle breathed in awe. “It has to have come from the island.”
“How could this have been built without us having heard any sounds of it?” Surgeon John Copper wondered aloud. He had taken to dyeing his graying hair red. “Even across the distances, wouldn’t we have heard something?”
“Perhaps it was built at the bottom of the lake, and risen up,” said Jane Mason, wife of one of the constables.
“Built by whom?” John Thistle asked.
“Look at it. Look at the machinery. This is the work of the Ancient People,” said Jane Mason.
“The Ancient People were demons in the flesh,” John Stout said, “and the Master cursed them and cleansed them from our lands. They are extinct, and rightly so.”
“We don’t know what exists on that island. It could be the Ancients still survive upon it, if only in small number. But look at that ship, John Stout! Who else could have created it?”
“Hallo!” John Stout bellowed, advancing further across the damp gritty sand but not actually nearing the slithering membrane of the surf. “Hallo, in there! Show yourselves!”
In answer, the assemblage heard a grating of metal from above. Then, a whispery scrabbling sound…
John Stout backed up several steps, and in a rather less confident tone repeated: “Hallo?”
Below, they caught a fleeting glimpse of dark, silhouetted hands movng in quick darts and flurries, as fistfuls of flowers and broken petals were cast from atop the ship. The mayor stumbled backwards frantically now, as if the touch of the snow of petals might be poisonous.
With the petals still fluttering in the air like moths, a head rose up furtively to gaze down at the villagers. It was silhouetted, and thus difficult to make out—difficult, even, to fathom—but seemed to resemble the fleshless skull of a horse. And then, timidly, the body followed. Ribs curled free of the chest like those of a skeleton, and the vertebrae protruded in a line of jagged dorsal fins. The forelimbs were great pincers, like those of a crab…and with these the thing was lowering a rope ladder over the side…
