Ari the Navigator

“There weren’t always dragons in the valley.”

The human child who whispered these words was lying inside the small boat, sleeping, with her red hair bunched under her body and her arms splayed over her face, as if to shield out long-forgotten sunshine remembered only in body and dream. The peacock sitting across from her craned his narrow head for some further hint of where her dreams might be taking her, if for no reason other than to learn more about this strange creature he shared the boat with. For the past hour or so he had watched her sleeping form, listening. She occasionally muttered half-formed words, strange incantations under her breath. But the girl remained as mysterious to the peacock as the mighty dragons that surely soared across the skies of the valleys carved deep into her dreams.

Their boat sailed along in a gentle tide. The peacock noted that the human girl had synchronized her breathing to the rhythm of the boat’s rocking. And when she did, she lifted her arm over her eyes as if in her dreams she still had a bright sunny day to walk through, even though the day itself was cold and overcast and foggy.

“There weren’t always dragons…” her sleep talk began to repeat before trailing off into soft, waking breaths. She sat up, brushed her hair away from her face, and shivered a moment in the sudden realization of the cold air. She was only wearing a plain white shirt and gray pants, with both of her arms and a portion of her chest exposed.

The peacock didn’t say anything to her. He didn’t want her to know how long he had been watching her sleep. And she in turn didn’t seem to notice him. When she looked around she was more interested in the vast grayness of the day than his colorful feathers in front of her, and when she finally looked at him, her expression didn’t change, as if she had no trouble assuming this colorful, exotic bird sitting before her, looking at her with muted interest, was as expected a part of this particular world as the sea and the clouds that hung low and gothic above them.

She yawned. The peacock noticed the splotches of red that had been sunburned into her skin, a quirk that humans were prone to when out in the sun too long. He hadn’t seen a sunny day in hundreds of miles. She turned to him with a soft, expectant smile, expressing so much familiarity to him that he wondered if she might not still be operating under a dream logic, in which peacocks were common sights in gray, cold oceans.

“Hi,” she said. The peacock flinched in unintentional indignation. For the past several years, he had been approached by no one at all. Before his loneliness, few dared approach him in such a careless manner. But he remembered where he was, and who he was no longer, and he relaxed his tail feathers.

“Hello,” he said. He was perched on the side of the boat, underneath the single white sail that flapped in the slight but study wind. He was looking down and her, cradled in the curvature of the bottom of the boat. She shook her head and her hair erupted into the wind, and he noticed how much longer it was than he had thought when it lay curled up beneath her. Not merely long, but also vast, spiraling out in curls in every direction.

“You’re very pretty,” the girl said.

“Why thank you,” the peacock said. “You’re very pretty as well.”

She grinned at him with her lips parted to reveal her uneven gap-tooth smile.

“I haven’t seen a mirror for a while, not since that evergreen forest up in the mountains. They had still-water pools that were so clear I could see reflection down to every hair and freckle on my face. I thought I was pretty ugly there, but maybe the mountains were playing a trick with my mind.”

“I don’t think you’re ugly at all,” the peacock said.

“Well, you seem like a smart guy,” she said. “I’ll take your word for it.”

The wind picked up a bit and the boat began rocking at a more intense pace. The peacock had to adjust his position perched on the side of the boat, though he tried not to let her see it.

“You’ve been asleep for quite some time,” he said. He paused immediately after saying this, afraid he had just revealed the extent to which he had been following the girl’s boat, watching her sleep in avian silence, the nameless fixation she held for him, orienting his thoughts towards her and her red hair, and the subtle vibrancy of her breathing, even as she slept. But if this slip disturbed her in any way, she didn’t show it.

“I know, I just left the mountains. It’s rough terrain there, I don’t know if you know. I spent three whole days without sleep, trying to get through this cluster of roots, it was like a maze, and the roots themselves were taller than I was. I couldn’t even see the tops of the trees. And it was dark there, all the time. I think the trees were so thick they blocked out the sun. I had to follow this tiny stream that slipped through the roots and ran over slippery rocks. Clouds were covering the higher mountain peaks, so it must rain up there, I thought. And these streams sometimes got lost in underground holes dug by the roots, and I had to try and follow their sounds to pick them up again. I knew they led to the sea, and if I could get there I could get away from the forest. But I was afraid to sleep, because…”

She stopped talking, her breath stilled by something turning in her thoughts. The peacock had long ago learned how to read people, but he didn’t let his interest be known.

“…anyway,” she continued. “Once I got out of the forest I found the river and built this boat. By that time I was so sleepy once I got the boat into the water I zonked right out.”

The peacock regarded her with his princely severity, even though it seemed to not affect her.

“So, you managed to build this boat all by yourself?” he asked.

“Well, sure,” she said. She grasped the mast holding up the single sail and pulled on it for a second or two. He noted the lack of give.

“I know it’s not the best,” she said. “I only had a few logs to build from. It took me a whole day and a half. I had to hollow out the biggest log, carve the support boards, tie the sail to the mast, the sail is my old blanket, by the way.”

“That’s very impressive,” the peacock said. “Where did you learn how to do this, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“My grandfather taught me,” she said. “He was great and building things. He was building things all the time, and teaching me how to do it.”

“I see,” the peacock said.

He had come across her small boat the day before. It was still drifting through the river embedded by steep hills slopes and dense forests on either side. He had been sitting atop a rocky efface looking down into the gorge where the river was broken on hidden shards and crevices and became violent. He saw the boat descend the falling, white water, its miniature sail thrown back and forth and its bow rocked as if the central support would be shattered by the force of the raging water. He saw someone lying inside, although from that distance he couldn’t make out any details. So he followed the boat from the top of the gorge, tying as best he could to manage the rough terrain and keep pace with the current. He fell behind, though, and soon the boat had disappeared around a bend where the sides of the gorge were too steep and too cluttered with trees for him to make his way through. So he had to retreat into the forest, where it was dark and he heard the far-off but constant calls of what his blood and his panic instinct told him were predators. After a while in the forest, he had to admit to himself that he had lost his bearings and gotten turned around somewhere, veering off from the course of the river. He despaired for whoever it was that lay in that make-shift sailboat, surely then crushed by the savage rocks and drowned in ever-turning whirlpools that would consume their bones forever. But after several fearful hours, he reached the bottom of a hill and found himself once again by the side of the river. At that point the rocks had grown smooth and the river had calmed itself in response into a nearly-still pool surrounded by mossy logs and overhanging branches and vines. And as he approached the shore, this time at the same level as the water, he once again saw that same boat, its tiny sail now still and its frame kept steady by the gentle current. But he saw no sign of the person who had been lying there, so despite his misgivings, he waded into the water, his talons sinking in sharp craters into the muddy bottom and his feathers becoming achingly wet. At last he reached the boat and grabbed a hold of the side with his winged arm. He peered inside, and saw, to his amazement (even all that time later) the person not only still firmly inside the coffin-like space of the boat, but soundly sleeping, with her head reclined on her arm as one has when one has slept indefinitely with the mercy of tranquility to guard her slumber. He also realized, to his further amazement, that the human inside the boat was, if his understanding of that species held up, no more than a child, a female child at that, who had braved the savage waters and the malevolent rocks by herself, with no hint that the worst of nature could even disturb her child’s slumber.

He debated with himself as to whether or not he should wake her. It was possible, he figured, that her survival of the rapids had been merely the outcome of a remarkable arrangement of luck, one that could not be counted on to preserve her in the future. It would therefore be advisable to wake her up and warn her of her situation, since, for all he knew, the river could grow irritable again downstream, and since, as he did know, it eventually emptied into a vast and nameless sea. But at the same time, whenever he moved to wake her, he felt a sudden surge of revulsion at the idea, that he should break into her perfect dreaming when it had been unbroken by the forces of nature she had endured thus far. He found himself, in a strange depth of emotion he had never descended to before, feeling a strange level of intrigue with this small human child, having never, in his royal avian prestige, felt any need for deference to another species, especially one as base as a hominid. He watched her breathing, the gentle indifference of the way her stomach rose and fell. He watched her eyes flutter but never open under her eyelids. And he considered if he wasn’t going to wake her, simply abandoning her altogether, leave her at the mercy of further elements who may be undeterred by any more streaks of luck on her part. But his wings never moved to wake her, nor did his talons retreat to the shoreline to abandon her. Instead, he watched her, waiting for her to wake, waiting to receive any clear sign that he could safely leave her to her fate. But she only offered a few soft murmurs echoing below her closed lips, but undoubtedly echoing the dreamscape she was then lost in.

After he had watched the human child for over an hour, and she had shown no signs of waking up, he, acting on an impulse that seemingly arose from his very muscles and sinews themselves, wrapped his feathered fingers around the splintery edge of the boat and pulled it out of its embankment towards the river, pushing it into the current. And his fingers clutched the boat and hoisted the rest of his body up until his muddy talons perched on the side of the boat. He folded his wings alongside his breast, staying like that for the whole day, watching both the child sleep and the river up ahead for any further signs of danger. But the river remained still and gentle for the rest of the day and into the night. And he eventually lowered his beak to his side and slept on light wings of unremembered dreams. When he woke, he saw that the world had gone the gray of an early morning painted with fog and that he could no longer see the shoreline on either side. As he had slept, the river had given out into a formless sea, and he saw they had left the mercy of the current and entered the mercy of a tide controlled by winds and moons unknown to him or his race.

“What’s your name?” she asked him. He noticed that she hummed when she talked, like certain birds of paradise he had known. His mind first fell on the princely titles that he soon remembered no longer applied to him. He contracted his tail feathers, as if to hide them from her eyes, (even though she didn’t seem to care), or the world itself, (even though he knew it didn’t).

“My name is Berserk,” he said.

“That’s an interesting name,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a name like that.”

“It was my father’s name,” he said. He was loath to bring that up, but habit forced his hand. “His father’s, and his great-grandfather’s, and his great-great-grandfather’s, going back quite a while. I’m actually Berserk the twenty-fourth.”

“Wow, that’s a lot of Berserks,” she said.

“It’s probably more common in peacocks than humans,” he said.

“I don’t think it fits you,” she said. He contracted his beak in a scowl.

“Pardon me?”

“I think it’s a pretty ugly name. It doesn’t match your beautiful feathers. You need a colorful, poetic name.”

“I see,” he said. He puffed up his chest while reminding himself of his current position with her. “I’m sorry my name doesn’t meet your standards, but unfortunately I have no control over it.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t really like my name either. No one can pronounce it correctly.”

“And what might that be?” he asked.

“Arianthe,” she said. “I think it means some sort of flower. But my grandfather just called me ‘Ari.’ Actually, pretty much everyone I’ve ever known has just called me ‘Ari,’ so I don’t know what the point of ‘Arianthe’ is.”

“Well,” Berserk said. “If everyone calls you one thing, I would suppose that would be your name, regardless of what was given you at birth.”

“I guess you’re right,” she said. She smiled at the foggy day, which did not smile in return.

“May I call you ‘Ari’?” he asked. “Your original name is a bit hard for me to pronounce with my beak. Us peacocks weren’t granted lips like your human were.”

“Of course,” she said. “Do you have anything else you want me to call you?”

She blinked with a smile unburdened by pretense or any hint of irony. Despite the indignant puffing of his chest and growing restlessness of his tail feathers, he knew that this human child had no real comprehension of how rude his questions were to someone of his history.

“Berserk is fine,” he said.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I’d go for something else, but it’s up to you, I guess.”

Berserk’s chest and tail feathers subsided a bit and loosed his talons’ grip on the side of the boat. Just then wind picked up and the sail puffed up in mimicry of the blundering gray clouds overhead. The boat increased in speed and the rocking intensified. Berserk was unprepared and nearly lost his balance overboard. He flapped his wings to try and regain composure before Ari reached out and grabbed one and pulled him off the side and into the boat itself.

“Why don’t you just stay in here, instead of perching on the side like that?” she said. “It’s much more comfortable in here.”

“If you say so,” he said. He noted that the years he had spent wandering alone had not muted his sense of pride any, given the grumbling shame that stewed below his feathers at that embarrassing scene.

Slowly, Berserk lowered his coiled form into the interior space of the small sailboat. His tail feathers, so used to being tensed and on guard, relaxed against the soft wooden boards beneath him, and he reclined his head back against the aft.

“Sorry I slept so long,” the girl he would call Ari said. “But I was having the best dream.”

“About dragons,” Berserk said against the sea wind.

Ari blinked. “What?”

“I heard you talking in your sleep,” he said. “Something about dragons in the valley.”

Ari twisted her mouth. “No, no, I don’t remember that,” she said.

“Well, you said it regardless,” Berserk said. “There weren’t always dragons in the valley,”

Ari nodded, but her eyes were clouded in a sudden descent into the depths of thought. “The valley…yes, I think…no, no that can’t be right.”

Ari turned to Berserk with a strange expression that crossed somewhere between childlike wonder and an elder’s cursed wisdom. “I’ve never even seen a dragon,” she said. Berserk caught a tone in her voice that suggested a desire to change the subject. “Have you?”

“A dragon?” Berserk said. He felt his tail feathers, so closed to relaxation, perk up once more at the mention. “My dear, us peacocks are descended from dragons.”

Ari’s eyes grew wide. “You are?”

Berserk nodded. “Yes, the great dragons of old are my proud ancestors. Back in…” He caught his voice before going further, his chest suddenly recoiling at the inadvertent memory. “…back where I come from, the ancient skeletons of the mighty dragons lay in our vast forest, so old that the tallest trees grew from between their hollow bones and rib cages. Their gigantic nests built in volcanic craters. Their vast scales preserved in obsidian rock.”

“That’s neat!” Ari said. Berserk flashed her a side glance, and saw, with some astonishment, that she had reached into the small leather bag she had been using as an improvised pillow and pulled out a single piece of what looked like a fruit tart.

“Yes, neat,” Berserk said. “According to our legends, the very colors of our feathers were forged from dragon fire. The ancient dragons did not merely breathe fire of orange flames but all the colors of nature. Yellow flames for the morning sun, red flames for the evening. Dark blue for the deep rivers carving through our forests, light blue for the ocean. Emerald green for the treetops, purple for the banded clouds heralding rain. Our legends hold that one great dragon ancestor grew tired of gifting these colors to the world and not himself, and sought to wear them. But every time he tried to breathe the fire on himself, he was merely burned, so badly that his form shrunk and his wings diminished. But he, like all great dragons, was not deterred. He gathered the last of his strength and flew high into the night sky, higher than any had ever flown before, flying to the icy currents of the moon. There, he breathed in blue, green, purple, and yellow, until the flames froze in the cold moon’s air. And then he plucked the frozen flames from the sky and wore them across his body, saving the biggest and most colorful for his tail. These become the great feathers of the peacock, that we so proudly bear into the world today.”

His tail glimmered in the small amount of sunlight allowed by the fog. He had no intention of unfurling the extent of his tailfeathers for her, as humans—let alone human children—were beneath such privileges. But he let the tops of his tailfeathers sway in the sea breeze, waiting for her to catch the miracle of their colors and slip into awe.

But Ari merely took another bit of her tart and once more said: “Neat.”

Berserk’s tail feathers retreated to the bottom of the boat.

“So,” Ari said through a mouthful of tart. “What do you do?”

Berserk inhaled deep to answer her, but stopped with his chest puffed out and his face blank. He considered lying to her. But lying had always been the basest of all the vices, as only the crudest and least civilized of creatures would need to conjure a whole other reality to satisfy a temporary trifle.

“I’m an exile,” he said at last. The wind poured through the sail and emitted a sad call to complement his tragic pronouncement.

“Neat,” Ari said. She spoke through a mouthful of tart.

“I take it, child, that you don’t know what an ‘exile’ is?”

“Nope.” A few crumbs flung out of her mouth when she spoke. Evidentially no one taught you manners, either Berserk thought.

“What’s an ‘exile’ do?” she asked. She had stuffed an entire half of the tart into one of her cheeks, much reminiscent of a squirrel.

“I wander,” Berserk said.

“Oooh, so do I!” Ari said. She sprayed another cloud of crumbs in Berserk’s direction. “Where are you wandering to?”

“An exile doesn’t wander to anywhere,” Berserk said. He didn’t know if his chest feathers had puffed up in indignation or in response to the wind that had just then grown colder.

“I don’t get it,” Ari said. She had, at last, swallowed that half of the tart and stuffed the other into her mouth with just as much grace.

“My dear, an exile can only wander away from somewhere. It doesn’t matter where to. To wander to somewhere presumes a destination, an homewardness. After all, a ‘home’ is best defined as a place where one may cease all wandering. An exile, on the other hand, has no home, and thus he must wander, not towards a particular direction but rather in a particular state of being.”

Ari extended her filled cheek out to the side of her face. “So, you don’t have a home?” she asked.

“That is correct,” Berserk said.

“Did you ever have a home?”

Berserk thought that the wind grew colder then, although his sudden shivering may have simply led him to believe that.

“Once,” he said. “A long long time ago.”

“What happened?” Ari asked. She had no apparent social grace that would have allowed her to not ask that question.

“It's a long story,” Berserk said. “Fill with much sadness and stupidity, not right for this time or place, or listeners such as yourself.”

Ari shrugged. “Well, if you ever want to tell it, just let me know.”

“I’ll not hesitate,” Berserk said. He realized in the next second that this human child had no real notion of sarcasm.

“Well,” Ari said. She had finished her tart and wiped the crumbs away from her mouth as she spoke. “I’m wandering too, I guess you could say. Only I wouldn’t say I’m an ‘exile’ exactly.”

“You have a home you’re going to?” Berserk asked.

Ari paused for a few seconds. “I had a home. I lived with my grandfather. He had this cabin on a hilltop near a great forest, right by the stream. It had a huuuuuuge greenhouse, and a laboratory where he did his experiments, and a library that was bigger than the house itself, and he had a garden full of wildflowers and all kinds of fruits and vegetables, a bunch of stuff I had never heard of before, I couldn’t even find it any of the books in his library. He said he created them himself, by splicing seeds together. I took his word for it. And my room had this big window right over my bed, where I could look out on the valley and the mountains far off in the distance. And it had this skylight, where I could look up and see all of the stars and constellations right before I went to sleep.”

“Well,” Berserk said. “That sounds wonderful. Are you going back there?”

Ari paused again, her mouth twitching as if it wished it still had a tart in its mouth before she tried to answer that question.

“No, I left the house,” she said. Berserk detected a faint trace of unease in her voice. “I wandered away from the house, but I wouldn’t say I’m not going anywhere, like yourself.”

“I never said I wasn’t going anywhere,” Berserk said. “I said I was wandering without a destination. There’s a difference.”

Ari scratched her head. “Well, it’s complicated…” she looked like she wanted to say more, but had no words in her young head to express it.

“It’s not exceedingly important,” Berserk said. “I’ll make you a deal, if you ever want to tell me where you’re going, I’ll tell you where I’m coming from.”

“Deal!”

Berserk folded his wings and relaxed on the wooden interior of the boat. Ari reclined her head on her bag and stared up at the vast gray sky whose cloud cover had not broken once during their entire conversation. Berserk looked her over, and in doing so noticed how her bag was stuffed to full capacity, with its leather seams looking to be on the verge of bursting under its contents. Ari had the bag hidden beneath her upper back. Berserk recalled that, when she had been sleeping, she had kept the bag clutched in the tight bundle of her arms, never letting sleep relinquish her grip. Berserk noted a level of fierce protectiveness in this, reminiscent of how the peahens would guard their eggs against predators in the dense tropical forest where he had once reigned. He wondered if she had anything in that bag other than fruit tarts. But he didn’t ask her, merely watched with the side of his ever-turning eyes while he kept his beak lowered towards his thick and colorful chest feathers. Ari, for all of her waking energy, was comfortable denying anything further conversation and directing her attention further skyward. Berserk, in response, folded his wings and decided it might be time for a nap of his own.

Before he fully awoke he knew it was after dark. The deep blue of the day's foggy haze had shifted behind his eyelids to a heavy black blur lightly touched with dancing fairy lights. When he opened his eyes all the way the human girl was still there, still awake. She was craning her neck back, looking up into the undiluted night sky above them. She stared like that for over a minute, so long that Berserk grew weary looking at the back of her head and lifted his face as well to take what was once a formless blur of fog and cloud. But what he saw instead forced all else from his mind.

He hadn’t taken in the whole of the night sky before, at least since beginning his journey as an exile. What he saw when he looked up cast from his mind any lingering fixation on the girl or his lowly caste in the wandering world. His chest deflated and he clutched his coiled tail feathers, diminishing himself as much as possible against the weight of enormity cascading down upon him.

He didn’t know how the ancient races had managed to force upon the stars their crude shapes and call them “constellations.” The night sky was a menagerie of scintillating lights, too vast and too amorphous in their patterns to fit easily into any shape recognizable to mortal breeds. Not only did the stars stretch to every horizon until they were lost in the purple blur at the edge of the world, but across the top of the nocturnal dome there was stretched a thick, cloudy band of plasma containing in every fraction an infinitude of stars, each of them, he presumed, contained its planets and its species with their histories. As he watched, a shooting star slipped across the pane, and down there, across the face of the ocean, the wind stirred through his feathers in the same direction, as if to follow it. He inhaled the air that spiraled into his nostrils, tasted the salt and the mist, searching in his palate for a hint of the universe that may have rained upon the sea on nights like this, so long ago that the stars may have been completely different, speaking of lost constellations and lost dancing patterns of stars.

After a time he couldn't count, a soft melody, at last, pulled his eyes from the stars. He looked instead across the boat, at his lone companion. The girl was not asleep, but had he eyes buried in a map sprawled out on the boat below her. She drew something with silent intensity, something he could not see. And then, she lifted her head, and looked to the heavens as Berserk had done. But rather than astonishment, the human girl, for all her sleepless youth, merely smiled, seemed to greet the endless stars as old friends, and then, satisfied with what she found, returned to her map to draw again in her deep mystery.