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THE TALE OF

THE AJAN COIN,

CONTINUED

“WHERE WILL I BE?” VACHYA SAID SHYLY, AND the fisherly blue tail wrapped his walls three tih his chimney flue

And so Amilcar was happy, for a time He would not set fire to the sheet-music

wife, as Vachya asked, but in the spirit of marital compromise, kept her politely in a closet But Vachya was a wild thing, and though it was true that her gills were old with an eerie blue tint to the ills at the h her kisses were sweet as sturgeon eggs, they were hard and violent and Amilcar quailed in her e with his horn so passionately that the eels fell dead in a swoon, and the riverof sailor blood and bluewith such strength on her breasts that she felt ice form on her cobalt nipples He looked on her onder, and she smiled

Now, as husbands sometimes will, Amilcar was seized with an unfortunate folly as some men are seized with leprosy You may think this is an overstatement, but not so when one’s wife is a Laers, his fish for their pots and pans and tinkered scissors, for their spice and their tales It so happened that Aleareat store of all the spices of Ajanabh She looked on hinant with her fifth child, and had no time for amorous fishermen Amilcar loved her as he had once loved his music-wife, but she did not want him

One evening, Amilcar returned to his hut with the day’s catch—a bundle of carp which did not speak or promise wives—and Vachya sat very quietly in the chair which had held the mute and voiceless wife of ht shone in it, like stars, though Amilcar knew them by now for her dark-water lures, hts Her tail coiled around the entire rooed with silver-blue fins

“How many wives do you wish to have, Amilcar?” she hissed

“Three,” he confessed, his hands shaking “I wish to have you in lossy wife of paper by my horn when I play”

In a rage, Vachya rose out of the roof of the house and flew in a blue streak to the river bargers The lures in her hair shone bright as lae, the wo on her broad back, her belly barely showing Vachya had never asked for a child, and when she saw the little swell of the spicer’s belly, she thought in her heart that A his throat to the brazen worass-scented blood Her tail burned white with shae The woman did not wake, for a Lamia’s lures lull even whales to slumber, and Vachya in her fury pressed her hands to the wo two livid blue handprints that had faded byThe child was crushed to death beneath the sea serpent’s palms

Now, in some tales it is said that the child did not die, but was born deformed, a Lamia’s half-breed, with three breasts and a very difficult life ahead of her, but this is surely fanciful

When Vachya returned to her husband, she scrabbled at Amilcar’s neck for thebefore she could not tell the difference between the wounds of her hands and any ht have left Her sobs hitched like sailor’s knots, and she threw open the closet, where the bedraggled, neglected paper-wife lay She tore it into pieces with her hands before her husband’s eyes, and sed each bit of rief and bitterness Amilcar was shocked, but what can a man do who married a serpent? And this tale would have ended there, with perhaps a more loyal Amilcar and a hed with the last mouthful of music

Out of her turquoise ed the color of a drowned sailor’s throat

Still reeling, Aain!” he cried