Four months and three days before his thirteenth birthday, Thimas was appointed the Maker of Fish for the long long Lanky River and all its tributaries and streams and rills.
He was of unprecedented age, questionable tutelage, and unknown enthusiasm, but there were none more qualified, principally because four months and four days before his thirteenth birthday the previous Maker of Fish had gotten drunk, stayed out late, and fallen headfirst into the Lanky, where a crawfish-catcher had found most of him the next morning.
So Thimas was woken up early by his aunt and uncle, dressed in ceremonial robes intended for someone who’d suffered at least two more growth spurts, handshaken by the mayor and the priestess and the hermit, and feasted on all the available forage of the season before he was taken to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish and – with many blessings, and much cheering, and great and generous hope – thrown inside.
The door clicked.
It was just a little after noon and he was all alone inside a house inhabited by the same old man for fifty years running, surrounded by half labeled jars and jugs and barrels of things to make fish with, half-shucked-free of ceremonial robes, and overfed on (by word of his guts) half-ripened roozberries. And it sounded like he’d just been locked inside.
First, Thimas permitted himself some small swearing. Second, he found an empty barrel and liberated a sleeve from his discarded robes. Third, he began inventory.
Jars of ink, for squid to fill their ink sacs with.
Iron files, for sharks to sharpen their teeth upon.
Dog tongues, for cods to speak cod latin with.
Wiring, for electric eels to run electric current through.
And more, and more, and more, and more, stacked in the crates on the shelves dangling from the ceiling in jars wrapped up in paper and stashed under the bed lashed together with twine and leaned against the walls and sealed in the big metal safe that said DO NOT EVER OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO that the old Maker of Fish had pinched Thimas’s ear until it was throbbing red for asking about.
It took a lot to make fish.
Thimas rattled at the big metal safe’s handle for a bit. It was locked, and when he gave up the rattling continued.
“It’s locked,” he called out.
“Oh, sorry,” said the visitor in the insincere and hesitant voice of one who’d said those words too often and too lightly. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, I mean it’s locked on your side.”
“Oh sorry oh no oh dear,” click click, and in stooped Windy, six and a half foot of Windy, fisherman Windy, always first to the weirs and last to come home with a bag half full, with a bear’s face and a bear’s hair and the fishing ability of a limbless chicken.
He tried, Windy. He really did. But sometimes, the old Maker of Fish had muttered, trying meant trying something else.
“I’m very sorry, but I heard you are the Maker of Fish now, if that’s okay,” said Windy, shoulders visibly cringing inwards at the audacity of this statement.
“Yes,” said Thimas, who was hoping he’d tucked the (not quite empty anymore) barrel far enough into the corner that nothing would be said of it.
“Oh well, if it’s no trouble, I was wondering if it wouldn’t be too rude if I asked – no pressure – if it’d be alright if you could maybe consider possibly, if you feel like it, and not just for politeness’s sake, potentially… making some fish for me? I’m sorry it’s stupid I’ll go away sorry for bothering you never mind don’t worry about i-”
“What kind of fish?” asked Thimas, and caught by surprise mid-apology Windy said “trout” and became mortified.
“Trout,” said Thimas to himself. And he hunted through the creaking bookcase by the door where the handiest fish were kept close to hand, and in a truly huge tub that was unlabeled because its contents were so omnipresent and obvious he pulled out four handfuls
(the old Maker of Fish had used two, but his hands had been bigger)
of many-hued little painted clay-fired pellets, which he jammed into the pockets of his (slightly depleted) ceremonial robes and slung over his shoulder like a backpack because he already had perfectly good shorts on and thought it would be silly for the Lanky’s Maker of Fish to fall over and drown twice in two days.
Nobody paid any attention as Thimas walked down to the weirs. Everybody very definitely paid no attention. Nobody looked with their eyes one little bit.
Four handfuls, one after another at the edge of the pier. A deep breath before the first, a terrible urge to scratch your nose shoved away, and WHOOSH, high into the air, a spray, a swirl, an arc of glittering colours in the sun.
A rainbow plunged into the water, and it churned and lashed with the onset of many curious fins and Thimas could breath again, which he did. Wheezily.
“The trout are provisioned,” he said.
“Sorry,” said Windy, which was almost like thanks.
So Thimas went back to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish and found some chalk and a slate, which he used to make a diagram, which said:
TROUT I
with plenty of space for more.
***
Three months and nine days before Thimas’s thirteenth birthday, he sat up in bed and looked at the slate, which he had placed on the wall, and it read:
TROUT IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
SALMON IIIIIII
There was still plenty of space for more. Honestly, it seemed roomier ever time he looked at it. He wished he could stop looking at it.
The Lanky’s waters ran clear and wild. The fishermen’s baskets were heaped high. Everyone was pleased. Everyone said he was doing a wonderful job.
Rap rap rap, came the door.
“Come in,” said Thimas, who was starting to suspect why the old Maker of Fish had grown a beard large enough to hide his face and everything it could possibly indicate.
He was already up and walking to the trout tub before the door opened.
“Hello, Maker of Fish, it’s my wedding tomorrow and-”
“Trout,” agreed Thimas.
“What? No, I-”
“Salmon,” concluded Thimas.
“I’m sorry, but no, Maker of Fish” – and this was so outlandish that Thimas found himself paying attention to his visitor for the first time in days: it was Ottough, a friend of his oldest sister’s, spindly and embarrassed to be speaking to him in a very different way than he’d ever seen before – “it’s my wife. She has a very specific favorite, you see, and I VERY much want her to be happy, and-”
“What?” asked Thimas. No, that sounded too unenthusiastic. “What?!” No, that sounded too angry. “What? What? What? WHAT?”
“Shark, if it would be acceptable, Maker of Fish,” said Ottough.
Thimas hugged him. But only briefly. There were so many shelves to dig through.
“What kind of shark?” he asked. Hammerhead, mako, bonnethead, lemon, scoophead, blacktip reef, shovelbill, sleeper…
“Oh. Err. I didn’t ask? Maybe I could-”
“No,” said Thimas. No. No stopping to ask questions. No opening a chance to wait, and second-guess, and return to the trout tub. “We can do a bit of everything. Here, hold this bag open.”
And into the wide-mouth triple-stitched remains of ceremonial robes went iron files to sharpen teeth, and sandpaper to burnish and smoothen tough shagreen, and toothpaste to shine an eternally-regrowing maw, and all the essentials of every kind of shark from great white (white polish for their white bellies) to dwarf lanternshark (matches for their lanterns) to blue (books of sad poems). All of it went into the water, a thick slosh that less churned than seethed, and already as Thimas watched the ripples spread up and down stream he saw the fins begin to circle.
“There,” he said. “Good luck.”
And he went home and added line after line after line to his slate until his hand cramped from the tiny letters he was forced to use, and he was filled with great and endless joy until his brain turned off.
***
Thimas woke and the sun was already setting. He had slept the sleep of the deeply, profoundly peaceful, slumped drooling over his slate, and this stayed with him for five perfect, deep, slow breaths until he realized that not only had no one woken him yet, but the village was quiet outside his window. No songs. No laughter. No arguments. Even the chickens were keeping it to a bare chuckle.
Thimas got out of bed. Thimas put on a new shirt. And Thimas, for the first time in almost a month, left the dwelling of the Maker of Fish of his own accord.
Everyone was easy to find. They were down at the weir. Watching.
Once again, nobody was looking at Thimas. But they didn’t have to try that hard this time. The Lanky was a sea of fins, the water seethed with long, hungry bodies, muscled jaws, and a million-million teeth of a thousand kinds.
“It would seem,” said a very calm and polite and considered voice from somewhere in the crowd, “that we are somewhat overblessed with fish.” It might have been his aunt.
Thimas nodded. Not too quickly, he hoped.
“This will not be a problem,” said an even calmer and more polite and over-considered voice from within the crowd. “Because we are blessed to have the assistance of the Maker of Fish. If fish caused this, fish can fix this.”
“Yes,” said the first voice.
“Yes,” said the second voice right back. It could have been his uncle.
“Yes,” said someone else.
“Yes,” said everyone else, not all at once, not all the same way, not all as polite and calm and considered and one or two really close to being muttered.
So Thimas walked home until he was out of sight, then he ran home, and he hunted from top to bottom until he found the chest buried in the dolphin bin that was filled with black-and-white beachballs and blood, which he combined, lugged down to the weir, and poured into the Lanky.
Then he added a little more, just to be sure.
And a little extra, just in case. It was just ONE kind of fish he was using, after all, so they’d be very outnumbered. Best to give them plenty to work with.
The water roared and surged. The many dorsal fins that darted up and down the Lanky wobbled in a hundred hundred different salutes, flags of undersea nations.
The crowd watched. And when the water began to settle, they went home, in dribs and drabs.
Thimas didn’t. He waited, and watched, and waited, and worried, and waited, and worked his way bit by bit into the fretful and unpleasantly stretched dreams of the deeply, profoundly guilty.
***
He woke up in the dark before dawn to something wet and flapping slapping him in the face, which he yelled about, which got it in his mouth, which cut his tongue – sharp rough skin. Denticles.
Thimas spat out his mouthful of shark meat and rolled out of bed, which was the weir, and out from under his covers, which was the severed and disemboweled corpse of a four-meter great white shark, and landed on the floor, which was the face of a watching orca.
“Hleef,” he explained.
It grinned at him. It was probably a grin. The teeth were showing, and it seemed to be happy. Then there was a flip and a twist and a nudge and Thimas was upside down and backwards and on the weir’s edge again, nose to nose with the carcass he had been gifted.
The black eyes were unreadable. The angle of the slackened mouth was reproachful.
The river looked full, and at least half red, and the flags that marched within its borders were tall-ships now, great towering black fins that bobbed cheerily as their owners flipped their prey onto the backs, tore their fins off, pummeled their organs into jelly, chattered enthusiastically among themselves and played catch and keep-away with the bodies once they had eaten their fill.
Thimas threw up. This did not Make any Fish, but it DID attract a curious snapping turtle from beneath a rock, which was immediately whisked away and swallowed by a titanic black-and-white set of jaws.
This was not an improvement. There was still an overblessing of fish. He still had to fix this.
If fish had caused this, fish could fix this. Yes. Yes. Yes.
So Thimas went home, opened every container he could – which was all of them, save for the big metal safe – and when he found the one that was full of gigantic steak knives and a big bottle of whale oil he took it down to the weir – using the ceremonial robe-sack as a sling – and tipped in with its entirety.
The dorsal fins circled, curious.
Then there was a cacophony – almost like gunshots. CLICK CLICK CLICK and splash, splash, splash, the beating of flukes on the water. The river churned and reeled.
The waterline slid upwards. Little wavelets slid over Thimas’s toes.
Then it surged, and splashed, and an orca came free of the waves, clutched in a mouthful of serrated triangles at the far end of a twenty-meter lawn dart.
The water closed up.
Thimas was on the shore. He had no memory of getting there.
Farther downstream, there was another splash. And another.
And a crash, as a shark larger than most of the buildings in the village misaimed a lunge and landed in the middle of cousin Burct’s unoccupied chip stand. It squirmed back towards the water, slowed by the six terrified whales clinging to its flanks and removing pieces of meat bigger than Thimas with every bite. One of the last rowboats in the village that hadn’t become a plaything got between two of the combatants, briefly.
There was a grinding noise as an entire pod escaped over the top of the weir, taking half of it with them. The remainder scraped the pursuing megalodon’s belly clean of remoras.
Thimas went back to the dwelling of the Maker of Fish. He wasn’t looking at anything, but he was listening, and it was very hard to think with all that noise. Even after he shut and barred the door it was very hard to think with the memory of all that noise. Even after he shouted and threw the ceremonial robe-sack-sling to the ground and stamped as hard as he could it was hard to think through the memory of all that noise, until he stamped a little too hard and fell over with his foot in his hands and a squeal in his throat and a drab, pointy little metal key skittering loose over the floorboards, torn free at last from some hidden pocket.
Thimas looked at the key, which was much better than listening or thinking. Then he held the key.
Then he dragged out the big metal safe that said DO NOT EVER OPEN UNLESS YOU HAVE TO and put the key in and opened it.
There was a garbage bag in there, double-knotted and surprisingly light. On the basis of speed and desperation, Thimas did not open it.
Instead, he walked down to the shores where the weir had been – now thinly populated by early risers, who were hollering and encouraging others to come stand there and help holler over the ongoing mutual-massacre – and poured out a seemingly endless flood of…meat scraps? They reeked of the pub, of too-high prices and high-capsaicin hot sauce that was all heat and no flavour. They plunged into the water and the grease and the peppery spice cut through the smell of blood that Thimas hadn’t realized was drowning him nose-first until it was broken.
He held the garbage bag in his shaking hands, and something was jabbing his palm – splintery, not like the key. He unfurled it, uncreased it, took one million years to pull it loose.
A stripped-clean chicken wing.
The water broke without boiling, the banks overflowed, and into the sky they rose, one chasing another. The orca breached, fins spread wide, body corkscrewing frantically for height, and behind it the shark, tail beating side to side with enough force to generate power for all of main street, jaws just a little open, eyes twitching and ready to roll back at the first chance to strike, both of them up, and up, and up, and away into the sky, their little fluffy white wings beating with the fury of an ascending grouse from beneath the hunter’s foot.
Everyone stopped hollering at that.
They started again right quick though, when the second-through-five-hundredth followed.
“He never liked eating fish much,” said Thimas as his aunt and uncle picked him up, torn between every emotion at once, watching the flock whirl away over the treeline and into the sun. A straggling carp – survivor of endless warfare – fluttered by them, loop-de-looping for the sheer thrill of it as it headed inland. “Never said why. I thought it was ritual bullshit.”
***
There are fewer fish these days in the great Lanky. But the fishing villages don’t complain, and they take only what they need, and they wish for nothing more than what’s already there. Only what’s already there.
Focus on what’s in front of you, they say. Don’t get carried away with wishing for what could be. You hear the folk from the Runny? Overland? Six leagues away? They believe in flying fish these days.
Honestly.