seventeentimes

The Three Sisters

A long time ago, an old woman of numerous and indistinguishable crevices, dreamt that she was making love to an angel. After this, she could always hear a faint ringing in her ears, and needless to say, she soon gave birth to three baby girls. The eldest was astonishingly beautiful, the middle child was quite plain, and the youngest was disconcertingly ugly. They grew up quietly, behind a veil of stolen glances and unmade promises - which suited everyone else just fine because the sisters were rumored to be extremely unlucky.
With not much else to do, they learned card games and played them incessantly in the shade of a big tree. If the eldest sister lost, she emitted a terrible silence, and the afternoon took on a different flavor for miles around. If the middle sister lost, the sounds of her sobbing and raging fled through the village like wild geese. When the youngest lost, however, the air rang with such cavorting, snorting belly-fulls of laughter, that even the haughtiest fishmonger’s wife couldn’t keep the thinnest sliver of a smile from creeping across her lips.
The sisters dealt and shuffled through their days in this fashion for many years. On good days, when the breeze had traveled for many thousands of miles and carried faint memories of sunrise and sleepless nights, the sisters sung. Like stitches cast off the day before, they picked up notes from the air and spun endless ballads of mischievous maidens and tortured heroines. On really good days, when the stars were still visible in the sky, the distant ocean roared all afternoon, and the sisters danced like water. And they danced like rocks. And they danced like thirty drums. And still they sung like banshees.
One day, on the hottest day of the hottest summer, when the sun baked everything in white, sizzling light and the trees creaked, and the earth opened up in creeping fissures of surrender, a stranger was seen walking slowly through the deserted streets. At midday, the sisters heard a single, heavy knock on their back door. After certain amount of unbolting, the sisters discovered a dark face with bony eyes staring at them. The first to blink was the eldest sister, and she blinked with eyes of silk and honey. And the first to speak was the stranger. In words of cloaked twilight, his tongue flicked across a tale so tall, the sisters had to stand on tiptoe just to hear the first sentence. By the time the sun had set and the sky was awash with a thousand twinkling stars, the sisters found themselves perched in the rafters, struggling in vain to catch the stranger’s final words as they flew up through the night air. After a long pause, the youngest sister let out a snort, and then a giggle, and then such a tremendous shriek of laughter, that she fell clear to the floor. The stranger turned and walked away, leaving the sisters to stare after him in the darkness.
The next day, the stranger returned and announced that he had a riddle for the sisters to solve. They looked up from their card game to see him standing before them holding out a small, shiny key. The middle sister, who was quite perturbed that all the attention had suddenly shifted from the magnificent hand she had just played, explained politely that they were rather busy and didn’t have time to solve a riddle just now. The stranger nodded, and whistled quietly to himself as he walked back down the garden path.
Several long days had passed before he re-appeared for the third time, and this time, he came prepared. The sisters were engrossed in an extremely complicated game involving seven decks of cards, which they had learned to play blindfolded. They did not notice when he sat down behind the youngest sister and begun sliding extra cards into her pile. The sun beat down, and the birds chirped suspiciously in the branches of the big tree. The stranger watched as a deep furrow crept across the brow of the middle sister. Slowly, her face turned an indecent shade of purple as she realized that there were far too many aces in her sister’s hand. Her lips formed around the most appalling insult she could think of, and she spat it at the youngest sister. This was followed by an onslaught involving curse words from many continents and finally, by a spine-tingling roar, as she grabbed the youngest sister violently by the neck. Before the eldest could intervene, the stranger had pulled her away and was whispering slippery ideas into her ear. While the youngest sisters rolled around in the dirt, she felt salt-water coursing through her veins and the swish of mermaid tails in her stomach. When the stranger asked if she would go with him, her eyes betrayed the fact that there was simply nothing else she wanted to do in the whole wide world.
Eventually, the gnashing and braying subsided, and her sisters lay on top of one another, panting through the clouds of dust and clumps of hair that gently settled in the afternoon light. Now the stranger turned to the middle sister, and with all the irritation she could muster, she listened to his promises of adventures in long, lost cities, and voyages to the ends of the earth. When he smiled a wily smile, and asked her to come with him, she discovered that she had not a drop of discontent left in her, and simply consented to go. The youngest sister raised her head but before she had time to so much as smirk, the stranger told her the saddest story she had ever heard, and in the silence that followed, the sisters knew that it was time to pack their bags.
Seven days later, the sisters stood at the edge of a busy harbor. Screaming flocks of gulls spiraled in the air, avoiding an enormous galleon that dwarfed the local fishing boats. The sisters watched as the stranger negotiated a deal with the captain, a broad, hulking man with sharp teeth and bushy eyebrows. The ship was painted entirely with writhing sea snakes and, rather incongruously the sisters agreed, enormous, snarling tigers. The youngest sister had just begun to find this quite amusing, when she overheard an old woman muttering to herself that it had been painted with the blood of sailors who died at sea from unpleasant sounding diseases. The smile faded from her lips, and only when they spotted a large and dim-witted cat cornered by an overconfident seagull, did the blood return to her cheeks, and the twinkle to her eyes.
They set sail at sunset on a scarlet sea, with the tolling of bells from the gradually sinking harbor ringing mournfully in their ears. A large, amber moon rose in the sky and lit the faces of the ship’s vagabond crew, who seemed much hairier in the shadowy light. The sisters slept in shifts behind a crate packed with the strange hides of animals from foreign lands. In the morning, still with little else to do, they resumed their card playing and smiled gleefully as the world opened up around them in an arc of salty light. The wind and sun brushed their skin in shades of tangerine and pineapple, while the ship creaked on amid the depth and width of a hundred thousand rolling waves.
After several days had passed, the sisters began to make out the shapes of islands creeping along the horizon. In the heat of the afternoon, they sometimes fancied they saw the island disappearing beneath the waves, and on those afternoons, they tried very hard to concentrate on their card game, and not the images of serpents flapping ominously above their heads. The sisters became impatient. They waited for the land to reach out to them in an embrace of exotic cities and far-flung kingdoms teeming with gallant knights and ferocious dragons. They waited for the cannon fire of wild-eyed pirates. They waited for their adventure to begin, and finally, it did.
Quite unexpectedly, on an otherwise uneventful morning, the stranger leapt over the side of the ship. After several frenzied moments of running around and screaming for help, the sisters realized that this was no time to make a rational decision, and one after the other jumped into the swirling waves. The stranger immediately rounded them all up and pointed them in what he claimed was the right direction. Looking over his shoulder as he swum away from the sisters, the ship, and all that seemed reasonable, he explained that there was rather a lot of swimming to be done.
Many hours and many unfortunate lung-fulls of water later, four sets of footprints slowly faded as the evening breeze swept across a sandy beach. The sisters slumped in a heap of dripping limbs and stared up at the tall, white wall towering above them, which stretched for miles in either direction. The stranger paced before them until they had caught their breath, and then beckoned for them to follow him. A little way along the beach, he suddenly dropped to his knees and began to dig in the sand. The sisters raised their eyes in unison, and then collapsed on the ground, where they fell fast asleep.
They wake up three days later with grumbling stomachs and ridiculous sunburns. The stranger was nowhere to be seen, but in front of them at the base of the wall, was a deep hole in the sand – which upon further inspection turned out to be the entrance to a narrow tunnel. Half out of curiosity, and half out of a desire to soothe their baking skin, the sisters hurriedly wriggled into it. The relief of the cool sand was short lived however, for no sooner had they climbed into the tunnel, they found themselves clambering out of it into a deserted street. The buildings were tall, with smooth walls the color of desert animals. Looking around, the sisters wondered which direction they should go in. The answer came in the form of a snaking ribbon of sound that caught in their hair and tickled their ears. They followed it along the narrow street and out into a wide square impossibly full of people. They were immediately overwhelmed by the swell of voices and music, accompanied by an unwieldy collection of pungent swells, which rose to a crescendo as they made their way through the barrage of market stalls. Somebody nearby was roasting nuts and fruit over an open fire. A group of women at their feet wrung the necks and plucked the feathers of plump, angry birds. In the shade of a fountain, hollow-bellied old men with cavernous lungs played board games on upturned crates of rotting vegetables. The sisters made their way slowly across the square, nibbling sweetly dripping pastries stolen from the busier and stupider market vendors. Chattering women draped them with shawls and strings of wooden beads until they pushed them away with sticky fingers, and the middle sister bore a few more teeth than the townspeople felt apt to barter with.
They were relieved to find themselves finally pushed out of the crowd and into a small alley. It was much darker than the first due to the walls of the buildings on either side, which leaned so precariously as to form a kind of canopy, hung with laundry and tiny, sparkling lights. As they walked along, the rich stench of animals and cooking food, was replaced by trails of musky incense. The youngest sister, who was lagging behind, was distracted by the feeling that someone was following them. When she looked behind her, the alley was empty, but her attention was caught by an old wooden door she had thought was shut when she passed by it moments earlier. Hanging from the wall was a faded sign, baring the picture of an angel and three stars in flaking paint. Calling out to her sisters, she walked back and stood squinting into a dark room lit with flickering, golden light.
As the sisters warily stepped out of the alley, they found themselves in a low-ceilinged waiting room. The walls were draped with thick, scarlet swathes of fabric, onto which many hundreds of gems had been carefully sewn in a myriad of constellations. Seeing that the only furniture in the room was a row of ornately carved wooden chairs, the sisters sat down, and, as it seemed to be the appropriate thing to do, waited. After so much excitement, they were quite grateful for the opportunity to twiddle their thumbs and absently peel off flakes of sunburned skin, which they jumped half out of when they suddenly noticed a hooded figure standing in the corner of the room. It was too dark to make out much more than a tall, robed man whose outstretched hand indicate that they follow, as it disappeared with the rest of his body through the curtains. Without quite knowing why, the eldest sister rose, and did just that.
The second room was larger than the first, and tingled with the low notes of what the sisters could only imagine was a choir of bees hidden in the shadows. Without warning, their unidentified host reached into the air, and filled it with a cascade of colorful ribbons. As they danced to the floor in riverlets, a second flourish produced an explosion of white feathers as the ribbons turned into a flock of wildly flapping doves. Finally, with a dramatic, pirouetting leap pierced by a tremendous, warbling cry, he transformed the doves into a fine mist of sparkling rain, which the sisters wiped from their skin in smears of lilac and turquoise. Turning on his heel, so that his robe flew out in two delicately embroidered dragonfly wings, he crossed the room and pushed away a heavy screen, where a long box rested on a low, narrow table. The eldest sister needed no encouragement when once more, he held out his hand. Carefully, he guided her up onto the table and into the box, before closing the lid, which he locked with a small key of pink granite.
Watching in horror as a cloud of smoke slowly filled the room, the two younger sisters felt their stomachs clench in fists of fear. When the man began speaking to them in a thick accent, they were too startled to understand what he was saying. Repeating himself, they stared frantically into the shadows of his face, hidden almost entirely by the hooded robe. Eventually, they realized he was asking how they intended to pay him. The wide-eyed sisters emptied their pockets to show that they had nothing to offer, but he was not dissuaded, and asked them again to pay for what he explained was an extremely rare performance. They protested with high-pitched indignation, and it didn’t take long for the middle sister to lose her temper and demand that he immediately unlock the box and allow them to leave. All the foot stomping and hissing and shouting she could produce, would not dent his insistence that they owed him a disturbing amount of money. Re-producing the key, he calmly unlocked and raised the lid of the now startlingly – if predictably – empty box. Turning to the sisters, who were clearly approaching a state of derangement, he said that he had a suggestion to make.
A delicious smile escaped as he spun around and pulled a book from, as far as the sisters could tell, nowhere. The book fell open as he turned it in his hands, and he held up a beautiful illustration of a unicorn with a large, white ruby between it’s teeth. As he slowly turned the pages, the sisters watched as the stone re-appeared at the center of a great, wooden table surrounded by ogrous warriors, in the crown of a sparkling-eyed queen, at the bottom of an icy lake, over and over through the ages, and finally, on the last page they stared in horror as a madly cackling, silver haired king held up his eye patch to reveal the ruby bulging out of the sunken hole where his eye should have been. “Bring me the ruby,” said the magician as he stepped out of the room, “and I will return your sister.”
Several days later, the sisters had lied, cheated and fluttered their eyelashes into the labyrinthine castle which loomed over the city from a craggy, raven-infested mountain top. For a whole week they snuck through it’s whispering passages and dragon-bellied banquet halls, in the desperate hope of finding access to the inner chambers of the castle, and so, the king. Driven by the deepest despair, they eventually decided to commit a crime of such magnitude that their subsequent beheading must surely take place before the king’s own eye. Without actually conceiving of how their otherwise brilliant strategy might conclude with heads still attached, the sisters recklessly murdered three of the king’s best hunting dogs before they were caught red-handed.
Thrown into the blackest dungeon, where the awful cries of long-dead prisoners echoed through the darkness, the sisters clung tightly to one another and sung themselves to sleep. In the morning, they were dragged into the light and across a courtyard to the throne room at the very heart of the castle. The floor, which must have been as wide across as a medium-sized forest, was covered by a marble mosaic which told the saga of twelve nights in search of a holy relic. Scattered throughout the intricate designs, mirrored shards reflected the morning sun in thin beams of light that met in the center of an incredibly high, vaulted ceiling. The sisters were shoved towards the north wall of the room where, on a raised platform draped with muscular women stroking huge, equally muscular cats, sat the king. Despite the din created by the hundreds of bustling courtiers, the king’s shrieks of laughter spiraled in great, dizzying currents and drowned out all other sound in the room. His long, silver beard poured over his belly and curled at his feet amongst a dozen lazily waving tails.
Much to the distress of the sisters, the atmosphere in the room suddenly shifted, and along with it, every hooked nose, every raised brow, every piercing eye turned slowly to face them. Terror crept up the spines of the two sisters. Sickness rocked through them in quakes that nearly sent them reeling to the floor. From their stomachs rose a fear they had never known. It climbed through their chests and down their arms. It drained them of all color until they stood translucent, shaking, weeping, staring deep into the eye of the insane king who was going to slice their heads from their bodies and eat them for breakfast. He rose from his throne, and rage, black as the worst night, bolted through the air and struck each sister’s heart. Paralyzed now, they watched in horror as he took step after step towards them. Not a breath escaped the multitude of parted lips as he silently unsheathed a sword with an edge so sharp the air peeled away behind it, leaving a deep slit through which fallen angels could be glimpsed swimming in a black hole of light.
When there was no time left, and the last chance swung a long arc across the room, the middle sister caught it deftly between her teeth and watched it swing away from her as she made the king an astounding wager. She told him that within on hour, she could make him give her his ruby eye. If she failed, before her execution she would lick clean every one of his putrid, disease-ridden, tiger-toothed hunting dogs. If she succeeded however, the king and all of his subjects must stay exactly where they were for five minutes, while she and her sister attempted a most unlikely escape. With a deranged pride which had long since outgrown the proportions of even his madness, the king scrutinized the sisters carefully, before accepting the incomprehensibly silly bet.
Ordering two of his attendants to wheel in a giant hourglass, he ascended the platform and sat down in his thrown, barely managing to contain the swarm of gibbering sentences colliding in his mangled brain. After an agonizing silence, broken only by the quickly extinguished splutters escaping from the king’s mouth, he pointed to the hourglass and screeched for the time to begin.
For the first fifteen minutes, the king watched with increasing disbelief, as the sisters did absolutely nothing. The only sound in the room came from deep within the bowels of twelve contented cats, purring love songs to the sunlight in which they bathed. By the time the bottom of the hourglass had half-filled with sand, the king’s eye was twitching in anticipation, and the knuckles of his hands were turning blue as he gripped terrible dents into the wooden arms of the throne. For fifteen excruciating minutes longer, he held his breath until his face had passed through several shades of blue, and now resembled a grotesque porcelain doll. The subsequent explosion of air from his burning lungs caused flaming drops of saliva to rain down on the startled crowd, and suddenly the air smelled of roasting beetles.
When there were so few grains of sand left to fall that the drooling king couldn’t stop himself from sending for his dogs, the middle sister began whispering in the youngest sister’s ear. The king froze. The youngest sister, however, did quite the opposite. At first, only the slightest raise of an eyebrow and a faint curl at the corners of her mouth were visible, but as the whispering continued, her shoulders began to shudder uncontrollably, and her nose let out little snorts of air. The shaking turned into full body convulsions, as squeals and sniggers leapt from between her quivering lips. This was quickly followed by a glorious burst of howling, and the youngest sister fell to the floor and rolled around in weeping fits of hysterical laughter.
The semi-delirious king felt his face contort, and he heard himself begin to chuckle seconds too late to do anything about it. The ensuing flood of roaring laughter was both inevitable, and absolutely beyond his control. The more the youngest sister screamed and beat at the floor with her fists, the harder the king laughed. Tears poured down his cheeks in rivers as he lurched in great, bellowing spasms, until his body buckled against the back of the throne in a final, earth shattering guffaw, and the white ruby popped out from beneath his eye patch, and rolled down the steps of the platform, across the floor, and into the hands of the middle sister. Without hesitating to see whether or not the king would stay true to his word, she grabbed her flailing sister by the wrist and dragged her through a sea of boggling eys and gaping mouths. As they fled through the courtyard and into the maze of passageways, the hours they had spent roaming through the castle in search of the king, now proved to be indescribably useful. They ducked through hidden tunnels and weaved in and out of countless rooms, not daring to look behind them or listen for the demented footsteps of the king in blood-curdling pursuit. By some miracle, they tumbled through an unremarkable door on the edge of the castle, and half scrambled, half fell down the side of the mountain. With thundering hearts, they ran faster than their legs could carry them through a blur of city streets, and down a dark alley hung with laundry and tiny, twinkling lights. Beneath a sign baring a picture of an angel and three bright stars, they entered a familiar scarlet room where they could hear the faint sound of somebody whistling, and waited for their next adventure to begin.