In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Then tell me a true tale—tell me how you lost your horn, and keep me company, if I am innocent enough to pull you over the fields like a plowshare.”

  A TALE

  OF

  HARM

  I AM NOT INNOCENT. CONSIDER THIS: IF A UNICORN is innocent, if she is the core and pivot of all possible purity, why should she seek it out? Why should she care if some other creature is innocent, if she herself runneth over with virtue? Why should she, time and time again, though she knows better—she must know!—be lured from the deep and shadowy green-wood by the simple presence of a girl in a white dress? Ridiculous. We want it because we have no idea what it is, except that we know its smell, its weight, its outline against a gray sky. We want it because it is new. We go toward it hoping that we can touch it, that we can understand it, that we may become innocent ourselves. You might chase down a cooling cake, but not if your belly is full. So it is.

  The science of innocence is complex and technical—I shall not worry your little ears with such talk. Suffice it to say the hymen is irrelevant, as irrelevant to us as trousers. The word innocent means without harm—did you know? Your mother ought to have taught you what a dictionary was. There is some debate, when unicorns gather, as to what, exactly, the definition ought to be: one who has not been harmed, or one who has done no harm. The smell is different, of course, and everyone has their tastes. I have always held that those who do no harm are the most rarefied creatures—which is why we draw back in such horror when the huntsmen come. Suddenly the dove who opened its little wings to us is a dove no longer, but a thing which has caused harm, great harm, which has brought arrows and knives, and smells like burning crusts, scorched flour.

  It should be clear that whatever interpretation is supported by the majority of the herd, it is a thing we have no part of. We do not have this horn for hanging laundry upon, or water-divining, or lock-picking. It is for gouging and puncturing, it is for ripping the flanks of deer and punching through the shells of turtles. It is perhaps for piercing, even, the skins of innocents—I will not say that the first unicorn to discover one ran her through immediately, and the scent of her blood was so sweet and spiced that we have sought it ever since. I will not say it, but it may be true. We are carnivores, we are horses and more—we mate and maul and shatter trees with our hooves, we fight each other with tangled horns, we race with such speed that the earth is torn to strips beneath us. We harm. We are not ashamed of it; it is our nature. But like all things we are drawn to that which is our opposite. And we are harmed in our turn—oh, doubt it not, child.

  And yet our horn is not a dead, mute knife: It is our secret self. When the wind blows it plays the slivers of space between red horn and black like a flute of flesh, and the most terrible and radiant songs are heard—but only by us. It is for mating, and for mothers with colts at their teats. I remember that my father knelt in a storm and let his horn sing me to dreaming once, when the forest was full. The voice of his horn was high and sad and bright as lightning, and I loved him. But he is gone now, and no storm can move me.

  They used a boy.

  In the green and bramble, his smell was sweet as plums and peppermint leaves. How do they find us? I suppose it is simple enough to track an animal, to find its drinking places, its sleeping places, its loving places. And by a pool clear as air they sat a boy down in the softly blowing dandelion seeds, a boy with large, calm eyes and the most hesitant beginning of a brown beard, told him to be very, very still, like a good boy, and he might see something to tell his children about.

  I did not want to go. The scent of it is horrible and wonderful, and we all of us try to ignore it, to bend our heads into the roses and blot out the smell, to pretend that golden beehive up in the poplar is of much more interest. But eventually it wins out, the sweetness and the longing, the almost-memory of a thing which we are not, could never be, the curiosity, to touch such a foreign substance, like ambergris or the tails of crystal fish—to kneel in the lap of grace and be touched, for only a moment, by something which smells of violets, and thick salted bread, and wholeness.

  He held out his arms to me, and it blew off him like steam. I ground my teeth, but I went to him, foolish as a virgin, and knelt near him, knowing that next would be the bridle and the whip—but I could not help it, his innocence wrapped me up soft and golden and if I could but lay my head in the lap of that purity, I would know what light was made of, and warmth, and grace. He would not hurt me, the scent said; he was not capable of it.

  He held out his arms to me, and slowly I sank into him. His hands went to my pelt, my mane; he gurgled a childish pleasure, and I opened my mouth to breathe him in. But the breath that came was not my own, for he sighed gently upon me, as though blowing out a candle. The secret music rose up, and I started in his embrace, for it was the sorrow-and-blood song, the marrow-and-grief song.

  “What are you doing, child?” I cried.

  “I wanted to hear the sound the wind makes out of you.” He shrugged, his brown eyes warm and delighted.

  “But how did you know of it? It is ours, our own thing, and not yours to play.”

  “My mother and father taught me everything about you, forelock to withers, so that when I found myself with your head in my hands, I would not hesitate…”

  THE

  POISONER’S

  TALE

  MY PARENTS NEVER WORRIED FOR EMPLOYMENT. They were poisoners, the best of their breed, and when they had a son, they called him Bryony, after the black herb that makes the palms itch until the owner claws them to gleaming ribbons. They resolved that I would be a prodigy among poisoners, and set about my training as soon as I entered the world.

  My mother drank tiny slivers of mandrake, powdered finer than hummingbird wings, in her morning tea, and it passed to me through her milk. She rubbed my lips with hellebore, just enough to taste—brackish and foul, if you’d like to know, like river water after a storm. My father made fried eggs with translucent crescents of night-shade sizzling in oil, salads of oleander and monkshood, pies of yew berries and rosary peas. All these things they fed me, tiny portion by tiny portion, so that when I was grown, none of them could hurt me, any more than blueberries might hurt another boy. They delighted in finding new things to wean me with: cherry bark that causes a plague of gasping until the breath is entirely gone; foxglove that inspires riots of excited murmuring, nearly poetry, before a convulsive death; thorn apple, which grants extraordinary visions, then a black blindness. Once my mother bade me hold a sprig of mistletoe and one of hemlock in each hand and eat a needle of one and then the other, while she wrote down my descriptions of stomach seizures.

  There were more exotic venoms—the saliva of a rabid wolf, harpy milk, basilisk bile. But we always found the simplest poisons to be best. You cannot imagine what can be made from a buttercup.

  It was, in its way, a happy childhood. I was loved, I ate well—and pinkgill is not at all an unsavory mushroom when used judiciously, and eaten by those whose bellies are staunch and steadfast as ours. We lived in a rickety, bare-roofed house on stilts near the long blue river, which was cold as a corpse’s cup and prone to flooding. Poisoners are paid well, of course, but if one displays one’s wealth, then one is often asked its source, and we thrived on a discreet business. The riverside was a poor part of town, where folk slopped their garbage onto the current and cursed their chickens in braying voices, and so we chose it, and my parents practiced their art on me with tender attention.

  Curiously, however, the layering of poison upon poison in my blood did not prove entirely benign. My skin grew stretched and thin, like a snake’s, and quite as untrustworthy. When I was just a boy, my father was teaching me to mix bilewort, holly seeds, and elephant ear to make a draft that would plant the seeds in the subject’s stomach, resulting in a very festive arrangement bursting from their mouths a few weeks after application. When we finished, he spread a bit of the stuff on my tongue, like a sacrament—for my parents believed sincerely tha
t death was a sacred covenant between poisoner and condemned, and like all sacred things, required due reverence. We give a person the world distilled, and thus deliver them from it. What more profound act can there be? I closed my eyes, prepared for profundity. The brew tasted dry and dusty, like flowers left too long in a white vase, but there was a sharp tang to it, an arrow of sourness that flashed bright across my throat.

  I looked at my father, surprised, and held out my hand: A little holly sprig sprouted there, its berries vermilion against my skin. It grew smoothly from my palm, the child of some combination of oil and seed or root and blossom that I had suckled in over the years. We laughed nervously and trimmed the miniature bush down to the skin. Eventually, it scabbed over, but from then on I was occasionally plagued with effusions such as these, twisting out of my flesh like new limbs.

  And so I became both source and practitioner—but I was not allowed to actually sprinkle the food or mix the draft, no matter how I might long to experience the exchange of one world for another. My education was purely alchemical.

  “If we let you loose the venom from your own hand, it might spook the unicorn,” they said, grinning, knowing I did not understand. But I observed many poisonings while I was beardless and giggling, concealed behind door or hollow wall, beneath hanging tapestry or bed. Shall I tell you of my favorite, while we have the time? You must be curious—we are so alike, you and I.

  The Doge of a far-off country, a place full of red rocks and red roofs and stoops dusty with sage and sap, was possessed of two daughters, the one devilish and heartless, the other sweet and good as milk. Such men are often afflicted thus these days. In this city of red rocks and red roofs, which was called Amberabad, the first child of the Doge was called Hind, and she was the sort that liked to dance with men and eat iced cakes and read books with pictures she ought not to see. The second was Hadil, who liked only to please her father. As they grew, alike in beauty and poise, the Doge frowned into his cups and weighed their differences. He was a complex man, and decided to teach them a lesson, though perhaps a switch to the back of one and a stiff drink to the other would have sufficed. But he was, as I have said, a complex man.

  Now Amberabad was a prosperous, though small, city, which sat like a fisherman with his legs dangling in a salty spit of sea. A tiny inlet fed blue water into the center of the territory, and all along it grew weeping cedars, at which the young men would laugh, calling them the future wealth of Amberabad. For the present wealth of Amberabad was amber, which is so plentiful in those parts that one may walk along the narrow, rust-colored beaches and pluck wet, glistening stones from the sand. Some even fish for it, with fine nets of nettle and flax, drawing red-golden gems like salmon from the frothing water. The city smelled richly of resin, and strangely of burning jewels, and cast its shadow in pale yellow streaks on the earth, for Amberabad was a city in the sky, suspended between the trunks of the great seaside cedars.

  Long garlands of chicory, milkweed, and tightly budded roses wound around the delicate bridges that led from tree to tree as in some cities streets will lead from ministry to cemetery, and in others canals will lead from market to haberdashery. The people of Amberabad are exceptionally fleet of foot, and hardly any of them fall. The Doge’s palace is, rather predictably, built out from the widest part of the trunk of the greatest of cedars, and all of its rooms are enameled in amber, studded with carvings of blossoms, women, soldiers, horses at full gallop, and any number of heroic scenes. All the rooms are red and gold with this gleaming material, and with the soft, furry planks of cedar which show through the occasional strategic gaps in the walls.

  In these rooms walked the sisters Hind and Hadil. Hadil wore long strings of amber beads, lacing over her body in complex patterns, close at her throat and looping wide over her wrists and waist, crisscrossing her modest, high-collared chest. Her eyes were bright and gold as sap, her hair as deep a red as the most costly resin. Hind too wore long strings of beads, but hers were cast from amber pitch, the strange black ruin left behind when amber is burned to make that costly oil which her sister so resembled. These black beads whorled round, loose at her throat and close at her wrists and waist, crisscrossing her barely contained breasts.

  In these rooms Hind tried to coax her sister to read the books she read, which had woodcuts no girl should see, and to eat cakes which would make her spidery figure ample, and to leave open the amber doors of their room so that men from other cedars might swing across the milkweed garlands and sing to them through the hinges. In these rooms Hadil tried to rein her sister close, and close up the hinged doors when the night streamed darkly in, and crumble the cakes onto the sill for passing birds, showing her sister instead plain brown breads and raw roots. She tried to train her sister’s wanton eyes to prayer books which had no woodcuts at all, but only psalms and hymns, which Hadil would sing on the balconies of her high house until her voice became known as the Bell of Amberabad. In these rooms neither sister yielded to the other, and they sat sullenly upon their red couches, the one chewing her roots, the other her cakes.

  “Why will you not play with me, as a sister should?” Hind would cry.

  “Why will you not pray with me, as a sister should?” Hadil would whisper.

  And so their father called upon us, and we traveled in our little caravan to this city, which, my father said, was over-fat, nearing the time for a fasting, as he usually said of the opulent cities where our arts were most appreciated. He was something of an ascetic, my father, tall and thin and imperious, his sparse hair gone slightly green from the same little drafts of poison to which I was happily accustomed. The Doge was unspecific in his letters as to the shape of the lesson, only as to its intended content. Thus we pored and pondered until we had devised what we thought an acceptable tutorial.

  It was a very complicated boil: shattered oyster shell and quartered toad, lily of the valley and autumn crocus cut carefully from the insides of my cheeks, jack-in-the-pulpit and poached rhubarb leaves, smoked and reduced and thickened with cane for weeks. At the last, pearls were dissolved into the brazier, and toad eyes pierced and allowed to dribble into the mire. We baked them into sweet candies, with a light flavor of anise and dusky peppers, and presented them to the girls at a banquet, posing as cooks. I watched from behind my mother’s voluminous chef’s skirts, a little kitchen waif gawking at the finery.

  They sucked them down happily, Hind greedily chewing and Hadil making small kissing gestures with her pink lips as the anise puckered her cheeks. It was some time before the effect would be seen, and we were invited to stay and enjoy the food we pretended to have prepared. I was sitting between my parents with an antler fork in one hand, poised to mouth a sliver of sheep’s fat, when Hind turned to her father and said:

  “When you are dead and I am Doge, I shall invite all the woodcutters and poets to this place, and they will write odes to the beauty of Amberabad and her two daughters!”

  Hadil blushed. “When you have gone and I am Doge in your place, I shall cover my face in mourning white, and no images shall be made of anything at all for a full year, so that we may remember only your kindness, and your face.”

  Hind looked at Hadil with disgust. “When did you lie down under the surgeon’s knife and let your heart be cut away? Can you not even once smile with me and be my sister? Stuff your pinched face with your damned bitter roots and choke on them! May you—”

  She did not finish her curses. Out of her mouth came a single pearl, large and white and shimmering. Hadil cried out in surprise, and from her rose-scented lips came a slim green frog, hopping unconcernedly onto the table. Another followed, and another pearl from her sister, and another frog. The table leapt with green and clattered with white, the Doge’s beautiful daughters holding back their curled and perfumed hair with both hands as they vomited up jewels and amphibians.

  The Doge scowled. “I told you to teach them. Teach the one that goodness is not enough, and the other that cold cruelty is too much. What is this?
Precious jewels from the corrupt daughter, slimy creatures from the virtuous? You will get no payment from me.”

  My mother, always the orator, bowed low. “Your Grace, forgive me, but you do not see as we see. From the mouth of the child you judged wicked comes nothing but cold stones, lifeless, shellfish waste. In a seaside kingdom such as yours, they are too common to be called valuable. Beautiful, yes, and they have their worth, but they are just pretty rocks. Out of the other comes frogs, which you may consider ugly, but are food and clothing and curatives and poisons. They are eminently useful creatures in any clime, and she will never be hungry, nor anyone who comes near. Yet those who come near will as often as not cry out in disgust and speak not to her sweetness. Tell me I have not taught a lesson they will remember!”

  The Doge laughed, and so did I. Hind hiccupped, and a pearl formed at the corner of her mouth. She stifled tears as one of her sister’s frogs caught the jewel with his tongue and swallowed it.

  I have heard that, swollen with pride in her frogs, Hadil became an inefficient Doge, caring only for her amphibian subjects, ordering every frog to be escorted across the road and hoisted on silk cushions, lest the poor beasts suffer. She kept up her singing until no one could stand to step out of their homes, as she added songs for her father’s shade and songs for the betterment of frogs and songs for the salvation of her lost sister. Finally, there was no hour left in the day when the Bell of Amberabad did not endlessly drone from its high balcony.

  Hind, I have heard it said, went into the world, dropping pearls behind her and thinking no more on politics.

  Perhaps we had too great a love of preaching. But we were clever and delighted each other and practiced our arts with a precision nearly unknown in these degenerate times. And I will take their place when they have gone. I will be greater even than they, for I need no wild wood to give up its savages to me. I am the wild wood, and to produce both pearls and frogs from maidens I need but to extend my hand.