In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  This is what the book on the golden podium in my mother’s hall says. I do not know, but it makes a very pretty story, and I was encouraged to eat cabbage each day as a child.

  However it began, this is now the pastime of our aristocratic classes, the breeding of lizards, one to the other, and certainly most extraordinary things have resulted. I am not surprised you come to us for answers—what answers have we not given, when asked? Why, we have learned that it is even possible to distill food from rocks and jewels! We have bred the very algebra of government on the back of an iguana! Yet though we have bred lizards with rain hymns to those with a map of the glass molecule sketched in orange against black scales, and those with storm predictions to those with plans for a glass cathedral blazing red on green, we have never discovered a way to hold back the Glass Rain.

  When I was young, my mother kept me always at her silver side, against her silver hip, in the crook of her silver arm. For her, “Queen of Glass” is only a title, or a way to talk about her wonderful features, her customary silver crinoline, her glassy, wet scent that drifts after her like pine trees dripping dew to a moist forest floor. For me, it is simply what I am.

  She let me out of her sight only once, when my favorite lizard, a huge, fat fellow with a map to the Antipodes subtly drawn in brown on his dry, parchment-colored hide, broke his braided silk leash and went bounding across the grasses, his whipping tail held high. I tore after him, my mother in her glittering dress and glass parasol calling after me, calling my name across the green. But I could not let him go—he was meant to be bred to a sleek little black female with a yellow navigational chart glinting on her belly. We had high hopes, and besides, he always slept with me at night, and he would be lonely out in the cold. Soon I was quite far from my mother, though I could still hear her high, even call.

  The storm came quickly that day, and none of the lizards had predicted one that season. The white clouds rolled in like horses stumbling and with a terrible crack, like a knife thrust through a mirror, the Glass Rain fell. I felt it—I must have felt it. But when I think back on it now I cannot remember any pain, I cannot remember hurt or skin slicing open or the edges of the rain meeting the edges of me. But meet they did, and thousands of slivers of glass fell screaming into my skin, piercing my shoulders, my hands, my scalp, my cheeks, my legs—ah, there it is, I remember, the legs hurt when they went—in so many places and so quickly that I was rooted to the spot by the glass that had poured so suddenly into me, like water filling up a vase.

  In fact, it was so quick, and so many slivers fell that day, that when the storm had passed, I stepped away from the prairie and onto the road again, and to my surprise, a girl of glass stepped out of the girl of skin. So much glass, so quickly! More of me was glass than flesh in that moment, and so it has been ever since.

  My mother was frantic. She culled lizards from every kingdom, even fresh stock with nothing at all on their backs. Clutch after clutch of eggs were laid in the hopes of finding a cure. She sent letters to every doctor and wizard and witch, begging them to turn her daughter to flesh again. They even—I hesitate to say it!—fed some few of the breeding lizards which seemed to have glass-lore on their backs slices of my old skin, which had been gingerly carried from the field. It did not matter. I remained glass. They tried rolling me in pollen, or clouding the glass with oil and paint, or mud and grass. But I am made of rain; it all slides away.

  Finally, on a day when it was so clear that roaming squirrels were blinded, a drifting snow fell on those fields, and walking with my sorrowing mother, her silver hair limp and strung with flakes, I felt my skin frost over, forking lines of frost shooting over my cheeks, my arms, my belly. My breath fogged in the air, and the sun shone through my hair just as it would through a real girl’s curls.

  My mother threw her arms around me and her warm fingers stuck to me, but she only laughed and wept and called me her darling. We strode through the fields, and she picked crocuses for me, and gave me honey cakes to eat. We talked of the lizards, of the Rain, of silly things which we always talked about when I was only a voice and a weight on the couch—but they seemed brighter and more important, now that she could see my frost-fringed eyes close when I laughed.

  But it cannot snow all the time.

  On those few days when the sun and snow join hands, my mother and I go walking in the high and brittle grass. When all the other days dawn snowless, we weep, and tend the lizards in silence, and I try to spare her the pain of hearing my voice without seeing me. I am the ghost of her daughter, and I am sorry, I should not have run off. That silly old lizard. I should not have done it.

  But in secret, I think glass is very beautiful, and I among all possible village girls may stand in the Glass Rain and look into the clouds as they weep their hard, cutting tears. They cannot hurt me anymore. And I became the breeding mistress in my mother’s place, long before I ought to have inherited it—the lizards love me, and they can bite all they like. My glass fingers never feel it; their teeth leave no mark. I am good at it, better, even, than my mother, and it was I who discovered the way of rendering jewels to food, for which I was much praised.

  But my poor mother, she cries out for me at night, and cannot see that I am there.

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  LIZARD’S LESSON,

  CONTINUED

  “I AM A GHOST-LIBRARIAN,” THE VOICE SAID. “A shade who carries lizards to and fro, opens and closes pens, but no more. I will become a glass crone with wrinkles like prisms, but I will never be Queen. I will haunt my wretched, mourning mother and make sure the eggs are dry, and that is all.”

  We gawked a little, I admit. That is not very good manners, but perhaps we can be forgiven.

  “What is it, then, that you wish to barter from us, Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening?”

  I cleared my throat. “It is a matter of roses, Ostraya who-was-born-in-the-rain,” I said, shyly.

  “Oh! Roses are very interesting, are they not? Did you know that if you feed one nothing but sugar water and a mash of honeybees, it becomes sweet and thick enough to be fried for sandwiches, like boar meat or fish? We have lunched on rose and leek sandwiches for most of this season!”

  We expressed some interest in this, and were shown the parent lizards for that recipe, one grafting process so complex there hardly seemed to be a lizard beneath the markings, one anatomical diagram of a large pike. They lolled about in their pen, proud of their children, their thick legs and flamboyant tails, and knew nothing of what was on their skins. We were shown by invisible hands all the lizards which had a thing to do with roses, and spent many months there in contemplation. Yazo was beside herself, her breath thick and fast, her water jostling in her skull. I kept away from her when she spilled herself, and the days after when she could not remember who she was. It was too disturbing, and I did not know how to ask again how she could torture herself so.

  Only once did I stumble upon her at that grisly ritual. I had a theory regarding ink and yolk production I wanted to share with her, and I admit that contrary to manners I burst into her room to find her on her knees on a white mat, with a silver bowl before her. I grimaced, and would have left her, but she turned her black eyes to me, and the green bags beneath them were so terrible and deep. I knelt at her side.

  “Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter, please do not do this. It is an obscenity; I cannot bear to witness it. Do you not see your webbing? Your hair?”

  “I am teaching myself a lesson, Yoi. Myself and all Kappa. Of course I see it.” She brushed my tonsure fondly. “I am sorry it distresses you. But you must understand—the others think that to lose one’s water is only a matter of a few days’ bleary eyes and stumbling into things. It is much worse. No one will believe it, and so I show them in my skin. When I am far gone enough, they will understand that we must find a place where the water can be kept safe, and never spilt out for the amusement of a village oaf.” She coughed and took my hand. “I do not even rememb
er now how to grow the pomegranate-ant. I have done nothing of note because I cannot remember how. One day I will not remember when I was born. But that is all right. Then they will see.”

  I helped her. Forgive me, I helped her to bend forward into the bowl, and listened to the blue water splash in the silver, and looked into her skull when she had finished, empty and dry, the color of old weeds. I laid her in her bed, and sang to her while she slept insensate.

  In only another month, while Yazo was stumbling in the dark and crying and even I could not reach her, I asked Ostraya—I had a little glass bell which let her know I wanted her—to bring me the glass lizard, which is to say the lizard which first carried on it the way of making glass, of blowing it into shapes. I held under my arm an enormous red female who would absolutely not stop licking her eyeballs. She was a rose-lizard, the very simplest one I could find. On her back was nothing more than a minutely fine, infinitely detailed image of a rose, perfect in every petal and thorn. It was red—red on red, the rose itself a deeper and bloodier shade than her skin. Ostraya was quiet for a long while, but I could hear her breathing and knew she was not gone.

  “He is an ancient fellow,” she said finally. “And a miserable, hoary old monarch besides.”

  “If it is too much to ask in the Glass Country to see this beast, Ostraya-who-was-born-in-the-rain…”

  But she brought him, in a wicker basket on his own blue pillow, a gray and green and crusty bull, his crest flopped over as though exhausted with the effort of staying upright for so many years. His eyes were milky and filmed; his throat emitted a constant rattle. But he was covered in instructions, and so I felt generous toward him.

  He bit me, of course, when I placed him in the pen next to my scarlet female. Lizards are vicious.

  By the time Yazo was herself again—though she looked strangely at me when I used that phrase—the red lizard was getting her nest ready and looking very pleased with herself. We waited, and waited, and ate rose and leek sandwiches and rose steaks and rose roasts and poached rose until we had to say, very politely, to be sure, that rose was no longer quite to our liking, begging the pardon of all our estimable hosts.

  When we departed the wide prairie, we had passed through the warm season and into the cold again. The next Glass Rain was still weeks off, according to the latest lizards. We had in our packs a very curious young thing with coral skin and a stark black lesson snaking across his back, and even Yazo was talkative.

  “It was very clever of you, Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening. I will tell everyone that it was you and not me who discovered it,” she chirruped, skipping down the breeding house steps like a child.

  We walked out of the womb-warm hall and into a clear, freezing day.

  The sun streaked through heavy clouds and played chasing games with the grass. And very lightly, it began to snow. We laughed and stuck out our tongues, feeling very strange indeed to feel snowflakes falling into our skull-water. We turned back to look at the bright, tiled roof all covered in white, and saw at the door a beautiful, sad-eyed young woman, all of glass. Her hair fell in crystal rivers to her waist, and her dress was crisply cut, frosted at the elbows. Her hands were slender and tipped in blue, her cheeks jeweled and clear, a little glass mole on the side of her transparent nose. She waved us farewell, her mouth a wide, sparkling smile through which the sun blazed.

  At her feet was a huge, fat lizard on a glittering leash, his glass belly rippling, crystalline and swollen, his fringe sharp enough to cut, his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a glass bookmark.

  THE

  FERRYMAN’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  “OUR LITTLE CORAL BULL WAS A SENSATION IN the Greater Kappa. His lesson, which became our lesson, was enough to catch the breath of all the turtles with their feet tangled in cucumbers. How to make a rose which would never die or wilt, which would lose one petal in a century, whose gloss and shine were like glass, which would last until all the glass of the world were turned back to sand.”

  “This is the rose I seek.”

  The Kappa gestured toward the glass houses. “It is there. I told you we chose this place—we chose because of Yazo, darling Yazo, Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter. By the time we had become famous, by the time the Upas and the Ixora grew tall in the thesis-fields, and the corral was full of rolling Manticore, fat and furry as kittens, and fluttering Firebirds, she had almost no skin on her. Her webbing hung from her fingers in shreds, her eyes were sunken, her hair had all fallen out. She did not know her name—but I told it to her every day. I woke her and whispered in her green ear: ‘You are Yazo, who is beautiful, and was born at the bottom of winter, and my friend.’ Everything I did, the great grafts and splices that made my name—I told everyone that she was the senior of us, that she was my collaborator, my indispensable partner. Her name rose with mine, even as she forgot it entirely, and nothing I said in the morning mattered. She prodded our kittens listlessly, and did not notice if they nipped her thumbs. But she did what she meant to: She proved to them the danger of losing the skull-water, that it was more than a few days of blear and blight. She pleaded with us to move the Greater Kappa to a safe place, a place where horrid villagers would not be forever bowing to us, and laughing at our spill, where we could be sure that we would not lose ourselves as she did.”

  Yoi led me to the houses, whose shattering traced lines over every pane of glassy ice. Shapes moved inside, but she did not invite me to enter.

  “The Greater Kappa is all around you,” she said gently. “These are greenhouses. Here on the roof of the world our water freezes and does not flow out—by her we are saved, and the best minds of the Kappa are preserved against the depredations of the average vicious child.”

  “I am glad for you,” I said, putting my hand on her little shoulder, where the rim of her shell met flesh. “Though your houses seem to be in disrepair. Perhaps I can help with that, if you give me what I need.”

  She snorted. “We do not need your help.”

  Pushing the door of one of the larger houses open, I was thrust into a world of green, green plants and green turtles, and a sea of heads glittering blue, liquid water rippling bright. Hundreds of eyes turned to me, and regarded me with calm.

  “The cold took the houses, but in most cases, ice is as good as glass. Here it is warm, here we may be intimate with each other, and let our skulls thaw. Here we teach our lessons as we always have, and our catalogue grows. But we keep ourselves to ourselves, and the world comes no more begging bouquets at our door. Until you.” Her expression grew grave and sad. “But the cucumbers—for some reason the cucumbers detest the climate, and they refuse to grow. We have all the blossoms we could want, but their taste is inferior to the fruit.”

  “I have brought you so many varieties, surely you can breed a cucumber with a heart of ice. All I ask is my rose.” I kept my wings folded neatly back and stooped under the ice roof, trying to be as small and familiar as it is possible to be as a swan among turtles.

  “Yes, well, you must wait,” huffed Yoi. “We hardly keep mature specimens on hand for the pleasure of whatever outlandish flying thing finds its way to our doorstep. But we would enjoy the cucumbers now, of course.” She grinned, finally, and her teeth were small and brown and neat, like a wooden model of a child’s teeth.

  I handed over my sack amiably, and the Kappa scurried forward like cats to cream, sorting those to eat from those to dissect, and chewing greedily at the unfortunate fruits which were deemed too common to breed. And as they ate, Yoi beckoned each of them away from the feast and to her, touching the water of their skulls and whispering. When the meal was done, I was sent away, told to meditate on the wonders of succeeding generations of plant life, and wait. A glass house was provided for my comfort, an empty cottage at the far corner of the village.

  “Why do you have an empty house, if you do not expect visitors?” I asked as I was gently but firmly pushed toward the door by a dozen webbed hands. Yoi answered me, her f
ace downcast.

  “It is Yazo’s house, who died the day we came to this mountain. We keep it in her honor, and you must treat it kindly.”

  It was a long while to wait. I wrapped my wings around myself in the low-raftered house of Yazo, slowly opening and closing them in imitation of the poor, lonely moon. This is the Hsien’s way of meditating, and when her light shone through the shattered panes, my skin was covered in her, covered in long lines of blue like a mother’s arms. I considered many things, though not often among them was the nature of succeeding generations of plant life. In my mind, lightened by the nearness of the moon, I designed the Dome of Shadukiam, shaped it petal by frame until it stood erect and perfect within me.

  When it was done, Yoi came to collect me. She wore a little black cap which I took to be a sign of respect for her absent comrade in whose house I trespassed. She did not explain it. I followed her up the snow-pat street and into the greenhouse where I had first seen rippling water in the depths of her tonsure. Within were countless Kappa, all respectfully standing at attention, their hands clasped together.

  In the head of each one floated a flawless rose, pink and white and red, without blemish or brown. Yoi slowly removed her cap, and beneath it, too, was a large and spotless flower, as true a scarlet as any I have seen before or since. I must have looked surprised, for she laughed, a small, musical sound like wooden drums pattered upon by rain.

  “How did you think we grew things? In the soil like farmers? Every lesson I have taught, from lily-berry to Ixora, was grown first in my own head. Where else should I trust it? Take these things, Idyll-who-supposes-he-was-born-at-night, and do not let our work be forgotten in the world below.”