In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  One by one the Kappa reached into their skulls and plucked their flowers, careful not to spill a drop, and one by one they piled them into my sack, until it was brimful with roses.

  “Farewell, Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening,” I said, and as I ducked out of the glass house, I saw the smallest of cucumbers budding from the walls.

  And so was finally built the Rose Dome of Shadukiam. As I had constructed it in the house of Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter, so it blossomed over the infant city, its colors reflected in the cart tracks of the mud streets. My siblings and I flew back and forth over the apex, nets full of immaculate flowers suspended from our shoulders, sewing them to the superstructure with infinite care, with a thread of diamonds and iron. And the stalks which arched so high and bore their roses with grace long enough that no one can now speak of Shadukiam without her roses? Glass, all of glass, perfect and pure as ice, perfect and pure as a young woman’s face.

  And once in a century, there would be a strange, soft rain as each rose lost a petal and the petals would drift to streets that were mud, then stone, then silver, not unlike a Hsien peeled off from the face of the moon.

  All this completed, I went to the city fathers of Shadukiam and asked for my payment, my opals and silver. I considered briefly that I should have asked for better, but agreements are agreements, and living stones rarely break theirs. Imagine my surprise when the Shaduki governor glowered darkly and mumbled that he could not possibly render my payment when the flowers that crowned his city were clearly no roses, but some monstrous abomination of a flower that only a specter like myself would know where to find.

  “Did I not do just as you asked? Did I not find for you an imperishable rose?”

  “Well—” The little man shuffled, twisting his bracelets in anxiety as I flared my wings, towering over him. “Even on this point we must disagree. They are not strictly imperishable, are they? One petal in a century, it’s quite a lot of work for city sanitation on those occasions…” He sweat red and redolent under my nose.

  “I have worked wonders for you,” I whispered.

  “Even so,” said he.

  “I will bring down the Dome on your heads; the shattering of the frame will be heard all the way to the sea.”

  “Again,” said the wretched governor, his hems weighted in gold, “we must disagree.”

  It is difficult to subdue a Hsien. One might as well try to keep the moon still. But they gagged me and bound me and there were so many of them, so many, like ants, and the blood they drew from my scalp was white and thick, like molten bone. They bound me and dragged me up to the highest of the diamond turrets, which were clearer and sharper in those days than they have ever been since, and with so many hands they impaled me on its tapered tip. I saw the glittering edge of the turret slide through me, dripping white, shredding through my skin. I shrieked owl-shrill, but there was no help, only their laughter, which perhaps you know well enough, my boy. My siblings tried to release me, but they were kept away by volleys of arrows so thick they seemed to be flocks of ravens flinging themselves at the Hsien. For nine days I lay there bleeding on my roses, and they kept vigil, watching me die. I screamed, I cursed, and all of Shadukiam listened as though I was a great bell tolling out their hours.

  I bellowed out any number of dooms, any number of hideous wishes to the alabaster ears of my mother. Maybe she could not see me, up there on the roof of a city. Does she see the grackles, the sparrows, the doves? She did not see me. But I seem to remember now, in that history before history, so long ago, that as the ninth sun set I sobbed weakly and begged her to let that place die, too, to let it become as dead and gray as her own dry kneecaps, to let it starve, since it would feed no one but itself.

  I seem to remember this, and I am sorry.

  THE TALE

  OF THE CROSSING,

  CONTINUED

  “WITH THAT NINTH SUN I PERISHED THERE, AND I cannot say what became of my body, no more than any man can. I came here; it is the first thing I remember, the lonely shore and the ferry. And the bones and the lizards—we are all translated on these shores, and I am sure I don’t understand it, but there is a kind of poetry in metamorphosis, and if I could but see my lizards, I should be very interested to know what is written on their backs. But I was angry at first, and the little things scratched so terribly, and my journey on the lake was much farther than yours. When the storm came, I seized the pole from the ferryman in a frenzy of itching and impatience, a nice old woman with no teeth at all and two parrots’ heads squawking out of her palms. I tried to steer myself, and fell into the water. I’d advise you not to try it. When I spluttered and gasped my way back onto the raft, the old woman was gone, and I have been the ferryman for all the years upon years that have piled up since in this place.”

  Seven blinked and chuckled a little. “That’s quite a story.”

  Idyll shrugged. “Almost as good as yours.”

  A few drops of rain spattered onto his broad face. And, as is the way of storms, once the first drops had squeezed from the sky, the rest came tumbling after, and soon the pair was drenched.

  “This is your storm?” Seven asked shakily, trying not to think of the creatures scurrying beneath that pitiful scrap of cloth. But the ferryman shook his head.

  “Best let me shelter you, boy. We aren’t going to make it across before they come through.”

  Idyll held out his arms, and shuddering, Seven fell into the embrace, his teeth chattering as bone arms and flesh hands wrapped him, as the cloak stuck to his skin like wet grass, as two ponderous wing-frames, their hollow bones whistling in the whirling wind, tore through the cloth and closed over his body. He could feel the lizards moving, and tried not to look them in the eye. But the backs—he saw their backs, and on one was a terrible song of wind through broken windows, and on the other was a complicated algorithm concerning cloud patterns, and together he thought they might say something about the staying of rain.

  Suddenly, the wind began to shriek—truly shriek; dozens upon dozens of throttling screams rolled past Seven’s ears, men’s cries and women’s keening, children’s hitching sobs. Clouds whipped by him, sharp and hard, slashing his cheeks. He felt warm blood dripping from his chin. The rain was nothing, he could not even feel it, but the terrible shrieking and the hard clouds, they clutched at him, trying to reach him through the cage of Idyll’s arms. The ferry pitched and bobbed on the raging water, spray flinging itself against the two passengers. Wisps of gray cloud snapped from the wide wings like laundry on the line. Seven gripped the ferryman’s frame and shut his eyes, buffeted and battered by the voices in the wind.

  And as quickly as it had come, it was over. Seven stood on the ferry, his face bleeding onto the boards, Idyll slowly folding his wings up again under his cloak and picking up the long pole once more.

  “What sort of storm did you expect in this place, Seven? They come through every few hours, like chariots rounding the last corner. Everything is plainly itself here, nothing more or less. You bear up under the Storm of Souls, and cross the Lake of the Dead.” The old man’s mouth twisted into a mocking smile. “Are we not courteous, to name ourselves succinctly? Are we not kind? Be glad I have not yet tired of my work. Be glad the Moon is patient, or I would have pushed you overboard and had my peace.”

  Seven sat heavily against the mast. He wiped at his bloody face.

  “But you are not dead, my friend,” Idyll went on. “You are as you are, and untranslated. How did you ever find your way here?”

  The boy shrugged. “There is a lake here, there is a lake there. A lake, and a cave, and a grove, and if you pay the maid who lives there,” he cleared his throat, “if you pay her enough, she will open the cave and the grove and the lake, and let you pass.”

  Idyll snorted. “Strumpet. I shall have to have a word with her.” Seven smiled weakly. “I find it curious,” the ferryman continued, “that you have never once asked whether I carried her across, your tree-girl, and how she cam
e, like you, or like me.”

  There was a long pause. “I know she came. I know it.”

  “I suppose you will see soon enough.”

  And indeed, it was not long before the mist cleared and a long silver shore spread out before them, glistening gray pebbles washed by weak gray foam. A small, paint-peeled dock jutted into the still-sulking water. Lashing the ferry to it, Idyll squinted into the murky forest that began just beyond the beachhead. He did not step onto the dock.

  “This is the Isle of the Dead,” whispered Seven, gripping the dock post with white knuckles. The ferryman burst into laughter, a short, shocking sound that echoed across the shore like an ax blow.

  “There is no Isle of the Dead! The geography of this place is more complicated than you could possibly imagine! Why do you think these docks are needed, and a ferryman? I am no mere psychopomp—I am the lake-pilot. I know all the waterways, all the Isles. There are as many as there are whales in the sea, and more, whales and sharks and tortoises together. Perhaps whales and sharks and tortoises and anemones. I know them all, I know the navigable paths, I know where to take each wretched soul that comes to my dock. You wanted to go after her? This is where she came. This is where I brought her, and she paid as dearly as you, never think she did not. She wanted to come to this shore alone of all the others. This is where I take the Stars, it is the Isle of Lost Light, and I would not take you beyond it—you are not qualified, and neither are they.”

  Out of the Garden

  DINARZAD FOLDED HER HANDS IN HER LAP. ON EVERY FINGER WAS a ring of gold and tiger’s-eye, and so her hands seemed to look back at her, baleful and fiery and sad. The braziers flickered and warmed her shoulders, and through veils the color of a peacock’s head she watched the banquet which seemed to whirl around her like dishes around a mute centerpiece, or dancers beneath a tall, elaborate lamp that has no choice but to shine. The ivory circlet cut into her skin, and in the morning her forehead would be red and chafed. The man beside her had a thick mustache, and had brought her as the sixteenth in his parade of gifts a tiny bird of paradise carved from a single huge pearl, with a tail of trailing sapphires and topaz. Its eyes were dead and shimmering, and when you pulled the tail, some mechanism deep in the bird’s throat chimed like a clock. She thought it was meant to be more like a crowing or singing, but to her it seemed nothing more than a clock marking the time. She pulled its tail. It chimed. She delicately placed her napkin over it, so that she would not have to look it in the eye.

  She was thinking about the girl in the Garden.

  It was the pirate ship that she remembered when she thought of the girl’s stories, the pirate ship and the sad, broken Papess. She thought she understood that, how to give up and give in to the inevitable. She knew what inevitability felt like, how it tasted. It felt like the mustached man’s hand on her knee. It tasted like his kisses. She wished that she could cut her hair like a Sigrid, so that they would stop stringing it with jewels and brushing it straight. She wished she could cloister herself away from inevitable kisses.

  She wished she were an orphan with endless tales to tell and no one to love her enough to bring her birds of pearl.

  But she was not her brother, she could not bring herself to sit at that girl’s feet and listen to her openly, she could not bear the possibility that the girl was not a bird of pearl, that she could not simply pull her tail and hear the chime she longed for. But she did long for it.

  “And where is the little Sultan tonight, your brother?” said her suitor amiably, his voice like thick liquor, flowing over her and into her skin whether she willed it or no.

  “He is hunting in the country, my lord,” she said, not lifting her eyes under the deep blue veil. “After all, when he is not so little a Sultan anymore, he will not have time for such noble pursuits. He took our father’s ebony bow and went to shoot a lion in my lord’s honor, as a wedding present.”

  She wondered at how easy the lie was. Is this how you tell a tale? she thought. You open your mouth and chime, let whatever seems lovely pour out, and hope it sounds more like singing than the tolling of a clock? She warmed to her story and lifted her eyes demurely.

  “My brother is most impressed with my lord. He prefers you infinitely to the younger man who brought all those ghastly roosters. He is most interested in the mechanism of your birds, which he feels is superior to the golden clockwork of that other man.”

  “Why, I should be happy to show him how it is done!”

  “I am sure he will be most grateful, my lord—how generous of you, to marry his sister and show him such wonders! He will surely reward my lord beyond measure. My brother is a prodigy in the ways of diplomacy—he spends his nights in contemplation of the movements of nations and governors, and in the perfect halls of his mind he moves them as deftly and surely as shatranj pieces. He thinks so often and with such intensity that I have with my own eyes seen steam pour from his head as from a kettle. He will be a great Sultan, when he is grown, and he will always remember the delightful singing of my lord’s birds.”

  “Your voice is sweeter than all of my birds chiming at once.”

  “But not, I think, sweeter than those of all your wives chiming together.”

  But there she had gone too far, and a shadow passed over the oiled and perfumed features of her bridegroom. She coughed and summoned up a maidenly blush, lowering her eyes to her plate again. The gold was streaked with goose fat, and she had no appetite. Somewhere far off on its own long table was the spotted carcass of the giraffe neck, which was so rich and marrow-sweet that she could not stomach it. A few sapphires peeked out from her napkin. She pulled the strands, and shuddered at the sound.

  When the night was over and her neck ached from keeping her head bowed, she went to the tower room and folded her cloak in half, then in quarters. It was red, dyed over and over until it was so dark that to call it red beside other reds was to call the sun bright beside a lamp. It was lined with deerskin, from some country so far off that the deer were shaggy and thick-pelted. Its lower hem was trimmed with black wolf tails. It was the simplest, least ornate cloak she owned. She pushed it slowly into her brother’s pack, and with it the little pearl bird.

  “I don’t know where it came from,” the boy said. “I certainly didn’t bring it. You told me not to.”

  The girl ran her fingers over the fabric soft as ink. The wolf tails flopped over her small hands, and the deer fur ruffled back from the hood. “It’s all right if you did.”

  “I didn’t! I brought quail eggs and cinnamon candies! They were having goose tonight—I didn’t feel right about that.”

  The girl considered it for a while, and decided that if he could not work out the clickings and whirrings of his sister’s mind, it was far beyond her to do so. She unfurled the coat, and the boy helped her heft the thick, heavy thing over her thin shoulders. The prickle of the deer fur on her skin was strange and thrilling, something akin to the slick tang of the cinnamon in her mouth. She smiled a little, and her teeth were cold in the air. As she arranged the folds around her by the side of her lake, which was strewn with leaves and duck feathers, the little bird fell out into her hands. She looked at the boy curiously, but he shook his head. She pulled the string of sapphires and topaz, and the pearl bird opened its intricate mouth, letting loose a loud, clear chime, like the tiniest church bell in the world.

  The girl laughed.

  THE TALE

  OF THE CROSSING,

  CONTINUED

  SEVEN STEPPED OFF THE DOCK ONTO THE WET beach. Idyll was already punting away from him, the flash of lizard tails peeking out from his cloak every now and then. The young man walked up the shoreline, gingerly, trying not to look down—for the beach was strewn not with gray pebbles, as it had seemed when he saw it from the lake, but with thousands of closed eyelids, glistening silver and wet, which opened wherever he stepped, their irises pale and accusing. They wept constantly, and their tears mingled with the lake foam in salty waves. He clutched his empty s
leeve and did not look down, though his stomach lurched with each wet and yielding step. He was relieved when the coast of eyes gave way to gray loam and skeleton leaves, and the forest spiked up around him, bare and thin-branched, birches and larches and gnarled oaks with no leaves clattering in the lackluster wind.

  But he did not know how to find her. He wandered in the wood, and no bird called, no deer chewed acorns, no mouse scurried past. There was no sun, and he could not tell where he went—but he went on. He was frozen and numb with a damp that crawled over him like a pair of lizards.

  “What have you done now, you silly old cripple?” The voice came from nowhere; the wood wound ahead of him in its patches of gray and white, empty and still. But he knew the voice—oh, how he knew it.

  “Oubliette, where are you?” he whispered.

  One of the trees, an old twisted ash, turned around, and it was his Oubliette, her hair brown and fog-plastered to her neck, her eyes wide and sad, her dress, what was left of it, pale and clinging. He ran to her—who would not have run? He ran to her and she put her arms around his neck, her brow on his mangled shoulder.

  “Why did you come after me? How will you get back, you stupid boy?” she said ruefully, shaking her head against him.

  “I came to save you,” he said, surprised and confused. “It’s what we do, isn’t it? We save each other.”

  Oubliette pushed him away. “I didn’t need you to save me! Do you know what it cost me to get here?”

  “Do you know what it cost me to follow you?” Seven exploded.

  She turned again on her heels, and her tree-side whipped around, pitted and petrified—and smooth, not tail at all. He had not seen her because she was all tree now, her sweet tufted tail gone. “I paid him in flesh, the ferryman and his awful lizards. I assume you did, too? You spent the last of our dhheiba to get here? To save me?”