In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But he was sure she would come again. He knew it. The flat sky filled with drifting snow and it melted on his scalp, but he felt no cold. She was there, in the Garden, somewhere, and so he was happy enough, sure that just around the next drift she was waiting for him. When she had disappeared before, he was sure she had abandoned him, but now—had he not heard the tale of Seven and Oubliette? Did he not know himself as true a friend as the one-armed boy? Did he not know her as wild and lovely as the huldra? His faith only faltered a little, like a larch bending in a stiff wind, as the winter wore on, and the snow did not melt, and she did not appear. He chased drafts of black hair like rabbits, and the night of the wedding drew nearer, and she did not appear. Dogs leapt; bells jangled.

  Finally, the night before the wedding bloomed lightless, moonless, starless. The only lights in the Garden were high braziers and candles, their flames reflecting blue and white on the sparkling, freezing ground. The boy walked through the chestnut chapel, where everything from altars to aisle was draped in cloths to keep it safe from the frost. And so it seemed that the deepest snow of all lay on Dinarzad’s dais. As he passed it, he thought he heard the chime of a little bird, and, his heart leaping, he dashed into the snow to follow it, through bloomless rosebushes and the black husks of pomegranates, through blazing, icy persimmons and knobbled acacias, all the way through the center of the Garden and through it, to the far edge, farther than he had ever run before, to the great silver Gate which ran all around the Palace grounds like a river. The bird chime led him on, and the boy’s breath was quick and fast, his brow wet, by the time he reached the filigree Gate, which showed an endless scene that circled the Garden and back again on itself, a scene of a great battle between men and monsters, in which the men had stern eyes of silver and pearl, and the beasts had craven expressions wrought in iron. Braziers capped the Gate every so often, and the wood beyond was dark and deep.

  On the monsters’ side stood the girl in her red cloak.

  In that moment the boy loved his sister for slipping that outlandish thing into his pack—the girl’s lips were pale and her eyebrows white with snow, her long hair strung with flakes like pearls. She held the little jeweled bird with its long blue and gold tail in her hands and did not smile, or raise her eyes. He could not be sure if she was crying, but her breath was warm and misted on the air.

  “I do not know any more stories,” she whispered.

  “What? But you swore to tell me more!”

  “There are no more that I can tell.”

  “But if the tales are over—”

  “I did not say they were over. I said I did not know any more.” The girl picked at the pearly beak of her bird.

  “I do not understand.”

  The girl looked up, and the rims of her eyes were red beneath the sweet, inky black of her lids. “I told you long ago that I read the tales of my eyes in cast-off mirrors, or in pools and fountains. I told you that it was difficult, that I could only read one eye at a time, and that I read them backward, slowly, as such tasks will go. I told you stories from the creases of my left eyelid, and my right. I told you all the stories that I could read in those mirrors and fountains and pools. I have told them all. All that remains now are the tales which begin on one eye and end on another, which cross creases and lashes and twist over each other—these tales I do not know, I cannot tell. I cannot close my eyes and yet still read them in the water, or in the glass. They are hidden from me.”

  The boy opened his mouth, and closed it again. “But I want to hear more!” he cried.

  The girl smiled, a long, slow smile he had never seen before. “Will you tell me a story, my prince? Will you read from my closed eyes and let me rest my throat, let me hear the last things which are written upon me?”

  “But… I can’t do it. I can’t tell them the way you can. I’m not like you, I don’t know how to tell a tale, I don’t know how to speak in all those voices.”

  “It is all there, already. Please. I want to hear them. I want to know what is waiting on my skin, waiting to be told, waiting to be heard. I have told you so many things—tell me a story, if you are my friend.”

  The boy was blushing furiously. By the firelight he laid out his own cloak on the stiff, ice-scrimmed snow, and gave the girl a tiny vial of orangewine and a slice of hippopotamus, which they agreed was not entirely pleasant, and tasted something like chewed mud and river-water with a honey glaze. Finally, the boy leaned forward, until their noses were almost touching. He could see, as once before, the lines and letters of her eyes, and the closer he looked into the black, the more the words swam up to greet him, submerged alphabets and sigils. He became dizzy; he closed his own eyes, and righted himself like a little ship tossed on a violent ocean. He looked again, and the letters were still there, floating, serene. His voice was high and quavering as he began, unsure and frightened to his marrow to appear foolish before the girl.

  “On a blasted plain where the Stars do not look there blew hot winds like bellow-gusts, and scrub sage crawled over white rock.” He read slowly, as if first learning his letters. “On this plain hung a great iron cage in a great iron frame, and the wind shrieked through it like a woman cut open on a slab…”

  THE TALE

  OF THE WASTE

  THE MOON WAS A MOUSE SKULL IN THE SKY. THE blue of the air was dense and deep, the color of the ocean floor, yet it blazed with heat, and golden stones quavered against the horizon. Three long shadows were cast on the thirsty earth, whose dark cracks forked out in all directions like vines searching for the smallest trickle of water. Three long shadows lay black and sere on that fractured desert. The iron cage threw its bars down to the dirt in disgust. There it met the curious hadow-shapes of a woman and a leopard sitting with her ears bent forward, alert and interested. The woman held her cat on a long silver leash which swung back and forth in the wind. She was wrapped head to foot in heavy black veils that whipped and billowed behind her—only her eyes were naked to the air, yellow as withered lemons, her irises sickly red.

  The cage was filled with smoke.

  It blew out of wrought bars that had been bent into a crosshatched orb hanging by a chain thicker than a man’s waist from its frame. Black and acrid and stinging, it whorled and eddied and spun, caught and caustic. Within the smoke flashed two red-orange eyes, baleful and fringed in fiery lashes, tipped in fiery brows. The circuit of smoke snapped its tail around twice and a body rose partway over the soot, like a mermaid peering through her own scaly tail. Her face was full of fire, and her hair was the root of that exhalation of smoke—it blew and curled away from her dark and flaming features. But the smoke came too from below her waist, for her flesh ended there very much as a mermaid’s will, and nothing but blackness and red sparks striking snaked out where her legs might have been. She was naked, humiliated, her breasts tipped in angry fire, her navel a glowering, ugly ruby, everything that might once have been hers piled up beneath the cage like a funeral offering.

  The two women watched each other for some time, like two vultures on a long and lonely branch. The leopard did not stir, except for the occasional wave of her tail across the blighted ground.

  Finally, the leopard spoke.

  “Who has put you here, friend Djinn?”

  The creature thrashed her smoke again, obscuring her blazing eyes. The moon was setting behind her, dry and transparent against the blue, as if it too had been sucked dry.

  “That’s a nice trick,” she hissed, her voice like the snapping of green branches as they first catch flame. “Doesn’t the tall one talk?”

  The leopard yawned, her whiskers flaring, her pink tongue lolling out before the great cat remembered to put it back.

  “Her throat is afflicted, if you’ll pardon her. Her name is Ruin, and I am Rend, and we travel together because it suits us to do so. We did not know that these parched wastes were a prison. We did not expect to find such a thing here.”

  A tendril of smoke unspooled out of the cage toward the ve
iled woman in something like the shape of a slender hand, three of the fingers circled in flame like a rich woman’s rings.

  “Please!” cried the leopard. “Do not touch her, you mustn’t touch her.”

  Ruin’s tired eyes were soft and sorry, and she raised a hand out of her black robe by way of explanation. It was withered nearly to the bone, the skin as cracked and peeling as the desert, the nails blackened and split. Pieces of her skin were slowly stripping away, blowing back from her crooked fingers in the hot air. She folded her veils over the hand again and looked down in shame. The smoke recoiled and the Djinn drew it back into the hanging cage.

  “We would share our food, if you give us reason to pity you, and our water, which is more precious than amber, but you mustn’t touch my lady. She is not well.” The cat looked wretched, her eyes black and round, her spotted fur twitching under the predations of sand mites.

  The Djinn considered, her eyes narrowing. She rubbed her nose with one painted hand—for the palms of her hands were stippled in glowing patterns, swirling in and in on themselves, the incandescent ink tracing scarlet loops where the lines of her hands might have been, if she had any.

  “I am Scald,” she said at last, “and across six seas and nine deserts, I was one of the three Queens of Kash, and I had a crown of embers.”

  Rend pawed the soil. “Why are you caged, Scald?”

  The Djinn was quiet, her clouds dark and thoughtful. “Across nine seas and six deserts, I laid siege to the city of Ajanabh…”

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE CAGE

  OF IRON

  IN THE CITY OF KASH, THERE ARE SIX PALACES, six Thrones, and six Crowns. Three Queens and three Kings there are, each in their house. I was the Ember-Queen, and my coal-buttressed hall stood at the end of a long boulevard which was lined with Ixora and the Palaces of my sisters, the Tinder-Queen and the Ash-Queen. So too my brothers’ fastholds, the Hearth-King, the Kindling-King, and the King of Flint and Steel. When I call them my brothers and sisters, of course I by no means wish to indicate that they are any relation to me—cut this thought from your heart. Monarchs are members of a wide and varied fraternity, and this is all my connection to them.

  We are the inheritors of the Kingdom of Kashkash, who was the first of the Djinn. He spun all of the rest of us out of the smoke of his beard, and the black curls flowed over the face of the earth. In the sacred fire of his heart we were first conceived, the immaculate flame. His stare burned forests in their shade and caused even human women, icy of heart and eye though they are, to swoon before his majesty. As his wispy children cavorted around him on the plains of the world, he exhorted them to follow him, dancing before them, as he led them into glory and might.

  He told us that we had no need to build cities as the rest scrambled to do, but that cities would build themselves around us, for what man did not need fire? Thus he stood at the center of Shadukiam in the days before it knew that name. The whole of the city swirled up around him, all those roses, all those diamonds! Djinn followed him wherever he bade, into that glittering city and out again, and still his name is holy among us, incandescent, radiant. He was beautiful. He was loved, for in his beard were wonders lesser Djinn could not dream of, lamps and jewels and scrolls of flame and cloud, which he would pluck from his body and distribute like bread. He danced on the minaret tips of our first real homes and cried poetry to the blood-riddled sunsets, cried ho! For the thousand-year holocaust of the Djinn! And far below the rabble screamed their adoration. Of how many Kings in those days did Kashkash grant the wishes? How many maidenheads did he burn clear through? We named this city for him, and even human virgins anoint their foreheads with ashes in mourning, all these centuries hence.

  This is what we tell to the world, with horns of brass and carnelian. So I was told; so I believed while I grew, a child in the city of Kash, wishing for golden bells for my belt and sweet honey for my supper. Thus we have told the world for century upon century. In my own time, my smoke-hair snaked and spiraled so long and so far that I had to carry it at my hips in two baskets of woven silver, and the other children laughed at me, until their parents admonished them—for such a mark meant that I would be Queen, just as the great beard of Kashkash marked him as King. I was taken away from my little house, taking with me three sets of golden spoons and a very nice samovar, and was initiated into the strange world of royalty. I was ten years of age, but among my people this is a respectable middle age. We do not age, but we die out rather more quickly than other folk. We flash and spark and die. Those who are pressed by seals and trickery into lamps and suchlike live longer, nigh on forever, as a coal will live if not struck alight. And as a coal is not alive, so a Djinn confined is not. This is the choice we make: Once in the open air and burning, ah, we never last long. Thus at ten I was no child—but my crown was young as a weeping orphan without a breast.

  The Ash-Queen and the Hearth-King, Kohinoor and Khaamil, escorted me into the Alcazar of Embers, each of them carrying one of my baskets. I thought they were terrifying and beautiful, with burning gems set into their black skin and burning gold rings in their noses. Kohinoor was tall and thin as a hermit, all black smoke without a single spark in her, while Khaamil was smaller and fatter, lovely folds of flaming skin undulating, cradling a huge topaz in his navel. He had but one golden eye, the flame in it dancing like a dervish. The other socket was empty and burned black.

  In the center of a red tile floor lay a banked and glowing bowl of coals, the symbols of my office. The Queen sat me down on a purple cushion—I balanced gingerly on my smoke, so as not to burn the tassels. She spoke firmly and kindly as she was able, being a woman of no small position, and too busy to care for an upstart new Queen. They had both of them been fonder of the old Queen, who had simply gone up in flames at a family dinner the previous winter, to the mild surprise of all present.

  “Now, young one,” said Kohinoor, firmly putting me in my place, for she was nearly fifteen, a daunting age, “it is not appropriate that you should reign and remain ignorant of our history. Thus it is our duty to tell you how things were in the old world, and how they came to be. However, we have a luncheon appointment with the Kindling-King, and he is serving blackened basilisk, which is our favorite, so kindly pay attention so that we are not forced to repeat ourselves…”

  THE TALE OF

  THE FIRST DJINN

  NO DOUBT YOU VENERATE KASHKASH AS YOUR grandfather and best-loved household god. Stop. At this very moment.

  It is necessary for the glorification of the Djinn, and also so that we may not be endlessly ensorcelled into various kitchen items for the purpose of granting the wishes of fishmongers’ daughters, that the name of Kashkash be adored and feared. Do not rub that lamp, darling, lest Kashkash leap out and swallow you whole! Do not clack your spoons together, sweetling! Kashkash will come billowing out of the handles and gobble you up! It is, however, not sensible to expect others to adore and fear what we do not, and so the secret history of the smoke-fiends is known only to a select few, of which you are now a member. It keeps the Djinn in terror of their monarchs, and the world in terror of the Djinn.

  Shut your mouth, dear, it does not do to attract moths.

  Kashkash was not the first Djinn—that poor, benighted soul has no name that any may recall, being the unwanted child of the fires that the Stars conflagrated when they walked through the first lands of the world. Every scorched thing spat out a Djinn like the pit in a cherry, and we had to find our way, even though we burned and burned and could not cool. We are nothing but charred, forgotten children whose birth was utterly unnoticed. I am a child of the Djinn who rose up from the scalded grasses. Khaamil is the child of the seared winds. The Queens kept their counsel and their records, though Kashkash wished all knowledge of our origin destroyed in the fire of his name. Now that you are one of us, we shall have to look into your pedigree. Kashkash was not the first, then, though many might now say he was. For it is not
only the common Djinn who pray in the name of Kashkash, but many preening priests and men of rank who know the truth in their boiling hearts, but take delight in telling the tale of a Djinn like Kashkash, who could have any woman, destroy any man.

  Kashkash was indeed powerful, and fashioned his smoke into waving, fiery shapes to terrify us in our infancy, colored as no other Djinn had done, in blue and green and violet. To see him was extraordinary, they say, and we do not argue, at least in this. Around his head waved these airy flames, proud and strutting, proud and vain. So too is it true that he was present in the early days of the city which would come to be called Shadukiam. He dragged his flaming heel around the perimeter of that dung-spattered clearing that could hardly be called a shantytown in those days, when the long boulevard on which your Alcazar sits was nothing but a red dust-run. The place which Kashkash marked out in the mud was quickly dwarfed by the endless growing roads and markets of the Rose City. We built nothing, as he instructed us, but stole and wished our first settlement into life. Kashkash told us that no one of the Djinn could wish as he could, and thus wishing which he did not approve was outlawed. The great talent of the Djinn is in wishing, and of it we made a science after he passed from the world, though it has, in its turn, passed out of its keenest use since children have ceased trapping us in lamps and spoons. In those days we were young, we could not do it very well, but he could do little better: He wished for a palace of cedar and horn, and up rose the ramshackle towers of the Quarter. But oh! What he promised us! When he learned better, learned more! When he had made enough Kings his slaves, what he would build us then! How long he could stretch our lives—we would no longer be candles, briefly lit and briefly snuffed. We would be the flame of ten thousand generations!

  He did learn, he did become a prodigy of wishes, but never to us were his talents bent. He loved better anything that was flesh and not smoke—the smallest of these things seemed to him more beautiful than we.