In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Once while I plowed a near-dead field, I saw a couple clutching a little girl in their arms, and her hardly old enough to walk.

  “Simeon!” they hailed me—for everyone knew me by that time, the Giant Who Stayed.

  “Hello, small folk,” I said warmly, and squatted down so they would not have to crane their necks so much.

  “We are bound for Muireann, where the whale fur thatches the roofs, and the roads are paved with mother-of-pearl.” Their girl giggled and reached up to me—I gave her my pinkie to hold, as big in her arms as the trunk of a tree her own age.

  “I wish you well of it,” I said.

  “This place is dead. There is nothing for us now; our pepper plants withered and died, and there are no corns for our little girl to grind when she is grown. She will spear seals and narwhal instead, and sleep in a bed made of their spiraling horns! We will bounce our grandchildren on knees chilled by snow and sea—won’t that be something!”

  I smiled at them. Ajanabh was so warm and wet, it tended to make one forget what snow was—I only dimly remembered breaking through the frost with a shovel to get the bulbs in back home. They walked off, down toward the harbor where the ships bellied up to the dock every day, and left the city that loved them. Sometimes I imagined I could hear Ajanabh weeping, a poor lady distraught that her babies abandoned her when she grew old and dry.

  Finally, I put my plow aside, and sat on my last field, knees drawn up to my chest, looking at the city. There were no lights in the houses piled up like red beehives, and no sounds of laws being worked out in the streets. No bells tolled out the hours, there being no one to ring them. My city was empty, and so I decided that no one should really mind if I were to take up my residence there. No one could tell me I was too big anymore, and I would sleep under a blanket of spice-smog, as I had once or twice dreamed, snoring after the giant-feasts of home.

  I stepped over the rotted gate, long since claimed by mold and sea air, and into the steep hills and alley-dells of a city which was built up and up, with streets that jackknifed sharply down and diagonal and straight up and any way they pleased, the cobbles being as lawless as anything else in Ajanabh. I walked with my hands in my pockets, sniffing the air, still delicious and dark as ever, save that the sour smell of people had gone, and left only the spices to scent the night. I grinned, my big teeth like a moon above the city. I tried not to step on anything that wasn’t meant to be stepped on—but I had to squeeze, sometimes.

  I thought, again, that I could hear my girl, my city, weeping, lost and lonely.

  “I’m still here, my lady,” I whispered.

  But there was something—there was a sound. It wasn’t my fool head playing games as it does when the plowing is boring and the sun is high. It was high and piercing and sad as anything, like a voice but not a voice. I had never heard anything so beautiful in all my days—and the giantesses can play the bassoon like nothing you’ve known, when the mules are fat and the coconut-wine has a good head on it. I followed the sound, careful not to crush anything too much, up and down the weird maze of streets that makes Ajanabh seem all alley, and finally to the center of the city, a little courtyard all humped up in the middle, with a fountain that has green water shooting about like vines and all manner of vines shooting about like water. It’s got a little figure in the middle of it, too, which I think is supposed to be the Cinnamon-Star all cavorting in the stream, but her eyes fell out a long time ago, and her knees aren’t so good, and I never could tell if she’s got the Bark of Plenty in her hands or some old toys the children stuck in there when they got bored with them.

  In front of the fountain was a lady, and I was six kinds of shamed to see I was wrong, and ten kinds of tickled that I wasn’t the only one who stayed. But she wasn’t like any lady I’d seen before. She had a red dress on, not much more than a slip, and she was dancing—but that wasn’t too odd. Ajanabh never was poor of dancers and singers and that sort. It was her hands, well, her hands and her hair, but without the hands the hair wouldn’t have struck me. She had no fingers at all, but violin bows, fiddle bows, strapped on where her fingers ought to be, and the strips of leather went all around her forearms and up to her shoulders, to keep the bows on tight. Her black hair was stiff as catgut, and she danced so quick and light that it flew out in all directions, long and wide enough that I swear to you that woman was playing her own hair with each hand, five bows together, whipping her head from side to side to change the length, like a fiddler presses on his frets. With bare feet she slapped the cobbles, her toes all bound in copper rings, and the sound of her playing was the sound I had heard, swift and terrible and lovely.

  When she stopped her scales for a moment to oil the bows, I cleared my throat. “I thought you had all gone.”

  The woman looked up, her eyes green as palm leaves under the ecstatic shocks of hair. “Not all,” she said mischievously. “Some of us will never go.”

  I looked at the beehive-houses, and indeed, in some of those round windows, faces peeked out, looking for the violin-girl, wondering why she had stopped her song.

  “My name is Agrafena,” she said, and put her bows very gingerly into my great hand. “I am the song of Ajanabh. I am staying, and so are they.”

  “But who are they?”

  The woman spun around on one heel, sending her hair flying again. “We are those who loved this place enough to hold her hand through death, and watch her come out the other side. We stayed to record her dying, each in our way, painters and poets and calligraphers, singers and dancers and violinists, sculptors and acrobats, jewelers and jugglers, glassblowers, pantomimes, orators, and toy-makers, novelists and layers of mosaics, mask-makers and players of scenes. We stayed. We wrote and painted and chiseled and sang her death, and we have found, now that the crowds have gone, that like a fallen tree, she has enough for us, we mushrooms and mosses, we spiders and glowworms. The dancers tamp down the seeds in our little city gardens, and there are carrots and blackberries enough to feed us. The lion-tamers find little clutches of cattle preposterously easy work, and there is meat enough to fill us. We take empty houses and apartments, parlors and sitting rooms, and there are more than enough—there are few locks in Ajanabh these days. An empty city is a paradise, and here all Vstreychas now end. There is even a wine-maker who stayed to press out the last vintage, the famed cardamom wine which is now ours alone to savor.”

  I hung my head. “Then I am sad, Agrafena, for I stayed, and yet I know no art but the pounding of paprika and the cutting of vanilla beans. I can give nothing to the new Ajanabh, except my bulk, which is not welcome.”

  She turned her head to one side, as if sizing me for a new pair of shoes. “Poor Simeon! Our last giant! But if you are willing, and if you love your city, I know a thing you can do which is harder than any of the little acts we perform in her name.”

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED

  “SHE TOLD ME,” THE GREAT GATE SAID POINTEDLY, “that now that Ajanabh had not so many laws prowling her streets, and not so much wealth with which to throw on armor when needed, sooner or later, folk would come who did not juggle or sing, but carried things bright and sharp, swords and arrows and others besides.” He glared at me with his brass eyes. “She bade me stretch myself as far as I could and lie around my city so that she would be safe. I worried about my skin, as surely these sharp things will be flung at me in the hurly-burly, and I should not make a very good wall then. But she calmed me with her sweet bows and called to her side stonemasons and brass-workers and tanners, and directed them to shore me up on all sides with red rock and brass buckles and leather straps, so that I should be a proper Gate, and safe withal. I went to the outside of my city, and kissing her topmost turrets, bent back my legs as far as I could, and stretched up through my ribs as tall as I could, until my ankles met and my head cast a shadow on the courtyard, and not a few pelicans dropped fish into the
salt sea in surprise at such a sudden mountain in their midst. Then I crossed my arms, and closed up the Gate of Ajanabh, which is who I am now, and not Simeon any longer.”

  I bit my lip. “But if there are only artists inside—”

  “They will all be slaughtered. We have an armorer, an old water rat living in a leaky garret with dozens of empty suits lining his wall—but what are dozens to your assembled horde?” His smile was hard and cruel. “But never you worry about it, you drafty old thing. No sword will pass my fingers, and they will be safe. Ajanabh will provide for them.”

  “I did not want to come,” I muttered sullenly. “No one asked me, they just whisked me here and put a cup of brandy in my hand.”

  “That will hardly make us feel better,” the Gate huffed.

  I turned the flaming rings on my fingers. Something within me longed to see the corkscrewed streets of Ajanabh, longed to hear Agrafena’s bows slide through her hair. I had been Queen only a day and seen nothing at all but my own house. I did not want to put a torch to that place, any more than I had wanted to hear that Kashkash was wicked or that I was only Queen because of my hair.

  Suddenly, I reached out and clutched at the Gate’s massive stone finger, which was like a long temple pillar in my hands. “Let me in!” I begged. “Let me see the city. Perhaps I can convince them to leave. Perhaps if I can find that ridiculous carnelian box, they will take it and go, and be glad to lose no one to a battle.”

  The Gate squinted, his brass eyes crusted with verdigris, suspicious. “How do I know you are not intent on some sabotage? You are a Djinn. I would sooner trust a starving crocodile who wishes to mind my mule than a Djinn.”

  Color and flame flared in my cheeks. “How should I trust a giant not to crush me in his fingers because a fly was buzzing at his ear?” I banked my fires. “But come, you must see that I am young. I was only made Queen yesterday; I know nothing of this place, or this war. Let me in, and I will try to find what they want, and bring it out to them with no bloodshed. If I am lying, I will wish it all back for you, and damn the Khaighal.”

  The Gate frowned, his mouth lines deep and clogged with clay. “I will let you in. For one night. You must be again at my fingertips by dawn or I will not let you out, and you will discover that actors and singers are often forced into rather more unsavory lines of work, and they are not out of practice. No one who lived in Ajanabh-of-old lets their muscles soften for even a moment.” I nodded furiously. “Swear by your wish-wrangling King, swear by Kashkash the bold and his brazen beard, and I will believe you,” he grumbled.

  I could make that promise, but it would mean nothing to me, not anymore, not now. Slowly, I gripped the sides of my silver hip-baskets and said, “I will swear by him, but also by the Cinnamon-Star, and the Snake-Star, and the Seven Sisters.”

  Grudgingly, he nodded, and lifted his forefinger from his middle finger, exposing just enough space for me to gather my smoke and seep through. “Go to the fountain, and find Agrafena. She is always there this time of night, fiddling up the moon. She will take you to a room with rafters so high you will think it is open to the night, and an ivory cage, and a flame like your own.”

  I thanked him and, holding my baskets close, drifted through his fingers and into the red city.

  In the Garden

  THE BOY STOPPED.

  “You’re doing fine,” said the girl warmly. She put out her hands to take his, and opened her eyes. They sparkled in the firelight, and the snow in her hair had melted to dew. “Shall I bring you dinner tonight”—she laughed—“and run to escape my sister?”

  “It feels strange, to speak to you, when I am so used to listening. This is how it is in the stories I knew before you—a beautiful girl sits at the feet of a boy and treasures his every word. But it does not seem right.”

  “This is still my story,” said the girl, drawing away. “My last story. It is not yours simply because it sits in your mouth awhile.”

  “I know! Oh, please do not be angry. I know. And I am afraid. I shall read as slowly as I can. It is your story, and it will take you away from me at the most beautiful part. Just when I want nothing more than to read it forever, it will be over. I know it.”

  She smoothed his hair, but could say nothing. “At least I can rest. I had become so tired, like a little place had opened in me and all of me had fallen out of it.”

  “How can you be so tired by only reading? Are you sick?”

  “No, but that is the way of it. I told you it was my story. Even now you draw it out of me like a fisherman draws a carp from a lake. It thrashes and bucks as it is dragged from the water, but the sun on its scales is so golden!”

  The boy’s eyes widened, and he looked at her again, how flushed her cheeks in the cold, how thin her arms, how the black of her eyes seemed to burn like pitch. He was a little frightened of her, and she was so strange—he had almost forgotten how strange she had seemed to him in the beginning, how strange she was still, and how unlike any of the girls whose black hair he had chased around the trunks of trees.

  “Are you tired now? Would you like me to leave you?” he whispered.

  And she came back to him, her face warm and wide and winsome as an eager cat. “No, please. I want to hear more. I want to hear how Scald found the city of artists. How odd it feels to not know what happens next!”

  He laughed ruefully and passed his braceleted hand over her eyes, closing them gently. The letters danced. He read, slowly as ever, his uncertain voice sounding in the snow like a hare’s footprints.

  “I followed the Ajan streets as I was told, and they were steeper and sharper and narrower even than I had imagined. But they whirled inexorably toward a center, and the moon was not even above the brow-ridge of the Gate before I found the fountain, and the dancing, fingerless maid…”

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED

  SHE WAS YOUNGER THAN I HAD THOUGHT—SHE must have been little more than a girl when Simeon had first found her. She was full-grown and then some now, just over the crest of life, laughing lines at her eyes and a deep, weathered color to her brown skin. She played with both hands upon her stiff, wiry hair and her red slip snapped crisply around her as she plied her practiced steps. The song was not the dirge for a city that the Gate had heard, but something sly and serpentine, staccato and sure, something that wound and writhed, something knowing, something hidden to all but her. I waited; I would not interrupt.

  She finally stopped, bent at the waist, her foot pointed and poised in the air. Without moving any other muscle so much as a twitch, she turned her head to the side and winked at me. The Gate was wrong—her eyes were far greener than palms, glittering with a weakly burning light I thought I recognized—but no, it was not possible. She looked me up and down, and a secretive smile unfolded on her lovely face.

  “You’re Djinn!” I cried, pointing like an accusing child. “No wonder that hair can play! How do you get it to stiffen like that?”

  Agrafena laughed, a gravelly sound like coals raked over. “No more than a quarter, I’m afraid, and on the paternal side—more’s the pity.” Her eyes flashed their dim fire at me. “We do not all lie on silk cushions in the vaults of Kash, you know. And like me, the hair is only a quarter smoke. Enough to be reasonable when I treat it nicely.”

  “But how? It is absolutely forbidden to mate with humans! After Kashkash died they forced us to agree to it—so many were crushed into spoons and lamps that day! There were too many ruined maids and inoperable boys for them to countenance. There has not been a half-breed for centuries! Longer!”

  “Thank you for using such a generous word for me. But as I said, I am not half-anything, I am a solid and smoky quarter-breed, and if you wish to arrest someone, you shall have to dig up my grandparents, and I am sure they would be very cross about it.”

  I did not know what to say. She was an impossibility. At home she would be burne
d immediately and that part of her which was inflammable sunk to the bottom of the sea. Such was the contract the Khaighal witnessed; such was the contract men made us sign with regard to their prettiest children. I finally settled on the simplest thing I could summon up.

  “The Gate sent me,” I said.

  “Simeon? It will be time for his mules soon, I should think. Is he asking you to call him Ajanabh yet? Silly old farmer, but a better soul you never knew.”

  “I am from the army outside. The army of Kings and Queens that is waiting to flatten this place.”

  Agrafena’s face darkened, and even a quarter-Djinn can go very dark. “Yes, I know which one you mean,” she rumbled.

  “I came within the walls to find what my siblings seek: a little carnelian casket, no larger than my arm.”

  “Your siblings?”

  I drew my smoke up and the jewels of my waist flashed. “I am the Ember-Queen.”

  Agrafena just laughed and scratched her scalp. “And what is in this box?”

  “I… I don’t know.”

  “Well, the Queenship of Kash is not what it used to be.”

  “I have been Queen for a single day!” I protested. “They tell me nothing! I was lucky to learn there was a box at all!”

  “Well enough, well enough. I have no idea where such a thing might be. I have seen nothing of the sort—carnelian is common to your country, not ours.”

  “The Gate—Simeon—told me you would take me to a tall room, and an ivory cage, and a flame like mine.”

  Her eyebrows arched. “Did he now? Well, I suppose I know what he means. I doubt you’ll find your box there, though. More likely bird droppings and an earful of prattle.”

  “Nevertheless.”