by Jane Yolen
So I am no-name, son of no-bird, pulled from the waters of the sea north and east of Delos, too far for swimming, my only sail the feather in my hand.
The chief of the fishermen who rescued me was a morose man called Talos who would have spoken more had he no tongue at all. But he was a good man, for all that he was silent. He gave me advice but once, and had I listened then, I would not be here now, in a cold, dark cavern listening to voices from my remembered past and fearing the rising of the sun.
When Talos plucked me from the water, he wrung me out with hands that were horned from work. He made no comment at all about my own hands, whose softness the water-wrinkles could not disguise. He brought me home to his childless wife. She spread honey balm on my burns, for my back and right side were seared as if I had been drawn from the flames instead of from the sea. The puckered scars along my side are still testimony to that fire. Talos was convinced I had come from the wreckage of a burning ship, though no sails or spars were ever found. But the only fire I could recall was red and round as the sun.
Of fire and water was I made, Talos’ wife said. Her tongue ran before her thoughts always. She spoke twice, once for herself and once for her speechless husband. “Of sun and sea, my only child,” she would say, fondly stroking my wine-dark hair, touching the feather I kept pinned to my chiton. “Bird–child. A gift of the sky, a gift from the sea.”
So I stayed with them. Indeed, where else could I—still a boy—go? And they were content. Except for the scar seaming my side, I was thought handsome. And my fingers were clever with memories of their own. They could make things of which I had no conscious knowledge: miniature buildings of strange design, with passages that turned back upon themselves; a mechanical bull—man that could move about and roar when wound with a hand-carved key.
“Fingers from the gods,” Talos’ wife said. “Such fingers. Your father must have been Hephaestus, though you have Apollo’s face.” And she added god after god to my siring, a litany that comforted her until Talos’ warning grunt stemmed the rising tide of her words.
At last my good looks and my clever fingers brought me to the attention of the local lord. I, the nameless one, the child of sun and sea and sky. That lord was called Circinus. He had many slaves, and many servants, but only one daughter, Perdix.
She was an ox-eyed beauty, with a long neck. Her slim, boyish body and her straight, narrow nose reminded me somehow of my time before the waves, though I could not quite say how. Her name was sighed from every man’s lips, but no one dared speak it aloud.
Lord Circinus asked for my services and, reluctantly, Talos and his wife let me go. He merely nodded a slow acceptance. She wept all over my shoulder before I left, a second drowning. But I, eager to show Lord Circinus my skills, paid them scant attention.
It was then that Talos unlocked his few words for me.
“Do not fly too high, my son,” he said. And, like his wife, repeated himself: “Do not fly too high.”
He meant Perdix, of course, for he had seen my eyes on her. But I was just newly conscious of my body’s desires. I could not—did not—listen.
That was how I came into Lord Circinus’ household, bringing nothing but the clothes I wore, the feather of my past, and the strange talent that lived in my hands. In Lord Circinus’ house, I was given a sleeping room and a workroom, and leave to set the pattern of my days.
Work was my joy and my excuse. I began simply, making clay-headed dolls with wooden trunks and jointed limbs, testing out the tools that Circinus gave me. But soon I moved away from such childish things, and constructed a dancing floor of such intricately mazed panels of wood that I was rewarded with a pocket of gold.
I never looked boldly upon the lady Perdix. It was not my place. But I glanced sideways, from the corners of my eyes. And somehow she must have known. For it was not long before she found my workroom and came to tease me with her boy’s body and quick tongue. Like my stepfather Talos, I had no magic in my answers, only in my fingers, and Perdix always laughed at me twice: once for my slow speech and once for the quick flush that burned my cheeks after each exchange.
I recall the first time she came upon me, as I worked on a mechanical bird that could fly in short bursts toward the sun. She entered the workroom and stood by my side watching for a while. Then she put her right hand over mine. I could feel the heat from her hand burn me, all the way up my arm, though this burning left no visible scar.
“My lady,” I said. So I had been instructed to address her. She was a year younger than I. “It is said that a woman should wait upon a man’s moves.”
“If that were so,” she answered swiftly, “all women would be called Penelope. But I would have woven a different ending to that particular tale.” She laughed. “Too much waiting, without an eye upon her, makes a maid mad.”
Her wordy cleverness confounded me and I blushed. But she lifted her hand from mine and, still laughing, left the room.
It was a week before she returned. I did not even hear her enter, but when I turned around she was sitting on the floor with her skirts rolled halfway up her thighs. Her tanned legs flashed unmistakable signals at me that I dared not answer.
“Do you think it better to wait for a god or wait upon a man?” she asked, as if a week had not come between her last words and these.
I mumbled something about a man having but one form and a god many, and concluded lamely that perhaps, then, waiting for a god would be more interesting.
“Oh, yes,” she said, “many girls have waited for a god to come. But not I. Men can be made gods, you know.”
I did not know, and confessed it.
“My cousin Danaë,” she said, “said that great Zeus had come into her lap in a shower of gold. But I suspect it was a more mundane lover. After all, it has happened many times before that a man has showered gold into a girl’s skirts and she opens her legs to him. That does not make him a god, or his coming gold.” She laughed that familiar low laugh and added under her breath, “Cousin Danaë always did have a quick answer for her mistakes.”
“Like you, my lady?” I asked.
She answered me with a smile and stood up slowly. As I watched, she walked toward me, stopping only inches away. I could scarcely breathe. She took the feather off the workbench where it lay among my tools and ran it down my chest. I was dressed only in a linen loincloth, my chiton set aside, for it was summer and very hot.
I must have sighed. I know I bit my lip. And then she dropped the feather and it fluttered slowly to the floor. She used her fingers in the feather’s place, and they were infinitely more knowing than my own. They found the pattern of my scar and traced it slowly, as a blind child traces the raised fable on a vase.
I stepped through the last bit of space between us and put my arms around her, as if I were fitting the last piece of puzzle into a maze. For a moment we stood as still as any frieze. Then she pushed me backward and I tumbled down. But I held on to her, and she fell on top of me, fitting her mouth to mine.
Perdix came to my room that night, and the next I went to hers. And she made me a god. And so it continued night after night, a pattern as complicated as any I could devise, and as simple, too. I could not conceive of it ending.
But end it did.
One night she did not tap lightly at my door and slip in, a shadow in a night of shadows. I thought perhaps her moon time had come, until the next morning in the hallway near my workroom when I saw her whisper into the ear of a new slave. He had skin almost as dark as the wings of the bittern, and wild black hair. His nostrils flared like a beast’s. Perdix placed her hand on his shoulder and turned him to face me. When I flushed with anger and with pain, they both laughed, he taking his cue from her, a scant beat behind.
Night could not come fast enough to hide my shame. I lay on my couch and thought I slept. A dream voice from the labyrinth that is my past cried out to me, in dark and brutish tones. I rose, not knowing I rose, and took my carving knife in hand. Wrapped only in night’s
cloak, the feather stuck in my hair, I crept down the corridors of the house.
I sniffed the still air. I listened for every sound. And then I heard it truly—the monster from my dream, agonizing over its meal. It screamed and moaned and panted and wept, but the tears that fell from its bullish head were as red as human blood.
I saw it, I tell you, in her room crouched over her, devouring my lady, my lost Perdix. My knife was ready, and I fell upon its back, black Minotaur of my devising. But it slid from the bed and melted away in the darkness, and my blade found her waiting heart instead.
She made no sound above a sigh.
My clever fingers, so nimble, so fast, could not hold the wound together, could not seam it closed. She seemed to be leaking away through my clumsy hands.
Then I heard a rush of wings, as if her soul had flown from the room. And I knew I had to fly after her and fetch her back before she left this world forever. So I took the feather from my hair and, dipping it into the red ocean of her life, printed great bloody wings—feathered tracings—along my shoulders and down my arms. And I flew high, high after her and fell into the bright, searing light of dawn.
When they found me in the morning, by her bedside, crouched naked by her corpse, scarred with her blood, they took me, all unprotesting, to Lord Circinus. He had me thrown into this dark cave.
Tomorrow, before the sun comes again, I will be brought from this place and tied to a post sunk in the sand.
Oh, the cleverness of it, the cleverness! It might have been devised by my own little darling, my Perdix, for her father never had her wit. The post is at a place beyond the high-water mark and I will be bound to it at the ebb. All morning my father the sun will burn me. And my father the rising tide will melt the red feathers of blood that decorate my chest and arms and side. And I will watch myself go back into the waters from which I was first pulled, nameless but alive.
Of fire and water I came, by fire and water I return. Talos was right. I flew too high. Truly there is no second fooling of the Fates.
The Moon Ribbon
There was once a plain but good-hearted girl named Sylva whose sole possession was a ribbon her mother had left her. It was a strange ribbon, the color of moonlight, for it had been woven from the gray hairs of her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother before her.
Sylva lived with her widowed father in a great house by the forest’s edge. Once the great house had belonged to her mother, but when she died, it became Sylva’s father’s house to do with as he willed. And what he willed was to live simply and happily with his daughter without thinking of the day to come.
But one day, when there was little enough to live on, and only the great house to recommend him, Sylva’s father married again, a beautiful widow who had two beautiful daughters of her own.
It was a disastrous choice, for no sooner were they wed when it was apparent the woman was mean in spirit and meaner in tongue. She dismissed most of the servants and gave their chores over to Sylva, who followed her orders without complaint. For simply living in her mother’s house with her loving father seemed enough for the girl.
After a bit, however, the old man died in order to have some peace, and the house passed on to the stepmother. Scarcely two days had passed, or maybe three, when the stepmother left off mourning the old man and turned on Sylva. She dismissed the last of the servants without their pay.
“Girl,” she called out, for she never used Sylva’s name, “you will sleep in the kitchen and do the charring.” And from that time on it was so.
Sylva swept the floor and washed and mended the family’s clothing. She sowed and hoed and tended the fields. She ground the wheat and kneaded the bread, and she waited on the others as though she were a servant. But she did not complain.
Yet late at night, when the stepmother and her own two daughters were asleep, Sylva would weep bitterly into her pillow, which was nothing more than an old broom laid in front of the hearth.
One day, when she was cleaning out an old desk, Sylva came upon a hidden drawer she had never seen before. Trembling, she opened the drawer. It was empty except for a silver ribbon with a label attached to it. For Sylva read the card. The Moon Ribbon of Her Mother’s Hair. She took it out and stared at it. And all that she had lost was borne in upon her. She felt the tears start in her eyes, and, so as not to cry, she took the tag off and began to stroke the ribbon with her hand. It was rough and smooth at once, and shone like the rays of the moon.
At that moment her stepsisters came into the room.
“What is that?” asked one. “Is it nice? It is mine.”
“I want it. I saw it first,” cried the other.
The noise brought the stepmother to them. “Show it to me,” she said.
Obediently, Sylva came over and held the ribbon out to her. But when the stepmother picked it up, it looked like no more than strands of gray hair woven together unevenly. It was prickly to the touch.
“Disgusting,” said the stepmother dropping it back into Sylva’s hand. “Throw it out at once.”
“Burn it,” cried one stepsister.
“Bury it,” cried the other.
“Oh, please. It was my mother’s. She left it for me. Please let me keep it,” begged Sylva.
The stepmother looked again at the gray strand. “Very well,” she said with a grim smile. “It suits you.” And she strode out of the room, her daughters behind her.
Now that she had the silver ribbon, Sylva thought her life would be better. But instead it became worse. As if to punish her for speaking out for the ribbon, her sisters were at her to wait on them both day and night. And whereas before she had to sleep by the hearth, she now had to sleep outside with the animals. Yet she did not complain or run away, for she was tied by her memories to her mother’s house.
One night, when the frost was on the grass turning each blade into a silver spear, Sylva threw herself to the ground in tears. And the silver ribbon, which she had tied loosely about her hair, slipped off and lay on the ground before her. She had never seen it in the moonlight. It glittered and shone and seemed to ripple.
Sylva bent over to touch it and her tears fell upon it. Suddenly the ribbon began to grow and change, and as it changed the air was filled with a woman’s soft voice speaking these words:
Silver ribbon, silver hair,
Carry Sylva with great care,
Bring my daughter home.
And there at Sylva’s feet was a silver river that glittered and shone and rippled in the moonlight.
There was neither boat nor bridge, but Sylva did not care. She thought the river would wash away her sorrows. And without a single word, she threw herself in.
But she did not sink. Instead, she floated like a swan and the river bore her on, on past houses and hills, past high places and low. And strange to say, she was not wet at all.
At last she was carried around a great bend in the river and deposited gently on a grassy slope that came right down to the water’s edge. Sylva scrambled up onto the bank and looked about. There was a great meadow of grass so green and still it might have been painted on. At the meadow’s rim, near a dark forest, sat a house that was like and yet not like the one in which Sylva lived.
“Surely someone will be there who can tell me where I am and why I have been brought here,” she thought. So she made her way across the meadow, and only where she stepped down did the grass move. When she moved beyond, the grass sprang back and was the same as before. And though she passed larkspur and meadowsweet, clover and rye, they did not seem like real flowers, for they had no smell at all.
“Am I dreaming?” she wondered, “or am I dead?” But she did not say it out loud, for she was afraid to speak into the silence.
Sylva walked up to the house and hesitated at the door. She feared to knock and yet feared equally not to. As she was deciding, the door opened of itself and she walked in.
She found herself in a large, long, dark hall with a single crystal do
or at the end that emitted a strange glow the color of moonlight. As she walked down the hall, her shoes made no clatter on the polished wood floor. And when she reached the door, she tried to peer through into the room beyond, but the crystal panes merely gave back her own reflection twelve times.
Sylva reached for the doorknob and pulled sharply. The glowing crystal knob came off in her hand. She would have wept then, but anger stayed her; she beat her fist against the door and it suddenly gave way.
Inside was a small room lit only by a fireplace and a round white globe that hung from the ceiling like a pale, wan moon. Before the fireplace stood a tall woman dressed all in white. Her silver-white hair was unbound and cascaded to her knees. Around her neck was a silver ribbon.
“Welcome, my daughter,” she said.
“Are you my mother?” asked Sylva wonderingly, for what little she remembered of her mother, she remembered no one as grand as this.
“I am if you make me so,” came the reply.
“And how do I do that?” asked Sylva.
“Give me your hand.”
As the woman spoke, she seemed to move away, yet she moved not at all. Instead the floor between them moved and cracked apart. Soon they were separated by a great chasm which was so black it seemed to have no bottom.
“I cannot reach,” said Sylva.
“You must try,” the woman replied.
So Sylva clutched the crystal knob to her breast and leaped, but it was too far. As she fell, she heard a woman’s voice speaking from behind her and before her and all about her, warm with praise.
“Well done, my daughter. You are halfway home.”