by Tori Truslow
“Seems you got into yours yourself—”
“—but we can go, paint ourselves new! Look, the city’s growing festival fruits.” He held them up, ripe, split, oozing gold and silver paste. As if in answer, the decayed walls put out new shoots, thick and thorny.
“And my house is growing brambles to keep me in. If I climb out they’ll tear my face, and who’ll want me then?”
He swore he would—if she wanted him—and she pulled herself up to crouch on the windowsill, and took a wide look at the night, and jumped through the thickening stems. Bue fell as he tried to catch her, fell still-grinning to the deck. Oh, but don’t be so quick to grin with him—
Wyrisa looked at him, and her face was blotted with a mark like a lizard, petal-scales and claws of thorn, curling from jaw to forehead along the left curve of her skull.
“How do you like my real face?” she said, and finished her earlier song:
“Mother’s gone to the forest,
Hush-oh sleep,
Or the crow will eat your eyes
The snake your insides
Hush-oh sleep!
And she will bring you branches
From a ghost-fed tree,
To frame your cursed face sweet.
Hush-oh, sleep.
“Boughs from a hundred trees to make my room, a hundred haunt-gifts, and the best of all to make the window. A ghost so fixed on beauty that it cast faces on anyone who’d stand in its shade, lovelier than any living thing. That ghost’s pale shadow, you loved; not me.”
“But your eyes,” said Bue, looking at her, at the life that bloomed in place of those polished black stars. “They’re just like eyes!”
She laughed. “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard said. And my bad-luck mark—aren’t you scared?”
“Haven’t I told you?” Bue said. “I’m lucky enough for two.”
Very well, then: be quick to grin with him, as you do for heroes full of luck and pluck. We could leave them there—only the moon was high and the night was big and the drums were calling over the waters. And so, let’s follow them.
“To the festival?”
“To the festival.” She jutted her face forward, and Bue painted her like a boy hero from a masked play, then pulled her up to the narrow sidewalk. “Go on,” he whispered to the boat. “Go celebrate however boats do.” Then they sidled around the corner to the next canal, where they saw the tail of a great crowd, boats and bank-walkers, winding into the thick of the city.
They followed the fattening crowd to a lantern-starred isle strewn with sand and straw, where Kam’s tall shell-studded temple stood. The air was full of swelter and balm, the compound crammed with entertainers and market stalls. “What’s this?” said Wyrisa, as Bue bought the hottest, sweetest, stickiest items from every stand to pile into her hands.
“This?” Bue looked to the great tent of white paper that stood, like a giant’s lantern, at the heart of the temple courtyard. “It must be a shadow-show! Let’s see it!”
“Not more shadows,” said Wyrisa, but Bue tugged at her hand.
“These aren’t your haunt-shadows. Just puppets and light.”
“Ah!” cried Wyrisa as they ducked inside. “So bright!” She shied her eyes from the tent’s core, not a wooden pole but a column of lamps like a dazzling fish-spine, going up, up, up to the slatted ceiling. All was still, the paper-wrapped space holding its breath.
Everyone in Salt-Plums knows the story played in that place, but I’ll tell it to you, and forgive my words—poor shadows of shadows!—for not getting close to the wonder of it. First comes the colorful shade-parade of acrobatic tigers, serpents, bulls, peacocks, chased by the long-tongued storyteller who calls to them to stop and see the tale: The Wandering Lovers, or How Kam Married Theirself.
“But where’s the puppeteer?” said Wyrisa.
Where indeed? There was only streaming light and no place for a puppet-man to hide, though all could hear his chanting. Musicians dangled their legs over the slats above, but the shadows could not be flung from up there. The dancing silhouettes seemed part of the tent-wall itself.
Were even temples now turning to haunt-tricks to awe the crowds? No, Bue thought, it must be Kam’s magic, holy and joyful!
Now the story unfolds: here is Kam the tiny god, performing small kindnesses where it can. Here, a princess who stepped out to see a little, only a little, of the world but fell so in love with walking that she could not stop. Here, a prince who fled his father, a wicked sorcerer-king. See them journeying from opposite directions, see them reach the Town Where Salt-Plums Grow, where instead of ever onwards, the wanderer is drawn ever inwards. Shadow-houses and filmy trees flicker and twist, light rippling like water between them.
See Kam the tiny god meet with a hundred little mishaps. It tries to help a fisherman but tumbles into the water. See the shadow-fish leap! Kam is pulled out by a fisher girl (our princess in disguise, of course); the god promises her a favor. Oh! she gestures. See her thoughts: a man kept as a demon’s slave (isn’t he that same exiled prince?). The fisher girl would rescue him if she could leave her duties for just a day. So Kam splits itself in two: one half dons the princess’s face and takes her place, the other puts on the prince’s shape and stays with the demon while the lovers make their escape.
Now, with them safely away, prince-shaped Kam challenges the demon: who can produce the most astonishing thing from this locked cupboard? The demon brings forth a man who breaths out full-grown lions, lions with vines for manes, vines whose fruits burst into stars that float up to the sky. The god nods and takes its turn, opens the cupboard to reveal itself—theirself—split twice more into the shape of the new-married couple. The demon’s mouth stretches so wide in surprise that it snaps back, envelops his body, and he’s gone.
Now see Kam the great god, stooped double to fit on the walls, dancing the year round. For a season she is the princess with her fish-basket. For another, he is the runaway prince. And for the final season the pair united in one form, the god male and female.
And now it’s the heart of summer, the day when Kam makes that crossing again, and all the revelers cross in turn. Perhaps just for the day—morning after, many will cross back to being sons or daughters, wives or husbands, but others will stay. And there are those who don’t call themselves men or women in any month, who dance along today’s canal-banks with everyone else, dance in perfection.
For summer has come. And summer mingles all things.
* * *
See the lovers, new light on their gilded faces.
See the wide deep street, turned by the sun to burning silver.
Hear the drums, the bells, reverberating over the water. But hear, too, the low melody hiding in the air, hiding with teeth and tails in it. “My room,” Wyrisa whispered. “It’s somewhere near.”
“Forget it,” said Bue. “That ghost-eaten thing, it’ll be dead by evening.”
And so they stepped over the threshold of this day that stretched long and lovely as a shining lake before them.
But sharp and secret things lie under lovely pools.
See the thin house peering from a thin alley, dripping the dust of its walls to the muddy ground.
* * *
The procession wound all round the canals, faces flashing bright. Wyrisa and Bue followed on sidewalks and over bridges and, as the day ripened and burned off the shallowest streets, along the cracked mud and slime. A summer novelty, to walk on the canal beds rather than skim above, among the year’s inventory of lost and sunken things. They saw drowned toys, trinkets and animals’ bones. They saw a stranded Carnival boat of young boys with painted ladies’ faces, striking parody poses, all but one making themselves giddy laughing at each others’ antics. The last of their number simply peered at her new reflection in a puddle and smiled; her friends didn’t laugh at her.
They came to the Market Square, where the water was still deep, and saw a floating stage, where the mask-features of the danc
ers flashed from prince to princess to both to entirely other with each flick of their fans. They watched, delighted, from a platform under a heaped block of shophouses, swinging feet above the flower-starred water.
“My lullabies never told me there were so many other ways to be,” Wyrisa said.
“Most days, there aren’t. Kam’s religion is young, but the way their story-chanters have it, there were once more than a hundred genders—you can tell from old stories, they say, whispered histories, and from the shape of our language—but the city merchant-princes boiled them down to two. All the rest get squeezed into this one festival. And we should squeeze them back out. Or, that’s what some of Kam’s followers say.”
“Wear ourselves however we like, whatever the season?”
“Yes.”
“Well, get this face you’ve painted off me then, and let me do my own.”
So Bue wiped Wyrisa’s cheeks clear. Under her fingers, the lizard-mark was warm as any other skin, warm and still.
They said nothing, only saw each other brimming with light and shade both. And Bue did not see the thing that thrashed across the square: a rough-hewn canoe with a crocodile’s tail, and Jerrin scowling atop it, face unpainted, eyes searching the crowds.
But Jerrin saw Bue and stopped sharply under the platform. “What have you done with my boat?” he yelled up. “Where’s my bride?”
Bue looked at Wyrisa, who turned her face away. Of course, Jerrin could not recognize her without her window-face. What to say?
Before Bue could think up a story, Jerrin yanked her by the ankle to the churning craft. Hitting the wood and twisting to look back, Bue saw that the old rotted house had somehow crawled in among the jumbly tower of shops. There was a flash in its triumphant window: Wyrisa’s foot, glassy and golden, vanishing inside. Had it swallowed her up, or had she fled there?”
“Wait—!” Bue called.
The canoe shot away, ghost-fast.
* * *
Now, Wyrisa saw Bue snatched away, but all she could hear was wood creaking like sharp musical strings behind her: eat your insides, it rang. Had she ever thought she would escape that place? Oh, they had beaten it once. Oh, but it was so empty, so waiting.
She turned to face it, and the lizard-marked side of her face twitched cold. Then she went, as she had known all along she would, climbing into the waiting shell of her room, where old blue shadows lay on the floor like drifted ashes. Canal-light came through slack-mouthed gaps in the walls, dancing up over the beams. Pulse of silver. New season, new world, how strange and bright! How to snatch it back, and catch Bue again too?
Hush-oh, stay inside, the pooled shadows breathed. The shadows that had loved her. Or the world will eat your heart. The shadows that had told her she could be a girl or a ghost, nothing more.
Hide safe until it’s time.
Disguise, came the thought. My love is fond of faces.
On her dressing table were pearl-tipped hairpins, bright brooches, tiny jeweled scissors. Wyrisa scooped them up, went to her window, drove the scissors under a carved bird’s back, and worked, how she worked! She used her long hard nails and sang to drown out the whimper of the walls as she filled her fingers with splinters, as she bled.
The wood under her hands pulsed and cried like a living thing, a murdered thing. She shook her head against her own tears, for the place that had cradled her; for the window that had given her the golden skin of the moon. Outside, below, the Carnival twirled on into the afternoon; bright masks as far as the eye could see. None saw her.
Wrench. Bleed. Carve. With a cry of savage joy, at last, she flung the bird into the air. And it flew! Lopsided and wooden, buoyed with purpose, it flew.
* * *
Have you ever waited alone for a lover as the light goes out of the world? It can make you sick, and how much more so when your blood is still running and your home cooling about you like a corpse? Wyrisa saw the street drying up and slowly lengthening, all the trees along its banks putting out clouds of tiny flowers to hide the retreating city in white. She heard the laughter and life of the day recede into the distance. But she waited.
And Bue came in the dark, as the tide began to trickle back. Swinging a bundle of dry white flowers, wearing thin wedding garlands.
“Why are you wearing those?” cried Wyrisa. “Where’s my bird?”
And this is what Bue told her:
* * *
Your bird! Afraid I’ve lost your bird—but I’m getting this all backwards. I’ll try to tell it right.
Will you come down? Ah, don’t look like that! I know it’s late, but did you think I’d find you quick? I had to get away from Jerrin first, and then everything was swallowed up in summer smoke and dust!
You should have seen his face, his fury! He whisked me off on that cursed crocodile-boat—I didn’t ask where he’d got that from—back to the gardens, raging at me all the way:
“Is this how you repay my friendship? I woke this morning and thought, where’s the boat gone?” he said “I feared for you at first, ha! What if the boat caught the fish-trap, I thought, what if it’s taken Bue off and eaten him?
“Then other thoughts crept up on me—perhaps you’d given up your task, too scared to see it through, and you call yourself a haunt-smith! Where would you go? I went to your village, all the way, to all that mud and gloom! I’m looking for a lad called Bue, I said. Trap-maker, cocky, clever with death. Bue’s a girl, an old grumbly man said, my neighbor’s bad-luck daughter. Someone scolded him then, for speaking ill of one of their own, and for naming someone’s sex on Crossing-day.
“Well, I came back in a bleak haze, but my luck turned on the Market Square. I’ve got you, and you can be my wife, for I’ve still a bet to win.”
I felt what he meant about a haze. The air was all heat and haunting and bells and dreams and dead houses and the taste of smoke and splitting fruit. I was off floating, far from myself, had to get back, how to get back? I thought you’d abandoned me, and I still couldn’t think of anything else.
Jerrin started up talking again, but I stared without hearing until he dashed canal-water in my face. “That’s better,” he said, as my make-up dripped away. So angry, he was, but something lost about him too.
“You’re a fool, Jerrin,” I said. “What kind of wife would I make for you?” But I knew I was stuck.
Then I saw we were going under low-leaning trees, and I managed to pull myself up on one. Then what? Walk all the way back? It was all I could do. Jerrin got up on the bank and came cursing after, and though I tried to lose him in the bundles of people walking by the water, he was never far behind.
But as I pushed through the crowd something flew down to me, a wooden bird, one half of it all pretty and polished, the other cut rough. I knew just what it was. “Hop on my head,” I said, and it did, just as Jerrin caught up.
I sneaked a look at my reflection in the water and saw a face like a puppet’s, my hair in ripples, and the bird floating there like some mad new comb for fine merchant-women to envy. It made me shiver, my skin all glazed like that and eyes turned to coins. And more of a lady than I’d ever looked in my life—but then, I hardly looked like me at all.
Jerrin stopped and cried: “Oh! What goddess are you, come to walk the festival among us!”
“No,” said I, and it was the bird’s voice I spoke with. Had to fight in my throat to get my own voice through, and I spoke in my regular low tone: “I’m no goddess.” Oh, and he didn’t know if I was man or woman then, but I could see how he wanted me.
It was a fine idea of yours, but the bird’s ghostly little heart wasn’t so strong as when it was stuck in your window-frame, and its power flickered over me. So Jerrin chased, and saw my true face, and said he’d leave me be if I could help him find this strange new beauty he had seen. And Jerrin chased, and saw my mask, and claimed such love I’d have blushed if my cheeks weren’t false and frozen. I led him along until I couldn’t keep it up and fell over laughing. He tried to kiss m
e, and saw my face flickering, and oh, poor boy, he didn’t know what to do.”
“What are you?” he howled, and then shook his head and said, “no matter, just let me go and face my ruin.”
Well, I’d been cruel enough, and to one I’d called a friend. So I told him the whole thing, and made him a deal. After all, I figured his silly bet had given me a new shot at the world, even if he never meant it to. So I went with him to his brother, yes, wore the wedding garlands, even sang the promise-songs, in my ghost face. How the little bird struggled, to keep me frozen for long enough—but it did. And I made certain Jerrin knew it was the ghost he wed, and the bird knew it too, and ah, you should have heard it sing! But it was a broken thing, and I made him swear he’d burn its spirit free, eat salt-plums in its honor.
I left him a widower, but he kept his inheritance. If there’s a thread of sense in him, he’s learned his lesson.
I walked all the way here; no clever boat to carry me, no incense-trees to beckon, only my luck to feel the way. The city stretched itself out, streets dried to hot clay and grown so, so long, but I walked them.
And I could turn back around now and go home; I will if you tell me. But I’m no-one’s wife, if you’ll believe me. I’d be yours, your husband, your anything, but just come down out of there!
* * *
In anger Wyrisa came down, the anger of ruined fingers and long cold hours and marriage-games. Or perhaps it was boldness, the boldness of shaking off old faces. Or—and I think this is the truth—it was both.
They stood in the deepening street, and realized they knew where they were: they place where telling stories to each other was no longer enough.
What follows is their own affair.
* * *
Isn’t that satisfactory? That’s the way of the city—it doesn’t tell complete tales, but you might find pieces of this one in fragments from other tellers’ tongues. Like those who write accounts of all the strange fish you can find there, all their blessings and curses: the crowfish that scream at dawn in bed-side jars, or the long leathery eels that were once men and should never be eaten by moonlight. And the most talked-of these days, the basket-fish: scales so very much like weave; hollow of meat and pebble-eyed. There’s a tale told about how they came to be, woven with wood and death and boldness into a sort of life; empty as wishes, hungry as love.