Myths of Origin

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Kagu-tsuchi!” came the howl like a tree-trunk tearing in two.

  Izanagi stepped through the shattered door, which had once been carved so prettily, as if to welcome them, and saw the only woman yet in the world standing on the tortoise-floor, her body wrapped up in red, in orange, in blue and white. Her flesh bubbled on her bones, and her once-swelling belly sagged as if it meant to fall from her; her thighs were burnt black and crisp, and the smell of the meat of her filled the hall. The hot, ropy light pulled back her lips from her teeth, her lids from her eyes, and what stared at him was a skull, save that her hair still streamed back from it, as though it had all along been conspirator to the flames.

  In her hands she held a flashing, flaring thing, its limbs splayed out and full of the boiling scarlet stuff, tongues of it licking around his chubby infant’s arms, his mouth full of it, his eyes too bright, too bright, burning already in its head.

  “Kagu-tsuchi!” she snarled, thrusting the inferno-child at Izanagi. “This is Kagu-tsuchi, this is Fire, it is born to us, it is your longed-for son, from your pure and perfect words! Take him, take him and may he burn you out from the inside, may he hollow you like a gourd, as he has done to me.”

  All around them, the house buckled and creaked, the fire of Kagu-tsuchi lapping hungrily at its mother’s breast, at his mother’s feet, at anything that would burn. Happily he nursed at the floor and rafters, at the ruined words carved on the holy wall. Izanagi held out his hand to his wife.

  “Come out of this place,” he begged.

  Izanami threw back her head, burned clean of flesh, and her voice sent the roof into conflagration. Her body opened as if on a hinge, and out of her blazing bones tore a child of green and forked branches, her mouth a cluster of bleeding berries, and this was Hani-yama-hime, who was the growing earth, and then a splash of water which did nothing to dampen the orange flames still lapping at the belly of Izanami, and a sopping, blue-skinned daughter descended from her mother: Midzu-ha-no-me, who was well-water and puddles and lakes, and her fingers dripped with scum and algae. They rolled on the smoking floor, and Midzu gurgled as she slapped out lazy sparks with her wet and plump hands.

  Izanami held her son to her tightly, and flames poured from her blackened womb, from her shriveled breasts, it leapt out of her mouth, and Kagu-tsuchi laughed, patting his mother’s cheek with a flaming hand.

  As she died, first of all women in the world to die, she thrust her son into Izanagi’s arms, and her knees buckled into ash beneath her, and her body blackened the green-tiled floor.

  Izanagi ran from the holocaust-house, his arms full of children as of apples, and Kagu-tsuchi giggled in his arms. Midzu-ha-no-me started patting at her brother, dowsing his flames in places, while he struck back at her, trying to set her afire. Hani-yama kept her wooden arms far away from both of them, shuddering. Izanagi dowsed his son in the churning sea, and the flames beneath the baby’s skin banked to glowing embers, warm and cheerful. Midzu splashed happily, and her sister drank the waves with soft sighs. He drew his son from the water and stroked his cheek. The child turned his face towards his father’s finger.

  All around them, the jellyfish curled at the edges like pages and turned black, shriveling to smears on the water, and then to nothing.

  FOURTH HEAD

  {Her belly had grown into a globe, swollen with her fourth daughter’s kicking life and round as a toy. She was become the moon, circular and symmetrical, a vast pale mass, pulling all the pulsing life of her youth into the new planet of her stomach, into the little red limbs floating inside her,} floating, floating, within me, within her, circle and back, circle and back, into the interior churn, the water, the streaks of fat and lymph and blood, familiar as houses {adrift on an inland sea, a thing which would be me, which once had gills and transparent skin like a salmon, that once swam in the universe of her body, but now pushed at the edges, outgrowing the space, impinging on tender organs and galaxies, stretching the tanned skin. She had become the Kaya-bird,} my Kaya-bird {her chest bright and out-thrust. Her movements were those of elephants, lumbering crocodiles.} Ours are the movements of nesting, and the surfaces of nameless eggs, and soft, slithering things over the forest floor, and there is never any release for us, but we manage, don’t we, Kaya, we manage. {She could no longer bear the pinch of shoes on her feet, and walked barefoot through her house, marveling at her own metamorphosis into a snarl-toothed hippopotamus.}

  After the third, my skin was hot and crackling in its boil of color. Even my toes had gone blue as rocks on the floor of the sea. My eyes were still shut, slick and pale against saffron eyelids. Each of you made me heavier, warmer, as though I was incubating you. And the cut, the cut along my underside had widened, flushed redder and wetter, and begun to drip onto the thirsty ground.

  {But still, the baby did not come. Eight months and she was simply enormous. She could hardly move.} Gashed and daughter-full, I can hardly move, they hardly move within me, it was summer and everything was so still, so still. {She felt as though she contained cities, river barges, farming communes. She could feel the corners of the rice-fields pressing on her left side, carved temple-reliefs on the other. In the centre swelled a sanguinary Fuji. Snow swirled at her peaks, dense jungle crowded her base. Once she had been lithe and small, delicate, even, not this glutted thing.}

  They told me you were the middle child, the prettiest save the last, and that you never listen. They told me about the tall weeds, and your little, wiry hands.

  {In the beginning, I think, she had dreamed about this child, that it would at last be a son, dreamed of his dark eyes and soft skin, how his laughter would sound. But by that summer she merely prayed for release, for the end of her enormity, the end of the sensation of being filled to the throat, a sack of rice packed as tightly as possible, sent to market with tufts of white flying out of the bindings.}

  They told me your sweet lips were famed in the province, and that the man who was neither sweaty nor pimpled secretly wanted you, even as he opened their obi under the stars.

  {It was a Tuesday, dawned hot and blue, that she decided. No one was in the house, the doldrums of summer having boiled everyone red and driven them into town. She took a scythe from the shed-wall, the one with the smooth black handle. She marched out along the beaten dirt paths to the weedy fields like a general approaching his cavalry line. Stopping in the center of that yellow sea, she began, with long, sweeping strokes, to cut the gold-green stalks of thorny grass.}

  They told me you were the middle child, and that you never listen, but they indulge you, because of your rosy lips, and how they came from the weeds. Will you not touch the wall of my throat, pretty Kaya? You can tell your birth-story over and over, it will not make you less dead.

  {My mother loves me. She will cut us out, one day.}

  Your mother forgot you as soon as the man who was neither fetid nor foul woke without his third wife. How many girls do you think she could lose before she no longer held you precious as the soup-eyes? Mothers forget, it is what they do. They cannot always be expected to be wet at the teat and smiling. And the prettiest girl, even the prettiest-save-the-last, does not always make the best soup.

  {She panted with the effort of having me,} all mothers do {sweat ran down her face and back like delta-silt into the ocean.} All mothers sweat so. {The scythe rushed through the tender plants, her brown hair flapping like a nightingale’s wing in time to the strokes. She told me that imagined she must have looked like deathshead, this young woman with her great scythe and plain black dress, weeds falling before her like ranks of soldiers.} No, darling, I am Death, and I bend the weeds, and I hold you inside me, and you are my child, and nevermore hers. {Death with long-lashed eyes,} eyes in soup, eyes in children, eyes in me {gliding through the fields like a shadow, Death beautiful and terrible, with her gentle face and singing blade. Only the great curve of her belly called her liar, called her not-Death; she swung the scythe high, grimaced with the effort of the swing; her arms burned.
She was no doctor, to induce labor peaceably in a clean room, but gave herself to the strain of her muscles in the sun. With a downward stroke she felt something move inside her, like a stone grinding aside.

  It was the weed-trees for you, then, the little saplings not yet grown. {She fell to her knees in the sweet-smelling earth, strands of grass stuck to her hair.} And with the cicadas in your ears from the moment of your birth, you never learned to listen. {I was born small, but my lips were perfectly formed, and so pink.} They tasted of orchid, of orchid and crabgrass.

  {The sun was hot so early in the day when we woke and Kiyomi was gone. The man who was neither lovely nor soft took me by the wrist—his hand went all the way around my bones!—and his face went blotched and black. He accused my mother of cheating him, said that he would burn her house and poor father’s fields if he was not given the wife he was promised. He said the others died because mother did not give proper obeisance to the gods; it spared him because he was pious} I spared him because his blood smelled of oil and shit { he took me there, that morning, into the rear rooms, and I cried, oh, I cried} poor Kaya-bird {I screamed and squealed as he tore my clothes, and he stopped up my mouth with his tabi and my tears soaked it through, and he pulled the bloody veil of my sisters’ weddings over my face and his breath came in hitching gasps, frightened, mouse-chirp wheezes.}

  I was sleeping when you came, but your sobs, your sobs were like thrushes singing {He dragged me from my mother’s house and she did not cry—I called back to her over and over—why are you not crying?} You ask too much of mothers, to weep over every child they lose. {Mother, why won’t you weep for me? And my father looked at his feet, mumbled that this was the way of marriages, sometimes, and one doesn’t approve, but when the grandsons are underfoot no one recalls the ceremony.} He fell to his knees in immobile ecstasy when I reared up from the waving weeds, holding his arms out, {and I stopped crying, for at least this I understood, understood I was no different, that the man who was neither young nor old was still dripping from between my legs and this was no shield, a wife is no safer than a maid} and I sighed into my Kaya-bird, nuzzling your new-beloved face with my own, crooning to you in the Mouth-dialect, knowing you would understand it, hear the new chorus behind the lower registers, for you were open and pulseate, and I was ready, hungry for your form to fill the void I carry like an egg within me, ready to be full of you, like a pale moon, and heavy. { I held up my arms like a child waiting to be picked up, and the colors of the snake’s mouth, oh, they were brighter than festival lanterns, and in the wavering throats like weeds I saw my sisters’ mouths opening and closing like anemones, and I smiled, I smiled as you took me in, I was only frightened for a moment—} He was weeping, shaking terribly—he understood, perhaps, what passion is. He hated my flesh and loved it, he cannot possess it, but it is possible he desired it, desired the thing glutted with the bodies of his wives, and knew that he was weak, that I could possess him, and their purity was no shield.

  {I} you {can hear} me {you, always, even if I do not like to listen. Sometimes I} you {touch the gullet-flesh} my body {with my} your {tongue, like an icicle, and it burns me} it thrills through me

  {it tastes sweet, like the old soup.}

  V

  NE NO KUNI

  Izanagi was alone on Onogoro.

  The jellyfish had gone, somehow, learning at last what was and was not ocean, or at least, failing their lessons elsewhere. The strand was silent, and the ruins of the house of the pillar rose up like broken black jaws on the bluff. The pillar still stood, blasted and tall, and it seemed to laugh at him.

  “Izanami!” He called to the cinders.

  “Izanami!” He called to the empty shore.

  “Izanami!” He called to the churning sea, and to the Heaven-Spanning Bridge, whose girded underside he could still glimpse, on clear days, far up behind the blue of the sky.

  First of all things that are left behind, Izanagi could not think where she might have got to. He put Kagu-tsuchi, and his sisters to bed in the rushes and asked them what happened to women when they burned—they being the source of fire, and the death, and there being no one else to ask.

  Kagu-tsuchi did not know. He sucked his thumb like a match-head.

  Midzu-ha-no-me did not know. She sucked her thumb like a faucet.

  Hani-yama-hime did not know. She sucked her thumb like a stalk of grass.

  With the shadow of the bridge thin and receding on the shoals, Izanagi lashed together the trunks of eight young trees, and taking a lock of his son’s hair to light his way, tucked the three bright-eyed children of Izanami’s flesh away in the charred shell of the house with the last of the jellyfish to give them suck. On his raft of trees, the first widower of all things bereft set out across the churning sea, across the foam and the tipped waves, across the violet water and the black.

  When he ran aground on Honshu, his beard was tangled and clotted with salt. He marveled at how Honshu-his-child had grown, how the acacia had brambled, how the mountains had grown braids and top-knots of snow. How the stones had rolled up from the barrels of earth. And he wandered.

  “Izanami!” he called to the bloody-flowered acacia.

  “Izanami!” he called to the top-knots of snow.

  “Izanami!” he called to the stones from the barrels of earth.

  And it was the stones that answered.

  “Here,” they murmured in their grinding, “here.”

  Izanagi pushed stone aside from stone, slate from shale.

  “Here,” they sighed, and moved from their loam, “here.”

  Behind a certain stone, there was a hole, tangled with roots and sifting soil, tangled with the dead-skin bells of mushroom and the sinuous movements of centipedes retreating from the light.

  “Come in,” sighed the centipedes as their ruby tails vanished, “this is Ne no Kuni, the Root-Country. She is here, she is here.”

  It was small, only wide enough for his shoulders, for his own hips, and it was open and dark as a mouth.

  “Izanami?” he whispered.

  No answer came, and thus, second of all things that go under the earth, Izanagi wriggled through the scrim of mud into Ne no Kuni.

  In the Root-Country, there is no light. Even before there was land, there was light, and Izanagi crawled through the sludge trying to taste the dark, to breathe it, to understand how so complete and utter a thing could have come to be without his knowledge. The darkness grew around him until he no longer felt the wet earth stroking his limbs, but was simply over-hung with it, like curtains and veils, and he could see nothing, first of all blinded things. His feet squelched in a kind of softness underfoot; his hands groped in a mist like breath. There was no sound but himself and the darkness, which seemed to draw into itself and out again.

  He pulled a comb from his hair, fashioned in the days before Kagu-tsuchi from pieces of the tortoise-floor, days Izanagi recalled as happy, when Izanami was quiet and fat with islands. He fumbled in the black with the curl of his son’s hair, and lit the edge of the green comb. Fire flared out of the prongs, white and gold as a blanched sun, and the tile-teeth burned slowly down.

  In the sudden glare, he lifted one foot and then the other out of the yielding ground; in the sudden glare there was no ground but flesh; in the sudden glare there was no air but the thick fumes of decay spiraling yellow and gray; in the sudden glare there was no Ne no Kuni, there was only Izanami, spread out over the gloam like a shroud, her body become the Root-Country. He was deep in her, in the pooled, moon-shot morass of her stomach, stretched now into a vast and planted field, wavering with untold grasses, with straggling trees clutching at her navel like dead hands. Her breasts rose up stiff and capped with black ice—clouds and cracks clustered at their peaks. Her arms lay out straight as highways, pocked with moldering wells and sinks where her blood had become brackish rivers moving sluggish and sere through the hollows of her elbows. Her knees had split open, and the flora of the dead already bloomed there, asphodel and d
ragonfruit and oranges like leering faces. Her thighs and calves spread off behind him; he could not see their end. She was gargantuan, the landscape itself, and her skin was broken so often, still streaked with scorch-streaks, that the red curve of her liver rivaled her femur for color-ghast, and her broken ribs rose up in jagged, thin-tipped stalactites. Her heart did not beat, but sat huge in the center of the world like an anchor dropped into an unguessable sea, cut by wiry meridians, its ventricles swollen and spider-blown, congealed and flayed and burning still.

  Izanagi’s lips curled back in disgust, and he vomited onto the navel of his wife—but the sight of his trickling sour seeping into her flesh caused his dry throat to retch again, and again, pushing against itself and finding nothing more to give to the country of Izanami.

  Somewhere behind the ice-caps of her teeth, a cry began. It hurtled up from the depths of the rocks of her bones, it shook the hand-roots of the trees worming at her sternum. The roof of the Izanami-world shook, and strands of her hair, which he could see now had made up the great darkness stretching over him and over her. Great, ropy shafts of it tumbled down, crashing onto the wet-flesh earth, sending up sprays of stilled, clotted blood. The cry grew until he knew it for the voice of Izanami, and amid the spray of long braids slashing through liquefying vertebrae, Izanagi, first of all things that feared, ran from the bellow of his wife towards the tunnel which had emptied him into her.

  “OUT! OUT!” it snarled, and shards of cartilage shot through with starlight and mosses cut through his back like shrapnel. He scrambled up through the mud and the skein of roots, through the centipedes laughing “Here, here!” and the stones gurgling dryly around him like swallowing throats.

  “OUT! OUT!” the cry shook the dirt from the tunnel, and it sifted onto the face of Izanagi, it drifted into his eyes, his nose, his mouth, until he could not breathe, nor see. He choked, first of all things in the world to suffocate, and he was filled up with her, her voice stopping his ears like wax, flakes of her skin closing up every open part of him.