Gently, with all the weight of breath, the dead woman on the bier closed her fingers over my paw.
That was all—she did not open her eyes or sit up and ask for water. Four fingers just lifted and fell again, closing me in a grip which stone might envy.
The Wolf-Star leaned over us. “We always hope—it would be an answer, anyway. But they never wake up. I suppose after all this time it would be strange if they did.” Liulfr closed her eyes and began to wash me, to clean my wound in the wolfish way, with her long tongue, rough as marsh sand. With each stroke my body pulsed, vibrating under her like a plucked harp. I could see only her golden fur, shimmering candle-wise, though I could feel the Stone-Star’s fingers on my fur, cold and lifeless. She lapped up the light like milk, slurping at it, sucking it from the gash in the Manikarnika, carefully collecting every drop.
Finally, she closed her long, silky snout over my shaggy breast, gripping my chest in her jaws and pinning me to the diamond girl, teeth pressing my ragged skin.
I could feel it, rushing all through me like a burst wine barrel, the light and blood that poured out of her jaws, finding its circuit in me, doubled back brighter and harsher and more terrible than before, searching out a wave to ride into my bones and belly, great, rolling tides that filled me up like a water-horn. I was glutted with it, light from the Wolf’s mouth and the jewel’s body, the jewel’s body and mine, light old and unspeakable as the sky. I choked, moaned, even screamed emptily into the cavern as they pushed it through me—for this is work, granddaughter, the change of light; it is pushing a boulder up a mountain, or a mountain up a mountain. She opened and filled and sewed and opened me again. And how many hours I lay helpless and quivering between them I cannot say. They took the dim, whittled light I had in me and returned it to me, blazing like nothing I had ever known.
When finally I felt the Wolf’s jaw release me, I started as if out of a dream, every pore thrumming, open, shaking. I was a woman again, I could feel it: five fingers on each hand, teeth flat and thick, long hair grazing my waist like a paintbrush.
Liulfr touched my face with her wet nose. “What we have given you is yours, but it does not belong to you. We don’t mind it, we have never minded, but light is a thing with limits. You must understand that when a Star gives it she is diminished.” She shut her eyes against my cheek. “I have been here for you and your mothers for a long time; I am the source you come to; I am the well from which you drink.”
For the first time, the Star seemed to me to be less bright than the cave walls. She was just an old wolf, her fur bare in patches, her eyes milky and misted, her muzzle going gray. But then she smiled, as much as a wolf can smile, and I was once more surrounded by her light and warmth, which was—was it? I could not tell—only a little less than it had been before.
“You changed when you entered the cave. We did it for you then. It is a great magic, almost,” and here she paused, stealing a glance at the woman with colorless curls, “the greatest of all. Metamorphosis is the most profound of all acts. When your light comes from our hands, and not from your grandparents and their grandparents back and back and back, to that poor girl in her tent clutching a baby to her breast, you can be like us, at least a little like us, and it is only a simple thing to change the outline of a hole.” The Wolf-Star swallowed hard. “After all, a hole is nothing but space.” After a silence deeper than a dungeon, she stood back, straight-spined, and stared down at me, speaking carefully through her silky muzzle.
“But you are not one of us. For you, this thing is irreversible except by death, and not only the flesh is altered. Only the strongest of you can resist the collapse of the soul into the form; the mind is lazy, it naturally imitates the body. I have known none of you yet who can remain human when they wear another skin. But the thing is yours to do, if you should wish to do it.”
The cold, clear hand of the jewel-girl released mine, and it had all the life of a scrap of paper blowing across an empty street. Without a word, the old gold-pelted Wolf led me back through the two doors and into the great open arena of the first cavern. It seemed a century ago that I had bent under the Mare’s teeth there, that she had made her hole in me.
“Go, Star-daughter. There is much work for you to do.”
I knew I should not, but I could not keep myself from it. I knelt and put my arms around her great, shaggy neck, burying my face in the smell of her, of cedar and wet rock, of snow just fallen. “You never know,” I whispered, “maybe the new Stars aren’t just markers. Maybe they are the Manikarnika. Maybe they went home.”
Liulfr shook her head against my skin, and the fur was like the crackle of heat-lightning. Her voice was tiny and soft. “No one goes home. A hole is nothing but space. We are accidents, and there is no grace for us.”
She pulled back and gave my cheek the briefest of licks. The Wolf-Star padded quietly away from me, vanishing before she found the far wall.
Stumbling out into the lightening world, my eyes stung by the first darts of sunlight, I sat heavily on the grass, exhaustion slamming into me like a stone wall.
And the Fox stood a few feet from me, watching me with cold eyes.
“Some who deserve failure do not achieve it,” he sniffed. “Some who deserve nothing are given the world. So, here it is, woman. The world. Go into it, but do not ever speak of what has passed here. It is forbidden to all with tongues to utter it. We want to stay hidden; we have chosen this place, and power granted can be lost. Do not think you have seen the last of me, nor ever that you are now my equal. Liulfr is hopeless and old. A filled hole is not empty space, and we were all full, so full of light. You are a thief and a vampire, and if I had my way you and your daughters would have no more of our blood.”
As the sun crept on lion’s feet over the green hills, it illuminated his fur, bristle by bristle, until he was so bright I could not look. And then he was gone, and the light shone through the place where he had been.
Out of the Garden
WHEN MIDNIGHT LAY OVER THE TWO CHILDREN LIKE A SERAPH’S BLUE arm, the boy gingerly laid his head on the girl’s lap, letting her voice cradle him. He pretended he did not hear her breath stop when he shifted, or the quaver in her voice like a single mislaid thread in a beaded gown.
But as soon as his head touched the rough fabric of her dress, a terrible crunching sound was heard as strange feet trampled the earth outside their little thicket. The girl screamed, an awful, high-pitched sound like a crane shot through with a silver arrow. The boy leapt up, drawing his pathetic little dagger, determined to protect his secret prize. But as ghostly hands ripped apart the sweet-smelling briars, he recognized that the danger was far worse than any witch or arcane spell.
The boy saw, framed in jasmine boughs like a fiery mandala, the wrathful face of his sister, her eyes filling with accusations like a judge’s scroll.
“I’ve caught you now, you vile little rat!” she crowed triumphantly. “You’ll be punished! Consorting with the demon girl!”
“She’s not a demon!” he blurted, not at all meaning to—Dinarzad was fearful as a lion in heat. The girl breathed quick and hoarse, unable to move. “She’s not! You leave us alone!”
Something of the wolf and the cave must have seeped into him, like spilled ink, for he never before had had the courage to say such a thing to her. Dinarzad swooped into the thicket like a crazed harpy—the boy could almost imagine feathers puffing from her skin—and seized him by the hair, dragging him away from the now weeping girl though he kicked and cursed like a grown man.
In his vision, the girl retreated, a moon slipping behind cobaltrimmed clouds. The light was draining from his world; all he could see was her eyes, huge and dark as forest owls, staring after him.
When they reached the gates of the Garden, the boy bit his sister savagely on her perfumed arm and she stopped, slapping him hard across the face—so hard it split his lip like a pine branch. He spat blood onto the earth.
“You may think you are a man now, little
brother, but men do not go near wicked devils like her. Do you want to bring her curse on the whole family? You spoiled little whelp! I’ll whip you till morning!”
Defiant as a rooster crowing at sunset, the boy bellowed back, “Yes! Yes! I am a whelp! I am a wolf with teeth like pirates’ swords and I’ll tear you into as many pieces as there are jewels in the Sultan’s vaults! She is not a demon—and I am going back to her. Right now.” He crossed his arms over his young chest and felt pride surging in him like the Star’s blood.
But Dinarzad blazed. Her eyes grew dark as molded dungeons and she gripped his arm, tightening slowly.
“No, little brother. You are not going anywhere.”
The boy woke in a dark, foul-smelling prison.
Dinarzad held a child in each arm, twins bawling their identical hearts out. He was trapped with her in the royal nursery, amid the tortured cries of dozens of infants, more terrible than horned demons at their forges.
Dinarzad, almost a woman grown and ready to be married out of the household, spent her evenings caring for the Palace children, and she ruled them all with a fist stronger than any iron smelted by mortal man. She was a vengeful goddess and her will was absolute. Tonight she was tending the youngest, and for his trespass the boy was tied to her skirts and this wretched room. It was worse, he was certain, than any old dungeon in a King’s castle, and there was no hope of escape as long as his sister’s eyes were fastened on him like scorpion’s pincers.
But the gods are not always unkind to small boys, and fate was to intervene in the pink flesh of a colicky princeling. Not yet understanding its royal duty, the poor thing simply insisted on his mother’s arms. Thus Dinarzad was compelled to deliver the squalling child to the appropriate bedroom.
“If you so much as move a toe from one flagstone to the next,” she warned, “I will lock you away until you rot. One brother will not be missed amid the dozens.”
And with that, she swept out the door, rose-colored silks trailing behind her.
Of course, the boy had disappeared out the north window within three heartbeats.
The bower looked as though a battle had been fought there, pitch tossed from battlements and soldiers in formation crushing all underfoot. The white blossoms were in tatters, hanging like peasants’ rags on snapped boughs. Their supper had been strewn everywhere, and he saw that he had dented his water flask against a gnarled root when Dinarzad had snatched him away. The ruin of the flowers touched him most, the oleander torn petal from petal, scattered onto the dirt. The place where he had heard tales that still burned like lamp oil inside him was destroyed, ransacked like a fine house.
And the girl was nowhere in sight.
He searched over all the hiding places he knew in the vast Garden, through the hedges and rose trees, the lily ponds with their ululating bullfrogs, the olive groves and the borders of the fruit orchards. She was gone, disappeared, and all the stories with her.
The boy sat down heavily on the rim of a bronze fountain, whose water trickled gently into the night. He put his golden head in his hands, reproaching himself for lack of care, that he had let himself be caught, found missing. He was an impossible thief and even more hopeless protector. But then, he thought to himself, Prince Leander was also caught, so perhaps he could be forgiven.
He looked up in his despair, and the moon floated through his sight like a great paper lantern. And as the clouds passed over it, a single wild goose arced over its vast face, tracing a graceful path in the night. He heard it call, lonely and foreign, like a jade flute, and sighed deeply.
The goose sounded again, this time very near him, and the boy realized that it was no bird which called to him, but the dark-eyed girl, who was hiding behind a slender young cedar not far away. His heart flew upward like a duck taking flight from a still pond, and he ran to her, stopping just short of clasping her in his young arms. She looked bashful and embarrassed, her black eyes downcast.
“How did you learn to call like the wild water birds?” he asked eagerly.
“I told you. I have fed them and talked with them since I was a child—there was no one else. They… sometimes they spread their wings over me on winter nights when it is very cold, and we rest together under the hard stars.”
The boy again resisted the urge to embrace her, and instead clapped her on the shoulder as he had seen his father do with his comrades.
“You told me, but how could I believe it? Someday you must teach me!” he announced. “But first, the story! Continue the story! I must know what happened to the Prince now that the Witch has finished her tale!”
The two stole away from the fountain, which was, after all, a poor hiding place. They ducked into a grove of sweet-scented cedars and the girl settled in.
She smiled up at him, a strange, feline grin.
“You are wrong, though. The Witch had hardly begun…”
GRANDMOTHER FOLDED HER ARMS LIKE AN OLD stick-bug, smiling her thin smile and stroking my hair. I still remember her voice, and how it wrapped around that dark cellar, clawing at the walls and licking into the massive locks at the same time that it softened my fear like a spinner wetting thread between her lips.
“So you can change like that, even now? Right now?”
“Yes, I could.”
“Could I do it?”
“You will never go to the cave now, my love. You will never touch the light inside Liulfr, or inside the dead Star. You will be a witch of leaves and grasses, at best: you will make love-potions and cold-cures and gout-softeners for those who can pay you, and look up at the sky, and tell a young girl whether her husband will have light or dark hair, and deliver her baby when the time is right for it, and you will bury her when the time is right for that, but that is all.”
I swallowed that, chewing on it like a strip of hide. Finally, I grunted. A weak witch was better than no witch at all.
“Could you do it to another person?” I asked suddenly.
Grandmother’s eyebrows knitted, as if she were trying to work out a strange set of hoofprints. “I don’t know. I think I could, I… I suspect there’s a way it could be done. But I wouldn’t like to be the one to try it.”
“Do it now, then!” I cried, grabbing at her skinny hands. “Turn into a mouse and crawl out through the lock, or a bird and fly out through the window grate. Bring back a key and let me free, and we’ll go into the steppe together, and eat deer, and never think about this place again.”
“Poor little Knife, you can be dull and blunt as a rock, sometimes,” she said kindly. “If I became a mouse, I would scurry out and think of nothing more pressing than getting cheese into my little gray belly. I would forget you, and we would never eat deer together again. Besides, I have a killing to do before I can think on mice or birds. And you have a birthing.”
THE WITCH STOPPED SPEAKING. NIGHT STREAMED through the Witch’s windows like bolts of silk. Thick and black, it coiled around them both. The Prince was uncomfortable and cold, his hands covered in bread flour, but he did not dare complain.
The Prince no longer heard her at all, and his hand had begun, again, to bleed. Blood trickled into the bread, but he did not see it. The crackling fire leapt like trout, scenting the hut with green branched sage and sweetgrass smoke. The Prince’s eyes watered, though he did not know whether it was the stinging air that wrenched the tears from him or the buried memory pierced by her casual mention of his mother. The memory had paced back and forth in him for hours, a flash of yellow hair and a flutter of wings beating at the back of his brain.
And it all was becoming so strange and hard to follow, the path he had taken to this house through the forest, the braided words spilling like ink from this gnarled woman’s mouth, the throbbing fear waiting in him, that at the end of all this storytelling, he would still have to suffer her punishment for his killing of the goose—and the memory, the memory, brushing his heart with its awful gray wings.
In truth, lost in her tale, he had nearly forgotten that there ever was s
uch a pearl-feathered creature as that dead bird, that he had ever snapped its neck in the morning light. But he looked down at his flour-speckled hands, washed in the flicker of fire and shadow, and glimpsed drops of blacker blood among the white dust and within his own wet wound, and remembered. It was only a moment ago, wasn’t it, that he had left his father’s Castle like a fugitive, determined never to return? And now he was a prisoner only a few miles beyond the borders of the kingdom, his adventure cut off before it had begun. He was lost as a trapped hare, lost in the mire of this hissing voice, of the hut shadows and the fire and the corpse of the goose-girl, crumpled against the wall, near the hearth to keep her flesh warm.
And now she had uttered his mother’s name, and those old, forbidden syllables layered her tale, which had nothing at all to do with him, of course, but somehow his mother’s memory was a rough lever, and with it the Witch slowly broke him open, inch by bone. He had hardly heard the last sliver of the long tale, so sunk in sorrow, its waters swirled around his chin.
The Witch cocked her head to one side, watching her guest with mild curiosity. Quietly, she took his hand in hers and pressed her palm against the bloodied fingers, stilling the blood. She rubbed some sweet-smelling root against the stubs of his fingers—it prickled cold against his raw flesh.
“Grass and leaves,” she snorted. He tried a wan smile, but it refused to come. The Witch narrowed her feral eyes at him.
“What is it, boy? My servant, yet you cannot even listen to me for an evening? Instead you wrap yourself up in your own troubles like a bolt of wool, and moon after me to take them off your shoulders.”
“My mother,” the Prince mumbled, “you said you knew my mother.”
“And you told me not to speak of her,” she grunted. “Very well, then, shall we stop and listen to the murderer beat his breast and spit out his woe onto my floor? Your mother is dead and your father has all but erased her from the memory of the world. Is it necessary to know more than that of the poor woman?”
The Orphan's Tales Page 6