The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  The two retreated to the opposite end of the great hall. But the ears of my people are keen, and I heard them as clearly as my own horse snorting in a field of grass.

  “My King, I have a thought which may achieve all our ends. You want the Witch-woman. I want whatever power her grandmother might have taught her. Why satisfy only your lust? Why not marry the creature?” The King was silent—one could almost hear the tick of calculation echo in the rafters.

  “But she is a barbarian,” he reasoned. “She is worthy of my use, not my hand.”

  “But lord,” the Wizard insisted, “to marry her would show the conquered tribes that you are to be trusted, that you are a good and just ruler. To win their trust is the only way to quiet the savage bands. Make her Queen and they will adore you for it. Even monsters are given fair hand by the new King, they will whisper. And everyone knows those tribeswomen are fertile as cows. She’ll bury you in sons. I only ask, humbly: The nights she does not spend with you, give her over to me, so I may extract what I can from her before she dies, whether from your ministrations or mine.

  “Let me tell you a tale to make clear my meaning…”

  ONCE, IN A FAR-OFF KINGDOM—OF COURSE, NOT nearly so magnificent as yours, my lord—there lived a Raja by the name of Indrajit. He was a fine ruler, strong and just as an arrow through the heart of a thief. His conquering Hand was laid out on the fields and farms like a cloud that brings blessed rain. None refused his rule, and no voice was raised against the power of that most sacred Hand.

  But still he sought to bring the light and glory of his just rule to the far reaches of the countryside, an ambition not unknown to you, my lord. He looked beyond the great river that flowed like a bolt of silk through the fertile kingdom. And so he led his famed Royal Guards, who as legend told it had sprung up from the earth when Indrajit slew a monstrous boar in the hinterlands and the beast’s teeth fell to the ground and shattered. From those teeth came the hundred and forty-four warriors ever after known as the Dentas Varaahasind—the Teeth of the Boar. They were bound utterly to Indrajit, whose slaying of the monster had given them life. The boar-soldiers were fierce and terrible, and their loyalty was pure as snow on the carcass of a kill. They carried shields made from the vast shoulder blades of the wild pigs of the mountains, which grew in that time to be as large as the vaults of the Raja’s treasure house. Their armor was covered in the blood-red skin of these boars, and they wore necklaces of the long, curving teeth that had given them birth. They painted their faces in pitch and sharpened their teeth with blacksmith’s tools, so that the sight of them was like seeing a demon horde rising up under the moon. The country loved the Raja, as subjects should, but they lived in cold terror of the Varaahasind.

  Indrajit one summer led his loyal band across the sparkling river to a small monastery, which he wished to conquer and use as an outpost for the bringing of his just reign to the South. The temple was, curiously, peopled entirely by women, and it was dedicated to some heathen serpent-god draped in jewels. When the women saw the Varaahasind approach, and heard their ghastly battle cry, which was like to the screaming of a boar pierced with an ash spear, they did not shriek or run, but gathered close around the icon of their god, shielding the green-bronze metal with their veiled bodies. A few of the women did show their fear, and fainted dead away, but their limbs were held up by the other acolytes.

  Touched by their devotion, Indrajit did not sever their ungrateful breasts immediately and feed their bodies to his men. Instead, he pulled them aside and simply smashed the statue into jagged shards with the pommel of his massive sword, famed in all regions as an invincible blade. Still the women did not cry out as women ought to do. Instead, one of them, with eyes as black as the lightless throat of the serpent, looked at the great King and said:

  “That was ill-done. You will walk under Her curse now, for the length of your days, which will spool out onto the earth like a hideous thread.”

  Indrajit was not so touched by their devotion that he broached the disrespect of a woman. He ordered his men to take the women out into the forest and cut out their tongues, so that they would never again speak to their betters, leaving them to wander and beg. But he was fascinated by the woman who had spoken so defiantly to him, whose name was Zmeya. He, as any King would, wished to teach the recalcitrant wench her station in the world.

  But he also birthed a powerful lust for her in his heart. She was, after all, very beautiful in her white veils, and her black eyes were so deep they seemed to have no pupils at all. Her hair fell past her waist in long black curls, and it shone most curiously in the summer sun, like the smooth skin of a salamander, and her skin brooked no blemish, nor tolerated a less than perfect contour. She did not lower those disconcerting eyes from the King, even when he bound her hand and foot. He carried her slung over his copper-studded saddle to his Palace to be his Queen.

  She was only one of a thousand wives, of course, and even more bound concubines. But in marrying her he hoped both to sate his lust and to incur the good fortune of her god, and thus she was more prized than any of the wretched mares he harvested from his own country. But he could not house her with the perfumed harem, lest she incite the poor beasts to rebellion. Thus Zmeya was kept in a room all her own, accessible only by a passage from the Raja’s bedchamber. Before she entered that vaulted space, she turned to Indrajit and spoke to him for the second time.

  “I will consent to this marriage of my free will and swear an oath not to wage battle against you within your walls; I will bear you seven sons and seven daughters, and they will all grow to be great warriors and beauties famed throughout the wide world. I will avert from you the wrath of the serpent-god and protect your house. But you must grant to me this condition.”

  Indrajit burned for this woman, with her strange hair and lithe limbs. He would certainly grant her this thing if he could have her without a struggle.

  “On the third day of each new moon I must be free to do as I wish, and you must swear an oath on the body of the Boar whose flesh gave you your sworn warriors that you will not attempt to see me or come near me on that day. Fear not, I will not leave the Castle nor try to escape you. This is my condition, and it cannot be altered.”

  The Raja agreed with a voice of crimson velvet, and Zmeya spoke no more.

  Years went by like blackbirds in the night, and indeed, the strange-haired woman gave birth to seven sons and seven daughters, each with the same black eyes and thick curls as their mother. Truly, they seemed to be nothing like their father at all, but took their blood only from Zmeya, who never seemed to grow older nor less beautiful. Even when the children were fully grown, each stronger and more radiant than the last—and, true to her promise, all the girls were great warriors, and all the boys beauties—she stood among them as a sun among candles.

  And the King, being a King, kept his word. He busied himself with subjugating the continent and managing the affairs of state. But his suspicion grew, as each child looked less and less like him, that she spent her new moons in adultery and sin. She was, after all, a heathen and entirely uncivilized. She could not be trusted. Indrajit grew purple in the flesh over this fear, made himself ill with it, until he could no longer restrain himself, but resolved at the next new moon to spy upon his barbarian wife and catch her at her crime.

  And so it was. It was not difficult, since her chamber was connected to his. He crept down the hall as silently as only a practiced assassin can, and put his eye to the cracks in the wooden door.

  What he saw was a vision from the dream of a demon. The room was washed in the sickly light of the dying moon, and it was a mass of writhing snakes, fourteen serpents in their outlandish skin, purples and blues and greens flashing phosphorescent in the night, great curving lengths rising up the stone walls and hissing in some unnamable tongue. They seemed to be every color, iridescent as a dragonfly’s wing, and thick as a man’s body. The dead light of the night-sky seemed to feed them, and they danced a terrible dance in the sh
adows.

  And in the center was a serpent so vast it made the others seem like bait for a child’s fishing line. Her girth was as a Palace column, and her skin flashed in all the colors of a rushing stream at sunset, glowing with a white fire. Her eyes gleamed black upon black, with no pupils at all, and when she saw the peering eye of Indrajit at the door, the serpent queen threw her long body into tremors and screamed like the grinding of a granite stone into a blade.

  “Betrayer!” she cried, and shimmered as though he was seeing her through a wash of heat, becoming again Zmeya with her flying hair, and each of the smaller snakes became the seven sons and seven daughters. They all looked at him with identical accusing eyes, hatred flaring like a blue flame in each.

  “You swore,” she cried, throwing open the door with such strength that it shattered against the wall, “you swore this time was mine. And now all is lost for you, wretched Indrajit. You came to my temple and destroyed it like a glutton presented with a roasted bull all for himself. You took me in rough ropes to this black-halled palace. All I asked was one day without your stinking pig-breath on my neck. I gave you all of these children—”

  “Demons!” he bellowed, full of horror.

  “Children! My children, my beautiful hatchlings. They are perfect! You did not take the time to discover the nature of our order before you ruined us. I do not worship the serpent god—I am the serpent god! I sat in the sky when the earth was nothing but air. Once a month I return to my old form to bathe in what thin, distant light I can glimpse, and they with me, for you touch me and touch me and take me from myself, so that I have nothing left with which to nurse them. I have given you a litter of demigods, Indrajit, who would have filled a thousand books with their deeds. Now they are nothing and you are damned.”

  Indeed, the children seemed to be fading, tears coursing down their cheeks as their bodies became transparent, and then vanished as though blown by a fell wind.

  Zmeya looked with a terrible grief upon them. “They are so delicate at this age, like cobwebs in a banquet hall. We so rarely have children, we hardly know how to keep them alive. I tried so hard, but you left me with nothing, and they perish so easily, little bubbles popping in the sun. A hole is only empty space, and I couldn’t fill them up, I couldn’t do it. If their feeding is interrupted, if they are kept from the sky-mother’s light, they fade like morning steam on the river. You have killed all your best heirs, Raja. And you have brought your own doom down to you like a child’s yellow kite.”

  At this she lunged at him, sighing again into her serpent-self. But Indrajit signaled and in a breath twelve of the Varaahasind were at his side, and the Captain had sliced off the serpent’s ponderous head with a clean stroke of his blade.

  It was the decree of the Raja that a great feast was to be held for the Varaahasind that night. The body of the great snake was dressed and quartered, and sent down to the bubbling kitchens. Each of the men was to eat his share of the succulent meat, so that Zmeya could never return, trailing that doom behind her. And Indrajit himself would eat her swollen heart, and so take the strength of the serpent-god into his breast, and spread his reign across the sea.

  “YOU SEE,” THE WIZARD CAJOLED, “BECAUSE HE took his enemy to wife, Indrajit was eventually able to take all her power from her. Make her your Queen and let me have her but once a month, like Zmeya, and between us we will feast upon all that is in her.”

  Again, there was a long and calculating silence. At length his tumblers and locks must have seized upon an agreeable equation. The King seemed to half agree.

  “But I cannot marry her with her face mangled with paint and scars. It would not do to appear in audience with that beside me.”

  “I understand. For me, too, it is her power and not her flesh that draws. The wild people are, to say the least,” he sniffed, “fragrant and lumpish. But this is no trouble at all—I can change her so that she will appear to all, even you, as beautiful as the risen sun. I have learned that much, at least.”

  The King looked at me across the long ivory hall.

  It was dawn when they moved me again, this time into the Wizard’s chambers, where he bound me hand and foot with nettle-ropes and wedged a knotted gag into my mouth. I lay on the cold floor, looking at the tables filled with books and candles that had expired long ago, spilling their waxy blood onto the pages. He was preparing some vile-smelling liquid in a glass kettle, to change me, no doubt, into some unnatural beast. I wondered uselessly if Grandmother had been frightened when the change came over her. I could not tell if I was—my blood surged, but I was calm as an underground lake.

  “It is a fine hour for me, Knife. The imbecilic King wants to rut with you—let him have his way. I doubt you will enjoy it. But you will enjoy my affections far less. I have gotten the better bargain.”

  He pursed his thin lips as a deep red infused the kettle. “After all this time, and all those useless women spoiling my beautiful tower, you fall right into my lap, with all the knowledge I need to complete my work. It makes one believe in providence. Almost.” He tapped the side of a vial which bubbled thickly and smelled of rotted tobacco fields. “Change, my little barbarian, is the nature of the universe. He who controls the process of change is next to the gods in his might and glory. Metamorphosis is the most profound of acts. Without it, nothing grows, nothing evolves, nothing expands. But should I simply wait for nature to take her pitifully slow course, bending me to her will? Preposterous. Since I was apprenticed in the Southern Kingdoms I have striven to control my own changes, kept myself alive and strong, though I served the old King before my master, and the Raja himself before that. I have strained, through all those reigns, to discover the secret whereby I may alter myself according to my own designs. The mind, you understand, must have sway over the body. It is the province of gods to fashion their forms to their will, and through you, my little wolfling, I will become as bright as any Star. It is all about control. Who has it, and who does not.” The Wizard dropped a handful of clumped herbs into his salivating brew and turned to look at me, a calm gleam in his depthless eyes.

  “Of course, when one is not naturally inclined, one finds ways to exert control which are less… elegant.” The man seized a rat which was scurrying across the floor and wrenched four teeth from its squirming body, dropping them into his vial, where they sizzled. “For instance. The King wishes to believe himself powerful and in control of his destiny—it is the wish of all beings, in the end. But I control his actions as surely as if he were a doll in the hands of a cherubic child. You recall the story I told him? I told him only half—the half he needed to convince himself to keep you. I wanted you exactly where you are, so I told him just enough to present him with an excuse. Would you like to hear the rest?”

  I sagged miserably and moaned beneath the filthy cloth which bound my mouth.

  “Of course you would. You’ll listen to anything I wish to tell you, won’t you? Where were we? Oh, yes, Zmeya was dead and resting comfortably in one hundred and forty-five satisfied stomachs…”

  THE PALACE OF INDRAJIT THE TERRIBLE SLEPT peacefully that night, dreaming the blood-rich dreams of righteous murderers. But when dawn broke like a win dowpane over the steel-tooth mountains, a strange thing occurred.

  The Varaahasind, bringers of death, began to go mad.

  At first it was nothing anyone would notice. The soldiers, after all, had always behaved barbarically, decorating their huts with the limbs of slaughtered maidens, painting their faces with boar’s blood. Madness would have to be strong as paired oxen in them to be marked out from their usual custom.

  And so it was that morning found a lieutenant at his bath, calmly shaving his ornate beard, which curved down to his collarbone like the tusks of a great pig. He was delicately cutting it with the edge of his sword, eradicating the symbol of his glorious manhood. It was against the code of the Varaahasind to shave that proud beard, the penalty death by exposure—yet this man removed it so cleanly that his face was like that
of a child, smooth as a moon.

  The next week, a captain was found in an ivory tub, singing some wordless psalm full of hideous vowels—worse, the tub itself was filled to its gilt edges with wriggling green snakes, thick as a woman’s waist, which wound around the captain in reptilian ecstasy.

  And finally, on the third day of the new year, the second in command of the fell troops lost his ability to speak. He spat and hissed obscenely, his body contorting with the effort of uttering even the slightest sibilant syllable. When the court physician calmed the poor man sufficiently to open his mouth, it was revealed that his tongue had become forked, a deep split through the thick flesh.

  At this pass, the King and the Commander of the Varaahasind began to fear for their own minds, and called a certain magician to them, in order to divine the source of the malady.

  I was young then. I had just taken the collar under Indrajit. For the first time I was not just Omir, scrabbling on a farm for roots out of the earth. I was Omir Doulios, and if others spit that word as a curse, I wore it like a crown. It meant I was more than a potato or a turnip or a beet covered in mud. Even a slave is better, even a slave handed master to master until he dies. I wore the iron collar as easily as a necklace. It clasped my throat from chin to chest, a symbol of my servitude, polished each morning to a high shine, glinting like a sword held to my neck. I was forbidden to perform magic except in the service of Indrajit, and even then not without the observation of other craftsmen, as if I were a common cobbler. But it was better than a damp parsnip and a damp wife. And so, when I was brought for the first time before the Throne of Teeth, excitement filled my blood, after long months of boredom and the waste of my talents.

  “Omir Doulios, lowest of slaves, you are come before us to solve the riddle of the lunacy which plagues my men. The speed with which you accomplish this task will directly determine how long you will live once you have left our presence,” Indrajit intoned peremptorily, without waiting for the speech of introduction I had painstakingly prepared. The Tusk-Crown flashed and glowered in the torchlight, distorting my vision. Yet, I thought, perhaps this was better. For, of course, I had already deduced the root of their sickness, being the wisest of all my brothers and sisters in slavery. I had a morsel to dangle before his porcine nose, and it might purchase me that which then I most desired.