The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “It’s my understanding that since I have taken a feather from your tail, you are mine to command. Is that how it is?”

  Of course she would know that. My luck would have it no other way.

  “Unfortunately for me, it is.”

  “What would you say then, oh mallard mine, if I were benevolent enough to offer a trade instead of compelling you to do what I want?”

  “Why would you do that, if you know I can’t refuse you?” I asked, still woozy from the loss of my plumage.

  She smiled, and her teeth, too, were pale green, the color of pear skin. “Call it manners, gallantry. Chivalry. Call it the fact that I, unlike some, would rather barter fairly for goods than get them by knavery. The weed takes what does not belong to it and gives nothing back but more weeds; the apple tree takes what is freely given to it, and returns cider and pies and tarts and jams.”

  I wanted to say that it is hardly the weed’s fault if its seed is blown into an apple orchard, and anyway, some plants are good whether or not they are useful in pie-making. But I thought better of it. “Well,” I answered instead, picking flecks of dirt from my wings, “what sort of trade?”

  “The pick of any fruit I own, in exchange for a fruit I do not.”

  At this I was finally piqued, and all my remaining feathers flushed fiery with interest.

  “Would I have to steal it?”

  She laughed, and her leaf-dress rustled. “I’m afraid you might. But at least no one particularly owns them, so the theft would be technical at best—in the sense that the harvesting of any fruit is a theft from a tree. I need the seeds of the Ixora tree, which are not unlike cherries themselves, so I would not begrudge you if you took a few for your cousin. The Ixora grow in the Tinderbox Desert, and their branches burn all day and night. But I think this will not be a problem for you.”

  “No, my lady.” I chuckled. “The fire has not been kindled which can harm me.” I did not want to tell her yet how well I knew the Ixora, how I had been born in their scalded shade, and how it was in the ruin of one that my cousin even now waited for me.

  “Then it is a trade?”

  “It is. Will you give me back my feather now, since we are such good friends?”

  She looked at the long red quill, and again at the tree. “No,” she said slowly, “I prefer fair barter, but one ought never to fully trust a thief. You may have it back when I have my fruit.”

  I scratched with one claw at the soil around the golden roots. I was caught, well and truly. “I had better be off, then. The desert is far away. But I think I ought to say, before I go, that I have never heard of a pumpkin tree in any corner of the world, and since everyone knows pumpkins grow on vines, I suspect you have done something vicious to it to make it wind up into a tree, and I ought not to trust you, either.”

  She leaned against the unnatural tree, lovely as it was, and grinned. Before my eyes—little goose, I would not lie to you—she leaned further and further in until she was entirely swallowed up by the orange trunk, and only her green toes waggled outside of it.

  “I collect rare things,” came her voice, only a little muffled by the pulp, “and that is what got me into such trouble in the first place.”

  Her head appeared in the high branches, and bit by bit she emerged, the long ropes of her hair popping free and tumbling nearly to the ground, until she sat quite comfortably on a branch between two still-infant pumpkins. “You see,” she said with a sigh, “when you become famous for the variety of your produce, all manner of folk appear at your gates, demanding that you satisfy their appetites, however horrid they may be…”

  I AM A TREE.

  But it is as easy to say this tree is me. I was born when the tree before it dropped seed; I opened my eyes under ground and ate dirt, dirt like cake and jam and wonderful water dripping through the earth like honey through a sieve. I was always thirsty.

  And one day I came up through the ground in a little green shoot. I opened the shoot as easily as a door, and stepped out into the sun, a child like any other child. But I still slept in the tree every night as it grew, and as I grew. I loved it like a limb, and it loved me like a torso, and we were very happy together.

  Once a peddler came by the brick wall with a sack full of marvels to sell. I ran up to him, since I had never seen another person before, and asked his name, his city, his profession, how many brothers and sisters had he, all the things an excited child will ask of a stranger. He was very kind, and invited me to come over the wall and see what he had to sell—and what he had to sell were seeds.

  Apples, persimmons, walnuts, lemons, almonds, dates, and yes, cherries, anything you can name and many I certainly couldn’t. I wanted to go over that wall the way certain men want to go to war, and others want to go to women. But I had no money, being a tree only lately sprouted. The peddler felt sorry for me, a grubby little orange-haired girl with green teeth and nothing to her name but a few acres of empty mud. He crouched down very close to my face and told me that should I like to come with him and peddle and tinker and barter and do all the sorts of things traveling folk do, he would give me a penny a month, buy me a real dress, and I could have all the seeds I liked.

  I thought this was a very fine plan. I hopped over the wall as graceful as a jackdaw—and fell down dead.

  Or as near to dead as makes no difference. When I woke, it was already deep in the furrows of night, and the peddler had carried me back over the wall, laid me in what grass he could find, and left a bulging sack of seeds in my hand.

  I could not cross the wall, not ever, no more than a tree can cinch up her roots and travel by coach to another forest. This was sobering. I was as curious about the world as any child, and I knew then that I would never see it.

  So I planted it. Apples, persimmons, walnuts, lemons, almonds, dates, and yes, cherries. Anything you can name and many I never could. I had all the time in the world; the life of a tree is long. I learned the arts of irrigation and aeration, of the tripartite field and the leaving of the fallow, fertilization and pruning, and the science of grafting. And all the while the pumpkin tree grew, and gave fruit, and wherever I mashed the pulp into the roots of the new trees, they would bear their own fruit all the year. The acres of mud became a forest, an orchard, the loveliest of any that ever grew, and at the center my tree that is me and me that is the tree, and we all grew together, and we were happy.

  Eventually, folk came, and they were not kind peddlers with sacks full of seeds for a dirty-cheeked little girl. Oh, some of them were kind enough, wanting a basket of pears or a bushel of figs for one reason or another—but what do I need with money, when I drink rain and eat dirt? Finally, pressed by their outstretched hands, I began to trade. Fruit for seed—if they could bring me a seed I did not have, I would give them whatever they liked. And so my orchard grew even wilder and more marvelous, and more folk came. I learned about the world from their lips, and I was a good student.

  Finally, three fortnights ago, a man came to my wall. I did not like his look, but who is a tree to judge the looks of men? An oak may be gnarled, and still have a kind and sap-wet heart. His hair was iron and his skin was hazel-bark, and his clothes were bright red, as bright as any robin who chirps on my apples. His neck, though, his neck was pale, almost blue, as though it had not seen sunlight since it slipped from his mother’s womb.

  “Good afternoon, Ravhija,” he said, and bowed, and I have long since ceased to be surprised when all manner of strange creatures know my name. “I have come with a long list.”

  I put a hand on my hip, which had long since grown its own fine dress, though I admit I still dream of the muslin my peddler might have bought me. “As long as you have good trades, I’ll do my best to give over whatever you need.”

  “Ah, there it is. You see, I do not trade. I make a policy of it. Why lose perfectly good belongings when it is just as easy to take what you want?” He snapped his fingers and a small blue flame appeared above his palm, crackling and hissing. “I d
o not believe that a tree needs further explanation. Immolation is a fate none of us would wish for ourselves. Let me in.”

  Well, what choice had I? Either he would burn it all to the ground, or, if he knew my nature, he would drag me across the wall and plunder us anyway. I walked the rows with him as if he were a landlord, though no one but me had ever set foot in the garden. I tried to fill his list, which was very strange, and full of herbs as well as fruits, and bark and sap and bits of soil as well. I had nearly all of it; I am not famed for nothing.

  But the last, oh, the last.

  “It should be plain that I do not have an Ixora,” I whispered, refusing to meet his eyes and shying from the dancing flame he still held in his hand. “Surely you would see the smoke if I did.”

  “But I was told that you have everything that grows under the sun. I need the Ixora; without it the rest is useless.”

  “What do you need all this for?” I asked plaintively, holding back my tears as best I knew how.

  “My dear lady, I am a Wizard. It is enough that I require a thing. Some are born with magic floating inside them like a fly caught in a glass. The rest of us are not so fortunate…”

  IT SEEMED CLEAR TO ME LONG AGO THAT IT WAS better to be a wizard than not to be one. Better to close oneself into a room not so different from a kitchen and brew the world in a glass pot than to scrabble in the dirt for mean roots and carry milk from bony heifers and scratch at your cheeks until they were blood-run as a butcher’s.

  I could never stop scratching, you see.

  From the time I was born, my skin peeled and paled, sloughing off as though I could not wait to be out of it, and it itched, oh, it itched, and the scratching never really helped, but I had to do it, I clawed my arms and my chest and my neck, my cheeks and even the creases of my eyelids—there was nothing of me that did not burn.

  Folk gasped when they saw me, a boy determined to shed his skin, thin bits of flesh wavering on my body like bits of paper blown by a harsh wind. Doctors and witches and even wizards came, but no one could cool my flaming body. Finally, my mother wrapped me in swaddling clothes and tied my arms to boards so that I could not scratch, and propped me against our damp store wall. There I stayed and grew, fed with a pitted spoon: carrot mash and carrot soup, carrots steamed and baked, carrots raw and burnt and beaten into cakes, carrot-blossom tea and carrot-crusted bread. All we grew were carrots in our few fields, and all my days were filled with orange roots, spooned into my peeling mouth by my frightened mother.

  I hung on my boards and my skin crawled. My breath became shallow and quick, I could never seem to get enough air. When I was no longer a baby but a young boy, and still hung up on the wall like a portrait of myself, my skin hardened into something like scales and my hair fell out, but still my flesh itched and scalded and still I could not scratch. The lightest waft of carrot-breeze through my window was agony, stealing my breath and cutting through my bandages to sear my skin.

  “Death is at the window,” my father would whisper to my mother after a meal of carrot-broth and carrot-greens. I looked—but I could see nothing at the grimy window but the sickly moon like a seed in a black furrow.

  “He’s at Death’s door,” my mother would whisper to my father when my breath came sparse and whistling as weeds in the root-rows. I looked—but I was bounded in a bedroom, and nowhere near our thick, warped-wood door.

  And when I was very sick, and orange vomit trickled from my mouth to pool on the floor, they would shake their heads and say: “Death stands at his shoulder.” I twisted to see him, to glimpse his shape behind me, but there was nothing.

  Finally, when I was not much older than twelve, it stopped. As though some strange creature had passed its hand over me in the night, my scaly, peeling skin smoothed and my breath swelled up again, and in time even my hair grew back. It was as though I had never been ill, and with a joy in her great as bushels lashed together, my mother unwrapped the swaddling clothes and took my arms down from their boards, revealing a grown boy, one she had only glimpsed when she changed the bandages: dark of hair and eye, with skin like a drought-blasted field, scars already fading, and a stare she could not meet.

  They were eager to get me working the land, as I had missed many years of farm-chores, but I would not cease scratching my flesh only to scratch at the earth.

  “All these years you have said Death was nearby, and I have seen nothing. Before I give my life to carrots and cows, I will find Death and ask him why he did not want me, when he lived at my house and shared my board for so many years.”

  My parents looked at each other and feared the illness had made me mad. “You cannot find Death,” they said. “Death finds you. Be glad we were passed over and learn to pull roots from the soil so that they do not break.”

  But I had a child’s understanding, and in my heart Death was a tall man in black who perhaps did or did not ride a black lion—I could not decide—and if he had been so near me and seen my suffering, then we would surely be friends, since he already knew me so well. I would ask him why, if he was my friend, he let me burn and did not take me.

  They forbade me, and I did the sensible thing: I crawled out of my window in the dark of the world and crept over the sprouting fields. Perhaps they missed me; perhaps they cried. I do not know, and I never returned.

  I pursued my goal in a most logical way—I sought out all the places Death was likely to frequent. Sick men and stillborn children, wasting women and plague-houses and hospices, battles when I could find them and walk behind the lines in the supply trains, looking for the direst of wounded soldiers. I even befriended poisoners so that I could be near their victims at the last moment. I was resourceful, and my young body seemed to want to make up the time it had spent suspended. I was strong with walking and clever with the many lies I told so that a child might be allowed in the presence of the dying. It was, after a manner of speaking, an education, and certainly slashed and moldering flesh taught me far more than carrots and rainwater would have.

  But I could not find Death.

  I asked every doctor and midwife, every soldier and assassin, and they all replied the same: “You do not find Death; Death finds you.”

  Finally, grown long and taut as a knotted wire, I came in my wanderings to a kingdom whose sun blazed an unimaginable red, whose jungles were damp and squelching, whose King was a terror and whose roads were mud tracks through the green. Not far from the capital, I was wet to my hips with the slapping of wide-leaved bushes and the splashing of silt-gilded water. The road was not much better than the forest, and I was in a foul mood when a stranger strode up beside me.

  “Hello, boy,” he said, a short, gnomish man in brightly colored robes who had tied his hair back in complicated patterns, and who wore a wide bolted iron collar that obscured all of his neck and the beginnings of his shoulders. His cheeks were very round and his voice rough as old fence- posts. He nodded a greeting.

  “Are you on pilgrimage?”

  “Of course not, why would you say that?” I barked.

  “Pilgrims are the only ones who take this road. I think it makes them feel as though they are struggling in the face of adversity, as the soul struggles against the body, or some such patter.”

  “Are you a pilgrim, then?”

  “Of a kind.”

  “Well, I didn’t know there was another road,” I sulked.

  “Many and varied, many and varied. And perhaps one day there will be no road in the world which does not lead to our harbors and towers and chapels. One may hope. But if you are not a pilgrim, why do you aim your feet for Varaahasind, the City of Boars, where Indrajit sits on his throne?”

  I sighed, and launched into the litany that by then was as familiar as my own tongue in my mouth. “I seek Death. I was at his door, he was at my window, he stood at my shoulder, but I could not see him. He has been the goal of my heart for years and I have walked half the earth in search of him—and do not tell me to wait until he finds me, or that a nice bo
y like myself should run off and play. I’ve heard it, and plenty worse.”

  The man seemed to consider, and his collar glinted in the sun, reflecting the wet green road.

  “No, I wouldn’t tell you that, not that.”

  We walked for a while in the muck, until the first blanched-brick spires of the city showed through the thick trees.

  At length, he said: “What if I told you, instead, that I knew where Death lay, and would take you there gladly?”

  I swallowed hard. “I would ask what you would have in return for such service.”

  “Only that when you have finished listening to all that Death has to say, you listen to me for a while, and see which of us is the wiser.”

  Others had claimed to know, of course, and then led me to dark alleys dank with shadows, where I was subsequently robbed or beaten and left face down in innumerable puddles. But I could not afford, on so strange a task as mine, to refuse anyone. I shrugged and followed him into the city, where pigskin canopies shaded thin and winding streets, and the wind smelled of brewing barley. I followed him up through endless red-brick terraces and shining rice-fields stacked one atop the other all the way up thick green hills, rice-fields couched between towers, between barracks, anywhere a pool of water might stand.

  Near the top of the hill was a house like an anthill, just beyond the enormous wall that shielded a bulbous and darkly glinting palace from the plain rice-plantings and dusty terraces. The house was large and might have been handsome if it did not so much resemble a man’s head half-buried in the earth. The thatch of the roof drifted down like hair, and the windows seemed to watch us, shutters like lids opening and closing fitfully in the hot afternoon.

  “This is the House of Death,” my companion said, as casually as if he were announcing the house of a baker or a midwife.