The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Would it be better if I was King, Mother?” I exploded, pushing through the hole onto the bed and grabbing her violet-wrapped shoulders—she was so thin! “If I were King, would you curtsey and put on your ermine and dance at our wedding? You know the family law. Better wedded to me than to this disgusting display of magic tricks, cloistered with it day in and day out! I won’t apologize for my father and I won’t apologize for you. Nothing is gotten in this world except by force—a lifetime in this dead place, where nothing ever happens because the only people who live here are dead, has taught me that!”

  She started laughing, hysterical, unhinged as the door to her room. “Yes, yes, if you were King it would be licit; Kings do whatever they please, Kings and their Wizards—no laws for them! They take and take and what does it matter? No one asks the taken; they just forget, they just forget, they disappear and everyone forgets.” She looked up at me, her eyes suddenly canny as a fox in sight of a mouse. “I’ll play this game if you want to play it, Ismail mine, but you have to perform a deed of honor. That’s what young men do when they’re courting, if I remember.”

  I let her go gently. Was that all? Bring her roses or a dragon scale from furthest isles and she’d put up no fight? “What would you have me do? Let us get this over with as quickly as possible.”

  “Bring me the head and the collar, and whatever other pieces you want to keep, of the Wizard who took your sister.”

  Well, killing is easy work. I rose from the bed, and the hole coalesced again where I had been. I bowed to her in as courtly a manner as I have ever managed.

  “Lady Iolanthe, I am at your service.”

  I did not particularly want to marry my mother, you understand. If another girl had fit the belt I would have had her just as easily. But protocol must be observed when one is of a certain station, and it wouldn’t be so awful, after all, for her to stand at ceremonies and dance at balls. It’s not as if she had ever shared a bed with her last husband, beyond what was necessary for inheritance. I was not happy to go off and kill a Wizard who had done no harm to me, besides being part of an unsavory profession, just so I could make Iolanthe a Baroness twice over, but then, what is happiness? I’m sure I’ve never met the beast.

  It is not that we didn’t know where the Wizard who took my sister from us lived—there was not a farm-haggarded soul in the countryside who did not know where Omir rested his staff and vial. But one does not go demanding one’s daughter back from such a man, especially when he is bound to such a King as we were ruled by in those days.

  That King’s Palace was surrounded by deep woods whose trunks were bunched and cracked as old women’s spines. The thing itself was close-bordered by two strange-watered rivers, one black and one white. As I crossed the bridges I looked into the current—the black one reflected my face like the side of a dead volcano, glittering in flat shapes between ripples, showing a reasonably handsome young man who was not a Prince, but might be mistaken for one on a particularly sunny day.

  The white river showed nothing, sheer and dull as milk.

  Not knowing much about how to assassinate when it is not a simple matter of a bedroom and a knife, I applied for an audience and, predictably, was told to wait. I busied myself as best I could, and enjoyed a new kind of life: sleeping in proper rooms for once, eating at proper tables, dressing in proper clothes.

  I walked out to look at the rivers every day.

  Finally, I was called into the high-ceilinged audience chamber, heralded as Ismail of Barony Baqarah—how strange it was to hear my name intoned by a bored scribe!—and stood before the King and his favorite slave. The King was at his midday meal, slavering at hay in a golden trough, shoving his face full of grass with both hands.

  Monstrous. Unnatural. For men to be ruled by an animal. I suppressed the urge to vomit onto the silver-tiled floor.

  Sorrel, the Centaur-King of the Eight Kingdoms, looked up at me, his forelegs buckled and kneeling so that he could eat his fill. His chestnut tail flicked at the air. Hay still stuck to his brown beard. “Oh,” he grunted, “it’s you.” Behind him, the Wizard, in ill-fitting blue-brown robes and a heavy iron collar that weighed on him like a penance, looked from the horseman to me with an uncertain gaze.

  “It is him, isn’t it, Omir?” the Centaur said, lifting his huge equine form with some difficulty from the trough and clacking his hooves on the tile, keeping his right side always to me, his left in shadow. His brown pelt flowed into pale skin that seemed to rarely see sun and he wore, as you might expect, nothing. There was no throne—how could there be?—but he rested on a pile of rose-colored cushions on a dais, and I suppose for a horse that is as good as a throne.

  “Yes, my lord, I believe it is.”

  “I’m sorry; who am I meant to be?” I asked, nonplussed. Killing is meant to be in the dark, in the quiet, and there I was in a room that could not be brighter if its foundation had been sunk in the sun itself, and what’s worse, expected.

  Sorrel scratched himself at the forelock with an expression of boredom on his moon-broad face. “Omir told me you were coming, the man who would replace me…”

  BEFORE MY GRANDFATHER WENT OUT TO PASTURE, it was decided by those much wiser than I that the Eight Kingdoms, as varied in their folk as a field of ten thousand blades of grass, could not be governed by men and women. They were fit for country gentry, certainly, counting things up and doling things out, but how could they be trusted to speak and act for us, the second nation, the nation of monsters?

  Obviously, they could not.

  Centaurs seemed a likely choice, standing as we do between the bed and the stable, between men and beasts, between the wild and the world. It was thought providential that our massive hearts, necessary to serve such massive bodies, had eight chambers, one for each Kingdom. And so it was that for many lifetimes, Centaurs ruled—some badly as untrained stallions, some well as sweet-natured geldings. That is the way with rulers; we were never immune. But watching the Kings of men before us, we learned that passing the crown to sons and daughters was as foolish as feeding seaweed to a wolf. We decided our rulers in a way more suited to our strengths: with a race.

  The morning was crisp and apple-strewn the autumn that I took my place at the starting line. My rival was Dapple, a tall, handsome gray whose chest was so broad I could not have put my arms around it if they could stretch to twice their usual length. I was a little worried—fast as I was, I was not the strongest of my herd, and my chest looked sickly next to this muscled block of breath and bone.

  “It is a perfect day for a race,” Dapple boomed approvingly, pawing the earth with pearl-bright hooves. “I hope you mean to make a real contest of it; I should not like to be Queen just because you had caught a sniffle.” She beamed at me, a winning smile framed by heaps of silver hair. Despite our position, I liked her. She smelled good, like birch leaves and alfalfa and quick-running streams.

  The rules were these: Those who had the wish to rule would present themselves at the starting line—and few enough did this, as Centaurs are a reticent folk who generally keep to themselves and scoff at the trappings of power, another reason we were deemed suitable for it—and each of them fastened to a plow. Another plow would be set beside them, and whatever local magician or soothsayer had been chosen for it would enchant the blade to draw itself. The horse who could beat the undrawn plow and the competing beasts would take the crown: Those who could best furrow the earth and make it flourish were those who should help its people to flourish as well.

  There were only two of us the autumn morning when I stood beside Dapple and tried my legs at a reign. Each time a race was held, fewer of us turned up at the starting line. In the end, Centaurs prefer the pasture and play and mounting and rolling in grass. But I was not reticent, nor did I scoff at power. I was not the wisest horse ever to whistle through the wind, but I was hungry—in those days, I was so hungry. The crown seemed to sing and whisper and wheedle from its height, slung onto the branch of a tree at the far en
d of the field. It shone, and sparkled, and sighed that it wished only to rest on my head. I liked it, too; it smelled only of itself, and that was good enough for me.

  My thoughts were interrupted as the crowd began to murmur and stamp its hooves in confusion. The trial’s Wizard had come into the field with his plow sparkling like a young colt’s eyes in the sun, long red robes flashing and flapping in the brisk morning.

  He had no collar.

  He was ageless and high-nosed, clearly schooled with chairs and pencils, well clothed and well shod—but there was no collar. We did not know how to look at him, how to address him, how he fit with us.

  He took all of our glances in his stride and set to rubbing his gleaming plow with powders and oils, murmuring to it like a favorite dog, brushing it with his long, thick-knuckled fingers. When he was finished it did not gleam, but dripped and clouded with baleful colors, ochre and oxblood and onyx. He invited me from my starting position to check his work, as if it were a particularly complex arithmetic problem. I trotted over, meaning to sniff as quickly as I could at the noxious fluids and declare it well done. I was still a simple horse—what did I know about magic, besides how bad it smelled?

  But once I was bent over the plow, swishing my tail at flies and scratching the back of my head in what I imagined was a very knowledgeable manner, he turned his pinched face and dark eyes up to me through the share and the shin and whispered, so quietly I thought it was a bee buzzing in my ear, so quietly that he could be sure no one heard him but me.

  “I can give you what you want.”

  “What?” I said, too loudly. Dapple looked over at me through a crowd of impertinent young colts who were trying to measure her height and breadth. Her bared chest was smooth and puffed as she pranced, her proud breasts sheened in gray. She snorted and raised a silvery eyebrow. I coughed theatrically and grinned at her through my sniffle—she laughed, and her laugh was as big and broad as her chest, a laugh fit to burst barrels.

  “I can give you what you want: this race, the crown,” came the voice again, softer than flies in a yearling’s tail. “You’re fast enough to beat the plow—that’s certain as rain in winter. But you’ll never beat her. Look at those shoulders, like spotted boulders they are! She’s a better horse than you, a better runner; she’d probably make a better monarch. But she won’t give me what I want; I can see that in her withers, her hooves, the fall of her hair, the set of her jaw. She’s one of the ones who think virtue can sit easily on a throne. But you, you know how the world really rides, I can tell.”

  “What is it you want?” This time I was soft as mice in the brush, staring studiously at the workmanship of the plow.

  “Why, you, my dear Sorrel! You are precious among creatures, you must know that.” He pretended to tighten the joints and brushed a sweaty lock of hair from his face.

  “I wasn’t particularly aware, no,” I answered.

  “You are halfway between man and animal—that makes you ideally suited to my interests. Let me pursue my art in peace and without interference. Assist me in the smallest ways from time to time and I will win this race for you.”

  I thought as quickly as a rabbit with a fox after him. “You have no collar.”

  He clenched his jaw. “No. I was freed from it by good fortune; I have reveled in its lack. Slavery is a sin.”

  I thought as quickly as I am able. It was a good bargain, but if I knew anything I knew that it would end up being more than he claimed. I wiped the sweat from my hands on my coat. “If I am King, and I have a Wizard in my employ, it would only be correct that he be bound to me, that he be my doulios. Otherwise, how am I to trust him? What is to keep him from cutting me to pieces on the smallest whim? Virtue does not sit easily on the throne, you say? Well, then, sin may have a comfortable rest there.”

  The Wizard grimaced, and I could see his teeth grind beneath leather-thick skin. He looked up to the sky imploringly, and down at his hands, which opened and closed as though his palms were pricked by the tip of a brand. For a moment, I thought the man would actually weep. But he did not. His shoulders shuddered under his crimson robes, which seemed suddenly less bright and cheerful. He put his fingers, almost absentmindedly, to his neck, stroking the pale, clammy skin.

  “Yes,” he rasped, “fine. Yes. I will put the collar on again if you will give yourself to me. It will be worth it, to have you. We will give ourselves to each other.”

  I tapped the dirt with my hoof. “What… what will you do to her? It will not be too terrible, will it?”

  In less time than a mayfly takes to flap its wings, the sorrow was gone from his eyes, replaced by an uncut stallion’s ravenous glee. “Not too terrible, no. I will burst her heart in her chest, one chamber at a time.”

  I looked at Dapple, how beautiful she was in the autumn light, savoring a lump of sugar in her ruddy mouth. Her long hair sparkled like a fall of spring rain, and her belly was furred in the softest white. I did like her, I did like her so. But the crown shone ahead of her, and it sang, how it sang!

  “No.” I swallowed dryly. I could hardly speak. “Not too terrible.”

  Dapple nosed me playfully when I returned to the garlanded starting position.

  “I promise,” she said teasingly, her smooth, race-naked skin shining like armor, “I’ll let you stay on as my consort. I’m sweeter than apples and sugar and acorns after rain, I’ll promise that, too.”

  I managed a good impression of the grin that such bravado requires, and slapped her rump as comrades will. My fingers were smeared with foul-smelling gray unguent that the Wizard had given me. It would not show against her skin, he said, and no one would be wiser. She blushed with pleasure—and a blush beneath silver skin is something to see.

  The bone-horns blared and we were off, running, faster than any rider and horse, and the driverless plow bouncing along beside us, drawing a long, even furrow in the rich soil, its dusts and oils falling off in orange clumps as it went.

  For a few seconds, I thought I might win on my own—I am very fast, fastest of all my chestnut-hided family, and sometimes the slender horse will beat the behemoth. My legs clattered quick on the pebbles, but Dapple was only holding back. She spurred ahead with a laugh that shook the elms and firs alike, and slapped my rump with friendly delight as she passed me by completely.

  My own heart surged in my chest, as if sympathetic to hers—would he keep his word? She was so far ahead now I could only keep her gray-white tail in view. And then she stumbled.

  I felt it in my own chest, a tiny echo of what must have been a cloud-clapping clamor in hers. One by one I felt them go, each chamber collapsing like a hand suddenly clenched into a fist. One, two, three, four. Five, six. Seven. Eight. Dapple tumbled onto the raceway with a terrible dull sound, and pebbles sprayed up all around her like a wave.

  I sped ahead. The plow was a full horse-length behind me. I did not look at her as I passed her body, already surrounded by the concerned, soon to be mourners. I crossed the line. The crown sang so loudly, so loudly, and with both hands I seized it, and its voice was pure as sugar, and apples, and acorns after rain.

  When we burned her, as Centaurs do their dead, I gave a long and heart-felt eulogy—I was the King, it was my duty to mourn the fallen. The air was filled with the smell of her meat, and I tried not to gag. The Wizard, Omir, came to me after her ashes were combed and looked over the charred bones.

  “You will be the last Centaur-King. I thought I should mention it. Perhaps if you were not the kind of beast to whom a crown sings there would be more after you—it never sang to Dapple, after all. But then, if it had, I would not have chosen you, and your sad place as last in a long line is why it had to be you—you will help me, and you will conquer peoples who will help me. After you, the Kings will be men again, and I know already what they are made of. When you are not past middle age, a young and hungry man will come to you on an unspeakable errand, and he will put a knife into the eight chambers of your heart, and he will be King after
you.”

  Slowly, fat drops of rain began to fall from the sky, extinguishing the last of Dapple’s embers.

  “Shall we go in?” said the Wizard, a wide smile on his face.

  THE CENTAUR-KING WAS LOST IN HIMSELF. “I MEANT to be a good King,” he mused, “I did mean to. But there were revolts to put down and taxes to collect and threats to quell on the borders, and it just becomes too much to carry all that on your back along with virtue. Virtue rides heavy in the saddle, you know.”

  He rose from his pile of cushions and for the first time I saw him whole, saw his left flank, which had been swallowed up in shadow and rose-colored silk. It was a map of scars, of scars and missing flesh, the cuts, old and new and every age between, crisscrossing his haunches until there was no hide left, only knotted flesh, and long pieces of him were missing, just gone, scooped from him as cleanly as cream from a bowl. Not one of his ribs had been left unbroken. One hoof was as fragile and as filled with holes as a honeycomb, the ankle a mass of scabbed-over wounds. He favored it, and his gait had a terrible lope. He hobbled to me and bent his face to mine, lanky brown hair smoothed back from a haggard brow.

  “Tell me—Ismail, is it?—how does virtue ride with your errand in his bags?”

  “Lighter,” I whispered, “than with an unnatural creature who lets a slave cut into him until he cannot walk.”

  He looked down as if he had not noticed his ruined side until now. “Oh, yes. This is my use. I don’t suppose you have this sort of use—you notice he takes flesh only from the horse half of me, or if I am lucky, the place where horse and man meet. I am happy you came, now that it’s happened. Heirs are heirs, after all. I’m sure you two will find some use for each other, and frankly, I am tired of being useful.”

  I glanced at Omir. He met my stare, stone to steel, unabashed and unashamed. In that moment, we understood each other, and all thought of my mother evaporated from my mind like steam rising from a snow-rimmed lake. She could rot in her tower with her thrice-damned hole. I did not need her; I needed him.