The girl opened her eyes slowly—though truly it was as though she closed them, hiding the dark stains of her eyelids with the cold light of her eyes. She looked directly at him, and he flushed deeply, expecting her to be angry, to retreat from him in shame. Instead, she simply stared at him calmly, the moon and the water still pooling on her body, and made no move to cover herself. They stood this way without motion for some time, as the wide-leaved trees whispered to each other overhead. Finally, the girl waded to shore and pulled her ragged shift over her head. He rushed to the mound of thick grass where she sat and, without meaning to, reached out and gripped her by the shoulders.
“Where have you been?” he choked. “I have looked for you for seven nights!”
The girl cocked her head to one side, like a sparrow considering a hand full of seeds.
“You… you said that you would tell me another story… more strange and wonderful than the last… I thought…” He stared down at his hands helplessly. “I thought you wanted to tell me your stories. I thought you would tell me all of them,” he finished lamely.
“I will tell you another, if you like,” she answered, her voice still and cool.
“What’s wrong? Why have you hidden from me?” the boy cried.
The girl brushed a fluttering strand of hair behind her ear. “I have not hidden, or at least, I have not meant to hide. It is only that you have not found me. The Garden is wide, and I am sorry. Folk have come and gone since last you heard my voice, and I could not be seen.” She looked at him in that strange, birdlike way again, a light sparking deep in her eyes. “Would you like to hear another tale from the folds of my eyes, a tale of ships and saints, of maidens and beasts and a dreaming city?”
The boy bit his lip. He felt that the polite thing to do was to ask how she had fared, if it had been very hard to escape the notice of one or another noble lord, if she had eaten well without him—but he had not heard the promises of her fantastic creatures in so long that they sounded in his belly like the tolling of church bells, like anchors dropping in a soundless sea, and he felt such a desire for them that he could not be polite.
“Tell me the tale, please!” he whispered.
The girl settled herself on the grass, under the perfume of cinnamon trees and stars like hanging gardens, and spoke, her voice once again as wide and soft as the hide of a jungle cat.
“Once, there was a girl named Snow, and she had no one in all the world to love her.”
NOW, SHE HAD NOT ALWAYS BEEN CALLED THIS. THE girl had once lived in the city of Ajanabh, a warm and well-built place which sat fat and rich on the golden silt of a wide river delta, scarlet flags flapping proudly, the streets winding marvelously through its jeweled heart. She was loved and safe in her mother’s house, and expected that her life would continue that way forever, with the cinnamon-scented wind on her skin as she slept.
But Ajanabh faltered, as cities will, and the day came when her fisheries were no longer so full, and her merchants no longer so eager to pole the sludge of the river to reach her glittering harbor. Slowly, the people left their whitewashed houses. Slowly, they abandoned their thick-soiled fields, which had once been so lovingly and reliably inundated by the clear green waters.
Snow, unremarkable among so many others who would never again call the warm-winded southlands home, stood with her parents on the deck of a ship as the pearl-domed city retreated in the distance, until it was nothing more than a glowing line against the sea. She stared over the rail of the ship for days, her hair becoming tangled and salted with the wind, though her parents begged her to come below. They were bound for the glacial North, other harbors great and small, where whale meat and seal fat were to make new fortunes for all the lost children of Ajanabh. Bound for the city of Muireann, which lay on the gray waters of its stormy bay like a child against its mother’s breast, host to every ship that crossed the diamond-tipped waves.
But the passing had been difficult for her parents, who could not bear the savage cold. Even less were they prepared for life in Muireann, whose winter seemed never to end, and whose people were as frozen and implacable as snow on a flat roof. The endless chill set into their bones, and before her family had passed a year in the salt-wind and the sea, Snow’s parents died.
She grew, surely as an ash tree, and lived as near to a beggar as was possible without starving, mending nets with the fishwives when they would let her take some of their work, scurrying through the docks on odd errands, simply to get a beaten coin to buy bread and seal fat to moisten it.
Though she was resourceful, Snow was not a beautiful girl. Her face was plain, unmarked and unremarkable. Her eyes were a watery shade of green, like sickly lakes caught in a lightless winter. Her lips were small and perpetually chapped; her skin was neither the milk-smooth of girls who ate breakfasts of oranges and strawberries on silver plates, nor the hardened brown of dockworkers’ daughters. She chewed her nails and picked at the skin on the back of her hands. Though she was as old as any of those girls, the ones who spent their days entertaining suitors in parlors of brocade and soft laughter, folk that passed her on the streets of the village thought her a child. She never grew as tall of leg or as fair of hip as those charmed ones—in fact, no one would have noticed Snow at all, were it not for her hair.
Since the day she buried her mother and father, her hair had gone pale as an old woman’s. It flowed down her thin body in all the colors of a storm-whipped wave: slate and silver, ice and cloud, smoke and fog, ash and iron. The process had not hurt—she simply woke up, grave dirt still under her fingernails, and saw in the mirror that the colors of her home, which once glinted like lamplights in her thick curls, had fled. She was as colorless as ocean foam against the shivered planks of wrecked ships.
And so it came to pass that the girl became a fixture among the fishwives who crowded the dock, tying their nets and mending sails, and for her hair they called her Snow. If they did not love her, the Muireanners accepted her presence and found bits of work that would keep her belly quiet, if not satisfied, looking the other way when she slept in the shipwrights’ cavernous warehouses, curled into the skeletons of half-built clippers. She sought the solace of shadows, keeping her head low and moving through her life with no more sorrow than she had already collected to her thin breast.
One evening, as she sat with a round-faced woman, knotting the last of the day’s great silver nets with practiced fingers, she looked up from her work to find that the woman had tucked an orange into the yellow folds of her skirts. Snow glanced at her benefactor, whose loose brown hair curled tightly around a face that might have belonged to a well-fed gnome, merrily lumpy and red-cheeked. Her body was solid as a bull walrus, muscles bulging silkily beneath layers of fat. The woman winked at Snow without stopping her quick stitching, fleshy fingers flashing in and out of the flaxen ropes.
“Can’t have those pretty teeth falling out, love. Oranges are like rubies up here, loved as gold and twice as rare. But an old friend of mine from the South sends me a crate every winter. And someone like you deserves a ruby or two from time to time.”
Snow turned the blazing fruit over in her hands. When she spoke, her voice was soft and hoarse, for she rarely talked at all, and it had grown as creaky as a brass gate from disuse.
“Where I was born, they grew from trees, hundreds of them, like drops of fire. My mother spiced cakes with the peels.”
“So you did come from somewhere!” The woman laughed, her thick body rippling like a bear in mid-roar. “You didn’t rise up from the waves, fully formed, on an abalone shell? Well, that’s a relief. Wouldn’t want to think I spent half my shift sitting thigh to thigh with a naiad.”
Snow blinked, brushing her high cheeks with lashes pale as snow-crusted sails. “Is that what they say about me, truly?”
“Some, to be sure, love to tell tales. But no one says much about you—you’ve no prospects at all, and that means you’ll be on these docks till you freeze to the boards. Not the sort of life to
inspire the gossips to gnash their own pretty teeth.”
Snow did not scowl, as another girl might, but simply pulled back the small tendrils of herself which had ever so briefly been extended to a bright-voiced stranger. The woman extended her fat hand, studded with rough iron rings, to the girl’s shoulder. “Of course, I don’t mean to be cruel, love—I’m not likely to be crowned Queen of Whalesongs any summer soon, either. There, there. Sigrid’s tongue does tend to flap away without asking permission first.”
“Don’t worry,” Snow said abruptly, shrugging off the hand. “I won’t cry. What you said is true enough, I know that.”
Sigrid gave the gray-haired child a long look, slow and appraising, a jeweler examining a use-blackened sapphire. “We shall see, I suppose. I thought I knew what was true, when I was young and beautiful. I thought I would always be able to run as fast as I pleased, and take such pleasure in simple meals of seal flanks and pelican eggs. Then the world changed, and I was no longer a maid, and I never knew again.” Sigrid straightened, plunging her stubby hands back into her nets. “I’ll tell you a tale of my youth, if you like. It will pass the time.”
Snow nodded, willing to hear anything that would take her mind from the cold stiffening her fingers to stalactites, and the frozen night which would find her huddled and frozen in the belly of a hollow ship.
WHEN I FIRST BECAME A WOMAN AND THE BLOOD was still high in my cheeks, red and quick, I longed to leave the frozen waste of my family’s lands. There was nothing for me there any longer. My brothers and sisters were all grown, gone to Temple or farm, and my mother did not want to look at me, hoping that I, too, would find my way out of her house. But I lingered—there were still things I loved in the snow, and I was a little afraid to go into the world.
One spring, when the lichen was green-fringed and springy, a group of monks came to our village. All strangers are sacred to us, so they were taken in without question. My mother drew the lot to house them, and that was how it came to pass that three brothers ate, and spoke, and slept, under our snow-thatched roof.
At first they kept their deep scarlet hoods over their heads, mumbling thanks and bowing stiffly over their suppers of near-raw fox and leafy lichen. I was intensely curious, as all maids of that age are, and I peered beneath their cowls throughout supper, trying to catch a glimpse of their faces. Finally, the middle brother straightened, threw back his crimson cloak, and fastened his milky yellow eyes onto mine.
“Is this what you wanted to see, little one?” he growled, and indeed he did growl it, for though these monks had the bodies of strong-calved men, their heads were those of great dogs, tongues hanging from their jaws like the clappers of bells. Their fur was thick and deep, falling to their shoulders, rough-cut as the beards of mountain sages. One brother had a bluish-white pelt, another was black and brown in patches, and the last was a deep red-gold, like the hair of a girl. But the eyes of each were chill and hard, the color of old mosses, gray and gold all at once. I could not help but gasp, but my wonder only made the middle one laugh, a sound like the grinding of boulders.
“We’re not werewolves, love, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the red dog chuckled. “Cynocephaloi, dog-heads. Entirely different.”
“Vegetarian, for one thing,” said the white one, gesturing at his plate, where the pink fox meat lay untouched. My mother apologized profusely, deathly afraid that she had polluted them—some number of my sisters had entered the priesthood, and Mother was ever sensitive to religious niceties. The middle one, clearly a pack leader of sorts, looked up with his liquid eyes and reassured her.
“No, no, meat does not offend us; we simply choose to eschew it. It appeals to the higher nature of the self to put aside food which once lived—I do not consider myself food, why should I ask all other creatures to consider themselves so? Our Order is, however, rather strict. We certainly do not ask our hosts to know our Scripture—certainly not when we have been so rude as to eat without sharing ourselves. But we, too, are wary of violating spiritual… etiquette. This is a land of many faiths. Some do not permit the Sacred Guest to speak of himself, or at all. Others do not allow names to be uttered before the meal is finished. As we have quite finished all that we are permitted to eat, I will begin. I am Bartholomew, and these are my brothers. Balthazar,” he said, indicating the blue-white Cynocephalus, “and Bagdemagus,” indicating the red. Turning to me, he added in a mischievous tone: “But you may call him ?Bags.’ We all do. We belong to the Order of the Scarlet Hood—for beneath the Hood we are one.” At this all three made a delicate motion with their hands and whispered some sort of prayer.
Balthazar took up the thread of their introduction then, rasping through his long teeth. “We are traveling home, to Al-a-Nur, City of Light, and the Chrysanthemum Tower. We were a delegation, sent to mediate a great quarrel in our faith, and now that our part is done, we are permitted to return to the Tower which gave us birth.”
I must have seemed such a child to them, sitting plate-eyed and loose-mouthed at their feet, savoring the foreign tang of the word on my tongue like a spiced cake: Al-a-Nur. My mother eyed me with suspicion, but I ignored her. I begged to be told of this city, which in my heart I already knew must be the holiest city ever to sit on the earth.
“Truly, girl, you have never heard of the City of Twelve Towers?” Bartholomew stroked his fur as though it were a beard and peered at me. “Seat of the Papess, She Who Was Born in the Purple, the Anointed City which shines like a summer star?”
“Never!” I cried breathlessly.
“Very well,” he chuckled, straightening his back like a teacher about to give lessons, “your kind mother permitting, I shall tell you of the Dreaming City, enclosed in her seraphic spheres…”
LISTEN, CHILD, AND I WILL TELL YOU OF AL-A-NUR, seat of the Twelve Towers, the Anointed City. She was founded a thousand years ago, in the year Seven Hundred and Fifty-three of the Second Caliphate. The foundations of the Towers were poured in agate and porphyry, the tapered windows were chiseled into graceful arches. Clear green ponds were dug from the loamy soil, tamarinds and palms were planted, willows and pale-barked birch. Aqueducts ran with sweet water, gurgling up through fountains of silver and glass. Roads were arranged in con centric circles, according to the Lo Shen board, our sacred Game, named for the river goddess who laid her waters around the blessed City. The roads were paved in lapis and turquoise, stones which were plentiful in the surrounding mountains—even today the cobbled walkways keep their deep blue sheen.
Markets sprang to life like mushrooms after a rain, filling the closes and keeps with the scent of saffron and broiling meat; traders came to sell dolls and cabinets, sleek red horses and love charms—but they stayed to contemplate the divinity that resides in the exchange of gold in the marvelous Towers which comprised the many hearts of the City.
The Towers were themselves arrayed in the pattern of the Chang-O configuration—the ideal defensive deployment of the Lo Shen pieces. On the outer rim rose up the Tower of Sun-and-Moon, whose roof was tipped with a great diamond and a great topaz, melted into one another in an unimaginable furnace. Now one stone, it refracts the light of the heavens onto the City in a shower of prisms. There is the Tower of Patricides, bright with blood trickling between its polished stones, a thin, steady flow which pools in a glowering crimson moat at its base; and the Tower of Ice and Iron, its twisted metallic spire bruising the clouds. On the second ring lay the Coral Tower, its deep rose pocked and rippled with anemones kept moist by loving novices; the Tower of Hermaphrodites, hung with veils and inscribed with sacred ideographs, silver ink on a golden wall; the Chrysanthemum Tower, the living stone ablaze with sixteen-pointed flowers flashing gold and scarlet at the noonday sun; and the Tower of St. Sigrid, bristling with ships’ prows and wheels and masts. In the innermost circle were built the Nightingale Tower, through whose walls the wind whistled, singing as sweetly as that tiny brown bird; and the Tower of the Nine Yarrow Stalks, whose very surface was a divinatory
device, painted in a thousand shades; the pattern of sun and shadow on the colors is still interpreted daily within those walls. There also were the Towers of the Living and the Dead, which once stood straight and tall, the one walled in hawk and falcon feathers with tufts of fur thatching the roof and doors of serpent-skin, the other riddled black with catacombs and crannies—but over the centuries, they have leaned further and further from their bases, until they almost touch. Now there is a small bridge of silk and ebony between the upper rooms of the Towers, and the initiates move freely between them.
Finally, in the center of Al-a-Nur a slender, simple tower was erected, fashioned from camphor wood and the roots of rose trees, knobbed with silver nail heads glittering like constellations set into the polished walls. Its roof was thatched from willow whips, its windows shaded in soft deer-skin—and this is the Tower of the Papess, the holiest site of this holy City.
For Al-a-Nur is the seat of a dozen faiths, all presided over by the Papess, whose wisdom has guided us from our earliest days. Each Tower is a self-contained spiritual sphere, each with its liturgies and fasts and scriptures. They recognize the divine in myriad ways, but recognition of the Papess ensures peace. The Caliphate, which rules the surrounding countryside, allows Al-a-Nur complete sovereignty; and thus it has gone in prosperous and tranquil fashion across the long years. From every direction come young men and women, seeking to spend their lives in contemplation, and there, under the light of Sun-and-Moon, they find a path that suits them. Al-a-Nur is a carved box which holds the wisdom of the world, knowledge lost to all but our spindled Towers. It is the paradise of the wishful and the wise.
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