The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  And then I saw children who had faces just alike, walking two by two, and these were twins; I knew that I also walked two by two, even though I had only one body. I split my face and became the Twinned Star, and though I would puddle out my light on the dry ground to fit in the cities of men, I would not change my nature. And why should I? The cities were always filled with monsters, and I could easily be mistaken for one of their number. I called myself Itto, and vanished into a noisy tangle of streets.

  I lived, I ate, I worked, I walked two by two.

  I watched the world forget what we looked like, and then pile up flowers on altars in our names. I shook my head.

  I lived, I ate, I worked. I passed well for a monster, and men did not love me.

  After a long while I took it into my head to try the ocean on my skin. I set out to build myself a ship, and bought a great quantity of wood in a seaside town—beautiful wood, like none I had ever seen, with a grain like veins filled with blood, deep red and glossy. I made a place for myself out of the way of the other shipwrights, who laughed when the freakish child came striding by, his arms full of their tools, and set to the keel with a hammer and his own callused hands.

  It was not long before the shipwrights came to me and said: “Itto, that wood is too fine for your kind. By rights we should have it for our ships, for surely your stunted ship will be as misshapen and deformed as you, and spoil the wood.”

  I did not want them to take it, of course I didn’t. But they held me back and gathered whatever of the red wood they liked. What could I do? We are not marvels; we do not have the strength of ten. When our light is spent, we are less, even, than a knot-faced, salt-shouldered shipwright.

  When they had gone, I looked at what was left and said, “Very well, I cannot build a ship. I will build a canoe.”

  It was not long before the shipwrights came again and said: “Itto, that wood is too fine for your kind. By rights we should have it for our ships, for surely your crook-beamed canoe will be as misshapen and deformed as you, and spoil the wood.”

  I did not want them to take it, of course I didn’t. But they held me back and gathered whatever of the red wood they liked. What could I do? I had spent myself on the grass and the salt—I could not blight a man with a glance.

  When they had gone, I looked at what was left and said, “Very well, I cannot build a canoe. I will build a raft.”

  There was hardly enough wood left even to make a raft, but I lashed plank to plank, pole to pole, splinter to splinter. Before long I had a red raft, and it was sturdy and small, and I loved it. It was my own thing, a thing I made as the sky made me, and no less dear to me than if it had been a child.

  It bore me on the purple waves as surely as a hermit bears his pack. I fished well from its edge, and my shirt was a poor man’s sail. It filled; my nets filled. I lay on the rough surface of the red wood and smelled its fibers, like blood and cinnamon prickling my nose. I spoke to it, and I thought, lonely as I was, that it answered, and its voice was smooth and dark as the sky. It pressed up under my back at night, and the dark washed both my faces with gentle hands.

  When I returned to the city, I kept it folded away in long, oiled cloths, stained with fish skins, certainly, but as soft as I could afford. It leaned up against the meanest wall in the smallest boathouse on the docks. And one day, when I came to unwrap my raft and put out into the shallows, there was nothing leaning against the mean wall but filthy, stained cloths and a single broken plank of scarlet wood.

  As I stood trying not to weep, a voice came from behind me. I turned—it was the scraggly, lanky son of one of the other shipwrights. He shoved greasy hair out of his eyes, which darted like a guilty dog’s between me and what was once a raft. “Itto,” he whispered, licking his lips, “that wood was too fine for you.”

  He ran from the boathouse, leaving me to the remains.

  I carried the broken plank away from the countless sands of the beach, away from any house with a tiled roof, away from the makers of round, hard cheeses, over the grass and past any place which salted its meat. Finally, I reached a forest wide of branch and root, and in the center of the forest I found a patch of deep earth, where I buried the shard of glossy red wood just as I would a child of my body. I wept into the grave, as bitterly as I have done any thing since I took my step down out of the sky.

  I did not know what else to do; I returned to the city, to my wretched, shingle-shack home. The lanky boy was waiting for me. As if in apology, shuffling his feet and picking at his pimples, he offered me a place on his father’s ship. “If you want to sail, it is easier to serve on another man’s ship than to build your own, you know,” he said, as if he knew everything that could be known about the matter.

  My raft was gone. One set of planks was like another. I went aboard the ship, and for weeks washed the sickly brown boards as they told me, stitched the thick sails as they told me, slopped tar in broad barrels as they told me.

  And then one night, the shipwright’s son sunk an oar in my head.

  “I SUPPOSE HE WANTED TO MAKE HIS FATHER proud,” the boy groaned, leaning heavily on my taut stomach. Truthfully, my back was beginning to ache from balancing him above the waterline, but it behooves a King to be patient. “I did the natural thing—my hands flew up to my head, while pain thrashed in me like a raft in a storm, and when he drew out the oar, I held myself together, somehow. The boy saw it, he saw that I still spoke, and staggered, and that what came out of me was not exactly like blood, and with his stringy arms he threw me over the side, my hands still clutching my head together like two halves of a cut peach and what light was left in me blanched the sea.” Itto turned up awkwardly, to look at Sekka with his left eyes. “But you see, if I let go I am sure I will perish, and I am afraid. So few of us have ever died. I am afraid.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We floated there like pieces of a shipwreck, and the moon moved on his frail back.

  “Where do you want us to take you? I’m afraid you wouldn’t like my pier very much.”

  Sekka was very quiet. Her huge black eyes were fixed on the bedraggled boy. “You want to go back. Up there.”

  “I don’t know,” he answered, but his voice hitched itself into a half-sob. “I couldn’t get back, even if I did. I let all my light out, or most of it, and I’m so weak, I can hardly heave myself off an otter’s belly. But I’m afraid. I don’t know what’s up there, if that’s where the dead go, if I can go back without dying. I don’t know anything. But it doesn’t matter; I can’t get there any more than a mouse can get up a mountain.”

  Sekka fluffed her feathers lightly, making her look even bigger than usual. “Would a mountain do?” She turned her head to one side, like a rooster in the morning.

  Itto took a long time answering. I felt his breath on me, light and fast, a little wing fluttering against my fur.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it would.”

  RAKKO RAN HIS THICK PAWS OVER HIS BELLY AS IF in memory.

  “Well, what happened?” I cried eagerly.

  “Sekka took him up to the mountain, long years ago, and she can’t bring him back. He won’t come down. Poor Sekka circles the mountain and cries her long cries, but he doesn’t hear. I want you to bring him back for me, and for her, like a good little fox. Steal him from himself. Drag him. Throw him over your shoulder.” The King of the Otters frowned. “He shouldn’t be there all alone. I’ll share my buckets and my nets. Sekka would cover him with her wings for the rest of her days and let the nesting be damned. He doesn’t have to be up there alone.”

  “And how am I supposed to get to the top of a mountain? I’m a fox, and I’ve only just discovered that much. I’m not an eagle.”

  From behind one of the paint-stripped pillars, a huge bird emerged, with clear black eyes and white spots on her wings. She was just big enough, I supposed, to carry a child on her back.

  “He told Sekka where he buried his raft, you know. If you bring him down, she’ll tell you.”

&
nbsp; “Why would I care where he stuck an old piece of wood?”

  The loon Queen glided up to me. “You ask too many questions,” she said with a sigh. Her voice was low and sad, softer than the loon wails I had heard when the black-and-white birds gathered in my mother’s pond. I looked back over my shoulder at the long pale strand of beach, and the dark shape of Majo and her house-hunch surrounded by tall grass. She looked quite asleep.

  Without another question, I climbed onto Sekka’s broad back, and put my arms around her slim neck. Her feathers smelled like scallop shells, and seaweed, and eggshells. She lifted us both up into the night.

  “DO YOU NEED FOOD?” SIGRID SUDDENLY SAID, AS though it had only just occurred to her that folk occasion ally eat.

  “I am a little hungry.”

  The woman heaved her bulk onto her feet and disappeared inside the ship-tower. I was left in the last glow of the sun, the scent of the not-too-distant market in my nose: saffron and roasting meat and sour silk-dyes, sweat and barrels of still oil and molten metal poured into molds. Al-a-Nur was warm, and alive, and there was no snow or lichen or ice anywhere.

  Sigrid reemerged with a wooden tray and dropped it unceremoniously at my feet. On it were a few brown squares, a single strip of desiccated meat, an iron flask, and an orange. “Hard tack, jerked vole, rum, and a bit of fruit to keep your teeth in your head. If you enter the Sainthood, it’s all you’ll have to eat for your first year, so learn to like it.” A lopsided smile crossed her creased brown face like a pale page turning in a beaten book. “For me, it still tastes as good as wine in crystal and doves stuffed with blackberries. The best stuff there is.”

  I ate politely. It was hard and crumbly and tasteless as a shingle. The meat was like a solid strip of salt, and the rum bitter as fox bile. The orange alone was sweet and golden.

  “So you believe in the Stars?” I asked tentatively.

  She shrugged, like a mountain settling its boulders. “The Stars are here and there, whether we believe in them or not. I could believe in you or declare to all passersby that you are a lie and a silly story, but it wouldn’t change the fact that you’re sitting here, you mark the grass, you ate my food, you take up space. But the Stars don’t act. They give us no model for living. They teach us nothing. The first Sigrids looked for more than that. But that’s putting the stern before the bow. We’re hardly at the beginning of Saint Sigrid, but nearing the end of Tomomo…”

  BENEATH ME, THE QUEEN OF THE LOONS WAS WARM. Above me, the night was cold as dead hands, and those hands pulled at me, at my thin nightrobe and my bare, unbound feet. I buried my face in her feathers.

  “He doesn’t even speak anymore,” she crooned, and clouds whisked across her beak. “He just sits up there in the frost and stares. I don’t think you can do much, but I have hope. He’s heavy, so if you have to carry him, it’ll be tough going.”

  “Did he speak much in the beginning?”

  Sekka lowered her dark head. Her webbed feet opened and closed beneath her. “We talked all the way to the top of the mountain. Sweet things and soft things and sighing and whispering, and stories of the dark at the beginning of the world, stories of the eggs at the beginning of the season. Rakko doesn’t listen too well—except when I told him how to be King—but Itto listened, and I didn’t have to tell him any tricks just to get him to stop interrupting me like a fur-brained fool. And after I left him in the cold at the roof of the world, I used to fly back up when the drakes stopped squalling for mates, and then we’d sigh sweetly and whisper softly again, and tell stories about the dark and the eggs. But after a few seasons, I was the only one talking, and nothing about him was sweet or soft anymore. Now he sits on the rocks and there’s nothing but him holding his head together and looking at the black. I haven’t been back since the last girl Majo brought, who gave up after only an hour.”

  “I won’t give up,” I whispered, soft and sweet.

  I cannot say how long it took to reach the top of the mountain, though it seemed that some number of suns rose and set on my wind-whipped skin. At the peak, though, it was always night, as dark as the belly of a blackbird. And Sekka set me down in that endless murk, on the craggy summit. The summit of a mountain is smaller than you think, and there was hardly enough room for me and Itto—for there he was, knees drawn up to his chest, hands pressing two faces towards each other—to sit side by side. Sekka roosted on a lower rock and waited for me to fail.

  “Hello,” I said, for lack of a better word.

  The Star said nothing.

  “I’ve come to get you down from here, away from here. It’s cold as still blood, and your Sekka wants you.”

  The Star said nothing.

  Well, she had said he wouldn’t. So I pulled at his limbs and tried to put him over my shoulder—I was skinny, but so was he, and not much larger than I was. I was sure I’d be able to do it. A fox carries a kit in her mouth, doesn’t she? But he was much heavier than he seemed, like a sack of iron slugs, and I could not budge him, no matter how I pushed and pulled.

  The Star said nothing.

  So I said nothing. I sat and looked where he was looking. It was a long expanse of black, marked with seven stars all in a tight cluster, leaning one against the other. It was very boring.

  “I can do a trick; would you like to see?”

  The Star said nothing, but his right eyes flickered a little. I gathered a lump of snow from the gray rock of the summit and warmed it in my hands till it became water. I held it out between us, and, leaning over the little pool in my palms, I showed him my fox face with its creamy tufts of fur at the ears, and smart black nose.

  He laughed a little, a sound like water trickling off of high stones. “That’s a good trick,” he said, his throats hoarse from cold and silence, and he did speak, just as the otter said, in unison with himself, one voice high and one low.

  “I’ve only just learned it,” I confessed, “and now that you’re speaking, won’t you please come off the mountain?”

  “There isn’t a good enough trick played by the best of all tricksters to make me do that.” He sighed. “I’m holding vigil, and a vigil doesn’t vanish because one’s toes are frozen blue.”

  “Why are you holding vigil?”

  “Do you see those seven stars there?” he asked. I did, of course—there was little enough to look at but those glittering specks. “You might say those are my cousins. Of course, you might not.” He coughed and rubbed at his four temples with his fingers. “I came up here because I was afraid. I was afraid to let go of my head, afraid to die, even though I should be dead. I came up here to see if the seven stars in the sky were my cousins, who died so long ago I hardly remember what they looked like, safe home and no worse for death. If they were, if they were safe as rabbits in a hutch, then I wouldn’t be afraid, then I could let go of my head and drift up. This is the roof of the world, and you can almost touch the tiles. I wouldn’t have so far to go.”

  He looked at my still-wet hands, just beginning to frost over, and I think if he could have he would have taken them in his. I reached up, as I imagined he wanted me to, I reached up on my toes to touch the sky—and I did touch it, I did; my fingers pressed into the black and oh, it felt like flesh! It felt like skin and a soft, glistening leg or belly behind the skin, and a diamond bone behind that. I could not guess whose skin it might be, but it was warm under my chilled fingertips, so warm. And when I touched it I saw the seven stars as he must have, and they were nothing like stars at all, but just seven troughs dug in the sky, pale as sea-bleached bones.

  “They’re graves,” he whispered, “nothing but graves, and their light is nothing but a headstone, and they are not there, not there at all, the sky is a tomb and I cannot die, because I am still so afraid. Where do we go if not here? I am so afraid, and so alone, and all I have ever loved is a pathetic broken raft, and it is all that has ever loved me.”

  Itto was weeping then, great hot tears from each of his four eyes, and they froze on his cheeks
as they fell.

  I crouched on my knees before the Star and took his huge, misshapen head into my hands. I stroked his brittle, snow-crusted hair and pressed my face to his. I said nothing; I crooned like a bird, or how I thought a bird would sound, and I held him for a very long while. I did not know how to get him down, but I supposed that I did, in the end, know how to steal him from himself.

  I wrapped my numbed fingers around his wrists and began to pry his hands from his faces. He stiffened and shrunk away. “No!” he gasped. “I can’t!”

  “It’s all right,” I said, and I said it over and over. “It’s all right. You’re hurting your Sekka, who loves you like a raft, and would rather see you snug under the forest loam, safe and no worse for death, than alone on a crag feeling sorry for yourself. It’s all right, I’m here, and I know you’re too afraid to do it, but I’ll help you.”

  His lips were dry against my arms as I pulled at his hands. “But couldn’t I stay like this, forever, in the freeze?” His doubled voice was plaintive as a child asking for a sweet and a man asking for a sweetheart—but he answered himself. “No, I am tired, so tired, and my arms ache from holding myself to myself.”

  “I know a good trick, Itto,” I whispered, “a very good trick.”

  He turned his head so that one of his faces could see me, his great dark eyes sweet and soft. I kissed him, very lightly, on each face and his lips under mine were cracked and torn as old paper. It was my first kiss, and my second, and they tasted of snow.

  He went slack, and let me pull his hands from his head. I folded them in his lap. He stayed whole for a moment, and then his head opened into two halves, like an iris opening in the sunlight. Black fluid poured out of him, cold and ugly, over my hands and my robe, lumpish, dead stuff which had no scent at all. His body slumped forward onto me, and finally, after I had been soaked in his blood which was not exactly blood, two tiny silver drops of light squeezed out from the center of him, falling onto my hand like tears. I closed my fingers over them.