The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Sekka turned her head away when she saw my dress spattered black. She sent up a long, low cry, that strange loon-cry that makes the moon weep. She took me again on her back, and though she sang her funeral dirge to every passing cloud for all the days and nights it took to descend from the tiled roof of the world, there was a kind of happiness in it, a relief, sweet and soft in the lowest notes of her song.

  And I must have done well, for she told me where the raft was buried just before we landed softly by Majo’s snoring form, her house-pack creaking in time to her grunts and snorts. She woke with a start and saw my fluid-stained dress clinging to my thighs, and nodded as if it was all no more than she expected. And Sekka left us, tottering down the beachhead to the long and lonely pier.

  But I did not go to the forest that morning, or the next. I stayed with Majo, and nearly forgot about the plank of wood planted in the earth. I aged slowly, but when I asked, she only shrugged, grunting that each creature lives out its natural term. I learned much—though I was always hopeless with magic. I could no more fashion a charm than a horse could knit its own saddle blanket. My talent was in the hunt and the chase, and in the kill. These things Majo taught me with pleasure, and my skill grew great. I had too much fox in me, she would say sadly over countless night fires. I could perform only fox magic, which was ever the magic of stalking, invisible in the shadows, and the snatching of prey from the air. The truth is that there are many kinds of magic, and her kind, the magic of precisely ground herbs and charms bound at the right phase of the moon, lay in the human half, not the animal. What use a fox’s paws in the lashing of seven-knotted spells? It knows only the magic of hot blood and swift fur—and these are powerful, so powerful they need no little satchel of leaves to help them along. But the fox is not overfond of tools.

  “We can be certain,” she would cackle, “that you would have been a most dull and tedious woman. It is the fox that saves you from total idiocy.”

  But it was clear that Majo was not the guardian of my destiny. I wanted her to be; I wanted to be a good Witch and carry her cart for her over silver fields and slushing marshes in the early morning light. But I could never accomplish more than a simple tincture or poultice for a slashed ear. In her eyes I saw the truth: We would soon part. She would find a better student, and I would find a life that contained no carts or eager women begging for love spells.

  The day we parted she showed no more emotion than the day we met; she was bemused, proud of herself, conspiratorial. She took me walking as we often did, and the sun was crisp as apple skin on my back. It was not long before we reached the edge of a forest, the very forest I had told her Sekka said contained the buried plank. I had forgotten, like the summer forgets the snow. Majo grinned. “You were always an absentminded girl. Try to work on that.”

  She tapped my right hand with her finger and I opened it—lying on my palm were the two drops of silver light, shining like tears, which had long ago seeped into my skin and disappeared. I looked up at her, wonder written as plainly on my face as a tattoo. She gripped my hand in her withered old claws and tipped the palm so that the tears fell onto the earth, and then embraced me, I knew for the last time, as a kit always knows when it is time for her to catch mice by herself and not trouble the vixen any longer.

  The two tears wet the rust-red soil beneath me, pooling there like rain in a cottage gutter. But they did not seep into the ground as they had once disappeared into my skin—they began to trickle away from me, faster and faster. I held Majo tightly for a moment, tears clouding my last vision of her face like the trunk of a great tree, and then, eyes dry, I chased after them with a cry of excitement.

  I looked over my shoulder only once as I ran—and soon I was running as fast as I could go—to see Majo trundling away with her house on her back like some ridiculous turtle, and it seemed to me that there was a kind of light at her heels, silver as the old woman’s hair.

  But the twin tracks of salt tears were swiftly disappearing into the distance, and perhaps it was only a trick of the sun. I rushed after them for almost an hour, ducking under bough, leaping over root. It was a marvelous hunt. Finally, they stopped and parted, each streaming around the trunk of an extraordinary tree.

  At first, I did not even realize it was a tree. The drops of Itto’s light had grown as they flowed on, until they surrounded it as a knee-deep moat, rippling in the dim light. A tree rose out of that water which was not water, yet it was not a tree, either, but a menagerie of ship-shards, twisted together into the shape of a trunk, of branches, of roots arching into the moat of tears. Prows jutted angrily from the base, masts and keels winding around each other, chasing rudders and booms of colorful wood, ruddy and golden. An enormous oaken forecastle hung from one side of the tree, while smooth wheels spun lazily in the wind on high and low. There were only a few dusky green leaves hanging from the branches; instead, they were hung with lines and rigging, and sails half tangled in the crows’ nests that served as the topmost boughs. Lazy breezes filled them and left them sagging as they liked. The forest was filled with the sound of billowing sails and creaking wood. In the center of the trunk was a figurehead whose paint had been faded by sun and salt: a sea-goat with a curling tail and furry breasts, a wisp of a beard at her chin, her arms braced against the jumble of tree and ship, her large eyes cast heavenward, mouth agape.

  The wood of the tree was a deep, glossy red, the grain of it like veins filled with blood.

  As I gawked at the spectacle of the Ship-Tree, her eyes rolled slowly down from the sky, like a stone rolling across the mouth of a cave, and her jaw unlocked to speak.

  “Is that you?” she said softly, her voice rustling like leaves, or sails.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think it is.”

  “Oh.” The tree sighed. “It never is. I’m used to it by now. When I was a sapling I was sure he’d come any day. Is that… is that seawater?” she gasped, her timber-flanked body quivering with surprise. “The real thing? From a port full of drunkards and thieves and shipwrights’ sons? Drawn from a pier full of crab fishermen with nets like giants’ bracelets? Oh, is it?”

  “No,” I answered, “it’s the last thing the Star left behind him: blood which is not blood, light which is not light, water which is not water.”

  The masthead’s face became as soft as wood can manage, and tears of sap flowed down her face. She spoke to the moat around her.

  “Itto? Itto? Do you see how big and tall I’ve become? I’m a real ship now, not a silly broken raft. Aren’t you proud of me?”

  I thought, then, that I had done what I came to do, and that no one who knew the Star could have asked more. I turned to leave the Ship-Tree alone with the tears.

  “Oh, please, oh, please wait!” The figurehead writhed towards me, and it seemed at any moment she would twist right off the tree and tumble into my arms. But the Ship-Tree moved with her, and the sound of creaking grew even louder, accompanied by the rusted squeaking of the hanging rigging. I climbed up a little onto a keel-root.

  “I’m here.”

  She blushed, her red wood becoming even darker and more crimson. “Thank you for the water,” she said.

  “I would like to give you something too, even though you never rode me through the dark water—I would have done it for him, but I can still do it for you, I can bear fruit for you, just like all the other trees.”

  I was immediately unsure. “What sort of fruit do you have, Ship?”

  She smiled, her bright cheeks quivering with barely held tears. “It’s my present to you: the best dream of a lonely raft, everything I ever wanted to be when I slept wrapped in oilskin.”

  The Ship-Tree seemed to bulge, and its groans vibrated through the forest. The sails twisted together, the rigging knotted itself into half-hitches and bowlines, the keels and prows clattered together like branches tapping against a window. The figurehead kept laughing, louder and more shrilly until I felt my ears would burst from the sound. The creaking and cracking of wood
was like a storm rolling across the wood, and all the while, the moat of tears was spreading and growing deeper, until I was trying desperately to swim as little waves sloshed over my chin. The tree was so large then that I feared it would engulf me entire, if I did not drown first.

  But I did neither. From the topmost branches of the Ship-Tree, a thing began to take shape. A prow, a mast, a jib, then a hull, a keel. A bright wheel spun into being like a sunflower opening. A ship, full-grown, descended from the branches like an apple falling, and came to rest comfortably on the now swift-flowing river of tears. The figurehead quieted herself, and drew one of her huge wooden hooves from the side of the trunk, scooping me out of the still-rising water by the scruff of the neck.

  “Don’t wreck her too quickly,” the figurehead said worriedly, and set me down at the new ship’s wheel.

  When my feet touched the newborn wood of the decks, I felt suddenly at home. It was not a question of which line to pull taut or which sail to trim; the sleek schooner was as familiar to me as my own limbs. The ship was mine, made for my hand as surely as a child of my own womb.

  And the river of tears, now deeper than the fruit-ship’s keel, moved gently away from the tree which was once a raft, flowing ahead of itself, carrying me along the forest floor in silence, save for soft ripples against the hull, like a child kissing her mother’s cheek.

  And slowly, ever so slowly, it bore me past the edge of the wood, down through ripe fields of wheat, over grass and salt and the huts of the makers of hard, round cheeses, past houses with tiled roofs and the countless grains of sand on a pale beach, past a long, lonely pier and into the sea.

  TOMOMO LICKED HER LIPS, THE FOX REFLECTION flicked its pink tongue over its muzzle.

  “And that was how the Maidenhead was born. I named her for a thing I had long lost, and sailed her true. Who would have thought a fox could grow sea legs? As soon as I had mastered her I glided into the nearest port and took on sailors. At first it was not that I asked for women, or for monsters, to serve. But the men would not sail under a female captain, and women without our… unusual histories were clamped into their houses like fireflies in a glass jar, and had understandably never learned any seacraft. Thus the Maidenhead, with all her strangeness, became even stranger, and more wonderful. We are happy, we are free—you can be, too.”

  Sigrid nodded, her eyes lit with joy like beacons on high hills. She had never imagined her life would be filled with anything but the measuring of cinnamon dust and the keeping of her father’s books. At that moment, her heart belonged to the black-haired Tomomo, and there was nothing she would not have done, if her captain had asked it.

  Being the captain she was, Tomomo knew this; she knew the light in Sigrid’s eyes, she knew the eagerness of her posture. Many a girl before her had been enchanted thus, and not for the first time Tomomo thought that the magic of the hunt was not limited to the chasing of mice across a rain-wet field.

  “Since you know nothing of ships yet, barge daughter, you will have to make yourself useful in other ways until you have learned. Go below: find a Satyr with green rings on her fingers—she will introduce you to our passengers, and you will see to their needs for the night.”

  “Yes, Tomomo—I mean, Tommy!” Sigrid smiled, a smile which had never before touched her face, the deepest smile, which comes from the belly, and gleams with its own flickering light. She turned and instinctively ran towards the door which led into the innards of the scarlet ship, letting the door bang closed behind her with a merry clang.

  In the Garden

  “I MUST GO,” THE BOY WHISPERED, HIS HANDS ALREADY ILLUMINATED BY the blue-gold light weaving its way through the sky as the night died away from them. The girl said nothing. She stared at her hands as though she might read there some arcane method of freezing the sun in its ascent.

  “Will you be here when I return?” The boy was sure she would not be, whatever she might answer. She had slipped from him, somehow, like a veil sweeping over his hands. When she had sat on his windowsill and told him of the death of the wicked King, and the flight of the bird-maiden seeking her cave, he had been able to touch her, to rest his head on her lap, to feel her warmth like a sparrow’s wing in the sun. Now, she seemed thin, transparent, and he feared that if he reached out his hand to her it would pass through her skin as though through a waterfall. All he could think was that he would steal her any feast, any cloak of feathers or fur, any flask of wine or even the jewels from Dinarzad’s fingers if she would only smile at him again, the way she had done that night, like the sun breaking over the first sea of the world.

  He frowned at her, picking at a clump of dirt with his civilized hands.

  “Meet me on the cypress path, where the stones are painted red. I will be there, I promise.”

  And then she did smile, soft and wide as a river trickling through a secret wood.

  He had not set down his second foot past the arching gate when Dinarzad’s voice cut cleanly through him like a hot knife in his stomach.

  “Why do you insist on hurting me this way?” Her tone was petulant, sorrowing, but he knew the danger in it.

  “Sister,” the boy began, “she is not what you think—”

  “I do not care what she is! She has not broken the rules of her house—she does not have a house to disobey! It is you who have defied me and the Sultan, who have kept the wives in a constant panic, like birds chasing after seed!”

  Of course they had done no such thing. The harem was massive, so huge that the comings and goings of the many children were largely unnoticed. How could he be so special as to be missed by anyone save Dinarzad, who hated him so? The wives were desultory and sage, lounging in their halls like lionesses, occasionally swatting an errant cub. The army of tutors and guards and older sisters on the brink of marriage kept the brood in check, and it must be they who marked the boy’s nightly absence.

  “What are you doing out there with her? You must know you are of an age where it is more than unseemly to be alone with an unmarried girl all night. Why can you not behave as you ought to, as a noble son ought to? How can it be worth all of this just to sit with another child under the stars?”

  The boy saw his chance to make her understand. But when he tried to tell the girl’s story and make her see how his heart strained towards the Garden like a horse who senses home is near, it became jumbled in his mouth. No matter how he tried, he could not make it beautiful, he could not tell the same tale that the girl unspooled from her eyes like strange, black thread.

  “Dinarzad, let me tell you a story. Once there was a girl that no one loved, and she was called Snow. She lived in a town by the sea, and one day another woman, who I think was very fat, made friends with her by giving her an orange because both of them worked mending nets and Snow came from the South where there were lots of oranges. Or—yes, I think that’s right. The woman, who was named Sigrid—that’s important, you know—told Snow a story about how three men with the heads of dogs took her away to a holy city and then the dog-men told her a story about a terrible lady called the Black Papess, who could drive men mad just by kissing them. And the Papess kissed the dog-headed men and made them eat their brother—”

  “Have you gone mad, child? Has she cast some spell over you and softened your brain like an apple in the rain? I will hear no more of this.”

  The boy protested, but Dinarzad would not listen. She seized him by the hair and dragged him across the courtyard under the sunshine of the new day, clean and bright as washed linen. He did not cry—at least he told himself that he was not crying, though tears streamed silently down his cheeks. His sister’s fingers were very thin, and curled like the claws of a starving hawk. She hauled him behind her and into the stables, which stunk of horse sweat and dung, depositing him at the feet of an old man with greasy hair and enormous hands. All the boy could see of him were the huge hands, knuckled like the roots of an elm, laced together at the level of his eyes into one massive fist.

  “Treat hi
m no better than one of the mute slaves, and if he escapes in the night you will both be whipped,” announced Dinarzad curtly. She turned on one flawless heel and left the stable in a flurry of violet silk and black braids.

  The boy stood and brushed himself clean of the bits of hay that stuck to the floor and now his shirt. He was careful to look as contrite as he could, though of course he was already planning to slip out as soon as the old man was in his cups that evening. He could see the man’s face now, which was lumpish and ugly, but not very frightening, more of the gnome than the ogre about him.

  “That one’s a she-dragon and no doubt about it,” the blacksmith grunted, cracking his huge knuckles with a sound like the breaking of stone pots. “Firstborns are always trouble. Ask me, they should expose the first brats out of the Sultan’s women just to be safe. If not for what’s between her legs, she’d have been Sultan herself—no doubt that’s why you trouble her so.”

  “But I’m not to be Sultan,” the boy protested. “There must be dozens of sons ahead of me! If I were the heir, they’d have told me by now! I certainly wouldn’t be allowed to run around the Garden—or put to work in the stables!”

  “Look who knows so much!” the old man chortled. “The servants always know ten times what the master guesses. Mark me, boy—you shoe the horse today that you’ll ride tomorrow.”

  The boy stared, nonplussed. He might have explained further that it was perfectly impossible for him to be anything but a minor courtier, but the old man had begun to pile equipment into his arms—a curry-comb, hammers of varying sizes, horseshoes, new nails, hooked tools he could not possibly name.

  “We’ll start with the black one on the end, eh? He’s not too out of sorts in the morning—some of the others like their beauty rest.” The boy began to follow obediently, struggling to contain the tools in his small arms, but the blacksmith turned back and gazed through his cloudy eyes at the boy.