The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  The creature, which I could see was a Monopod with a rather unimpressive foot once he had extricated himself from my brother’s feathers, stood awkwardly by while Jin pressed his head to mine, and we nuzzled each other in silence, stroking necks with our beaks and closing our eyes against the other’s familiar scent. Unbidden, crooning, burbling cries rose from our long-separate throats. The Monopod cleared its hideous throat pointedly. Without looking at it, Jin barked:

  “Go, Monopod. Bring the Yi-woman to me by midnight, and I will do your deed.” His eyes stayed locked on mine, and the little man hopped away.

  “Giota is not my mother anymore,” I croaked, the sadness of it still able to break my throat in half. Jin only shrugged his azure shoulders.

  “She never truly was, my sister. You ask so much from her.”

  “You haven’t seen what she did to herself! Go to her and see it, see how she has beggared herself into filth and squalor! Go and ask her to tell your fortune—that’s all she is now, a stupid gypsy reading the Stars for signs!”

  And so we went to her together. Reunions are wearying to relate—they only matter to those reunited. The complicated embrace of two giants and a slight creature clad in her own hair is too delicate and careful to describe. We loved her; we still love her; we held her like a chick between us. She rolled her black eyes up to us, parting the hair over her belly to speak.

  “I know you do not wish to hear it, but it is time—there are eggs waiting to be hatched, and my pretty blue boy will not live out the night.”

  Jin did not stir, but caressed Giota’s cheek tenderly with a long ink-blue forefeather. I started, stricken. “I wish I had come only to see you, Quri,” he whispered, “but I am here for the stump-leg, and I am meant to kill a thing tonight. Whenever you murder, you pay for it—thus do we pay for the Griffin who murdered horse and Arimaspian, and they pay for the Griffin they kill.”

  “Go now, into the sky,” Giota rasped urgently. “If these can be called my grandchildren, so be it—but they must be born. There is no one else to quicken her.” She climbed from our embrace back to her mossy wall, and turned her face from us, stroking her lips and muttering softly. Jin looked at me calmly, with shame or joy or despair I could not tell. But he rose up into the sky with a single stroke of his wings, and I followed.

  How can I tell you of the mating of Griffin? We are not birds; we are not cats, but we spiral up to the bellies of the clouds as birds do, and we bite into each other’s throats and shoulders as cats do. No one had told us how; no one had told us we should not. Our eyes blazed gold and black, our fur bristled and our hackles rose. We snapped at each other and growled deep in our chests; we wrestled in the air like angels. We circled each other in the blinding blue and white of heaven, and he sunk his teeth into the back of my neck, and I cried out like the sound of bells shattering, and we wept as we came together under the sun and the thousand roses of Shadukiam.

  When we descended, the stars had broken the skin of the sky, and we were bloodied and bruised. The Monopod stood waiting at the great door of the church—at his side was another of his kind, a female. Its skin was pockmarked and sallow, almost translucent, like petals wilting. It leered at us, revealing tiny teeth, jagged and sharp. I sucked in my breath—it was clear that a Yi was lurking under that skin.

  “Do I get the male or the breeding cat?” it hissed, grinning horribly at us.

  “It was the only way,” the first Monopod said pleadingly. “It would not come unless I promised it a body.”

  The Yi licked its cratered lips. “We have never managed a Griffin. You all fix it so that you die alone on wretched beaches and boil your blood in the desert. We are curious; what will it be like to fly with those wings?”

  Jin looked at me for a moment and whispered thickly, “It is like dying.”

  Then his dark shoulders shifted imperceptibly. He moved so quickly I saw only a blue rush, and sunk his talon into the eye of the decaying Yi. It screamed with such violence my ears ached to burst, a terrible sound—metal grinding on metal or the squeals of pigs and rats. The eye-white around my brother’s talon puddled and sagged, dribbling onto the polished courtyard like spoiled milk. Finally, there was little left but a pile of half-liquid bones, and these the Monopod gathered to his chest lovingly, weeping with thanks.

  “I will bury them properly, I will say the words of the High-Growing Moss above her grave, and every year after on this day. Thank you, Jin-of-the-Red-Peak, thank you, thank you. You do not know how much you have given me.” He bowed many times, bobbing ridiculously like a toy. I breathed relief; this horrible transaction was done.

  And suddenly the courtyard was full of white shapes, panting like a pack of dogs and baring their teeth, yelping and snapping. I had never seen Yi, truly, only heard of them, and certainly I had never seen so many, and so many in the late days of their possession, when the bodies mirrored the surface of the moon—green-white, scarred, tight and shining like masks of bone. They had lost all semblance of the civilized demeanor they liked to affect, and stood around us howling and slavering like starving wolves. They clapped their cadaverous hands together with a gesture between menace and joy; bits of their fingers flew off the bone, thudding to the pavement like dough dropped from bakers’ spoons.

  Their speech was a terrible chorus of hissing and smacking of tongues, and they did not speak at once or separately, but their sentences floated from creature to creature, as though none could finish a thought without his brothers and sisters.

  “How dare—”

  “You touch us? You are—”

  “Hated of Moon, we are her best—”

  “Beloved children! We will gnaw your wing bones—”

  “We will slurp the flesh—”

  “From your knuckles! Half-breed mongrel—”

  “You had no—”

  “Right!”

  Jin stepped slowly away from them, his hind paws clattering on the stone courtyard. But their slavering only increased, and a few—of shapes too strange to guess at—closed the circle behind him. The Monopod was pulling at my pelt, his great black eyes pleading.

  “Come away, come away! They will never let him go now. If you run, they will not notice you.”

  “But his body! I cannot let them have his body—all this was for your own wretched woman and you would let it happen over again to my brother?”

  “This is not a possession,” he mumbled grimly. “It is a mob. They will not take his body; they will tear it into pieces. For them, to lose a single member of their tribe is like losing a leg at the knee. This is revenge, and when they are done, there will be nothing left but a few drops of blood for tomorrow’s churchgoers to wipe off their shoes. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I knew this might happen, but I had to help my Tova, I had to get her free. I promise, there is nothing you can do, even with all your strength. If you killed all of these, with their last breaths they would scream for their siblings—and they would come, from the deepest cracks and alleys of the city. There is no limit to their numbers. If you want to live to birth your chicks”—he blushed slightly and looked away, consumed, I surmised, by some tradition of propriety towards breeding females among his people—“the sky is the only safe place. Go, find some forgotten strand, and hide your young away. While the scent of my Tova is in the air, they will be frenzied, and forget you. When it has passed, they will calm again, and they will not give you the mercy of vivisection. They will take your body and your babes will be born gray and dead, their first cries mocking laughter.”

  I stared at the hateful little man, who had sold us to these scavenging horrors. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to put my claws through his eyes as he had begged Jin to do to that creature. It would have felt wonderful, I imagined, and his blood would be hot.

  But Giota would be ashamed of me. She would turn away from me, and forget my name, and my children would never know her. She had known that Jin was near death—it must mean something, it must be more important than a mere balanc
ing of scales after a murder.

  I leaned into his face, and he did not blink. Quick as a tailor tearing her stitches, I snapped my head to one side and tore his left ear from his head and spat it onto the ground. His blood, hot as I had imagined, dripped from my beak, and I hissed through the red mess at our betrayer, before flapping my long wings—once, twice, three times, and lifting into the night.

  I circled overhead, high enough to be safe from the pack of scarified Yi, who quivered with excitement and lust. There was no chance for my brother to follow my flight with his eyes, to know that I was safe before he died, a mercy that stories like ours always allow. It was not allowed to us.

  I watched as they lunged forward and sank two dozen sets of diamond teeth into my Jin’s flanks. He screamed, like a wind through broken glass, and kept screaming until one of the pale, bony things caught his perfect blue throat in its jaws, and he died with a wet, strangling whimper.

  I watched as they ate him in the sickly light of their Moon.

  QURI STROKED THE SAND WITH HER GLOSSY PAW. “All my life, I never gave the Arimaspian problem any thought. How could I, when I was so busy adoring a human woman and bearing these poor eggs? I watched Jin die; I watched him become food for ghosts and wraiths whose blood was moonlight. I did not think about silly men who liked gold enough to kill an entire race for it. I came here; I laid my eggs all the autumn long in a dry patch of sand, and covered them with the fur of my body. Years passed—a Griffin’s egg is a slow thing growing. Gold washed up in the waves, slowly, flecks and nuggets and slivers. It sparkled in the sand; it added to the sand. This island is half made of gold. Of course I didn’t know that when I came; I only wanted a place to rest where no one would ever find me. The Boil would protect me. How could I expect that in the midst of boiling waters an island of gold would rise like a whale’s fin? Slowly, I began to find it beautiful, and draw the larger pieces together to make a real nest for my chicks. Slowly, I began to see it as all Griffin before me had seen it—the color of the sun, burnished and burning, light and life and fire sparkling inside it so fiercely that it gives off a quiet heat that only we can feel. I began to love it. And still I did not think of the Arimaspians, the creatures who killed my mother, the reason we cannot hoard as much of the precious stuff as we wish, because it would draw the killers like bees to summer-honey. Until I saw a ship’s mast, impossibly, on the roiling horizon, I never thought of it. Then I remembered; then I was ashamed at my naïveté. I wanted only to help my chicks break their eggs and teach them to fly; I wanted only to bring Giota under cover of night three perfect children, who would nuzzle against her neck, and press their warm heads to hers. I forgot that I am not a Griffin, I am only quarry—the last quarry.”

  Sigrid’s eyes were full of tears, but they did not fall. She knuckled them away and fought the urge to touch the Griffin’s beautiful fur, which glimmered coldly like snow over a silver statue. She just stared up at the fabulous monster, whose eagle head was silhouetted against the clouded sun. The gold of her beak flashed—and indeed, Sigrid could see answering flashes in the sand: Here and there and here again, a gold fleck gleamed among the grains.

  Into her thoughts the deep drum-voice of Oluwakim burst like the flight of an arrow.

  “Well. She’s an abomination and a coward. I thought we’d come to find a real beast, and instead, we only find this poor heap of garbage, last bedraggled pigeon of a race of pigeons.”

  He shrugged, his great black muscles rippling like continents drifting in the night. His men had not moved, standing frozen as blocks of wood. In all this stillness, it would have been easy to miss the sudden rush of movement that snapped through the crowd, but Sigrid saw it: Oluwakim reached for his sleek, thin dagger and clutched it in his fist for only a moment before throwing it, almost casually, between Sigrid’s arm and her ribs, directly at the heart of the White Griffin.

  And as soon as the knife had left his hand, a second knife buried itself deep in his back, so that the dying cry of the King sounded in harmony beneath the last keening of the White Beast. Both bodies slumped forward and spilled the blackest blood of their hearts into the golden sand.

  Sigrid cried out, and even in her mourning, she searched for the source of the second knife. Her eyes darted over the wretched beach, scouring it for an assassin. Finally, she seized upon black-haired Tomomo, who leaned casually against a skinny, starved palm tree, one muscled leg crossed over the other.

  Standing next to her was a woman who might have been the twin of the dead King. Her hair was as long, and as braided with glowering gold. Her skin was as burnished black, the color of shadows within shadows. And where the King’s golden eye had been, she carried an eye of beryl, green and blue, shot through with white. At her waist were at least a dozen knives, all of gold, hanging still as bells without clappers.

  As Sigrid stared in wonder, Tomomo took the dark woman’s hand in hers and kissed it in a genteel fashion. The two women smiled at each other, and the stranger took her hand from the captain, striding towards the corpse of Oluwakim with a grim face, her lips so tight that the thinnest thread could not pass between them. She stood over the body for a moment, her breathing harsh and ragged. Then, in one savage movement, she braced her sandaled foot against the King’s massive shoulder and ripped the golden eye from his skull. The Arimaspians howled their outrage, but at a glance from the woman, they fell silent. Solemnly, she removed the beryl eye from its socket and replaced it with the golden one. The blood of the King dripped from the eye like tears.

  “Tommy!” Sigrid cried, her limbs so frozen in shock and grief that she had not even left the great nest. “What is happening? What have you done?”

  The captain left her tree and joined the other woman at the corpse of the King. She knelt and examined the body, plucking a few choice pieces of gold from his hair.

  “Sigrid, this is what piracy is,” she said ruefully, never looking up from the corpse, which she still combed for treasure. “Oluwakim gave us a great deal of money to chase down the poor Griffin. Oluwafunmike gave us more. We hid her away in the hold—not difficult. The Maidenhead is quite as remarkable belowdecks as she is above, as you’ve seen. She hoped, I think, that her father would only take an egg, and not kill the Griffin. It is sad that trust in one’s parents is so often misplaced. But it is not our place to take sides in dynastic squabbles, even”—she raised her eyes to meet Oluwafunmike’s, her gaze full of affection—“if one side clearly has the lion’s share of virtue.”

  The princess scowled at her father’s corpse and retrieved her knife. “Our people can no longer allow our entire race to be exalted by the murder of the Griffin. I take the Ocular now, and begin a new dynasty. This eye, this last of all eyes, will be passed from heir to heir, and never again will we rip our gold from the breasts of innocent beasts. The end to this sad circus was worth whatever I had to pay Tomomo—and worth bearing the presence of pirates.” She jostled the captain’s shoulder with a large and comradely fist.

  “But this is who we are, daughter of the Oluwa,” one of the Arimaspians protested. “Without the Griffin hunt, we are but nomads on the sea of the steppes. You will destroy our spirit! The Eye blessed us!”

  “Can you not see? The Griffin are all dead. There is no hunt, whether I declare it or not. But if you would argue with me, or challenge my Ocular, you will find yourself as dead and rotting as my father. If I do not fear to sink my knife in his back, please believe I will not hesitate to bury it in yours.” The man fell into sullen silence, and Oluwafunmike shook her head in sorrow. “They are all dead, son of the Ofira. Dead and cold as winter in the great desert. The Eye blessed us, yes, but we have not been worthy of its Gaze.”

  As if to answer her, a cascade of sound echoed suddenly over the beach. A quick, rustling noise could be heard, and it deepened into a cracking, clawing cacophony, like wood splintering under a silver axe. Tomomo and the princess started like pheasants in an autumn field, trying to discern the source. The Arimaspians looked
suddenly ashen and fearful, as though they expected the ghost of their King to appear and punish them for submitting to his daughter. But Sigrid understood immediately: The eggs beneath her, still nestled in the golden nest, were hatching, and all at once, first of all the things which should not have been. Their marbled blue and white surfaces fractured like sapphire bones, and the last of the glittering golden yolk dribbled out.

  Out of the cerulean ruins of the eggshells rose shakily three infant Griffin—two so deeply blue they were almost black, and one whose feathers shone whiter than the first snow in the first winter of the world. They were the size of wildcats, and power already rippled beneath their colored skins. They shook themselves like pigeons, spattering Sigrid’s face with shimmering yolk droplets. There was no sound on the windswept beach, no sound but the wind battering the shoulders of a dozen people, none of whom dared to move or speak. The silence was unbroken, untouched, a block of obsidian.

  Then the keening began. The newborn Griffin turned their delicate heads to the brooding sky and shrieked, their throats ululating with a terrible cry, like claws rending a mirror into ribbons. None could bear the sound—the Arimaspian horde fell weeping to the sand, scratching at their aching ears. Sigrid alone was not afraid, and the sound which to the others, even Tomomo and her princess, was a horror, was to her the simple and beautiful sound of birds singing up the sun. She crawled to the howling children and tentatively put out her arms to them. They quieted immediately and curled themselves into her small brown hands, snuffling at her to catch her scent, and still weeping softly.