The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

“Where are we?” I hissed. But my hiss was like a shout in the hushed, empty alley. The thing looked startled.

  “You are not supposed to talk to me,” it said haltingly.

  “We can’t obey rules no one tells us about,” I insisted.

  “You know now. Go inside and don’t make trouble.”

  “We shouldn’t have to obey rules we haven’t agreed to. You aren’t our parents,” the girl said, and thus I heard her voice for the first time. It was low and thick and firm as a forest floor.

  “She’s right,” I said. “Tell us where we are. And what is that place where you sent the others?”

  It stood, confused, looking from the door, where its companions had already disappeared with the last of the children, to us and back again. It rocked from one stiltlike leg to the other. “I’ll be punished,” it whined finally.

  The girl rubbed her shaved skull. “Look,” she said, “has any other child tried to talk to you?”

  “Never.”

  “Then you can’t really know you’ll be punished. But you’ll certainly be punished if I scream and he runs off. If you tell us these things, we will be good, and afterward we’ll go where you want us to go.” She looked at me, her dark eyes burning like blades. “We promise.”

  The thing took a deep breath and pulled its meager coat closer over its huge stomach. Its mouth was very wide, almost ear to ear, and strings of bluish hair tumbled down over its cheeks.

  It cleared its long throat. “All… all right…”

  THE

  FOREMAN’S

  TALE

  IF IT PLEASES YOU TO KNOW IT, I AM VHUMMIM of Marrow, third daughter of Orris, who was the grand niece of the seventeenth Chrysoprase, which is how our rulers were titled in the days before the Wasting. From the degenerated wealth of that long-dead personage, Orris-My-Benefactor inherited an apple cart and a fetish stand. In my turn I took proprietorship of these things, and added to them a meat-pit. Among wealth I was not wealthy, but beyond the rolls of the Asaad, the Great Market, I would be envied for the gold at my throat and the silk at my feet. So were we all, envied and envying, in the glory of Marrow-That-Was.

  When I was a child, the Asaad was the heart of my heart, and in this I was not unique. How high its canopies flew, how bright those draping oranges, those greens, those deep blues! Frankincense bubbled thick and brown in high-rimmed cauldrons, black-faced sheep babbled in their pens, gold was measured out into black purses great and small. How sweet was the sound of creaking cart wheels, the sound of bartering, the sound of coins solid in the palm! The blessed sky over the Asaad was always blue, the polished stones of the square ever shining. For my own part, I was eager to sell our apples, our little figurines, and so proud to acquire the flame-pit and roasting tongs, to add to my family’s economy. All citizens took part in the Asaad, or one of the smaller satellite markets, if one could not afford the stall rent demanded in the city center. To shirk one’s duty to economy was a crime punishable by scalding irons applied to the arches of the feet. So it was that each morning the entire city—the city that mattered, anyway—crowded under canopies to play out the grand procession of commerce.

  My apples were crisp between hundreds upon hundreds of teeth; my jade and onyx and garnet fetishes bought themselves thrice over in luck: bears and snakes and spiders and storks, elephants and crows, and an endless, grotesque variety of Stars. I oiled my hair, the pride of my beauty, with the most expensive attar of emerald—a very intricate process, to press oil from gems, but once, in this place, we knew how to do it. My scalp shone green and black. My neck was short, my thighs round. I was even a bit fat, not an easy thing to avoid in the Asaad, where any taste is answered by twelve more rarified. I preferred date-stuffed serpents with a drizzle of rose-glâce, in my day. The juice of pepper-crusted dormice and honey-mashed snail shell ground finer than diamond dust ran down my sisters’ chins. Little songbirds basted in raspberry sugar and bees’ wings made sticky my brothers’ fingers. In the fruit-sellers’ quarter, pomegranate skins were packed with the tiniest of edible rubies, so small they melted on the tongue like cubes of sugar. Even more complex is the process by which foodstuff is made from the raw material of wealth, but we had mastered this, too, in the days when we knew all things. Once I ate a topaz the size of my father’s fist, and its skin split under my teeth like my own apples. The sun was so warm, that day, I thought it would shine through me. My father encouraged me gently, pushed the golden thing to my lips. It tasted of summer-baked wheat and the palest of peaches.

  In the Asaad we ate everything we could buy and we could buy anything. Nothing did not answer our hunger, nothing did not have its price.

  I first heard of it during the third luncheon shift—the whole market could not cease because we are inclined to be hungry in the middle of the day. We ate in shifts so that commerce never truly paused. That day I reclined on a red sofa beneath a violet canopy spangled with silver crescents, drinking spiced chocolate in a cup of plain gold. I was young then; I could not have expected more. A rind of citrine floated in my drink, and I prodded it with one long, frost-painted fingernail as the quince-seller whispered:

  “Have you heard? It’s all the way up to the Rhukmini shops now.”

  A particularly corpulent merchant, who had a few years earlier developed an astonishing and popular hybrid of plum and amethyst, yawned and slapped iridescent blue flies from his own cup. “So? They’ll block off the street and we’ll go about our business. Rhukmini was a fishmongers’ slum, anyway, you old melon-wort, a pale and piecemeal shadow of the Asaad—I call it a blessing. No more lifting one’s pant leg to avoid the squid ink and ice-chunked cod blood.”

  The plum-breeder had taken to the latest fashion of grafting various extraneous limbs to his body—his face was gray, contorting slowly into a small elephant’s trunk which sloped over his mustache. He was quite proud of the infant appendage, and made sure all in the Asaad knew it would surely grow much larger by the end of the season. He was a man of considerable size, after all.

  “What’s happened?” I asked, curious. I smoothed a shimmering strand of hair over my forehead—the heat pooled sweat and gem oil together, and a few green trickles warmed my neck. The quince cart-woman turned to me, her nose rings glittering.

  “It’s gone,” she said triumphantly. “The entire Rhukmini.” Second only to our goods is our command of gossip—and she had the upper hand in this other economy. Her short hair was slicked in garnet, and she never sweat.

  “Gone?” I was never a conversationalist.

  “Well,” the plum-breeder cut in, stroking his lazuli-coated mustache with his thumb and his fledgling trunk with his forefinger, “not entirely. There’s bits of it left, blowing around. But I daresay no one will be bashing out octopus skulls there anytime soon.”

  I must have gaped—who would not have gaped? My agate-tattooed teeth (but one art in a city which contained all possible arts) showed behind my thick painted lips. I could see the plum-breeder nakedly calculate whether my teeth trumped his trunk in the hierarchy of opulence, which shifted and slid with each new process, alchemy, or mechanick the Asaad supplied. He seemed to decide his little gray appendage was safely superior.

  “Why don’t you go down Rhuk-side and see for yourself? I’ll have my boys watch your cart; they’re as honest as a skulk of foxes, which is to say not particularly, but they sell as well as they steal, and what more can anyone ask of the young?”

  I frowned. True, they would steal, but his sons had quick tongues and I was young enough to be curious about the city beyond the canopies, young enough to think the stinking alley full of empty crab claws and squabbling gulls flapping in off the river might be worth the loss of a few apples and knuckles of meat.

  I went—who would not have gone?

  In the Garden

  THE BOY SHIVERED.

  “I don’t like this story,” he whispered. A low wind blew through the Garden, throwing old flowers up into dervishes and clattering one branch agai
nst another. “I liked the pirates better.”

  The girl shrugged. “I cannot change what is written on my skin, any more than I can change my skin itself.”

  The evening was now full of mist and blue, rolling through the Garden paths like a regiment clothed in starlight. The girl picked at the deep moss and looked toward the Palace, which was as full of light as ever, light and voices. Her fingertips were colorless. She spoke as if from a long way off, and hidden behind a wall of marble and glass.

  “If I had not these marks on me, if I were not a raccoon-demon scampering over a Garden rich in scraps, I might have been called Dinarzad, and had pearls strung onto my hair, and married a man who owned golden roosters. It is very strange to think about.”

  The boy furrowed his clear brow.

  “I do not think you would like the man with the roosters.”

  The girl grinned like a hare who knows it has escaped. “I am not a fool. Most of the time, I am glad not to be called Dinarzad. But the cold is sometimes like dying, and then I think it would not be so bad.”

  The boy started as though he were a young cat seizing upon a mouse for the first time. “What is your name, my friend? I am ashamed I did not ask it before!”

  The girl looked down toward the moss and her freezing hand on it like a blight. She made her face very still, still as water, still as stars, so that he would not see her bitterness, hard as hawthorn bark. “How should I know my name? Who was there to call me so, to call me anything but demon, urchin, raccoon? If I have a name I do not own it—someone else must have it folded away in some strange purse, and my eyes will never see it.”

  Chagrined, the boy followed her gaze to the Palace and they sat in silence for a time. It did not seem right for him to offer his own name when she had nothing to give him in return. He did not want to show her once more all the things he possessed that she did not.

  The first dead leaves left their trees and floated down, their stems noiseless against the wet stones. Somewhere behind her, the girl could hear the slow rippling of the pond where the boy had caught her bathing, had caught her under the moon. There were low, wild roses around their cairn of rocks, but they had lost their color to rain and wind, and lay ruined at the children’s feet like torn pages.

  “If you want me to stop—”

  “No!” the boy said quickly, his dark eyes wide. “I do not like it, but I could not bear it if I did not hear it out. Tell me about that awful place.”

  The girl moved her hand over her eyes, touching that black, soft place where all these things had long ago been written. Not for the first time, she thought she could feel the shape of the letters burning into her. At length she began again, her voice echoing on the green rocks like water splashed into an empty well.

  “Vhummim the gem-eater went into the old fishmarket, and the smell there was of old scallops and shattered shells…”

  THE

  FOREMAN’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  THE RHUKMINI HAD BEEN BEAUTIFUL IN ITS way—the sound of silver crab mallets thudding against claws and green clacking of lobsters muffled by their diamond tanks. There had been awnings of narwhal skin, blue as new ink, and carts with wheels of baleen. There had been a little alcove where the curious might sample seawater from every ocean in the world, just to know how the taste of salt differed from surf to surf.

  It was gone—not gone, wasted.

  A terrible wind blew through the long alley which had once been the Rhukmini market, and on it was some memory of the smell of ice floating in fish blood—but truly it smelled of dust, nothing more than dust. The rest was simply ruin, pieces of shell and paper and meat and wire and skin, as if the whole place had been torn into shreds by the hand of some vengeful giant. The wind kept what remained in the rough shape of the old alley, whipping whitefish against one wall and wrapping papers against another.

  It was not unlike what you see of Marrow all around you—save that this was new and raw, wet and weeping wound-bright on that old arm of the city. All the colors were still vivid, and I could see smears here and there which might have been cuttlefish or salmon, which might too have been a shopkeeper or a customer in search of malachite roe.

  Perhaps I should not have looked closer than this. The alley was clearly marked and blockaded with bleached-pine boards; it was a logical response. A limb has rotted? Cut it off, provide a tourniquet for the tattered stump, and go about the business of living. But I was curious—who among us was not curious? Thus I climbed between the boards and onto the shredded, ruined thoroughfare of the Rhukmini—and fell at once through the striations of refuse and fish skeletons and paper, endless paper, into darkness deep and hard as a closed fist.

  Beneath the city, light fell in broken tufts where parts of streets and squares had gone the way of the Rhukmini. It was not as far to fall as you might think. Even so, I could not reach the first fluttering gray pieces of market to pull myself up again. Instead, I wandered—and who could have done otherwise? It was not so far to fall, but it was very far to wander. I could smell my own sweat mingling with the emerald oil of my hair—did you know that emeralds smell of limes and frankincense? They do, they do—I remember it so well, how I loved that smell, the smell of myself adorned.

  It was great and black and hollow, the underside of the city. The air was warm, almost hot, and moved languorously around my ankles. Stone pillars snaked and coiled into a sodden bed of dirt—when I think on it now I think they must have been the roots of Marrow, the granite and marble roots of banks and towers and universities, the piled stone roots of tenements, of factories, the golden roots of jewelers’ palaces. Each edifice sent down its strange and secret toes into the undersoil, and I wandered through a forest of stone. Despite myself I began to search through the mere for the roots of the Asaad—how much more beautiful, how much richer and brighter, the stone of those roots must be than all these others! It was this thought that kept me from fear in those low, hidden paths, strung with spiders and mold. I would find the Asaad again, and surely it would lift its child up.

  But I did not find the tangling roots of the Asaad. I came, after passing through some few threshings of light that sputtered sickly through to the depths of the root-city, to a great snarl of cedar—real wood, amid all that endless stone. The ground was closed tight around the massive red curls, so that I could not see what sent down such tendrils into the dark. And from behind those gnarling crags, I heard a gnashing, a grinding, a crunching, gnawing sound which I shall not forget, for all of my days.

  I went toward it. Who would not have gone toward it?

  At first I saw nothing in the dusky shadows, the sharp smell of cedar filling my nose like water. Then it was a gleam of white—behind the roots, further back and farther in, a gleam of white flashing in the gloam.

  “Is there someone there? My name is Vhummim, daughter of Orris—I have become lost!” I called. My voice was weak and quavering. Whose could have been stronger, more sure?

  My answer was a louder gnashing, a louder grinding, like a whetstone spinning.

  “Do you know the way out?” I whispered.

  “I am the way out,” a low, humming voice whispered back to me. “Through me you can find the light again.”

  It crawled close to me, on its belly like a cringing dog, and peered up into my eyes, a creature made entirely of teeth. Its four legs were a jumble of molars, bicuspids, incisors. Its eyes flashed: wolfs’ teeth yellow with age. Great flat elephants’ teeth made up its spine, and long tigers’ canines curved into ribs. Its feet were hooves of enamel; its jaw hung hungrily open, white and yellow. Its delicate face: row after row of infant teeth, pearly and pale. There was nothing of it that was not teeth—what I could see between the gnashing molars was empty space. I was afraid then, of course. Who would not have been afraid?

  “Who are you?”

  It sidestepped, back, forth. The molars of its feet left tracks in the warm, wet soil. “I am Golod, He Who Swallows.”

  “Will
you show me the way out, Golod?”

  “You are pretty, and your smell is pleasing.” His sharp eyes ground against his enameled eye sockets. “I came to this place to find pretty and pleasing things…”

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  HUNGRY LORD

  DID YOU KNOW THAT A CITY CAN DIE AS EASILY as a person? It is true, I promise you. It dies in the same sad, lonely ways that people do: a knife in the governor’s heart, a quick poisoning of rivers. And there are cancers that begin slowly, a pinprick in a bookseller’s shop in a dust-clouded alley, a lump in a rainspout splashed with yellow leaves. Who would ever notice such a little thing tucked away like that, in a city of pillars and plums and plumes? Or it can become food, as all things inevitably are. It can be devoured, torn limb from street—it can be swallowed. By larger cities, by armies, by citizens too hungry for the meager meat of lamps and botanical gardens and commemorative war statues.

  Or by something which has come to like its taste.

  I suppose you could call me a cancer, a tumor tucked into the storm gutter, but it would be more apt to call me a creature of appetite.

  Would you like to hear about my family? Every time I have come across one of you gem-gobbling peacocks, you immediately tell me who your mother is, or who your father is, or who your great-uncle on the distaff side is. I should offer no less—I had no mother, I had no father. Is not my pedigree immaculate?

  There was a man, once, in a wood far from here. This man suffered a great hunger, suffered it the way some men suffer a wasting illness or an arrow in the foot. He was a man of some property, and before he was struck by his hunger, he was not unhandsome, and married well. His wife was lovelier than a year of Aprils, black of hair and eye. He was called Maciej; she was called Malgorzata.

  Because of the fortunate match of Malgorzata, Maciej found himself in possession of a goodly number of tenant farmers, which for a time he treated as well as any lord may—which is to say, with neglect at all times save harvest, for at harvest all lords exhibit hunger beside which Maciej’s would seem but moderate and mild. But it came to pass that for three harvests the land was cruel and hard, and yielded up barely enough to feed all that tilled it, and the house on the hill had to satisfy itself with selling tapestries and suchlike in order to provide apples and pig flesh and cabbages.