The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  A TALE

  OF HARM,

  CONTINUED

  BRYONY PUT HIS HAND NEAR MY NOSE, PALM UP, and from it twisted up a thorny rose, cloying in its scent, which interfered with his own.

  “You understand why I could not give the girls their candies. I did not, not then. But when I was older my mother and father showed me their books, and I read about you, about the unicorn, about the song that the wind plays on your horn. They told me that my graduation from their little academy would come when I had caught you and made my poisoner’s cup, for no poisoner can afford to be felled by his own leafy thralls, and it is known that your horn makes all poison as harmless as water. ‘There is a unicorn in this part of the world, and her name is Nevinnost, and we have saved you for her,’ they said. ‘Go and become a man.’ This is why I have knelt by you, and held your head, and let you smell me all you like, the last wafting fragrances of my innocence, for I am eager to do harm in the name of the world distilled, eager to join my parents again in their stilt-house.”

  “I should have expected it.”

  “Yes, you should have. I hope I have been a soft bed for you, Nevinnost. I hope the scent of my skin is all you hoped for.”

  With this he drew a long silver chain from beneath him, and wrapped it round my neck. I recoiled—his smell had changed, slanted into acrid and burning, charcoal and soot and rinds of sour lemon roasted on white embers. He smiled and the stench worsened; my nose clogged with clanging, warring drifts of him, smoke and ashen logs, vinegar and limestone and his stinking, cloying rose. As I struggled, they came. And surely you have heard this part of the story before: how the huntsmen came with their green hose and their brown arrows, and held me to the earth while Bryony sawed my horn from my head with a blacksmith’s blade.

  The wind made a sound like shrieking when the red whorls snapped and shattered. I bled—the black whorls bled and the ground was wet and slippery; I scrabbled against them but the blood-mud held me fast. Our horn is flesh, no less than your nose, and the blood spurted from me like a string of black pearls onto the velvet lap of the poisoners’ son.

  THE

  HULDRA’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  THE UNICORN GLARED AT ME, DEFYING ME TO tell her how foolish she had been to go near him, or that she was no kind of beast to have lost her horn. Perhaps a grown woman would have done this, but I could not.

  “Nevinnost, I am sorry for what he has done. A boy once took a thing from me, and in its place I was given a golden ball, and now you see what has become of me. I am like you.”

  Her gaze softened. “I am not a unicorn if I have not my horn. I am only a mule with a beard and a very odd tail. You are still a girl. Though I am sorry for you. A golden ball is no thing to give a child.”

  “Please help me. I can help you, if you will release me. I will not call a huntsman. I will not call the awful hedgehog who bound me here. If I am innocent, you are safe.”

  “All things are innocent until they are not,” she snorted, but bent her dark leg and pawed at the quills which bristled from my pinioned hair in untold numbers. She dug at the soft soil, bit at the slick metallic quills, but her teeth could not catch on their surfaces, and they were driven too many and too deep for her to reach. Finally she just stood before me, her brown flank glistening with sweat. The night sky was beginning to lighten in the east, a long, jagged strip of cold blue against the cold black, and I knew Ciriaco would be coming soon.

  “My hair,” I whispered. “Chew it off, and I will be loosed. If I am innocent then all parts of me are innocent, and you may taste of it, in my hair, in my curls, a thing which your treacherous boy would never give. Take my innocence, and set me free.”

  Nevinnost hesitated, sidling to me and away just as she had done when she first approached, neighing softly and reaching out her long, bloodied head to me, then drawing it back. Finally, she began to graze at the black strands, just like grass, and in the dew-frozen morning, she severed my hair at its roots, murmuring as she did, in pleasure or in pain I could not tell. But she was somewhat overzealous, and she chewed my hair right to my scalp in her hunger and eagerness. I did not mind. Long after I could move again I let her keep at her meal, leaning forward when she could not reach me.

  “You taste like the moon, so cold and so pure,” she whispered in my ear, and began to kick at the sod bricks, by now turned to iron plates by the frost. I tumbled out of the house that my golden ball built—for I still and always thought of him as mine, and my ball—at Nevinnost’s feet.

  “You said you could help me,” she said, still in a half-swoon.

  I turned and clawed in the hard soil around those unnumbered quills, gold and silver and copper and iron and quartz and diamond and emerald and sapphire. I dug deep and as I dug I wept and grunted and cried out, all those months walled into the sod tower rushing from me like frogs from a good girl’s mouth. My fingers were hooked and grimed, but finally I held out to her a bouquet of dirt-clung bristles, in every metal imaginable.

  “It is enough,” I said, sobs hitching in my voice, “for a new horn.”

  Nevinnost bent her head and nuzzled me very lightly. “My horn is a colored cup on a table far off from here. I cannot take another while it still lives—what would it say? But should it break, in lands I will never see, perhaps, perhaps, I shall know what wholeness is.”

  Very slowly, she sank to the ground and lowered her ruined head onto my lap. Blood had begun to ooze again, just a few drops, from the scabs on her severed horn. She closed her eyes and breathed very deeply through her soft nose.

  I lay beneath her, feeling her weight, heavy as guilt.

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  TWELVE COINS,

  CONTINUED

  OUBLIETTE RUBBED HER SHORN HEAD ABSENTLY. “She took my innocence, what there was, into her, and then not only was I wicked, and ugly, and at the mercy of anyone who decided he loved me, but I was a grown woman, too, and bald as a vulture. I had hardly stumbled out of the field where Ciriaco had built his house of sod and child when the city blew in, and the Pra-Ita seized me up, knowing, as my ball did, that no one would come looking for me.”

  “I don’t think they know—they just gather whatever the wind scours up—”

  “They know.”

  I could say nothing. Instead, I slipped out of bed and hopped quickly around to the other side, the floor icy beneath my soles. I climbed in again, behind her. Gingerly and gently, I put my arms around her—I was a man, and ought to know how to do this—and pressed my skinny body against her bark-back, holding her and rocking her like my own child.

  “You are not ugly or wicked or at anyone’s mercy,” I whispered. “Though you are bald.”

  She laughed a little, but as she warmed beside me, I felt her crying, quiet as pages rustling.

  We worked at the Mint for seven years.

  She kept her hair short, cutting it with the side of a sharpened gear. It was short and ragged, but thick, dark, over her head. When I asked about it, she shrugged and said: “My hair is hers now.”

  I cannot begin to tell how often the wind carried us, or to what crevices of the world. Sometimes it seemed that beyond the tattered borders of the city, it snowed. Other times I seemed to smell a sage-and-stone desert. There was never a lack of materials for the Mint. Mostly, we did not have time to look at those borders, or anything outside the walls of that place. We worked. We ate—opals and garnets and pearls and chalcedony and hematite and lapis lazuli and malachite dark and green. Vhummim was right: A topaz tastes like a peach. Once, when the quota for the day had been exceeded, we were given diamonds. They tasted like frozen lemons.

  Occasionally, we slept.

  They watched us whenever we ate, stroking their long necks in time to our chewing. The dead city traded and bustled, but ate nothing, drank nothing. They watched us like a play, and salivated. Some of us grew up—many did not. Like any machine the Mint was fickle and thirsty. Fingers were crushed and arms were
torn from sockets; not infrequently an entire child fell or was pushed or jumped—ah, so many jumped!—into the gears and stamps. The first time it happened, I cried out, and my cry in that huge, silent hall was like a knife through the air. Everyone stopped, turned to stare. But they stared at me, and not the child who had swooned into the coin stamp and left a bloody stain on the boards. I had cried out; I had called attention to myself. They hissed at me to be quiet, and the Mint ground on.

  By the time I was fourteen, only Oubliette was older than I. And by then, we thought we were strong enough, and clever enough, to escape. Gems are not nutritious, but the Mint gave us a dim and sallow strength, turning and twisting as we had to, shoving the stamps down, as she did, or shoveling dead children onto the boards, as I did. We did the same work for seven years.

  And we shared a bed—not as lovers, you understand. I think I would have married her, eventually, except that marrying her would have been like plowing a river with a perch-drawn plate: I wouldn’t know how to begin, and what would be the point? When I looked at her body I did not see breasts or hips or even a tail and rough gray bark. I saw money. I saw coins piled up in a basket. I saw the money her bones could make. This is not the stuff of husbands. Some things you cannot put behind you and forget as though a golden curtain had closed on them. We shared our bed for warmth and company and if we had not I think one of us would have gone headlong into the gears long before. I scratched her bark and burls; she rubbed my neck. We helped each other return to ourselves when the work was done. After a while, we stopped sneaking about, and just filed into a common bed at shift’s end. The Pra-Ita said nothing. There was always a new child for an empty bed.

  On that night of all nights, as I cradled my tree-girl in my arms, she spoke, quieter than a single drop of water dripping from a roof:

  “I am going into the machine tomorrow.”

  I started, turned her to face me, her dark eyes wide and calm. “What? Why? Why would you leave me here?”

  “Hush, I’m not leaving you. I have found us a way out. I am going to crush my arm in the stamps tomorrow, after the shift bell. I will creep back onto the floor and put my arm on the boards. I will let the great glossy stamp sever it. I will make with it the dhheiba we need to buy our way out. An arm is not so much; I have another. But I will need your help to run the rest of the Mint—the scrapers and scrubbers and cutters and board-runners. I think if we are quick we can do it.”

  “An arm’s worth of coin is not enough to tempt anyone in this place. They have hundreds of arms at the end of any reach.”

  “It will tempt Vhummim. She likes us. She watches over us. It will be enough.”

  I was silent for a long while, and the other children, young and new, snuffled in their gray beds.

  “It is a good plan, Oubliette. But not for you. I will put my arm beneath the stamp, I will let it cut into my shoulder, and you will remain whole.”

  Her thick eyebrows furrowed and she scowled at me. “Why? You know you are an overgrown, scruffy-limbed infant when it comes to pain.”

  I held her face in my hand, cold skin on cold skin, her clipped hair bristling against the tips of my fingers like quills.

  “My arm is bigger. We will get more money.”

  She said nothing—what could she say to that?

  “You will cry out.”

  “I will not.”

  We held each other all that night, and she kissed—the only kiss she ever gave me—the spot where my shoulder joined my arm.

  In the Garden

  THE BOY HAD LEFT HER.

  He always left her. Each morning, and the morning after that one. She did not mind, really—it was difficult to speak for so long, to remember so much of what was written on her eyelids, to be close to another child when she had been alone for so long. She had not known how that could tire her. And so it was that when he had gone from her, she often went into the placid Garden lake, to let the cool water, rippling like a dress pulled up above the knees, wash him away from her. The hard, round pebbles under her bare feet were comforting—she had always had them, and the lake, and the reeds, and the knocking cattails, and the moon and the stars, to stroke her to sleep. She thought of the boy, how eagerly she waited for him whenever the red sun sank below the pomegranate trees, yet how often she was emptied, when he was gone, like a painted vase whose water has been flung out onto the flagstones. It was so easy to miss someone, she thought, when you have never missed anyone before.

  She knew her stories so well, she did not lose them when she spooled them out to him—she told herself this over and over. They were still her own, her own. But when the words of the tales passed her lips and wound into his ears, they seemed to become so solid, to grow limbs and hearts—bodies winding into each other like snails winding into their shells. When she had been alone, and whispered those tales into nothing more than the surface of a little pond or a thatch of blackberries, they had stayed thin and wispy, shreds of a gown which did not quite fit her fluttering in the wind. She was happy to see them grow solid—she told herself this over and over, too.

  Waist-deep in the lake, she turned her face up to the starlight, and the falling shadows of dwindling ash leaves. The leaves were all gray in the dark, their reds and golds seeped out like tales. She ducked her head under the water, once, twice—she had long ago stopped praying that the black marks would come off when she did so. She would be looking for him again by the next evening, she knew, but now she felt as though all her self was laid open, like shining tendrils, like snakes let out of their basket to wriggle in the world, and she gathered them in again, in the silver light.

  When she came up for breath and cleared the lake from her eyes, a figure was walking nearby, cloaked in white and not her boy at all, some distance from the violet-bordered water.

  It was Dinarzad.

  Her hair flowed behind her like the shadow of a much taller woman, and her feet were bare on the grass. The girl feared Dinarzad had gone mad—proper amiras did not go about thus. But she seemed calm, did not weep or tear her hair, but touched the trees lightly, as she passed, as though looking for something. Finally, she saw the girl in the water, half submerged like a lamia or a mermaid, and froze near an orange tree which was still glossy and green in the forest of bare branches. The girl said nothing—when one approached a strange animal for the first time, she knew, sudden movements would frighten it or enrage it, and if she did not want a terrified goose on her hands, surely she did not want a terrified princess.

  Dinarzad opened her dark mouth and squeaked. She tried again, her voice clearing like a winter sky.

  “I wanted to hear… I wanted to listen—”

  She bolted, a doe caught before an arrow. The girl watched her go, not knowing what she could do to make the woman stay. She had never tried to make the boy stay, once the tales had begun. He was naturally faithful as a sleek hound.

  And so it was not surprising when he found her near the moss-drenched stones the next night—it was only as much as she had come to expect from him, expect and anticipate, though it cost her. He brought her a round cheese and a slice of pastry. They whispered and ate as they had always done until the sky had gone as black as it might, and she could begin again in secret and in safety.

  “I want to hear more!” the boy said excitedly, clapping his hands. “Dinarzad didn’t speak to me all day—it was like a holiday! Tell me how they escaped!”

  The girl smiled softly and breathed deeply, opening up her tales again, herself, like a reliquary full of sacred bones.

  “Seven was certain he would not cry out when the stamp pressed down on his shoulder—he would be brave and stalwart, stoic and true…”

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  TWELVE COINS,

  CONTINUED

  I SCREAMED. OUBLIETTE PUT ALL HER WEIGHT on the stamp and it slogged into my armpit, mashing skin and bone and blood together. It did not sever on the first try, and I whimpered, I groaned like a woman in labor as she l
oaded up the stamp and brought it down again. I think I may have fainted away, for I remember waking to her tightening a strip of one of the corpses’ dresses around my stump. She held the tattered shoulder to the hottest parts of the machine, which glowed a baleful red, and I probably screamed again. It was a wonder we were not caught—but then, the children often cried out in their sleep, often screamed, often wept. Perhaps I should have let Oubliette do it after all. She would not have screamed.

  I remember staring at the ruined arm, which was once part of me, once my own, and would be no more. Those were my fingers, fingers that had gripped pens and bucket handles, cow teats and apple cores. Those were the lines on my palm, that foretold who knew what future. It was my body we put through the Mint, laboriously, my blood we smelled as it wet the innards of the machine, as we turned the gears and moved the pistons with her two hands and my one. It was my body I heard crunched under the final stamps, and my body I saw emerge from the mouth end of the machine’s arc, the mouth which had been shaped into a tooth-wight’s grin.

  Twelve coins, pale and round, of clean, gleaming bone. All we had in the world, out of my own flesh, like a wet fruit cut out of its skin.

  During the midday meal, we found Vhummim watching one of the girls devour translucent tourmalines as though they were the first cherries of summer. She stroked her neck. She stroked her diamond belly beneath her rags. We smeared our best smiles on our faces and called her to us.

  She did not seem to notice the arm—so many of us were mangled there, another injury was no foreign thing.

  “We want to leave, Vhummim,” Oubliette said firmly.