The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “I am certain that you do, little one. All is not as it was, when Marrow was the center of the world and no man wished to leave it before his pockets were full of lapis and his arms full of women. But you must know I cannot help you.”

  “We do not want your help,” my friend hissed. “We are citizens of Marrow now. We have paid our taxes, we do our civic duty. And we have the right to trade, just as anyone.”

  Vhummim cocked her head, her bluish hair falling into her face like waxen icicles. “You have no money to spend, precious ones. No dhheiba. What could you possibly buy with air?”

  Oubliette drew out our purse. I was still half faint and ashen; I did not trust myself to handle the coins without dropping the whole lot to the rubbish-floor. One by one, she fed the coins into her palm until it was piled high, and held it out—six, only six coins in her shaking hand, to buy our lives back. The grain merchant’s daughter knew to hold something in reserve, in case the ghost drove up the price. Vhummim licked her lips with a colorless tongue.

  “That is not enough to buy your ruby breakfast,” she said, but she did not look away. She and Oubliette locked their gazes for a long time, a kind of silent bartering I could not enter. Finally, the foreman spoke, her glassy eyes drooping in her skull.

  “In the days when we ate all possible things, the rarest transactions were the most prized, even if they were no more than a twig traded for a feather—if the seller of the twig were a man with one eye, and the seller of the feather a woman with a beard, it was called a success. No worker has ever made this offer, and I will accept it, in the name of the old Asaad. But you will leave under the vault of night, and I will boast of my trade only after you have long gone, lest it be judged less rare than I think, and I am punished.”

  We agreed, and she took the coins in her long, spidery fingers, closing them over the bone reverently, with a strangely kittenish moan of pleasure.

  “It was like this,” she murmured, “before, in the time when all possible things were bought and traded, and the silk was high and red over the Asaad. The feel of economy was like this, light and thick and sweet. I remember it, I tasted it long after I could taste nothing else, the memory of Marrow the lost, which was called Shadukiam in days now dead and cold.”

  She closed her eyes and looked up through the ragged roof, her gray throat ululating in grief and longing.

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  CROSSING,

  CONTINUED

  A WIND HAD PICKED UP ACROSS THE WATER. THE surface was dull and flat, gray as a maiden’s eye, and moving quickly, wrinkles forming and traveling around the little ferry.

  “I suppose Marrow seemed a fit name, considering their new vocation, better than their old one, at any rate,” Seven mused.

  Idyll chuckled and shifted under his cloak. He stroked the hunch of his back with one hand thoughtfully. “Shadukiam was a place of wonder once, boy—those roses blowing through your door once covered the whole place in a dome of flowers. There were silver towers, and diamond turrets. There were women in purple and men in scarlet. It smelled of algae and gold. Do not speak of what you do not know.”

  “I know enough of that stinking, windblown hole!” Seven said hotly, his breath fogging in the icy air.

  “Because you know a corpse does not mean you knew the man.”

  They lapsed into a woolen silence. Seven pulled up his collar around his face with one awkward hand and scowled into the breezes whipping his cheeks. He could see the clouds bunch and knot in the northern sky, not dark, as rainclouds ought to be, but pale. They were simply gathering, a great snarl of white, like cotton wound sloppily round a spindle.

  “The storm is coming,” Idyll said quietly. “She’s early today. I don’t know if we’ll make land by the time she blows through.”

  “I have weathered storms before, old man.”

  “No doubt, a brave thing like you. But lake storms are a breed apart.”

  “I am brave,” Seven grumbled. “If I were not brave, I would not have come here. I would have drunk steaming cider by a hearth instead of this, built a house, had children. I am going to save her. She saved me. We kept saving each other, even after the Mint. What else can I do?”

  “Nothing, son,” said the ancient ferryman, his voice relenting to softness. “No one who crosses this water ever had another choice.” He poled the silt-stuck bottom of the lake, and somewhere far off, a bird keened, a gull or cormorant. Seven thought the trees were closer now, that the silver line of a beach gleamed below them, but he felt sick with the rocking of the ferry, and his eyes were rubbed raw by the wind’s fingers. The sky was so blank he could not see the sun, and he thought he smelled a coming snow. Idyll’s cutting voice sank into his thoughts.

  “Tell me, how many of those awful old things do you have left?”

  “One,” the young man said. “I saved two. One to get me to her, the other to get us back. I saved enough for this, for her. That’s all that’s left.”

  “And that leaves four to fill out your tale, before the storm screams in and there is no more room to talk beneath the white winds.”

  Seven nodded and coughed roughly. “Four. Four coins for a cripple and a monster to ply the road—that’s all there was outside of Marrow, once Vhummim had punched through the fish-bone wall at the edge of the city for us. Roads, paved and dirt-packed, cobbled and painted and bricked. We followed one, we might have followed any of them, but we followed that one, and now I am crossing a lonely lake to her, to her, my sister and my friend…”

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  TWELVE COINS,>

  CONTINUED

  WE CHOSE A ROAD, AND FOR THE FIRST TIME IN seven years, a golden sun, hanging in the sky not unlike a ball, shone on our skins. It turned us red. We swam in blue rivers and splashed each other. We ate blackberries and walnuts cracked with flat stones. We did not work. Yet when we swam and I saw her naked flesh shoot by under the cold, clear water, I still saw nothing beautiful, only dhheiba, lurking beneath.

  We wandered for a long while, she and I. We might have searched out our homes again, or homes which would suit us now, but we had, by mutual agreement, done with cities. We kept to the green orchards like foxes, and sucked at sweet owl eggs. Autumn was beginning to swell the apples before we saw anyone on our road, and I am sure we looked quite feral by then. Oubliette’s hair was even growing long and shaggy, crow black, framing her face like rough hands. We had no mirrors or shears, and my hair was longer than hers. We were in quite a state—though happily gorged on apples and rabbit haunches, as we were between us quite clever at catching them. After agate and jasper, soft meat and crisp fruit were miracles to us, and we sought them out, starving. And so, when we heard the cart clattering down the lane, we were still in rags and shoeless, but fatter than we had ever been.

  The cart had two great wheels, which towered over the thing itself, painted blue and spangled with silver stars. A little wagon was suspended between the wheels, with a peaked gypsy-roof and round windows. Doors opened in each side, and it seemed spacious enough; maybe it was even pleasant to sit inside and watch the spokes clack by. It was drawn by a lithe man clothed all in green—hose, doublet, fetching little cape and hat, all greener than apple skin. He had hair the color of egg yolks that stuck out from under his cap and a thin, affable face. His feet, from the knees down, were the spindle-swift legs of a dun brown gazelle, and his green hose ended just before the fur in a brass buckle, old enough to have gone slightly green itself. Oubliette and I stared, our mouths gaping.

  “Well, good morning, little ones! How does the glabrous day find you?” he said, curtseying as well as his legs allowed. He did not let go his long blue poles, and his voice was like a thrush’s chirping song. He smiled—his teeth were small and bright and sharp as a fox’s.

  “Good… good morning,” I said. Oubliette held my hand tightly.

  “You are fortunate to have crossed paths with us, my wastrels! I can see you are in need of c
ivilization, and art is the midwife of the civilized soul. We are performers and minstrels, singers of songs and players of scenes, catamites and castrati, the finest and brightest and best-dressed of all of these. For a coin we will show you the world on our stage, for two we will teach its ways to you. I am Taglio—juggler, dancer, eunuch, acrobat, and scenery-wrangler, and superlative knight of the cart!”

  We introduced ourselves shyly, but neither of our hands went to the hidden purse. We could not afford to spend my body on this colorful man, no matter what he promised. He beamed at us with sparkling green eyes. As we looked closer, we saw that the silver stars were simply bits of tin suspended from the wheels. The paint had worn in places, from a startlingly dark and vivid cobalt to pale turquoise. The effect was very pretty all the same, and the stars made a tinkling sound in the breeze.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have a little dance?” he trilled, hopping from one hoofed foot to the other. “A little scene—‘The Princess and Her Faithful Cat,’ perhaps? ‘The Huldra, the Bull, and the Tree’?” Oubliette looked stricken, and Taglio hurried on. “Or something more grown-up, as befits two upstanding young things such as yourselves? ‘The Murder of King Ismail’? ‘The Rape of Amberabad’? ‘The Siren’s Seraglio’? Or perhaps just a song, a card trick, a coin from behind your ear? We are flexible, we are amenable, amicable, and amiable, as all must be in times such as these. We too are hungry for sparrow pies and blueberry cordials, and barter our talents for such reasonable fees.”

  A large red paw emerged from one of the blue windows. It stretched lazily, extending its scarlet claws and retracting them again.

  “Who is that, Taglio my pet?” a low voice came from behind the bird-skin curtains. It had a growl to it, but was not unpleasant, like rubbing fur against the grain.

  “That will be my mistress and my partner, the other half of my ‘we,’ my menagerie, my muse, my terror, my darling!” said the green man, finally setting his long poles onto the dappled ground and gallantly opening one of the moon-round doors of the spectacular cart.

  Out of the blue stepped a Manticore.

  I know this now, because she has since carefully shown me all the parts of her body and explained their origins and uses, but then she seemed an outlandish vision, and I could not have named her for a hundred bone coins. She was a lion, of sorts. Her pelt was red as leaves, and oiled to a glossy shine—but her head was that of a woman with enormous blue eyes, the same blue as the cart, her aristocratic face framed with stiff, wiry hair the same shade as her fur. Haloing her head like a mane, it flowed back over her muscled shoulders like a genteel shawl. As she exited the cart completely, her tail came into view—it was that of a great serpent, mottled green like old copper, scaled and scabrous. At its tip was a scorpion’s barb, hard and shiny as a beetle’s carapace.

  “Grotteschi the Red,” Taglio crowed, “actress, beast, mezzo-soprano!” The Manticore inclined her head modestly, her ruddy cheeks high and lovely. There was something strange about the line of her jaw—it did not close quite right, like a child’s broken music box, but it was wide and generous, her lips like a swipe of blood. In her jaw were three rows of sharp yellow teeth. “Will you not hear her sing? It is worth five times anything you might pay to listen, I swear by my Absentia.” Oubliette crooked a quizzical eyebrow, and the gazelle-man grinned. “A eunuch is lacking in some things, and flush with others. That which I do not possess are naturally absent from me, and thus, in polite company, I refer to them as my Absentia. We must all be allowed our little eccentricities. If you will sit yourselves down on the grass—a cushion fit for lords and ladies of twice our collected ranks!—I will tell you the tale, should it please you. The first taste is always free.”

  The Manticore rolled her bright eyes.

  “How can they decide if they want the whole show if they do not get a taste of us?” he protested.

  “Go on, then, and don’t complain to me when it’s mice for dinner again,” the red beast retorted.

  Taglio smiled his sharp, glittering smile, tapped the earth with his hooves in a shuffling two-step, and began.

  THE TALE

  OF THE EUNUCH

  AND THE

  ODALISQUE

  SING, OH, SING, OF THE GRACEFUL GASELLI! Nimble and fleet are their boot-black feet, and sweet are their whistling songs! No shepherd more steadfast than we, no firefly so quick on the wing, no melodies lighter, no lyrics brighter than ours—than ours!—on the sheep-spotted fields of home!

  We are the bringers of grace, we are the players of the goat-horn flutes, we are the fire-tenders in fields where hay has been bundled and wheeled. But light up your camp and find us gathering near, stamping our hooves on the grassy ground, stamping our hooves to the beat of your drum, stamping our hooves to the sound of your wine-sped violas! But kindle a flame and see us creeping in from our sheep and our cattle, creeping in from our milk and our meat, creeping in from the dew and the damp and the pinwheeling, heart-reeling ergot on the rye, the wheat, the golden, gleaming grain!

  And if in the morning you find your wife has gone missing, if in the morning you find your brother run off, if in the morning you find your number one or two less than the night before, it is not our fault, we are but animals, and follow our bestial nature, as you do, as you do, else there would be no fires and no wine, no songs to thresh the mind, no whirling, no wheeling, no slaughter-sheep bleating—and what would our lives be then? Yes, we take one or two, but what do we give you? Fire and wine and songs in the mind and whirling and wheeling and lovely girls bleating—we give as good as we take.

  Yes, sing for the Gaselli. These are my people, and we are well sung. We hunt the campfires out in the low dells, and do we dance? Do we sing sweeter than any twanging country harp? Bet on it. Are we lissome and lithe, are our faces fair, do we kiss like poets imagine they do? And are there one or two gone in the morning? Bet on that, too. By our green you shall know us, our green coats and our green skirts, trailing behind us so that only those who know to look will see those boot-black hooves a-gleaming. And what befalls those lucky one or two, who in the damp, ashen dawn are nowhere to be found?

  All creatures under the Stars must eat, my dears.

  We are shepherds—to eat the sheep we tend would be an abomination, would it not? To eat cattle and goat would be obscene! How could you even suggest it? What perversion you describe! Be off with you, now, else you shall feel my hoof!

  But wait. Perhaps there was a Gaselli with hungers like the ones you expound. Perhaps there was one who did not like the taste of girl, even less the taste of wiry Gypsy boy. Perhaps he thought lamb and roasted cow smoky and rich and sweet, perhaps he thought goat salty and soft to his neat, white teeth. Perhaps his name was Taglio, and perhaps he stands before you. And it is not impossible to imagine that after years of secret meals and pantomiming at the revels, pretending to gnaw a bone or lap a wound, he was caught gorging himself on a little lamb who had died of the cold. But this poor Gaselli begs forgiveness! What it was that caught me at my feast is hard and hard to believe.

  It was a cow. This does not strain the mind, I am sure! But it was a cow the size of a barn, with eyes like the forked spaces between flames, depthless and black and glittering fair! Her flanks were dun-golden, smooth and muscled, showing girl white, sow white, wool white skin beneath. Her hooves were bronze, her udder full and firm as a moon, her nose flared trumpet-wise, the breadth of her chest enormous. Yet she moved, I swear it so, without sound over the grass, graceful as a trained horse, and her hooves burned the earth where she stepped, sending up sighs of steam.

  There was a light about her, I tell you true. It was not a glow, but a light that hung within her, like the shape of a second cow. I fell before her, on my knees.

  “O Great Heifer of Heaven!” I cried, for my poetry had not left me. “You have come to punish me for devouring your children! But they were sweet, and I am weak!”

  She regarded me calmly. When she spoke her voice vibrated in my bones. “I
eat. Why should you not?”

  “Because Gaselli eat dancers, not the flock. We are to eat drunkards who cannot find their way home through the mere—not a poor, defenseless cow who never knew where home was to begin with.”

  “I know where home is.”

  “I daresay you are not defenseless, either!”

  “I have not my brother’s horns, but it has never been a worry to me. I have not my brother’s heart, either. I shed my hiding place to taste the salt-sweet grass and listen to the lowing of beasts, for these things are as cool water poured over my forelock when I have been cloistered in the stone and the dark for so long. He never cared for the grass.”

  Sing for the Gaselli! But also sing to them—for we are beloved of tales, and they are beloved to us. I knew her then, and scolded myself that I had not known her before. Had I not myself told tales of Aukai, the Milk-Star, who makes oxen of bulls with a snap of her jaw? Had I not told of the mad castrati-monks to frighten the calves in their crèches? I fell to my knees, my own small, furry knees, below her great, shining face—beauty beyond any dancing girl with a red shawl and blue stockings. Her light filled me—I could hardly see for the glow of it!

  Perhaps it is not right to explain how a man is moved. Perhaps he ought to keep the logics of light and blood and heaven locked tight within him, with a chain and a snapping dog before it. Perhaps it is enough to say that a man with graceful feet and a tongue more graceful still was struck dumb by the radiance of a cow, pierced with shame for all he had eaten in her image, cut through with adoration of the smallest shadow cast by the flick of her tail. How can even the most quick-fingered of minstrels convince his catgut harp to tell what ecstasy is? I am the most quick-fingered of minstrels, and I cannot.

  What did I say to her? I swore things. I babbled like a lost sheep. I would join those who cut themselves in her honor, for her love. I would do the penance her brother refused. If she would but touch me I would die at her lowing. It is hard to recall now. Ecstasy slips the mind. But before she could reject me—might she? I could not let her!—I drew my sheep’s shears and did his penance and mine there on the long grass. My blood mixed with the blood of the flock, and with her light, her milk-light, lying on me like a forgiving hand. The pain was a ripping, a gouging, keener than horseshoe nails pounded into me, and my green trousers were a sudden red—but her light was with me, and filled me, and the silver singing in my head was greater than any shear, the silver, woolen singing which stopped up all but itself, the silver, wild, and woolen singing which I shall not forget for all my cart-drawn days.