The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Though we asked to walk with Taglio, panting to hear more of Immacolata, he insisted that Oubliette ride with the great scarlet Manticore and not trouble her little feet. I would not leave her side—I would never leave her, never—and reluctantly, we slunk off toward the jangling blue cart, and climbed inside the waiting door, making room for ourselves in the coil of Grotteschi’s thick, mottled tail. We inched closer to the beast to avoid her green barb. But the tail flesh was warm as a sun-baked brick, and we were soon quite comfortable. The feel of it beneath our backs was soft and firm, but we could feel her pulse, low and thick as a huge drum.

  She turned her remarkable blue eyes onto us. The shaggy red hair around her shoulders thickened on her neck and chest, curling below her chin so that she really did seem a maned lion, king of the pride, save for her woman’s face. She licked at the stiff, wiry fur.

  “You want to hear of the odalisque, yes? Of the tea-maker’s girl. You would rather walk out there, on the hard ground with the moon slapping your heels with her bony hands, than in here with me. Taglio thinks he can tell stories, but the songs of the Manticore are famed by those who survive them, and I knew her, too.”

  Gingerly, Oubliette reached out a hand to stroke Grotteschi’s brilliant fur. The serpent-lion purred and hissed all at once, and her eyes softened.

  “Listen, darling, infant things! And tell me I cannot sing as well as a gazelle…”

  THE

  MANTICORE’S

  TALE

  SING, OH, SING, OF THE SUN-MUSCLED MANTICORE! Thundering fleet are their scarlet feet, and great are their echoing roars! No hunter more patient than we, no serpent so sour-tailed as we, no snarling leaps lighter, no long teeth brighter than ours—than ours!—on the scrub-spotted deserts of home!

  Ha! Let us have none of that. Do not sing of us. We do not want your songs. We will sing, and you will listen.

  The desert is wide and white and dry as an old bone. We worry it, we gnaw and tear and peel it bald. And we sing when the moon is jumping on the sand like a skinny white mouse, we sing and the saltbush weeps. The oases ripple under our breath, the blue and clear water where the rhinoceros wrangle, where the cheetah purrs and licks her paws, and the Upas trees waver green and violet in the scalding breeze!

  They will tell you the Upas is a death-bower. They will call it the hydra-tree of the desert, and warn that if you sleep beneath it for even a night, you may wake, but to no morning man has known. They will say that three hundred soldiers all in bronze and feathers camped beneath an Upas once, to drink from the clear stream that flowed beneath its branches, and that by the time the sun touched their toes all were dead and cold as dinner. This is ridiculous, a fairy tale. But I suppose it is yet not entirely untrue, for the Upas is our mother, and we are enough of death for anyone. And if soldiers camp under an Upas when she is blowing her seed, it is no fault of the hungry kittens that tumble out if they find their supper plump and laid out on the sand.

  Look, passersby—though not too closely!—at the radiant Upas, lover of the Sun in his golden bedchamber, her red branches thick and strong as a haunch, thorny and pitted, her green needles far too glossy and stiff to grow in the thirsty desert. Look at her fruit, nestled in the shadowy forks of her knotted trunk, how scarlet and purple, how thick and full of juice! Touch one at your peril, for these gleaming berries are not fruit but eggs, and it is we that grow within them, in the crimson sacs which wax in the blistering scrub-light, full of the peculiar Upas yolk we drink and drink, which fills our tails with enough poison for a lifetime, until we rip that silk-thin skin and tumble out headfirst into the water, or soldiers, whichever seems most convenient.

  I remember the Upas milk. It was sweet, like blackberries and blood.

  In the fruit sac we know all things: how the Sun preened on the face of the oasis pool, how one Upas, though neither the tallest or most beautiful thing in the desert, opened up her branches and grasped the reddening beams for her own. Her wood warmed and the pool rippled—the Sun would not have noticed if his mirror had not been marred. He would have been angry, and scorched the tree for her theft, had not the first Manticore fruit burst open before him, and if he did not think the little cub with her needle-teeth and her whipping tail and her sky-bright eyes was the most lovely of all imaginable things, and immediately set about teaching her to sting and roar and sing and kill, all the things he knew. The Upas smiled, and told her sisters how to follow her lead.

  After we fall, it is harder to remember these things, to know they are true. But we do our best to love our parents and turn our prayers to the sky and the sand.

  It is only unfortunate that we are more or less helpless when the Upas blows us free. No more fierce than little red kittens or infant snakes, blind and wet and mewling. Our tails do thrash quick and sharp in those first hours, indiscriminate, for we have not quite learned to control it when the oasis, littered with palm nuts and antelope ribs, catches us in green-gold arms. This is when the wranglers come, if they are clever, with their silver tail caps spangling in the desert light.

  I would like to tell you I was reared in the open flats, the white and worried bone, that I tore open leopards and antelope and rhinoceros, that I remember what that tough gray flesh tasted like, and that horn. I would like to tell you that the Sun and I ran together, bounding red-pawed over the saltbush and the pale weeds, that in the warm red rocks I rolled with my legs in the air, scratching and roaring and eating as I pleased. I would like to tell you that the echoes there taught me to sing. I would like to tell you I was happy, and that the Sun was high in the sky.

  But the wranglers came with a little silver cap, something like a thimble with buckles and straps, and armored in polished metals splashed with the last desperate strikes of countless kittens, lashed the thing to my barbed tail. My thrashings were dull thuds and sprays of sand, but nothing more. I howled—it is not only the province of wolves. I howled and that did startle them, for the voice of the Manticore is terrible and piercing and sweet, the sweetest and most terrible of all possible voices, like a flute and a trumpet playing together. It is barbed as surely as a tail. I howled and keened, thumping my useless limb against the ground pitifully. They took out wax stoppers and closed their ears to me, and into an amber cage I went, clapped in an amber collar, and gagged in leather to keep me silent.

  Tell me again how the Gaselli sing. Tell me that no melodies are lovelier than theirs.

  The heights of the amber city made me dizzy. The platforms spiraled up and up those impossible cedars, and on the spindly bridges I nearly fainted away, so far below did the ground sway and wobble. They pulled me up with squeaking pulleys and moving flats drawn up with wet ropes. I retched into the muzzle and choked on my own bile. The green branches cut the clouds as I rose and crumbled against the lifting floor and sobbed against the straps which bit into my face until I tasted my own blood with every lurching inch upward. I hitched and gagged, bewildered, as afraid as any lost beast. But I was close to the sky, so close, and the Sun beat my back fondly.

  The amber cage had an amber lock, and there was a girl with an amber key. She kept it on the beads that slung around her like chains, dangling right at the base of her throat. In those days any number of creatures were brought from every hovel and height in the land to delight this creature, whose clear, calm eyes took in everything with equal regard and due. She was dutifully amazed at my fur and my tail, dutifully frightened at my muffled roar, dutifully patted my head, and dutifully passed on to the next wonder of nature brought up the trees for her pleasure. She took no joy in any one animal over any other, and her voice was genteel and grateful when she thanked the wranglers for bringing her these miracles and grotesqueries. By the latter, she meant me, and thus I was given my name.

  For some weeks she came, dutifully, to visit her menagerie, escorted by wranglers and noble nursemaids and occasionally her father. She played with the pygmy elephant and the wobble-kneed young Centaur whose legs were bound in her absence so that he w
ould never grow to shame her with excess height. She had a Djinn whose smoke had gone out and a fish in a great glass bowl which owed her yet two wishes. Their games were odd and solemn—she sang to them and sat them to tea with amber cups they could not help but break, and scolded them for their manners. She forced their struggling heads onto her breast and all exclaimed it a miracle that her gentleness of spirit and purity of heart could charm the most savage of monsters.

  She did not charm me.

  After attempting to get me to drink from her dainty cups and sing with her while she did her sewing, she declared with great sadness that the beast she had named in jest was truly a grotesque beyond salvation, and that I should be sent away, for I was surely, in my unfathomable heart, unhappy there. I knew this meant the slaughterhouse or simply being shoved off the platforms into the narrow spit of sea, but what maiden knows how the world is skewed to spare any testing of her virtue?

  When she and her escort had gone, a small, dark shape remained, silhouetted against the door frame of the wretched zoo. It came into the light, and I saw that it was a girl like the other one, and lost interest—save that she came and knelt by my cage, and, loosing a strand of black beads from her throat, put her own amber key into the lock, and opened the amber door.

  “Poor Grotteschi. Do you see these beads? When amber is burned to make resin, this horrible black stuff is left over when the golden oil pours dutifully into the catch. No one wants it. It is garbage. I, too, am what is left over from her, what is thrown away when she has passed over it, what remains in the corners when she has swept by.”

  She put her hands to the muzzle’s buckles and let it loose. By then I had grown, I was the size of a small horse, but the muzzle had never been changed. My jaw would never close quite right again. She did not mind my teeth. She rubbed my chin and my cheeks, wiped at the hardened blood with the hem of her dress. Her name was Hind. She was a good girl, and I slept in her bed from that night on.

  Even when I was fully grown, she slept curled between my paws and demanded iron supports for her pitifully delicate bed. Together we snuck into the libraries at night, and she taught me to read from the books kept on the highest shelves, which I could reach for us, stories of lost girls and lost beasts and grotesques like us. She brought me cakes from the kitchens, covered in icing, so much thicker and richer than the mashed and rotten meat of her sister’s zoo. When she became more beautiful even than her sister, I used to sing at her window to the men who gathered there to play their flutes or harps. They scattered when faced with my superior songs, and I padded back to Hind and her black beads. I was happy. The Sun was high in the sky. Happiness, when you look back on it, seems so brief, but then, with her, my whole life seemed to pass by under the flitting cedar shadows. Until the day she ran into our room and slammed the door behind her, her chest heaving under those black beads, her face flushed with tears. I ran to her, and she buried her head in my mane. Finally she drew back and sobbed horribly, a long, broken howl—I remember when I howled that way.

  A pearl fell out of her mouth.

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  TWELVE COINS,

  CONTINUED

  GROTTESCHI’S VOICE HELD US FAST. OUT OF HER misshapen jaw came a strange, lilting tone, low, rasping, but sharp and keen as a plucked harp string.

  “Someone had poisoned her,” she moaned, “having no business in Amberabad but to vex my friend, because her father did not like her books or her cakes or her pets. What kind of a person fills their larder by punishing other people’s petty complaints?”

  Oubliette and I shifted against her tail, and I glanced over at my short-haired friend under my eyelashes.

  “You’re telling the wrong story,” I whispered. “What about the tea girl?”

  Grotteschi stared at us, her eyes bright and amused. “What an impatient couple you are. I was getting to it, you know. So spoiled by my friend in green! You like his story better, because it has a harem. Young boys always like tales of distressed women in silk.”

  Oubliette elbowed me hard. “I like this story. Be quiet,” she hissed.

  The Manticore rolled her eyes.

  “Very well; a performer must always play to her audience.” Oubliette dared to creep closer to the red lion, resting gingerly against her ribs. “Hind begged me to take her away. She promised that she knew how to use the floating platforms, and we could run from Amberabad to another city, where her affliction of pearls might be of some use to us. And so the girl strung with black beads packed her cakes and some few of her precious books and climbed onto my back, proudly astride, as her father had told her over and over not to do…”

  THE

  MANTICORE’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  WE DESCENDED TOGETHER THROUGH THE BRANCHES and clouds, onto the long road, and she clung to me all the way down, her long fingers gripping my mane so as not to fall while I bounded off the last amber plank. I faithfully kept my tail from curling tightly upward, as the recalcitrant thing is wont to do, so as not to hurt her. We stepped onto the thick grass and my friend laughed to feel it, solid ground beneath her. We went into the world, in search of this other city, and it was on the road to that fabled place, which was called Ajanabh then as it is now, that we met the oddest couple trundling along the seaside paths.

  I am sure there is no need to describe my Taglio to you. Was his hair longer in those days? Were his eyes brighter? I cannot tell. He did not wear green then. Immacolata had shredded her red silk, but kept it knotted into her hair as a reminder of her bondage, braided bright against the brown. They were beautiful. Taglio played his pipes and Immacolata had become a kind of tinker, though her tea bags were never far. They made a meager living through sleight of hand and the odd set of tongs played for a hunk of bread and a chunk of cheese. They told us their tale, and that they did not know where they were going, only away from where they had come, and they had been already years on that hungry road. Hind, being fond of pets, asked them to go along with us to the city of spices, which was so far from where we stood that it might as well have sheared off from the map of the world and gone drifting on the underside of the parchment.

  “I am lonely for company,” Hind said. “Though my red beast and I love each other, I think she would be glad of another beast, and I of another woman. In Ajanabh there must be spices for your teas that you have not yet dreamt of. In Ajanabh there must be meats roasting that you could not begin to name. Come with us, and tell us tales, and eat our cakes, and read our books, and become as beloved as you may.”

  When she finished her speech, her hands were full of pearls. The couple stared at her.

  And so we traveled. With Hind spitting her pearls word by word, we were rarely hungry. Taglio taught her to juggle and pantomime; Immacolata made us tea over countless campfires. They were happy—there are many ways to be happy, and they had theirs. They pulled coins out of each other’s ears and made countless cups and shoes vanish, only to reappear to gales of high-pitched laughter, like owls hooting in the wind. I envied them, and so did poor, lonesome Hind, who had no more pretty boys at her window, only me to sing to her. Every evening the red-braided girl would take the Gaselli behind clusters of trees or reeds and let him taste a single drop of blood from her throat. Her neck was a pattern of tiny scars, like a star chart. Hind watched this in silence, standing alone near the fire with her hands clasped tightly together. Whatever she thought of their ritual, she kept to herself.

  Slowly the sea became long, grassy valleys, and in one of these valleys we stumbled into a shantytown of brilliant and varied colors, tents breaking the low morning fog like the masts of ships. It was something like a circus, performers of all kinds rubbing the sleep from their eyes and stretching their legs, strapping on stilts and polishing trumpets, practicing violin scales and barker calls, elongating any number of legs into graceful steps. A hundred voices trilled octave to octave, a hundred lines of tragedies and comedies bellowed out from a hundred obese contraltos. />
  As we descended into the cheerful maelstrom, Hind clung to me, unsure of so many strange folk. Immacolata stroked her hair. A woman nearly collided with us on the path through the tents, driving before her a massive boar which walked on its hind legs, a little yellow cap on its head and yellow ribbons hanging garishly from his bristly neck. The woman was rather short, slender as a cracked whip, dressed all in goatskin, fur hanging gray and coarse from her arms, her waist, all the way to her tiny ankles. Her eyes were a keen, narrow gold, and her hair was blue as drowning. She held a long churchwarden pipe in one hand, its mouthpiece glittering green.

  “Watch where you wend, friends, or my pig is like to trample you. It takes all his concentration to keep in a straight line,” she said, her voice thick and raspy with smoke.

  “Excuse me,” said Immacolata, always polite—and it had long ago been agreed that Hind was not to talk to strangers, as we would not want to be robbed of her by someone who fancied having a girl who dispensed endless jewels from her mouth. “But where are we? What is this place?”

  The woman drew deeply on her pipe and blew green smoke at her boar. She looked up at the tea girl’s scarlet ribbons, and her eyes narrowed further. “How long have you been away from Varaahasind, my little decadent?” Taglio started as if slapped. The goatskinned woman laughed and coughed and laughed again. “Don’t worry—who would I tell? As for the rest, this isn’t any place, silly things. By tomorrow we’ll all be gone, each to our own corners of the yawning, grassy world…”

  THE

  PIG-TAMER’S

  TALE

  MESINYANE HAS A TUSK PIPE AND A PIG CALLED Femi, and my pipe it is a hollow tooth, and my pig he is so named, and thus you may be reasonably sure that Mesinyane tells you these things.