The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I am here because this is where we go, who travel and perform and live on the world but not in it. The wind blows us together, to exchange news and tricks and techniques, to whisper to each other what cities can afford us, to trade tightropes for horseshoes. The blue of my hair is paint, the shade of my eyes a cheap glamour purchased from a mixer of oils and unguents who had a green cart and great, long fingers. I am dressed up no less than my boar. We do all these things, trade and dye and dance and learn and part—it is a happy vagary of our lives. Word is passed horse to ox to magician to singer, and we wind our way, eventually, to an agreed-upon dale. This is a Vstreycha, a congress of fools, and I came to it from Varaahasind, where I was born in the house of my father, who was also a fool, but the kind who lets the milk curdle in its pail and the beer lose its head to the breeze, not the professional kind.

  When I was grown, and our hut of pigskins was low and warm in the jungles outside the city—we were too poor to live on the terraces, near the palace with its perfumed queens! I often used to dream of catching a glimpse of one of those women, strange and exotic as chained leopards. But we lived on the outskirts, where the banana leaves cast green shadows, and my father Femi slept behind the stove.

  This is not so odd—certainly it was warm as a held breath in our forest, but it is a pleasant thing to sleep on the bricks behind the stove, warmed as they are by the bread baking against the side of the iron, and sweat away bad dreams and the occasional cough. I often wished to sleep there, but my father held his post like the last soldier on a hill.

  “Father,” I would say, “go to the well and get us some water so that I can make us fish stew.”

  My father Femi would roll over on his bricks. “Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane? What did I have a daughter for? Get it yourself.”

  And so I would go and pull the water from the well with buckets of baobab wood, and the stew would be sweet anyhow, with green onions and pink tails floating in it.

  “Father,” I would say, “go and cut us some camphor wood, so that I may build up the fire and warm your bricks, so that the hut may smell of cinnamon, not yesterday’s fish stew.”

  My father Femi would roll over on his bricks. “Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane? What did I have a daughter for? Cut it yourself.”

  And so I would go and cut the camphor wood and bring it in to dry, and the hut would smell of thick and spicy things, and the bricks would warm beneath my father’s back.

  “Father,” I would say, “go to the market and fetch us two black roosters so that I may roast them up for us, and stuff your pillows with the feathers.”

  And my father Femi would roll over on his bricks. “Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane? What did I have a daughter for? Get it yourself.”

  And so I went into the jungle, where the banana leaves are high and their fruit not yet ripe, where the cacao flowers are wet and pale. I was muddy to my knees by the time the road smoothed out through the coffee plants wavering white and green and red. My arms burned with shoving the forest aside to let me pass, and my face was full of the pricks of mosquitoes. But I could see the first rounded terrace tops, and my mouth watered for the chickens to come.

  But my legs are small, and by the time I found a little butcher’s shop with cockerels hanging in the window, all was dark and every door shut against me. My feet were torn and bloody, my shoes worn through to nothing, sweat clinging my hair to my scalp as though I had slept all the day on my father’s stove. I looked up and down the narrow street, full of clothes shops where I could afford nothing and bakeries already puffing the smoke of tomorrow’s bread through their roofs. The palace hunched in the distance, and the high wooded hills hid the moon from me. There was nowhere I could see that would open its doors to a goat-furred urchin, so, with rather fewer sniffles than you might expect, I settled down against the brick wall of the butcher’s shop to await the old red sun’s return.

  I could not really sleep, but fitful dreams ran over my eyelids, leaving their tiny footprints. Sometime after the moon had finally grunted and sweated and hoisted herself up over the treetops, I saw through slitted eyes a figure walking from the palace toward me: a man who was white all over, the white of milk or cheese or chalk, and he wore very little, his long, muscled legs showing bare, his chest slung with a barbed harpoon and nothing more. His hair was long and straight, and in his arms he held a woman, stiff and dead, her beautiful limbs frozen and unmoving, crystalline snakes wrapping her arms, her skin clear as the glass of a poultry-seller’s store. I had never seen anything so radiant and lovely as those two, and I think the man looked at me as he passed, but I cannot be sure. He cast a flitting light against the alley walls, shadows spitting angrily at the stone.

  I could not help it—I was curious as a mouse who has not heard that someone, somewhere, has thought of a thing called a trap. I followed them, creeping close behind. I followed them all through the night, in which they floated over the ground like the moonlight that so rarely penetrated the banana canopy, and into the day, in which they still gleamed, as though their skin was hungry for light, always light. I followed them through the cacao flowers wet and pale and the coffee plants wavering white and green and red, I followed them through the baobabs with their roots like elephant trunks, I followed them past my own house.

  Now, I loved my father as best I could, and I did not think he would want to miss such a thing passing by our very own door. So I rushed in and shook him awake on his stove.

  “Father!” I cried. “There are Stars stamping flat the banana leaves outside our door! Come and see!”

  My father Femi rolled over on his bricks.

  “Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane? Did I have a daughter only to nag me and pelt me with lies? Go see yourself if you like, but leave me alone!”

  “Father, I do not lie! Come and peek out of the door, just peek, and if there is no pale figure striding by you may lie on your stove all day and night and I will say nothing about it!”

  My father grunted and slowly rolled back and forth, working himself up to standing. He stumbled off of his stove and went to the door, placing his eye to the jamb—and indeed, a slim, cream-blanched ankle was disappearing beyond a clutch of palm fronds. My father’s face contorted like an acrobat’s leg—as if in a daze he wandered out of the house and after the creatures. I knew that he was not so thick as to be unmoved by our little plot of land alight with gods! The two of us, small and quiet, followed them through the night and into day.

  But it was difficult to keep up. Sleeping on a stove does not really prepare a man for marathons through high brush.

  “I’m thirsty!” whined my father Femi. “What did I have a daughter for! Fetch me some water!”

  “There is no clean water to be had, Father. Be patient, and perhaps we will pass a stream.”

  “But there is rain pooled in the leopard tracks here!” he said, pointing at some broad, deep pawprints.

  “It is not safe, Father Femi. Remember what your wife, my mother said: ‘Drink from the feet of a beast and win those feet for your own.’”

  After a long while, as the jungle became thinner, and the mud turned to pebbles underfoot, and still we only saw the burnt leaves and steaming mist of their passing, my father Femi cried again:

  “I am thirsty! Find me some water, girl! What did I have a daughter for?”

  “There is no clean water to be had, Father. Be patient, and perhaps we will come to a lake.”

  “But there is rain pooled in the tiger tracks right here!” he said, pointing at more deep, broad pawprints.

  “Remember what your wife, my mother said: ‘Drink from a footprint and it will not go well with your own scraggle-toes!’”

  “Your mother is off whoring herself to the Raja,” my father snapped, “eating sugar pies and lamb fat and sleeping in silk every night!” His face was red as a boil. Tears leaped to my eyes.

  “She didn’t want to go! The procurers came and you wouldn’t beat them back with your fis
ts or your club or your bricks, you only slept on your stove and refused to budge! ‘What did we have a daughter for?’ you said. ‘You get her back, if you want her so much,’ you said!”

  We walked after the Stars in sullen silence after that. High red berries glittered, and I was thirsty, too, but I obeyed my mother. Finally, my father wailed, a long, wretched sound.

  “I am so thirsty the sides of my throat stick together!” he moaned. “There is water in the boar-prints—let me drink, cruel Mesinyane!”

  I turned to him and planted my hands on my tiny hips. My face was flushed and sweat-stung, my arms itchy from biting vermin, my feet a bloody ache. We were losing their scent, even as he dawdled. “Fine!” I cried. “Drink from the hoofprints, Father, drink your fill, if you will just be quiet and do as you’re told!”

  Happily, my father Femi set to scooping the coppery water from the deep pig-prints. “Perhaps, when we catch them, the Stars will give me a new stove, with smooth bricks which do not leave marks on my back,” he chortled. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for him to finish.

  As I watched him gulp down the rainwater, mud trickled down his chin, and before it could drip back again onto the churned earth, my father Femi’s chin was considerably hairier and broader than it had been before. The filthy water frothed suddenly between two yellow tusks, his thick hair twisted into a forelock, his eyes grown tiny and beady. Before my eyes my father twisted and grew until he was a great, huge, lumbering boar, and though I didn’t mean to, I laughed at him squealing in the forest, still thirsty even after all his slurping.

  THE

  MANTICORE’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  “AND HERE HE IS, THE OLD BEAST, WITH NO stove at all anymore!” laughed the pig-tamer; and gave her boar a little slap on the rump. He moaned, and through his snorting he seemed to say:

  “Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane?”

  The blue-haired woman grinned at us. “We lost their trail—I have an idea where they were going, but a Star lost stays lost. I decided to make the best of it, and worked out this little act, which keeps me out of huts with stoves and in thick shoes. But I had to dress him up in ribbons and hats—folk don’t believe it’s a tamed beast if it doesn’t have the right costume. All tamed things are made a bit ridiculous in the process, you know.”

  Immacolata was ashen, twisting her red ribbons with a shaking hand. “It was Zmeya, wasn’t it? She’s dead, somehow, she’s dead!”

  “That’s the story we tell—and you’ll find that story told quite a bit in the Vstreycha. After she ate up her wicked husband Indrajit, the kingdom fell into the hands of the harem, who knew best what goes on in the palace, and through a complicated chain of ears, what goes on everywhere. The old perfumed queens run things in the city of pigs these days. They make sure the tale spreads far and wide, of what wronged wives may wreak. It was bad there for a while though,” she mused, “while they made their way to the throne. There was a terrible spate of poisonings. Some of us here do poison from time to time, if work is hard. I’ve heard such things from them—they love to see Father Femi and his pretty bows. Maybe one day we’ll trudge back to the jungle and let Mother see what became of you, eh?” She prodded the great pig and he moaned again.

  “Where do you think they were going?” whispered Immacolata.

  Mesinyane shrugged. “Fools are a keen old pack of crows. There is a fool for every scrap of knowledge in the world, I’d bet, and they talk to each other. I think they went to the Isle of the Dead; I think he went to bury her, to do as much as one Star does for another in the way of funeral rites.”

  I thought I saw tears in the odalisque’s dark eyes, but I could not imagine why. She had known the woman for a moment, and so what if she was a Star? The Sun was my father, and he never slept on a stove.

  “Can I offer you supper?” said the gold-eyed pygmy cheerfully. “I have a nice rasher of bacon back in my tent.” She grinned, and her teeth were small, small and sharp.

  Once Mesinyane had filled us with bacon and rhyming songs about the laziness of pigs and men, we wandered alone through the Vstreycha. Taglio and Immacolata learned many new tricks with their cards and silks, and they purchased a ramshackle cart with a particularly moving rendition of “The Rape of Amberabad,” which we shall perform for you, if you like. It was a favorite of Hind’s and of mine, especially the part when the red ship sails up the harbor—which we made with fluttering blue gauze—and the three-breasted captain cuts the palace into amber coins for her hold. They bought this broken cart and Taglio painted it blue to match my eyes, and Immacolata fixed its silver stars in their firmament. Finally, we found an amber-seller in a tall black hat with a long golden feather flopping on its side, and Hind asked eagerly for news of home, of her frog-spitting sister, of her father with his silly lessons. I told her she should not care, but she only smiled sheepishly and pressed the bearded fellow for gossip.

  I told her to let it lie, I told her, but she could not. Do I go whining back to the desert when an Upas dries up her sap and lies down by the water? No, I do not. But she could not let those who did not love her nearly so well as I lie still behind her as they ought. And so she heard from this man in his ridiculous hat that her father had died, and the Bell of Amberabad chimed in mourning, day and night.

  Hind twisted her black beads. She looked at me, stricken, and buried her head in my mane. I pressed my broken jaw to her face, and her tears were hot as Upas milk.

  “It is all right, my girl,” I whispered into her hair. “They are gone now and you are free of them. I will sing for you at any window you indicate with the smallest of your fingers, and we will be happy. There are many ways of being happy. We will find ours.”

  Hind looked up at me miserably, scarlet strands of my hair clinging to her face. “No, Grotteschi. I must go home. I will not be forever the wicked sister. I must do as much as any woman does for her father, for her sister.”

  I crouched down in the small mound of pearls that had spilled out over her toes, my paws dark against them, and made my voice soft as fingers stroking old drumskins. “I will never go back to that place. My jaw aches when I think of it—I will never touch amber again with these paws.” Hind wept silently. I could not look at her. “Are you leaving me?” I growled.

  She flung her arms around me, and her beads were hard on my cheeks. “Find me in Ajanabh,” she whispered, pearls streaming over my shoulders like tears. “I will go there, when all things which should be in the ground are buried. I will go there, and you will find me, and sing at my window, and I will come out to you.”

  When the first silver streaks of dawn began to stream across the valley, she was gone, and so was the Vstreycha. A few tent spikes remained, a few pearls rolling loose and dirty. Taglio might have consoled me, and I went padding about the wreckage of the makeshift camp to find him, to find his boot-black hooves and his smiling face, which was dear to me, if not quite so dear as a wicked sister and her loud laughter.

  Immacolata and her Gaselli were down in the depths of the vale, by a freezing stream which gurgled blue and frothy through the tall weeds.

  “I am going,” said the odalisque quietly. I don’t think I ever heard her raise her voice, in all the time we walked paw by foot. She was calm as tea in a cup.

  “She knows you care for her; you do not need to do more,” said the eunuch, his head low.

  “I will repay her gift to us. I have heard the story from three fools and a tragedian of her death, of how she killed the King, and how her brother carried her body off from the palace. Where did he take her? What can she have in that cold, dark place where Stars go? I will not let her languish—she did not let me!” Finally Immacolata’s voice did break, and she struck her fists against the chest of her ersatz lover. “What did you give to the Star?” she wept. “I will give her no more than a little leaf. What did you give? What did you give?” She ripped her scarlet ribbons from her braid, long strands of hair coming with them, her tears terrible,
like water boiling to a white scrim on the bottom of an old pot. “I am not like you! I don’t care about religion. She saved me, she saved me when you only watched and guarded the door. She said we were sisters! How can I let her go into the dark alone? I cannot abide a sister’s suffering!”

  “I am sure she has enough of wild followers and grief-stricken siblings.”

  “She saw the leaf in me. She knew this day would come. Drink my tea and you will know what I dream of. Wear my shoes and you will know what I dream of. I dream of my sister, alone, weeping!”

  He held her then, stroked her torn hair. I could not hear what he said against her skin, but I saw the sharp gleam of blood again, and I saw him dry her tears. She stood back from him, an old, familiar smile on her face.

  “I have one last thing for you, who has as much of my blood in him as his own.”

  “I do not want anything else. I only want you to stay.”

  She tried to laugh, but it came out poorly, a broken cello string. “Please, my love, don’t. She needs me.” The odalisque shook her hair back. “I am made of tea, remember? It will be as though I simply steep, in endless water. And because of that, I can do a thing which would amaze anyone in the Vstreycha. Come close, my dear gazelle, and jump through my ear.”

  “What? Don’t be ridiculous!” Taglio recoiled. She only laughed.

  “I am only tea—can you not leap through a tea bush? So you may leap through me and come out the other side.” She went to him, put her hands on his face, kissed his eyelids. “Taglio, dearest shepherd, dearest sheep, in this way you may enter me, and it will be as though we neither of us have lost anything in our lives.”

  He pressed his head into her, and I could hear his sobs, the sound of them like planks of wood splintering under a bronze ax. But he drew back, and to my never-ceasing surprise, took a running start, and leapt into the ear of Immacolata.

  THE TALE

  OF THE