TWELVE COINS,
CONTINUED
“HE CAME OUT OF HER CLOTHED ALL IN GREEN, as he was before the harem, as the Gaselli always were. His buckles shone brilliant, his cap was soft as a mule’s nose. But he looks at the green now and sees no pretty dell and unguarded campfire. He sees her leaves. Mourning clothes, he calls them, the green of young tea plants. He has never taken off the clothes of her body, and in this way, I think, he dwells within her always.
“They waded into the stream together, then, hand in hand; waist-deep in the rushing, icy water, Immacolata turned to her eunuch and smiled, tears spilling down her cheeks like cream onto a rich table. She reached up, behind his ear, and with a little flourish, produced a shimmering silver leaf out of the air.
“‘You must find the Isle of the Dead, and take this seed of me to her. I know you will do this for me; I know it as well as I know the lines of my palm and the hairs of my head. Go into the world, and take me out of it. This is my heart—carry it with you. I will dream of you in the dark, and you will taste it in my tea, and feel it in my shoes.’
“With that, Immacolata dissolved slowly into the water, like sugar. She drifted apart, each brown leaf wafting slowly onto the stream. The current held her for a moment, a great circle of leaves with green-clad Taglio in the center, and then carried them off and away.”
Oubliette and I gawked at the Manticore, our mouths hanging open as though we had gone simple. And as we sat curled in her tail, the great red beast closed her sparkling eyes and began to sing, low and soft, like a wooden flute and a diamond trumpet playing together. She did not lie about her songs—we wept openly under the strokes of her voice, the lost, sorrow-bound notes moving against us like hands, telling us how beautiful Immacolata was as she drifted downstream, and how it pierced Grotteschi to hear Taglio keen and scream as he did on that lonely bank.
Finally, she closed her misshapen jaw, and we came slowly to ourselves. “We had both been abandoned by our best-loved beasts. It seemed right to carry out their wishes together, and we went first after the Isle of the Dead.”
“Did you find it?” I said, breathless.
“No,” she said shortly. “And it is my turn now. We are going to Ajanabh and I will sing for my girl at every window until she comes to one, her black beads tumbling out, and calls me up to her.”
The great beast glared defiantly at us, setting her jaw as best she could, daring us to mock her. We nestled in quickly against her, and there were no more stories that night. After a time, all of us slept, even her, her scarlet fur buffeted by snores.
I woke in that awful cold that seeps in sometime between midnight and dawn, as if the sky had frozen, and its black edges crept into your clothes through every seam. Even in the cart with its warm curtains I shivered, and turned to Oubliette for warmth as we always had—but she was gone, an empty space in the coil of Grotteschi’s tail where she had been. My stomach seized—in all those years I had never woken to an empty bed, she had never been anything but there and heavy and warm in the night. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, went the refrain of our life together.
Carefully I moved the coils of the Manticore’s tail from my legs, gingerly lifting the beetle green shell of its scorpion tip from the door frame, and crept outside, into a cold that stung my face like birch branches. Taglio rested next to the long blue bars of the cart, his green clothes clung with dew, ice stuck to the bottom of his boot-black hooves. Oubliette lay asleep, curled against him like a cat, her face clouded with dreams but not frightened—I do know the look of fear on her face, I know it so well. I wanted to go to her and sleep against her as I used to, to tuck my head into her shoulder and breathe together, to hold her between me and the dark. But perhaps she was not entirely mine any longer, perhaps she had not snuck out of the cart on a whim, and I should not disturb her.
I crawled under the cart handles and drew myself up next to Oubliette anyway, her familiar body, her familiar smell. Taglio stirred, and extended his long, slender arm over both of us.
“I couldn’t find it,” he sighed. “That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? How I could stop looking, how I could let her go. I tried so hard, but the paths that go to the Isle are hidden and dark and I could not find them. I am a shepherd, I know only well-tilled fields and plots of earth where folk have lived back and back and back to their greatest grandparents. I couldn’t find it, and Grotteschi deserves her chance, too. Someday I will start the search again. Perhaps in Ajanabh, there is a mapmaker who knows the way, or a poet who has heard of how it is done.”
Gently, so as not to wake Oubliette, he pulled a small box from his jerkin, an intricate box of tea wood, with a sweet green shoe carved on its lid and inlaid with beryl. He opened it, and there inside lay a silver leaf, glimmering dark and pale.
“But I keep her with me, always and always,” he said, and closed the lid again.
And so we traveled together, ever wending toward Ajanabh, which proved to be farther than I could have imagined the ghost city could carry us. I had never dreamed the world so wide. We walked, we rode, we performed to keep bread in our bellies, lacking anyone capable of spitting out pearls for our daily use, and Taglio caught the occasional gamey rabbit. Oubliette went with him to hunt, and she became a wild thing, rarely speaking, growing lean and tall, her movements sudden and sharp.
In our little show, she danced.
There was a red curtain in the cart, and when there were more than a few villagers with pennies clutched in their turnip-pulling hands, we strung it up high, and pulled Grotteschi’s tail through it, slung with a thin green sock to hide the barb. She shuddered when we pulled the cloth over her, every time, but she did not protest—it was our best act. We had others: Grotteschi often sang, and as she sang she turned her face to the sky and wept, and this never failed to fill our baskets with food and money, for the Manticore’s song seemed to grip folk by the wrist and empty their pockets by force. Taglio danced—but he often frightened folk, who knew how the dances of the Gaselli usually ended. More often, he tied a ribbon to his Manticore, and terrified them with his tamed monster. More often than not, Grotteschi devoured the ribbon in disgust afterward, and we were always short of them. But Oubliette’s dance was the best thing we knew how to do.
With her sock in place Grotteschi’s tail was a very convincing snake, and she and Oubliette performed a strange and sinuous dance while Taglio played his pipes or his fiddle of almond wood. As the years went on and the road grew little shorter, I learned to play his fiddle, and we accompanied the beast-dance together. It was always an alien, affecting thing, when Oubliette danced. Though she wore a long dress, some villages called it obscene—but it was only that she danced so desperately, faster and faster each time, and never twice the same. She danced as though she could dance her way out of the sod tower, and the golden ball, and the ghost city, and the hedgehog’s love.
What she danced, while Grotteschi writhed her tail in undulating patterns, flicking it and swelling it and coiling it in lazy circles, was a story we learned in the Vstreycha, a story we never found unknown in any hamlet or within any burgher’s wall, of a woman who was also a snake, who was also a Star, and how her husband betrayed her, and how she took her revenge. By the final notes, Oubliette would be concealed behind the curtain, and only the great green tail remained.
My friend grew obsessed with this story, with her dance. She hardly spoke to anyone anymore, though at night she still could not sleep alone, and clung to Taglio or me or even the furry flank of the red lion. Once, when she was strapping knives to her calves in order to hunt deer, I tried to kiss her—just once, just to see if I could. She recoiled and looked at me with bruised black eyes.
“Why?” she said, her voice long and deep now, a grown woman, finally. “Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and it was true.
She brought back a fawn that night. Its spots were white and eerie in the moonlight. In the morning, she was gone, and Tagli
o’s little box was empty.
THE TALE
OF THE
CROSSING,
CONTINUED
“I FOLLOWED HER. I HAVE ALWAYS FOLLOWED her. She is there, on that island, I know she is, and I am going to save her. We save each other; it’s what we have always done. I was made to save her; she was made to save me.”
Idyll frowned into the sky, black and boiling with the oncoming storm. “How did you spend the last three coins?”
“Why do you care? Isn’t it enough that you have one of them?”
“Call it an interest in numismatics.” The old man chuckled.
Seven covered his eyes with his rough, knuckle-split hand. He forced back tears, though his throat threatened to strangle his words. He could not make his voice steady; it was ragged and broken, the sound swallowed up by the great glassy lake and the rumbling sky. “I spent them to get here! I spent them to find her! I spent them to get farmers and astrologers and idle princes and dairywomen to tell me where she had gone, mapmakers and poets and river pilots and necromancers to tell me how to follow after her. I spent them to get her back—what else are they good for? What else could they buy? I spent them to buy her back, I spent them to cross the lake, I spent them and they’re gone and all I have is an empty sleeve.” He broke into fog-softened sobs and the old ferryman might have comforted him, indeed leaned forward to do so, had not a thin, reedy wind blown by, a wind like the last gasp of a man frozen to death on a barren snowfield. The wind blew aside Idyll’s shabby brown cloak, and Seven saw what was beneath it—he meant to scream, or cry out, but all that his lungs could manage was a groan and a slack jaw.
Idyll’s skin ended at the base of his throat. The rest of him was all bones, great, long, yellow bones, and his skeleton was more than a man’s, for the thin fringe-frames of huge wings arched up from his spine, the substance of his senescent hunch. He had fleshy hands, and feet, wrinkled skin sagging and dry, but beneath the cloth he was as naked as it is possible for a man to be, and through the gaps in his bones, Seven could see the choppy silver waters of the lake.
Through those same spaces ran two black lizards, chasing each other up and down his barrel–rib cage like squirrels around an oak tree. They chattered and hissed as they passed, flicking their tongues at his clavicle, his pelvis. Their eyes were white, like the eyes of blind men, and once in a while, one would pause briefly, as though he had found a walnut, and gnaw on one of the ferryman’s vertebra.
Idyll looked chagrined. He pulled his robe back over the racing lizards. “It’s not so bad, really. I’ve gotten used to them. But I suppose that they require an explanation as surely as a bone coin…”
THE
FERRYMAN’S
TALE
THERE ARE SOME WHO SAY THE MOON IS DEAD, that only the dead trace their lineage there. They are wrong, and if you would believe the scripture of such creatures, you would surely believe anything.
The Moon is ever fertile. She cannot turn to look at herself in the ocean’s mirror but that a peony with crystal edges blooms from her navel. When she speaks, oysters fall from her mouth, oysters and tadpoles with wiggling tails. In the dark of the world before there were eyes to open and call it black, she was whole, and perfect, and did not change her shape through the month. But in the dark as in anything else, there were drifting winds and currents, and these blew gently against the ribs and shoulders of Moon, causing her to slowly spin in the sky, her arms outstretched as a child will do when she floats upon a clear and blue-green inland sea, letting the little kissing waves push against her body.
When the Stars left the sky—folk do not lie on that score, at least—their going left sucking holes in the dark, and winds issued from them as from a burst balloon. Poor Moon was battered on all sides by these whistling winds, and she began to spin faster and faster. As she spun in the sky like a dervish, the winds were so fierce that they began to peel off slivers of her flesh, pale and translucent and shimmering. These slivers drifted dreaming to earth, feather-slow and fragile as petals.
Finally, Moon had nothing left for the empty sky to peel away. The little black core of her rested at last in a lightless hollow, no bigger or brighter than a speck of soot. But as all things will do when they are allowed some respite, Moon began to grow again, for she cannot help her fecundity. She turned this way and that, and peonies bloomed from her navel, chrysanthemums exploded from her palms. Oysters and tadpoles fell out of her mouth. Pine boughs snaked around her waist. In her hair saplings writhed and danced in blind ecstasy. It was not long before Moon was full and vast again, as she had been. But the Star-sparse sky had become like a river flowing between a few sharp rocks, the currents more fierce than they had ever been, and no sooner was she round and bright but they began to peel off her flesh again.
And so the Moon waxes and wanes, from a swell of light to a speck of soot. Poor, lost little Moon, who gets only the briefest moments of respite. We are sorry for her, we feathers, we petals, we sloughed-off children. Moon skins the Hsien are, cast away like plum skins. We are the drifting shells the black winds blow from her, silver-dim as the shadow cast by a foxglove at moonrise, clear and hard as frozen glass.
Once we waged a holy war against the rotting heretics who cling to a false Moon, but they do not mourn for their dead as we do. Attrition is a terrible thing when you must bear it alone. Long ago we gave in—if they wish to amuse themselves with morbid fairy tales, we will not spoil their games. We persevere, knowing the truth, even in the face of their perversion.
I am sure that I have given the impression of maleness to you—it seems to suit the work. But we are not male, and neither female. The petals of the Moon have no sex, no children, no marriage. More of us drop each month from her flesh, and if they survive, like turtles sent across the sand into the welcoming sea, then we are replenished. We are not equipped for children; we are tiny moons, and moons do not couple, do not increase the number of aggregate moons. Neither do we eat the five cereals as men do, but suckle wind and drink dew. We age slowly as stones, and it is difficult for us to die, though it does happen, as it is possible to smash a quartz-riddled rock.
Thus it is that I am old enough to be able to tell you that I raised the Rose Dome of Shadukiam over the diamond turrets of the city in the days before it withered into Marrow. I was an architect then, and I was sought out by the city fathers to cap their walls with flowers, flowers which would not fade, nor wilt, nor fall. It was thought by some that a walking sliver of the Moon would know something about permanence. I was promised a wine vat filled with opals and silver as payment—they were always decadent, nothing has truly changed.
In those days Shadukiam was a spiky forest of scaffolding. They were still cutting slabs of earth away to plant buildings like saplings in the wet black soil—how the city of metal and merchants began obsessed with growing things! The diamond turrets were only lately erected, their facets still tapped and chiseled by workmen with no fear of heights. The roads were tamped with feet, not rolling stones of gold and silver. The Asaad was canopied in wool. How we match, you and I! I remember the city before it was Marrow; you remember it after. This is history before history, boy, and I was there.
I instructed some few of my siblings to make their nests on the sparkling turrets or the platforms below them and await me, while I flew into the world to seek out an imperishable rose.
In the Garden
THE GIRL HAD WATCHED THE BOY DISAPPEAR INTO THE PALACE LIKE a bee buzzing into the mouth of an alligator. She had followed as close as she might, wanting to extend—just a little longer!—the time in which she was not alone, not cold, not silent. While he went into that shadowy, many-towered place, that place she would never go, the girl paced out the square that was to hold Dinarzad and her husband with her little feet. The scaffolding was half up, the chestnuts bent forward and around, their bare stick-limbs thatched and wired with gold to make a canopy thick enough to shield Dinarzad’s veiled head from the eye of heaven. The girl wond
ered what the eye of heaven might see through so many branches and layers of silk. The sun was not quite up, but she and the boy had either become much better at their little game, or Dinarzad had become much less vigilant. Her friend was safe in his warm bed, she was sure, piled with fox fur and wool. Perhaps the dew wet his hair at the brow, perhaps not.
The peacocks wandered around the Garden, their green-violet tails dragging in the flower beds, their blue heads popping up behind clusters of late-fruiting berries. The girl and the peacocks had always been wary of each other—they did not know how to sing, and she did not know how to affect an ostentatious display. Peacocks are not entirely wild, and she was not entirely tame. But on this day of all days, she made peace, and tightened her throat enough to make a squeaking peahen’s cry. A cobalt bird ventured out from its briar, and after nipping her fingers once or twice nestled its head in her hands. She longed for the lake, but she longed more for her birds, her geese, the untamed ones that dipped into the Garden for flowers and glittering insects and then went on when the winter came. The long emerald feathers brushed her cheeks as the creature gesticulated, and she laughed, low and piping, an owl’s evening cry.
“Is there anything that does not do as you say?” came a voice behind her.
The boy emerged from the chestnut chapel, and the peacock started, hissed in his direction, and huffed off, its tail held in high indignation.
“Many things. Gardeners, sisters, Sultans.”
“Well, you have yet to learn their mating cries. I’m sure you’ll get it eventually.”
The girl grinned sidelong. “You should be in bed. You will get us in trouble again.”
“There is another banquet today, for my sister’s new family, her suitor’s mother and father and thirty-seven brothers and sisters, if you can believe it. I haven’t even tried to count the cousins.” He gave a short, sharp laugh, like a bow twanging. “They killed a giraffe! I had never even seen one, but they brought the spotted thing in through the back gate, so that they can all feast on the neck. Do you think a neck will taste good? I’ll try to bring you some, if you like. But truly, no one will care if I’ve run off again—they’re used to it by now, and she can hardly throw a fit in front of her new relations. They’ll be dancing and eating until their feet or their tongues wear through—one or the other.”
The Orphan's Tales Page 57