The girl began her pacing again, wiping her peacock-warm hands on her skirt.
“Would you tell me a tale in the daytime?” the boy said shyly. “Does it not seem strange even to ask, to talk by first light instead of last?”
“Is there anything that does not do as you say?” the girl asked archly. He blushed.
“You know my cry. I do not know yours,” he mumbled, not meeting her gaze.
A thin kind of sunlight, not so very different from moonlight, seeped through the clouds as through a cheesecloth, tipped the trees in wet light, and slanted down the edge of the girl’s long, straight nose. Her hands were cold with morning, the Garden paths damp and shivering. She drew him away from the newborn shadows cast by the chestnut chapel, and into a thorny, bloomless bramble, not unlike the first one they had shared, save that this was bare and brown, the thorns overhead dripping dew. The boy settled himself with sure habit, and reached for her hands to warm them as he would have with one of his younger siblings. She let him rub the skin of her fingers until they tingled red and hot, and began again.
“‘It seemed obvious to me that you could not raise a rose that did not know deep in its stem and roots how to wilt and die,’ the ferryman said. ‘But, I reasoned, you might freeze one in its blooming…’”
THE
FERRYMAN’S TALE,
CONTINUED
THERE ARE MOUNTAIN PEAKS WHICH NO POOR, earthbound creature can see. Clouds hang from them like prayer flags, veil them and shroud them, and we would not see them either, if the sky were not for us a road, and if we could not see that the road keeps going past what you would call the summit, peak, tip. To these hidden places I flew, extending moon-blown wings as far as I might. Their tips frosted, their shadows on the snow were fitful and pale. From my chest hung a long leather strap, which held a sackful of what would pass as money on the ceiling of the world. I was so close to the sky I could smell its sweat, and if the Moon, our poor, besieged mother, had not been resting in her coal-dark core, I would have—would I?—been able to touch her as she spun.
In time, I came to a peak beyond which the road does not extend. I do not say that there is no higher crag, but it is the summit of the Hsien, as those rocks far below were the summit of men. Perhaps some other thing laughs at my peak, calling it but a valley, a respite from heights. I do not know; it is not my place to know. I flew as high as I was able, and my wings burned with the effort. I walked in the snow shoals ringed by sharp stones, ringed by crags like the prongs of a crown. The peak of a mountain takes many shapes, and this one was as a circle of land with granite teeth all along the edge, cut with many frozen rivers and ponds, which had once flowed with water when the mountain-table was lower, in the history before history before history.
Along these old, hard rivers were tiny houses all of glass, or ice, or both—I suspected that they had once been made of glass, and broken in the harsh winds of the country, but froze again so quickly that no one noticed the shattering. Perhaps this had happened so many times that there was nothing left of them but shatter, held together by surprised gasps of ice. To these houses I shuffled in snowshoes made of wicker and my own feathers. When I reached the center of the town, I sat myself down in the snow and waited, my wings twitching in the drifts, drawing quick, lively patterns in the white. I was prepared to wait a good while, but hardly a week had passed before the shattered door of one of the houses cracked open and a small, green thing shambled out to me.
I had come to the kingdom of the Kappas, and one of those reluctant, recalcitrant creatures was even then shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot before me. She was very much like an upright turtle, though even upright she no more than passed my knees. Her shell was green as a girl’s eyes, her limbs mottled as moss, leathery and lithe. Her hands and feet, between which there was little enough difference, were large and webbed, like a duck’s, but her wrists and ankles were thick, knotted with muscle. She had a few thick yellow teeth in her face, which contorted into something of a beak under a fringe of brown hair cut like a monk’s tonsure. It fell flat and frosty across her forehead, and bald in the center, where the turtle-girl had no skin, but a deep hollow in her skull, which was filled with still blue water—save that considering the snow and wind, it had frozen solid and now shimmered silver and safe in the bones of its owner.
“I am Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening,” she said, her gravelly voice like feet scraping the bottom of a lake.
“And I am Idyll, who was born, well, at night, I suppose. I have come to beg a treasure from you, but I have not come without barter.” I opened my sack at last, the heavy old thing, and drew out a handful of green fruits, long and glossy. Yoi sniffed at them and her black eyes widened.
“Cucumber,” she whispered.
“You are very wise, Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening. I have culled cucumbers for you from the world over, slicers and picklers, yellow and green and white as a ghost’s nightclothes, sandwich quality and rough, hardy breeds good enough to be boiled in stew. Gherkins the size of your thumb and rare hybrids, tiny as peas. There is even a southern varietal whose blossoms are red as a heart, and the meat of the fruit blushes orange.”
The Kappa’s mouth watered, though her saliva froze at the corners of her lips.
“And what is it you wish to trade for?” she asked.
“A rose which will live forever, and never fade or wilt or drop petal.”
“Does it seem to you, Idyll-who-supposes-he-was-born-at-night, that roses bloom in this place?”
“Are not the Kappa great tenders of plants? Are your reputations undeserved? Surely in your shattered houses there are many wonders, or the world is much deceived.”
The little turtle sighed. “It is possible that we still possess what you desire, the rose-which-was-born-in-a-lizard. But in these times of still and cold it is rarely our habit to part with our hard-won graftings. Even cucumbers—precious, delicious cucumbers—do not grow so well here. But such is the choice we made…”
THE TALE
OF THE
LIZARD’S LESSON
I WAS NO ONE’S BELOVED DAUGHTER. I UNDERSTAND that in tales told off the mountain, in stories told around hearths like burning hearts, it is always a King’s son or a merchant’s best-taught boy who is spirited away to some black kingdom or ventures forth to find a wife or a slab of gold. But I was nobody in particular: I was born in the evening. The water was violet and so was the sky, and I hatched in a nest of unripe berries and brambles, and ran toward the water with all my brothers and sisters, praying that no kestrel or osprey or alligator would snatch us out of life just as we came into it. Many of them never felt water on their webbing.
We wallow in our pools and rivers, we Kappa. We are drawn to the water, to the deep of it and the loam. The water in our skulls calls to the waters of the world. We love our pools, their catching of star-which-is-born-in-the-water and cloud-which-is-born-in-the-reeds in the perfect mirrors of their surfaces. And should a terrible, naughty, wicked thing who was born in a house stumble into that perfect water, and splash about and churn up mud, we certainly ought never to be blamed for biting them soundly.
The pool of my birth was a little pond, greenish brown, with a few reeds sprouting like hair on its banks, and three matronly lilies which grew close together, drawing their yellowed petals around them like woolen shawls. She was not a grand pool, or a tempestuous river, splashing her way through a century of rock, just a circle of water in the dark of a wood, neither deep nor wide. But she was mine, and no kestrel had snapped me up before I sank into her evening mire with gratitude, and I loved her. I scrabbled in her shallows to keep her free of weeds. If a farmer came to draw her waters into his bucket, I gnashed my teeth at him and narrowed my black eyes to slits. If a miller’s daughter came to bathe in the deeps, I pulled her hair with my thin fingers and bit her where her spine joins her hips, and soon enough she shrieked her way home.
This is how we lived, connected, each in our pool, connected ea
ch by each, born-in-the-evening to born-in-the-morning, by rivulets of rain trickling from pond to creek to river. And we kept our water still and balanced in our skulls, for we do not like to lose it—for days after, until we are full again, we swoon and dream and are blind, while the water swells up again. Soon enough all manner of beastly things managed with their dry brains to discover this, and they made endless sport of bowing to us. We are polite, ever polite—manners are our provincial pastime and native dialect! We may bite them when they trample our homes, but how can we then refuse a bow? We are compelled to bow in return, and then I suppose it is very funny for them to watch us stumble and fall about like drunk turtles.
I taught my three lilies to give fruit. We are very good at instructing the world to bend and bow to us—it learns such things from us, things it would never have thought to try on its own. I brought peach plants as exempla for my lilies, and by patient tutorial coaxed sweet, small berries from them, though they were reluctant, as all old women are, to try new things. The lily-berries-who-were-born-at-noon tasted of paper and crystallized honey and dust. Because of the lesson I taught the lilies I was allowed to follow the trickling streams from pond to pond and join the grafters and seed-splicers of the Greater Kappa, who spent their days in contemplation of the infinite lessons we had yet to give, and in charting those we had already completed in illuminated catalogues. The vaulted ceilings of the Greater Kappa were whorled with leaves and vines, and if, whilst sketching a theoretical pumpkin tree and its symbiotic attendant in the margins of a treatise on the unassuming apple—always keeping one’s posture pleasantly straight and one’s water in one’s head—a turtle was hungry, she had only to reach up and pluck a sweet, wet cucumber from the window frame and her belly would be satisfied.
With a basket of lily berries I entered those green vaults, nervous as a child on her first day of school. I was given a desk below a window of cucumber flowers so sheer I could see through to the valley outside, all a-blossom with hypotheses.
When I had been there for three years and produced only a few modest successes: the blue lime-blossom, the oolong-melon, and the lemon-macaque, I was sent into the field with Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter. We were to return in a year to teach our own variant on the humble, workaday rose. She was a year ahead of me, but considered a tragic mistake. Her first lesson, the pomegranate-ant, had seemed to promise so much, yet she had done nothing but catalogue since she arrived. Therefore she was punished by being partnered with an untried turtle, and I was cautiously prodded to work harder by being yoked to the puzzling genius who refused to work. We were decades from our greatest collaborations: the Upas-which-was-born-by-the-water, the Ixora-which-was-born-burning, and but a year, give or take, from the rose-which-was-born-in-a-lizard.
Yazo was pretty, her face an unusual yellowish green, her tonsure glossy and black—but her hair was messy, her eyes always tired. There were little holes in the webbing between her fingers, small as needle pricks, but I saw them. As we walked out from the seeded doors of the Greater Kappa, I shouldered her pack as well as my own, so as to save her the effort. We are polite, ever polite, as I have said.
“Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening,” she said, after we had been walking in the fields for a time, following the curve of the river which flowed through the central room of the Greater Kappa and out again into the world, “do you suppose that when our water spills out, and afterwards fills up again like a basin emptied in the morning and filled at night, we are the same Kappa, the same dear turtle that we were before?”
“I do not know, Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter,” I stammered. “I have never considered it.”
“I have spilled out my water once a month since I entered the cucumber vaults,” she said softly, dreamily, looking out over the warm water and drifting milkweed-mayflies.
“What?” I cried, aghast. “Why would you do such a thing to yourself? It’s terrible, obscene!”
“Perhaps I am teaching myself a lesson,” was her only answer, and we walked in a stubborn silence which would not give us up. I looked again at the holes in her webbing and her frazzled hair, her peculiar skin. I saw why the other Kappa did not like Yazo—she was ragged and strange and possibly mad. But still, I did as she said.
And what she said was that we were bound for the Kingdom of Glass Rain, a far-off prairie land whose folk had discovered a novel way of ferreting out the answers to things. In need of answers, we turned our shells to the grasslands, and I thanked the Stars each night that the journey was not so long as a month, so that I would not have to witness Yazo’s scarification.
The Kingdom of Glass Rain was indeed full of wild grasses, which blew over the flats like waves rolling in with high tide. They were green and gold and their stalks were silvery gray, and the waves were very beautiful. All ringing the dell were red rocks and squat, flat-topped hillocks, streaked in pale swathes of yellow stone. It was cold; the sky was high and brittle, and the long roofs of the capital, tiled like, well, like a turtle’s shell, glinted clear and sharp in the distance.
We were received, in a manner of speaking, at the gate of the local academy, which was a thick, dusty cedar door carved in a complicated pattern of interlocking lizards. I say “in a manner of speaking” because we were not at first sure that anyone at all was there, just inside the shadowy threshold, which smelled of hay and eggs and old cedar, polished by a hundred hands.
“Please,” a voice said, small and gentle, like a shivering cat pawing at the kitchen window. “Who is this who wishes to enter the breeding house?”
But there was no one standing where the voice seemed to be born. Only the beginning of a long hall filled with hushed voices and the sounds of clacking claws on glass.
“I am Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening, and this is Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter, of the Greater Kappa, who have come to ask answers of you.” I aimed my speech where I thought it should go, but the voice sounded again, farther off to my right.
“I am sorry, I know you cannot see me, and that it is disconcerting. My name is Ostraya, and I am the Princess of Glass, and I keep this house. If you have questions, I am she who will breed the lizard who will have your answer.”
We were somewhat nonplussed by this, as you might imagine. “But where are you? Why can we hear you and yet see nothing?”
The voice laughed a little, as if at a very old and no longer particularly funny joke. I felt a weight fall on my hand, cool and hard—a hand of glass.
“The Glass Rain took me…”
THE TALE
OF THE
GLASS PRINCESS
IN THIS COUNTRY, WHEN WE SPEAK OF THE GLASS Rain, we do not wax poetic. It is not a quaint local figure of speech. We speak of the spring, new and green and grass-scented, which brings clouds so white and pure that they have no scent at all. The clouds crawl in and let loose their bows—and the Glass Rain comes upon us.
The drops are slivers of glass, a broken mirror falling from the sky. They pile on the grass, cutting it low, like terrible, hard snowflakes. They scream as they fall. They slash the air and catch the cloudlight, they flash and flare. For weeks after, the roads crunch and chatter beneath our feet. When the clouds come, mothers hurry their children indoors, bankers seal themselves up in vaults, cobblers barricade themselves behind row after row of iron-toed shoes. All crouch and listen as the rain clatters and shatters and shivers to pieces on the tile roofs, and falls off the eaves in a rainbow of reflected storm colors.
I was caught outside.
My mother is the Queen of Glass, and I can hardly begin to tell of her beauty. Even as a child, there were times when I could not speak for awe of her, her silver hair and silver eyes, her lashes like spun sugar, her lips so red that apples envied her. She was the breeding mistress then as I am now, and her fingers were ever bandaged, for lizards are tempestuous, willful creatures.
In this country, lizards are not plentiful. We brought them when we were nomads, so many generations
ago we have given up trying to remember what land was first our home. But bring them we did, and bred them in warm burrows where they cooed and hissed happily over clutch after clutch of eggs. Who first noticed the markings on their backs? Who can say? A woman, a man, a child? A King, a Queen, a pauper, a knave? There is a book on a golden podium in my mother’s hall which says, with many pictures in costly scarlet ink, that a cook with wooden shoes once sought a novel way to cook cabbage. One evening he produced the most amazing dish for the royal banquet, towers and turrets of shaped cabbage, stuffed with raisins and goat meat, with cabbage trellises draping over cabbage rivers steamed in black wine. When the cook was asked how this extraordinary display came about, he produced his pet lizard, which had, in the markings on its back, a complex and magnificent recipe carefully filigreed in scale and spine. From that day forward, lizards were culled and read, and though not all of them had recipes written upon their backs, many had stories, and equations, and formulae, and prophetic utterances, and laws we had never heard of. The recording of the lizards’ markings became the obsession of a generation.
And then it was discovered that if one bred the lizards, new and marvelous markings resulted. If the lizard which showed the method for creating a beautiful copper spoon were bred to one which showed a new technique for mining tin, eggs would hatch with fat babies carrying the instructions for beating out a bronze sword, or schematics for a water drill, or an epic poem dealing with two statues on opposite ends of a square who fell in hopeless love, one of copper and one of tin. Thus was born the Lizard-Calculus of the Glass Country.
The Orphan's Tales Page 58