The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Not the last.”

  Oubliette’s eyes blazed, her skin suddenly less than gray, flushed with anger. She threw herself against him, almost knocking him to the forest floor, and kissed him with such ferocity and brutal strength that he could not breathe. Her mouth was hot in the freeze and the fog, her teeth cracking against his. She drew blood from his lip and tore away, her mouth still stained with his, scarlet in the gray.

  “That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? The grateful kiss of a rescued maiden? Her pretty hand in yours? Doe eyes batting stupidly at you? Just like a miller’s son!”

  “No! No! Oubliette, I never wanted you like that, you know that!”

  “Well, why not?” She laughed, desperate and shrill. Seven looked at her, his eyes full of tears, his back bent and broken, his sleeve dangling.

  “There are some things you never get over,” he whispered. “What do you see when you look at me? Tell me what you see; tell me you see a man. Tell me.”

  Oubliette cringed, her mouth twisting into an ugly grimace. She was so much older now, he saw. Her jaw was hard and sharp, her face her own, entirely, without the smallest hint of a child haunting it.

  “Bone,” she hissed. “I look at you and I see bones. Bones and coins.”

  “I know.” Seven reached for her again, and she let herself be held, shaking like a caught deer. “You saved me, my friend, my only friend. I had to save you. I had to.”

  “I chose to come here. I wanted to come. I went to the lake—”

  “I know! I went, too! Did you see her?”

  “Yes! She was beautiful, so beautiful, and her face was so dark—”

  “Were you scared?”

  “No, well, yes—were you?”

  “Of course! Did you do it?”

  “I had to! Did you—”

  “Yes—did you throw up?”

  “No, but I wanted to, when she cut me to fill her bowl—”

  “All that red! It was like—”

  “Before. Yes.”

  The two looked at each other, half smiling.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Seven said against her wild-smelling hair.

  “Not really,” she snorted, wiping her eyes. “What is one entrance to the underworld? It’s always the same, the blood and the hooded lady and the cave. You give what you can, you go into the dark. The dark took us. No more needs be said.”

  “There is always more. Tell me, like you used to, when I warmed your bark with my belly and you kept your hair so short.”

  “You were always tiresome and greedy.” Oubliette sighed, but she was smiling a little. “I went to the lake…”

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  DANCING GIRL’S

  DESCENT

  TAGLIO KEPT HIS ABSENTIA IN A LITTLE BOX, too, did he tell you that? He showed me once, and he wept over them, shriveled and black, knocking in an or angewood box like the rattle in a snake’s tail. He wanted me to see them because I am a huldra, and so in some roundabout sense he had mutilated himself for me. For my grandmothers, for my celestial aunt. I wrinkled my nose—it is embarrassing to witness another person’s faith laid out like that, reduced to something small and dry and lifeless, a reliquary full of toenail clippings. I think he always liked me better than you. He had never met a real huldra. We were abstract; the story of the Heifer-Star and her brother was real. I was proof of his religion, I was as good as a Star, and I slept against his stomach between the cart handles. He looked at me and told himself he was right, that the dull, phantom ache between his legs was sacred.

  I don’t know anything about that. I am only myself. I have always been made of wood and girl and cow, and that is no more a divine revelation to me than a man’s thumbs are to him. You never thought I was proof of the existence of a god. But I felt sorry for our green gazelle—do you remember his little cape?—and I let him tell me I was holy. It seemed the least I could do. We hunted together while the Manticore taught you to pick pockets and sing scales. He was so quick with those teeth, and I became as quick as he. It was so hard to stay by you—I looked at you and shivered as though the hollow walls of the Mint were still all around me. I looked at you and knew I should have taken the burden, I should have lain under the stamp. It was my idea; it was wrong of me to let you do it. I looked at you and remembered everything. With Taglio singing little rhymes to the rabbits until they were close enough to snatch, I forgot.

  And I forgot when I danced. When I was Zmeya, I was beautiful, and strong, and immune to all hedgehogs. When I was Zmeya I could not be touched. I did not have to be a tree-girl who had lost a kiss to the miller’s son, or her hair to a unicorn, or seven years to a factory. I was her, and I was green, and I writhed. And as the music became quicker, as you joined in with Taglio and played his little flute, I understood less and less that I was not her. On the hunt he called me holy; in the dance I knew I was divine. If it seems silly now, at least I have the consolation that many others had gone before me in madness for love of her, for love of the snake and the sky. I cannot explain it better. I danced her so often that I felt her in me, I felt her far off in the dark, coiling around herself in the fog. What damage does the telling of a story play upon its teller? I told her story hundreds of times. I could not bear to remain outside of it.

  The day after you kissed me—I was not angry, don’t think I was. I never thought of it again. Taglio and I went after supper. We were on the track of a fawn. I lay on my belly in the moss and birch leaves and watched its spots flash in and out of the wood. He lay beside me, and we whispered to each other while our prey chewed twigs.

  “You look like a snake lying there. I am sure it is not an accident, and I am sure you are about to leave us,” he hissed accusingly.

  “Why would you say that?”

  “You are barely here. I can almost see through you. You would speak to no one, and only dance, if you did not like to hunt so well. If you did not like me so well. And I have begun to wonder if you do not like me only because I once saw her.”

  I turned my head slowly, so as not to start the deer. “Don’t say that. You are my cart-knight.”

  “For now. But you left us days ago—I felt you go. Now there is only this stranger in your place, lying to me and telling me she is you.”

  I looked at the mash of old, broken forest beneath me. “You do not want me to stay. That is why you say such awful things.”

  With equal slowness, he cupped my head in his hand. “Darling huldra, bull-born and borne to me by a fortunate wind—go. I will not be the one who keeps you, and we will soldier on without your moods and your scowls, much as we love them. Find whatever you are already looking for.”

  “I will go,” I mumbled, “to the Isle of the Dead and do what you could not.”

  He blinked, as though I had cut into him with my hunting knife. I saw his lip tremble, in anger or grief or hope, and a long while passed when we did not mark the fawn at all, but wrestled in our gazes. Finally, he drew from his vest a little brown box, and drew from it a silver-black leaf.

  “Don’t fail us,” he said, and as one, with the leaf clutched in my hand, we sprang out of the brush and took the fawn down in one single red stroke.

  How do you find the land of the dead without dying? Everyone has a story of that place. It is gray and lonely, it is a raucous circus, it is a place of judgment where the soul is weighed against a feather, it is nothing at all, I do not care, little girl, go away and don’t steal milk from my cow. You could ask a thousand folk and hear a thousand tales.

  Or you could go to an astrologer and by turning your back amaze him into drawing you a map to an almond tree which is almost a legend, but which is in actuality your petrified, mistletoe-infested grandfather, and tell him that if he does not tell you the way, you will cut him right down and not even weep, for he never should have touched your grandmother at all.

  You could brandish an ax to make your point. It would have to be a very sharp one. The tree might ask how he would know
the way. You might say that he is neither living nor dead, being mostly Absentia and almonds, and surely able to tell you how to slip into the in-between places. The tree might grumble, but only one or two swings of the ax, only one or two showers of wood chips would probably induce him to shout and wail and holler out just exactly how to find a lake with a woman living near it, at the mouth of a cave.

  The tree who is some part of your grandfather might then whip his branches around and try to catch you, slapping at your arms—but it is too awful to think about, and you would get away as quickly as you could, and would certainly never tell anyone about it.

  There is a lake here; there is a lake there. It does not seem much like any other lake, save that its beach is littered with thin slivers of glass like raindrops. Over that sharp shore I walked, with my good, solid shoes well bought, and my steps echoed across the water like shouts. So I should not be surprised that she was awake and waiting for me, a black cowl drawn over her face, so that I could only see a long hoopoe’s beak, long and thin and curved, pointing out at me. Her black skirts spread out over the ground in drooping folds, on and on, down the beach and into the black water, and it seemed that there was no difference between the cloth and the lake.

  “Let me pass,” I said.

  “Pass what?” she said, and her voice seemed hollow in that clacking beak.

  “Pass through you, to the land of the dead.”

  “You may try to pass through me, but you will find I am very thick, and made more or less of bone and meat, and therefore I am afraid you will find it tough going.”

  I blinked at her, and she threw off her hood, revealing a middle-aged woman, neither thin nor fat, with the beginnings of gray hair creeping through brown, and skin like an old blasted oak. Her eyes were narrow and dark. She reached behind her head and loosed a clasp, pulling the beak away from her face—she was only a woman, with a mouth and a nose and teeth like any other.

  “Didn’t you like my joke?” She laughed. “One doesn’t get many opportunities to chat in my line of work. The least you could do is chuckle a little. Maybe even giggle. Don’t girls still giggle out there in the world?”

  “I’m out of practice,” I grunted.

  “So am I, dear. Maybe it was not a very good joke.”

  “What do I have to do to get through?” I am afraid I was very short with her. Perhaps you did better.

  She sighed. “You might listen, instead of talking so much…”

  THE

  MOURNER’S

  TALE

  I OCCUPY A STRANGE PROFESSION. IT IS ONLY slightly stranger than my previous employment. I was once a mourner by trade, an avocation which harpies take particularly well to, having a screech like no other creature.

  Did I forget to mention? Well. Don’t look under the cloak.

  We know what a lament is better than any who walks on five toes. When we are required, we live with a corpse for weeks on end, we live with our lament until it has shape and heft, until it has the weight of the corpse, and in the putrefying gases we detect the virtue or degeneracy of the subject. Decomposition does not lie. We lament not when we are told to, but when the lament is finished, be it days or years hence. When we can hold its hand and walk down the street of a city, showing it the grocer’s where the deceased bought her carrots and turnips, the butcher where she cut her meat and in secret met her lover, the gallery where just once, a portrait of her hung, then the lament is grown and done. It nods sadly and passes through all these places to a grave, where we screech and sing and tear our hair, where we rend our breasts and howl grief into the ground.

  Once, in Irsil, which is poor and sad in all things save retired soldiers with broken swords and useless plowshares, we took fifteen years to rear the lament of a certain general. We walked it through the shanties and the porches where old officers told their bloody tales to the wind, and they followed behind, falling in like ranks, to hear how the old man was mourned.

  It is necessary work. I was good at it. I suppose that is what got me here.

  One cannot, among the mourning harpies, be truly considered adept without the hoopoe’s beak. We can crow and keen and split your ears into bloody halves with the anguish in our throats—but not all of a lament is sorrow. Even in the old general’s scar-kneed life there was sweetness—there was a woman in a village who looked like his mother, and he married her, and we did not refrain from commenting on that, for a lament has no shame—but there was a moment before he left on campaign when the woman who looked like his mother showed him twin babies, a boy and a girl, and he could not breathe for the sweetness of their cheeks, and we sang that, too.

  But it is hard to sing of sweetness with a harpy’s mouth. We are made for rending. It is hard to simply weep.

  We must go and get it, the beak, and we may not steal it, but must sing the hoopoe’s lament when it dies, and if its chicks deem the lament sufficient, they will give it over. In such a way the hoopoe ration the grief of the world.

  I was past thirty by the time I went to get my beak. Not a few of the others were unsure that I would ever be ready to wear it. I am sure you wonder at the hoopoe—are these not tiny, colorful, but shallow and flittering birds? How could a beak like a dove’s wishbone ever produce such funeral songs as I speak of? But I say to you that once there were great hoopoes the likes of which you have never seen in these fallen days. Their rose-orange wings were like those of an albatross, and their beaks were trumpets, and we were the wind blown through them.

  I went into the mountains. I will not bore you with the details of a Quest. They are all much the same: One goes forth, one obtains, one returns. But when I found a huge old mother hoopoe dying in her nest, I crouched down among her flame-headed chicks, their feathers tipped in black and white speckles, to hear the life of the bird I would lament. She turned her old downy head to me and this is what she said:

  THE

  HOOPOE’S

  TALE

  MY EGG WAS HARD TO BREAK. THE YOLK WAS golden and ropy. I opened my eyes in such brightness. My mother pierced her breast with her beak, and fed me on her blood, which tasted like flying. She called me Orange as the Sun.

  The tide came in, the tide went out. I ate worms and beetles.

  I sang very loudly and so did another hoopoe whose tail was black and strong. I made a nest of hazel and down and bits of a strange, sweet red wood that a raft-builder had left carelessly behind. I laid three eggs that year, and four the year after. I pierced my breast with my beak, and fed them on my blood, which tasted like flying. I called them Pink as a Fat Worm and Speckled as a Shadow and Red as Mother’s Blood and other things. There were a lot of them. It is hard to remember.

  The year after that I laid one, and last year I laid five. So it goes.

  The tide came in, the tide went out.

  A hawk chased me once. She made a dent in my skull and another in my beak. I clipped out one of her eyes.

  A cat mauled the hoopoe with the black tail and my last eggs were from one with a blue crest.

  Now I am old, and I have no blood in me for more children.

  It was a good life.

  THE

  MOURNER’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  I HELD HER OLD WITHERED HEAD IN MY HANDS like a browned apple, and her thirteen chicks gathered around, Pink as a Fat Worm and Speckled as a Shadow and Red as Mother’s Blood—and also Blue-Bottomed as a Jay, Rosy as a Burned Farmer, Sour as a Hungry Badger, and all the rest. I raised up my head and sang of that diamond egg, the struggle to shatter it, the light of the morning sun on that shimmering yolk, the taste of Mother’s scarlet blood! I sang of the beauty of the black tail, of the smoothness of infant eggs, of the flow of blood from Orange as the Sun’s breast, the sting and the pain of her children’s beaks on her breast. I sang of the frightful, bitter-voiced hawk, and the great battle which lost the bird of prey a precious eye. I sang of the wicked cat and the lost mate. I sang of new love with a blue crest. I sang of all those eggs, all t
hat blood, and an empty chest singing out at the end of its days.

  I flew down the mountain with Orange as the Sun’s beak in my hands, slightly dented from the hawk fight—but the dent made the sweetest, most broken and sorrowful notes of any beak. I tied it onto my face and began my trade.

  Some years hence I was approached by a clutch of women weeping like hoopoes for their comrade, a corpse they carried on a bier made from the prow of a ship. She had white hair and a smile on her lips, and I listened well as they told me her life. I took the body to my accustomed place, hidden away in a forgotten and empty land by a little lake where I would not be disturbed for the years it would surely take to bring up this woman’s lament from infancy. But they had paid me well, those women, and I settled into my task, combing the fading corpse for its tale. It smelled sweet, and nothing at all like a corpse, like roses and incense, much as you may mock me to hear such things said. I learned much from her slow rotting away to nothing, and though her body is gone, I am still fashioning her lament.

  Before it shivered away to dust, I happened to catch a glimpse of the great bier in the water, and to my surprise, the skeleton had the head of a decrepit old fox, whose fur might have once been red.

  THE TALE

  OF THE DANCING

  GIRL’S DESCENT,

  CONTINUED

  “I STAYED HERE SO LONG AND FOR SO MANY years that the other harpies forgot all about me.” She drew aside the long folds of her cloak and beneath them I saw that her harpy-body, covered in brown feathers, had grown entirely into the earth. There was now little difference between feathers and leaves, and her legs were gone altogether. She grew up out of the dirt like a stubby sapling. She chuckled and closed it again. “I told you not to look. I have been here so long the ground came up to greet me, and we have gotten along very well. I chew dirt like a shrub, and the strange roots of this place ensure I have time to finish her lament. The cloak grows like foliage, and my face has set into something like bark. But even in my work, even as the dirt came up to hear my lament in its youth, I began, in my songs, to catch wafts of other bodies from the cave, the beginnings of other laments that cried out to be raised properly. I understood—though slowly, for have I not already said that I was a slow student?—where I had made my nest. Once in a very long while folk interrupted my work on the fox-girl’s lament to ask passage into the cave. At first I told them I hardly cared where they went, but as I guessed at the true shape of the cave, that it was something like a door, I thought it only right that tolls be exacted.”