The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But surely you know this story. Surely you danced it, or sang it, or heard it at your mother’s breast. I am in everyone’s mouth these days, just as I was then.

  My brother saw to my body. It is in a cave somewhere, I think—sometimes I smell dripping water, and old stones, even now. I came again to the lakeside, and this time no one put a hand to my chest, or a wail to my ear. It was empty, and the wind wheedled the stones. No one came for me. I was alone. The dock had been painted. The sandpipers seemed fat. My hair was wet this time, wet with belly and tears. I waited a long time, but the ferry came, dragging dark water behind it.

  I came from the lake to the Isle. I came from the Isle to the thing which is not a village nor a town nor a city. I huddled in the low gray houses, cold and alone. It was not pleasant, but it was not unpleasant. At least he was gone, and I only moved my own eyes, and not one hundred and forty-five pairs of eyes. I called out for my mother, but she did not answer. I called out for my children, but they did not answer—though a low scratching came at the ramshackle door.

  I opened the door, my own hand so bright against the gray. I do not know what I expected, but what I saw was a young woman whose body was covered in diamonds so that she had no skin which was not jewels, no pink or brown about her. Her hair was a river of ice. Around her were fourteen slips of light with no faces, like candles lit in a chapel.

  “I’m sorry,” the diamond girl said, and her voice was so familiar to me, though I had never heard it. “They never grew up, you know. They wanted to find you, they are drawn to you, Mother-moth, but they don’t really understand, they don’t really speak. They are just light, light which knows it was once something else, but which cannot quite recall. But you called them, and I brought them. They did want to come.”

  My children glowed around me in a ring, and little Diamond, bright as a burning pyre, smallest of the Manikarnika, folded me into her arms.

  There are so few of us who ever died, this is a sparse and lonely place. But we are all together, and some reflection of our light floats around us, like lamps shining in a pool. My girls are here, my Grass-Snake-Stars and my Copperhead-Stars and my Cobra-Stars, my loves and my oracles, and we wander as we used to, our little cloister. I am never alone.

  “Who built the houses?” I asked Diamond once. She shook her head.

  “They were here. How should we know how to build houses? I think—” She blushed, and the diamonds in her face flushed into rubies for a moment. “I think Idyll built them for us. Surely there must be days when no one dies.”

  I would like to say time passed, but I cannot be sure. I would like to say, “One day I met two men walking between the birch trees.” But what is day? What is night? It is always dark here, some anonymous kindness, to remind us of the cradle of the Sky. And so all I can say is that it happened sometime, and somewhere, among the white trees, in the dark. Two came walking hand in hand. They were both bright as I, but I did not know them. Their skin was red and deeply grained, like wood, and when we clasped hands in greeting, their fingers were hard as a raft’s planks. They wore sailors’ rags over identical bodies, and their eyes were wood-warm and gentle, lined a little at the corners—but perhaps that was just the grain of their skin. Reddish hair flopped over twin foreheads like thready bark.

  “We are Itto,” they said in unison. One’s voice was deep, and the other’s high, like a child’s, but beyond that they were the same in every fashion. “We were the Twinned Star once, and in this place, we have been made to walk two by two. We do not find it unpleasant.”

  They spoke always together, and it was only strange to me for a while. He had been translated into twins, as I had into my half-snake self, and their skin had gone the shade of their raft. They told me the tale of their raft, and their death, and their fox-girl, and I held them while they cried for the lost craft and the lost world—we are all so lost; we are all so broken, the least of us would hold the smallest as they wept. I told them the tale of my husband, and my children, who still followed me like confused will-o’-the-wisps. The two young men looked at me with chagrined, resigned eyes, as though they expected no more than this, and held four red arms out to me. I did not know what they meant. I told them of the boar-men, and how the voice of the boar-tooth sounded, and how the women stopped me at the shore. They folded me into their wooden arms on the floor of the forest, and I lay stiffly against them. I did not cry—snakes do not—but I was grateful for them, for their circuit of arms and because they had not sought me out, to show me their love, to make certain I was not alone, to show me some ill-got devotion, to disturb me in the dark. I softened against them, and they stroked my hair. I told them how I was just once alone, on the lakeside, the second time, when no one came for me.

  My children lay around us in a ring, like glowing, insensate mushrooms.

  “I am not a raft,” I said, and the twins chuckled.

  “We are not a King,” they answered.

  It was difficult to tell them apart unless they spoke, which was not often. One of them became my lover, and his deep voice sounded in my bones. The other was harder, more raftlike, and he was simply kind to me, his child’s voice rare and thin. He helped me molt, and once, when there was almost something like a moon above the Isle, he came to me, having cut himself on the hinge of my door, and touched my lips with a light-smeared thumb. It tasted of salt, and wood. The other twin was with me always, and his kisses were red and dusty and gentle. They tasted like the sea. We walked in the wood, and once in a while red fruit appeared on the trees like ambassadors from some far-off spring, and we all ate together. I was not alone. I am not alone. Who could think I have ever been alone?

  But a girl came with a bloody stump where her tail should have been, telling me how lonely I am with her huge, needing eyes, clutching a leaf in her hand. I knew the leaf in a moment—I had seen it in the tea-woman, the distant child of the leaves I had crushed when first I fell. She brought it to me as though it would mean something to return my own light to me, like a child’s doll which was discarded long ago, one eye missing, one arm empty of stuffing. I placed the leaf against my skin and it melted back into me where it belonged. I thought no more of it, and offered the girl my house, my red fruit, though she would not eat, the ungrateful thing. But perhaps it did mean something after all, because it was only afterwards that my belly grew.

  I cannot tell if it was the light of one twin or the kisses of the other or the leaf itself or the girl who brought it that filled me up with child again. Perhaps it was all of them. Perhaps none. But I am not alone, even in my own skin.

  THE TALE

  OF THE CROSSING,

  CONTINUED

  “HOW IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE IN THIS PLACE?” Zmeya cried, cradling her stomach in her arms. “What will come out of me, that was born with the dead for midwives, a dead mother, a dead father?”

  Oubliette looked down in shame. Tears were hot on her face, steaming into the air. She glanced up at Seven ruefully. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted to save you. To save her, the tea girl. I was just silly.”

  Zmeya’s face softened, shades of green playing over her cheeks. “Oh, I don’t blame you, poor thing. You are so lost, too. Can I help but tease you for those great hungry eyes, for all those things you said when you came here squeezing your little leaf? But why would you not eat at my table?” The Snake-Star moved forward to hold the huldra’s head in her hands.

  Oubliette laughed and wiped at her tears. “Anyone who has read a book in her life knows not to eat the food of the dead,” she answered. The two women embraced briefly, as though they did not want to embarrass their visitor. Seven felt the weight of how much she had seen and done without him pulling at his sleeve.

  “Why do they love you like this?” he demanded. They started back, away from his frayed voice. “Why does everyone fling themselves at you, just praying you’ll catch them? Immacolata, Oubliette—they gave up everything just for you!”

  Zmeya looked at him over Oubliette
’s bent head. “I don’t know!” she hissed. “Who knows why you do anything? You look at us and call us gods and sacrifice your seventh sons on altars we know nothing about! You build up towers we never asked you to build, and with your other hands you slaughter us and tell us that wood is too fine for the likes of us, and rape us until our legs crack! How should I know why some few of you fail to mutilate us? But if those few fling themselves at me, what can I do but catch them? Who will do it, if I do not? If I turn them away like bad children who ought not to trouble their betters?”

  “They are not your children to catch!”

  “Tell them that. And then tell me to turn away a girl who cuts into her body for my sake, tell her that she is not welcome, there are already too many sisters here, we have no room for more.”

  The one-armed boy turned to his friend with eyes that pleaded and prostrated. “Was I not brother enough?”

  Oubliette glared at him. “There are some things you never get over,” she spat. “You left Taglio and Grotteschi without a word. Were they not family enough? Have you thought at all of them, how they might miss you, how they might wish you had stayed, if they are closer to Ajanabh, within its gates, if Grotteschi is even now singing at shuttered windows?”

  Seven said nothing.

  “That is how often I have thought of you,” she finished.

  In the Garden

  THE TWILIGHT WAS THIN AND WISPY OVER THE LAKE. THE GIRL’S SKIN was warm under her cloak, but the boy trembled.

  “When you finish the tales,” he said, “when your eyelids have poured out all their ink between us and the Garden is black with them, will you leave me as Oubliette left Seven? As Seven left the Gaselli and the Manticore? Will you go off into a place I cannot touch and never think of me again?” He swallowed hard. “Or will you remember that there was once a nice boy who was not afraid of you, and walked in the Garden with you, and listened to you, and did not interrupt more often than is polite? Will you sit at a table of blue crystal with parrot wings for legs with fabulous monsters all around, eating lunches of leek and rose and think to yourself: I wonder whatever happened to that boy, where he is now, if he is married, if he is fat, if he has kept the Garden well trimmed?”

  He could hardly look at her; his hands shook like brown cattails.

  The girl scowled at him. “When I finish the tales, when my eyelids have poured out all their ink into your hands and I have nothing left for myself, will you run back to the Palace like a good prince and leave me to my fate, just as Hind left the beast who loved her? Will you go into rooms at whose doors I am not even allowed to knock and never think of me again? Or will you remember that there was once a nice girl who did not ask too much of you, and walked in the Garden with you, and told you stories that made your head swim with all manner of strange fishes, and thought so much for your safety that she taught you all the secret places that were once hers alone? Will you sit with a Sultan’s turban and crown on your head, a Sultan’s bangle at your wrist, at a golden table borne up by the backs of perfumed slaves and think to yourself: I wonder whatever happened to that girl, where she is now, if she is married, if she is fat, if she has made friends among the demons?”

  Neither of them spoke for a long while, the air between them heavy and sad as old rain. The girl clenched her teeth against the reassurances that yearned to come. They were soft and sweet and untrue. She did not know—how could she know?—what would happen.

  “I think,” the boy said, “that I would bring supper out to these stones, out to this lake, for fifty years, for all of my reign, in hopes that you would come back, with fresh ink on your eyes, and new marvels to tell. I would take down all the Garden gates, and someday there would be an old, white-haired man with green apples and roast dove in his napkin, sitting by the water and asking himself whatever happened to that girl.”

  She smiled, and touched his hand. The bird of pearl sat between them, unconcerned.

  “We have the whole night,” she said. “The moon is not even up. Shall I finish the tale of that awful, lonely Isle?”

  “Yes,” the boy breathed.

  THE TALE

  OF THE CROSSING,

  CONTINUED

  THE CHILD WAS LONG IN COMING.

  Seven joined Oubliette in one of the long, empty gray houses. There were two windows, and two long beds, and a low, rough table, but she would not let him eat the apples and plantains and pomegranates that were laid out there.

  “Who left us this?” Seven asked.

  The huldra shrugged. “They tend to credit Idyll for anything strange and bright that does not come from them. But who can say? The second bed is new, as well. Maybe no one. Maybe it grows from the table like a spring of holly from a holly bush. Maybe this is a house-bush, and it blossomed up a new bed for you, and supper.” She crooked a smile, and things went easier between them then, though they both wondered how long they could last without eating the rich red meal that each evening sat shining on the table.

  They slept separately for half of a single night before Oubliette crawled in beside her friend like a wary cat.

  In what passed for mornings on the Isle, one of the Itto twins might come and take them to see how the wispy lights of Zmeya’s children wheeled along the forest floor, playing like butterflies or finches. Diamond might come with one of her sisters to bring sticks of fire to each of the houses’ hearths, should the houses have hearths that day. They were odd, intractable shacks who might offer a fire grate once, and, if rebuffed, withhold them from everyone for weeks. So when hearths appeared, the Stars hastened to please them with sparks and crackling logs. Yet no matter how often Seven and Oubliette politely told their house they were not hungry, or did not care for fruit, there it was the next evening, fresh and new and sparkling.

  Sometimes Zmeya herself would come, with a kind, distracted smile, and her teeth were sometimes green and sometimes red, and her face was soon enough familiar to them as any neighbor’s who often comes to borrow sugar or soap. Once she took them far into the Isle, into the bare forest, and showed them a little clear pool. She placed her finger on the water and it swelled up with brown leaves, tea leaves swirling thick and fast in the shape of a woman’s face, a woman’s face the color of the sole of a shoe, the color of oolong and lemon peel. The face wept sweet brown tears to see Zmeya, and more to hear the mortal pair tell of Taglio, and how he fared in the world. Oubliette and Seven thought that thin, warm voice was the loveliest thing they had ever heard.

  At other times, Zmeya would take them walking down by the shore, and showed them a firm stone path among the blinking eyes which Seven had not seen, and they would watch the horizon for a sign of the ferry. There were algae on the lashes of the eyes, but the sandpipers did not come out that far, and only once or twice did they hear an owl, or a thrush, or the weird, whooping cry of a tiny hoopoe.

  The lake was vast; the other side could not be seen, and when it rained, which was often, the water and the sky blurred into one great gray globe. Seven repaired the dock as best he could with no tools and one arm, which is to say not very well, but the effort was appreciated. Oubliette painted it with a mixture of boiled bark and beach-tears. It glowed ghostly in the water, and after a time, as was surely inevitable, the raft appeared within the great gray globe, and the ferryman brought a woman to the valiantly mended dock.

  She was not yet a crone, but tending toward it as a weather vane will veer toward an easterly wind. She had long gray wings where her arms ought to have been, and her feet were webbed and yellow. Her hair was dark, streaked with wide bands of silver feathers, the thick black strands clearly losing their battle against the bird. There were well-grooved lines at her deep, wide eyes, and at her mouth, but she was thin and nimble as a goose in flight, and her cheeks were whipped and flushed by the lake gales. Her gait was businesslike and brisk, her fingers long and purposeful, pushing back her fog-damp hair from her forehead. Her gaze went immediately to Zmeya’s swollen stomach.

  “I see I am ne
eded,” she said. Her voice was rough, as though she had been talking without cease for years on end.

  Zmeya covered her belly with one long, green arm. “How long,” she murmured, “do you think it takes a child to grow inside a dead woman?”

  “As long as it pleases, I expect,” the stranger said with a bemused grin.

  Idyll glanced at Seven and Oubliette, and opened his mouth as if to say something, but closed it again. Finally, he grunted:

  “The dock looks better. Shoddy joint work, though.”

  He slowly poled away from the shore and into the mists. The water lapped behind him, a sound like an infant crying far away.

  “Well,” said the newcomer, “that’s done with. Now, Mistress of Snakes, Pig-Slayer, Star of the Jungle! Your brother is worried about you…”

  THE

  MIDWIFE’S

  TALE

  IN MY YOUNGER DAYS, I WAS A GOOSE.

  This is nothing to gawk at. Geese are quite common in my country, which lies as far to the east as the ice floes lie to the north. When we moved through the sky, we were like a hand passed over the face of the sun, and the forests were in shadow. My name was Aerie then, and it remains.

  But that was a long time ago. Now I am a woman, and my flock is gone, and my brother was King, for a time.

  Perhaps you have heard this story. It is not so common as tales involving ravenous snakes, but some few minstrels still sing about the goose-girl and how she and her brother killed a tyrant.

  My brother did not love a lonely chair in a lonely castle, and went long ago to join the Patricides in Al-a-Nur, where he is at peace, and wears a red habit. I was not there with him when he took his vows, though he sent men to find me to all the corners of the world, to beg me to come home. But that place, that castle with its rivers and its secrets, was not my home, and I hid when I heard them call. They told him that they found geese and girls, but not both, and with a bent head he went out of the world, and out of our story.