After many lessons with which I will not bore you, the rooster marked the hours with little, nervous words: only the number of the hour at first, but then “hello” and “mother” and “ice.” I found it pleasant to be with, but I also found that in my thirtieth year I was quite tired of roosters, and quite lonely for people. Muireann is a glowering and recalcitrant place where folk do not much like to speak to one another outside tea and watercress and oranges, where the rules of conversation are fixed and true as the heavens, so that no one need tax themselves over-much. Thus I began the process of reshaping the rooster’s outside as I had done its inside.
I had not nearly enough gold to build her in style—for I had decided to make a hen of my rooster, and to call her Hour, for the first things she ever knew. There was enough, only, for the eyes, my father’s famous eyelids, but no more. But I had a great many rooster pieces, and broken clocks, and broken armor, and fishhooks, and such. I took away her little three-toed legs first, and fitted her with bronze bolts and calves and plate. She was like a siren then, a bird’s body sewn to a woman’s legs. I gave her a new torso of silver and bronze from the armor shards, and then arms, and then the throat—a new voice, lower than the chirping birdsong—and a face, my beloved girl’s face that I know so well, now. Finally I gave her hands like mine, and why should I not? A child takes after her parents. For a while I used one of the old white wigs for her hair, but this only made her look ridiculous. Every day I wound her like a pocket watch, and set her going: click, click, click.
She was as curious as any child, and I brought her to my parents’ teas, where she learned the words “watercress” and “biscuit” and “speak up, no one can hear you,” where we misused our egg spoons together. When we returned to the house and the moon was beaming through the frost-foam, I sat her down on a chair—she had not quite gotten the trick of sitting on her own yet. She asked me, as it was the midnight hour and she did not yet speak between her alarums:
“Good children are given stories at nighttime. Am I a good child?”
“Of course, darling, you are the best child that ever used her salad fork on her snails.”
“Then I should be given a story.”
“All right,” I said. I did not really know very many stories, though I knew a great many poems. But these are not the same thing, even if one takes the newer fashions of verse into account. I settled back in my own chair, and the moon curled up in my lap like a cat. “Once upon a time there lived a maiden in a castle—”
“What is ‘Once upon a time’?” Hour interrupted.
“It means a very long time ago, or at least, long enough ago that it would be impolite to reveal the actual number of years involved.”
“What is ‘lived’?”
“It means to walk and talk and eat biscuits and watercress and use one’s fork improperly, and also to sleep inside a house rather than out on the stones in the cold.”
“What is a maiden?”
And so I had to explain about virginity, and about dowries, and marriage contracts, and hymens, and paternity, and primogeniture, and the various expressions of royalty, systems of rank, and court etiquette. After that, I had to sketch a castle for her, and explain about buttresses and moats, drawbridges and portcullises, dragons and invading armies, knights and feudalism and a general history of both architecture and comparative political systems. Then she wanted to know about weddings, and how a dress would be made, and feasts, and how food should be prepared, and rituals of pair-bonding, and what a maiden turns into after she is married. It was very tiring, and took many months.
At last, when summer had come again and the dandelions had turned to white gauze, I had just finished explicating the various methods of quarrying stone and in what countries what stones were common. Hour, with her great, eight-jointed hands on her knees, nodded her head with great effort—we had only begun to address nodding and shaking one’s head—and said:
“I think I understand now. Thank you. That was a very good story.”
THE
VIOLINIST’S TALE,
CONTINUED
“MY FATHER DID NOT LIKE HOUR MUCH. HE felt that she never got the crook of her finger quite right when she sipped her tea. I did not have the heart to tell him how difficult it was for her to sip tea at all, how many catches and sieves I had to fix in her throat before every luncheon, so that he might love her, just a little. He did not. And so, having exhausted the amusements of whalebone harps and watercress, we set roosters aside entirely and came south. We did not intend Ajanabh, but sooner or later most folk of a certain temperament find themselves here. In a city of artists and thieves I am not entirely out of place, and Hour mends the clocks. I am a good mother; I wind her every day. She is precise and perfect, and so too the bells of Ajanabh are as accurate as the sunrise, and never fail.”
The old inventor took Hour’s hand, which looked as though it had been cut from a soldier’s metal fist, in hers, and patted it fondly, like a grandmother proud of her cleverest child. The automaton knelt with a strange and awkward grace and laid her head on Folio’s shoulder. My mother was right. All the wonders of Ajanabh were authored in that little shack.
And so too they authored my hands. Following Hour’s suggestion, ten long bows were fashioned, not only of fine wood both red and dark, but within each stalk Folio laid a strand of her wiry hair and a trickle of quicksilver. No mere horsehair was strung from tip to tip, either, but Folio sent a boy with a coin to find the circus-master and ask after his mermaid, who had died of the most unfortunate gout. Finally, ten slender bows lay on the table, torchlight flickering on their polished surfaces.
“I am no musician, but I daresay these are the finest bows made.”
Being somewhat more dense in those days than I have since become, I did not quite understand, even then, what she intended. Folio laughed at my perplexed expression.
“Didn’t your mother ever read you stories about little girls who make deals with the devil for the sake of a violin? I’ve told Hour dozens. What then, should we make of a devil who makes deals with an old woman? I think we should say that anything worth doing is worth shedding blood over.”
Folio laid my hand flat on the table, and gently closed a vise around my wrist to keep it in place.
“I am sorry,” said Hour, her throat clicking and whirring, “this will hurt very much. It will be like the time that Mother gave me a new arm in place of a wing.”
There was blood, a great deal of blood, and a little dribble of fire, but not much, not very much at all.
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
I PULLED A PERSIMMON FROM THE TREE AND roasted it lightly for her on my thumb. Agrafena smiled beautifully, her teeth gleaming slightly orange—or perhaps I only wished to see them so. She allowed me to feed her the fruit, its skin brown and bubbling, as her own hands were indelicate.
“She took my old violin as payment,” Agrafena said when she had swallowed the last morsel. “The lava-and-fire fiddle that my grandfather hoped would serve me all my days. I watched her as she fit the fiery blue bow-string to whatever strange object it was that allowed Hour to talk. She took it out—Hour was mute for days—and opened it up on her workbench, spooling the string inside. It looked like a music box fashioned from the red stuff of a rooster’s coxcomb. But Hour’s voice was much better after that.”
We rose and walked deeper into the city still, the streets inclining downward, like water swirling toward a basin drain.
“My parents were horrified; my grandparents roared with delight, and my grandfather’s fire-beard was never so bright. But I found that if I did not play every day, if I did not dance, if I did not oil my hair and tighten the leather that lashes my fingers to my arms, I would shake and shiver like a starving beast. I knew peace only when I played, and so I went into the city, where a playing beast can earn her supper. Such is the fate of devils who bargai
n for their fiddles.” She stared ahead of her, into the murky distance. “The basil died first, you know. So fragile. My parents went to plant medicinal wildflowers outside of Urim, and I stayed. I stayed with Ajanabh, to watch her die and hold her old red head in my arms.”
We were passing through a section of town which was at once resplendent and shabby, spangled and torn. Every house’s door had a curtain of some deep red or purple or green shade drawn over it, tasseled in gold. Where the drapes were drawn aside, there were ornate knockers, a griffin or a lizard or an open mouth whose tongue clacked against its lip. But the velvet was worn through in many places, even burned through, and the tassels were unraveling, and the finish on the knockers was rubbed away by countless fingers. Every window had a cascade of flowers, lilies and roses and honeysuckle—and each was wilted and fading, brown at the petals, slumped over the sill. The air was full of dead sweetness. The whole quarter was full of trilling songs, scales sung up and down by tenors and mezzo-sopranos, bombastic arias shattering goblets in every parlor.
There was a little square where the road split, and on it was a stage with long, tall supports and a checkerboard floor, long strips of turquoise satin undulating along its rear edge to represent the sea, and a red ship carved ornately and bobbing upon it. The silk was threadbare and the ship had lost one mast already, but in the torchlight one could hardly see these things. There were two men on the stage, singing fit to burst barrels, their voices punching holes in the night air. There was no audience, but in the wings, a chorus was hurriedly pulling on tights and rouging their cheeks, urgent and excited.
“Who are they performing for?” I asked.
Agrafena smiled sadly. “There are no audiences in Ajanabh. We all act; we all observe. Yet it is no less vital that the theater be perfectly timed, that the songs be on key, that the sculptures breathe as though living. This is the Opera Ghetto—poor things, the opera was always such an expensive profession. I can play my songs whenever I like, but where are they to get more rouge? Where are they to replace the shoes of the ballet corps? But they are brave and true, and there are performances every night, with matinees twice weekly. They are as faithful as husbands.”
We watched the tiny opera for a time, and the women danced like no women I have seen, their parrot-feathered dresses more stalk than feather, a few strands of blue and green trailing behind them as they leapt across the stage. A girl in stilts and horns embraced a high tenor in an outlandish seal’s head with one eye missing, and I was ashamed to watch their passion. I wanted to give them peace and privacy, though that is surely silly, and so I fixed my eyes at the foot of the stage while her voice spiraled up to the moonless night with the torch sparks.
At the foot of the stage was a little mound capped with a stone plaque, littered with ginger roots with faces whittled wetly into their yellow flesh and rough bouquets of violets, sheet music burnt at the edges and the satin laces of cast-off stage shoes. While I studied this diminutive monument, the show ended and the dancers stepped lightly from the stage into their homes, scraping their rouge carefully into little wooden pots, saving it for the next show.
The tenor sat down on the edge of the stage and grinned at us through his tottering papier-mâché head.
“Brought your country cousin to see the sights, Fena?”
“Hardly. And take that stupid thing off, Arioso. I never liked that story.”
He lifted the seal head from his shoulders and tossed it lightly aside. Several whiskers fell out onto the stage. Under the mask he had the head of a great brown bear with yellow teeth and a torn ear. I caught my breath.
“Don’t look so shocked, burnt-face. A head is a head.” He put his hands to his chin and lifted off the bear’s head, under which he had the clapping, flapping beak of a pelican. Cawing gleefully, he wrenched the bird head off by the throat pouch with one hand. Beneath it he was a very handsome young man, with a curly white wig and penciled eyebrows. Unceremoniously, he ripped his curls away. Beneath that, he had the long-eared, sleek-furred head of a jackal with a small black nose, and his jaw was very fierce. I waited, but he did not remove that one.
“Is that all?” I ventured.
“Maybe,” he said, still grinning.
“We haven’t time for this. Come, Scald, a night does not last forever, even in Ajanabh.”
“Wait, wait!” the jackal-headed man cried, bounding off the stage. “She was looking at the grave! She wants to know the tale! I know she does, I can feel it in my ticket-burdened bones! It has been so long since we had anyone to talk to who didn’t know our every libretto and score, Agrafena! You can’t keep her all to yourself!”
“I do know your every libretto and score, Arioso, and besides that I know there is an army camped outside Simeon this very night, an army which contained this one, until recently. Now, do you think you can leave me in peace?”
“An army? Think of the full seats!”
A glare from the violinist silenced him for just a moment. “But, Fena darling, you must let me have her for a few moments. Don’t be selfish! Do you know why the fields died, smoke-bones? Let me tell her—”
“The fields died because they were farmed dry for century upon century,” grumbled Agrafena, scratching her shoulder blades with a long, slender bow.
“Ha!” His small black face was alight with eagerness, his pink tongue panting in and out. “That’s what you say! But what kind of opera would that make, hm? I have never been one for verismo. Let me tell her the better tale, let me tell her about the Duchesses…”
THE TALE OF THE
TWO DUCHESSES
IN DAYS GONE BY, WHEN THE PALMS WERE GREEN and high, and the saffron threads were stitched into the aprons of young girls with milk still on their breath, Ajanabh was a Duchy. This is not to be wondered at! No city so absurd, beguiling, and barbaric as ours would tolerate a King. Dukes are far more likely to lose their daughters to enchanted forests or to find themselves shipwrecked on sinister isles. This is a keener expression of the Ajan character than a dotard with a crown teetering on his bald head.
It so happened that the Duke had a lovely daughter, as Dukes are prone to do. Her hair was golden as a rooster’s breast, her eyes bluer than the bay tide. It was clear enough that the Duke’s wife had been a foreigner, but no one ever saw her. The Duke had it put about that she had died in childbed, and this was common enough that no one suspected otherwise. The child had such sweet pink cheeks and a laugh like silver falling from a sparrow’s mouth, and all loved her. She was called Ulissa.
Now, it so happened that in the poorer quarters of Ajanabh, in the slosh-slough of the Vareni, which flows through the left-hand side of the city like a giant’s tears, another child was born on the lowest floor of a red and pockmarked tenement, which is to say lower even than the street itself, for such buildings house the poorest folk below the grates and below the ground. This child also had golden hair and eyes like the sparkling of the sun upon the sea, and a laugh like gold coins falling from a grackle’s mouth, and all in her sad little rookery doted upon her. Her name was Orfea, and in every way she was identical to the Duke’s daughter, though Orfea’s mother was nothing but a seamstress with needles in her mouth and dirty blond hair sweat-plastered across broad cheeks, and Ulissa’s mother’s body was carried through the streets in a closed casket all of mother-of-pearl. Think not that this is strange, for in the theater we see it happen as often as not, and are undisturbed.
Now, as these children grew, the Vareni flowed thick and rich as the rents, and Ulissa had the best tutors to ply her fingers on glass harpsichords, while Orfea sang her own little songs in the morning while she folded her mother’s work, and both were as happy as girls can be. Of course, Ulissa sang as beautifully as any flute may play, and longed to walk upon the stage jeweled in glass instead of rubies, and sing of unfortunate love and tame bears and a life on the sea. She sang arias until her father prayed her give him peace, for he did not approve of opera, and even then she whispered them to he
rself beneath her blankets. And of course Orfea, who sewed the garments of others as day dawned and day set, longed to have enough silk and trim to fashion something of her own. But even her mother’s scraps were too fine and precious for a young girl to be allowed to touch, and were resold at market to buy their milk. Instead, Orfea, quick and clever, caught the vermin of her tenements and skinned them, boiling mouse stew and rat stew and mole stew, possum stew and chipmunk stew and weasel stew. Her best dress was made of these weasel skins, and it was softer than anything her mother mended.
And when they were grown as two swans with their heads bent heart-wise, they happened to meet upon the roadside, Orfea on her way to fill her basket with turmeric and blueberries at the market, and Ulissa to have her best boots mended.
Can you not see this scene in its proper regalia, staged and sung? The two sopranos in their golden wigs! The glorious set-pieces! We perform The Two Duchesses once a year in their honor—you must come!
So it was—and you must, in your mind, see it as it is rightly shown, with Ulissa in her ermine and black bodice, with a little crown of netted silver over plush blue linen, and Orfea in her weasel rags, her plump calves showing, her feet all bare and humble! You must imagine it, how they each dropped their burdens in shock and surprise, how they touched each other’s peculiar curls, how they exclaimed in wonder!
“Why, you could be my mirror, walking the streets like a girl!” cried Ulissa.
“Why should I be your mirror, just because you can afford glass! You could as well be mine, and how dare you walk strumpet-proud, bearing my face?”
“Let us not be enemies!” said the Duke’s daughter. “For what fun we might have if we were allies!”
And so it was decided. Ulissa would go into the slums and sing for her supper, and Orfea would wear ermine and laced corsets. Neither was entirely sure that she would be as happy in her new life as in her old, but it seemed too good a trick not to play it at least once, and besides, Ulissa had seen many an opera in which this sort of thing turned out reasonably well. Once a month, they would meet and exchange clothing again, and go to rest in the arms of Orfea’s broad-cheeked mother, and Ulissa’s white-coated father, for a single day before separating again.
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