The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  For a long while, this was a very satisfactory arrangement. Ulissa rose quickly among the actresses of Vareni-side, for her hair was golden and her eyes were blue, and even in these parts it is well enough known that this is the proper masque of an ingénue. Because of her high bearing and her cultured voice, she earned for herself the nickname of The Duchess, and laughed to herself every night in a shabby bedroom where bottles of perfume stood dusty and dear, where Orfea had boiled water with rose petals and rose hips floating pink and red until some thin scent could be gleaned. Ulissa would touch these bottles and smile, and think of her far-off friend.

  Orfea, for her part, learned to dance in very complicated ways, and in very complicated dresses, and though she liked the Duke very much, thought he was odd and haggard about the eyes. She did not dare ask about the golden-haired woman who had once lived there, but on her lace-covered table there were costly oils of frankincense and rosewater and ambergris, and she touched them with wonder, thinking of her far-off friend.

  Each month they met in a courtyard far from the center of anything, peppered with persimmon trees and coconut shells. Orfea would take her weasel-skin dress in hand with joy, and help Ulissa into the black gowns she loved so well, and arrange her familiar hair under the glittering snood. But one month of all months, as sweet little Orfea was skipping home, fur-clad, thinking of her mother’s caterpillar pies and stone tea, she was stopped by a curious sound in a nearby alley, and paused, as girls ought never to do, to listen.

  It was a clacking and a dragging, and a chirruping and a moaning. Orfea, with her curls close around her chin, twisted her weasel-tail belt and peeked around the corner—only to glimpse a Basilisk, his head bloodied and baleful, clambering up the cobbles. She gasped and hid herself, for even poor girls hear stories, and our Orfea knew well that the gaze of the Basilisk turns flesh to stone. But oh! Foolhardy Orfea! She had to look again, to have a thing to tell her mother, to have a thing to tell her friend, who knew well enough all the wonders of the Duke’s residence, and needed nothing less than to hear once more how much better her own shoes were than a pauper’s.

  It was smaller than she had imagined, the size of a wildcat or a large pig. It was a four-legged serpent covered in a cockerel’s feathers, all black and red and pale gold, and its face twisted into a scaly, peeling, greenish brown beak. Upon its head was fixed an iron miter, which pinched terribly; that the young girl could plainly see. Trickles of blood had dried around the bands. It moaned and pulled itself up the steep turn, its jaw broken and scabbed. Its feet were red sandstone, pocked and prickled, the very stone of the streets and walks and campaniles of Ajanabh. They scraped along the road, sending up the occasional spark.

  Now, it is well known that young women with golden curls and blue eyes are afflicted with a certain fatal innocence. Thus it is that in Ajanabh, where the local coloring tends toward the dark and coppery, there are so many clever, cunning girls. But in pity, as her folk are compelled to do by some inner song which sings not to others, Orfea cried out and went to the poor beast—imagine the aria floating high and pitiful!—wrapping it in her arms and loosening the miter and rubbing its shattered jaw.

  The creature looked at her in horror, glaring and gazing with all its might. Yet Orfea lived, warm and sweet.

  “Why do you not turn to stone? I demand that you turn to stone immediately!” roared the Basilisk. But his voice was rough and sibilant, as it too was all of red sandstone.

  Orfea’s gentle brow furrowed. “I do not rightly know—but is it not fortunate for you that I do not? I can clean your wounds and make you well. It is as simple to sew flesh as organdy.”

  The Basilisk sniffed her from neck to ankle, and when his beak grazed her hem, he recoiled. “What sort of creature goes swathed in weasel skin? I am quite sure that is not the height of fashion.” The girl understood him well enough, for many of her friends and uncles in the tall tenements were often as drunk and slurred as a mutilated Basilisk.

  “I am not the height of fashion, myself.” She shrugged.

  “Weasel is the enemy of the Basilisk, forever and all time. It is but the thickness of a dress which protects you from me.”

  “Then I am thankful for it, and I will make you right again. But what has happened to you, poor beast?”

  The Basilisk squirmed out of Orfea’s arms, nipped her briefly, just to see what she tasted like, and sighed his resignation. Whipping his tail around him in an oddly feline gesture, he began, his tongue-stone wagging pitifully.

  THE TALE OF

  THE TONGUE

  THE TONGUE OF A BASILISK IS A VALUABLE thing—the thin veneer of skin, thinner than a manuscript page, hides a muscle all of fire, and with this we hunt, and eat tasty hens and seabirds and pretty little finches. You might think it is wicked of the Basilisk to eat hens, but we will eat what we like, and if what we like is you, woe to your bones! In the lands where the sun is hotter than a thrice-struck blade and the earth is parched as a throat, it is known by even the smallest child that the Basilisk were born when a hen, her feathers warm and golden, saw a clutch of serpent’s eggs whose mother had been eaten by barbarous, base, blackguard Weasel, and being kind in her chicken’s heart, sat upon the eggs until they hatched.

  Hens ought not to sit upon things which are not theirs. One of the little brutes ate her right up, with bits of shell still clinging to her pate. And then, being a wise beast, she began to look for Weasel, who had chewed on her mother’s backbone. Ah, but Weasel is tricky, is he not? She could not touch him, when she found him in his filthy hole, though she lashed her fiery tongue at his tail and reached for his furry throat with her throttling claws and glared and glared until the grass itself had turned to stone.

  “What have I done?” cried Weasel, trickster-cunning. “I was only hungry! I have my own babes to feed!”

  But we were not fooled. Weasel may seem sweet—so may anything. Weasel had eaten our mother, and she must have been a great serpent—cry Woe and Harm! How shall we know her now that Weasel has taken her from us?—for her green meat in her murderer made him by some dread alchemy immune to the tricks of her children.

  Weasel is wicked; we shall not forget.

  But here we are, feathered and scaled and delighted to turn things to stone and burn birds into supper in midair. We make it our business to search out Weasel in all his horrid haunts, but in these degenerate days, this is more a hobby of the Basilisk than a Quest, for Weasel breeds quickly and is wretched, while Basilisk breeds slowly, and is noble. Instead we take great joy in our art—for who in the wide world can sculpt in better fashion than we, who need but glance at a thing to make its likeness in stone, perfect and fell?

  We are each of us capable of casting a certain stone—my eye is prone to red sandstone, plain and sorry though it may be. I have in my time glanced at Kings and Queens, maidens and youths, soldiers and farmers, corn and wheat and peas and melons, dogs with bells on their collars, horses with fringes on their reins, cows with wet noses, a few lions and many lizards, and Weasel, always Weasel, wherever he lies. Of these I have made many fine works, statues where sparrows rest in the eye sockets, a pietà that babes still come from far and wide to see. Only Weasel escapes my gaze—but then, perhaps one ought not to immortalize a rat and a coward.

  I took the miter after a war widow lifted her daughter from the wreckage field and, weeping toward heaven, was caught in my stare. In me she became art, and her bleeding child with her, and it is true what I tell you, that even now she stands in that mud-mire as a war memorial, and children pile up roses and scallions and peppermints at her feet. My brothers saw this was worthy and good. They wedged the miter onto my head and oh, it hurt, but I was proud that day!

  Thus it was that I was not afraid when three women approached me, shading their eyes and singing a dirge. I would make of them graces and goddesses cast in sandstone, scarlet and shining! As they came close, however, I revised my plan, and decided to make them demons, for they were terribly cut and brui
sed, their breasts severed and bandaged, black blood staining their white frocks, their hair a mass of writhing snakes which seemed exhausted, their forked tongues lying on their mistresses’ shoulders, their green skin flushed an unhealthy black. Out of the mouth of each maid trickled a half-dried spit of blood, and they would not look at me, being cunning maids of no gold locks. No matter—I still had my tongue, and I flicked it at their feet experimentally. I am interested in the varying taste of humans, as I have heard in many ways it is similar to Weasel’s. They stepped back quickly, as though from the frothing edge of the sea. Still they shaded their eyes and would not look at me.

  I shook my feathers. “What is it you want? You are too clever by half, so you might as well speak.”

  But they would not. They closed their eyes and opened their mouths as one and I saw that their tongues had been hacked out so far back that I could not see the stumps.

  “Has Weasel done this to you?” I said. It must be here admitted that we Basilisk are often somewhat narrow in our understandings of horrid deeds. There is only Weasel, who is wicked, and Basilisk, who is noble.

  They shook their heads and shuddered. From their skirts they drew a little mirror, and I recoiled—but they chased me with its tiny glass, and I caught my eye in its rim. But only one eye, for the women had only a small mirror, a circle of silver, and I could not see all myself. But I was rooted to the spot nonetheless, and I could feel the beginnings of stone tickling at my claws. Do you know, it feels something like your foot falling asleep, the prickles of blood drifting away where you cannot reclaim it. I watched my one rolling eye in the glass, its iris and its white, and I could not look away.

  And so I stood there while they cut my tongue out of my head and, bloody and dripping, shoved it into one of their waiting, empty mouths.

  THE TALE OF THE

  TWO DUCHESSES,

  CONTINUED

  “IT HURT SO MUCH,” THE BASILISK MOANED. “And there was so much blood, blood and fire. I stumbled and retched for days, the taste of my own tongue still slick in my mouth. Finally, though there was no art in it, I found a lumbering lizard, turned him to stone, and took his tongue, which faded into sandstone even as I closed my beak over it. The fire still in my blood fused the stone to flesh, but it is a weak join.” He shuffled from one stone foot to the other. “That was a long time ago. But it still bleeds. The stone chafes the skin.”

  “What vile women!” Orfea cried. “Why would they have done such a thing to you? What possible reason?”

  “All creatures have their reasons which no other creature divines. But in these later evenings, I wonder if they were not part Weasel, with their fur hidden away.”

  Can you not see this pair, walking through the early evening light which is so famous, the cool blues which fall across the crimson stones? It is here the flutists play an interlude in a minor key, and all folk weep.

  In the months to come, Orfea washed the Basilisk’s wounds and rubbed salve into the places where his miter cut the scales, and ground his tongue to smooth on the whetstone near the stables of the Duke’s Palace. In time, the Duke died, and still Ulissa did not desire to return to the Palace, and Orfea did not desire to return to her mother’s shop. And so Orfea, too, became a Duchess, and a blue sash was strung from her shoulder to her hip, and a bonny sword appended to her side.

  Yet the Duchess of Ajanabh did not tell her friend Ulissa about the beast, for she longed for a thing which was hers alone, which she did not have to share with the beautiful soprano, whose name rose and rose, as she sang the greatest parts yet written for the stage: Sigrid, Zmeya, Dapple, Diamond, whose part is so high and sorrowing that only the most discerning can hear the notes. The two women were as dear as ducats to one another, but each did keep her own things, and where Orfea had her mangled beast, Ulissa had a butcher’s boy who made her meat pies every Tuesday morning and once killed a stag just for her.

  The Basilisk, for his part, was fascinated by Orfea’s stubborn refusal to turn to stone. At first he tried to catch her unaware, but she was always so careful to wear her weasel-skin dress, and though the smell of it distressed him, he learned to catch the smell of her underneath the weasel, something very like damp lilies crushed beneath a cart wheel. After a long while he stopped trying to taste her, and finally, began to look for her coming to his little courtyard full of persimmons and coconuts, waited and leapt into her arms when she arrived, rolling in the dust with her and biting her playfully about the arms. He told her terrible, outlandish tales of the misdeeds of Weasel and glorious genealogies of Basilisk and their great sculptures. She told him about her advisors, and her suitors in their silly suits of armor, and her vials of perfume, and how many owners her sword had known before her. She fed him crickets and squirming squirrels, and once he brought her a stone stag, just for her, tall antlers flashing red and rough.

  But even these merry duets cannot last forever—though you ought to hear the castrato we have to play the butcher’s boy!—and a day dawned stormy and flat, as skies will be when rain is near, so near as to smell it, but not quite yet arrived. The Basilisk was rolling on his back, snuffling the wind, reveling in the wet-mud smell of the coming shower. And he saw, in the corner of his eye, a woman running through the persimmon trees, her hair flapping behind her, golden as apples, her dress dark and thick and furred, her smell like damp lilies beneath a cart wheel. He chortled in his beastly joy and waddled happily toward her, his ambling gait stomping heavily, stone on stone. He could not quite catch her, and her hair teased him, streaming bright as lightning in the dark clouds.

  Finally, he clamped the edge of her trailing dress under his claws and hooted triumph in his reptilian way. The woman stumbled and turned to look at him, at what had caught her, golden hair framing her face like a fine fur—and turned to stone. Her eyes went last, closing into sandstone with a hurt and puzzled expression. We can only imagine her final cry, the voice which set the opera of Ajanabh alight—then silence.

  The Basilisk was frightened and baffled—the woman looked just like his Orfea, smelled like her—but where was her dress? Why would she wear stoat fur instead of Weasel? Did she not love him? Did she not call him her best and only beast? Her beloved monster? Had he not let her grind his very tongue against her stone? She had abandoned him, betrayed him! Perhaps she had meant to send him away, but thought so little of him now that she had forgotten. She was Duchessing about without him and cared nothing at all for how he might miss her. What had he done? How had he given offense?

  The Basilisk wept. He howled in the storm and the thunder quailed. He called her name over and over, but she did not come. His tears streamed fire into the cobble cracks, and he struck his stone claws against the trees until the ground was wet and slick with fallen fruit. He had done nothing! He had loved her better than she deserved! Perhaps it was not a dress after all, but she herself, her wicked, Weasel self, seducing him into complacency so that she could feast on his backbone! Well, he had shown her!

  The Basilisk wept. But he had loved her. He had eaten from her hand. She had told him how stupid the suitors who came bearing flowers and baronies were. She had stroked his pate beneath the miter. He had laid his head on her lap. The Basilisk lay on the earth and keened, in rage and grief and loneliness, keened until his stone tongue fell from his mouth and he could keen no more.

  Holding his grief before him like a lamp, the Basilisk left the city of Ajanabh. And holding his rage before him like a pike, he stared hard at everything he passed: fence posts, stables, windmills. Basil fronds. Garlic patches. Red-pepper fields and black-pepper fields, the green peppers and the pink, and the cinnamon groves, and the coriander fields, and the saffron fields, and the cumin farms, the salt flats with their crystals like hard, cutting snow, the mustard plants, the paprika bushes, and the vanilla beans, thin and dark on the vine.

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED


  “IT IS SAID THAT SOMEWHERE BEYOND THE blasted, stone-struck fields of Ajanabh, there is a clear mountain pool with the most extraordinary figure crouched over it: a terrifying stone serpent covered in stone feathers, with a miter on his head and tears in his eyes, staring into the water like a mirror. What you see at the foot of the stage is our memorial to the greatest voice ever to grace the Opera Ghetto: Ulissa, who was Duchess twice over, sweet Ulissa, dead for the lack of a dress!”

  Arioso finished with a flourish, and bowed deeply.

  “You know that isn’t what happened.” Agrafena rolled her eyes.

  “Who is to say it isn’t?” the jackal-headed tenor said indignantly.

  “I am! No Basilisk could have blighted every field, yet every field perished.”

  “Ah! But the root systems, Fena dear, the roots! The stone would have spread, even if you could never see it in the withering leaves. And no city garden was touched. Only the wide and ox-tilled fields.” He crossed his arms over his chest in satisfaction, and turned to me. “When Orfea discovered what had happened—for of course, Ulissa had been caught in his gaze, and mistaken for her friend! Ah, without tragic mistakes of identity, where would the theater be?—she went mad with grief for both of them, and for her city which was blasted and broken. And perhaps, just perhaps, the mad Duchess wanders the city to this day, mourning by the riverside! Is it not a marvelous tale?”

  I agreed that it certainly was.