The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I tried to rub my legs together, but no music of any kind came from them, only a dry sort of scraping. I asked the moths in the Bird-keepers’ Ward, and they said:

  “We suspect it is right and proper for a spider to seek out the flame wherever it lies, and bask in its light.”

  I went then to the Candle-makers’ Quarter and there found more flame than tallow, but I found it very hot and uncomfortable, and when a foreleg began to smoke, I in my wisdom retreated.

  I asked the flies in the Calligrapher’s Close, and they considered for a very long while, keeping far back from me—I did not know why.

  “We suspect it is proper and right for a spider to eat flies,” they stuttered, “but we do not advise it. Perhaps it is more proper and more right for a spider to weave beautiful alphabets, as a calligrapher does, or beautiful dresses, as a tailor does. We do not know, but we seem to recall that weaving is the essential thing. Now please leave us alone.”

  I shrugged, and set about locating a calligrapher who would take me as an apprentice. I suspected the flies, like the moths and the crickets, were silly, flighty things who knew no more of spiderhood than I did, but without a map, all roads seem equal.

  I asked the squid in their tanks, all a-flush with ink.

  “We have no use for a spider,” they gurgled. “You are extremely drownable, and it would be impolite of us to ask you to work in our element. Try the humans.”

  I asked the man in the high shop with a hat of blue and buckles, who penned careful manuscripts all through the night.

  “I have no use for a spider,” he coughed. “You are extremely crushable, and it would be impolite of me to ask you to work beside my careless hands. Try the Sirens.”

  I crawled beneath the door of a room at the highest floor of the highest tower in Ajanabh outside the Duke’s estate, a drafty, cold place—cold! In Ajanabh! But there it was, the tower so high that the air itself shook with a terror of the heights. Within the rooms, the windows creaked and trembled with their own dread of the sheer walls, and three women blinked at me in wonder and hunger.

  They had women’s legs, and so I call them women, but from the waist, brown feathers overtook the skin, and the upper parts of them were sparrows, great, tottering beaks and long page-brown wings tipped in black folded neat as elbows at their sides. Their huge, wet black eyes regarded me with an early bird’s right to breakfast, and I tucked my legs in quickly.

  “Please! Do not eat me! I come to learn the art of letters—I can weave and spin as well as any, and I will stitch whatever words you ask me!”

  The birds looked at each other and said nothing. Instead, they extended their wings and began to turn, a strange, hopping, sinuous dance that looped each one out of the embrace of the other, ducking under one wing and hopping with bare, grimy feet over the pirouetting leg of another. Their backs arched and bent, their wings dipped down low and fluttered wide, tracing circle after circle. I watched them in awe, their sure steps, their constant touch—never was there a moment when one Siren did not have her wing or her toe on another of her sisters. When they stopped, they looked expectantly at me, as if they had spoken, as if I was now sure to answer, if I was not a very rude creature.

  Then I looked at the floor.

  It was covered in paper from wall to wall, fine, creamy paper soft as silk rugs, and upon it, with feet and wings which I could see now were dark not with mud but with ink, they had written:

  But we find spiders delicious.

  “I find many things delicious, but if I were to eat all of them I would be as big as a baker’s pan.”

  The trio danced again, their beaks turned up to the ceiling and down, their wings whipping, snapping, flicking at the paper floor.

  This is wise. But do you really think you could dance with us? Your penmanship would be so tiny, so intricate, only the very dedicated would wish to read it.

  “I have been told it is proper and right for a spider to weave—either alphabets or dresses, the flies were unclear—and dresses are so very big.”

  We have never heard of a spider-calligrapher.

  “I have never heard of Sirens who do not speak.”

  The women blinked again, one after the other, six eyes sliding closed and open again. And then they began to dance in truth, a swift, urgent dance that bent them close to the floor, their wings tapping and flipping at the paper, letters forming like shapes in water, long and lithe and exalted, their toes gently tipping an i here and a j there, their leaps elongated and graceful, sometimes spanning the room entire—but they never broke with each other, staying as close and tight as a flock of migrating birds, racing over the page, their movements alien and aching and radiant.

  This is what they wrote:

  THE TALE

  ON THE FLOOR

  WE SANG TOO LONG; WE SANG TOO WELL. WE are sisters in silence now: It is our vow and our penance.

  Once we had a nest in the open wind, on the open sea—how gray was that sea of our youth! How soft and thick was that nest we built! How long ago it was, how long ago it seems to us now, how much we have seen since we walked on our spit of stone and called each other sisters! But we are old now, we are old, and there is no sand anymore between our toes. How long since we sang innocent ballads on the shore, sharp and well turned, how long since we opened our throats in the rain and called it harmless.

  Our nest was then threshed of straw and juniper and loose, waving cotton flowers, driftwood and scallop shells and sandpiper bones. Long dune grasses crisscrossed themselves within, and there we slept in each other’s arms, heads tucked under our wings, and were warm, and were not wicked, no matter what they say.

  And in our joy, as we picked our way among the tide pools, sucking the orange flesh from mussels and closing up the anemones with our wing tips, as our legs grew blue and goose-pimpled with the ocean spray, we sang. We sang dizzy waltzes about the moon who breathes so deeply that she draws the whole sea into her, and blows it out again. We sang dirges for our mother, buried at sea when we were chicks with pink toes. We sang dirges for our father, whom we never knew. We sang tarantellas and danced them on the coral boulders until our feet bled. We were happy together in those days, and knew nothing of the world, innocent as mice, slurping fish from their bones and looking at the sky through our joined feathers.

  Do you know what it means to sing? Are there songs of the spiders, gossamer and glissand? It means to open up your mouth and unstop your chest and push your heart, your blood, your marrow, and your breath out of you like children. We opened up our mouths and unstopped our chests and pushed our hearts and blood and marrow and breath out of us, and the songs were all our nieces and daughters, lying among us and giggling at the wind.

  Then she washed up on our spit of stone. How beautiful we thought her! How blue her lips were! How strange her skin, how odd her hair, seaweed-strangled! How we watched her, how we prodded, like a dolphin beached, our drownèd girl! She had a sailor’s clothes, her shirt torn open, and—we did not know humans were made so!—there was a large compass needle waving northward in her navel, pointing up toward her chin. There was rust at the tip, like blood. Her boots were full of water—there were barnacles on the heels, and we pinched her and nudged her and rolled her over, and we sang to her—how we sang to her! What did we not sing to the drownèd dear? Warm, skipping minuets, thrilling ballads of narwhal hunts and octopus cities under the waves, crooning lullabies of children well held and tears never shed, all those we had from our mother so-long-dead!

  Wake up, girl! we sang, but blue she stayed.

  The tide is coming in! Now is no time for sleeping! we sang, but cold she stayed.

  Wake up, sailor-love! Ghadir has you, Ashni has you, Nyd will not let you drink the whole sea down! we sang, and she coughed, she groaned, she made the sounds a sailor does when it does not want to wake up. Her eyes opened, and they were miraculously blue. We had never seen anything with blue eyes, though Mother’s songs said that such things might exist very, very
far away. Her hair was black and plastered to her back, wet as a fish’s fin, and her face was ashen, tired, drawn as a crone’s.

  “Why do you sing me back, you awful old cat-bait, when first you sang me down?” she croaked.

  “What do you mean?” Ghadir chirped.

  “It was your song I followed, your song that filled up my mouth with salt and sea…”

  THE

  NAVIGATOR’S

  TALE

  I STEER THE SHIPS BETWEEN AJANABH AND THE northern passage, I chart their way between the shoals, between the shallows and the deeps, between the sunlit sea and the darkest tide. I am their true beacon, a light house the ship carries with her, never trusting the shore to give one over when it is most needed. My sextant is their chapel altar while we are at sea, and at its brass wheels and at its inky angles they pray as fervently as they have prayed in all their days.

  Which was never too fervently in Ajanabh.

  It is easy work, now. We go north so often, to the floes and the fishing villages and the whales blowing the sea into a mist over their singing heads. I know the route so well, as well as I know my own body—and that I know as well as I know the sea, for it was mapped and charted like a peninsula buffeted by storms the day I became a compass.

  There is a woman in Ajanabh who will do this sort of work. Her workshop is difficult to find, but I can navigate a street as well as a strait. And when I say she does this sort of work, what I mean is that you will tell her what you want to do, and she will tell you what to pay, and then she will grant your wish in the strangest way she can think of, usually having to do with cutting into some part of your body and fashioning you into the tool of your desire. This is how the mind of Folio clicks along in its way: better a golden limb than a flesh one which may fail.

  What did I ask? The navigator’s prayer: that I should never be lost. Hers is a Djinn’s interpretation, I’ll grant you. What did she take from me in return? She listened at my navel for the first things my mother said to me while I lay in a cradle of ships’ prows—she said you can hear it like the ocean. I will never let you set foot in the sea, my mama had whispered, or you will leave me alone and crying, as he did.

  And then the surgeon took my sextant, and the new compass in my stomach spun, unable to find north for shock and grief. My sextant was to me brother and lover and trusted guide, and it was gone, into her shop like a piece of junk metal.

  I had another easily, but it was long and long before I liked it as well. I looked at it on my cabin shelf with disgust and suspicion, until it seemed no longer so alien and the scabs of my stomach peeled away, and then I took out my maps again.

  It is easy work, as I have said. The immigrants are thick as oranges on the winter trees these days. They say the fields are failing, holding on to their green shoots like jealous bankers, and those who are wise will go. I am not wise, but the going and the leaving are my profession, and Ajanabh simply the port where my pay is held in my name.

  We set out for Muireann-port two weeks ago, our hold full of rum and lemons and little books with pictures children ought not to see—and families, huddled and shivering-sick, who had never heard of a coat of fur, soft with southern sunlight. I have seen so many like them. Did one couple have a little daughter, wide-eyed and silent in the rocking waves? I am sure one did. Did another have a parcel of boys, wrists tied one to the other to keep them together? I am sure of this, too, but it does not mean I can remember their names.

  My map covered my table like a dinner cloth, and all those continents and islands and fjords and bays were my salad and soup and supper and scallion, and I was well pleased, my stomach peaceably north-pointed, my sextant safe on its shelf. I had charted so safely and so well, my equations were neat as bride-clothes, and we would not go near the Sirens’ shoals, nowhere near.

  Some few of the men talked of hearing those songs when we sat out on watch with the stars like a school of minnows overhead, and the creak of the boards and the splash of the sea against the old strong hull. We smoked pipes of silver, and baleen, and plain corncob, and played dice for the lemons and the rum rations. Sturgeon-sour, the first mate always lost, and had a head full of empty tooth sockets for his pains. But still he played, and still did I, and still did we all. And the helmsman said through his juice-sticky beard:

  “Galien, I swear to you, I heard it once! I was a-mending the mast, and it came over the waves like the beam of a lighthouse, sweeter than nothing, singing of my sister and her new baby they all say looks just like me, toddling around with a wooden ship in his fat little hand! They were singing of the time my sister said she was proud of me, that even though our dad said I was a shame to him, what with me not being married and not being rich and not being sober and not being much of anything but an old rot holding a wheel, still I was no shame to her nor her boy, and every time I come home she’d have me a chicken roasted crisp, because I was her brother, and she loved me dear as diamonds. How do you like that?”

  “I don’t like it, you lying fisherman. How did they know a thing about your sister?”

  “How should I know? But I know what they were singing, and I’ll tell you more: It was my sister’s own voice come over the waves. I jumped after it—you can’t hear love singing on the wind when you’ve been at sea eight months and more, you can’t hear it and not go after it, your heart breaking like a jib mast all the while—I jumped after it and got my leg tangled up in the rigging, and hung there for an hour before Captain caught me out, and no rum for me for a week. But I heard them. I heard my sister singing and the chicken roasting at home, and I know what I know.”

  “Boys,” I said, laughing, “I think I can say safe as salmon run that the helm is drunk and ought to be relieved of his lemons immediately.”

  There was laughter of the kind that haunts ship decks after midnight, and the helmsman shook his hoary head.

  “You got no soul in you, Galien. Take us close again, so I can hear my sister sing.”

  “Your sister is teaching her son his numbers in a hearth-hot house. She’s not out here in the dark and wet, bless her.”

  And so I charted well away from the shoals. But the sea is a funny thing, you know. Sometimes she wants you somewhere and it doesn’t matter what your maps say at supper, she’ll carry you where she pleases. And if you are not properly respectful of her, or call her names she doesn’t like, or give away your sacred tools like they’re scraps of paper, she’ll drop you at the very place your sextant was quite clear about having no desire to go.

  The mist came up like a hand in our faces, and we could see nothing around us. I went up to the crow’s nest to try to get a clear sightline of the shore, but it was no good at all. I saw nothing but gray and the occasional gull—which told me we were not too far out—but beyond that I and my sextant were lost as children in a wood.

  And then I heard it.

  I heard my mother singing. I heard her hushing, quiet-darling voice, off-key as it had always been, lowered by pipes and beer. I heard a baby murmur in her arms, and I heard her rock it to sleep. I heard her sing about the sea, how blue and bright, how much like the body of a wife, and how all lovers leave when they see the whitecaps foam. I heard her sing about my father, who had red hair—imagine it! Red as a heart! Who would think such a thing existed in the world? About my father and his tall ship, and his sextant, and his lilies at the door, about the necklaces of coral and bone he brought her from savage lands, and about his salt skin under her mouth. I heard her sing about the empty dock and the empty bed and prayers for safe passage. I heard her sing about a ship that never came back, and a woman standing every day at the dock for years and more. I heard her sing about a daughter who would grow up to bake bread in a shop and never see the blue or the bright, a daughter who would hold her old gray head and tell her she had been a good mother to her all her days and nights.

  I heard my mother weeping—I heard her—and you can’t hear your mother weeping and not go to her, you just can’t. I dove into the
water, well clear of the rigging, and the splash was like a hanging, so cold and so hard, and the fish scattered in horror at the woman dropped into them, hook-sudden.

  I could still hear her, echoing and dim, under the water, under the mist.

  “Mama!” I cried, and water stopped up my voice.

  But there was an arm around my waist like a mother’s arm, and a hand on my hair like a mother’s hand, and a voice in my ear nothing like a mother’s voice, but sweet and sad and deep.

  “Why do you folk always listen?” it said with a sigh, bubbling up to the waves above.

  We broke the water far from my ship, fading in the distance, and a great, huge seal held me on his belly like an otter, looking at me with depthless black eyes.

  “Let me go! My mother is calling, my mother is crying!”

  The seal wrinkled its muzzle. “No, she’s not. She is drinking herself dizzy somewhere you cannot so much as guess. You are wet and pitiful and lost, and I have found you, but that is only luck, and luck rarely holds. Now, I will take you to dry land, for I am a kind seal and a good one. But you must answer me this, as I have been answered by every foolish sailor who finds himself overboard: Do you know of a Satyr who serves on a ship, with very big green eyes and curly hair?”

  “No, friend, I have heard of no such beast.”

  The seal heaved a sigh and squinted in the fog. “That is to be expected. I am always answered the same. I ran from her, and that is the truth. I do not deserve to find her again. I ran from the forest and the gold slanting through the oak and the yew and the birch and the pine, I ran from the giggling streams and the grapevines fat and purple, I ran from the hoof-worn paths and the mushrooms sprouting in the shade, I ran from the loam and the leaves, I ran from her. I said a great number of foolish things which seemed wise then and I clutched my skin to my chest, and I ran all the way to the sea, smiling and singing and my feet weren’t even tired, all the way to the sand and tide. I leapt into the froth and the wave, the sea beating me back, the waves pulling at my waist. I shouted to the wind and the pelicans, I was so full of salt and my skin was so slick and eager!