The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “It all seems rather silly now. As soon as I tasted the sea I knew it was no good. I had too much of her in me. It only tasted of tears. And one day a red ship sped by overhead and I knew it for her; I knew she was above me, stomping the boards with her hooves. I followed, but the ship was so fast. I followed all the way to the edge of the Boiling Sea, and there I could not go. But I am patient; I waited. I followed them to the Skin-Peddler’s Isle and I followed them into the icy seas where they were swallowed whole. And there too I followed. I beat the sea with my hands for weeks before the turtle-whale came up and gobbled me down with her. But his belly was so wide. I looked and looked among the old wrecks but I could not find her. I lay down on the liver of the beast and prayed to die. Time passed in the dark and I did not mark it. When the great fluttering of birds came and his mouth opened, I did not even look up, so far was I from those curtains of baleen. It was only when the awful old beast caught his belly on a reef and retched most everything in him up onto the tide that I escaped. I looked among the flotsam for the shard-planks of a red ship, but found nothing.

  “But I have heard rumors of that ship in the harbors and ports again. I know she is alive; I know she crests the waves.” The seal smiled softly. “Who would have thought she would go to sea? If I had known, if I had been a cleverer beast, if I had been older, less silly, I would have built her a house on the shore, and fed her black bread and sardines, and we might have been happy. There are many ways of being happy. We might have found ours.”

  “I am sorry.” I gently touched his face. “I have heard of no such ship, no such beast. Even the Boiling Sea has dried to a long, white, dry bed with no water in it at all now. We must steer around that wasteland, where shark skeletons litter the blasted seafloor.”

  He nodded miserably. “Well I know it. But still I ask. There is no shortage of sailors flying off their boats like great ungainly albatrosses. One of them will be from her ship one day. I know it.”

  THE TALE

  ON THE FLOOR,

  CONTINUED

  “HE WAS A SELKIE,” OUR SAILOR FINISHED, “and a Selkie dare not approach the shore. He dragged me as far as he could, and pointed my body at the land, and told me to swim. But”—she coughed, and seawater sprayed from her mouth—“I have never been a strong swimmer. I sail; I do not swim. I swallowed the ocean, and deep in the dark, in the bottom of the bottomless dark, I heard my mother singing again. I heard her telling the baby in her arms to wake up.”

  We looked at each other, blinking, perplexed. “Your mother is not here. Our mother is not here. This is a motherless place.”

  Galien sat up with difficulty, propping herself on her elbows. “Of course she isn’t. You’re here. Didn’t you listen to me at all? You sing, and we hear. We hear everything we long for. Do you know how many of us have died diving into the brine after your voices? On every map your isle is marked as danger, as wicked, as a place never to dream of going.”

  Nyd’s beak began to quiver. She tried not to cry. “That’s ridiculous,” Ashni said, stamping her bare foot. “We sing to each other. Every creature is allowed to sing. The songs were not for you. We did not go fishing for sailors, dropping our voices into the sea like barbed hooks. We push out our hearts and blood and marrow and breath—”

  “You dash out our hearts and blood and marrow and breath on these desolate rocks, and no one survives your song,” the navigator whispered.

  “But we did not mean to. We did not intend it. Our songs were for us alone,” Ghadir said, her face ashen.

  Nyd fell to her knees, and her sobbing echoed over the shoals. She laid her feathered head on the rocks and cried over and over: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  We carried Galien home. In the tangle of our legs she flew as no woman has ever done, and in Ajanabh we left her, to collect her pay and buy her mother beer and see her old helmsman’s sister with her roasted chickens. Her eyes were bruised and her lips were broken and bleeding, and the high, thin air did not help her. She was hollow-eyed and bent when we set her down trembling on the red rooftops. Her navel-compass waved erratically, and she slapped it into submission.

  “We will never sing again,” said Nyd, her voice shaking, as we stood with Galien among the chimneys and the steam pipes, the tiles and the pigeons’ nests. We held her between us, wing to wing, and the navigator’s eyes had no grace for us. “We will never speak again. This is our vow. We will call to no one, not even ourselves, and in years to come perhaps the drowned will call us forgiven.” Her black eyes overflowed with tears; her beak began an anguished clattering. “But I doubt it,” she finished.

  THE

  DRESSMAKER’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  THE SIRENS STOPPED THEIR DANCE WITH THE three of them spinning in unison over the final characters. They were bathed in sweat, their feathers sticking wetly together like newborn butterflies’ wings. They panted, stretched their exhausted feet, mopped one another’s brow. The floor was black with writing, and I finished reading some time after they finished their dance. The one I presumed was Nyd was hitching her chest, nearly weeping again with the memory of it.

  We never meant it, she wrote by herself in a small corner. How could we mean such a thing? We were just singing.

  “I think,” I said hesitantly, “that a Siren sings as a cricket does.”

  No one drowns in a cricket’s song, Nyd scribbled hurriedly.

  Besides, wrote another of the sisters, the silence helps us to work. We see the world in our calligraphy now, and if we were forever squawking and cawing, we should not know the song of silent letters.

  The sisters allowed that if I did not scurry too quickly, and therefore look to them like breakfast, I might be permitted to work on the marginalia. I stepped into their inkstone, wetting my feet in the black iron-gall, in the sepia, in the costly blue. I tried very hard, as hard as a spider may try. I danced masterpieces of tiny points in their corners and frontispieces. I wove my silk into pages so strong they might never tear, and they marveled at how soft the webbing was beneath their callused feet.

  But I was not happy. I was often underfoot—a dangerous place for me—and they looked at me sidelong when supper was scarce. The silence clawed. I wished for the buzz of flies and the splash of water and voices, just a few harried voices to break the thick quiet. I did not feel that I was a weaver so much as a very poor painter, and the heights made my head hurt.

  It seemed to me time to seek out a truer expression of the flies’ commandment. While the sisters slept, I dipped my legs in blue ink and spun in the margins of their latest manuscript a panorama of farewell against a calm and easy sea: sailor after sailor, standing safe on the shore, whole and singing.

  In the Garden

  THE BOY FELT HER EYES ON HIS BACK AS HE WALKED BACK TOWARD the Palace and a bed which had no snowflakes in it, no cold and no hardnesses. His vision was so full of her, full of her dark eyes dancing, full of the words he could now taste in his mouth like cakes.

  “Come to her wedding,” he had said.

  “I can hardly avoid it,” she had answered him.

  “I will come away from the crowd, and I will find you, and how clever we shall be, to meet with all such folk about!”

  “Be sure that in your cleverness you come far enough away.”

  But a thought had begun in him, like a flame which smokes and sparks before blooming into gold. He was not sure he dared—but how the smoke filled his chest! How it prickled and burned and billowed! He felt his heart catching; he felt himself beginning to burn.

  And so it was that the boy who would one day be Sultan went into his sister’s chamber the night before she would become a wife and a foreigner in one blow. Dinarzad sat at her mirror, and her hair was all unbound, falling around her like a desert tent, and before her on her little mahogany table were cloths stained with red and gold and dark blue. Her eyes were tired; her lips were thin.

  “I am so tired of all this paint.” She sighed. Her nightdress
was laced tight around her, like armor. “I cannot breathe for its stink.”

  “I am sorry,” the boy said.

  “It is not your fault. Are you not glad? Another night and you will be rid of me.”

  “If you are glad, I am glad,” he answered carefully.

  “It does not matter if I am glad.”

  She was quiet then, looking at herself in the mirror. “You may brush my hair if you like,” she finally said, awkward and hushed.

  The boy went forward and took her bone-handled brush. He ran it through her hair, afraid at first to snarl it, to hurt her, but she made no sound. He smoothed her black hair with his hands, amazed at the heat of her scalp. He had never touched her so before.

  “What…” Dinarzad cleared her throat, her voice faltering somewhat, like a bird who has not enough breath to finish a song. “What do you think happened to the Papess? Was she happy, do you suppose, in her tower when the war was done? Was she bitter? Did she rip books apart with her teeth and plot against the others? Did she rail like a caught tiger in that place? Did she throw herself from the tip of the tower? Did she go to sleep and never wake up? Did she wake up one morning and find that her heart was as white as a silkworm, and the sun was golden on the sill, and did she then believe that she could live, and hold peace in her hand like a pearl?”

  The boy started. “I… I do not know. She has not told me.”

  “If she does, when I have gone,” Dinarzad said thickly, “come to me in whatever Palace I live then, and tell me how it was with her.”

  It was then that his sister crumpled into his young arms and wept. “I am afraid,” she whispered, over and over. “I am so afraid.”

  He stroked her hair as he had seen their nurses do to the children, and in his heart he cursed his own unkindness toward his sister, poor lost beast that she was. Her shoulders stopped their jerking and shivering after a time, and she looked up at him with red and wretched eyes.

  “Tell me, my brother, tell me a story. Tell me a tale in which a woman is wed, and her husband is kind to her and no cold stranger, and the other wives love her as they would a sister. Tell me a tale in which a woman is wed and her children are beautiful and whole, and live a long while, and her sister-wives teach her to make bread in the fashion of their country. Tell me a tale where she wakes one morning and finds that her heart is white as a silkworm, and the sun is golden on the sill, and she then believes that she can live, and hold peace in her hand like a pearl. Tell me a tale in which a woman is wed, and she is happy.”

  The boy’s lip trembled, and there was pity in him like a strangling vine. He knelt at Dinarzad’s bare feet, and held her hands in his.

  “I do not know any stories like that,” he whispered.

  “Neither do I.” She sighed. “But it is not impossible that such tales are told.”

  Brother and sister sat with their heads together, and after a long while the boy told her of the thing which smoked and sparked in him, and she did not strike him or tell him he was foolish, and he loved her in that moment, his sister with her beautiful hair and her cold, thin fingers.

  The morning of the wedding came white as a silkworm, and the snow drifted lazily down, unconcerned about the occasion. A skeletal sunlight shone pale through the flakes, and all the court wondered at it. The boy escaped, his arms full of boiled quail eggs and chocolate, and found the girl at the wrought Gate again, her cheeks lashed red by the cold. He told her nothing, but they smiled and laughed like old comrades, and he passed his hands eagerly over her eyes to close them.

  “There are hours and hours before the wedding!” he said excitedly. “Let us find out how a spider changes her profession!”

  The girl closed her eyes and lifted her chin, her breath fogging in the chill.

  “It took me a great many days to walk to the Parish,” the boy began. “Eight legs are no guard against distance, and I am, in the end, so very small…”

  THE

  DRESSMAKER’STALE,

  CONTINUED

  THERE WAS A PLACE IN THE PARISH IN THOSE days which you might have thought was a church, if you were not careful. It had a carved door and a frescoed ceiling, and in the pews were parishioners, after a fashion. Where the nave should have been was a spinning wheel, and a loom, and a raised dais not unlike an altar. The windows were cast in fabulous colors, but this was not a church, and the woman who stood between the wheel and the loom was not a priest.

  This was Xide’s house, and even to a spider with eight legs to her name, Xide was extraordinary and grotesque. Her arms wheeled around her, one for each of mine, and there were rings of petrified wood and plain gray stone on each of forty knuckles, and each of forty fingers was occupied with needles and thimbles and cords, spindles and pedals, bolts of fabric and strips of lace, bustles and whalebone, tassels and cuff links. She was a wheel and a whirl, and I was frightened of her. In the pews were cedar boxes and in each of the cedar boxes was a silkworm busily spinning away, the thread draped over the benches, flowing up to the altar, through copper bowls brimming with dye of every shade, and to her. They looked up at their mistress from time to time in the mute adoration of which blind worms are capable, and, satisfied that their goddess remained yet among them, exuded another tiny length of precious, wet thread.

  I passed through all of these fragrant boxes unseen and unmarked, up toward Xide whose face shone among her arms, whose web-white hair was bound severely back. I watched her weave and my legs twitched in unison with her—they longed to touch such cloth, to make such miracles of cotton and silk. I was rapt; I was held.

  On the dais at that moment was a woman whose nose was very long and highborn, and Xide was spinning a red dress around her even as I watched, culling silk from the rows of cedar boxes and spinning it into fabric faster than my vision could catch. The woman was naked beneath the growing dress, holding up long strands of black beads in tented fingers so that they would not be caught in the rushing skirt.

  Everywhere I had asked where I might learn to weave properly, I heard Xide’s name, whispered, murmured in reverence. I called her name out then, and two of her hands ceased their motion, shading her eyes as she gazed into the distance, trying to find the sound.

  “Xide, it is I, I am here, on the floor,” I cried.

  “Hello, Spider. I am afraid I do not know any patterns for your body, but if you wait, I will try.”

  The woman in her half-built dress laughed. A pearl fell out of her mouth. One of Xide’s hands caught it deftly, and tossed it into a bowl already half full of white gems.

  “No, I do not need clothes. I wish to be like you, to learn to weave. I have been told it is the proper profession for a spider. I wish to be proper.”

  “My silkworms might be jealous,” she mused. “And I suspect, not being yet a proper spider, you know nothing of weaving beyond base instinct.”

  I hung my head. “I am sure that is true.”

  “Come closer, Spider.”

  I crawled up to her knee, which seemed so great and hard beneath me. Her face loomed huge above, young as a bride’s, her eyes full of laughter and light—but they had no pupil and no iris, being all white, smooth as a statue’s.

  “Fate,” she said, putting her head to one shoulder as her arms wove on, “is a blind weaver, they say. Did you know that? Have you lived long enough in the world to hear how she cuts and spins and stitches, how she never ceases, even for a moment?”

  “No, Lady.”

  “It is a very silly story. For one thing, I have never cut a thread in my life…”

  THE

  WEAVER’S

  TALE

  I SPIN EACH THREAD TO ITS NATURAL LENGTH, and when it is ended it is ended, and I exhort it to wind no farther. I do not sever it before its time, simply because it would make a neater sleeve. Everything I weave is neither more or less than what it longed to become.

  I was the last to step down out of the Sky. They went down like a rain of light, and they changed in their going, and I did
not wish to change. I saw nothing there I liked so well as the hole the Sky had made for me, its cool edges and its darkness. I wandered in the dark after they had gone, an orphan in an empty house. It had once been so full of light, and now the Stars that stayed hung like lanterns, far from each other and silent.

  Far off in the reaches of the black there is a field of grass. I could tell you that it goes on forever, but only a child believes that anything goes on forever. But there is a place where the dark becomes speckled with light, thicker and thicker until there is nothing but light, on and on and on. These are Stars, too, these speckles, Grass-Stars who lie over the dark like blades and wait for the part of the Sky that bellied out the world to wander through and nose them, just once, just a bit, just the slightest brush of her skin. There are so many of them who chose this. I suppose you cannot blame them; they are not the only orphans who have told themselves that if they make up the house very nicely, Mother will come home.

  I went walking there once, long after the bright ones left. I was lonely—can I be blamed if in the dark I went toward the thing which was brightest? I went walking, through the first swirls of Grass-Stars, their tiny faces beaming with anticipation that never wanes, never for a moment. I walked through the fields, into the marshes and the rivulets of pooled light, where the Stars were nearly to my waist, waving in nameless winds, waving in the dark. And I tried to step carefully, I tried, but they are so thick and so wide, sometimes I did step onto the grass. For that I can say I am sorry. It crumbled beneath me, falling in brilliant shards out of the Sky, sharp and screaming, falling out of the Sky like glass.