The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  And when the shards broke—shall I say I should not have gone? Shall I say I was punished, a little lost girl who has been told not to walk in the gardens, not to ruin the flowers with her muddy feet?—when they broke their light splashed out and into my eyes, and my eyes were washed away in it, and I saw nothing but light.

  I have seen nothing since but light.

  But in that light I could see a kind of shape, a shape which seemed to me something like the world, and a world which seemed something like me. There were things which wove, and I could not see them, but I could see their weaving, how tiny and diamond-strung, how intricate and perfect. And I wanted to weave that way, I wanted to weave bigger things and greater things, and as this wish formed in me like a spindle gathering flax, my arms opened up into eight, and silk pooled in my belly—but I did not want to become a spider. I only wanted to weave. I stopped before I could grow small and black and many-eyed. What use are many eyes to the blind?

  And so at last, I too came down from the heavens, blind and wet and small, cut through with the grass-rain, and in the place where I lay I began to weave with all my fingers, with anything I could find, with grass and leaves and branches and my own hair and mud and silk and cotton and wet wool and flax and rose thorns, stones and river water and stripped bark and tall trunks and evergreen needles: Everything I could touch I could weave.

  And as I wove I could see. I could see what I wove, and no more; with all that light boiling in my eye, I could see what I wove, I could see where every stitch began, in rose-seed and flax-flower, and where it would end, rotting to dust on the dead body of a witch laid out on her bier or cut into strips for a child’s swaddling clothes in a city which did not yet even have a name. I could see the threads, I could see the warp and the weft, I could see every day a thing I wove would live. It was so big I wept, and with my weeping and my weaving my light went out into these webs, these webs which became stones and streets and cornices and bridges and alleys, towers and bells and doors and churches, cutting into each other at all the sharp, cruel angles of a web, turning and twisting around me, who sat at the center. And after a while there was no light left, and my blood went out into the weaving instead, and all the stones and streets and cornices and bridges and alleys, all the towers and bells and doors and churches ran red as they wound out of me. How it hurt! But how it sang as it came!

  I have always been here. I will always be here. The red city is my weaving, and I rest in its center. Every stone and plank knows it was once in the palms of my hands. I can see where it all will end, all the way through the wind-wracked dust and red stones worn to grains of red sand. And I will be here then, too. I knew that folk would come, eventually, and marvel at this empty city, all ready for them, all laid out and beautiful as a dress. I knew that they would be hungry and cruel as little spiders, that they would walk on grass they were told to leave be, that they would weave and weave and weave, until all their days were spooled out before them, red, and bright, and bloody.

  THE

  DRESSMAKER’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  “THEY CAME BEFORE THE PEOPLE DID,” SAID the Weaver-Star, indicating the silkworms in their cozy boxes, “how far they must have come! Crawling on their weak, white bellies over tearing, chewing rocks! My darlings, my courtiers, who knew only that that which is woven longs for a weaver, and here lay one waiting.”

  The worms wriggled in ecstasy that their mistress deigned to speak of them, and the current of thread redoubled itself, singing through the bowls of dye and into her hands.

  “I have no more light, and no more blood, and my silk is rare and thin these days, but they make enough for anything I might wish to weave, and we are family, they and I. I am the Empress of the Alleys; they are silk dreaming of the Stars.”

  I thought I would burst for love of her, then, and her white eyes filled my vision. “But if you wove all these wonders, how can you be content to weave a woman’s dress? A dress is nothing!”

  Xide looked at the woman on the dais, nearly dressed now, her waist swathed in crimson, crisscrossed with black ropes to match her beads, the skirt clinging to her legs and falling all the way to the floor. “I do not understand you, friend Spider. How can you say a dress is nothing? Look at her. This thread begins in my silkworms and will end in the mouth of a Manticore, who will come to every window in the Woven City and sing until she is hoarse, and her voice will sound like a flute and a trumpet playing together, and at one particular window she will sing the saddest song she has ever sung, full of failure and sorrow and love thwarted, and searches which end in dust. It will be so terrible to hear that the whole city will weep. How can this be nothing? Tears in every flower bed, in every filthy sink! But this particular window will open and this woman will be wearing her crimson dress when she leans out, her smile so wide it would break your heart to see it. Her hair will hang down around her face, and also her beads, and when she calls out the name of the beast, a shower of pearls will fall from her mouth. The Manticore will break three stairs bounding up to her, and will bite her ever so gently on the shoulder when she knocks this woman to the floor in kittenish delight. They will grow very old together, these two: The muzzle of the one and the hair of the other will go quite gray. And when this woman—this woman, right here, whose dress you call nothing!—dies, as die she must, the Manticore will sing over her breathless body in such mourning that the city will shudder and groan and remember its first weeping, and seven suicides will fling themselves from towers in unbroachable anguish in the wake of the lion’s dirge. And in grief, the Manticore will pull all her mistress’s dresses from her armoire, and one by one she will tear them to pieces and eat them, for they will still smell of her, they will still taste of her, and the poor beast will not be able to bear to be apart from anything which recalls this woman whose dress was nothing.”

  Tears rolled down the face of the woman on the dais, her mouth hung open and she could not speak, her tears salting the dress, the beads, her breath ragged and hoarse. Yet through it she smiled, and clasped her bead-strung hands to her lips.

  THE TALE OF

  THE WASTE,

  CONTINUED

  THE BLACK-VEILED WOMAN AND THE LEOPARD lay curled together on the cracked earth, listening. The spotted cat lashed her tail back and forth.

  “In the place where we come from, which is called Urim, no one may go clothed in anything other than the black robes and veils you see draped over my lady. We cannot, between us, imagine such a dress.”

  “Nor could I,” said Scald, her smoke calm and flowing slowly in a circuit that began at the crown of her head and flowed all the way around to the tip of her mere-tail. “Djinn sometimes wear outlandish things, if they are Kings or Queens or Khaighas, but we can bank our flames into any sort of clothes we should desire, and more often than not this will outshine even the richest cloth. But I cannot see where the cloth of my body will end, and that would be a useful trick.”

  “In Urim, we know each other only by our eyes, and every window is also curtained in black.”

  “That would seem to me dreary and morose,” the Djinn said.

  “It certainly seems so to us—but then, Urim is the Funereal City, and we cannot act against our character.”

  The Djinn said nothing, her eyes flashing flame. She put her black hands to the bars of the cage. “Yet you are not dead, and you flee that black-slung place.”

  The cat smiled, in such a way as cats will smile. “The tales of the dead are all the same. We are interested in yours, who live and burn.”

  Scald shook her head. “You are very strange, Rend. And your mistress is stranger still.”

  “So says a fire-fiend caged in iron she could surely melt anytime she wished,” answered the leopard smoothly.

  “Quite so,” the Djinn said chuckling.

  THE

  DRESSMAKER’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  I CANNOT UNDERSTAND WHY SHE LET ME STAY. I am a spider and no more, yet she bade me s
it beside her and tell her of the glass, and the poisoner, and the poor Sirens. She never ceased her weaving, but she laughed at the right parts, and caught her breath at the right parts, just as though she heard me and could have a care for the travails of spiders.

  And she called me Sleeve. She meant for me to learn the value of dresses, she said. And so I did, and I listened to her tales of each garment: the green stocking for the Monopod who would tear his sock to emerald shreds on the thorns of the saltberry trees of the Antipodes, the black coat for the Ajan undertaker who would marry the day before he died, and be both wed and buried in this coat, the wispy white dress woven almost entirely of my own silk, my humble spider’s silk, for the Duke’s wife who would burn it all up into ash the day her child was born, the wings woven of horsehair and rose petals for the mask-maker’s son who wanted to see what Ajanabh looked like from above—these he would hide from his father under the floor, hide them for so long they would turn to dust and brown petals beneath a green carpet. I listened to the stories as carefully as I studied the patterns, and in the company of a Star I learned all that it is right and proper for a spider to do.

  In the church which was not a church, there were mice. This is not really surprising, as all churches are so plagued. Outside the radiant seat where Xide wove, and the rows of silkworm boxes, the place was terribly dusty and ill kept. Dust covered everything, turned it gray and dun and dull—after all, it is a rare celestial who will notice the state of the floor. Only I, who walked upon it, noticed. And in the corners where the mice lived, the dust was so thick and deep that if I was not careful I would sink into it like soft ash, and never be heard from again. The mice were much bigger, and walked through this fog of dust as though it were air, and saw little at all but the varying shades of dust, and became like roving drafts of dust themselves.

  I spoke to them from time to time, for they were in awe of the Weaver-Star, and her worms, and her spider, and dared not approach her—but they longed to touch her, how they longed to touch her!

  One was very large, his muscles trained on dust-wading. Deep in the summer evening he said to me, stroking his whiskers with gray paws:

  “She is so bright!”

  “I suppose she is. Imagine what she looked like in the beginning, though! All that light!”

  The mouse frowned. “She is brighter than anything we know,” he said.

  “She is no brighter than you or I. Her light is spooled out, thread by thread.”

  “She is bright on the inside!” the mouse snapped irritably. “We have been talking in the dust, and we think we would like to eat her.”

  I could not speak for a moment, my voice closed up in horror. “Is this what becomes of living in the dust? You cannot eat her!”

  “If we all bit her at once, we could.”

  “I will not allow it.”

  The mouse grinned. “You have enough poison for five, perhaps six of us if you are very angry. But the rest of us would get to drink all of her! How bright! How sweet! How bright we would become!”

  “Please! You cannot! What would we be without her?”

  “You may be what you like. We will be bright, bright as no mouse has dreamt!”

  THE TALE

  OF THE KINGDOM

  OF MICE

  IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS DUST, AND IN the end there will be Dust, and in the middle there is Dust, Dust, Dust!

  The Church-mice know that Dust is the substance of all possible things. We have heard that in the impossible land beyond the Church-door there are folk who believe that fire is the substance of all things, or water, or ether, or tiny specks of light no one can see. We cannot believe such folly exists.

  Though there are some of us who have heard—ah, if only they had never begun to imagine such a thing!—there is a burning ball outside these walls called the sun, and it is the brightest thing there is.

  We will eat that, too, if it exists.

  In the Dust, nothing is bright. There is only the gray and the dun, and the soft, ashy smell of it brushing your whiskers at every moment. We hate it, but we did not know, for a long time, how it could be escaped. When I was a pinkie at my mother’s teat, I heard the old gray uncles talking about Baldtail, who was the Viceroy of Mice in days gone by—for there can be no King of the Dust, which is all there is, which gives us life and death. The Dust is King over us all. Baldtail was brave, the bravest mouse the Dust will ever allow. He, cloaked in Dust, went forward from the Corners, as Viceroys sometimes do, being valiant rulers who do not shirk adventure. He saw the worms in their boxes—perversion!—and the threads waving, and the copper bowls which surround the Weaver. He rose up on his hind legs to peer into the bowls, to see what they could contain, and his whiskers whickered back and forth, showering bits of Dust into the bowl.

  As I have said, Baldtail was brave. And so he rashly rose up onto his tiptoes, and pulled the copper bowl over onto himself, and the dye which is the magical and alien stuff the Weaver keeps by her side soaked him from his paws to the end of his bare tail. He was Yellow from eyeball to ear-twitch, a brighter Yellow even than this thing they call the sun could possibly be. The dye washed away the Dust, and alone of all mice, Baldtail was free of it; Baldtail shed the substance of mortality and became golden.

  Baldtail returned to the Dust-pillowed Corners, and told all the mice what he had seen and done. At first they recoiled from his yellow body in revulsion and terror. He hurt their eyes, which had never seen anything but Dust, and their fellow mice roving in the Dust, lumps of gray among the gray. But there Baldtail blazed! Yellow! Can you imagine the uproar, the consternation? There were now two things in the universe: Dust and Yellow!

  The more the mice looked at Baldtail, the more they envied him. One or two ventured to lick his gleaming fur with their pink tongues flashing through Dust-covered teeth. He tasted so bright, they said. So bright, and so warm. For his part, Baldtail exhorted us to go forth too and discover the bowls for ourselves.

  “The Weaver sees nothing but her thread and her worms!” he argued. “She will not hurt us! Become bright! Become other than Dust!”

  But we were afraid of the Weaver then. She seemed so very large and cunning. But it was decided that we should become bright, after all, and so we all agreed in the corners of the Corners to eat Baldtail all up, and then we should all be Yellow, and triumph over the Dust. We way-laid the Viceroy in the thickest, dankest mires of Dust, and with our teeth tore him haunch from long, bald tail. He tasted like any other mouse.

  But oh, how it felt! We could feel his brightness in us, his Yellow. It slid in our bellies like butter, like we dreamt the sun would slide. Those of us who ate of Baldtail were exalted among mice, and we began to think as no other mouse had done before: What if there were more than two things in the universe? What if there were more than Dust and Yellow? We could not begin to calculate what these things might be, but we hungered for more brightness, for more light, for more Yellow! Those mice who had not tasted Yellow mourned their loss, and they were more eager than any of us to find these other things.

  Some few of them went out from the Corners and tilted her bowls over their heads. They came running back, scampering with glee, to show us that a thing called Green existed, too, and also the almost unfathomable Purple! We gasped, we choked in awe and ecstasy, we could not believe the universe had room for these things and also Dust. And we leapt upon them and slurped Green and Purple from their fur like meat from bone—of course we slurped meat from bone, too. Those were heady days—I cannot begin to tell you of the Feast of Red!

  But we do not wish to waste any more time lapping at her bowls. Why beg for crumbs when the roast is in plain sight? We know that the Weaver is the source of all Yellowness, all Greenness, all Purpleness, all Redness, all that is not Dust, and we will eat her up as we ate up Baldtail, and Blackwhisker, and Dustbelly, and Manglepaw, and how bright we shall be then!

  THE

  DRESSMAKER’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

&nbs
p; THE MOUSE LICKED HIS CHOPS AND WRUNG HIS gray paws. “What will she taste like? Will she taste like mouse?”

  I trembled under his hungry stare. “I have seen the sun, and the streets, and the world outside the Church-door. Why do you not go into it? I will wedge the door open for you, and you may go in all your numbers into the light, and see for yourself what the universe is made of, how many other things than Yellow and Green and Purple and Red. Do you know what Blue is?”

  “No! Would it be difficult to chew?” The mouse grinned, his dusty teeth showing.

  “Yes, very.” I tapped my hind legs desperately, my belly pained and anxious. “But come, friend mouse!” I said with as much joviality as I could manage. “Xide is hardly worth your effort! She is all wrung out, an old cloth! Come with me, into the world outside the Church-door, and all your brethren, too, and I will show you the very brightest things there are! I will weave whatever you like into beauty and color and light! And you will find that you can be brighter than lamps without eating anything untoward. There are so many roads to brightness.”

  The mouse looked doubtful. “I have heard that in the world outside, it is easy to become Stepped Upon, or Swatted with a Broom. We wish to be bright! We wish to be bright and great, so that no one may Step Upon us, or do anything to us with Brooms!”

  I considered this for a long time, tears forming in my manifold eyes. “I think I know how you may have all you like, and still leave the Weaver in her place, uneaten and unknown.”

  I went to Xide and rested in the hollow of her elbow, as full of sorrows as a web of flies—for now I knew, being a proper spider, what flies were for, and webs, and I understood why the flies had not wanted to speak to me. I told her all I had heard, and all I intended. She smiled sadly, her white eyes gleaming, and let her lips fall—ever so gently!—onto my back. It felt like moonlight, and I was at peace.