The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I began to weave many things in preparation for my leaving, for the exodus of the mice kingdom. First I wove green stockings, and soled green boots in pew-wood. I wove a long black wig of glossy curls. I sent to the Mask-makers’ Slums for a mask of gold and peacock feathers. And because they begged for it, I wove, over days and weeks and months and years, for a spider is still small, and no Star, a long jacket all of yellow, with gold thread at every seam.

  THE TALE OF THE

  CLOAK OF FEATHERS,

  CONTINUED

  “THEY PRACTICED WHILE I WOVE, PRACTICED piling one mouse onto another in extraordinary shapes: first a cat, because they are perverse, and then a dog, then a wolf, then a lion, and then, when they could open a mouth of mice and roar in such a way that it terrified the rafter doves and sent a rain of white feathers to the floor, they carefully built themselves into the form of a man, and on their squirming shoulders I helped them arrange their yellow coat, and around their crawling head I strapped their mask of gold, and onto their wriggling legs I pulled stocking and boot. They elected the mouse who had struck the deal with me to be the voice of their golem. He asked me to give them a good name which had nothing to do with whiskers or tails or paws. I suggested Kostya, the name of the undertaker. Perhaps this was wishful on my part.

  “‘But you will leave Xide be?’ I asked desperately.

  “‘If you keep us supplied with diverting brightnesses, we will surely let her live,’ Kostya allowed magnanimously.

  “And so I keep them in colors, and they leave the heart of Ajanabh unmolested. I give them a cloak of your feathers, and beg your forgiveness, but I cannot let the smallest tooth nibble at her hand.”

  Sleeve sniffled a bit and pulled one of her needle legs upward sharply, tightening a golden thread. “As for my legs, you must have guessed by now. Folio did it, who authors all the wonders of Ajanabh, of which I am but a small and secret member. I asked her to, I begged her to, to be worthy of Xide—and in this you will find a common tale in every quarter and Parish of the city. I paid her with more of my silk than I have ever spun out of my body—I was near dead with the effort, but she needed so much, to improve her daughter’s joints, you see.” Sleeve clacked her forelegs together merrily. “It is strange to think how much of her child is made from the beloved possessions of Ajans! She grants wishes like a Djinn, but oh, she takes and takes in return. Which is, I suppose, also like a Djinn. I wanted to weave more than webs—she obliged me. I was such delicate work, she said.”

  “What will he do with me when my tail is gone?”

  The spider said nothing, clicking her needles together wretchedly. “Perhaps you should remember my poisoner,” she ventured hesitantly.

  “Where do you find this loyalty?” I cried. “I cannot remember your poisoner! My cage is fast, and the feathers he owns bind me; not so your little glass of days gone by, not so your needles! Do something, if you hate him so, unlock my cage, bite him, do not serve him pitifully, as though you can do nothing else!” I rattled the blackened bars in frustration, but Sleeve simply regarded me coolly, her threads waving.

  “Do all large creatures think this way, as though their travails are the tragedies of the world, and the suffering of the small is nothing compared to their own? Certainly Kostya thinks so, now that he casts a long shadow. He does not mark me any longer—I am an eight-legged machine with no other purpose than to manufacture brightness in his sight. From where he towers, he cannot even see me. But he told you there are corners here, and where there are corners there are mice, and all mice live in awe of what he has accomplished, he who walks among men in such beautiful clothes. He does not need to watch me; they watch. They hear. A bell is a cage as sure as your own.” She shook her head. “I am not so bright as you, but still I bleed and bear up under him, for her sake.”

  Abashed, I lay back on my cushions. The cage rocked and the rafter groaned under its weight. The night pooled black on the thin floor-boards. Sleeve’s voice echoed again from the bell, thoughtful and rasping.

  “The thread I use in your cloak is not from your feathers, you know. It is the reddest of red-golden silk, and I helped Xide to spin it out from the worms in their boxes. And she told me—she always tells me—where the thread will end. Would you like to know?”

  “Yes,” I said weakly.

  “‘Little Sleeve,’ she whispered—she is so considerate, not to hurt me with loudness, as so many others do—‘you would not believe where this thread will wend! All the way through your little body, through to a cradle in the night, into swaddling clothes and a child’s only comfort. But it will not end even there—it is a gift from sister to sister, and there is so much fire to come, so much fire, and light!’

  “And so I think again you should remember my poisoner, and take heart.”

  There was no more from the bell, though I waited and waited and strained to hear the smallest thing. But there was nothing. The bell tower was hushed and still. In due time, the mouse-man returned to snatch another fistful of feathers from my tail. He sang and pranced in glee. I did not scream, but whimpered, and wept, and the circle beneath the cage grew. And so my days and nights went, with a spider at my ear and mice at my cage door. Once or twice I thought I saw the flash of gray fur or tiny black eyes behind the gaping eye holes of his mask.

  I am very large, but a cloak is thick with layers, and when my tail was gone, and I naked and shamed, it was still not enough. Thus I had to wait, and so did he, until it grew back, and could be plucked again. Sleeve, being but a little seamstress, could only weave so fast, and between these two happenstances, the weaving of the cloak spanned more than two years. I felt myself growing dim and old with loss of blood and flight and sour, golden tears. Three times he plucked my tail, and in the meantime the bell tower became piled with shining things, with jars of silver and braziers of copper, with coins and endless jackets, all of yellow and each brighter still than the others, with bolts of cloth that seemed to glow, with fruit that sparkled in the firelight—and the remains of this I was allowed to eat when Kostya had finished: apples and pomegranates and plantains and slick, wet dates. Occasionally, true to his word, there were mice, snatched from the corners of the tower and dangled into my cage: Why should he weep over mice who had not eaten Yellow or Green, who had not been reared in the Dust, who did not live in his casing of silk?

  Finally, when I had no strength left, so often had I been plucked and stripped, so often had my joy and my will gone floating up to the bell, Kostya came home from his evening sport shaking and giggling with anticipation. I could hardly lift my head without his ordering me to do so.

  “Lantern, perk up! It is ready, I am sure it is! The brightest thing I have ever known! I shall be brighter even than you!”

  I thumped my sparse red tufts feebly. A few sparks crackled against the bars.

  “What a sullen brat you are,” he admonished, adjusting his golden peacock mask. “Sleeve! Sleeve! Is not my cloak ready? Send it down! I have waited so long! You promised! If you do not present it immediately I shall run at quick speed all the way back to the Church-door!”

  Out of the rim of the bell came a sheen of gold which grew and grew. Even I was stunned, dazzled by it: the cloak of feathers, finished beyond imagination, so long that it would flare out behind the wearer in a regal pool of feather-silk. It shone with gold and red and orange and white, each feather layered upon others, the eyelets almost too bright to look at. It had a little, stiff collar of my shortest feathers, which would cuff the face jauntily, and it glowed with my own light, my own colors, fringed and lovely, lovely beyond the dreams of the highest-born tailor. I could not imagine a Queen, an Emperor, a dandy who would not be made small and mean and dark in that cloak. It was like the very sun woven into the shape of shoulders.

  Kostya squeaked in ecstasy. But as he examined it closely, he began to frown.

  “It was brighter before,” he groused.

  Sleeve ran down the length of the hanging cloth, still wavering fr
om the bell. “His feathers will only flame when they are attached—he is the fire, not they. But he is too big to wear as a shoulder brooch—no cloak has ever been made which could be its equal, Kostya, my friend.” She clicked her needles and swallowed hard. “You are brighter even than she,” she spat finally.

  At that, Kostya leapt into the air, dancing a jerky but joyful little step, clicking his emerald-booted heel against his emerald-stockinged calf. “Help me!” he giggled. “Help me put it on!”

  He stepped into the cowl of the cloak, and Sleeve, with her needle legs and a great deal of struggle, heaved the shimmering thing over Kostya’s squirming shoulders, ignoring his chirps of lust and the wringing of his gloved fingers. It lay on him like a huge, fiery hand, and in the moment that Sleeve pulled the left side up onto his body and fastened the clasp of my own talon, clipped and carved, the man of mice began to scream.

  He writhed in the cloak, but his mask kept his face impassive, the little slit of mouth neither moving nor twisting. Terrible and high the first voice came, and then hundreds, thousands, shrieking tinny voices, a chorus of mice in agony—and they began to pour out of the eyes of the mask, out of the mouth, out of the wig, chewing through the green stockings, the boots, rushing from the brocaded belly, tearing the yellow coat to filthy shreds. The mice poured out of their body, but as they ran, blind, desperate, they began to die, two by two, falling onto the floor-boards with small, wretched thumps, one by one. Sleeve ran among them, piercing them with her needles and crying in her own hoarse, thready way, terrified and triumphant. It took a long time for her to make sure they were dead, dead as dust.

  When she was finished, she hooked the cage key from his polished belt onto one of her legs and dragged it to me. I am not so dexterous with my beak as a rule, but I certainly had the grace to let myself free of that thing which had kept me for years on end.

  “I have been thinking,” panted the spider, “that perhaps mice ought not to be indulged. Perhaps a Star does not really need a spider to look after her. Perhaps I have lived in a bell long enough.”

  “I do not understand,” I said in wonder, stretching my wings from wall to wall.

  “It took me two years to infuse every feather with my poison. I am only one spider, after all. It steamed with the stuff by the time I was done, though you could not see it. They breathed in my vapors, and in their panic—one can always depend upon the panic of mice—chewed through their clothes and the bottom layer of feathers, and swallowed all my poisons as eagerly as they have swallowed everything else. My poison is not bright, but it is quick.”

  Weeping and laughing together, Sleeve and I walked through the wreckage of mice. I crushed them underfoot, one by one, making little rings on the boards like ghastly cups. She sat on my shoulder, stroking my feathers as my breath heaved in grief and relief.

  When we had finished, I let my sparking tufts light the cloak, and we watched it burn, the poison leaping bright and green in the flames. We watched it burn until it was clean, and then Sleeve asked me to break the bell.

  “I cannot turn that lock,” she said. “Surely you will do this thing for me.”

  I looked up into the disappearing rafters, so broken and high that the sky poured in like a bottle of black ink. I gave a few flaps of my wings to meet it, and though without my tail I was awkward, I managed to shiver it to bronze splinters with a blow of my beak.

  “Thank you,” Sleeve said, and began slowly to walk down the staircase, her satisfied needles clicking all the way down.

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED

  “OBVIOUSLY IT GREW BACK AGAIN,” I SAID, eyeing his full, thick tail, glowing cheerfully in the dark. It lit the room like a hearth.

  “Obviously,” he said.

  “But this place has hurt you so—why would you stay? And in that same cushioned cage? What a morbid beast you must be!”

  He laughed quietly, so as not to wake the child. “At first I was afraid to leave, to go back into this strange city, with its empty streets and alien sounds. I cowered here. I kept eating mice. But finally I peeked out of the door, and saw the Parish overtaken by all these saints of Ajanabh, who stayed, and danced in the ruins. I know something about that—and so I went to dance, as well. In the Carnival of the Dawn I am the sun’s best blaze, and in my flames the city sees each day born again. I am not a phoenix, but I do my best.”

  “You act as though you do it all by yourself!” The child sat up suddenly, long hair tumbling around her face, her arms crossed over her chest, glaring at the great Firebird.

  “Well, I did, my dark-eyed darling, before you came along.” Lantern looked up at me, his golden eyes bright with pride. “Children change everything, don’t you know?”

  The child, as I could see her clearly now, was extraordinarily beautiful. Her eyes were wide and clear and brown as good kindling, her hair braided loosely, long and soot black, her nose fine and flared, her chin cut sharply as a gem. I do not know very much about human children; she was certainly no woman grown yet. But she was not a baby, either, and I saw corded muscles in her arms—I could certainly believe she danced. Winding up her right arm and one side of her chest, covered in minimal fashion by scraps of red cloth, were intricate tattoos, painstakingly pricked into her skin: the long, forked black outline of a dancing flame, painted all the way up to her neck and licking at her cheek.

  “Still,” I mumbled, “she cannot be your daughter. Those are not true flames; she is no true child of yours.”

  The girl narrowed her eyes at me, full of hate and disdain. “What do you know?” she hissed. “Who are the parents of plain, smelly smoke? He is my papa, as true as anything you have known in your life.”

  Lantern looked uncomfortable.

  “Perhaps it is time,” he said miserably. “Perhaps I have indulged you like a little mouse.” The child looked stricken, her eyes filling with tears as easily as a child’s will. “She came back, you see. After all that time, she came back to me…”

  THE TALE OF THE

  CLOAK OF FEATHERS,

  CONTINUED

  I HAD LEARNED TO DANCE IN THE CARNIVAL, and all my feathers were full again. The cloak was closed safely away, and I owed fealty to no one. It was almost as though none of it had happened, almost as though I had never seen the world through a cage. But I could not quite bear to take the cage down, to dash its bars in and tear up the blue cushions. I told myself that it reminded me of what happens when a thief is not careful—for did not all this begin in Ravhija’s orchard, when I was so careless as to be caught with my mouth full of cherries? But I think in truth I was afraid of it, as though it were a living thing that had swallowed me up for all those years, and was still too dreadful to approach.

  So it was that I was roosting in the ruins of the bell when she came.

  I heard her coming up the stairs, a slow shuffle, a panting. When I think on it now I know it must have been so hard for her to climb those steep and winding steps. But climb she did, and stood before me, radiant and sorrowing and old, older than I had imagined, being but a silly bird who thought she would be just the same as when I knew her, just the same as before. This is the folly of all lovers, I suppose.

  My goose was there, with silver hair and a little coat of goose feathers, and long gray skirts. My Aerie, whom I had loved so long ago, when she was a spellbound goose and I did not know what a cage was. My Aerie, so long lost. She did not need to speak; I knew her, even walking in that ridiculous woman’s body—but what was not ridiculous about that moment? An old woman and a bird: as though a goose and a Firebird were not impossible enough. She had passed beyond all possibility of touch, of nesting, of flight, of the sky and of me. I laughed, a hoarse, barking, anguished sound. We stood facing, each swallowing slowly how far we had come from the other.

  In her arms she held a baby, wrapped in gray cloth and scraps of fur. I hardly saw it for seeing her.


  “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I didn’t ask to get old, or grow arms and legs. I would have been happy just to stay with you. But you wouldn’t let me.”

  “My feather—”

  “I know, my darling bird, I know. We could neither of us help it. Ours was a very sad story—perhaps the bedraggled opera down there will perform it one of these days. But being a woman is not so bad, and if I had stayed a goose, I would not have lived long enough to find you. Geese are brief creatures, and often silly.”

  She told me then all she had done since we parted, how she had known Stars and passed out of the world and in again, how she had delivered the Star’s child and borne it out of the dark. I told her of the spider and the mice and the Star at the heart of the city. We would have let our adventures pool between us all night, but the child in her arms awoke and began to squall. She gave it her knuckle to suck and it quieted a bit. She looked up at me through her wispy hair, which was, in her old age, not unlike long, thin feathers.

  “I brought her for you, all this way,” she said.

  “A child?”

  “You wanted chicks so much, when I flew with you. You wanted them more than you wanted me. When this little thing first tugged at my hair, I knew where she would be safe, I knew you would look after her, I knew you would want her. She is not a chick; she has no feathers and no beak and she will never fly. But then, neither will I, any longer.”

  I looked at the swaddled girl, her big dark eyes blinking sleepily at me, her shock of black hair like burned grass. She was not very much like a Firebird, but my heart was always gentle, and when the tiny thing reached out with her chubby red hand to clutch my warm bronze beak and I heard her laugh, I remembered all my cousin’s orange eggs, I remembered the ash-nest and the desert trees, and I knew that poor orphan for my own, my solace, my hatched egg, my girl.