The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “I would have come looking—” I began.

  “You would never have found me.”

  “She is beautiful.”

  “I know.”

  Aerie, businesslike and brusque, sniffed a little, and began to root through the broken planks and bolts of silk and shining things the mice had left to find enough shards to make a cradle. While she searched, I sang quietly to the child, and she gurgled along with me, after a while.

  It was nearly morning when the cradle was finished, a ramshackle but strangely pretty thing resting on two long, golden cello bows and rounded shards of bell, built of red wood and stone, bedded in the Weaver’s cloth and hooded with the lid of a chest that had once held piles of coins which had caught the mice’s magpie glance. She laid the child inside and went back to the cloth to cut a blanket.

  “Wait!” I cried suddenly, and dashed up the rafters, making the whole tower creak and shake. I pulled out my cloak of feathers from the space in the wall where I had closed it away, unable to look at it, unable to remember without terrible pains in my tail. I flew down, the golden cloak trailing behind me like kite cloth. With this we swaddled our girl, with this we tucked her into her dreams, and that black-haired dear slept in my down, all those golden feathers gleaming around her face like sunbeams.

  I missed the Carnival that morning. Aerie lay in my wings as she had once done, and we listened to the sounds of a sleeping daughter. I struggled with tears that I absolutely would not let fall on her slender shoulders.

  “But you will not go for a while, will you?” I whispered thickly. “I could not bear it. This is such a lonely place. Given time I could learn to hold this child so dear, dear as flames. Dear as any duck has held her chicks. But not without you. You must stay awhile yet, for me. We shall be a family, for a while. Just a little while.”

  Aerie turned to me and smiled dazzlingly, like a dozen noontime suns. “Of course I will stay with you, my only love, my own.”

  She did stay. For a little while.

  It was summer when she asked me. I had carried her up to the topmost rafters of the tower and she sat there happily, kicking her feet in the air, looking out over near-empty Ajanabh, pointing like a little girl at the landmarks she knew: the Vareni with its colors blazing, the Opera Ghetto faintly singing in the distance, the square of the Cinnamon-Star, and little Agrafena dancing, tiny and dark against the light.

  “Would you give me a feather?” Aerie said suddenly, squinting up at me, shading her faded eyes.

  “Why? What could you ask me that I would not do in a moment?” “I want to be able to call you whenever I wish, when I need to.”

  “Just cry out; I shall be here. Do I not jump whenever the child cries?”

  Aerie laughed. I did not like how dry and brittle her voice was, like crackling wood. “Even so.”

  I thought about it. The sun was so bright and so red, that merciless southern sun I had come to know well. “For no one else would I ever lose a single feather, but to you, I would give them all, and more: my burning heart, given over flaming into your hands.”

  I craned my long neck, and the sun was caught in its loop for a moment, its glare and mine blazing together. I pulled a single long feather from my tail, tipped in sparkling blood, and let it fall into her wrinkled hands.

  And do you know? It didn’t hurt at all.

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED

  “IN THE MORNING, SHE HAD DISAPPEARED AS though she had never been, and I stood alone in my bell tower, with a hungry daughter to feed.” The Firebird ruffled the girl’s hair with his massive wing. “I called her Solace, for so she is, my solace for an empty nest, my solace for a lost goose.”

  Solace was crying, her little shoulders heaving horribly, her head bent low.

  “I thought… I thought… I thought I was yours,” she whispered.

  “You are, little pumpkin-seed!”

  “No, I thought… I was really yours. You came from a tree, but you’re a bird. The Manticore comes out of fruit, and looks nothing like fruit. A dragon looks like a girl when it is young. I thought… I thought I was a Firebird. I thought I would sprout wings one day and fly with you, so close to the sun! I thought: Nothing in this world looks like its parents. I am no different.”

  She put her arms around the great neck of her papa, and wept bitterly.

  “I am sorry, poor dear. I ought to have told you. But I loved you so well, and you were so happy. I could not bear to tell you otherwise. Do you know,” he said to me over the shaking head of his daughter, “that when she could walk and jump she ran straight to my old cage and made it her bedroom? She loved the old thing, how it swayed and swung! I piled up more cushions for her, and the minute she was bouncing and laughing inside, it did not seem so dreadful after all.”

  “I am just an orphan,” the child whispered to no one in particular.

  “No, Solace, never that.”

  I watched the two of them, burrowed into each other, and casually patted back some of my smoke-hair that threatened to overflow its basket. They slowly recalled that they were not alone. Solace hopped out of the Firebird’s tail and sat on the rim of the ivory cage, looking at me intently.

  “You are a very good listener,” she said shrewdly, kicking her legs back and forth. Her right leg was blazing with the same flame tattoos, all the way down to her toes. She wore a short little skirt of the same ragged red cloth as her shirt—a dancer’s fluttering scarves. “I can’t go nearly so long without asking questions when Papa gets on about the dragon-girl and old Sleeve. She comes to see me sometimes, you know. Says I’m just like her: feral, not properly socialized. I asked her what proper girls do once, and she said she didn’t know, but she thought that dancing like I do was probably not on the list.”

  “Probably not,” I allowed. “Among my people I’m considered a matron, though I’d wager I’m no older than you in years properly counted. I don’t know what a proper Queen does, either, but I’m reasonably sure they don’t go behind enemy lines and listen to stories, so I think we’re about even in our wickedness.” I smiled. Solace flinched a little at the wisps of flame between my teeth.

  “I could tell you a story, if you like,” the girl said, a deep blush rising in her cheeks—but she did not cast her eyes down. I didn’t imagine Lantern had taught her how to do that.

  The Firebird nudged her a little, pressing his warm head to her back. “There’s time before dawn,” he said, proud as any father of his precocious girl. “Tell the bad old devil a tale if you like.”

  She giggled, a sound that from another child might have been precious, but hers was genuine and dear. “Very well! I shall tell you how I learned to dance…”

  THE

  FIRE-DANCER’S

  TALE

  BY THE TIME I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO DANCE, Ajanabh was well and truly dead. I was weary of the bell tower, but even in a city of artists, I was not brave enough—not quite yet—to go down into the streets without my papa to find out what it is that a girl ought to do. Even a dead city has ghosts, and I could hear them at night, howling and singing and dancing on this great red grave.

  I only came out to watch Papa dance at the Carnival of the Dawn. He was so beautiful, with his tail waving high and low, fluttering like a rain of stars. I wanted to stand in his tail while he danced, stomping his big claws down on the courtyard, throwing his plumes back in the first light, flaring that tail like a lady’s gown. I wanted to stand there and see all that fire moving around me, and listen to the sound of it—fire makes this great, roaring, snarling sound when it spins and leaps, did you know that? I hear it in my dreams.

  One day when I was roasting a mouse and a few dates for breakfast, Sleeve clattered up the stairs as she will sometimes do, grumbling and grousing as she often does.

  “Lantern, you are raising this child to be as wild as a kitten lost in the jungle! You must let her find other lit
tle girls and learn what it is that girls like, what they eat, what they do when they are happy, what they do when they are sad! Would you have her be like me? The other spiders think my webs are strange, even now.”

  “I don’t like other little girls,” I piped. “They are silly and taller than me and they have no flames at all.” I chewed a mouse bone and Sleeve gestured in righteous indignation.

  “See? She’s a wolf-girl.”

  “I’m a Firebird!” I insisted. I suppose I feel a bit ridiculous about that, now, but you let me believe it, Papa, so I cannot be blamed for having done just as you told me.

  “Lantern, let me take her down into the city. If she is to live here, she must learn an art, or she will be shunned, and a shunned girl cries very much, and you will never hear the end. I shall take her to the calligrapher in the high shop, for that is the closest thing to a little girl I know—he has similar parts, at least—and we will find out what it is that is right and proper for a girl to do.”

  “I am not a girl.” I frowned. Oh, Papa. You should have told me. I should not have made such a very big fool of myself otherwise. Poor Sleeve!

  But true to her word we went first to the calligrapher in the high shop, with his hat of blue and buckles, and his ink-stained fingers, and his many podiums with beautiful books open to beautiful pages of writing, with pearl-handled magnifying glasses resting in their spines.

  “What is it, Master Calligrapher, that little girls do in the way that spiders weave?” Sleeve asked primly.

  The calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: “It is right and proper,” he said, “for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones.”

  Sleeve beamed at me, pleased that we had discovered the answer in our first try. So it was that I went every day for a whole month to the calligrapher’s shop and read his books, which had lovely pictures in gold leaf and letters like swans in flight. I liked the books very much, but it was so quiet in his shop, and all his shutters were closed, so that the vellum would not be damaged by the sun. It was terribly dark and the calligrapher squinted, his face close to his pages. He never talked to me at all. If I stay here much longer, I thought, I shall become as weak and thin as a book’s page, and then one flick of my papa’s tail will set me alight!

  Very politely, as politely as I knew how, I asked if I couldn’t take a few of the books with me—the very sturdy ones, mind you, with not so very many golden pictures—and read them myself in the sunlight, or in the bell tower, or anywhere at all but that dark, dreary, dusty place. Besides, I knew to be wary of dust. My papa told me so. The calligrapher agreed, glad to me rid of me, I think, and I ran from his shop with three volumes clutched to my chest, my favorites of all his collection, the ones about lost girls and lost beasts and grotesques. And so I was sitting up against a mangrove tree reading about saints and centaurs when Sleeve came clattering up.

  “What are you doing! You should be with your calligrapher!”

  “It was dark, and he never spoke to me. Lantern speaks to me every day! How was I to concentrate on the books in all that silence?”

  “But he was a man; he could have taught you all you needed to know about being a little girl!”

  “But he is not a little girl,” I pointed out, I thought very wisely. “What does he know? His books know more than he does, and I took some with me, so I think I shall be all right.”

  Sleeve threw up four of her legs in digust. “How am I to become acquainted with real and actual girls? There are not so many little ones left in Ajanabh, and those there are often think it is right and proper for girls to crush spiders.”

  So we went to the creatures with which Sleeve was acquainted. We came first to the ants, their little mandibles gleaming red and their hill a great mass of straw and stone.

  “We think it is right and proper for a girl to enter into soldiery as soon as possible,” they said in unison. “No need to shelter the child—winter is coming, lean and toothed.”

  “But there are no soldiers left in Ajanabh,” I pointed out. One very large ant huffed angrily and said: “What nonsense! We are here!”

  And so we went to the worms, who writhed and churned in the dry red soil. They turned over in their muck and smiled in their wormy way, white and fat and eyeless.

  “We think it is right and proper for a girl to die. Girls must die if worms are to feast, and we think it is extremely proper for worms to feast.”

  I grimaced; Sleeve recoiled. “Thank you for your honesty,” I said, “but I think we shall have to disagree.” Their faceless smiles broadened. “For now,” I added.

  And so we went to the spiders. “I did not want to do this,” Sleeve groused, “but you are dear to me.”

  The spiders kept to their webs like acrobats determined not to touch the ground. I thought Sleeve’s needles must have made them nervous, but she put on a very brave face and asked her question. The spiders only laughed, high, tinny laughter like the shaking of marsh reeds.

  “What do you know about anything?” they jeered. “Spiders don’t weave, they eat. They spin and hunt and catch and feed. You have always been the stupidest of us. Whoever heard of a spider weaving dresses? Associating with birds? What is wrong with you, Sleeve? You are the worst sort of maiden aunt for this child. Girls weave, you freakish, hideous thing! Girls make dresses. Girls squeal very loudly and leap about and clutch their smelling salts.”

  Sleeve said nothing. Her body slumped, as though she had expected no more, and I could hear her sniffling against the dust. Well, I certainly leapt about then, and blew their webs into ruined threads. “What do you know?” I cried, kicking their silk in. “Sleeve makes the most beautiful things in the world while you sit about snickering into your ratty old webs! You know nothing! I have never made a dress in my life—she has made dozens! Does that make her a girl, and I a spider? And I have never smelled salt in all my days; what a stupid idea! Come, Sleeve, your cousins are the worst relations I can imagine.”

  I cannot really say I was a well-behaved child. I cannot really say I have learned much since.

  Her back was straight and her steps high as we left them, and as we walked I saw that her faceted eyes had a gleam in them. By gently pricking my toes she coaxed me down into the Clock-makers’ Square, with all its clicking and shadows and tap-tap-tapping of hands against numerals. She led me to a door all of locks, every sort of lock you can imagine: huge brass bolts to tiny, intricate silver keyholes no wider than a feather, wooden locks with gaping slots and golden locks with birds carved into their faces, locks so old and worn that only rust was left, and locks in the shape of open, staring eyes blown from purest glass.

  I put my hands against them and the door swung open. There was no one inside.

  “Hello?” I called, and Sleeve echoed me.

  There was movement in the rear of the workshop, a crash and a jangling. Two golden eyes blinked at me in a wreckage of plate metal and gears which had been her camouflage.

  “I am not supposed to come out when company is present,” the creature said uncertainly, all metal and whirling clock hands.

  “But there is no one here to call us company and make us tea.”

  “Mother is out,” the glittering woman said.

  “You can answer our question just as well,” cried Sleeve, delighted, introducing the woman as Hour, who had spider silk in her joints. “What is it that girls do in the way that spiders weave?”

  Hour seemed to consider it, wringing her metal hands. “I do not know,” she answered after a long pause.

  “What do you suspect?” I encouraged.

  The woman looked wretched, as wretched as a face made out of broken clocks and breastplates can look. “I suspect,” she whirred tentatively, “that they live in castles. Beyond that it is hard to say.”

  “A bell to
wer is like a castle,” I said. Sleeve rolled her eyes.

  “I am sorry, but it is not,” said the ticking woman. “It does not have a Prince inside or outside, and there is no portcullis or moat or chapel. Many castles have towers, but a tower is not a castle all by itself.”

  “I am sure I do not wish to live in a castle, then. It sounds vile,” I answered. “And what in the world is a Prince?”

  Hour brightened. “If you would like to know I can explain about primogeniture and patriarchal descent systems,” she said eagerly.

  “There are no castles handy,” chirped Sleeve hurriedly, “so I think we shall have to seek elsewhere. Do not worry! At least you will not have to ask the squid. They are ghastly.”

  “I am sorry,” said the machine, slumping at the shoulders. “I will try to have the right answer, if you will come back later.”

  I put my hand on the creature’s shoulder. “It’s all right; I don’t know, either. But spiders are funny and determined things, and must be treated carefully.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is the same with clocks.”

  We left the strange little shop, and Sleeve seemed glad to be away. She took me next up to the high, windy peak of the highest tower in the city. “Is this a castle?” I asked.

  “Certainly not,” puffed the spider.

  And that is how I met the Sirens, who were frightening as fire unchecked, but pretty enough to make me bashful. They nuzzled Sleeve in a very unbirdlike fashion, their women’s legs pointing and skipping in joy.

  “My old friends, you must help me! Tell me what it is that a girl does in the way that a spider weaves, so that Solace will not grow up to be the wrong sort of girl.”

  We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.

  “Please.” Sleeve sighed. “You needn’t be a bunch of silly, flea-bitten birds for my benefit.”

  “I’m a Firebird, anyway,” I grumbled under my breath.