The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  We think, went their flowing feet, their dancing penmanship, that girls ought to sing. They ought to sing, and dance while they’re singing. But we are not girls, and so can be almost certain that we know nothing about the matter. But we let you try, so why not her?

  The sisters seized me with their wings—theirs were cool and dry, not like Papa’s, but a wing is the right sort of thing, that I knew. Everything good in the world has feathers and wings and claws. They led me to the ink-wash and passed my feet through, and then began to whirl me between them. It was a mess of legs and wings and beaks, but it slowly became a dance. They lifted my feet with deftly turned ankles, moved my arms in time with their wings. We danced together, the Sirens and I, but they never sang, never once, and I spun with them in silence, faster and faster.

  When it was over, the four of us looked down at the paper floor, the expanse of swirling ink, trying to read the tale we had written there—something lovely, I hoped, with no castles at all and a great many birds—the tale our feet had dragged behind us in our swift, complicated dance.

  There was a scribble, a scrawl, a jagged mess. The sisters had managed a few words here and there, but in their instruction they could not manage both the steps and the tale. There was nothing of note. They leapt up again and fluttered to a fresh corner.

  You are hopeless at letters, they wrote, that is very sad.

  “But the dancing!” I cried. “The dancing! I want to dance like that!”

  Try the Dancing-Master, they suggested with a flourish. We only know how to dance with each other, how to dance the letters. We suspect perhaps one ought only to dance with one’s sisters.

  Sleeve sighed. Her poor needle legs were so tired of walking. But she was determined, more determined, certainly, than I, who after all had little interest in the fates of girls. We wound down from the Sirens and into the streets again, the winding, circular streets of my home. This time she led me down, down the tight, thin alleys and down streets wider than Lantern’s wings, but we went up no hills, turning and twisting to remain pointed downward, until we came to a little grating in a high wall, the side, I thought, of the opera house, which even the opera singers barely used anymore, since they now had the whole city happy to stand in for any courts of intrigue or enchanted pastorals they could dream of. It was nearly dark by the time we found it.

  The grate was small, and it led into a darkness without depth, but I was little then: I could wriggle through the bars, and darkness was darkness, and could not hurt me—Lantern taught me that, blazing as he did against the fears of any crawling shadow.

  “Come with me!” I said to my spider, who hovered around the copper bars, and looked suspiciously into the murk.

  “No,” said Sleeve slowly, shaking her head. “This is where the Dancing-Master lives. There is another entrance by Simeon’s knee, but that is farther. I thought this one best, and I brought you, but I know very well how to dance.”

  I shrugged. I was not very concerned. I walked into the dark with a straight back. The mud was warm on my feet, and as I descended the air became cooler and cooler, and the ceiling higher and higher, until I knew I was nowhere near the opera house any longer, and even if I put my arms straight overhead, there was nothing above me but dark air, swirling and thick.

  At last, the mud slackened, and a real path hardened beneath me, lit by a sudden bank of torches which burned low and sullen on the walls. Wider and wider the path grew, until it opened into a vast vault, whose stone walls vanished into bronze domes, arching up and up and up, spangled with painted dolphins with intricate eyes and faded white stars near the peaks of the many domes. The sides were scored with ancient watermarks, ascending the walls like the rings of a tree.

  At my feet was a maze. It was low and small and intricate, but no challenge at all, really, for you could jump over any of the walls as easy as you please. The tallest one came up to my waist. They were made of rock and bone, the little walls, Ajanabh’s familiar red rock with chicken bones and duck bones and common gull bones pressed into the sharp corners. It angled off into the distance, over the entire floor of the vault, polished bones glinting in the firelight.

  “These used to be cisterns,” came a voice like footsteps echoing in a marble hall, “when Ajans cared to worry about such things as sieges. There was once enough water here to keep the city drinking tea well into any war, slurping at their scarlet cups while the army outside ate itself into defeat. You used to be able to put your ear to the street and hear the gentle sloshing of the dark water—it was a comforting sound, for so many people. Now it is empty, it is drunk all up, and no one thinks about sieges anymore.”

  I looked but could see no one. I began to step over the first wall of the maze—and almost stepped on them.

  At the entrance to the maze was a pair of shoes. They were twisted out of the roots of cassia trees, curling wildly at the toe and the heel, the red roots snarling and looping like an embroidered hem. The scent of them was rich and dark and sweet: expensive cinnamon floating in a cup of black tea.

  “Don’t be afraid,” came the voice again. “I am for wearing—no one will punish you.”

  I raised my foot to slip it inside, and stopped. “I am supposed to learn to dance. And find out what girls are meant to do, the way a spider is meant to weave.”

  “Ah, but not all spiders weave, so your question is a bit foolish on the face of it, don’t you think?”

  I blushed. “Sleeve wanted to know. It doesn’t make any difference to me,” I mumbled.

  “As for dancing, there is nothing easier. Put your feet in my care. I am not called the Dancing-Master for nothing.”

  “You are the Dancing-Master?”

  “Of course. What else could teach so well as I? But I do not teach alone: This maze is laid out such that should you step through the correct path, by its end you will have learned the most extraordinary dance, such that any coronation would be proud to see at the height of its feast, such that any holy dervish would weep and call you his devotion.”

  “I think this is very strange—”

  “All things are strange which are worth knowing. Come, I have asked a third time. Step into me and while you walk the maze I shall tell you how a pair of empty shoes came to be at the bottom of a cistern.”

  I lowered my foot and sank into the shoes, which were just my size, and felt like sudden fists seizing my feet.

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  CINNAMON SHOES

  ATTEND TO ME, GIRL. I AM YOUR METRONOME. Keep to my voice; I will keep your rhythm true.

  I see you go bare-shod. This is most likely extremely sensible. Shoes are no end of trouble for girls, that tribe you seek in the dark. How many have danced to death in slippers of silk and glass and fur and wood? Too many to count—the graveyards, they are so full these days. You are very wise to let your soles become grubby with mud, to let them grow their own slippers of moss and clay and calluses. This is far preferable to shoes which may become wicked at any moment.

  I seem to remember being a tree. A cinnamon tree drank rain until someone pulled it out of the earth by the hair and made a very nice armoire, two high-backed chairs with seats of stiff linen, a round table at which generations of children learned their letters, a post for witch-burning, an extremely expensive book with cinnamon boards and cinnamon paper written upon with cinnamon ink—a Psalter, I think—a carriage wheel, and one pair of shoes.

  I remember also a woman’s hands, and how she sipped her tea of white leaves, violets, and a single red leaf as she pulled the roots into the complicated knot-work you see now. Her shop was pleasant and dusty and I had very high company to converse with, any number of riding boots and dancing heels, their white pelts stitched with fine blue thread. But they were truculent beasts, and would not speak to the ragged cinnamon shoes. I was not sorry to leave them when I was packed away and sent to the city on the red plain.

  In Ajanabh I was the superior shoe. No riding boot could compare to a shoe of
cinnamon, the sacred stuff of the city. I dreamt of sweet, slim feet whirling and kicking at festivals of spice and starlight; I dreamt of being kept on a high podium with a rose-colored cushion, my arches cupped by yielding silk. Instead, I was taken to a tomb.

  A tomb is like a cistern, you know. It is full of flesh as a cistern is full of water, and the ceilings drip. There are devotional paintings of the virtuous dead etched into the stone with inks that cost more than water or corpses, and voices echo, and the shadows lick the corners clean, and no one would go inside were they not compelled. I suppose he was compelled, the priest who bought me dear and carried me to his daughter’s bier like anointing oil.

  She had been a good girl when she was alive, he assured everyone who would listen. But what father has ever said otherwise? She was pious; she was kind to the poor. Every morning she would wash herself in freezing water—such an expense, such an extravagance in Ajanabh where they say the glass bubbles in the pane in summertime! And when her skin ached with the cold, she would dust red her arms, her chest, her face, her hair, with cinnamon ground finer than the most treasured dreams of salt. They were a holy family, and had to set an example, her father said. She went to the finest seminary in the city and learned there how to distill both liquor and ink from cinnamon and the light of the Stars—and more important, she learned that each has its proper time and use, and used them as they were meant. No one was more moderate in her dress or her person, her father said. No one lived who was more serious or more studious. No one behaved so much and so often precisely as it is proper for a girl to behave.

  And when the fields died, her father said, she was disconsolate, as it is necessary for the child of the Priest of Red Spices to be. She bathed in their icy fountain until her teeth chattered and her lips went blue and swollen. She prayed and studied her own little cassia-cuttings, her own window garden that it is only correct for a priest’s daughter to keep, but they were wild and thick with needles and dusty with sweetness. And finally, she stopped lashing her skin with bitter water, and left her garden to walk out among the fields, where she buried herself in the ailing earth.

  She left her eyes and her mouth open to the air, but the rest she covered up in red loam like a child pulling up her favorite blanket over her chest. And there—devout girl!—she kept up her prayers, encouraging the earth to learn from her hot blood, her beating heart, her ascendant soul. And so the earth took these things, but, like a man of poor breeding, learned nothing. Whatever withered the roots of the basil and the paprika, the cardamom and the garlic greens, withered her in the soil, and once planted, his beloved daughter never rose again.

  They unearthed her form, cold as it had been on any of her sacrosanct mornings in the frozen fountain, and carried it to the family tomb. There it was laid out on this very bier of fragrant cedar, a spray of cassia flowers clutched in her virginal hands, a dress of rarest bark-cloth arranged in precise folds on her body. He wept at her side every day, he said, his tears her icy fountain.

  Who knows with what grief’s whispering he decided that I would wake her? It is best not to ask, for the tribe of dead girls is infinitely more inscrutable than that of those living, and who knows what their shades insinuate when midnight has long closed up its windows? He believed it, believed in the holiness of the red spices, and perhaps that was enough. And so the cinnamon shoes were matched to the cinnamon girl, and slipped onto her hard, gray feet. The Priest of Red Spices waited there at her side with held breath, his face reddening with hope and need.

  I will not say she woke and threw her hard, gray arms about her papa. I will not say he sang with joy and they danced a filial waltz around the tomb. But after I had clutched her ankles for a fortnight and more, and he had fallen asleep on an empty bier, as fathers will sometimes do when they are waiting for their daughters to be born, a trickle of red mud came dripping out of her nose, and tears of red mud came weeping from her eyes, and a slow stream of red mud came oozing from her mouth. She rolled up from her slab and began to cough quietly, as a polite girl will cough, all the red earth of the Ajan fields heaving from her, wet and dead, bright and thick.

  Her father did not wake. Fathers sleep heavily. The pious daughter cleaned her mouth and stood shakily, balancing in me, in her cinnamon shoes, and I could feel her weight, so little, so light, having been dead so long. I felt her sadness and her fear, her urgency, her shivering soles, her need to see the sun again. These are the secret things a shoe knows, for we carry a creature within us, and divine all its self.

  “Papa,” whispered the dead daughter. “Wake up. It is time to take me home.” She kissed his cheek with dry lips.

  The Priest of Red Spices opened his eyes and saw his girl, his devotion, his cinnamon darling. Her long hair was wet and knotted with mud and anointing oil and clotted spice, but he kissed her anyway and held her close. She let him touch her, stiff and uncertain, and allowed softly that she would certainly like to be shown at services, and hold a red candle, and be called a miracle. What else should a pious girl want?

  But she was not at services when they were held. She was at the Duke’s empty Palace, dancing through the abandoned rooms with their ruined tapestries of tigers and terns, their splintered walls and broken perfume bottles. Since she had died they had become a place for endless balls, endless revels, endless frenzied festivals by the light of candelabras dented and tarnished. The young and careless were there, lined up in the dancing line like shabby dolls. Ajanabh was only lately dead; the wake still raged on.

  The priest’s daughter had only followed the light. Even the dullest creature knows to follow the light, and in her dull, gray state it was all she could manage: go toward the warmth, go toward the fire. I, too, itched to be used well, to be warm. I forced her feet only a little toward that blazing, raucous place. And there we danced, and there we spun, and there we felt the flames on us, hot and golden.

  Thus I danced after all, with her slim feet tight in me, at festivals of cinnamon and starlight. I danced every dance you can imagine—and I danced them all twice. How many arms around her waist, how many polished shoes to meet me, how many floors once shining and checkered, now shattered and filthy with summer dust, did we press beneath us? Too many to count, my friend, too many to count. And as we danced, as each night ran on into the next in the Duke’s abandoned estate, with all the topiary scorched black and all the roofs turned homes for pigeons and starlings, as we danced her arms became less hard and gray, her blood became less still and black, her cheeks became less sunken and cold. Her hair flew out behind her like a black wind, and her cheeks went redder than the candles, and her eyes became sharp and wild, red as cinnamon shoes. Her skin was less pink than scarlet, her blood so high I thought it might leap out of her. Her heart was nothing but a long, whirling scream.

  Her father was delighted, and saw only her high color and her smiles. He did not see her teeth, he did not see how tight she clenched that red candle, how fast she ran when services were done. And the more she danced like that, the less I liked her. I wished to dance, of course; this is the best a shoe can wish for. But I wished to dance courtly dances, at weddings and harvest-time, complicated reels and waltzes as precise as clockwork. This dance took no skill; it was just a constant tempest, a sirocco that went on and on. I was tired.

  And so I contrived, as she ran from the estate gardens with their blackened hedge-swans and hedge-giraffes, to slip from her feet and lie in the grass, happy and silent and unmoving. I would like to report that she fell down dead the minute I let her arch fly free, but she did not. I saw her black hair whipping the wind as she bolted home, over the gardens and through the alleys, back to that damned red candle once more.

  THE

  FIRE-DANCER’S TALE,

  CONTINUED

  “I AM VERY BEAUTIFUL,” THE SHOES SAID, preening like scarlet parakeets, “and was quickly picked up by a girl with better taste in dances. She had such green ribbons in her hair! I stayed in the estate for years, until there was no tal
low left at all for the candles, and the violin strings snapped and curled, and the marble squares could take no more stomping feet. I was passed from dancer to dancer, and in this way I learned all that a shoe need know. Finally, a girl took me home, and though I was not at all sure how I felt about that, I did not try to force her feet back, but let her take me where she would. Shame of shames! Her mother took one look at the snarling roots I bear so well, snatched me up like a fish which has gone sour and is fit only for cats, marched out into the street, and tossed me through the cistern grating. I splashed, I floated, and, after a time, sank to the bottom, where I might have stayed, drowned as a dog, if not for the slovenly martial habits of Ajans.”

  I was panting and my hair clung to my ears with sweat by then, so quick and fast had I been forced to leap and turn and step, with the tiny, heel-to-hip kicks the narrow corridors demanded, the elongated, elegant, sliding motions of the long straightaways, with the pirouettes, with the catlike tiptoes. The voice of the shoes kept perfect time, and my body hummed to the dance, hummed with the knowing of it, hummed with the learning of it, as sometimes it had hummed with the books on my lap in the calligrapher’s shop.

  “Why the maze, though?” I gasped, executing a daring midair turn and landing hard on my heel.

  The shoes did not answer for the smallest of moments. “I did not build it. I assume the Weaver made it, as she makes everything else here, and for her own reasons. It was here when I floated to the bottom of the black reservoir, and I discovered its use quickly enough.”

  Finally, with three full spins and a flourish of my arms, I completed the maze. The shoes clacked their heels against the floor in applause, which is very disconcerting, having your feet move without your say-so. I doubled over, catching my breath.

  “Thank you,” I wheezed.