The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  While she worked, I told myself not to touch her, that she would not understand. But all the same I saw my dark hand, my blazing fingernails, reach out to her doddering head. I stroked her hair, and cupped her head in my hand. Perhaps she was just mad enough not to care, but she rested her head against my palm and closed her eyes, tears seeping out over the deep creases.

  “I’m sorry, Orfea,” I whispered.

  Suddenly, Solace hooted and laughed from far off in the menagerie, and I took the old Duchess’s hand and followed the noise as one follows the sound of a pheasant in the brush. We found her standing next to a tall sandstone figure, red of cheek and ankle, long-haired and high-browed, her fur-lined dress whipping sharply around her as she turned to stare, hurt and puzzled, at something on the ground.

  Orfea reached out her rag-bandaged hands to the statue’s face. “Good girl,” she said with a sigh, “good girl, you found her, my darling, my old friend.” She nestled herself into the crook-armed embrace of the red stone, her withered cheek against its rough, stiff face. “Do you think they can hear her singing?” she said. “The others, do you think they can hear her, in their stony ears?”

  “Of course,” said Solace kindly, stroking the old woman’s hair just as I had done. “I can hear her now. She is so beautiful, when she sings up the sun.”

  The child drew me away then, and we left the two women there, stone and flesh. As we turned our backs, I could hear Orfea singing with her broken voice, and my throat closed on fiery tears that burned to fall.

  And as we passed the last statue, the farthest out, a sandstone child in her mother’s dress, tripping over the hem, I saw it, clutched in a red, rough hand, what was meant to be a snuffbox but which was not, just like the church which was not a church: a box of carnelian, no bigger than my own hand. I pried it out of the coarse-fingered child, and it was not heavy, not nearly heavy enough.

  “What is this?” I said urgently. I grabbed Solace’s arm and showed her the box.

  “How should I know? Just some junk the Duchess used for her little zoo. She uses everything; you must have seen just as well as I.” Solace rubbed her arm, a pale pink hand-shaped scald rising where I had touched her—I had not been careful. I pled her forgiveness. “Surely there are many boxes in all these dead hands. How can you know this one is special?” she grumbled, cradling her arm.

  But I knew. I looked at its polished surface, its design of curling, corkscrewing, arching grasses worked into the lid, its tiny claw feet, its minute, gold-speckled latch.

  “Well? Open it!” said Solace.

  “Should I? Kohinoor said it belonged to her. Perhaps it is not right that I should open it.”

  “Then I will open it! Come, you cannot resist it—don’t you want to know what’s inside? They never told you anything a Queen should know. What do you owe them?”

  I looked sharply at the young girl with her gleaming black tattoos and bare belly. “I thought you were sleeping,” I said suspiciously.

  The girl grinned sidelong, her hair hanging down into her wolf-keen face. “Open it,” she coaxed.

  And so help me, I did. I slid the flame of one thin fingernail into the lock and turned it, listening to the click of the carnelian tumblers. The lid popped up slightly, and I lifted it gingerly. Lantern peered over from behind a statue of a young man slaughtering a stag, and Solace stood on her toes to see inside.

  I let the casket fall open, and lying within, no bigger than a finger, was a woman made all of grass, her hair a mass of curled seeds, her form woven reeds braided together, one over the other. Her meadow-eyes were serenely shut, her tiny blade-hands folded over a dress of straw and light. No part of her did not shine with this light, silver and sere, and it pooled in the box as though I were holding a red candle in my hand. The three of us stood staring at her, the little green woman in the box.

  “Is she going to wake up?” Solace asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why Kohinoor could possibly want her,” I answered.

  With infinite care, I put my finger into the box and stroked the side of the grass-woman’s face with my smoke. She turned to it like a child suckling its mother and breathed the black of my skin. Her eyes opened lazily; they were green as a pasture. She sat up in her box, seed-hair falling behind her, and looked up at the faces of a Djinn, a Firebird, and a curious little girl.

  “Oh,” she groaned, “let me go back to sleep…”

  “I’m sorry,” I said quietly, so as not to hurt her reedy ears, “but it’s terribly important. Who are you?”

  She turned her face to mine, grassy eyes blinking miserably.

  “I’m no one, not now.” She sighed like prairies waving in the night winds. “Not anymore…”

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  CARNELIAN BOX

  IT IS A LONG WAY TO FALL, FROM THE SKY TO THE earth. It is a long way to fall, in the dark, and the space between is cold.

  I do not blame her. It is not in my nature to blame. But I did not want to go. The others all chose, to stay or to fall, to burn or to gutter and darken. I could not choose. A Star walked among us with legs like pillars of fire, before she wove, before the red city, and we were uprooted from the soft black, uprooted from the earth which is the Sky, and I wonder if she even saw us crumple beneath her, if she even saw us fall. So many were trampled and shattered that day, so many fell in shivering slivers, a slaughter of broken rain howling through the Sky like a shower of glass, but I was lucky. I lost only my feet under hers, and fell more or less whole, my ears able to hear all the screams of the Grass-Stars around me, sheared into nothingness, their light splattered across the fields.

  I know that if I had been allowed to stay, the black thing that bore me would have come back. Mothers always come back. I chose to be grass for her, I chose to lie at the bottom of the Sky, so that she would see how humble I was, so that she would see that I wanted only to be a thing that would please her. These things I was allowed to choose, and if I could have stayed, I would have felt her gentle face above me, I would have put my hands to her dark cheeks. I would have cried—children always cry—but I would have told her: See, Mother, I waited for you. I knew you would not abandon us. I knew you loved us still. I knew if I was faithful, you would come home. And she would have kissed me, and told me I was her best-loved daughter, and I would have known her smell and her skin, I would have known what she looked like, I would have known my mother at the end of all things.

  But I was not allowed to choose.

  I landed in a great field of sugarcane and my broken stumps burned the stalks. They crumpled and sizzled beneath me; smoke and shadows leapt up from their fractured, boiling leaves. I’m sorry! I cried as I walked; I wept as I walked, and as I walked I began to scream, for I walked nowhere that I did not burn, that did not incinerate beneath me, that did not fall into flames at the touch of my skin. I’m sorry, I wailed, for I scalded them to nothing, ash and shadows, and they could not choose any more than I. I tried to walk lightly, I tried to run, but shadows and smoke leapt up at my every step, until I stumbled onto mute stone, and huddled against a jagged cliff face, burning nothing, sobbing and afraid. It was there I lived, terrified to move, terrified to sear all beneath me, until even the stone had blackened to a slick, scalded glass, and the light in me was dim and hidden.

  That was how he found me. When it was all over, he would call me Li, and if I had a name before that, he spoke the name of Li so many times that I have forgotten it.

  His shoulders were draped in a tiger’s slashing skin, and from the edges of this hung talons of hawk and lizard. He was a big man, but his face was young, clear, and eager, and his lips trembled.

  “He did not lie!” the man marveled. “He did not lie to me! You are here, and real, and alive, and mine!”

  “Do not touch me!” I shrieked.

  He drew back, hurt. “Of course not, if you tell me I must not.”

  “You will burn,” I mumbled.

  “But you ar
e my wish! You could not harm me!”

  “I assure you, I can. And what can you mean? What did you wish for?”

  The man smiled with such joy and hope that my throat tightened in the face of it. “Why, what else? I wished for a wife…”

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  TIGER HARP

  IS THIS NOT A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY? YOU COULD be happy here. I would build you a den of wattles and tiles, and bring you sacks of down from the river geese for your blankets. I would do both these things for you, and more besides.

  When I was a boy, my father taught me to hunt, how to be very silent on my feet, how to strangle partridges and cut open deer in such a way that it hurts them little enough. When nineteen of my winters had left me living, I killed a tigress. This is very difficult, as tigers are clever, and my father was proud. He dressed her and gave me her heart to eat, steaming red in the snow. It was wet and soft; it tasted of old arrowheads and marrow. Then he gave me her liver, then her bones to suck. He told me to name the tiger I had killed, and remember her taste, how tall she had been, how many cubs watched us from the bracken. He told me to make a thing from her body every day for a year, so that I would know my tiger as well as I knew anything in our house. Soup and coats and sausages and rattles and roasts and gloves and lyre strings. All these I made and more. I worked all the year through, and grieved for my tiger.

  I called my tiger Li. It is a common name in this country. After the year of my tiger had passed, I saw in our village a girl fairer by far than tiger-ink. She had hair like black stripes, and eyes black as a cat’s, and her hands were soft and deft; she wove beautiful things, and she tasted like lemons, and warm stones. Her mother was a planter of crocuses, and a threader of the priceless saffron culled from their blossoms. Her land was wide, almost endless. Her name was Li. I have told you it was common. Li was so wealthy, I thought I could never wed her, being a boy who knew little but the secret taste of a tiger’s heart. But I loved the crocus-girl, even as I hunted silent and kind, even as my father died of chill and my mother of fever, even as I cared for my house alone, and made each tiger I killed last for a year, in soups and coats and sausages and rattles and roasts and gloves.

  There came a day when my cupboards were bare and I went into the birch-bracken to hunt. As I followed the tracks of a broad-shouldered tiger, in motions I had practiced as a dancer does her favorite reels, I heard beside me other footsteps, just as practiced. As I came upon the tiger, who snarled as cats will do, the other hunter came into the clearing, and before I could loose my bow, shot a crow-fletched arrow, straight and true, into the tiger’s heart.

  You will not be surprised to know it was Li. She stood with her long legs apart, her hair flat and straight, her arms cradling her bow easily. She turned to me and smiled.

  “What do you think I ought to name my kill?” she said. “Shall I call it Lem? It seems only fair.”

  “Yes,” I breathed, “call him Lem.”

  Together we cut open the white fur of his belly, and I gave Li his heart to eat, wet and soft. She said it tasted like her own skin. I gave her his liver, and also his bones, and together we took the carcass back to my house, where I showed her how to make tiger soup.

  Li’s mother was not altogether angry, but she did withhold her crocuses from our wedding, since her permission had not been asked. I accepted this as just, but I leapt over her stone wall and stole a single yellow flower for Li to wear in her hair, my crocus-girl, my tiger-girl. Li made tiger soup in my house, and tiger coats and tiger sausage and tiger rattles, tiger roasts rich as cake, and she played upon a tiger harp songs so sweet and strange that on warm nights there would gather around the threshold wild and striped creatures, nosing the air curiously and twitching their long, white whiskers.

  But Li was not happy. After a year she stopped hunting with me; after two she would not make the tiger soup.

  “What is the matter, my beloved, my crocus, my cat?” I said, taking her head in my arms.

  “Outside our door the tigers come to hear me sing, and I cannot make the stew of their bones, no matter how much saffron, and thyme, and marigold roots I grind into it, without tasting not my own skin, but my own song, which they love well enough to gather around the house of those who sharpen their arrows to pierce striped flesh.”

  “I need not hunt only tigers, Li. Deer are easier prey, and rabbits, and bear.”

  My wife turned her wide-cheeked face to mine. “And what will happen when I make the deer soup, and the rabbit soup, and the bear soup? What will happen when I play the harp of deer, the harp of rabbit, the harp of bear?”

  And so I hunted still the tiger, and made the soup myself. But Li still played the harp, and still the tigers gathered. One evening, when the sky was as deep a blue as any crocus may own, I brought her a wooden bowl with a soup of thyme and marigold, and no tiger at all. She drank it, and then took up her harp of bone and gut. She stood and opened the door to our house—I tried to stop her, but she laughed and shooed me back, and so I watched from the window as Li sat on a stump among the crocuses her mother had finally sent to us years after our wedding, and played to the moon and the bracken.

  It was terrible, what she played. It hurt me to hear it, the strings plucked in longing, the melody foreign and savage and toothed. She put her head back, and the moon glossed her scalp, and I did not know her in that moment, not really, the woman who slept beside me with her cheek on my chest.

  Slowly, the tigers came. There were nine of them, I remember that. Their muzzles were white and ghostly in the dark. Their stripes cut the night apart. Li played, and they listened, their heads cocked, tails stiff. One by one, they threw back their heads and howled. You will say cats do not howl, only wolves do as much; cats screech or hiss, but do not howl. But you are wrong. Cats can howl, and nine cats can howl like a choir of demons. Their voices joined with Li’s strings at feral angles, their fangs gleamed yellow, their throats ululated, and beneath their paws a hundred crocuses were crushed.

  Tears ran down Li’s face. She stopped playing, staring with wonder and ecstasy at the throng. One by one, they ceased their howls and looked steadily back at my wife. She opened her arms to them, and I understood her—never tell me I did not understand my wife. She opened her arms, pleading for forgiveness, pleading for feline clemency, for what grace tigers can give.

  They leapt as one beast into her arms, and devoured her: her heart, her liver, her bones. She did not last a year.

  THE TALE

  OF THE

  CARNELIAN BOX,

  CONTINUED

  “I AM SORRY FOR YOU,” I SAID WEAKLY.

  “I ate nothing but crocuses for months. I hunted all nine tigers and boiled their hearts. It did not help. I watched them eat her, and I could not go on.” Lem’s voice was rough and hard-used, as though he had never known the end of weeping. “But it is all right now. He granted me a new wife, and you are here!”

  “I do not know of any promises made to you, but I am not your wife.”

  “It was not a promise, it was a wish. And you are here. You are here. This is a beautiful country. You could be happy here. I would build you a safe den, away from the water and the storms. I would make for you the tiger soup. I would be as grass for you, humble beneath your feet.”

  I started, and met his eyes. I should not have moved from my rock. But I knew nothing of the world, I was alone. I did not know not to look into his face, so eager and needing.

  “I cannot walk,” I protested. “My feet are broken off. And still you must not touch me, for you will burn.”

  “My darling, my Li, I will make you new feet of pure, pale silver, and I will not ask for your touch.”

  “I am not Li. I am not her. Look at me. I am made of grass and light—I am nothing like her.”

  He looked at me sadly, great dark eyes wrung dry with yearning. “It is a common name in this country.”

  He would not meet my gaze, and stared at the rock floor, speaking very quietly,
his voice tremulous as an infant sparrow. “But I knew that if I waited, if I was faithful, you would come back. Wives always come back. If I chose to become very still, to play the ghost-harp on a stump of hazelwood, you would come to the door, and I would feel again, in my own hands, your gentle face above me. I would put my palms to your dark hair. I would cry—widowers always cry—but I would be able to say to you: See, wife my own, I waited for you. I knew you would not abandon me. I knew you loved me still. I knew if I was faithful, you would come home. And you would kiss me, and tell me I was your own husband dear, and I would know your smell and your skin once more after all these years; I would know my wife again, at the end of all things.”

  After a long while looking at his bent and penitent head, I sighed. “I do know something about that.”

  But still, I wept as we walked, and the grasses burned beneath my tears.

  His house was low and its roof was sound. I stood outside and would not go in, for I would burn his thatch, too; I knew it. I was fallen from my mother, and could touch nothing without harm. But in all the windows and the grassy roof, in the crocuses of the little garden, lizards blinked up at me, tiny lizards of blue and green and black.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Oh!” He laughed distractedly, putting his hand into his thick hair. “They are my lizards. Even tiger-hunting is sometimes tedious, and I learned from one of your uncles—” he blushed “—you remember, darling, the one who never married, and keeps all those skinny dogs—that lizards are pleasant and keep the insects away. But he did not know what I do, that the markings on their backs are strange and complicated. One of them had an incantation written on his scales. He is the only one, so far, but I have hope. It is how I made my wish, how I summoned him.”

  “Summoned who?”

  “Kashkash. He gave you back to me. Bless his beard! One day I shall take my bull-lizard to the Queen and show her the marvels in his skin, but I am not ready.” He smiled shyly. “And I have a wife to look after.”