The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  And so he went into his little house and began to prepare the soup of tiger meat and thyme and saffron and marigold roots, singing a little to himself, happy as a roosting hen. I stood outside, and shivered in the frost. My hidden silver leached into the earth even then, into the stump, into the lizards, who gathered around me as if around a drinking-hole, and my light flowed out of me over their scales. Before the night was done, I ventured in, burning nothing, never again, to his choking gladness. There was still light in me, but it was cold, then, and thin. I ate the orange soup from a bowl of wood. I could not decide if I was sorry that the hut did not go up in flames. But I was walled up within it, true and tight. By winter, true to his word, he had made me new feet, all of silver, and set my green and broken ankles into their hollows. I tried to make him a soup of light, but he would not touch it, pressing me with his cat meat and his fingers. I tried to believe that it was as good to wait upon the earth as in the Sky.

  But I was not happy. I did not wish to hunt the striped cats. I did not wish to learn to make the soup. I did not wish to learn to play the harp—the deer harp, the rabbit harp, the bear harp, even the tiger harp, which Lem would not let me touch. But I did not wish to touch it. I sat ever in the dark corners of the house, trying to feel as I had felt in the endless night-pastures of the Sky. He did not like this, and though he coaxed me toward the hearth, and the knitting chair, and the bed, I would not go. I wept, and scratched at the reedy flesh of my arms, and forgot my name in his grief.

  One evening, he touched my face with his big, gentle hands, and his palms grew greasy with light, and he said:

  “What is the matter, Li, my beloved, my crocus, my cat?”

  “I am unhappy,” I said.

  “How can you be unhappy? I have made for you the tiger soup and banked the fire so pleasantly, I have crushed thyme flowers into the bed linens so that it smells sweet. I have kept your crocuses bright as little candles in the soil. What else may I do?”

  I said nothing, stubborn and sullen. Why did I stay, you may ask me? Why did I not leave him to his muddled soup and his silver feet? I am accustomed to lying still and waiting, I would say to you. But how could my mother see me, down there on the ground, with the crocuses and the lizards?

  That very night he pulled his blue bull-lizard from a high cupboard, where the fellow had been gnawing on an old wine bottle, and whispered the words on his back, the black and winding words that the lizard’s fringed flesh offered up to him. The lizard’s eyes flared, and his scales split open to reveal terrible scarlet embers, and smoke belched from his poor mouth.

  “Lem! You are a tedious man! Why do you drag me from my paradise of six towers, where the music of the Djinn twangs stars against the wind hour after hour, and pack me into your foul, stinking lizard once more? This is no fit vessel for me!”

  “I am sorry, Kashkash! But I have great need! You were so kind and wise when last we spoke, and you heard my travails, and told me where to find my wife, huddled against the cliff! I have done so, and she is here, bedded into my house!”

  “Then why do you trouble me?” The lizard licked his eyeball in an uninterested fashion. He grimaced, the taste of eyeball being less than savory.

  “She is unhappy, and I cannot make her well. She does not speak, she does not make the tiger soup, she does not love the thyme-scented bed!” Lem rubbed the bridge of his nose and pled wretchedly with his beast. “I wish, I just wish her desires were not so great, that she were not so vast and empty, a pit into which my love pours and yet sounds no echo. I wish her needs were smaller and sweeter.” He licked his lips. “I fear she will take up the harp soon, and then where shall I be?”

  The lizard considered. “Surely this is easy enough for me to accomplish, who may hold in the circuit of his arms all possible things, even to the crushing of a Star into a house not big enough for her smallest finger. Even this Star. But why should I do such a thing?”

  “Because I will keep her safe! I will keep her and love her, I will be as grass beneath her feet, and I will never let the tigers touch her again, I swear it, noble Kashkash!” Lem took the tiny lizard’s claws into his hands.

  “Don’t touch me, you filthy tiger-tanner. I certainly do not care—but very well. And have a care with this lizard. I do not enjoy being summoned. I prefer to appear in regal excitations of smoke and flame whenever I please.”

  “Of course, Kashkash.”

  “Go to your wife and see what I have accomplished in your name.”

  “Yes, Kashkash.”

  The flames beneath the lizard’s skin snuffed themselves out and his broken scales sealed up again with a hiss of steam.

  I would like to say I felt it, but I did not. When Lem came rushing to me, his face once more full of eagerness and need, his face once more adoring and stricken, I was no larger than his hand. I waited for him to be horrified, to curse the name of his lizard, but he exclaimed, he exulted, he danced in his rickety house. He clasped me close to his cheek.

  “Now you will never leave me, never, and we will be happy, Li, you will see!”

  But I was not happy. I hated how small I had become, how impossible it was for me to eat or touch or see anything without the help of Lem, who for his part was pleased as a full tiger. He carved for me a tiny bed of cherrywood and packed it with soft linens. He made for me minuscule knives and forks. I wept, and little more. But as the years went on he began to fear for me, helpless as I had suddenly become. He forbade me to leave the house, to become the quick and thoughtless prey of a passing owl, and then forbade me to leave my bed of cherrywood, in case some cruel mouse were to take me in his hunger. I lay abed and did not move, and this suited me well enough, for I cared for nothing, and stared into the dark, trying to imagine myself home.

  So it was that he removed the blue bull-lizard from its perch near the chimney, and whispered once more the incantatory scales which were scrawled there. I lay in my cradle and watched the poor beast swell up with fire and spew his smoke, remembering the scent of the burning grass, remembering the grass I had been.

  “Lem, I do not like you.” The lizard belched. “Why must you call me again? I told you, I prefer my entrances to be of my own choosing.”

  “But, Kashkash! Hear me! I cannot bear the state of my life—what if, small as she is, my darling Li, my crocus-girl, my cat, were to be gobbled up by a possum or rat or falcon who knows no better? I cannot watch her always! I have not slept in so many days.”

  “What is it you ask of me? I cannot follow your gibbering.”

  “I wish that she would stay with me forever, safe and whole and untouched! I wish I could be certain that she remain unharmed, for all my days and more!”

  The burning lizard considered. “In your madness, Lem, you do know she is not your Li, don’t you? I never promised you your old wife back, and what I arranged for you was infinitely better than some lackluster flower-farmer.”

  Poor Lem, gentle Lem, looked at his lizard blankly, without comprehension.

  “She is a Star, Lem. She burned the earth when she came, and if you would understand me, I would tell you that I myself leapt from the smoke of her searing grasses. This is why you have this silly lizard, who nibbled rather densely at the scorched prairie where she fell. This is why I come to you when I have no real desire to. Every creature longs to see how his family is getting along.” The lizard grinned, fire leaping out of his throat. “But if this is your wish, I shall do what I must—and in this way no one will be able to say I was not the first, that I was not the finest and first of all Djinn! Darling Lem. Good boy. She will be safe, I promise. But this is your last wish.”

  Lem frowned, his eyes bleary and dim. “Why? Because I have had three? I have heard this is a law.”

  “No, because I find you tiresome. Go away.”

  The lizard bellowed out his fire and closed up his scales. He extended his long, pink tongue, and on it was a box all of sparkling carnelian, on its edges carved wheeling, curling grasses, with a tiny
lock gleaming on its side. It was just the size of my bed.

  “Oh,” breathed Lem. “Yes.”

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED

  “HE CLOSED ME UP INTO IT,” SAID THE LITTLE Grass-Star, “and latched it firm. I sat upon his mantel until he died, his finest possession, his art, his beauty: perfect, pristine, eternal. Licked by lizards and fondled by a man whose hands were rough with soup-stirring. When he died, his old mother-in-law took it into her family, and passed it down and down and down, and I suppose someone must have taken it to this red and ghastly city, probably stuck it upon some Duchess’s dresser and called it a pretty little trifle—I do not know. I fell asleep. I did not care to know. In the dark I was at peace, and could pretend that I was home, that my mother would see me shining, even through that awful box. That she would know I never meant to burn anything. Let me go back to sleep. Let me go back to the dark. I have been leached dry and shrunk into a ridiculous manikin, crammed in a box and left on the sill for centuries. I have done enough.”

  I blinked back my awe. “But… you could go back, now, if you wanted to,” I said.

  “I am tired,” she said, and her seed-eyes glistened.

  “I am a Djinn, you know. I came from, well, probably not you, but from some Star’s burning. I am not sure, really; the others haven’t cast my kindling yet. But we are distant relations, one might say.”

  The Grass-Star looked at me stonily and said nothing.

  “Scald,” Solace said, looking up at me with pleading eyes. “You can’t give her to them. The best thing they’ll do is put her on another mantel.”

  “Grandmother,” I said slowly, though the Grass-Star scowled at the name, “will you let me carry you? Just for a little while.”

  “When has anyone ever let me choose?”

  “Now. I am letting you. Scald of no particular family, the Ember-Queen of the Djinn. Because, you know, the dark”—I held up a palmful of my soot-riddled hair—“is something of an obsession of ours.”

  We rose like smoke. My tail trailed after me, and my silver baskets shook, buffeted by the wind. In her carnelian box, Li curled around herself and did not speak. I could see the tips of her silver feet peeking from the hem of her reed-dress. The air grew cold, and I drifted higher, to the tip of the Sirens’ tower, to the tip of Ajanabh, where her outstretched fingers reach their furthest. And there I held gentle, green-shouldered Li in one hand, and touched the dark sky, the last gasp of dark before dawn, with one flaming finger. The scent of scorched air flowed out from the puncture, and I cannot say whether it was because my fire is terrible or because I wanted it so fervently, wanted her to rest, wanted her away from Kohinoor and the army of Kings and Queens, wanted her home, that it blazed as hot as a wish might have, but the dark opened around my finger like a square of silk dropped over a candle, and I worked my hand into the flaming night, widening and stretching the dark around me. It felt like skin, and I choked, I wept, my throat froze. But I took her from her box, Li, one of a million seed-blown Stars, and folded her into the night like a child tucked into her bed.

  She looked at me, disbelieving, and she did not smile. I wish she had smiled. I wish I knew that I had done well by her. But she simply breathed deeply and closed her eyes, and the dark closed over her.

  In the Garden

  WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT, THE TORCHES STILL BLAZED AND THE SNOW pooled and watered around their polished stalks, quick little crows hopping forward to drink. The moon had set, and outside the halos of fire, it was dark as dreaming. In the still of the outer Garden, there was so little sound, no frogs, no geese, no hooting wolves. The flowers were dead and icy, the trees naked and hard. The stars were silent on the snow.

  The girl opened her eyes. The blackness vanished from the boy’s throat even as she did it, and he stopped in midsentence.

  “Come away,” she said. “Come away from here. I don’t want to be near them, your family, your father. It is almost over, I know it.”

  “We are safe!” the boy said, pointing through the waving branches at the far-off dancers, far-off children laughing and throwing brandy-soaked green grapes at one another.

  “No,” she said. “Come to the Gate, come to the edges, come to the snow and the iron.”

  “If that is what you want.”

  “Yes.”

  He took her circlet from her and let the scarlet veil fall onto the ice. She brushed flakes from her hands and lifted her heavy skirts, turning away from the light and the sound behind the chestnut boughs. The boy took her hand.

  “Wait,” came a soft voice behind them. Dinarzad stood there, in long yellow veils, her every finger ringed in emerald, her waist bounded in red. The children turned to look at her. But again, Dinarzad did not speak. She lifted her own veil and looked with mute pleading at the girl, her eyes dark and desperate. The girl let go her friend’s hand and crossed the snow to the older woman. She looked into Dinarzad’s face as in a mirror, and slowly took the amira’s long, glittering fingers in her own chapped, cold hands. She took a long breath, frightened as a hare who does not know if she has or has not seen an arrow in the mist.

  “I think,” she said, softer than light, “I think that one morning, the Papess woke in her tower, and her blankets were so warm, and the sun was so golden, she could not bear it. I think she woke, and dressed, and washed her face in cold water, and rubbed her shaven head. I think she walked among her sisters, and for the first time saw that they were so beautiful, and she loved them. I think she woke up one morning of all her mornings, and found that her heart was as white as a silkworm, and the sun was clear as glass on her brow, and she believed then that she could live, and hold peace in her hand like a pearl.”

  Tears slipped warm and grateful down Dinarzad’s lovely face, her lips trembled, and she folded her arms around the girl like a mother, like a sister, and kissed her frozen hair. She let her go, and drew down her yellow veil, and returned to the dais—but every so often, she glanced back over her shoulder, into the dark and the branches, into the Garden.

  The girl wound her hands in the iron Gate. She looked into the deep woods beyond the Palace grounds, where she had never ventured. Her fingertips were pale as mushrooms, and she could not feel the ice. Shadows pricked in the trees outside the Gate, shadows and starlight filtering down through leafless boughs and stiff black needles.

  She closed her eyes and tried to quiet her heart. She turned to the boy, her black eyelids blazing as though they burned her, and whispered:

  “Come, tell me how it ends.”

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED

  THE CARNIVAL OF THE DAWN SANG WITH A hundred open throats beneath the gentle shadows of Simeon’s elbows. When I returned to Orfea’s courtyard, Solace and Lantern had gone before me, and left me to find my way by the sounds of drums and flutes, trumpets and lyres and pipes and shouting, the sounds of so many voices. It was not difficult. I rounded a tall lamp-post whose capital was shaped like a fish, mouth flinging a spume of flame into the air, and the cobbled street below the wall was alive with folk, alive with Ajans, and the colors caught my eyes like hooks.

  Jugglers tossed iron pokers and scarlet flowers and the occasional child into the air, fire-eaters swallowed their trade, masks were donned and removed—and there, I saw Arioso pulling the edge of his jackal-face away to the delight of a young boy, but I could not tell what was underneath. Painters leapt madly at Simeon’s back, throwing pigment against him with the abandon of mating herons, their hands a bristle of frenzied brushes. The Sirens flicked their wings at the wall, inscribing it with their own blue ink:

  Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean’s drowned!

  Singers stood in clusters around trumpeters and pipers, voices high and low echoing by, and the howling, and the keening, and the barking of countless
creatures. A woman with a parrot’s green and scarlet head cawed out the hours, and a man with a tiny wolf on his shoulder howled a duet back to her. And the dancers—oh, the dancers! Everyone danced, a flurry of legs and arms, leaps I could not begin to follow in the throng, and Agrafena, Agrafena dancing and playing amid them all. But she was modest, after all things, and many others played louder, danced faster. Near a fountain that trickled water from the mouth of a fox-faced woman there was a girl all in red dancing with a man in a green coat, whose legs were like those of a gazelle, and she wound her long black beads around his throat while he bit her gently on the cheek. A red lion cavorted at their side. Spiders leapt from lamp to lamp, trailing iridescent webs behind them. Did one have needles for legs? I could not see.

  But there in the center of the square was Lantern, his tail flaring and flaming, and within its snapping ribbons danced Solace, her eyes shut in ecstasy, stepping deftly between the orange-red feathers, throwing her arms out, her head back, her black tattoos glowing wet and bright in the glare of her father’s light. When Agrafena stopped to shear a frazzled thread of her hair away, the two of them rested, and Solace ran to me. She was soaking wet from head to hip, her hair plastered to her skull, wrapped around it in long ropes. Her skin was slick and slippery. She looked down at herself and giggled.

  “Folio made this stuff, so I don’t burn. It smells a bit sour and bitter, like old beer, but it works. I’m only a little pink when I finish. I used to blister terribly.”

  I showed her the empty box, and she nodded. I think I might have stayed there, I might have walked through the Carnival with a child’s hand in mine, eaten apples doused in cardamom wine and told her how once, when I was very young, I had seen the old Queen dancing in her lonely hall, her embers red as bleeding, and I thought she was so beautiful, then. I thought she must be so happy. I might have done those things. I might have even declined to drift back through Simeon’s hands and ridden out the siege with the Ajans, cowering in corkscrewed streets—but a deafening sound cracked open the winds, and then another close behind it, shredding the last threads of blue night and letting the sun in, letting the fire in—for the fire did come, bellowing up before the wall, black and scarlet and vast, and a sound like the ocean. All our faces were lit by it, blanched white. Solace hid her eyes in my waist. There was another terrible sound, another gout of fire, shooting up into the dawn like a dragon being born. And then there was a worse sound, a crying, a snuffling, an awful sobbing as Simeon began to bleed, began to weep, began to call out to Agrafena, terrified and alone.