The Orphan's Tales

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “A dress which shines as brightly as the last moon of winter!” cried his first daughter, who was called Ubalda, and who loved such things.

  “A golden ball, as lovely and round as the first sun of summer!” cried his second daughter, who was called Ushmila. He frowned at her for a long time before he agreed.

  “If it please you, Father,” said his blushing third daughter, who was called Urim, “I should like an apple.”

  “No more?” said the merchant, who had certainly not raised his daughters to ask for such silly, simple things. A merchant expects certain tastes from his children, and he was mightily disappointed.

  “No more,” answered the girl, whose hair was very red, red as the rarest salamander hide, and whose eyes were very blue, blue as the most costly dolphin skin.

  “Very well,” said the merchant, and went in search of the meager fortunes which Shadukiam grants to foreigners: enough to snare them, but not enough to make them stay.

  Now, as often befalls merchants with one meek daughter and two haughty, fortune did not smile on the cattle merchant. He drove his flock before him, sheep of such fleeces as your mother might have heard of in the oldest stories she knew, and when he crossed into Shadukiam, he was promptly set upon by minor city officials and relieved of his livestock. His throat bled out into the Varil like a sheep cut down for supper, and we would weep for him, save that we have quite enough to do with weeping for our own misfortunes.

  As the cattle merchant’s body lay drifting into steam below turrets of diamond and bowers of roses, its blood called as it might to a shark, and as the moon rose milk-thick and silent, one of her children approached. He was very tall and thin as a length of paper. His skin and cloaks were the color of the moon—not the romantic, lover’s moon, but the true lunar geography: gray and pockmarked, full of secret craters, frigid peaks, and blasted expanses. His eyes had no color in them save for a pinpoint pupil like a spindle’s wound—the rest was pure, milk—moon white. He bent over the slaughtered cattle merchant and smiled.

  Perhaps you have heard of the Yi. We envy them—how much we would like to shed our bodies when they shrivel to pockmarks and craters. But we cannot.

  The Man Dressed in the Moon stepped into the cattle merchant’s body like another man steps into his winter coat, and he walked away warm and snug in this new face. And as the Yi are perverse, it amused him to drive the merchant’s cart out of the city of Shadukiam with a dress as bright as the last moon of winter, a golden ball as lovely and round as the first sun of summer, and an apple, a simple, silly apple. He remembered these things in the bones of the cattle merchant’s legs, in the veins of his fingertips.

  His daughters greeted him with kisses and exclamations of delight, for he kept a scarf at his throat and his skin was still more or less whole and pink. The slight gray pallor they ignored as daughters eager for presents will. He gave Ubalda her dress of deep blue and silver, and Ushmila her golden ball, and urged her to run along and play, and he produced with a flourish the silly, simple apple for pretty little Urim, with her red hair like foreign suns and her blue eyes like foreign seas.

  “But, Father, this is not an apple,” said the girl, her sweet brow furrowing.

  “Ah, but in Shadukiam, this is what is called an apple,” the Man Dressed in the Moon crooned.

  It was a ruby as deep and darkly shaded as a true apple, and at its ebony stem was an emerald leaf, thin enough to flutter in the wind.

  “How shall I eat it, Father?” Urim said.

  “Put your teeth into it, girl, like a wolf biting into a reindeer’s cheek.”

  And so the girl did. It tasted, she said, of brandy and cider and the reddest berries she had ever known. Because she was a good child, she shared the fruit with her sisters, and all of them agreed it was lovely, and their father the best of all possible fathers. They ate only half, and kept the rest for the dreary winter. But foreign produce does not often sit well with the provincial daughters of cattle merchants, and the girls sickened, the jewels in their stomachs pricking at their flesh, refusing to dissolve.

  And all the while they sickened, their father grew gray and silver and pockmarked, frozen peaks appearing on his cheeks, craters on his arms, and his eyes grew white, white as the salt sea of their home. Now, the daughters of this man, though weak of digestion, were not weak of will, and between them were wise enough to know their father was not their own, and that Shadukiam, as often as it gives, takes and takes and takes. Ushmila was overfond of books, and she saw the marks of the Yi on her father. Ubalda was overfond of sharp things, scissors and knives and diamonds, and brought her collection to her sisters. It was decided that Urim of the red hair like apple skins and the blue eyes like moonlight would discover the truth of the matter. And so the clever child brought her father the uneaten half of the Shaduki apple, jeweled and wet.

  “Father, I am sick, and close to death,” said Urim, her face pale as wasting.

  The Man Dressed in the Moon smiled hungrily. “How wonderful,” he said.

  “Surely you do not mean that, Papa!” cried Urim.

  “Of course not, my darling! Forgive an old man—his mind runs away without him sometimes.”

  Urim cast her eyes down, and mourned her father.

  “Will you not share this apple with me? It would comfort me, in my dying, for though it hurts me so, I have never tasted anything so sweet.”

  The Man Dressed in the Moon’s face softened as much as it might, for he believed well in the greed of young girls, and he folded her into his arms. “It would delight me, my darling daughter.”

  Urim cut a slice of apple for the pocked Yi, and he chewed it with the relish of an alligator sucking the bones of a finch. But soon enough he began to cough, and choke, for Urim had poisoned her foreign apple, and the daughters of the cattle merchant, Ubalda and Ushmila, rushed from the shadows and leapt upon the gray-skinned creature, cutting into him over and over—but never enough to kill. They had no Griffin’s talon, and could not hope for death. Urim sliced his cheeks with the faceted edges of her apple, grinning wildly into the face that had once been her father’s.

  “Let it never be said,” she cried, “that the daughters of a cattle merchant do not know how to put an animal down!”

  THE TALE

  OF THE LEPRESS

  AND THE LEOPARD,

  CONTINUED

  “THEY WERE AS CLEVER AS A PACK OF HYENAS, those girls,” the wicker-wight said. “They did not kill the Yi, but opened his skin and took the thinnest shavings of his bones—how they must have shone, like shards of the moon itself!—and these Urim instructed them to place on their tongues. The bones melted to vapor and the girls were healed, the sharp apple-jewels in their bellies melting to nothing. And Urim, wise child, kept her father barely alive, collecting his blood in the glass jars they had used for sheep’s milk, and put his body into a casket of white stone.” She nodded at the memorial. “A city grew around this casket, on the edge of the white and salted sea, and when folk were in need, shavings were carefully taken from his bones, placed on their tongues, and the casket sealed up again. After one hundred years, the Man Dressed in the Moon stopped screaming.” The wicker-wight looked down, ashamed. “Urim, named for that clever girl who wanted only an apple, became famous. More and more came. I came. My branches were drier than the skull of a lion left in the waste when I finally arrived at the gates. My skin was gone; all that remains was what you see. How this came to pass is not important—is the beginning of illness ever remembered so clearly as its boils and blood and broken, aching bones? The moment when you breathe your last clear air? One never remembers it. I am afflicted; so are we all. When first I came I was sure that Urim would hold me in its black-clothed embrace, look on me with her gray and mothering eyes, and brush my brow with her lips. She would give me an apple and a shaving of bone. I would walk from her whole. But there are so few cures in Urim, these days. The Yi’s bones are not infinite. They are precious. We do not all deserve them.”
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  I yawned. Of course my mistress deserved all things. “Will you wait with us, for the dawn?” I asked the poor, empty woman.

  “Of course.”

  I have told you what happened. The dawn came. Black-robed lepers came hobbling on canes of ash and hazel, having heard that one of their number had arrived, and they embraced us as sisters. Their hands safe on Ruin’s veils, they told us we were loved, that flowers would be rubbed into our wounds, that there were altars ready for our knees. If we were fortunate, if we were worthy, perhaps we would be granted a sliver of bone. A leper with one leg reached out to cup Ruin’s face in his rotted hands, his eyes alight with joy. He said:

  “There are no veils in Urim, my dear. Show us your affliction—we do not care for beauty.”

  With a stifled cry of relief, Ruin pulled her veils from her face, and with it came peels of skin like pages torn from a book, and the lepers recoiled.

  “You are not a leper!” one cried, covering her mouth with one putrid hand, green mold springy and thick in the webbing of her fingers.

  “She is dead,” whispered the first. “She is dead, already dead, and her death will spread among us like plague.”

  A third, his nose a crusted red gape in his face, hissed: “She shall not have the bones! They are ours! She cannot have them!”

  A fourth wondered if perhaps she was not Yi herself, with bones for their tongues.

  Lepers know well not to touch the sick—they embraced her thinking her like them, but they could not risk contracting whatever other vile illness she bore. They beat her with their canes and slashed out her tongue, so that she could not give their names to the night.

  THE TALE

  OF THE WASTE,

  CONCLUDED

  “I SNARLED AND LEAPT AND TRIED TO BITE them, but I am only a cat, and I was not raised to hunt, only to walk with her in the waste.” Rend raised a paw over her eyes. “They chained me to her, so that my thrashing would only harm my mistress, and left us battered against the white casket. They took her tongue gingerly, in gloved hands, to see if it could be boiled into medicine. After a long while, she stirred as if dreaming, and I pulled her from the city. She is dead; she did not bleed. I am as near to dead as makes no difference among leopards; I did not bleed. The silver chain suits us, we find. We are bound, she and I, and now we go home, to Ajanabh, where there are red spices and no cures, where she may lie down again in the earth and rest, and I may mourn my mother. When she has gone to stone entirely, I shall carry her on my back into the city, and place her before the House of Red Spices, and sparrows shall live in her hair, and I shall live at her feet.”

  Ruin wept, and in her tears tiny specks of flesh washed away. Rend looked at her with huge black eyes full of feline grief.

  The Djinn looked at the black-veiled woman as well, her red eyes dim with despair.

  “I cannot give you back your tongue,” Scald said slowly, her hair clearing from her flaming face, “but I could heal you.” She cleared her burning throat. “Well, I could try. My wishing days are done, the Khaighal saw to that. But if you would free me, I could try.”

  “How could we open such a cage?” the leopard said.

  “I suspect that if your mistress were to touch the bars, they would turn to stone, and could be as easily broken as any other stone.”

  “And what would you do, if we were to set you free?” The leopard clawed the ground uncertainly.

  Scald looked into the east, across the cracked earth with its ruined gold and scurrying mice. “Kohinoor was right. I am old now, nearly fourteen. I have not long left. I would go home, to Ajanabh, and converse with my friend spider, and dance with the Sirens, and burn in Lantern’s tail, and let my hand fall once or twice on Solace’s hair. I would watch the Carnival, and listen to Agrafena every morning as the sun graces her bows. I would see how my wives had got on. I would tell Hour such a story, such a story!” The Djinn-Queen closed her fire-rimmed eyes. “I would swim in the Vareni, and hear the bells ring out, and when all was done I would put my cheek to Simeon’s fingers, and rest.”

  Tears flooding her rheumy eyes, Ruin raised her arms and threw back her black cowl. Beneath it was sparse hair and skin like shavings of bone. Her skull showed through black strands, and her cheeks were hollow, translucent. She was made of glass, glass which was fainting back into sand. Her mouth was dry and white and chapped, and though she opened it, no sound came. She reached out with both hands toward the cage, and as her fingers grazed the Djinn-bones, the bone-bars flushed red and porous, Basilisk-bright. Wordless laughter erupted from Ruin’s broken mouth, and it mingled with her wrenching cries. The cage shivered red, at the end of all things, as red as Ruin’s house, her shoes, her father. And as she released the bars, Scald put her incandescent palms to them, and they sloughed to molten white. The Djinn emerged, her smoke-hair spreading free around her, with no baskets to contain it, like spilled water.

  “What will you do to her?” whispered the cat nervously, inching close to her mistress.

  “My darling cat.” The Djinn smiled. “I shall breathe into her, and bring her to life. There is no stone that cannot be rendered like the fat of a cow in fire—if the fire is hot enough.”

  “Will it hurt her?” Rend’s spotted, gold-furred head lolled anxiously on the earth.

  “Very much.”

  Scald drew a long breath, and the desert seemed to shimmer into her. Her chest cracked, and beneath the black skin embers flushed bright as two suns, then in her arms, and in her cheeks, and how she blazed, then, her face puffed and ready, her breath held, her painted palms phosphorescent. She blew out her breath, and the wind and fire of it was white as a Star at the center of a city, engulfing Ruin in light. Rend cowered and scrabbled away, singeing her tail. Ruin burned, a red candle in the blasted waste, and even after Scald had wheezed and coughed her last flames, the dead girl stood with her arms raised to the sky, her flesh peeling off in blazing strips like the ash that floats from a summer bonfire.

  It was hours before she stopped.

  Once, in the wasteland between Urim and Ajanabh, three long shadows were cast on the thirsty earth, whose dark cracks forked out in all directions like vines searching for the smallest trickle of water. Three long shadows lay black and sere on that fractured desert. A woman, a Djinn, and a leopard stared at each other over the golden earth, and the woman fell to her knees, her body burned and pink and blistered, but whole. Her hair was burned away, her bald head shone in the last rays of the sun, and she put her living, blood-bright hands to her soft belly and screamed into the ground, screamed, and laughed, and wept.

  In the Garden

  IT WAS NEARLY DAWN. A GHOSTLY BLUE LIGHT LAY ON THE CHILDREN, stippled with stars. Long shadows lay on the snow, and the fires had gone out in the center of the Garden, and the braziers at the Gate had guttered to smoking embers. The courtiers wandered back into the Palace, full of rhinoceros horn and cinnamon wine, dogs with bells on their collars leaping at their mistresses’ hems. The laces which held the chestnut boughs in the shape of a chapel were loosed, and sprang back with red-barked relief into their accustomed fork-boughed shapes. The wood beyond the Gate was dark and deep, and in it nightingales and starlings sang, pecking in the snow in search of the sun. The lake with its frozen reeds was still, as still as the world becomes before dawn, a hesitant hare testing the ice for thickness with its forepaw.

  The boy and the girl sat together, huddled for warmth. The world before dawn is very still, but also very cold, and it seemed as though everything had been conquered by blue, even the girl’s shivering lips.

  “That is all,” the boy said. “There is no more.”

  The girl opened her eyes, her hair wet with melted snow, her scarlet gown black in the dark. “That was a wonderful story,” she said, a smile opening like a lily on her face.

  The boy frowned, his face suddenly grown-up and very serious. “And there will be no others, no more strange and no more wonderful. It is over.”

  The g
irl touched his face gently, putting her cold hands on his cheeks. “Do you wish you had never asked me, that day, why my eyes were dark, like the lake before the dawn?”

  “No… but I thought… I thought something would happen. There would be lightning and thunder or a terrible pillar of smoke and something dreadful would come out.”

  “I don’t know,” the girl said. “I never knew what would happen.”

  “Maybe,” the boy whispered eagerly, “nothing will happen. I can come to you every day until I am Sultan, and then you can come to me, in the Palace, and sit at my table without a veil.”

  The girl shut her eyes, and the vast blackness of her lids glinted in the blue snow-light. No letters moved on them, they were dark and smooth and empty, no more than a mark, no more than ink. An owl flew overhead, home from a night of hunting.

  “Perhaps,” the girl said. “There is always a moment when stories end, a moment when everything is blue and black and silent, and the teller does not want to believe it is over, and the listener does not, and so they both hold their breath and hope fervently as pilgrims that it is not over, that there are more tales to come, more and more, fitted together like a long chain coiled in the hand. They hold their breath; the trees hold theirs, the air and the ice and the wood and the Gate. But no breath can be held forever, and all tales end.” The girl opened her eyes. “Even mine.”

  “Yes, my dear, even yours,” said a gentle, rough voice, like the feathers of a goose’s wings rubbing together.

  The girl turned and saw, on the other side of the Gate, on the other side of the wrought-iron battle with its cannon of ice, a bent old woman with tangled silver hair and a long, hooked nose. The girl caught her breath like a fawn in sight of a wolf, and her hands began to tremble.