The Orphan's Tales
Page 86
“You are here… you are here to judge me,” she said, her throat dry.
“That would be a severe interpretation,” said the crone with a sly grin.
The girl’s great dark eyes filled up with tears, glittering like snowflakes in firelight. She bit her lip. “Am I good?” she blurted. “Was I good enough? Am I a good girl? I am not wicked, like they said. I am not a demon, I swear it. Was I good enough for the spirit? I tried so hard not to be wicked, or angry, or bitter, even when the night was very cold.”
The crone tucked a silver strand of hair behind her ear. “Do you remember me?” she asked, as though she had not heard anyone speak.
The girl dried her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Yes,” she said, “you came when I was little, as little as one of my brown-backed geese. You told me about the tales. And you gave me my knife.” The girl drew it out of her crimson dress, the small, curving silver knife with its handle of bone.
The old woman nodded. “It is my knife. But it was better that you have it. You were more often hungry than I.”
“Please,” the girl said. “How does it end? How do I end? I have waited so long.”
The old woman wound her hands in the dead, dry rose-roots of the Gate. “Oh, my darling girl,” she whispered, her voice thick, “I know you have.”
THE
LAST
TALE
ONCE, THERE WAS A FERRY ON A LONELY GRAY lake on a lonely gray shore. It creaked in the storms and the wind, and its tether stretched. A man with a hunch on his back poled it back and forth, clothed all in rags.
Once, there was a lonely island in a lonely lake, and on that lonely island was a woman with green scales glittering on her skin, and she walked the shore, and the eyes that blinked on the gray lakeside wept for her. But the woman did not weep. She wrung her fingers and looked into the mist and considered many things, for her mind was as vast as the lake itself. From time to time a young man with red skin like fine wood came to find her, and stroke her green-black hair. But she could not be consoled, and finally stepped onto the cracked boards of the dock and opened her throat to call the ferry. She called until her voice died on the wind, dry as a molted skin. Please, she called. Please come back.
It did not concern the ferryman if the lake folk needed him. But he could not help but hear the snake-woman’s cries, and when the day’s storms had passed, leaving his bones wet and his lizards irritable, he let the ferry drift as it wanted to—for sometimes in his loneliness the man believed the ferry as alive as he, and he spoke to it, and listened to its troubles, which had mostly to do with barnacles and algae. But the ferry now spoke of a voice pulling at it like a pole, and it longed to go toward that voice, that snake-song which flicked its tongue at the poor ferry in the fog. They floated out to the island with the beach of eyes, and there was the woman with her glittering green skin, her long hair wet and plastered to her hips, her eyes dark and needful.
“I want to see her,” she said, before the ferryman had finished his docking.
“That is impossible.”
“No, it is not. You ferry anyone, if they pay the toll. I will pay. In the world, in the Sun, in the blood-riddled world, my daughter is breathing and eating her breakfast with a golden fork and laughing at a joke the cook has told her. I want to see her.” The woman’s eyes softened with depthless pleading. “Just once.”
“And what do you think you can pay?”
“You took the huldra’s tail.”
“I did.”
“Will you take my hair?”
The ferryman considered. He did not wish to. It was not right, and not his habit. But he should, perhaps, have refused the child in the first place, and to become priggish now seemed useless, small. The tolls these days were strange, and he had seen more tolls than he had ever seen years in the world. He thought perhaps he had tired of them, the endless coins, and these late, grotesque amputations.
“I will take it,” he said slowly, his voice echoing not at all in the thick fog, “but you must agree to my terms.”
The woman waited, her green a scream of desire in the gray.
“I will take your hair as two tolls—across, and back. You may not go as the goose-woman went, into the world to live and eat bread and dance. You must come back. You are not like her. Go to your child, just once, and return to me, to the lonely lake and the lonely shore. This is all that is right and proper.”
The woman nodded, and gathered her long, shimmering green-black hair into her hand. With the sharp edge of the ferryman’s wing-bones, she severed it at her neck, and stepped on board the ferry. It sighed under her, glad in what ways nails and wood can be glad. They drifted into the lake, and Zmeya looked back to the shore, where two young men with red skin like a ship’s hull stared after the dwindling raft. She raised her hand, and the mist closed over her.
She stood above her daughter’s crib. It was a beautiful room, with a fire in the marble hearth and a bottle of hot wine on a little glass table. The crib was cedar, and the blankets were pure and white as a dove’s belly. The little girl had a shock of dark hair and her red fingers were curled into fists, her tiny brow furrowed as she dreamed. Zmeya opened the window, so that the light of the Stars could stream in, the light of the Moon, the dark of the Sky. Dappled silver light fell onto the child’s face.
“Sorrow,” she whispered. “My Sorrow, my love.”
Tears welled up in her eyes, tears of light, of Snake-light and Star-light. Zmeya lit the room like a brazier, her silver self spilling into the corners. She had not known such light in her skin since before the Boar-King had taken her. It filled up her throat so she could not breathe. She had forgotten what it felt like to be so bright. She knelt by the crib, her jagged, shorn hair dripping light like blood, and smiled at her daughter. She wanted to stay, after all. She wanted to put a veil over her hair and take this child downstairs into the spinning world of the court, and watch her grow up. She wanted to make sure that the Moon and the Stars were always on her. She wanted to hold her child to her as she had done on the lonely island, and feel her living mouth tug at her breast.
Slowly, Zmeya reached out a glowing finger, and with infinite care, caressed her daughter’s eyelids, the first and last touch of the Star and her daughter in the lakeless world.
The skin beneath her finger curled black and steaming, and shadows leapt from the smoking flesh. Sorrow began to cry. A nurse came bustling in, and Zmeya stepped into the shadows and the starlight, chagrined.
Once, there was a ferry on a lonely gray lake on a lonely gray shore. It creaked in the storms and the wind, and its tether stretched. A man with a hunch on his back poled it back and forth, clothed all in rags. He saw a woman walking along the shore toward him, her hair short and unkempt, her eyes red with weeping. She came to the ferry and looked up at him stonily.
“I only wanted to touch her, with living hands, my living child. Just once.”
“Was it enough?” the ferryman asked.
Zmeya was a long time answering.
“Yes,” she said finally, and stepped onto the ferry once more.
Out of the Garden
“WHAT SHE LEFT ON YOUR EYELIDS, SORROW, MY DOVE, MY DARLING, my little goose,” said the old woman, “was your history, winding and tangling back and back and back. It was your story, the story of your birth, your life, swinging forward and backward like a holy censer, the tendrils of its smoke reaching out and around and into each other like the coils of a snake, pursuing all those strange and varied folk with a Star’s tenacity. They are the tales of everyone who reached into silver shadows and pulled you into the world: your mother, who was a murdered Star; your father, a lonely creature who loved a raft that became a tree and a tree that became a red ship; a tea leaf that found its way out of the world and quickened a dead woman’s womb, and the girl who carried it there; the boy who paid your fare across the water, the women who pushed your mother back from death, the Basilisk three women mutilated to speak once more before they di
ed, the bear who was turned back, and the flame-hearted Djinn who was born from your eyelids burning beneath your mother’s hand, who drifted into the world before you.” The crone smiled, her face breaking into wrinkles, her eyes spilling with tears. “And perhaps not least the woman who carried you on the ferry, who was once a goose, who took a child away from her cradle and far away, who left you instead, a magpie’s trick, who watched over you, and gave you a knife to keep you from hunger and safe, her own knife, the one she used to kill a Wizard when she was very, very young. Your name is Sorrow, my little bird, my dear-as-diamonds, and you have been loved all your days.”
The girl could not breathe. She coughed, and wept, and crumbled into the snow. Aerie opened the Gate and took the girl into her arms. She stroked her hair. She whispered to her and dried her tears. The boy watched, his mouth open, trying to remember every tale and losing them as quickly as they rose up in his heart, golden fish that would not stay.
Out of the wood a young girl came. She was very beautiful, and she wore a wispy red dress that seemed made for dancing. All along her right side ran stark tattoos: a dancing black flame. Beside her were a great Firebird, a black, smoking Djinn, and a small brown spider with glittering legs. The young girl walked slowly to Sorrow, who untangled herself from Aerie and stood to face her. Solace touched the girl’s eyelids softly, and looked into the white-hushed Garden.
“So this is where I would have lived, if I had not become a Firebird’s daughter,” she said. “Did you like it?”
Sorrow blushed. “No,” she whispered. “It was cold at night. I think… I think I have paid for your fire with my sadness since we were born.”
Solace grew very serious. “I am sorry.” She folded the other girl into her dancer’s arms, and kissed her cheek. They looked so much alike, the boy thought, standing like that, with their faces buried in one another’s shoulders, all that long black hair mingling.
“But now we will be sisters,” Solace said brightly, brushing Sorrow’s hair from her face. “And you will learn to dance with me, I promise.”
The Djinn floated forward, and Sorrow could see, in her eyes, how old she was now, the ancient, guttering fire. She was still as youthful-looking as any flame, her stomach taut and black, her palms gleaming, but she was so tired.
“I think,” she said, one red eyebrow arched, “that you are, somehow, my mother. At least as much as you are her sister. Aerie has tried to explain it, but I was never good at history. But it would seem I am the only Djinn of seared flesh, and that is something to know before one is blown out.”
“Why did you leave me for so long?” Sorrow cried, unable to contain herself. “I was so alone! I was so frightened! You could have come for me anytime! Why did you wait?”
Aerie regarded her solemnly. “The world is wide, and the rearing of children is a delicate thing. But, heart of my heart, I knew”—and from her skirts she drew a long, golden feather—“that all tales end. And I, and all, would be here when it was time for yours to begin.”
“Come with us,” said Solace.
“I… I am afraid!” Sorrow said. “I have never been outside the Gate, ever! I have wished for it, so many times, but I am so afraid!”
Aerie bent and took the girl’s dark face in her hands. Her laughing eyes were black as a bird’s. “Sorrow, come. Come into the world, into the land beyond wishing, where, I swear to you, there are miracles: a multitude of Griffins, and a Papess at prayer, and lost girls found, and a Satyr laughing in a cottage by the sea.”
Solace turned to Lantern and the two shared a glittering and conspiratorial expression. The spider said nothing, but clicked her silver legs together. He turned and let a long, glistening cloak fall from his back, and Solace caught it. She wrapped her sister’s shivering shoulders in a cloak of golden feathers, and arranged her hair over its collar.
“Come,” she said, “I will show you so many strange and wonderful things.”
The boy squeaked. He had meant to make a much more grown-up sound, but it came out a squeak. He did not know what he wanted, he did not know what to say, but his face was stricken, his mouth trembling—he tried valiantly not to cry.
“You were not always alone,” he managed to say. “Not always.”
And the girl, his girl, looked at him for a very long time, as still and strange as she had ever been, her dark eyes showing stark in the first pale light that tipped the trees like snow. She stood there, her hand clasped tight in Solace’s painted hand, a Djinn at her shoulder, a Firebird at her back, a spider at her feet, and an old grandmother with her hand resting on her shoulder. He wanted to run to her, but he dared not. He did not belong; he knew he did not belong with them. He would be sent back to the Palace to sit alone on a hard throne. But as the sun rose up like a pearl in the winter sky, Sorrow looked at the boy, her boy, and smiled, her eyes bright as feathers.
“Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me the tale of how we met when we were children, how we walked in a Garden and you were not afraid of me, and how we went into the world, and learned even more strange and wonderful things than we could have guessed at when our walls were made of flowers. Tell me a tale I have never heard, with a boy and a girl in it, and a long, wide road.”
Sorrow held out her pale, thin hand, shining in the morning like a promise.
The boy looked back over his shoulder, at the Palace, but only once. He laced his fingers into hers.
As they walked into the wood, Lantern sang out the morning bells. Behind them, in the golden light of a scalding sun, a purple bracelet slowly sank into the snow.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the close of a book that has presided over five years of my life, there are many people to whom I must tip my now-threadbare hat:
My grandmother Caroline, who read me the Bible by day and Arabian Nights and the Ramayana by night, and thus wrought this rough beast;
S. J. Tucker, my fiery sister, who both inspires and makes manifest;
The glittering network of folk from all manner of outlandish places who have offered faith, love, encouragement, and their spare bedrooms, but most particularly Delia Sherman, Rose Fox, and Josh Jasper;
Wilhelm and Jakob Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Aleksandr Afanasiev, Husain Haddawy, and all other saints of translation, oral tradition, and manuscript preservation;
Juliet and Michele, the twin ravens who sit forever on the shoulders of this book, wiser by far than I;
And last and always, Dmitri and Melissa Zagidulin, without whose steadfastness and insight this book would simply cease to be;
Thank you.
THE ORPHAN’S TALES: IN THE CITIES OF COIN AND SPICE
A Bantam Book / November 2007
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2007 by Catherynne M. Valente
Interior illustrations by Michael Wm. Kaluta
Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Valente, Catherynne M., 1979–
The orphan’s tales. In the cities of coin and spice / Catherynne M. Valente.
p. cm.—(A Bantam Spectra book)
eISBN: 978-0-553-90441-3
I. Title. II. Title: In the cities of coin and spice.
PS3622.A4258O76 2007
813'.6—dc22
2007019699
www.bantamdell.com
v2.0
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catherynne M. Valente was born in the Pacific Northwest, grew up in California, and now lives in Ohio with her two dogs. This is her fifth novel.
THE ORPHAN’S TALES: IN THE NIGHT GARDEN
YUME NO HON
THE LABYRINTH
THE GRASS-CUTTING SWORD
Poetry
APOCRYPHA
ORACLES
THE DESCENT OF INANNA