Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Quickly, Darlingred, quickly!”

  We began to run over the flat land, the binary earth, feet trailing bronze clouds like wings. It truly felt as though I stood motionless, and the Labyrinth swing wide and long around me, a farmer’s scythe whipping through grain. Blue and gold, sky and sand. And then nothing.

  We halted like a sentence fragment, cut off mid-syllable. Silence reigned and the horrible clamor was gone.

  The Road was garrisoned, bordered on all sides, attended like a bride. All around us stood limbs of glass, dismembered legs, arms, heads, blown glass like crystal, like sculpted water. They stood in formation, that old familiar (though how familiar to me who has known no othertime?) phalanx of the chessboard. On each side they stood, silent, transcendent, prisms through which the radiance of the sun-that-is-a-star flew like a wind. Facing Queens of women’s torsos, full regal breasts and prince-bearing, horse-riding hips, Kings with muscles like breastplates, broad, bow-drawing shoulders. The Knights were shapely legs meant to grip the flanks of a war-stallion, cut off at the crown of thigh and the ankle, the slice smooth and perfect, revealing faint rings like great trees. Bishops stood as straight, powerful arms, perched lightly on fingers like insects. Rooks molded into feet, toes like transparent pearls curling into the desert Board. And the Pawns, severed heads all in a row like marigolds in the window. Each of them were beautiful, craggy faces of crusaders and classic profiles of a dozen Helens—

  (—I will be Paris, for love of thee—)

  I pushed the voice aside like a heap of armor. Their pouting lips full and slightly open, hair falling in glassine waves around slender necks, couching the crystal faces in a sea of refracted light. We gaped, I am certain I no more than the Monkey with all of his smirking knowledge, with all of his high-sounding name. The suddenly equatorial sun streamed through them in broad sword-strokes. I could feel his paw sweating in my hand, and when he spoke his voice was low and growling.

  “I think we ought to be very quiet, and go around them. Follow, follow me.” He began to creep along the perimeter of the glass figures, but even as he passed the line of pawns rippling voices pricked the air. A fractured unison, each delicate soprano tone following on the previous note.

  “Stop. We know. We see. You are the Magus.”

  I froze before the mirrored unblinking eyes and tall limbs. “But I am not.”

  “Not you, womanchild. Him,” they sang. I turned towards the bronzed figure of Ezekiel, who stood with bared teeth.

  “We should go now. Hoo! I beg you, they will spoil everything!” The response of the crystalline limbs flew outwards like a sonic boom disrupting a choir of castrati. “No, No, you cannot! We know, we know who you are, we can see the flesh beneath your oystershells, we see your Path blazing ahead of you. You have returned! We knew you would, we did not lose faith. You must hear us!”

  I began to tremble, as though the precise tonality of their voices had achieved a terrible resonance in my bones, and I was shaking into rubble. There was no change in the figures, the Queens’ breasts still proudly rode the air, the Pawns’ hair did not rustle by strand or lock. They stared at each other, the opposing armies, ever at the instant before battle, before the Knight slides on his severed ankle to his appointed square, never truly fighting, shattering, slivering, poised forever on the edgemoment, the timebefore. The weight of their anticipation creased the wind. Ezekiel snarled and spat, noises bubbling up from his throat as from an ancient cauldron, rimmed in leather and studded with iron slugs. He growled under that stream of sound, “Now, now, now, now. We must go. They will take you away from me.” I knelt and held him, as he had held me, stroked his coarse yellow fur into silk, whispered and pressed my waxwet cheek to his shoulder.

  “No, I will stay, I will hear. I have to. I stayed for you, Ezekiel, I stayed to hear you. Perhaps everything ought to be spoiled.”

  He seemed to calm, the smooth of rippling muscles under alarmed skin, ruffle of bird’s wing ligaments and joints like mouths. He touched my face with something like tenderness, resigned and hopeless. But his flesh only leapt and hardened again when they spoke, fluttering in the wake of that sapphire music, thirty-two voices striking like a dulcimer hammer.

  “This is our mind: the quill-hand is the noble, the tooth-hand indolent. The left foot knows the blistered sky, the right foot treads the leavened Road. This is what we see when we look through the glass-that-is-you. Separation and shattering lie like lovers below your fifth vertebrae. The right hand and the left hand fly apart.”

  The Monkey’s shrill vibratory words cut through theirs. “You see? They know nothing, they are lunatics. You can learn nothing from headless pieces who can never Play.” He spat like a woman’s curse.

  “Oh, my Ezekiel, but I am a lunatic, too.” My face was an ocean, flowing in its own tidal reds, the effusion of tears eroding the shoals of my cheekbones. My mouth hung open, collecting the leaden drops, lips full and loose, gleaming with salt.

  “Magus,” came the glissando of the chessboard, “why do you hate us? We do not harm. We do not lie. We could never harm her, of course not, no, never, never.” It was as though the pieces asked and answered themselves, though they spoke in that same fractured unison.

  “That name is not mine. It is a lie.” The Monkey smelted his words like a twisted blade. “It is, it is!” They sang gladly, “The falcon told us, with his leather hood, and the desert mice! You are the Magus, with hands like stars, who walks the sacred marshes with crane-feet, who ate his name. He who made us and has come again.”

  If they could have danced, they would have made their chessboard into a ballroom. Their glass flesh glistened and flowed over invisible bones like the currents of a hundred rivers. The long calves of the Knights wanted desperately to tremble, the fingers of the Bishops, arched like flying buttresses, lusted for movement.

  “What else could it mean, that you bring her with you, excreting Want like sweat, she who will kiss the belly of our Queen, the Seeker-After, the Player?”

  “No one brought me. I came on my own feet,” I protested.

  “All that matters, humanchild, is that you came. You came and you will make us whole, you will mend what he built, give with both hands what he held back from us. He knows you will, he knows. That’s why he snarls at us, who never hurt him.”

  I looked helplessly at the inscrutable Monkey, his eyes like rosary beads, glinting dangerously between the shield-lines of crystal figures, his little copper body like a smoking hookah. I fell between their words, clinging to cliff-phrases, slipping on the algae of predicate nominative, tearing my fingernails to the quick. I could not understand.

  “Ignore them, continue on. We must stay on the Path. Forward motion, endless if, but still we must. You know the Door lies behind us. They are foolish.” He was already walking away, leaving me, expecting me to follow—how soon had he come to believe me a loyal child, an acolyte, a modest student with the moon-scalp between her braids illuminating humility! I straightened my scarlet spine and called out to his back, “Are you what they say? Did you make them? Who are you?” I whispered the last. His warm, autumn shoulders slumped, and he spoke to the wind, without turning towards me.

  “I am myself and no other. But in the beginning, before the Walls and the Road, beyond the beforetime, before and after the name traveled through me, I was also myself. Do not interfere with them. They are, that is enough. Let it be.”

  I waited for a friendly hoo, but it did not come. In the press of the desert I was cold. I turned back up to the watery shapes.

  “The tooth-hand is indolent. It does not speak. He carries the Stone, but it slithers in your veins like a sidewinder. As long as he walks beside you, you are not free. He keeps you mad for purposes none can divine. The right and the left. He conceals like a Door. He left us like this, and will leave you. But you can help us, you can, you can. With your red mouth you can show us the Way.” They seemed to beg, to implore.

  The Monkey had given up and leaned against
a large adobe Wall some space away, chewing on a cactus-thorn lazily. His glance spoke of resentment, do-what-thou-wilt, bemused sorrow. I closed my eyes, swam in the fresco of light on my inner lids.

  “How? I cannot help anyone. All I can hold in my hands is Death, red and bright.”

  “No, no, humanchild,” the chrysalis-voice of the pieces whispered, faint with anticipation, “You can give us the great silver chariot, the reins and the moon-bellied mares. You can move us, you can Play.”

  Stutteringly, I began to see. “You cannot move yourselves?”

  “We are the Game,” came the bell-like answer. “We stand forever at the beginning-place, where he put us, stiller than rain, and we cannot move the smallest iris. We are forever tilted towards action, never within it, never thrilling to Purpose. We were made, we cannot be. We do not know what Game we are, we do not know our name. We do not know Rules or Stratagems. We see into the hallways of your bones, but we cannot see a Path across the Board. No one can be both the Player and the Game, no one can hold both ends of the sword in his hand and yet part the flesh of his enemy. No one can be both the Man and the Bar.”

  “You want me to teach you to play chess?”A silken rustle, smelling of mint and new basil on a grandmother’s windowsill passed through them, sibilant and sighing.

  “Chesssss . . . is that what we are? Are we Chess? Tell us what Chess is, child, tell us how it tastes. Tell us, tell us, and we will give you a thing you desire.” My heart began to flutter like a sparrow within. “We will give you a Vision, a Vision of the beforetime. You may look into the glass belly of our Queen and see a landscape of notnow. We are poor oracles, our eyes cast not forward but backwards and within. But we can show you this small thing. Trade us for it, beautiful, blessed redwoman.”

  “There was no beforetime. I have always been here.”

  “And yet in the oracle’s eye you extend both forward and back. Perhaps you are right. We have been known to lie. It does not really matter, of course. Your want speaks loudly and in perfect verse.”

  The Monkey was frowning now, but he was a gold blur in the darkness of my tears. I held on so frailly to the Road and the now, I feared to look even an inch beyond it. One madness had become comfortable—could I bear another? The serrated edge of unlearning my own singularity? But my Will had long ago become flotsam, curiosity a plank which had forgotten the shape of its galleon. If a thing was offered, I could not refuse. It was not the Way.

  I sighed, drying my tears on my wrists, walking onto the Board, listening to the dull pad of my bare feet on the squares. The pieces seemed to lean in like glass towers, listening with their crystal veins. (But how do I know these Rules, how can I know them, who never learned them?)

  “The King,” I began, sniffing, “can move one square in any direction. But the Queen can sail the Board like a dreadnaught, can move anywhere she wants . . . ”

  20

  The Board thrummed with its new word: CHECKMATE.

  They were ready to move, leaning into the sun like wind sprinters, finding the shape of strategy in their glassy bodies. But they were honest pieces after all, and would keep their bargain. A high, clear voice like an amethyst trumpet trilled down the battle-lines, and this time it was the great Queen’s alone, her powerful shoulders squared and assured now of her position, hips flared provocatively, thighs in a feline crouch. “Come, humanchild, come here.” Her tone had grown leaves of command and the language had lost its surreality—she knew now she was royalty. I walked through the forest of erect glass, mirrored in the limbs, a bleed of woman through perfected flesh. They towered, crackling with silence.

  I knelt before her, because that is what one does in the presence of Queens. Headless her beauty seemed more annihilating and lightning-edged, full now of new power and surety, knowledge that she was the key piece in the precious Game. Though she had no hands to stroke my face, her voice nevertheless caressed me like a favorite daughter, smoothing my hair and drying my face of tears like blood.

  “Darling, it is not so dreadful as that. Oh, my dear, my dear one,” she crooned, as though rocking a sweet-faced princess to sleep after a nightmare. “Look into me, now, into the canvas of my belly, see what you have purchased, yourself and no other. Look deep, downdowndown. It is yours, our sight is yours. Don’t cry, don’t cry, my precious girl.”

  I placed my hands on the vase-curved of her waist and stared into the curved mirror of her stomach, the crystal womb within, and a strange fog was there, forming into a scene, projected against her uterine Wall like an amorphous child, slowly sprouting fingers and organs like a night-lily. This is what I saw in the Queen’s womb, with the anointment of oracular sight on my brow as I pressed against the coolness of her skin:

  A girl and a boy, sitting lazily cross-legged under a pale green willow, picking at the grass. She is lying with her head in his lap, long red hair fanned against his knee. Her skin is not my unnatural red but like honeyed cream. She grins up at him, his eyes the color of an evergreen forest, of dragonfly wings, his corn-gold, too-long hair falling over his forehead. And she laughs. When she does her back, her throat arches slightly, and he blushes. He smells of wheat fields and fallen autumn apples soft against the earth, and it is a smell she knows like her own. Under the filmy reed-curtain of the old willow tree, they hold hands and talk quietly, shoes discarded like peach pits. The sun is low in the sky, warm and orange-gold on their young faces, their strong white smiles and freshly washed hair. The light spills onto their shoulders like water from a well. There are sharp-smelling rosemary branches braided into her hair, with their little blue blossoms, and the oil is on their brown fingers. The boy whispers something in the girl’s ear, and she closes her eyes, lashes smoking cheekbones like bundles of sage.

  They rise from the thick grass. They lean, arm in arm against the tree, that melting sun illuminating their youthful forms, her smallish hips, his long legs all rimmed in summerlight. Just before the image fades into the looking-glass womb again, I can see him tenderly brush a strand of hair from her face, full of uncertain care. And then they are gone. They know nothing of any aftertime, any night in the long line of nights ahead, and they are beautiful, simply. I cry after them, hands and face flush against the crystal-ball belly of the Queen. I choked and sobbed, clawing after the vanished watercolor, trying to hold it to me like a doll.

  “There, there,” the Queen murmured. “It is what you came for, after all. To know that you are more than you were. Poor thing. But you must go now, for we are ready to Play at last, and we are terribly excited.” Indeed, she seemed to wriggle in her space.

  Stumbling across the Board I blindly sought the edge, and as I passed the last Pawn with his flowing hair, I heard him whisper sorrowfully, “I think you were very beautiful when you were young—”

  And then they were lost in a rush of light as a Knight leapt over the row of Pawns and the Game commenced, so swift and violent that a sharp-paged wind was thrown up by the whirring movement of the pieces. I could not even see them, only their phosphor-trails, streaming glasslight behind them as they looped threads of infinite patterns over the Board. Knight to take Bishop, Pawn to become Queen, Rook streaming across his straight highways.

  “Well, now you’ve done it,” came the reedy voice of the Monkey I had nearly forgotten, hairy arms crossed over his chest. “Do you think you’ve fixed anything?”

  I sighed heavily. “I did what they wanted.”

  “Of course.” He walked over to the edge of the Board, profile whipped by the Game-movement as by a speeding train. “Do you see what is happening, what you have done? They are Playing their Game, and they will Play as long as they can, every possible Game combination, every conceivable attack and defense. And when they have traced the leaf-Path of every Game that could ever be imagined, it will be over, and they will die. They will Shatter and Splinter and there will be nothing left but a mountain of broken glass. You were right, you carry only Death in your hands, and it is Death you have given them,
its tiny seed wrapped in your crimson smile.”

  I wanted to feel pain, but there was nothing. They had asked, begged, even traded. If they died it was their fault. I could not pity them, it was not in me, if it had ever been. We all find our Way here, or we do not. It was not my fault.

  “Surely there are many combinations,” I said.

  “Yes, more than you can hold in your painted head. But it is a finite number, and when they reach it they will die. As they were, they were immortal. They were missing a thing, and you have not given it to them. They can no more Stop now than they could Begin. You put them in motion, and now the motion eats them whole. But they are no more than they were, it is only that they have traded for a different stagnant swamp. The wretches would not be satisfied. Come, Darlingred, this is a graveyard now, with glass headstones, we should not stay to witness. I do not blame you. It hardly matters whether one thing in the whole lives or dies. But I warned you.”

  “What did I see?”

  “An image, nothing more. Let it be. Oracles show, they do not interpret. If you let it grow in you, it will consume the delicate madness we have woven to lead us to the Angel, and all will be lost. I warned you. Forget the children and the tree, forget it all. There is no possible retrieval of even a single strand of his hair.”

  We walked out across the empty desert, with its ghost of Road, and I stared ahead unmoving, falling though I was standing, yielding not to the radiating image of the Queen’s womb, but in the possession, entirely now, of the Stone within his belly, its promise of seizure and deliverance, and the moon like an epitaph in the black sky. I did not see in that half-light that my body had blushed to a deep, rolling green. I did not see the flush of fecundity, the sheen of willow-leaves covering the surface of me like a mosaic.

  I walked like a jade statue, over the dunes and Away.