Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  [I thought I would save them. The last two.]

  You came to me full as a sail, and the moon on your wrists was like a bracelet, like a dowry. Where did you come from—this endless procession of silver-shoed girls? [Where does any girl come from? We come from each other, over and over, mouth to womb to mouth to womb] In what moon-coated vat are you made, under what mottled sky?

  [It was sad for them, I suppose. They were already planning supper with roasted meats and parsnips, cold apples and broiled hawk. They were already peeling the eyes for that damned soup, that stupid, terrible, salty soup I ate every day of my life from the scoured floor of winter to the rafters of summer.]

  But not too sad, I think.

  [No, not too sad.]

  You were utterly like your sisters in every way. [Yes, I suppose we taste the same in the end, but to our mother we were distinct, you know, at least as distinct as plum from cherry blossom] Which is to say slightly more purple than pink, but still a mute, speechless flower, indistinct only from mice or spoons, but not, my love, not from other flowers.

  [Sometimes it is so cold in you, and the walls of your throat press in on me] press out against me [like a sarcophagus, and it is as though I am dying again.] But you’re wrong, you know. You didn’t taste the same at all—you were distinct, not as plum from cherry, but as lime from orchid from woodpulp—[and which was I?]

  You were sour, and bitter, bitter as birch. Your brow was clean and brushed with that same dark hair, your eyes smooth and featureless as meadows undisturbed by deer. You all had the same purity. [Well, that is what virgins own, you had to expect it—wasn’t that why you came rustling down from the hills over and over, into Izumo and into us, because our purity burned from us like soup overspilling its pot?]

  But it washed off of you like flung silk, white and thick, full of salt, once I closed around you, once I closed over you like a wife. [Well, that is what virgins lose.] I think you hoped that it would harm me, the bright bolts of it would penetrate my heart and stir my innards to ash.

  [I hoped nothing, nothing save that you would leave my sisters in peace. When the man who was neither old nor ugly returned to our house, even my mother’s shoulders sagged like sacks of rotting melons, and she knew that she would have to lay out her next girl’s hymen on the supper table.] This girl comes to my glade and not even her fingers tremble. I am still empty of her, but they ululate within me, in recognition, Kazuyo and Kama. But she is a blank scroll, radiant in her simple and tragic grace.

  [There is nothing to say about my wedding night. He had a true claim for once—Kama had been taken from our house, from his very arms, by who knew what bandit. We owed him another, there could be no argument, and the magistrate would certainly give him his due and more if we, if I, if anyone balked his will. Mother spat after him, and he pretended that he felt no speck of spittle on his neck. He was in the right, his back was straight as he went to pull me out of my little room. As before,] as before I took them [he took me as he wished, as any magistrate would give him, and there were sliding screens, and belts, and I imagine his breath smelled much the same when he crawled inside me] as you crawled inside me as I crawl inside you as we are in each other and there is no breath at all, only the sprawling, crawling interior of us, of sister and snake [and I am sure the wetness was the same, and the soreness. I looked over his shoulder at the quiet shape of the house and thought of Kameko standing at the soup-pot. I thought I could smell her on his mouth, I thought I could feel her pressing down on his back, pressing down on me, pressing and staring out of his eyes, the invisible carcass of Kameko that he came dragging behind him, with her childsblood on his belly.] Far off I smelled you moving off from him, his insensate body swathed in the sweat of two women, and within me, [within my sisters] the sleeping Mouth stirred—eyeless, atavistic, pure. It began to pant, [I crept out of the house in the night, sure that I could feed the snake and it would be enough,] that is not the way of it—do you eat a handful of cherries and then want no more for cherries through all possible winters? [that I could be a sacrifice, poured out in the dust, so that the next sister down the line might have a husband, might] and I began to look ahead of the hills for the candle-shape of Koto come singing through the grass like a carried knife, [be surrounded by mound of eyeballs like cairns built up to a sightless god, might have daughters under plum trees]

  What do you care for plum trees? They do not belong to your origin. What are the trees of Koto, what was the fruit that wet your mouth?

  [My trees are the trees of my sisters. They are my persimmons, they are my plums,] they are my innards [they are bundles of cherries that sat in my palms day after day. We made the soup of eyes together; we made beds of straw.] Each huff of smoke-sour want flushed my skin as you came nearer, and the stars were on your collarbone. Hunger spread inky and dark over me, the delicious cascade of color, trickling over my shoulder bones, my ribs, my tail, [I was born, I was born sixth amid sisters, there have always been women around me, women with dark hair like mine,] rose erupted in my breast, sliding outwards like a corona, a holy disc of fire. I could not help the groan—you did not seem to mind, after your groaning night—that escaped my throat as it bloomed into the shade of orange-skins—[and I was born in the laced fingers of my sisters, my trees were my sisters, my fruit the sweet smiles of my sisters,] and I could be the fruit of your trees, so many colors did I glow in your presence, your snake-fruit, your terror-fruit [sister-fruit, and what is the snake but a skin for us, a hiding place, like the hollows of the camphor trees, a bark, a crevice, and we, huddled together in the shade] The Mouth opened between my ribs, its hinges cracking jaw and tongue, the unbolting of this void within me, the glory of its sweet, dark dialect, whispering in my bones, whispering to you, it shudders out of me in a hitching sigh, [I went into the cool and fog-striated hills after my sisters, to be in them again, in the locked forelimbs of girls dancing under the trees that saw the first breaths of all the rest of them—]pulling you [us] in on the thread of a sibilant breath.

  My back exploded into vermillion and chartreuse.

  [But I have no birth story, there is no Koto except Koto-the-sixth-among-eight, I have only them, and their beauty, and their] light.

  [and their light.]

  VII

  TAKAMAGAHARA

  The stair up to Takamagahara is wrought gold—what else would it be? As I ascended, the heat grew and grew, and the light. The banisters glowed like oven-grilles under my hands, and in the blinding glow of the reed-strewn floor of heaven, Ama-Terasu came striding across to the uppermost steps, and in her footsteps bloomed chrysanthemums red and white. All around her the expanse of Takamagahara had become a garden, and its rice-paddies glittered in her radiance, and cherry trees lost their pink hue entirely in her presence, becoming molten and searing to the eye. Everything was aflame, aflame with my sister, and the sky exploded over and over in adoration of her presence, endless detonations of devotion.

  The whole thing gave me a headache.

  “Why are you here, mucus-brother?” she said, and her voice was the ground cracking under a broiling sky. “What right have you to come above the cloudline?”

  “I came to say farewell, dust-sister. I am to go underground, to join our mother and rule over all that is lightless, all your hem does not touch.”

  She snorted laughter. “That ought to be a short journey. I hear mother is nothing but a puddle of rot these days. But you can’t really be here to say good-bye to me—when have you given me the courtesy of a hello?”

  Ama-Terasu is a difficult woman—it all comes of being born first. I cannot explain it, but I did want to speak to her, to touch her light, to feel once as though I had a sister, and that her nature did not stray so far from mine. The instinct of siblings is strange and frequently foolish, but it surged in me, and I wanted her to touch my hair, to call me her little brother, her lamb, her storm-child. I was willing to make the first overtures, of course, and I touched her neck lightly, with a warm palm
.

  “I do not trust you,” she said, but her eyes slid to my hand. “And no one comes here without a demonstration of loyalty—this is the land of the sun, and I am the sun, and my light is law.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  She fingered the sword at my waist, a simple thing, dug from the barrels of the earth by Izanagi for his son. The moon has one like it, I am told. Taking this as invitation, I fingered her necklace, which hung in loops and whorls around her glowing neck, all red beads, carnelian and garnet and ruby. We stood thus for a long while, feeling the heft of each other’s belongings, before Ama-Terasu made her bargain—a bargain I should have suspected all along, for she is part of the rutting, multiplying earth, the fulminating green, the doubling and tripling blue. In those days all the world was hemorrhaging offspring. Why should she be different?

  “Let us have a contest of childbearing,” she said coyly, her golden smile smirking, “and if you should bring forth sons, I will know your intentions are good. But if you should bring forth daughters, I will know you bear me ill—girls are such trouble, you know.”

  “Oh, yes,” I chuckled, “I quite agree. The first troubles of all things troubling. Very well, if this is what you require of me, I will gladly give it.”

  I moved my palm to her cheek, and tilted her heat-radiating face to mine for a kiss. Was this what I had come for? I could not for certain say no. Her breath smelt of deserts and sweet grasses. I confess it, yes, I confess that for the first time—though hardly first of all things that lusted—my body was moved by a thing which was not grief.

  And at the moment that our lips touched, cloud to sun, she broke free of my arms and pulled my sword from its knotted sash. I watched in rain-soaked horror as the bright-belted bitch broke it over her knee in five places—the sound of the shatter was like birds’ wings snapping. Her grin was a cracked yellow gourd and her hands moved so fast, so fast, sweeps of light over the metal. Out of the five pieces she fashioned five strong boys, with limbs of quicksilver and eyes like hilts glinting. Their hair was iron; it hung in clanging choruses around their identical faces. Each was sullen as a sword, and each had my eyes, the line of my nose.

  I pushed her back from my boys and snatched the red beads from her neck—a burst of scarlet gushed from her, blood-quick—a thousand stones popping from her throat like seeds from a bean pod. I sneered at her; she laughed at me—this is the way of siblings. From her broken necklace I took five beads and stretched them into five children, red of arm and calf—but no matter how I prodded the jewels, they would not make the angles of sons, only curves and breasts like apples, hair unfolding over their ruby skulls like silk. They looked up at me through five identical sets of long, rosy lashes, and snickered behind their hands, mocking and slattern-red as their dam.

  “Daughters!” Ama-Terasu crowed, rooster-preening. “I knew you came to harm—you would never come for any other purpose, crow-brother.” How she loves to be right!

  “Daughters, yes,” I said slowly, playing at the craft of an ingenuous smile, “but daughters from your necklace. From my sword, from my body, you see five stalwart boys. They are my issue, these blushing five are yours.”

  She seemed to waver, unsure of my explanation, but the alchemy between siblings bubbled already away within her as in me, and I could see that she too wanted a brother, that she never saw the moon, and missed the communion of the waste-children, the children out of the Root-Country. She took me by the hand, up the last of the stair and into the corona of the sun.

  Behind us walked five daughters and five sons, beautiful as gallows.

  I want it understood that I did not intend, at first, to be anything but a sweet and loyal brother to Ama-Terasu. I helped her to comb the water of her paddies for rice; we laughed together when the storm-clouds around my head flashed blue and gold when splashed by the Speckled River-Trout of Heaven. Our ten children followed behind us through the high plains, and we thought them very fine; we broke the Piebald Colt of Heaven into his saddle, and held hands for the first time with real affection while feeding our dun-colored foal apples and sugar.

  She blushed in the morning fog as he nuzzled her palm. I stroked her burning hair.

  She poured in the evenings a tea all of light, and kept her blazing orange sleeves carefully out of the steam. I roasted octopus for her when she complained of fever. We were happy, brother and sister in one house.

  I was bored beyond dreams of leisure.

  She thought the rice harvest too meager, the colt not swift enough in its growth. She sniped at me, she taught her sons to reflect the crackling bolts of my storms with their mirror-limbs, taught her daughters to smile behind their hands when I had gone from them. She denied me her gleaming flesh and would not be moved even a step closer to me than she pleased, though we had all these ridiculous babes at our feet. I could not have drunk another cup of tea without gagging on it, and she retched at the thought of octopus.

  She was not Mother. Mother would not try me the way she did, would not willfully thwart my devotion. Mother would not exhaust me to the point of the silly tricks I played, would not spend her nights laughing at me behind her hand, when my desire shivered and snapped between us like a lightning-struck tree.

  In her hall of pearl and jasper, laid out in flecks from one side of heaven to the other, I pissed out her whistling tea, I squatted and shat out her awful, starchy rice—the pearl stank and the jasper steamed and I was well pleased. She pretended not to notice. She sent our boys to clean it, and the clang of their iron hands on the lacquer scraped my ears spotless.

  I walked through the rice paddies we had planted together, hands in the mud, and hers so bright under the sludge that I thought the sludge was itself gold, and what rice would grow from such soil! With my belt of cirrus flashing black, I kicked through her retaining walls and jumped from terrace to terrace, splashing in the sudden water as paddy flooded into paddy, and the rice—not so different than any other farmer’s rice—spoiled in the blinding light of Takamagahara. At this she did cry out, and sent our boys to shore up the walls again, but their ore-padded knees rusted in the standing wreckage. Her face was wide and twisted, shining in terrace after ruined terrace. I laughed—the Rice of Heaven was not even good for wine.

  But she did nothing to me, she knelt and poured the tea that evening as though nothing had happened, as though she had Mother’s patience, and I could not see her stomach flaring through her robes, and her hunger. Yellow-faced fool, she could not touch Mother’s patience with the longest of her beams.

  Sometimes I feel as though there is something else living within me, a smoke-mouthed and sneer-eyed creature which is me-but-not-me, and I cannot speak to it, but it drives me, drives me after dragons and Mothers and causes me, in its salt-in-wound morbidity, to push further than even I would have if it did not sit like a crow on my spleen, cinching in my guts with its claws. And so I think it was this thing which saw the Piebald Colt of Heaven prancing it its bronze pen, which saw the colt and hopped, horribly, from one black foot to the other.

  It must have been this thing in me which opened the pen and put out its hand for the colt to nose, which brought an apple and a lump of sugar and murmured to the beast as it chewed the sweet, wet meat. It could not have been I who stroked its blond mane, called him a good beast, and a kind beast, and put a nose to his. It, and not I, must have felt his hot breath on its cheeks and heard the soft snort as it cut into his flesh, peeling that gold pelt from the muscle, all in one apple-swift strip. I could not have watched the blood of the Piebald Colt of Heaven seep into the celestial plain, the creature I had raised with my sister, had called gentle, and lovely, and ours.

  Perhaps it was this thing which had had statues made of it, which stomped snakes with clay soles.

  It could not have been I who threw it into the chambers of Ama-Terasu, who laughed at the sodden slap of the carcass on her polished floor, at the high, flute-pale screams of our daughters as they leapt from their sewing, red hair f
lying, red eyes flashing.

  It must have been the storm-seed inside me, for I could never do those things to such a woman as the sun became.

  SEVENTH HEAD

  I am dragging blood behind me like menses—the grass is full of it, clotted with it, hungry for it, and I pick myself up over the hillocks and dells with a belly bloody and inflamed, a mass of maidenheads burst and gaping *we sit on the floor of the monster like a blister of blood, heavy and black, and we seep through, we seep through, and stamp our wet wombprints on the path from what was once our house to what is now our nest* I did not mean for this to happen *did you think you could eat a thing and not become it? We always knew, we who have eaten the soup of eyes every day from birth; what is there we have not seen between the eight of us?* Kaori, Kaori, it hurts *yes, it always hurts, we knew that, too, but blood is blood, blood is a portent, and you are beautiful when you bleed, when you bleed for us, and with us, and in us, and around us*

  I was so weak when I came to you, Kaori, so weak with the blood bellowing out of me *and your back, your poor back. None of the rest of them saw you as I did, your jeweled skin cracked open, your stomach ruined. No seduction there, only a monster, and terrible* I could not even cry, the sounds which came out of me were a cacophony, all those voices, all that screeching, I could not hide for the blood and the vomit of voices *It didn’t matter anyway, there were only two of us left, and mother would let neither of us go to the man who was neither well nor sick. His face was moon-blanched when morning found it, his voice gone with my sisters, and he was turned out of our house like a dog, but there was nothing left of him to whip, nothing left but food for other dogs* There are roots in my vertebrae, twisting and gobbling bone, and I am become the Root-Country, I am Ne no Kuni, all these throats stoppered up with women, women lodged in them like corks and the pain, the pain *I hung behind my mother’s skirts, too young even to look him in the face, and whispered to her that I felt so sorry for him. It was not his fault the snake had taken all his wives, and why should I not have my chance as his wife, when all the others had? I could be a good wife, I told her, I know how to make the soup, I know how to arrange the grass on the floor—why should I not be allowed to wear the rich, thick kimono my sisters had worn?* Kaori, the blood, where does it come from? *I was a silly girl, but pity sat in me like a fat baby.* Something is growing from my shoulder blades, I cannot see it, I cannot see it, but it is there, and its roots seize my eight livers, and its thirst, its thirst—