by Yoon Ha Lee
Mindful of her manners, the former soldier had brought the best offering she owned: her sword, oiled and blessed by a wander-priest. She descended the cliff by a trail cut into it by former petitioners, careful of her step, and to the sand-lined shore with its scatter of kelp and shells and driftwood. The roar of the sea overwhelmed her at first. It reminded her of battle, which she had not tasted in a long time. Then she regained her composure and called out to the Sea Oracle.
The Sea Oracle rose from the waves, taking on the shape of a sleek youth with secretive eyes. Jewels dripped from their hair, their fingers, circled their neck: pearls and sapphires and agate, carven ivory, beads of bleached coral. The former soldier laid her sword before the Sea Oracle and awaited permission to speak.
The Sea Oracle spoke in the everywhere voice of wind and wave and rain. “You have come a long way for a simple thing,” they said, not unkindly. “Look down.”
The former soldier looked down. She saw what she had seen before, sand and kelp, shells and driftwood. The gulls and terns cried out to her, yet she did not understand.
“You have a heart of stone,” the Sea Oracle said, “but did you think that meant your nature was unyielding? If there is something the sea knows, it is that sand is nothing but stone given wisdom by the hand of water over time. And sand can be shaped. How you wish to shape the sand of your heart—that is up to you.”
The former soldier bowed deeply to the Sea Oracle and would have left her offering, but the Oracle shook her head. “Take your sword with you,” they said. “I have no use for it. If you, too, are done with it, I am sure you can find someone to pass it on to.”
The former soldier began to thank the Sea Oracle, but all that remained was a rush of foam, an evanescent fragrance of blossoms and storm-ozone. Easy of heart, she picked up the sword and walked into a new life.
The Gate of Bells
At the northern border of a land where badgers play board games with comma-shaped stones and poems are inscribed on the very sycamores, a traveler paused at the Gate of Bells. She wore a bow at her back, and her hair was the color of sentinel nightfall.
“Open the gate,” the traveler called. When she looked up at the pavilions, painted in the five holy colors, she saw the silhouettes of ropes unswaying, ropes knotted, ropes without bells.
A man stood watch at the highest pavilion, eyes dark and keen beneath his helm. “The gate will open only when the bells ring,” he said. “As you can see, there are no bells to be had for miles around.”
“Do your people have no desire to welcome me?” she asked. “I bring gifts from the north, stories that once belonged to you. We have remembered them for you all these years.”
“I am sure they have grown finer in your keeping,” he said regretfully. “But the rule is the rule and I have no authority to change it.”
“In that case, take off your helm and set it aside,” the traveler said, “so that I may look upon your face before I go.”
The man saw no harm in this, so he set his helm aside as she had asked. He was not handsome, but his face was honest.
In no hurry at all, the traveler strung her bow and nocked an arrow fletched with gray goosefeathers. The arrow flew straight and sweet to strike the helm; and the helm sang with the voice of a hundred bells.
The gate cracked open from top to bottom. The traveler lowered her bow. “Am I still welcome?” she asked.
“More than ever,” the man said, glancing at the gate, and he came down the stairs to greet her properly.
for YKL
The Workshop
She is not an angel, but angels visit her workshop. Some are crowned in light from the universe’s first exhalation. Others come with swords forged from final kisses, and still others bring wine pressed from ripe stars. (Angels have indifferent palates, but she is kind enough not to tell them so.)
Angels visit her when their wings want mending. She has tools fine and terrible: needles hammered from indiscreet mirrors and nails that bite like first love abandoned, bandages woven from the susurration of seafoam and bonesaws that recite anatomical treatises in the language of entropy. No one questions her skill with these things.
But it is not her skill the angels think of when they come to her. Rather, it is that old story of an angel who unwinged herself that her comrades might fly again. When they mention it to her, however, she only laughs and says she could build herself wings any time she liked; it is their company she wants.
for YKL
The School of the Empty Book
At the School of the Empty Book, children are not taught to read until they are ten years old. Ten is one of the ten holy numbers. There are ten great sages, each associated with a flower of rare medicinal properties. There are ten sword-saints, such as Shiema of the Storm and Kir Red-Hand. And there are ten chronicles of battles past and future in the book everlasting.
It is not that the children grow up impoverished of stories. Every morning and every evening, they are read some poem, perhaps about the heavenly horses that bring the rain-chariot when it is time to plant the spring crops, or perhaps the curious history of Liaskion, the girl-queen who sacrificed her face in exchange for the wisdom to rule well, and who reigned from behind masks of butterfly and bird, so that even her consort never learned what she looked like.
In the meantime, the children at the School of the Empty Book learn other things: how to rake straight lines and flawlessly undulating curves in the rock gardens, how to prepare acorns for flour, how to spar with weapons of wood and bamboo. They learn to use the abacus, to meditate on the names of the ten angels without fidgeting, and to arrange flowers, including flowers of folded paper in the winter when nothing else blooms.
On his or her tenth birthday, each child is given two books. One is a primer with the sorts of things you might expect: tales of talking animals and humble trees, conjugations and stroke orders, exhortations about the proper frame of mind in which to attempt calligraphy. Here the child is finally given a systematic introduction to the beauties of the written language.
The child sees the other book as empty except for the title sheet, upon which the child’s name has been written in an elegant, smooth hand and embellished with gold leaf. Yet no child can read his or her own book. The pages seem to be creamy, smooth, and utterly blank. Others will assure the child that there is something there, several pages densely scribed. They even agree on what is written. Often these are stories about mysteries heretofore unknown, such as the current haunt of the nightbird who eats the sun-fruit each evening, or what happened to the child’s beloved older sibling who rode off to war and never returned. As the years pass, more stories appear in the book, and the pages remain as empty to the child’s eyes as ever.
Inevitably there are some children who spatter ink on their books or hold them up to fire in hopes of uncovering the secret writing. In the first case, the ink quickly fades away. In the second, new stories stop appearing. Even among those who are more careful with their books, the bittersweetness of this gift, which they must rely on others to read for them, never goes away.
for Nancy Sauer
How the Andan Court
Actually, I cannot offer you roses. Roses that taste like crystallized desire when you try to smell them. Roses whose buds are softer than the hands of the morning mist. Roses pierced through by the needles of nightfall.
Roses that count the season’s clock with their petals, disrobing red by red until all’s gone except the sun’s winter angles. Roses growing in walls around the wells of your heart. Roses crowding the boundaries of your cards until every shuffle is a procession of brambles.
Roses laid upon the swelling waters to be swallowed by black tides. Roses that candy themselves as they pass your lips. Roses so shy you can only glimpse their shadows as you fall asleep.
I would rather give you roses than a bouquet of words, but I do not speak the petal language adequately and it does not admit translation; this will have to suffice.
f
or Nancy Sauer
The Last Angel
In the streets of a city at the edge of hell, the last angel traces out every dead end in soft, measured footsteps. In her hand is a shard of star, with which she marks boarded-up windows and decaying walls. She writes fragments of poetry in gutter cant and half-formed creoles, draws crude stick figures of lovers coupling and cats curled by leaking radiators.
The last angel has only one wing, and it is the color of smog and the crisp, charred end of a candle wick. She plucks her flight feathers and gives them to nursing mothers and beggars huddled in coats two sizes too large. The last battle has been fought, and hell’s gates are open wide, but some people cling to the city’s cinders nonetheless. Although she cannot guide them out of the city—that is something only they can do for themselves—she can give them her assurance that, as long as they linger here, so will she.
for YKL
The Virtues of Magpies
Once in a border keep where the winters were tempest-winged and the sun never appeared without robes of violet clouds, there lived a youth who liked to feed the birds. In particular they were fond of magpies with their sleek black-and-white plumage and their cheery cries. Other people who lived in the keep viewed the magpies with scorn, for they were said to bring chancy luck at best, and they made a racket in the mornings. Or during any time of day.
Nevertheless, the youth insisted on continuing to save morsels for the magpies. As time passed and the youth grew closer to adulthood, they came to be blamed for the magpies’ antics, and the keep elders greeted them with cuffs and curses. The youth only said that even tricksters deserved to eat, and continued to wheedle crusts of bread or handfuls of seed from the kitchens.
Once the magpies stole all the keep’s light, from the flames dancing in the lanterns to the gleam of starlight upon spearpoint and armor-joint, and scattered the flicker-tapestry in the nearby wood, with the result that no one could see a thing for the next two nights, until the enchantment dissolved. Squirrels gnawed at the tapestry and undid the spell-strands. But by then the magpies, had lost interest anyway.
Another time the magpies switched the voice of the keep’s great warning bell with the voice of the keep’s chantmaster, which everyone found out on the morning of devotions. The chantmaster had to be restrained from hunting down the youth and deafening them with the clangor. (Deafening everyone, really.) The youth, who had acquired a certain storm-sense for magpie tricks, had elected to spend the day holed up in a well-insulated section of the library with some hastily-made sandwiches.
Most notorious of all was the time when the magpies switched left and right, which played havoc with everything from a dinner of state—the keep was hosting a delegation from a country where it was taboo to use the left hand to eat with—to the warmasters’ drills, to say nothing of everyone getting lost and books having to be read in mirrors. Even then the youth persisted in their affection for the magpies, and passed the birds baubles of bead or bright thread for their nests. (In secret. They weren’t so indiscreet.)
Yet when invaders came riding from the high hills, the magpies proved surprisingly useful. No one but the youth would have guessed it of them. The magpies filched the edges from the invaders’ swords and placed them on the rocks underfoot: instant caltrops. They snagged scraps of cloud from the sky-heights and clogged the invaders’ helmets with them, making it impossible to see or speak clearly. And they rearranged the countryside so that east was west and north was south, a swirl of misdirection with the keep at its inaccessible center.
Afterward, when the invasion force retired in disarray, the lady of the keep came to tender the magpies and their youth an apology. The magpies’ response was to braid a cage of crickets into her hair. The lady gritted her teeth, smiled, and accepted that the magpies’ nature could not be changed, so the least she could do was accept it gracefully. As for the youth, they were conspicuously absent during the exchange, but they were later seen napping in a corner, with several watchful magpies perched on their shoulders to make sure the chantmaster didn’t remember old grudges.
for Storme
Two Bakeries
In a city where tame peacocks wandered the promenades and trees mingled their branches in graceful arches, there lived two bakers. It was not a small city, of course; there were other bakers as well. But these two bakers were notable because their bakeries were side by side on the same street. One had a sign painted with a sheaf of wheat and a blue rose. The other had no sign at all.
The first bakery had shelves filled with loaves of all kinds: bread speckled with golden raisins and currants like secret treasures, bread that tasted of mountain honey or molasses, bread fragrant with thyme or rosemary; bread with thick, dark crusts that rewarded thoughtful chewing and delicate crusts dotted with seeds.
The other bakery sold wheat bread in plain, dense loaves. That was all.
The first baker noticed that, even so, all sorts of people visited the signless bakery next door. There were servants of the great houses in livery embroidered with amphisbaenas and eagles, and musicians who carried their coins in violin cases, and constables with callused hands and muddy boots. In short, they were the same kinds of people who came to her own bakery.
Finally, curiosity overcame her, and she went next door where the second baker, a tidy woman with square, strong hands, was sweeping the floor.
“Forgive me for my impudence,” the first baker said, “but may I ask you a question?”
The second baker smiled. “I don’t sell words, only bread. What troubles you?”
“My bakery sells all the different kinds of bread I can think of,” she said, “and yours sells only one. Yet people come to you day after day.” She stopped, not knowing how to ask her question without being rude.
The second baker understood her anyway. “When people go to your bakery,” she said kindly, “they are looking forward to the world’s riches. When people come to my bakery, they are remembering hunger.”
“Thank you,” the first baker said, and she bought two loaves on her way out.
for Nancy Sauer
The Witch and Her Lover
On the other side of the horizon, where the waters of the sea fall off into a great cauldron, a witch lived with her lover, a woman who armored her heart with bramble-story and sword-honor and prayers of charred words. Every night the two would meet breath to breath and hand to hand, as is the way of lovers, and every night the sun would ride beyond them to plunge into the cauldron on the other side of the horizon, lighting the witch’s home. The witch worked every sorcery she knew to please her lover, for she knew the small charms of lovers are the most difficult of all. Yet no matter what she did, her lover never smiled.
During the days, when the other side of the horizon lay in shadow and the vapors of the old sun scorched dragon-visions into the air, the witch meditated upon her failures. First she brought offerings of pickled apples or labradorite strung onto chains of fickle silver as gifts, or birds to sing dissonant symphonies. Her lover expressed her appreciation, but did not smile.
Then the witch invited poets and dancers and glassblowers to entertain her lover. Her lover watched the performances attentively, and seemed the most impressed with the glassblowers’ artistry. Their creations gleamed beautifully in the sun’s light. Yet she did not smile.
At last the witch, in desperation, descended into the heart of the cauldron. She wore talismans of cat-bone and chrysoberyl to protect herself, and waited in ambush for the sun. When the sun made its nightly plunge, she trapped it in a net woven from merfolk hair and gallows ropes and tongueless bells. The sun turned a face sightless with despair to her, but the witch was firm in her purpose and dragged it to her home to present to her lover. “Here,” the witch said, “we will always have light in our home.”
Then the witch’s lover said, still unsmiling, “Beloved, did you not realize? It is not a captive sun that lights my heart. And it is not that I never smile; it is that I only do so in the dark, w
here you must take it on faith.”
Then the witch apologized to her lover and to the sun, and set the latter free.
Moonwander
The court of the dogs met in a pack, in a circle in woods at the edge of the world where the night falls off into distances of infinite wild smells: pine, and water ever-running, and that sharp unshadowy tang of borders unbraided. There were huskies pale-eyed, and tall stern poodles, and German shepherds, and other dogs besides, including a beagle with his tricolor coat. Although the velvet blackness was pierced through with stars and stirred with luminous nebular drifts, there was no moon.
The beagle bayed at the absent moon, once and twice and thrice, and the other dogs took up the chorus. The first time no moon rode to silver the woods, nor the second, nor the third. Crickets quieted; frogs went silent. They knew.
“There’s no question,” said one of the German shepherds. “She’s slipped her leash one time too many.”
“She has to face the consequences, then,” the beagle returned. He had a quiet voice, but they heeded it well, in the court of the dogs. “She can’t claim ignorance, and it’s no excuse anyway.”
The dogs didn’t fear the dark, which wasn’t absolute in any case. They knew what it was to hunt for mice and voles and sleek fast rabbits in the woods; they knew what it was to follow scent-trails like smoke-knit puzzles. But the moon was the crown of the hunt, in her way. It was not proper for her to miss her allotted days in the sky.
“Summon her for the sentencing, then,” said a small fierce corgi, head craned back as far as it would go to peer up into the sky’s forever depths.