She feels liquid drip down her wooden thigh. Startled, she closes the doors tighter.
“I thought I’d be happy with you,” Solomon says from the pallet. “But you’re not a real woman. You’re a thing I made.”
You didn’t make me, she thinks. I grew.
With the shell in her mouth, she makes a tiny noise, a moaning sound, not a word, but not the sound of nothing. She chirrs a note. Everything that ever sang through her branches, every gust of wind, every bat, every bee, every bird. They all spoke to her and she spoke back to them when she was a tree. Now she is a hinged woman, muted by magic, and she moves the shell in her mouth, looking for a voice she’s not been made to have.
8.
Solomon gets up, dresses in his loosest garments, and writes. His skin is boils and snakes. His bones feel breakable, and even his thoughts feel diseased. Talking doesn’t help his loneliness. He wants to have her again, because she is all he’ll ever have.
She isn’t what he wants. He had a different woman in mind. Copper glances, black lace, a living woman willing to wrap him in bandages, a woman willing to carry him to a warm tub, a woman to cure his agonies.
This one is cold and has no heart. This one is ugly and has no mind. She’s only an orange tree.
He writes of the loneliness of the poet, years of shunning, the way his life has bent itself into a hoop of suffering. He writes of the eight-hundred-sixty-first form of loneliness, the loneliness of the scratching quill plucked from some dead swan. He writes of the forty-eighth form of loneliness, the loneliness of the moment of orgasm, when all the sky rushes from the blue and into the sea, leaving nothing in its place.
He goes to the golem and stares at her, considering the conditions of the magic. He asks for one thing he hasn’t had yet.
“Play me a song,” he says. “It’s too quiet.”
9.
The golem is surprised to discover that she’s made of music. She has no tongue, but she has noise.
The golem’s body is a chamber. There are strings made of silk, and a curved bow inside one of the cabinets of her thigh. When she threads three strings through tiny holes drilled in her sternum, and another set just below her stomach, she can play the rabāb. This was part of her diagram, any instrument, and the carpenter’s mother chose this one from her own home. There is a thin membrane of doeskin, tanned and stretched taut over the cavity of the cabinet, and this skin vibrates.
She plays the tunes given her by the carpenter’s mother, songs of the desert, songs of another religion. There are S-shaped openings in her stomach from which the song pours.
She draws the bow across the strings, filling with greater and greater pleasure, until the poet waves his hand, goes to his bed, and waits for her to stop the noise and come to him.
10.
There’s a hard storm that night, and all the pomegranates fall. The golem goes into the street at dawn and kneels to collect them, each one as large as a baby’s head.
“Who are you?” a woman says, and the golem looks up, startled, her fingers pushing through the pomegranate’s skin and deep into the seeds, groping for something.
The woman is standing over her, looking horrified, and when the golem raises her face, the woman screams and backs away, gasping.
The golem feels the seeds slick and fat between her fingers. She crushes some, and juice runs out into the dirt. There are tiny ants all over the fruit, and she feels their bodies crushing too, their certainty that they might carry something so tremendous. She feels sorry for that.
“What are you?” the woman says, and makes a gesture of protection. “Demon,” she whispers, and runs, dropping her basket.
The golem goes back into the house.
She curls into the cold fireplace, a heap of sticks, and stays there through the day and until the next morning, though Solomon shouts for her when she brings no evening meal. Her blossoms are falling off. The petals are dropping, and she feels as though she will soon be naked.
When the petals are gone, though, there are oranges, tiny green ones. Her skull is beaded with them.
The loneliness of the bee seeking nectar, the journey between trees, a wavering flight, a humming and thrum. The loneliness of the pale flower, a channel of gold at its center, dew and dawn and a white room.
In the morning she raises Solomon’s bed with him on it and sweeps the dust from beneath it. She swabs water over the new wounds on his skin. He is weak and fevered. She wonders if he will die.
“You serve me,” he croaks. She feels her doors opening. She has no say in it.
11.
Solomon presses into her, looking down at her still face, pushing against her hard flesh. He is too sick to leave the house at all. Too sick to enjoy anything. His skin feels like a board being planed, shaven, the scraps trod on by goats. He needs a diet of milk and honey, a balm of olive oil. She can’t fetch any of it for him. He is a monster and she is a cabinet. Neither of them can go into the street.
He considers the precious word that brought her to life. He means to pry it loose. She’ll be firewood at least. This has been a failure.
“You’re not what I wanted,” he says when he is finished.
He puts his fingers to the corner of her mouth, intending to open the hinges and remove God from her.
12.
As Solomon approaches her, the golem feels a startling jolt deep inside her body. Something sealed begins to unseal; something forbidden begins to reveal itself. She holds the innermost cabinet door shut, feeling the hinges stretching, the thing behind it trying to be loose. If the poet notices her alarm, he says nothing.
There is shouting from the street. Solomon withdraws from her. The golem smoothes her dress. The poet rearranges his robes. The oranges are ripening. The room is heavy with their smell, sweat and sweetness.
The door inside the golem’s body, the last and smallest door, the last and smallest hinge, shakes and swells. She keeps it closed. She refuses. Whatever is in there, it can stay locked behind the door. Liquid on her thigh. She closes all the doors with ferocious resolution.
Men shout to enter. Solomon ties a patterned cloth about her head, over the lumpy oranges.
“Qasmūna,” he says. “Your name is Qasmūna. You’re a housemaid.”
Her fists open and close convulsively as the door pounds.
She wonders if she’ll kill his enemies. That is what she was made to do.
13.
The men surge into the house, bearded and cloaked. There are five of them, and they’re all elderly, years beyond Solomon. He knows them. The elders are the ones who kept him in this house, unable to walk amongst humans. When he arrived in the city, he was shunned. It was only their permission and their memories of his parents, long dead, that allowed him to live here at all, to stop walking the roads. Otherwise, he’d be dead somewhere, parched and dried to leather.
It might be better than this.
He thinks for a moment that he can take them all, pulverize them. He might crush them into a cupboard and barricade them there. He might make them into the contents of a cabinet, dishes asking to be broken. Then he remembers that they’re living men, not his creation. He’s lost his understanding of the nature of the world. He is a sickly poet, and they are the men in charge of the city.
The men circle the room, staring at the golem, who stands in the center, waiting, trembling. She’s a tree full of birds, and they’re foxes.
“What have you done?” they shout at Solomon, and he lies to them, though it’s futile. They’re holy men with long beards and hundreds of years between them. They know his books and they know the history of his books. They know every corner of the law. Solomon feels himself surrounded by poems he will never write. He’ll be taken to executioners. It troubles him for a moment, and then it doesn’t. He’ll stab out their eyes as he goes. He’ll scream his own elegy from his last moments. It’s already written and stored inside his cabinet.
“This creature is no woman, Solomon ibn Gabir
ol,” says one. “Do you take us for fools?”
“She’s nothing more than a housemaid,” Solomon says calmly. “Her name is Qasmūna, and she came from Saragossa. I brought her here to tidy my house and care for me. You know that I’ve been ill.”
The loneliness of capture, the loneliness of guilt, a single intruder caught and tied, burned at the stake. The loneliness of fire touching feet, the loneliness of stones flying toward a target. All he wanted was a wife.
This is no sin, he thinks. This is not a sin. She’s a housemaid, and Solomon has a house that needs cleaning. He has a heart that needs polishing. He has a body that needs a companion. He cannot see the problem. There is a map inside his mind of all the sins, and he doesn’t believe in most of them. This one? To build a woman out of wood? How could it be wrong? To use her as a wife? She has no heart and she has no soul. She’s an instrument and he has played her properly. That’s what he’ll say. That’s how he’ll argue.
One of the men nearly touches the golem and then stops, his fingers inches from her hand. He leans forward and shakes his head.
“This is not a maid,” he insists, then lifts a metal cup and raps it against her wrist. It makes the sound of an ax meeting a tree. “No. We know what this is.”
The golem opens her mouth hinge, slightly, to show her teeth. In her mouth, the nub of tongue rattles, and she makes a tiny noise, a cry. A string within her body vibrates and makes a sighing tone.
“We do not know fully,” another man protests. He looks at the golem, skeptical. “Solomon ibn Gabirol isn’t holy enough to make a golem. He’s not held in grace. Perhaps she’s simply ugly. Open your mouth wider, girl, show us what you have,” he says.
She shows her teeth a little more, and her sound grows louder, a humming rattle, a clicking. Her eyelid hinges blink, quickly, a leathery brush against the green glass.
One of the men leans forward and taps her eye with a spoon. She flinches. It rings like a bell calling for prayers.
“She’s a living woman,” says Solomon, fearful of punishment, but angry too. His fingers curl around the tabletop.
“She is not,” one of the men says, and looks at Solomon with something approaching kindness. “Shelomo ben Yehuda ibn Gabirol, you are too lonely. You are fortunate we’ve come to help. No one knows you’ve done this, not yet, and we will save you from this sin for the sake of your father.”
14.
The golem trembles, bound to protect Solomon. She feels his rage like a windstorm bending her trunk. She is a newborn woman and she is a rabāb full of the songs of an entire country of travelers. She is a tree with hundreds of years of history.
She removes the bow from the cabinet in her thigh and starts to play the strings in her abdomen. The song is not a hymn. The song is a wild high flight from some other shore, the song of a woman shouting in a ship across the sea. The song of the strings bends and weeps, and she plays, her head bowed, while the bow in her hand moves quickly. Tongueless, she is telling them what will happen, but they don’t listen.
“Speak,” says one of the men.
“She can’t,” says Solomon. “She doesn’t speak our language.”
I am speaking, Qasmūna plays. I am warning you. You should leave.
“This is a sin. More than a sin. To fornicate with this. Speak in Spanish, you serving maid. Speak in Arabic. Speak in Hebrew. Speak any language at all.”
Qasmūna plays harder, her wooden fingernails stopping the strings, the bow calling forth the sound of women seizing a ship’s crew and tearing them apart. The loneliness of the shore with no one landing on it in a year. The loneliness of hunger. She is an orange tree clinging to a cliffside, oranges falling into the sea. She is a forgotten wife clinging to a village full of forgotten children. She is called to war while the men are at another war. She and her sisters march over the Atlas Mountains. She and her sisters sing war cries, play their instruments, light signal fires.
“SPEAK!” a man shouts. “Or we will know what you are.”
I am speaking, the golem plays. Hear me. Leave before you can’t leave.
Qasmūna can see veins bulging in Solomon’s neck. Her hinges flutter. The secret door inside her shakes loudly enough that the men can hear it. It is unsealing. It is opening. She can’t help it.
“This is not a sin,” argues another holy man. “She doesn’t need to be cleansed after menstruation, for she doesn’t menstruate. She can’t procreate. She can’t speak, nor has she any intelligence. She’s less than an animal. It can’t be fornication if she isn’t a woman.”
“Her lack of speech reflects the flaw in her creator,” the first man says. “He’s not holy enough.”
The golem listens to them argue over whether she is holy or only wooden. She plays. They look at her in annoyance. She is an instrument and she plays the music she is filled with. She bends and draws the bow over the strings, playing an attack on a tent, playing a moon rising over bloodied sand. They don’t understand her. She attempts to give them a final warning, but they are too busy with their debate.
15.
Solomon rages, but doesn’t dare do it with his voice. The golem is playing some tilting tune, and he can’t get her to stop. Her music is nothing he’d have chosen. Why did he not kill her last night? She could be in the fireplace, heating the house. She could be rising through the chimney, her smoke a small cloud in the sky.
This was a mistake, but now that they are trying to take her from him, he wants her back. Who are they to deny him a wife?
“You must destroy this golem, Solomon ibn Gabirol,” concludes the man most in charge. “For though it may not be a sin in the eyes of the law, you’re a poet, not a holy man, and you have made a monstrosity for yourself, not for any city. This is forbidden.”
“She’s not a monstrosity,” pleads Solomon. “She’s my housemaid. She cleans the dust.” His wounds are bleeding. He coughs, wet and red.
The loneliness of seeing one’s own blood on a white cloth. The loneliness of a disease impervious to magic, to knowledge, to weather. He is dying, and there is no one to take care of him. He is dying, and soon he will be like an infant, helpless and howling. Soon he will be a body in a bed, bones like kindling.
The thousandth form of loneliness is the loneliness of the dead, rotting just beneath the ground. There will be worms and insects, there will be birds pecking at the earth, but there will be nothing to love any man underneath the world. The thousandth loneliness is a grave with fresh shovel marks, the noise of the dirt being packed down above. He will be, he realizes, down where the orange tree roots snake in the dark, white wooden bones hard as stones.
“You’ll remove the name from her mouth. You’ll destroy her, and you’ll burn her materials.” The men nod. “You’ll do it now, for these witnesses, or you yourself will be put to death. Take her apart now. We will watch.”
Solomon sways. He’s still living, he thinks. His prick pulses. He must retaliate. He must fight.
There’s a creak in the room, and a muffled pounding.
“Defender,” Solomon whispers to his golem. “Defend.”
The golem is already standing, staring at the old man before her. She raises a hand, and looks at it. Slowly she brings her fist down on the man’s skull, a neat rapping. He cries out and falls. The holy men scream.
Solomon watches her push her fingers into one of the men’s mouths, her fist pressing deeper, deeper, until she finds the root of his tongue. She tears out the meat of his voice and crushes it, a splattering gore beneath her foot. Solomon makes a sound, whether of vengeance or of protest, he can’t say. He looks at the holy tongue for a moment, watching it bleed, then doubles over, vomiting.
The sound of something breaking open. He turns to see the golem and the last of the holy men, his skull vised in her two hands. She looks at Solomon, her face blank, and there is a grievous crack, sending blood spraying. Her mouth rattles and she breaks the man’s neck for good measure, as though he is a hen.
16.
<
br /> The loneliness of being the last man alive in a room filled with the dead is the nine-hundred-ninety-ninth loneliness.
They’re all murdered in his house, the holy men of Málaga. Solomon won’t die of illness as he’d imagined. He’ll be executed. He has to flee the city, but he can’t flee with her. He gathers himself. She has saved him and damned him at once. It can’t be his fault. No one would think it was. He would never order his golem to kill for him.
“Open your mouth,” Solomon orders his golem. “Give me the name. Take it out and give it to me.”
Slowly the golem’s jaw hinges open, showing the poet the name of God. One of her hands reaches up to remove it.
There is the sound of a sealed door opening. Something changes in the room.
Solomon looks down at the golem’s chair. There’s a creature in it, small and black, made of ash. It stands, its arms outstretched, a tiny thing, and it shakes the room with a high, wild song, a song like the rabāb and like a singer too, a song of loneliness beyond number. It sings a horde of women in open space, raging across a landscape, swords raised.
Solomon clenches all over. Can he smash it? With a dish, perhaps, or a text. It’s small enough. It’s no animal or insect he’s seen. A rough black creature, the size of a closed fist. The song is something . . . Solomon tilts his head. His ears feel penetrated.
“What’s that?” Solomon manages. “Where did it come from?”
Qasmūna picks the creature up and cradles it. The ash looks at Solomon, its eyes glittering. In its fist it holds a splinter of orange wood.
A splinter held by a tiny thing. That’s nothing. No sword, no matter the feelings roused in him by its song. Whatever those feelings were, they are falsehoods, defenses without teeth. Women running over sand, bloodied swords. This is only a small aberration. He’ll consider it later, when this is all done.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 35