With all the gentleness his trembling hands could muster, he lifted her from his worktable and set her down on the low shelf where the boy came to life one memorable night many years ago. He blinked once against the memory, then left to make four dainty pillows from the scraps of the materials of her dress, to arrange around her and arrest her fall should she awaken early.
He went through his day as if it were any other, busying himself with small toys that no one wanted to buy. He had lost an entire generation of children who grew up without knowing him or his work, since he stopped working to raise the boy. But he did not care about any of them. He took pains not to look at the low shelf where his new daughter sat, half-convinced that he would confound the miracle of life.
He cooked some oatmeal late in the day when he realized that he was hungry. He stood over the pot on the stove and stirred the thickening meal with little interest. When the boy lived with him, oatmeal was not an option. The toymaker’s larder had been stocked with hams suspended from the ceiling, as well as dried and preserved fruits in glass jars, honey in slender honeycomb sticks, and sacks and sacks of sugar, for the boy loved sweetness as much as the toymaker loved him. He hoped his new daughter wouldn’t miss sugar, as he had not bothered to replace the last empty sack.
He sat at the kitchen table and spooned hot oatmeal into his mouth, barely grimacing at the heat, listening to the relentless whirrs and ticks of the kitchen clock. He put down the spoon and realized with a start that he was sitting in darkness.
With barely concealed excitement, he stood up, leaving the cold bowl on the table, and made his way to the room with the low shelf, stopping only to light a candle and pocket another one. He did not want her to be afraid. He wanted her to see him in light. When the boy came to life, the first thing he did was to scream. That was the terrified wail that shook the toymaker from his sleep, and he remembered spending many hours comforting the boy.
He stopped at the door and craned his head toward it, trying to listen for the slightest whimper, the littlest cry. Hearing none, he opened the door and rushed to the low shelf to comfort his new daughter, thinking that perhaps some children greeted evening with disregard, because they simply did not know yet how to be afraid. She would need him, regardless, for he believed that every good father was a guardian against things unknown, though he knew there were things that no one could guard against.
The toymaker knelt by the low shelf and brought the candle close.
“Daughter,” he spoke the word as both question and affirmation.
The doll’s blue glass eyes caught the candlelight, and for a breathless moment he thought the miracle had come to pass. But when she did not move, long after he had expelled the air he contained in his chest, he knew he had to wait a little while longer. The boy, after all, with his unforgettable terrified wail, came to life in the long hours of the night.
He sat on the floor and watched his new daughter by candlelight. He thought about the best years with the boy and imagined all the possible mistakes he had made raising him, and all the possible solutions and corrections.
He thought about his propensity to praise the boy for every little thing — yet he could not completely blame himself for the daily amazements of his living, breathing miracle. Certainly no one would begrudge him that. But he knew deep within that too much kindness had the quality of watered-down sweetness. He promised himself he would not be too kind to girl, that he would be firm and resolute against the decay of love and respect, that he would raise her to be obedient and respectful and gentle and loving. But not too loving, for too much love only had the inevitable effect of diminishing itself over the course of the years, and he did not want that. He planned to love her in precise measures, no more, no less. That way, she would stay.
But part of him rebelled against the ghastly logic of withholding affection. He believed he should be able to create for her the most wondrous toys. In his mind was the plan for a dollhouse unlike any that any child had seen, the size of half a real house with miniature furniture and running water. And that would be only the first thing he’d build for her. He would plant a diminutive garden for her, populated by the smallest flowers he could find. Then a working carriage with clockwork horses, then a model of the world circling around the sun, then he’d figure out a way to make the distant stars twinkle for her even in daytime. And he would talk to her about anything that interested her, and he’d listen gravely to her every word, for it was important that she felt important. He’d guide her and protect her and give her everything that was love’s due, everything that was love’s right.
The toymaker woke up with start, for a moment disoriented by his abrupt transit from dreaming of laughter to the feel of cold hard floor on his cheek. In the dark of the room, he thought he heard someone draw in a breath. Realizing that it was the sound of his own inhalation, he reached for the extra candle in his pocket and forced his trembling hands to light it, replacing the exhausted one in the candleholder.
He drew closer to the low shelf, his lips in a helpless smile of anticipation, but saw nothing different in his daughter’s glass eyes. He bit back his disappointment and rose to his feet to check the time.
He stared at the clock on the wall. It was well past midnight. Anger at his ineptitude washed away the displeasure, and he hurried out of the room, banging his leg against a chair as he reached for the door. Only when he was out of the room, with the door securely closed, did he give in to the beginning of tears, distressed by the terrible possibility that his very presence near the low shelf had deprived whatever agency of the privacy it needed to work the miracle.
Sickened by his suspicion, he leaned against the door and closed his eyes. He banged his head backward once, twice, before releasing a low moan. Regret provoked thoughts of the boy — of how, in the end, the boy screamed that the toymaker’s relentless attention was the precise reason that he was leaving, that, and nothing else, because every horrible thing emanated from that single quality; of how, in the end, the boy accused the toymaker of treating him like a toy that could not be free, could never truly be alive; of how, in the end, the boy did not, could not, would never love him; of how, in the end, everything ended.
It was an hour past dawn when the toymaker entered the room again. He had spent the small hours of the incipient day in darkness, ignoring the gloom that conquered the solitary candle he’d lit past midnight.
On the low shelf, nestled against four small pillows, was his new daughter, her blue glass eyes unblinking.
The toymaker reached down and took her in his arms, opened the door to the hallway and climbed the stairs to the attic. Crouching low, he walked past boxes of old toys he’d all but forgotten about but did not possess the heart to simply discard.
He made his way to a hardwood chest, one of several, and opened it. He placed the new daughter in his hands among the other new daughters, closed the lid without a word, and went back downstairs, stopping only once to rub at his painful knee.
Into the Morning
A Language for Two
MY EARLIEST RECOLLECTION of my dam is when I was two, as she prepared to go to another canopy: her face made up meticulously, abdomen primly dotted, her hair swept up in an exaggerated wave that was meant to look accidental, her coordinated ensemble of beige and tan skins exuding unhurried elegance.
I began to understand my dam’s silent language around then. I could pierce the meaning behind her actions: the flicker of pursed lips, the quickening of an iris, the wiping of invisible sweat from under her dry spinnerets, the deliberately misused hiss, the subtle variations of tongue clicks, the underlying color theory of her selected cosmetics.
I knew my dam more than anyone, more than any of my nest-siblings, and definitely more than my sire.
A Moment at Four
MY DAM LOVED to weave. When my sire was away in the late afternoons, she’d sit in her favorite spot in the hollows, and hum as she spun the silk from her spinnerets. She’d shape strands into pat
terns that first caught the last colors of dusk, before transforming what she held into something marvelously ordinary — a blanket, a sheet, a dining cloth.
I remember when I was four, coming across her spinning, dappled in the fading sunlight. My nest-siblings were far behind me, and for a pure and perfect moment, my dam and I were alone. She looked up at me, her eyes reflecting orange and red and gold, and held out the web in her hands.
In that action, I caught the unspoken words: how she moved her shoulders, the motion of hair on her soft abdomen, the softness of light.
And of course what she held up for me to see.
To me, it looked like a star.
To me, it said love.
Sick at Six
WHEN I WAS six I found a small moth on an old web, high up in the tree where we lived. It was noon and I was supposed to be with all the others, learning the things that defined who we were: the qualities of stillness, silence, and surprise. Even then, I was easily bored and escaped when I could. That time I went up to a place I’d never been, thinking to see the sky.
The web strands were old and smelled unfamiliar, woven by someone in days long gone, and suspended in the weave was the moth, wings almost transparent, limned with dust. At that moment I felt hunger and moved towards the trapped creature, recoiling first at the almost complete absence of scent.
I ate it, beginning with the head, brittle in my mouth, spilling pieces downwards; then the body, hollow and tasteless; then the wings, flavored with dust.
By the time I returned home I was violently ill. My dam was beside herself with worry, though she did not speak, busying herself with actions that would cure me, including the most tender caresses that made all the pain worthwhile.
When my sire came home, he saw us together and told my dam to leave me and attend to other things. My illness, he said, was common and would pass. It was not worth all the attention.
Without a word, my dam rose and did what he said, dragging a leg as she moved away from me.
First at Eight
I ALWAYS SUSPECTED that, like me, my dam hated going to crèche reunions. I’d only been to them twice before, both times on my sire’s side because my dam’s family was thin-blooded and dispersed across several canopies. The first time was just before my eighth birthday. I remember my sire telling me how wonderful it would be for me to finally meet family members who hadn’t seen me since I was hatched. But when we arrived, I was overwhelmed by the cacophony of strangers, numbed by the countless embraces and tongues and pinches and unfair questions (“Don’t you remember me? I tasted you when you were born.”), and terrified by the way I was expected to experience familial love at first sight.
By the time the main meal was served, I could not be found anywhere. Hours later, one of the hunting parties led by my disheveled dam found me curled up among the weeping aphids, semi-conscious and dehydrated. My sire was furious. My dam did not scold me then, and I thought there would be a devastating tempest later, in private.
It never happened.
We spiraled down the webs together, clasping hands all the way home.
Second at Ten
MY SIRE EXACTED a promise from me to behave before we left for the second reunion when I was ten. I agreed and followed quietly up the webs, already itching in my black skin funeral attire. I did not want to upset him, who was mourning his own sire’s loss heavily. My dam and all my nest-siblings gave him wide berth, and the long trip was conducted in arduous silence. I remember wishing that day and night would pass quickly but my desire seemed to only prolong the journey. My dam just looked blankly ahead as she moved, her legs and arms gaining purchase on the fine silk that marked our pathways.
When we arrived, I was shocked to discover a range of exhibited emotions, ranging from caterwauling to raucous feasting headed by some of my sire's nest-siblings. There was a reprise of the painful greetings and impossible questions that I somehow managed to endure, drawing strength from my stoic dam’s firm smile. But when I realized that I was expected to taste my dead grandsire, I reneged on my vow to behave and promptly fainted. I came to in my dam’s arms and listened with my eyes closed to a thousand invasive questions and fragments of unsolicited advice from the others who had seen me collapse. I tried to apologize to my parents, but ended up crying instead, tears that were interpreted by many as genuine grief.
On the way back, one of my nest-siblings arched backwards and called me a bitch, which did not surprise me in the least. She had a foul mouth and was just a hatchling, after all. I chose not to tell my dam about it and instead turned away from my sister and focused on strands that led home.
Last at Twelve
ON THE SILKEN path high in the branches of a dead tree again to reunite for some unknown relative’s homecoming, just days before my twelfth birthday, the last thing I expected was for my dam to speak up.
“I’d really rather not go,” my dam clicked, the suddenness breaking the immaculate silence with the force of thunder.
“We agreed to go,” my sire said.
“We can turn back,” my dam replied. “Or we can go somewhere else.”
“We’re expected,” my sire hissed. “We told them we’re coming. What sort of dim thing is this?”
“Don’t call me dim.”
“Don’t act dim,” my sire clicked, jumping on the web, forcing all of us to race to catch up or suffer a tremendous fall.
I listened to the entire exchange with a sick feeling in my stomach, as if my pre-dawn breakfast had turned to stone.
“Stop moving,” my dam said, in almost a whisper. “Please stop.”
I watched my dam’s face. It looked to me as if her eyelashes were burdened by the enforced curls of the macopa extract she favored. Her abdomen exhibited a smudge of cosmetic. Several strands of the hair that framed her face were conspicuously out of place. Her secret language surfaced and receded on her face.
“No,” my sire said, continuing his motion in the early morning gloom.
“Let me go,” my dam said quietly. I saw the darkness that thrummed beneath her request and tasted the bitterness that circulated in the air. I wanted to tell my sire to stop jolting the web but could not speak.
“No,” my sire hissed.
My dam and I exchanged an accidental look. In that instant I felt the weight of her fatigue and drowned in its depth and immensity. Floating on the dark current was a dam’s doomed love for her offspring, condemned by choice and circumstance to be swallowed by the greater force of sorrow.
Goodbye, I spoke in our secret language.
Goodbye, my dam’s dead face replied.
With a precise and wounded economy of motion, she released her grip on the silken fibers and fell into the morning.
In the Dim Plane
AFTER THE END of the world, the hardest thing to fight is loneliness. I have never been truly sociable and eschewed the company of the few others here. With almost no power left and no way to recover any more, I managed to secretly maintain only one animated skeleton for companionship in the frenzy of escaping Forlorn’s destruction. Between the two of us, my sanity, my world, is kept intact.
I had left my cave on my way to meet the others — something that happens every year or so, at their insistence — when I unexpectedly encountered a ghost.
It was a beautiful woman with dark hair and sad eyes.
In any other place, in any other time, this would not have fazed me. I am, or was, after all, the greatest Necromancer of Forlorn. However, in this place of shadows, on the Dim Plane, I had barely enough power to do the simplest unnatural thing and could not defend myself if this was one of the hungry ones.
“What do you want, ghost?” I said with false bravado, at a loss to explain how a ghost came to be here, in this remote sanctuary, in the first place.
“Please,” the ghost said, holding out a small ornate sandalwood box toward me.
Before I could reply, she dissolved into the dimness, the box she held settling down softly near my feet
. I sensed that it was the end of her tenuous existence. I took the box, both puzzled and pleased. Puzzled, because here was a mystery; pleased, because it was something I could think about.
Just as I was about to open the box, a voice boomed out from the dimness.
“Teros?”
It was Lord Jussin the Betrayer, broad-shouldered and crooked-nosed, also on his way to meet with the others. I quickly hid the box in my vestments. It was not something I wished to share with a spavined craven like Lord Jussin.
“Teros,” Lord Jussin said with a scowl. “It is you. Come, old man. We might as well walk together toward our tiresome pretense of bonhomie.”
A fallen paladin who had denounced his queen for the promise of power, Lord Jussin did not, I believe, deserve to be in the Dim Plane. But somehow he found a means to get here, as the others and I did, so we all had to co-exist in peace.
There are precisely five of us living in the Dim Plane, survivors of the end of the world that we knew forty years ago. Though at first we kept away from each other, as time passed we began to seek each other’s company. We didn’t speak much then; it was sufficient just to see that someone else was here. But eventually, we began to exchange glances of feigned disinterest, then to talk, and finally we agreed to regular gatherings, sometimes as often as twice a year. At least it was something to do.
Braxas, Harrower of Flame, was the first to approach me. Later, I made the acquaintance of Lizel Gorgist, the Widow’s Bane. Lord Jussin the Betrayer was next, and the maxim-laden polymath Resa Undermasque, who had bartered parts of her body for knowledge, was last.
On Forlorn, the world that we lost, we knew each other only by name and reputation, our interests and agendas separated by oceans and continents. Each of us had, in the past, ruled parts of the world or made war with those who stood in our way, through virtue of craft, blade, politics, or poison. In the Dirmoth Archipelago, I built my kingdom of undead, crushed the noble houses that dared oppose me, and taught men to tremble at the mere mention of my name.
The Kite of Stars and Other Stories Page 9