by James Comins
Osiris looked down at the straw-blonde hair strewn around in a sunflower-wheel on the white floor, looked down at the arms clenched around knees pulled up inside the wide hem of the black dress, which shook in hungry sobs.
“Couldn’t she act from beyond her death?” said Osiris at last.
“No,” Indaell said.
“You’re lying,” the mummified god replied. Through his pale orange skin, behind the thin line of his pointed black beard, Osiris’ dark eyes flared.
“Maybe I am,” said Indaell without smiling. He squeezed his lips, played his tongue, bit his tongue.
Something snapped inside his mysterious angelity. He returned to his knees.
“I’m a liar,” he rasped at the room wetly. “I’m cruel.” He leaned in to Osiris severely. His voice had regained its old punch-in-the-gut importance. “I’m rotten on the inside. I abandoned one who loved me. Inside me--” He pointed to his sunken beanpole-belly at the sweep of his robe--“inside is more death than you’ve ever seen.”
He breathed, and all the sallow poisoned air of the pavilion seemed to seep away into the angel’s lungs. He exhaled, and a smell like dead apples washed out with it.
“I’ve killed angels.”
Another world-draining breath. Shudder.
“I raised a hand against my Lord.”
Breath.
“I followed a liar.”
The crying smell of decay watered the air.
“And I crave penance. I will sit and judge the dead in your place, Osiris, for I have learned to know a liar. Give her the damned cookie.”
Osiris turned to Isis awkwardly. He nodded.
In the air, in quick strokes faintly visible from Lenna’s curled-up spot on the floor, Neftis drew into the air a series of hieroglyphics with her forefinger, pictures blinking black in the air like floating shadows. Into the sly woman’s ringed hand dropped a black rice biscuit.
Indaell put out his hand, but she shook her head and took it out to the front of the scale where Lenna lay. Gently she knelt and moved the yellow hair aside and handed the hard bun down.
It was magical. Lenna bit a corner off and sneezed sunbeams. Another bite and the horrible peppery taste was suddenly wonderful. She picked a crumb off and handed it to the mouse, who pushed it away.
Lenna looked from inches away at the empty eyesockets, the somehow-white bones. There was nothing holding them together, no tendons or muscles. They were tiny, delicate white bones, bendy and flimsy and awake, with a tiny person inside who cared about what happened to her.
“I care about you, Little Mousebones,” she whispered.
“Cheep,” said Sabine soothingly.
“I am a reverse wampire,” she said. “I want you to be alive, so you can come with me.”
The mouse’s browbones came together in sympathy. Sabine Mouse cradled Lenna’s fingertips and looked into her eyes, then at the crumb. She pushed it forward to Lenna.
“Won’t you come with me?” Lenna asked.
The mouse’s head shook back and forth gently.
“Why? Where are you going to?”
Sabine pointed at the floor, point point.
“Why?”
Sabine looked up at Osiris.
“This particular mouse was once alive. It is now dead. The dead cannot return.”
“But they can!” shouted Lenna, sitting up a little. “I’ve seen them! I’ve seen real real dead things walking around!”
“The Fomor can take any shape, even the shape of the dead. But they are alive,” Indaell told her. “This is merely a dead mouse in a world of walking death.”
“What will happen when there’s a Change?” she asked desperately, clasping her hands with the half-a-biscuit protectively around the little animal.
“I don’t know,” said Osiris.
Sabine snuggled against her hand.
“The tart is a rare thing, like few things in the universe,” said Neftis. “Do not waste it.”
“But--”
The mouse tapped a fingerbone on the tart and pointed to Lenna.
“But--”
The mouse made another bitey-bite with her bat-blood-stained incisors.
“Do not waste it,” whispered Osiris.
So Lenna put the biscuit in her mouth and swallowed.
Then there was only the crumb.
“Please,” she said to Sabine, holding the cluster of grains out.
Snap-snap went the incisors into the air above Lenna’s hand. Sabine pointed hard at Lenna, shaking her skull frantically.
“You mean I must eat it?”
Sabine smiled and nodded. “Mm-hm,” she hummed sadly.
So Lenna ate the crumb, looking around to be absolutely sure she had to.
“Now there is renewed life in the world of death,” said Osiris, closing his eyes.
A stone door framed in twisted clusters of clotted bones slid out of the marble floor.
Instantly Indaell turned to it hungrily.
“Only one of us can go through,” said Lenna. “Right?”
Indaell’s fingers spidered into the air.
“Then how can we all go to the Thing?” Lenna asked.
“Not that way,” said Osiris. “The door to Outland is open. You must cast an element through the door. This will open the true path.”
“Pardon, Indaell of the House of the Fallen,” said Thoth nervously, “but I believe you agreed to judge the dead. Are you thinking, and I hope the thought should ah perish, as it were, but are you thinking of sneaking away?”
“Yes,” Indaell hissed. “Loki did.” His thin hands bent at the air, grasping, grasping, grasping.
“You lied again,” said Lenna. Sabine cheeped and cheeped and cheeped.
Indaell’s head nodded as he gazed at the door.
“Will you lie forever?” she asked him.
He stood motionless, thinking. Different emotions hit his face, hit his face, hit his face.
He lowered his hands.
“Finish the Change,” he spat, and the words were barbs. “Choose a magic, and I’ll send it through the door,” and the words were piercing quills. “I’ll stay and judge the dead.” His voice was husky with pain.
“Okay,” said Lenna. She kissed Sabine, and Sabine snuzzed against her cheek. Lenna stayed, feeling the cold small mouse there, there, there and real. Stayed for a long time. Forever.
“I choose water.”
Indaell scooped poisoned lakewater out of the rippling pool, and green sparks shot out as it became purified in his hand.
“Goodbye, Little Mousebones.”
“Cheep.”
Indaell let the water splash through the doorway of bone.
The pavilion washed away. The boat washed away. The mousebones fell into a scatter. Osiris fell forward and a few chopped-up body parts tumbled from the wrappings. Indaell was there on the throne, and both he and the throne washed away.
The white candles of the mummy cave’s mouth began to separate top-to-bottom. The cave mouth opened to a ruddy-blue view of the washing ocean and flying sky.
Lenna, Isis, Neftis, Thoth and Horace climbed down the red stone into a world of water.
Acknowlogies and Apoledgements
Every time I write a book, I try to share where I got some of the ideas. For Lenna and the Last Dragon, I looked up a word here and there from foreign language dictionaries, read a few Internet pages talking about locations in Iceland or Ireland, but mostly I drew from all the stories I read when I was a kid: Susan Cooper, Lloyd Alexander, T. H. White, Ruth Stiles Gannett.
This book was different.
I read skillions of books to prepare me for writing this one. Even after snorking down a million folktales from cultures around the world, I still found Lenna turning up in places I hadn’t even heard of before, places I knew nothing about. I’d have to stop writing and go learn something I didn’t know. This was very fun. The stories go from Asgard (floating above Norway) down to Breidablik in the Baltic Sea, across Germ
any, France, Hungary, Transylvania, Rumania, down to Egypt and out into what later turns out to be Saudia Arabia. That’s a long journey for a short book. Here’s where it came from.
My Asgard looks an awful lot like Denver, where I live. Hot, flat and clouded. Since all the Norwegian immigrants to America ended up here, I like to think it’s what Norse Heaven looks like. Asgard and the Norse Gods were first described in two epic stories called Eddas, written in Iceland: the Elder Edda of Saemund Sigfusson, and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlason. They’re very very very difficult to read. Helene Guerber’s summary of them, Myths of the Norsemen, is much better. Kevin Crossley-Holland wrote a big set of poems about them, The Norse Myths, but unless you’re really old, the best book to learn about Norse myths with is Padraic Colum’s Children of Odin. I learned about the Vikings from Else Roesdahl’s The Vikings, and from Zinken Hopp’s Norwegian Folklore. The characters of Baldur, Hodur, Honnur, Gullvig and Mimir are just about the same as they’re described in mythology. Nanna is definitely different and is partly inspired by how much I hated Mary Poppins in the Mary Poppins books. Mary Poppins is mean, and the Julie Andrews movie makes her only a little less mean.
Finally I get to introduce Lenna's real name. Her name was Llenowyn all throughout drafts one through eighty. I changed it because no one could pronounce it. In Welsh, the word doesn’t exactly exist, but it is close to several other words: the lovely lakes Llyn Ogwen and Llyn Llech Owen, for example. Llen means cloak, and llên means lore or legend. A llenoryn is a writer of legends, while llenwyn are the tides. The name might also have been influenced by Leyawiin, a city in the RPG The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. I should also mention that both the name and the character of Llenowyn probably owe a lot to Eilonwy, the heroine of Lloyd Alexander’s wonderful Prydain Chronicles, which I loved as a kid. Llenowyn is pronounced LEHN-uh-winn.
The tower made of fire and the hero defeating a monster are both part of a complicated Norse story, set in northern Germany, called the Saga of Sigurd. Defeating a monster in a dream probably comes from seeing Nightmare on Elm Street 3 as a kid. The war between Adils and Ali is semi-historical, told by Snorri Sturleson, about a king who wouldn’t pay his hired soldiers their gold, and how they started a huge fire in response.
The Verdance of Verdandi is made up. Verdandi is really one of the Norns, three sisters who unreel your life on a string, weave it, and cut it when it’s your time to die. Verdandi does the weaving. In this story I made her the Power of life, which is a big thing to be--so big that you never see her. I liked how the word “verdance” has the word “dance” in it. The rabbit waiting outside the door is probably not the one from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He’s the jackrabbit who hides beside the bumper of my car every morning. Lenna’s shrinking to get in the door is, however, straight from Lewis Carroll. The “rules” of the Verdance are inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Instructions. I wanted my instructions to be miniature and weird; his are much more sensible. In the crowd of dancing animals, you’ll probably recognize some of the books and movies I mashed together. In case you missed them, there’s: The Wizard of Oz, Super Mario Bros., So Dear to My Heart, Song of the South, Mary Poppins, Chip and Dale, Fantasia, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo, The Bremen Town Musicians from the Brothers Grimm, Jan Brett’s Berlioz the Bear, and many more. Renard swishes in very much like Puss in Boots from Shrek 2, or like Puss’s owner the Marquis de Carrabas from Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.
Speaking of Renard. The character of the trickster fox is very old, stemming from Aesop, and found in early African folklore before that. In France, medieval stories about Renard became so popular that the word for fox became le renard from whatever-it-was-before. Patricia Terry’s translation of Renard the Fox is not for kids, but it’s where I got most of the fox’s character traits. I should re-mention Neil Gaiman’s Instructions, which has a line about not losing your name. My Renard owes somewhat to Disney’s Robin Hood, especially the pretending-to-be-English part, but less than you’d think. I invented the King of Birds from the REM song, and the Eiderdown Thistledown Town I made up entirely. Tibert, Bruin, Isengrim, Coward the Hare, Miss Pinte the Hen, Espinarz, and Noble the Lion are all traditional parts of the Renard stories.
The wampires are Székeley (SHECK-a-lee), a group of displaced Hungarians and Rumanians. Tessek is pronounced “tesh-ayk;” it’s Hungarian for “please.” Koszonom means “thank you,” and Piros (“pee-roash”) means “red.” Their stories and points of view are recounted from Ghosts, Vampires and Werewolves: Eerie Tales From Transylvania, by Mihai Spariosu and Dezsö Benedek, which is scary fun for all ages, and from the delightful stories told by Zsuzsanna Palkó and collected by Linda Dégh in Hungarian Folktales: the Art of Zsuzsanna Palkó. The story of Anna is also partly inspired by a Grateful Dead poster I had in my room as a kid. Incidentally, I hate vampires. They’re dumb.
The Opening of the Mouth ceremony is copied more or less verbatim from Budge’s remarkable Rosetta Stone-inspired translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. I hope no one’s mad that I included a real real ritual. Blame Christopher Marlowe, who terrified audiences in the early Renaissance by including a real occult Latin chant in the middle of The Tragicall Historie of Dr. Faustus. Ha. I’m also deeply indebted to Clare Gibson’s The Hidden Life of Ancient Egypt for whatever knowledge about Egypt I didn’t learn from Reading Rainbow.
My Thoth is the ibis form. There’s also a baboon-Thoth. My Thoth reminds me of Zazu from The Lion King, Prunesquallor from Gormenghast and Lucien from Sandman. My grandfather Horace loves birds, and they love him. They land on his shoulder as he does his gardening. So I changed Horus to Horace. Isis has a little Major Motoko Kusanagi in her, from Ghost in the Shell, and Neftis is a little bit Death from Sandman. I amused myself by combining Seth the 70s self-help guru with Seth the Egyptian snake god.
Sabine is a secret.
About the Author
James Comins is the most remarkable person there is. His hair looks like Harlan Ellison’s, his ears look like Barack Obama’s, his nose looks like Stephen Fry’s, and his chin looks like Eddie Izzard’s. He lives in Denver as a ne’er-do-well and wastrel. He is trying to grow tomatoes and beans in a plastic tub from Wal-Mart, but his beans have tipped over.
Listen to him tweeting or email him if you dare. Visit his Smashwords page. I mean, why not?
Read the first Lenna book at www.smashwords.com/books/view/141065
Read my collection of short stories, Where the Cloud Meets the Mountain and the Mountain Disappears at www.smashwords.com/books/view/133897