“What sort of tolls?”
The harpy grinned. “There is only one kind of toll the dead accept: blood. It’s always blood. The hoopoe, the Gaselli, the Stars. Pierce your breast with your beak and pour out your blood for the hungry.”
I moved my hand to my chest. “What is in there? What is the Isle of the Dead?”
“Who can say? I am planted, I am not dead. Is it where the Sky went to escape her children? Is it the underside of the Sky? Is it just another country, with other laws and customs? No one tells Wept, she is just the keeper of the gate.”
“Is that your name? Wept?”
“I have done it all my days, and never for myself. It is my name; it is my nature.”
I pulled my calf-knife from its sheath and she pulled her bowl from the shadows. I paused, and cut into the skin of my back, letting sap puddle in the metal bowl, golden and thick as yolk. Wept raised her eyebrows and smiled widely, as a child will when shown a new thing. She pulled her cloak aside to let me pass, and I felt her feathers on the wound as I went into the dark.
THE TALE
OF THE CROSSING,
CONTINUED
“YES,” SEVEN BREATHED. “I HAD ONLY BLOOD to give her, of course. And she told me no tales, but I remember her face, and her bowl. But why?” he pleaded. “Why did you leave me? I would never have left you.”
She looked at him with blank eyes. “I stole a leaf,” she said simply, and took his hand, leading him up and into the forest, far past the lapping sound of the lonely lake against the lonely shore.
It was not a town. Nor exactly a village. It was certainly no city. But there were houses, low gray things slick with old rain, as though someone had once lived there, long ago. It was very dark on this part of the island, and there were pricks of light in the mire, almost, though not entirely, like Stars. One of them spun very quickly, faster and faster until a woman seemed to step out of it. She was flushed with color, all the color that the forest might have had, nearly too vivid to look at. Her skin was like a snake’s, scaled and thick and a screaming, writhing green, shot with black and blue and scarlet. Most of her undulated serpentine and boneless, her torso longer and more flexible than a woman’s ought to be. She wore yellow veils that whipped and snapped at her heels, but covered nothing in particular, not least her green skin, which showed dark and shining through the gold cloth. Her hair was long and black and glassy, and the bangles around her arms were jeweled in a hundred kinds of agate. Her eyes were black as the bottom of a well, and her blue-black fingers were long, grasping. Her legs were clamped together, as though by sheer hope they might squeeze into a tail, but they stayed stubbornly separate.
She was pregnant, her verdant belly sloping out of her veils like Vhummim’s diamond.
“I brought her the leaf,” said Oubliette, by way of an explanation Seven did not at all understand. “Immacolata’s leaf. I danced her for so many years, I loved her, I didn’t want her to be alone. I owed it to her, to both of them, to find the cave and the lake and cut off my tail. We are not… unhappy here, together.”
“I am not alone,” the woman said, her voice throaty and deep, echoing through the wood. “No one will let me alone…”
THE TALE
OF THE LEAF
AND THE SNAKE
I LOOKED DOWN OUT OF THE DARK, WHERE light held hands with light. I remember the looking, and the first searing step out of the Sky, how it hurt so, and how I cried out for my mother as I fell. They caught me in their green, my limbs so raw and full of light, slashed to ribbons, bleeding out of the pits of my knees, the hollows of my elbows, the nape of my neck—all the places where a hole can tear. I bled and I wept—we all did. We wanted to burrow into the world, but we didn’t know how it would hurt.
And the snakes were there, their green and their white and their black, their red and their gold. Their sheltering hoods, their comforting tails. I looked at them, how they stopped up my wounds with their little mouths, how they warmed me with skin that had baked on flat rocks in the sun, how they hissed and sang their whispering songs. I looked at them and I wanted to be like that, I wanted to be able to move like that, to undulate, to hiss and sing and have colors like that. They were as beautiful to me as anything had been since the dark, and while my brother was sharpening himself into a harpoon, I lengthened, and stretched, and arched my back, and coiled until all of me was a coil, long and green and grinning. And where I first slithered, stepping lightly into a snake’s body, I crushed beneath me a tea bush with delicate leaves, and thought no more of it than a woman who breaks a twig underfoot while running through a forest.
I was not there when the Manikarnika died, but I heard them cry out. We all did. I slid over the hills and away with the rest—I did not want to be alone. So many of the smaller Stars saw my coils and, delighted, shivered into their own. We cloistered together, we ate sparrows and mice whole, or capons and honey, as was our liking. Our shapes changed with the hour; we were fluid as rivers. We were not alone.
I knew his face when he came. Of course I knew it. Even a Star dreams. I have been dreaming a long time, and I watched the glittering cord of that man’s life spool out until it intersected with mine, and how the sparks lit the grass at my feet! I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other. But Stars, you know, are fixed in their courses, and we can no more change the throttling paces of orbit than a rabbit can shorten its ears. I saw his cord lashing and snapping in the dark, and could do nothing.
A moth told me the day I was going to die.
I sat in my room, and my children were all around me, playing with toy swords and real ones, depending on their age, lolling about, their skins flushed green with relief—their father had left us alone for a day, and we could relax into serpents, let our scales show through. We had each other, and no one would disturb us.
I sat at the window. The wind came through off the tea fields, sweet and brown at the edges. My son was mending the hem of my dress, his mouth full of pins. My daughters played Chaturanga, their shoulders warm as diamondbacks in the sun. Some other of my boys chased a white kitten I had brought them, their eyes bright and hungry. We were not alone, not ever. I wiped the youngest’s nose, and told her to keep her tongue in her mouth—the pink and forked thing licked in and out feverishly. These are the things a mother does—did not the Sky once wipe our noses and tell us to stand up straight, did not the blackness of our mother admonish us to raise our voices and be curious, be bold, to look after one another when curiosity and boldness failed? Did she not tell us she loved us, that we were never alone?
In the dark at the beginning of the world, she said those things. And I said them to my children, though the words often stuck in my mouth, and I did not expect to say them, when I burned incandescent beside my brother and not beneath that snapping cord, that man whose breath stank of frightened women and into whom my light leeched, and leeched, and leeched. I did not want children. They were a poor substitute for what I lost—did the Sky feel the same? Is that why she left us? But I looked at them that day and knew that they came from me, that he chewed a hole in me and they swelled up so bright, so bright! And they are why I did not leave. Perhaps I do not understand my mother—but I think that is not unusual.
I sat by the window and my hand was green as vines on the sill. The moth landed on my forefinger, nailless now and scaled. His wings were pale brown, with circles like marks left by cups on old wooden tables. He was not special. Perhaps neither was I. I wore him for a moment like a jewel before he turned his furry head up to me and spoke, his voice susurring and small, twigs rubbing against dry leaves.
“If you will not eat me, I would tell you a thing.”
“Why would I eat you, little moth?”
The insect paused, his feelers twitching. “You are a very large snake. At least, some of you is.”
“And you would make a very small meal.”
“I am grateful…”
THE TALE
OF THE
br />
BIRDS’ TEARS
WE KNOW BECAUSE OF THE BIRDS.
In Amberabad, there was a moth with yellow wings like a wolf’s eyes, and she drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping hunting hawk. The tears were cloudy and sweet, like dandelion milk.
In Muireann, there was a moth with black wings like the back of an otter, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping pelican. The tears were blue and clear, like the ice from a frozen river.
In Shadukiam, there was a butterfly with wings like spun glass, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping parrot. The tears were red and glimmering, like the petals of a rose.
In Ajanabh, there was a moth with gray wings like dust on a book’s cover, and she drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping mynah bird. The tears were yellow and dusty, like saffron.
In Al-a-Nur, there was a butterfly with blue wings streaked in white, and she drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping swan. The tears were bloody and dark and salty, like a thing not to be touched.
Near a castle in the center of the Eight Kingdoms, there was a moth with great flapping wings that cast delicate shadows, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping goose. The tears were gray and slow.
In Jinnestan, there was a dragonfly with a body all of black and green, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping alerion. The tears were sharp and piquant, as though teeth had been ground into them.
In Hoaka, there was a moth with gray wings like blown ash, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping ptarmigan. The tears were rosy and thin, like a girl’s perfume.
In the city of Lament, there was a very small moth with the whitest wings you ever saw, and she drank the tears of a sleeping hoopoe, and the tears were soft and fine, like the hair of children.
In Irsil, there was a butterfly with no wings at all, who with her very last strength drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping sparrow. The tears were spicy and thick, but they did her no good.
In Kash, there was a moth with wings all flaming and smoking, and he drank the tears of a sleeping phoenix, which were molten white, like a blade not yet born.
In Urim, there was a moth with wings like mourning veils, and he laid them over the eyes of the dead. He drank from the tears of a blood-cold kingfisher. The tears were red as apple skins, and blue as moonlight.
In Nahara, there was a moth with wings like a church window, full of brilliant greens and reds and blues. She drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping loon. The tears were black and thick, like an ebony sill.
And in Varaahasind, there was a moth with brown wings like a hundred other moths, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping peacock. The tears were blue and green and gold, like the skin of a snake, and his name was Fahad, and he came to this window, his belly full of tears.
What do the birds dream that makes them weep so? We might have asked, but they are quick to eat, and not to converse. Instead we flutter over the face of the world, in every dusty pocket and lantern halo, and drink their grief, and taste their mourning in the draft. Eggs that fall from the nest and break on the grass, terrible strands of yolk flung from blade to blade, not enough seeds in the winter, falcons with claws that snatch, fish which are too clever by half—ah! We have known these sorrows! But once in a long while there are the flavors of other miseries floating there. It took all the tears I have mentioned and more for us to taste the whole of it. We brought them, clinging to a thousand proboscises like diamond necklaces, to the cistern at the center of Ilinistan, the City of Insects, which is a place you are not permitted to know. There is flame there which does not burn the wing, and webs which do not tear, and rivers of sugar water trickling through mossy stones. There hives make honey for joy in its gold, and not for the hungry mouths of men. There ants may rest, for winters do not scour us, nor is any sweet thing rare.
There are so many flowers there, my lady, you cannot imagine.
And in the center of Ilinistan, there is a cistern, where the ants and the beetles and the termites hollowed a stump so smoothly and perfectly that anyone might be proud to write upon its walls as though it were the finest paper, save that the stranger should be promptly devoured by spiders for the offense. And once in a long while, the drinkers of tears commune there, to understand the sorrow of the birds, who are also not permitted to know the way to Ilinistan. So we let our tears fall, one by one, blue by white by red by green by yellow, into the cistern, until it is full to brimming, and we can look in its waters and see the shape of the thing that the birds mourn.
In the cistern, oh lady, oh Star, oh lost and lonely thing, I saw your face, and knew that your course would pass under the ground, where only the worms go, to whatever pale, blind city they call their own, and which I am not permitted to know.
THE TALE
OF THE LEAF
AND THE SNAKE,
CONTINUED
THE MOTH REGARDED ME FOR A MOMENT.
“Will you not weep, lady? Do you not care?”
“I am more interested, friend Fahad, in the existence of a place which I am not permitted to know.”
“He will come for you this evening, this very one.”
“And he will find us dressed in our very best, as befits children awaiting a visit from their father, and a wife her husband.”
I put my hand, very gently, to the moth’s wings, and stroked the fine hairs. “Stars burn out, little moth.”
But surely you know this story. Surely you danced it, or sang it, or heard it at your mother’s breast. I am so common, these days. Everyone speaks in my voice.
I did not burn out. Oh, Mother, why did you not let me? You could have stitched me together again, as though the hole was never there, and I could have forgotten what it felt like to tear myself out of you, what it felt like to have children tear themselves out of me, what it felt like to dribble light into a man’s mouth night after night. What my children looked like as they faded to nothing. What I looked like, too.
I did not burn out. I came to the lakeside, where, I suppose now, all things come. There was a sorry little dock in dire need of new paint, and a low tide, frothing gray water and sandpipers fishing for fleas. What sort of fleas do they find, I wonder? I walked the shore, and my elbows were damp. I was stuck between woman and snake, my body twisting out of one and into the other—did my mother wish to indicate that I should have made up my mind? I have already said I do not understand her. She probably had nothing to do with it. I walked the shore and I could see the ferryman coming, I could see his raft and his ruined mast, I could see his pole. And when he moored at the dock, I stepped forward, to climb aboard.
But the air thickened like cream around me, and there were hands on my chest, pushing me back. Dimly in the fog I could see the faces of my girls, my loves, my little Stars, their beautiful eyes burning up the air. They put out their hands to me, and I took them as I used to—they were cold, but women’s hands are often cold. How many times do I remember breathing on them, rubbing them red again? They would not let me pass. They opened their mouths in unison, and I saw that their tongues were cut out. They pressed on me in unison and I staggered.
And in the throng I could see two, one with no eyes, and one with no ears, who cried out louder than any. They pushed and wept and their laments were like stones thrown after an unwanted child. They pushed me back from the shore, and the ferryman watched, but made no move. They pushed me back, and back, and back, to the wet green jungle and the red towers.
I opened one hundred and forty-five pairs of eyes.
They pushed me into those bodies, those bodies who had eaten me, chewed me to gristle, and still held me in their swilling bellies. It felt strange to move one hundred and forty-five pairs of arms. They seemed to pinwheel all around me, I could not keep them steady. I looked with my eyes into my eyes into my eyes, I was in all of them, and I could smell pig’s flesh, always, always. They swallowed me down; I lived inside them like a child. And in the core of each of them, under the pig’s
heart and the pig’s squealing lungs and the pig’s starving stomach, was the little white blade of the pig’s tooth. Only my husband was empty of that tooth, and him I could not bear to smell, or hear, or touch.
But the rest were a smoky labyrinth of pig and man, and I writhed through it, flashing green at their boiled and festering pinks.
I am tired, the boar’s tooth said.
I am sorry for you, I answered.
I was only hungry. I didn’t mean to eat all those maidens, all those boys, all those horses. But I was so hungry. What beast is blamed for its hunger? Only me. He cut me up like breakfast and pulled all these creatures out of me, and now I am hungrier still, I eat for a hundred and forty-five, my belly growls in one hundred and forty-five skins, and I am so tired.
I am sorry for you, I said in the depths of those hundred and forty-five. He cut me up, too, like supper, and pulled children out of me, and I am tired, too.
If I were myself again, I would eat him, and be sated.
Would you like me to help you?
Yes, oh yes.