“How many wives do you wish to have, Amilcar?” she hissed.
“Three,” he confessed, his hands shaking. “I wish to have you in my house, and the barger’s wife in my bed, and my glossy wife of paper by my horn when I play.”
In a rage, Vachya rose out of the roof of the house and flew in a blue streak to the river bargers. The lures in her hair shone bright as lamps. She found, in the great spice barge, the woman Amilcar loved, sleeping on her broad back, her belly barely showing. Vachya had never asked for a child, and when she saw the little swell of the spicer’s belly, she thought in her heart that Amilcar had put it there, opening his throat to the brazen woman and letting her suckle at his grass-scented blood. Her tail burned white with shame and rage. The woman did not wake, for a Lamia’s lures lull even whales to slumber, and Vachya in her fury pressed her hands to the woman’s gravid belly, leaving two livid blue handprints that had faded by morning. The child was crushed to death beneath the sea serpent’s palms.
Now, in some tales it is said that the child did not die, but was born deformed, a Lamia’s half-breed, with three breasts and a very difficult life ahead of her, but this is surely fanciful.
When Vachya returned to her husband, she scrabbled at Amilcar’s neck for the marks of his adultery, and it was not long before she could not tell the difference between the wounds of her hands and any mark the barger’s wife might have left. Her sobs hitched like sailor’s knots, and she threw open the closet, where the bedraggled, neglected paper-wife lay. She tore it into pieces with her hands before her husband’s eyes, and swallowed each bit of music, each bit of wife, in grief and bitterness. Amilcar was shocked, but what can a man do who married a serpent? And this tale would have ended there, with perhaps a more loyal Amilcar and a more kindhearted Vachya, had the Lamia not, just then, coughed with the last mouthful of music.
Out of her turquoise mouth came a golden coin, tinged the color of a drowned sailor’s throat.
Still reeling, Amilcar stared dumbly at the coin. “Do it again!” he cried.
Vachya coughed again, and out came another gold coin. This time, she did not wish to give it to him, and bit into it as he tried to pry it from her mouth, leaving two perfectly round holes in its center.
THE RIVER
PILOT’S TALE,
CONTINUED
“AMILCAR BECAME VERY WEALTHY, AND KEPT his wife in cold rooms, so that her throat was always a-rattle. Eventually he built a great house on the river, and kept her in the lower rooms, near the water, where there is always a chill to rattle the chest. And thus Vachya became the first mint of Ajanabh, and Amilcar its first Duke! Even now our coins are tinged with blue, and bear those two distinctive holes in their center!”
I looked, horrified, at my captor. He beamed, having told what he considered to be an excellent story.
“I am a dragon, not a bank,” I said softly.
“I keep telling you, lovely girl, you are neither.”
He took me through the gate of a house with as many rooms as a river has branches lying on its floor, and he sat me near a great fire grate with a dragon’s head nodding over it, stuffed like an elk’s.
“Now,” he said, taking my hand in his and kneeling on a spotless marble floor, “that is a dragon. It is very old and very dead. You are very young and very alive, and a maiden with hair the likes of which I have never seen. I think you are marvelous, and radiant as coins in the sun. And if you are not entirely mad, I would be happy to keep you in this house and dress you in something other than stained breeches and a shirt far too big for you and feed you soup and make you my wife.”
The other members of the household seemed to think this was rather sudden, and all the city was dutifully scandalized. But I am a fish. I lay my eggs twice a year by the dozens, and it is none of my care if they survive. If food is scarce, I will even nibble on a few—this is the nature of goldfish, the nature of rivers. Mating is easy—it hardly takes as long as lunch. I have had so many children, and I have forgotten them all, so they their own children, and their grandchildren. A goldfish has a golden heart, and with all that gold, there is no room for sentiment.
And so I married him. It seemed a rather lot of fuss just to spawn. I wore a dress like a thousand spiderwebs trailing over my maiden’s body. Perhaps, I thought, a fish becoming a maiden is nearly as extraordinary as her becoming a dragon. Incense swung in censers and bearded men anointed foreheads. But then, maidens did seem to take more fuss over things than fish, and there was a wedding bed with an embroidered coverlet where there ought to have been a nice clump of twigs and a bit of shade. And instead of glistening little eggs I never had to think on again, stuck to the side of the lock, there was a big belly, and it went on for months, until I thought I would spawn forever.
But as my belly grew, my skin began to peel. I had become used to the pink and the soft, and was alarmed. I went to the doctor who lived ensconced in his rooms in the great estate, and lay on his table. He plied me with leeches and poultices for a long while, but still my skin peeled. At last some piece of my foot sloughed off its last shred of maiden skin, and beneath it, gleaming and glistening on the spotless marble floor, were three long black claws, and green scales like emerald shavings.
THE TALE OF THE
CLOAK OF FEATHERS,
CONTINUED
“I UNDERSTOOD IN A MOMENT.” THE GOLDFISH laughed, a stream of bubbles breaking on the surface of her goblet. “After all, an infant goldfish looks more or less like a golden eyelash floating on the water—nothing like the full-grown fish. I leapt over the falls and began an infant’s life. Once I had spawned, I was mature, and therefore I entered my adult phase—scales, wings, fire, and all. Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.”
“What happened to your child?” I said gently.
Lock shrugged, rising and falling slightly in the water. “I am afraid that during its birth I completed my molting and rose immediately from childbed and out of the great country house, my long green tail corkscrewing behind me. I bellowed fire at the moon in sheer joy—and then bellowed fire at the house, at its lowest rooms. And as I flew faster than a river barge, I glimpsed behind me something great and blue disappearing into the river.
“I flew as fast as my fishpole-wings could carry me, up into the mountains and back to my river and my lock. I thought nothing of the child. I do not even know if it was a boy or a girl. I thought nothing of its father, either. Mates do not last more than one season; that’s obscene. And eggs will survive or fail in their own way. The best a mother can do is keep the males from eating them for a time, and then leave them to the river. I came here, to the other goldfish, to show them how it was done, that it could be done. I soared over the foaming, frothing edge of the falls, my tail snapping like a green flag, my nostrils flared to taste the wind—oh! It tasted like brine shrimp and broken stones! My spine ridge ruffled white and blue, blue as the poor Lamia. I called out to them, the lock fish, the goldfish, the trout, the pike, the thorny-boned catfish, the clacking drumfish, the eels who would never lie, the bass.
“And as I cleared the waterfall, I felt my scales squeeze in, and my claws seize up, and I snapped back into a goldfish, just as quick as the flick of a fin. I fell into the pool with a loud splash.”
I could not help it. I laughed, cawing against the bars of my cage. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be cruel. It must have been very sad for you.”
The fish gave her piscine shrug again. “They laughed, too. But they saw me, some of them, pike and eel and trout and lock-fish. They saw that I was a dragon.”
“Couldn’t you leap back over?”
“I suppose. But it was not long after that that the barge men came scooping fish up in their goblets, explaining to them what they would pay and how large the glass would be, and it seemed to me very satisfactory work, tasting the riv
er. I travel as far as any dragon on these routes. And I don’t think I should like to go through the infant stage again—it was not nearly so marvelous as the last part, and I do not really like the color pink.”
Lock and I had many fine conversations on the deck of the river barge, but all rivers end. This one was very long and its passage took a great many months—and it was not even half the journey to Ajanabh. When the water had finally narrowed so far as to be impassable, I had nearly forgotten I was in a cage, so kind and piccolo-cheerful was her voice, so bright were her scales in the crystal goblet. I thought often of my goose, her flapping orange feet, her hooting cry. When I wept, Lock was kind enough to look away. But she bade me farewell with a slosh of her water, and only looked sad for a moment when Kostya loaded me onto a cart, and though I bounced and flashed my tail, scorching the bars, the lock, and Kostya’s hems, there was little I could do to keep myself clear of the red city. I had only to wait.
The Vareni was quite as splendid as Lock had promised, and the bridges rattled under our cart, tossing red dust into the current. But I hardly saw the colors in the glare of Kostya’s yellow coat, in the gray mire of my own misery. And when he steered his cart through the Dressmaker’s Parish, I was certain I knew where he had gotten that coat.
Every window and hovel door was slung with clothes, the dyes glossy and intense, even the simplest apron glowing goldfish-bright. Troughs of dye lined the streets like gutters in scarlet and yellow and blue, and a few merry folk, far too few for the number of troughs, dipped in their skirts, their trousers, their hats, their fine, long coats. Spools of costly thread stood like lampposts here and there, with a child selling lengths with her own pair of shining scissors. There were few enough people, but clothes there were in plenty. Far off there sounded laughter and screaming and jostling and spilling, the crunching of bones and the tearing of silk, the singing of songs and the dancing of feet—Ajanabh was only lately dead, and the wake still raged on. Kostya did not look at me, but stood straight and tall and proud with his prize, as a child or two stopped and stared up at me in mud-cheeked wonder. His gait was awkward—he limped, as fashionable noblemen often do, and until we came to the bell tower by the east bank of the Vareni, far from the crowd and the dresses hung up like curtains, I thought nothing of it.
The bell was whole, then, but much of the rest was as you see it, as many things are on the banks of the Vareni, following their natural inclination downward, sliding slowly into the river. Everything was boarded, broken, dusty, dim. The bell never rang and the floors creaked, and my cage was set just where you see it, and never moved again. Kostya opened his arms expansively, as if presenting me with a very great gift, wrapped up in a bow.
“This is where we shall work, my good friend. It is a lovely place, with a great many corners for hiding things in.”
“What work is it you wish me to do?”
“Nothing, nothing! Sit very still while I do what I must. I should have no use for a slave of such a very great size.”
And Kostya, with his gold mask gleaming beneath its peacock fringe, bent low, and plucked a single long feather from my tail. I screamed, the sudden, short pain of it; only Ravhija, my pumpkin-dear, my gardener-girl who caught me stealing and plucked her punishment, had ever dared such a thing before. I bled and stared at him, hurt and uncomprehending. He already had me in his grasp. What could another feather avail him? It smoked and hissed against his glove. He quickly threw it up into the belly of the bell, and it remained there.
“So bright!” he cried. “Bright as Stars in the heavens!”
So it went every morning, like a clock chiming dawn. He came and plucked a feather from me, dripping scarlet blood in a circle under the bell, from whence they never returned. His glee increased with every feather, and with every feather I was weaker, wept more bitterly, until I could hardly stand in my cage, and had to be given cushions on which to lie as my tail depleted, morning by morning. The space below my cage was stained with blood and golden tears, as though someone had left a ghastly cup there on the boards.
What Kostya did with his nights I could never say. He went into the city, I presumed to drink and sing and whore as men in wigs will do. But my own nights were dark and damp and full of river sounds, the sloshing currents lapping at the stairs. There were clicking sounds in the bell, but they were no company. My tail was half plucked, my heart half dead. I longed for the glimpse of a silver feather through the tapered windows, a long neck speckled with moon. But she did not come—it was foolish to think she could come.
In my thick and knotted despair, there came a scratching noise, a clattering and a scraping. Out of the bell floated a few of my feathers. I sang happily at them, so overjoyed was I to see them again. Their flames had gone out, of course, long gone from the heat of my body, but the gold sparkled still. After them came a long length of pale thread, and along this came a quiet brown spider, the size of a child’s fist, whose legs were eight delicate, glittering needles, their eyes jutting out sharply at the joints where they met her thin true legs, and in each eye trailed threads of scarlet and gold.
“Good evening, oh fabric of mine, oh spinner of my best silks,” said the spider in a voice like pages rubbing together. Her manifold eyes regarded me seriously.
“You must be mistaken, for I am quite sure that you are the spinner of silks between us.”
“On the contrary,” she said, swaying a little on her silky lead, “Kostya has asked me to make him a cloak of feathers, the brightest the world has seen, and you are my cloth, my model, my thread, and my pattern all together.”
I looked at her in horror. “Why would you agree to such a thing?”
She shrugged. “Kostya has always paid me well—and well he might. We have known each other since I was barely out of my egg sac and he was adorned in whiskers and fur. I am Sleeve, the Bell Spider, famed the Parish over for my gowns and jackets. Who would not come to me with such a commission? Who else would do the materials justice?”
“I am not materials,” I said quietly, my eyes cast to the ring of tears and blood.
“This is Ajanabh,” she answered, her voice stitched thick with apology. “Everyone is materials.” And at this she waved four of her needle-legs.
“Did Kostya do that to you? Did he make a little bracelet of your legs?”
“How funny you are! No, of course he didn’t. I am a recluse spider. It is an apt name, and indicates the poisons of my body, besides. No one could sever my legs did I not ask them to…”
THE
DRESSMAKER’S
TALE
ANOTHER CREATURE’S TALE IS LIKE A WEB: IT spirals in and out again, and if you are not careful, you may become stuck, while the teller weaves on.
Did I become stuck in Kostya’s tale, or did he become stuck in mine? It is confusing, and so I will begin with mine, and perhaps somewhere along the strand we will snare him.
The first thing I remember was glass. I was caught under glass with a few dozen others as brown and small as I—perhaps siblings, perhaps not. One cannot really smell the egg sac after a few days, and though we might have been brothers and sisters, we easily might have not. Who can say? But what I saw from that squirming, thronging glass was a long table with a tall cup standing on it, holding up a stack of books, a cup of horn, all twisted red and black and yellowed white.
Each day he would scoop some of us out and crush us in his mortar, mixing in rose and snake scale and whatever else he could think of. He would pour this mixture into the cup and drink it down, savoring and considering each concoction. Now, even as an infant I was a clever thing, as spiders must be to find their web rafters and their suppers so soon after their mother crawls back into the dark. We are born with the knowledge of poison beating hard in us—we taste it; of course we taste it. Do you not know the taste of your own mouth, your own spit, your own blood? So do we, and know it well. He could have been at no other trick than poisoning, with so many of us crushed in his bowl, twitching legs brush
ing weakly at the rim.
I have no grudge against poisoners, being one myself, but nor did I greatly desire to become a tool of his trade. And so, when he came for me, with his dry, thin fingers groping under the glass, I was ready, and scurried up his reaching arm, all the way to his neck, and sank my fangs in him as quick as a snapping web strand, before he could even cry. When I am very angry, I sometimes have a second bite to give, and this too I gave gladly to him, with a high, whispering shriek of triumph, and two red points of blood on his cheek.
I am quick. I am merciful. He thrashed like a drowning man, and out of his skin came snaking vines—I have since been very careful, in case all men have these whipping things hiding in their skin. Out snarled holly and thorn apple and ivy, reaching to find and strangle and save. But I am too small for such blunt limbs, and they never touched me. One lashed out, a blackthorn branch, and shattered the cup of horn, which had held so many spider broths—and a terrible, sorrowful sound filled the room, like the last gasping note of a song that had once dreamed of forests, and storms, and lightning brighter than love. I shuddered as it died away in the room’s stale air. But I cannot really mourn a cup.
Away from his purpling corpse I and some few others ran, into the world and the light. Having been captive since as near to birth as makes the difference of one strand of thread to another, I was not properly socialized, and unsure of what a spider ought to do with her time.
I asked the crickets in the Glassblowing District, and they said:
“We suspect it is proper and right that a spider should rub her legs together and make a very nice sort of music which fills up the night air and draws mates from all corners, green and black and handsome!”