When they found Orfea’s courtyard they were as upset as a flock of squabbling geese. They put their fingers to the eyes of the statues, they shook their stone shoulders, trying to wake them, they called out to the sandstone figures, they begged them to answer, begged them to breathe. They wept and trembled to see these mirror-siblings; they did not understand. I tried to calm them, but hundreds of stone folk who think they stand in a field of slaughter are not easily calmed.
I held the head of an inconsolable woman of lapis in my lap, and a young man of obsidian lay sickened at my feet. From behind a sandstone bust of a boy with bees’ wings, a soft voice sounded:
“Please,” it whirred, “listen to me.”
The stone wives looked up, eyes wet with sparkling, mica-flecked tears, and before them stood Hour, her head bent, her clock-heart ticking, her armor hands clasped like a girl who has forgotten her lesson.
“These are not like us,” she said, “and if you will listen, I will help you to grow up, I will tell you all you need to know of living.”
They gathered close round her, many-colored eyes hopeful and curious. They, too, folded their hands politely and waited. The tall, gleaming woman stood very still.
“Once upon a time,” said Hour, “there lived a maiden in a castle…”
THE TALE
OF THE WASTE,
CONTINUED
“I LIVED IN AJANABH AS WELL AS A GOOSE IN ITS flock. But it was no more than a year, I think, before the Khaighal came. They did not bring an army. They did not bring their books. They brought a cage. Not because I had wished for my wives—they could say nothing on that score—but because I had abandoned my Alcazar, and left Kash without one of her Queens.” The Djinn laughed as bitterly as a veteran. “Dereliction of duty. They poured out their smoke over me, white and roiling, and when it cleared a cage was in its place. It is not iron—it is made of Djinn-bones, and I can no more melt them than I can breathe at the bottom of the sea. I cannot slip through the bars. They keep me here, in the wasteland, and until you, there has been but one other visitor to my prison of bone and sand and sage.”
The leopard and her mistress waited with the patience of stones.
“She came when I had been here through a full summer, and my heart was as dry as cedar bark. Kohinoor, without her salamander, a pillar of smoke and ash in the desert. She came near to my cage, though not too near.
“‘I am sorry they decided this,’ she said. ‘But it will not be long. You are old now; you will not last. Nor will I—ash is ever older than flame.’
“We played the scene that angry, soured old women will play: We taunted, we sneered, we threatened. It hardly matters, really. She stood there a long time when the words were done, silent, staring.
“‘Why did you come?’ I asked.
“‘She was mine.’ Kohinoor sighed, as though she no longer believed it herself. ‘Who will fill me with flame now?’
“I understood. I was not Queen long, but I understood. Sisters, even such motley sisters as we, do understand some simple things. The simplest things there are. I extended a long hand from my cage, and she walked into my fingers. Into her smoke, into her throat, into her eyes I reached, and the flame of my palms and my wrists and my fingertips passed into her, lighting the darkness of her bones to a radiant gold, red flames opening like funeral flowers in the base of her belly, streaming from her navel. The roots of her hair glowed incandescent, and in the desert, the Ash-Queen burned.
“‘Oh,’ she breathed. ‘Yes.’
“She wept then, real tears, liquid fire, dripping to scald the earth. And then her body fell into ash, true ash, and her last breath scorched the wind.”
“Thank you,” said the leopard, sitting at attention. “We are grateful to hear such things, though we are disturbed—rather, I am disturbed on behalf of my mistress.”
Indeed, the veiled woman wrung her hands and looked imploringly at her cat with great red eyes. Scald reeled in a length of her hair and obscured her face for a moment, overcome by the memory of the old Queen. “Why?” she said from behind her screen. “It is my tale, it was not meant to disquiet you, it is nothing to you but a story told by a devil caught in a cage.”
Rend frowned and pawed the thirsty ground. She purred softly.
“That is not entirely true…”
THE TALE
OF THE LEPRESS
AND THE LEOPARD
IN URIM, EVERY WINDOW IS HUNG WITH BLACK.
This is not so monotonous as it might seem—shades of black differ as greatly from one to the other as oxblood and cobalt. In our long black banners are infinite designs, spirals and mandorlas of ghostly and intricate design. Within tall citadels the people of Urim contemplate these banners, and it calms them.
For Urim is a city of plague.
It is a hopeless place, and those who are hopeless are its priests and its citizens. Lepers and other ailments of as many varieties as spices in Ajanabh by the thousand gather there, treat one another as they can, salve one another as they may, and die in each other’s arms. The wildflower fields surround it in a wide, green-rose circle, like the window of a church, where cures of all fashions are bred and planted and culled. Some of them taste sweet as apples, some bitter as banyan root. Most of them do nothing. But we hope, we always hope. In their ailments, Urimites are brothers, and no city is so full of gentle, exhausted, beneficent folk.
They tore out my mistress’s tongue when we came, and chained me to her while she lay broken on their streets.
But I get ahead of myself. It is a cat’s habit. We bound and leap and leave the tale far behind, when we should hold it between our paws and worry it to the bone. I shall pierce it with two claws: She found me in the grasslands, and I was cold and gray as slush-snow.
Do you know how a leopard is born? We are mules, soft-nosed and long-tailed. My mother was a lion, my father was a pard of many colors; his pelt was like a war flag. On a day of hunting he found her, her muzzle bloody with antelope, and against the custom of both feline tribes they coupled in the long glare of a screaming sun. They went their ways, as cats will do. And my mother gave birth to one cub, dead as an antelope, as all leopards are born. Our mothers must breathe into our snouts, or our fathers roar into them, or we will take no life. But a new lion with a mane of tangled gold had padded into my mother’s pride, and did not care for cubs which were not his own. She left me in the saltbush, unbreathed, unroared.
That was how my mistress found me. Little gray paws curled up toward the sun like old mushrooms, spots like specks of mold, a tongue that never tasted light or meat. Even in her extremity, the woman I came to know as Ruin knelt by that bedraggled, infant cat, fur still stiff with birth water, and without knowing what she did, looked closely at my half-lidded eyes, and breathed into my spotted face.
I woke. I saw her. She was not a lion, or a pard. Her veils were parted to show her face: her cheeks flushed, her eyes scarlet as the inside of a deer, and her skin peeling from her like paper, layer after layer, like pages falling out of a book. I gripped her fingers with my paw and pierced her skin in my eagerness—but drew no blood.
“You cannot hurt me, little one,” she said, her voice rough as a tongue. “And as you are quite yellow and black and neither peeling to pieces nor turned to stone, I think perhaps I cannot hurt you…”
THE TALE
OF THE
GOOD DAUGHTER
I HAD A NAME BEFORE I DIED. I KNOW I DID. I can taste it on my tongue like the ghost of sugar. But I cannot remember it. Ruin I became and Ruin I am. My father said I was an angel, seraphic, holy as myrrh. It was never so, but I tried so hard, I tried for his sake, but Ruin is the whole of me.
Our house was full of bundled spices, yarrow and cinnamon and paprika, bright red turmeric flowers bunched by the windows. My father wore red robes, and taught me to pour out the freezing water into our carnelian font, and put wild celery flowers in my hair, so pungent in their scent that my eyes itched. Everything in our world was
red. Red, my father said, was the color of heaven, the color of Stars falling. Red was the color of piety, and so he swathed my crib in it, and my body when I rose from that crib. I knew nothing that was not red.
Is it surprising then that I kept to red things, in the House of Red Spices? Is this piety, to never step outside the shade of your bedclothes? I bathed in the frozen font each day, and I learned, after a very long while of gritted teeth and chattering, to love the blue feeling of its splash on my skin, which was not red, which was nothing like red. Under my bed I collected green things: grass, jade, green silk, clover. White things: chalk, alabaster, dust, daisies. Blue things: lapis, blue crinoline, scraps of paper from the indigo dyers’ shops, ice. The ice always melted, but I kept it in vials of crystal, and in some lights, these too were blue. I would take these things and hold them to my chest in the night and dream about water which was warm as a heart.
And then the fields began to die. I did not understand why—I was so young, innocent of everything outside our house; I could not have even matched my stockings if everything I owned had not been red. But I watched them wither and die from the tower windows curtained in scarlet, and I wanted to see the green and the white and the blue and the gold and the violet of them before they were gone. I wanted to lie down in everything not red and feel them crawling over me as they rushed to escape from the world.
I went from my father’s door with prayers weighing my wrists. I pulled the earth over me like a hood. I waited. Roots nosed my elbows, the hollows of my knees—and something deep in me hardened into stone. It sat in me, spreading and chewing, and I closed my eyes in the earth. I saw no red, but black.
It hurt so much. That is what I remember. The shoes were wedged onto my feet and in the place within me which had turned to stone, the place which was pumice and sandstone, wrenched in anguish. My skin softened, blood flowed back into flesh, dragging knives behind it. On my red bier my limbs became heavy, prickling like a forgotten finger. I could not even groan for the sear of it. Even when I woke, and stood over my father, tired and empty of piety, the blood in me bellowed, enraged that it was no longer stone, not black, that it was forced into red once more. Every step in my gnarled, twisted cinnamon shoes was filled with the bright, piercing cries of my blood, blood which remembered being stone, which howled to be stone again.
And the shoes, through the howling, whispered. They whispered of the light in the far corners of the city, they whispered that there would be no pain if only I could move fast enough on my feet, if only I could dance, if only the world could whirl around me, swift enough to carry any stone away.
The shoes lied. I danced, I danced every night, and I went to no services, held no red candle until my father dragged me to the altars and tied my ankles to them under my red, red skirts. I danced, endlessly, and every step, every whirl, screamed. As I danced the stone left me, scouring me empty as it went, but it did go. My hair became long and bright again, my cheeks red, my legs nimble. And on one night of all nights, when there was almost no pain left, only the nagging, grinding ache of my belly, where the stone had begun, I lost my shoes.
I did not mean to lose them: Though they lied and chose their own path, they were good and lovely shoes. I did not feel them when they fell from my heels. I did not go back, searching through the brush and the ruin of courtly orchids trampled by revelers to find them. Some other girl could have them now, I thought: I was well. But as I lay in my red blankets, in my bed so like a bier, the thing in me which had turned to stone as I lay in the earth pricked once more, and hardened a little, like a fist clenching.
My father told me it was nothing.
“Do not think on it,” he said, “and it will go away, just as it did before.”
“Before,” I mumbled, “I had my shoes, red and dusty.”
“Perhaps,” said he, stern as stone, “you should take up your ablutions again. Perhaps this is your punishment for such unseemly things as you did in the Duke’s old Palace.”
“I told you, Father, I only danced.”
“I will search the city for the sacred shoe that fits your foot,” he announced, and though I protested, he turned his back and called his heralds.
But I did as he said, fearful of the hard thing in me like a pit in a plum. I tried to scrub it away in the clear, hard morning water, frantic to melt it back to blood. My father saw this with pleasure, and held up my hair while I shivered. I held the red candle at the altar, and after a time he removed my stays. In the evening he rubbed red spices into my belly and mixed them with his tears. The spices burned, left blisters, trickled from my stomach to the linens.
And all the while, every shoemaker in Ajanabh, which was, certainly, fewer shoemakers than there had been, came to the House of Red Spices. They brought their finest heels and laces, of the twisted roots of tamarisk with rosettes of aloe, scraggle-toed banyan shoes, cedar and pomegranate-wood, date palm and sandalwood, camphor and wet ginger-shrouded shoes that burned my soles. They brought delicate black vanilla-bean shoes and fragrant maydi-shoes, shoes of nutmeg seeds and shoes of cardamom pods white as pearls. They even brought cinnamon shoes, dusty as my own, but none of these helped, and still my stomach hardened.
And my skin began to peel. Like onion skin, it fell from me. The stone wished to come out as I wished it to wither. I woke in the morning, my flesh sloughed off in the night, the skin beneath new and raw. My father exclaimed—I was healed, I must be healed, such a thing was a miracle of the candle and the altar. My skin lay around me, translucent and dead. But as the days went on, the skin beneath peeled, too, and beneath it was not new skin, red and bright, but more peeling, thin and terrible, like plum rind, sliced away, ruined. My father sent to the Duke’s old Palace for every set of cast-off shoes, for every maid that danced, but they were gone, vanished, shredded to flavor some beauty’s tea or danced to pieces on a floor I knew as well as my bed.
And still my skin peeled. There seemed to be no end to me, or to the peeling, and my belly was hard and cold, waiting to emerge.
THE TALE
OF THE LEPRESS
AND THE LEOPARD,
CONTINUED
“ONE DAY, MY FEET BARE AMONG A DOZEN PAIRS of shoes, I said to my father:
“‘This must stop. I am dead, Father, I am dead and you seek to cure it, but there is no cure here. I shall go to Urim, where all cures reside on shelves of obsidian and pearl. I shall go to the pale white sea, which washes the hem of Urim with all the salt of the world. The dead will walk in the desert—our place is not in the city.’
“And so I came, little cat, peeling and shedding my skin like a snake. I wrapped myself in black so that I would not frighten anyone, and so that the gate of Urim would know me as a pestilent. The stone in me is so heavy, now. Anything I touch hardens. Anyone I touch becomes art, becomes sculpture.” Ruin laughed wryly. “Perhaps I have found my calling. But you pierce my skin, you see that I have no blood left but stone, and yet you are soft and sweet and spotted as ever.”
I coughed, a tinny kitten’s cough. “You breathed into me. I… I am not a leopard, I am not alive. My mother did not give me her breath. You did, a corpse walking wide. Thus, I think, I am dead, still, dead as I was born, as dead as you. We are dead together. How could you harm me? Do you believe, in Urim, there is a salve for you?”
Ruin regarded me calmly, her eyes red and serene. “No. But we always hope.”
I nuzzled shyly into her palm. “Take me with you. I have your breath; I am your leopard. You cannot leave me. You must name me and love me and lick my fur into behaving itself. It is very necessary.”
She laughed. “You are not bothered by my eyes, the molt of my skin?”
“How could I be? You are the first woman I have ever seen.”
And so it was that we went together, and my legs grew very long, gold and black and wiry. I loved my mistress, and once, just once, when our fire was very low and she looked out across the empty plains between Ajanabh and Urim, I put my unruly head in h
er lap, and she licked my fur to shining.
We came to Urim in the night, and all things in the city were black. It was a city mourning itself, and how dark were its vestments! We entered; there was no sentry. Urim is not often visited. All things slept, and we sat at the center of the city, waiting for dawn on the lip of a great memorial: a pure white man resting on a bier, his face beatific. On the lip of this slab was carved:
FORGIVE US, FOR WE WERE IN NEED.
Against this nameless man and his nameless bed we huddled; I wrapped my tail around my haunches, and the sky wheeled by over our heads. Sometime before sunrise, a strange creature came walking from a distant road, its footsteps scraping the pale cobbles. It was a woman all of wicker, of brambles and stick, of hazel and red osier, green and pliant willow. It moved smoothly and gracefully for all that, and bowed low to us.
“That is an uncomfortable place to sleep,” she said, her voice hard, like branches snapping. “Perhaps it brings you hope, however?” Her eyes were sappy blossom nubs, rose-colored and wet.
Ruin stirred and adjusted her veils quickly, covering her exposed cheek. “We await the day, and the Urimites, to tell us how to live in this place. We are… in need.”
“So are we all,” answered the wicker-wight. “But he”—the woman indicated the statue—“is the answer to need…”
THE TALE
OF THE
CATTLE MERCHANT
AND THE APPLE
EVERY POOR, LOST CREATURE OF URIM KNOWS this tale, gathers around this pale casket in hope so hot and bright it would burn any who did not know that Urim itself flames with such hope, that you can look nowhere in the city without being blinded.
Long ago there was a man with three daughters. This man lived in a country which bordered a sea so salty it foamed white on the sand, a country full of rich grass and cloudy skies. This man was a cattle merchant, and as all merchants did in those days, he traveled often to Shadukiam to trade. On one such occasion, when he was in need of such sundries as merchants long for: cloth, jewels, food which could not dream of growing in their own countries, he asked his daughters what they would like from the great city.