The Orphan's Tales Read online

  My mother died in a horse raid when I was very young, and her mother had died in childbirth, and so when I came of age there was no one to teach me, to show me the secret ways, to give me a place in the tribe. Instead, I was sent away, packed into a cart with hides and jewelry to pay for my fostering in a neighboring village, to be taught by the witch-woman of their people. My hair was thick and red, then, bright as a fire ripping through the steppes. My limbs were smooth and hard as hooves—the jangling cart bouncing across the wide emptiness between villages hardly affected me.

  When I arrived, my mistress seemed to me fierce and beautiful and terrifying. Thurayya was very strict—she distrusted my foreignness, my red hair, and my simple name, and most of all my stubbornness. For one year I did nothing but serve her; sweep her hut, polish her blades, carry her water, comb her horses. She said nothing to me. I slept outside the hut, under the stars and cushioned by dry grass. Only in the second year did she allow me to sleep beside her, and begin my education. Is this the proper way to teach a girl? I don’t know. But I could not bear to bring you up, or Quiver, or Sheath, that way. Perhaps I am not, in the end, as strong as my old mistress.

  The first night of that second year, I lay stiffly against her old, musty skin, her sharp bones and stringy white hair turned almost my own shade by the last embers of fire, and without looking at me, she suddenly spoke.

  “Listen, Bent-Bow, you little goat. See if you can’t learn something besides milking yaks…”

  OPEN YOUR EARS, AND LET THE SKY IN.

  In the beginning, before you were the spark in the dream of a lice-shagged goat and a lonely farmhand, there was nothing but sky. It was black, and vast, and all the other things you might expect a sky with nothing floating around in it to be. But the sky was only a sky if you looked at it slantwise—if you looked at it straight, which of course, no one could, because there wasn’t anyone to look any way, it was the long, slippery flank of a Mare.

  The Mare was black, and vast, and all the other things you would expect a horse the size of everything to be.

  After a long while, the Mare chewed a hole in herself, for reasons she has kept as her own. The hole filled up with light the way a hole in you or me would fill up with blood, and this was called a Star. They were the first, true children of the Mare, made of the flesh of her own body. And because she liked the light, and the company, she chewed other holes, roughly in the shapes of Badgers and Plows and Deer and Knives and Snails and Foxes and Grass and Water and suchlike, and so on until the Mare was ablaze with holes, and all the holes were Stars, and the sky was not very empty at all anymore.

  Now, the holes were up and walking around like you and me by this time, and one, in roughly the shape of a Rider, climbed over the Mare and she became full, as full and huge as a horse the size of everything can be, until she foaled the whole world in a rush of light and milk and black, black blood from the most secret depths of the sky. The grass and the rivers and the stones and women and horses and more Stars and men and clouds and birds and trees came dancing through the afterbirth of the Mare, and swam happily in her milk and stopped up her secret blood, and the world was made, and the oceans washed the shore, and the Mare went cantering into the corners of herself, which just barely showed through the burning field of her Stars, and lay in a pasture neither you nor I could guess at, and chewed her favorite Grass-Stars in peace.

  Now the holes which were Stars were still full of light, and still walking around the sky, awkward as three-legged dogs. Without the Mare, the black was just black, and not a flank, not a hide, not a thing with smell and salt and fur. Naturally, this frightened the holes, since up until then they had always had the smell of the Mare in their noses and the feel of her at their backs. A few of the holes looked down on all the things which had come out of the Mare before she went off away from them, and thought that it seemed less terrible and dark than the sky—and besides, there were things like themselves there: badgers and plows and deer and knives and snails and foxes and grass and water. And even horses, which were like the Mare they remembered, only much smaller, and of many different colors.

  And, my mange-ridden little goat, there they lived, just like you and I do, while the less brave of their brothers and sisters stayed up in the sky to light their way. And they were teachers and students and mothers and daughters and brothers and uncles and crabby old men. And they couldn’t help it: everywhere they walked they carried their light, the light which, you remember, wasn’t really light, but the Mare-blood of the first days of the world.

  Now, in the beginning, they were so full of this blood-light that everything they touched went silver and white with it—it flowed out of them like sweat and all kinds of things were wet with it. But as time went on, there was less of the light to spill, and they began to be afraid that they would lose the last thing the Mare their mother had ever given them. But they were more afraid of the great black motherless sky, and would not leave the world again. So they went away into little clutches, like flowers growing in rocks, into the caves and the hills and the rivers and the valleys, far off from anyone else, and touched only each other, for between them the light only pooled, and rippled, and did not leak from their bodies.

  But after the Stars hid themselves away, the things they touched were still where they had left them, full of light, the light which was blood, and they glowed with the silver and white of it. And these things were special, flea-bed mine—where they were stones or plants they passed their light into deeper stones and into their seeds, and where they were people, they passed the light to their children, which diminished just as it had when the Stars first touched the world and the blood went out of them. It was not long before no one could tell what had been touched in the first days and what had not. The light was buried and secret.

  But it was not gone. In many things and many people it is still glowing, deep down in their guts, and this, my scraggly, milk-bellied kid, is what magic is.

  I LISTENED TO HER STORY, AND IN MY SECRET heart I thought she smelled sweet, of blood and milk and hide, like the Mare herself, and I allowed my body to inch, ever so slightly, closer to hers. She said nothing more that night.

  I grew under her frown for many years like a sleek colt, learning to find the glowing thing in my gut, to control its light and strength, to be its bridle and bit. The world moved under me like a flowing field beneath amber hooves, and I could feel the blood-light in me pulsing, its life in my body like a newborn—and I had to deliver many, my girl, both under Thurayya’s direction and alone.

  I exulted in it, the pooling of light in my heart. I learned to make it into medicine, and spells, and charms, to push it out of me and fashion it into shapes. How many nights did I spend with her under the lightning and the black clouds, her hair streaming like frenzied serpents, her thin arms extended towards the raging sky? I learned without the light, too: the way of animals, and the way of the steppes. I learned how to deliver a colt who has become strangled in its mother’s womb, and how to catch and milk the shaggy cattle that chewed the prairie grass. The time went quickly, when I was young, and I loved my mistress, and there was so much yet to know.

  But one night Thurayya came to me and the moon crowned her with silver and black.

  “Bent-Bow,” she hissed, “goat-of-my-heart. You must come with me now. For once in your life, do not question me.”

  I opened, thought better of it, and closed my ever-busy mouth, to take my pack and follow the thin shape of the witch away over a long meadow which bordered the village. Her form swayed ahead of me, blurred, as the miles we crossed began to carry me into a half-dream, the sky and the cutting winter air skimming along past my cheeks.

  After some time we approached a monstrous cliff, rising up like a great bear ahead of us. She drew me up next to her and embraced me, a thing she had never done. When she pulled away her craggy face was wet with tears.

  “You have been my best student. I am proud of you. But I cannot go with you tonight. I hav
e never done this thing—it is not my right. It belongs only to you, and had there been any woman of your family left to bring you here, we would never have met. After tonight, if you come back to the village, it will be the end of your time with me. You will be a full well: enough silver water within you to return to your own people and ladle it out to them, to guide them, and teach them. The rest of your education will be the private learning women like us work for all our days, when you will become both teacher and student, mistress and apprentice. You will return pregnant with knowledge to bear to your tribe, and your power will grow like a child, and you will spend the rest of your life in labor. But you must pass this night first, and emerge again. Then you will be ready, my beautiful, beautiful daughter. My beautiful little goat.”

  She smiled brightly, her lips curving like a scimitar, and pointed to a gaping hole in the cliff wall. I kissed her cheek awkwardly, looking into her shining eyes. I was determined not to show my fear, to possess it and enter it, to dwell within it until it disappeared into my calm, quiet belly. I turned away from Thurayya, from my life with her and my youth, and entered the mouth of the cave.

  Soon I could see nothing; darkness like hands pressed in on me. I made a place for myself on the cool, compact earth, listening to the slow, lazy rustle of bats far overhead. And I waited, bounded in blackness.

  KNIFE’S FACE WAS LIT BY THE REDDENING SUN, HER nose casting shadows on her scars, her eyes deep and impenetrable as snowy mountains. Well water glistened crimson and saffron in wooden buckets that lay scattered around the house like wildflowers, reflecting the blazing sky. The Prince rested on his heels, ran his hand through thick black hair, now marshy with sweat. He started, as if out of a spell, and looked sharply at the old witch.

  “Well,” he blurted, “what happened then?”

  The woman cackled huskily. “Then the pretty Prince came inside the hut, for it was becoming night, and kneaded dough for the terrible, ugly witch’s bread.”

  This was nearly too much for the Prince, who had tried very hard to keep his dignity thus far. To now work in this deformity’s kitchen like a scullery maid? Leander of the Eight Kingdoms, the Two-Blooded Border-Lord, Son of Helia the Radiant, would absolutely not bake filthy, thin peasant’s bread in this wretched place. He had promised to serve her, yes, but he had meant to do so in some manly fashion which involved the slaying of some things and the rescuing of others. Bread needed to be neither slain nor rescued.

  He opened his noble mouth to say so, but the chill stare of the witch stopped his words like a noose about his neck. Her teeth gleamed horribly bright under cracked lips, and seemed to lengthen and twist into clashing ivory knives. In a moment the vision had evaporated, but the Prince was now convinced that bread-baking was a most estimable and agreeable work, and that perhaps kneading was not too dissimilar to slaying.

  Though he had to duck to enter the hut, it was more comfortable and spacious inside than he could have expected, a fire licking at gnarled hawthorn logs in one corner, bound books lining the walls. Knife turned as he removed his fine leather boots.

  “Excuse the doorway. My people have always been small.”

  Bundles of dried herbs and once-bright flowers hung like stalactites from racks on her ceiling; gray, red, brown. He saw withered peach blossoms, dusty lupines, roses and bundles of mushrooms like roses, angelica and buckbean and bladderwrack, coltsfoot, rue, and mallow—and there his knowledge of botany, with its princely limitations, failed him. Glinting black furs covered the floor like autumn leaves. Great terra-cotta jars and mystifying chests with copper and silver locks, innumerable walking sticks of every material, and bolts of strange, deeply hued fabric were strewn about the borders of the wide central room, and a massive table of shimmering wood dominated the area near the fire. It was, all in all, everything he had been led to expect from a witch’s house.

  On the table were heaps of inchoate dough and ceramic pots of fragrant spices. The witch gestured towards it and a low chair. She turned to a large iron stove, her muscled back obscuring whatever task lay unfinished on its steaming surface. There was a long silence, stroked by the soft, slushing sounds of the Prince’s hand slowly, awkwardly pounding dough—for he kept his wounded fist at his side, so that his seeping blood would not stain the loaf. The pain had nearly left the stumps of his fingers. After a time, Knife looked up from the stove, shaking her gray hair like a foal, and spoke into the rough-hewn wall.

  “You have your mother’s hair, you know, all those long curls like strips of bark. Not the color of course, but the heft of it.” Her voice was rough and pained. The Witch turned from her work and moved to the table with two clay cups of steaming greenish-yellow tea.

  “Willow bark and wild mint,” she grunted, picking at the woodgrain, her face caught and silhouetted by the firelight. “And a bit of her eyes, though your father is there, too, black, reflecting nothing.”

  The Prince’s breath stopped, and words rushed to his lips only to die strangled on his tongue. His whole body seemed to struggle with itself, until suddenly he was crying softly, salting the bread, his young shoulders shuddering.

  “Please,” he begged, “how can you know anything of my mother? No—do not tell me, do not speak of her. Never speak of her.” He dried his eyes with the dirty cuff of his sleeve. “Tell me what happened to your grandmother in the cave, tell me old Star-tales no one believes anymore, but do not ask me to remember my mother.”

  The Witch swallowed her tea.

  “In the cell, Grandmother rubbed at her temples and drank a little of the polluted water left us in a decrepit iron jug. I waited patiently, still a good student. At length, she began again…”

  IT WAS DARK, OF COURSE. THESE SORTS OF THINGS always begin in the dark. I leaned with my back against the rock wall, feeling the slight damp, the thick air of that stone womb which was blacker than black.

  Ages passed. Or minutes.

  I looked into the shadows, their substance, their limbs, their weight. At times, I felt at peace and watchful, as though I sat on the giant lip of a blue-black lily, its fat flesh curling underneath me, so perfect that no part of me could not be a part of it, and my body was changed, converted into its charcoal and gloam. At other times, I felt cold and alone and very small. But I felt the tiny, struggling light inside me, and it was warm as a fire at my feet. It spread through me as though I was a sieve of silk, left me clean and pure in that silent cavern. I sat with palms upturned, trying to hold the curve of darkness like a great hanging belly, thunder-black and written upon with swarthy symbols, all alive and breathing and swirling in the violet long-past-sunset.

  I think I must have nearly fallen asleep, when suddenly my flesh sparked and shivered, and a thing began to coalesce out of the hematite air. I could not, at first, see anything at all but a length of deeper black amid the blackness. Its edges seemed to shimmer with light, a heat lightning crisping the edges of a shape, glowing like an afterimage. I was afraid, granddaughter, of course I was afraid. I cowered into the curve of the cavern, shaking like a newborn fawn.

  At length I perceived a long head and flowing hair, luminous eyes round as moons. It seemed a part of the stone, a part of the night, a part of nothing I had ever come near to knowing. My eyes rolled in my head and sweat slicked my skin. My heart beat so fast I felt as though I had swallowed a hummingbird.

  Finally, the outlines of the shape, rimmed in white fire, became clear and distinct.

  In a moment it was utterly familiar to me, the long curve of black neck, the smooth haunches and velvet fur, a thick tail in a hundred braids brushing the cave floor, breath puffing from her great nostrils like pipe smoke: a horse beyond fantasies of horses, beyond any guess at size or hope of beauty, her ears seeming to brush the ceiling like stiff feathers, their twitchings carving some arcane verse on the rock. Scattered around her hooves lay charred jawbones and shoulder blades, and sternums like scepters.

  The Mare watched me calmly, snorting occasionally and blinking her incandescen
t eyes. There was no sound for a space that seemed like a thousand winters joined at the snowline.

  I still could not say where the courage came from, from what hidden place in me it sprung up and gurgled brightly, but I stood on clamoring legs and reached out my little hand to the creature, avoiding the rattling bones in their protective ring. I stroked her nose and the sides of her lightless face—and granddaughter, I cannot even now describe the softness of her flesh, the gentle glide of my hand over her thick, gleaming fur. Her skin was the texture of new cream, the shade of a crow flying high in a moonless night. She was beautiful and terrifying, savage and pure. Her eyes wheeled like suns and her great heart thundered against me. I buried my face in her mane and breathed the scent of wild earth and a burning sky. There was no other world but her.

  And suddenly, without warning, that great head turned like an opening door and the black Mare bit into the flesh of my shoulder with blazing teeth, tearing muscle from bone. I screamed uselessly into the echoes, and blood surged from the wound like a river through a red canyon, gushing warmly onto my breasts and hands. I flailed against her, beating her flank with my fists, but the teeth only ground harder into me. I think I must have fainted then, and as I fell against her body I expected nothing but death.

  When I came around I lay once more against the rock wall, drenched in my own blood as though I had been caught in a rainstorm. The Mare had disappeared. I wept bitterly—though she had sunk her teeth in me I missed them, I felt empty without their light burning into me. She had done no more than she had always done—chewed a hole in flesh. And the edges of her hole longed for her, after she was gone. Her absence filled the chamber like a voice.

  In her place was a much smaller creature, not at all commanding or terrible, sitting on its haunches, eyes sparking in the returned blackness. When it saw I had revived, it padded across the earthen floor and stood directly in front of my face; a handsome red Fox with a splendid furry tail. He smelled of burnt grass and copper filings, and his fur crackled with a baleful kind of rusted light.