The boy frowned into the wind and scratched at his collar. “I have to dress like a doll just to watch her eat,” he mumbled. “And this thing has no pockets at all—I couldn’t even bring you anything.”
“That was never necessary, you know,” the girl demurred. “I have enough, I’ve always had enough, even if my enough and yours are as different as an elephant and a minaret.”
Her black-rimmed eyes flickered to the earth and back to the boy, and she took him gently by the hand, away from the open paths and into the interior Gardens, past the marble benches and fountains, past the over-picked orchards and the over-pressed grapevines to a clutch of stones so thick with moss that they seemed to be the bodies of long-dead tigers or leopards, whose fur still grew and grew after they had perished. In their long shadows the children were spared the winds, though the girl breathed into her hands to warm her bloodless fingers and the boy’s hems were soaked through with dew and old rain. But he did not seem to notice them—he was plucking at his rich vest and looking curiously at the girl.
“You know,” he said shyly, “I think I could bring you a dress.”
The girl laughed again.
“I have dozens of sisters with hundreds of dresses—they would never notice one gone missing, I know it. It would be warm, and softer than that old rag.”
The girl glanced at the frayed fabric that fashioned her skirt, and shook her head. “What would I do with a dress like theirs? You might as well sew my hair with pearls. No, if I am cold, I have blankets of leaves and my birds. I am not one of them, and it would be silly to dress up a camel in lace and bells and jewels. You would do it only to laugh at the poor beast.”
They said nothing for a moment, and the boy was ashamed—but he saw the gooseflesh on her shoulders, and the bruised color of her frozen toes. The sky was deepening toward evening, gray and yellow against the wild colors of the Garden, light slowly wandering away from the clouds—and he knew enough of proud young girls not to argue about the dress.
“Is there… is there more?” the boy finally blurted, fidgeting with his bracelet.
“Oh, yes.” The girl laughed. “There is always more.”
The girl leaned her head against the springy moss and closed her eyes, the stains on them showing full and dark as ever. She began to speak in a half-whisper, like breath leaving a glass flute.
“I will tell you a story from the crease of my right eye.
“Once, there was a long, lonely shore, gray as it is possible for gray to dream of, and the lonely shore ringed a lonely lake, whose water was black as it is possible for white to fear. And in this lake was a dim, wooded island, far off from the shore. There was a ramshackle dock on the shoals, and a ferry, little more than a raft of ash-wood and a long pole, which was dragged back and forth through the silent water by a tall man in a coarse brown cloak—or he might have been tall, if he were not afflicted with a stooping hunch, which the cloak served to hide. To this ferry, and this dock, and this lake, and this island, and this long, lonely shore came a troubled young man who had but one thin and sallow-elbowed arm, and he was the seventh son of a seventh son, so naturally, he was named Seven…”
THE TALE
OF THE
CROSSING
THE PEBBLED BEACH WAS WET AND COLD, EACH gray stone slick with rain and lake and mist. Nothing grew save a thin green mold at the water’s edge, no sandpipers pecked at the shore for mites or worms, no cattails knocked against the bitter and scentless wind. Two figures were black against the heavy woolen sky, which leaked a slow, sullen light like wrung sweat. The shapes were featureless save for their curved backs—the one hunched and bone-twisted, the other bent under his satchel. Slowly the one approached the other, until from a distance there was but one great black shape where the two men met and spoke.
The younger man looked up at the ferryman, whose face was scored with lines like a constellation chart, though his eyes and hair were as black as if he had been born only a winter past. Even with his warped spine, he was still a massive creature, leaning against his saw-hewn pole and frowning at shadows moving on the brackish water.
“If you want to cross, it’ll have to be now, son. The storm comes through three times a day, and the last gale of the evening is due through sooner than you’d like to know.”
The young man frowned and reached into his sleeve with his right hand—for the left sleeve was empty. With his good fingers he pulled a patched purse from the sleeve and clumsily extracted a single coin. He held it against the pad of his hand with a bitten thumb, held it as though it weighed heavier than iron: a small, pale coin, yellowed by many handlings, with a seal stamped onto it, something like a seven-pointed star writhing with spiders. He moved his thumb over it, and sniffed the cold mist. He held it out to the ferryman, staring at him flatly, as though daring him to refuse.
The ferryman did not reach for it. His eyes flickered from the boy’s face to his empty sleeve to his fare. Finally, he sighed, a light, rasping sound, like a bird’s wings rubbing together. “I know what that is, boy.”
Seven snorted. “Is it enough, old man?”
“It is worlds more than enough, and nowhere close to it. But I will take it.”
Seven slowly relinquished his coin, rubbing it again with his thumb before handing it over, and climbed onto the ferry, balancing himself as the boards adjusted to his weight. As he settled himself down, he glanced at the hulking figure pulling the pole from its anchor. The ferryman’s shabby cloak shifted with his motions, and Seven thought he saw—only for a moment, of course—a green-black glint of claw flash in and out beneath the frayed fabric, which barely served to cover the man’s chest. Seven shook his head and called himself a fool of the fog, leaning back against the makeshift mast, whose sail was so torn and ruined that the ferryman had seemingly given up on it and lashed it to the shaft, useless as a two-legged horse.
The pole guided them smoothly through the vast lake, though it must have been very deep, and the staff seemed not at all equal to its work. For a time they sat in silence, pilot and passenger. Finally, the ferryman swallowed thickly and spoke:
“Where did you get that coin? It is not a thing you should own, a young thing like you.”
The lake slid around the pole like old oil. Seven chuckled, and his chuckle was not unlike his rasping cough. His stare was blank and tired. “I am not so young as all that.”
“The lake is wider than you think,” the ferryman said. “The water warps the distance like a folded mirror. We have time together, you and I, and I am neither mute nor deaf. I am called Idyll, by those who have gotten into the habit of calling me things—and I would know where a boy no grander or taller than any partridge-farmer got hold of dhheiba.” He spat the last word like a lump of tooth from his mouth, and it lay between them, glinting and garish.
“Where does any man find money?” Seven sighed, looking out over the gray water and the tips of bare trees in the distance. “Ask where an Ajan three-piece comes from, the answer is obvious. Ask where Shaduki silver was minted—you have answered your own question in the asking. Ask after my dhheiba—it must be plain what I will answer. I have been to the city of Marrow, and I have come out again…”
THE TALE
OF THE
TWELVE COINS
MY BROTHERS WERE ALL GROWN, BULL-BROAD and earnest as grass, when I was born. I hardly knew them—but my mother held me to her breast as though she had never had another son, as though six other mouths had not pulled at her, as though twelve other little red hands had not clutched at her hair. My father gave me a number instead of a name and returned to his cups.
Of course, as a boy I understood nothing but that my mother loved me and my father did not—my little heart could not begin to grasp that both her embraces and his wine-sopped silence were rooted in the same day, a day that sunk ahead of them like a pit in soft earth. I could not know that for nine months they had prayed for a girl, eaten mashed snake-innards and washed my mother’s belly in hidden
springs. But another son came, and my parents were always pilgrim-pious and honest as ants.
Among my people a seventh-seventh son is a mark of grace, and grace must be answered; grace must be paid for. On the boy’s seventh birthday, he is laid out on the hillside, lashed to the earth by five white-wood pegs, and left to the favor of the Stars. The seventh son pays for the eighth, and the ninth, and the first grandson, and the fifth granddaughter. A fair trade, don’t you think? One child for dozens, dozens, all lined up and waiting to be born while that little boy lies on the mound, shivering in the rain.
It is always done this way, and if any hut full of dirt-farmers were to withhold the sky’s due, it would not have been mine.
So my mother kissed me and my father refused to look at me and she had to tie me down all by herself, far off from our fields, her hands shaking as she put the stakes into the soft earth and knotted the ropes as tight as she dared, and I told her she didn’t have to, we could tell everyone there had been another son before me, stillborn, and that was good enough for the Stars, one gray, dead baby was good enough, and I wasn’t a seventh son at all, I was an eighth boy, and a good boy, and she didn’t have to leave me there, where it was so dark, so dark and cold. She cried when she kissed my forehead for the last time, awkwardly lying over my splayed body, trying to hold me. Her tears rolled down my face, onto my lips, and they were all the water I had. She told me that no one knew what happened to the seventh sons—maybe it was something wonderful, something special. But her eyes were dead, and I couldn’t look at her while she lied.
After a while, she left, and I looked up into the Stars, which I did not believe were alive—how could I? It was ridiculous. What sort of Stars wanted boys to eat? Or if they did not want us for dinner, to pull their oxcarts or pick their cherries or whatever chores a Star might have to do. The Stars, the living Stars, were children’s stories, and I was no child. No one would do this to a child, so I must have been a man. And men are brave, even in the dark, and the cold.
I think I fell asleep—I must have, because I remember waking up, and the smell of burning lamps and burning grass was all around me, and there was a light, a light already fading into a memory of silver, and my ropes were untied, lying limp on the grass beside me. I sat up and rubbed my numb, rain-soaked ankles and legs until, painfully, they prickled into life again, and I was able to stand.
I did not make it to my feet.
A great wind blew through the little valley, and it knocked me to the earth again, a wind so stiff and quick that it slapped my eyes shut like snow-stuck windows, made them water behind the lids, whipped every drop of sweat from my skin until I was dry as a page. I could not open my eyes, I could not see, but hands seemed to clutch at me in the dark, tear at my clothes, carry me up into arms I could not begin to guess at. Dark moved through dark and time passed without speaking to me.
And, though a man would not sleep at such a time, I woke with a raw throat and another child’s arm flopped over my face. It was thin and bony, all elbow. As I swam up into myself, I realized I was lying over another body, not less thin than the first. I looked up through a net of limbs, and beyond the limbs were thick bars of glass frosted over with ice. The wind had dwindled somewhat, much as a sirocco will dwindle into a sandstorm, but dwindle nonetheless. It curled and snapped through the cage and every angled limb.
As I struggled up through the mass, some sleeping children moaned and turned over, some wakened ones moved to the side—all were nearly naked, clothed in scraps which might once have been suits and dresses, and none reached up to draw a rag over their nakedness when my movement brushed the clothing aside. I reached the top of the pile of bodies—I thought there were about twenty of us there, shoved into the cage like stacked cow-ribs—and peered out into a world of wreckage.
Please be patient with me—I am trying to describe a place you will never see.
Wind-sprung tears streaked my face as I looked across a kind of central square. There were houses at its pale edges, fountains, even a bell tower, but I could see no wood or stone. Everything in the place was made of what the wind had managed to accumulate—paper and fish-bones and the bodies of unfortunate birds, scraps of fur and broken plaster and apple peels, lemon rinds, date seeds, old dresses, shoes without soles, soles without shoes, frayed rope and shattered pulleys. But most of the detritus of the city, most of the city of detritus, was paper. The fountains shot folios and scriptures and broadsheets into the air, and they were drafted by the gales into construction: endless pages sealed together as walls and stairs and peaked roofs by the unceasing wind. At the smallest break in the storm, I suspected, the whole place would drift into nothing.
The glass cage swung from an iron frame on a dais in the square. Canopies hung in patches over us, shredded cloth stretched through their frames, threads slipping almost to the ground. There were holes and rifts and cuts everywhere, but under their doubtful care, the wind behaved like a willful infant: cowed, but determined to get its own back the minute any back is turned. Folk moved over the rustling courtyard, poring over barrels and boxes and trays—tottering creatures with slender, wispy arms and legs, necks like those of swans, curving up to heads high above their shoulders, and great, distended bellies, swollen as a mother’s mound on a woman already full of too much meat and wine. Occasionally, one would peel a blown page from its spidery calves. The moon shone dully through the torn canopies like a bone through punctured skin.
We were ignored in our cage, shivering, clutching each other in a blind search for warmth, for hours. Sometime near dawn I grabbed at an arm for purchase and heard the smallest of cries—and I saw her, for the first time. A little older than I, but much thinner, thinner than a fawn at the bottom of winter’s well, and she looked up at me with enormous black eyes, her dark hair cut roughly, like a penitent’s, close to her head, in uneven patches and bald spots. Her lips were pale, cracked, as though she had not drunk water in days. Her tiny wrist twisted painfully in my hand. Her gaze slid to the wandering creatures in the square and back to me. I let her go as though she had burned me—and she had burned me, of course she had—those black, black eyes had burned me as surely as a brand. I held out my hand to pull her up out of the well of legs and arms, but she shook her head and cringed back into them. I rested my head against her gingerly; she coughed a little. These were the first times I touched her, and the first sounds I heard from her mouth.
Finally, the sun came gray and dingy through the high and wind-worried clouds, and one of the long-necked things came sidling up to the dais. In one quick motion it unlocked the door of the cage and stepped aside to avoid the pile of children that tumbled out. Soundlessly, it prodded us, squeezed us, and, with a strength I would not have suspected, pulled us apart, sorting us onto either side of the dais, where others of the city’s folk guided us into two shivering lines. The creature’s skin was pale and silvery, as though water moved just beneath the surface; its touch was cool and dry.
I was relieved that the girl was sorted into the same line as I, which was much shorter than the second. We stood side by side, she and I, waiting. The children opposite us were tied together, wrist by wrist, with a rope paler than skin. They looked at us helplessly, teeth chattering, toes blue. Then, their thin-armed guardian towed them over to our side and gave the lead to the last child in our line. It had to prod him roughly, and finally it just put the rope into his hand and closed his fingers around it. The creature who had opened the cage then took the hand of the child at the front of the line and led us all away. By instinct we locked hands together, as if going to a picnic behind our mother’s skirts. The girl squeezed my hand gently. We walked out of the courtyard and into the howl, through streets made of little more than rooster bones and petrified branches. It cracked under our feet, and the cracking was the only sound, until we stopped before a tall edifice with a solid, well-made door set into the rubbish-walls. It might have been a church, once, a basilica with tall towers. Now, like most of the architecture
of the city, the factory—for that is what it was, I came to learn—was mostly paper. I could read many of the printed letters, but they folded into each other or thatched over each other to make an arcane gibberish:
HERE BEGINS THE BOOK OF CLOWN, BURGLAR, CRIMINAL PROSPERITY TO MARROW AND ALL HER MARKET CLOSED BY ORDER GOATFLESH—TWO PORTIONS FOR GOBLETS UNAVAILABLE IN BLUE, YELLOW, RED SILK MEASURED BY PROPRIETOR’S ARM NOT CUSTOMER’S WOLF SOUP HOT AND TASTY CARAT WEIGHT THUS WAS BURIED ONCE THERE WAS A CHILD, WHOSE FACE WARNING: SALE OF INFESTED WHEAT ALL WEALTH TO THE CHRYSOPRASE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT—
On and on it wound, around the lintel and over the walls like a frieze, parchment and vellum and plain paper and linen, white and gold and black and gray and even scarlet, bright green mold glinting at angles. The children passed through the door—and it seemed so strange to me then, that a real door should have been shoved into the pages here but nowhere else—first the unbound, then the bound. The silence pressed down like piled stones on our shoulders; it was too much to bear. Just as the last of the knotted ones passed over the threshold, I slipped my place in line, hauling the girl with me, and dashed out, down the steps and onto the wind-racked street of bones and branches.
One of the creatures caught us easily—they are so fast on those thready legs, like terrible ostriches. In a gale-shaded alley it gripped me by the hair. It motioned back toward the factory and tried to guide us with its gaunt fingers. I stood my ground, and my friend moved closer to me.