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“If you want me to stop—”
“No!” the boy said quickly, his dark eyes wide. “I do not like it, but I could not bear it if I did not hear it out. Tell me about that awful place.”
The girl moved her hand over her eyes, touching that black, soft place where all these things had long ago been written. Not for the first time, she thought she could feel the shape of the letters burning into her. At length she began again, her voice echoing on the green rocks like water splashed into an empty well.
“Vhummim the gem-eater went into the old fishmarket, and the smell there was of old scallops and shattered shells…”
THE
FOREMAN’S TALE,
CONTINUED
THE RHUKMINI HAD BEEN BEAUTIFUL IN ITS way—the sound of silver crab mallets thudding against claws and green clacking of lobsters muffled by their diamond tanks. There had been awnings of narwhal skin, blue as new ink, and carts with wheels of baleen. There had been a little alcove where the curious might sample seawater from every ocean in the world, just to know how the taste of salt differed from surf to surf.
It was gone—not gone, wasted.
A terrible wind blew through the long alley which had once been the Rhukmini market, and on it was some memory of the smell of ice floating in fish blood—but truly it smelled of dust, nothing more than dust. The rest was simply ruin, pieces of shell and paper and meat and wire and skin, as if the whole place had been torn into shreds by the hand of some vengeful giant. The wind kept what remained in the rough shape of the old alley, whipping whitefish against one wall and wrapping papers against another.
It was not unlike what you see of Marrow all around you—save that this was new and raw, wet and weeping wound-bright on that old arm of the city. All the colors were still vivid, and I could see smears here and there which might have been cuttlefish or salmon, which might too have been a shopkeeper or a customer in search of malachite roe.
Perhaps I should not have looked closer than this. The alley was clearly marked and blockaded with bleached-pine boards; it was a logical response. A limb has rotted? Cut it off, provide a tourniquet for the tattered stump, and go about the business of living. But I was curious—who among us was not curious? Thus I climbed between the boards and onto the shredded, ruined thoroughfare of the Rhukmini—and fell at once through the striations of refuse and fish skeletons and paper, endless paper, into darkness deep and hard as a closed fist.
Beneath the city, light fell in broken tufts where parts of streets and squares had gone the way of the Rhukmini. It was not as far to fall as you might think. Even so, I could not reach the first fluttering gray pieces of market to pull myself up again. Instead, I wandered—and who could have done otherwise? It was not so far to fall, but it was very far to wander. I could smell my own sweat mingling with the emerald oil of my hair—did you know that emeralds smell of limes and frankincense? They do, they do—I remember it so well, how I loved that smell, the smell of myself adorned.
It was great and black and hollow, the underside of the city. The air was warm, almost hot, and moved languorously around my ankles. Stone pillars snaked and coiled into a sodden bed of dirt—when I think on it now I think they must have been the roots of Marrow, the granite and marble roots of banks and towers and universities, the piled stone roots of tenements, of factories, the golden roots of jewelers’ palaces. Each edifice sent down its strange and secret toes into the undersoil, and I wandered through a forest of stone. Despite myself I began to search through the mere for the roots of the Asaad—how much more beautiful, how much richer and brighter, the stone of those roots must be than all these others! It was this thought that kept me from fear in those low, hidden paths, strung with spiders and mold. I would find the Asaad again, and surely it would lift its child up.
But I did not find the tangling roots of the Asaad. I came, after passing through some few threshings of light that sputtered sickly through to the depths of the root-city, to a great snarl of cedar—real wood, amid all that endless stone. The ground was closed tight around the massive red curls, so that I could not see what sent down such tendrils into the dark. And from behind those gnarling crags, I heard a gnashing, a grinding, a crunching, gnawing sound which I shall not forget, for all of my days.
I went toward it. Who would not have gone toward it?
At first I saw nothing in the dusky shadows, the sharp smell of cedar filling my nose like water. Then it was a gleam of white—behind the roots, further back and farther in, a gleam of white flashing in the gloam.
“Is there someone there? My name is Vhummim, daughter of Orris—I have become lost!” I called. My voice was weak and quavering. Whose could have been stronger, more sure?
My answer was a louder gnashing, a louder grinding, like a whetstone spinning.
“Do you know the way out?” I whispered.
“I am the way out,” a low, humming voice whispered back to me. “Through me you can find the light again.”
It crawled close to me, on its belly like a cringing dog, and peered up into my eyes, a creature made entirely of teeth. Its four legs were a jumble of molars, bicuspids, incisors. Its eyes flashed: wolfs’ teeth yellow with age. Great flat elephants’ teeth made up its spine, and long tigers’ canines curved into ribs. Its feet were hooves of enamel; its jaw hung hungrily open, white and yellow. Its delicate face: row after row of infant teeth, pearly and pale. There was nothing of it that was not teeth—what I could see between the gnashing molars was empty space. I was afraid then, of course. Who would not have been afraid?
“Who are you?”
It sidestepped, back, forth. The molars of its feet left tracks in the warm, wet soil. “I am Golod, He Who Swallows.”
“Will
you show me the way out, Golod?”
“You are pretty, and your smell is pleasing.” His sharp eyes ground against his enameled eye sockets. “I came to this place to find pretty and pleasing things…”
THE TALE
OF THE
HUNGRY LORD
