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grumpy. She relaxed, but her grip did not lessen. I squeezed back, and she drew a single dhheiba from our purse. The Gaselli and the Manticore recoiled, but could not take their eyes from it. I felt the weight of it in my hand, my own flesh. Was this what Vhummim meant, about the thrill of the rare trade? I felt sick.
“That would buy an army of children twice your size,” the green man breathed. He took it solemnly, and closed it away in his belt. I did not let it go easily, but I let it go.
“Can you sing or juggle or act? Can you balance on a branch? Do you have any interesting deformities?” Grotteschi tore at the uncomfortable silence and peered at us, a buyer canvassing horses.
“I can juggle,” Oubliette said, blushing in the face of the great lion. “I once had a lovely ball, and I learned well. And—” She turned slightly, so that her bark-back was clear, and flicked her dun tail with a flourish.
The red lion’s face softened, and Taglio’s mouth opened slightly, in shock and recognition. The gallant little man sank to his knees before my friend and put his hands to her face.
“Oh, poor child of Aukon! You should have said so from the first,” he whispered.
In such a way we joined the pair of them on the road we chose, which led to a lake and a cold, gray wind.
Though we asked to walk with Taglio, panting to hear more of Immacolata, he insisted that Oubliette ride with the great scarlet Manticore and not trouble her little feet. I would not leave her side—I would never leave her, never—and reluctantly, we slunk off toward the jangling blue cart, and climbed inside the waiting door, making room for ourselves in the coil of Grotteschi’s thick, mottled tail. We inched closer to the beast to avoid her green barb. But the tail flesh was warm as a sun-baked brick, and we were soon quite comfortable. The feel of it beneath our backs was soft and firm, but we could feel her pulse, low and thick as a huge drum.
She turned her remarkable blue eyes onto us. The shaggy red hair around her shoulders thickened on her neck and chest, curling below her chin so that she really did seem a maned lion, king of the pride, save for her woman’s face. She licked at the stiff, wiry fur.
“You want to hear of the odalisque, yes? Of the tea-maker’s girl. You would rather walk out there, on the hard ground with the moon slapping your heels with her bony hands, than in here with me. Taglio thinks he can tell stories, but the songs of the Manticore are famed by those who survive them, and I knew her, too.”
Gingerly, Oubliette reached out a hand to stroke Grotteschi’s brilliant fur. The serpent-lion purred and hissed all at once, and her eyes softened.
“Listen, darling, infant things! And tell me I cannot sing as well as a gazelle…”
THE
MANTICORE’S
TALE
SING, OH, SING, OF THE SUN-MUSCLED MANTICORE! Thundering fleet are their scarlet feet, and great are their echoing roars! No hunter more patient than we, no serpent so sour-tailed as we, no snarling leaps lighter, no long teeth brighter than ours—than ours!—on the scrub-spotted deserts of home!
Ha! Let us have none of that. Do not sing of us. We do not want your songs. We will sing, and you will listen.
The desert is wide and white and dry as an old bone. We worry it, we gnaw and tear and peel it bald. And we sing when the moon is jumping on the sand like a skinny white mouse, we sing and the saltbush weeps. The oases ripple under our breath, the blue and clear water where the rhinoceros wrangle, where the cheetah purrs and licks her paws, and the Upas trees waver green and violet in the scalding breeze!
They will tell you the Upas is a death-bower. They will call it the hydra-tree of the desert, and warn that if you sleep beneath it for even a night, you may wake, but to no morning man has known. They will say that three hundred soldiers all in bronze and feathers camped beneath an Upas once, to drink from the clear stream that flowed beneath its branches, and that by the time the sun touched their toes all were dead and cold as dinner. This is ridiculous, a fairy tale. But I suppose it is yet not entirely untrue, for the Upas is our mother, and we are enough of death for anyone. And if soldiers camp under an Upas when she is blowing her seed, it is no fault of the hungry kittens that tumble out if they find their supper plump and laid out on the sand.
Look, passersby—though not too closely!—at the radiant Upas, lover of the Sun in his golden bedchamber, her red branches thick and strong as a haunch, thorny and pitted, her green needles far too glossy and stiff to grow in the thirsty desert. Look at her fruit, nestled in the shadowy forks of her knotted trunk, how scarlet and purple, how thick and full of juice! Touch one at your peril, for these gleaming berries are not fruit but eggs, and it is we that grow within them, in the crimson sacs which wax in the blistering scrub-light, full of the peculiar Upas yolk we drink and drink, which fills our tails with enough poison for a lifetime, until we rip that silk-thin skin and tumble out headfirst into the water, or soldiers, whichever seems most convenient.
I remember the Upas milk. It was sweet, like blackberries and blood.
In the fruit sac we know all things: how the Sun preened on the face of the oasis pool, how one Upas, though neither the tallest or most beautiful thing in the desert, opened up her branches and grasped the reddening beams for her own. Her wood warmed and the pool rippled—the Sun would not have noticed if his mirror had not been marred. He would have been angry, and scorched the tree for her theft, had not the first Manticore fruit burst open before him, and if he did not think the little cub with her needle-teeth and her whipping tail and her sky-bright eyes was the most lovely of all imaginable things, and immediately set about teaching her to sting and roar and sing and kill, all the things he knew. The Upas smiled, and told her sisters how to follow her lead.
After we fall, it is harder to remember these things, to know they are true. But we do our best to love our parents and turn our prayers to the sky and the sand.
It is only unfortunate that we are more or less helpless when the Upas blows us free. No more fierce than little red kittens or infant snakes, blind and wet and mewling. Our tails do thrash quick and sharp in those first hours, indiscriminate, for we have not quite learned to control it when the oasis, littered with palm nuts and antelope ribs, catches us in green-gold arms. This is when the wranglers come, if they are clever, with their silver tail caps spangling in the desert light.
I would like to tell you I was reared in the open flats, the white and worried bone, that I tore open leopards and antelope and rhinoceros, that I remember what that tough gray flesh tasted like, and that horn. I would like to tell you that the Sun and I ran together, bounding red-pawed over the saltbush and the pale weeds, that in the warm red rocks I rolled with my legs in the air, scratching and roaring and eating as I pleased. I would like to tell you that the echoes there taught me to sing. I would like to tell you I was happy, and that the Sun was high in the sky.
But the wranglers came with a little silver cap, something like a thimble with buckles and straps, and armored in polished metals splashed with the last desperate strikes of countless kittens, lashed the thing to my barbed tail. My thrashings were dull thuds and sprays of sand, but nothing more. I howled—it is not only the province of wolves. I howled and that did startle them, for the voice of the Manticore is terrible and piercing and sweet, the sweetest and most terrible of all possible voices, like a flute and a trumpet playing together. It is barbed as surely as a tail. I howled and keened, thumping my useless limb against the ground pitifully. They took out wax stoppers and closed their ears to me, and into an amber cage I went, clapped in an amber collar, and gagged in leather to keep me silent.
Tell me again how the Gaselli sing. Tell me that no melodies are lovelier than theirs.
The heights of the amber city made me dizzy. The platforms spiraled up and up those impossible cedars, and on the spindly bridges I nearly fainted away, so far below did the ground sway and wobble. They pulled me up with squeaking pulleys and moving flats drawn up with wet ropes. I retched into the muzzle and choked on my own bile. The green branches cut the clouds as I rose and crumbled against the lifting floor and sobbed against the straps which bit into my face until I tasted my own blood with every lurching inch upward. I hitched and gagged, bewildered, as afraid as any lost beast. But I was close to the sky, so close, and the Sun beat my back fondly.
The amber cage had an amber lock, and there was a girl with an amber key. She kept it on the beads that slung around her like chains, dangling right at the base of her throat. In those days any number of creatures were brought from every hovel and height in the land to delight this creature, whose clear, calm eyes took in everything with equal regard and due. She was dutifully amazed at my fur and my tail, dutifully frightened at my muffled roar, dutifully patted my head, and dutifully passed on to the next wonder of nature brought up the trees for her pleasure. She took no joy in any one animal over any other, and her voice was genteel and grateful when she thanked the wranglers for bringing her these miracles and grotesqueries. By the latter, she meant me, and thus I was given my name.
For some weeks she came, dutifully, to visit her menagerie, escorted by wranglers and noble nursemaids and occasionally her father. She played with the pygmy elephant and the wobble-kneed young Centaur whose legs were bound in her absence so that he w
