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ould never grow to shame her with excess height. She had a Djinn whose smoke had gone out and a fish in a great glass bowl which owed her yet two wishes. Their games were odd and solemn—she sang to them and sat them to tea with amber cups they could not help but break, and scolded them for their manners. She forced their struggling heads onto her breast and all exclaimed it a miracle that her gentleness of spirit and purity of heart could charm the most savage of monsters.
She did not charm me.
After attempting to get me to drink from her dainty cups and sing with her while she did her sewing, she declared with great sadness that the beast she had named in jest was truly a grotesque beyond salvation, and that I should be sent away, for I was surely, in my unfathomable heart, unhappy there. I knew this meant the slaughterhouse or simply being shoved off the platforms into the narrow spit of sea, but what maiden knows how the world is skewed to spare any testing of her virtue?
When she and her escort had gone, a small, dark shape remained, silhouetted against the door frame of the wretched zoo. It came into the light, and I saw that it was a girl like the other one, and lost interest—save that she came and knelt by my cage, and, loosing a strand of black beads from her throat, put her own amber key into the lock, and opened the amber door.
“Poor Grotteschi. Do you see these beads? When amber is burned to make resin, this horrible black stuff is left over when the golden oil pours dutifully into the catch. No one wants it. It is garbage. I, too, am what is left over from her, what is thrown away when she has passed over it, what remains in the corners when she has swept by.”
She put her hands to the muzzle’s buckles and let it loose. By then I had grown, I was the size of a small horse, but the muzzle had never been changed. My jaw would never close quite right again. She did not mind my teeth. She rubbed my chin and my cheeks, wiped at the hardened blood with the hem of her dress. Her name was Hind. She was a good girl, and I slept in her bed from that night on.
Even when I was fully grown, she slept curled between my paws and demanded iron supports for her pitifully delicate bed. Together we snuck into the libraries at night, and she taught me to read from the books kept on the highest shelves, which I could reach for us, stories of lost girls and lost beasts and grotesques like us. She brought me cakes from the kitchens, covered in icing, so much thicker and richer than the mashed and rotten meat of her sister’s zoo. When she became more beautiful even than her sister, I used to sing at her window to the men who gathered there to play their flutes or harps. They scattered when faced with my superior songs, and I padded back to Hind and her black beads. I was happy. The Sun was high in the sky. Happiness, when you look back on it, seems so brief, but then, with her, my whole life seemed to pass by under the flitting cedar shadows. Until the day she ran into our room and slammed the door behind her, her chest heaving under those black beads, her face flushed with tears. I ran to her, and she buried her head in my mane. Finally she drew back and sobbed horribly, a long, broken howl—I remember when I howled that way.
A pearl fell out of her mouth.
THE TALE
OF THE
TWELVE COINS,
CONTINUED
GROTTESCHI’S VOICE HELD US FAST. OUT OF HER misshapen jaw came a strange, lilting tone, low, rasping, but sharp and keen as a plucked harp string.
“Someone had poisoned her,” she moaned, “having no business in Amberabad but to vex my friend, because her father did not like her books or her cakes or her pets. What kind of a person fills their larder by punishing other people’s petty complaints?”
Oubliette and I shifted against her tail, and I glanced over at my short-haired friend under my eyelashes.
“You’re telling the wrong story,” I whispered. “What about the tea girl?”
Grotteschi stared at us, her eyes bright and amused. “What an impatient couple you are. I was getting to it, you know. So spoiled by my friend in green! You like his story better, because it has a harem. Young boys always like tales of distressed women in silk.”
Oubliette elbowed me hard. “I like this story. Be quiet,” she hissed.
The Manticore rolled her eyes.
“Very well; a performer must always play to her audience.” Oubliette dared to creep closer to the red lion, resting gingerly against her ribs. “Hind begged me to take her away. She promised that she knew how to use the floating platforms, and we could run from Amberabad to another city, where her affliction of pearls might be of some use to us. And so the girl strung with black beads packed her cakes and some few of her precious books and climbed onto my back, proudly astride, as her father had told her over and over not to do…”
THE
MANTICORE’S TALE,
CONTINUED
WE DESCENDED TOGETHER THROUGH THE BRANCHES and clouds, onto the long road, and she clung to me all the way down, her long fingers gripping my mane so as not to fall while I bounded off the last amber plank. I faithfully kept my tail from curling tightly upward, as the recalcitrant thing is wont to do, so as not to hurt her. We stepped onto the thick grass and my friend laughed to feel it, solid ground beneath her. We went into the world, in search of this other city, and it was on the road to that fabled place, which was called Ajanabh then as it is now, that we met the oddest couple trundling along the seaside paths.
I am sure there is no need to describe my Taglio to you. Was his hair longer in those days? Were his eyes brighter? I cannot tell. He did not wear green then. Immacolata had shredded her red silk, but kept it knotted into her hair as a reminder of her bondage, braided bright against the brown. They were beautiful. Taglio played his pipes and Immacolata had become a kind of tinker, though her tea bags were never far. They made a meager living through sleight of hand and the odd set of tongs played for a hunk of bread and a chunk of cheese. They told us their tale, and that they did not know where they were going, only away from where they had come, and they had been already years on that hungry road. Hind, being fond of pets, asked them to go along with us to the city of spices, which was so far from where we stood that it might as well have sheared off from the map of the world and gone drifting on the underside of the parchment.
“I am lonely for company,” Hind said. “Though my red beast and I love each other, I think she would be glad of another beast, and I of another woman. In Ajanabh there must be spices for your teas that you have not yet dreamt of. In Ajanabh there must be meats roasting that you could not begin to name. Come with us, and tell us tales, and eat our cakes, and read our books, and become as beloved as you may.”
When she finished her speech, her hands were full of pearls. The couple stared at her.
And so we traveled. With Hind spitting her pearls word by word, we were rarely hungry. Taglio taught her to juggle and pantomime; Immacolata made us tea over countless campfires. They were happy—there are many ways to be happy, and they had theirs. They pulled coins out of each other’s ears and made countless cups and shoes vanish, only to reappear to gales of high-pitched laughter, like owls hooting in the wind. I envied them, and so did poor, lonesome Hind, who had no more pretty boys at her window, only me to sing to her. Every evening the red-braided girl would take the Gaselli behind clusters of trees or reeds and let him taste a single drop of blood from her throat. Her neck was a pattern of tiny scars, like a star chart. Hind watched this in silence, standing alone near the fire with her hands clasped tightly together. Whatever she thought of their ritual, she kept to herself.
Slowly the sea became long, grassy valleys, and in one of these valleys we stumbled into a shantytown of brilliant and varied colors, tents breaking the low morning fog like the masts of ships. It was something like a circus, performers of all kinds rubbing the sleep from their eyes and stretching their legs, strapping on stilts and polishing trumpets, practicing violin scales and barker calls, elongating any number of legs into graceful steps. A hundred voices trilled octave to octave, a hundred lines of tragedies and comedies bellowed out from a hundred obese contraltos.
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