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Finally, she closed her misshapen jaw, and we came slowly to ourselves. “We had both been abandoned by our best-loved beasts. It seemed right to carry out their wishes together, and we went first after the Isle of the Dead.”
“Did you find it?” I said, breathless.
“No,” she said shortly. “And it is my turn now. We are going to Ajanabh and I will sing for my girl at every window until she comes to one, her black beads tumbling out, and calls me up to her.”
The great beast glared defiantly at us, setting her jaw as best she could, daring us to mock her. We nestled in quickly against her, and there were no more stories that night. After a time, all of us slept, even her, her scarlet fur buffeted by snores.
I woke in that awful cold that seeps in sometime between midnight and dawn, as if the sky had frozen, and its black edges crept into your clothes through every seam. Even in the cart with its warm curtains I shivered, and turned to Oubliette for warmth as we always had—but she was gone, an empty space in the coil of Grotteschi’s tail where she had been. My stomach seized—in all those years I had never woken to an empty bed, she had never been anything but there and heavy and warm in the night. Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, went the refrain of our life together.
Carefully I moved the coils of the Manticore’s tail from my legs, gingerly lifting the beetle green shell of its scorpion tip from the door frame, and crept outside, into a cold that stung my face like birch branches. Taglio rested next to the long blue bars of the cart, his green clothes clung with dew, ice stuck to the bottom of his boot-black hooves. Oubliette lay asleep, curled against him like a cat, her face clouded with dreams but not frightened—I do know the look of fear on her face, I know it so well. I wanted to go to her and sleep against her as I used to, to tuck my head into her shoulder and breathe together, to hold her between me and the dark. But perhaps she was not entirely mine any longer, perhaps she had not snuck out of the cart on a whim, and I should not disturb her.
I crawled under the cart handles and drew myself up next to Oubliette anyway, her familiar body, her familiar smell. Taglio stirred, and extended his long, slender arm over both of us.
“I couldn’t find it,” he sighed. “That’s what you want to know, isn’t it? How I could stop looking, how I could let her go. I tried so hard, but the paths that go to the Isle are hidden and dark and I could not find them. I am a shepherd, I know only well-tilled fields and plots of earth where folk have lived back and back and back to their greatest grandparents. I couldn’t find it, and Grotteschi deserves her chance, too. Someday I will start the search again. Perhaps in Ajanabh, there is a mapmaker who knows the way, or a poet who has heard of how it is done.”
Gently, so as not to wake Oubliette, he pulled a small box from his jerkin, an intricate box of tea wood, with a sweet green shoe carved on its lid and inlaid with beryl. He opened it, and there inside lay a silver leaf, glimmering dark and pale.
“But I keep her with me, always and always,” he said, and closed the lid again.
And so we traveled together, ever wending toward Ajanabh, which proved to be farther than I could have imagined the ghost city could carry us. I had never dreamed the world so wide. We walked, we rode, we performed to keep bread in our bellies, lacking anyone capable of spitting out pearls for our daily use, and Taglio caught the occasional gamey rabbit. Oubliette went with him to hunt, and she became a wild thing, rarely speaking, growing lean and tall, her movements sudden and sharp.
In our little show, she danced.
There was a red curtain in the cart, and when there were more than a few villagers with pennies clutched in their turnip-pulling hands, we strung it up high, and pulled Grotteschi’s tail through it, slung with a thin green sock to hide the barb. She shuddered when we pulled the cloth over her, every time, but she did not protest—it was our best act. We had others: Grotteschi often sang, and as she sang she turned her face to the sky and wept, and this never failed to fill our baskets with food and money, for the Manticore’s song seemed to grip folk by the wrist and empty their pockets by force. Taglio danced—but he often frightened folk, who knew how the dances of the Gaselli usually ended. More often, he tied a ribbon to his Manticore, and terrified them with his tamed monster. More often than not, Grotteschi devoured the ribbon in disgust afterward, and we were always short of them. But Oubliette’s dance was the best thing we knew how to do.
With her sock in place Grotteschi’s tail was a very convincing snake, and she and Oubliette performed a strange and sinuous dance while Taglio played his pipes or his fiddle of almond wood. As the years went on and the road grew little shorter, I learned to play his fiddle, and we accompanied the beast-dance together. It was always an alien, affecting thing, when Oubliette danced. Though she wore a long dress, some villages called it obscene—but it was only that she danced so desperately, faster and faster each time, and never twice the same. She danced as though she could dance her way out of the sod tower, and the golden ball, and the ghost city, and the hedgehog’s love.
What she danced, while Grotteschi writhed her tail in undulating patterns, flicking it and swelling it and coiling it in lazy circles, was a story we learned in the Vstreycha, a story we never found unknown in any hamlet or within any burgher’s wall, of a woman who was also a snake, who was also a Star, and how her husband betrayed her, and how she took her revenge. By the final notes, Oubliette would be concealed behind the curtain, and only the great green tail remained.
My friend grew obsessed with this story, with her dance. She hardly spoke to anyone anymore, though at night she still could not sleep alone, and clung to Taglio or me or even the furry flank of the red lion. Once, when she was strapping knives to her calves in order to hunt deer, I tried to kiss her—just once, just to see if I could. She recoiled and looked at me with bruised black eyes.
“Why?” she said, her voice long and deep now, a grown woman, finally. “Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and it was true.
She brought back a fawn that night. Its spots were white and eerie in the moonlight. In the morning, she was gone, and Taglio’s little box was
empty.
THE TALE
OF THE
CROSSING,
CONTINUED
“I FOLLOWED HER. I HAVE ALWAYS FOLLOWED her. She is there, on that island, I know she is, and I am going to save her. We save each other; it’s what we have always done. I was made to save her; she was made to save me.”
Idyll frowned into the sky, black and boiling with the oncoming storm. “How did you spend the last three coins?”
“Why do you care? Isn’t it enough that you have one of them?”
“Call it an interest in numismatics.” The old man chuckled.
Seven covered his eyes with his rough, knuckle-split hand. He forced back tears, though his throat threatened to strangle his words. He could not make his voice steady; it was ragged and broken, the sound swallowed up by the great glassy lake and the rumbling sky. “I spent them to get here! I spent them to find her! I spent them to get farmers and astrologers and idle princes and dairywomen to tell me where she had gone, mapmakers and poets and river pilots and necromancers to tell me how to follow after her. I spent them to get her back—what else are they good for? What else could they buy? I spent them to buy her back, I spent them to cross the lake, I spent them and they’re gone and all I have is an empty sleeve.” He broke into fog-softened sobs and the old ferryman might have comforted him, indeed leaned forward to do so, had not a thin, reedy wind blown by, a wind like the last gasp of a man frozen to death on a barren snowfield. The wind blew aside Idyll’s shabby brown cloak, and Seven saw what was beneath it—he meant to scream, or cry out, but all that his lungs could manage was a groan and a slack jaw.
Idyll’s skin ended at the base of his throat. The rest of him was all bones, great, long, yellow bones, and his skeleton was more than a man’s, for the thin fringe-frames of huge wings arched up from his spine, the substance of his senescent hunch. He had fleshy hands, and feet, wrinkled skin sagging and dry, but beneath the cloth he was as naked as it is possible for a man to be, and through the gaps in his bones, Seven could see the choppy silver waters of the lake.
