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“‘It seemed obvious to me that you could not raise a rose that did not know deep in its stem and roots how to wilt and die,’ the ferryman said. ‘But, I reasoned, you might freeze one in its blooming…’”
THE
FERRYMAN’S TALE,
CONTINUED
THERE ARE MOUNTAIN PEAKS WHICH NO POOR, earthbound creature can see. Clouds hang from them like prayer flags, veil them and shroud them, and we would not see them either, if the sky were not for us a road, and if we could not see that the road keeps going past what you would call the summit, peak, tip. To these hidden places I flew, extending moon-blown wings as far as I might. Their tips frosted, their shadows on the snow were fitful and pale. From my chest hung a long leather strap, which held a sackful of what would pass as money on the ceiling of the world. I was so close to the sky I could smell its sweat, and if the Moon, our poor, besieged mother, had not been resting in her coal-dark core, I would have—would I?—been able to touch her as she spun.
In time, I came to a peak beyond which the road does not extend. I do not say that there is no higher crag, but it is the summit of the Hsien, as those rocks far below were the summit of men. Perhaps some other thing laughs at my peak, calling it but a valley, a respite from heights. I do not know; it is not my place to know. I flew as high as I was able, and my wings burned with the effort. I walked in the snow shoals ringed by sharp stones, ringed by crags like the prongs of a crown. The peak of a mountain takes many shapes, and this one was as a circle of land with granite teeth all along the edge, cut with many frozen rivers and ponds, which had once flowed with water when the mountain-table was lower, in the history before history before history.
Along these old, hard rivers were tiny houses all of glass, or ice, or both—I suspected that they had once been made of glass, and broken in the harsh winds of the country, but froze again so quickly that no one noticed the shattering. Perhaps this had happened so many times that there was nothing left of them but shatter, held together by surprised gasps of ice. To these houses I shuffled in snowshoes made of wicker and my own feathers. When I reached the center of the town, I sat myself down in the snow and waited, my wings twitching in the drifts, drawing quick, lively patterns in the white. I was prepared to wait a good while, but hardly a week had passed before the shattered door of one of the houses cracked open and a small, green thing shambled out to me.
I had come to the kingdom of the Kappas, and one of those reluctant, recalcitrant creatures was even then shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot before me. She was very much like an upright turtle, though even upright she no more than passed my knees. Her shell was green as a girl’s eyes, her limbs mottled as moss, leathery and lithe. Her hands and feet, between which there was little enough difference, were large and webbed, like a duck’s, but her wrists and ankles were thick, knotted with muscle. She had a few thick yellow teeth in her face, which contorted into something of a beak under a fringe of brown hair cut like a monk’s tonsure. It fell flat and frosty across her forehead, and bald in the center, where the turtle-girl had no skin, but a deep hollow in her skull, which was filled with still blue water—save that considering the snow and wind, it had frozen solid and now shimmered silver and safe in the bones of its owner.
“I am Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening,” she said, her gravelly voice like feet scraping the bottom of a lake.
“And I am Idyll, who was born, well, at night, I suppose. I have come to beg a treasure from you, but I have not come without barter.” I opened my sack at last, the heavy old thing, and drew out a handful of green fruits, long and glossy. Yoi sniffed at them and her black eyes widened.
“Cucumber,” she whispered.
“You are very wise, Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening. I have culled cucumbers for you from the world over, slicers and picklers, yellow and green and white as a ghost’s nightclothes, sandwich quality and rough, hardy breeds good enough to be boiled in stew. Gherkins the size of your thumb and rare hybrids, tiny as peas. There is even a southern varietal whose blossoms are red as a heart, and the meat of the fruit blushes orange.”
The Kappa’s mouth watered, though her saliva froze at the corners of her lips.
“And what is it you wish to trade for?” she asked.
“A rose which will live forever, and never fade or wilt or drop petal.”
“Does it seem to you, Idyll-who-supposes-he-was-born-at-night, that roses bloom in this place?”
“Are not the Kappa great tenders of plants? Are your reputations undeserved? Surely in your shattered houses there are many wonders, or the world is much deceived.”
The little turtle sighed. “It is possible that we still possess what you desire, the rose-which-was-born-in-a-lizard. But in these times of still and cold it is rarely our habit to part with our hard-won graftings. Even cucumbers—precious, delicious cucumbers—do not grow so well here. But such is the choice we made…”
THE TALE
OF THE
LIZARD’S LESSON
I WAS NO ONE’S BELOVED DAUGHTER. I UNDERSTAND that in tales told off the mountain, in stories told around hearths like burning hearts, it is always a King’s son or a merchant’s best-taught boy who is spirited away to some black kingdom or ventures forth to find a wife or a slab of gold. But I was nobody in particular: I was born in the evening. The water was violet and so was the sky, and I hatched in a nest of unripe berries and brambles, and ran toward the water with all my brothers and sisters, praying that no kestrel or osprey or alligator would snatch us out of life just as we came into it. Many of them never felt water on their webbing.
We wallow in our pools and rivers, we Kappa. We are drawn to the water, to the deep of it and the loam. The water in our skulls calls to the waters of the world. We love our pools, their catching of star-which-is-born-in-the-water and cloud-which-is-born-in-the-reeds in the perfect mirrors of their surfaces. And should a terrible, naughty, wicked thing who was born in a house stumble into that perfect water, and splash about and churn up mud, we certainly ought never to be blamed for biting them soundly.
The pool of my birth was a little pond, greenish brown, with a few reeds sprouting like hair on its banks, and three matronly lilies which grew close together, drawing their yellowed petals around them like woolen shawls. She was not a grand pool, or a tempestuous river, splashing her way through a century of rock, just a circle of water in the dark of a wood, neither deep nor wide. But she was mine, and no kestrel had snapped me up before I sank into her evening mire with gratitude, and I loved her. I scrabbled in her shallows to keep her free of weeds. If a farmer came to draw her waters into his bucket, I gnashed my teeth at him and narrowed my black eyes to slits. If a miller’s daughter came to bathe in the deeps, I pulled her hair with my thin fingers and bit her where her spine joins her hips, and soon enough she shrieked her way home.
This is how we lived, connected, each in our pool, connected ea
ch by each, born-in-the-evening to born-in-the-morning, by rivulets of rain trickling from pond to creek to river. And we kept our water still and balanced in our skulls, for we do not like to lose it—for days after, until we are full again, we swoon and dream and are blind, while the water swells up again. Soon enough all manner of beastly things managed with their dry brains to discover this, and they made endless sport of bowing to us. We are polite, ever polite—manners are our provincial pastime and native dialect! We may bite them when they trample our homes, but how can we then refuse a bow? We are compelled to bow in return, and then I suppose it is very funny for them to watch us stumble and fall about like drunk turtles.
I taught my three lilies to give fruit. We are very good at instructing the world to bend and bow to us—it learns such things from us, things it would never have thought to try on its own. I brought peach plants as exempla for my lilies, and by patient tutorial coaxed sweet, small berries from them, though they were reluctant, as all old women are, to try new things. The lily-berries-who-were-born-at-noon tasted of paper and crystallized honey and dust. Because of the lesson I taught the lilies I was allowed to follow the trickling streams from pond to pond and join the grafters and seed-splicers of the Greater Kappa, who spent their days in contemplation of the infinite lessons we had yet to give, and in charting those we had already completed in illuminated catalogues. The vaulted ceilings of the Greater Kappa were whorled with leaves and vines, and if, whilst sketching a theoretical pumpkin tree and its symbiotic attendant in the margins of a treatise on the unassuming apple—always keeping one’s posture pleasantly straight and one’s water in one’s head—a turtle was hungry, she had only to reach up and pluck a sweet, wet cucumber from the window frame and her belly would be satisfied.
With a basket of lily berries I entered those green vaults, nervous as a child on her first day of school. I was given a desk below a window of cucumber flowers so sheer I could see through to the valley outside, all a-blossom with hypotheses.
When I had been there for three years and produced only a few modest successes: the blue lime-blossom, the oolong-melon, and the lemon-macaque, I was sent into the field with Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter. We were to return in a year to teach our own variant on the humble, workaday rose. She was a year ahead of me, but considered a tragic mistake. Her first lesson, the pomegranate-ant, had seemed to promise so much, yet she had done nothing but catalogue since she arrived. Therefore she was punished by being partnered with an untried turtle, and I was cautiously prodded to work harder by being yoked to the puzzling genius who refused to work. We were decades from our greatest collaborations: the Upas-which-was-born-by-the-water, the Ixora-which-was-born-burning, and but a year, give or take, from the rose-which-was-born-in-a-lizard.
Yazo was pretty, her face an unusual yellowish green, her tonsure glossy and black—but her hair was messy, her eyes always tired. There were little holes in the webbing between her fingers, small as needle pricks, but I saw them. As we walked out from the seeded doors of the Greater Kappa, I shouldered her pack as well as my own, so as to save her the effort. We are polite, ever polite, as I have said.
