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“Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening,” she said, after we had been walking in the fields for a time, following the curve of the river which flowed through the central room of the Greater Kappa and out again into the world, “do you suppose that when our water spills out, and afterwards fills up again like a basin emptied in the morning and filled at night, we are the same Kappa, the same dear turtle that we were before?”
“I do not know, Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter,” I stammered. “I have never considered it.”
“I have spilled out my water once a month since I entered the cucumber vaults,” she said softly, dreamily, looking out over the warm water and drifting milkweed-mayflies.
“What?” I cried, aghast. “Why would you do such a thing to yourself? It’s terrible, obscene!”
“Perhaps I am teaching myself a lesson,” was her only answer, and we walked in a stubborn silence which would not give us up. I looked again at the holes in her webbing and her frazzled hair, her peculiar skin. I saw why the other Kappa did not like Yazo—she was ragged and strange and possibly mad. But still, I did as she said.
And what she said was that we were bound for the Kingdom of Glass Rain, a far-off prairie land whose folk had discovered a novel way of ferreting out the answers to things. In need of answers, we turned our shells to the grasslands, and I thanked the Stars each night that the journey was not so long as a month, so that I would not have to witness Yazo’s scarification.
The Kingdom of Glass Rain was indeed full of wild grasses, which blew over the flats like waves rolling in with high tide. They were green and gold and their stalks were silvery gray, and the waves were very beautiful. All ringing the dell were red rocks and squat, flat-topped hillocks, streaked in pale swathes of yellow stone. It was cold; the sky was high and brittle, and the long roofs of the capital, tiled like, well, like a turtle’s shell, glinted clear and sharp in the distance.
We were received, in a manner of speaking, at the gate of the local academy, which was a thick, dusty cedar door carved in a complicated pattern of interlocking lizards. I say “in a manner of speaking” because we were not at first sure that anyone at all was there, just inside the shadowy threshold, which smelled of hay and eggs and old cedar, polished by a hundred hands.
“Please,” a voice said, small and gentle, like a shivering cat pawing at the kitchen window. “Who is this who wishes to enter the breeding house?”
But there was no one standing where the voice seemed to be born. Only the beginning of a long hall filled with hushed voices and the sounds of clacking claws on glass.
“I am Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening, and this is Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter, of the Greater Kappa, who have come to ask answers of you.” I aimed my speech where I thought it should go, but the voice sounded again, farther off to my right.
“I am sorry, I know you cannot see me, and that it is disconcerting. My name is Ostraya, and I am the Princess of Glass, and I keep this house. If you have questions, I am she who will breed the lizard who will have your answer.”
We were somewhat nonplussed by this, as you might imagine. “But where are you? Why can we hear you and yet see nothing?”
The voice laughed a little, as if at a very old and no longer particularly funny joke. I felt a weight fall on my hand, cool and hard—a hand of glass.
“The Glass Rain took me…”
THE TALE
OF THE
GLASS PRINCESS
IN THIS COUNTRY, WHEN WE SPEAK OF THE GLASS Rain, we do not wax poetic. It is not a quaint local figure of speech. We speak of the spring, new and green and grass-scented, which brings clouds so white and pure that they have no scent at all. The clouds crawl in and let loose their bows—and the Glass Rain comes upon us.
The drops are slivers of glass, a broken mirror falling from the sky. They pile on the grass, cutting it low, like terrible, hard snowflakes. They scream as they fall. They slash the air and catch the cloudlight, they flash and flare. For weeks after, the roads crunch and chatter beneath our feet. When the clouds come, mothers hurry their children indoors, bankers seal themselves up in vaults, cobblers barricade themselves behind row after row of iron-toed shoes. All crouch and listen as the rain clatters and shatters and shivers to pieces on the tile roofs, and falls off the eaves in a rainbow of reflected storm colors.
I was caught outside.
My mother is the Queen of Glass, and I can hardly begin to tell of her beauty. Even as a child, there were times when I could not speak for awe of her, her silver hair and silver eyes, her lashes like spun sugar, her lips so red that apples envied her. She was the breeding mistress then as I am now, and her fingers were ever bandaged, for lizards are tempestuous, willful creatures.
In this country, lizards are not plentiful. We brought them when we were nomads, so many generations
ago we have given up trying to remember what land was first our home. But bring them we did, and bred them in warm burrows where they cooed and hissed happily over clutch after clutch of eggs. Who first noticed the markings on their backs? Who can say? A woman, a man, a child? A King, a Queen, a pauper, a knave? There is a book on a golden podium in my mother’s hall which says, with many pictures in costly scarlet ink, that a cook with wooden shoes once sought a novel way to cook cabbage. One evening he produced the most amazing dish for the royal banquet, towers and turrets of shaped cabbage, stuffed with raisins and goat meat, with cabbage trellises draping over cabbage rivers steamed in black wine. When the cook was asked how this extraordinary display came about, he produced his pet lizard, which had, in the markings on its back, a complex and magnificent recipe carefully filigreed in scale and spine. From that day forward, lizards were culled and read, and though not all of them had recipes written upon their backs, many had stories, and equations, and formulae, and prophetic utterances, and laws we had never heard of. The recording of the lizards’ markings became the obsession of a generation.
And then it was discovered that if one bred the lizards, new and marvelous markings resulted. If the lizard which showed the method for creating a beautiful copper spoon were bred to one which showed a new technique for mining tin, eggs would hatch with fat babies carrying the instructions for beating out a bronze sword, or schematics for a water drill, or an epic poem dealing with two statues on opposite ends of a square who fell in hopeless love, one of copper and one of tin. Thus was born the Lizard-Calculus of the Glass Country.
This is what the book on the golden podium in my mother’s hall says. I do not know, but it makes a very pretty story, and I was encouraged to eat cabbage each day as a child.
However it began, this is now the pastime of our aristocratic classes, the breeding of lizards, one to the other, and certainly most extraordinary things have resulted. I am not surprised you come to us for answers—what answers have we not given, when asked? Why, we have learned that it is even possible to distill food from rocks and jewels! We have bred the very algebra of government on the back of an iguana! Yet though we have bred lizards with rain hymns to those with a map of the glass molecule sketched in orange against black scales, and those with storm predictions to those with plans for a glass cathedral blazing red on green, we have never discovered a way to hold back the Glass Rain.
When I was young, my mother kept me always at her silver side, against her silver hip, in the crook of her silver arm. For her, “Queen of Glass” is only a title, or a way to talk about her wonderful features, her customary silver crinoline, her glassy, wet scent that drifts after her like pine trees dripping dew to a moist forest floor. For me, it is simply what I am.
She let me out of her sight only once, when my favorite lizard, a huge, fat fellow with a map to the Antipodes subtly drawn in brown on his dry, parchment-colored hide, broke his braided silk leash and went bounding across the grasses, his whipping tail held high. I tore after him, my mother in her glittering dress and glass parasol calling after me, calling my name across the green. But I could not let him go—he was meant to be bred to a sleek little black female with a yellow navigational chart glinting on her belly. We had high hopes, and besides, he always slept with me at night, and he would be lonely out in the cold. Soon I was quite far from my mother, though I could still hear her high, even call.
The storm came quickly that day, and none of the lizards had predicted one that season. The white clouds rolled in like horses stumbling and with a terrible crack, like a knife thrust through a mirror, the Glass Rain fell. I felt it—I must have felt it. But when I think back on it now I cannot remember any pain, I cannot remember hurt or skin slicing open or the edges of the rain meeting the edges of me. But meet they did, and thousands of slivers of glass fell screaming into my skin, piercing my shoulders, my hands, my scalp, my cheeks, my legs—ah, there it is, I remember, the legs hurt when they went—in so many places and so quickly that I was rooted to the spot by the glass that had poured so suddenly into me, like water filling up a vase.
