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Now I am old, and I have no blood in me for more children.
It was a good life.
THE
MOURNER’S TALE,
CONTINUED
I HELD HER OLD WITHERED HEAD IN MY HANDS like a browned apple, and her thirteen chicks gathered around, Pink as a Fat Worm and Speckled as a Shadow and Red as Mother’s Blood—and also Blue-Bottomed as a Jay, Rosy as a Burned Farmer, Sour as a Hungry Badger, and all the rest. I raised up my head and sang of that diamond egg, the struggle to shatter it, the light of the morning sun on that shimmering yolk, the taste of Mother’s scarlet blood! I sang of the beauty of the black tail, of the smoothness of infant eggs, of the flow of blood from Orange as the Sun’s breast, the sting and the pain of her children’s beaks on her breast. I sang of the frightful, bitter-voiced hawk, and the great battle which lost the bird of prey a precious eye. I sang of the wicked cat and the lost mate. I sang of new love with a blue crest. I sang of all those eggs, all t
hat blood, and an empty chest singing out at the end of its days.
I flew down the mountain with Orange as the Sun’s beak in my hands, slightly dented from the hawk fight—but the dent made the sweetest, most broken and sorrowful notes of any beak. I tied it onto my face and began my trade.
Some years hence I was approached by a clutch of women weeping like hoopoes for their comrade, a corpse they carried on a bier made from the prow of a ship. She had white hair and a smile on her lips, and I listened well as they told me her life. I took the body to my accustomed place, hidden away in a forgotten and empty land by a little lake where I would not be disturbed for the years it would surely take to bring up this woman’s lament from infancy. But they had paid me well, those women, and I settled into my task, combing the fading corpse for its tale. It smelled sweet, and nothing at all like a corpse, like roses and incense, much as you may mock me to hear such things said. I learned much from her slow rotting away to nothing, and though her body is gone, I am still fashioning her lament.
Before it shivered away to dust, I happened to catch a glimpse of the great bier in the water, and to my surprise, the skeleton had the head of a decrepit old fox, whose fur might have once been red.
THE TALE
OF THE DANCING
GIRL’S DESCENT,
CONTINUED
“I STAYED HERE SO LONG AND FOR SO MANY years that the other harpies forgot all about me.” She drew aside the long folds of her cloak and beneath them I saw that her harpy-body, covered in brown feathers, had grown entirely into the earth. There was now little difference between feathers and leaves, and her legs were gone altogether. She grew up out of the dirt like a stubby sapling. She chuckled and closed it again. “I told you not to look. I have been here so long the ground came up to greet me, and we have gotten along very well. I chew dirt like a shrub, and the strange roots of this place ensure I have time to finish her lament. The cloak grows like foliage, and my face has set into something like bark. But even in my work, even as the dirt came up to hear my lament in its youth, I began, in my songs, to catch wafts of other bodies from the cave, the beginnings of other laments that cried out to be raised properly. I understood—though slowly, for have I not already said that I was a slow student?—where I had made my nest. Once in a very long while folk interrupted my work on the fox-girl’s lament to ask passage into the cave. At first I told them I hardly cared where they went, but as I guessed at the true shape of the cave, that it was something like a door, I thought it only right that tolls be exacted.”
“What sort of tolls?”
The harpy grinned. “There is only one kind of toll the dead accept: blood. It’s always blood. The hoopoe, the Gaselli, the Stars. Pierce your breast with your beak and pour out your blood for the hungry.”
I moved my hand to my chest. “What is in there? What is the Isle of the Dead?”
“Who can say? I am planted, I am not dead. Is it where the Sky went to escape her children? Is it the underside of the Sky? Is it just another country, with other laws and customs? No one tells Wept, she is just the keeper of the gate.”
“Is that your name? Wept?”
“I have done it all my days, and never for myself. It is my name; it is my nature.”
I pulled my calf-knife from its sheath and she pulled her bowl from the shadows. I paused, and cut into the skin of my back, letting sap puddle in the metal bowl, golden and thick as yolk. Wept raised her eyebrows and smiled widely, as a child will when shown a new thing. She pulled her cloak aside to let me pass, and I felt her feathers on the wound as I went into the dark.
THE TALE
OF THE CROSSING,
CONTINUED
“YES,” SEVEN BREATHED. “I HAD ONLY BLOOD to give her, of course. And she told me no tales, but I remember her face, and her bowl. But why?” he pleaded. “Why did you leave me? I would never have left you.”
She looked at him with blank eyes. “I stole a leaf,” she said simply, and took his hand, leading him up and into the forest, far past the lapping sound of the lonely lake against the lonely shore.
It was not a town. Nor exactly a village. It was certainly no city. But there were houses, low gray things slick with old rain, as though someone had once lived there, long ago. It was very dark on this part of the island, and there were pricks of light in the mire, almost, though not entirely, like Stars. One of them spun very quickly, faster and faster until a woman seemed to step out of it. She was flushed with color, all the color that the forest might have had, nearly too vivid to look at. Her skin was like a snake’s, scaled and thick and a screaming, writhing green, shot with black and blue and scarlet. Most of her undulated serpentine and boneless, her torso longer and more flexible than a woman’s ought to be. She wore yellow veils that whipped and snapped at her heels, but covered nothing in particular, not least her green skin, which showed dark and shining through the gold cloth. Her hair was long and black and glassy, and the bangles around her arms were jeweled in a hundred kinds of agate. Her eyes were black as the bottom of a well, and her blue-black fingers were long, grasping. Her legs were clamped together, as though by sheer hope they might squeeze into a tail, but they stayed stubbornly separate.
She was pregnant, her verdant belly sloping out of her veils like Vhummim’s diamond.
“I brought her the leaf,” said Oubliette, by way of an explanation Seven did not at all understand. “Immacolata’s leaf. I danced her for so many years, I loved her, I didn’t want her to be alone. I owed it to her, to both of them, to find the cave and the lake and cut off my tail. We are not… unhappy here, together.”
