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“I am not alone,” the woman said, her voice throaty and deep, echoing through the wood. “No one will let me alone…”
THE TALE
OF THE LEAF
AND THE SNAKE
I LOOKED DOWN OUT OF THE DARK, WHERE light held hands with light. I remember the looking, and the first searing step out of the Sky, how it hurt so, and how I cried out for my mother as I fell. They caught me in their green, my limbs so raw and full of light, slashed to ribbons, bleeding out of the pits of my knees, the hollows of my elbows, the nape of my neck—all the places where a hole can tear. I bled and I wept—we all did. We wanted to burrow into the world, but we didn’t know how it would hurt.
And the snakes were there, their green and their white and their black, their red and their gold. Their sheltering hoods, their comforting tails. I looked at them, how they stopped up my wounds with their little mouths, how they warmed me with skin that had baked on flat rocks in the sun, how they hissed and sang their whispering songs. I looked at them and I wanted to be like that, I wanted to be able to move like that, to undulate, to hiss and sing and have colors like that. They were as beautiful to me as anything had been since the dark, and while my brother was sharpening himself into a harpoon, I lengthened, and stretched, and arched my back, and coiled until all of me was a coil, long and green and grinning. And where I first slithered, stepping lightly into a snake’s body, I crushed beneath me a tea bush with delicate leaves, and thought no more of it than a woman who breaks a twig underfoot while running through a forest.
I was not there when the Manikarnika died, but I heard them cry out. We all did. I slid over the hills and away with the rest—I did not want to be alone. So many of the smaller Stars saw my coils and, delighted, shivered into their own. We cloistered together, we ate sparrows and mice whole, or capons and honey, as was our liking. Our shapes changed with the hour; we were fluid as rivers. We were not alone.
I knew his face when he came. Of course I knew it. Even a Star dreams. I have been dreaming a long time, and I watched the glittering cord of that man’s life spool out until it intersected with mine, and how the sparks lit the grass at my feet! I looked at this man and thought: Oh, how we are going to hurt each other. But Stars, you know, are fixed in their courses, and we can no more change the throttling paces of orbit than a rabbit can shorten its ears. I saw his cord lashing and snapping in the dark, and could do nothing.
A moth told me the day I was going to die.
I sat in my room, and my children were all around me, playing with toy swords and real ones, depending on their age, lolling about, their skins flushed green with relief—their father had left us alone for a day, and we could relax into serpents, let our scales show through. We had each other, and no one would disturb us.
I sat at the window. The wind came through off the tea fields, sweet and brown at the edges. My son was mending the hem of my dress, his mouth full of pins. My daughters played Chaturanga, their shoulders warm as diamondbacks in the sun. Some other of my boys chased a white kitten I had brought them, their eyes bright and hungry. We were not alone, not ever. I wiped the youngest’s nose, and told her to keep her tongue in her mouth—the pink and forked thing licked in and out feverishly. These are the things a mother does—did not the Sky once wipe our noses and tell us to stand up straight, did not the blackness of our mother admonish us to raise our voices and be curious, be bold, to look after one another when curiosity and boldness failed? Did she not tell us she loved us, that we were never alone?
In the dark at the beginning of the world, she said those things. And I said them to my children, though the words often stuck in my mouth, and I did not expect to say them, when I burned incandescent beside my brother and not beneath that snapping cord, that man whose breath stank of frightened women and into whom my light leeched, and leeched, and leeched. I did not want children. They were a poor substitute for what I lost—did the Sky feel the same? Is that why she left us? But I looked at them that day and knew that they came from me, that he chewed a hole in me and they swelled up so bright, so bright! And they are why I did not leave. Perhaps I do not understand my mother—but I think that is not unusual.
I sat by the window and my hand was green as vines on the sill. The moth landed on my forefinger, nailless now and scaled. His wings were pale brown, with circles like marks left by cups on old wooden tables. He was not special. Perhaps neither was I. I wore him for a moment like a jewel before he turned his furry head up to me and spoke, his voice susurring and small, twigs rubbing against dry leaves.
“If you will not eat me, I would tell you a thing.”
“Why would I eat you, little moth?”
The insect paused, his feelers twitching. “You are a very large snake. At least, some of you is.”
“And you would make a very small meal.”
“I am grateful…”
THE TALE
OF THE
BIRDS’ TEARS
WE KNOW BECAUSE OF THE BIRDS.
In Amberabad, there was a moth with yellow wings like a wolf’s eyes, and she drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping hunting hawk. The tears were cloudy and sweet, like dandelion milk.
In Muireann, there was a moth with black wings like the back of an otter, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping pelican. The tears were blue and clear, like the ice from a frozen river.
In Shadukiam, there was a butterfly with wings like spun glass, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping parrot. The tears were red and glimmering, like the petals of a rose.
In Ajanabh, there was a moth with gray wings like dust on a book’s cover, and she drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping mynah bird. The tears were yellow and dusty, like saffron.
In Al-a-Nur, there was a butterfly with blue wings streaked in white, and she drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping swan. The tears were bloody and dark and salty, like a thing not to be touched.
Near a castle in the center of the Eight Kingdoms, there was a moth with great flapping wings that cast delicate shadows, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping goose. The tears were gray and slow.
In Jinnestan, there was a dragonfly with a body all of black and green, and he drank the tears from the eye of a sleeping alerion. The tears were sharp and piquant, as though teeth had been ground into them.
