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Sometimes Zmeya herself would come, with a kind, distracted smile, and her teeth were sometimes green and sometimes red, and her face was soon enough familiar to them as any neighbor’s who often comes to borrow sugar or soap. Once she took them far into the Isle, into the bare forest, and showed them a little clear pool. She placed her finger on the water and it swelled up with brown leaves, tea leaves swirling thick and fast in the shape of a woman’s face, a woman’s face the color of the sole of a shoe, the color of oolong and lemon peel. The face wept sweet brown tears to see Zmeya, and more to hear the mortal pair tell of Taglio, and how he fared in the world. Oubliette and Seven thought that thin, warm voice was the loveliest thing they had ever heard.
At other times, Zmeya would take them walking down by the shore, and showed them a firm stone path among the blinking eyes which Seven had not seen, and they would watch the horizon for a sign of the ferry. There were algae on the lashes of the eyes, but the sandpipers did not come out that far, and only once or twice did they hear an owl, or a thrush, or the weird, whooping cry of a tiny hoopoe.
The lake was vast; the other side could not be seen, and when it rained, which was often, the water and the sky blurred into one great gray globe. Seven repaired the dock as best he could with no tools and one arm, which is to say not very well, but the effort was appreciated. Oubliette painted it with a mixture of boiled bark and beach-tears. It glowed ghostly in the water, and after a time, as was surely inevitable, the raft appeared within the great gray globe, and the ferryman brought a woman to the valiantly mended dock.
She was not yet a crone, but tending toward it as a weather vane will veer toward an easterly wind. She had long gray wings where her arms ought to have been, and her feet were webbed and yellow. Her hair was dark, streaked with wide bands of silver feathers, the thick black strands clearly losing their battle against the bird. There were well-grooved lines at her deep, wide eyes, and at her mouth, but she was thin and nimble as a goose in flight, and her cheeks were whipped and flushed by the lake gales. Her gait was businesslike and brisk, her fingers long and purposeful, pushing back her fog-damp hair from her forehead. Her gaze went immediately to Zmeya’s swollen stomach.
“I see I am ne
eded,” she said. Her voice was rough, as though she had been talking without cease for years on end.
Zmeya covered her belly with one long, green arm. “How long,” she murmured, “do you think it takes a child to grow inside a dead woman?”
“As long as it pleases, I expect,” the stranger said with a bemused grin.
Idyll glanced at Seven and Oubliette, and opened his mouth as if to say something, but closed it again. Finally, he grunted:
“The dock looks better. Shoddy joint work, though.”
He slowly poled away from the shore and into the mists. The water lapped behind him, a sound like an infant crying far away.
“Well,” said the newcomer, “that’s done with. Now, Mistress of Snakes, Pig-Slayer, Star of the Jungle! Your brother is worried about you…”
THE
MIDWIFE’S
TALE
IN MY YOUNGER DAYS, I WAS A GOOSE.
This is nothing to gawk at. Geese are quite common in my country, which lies as far to the east as the ice floes lie to the north. When we moved through the sky, we were like a hand passed over the face of the sun, and the forests were in shadow. My name was Aerie then, and it remains.
But that was a long time ago. Now I am a woman, and my flock is gone, and my brother was King, for a time.
Perhaps you have heard this story. It is not so common as tales involving ravenous snakes, but some few minstrels still sing about the goose-girl and how she and her brother killed a tyrant.
My brother did not love a lonely chair in a lonely castle, and went long ago to join the Patricides in Al-a-Nur, where he is at peace, and wears a red habit. I was not there with him when he took his vows, though he sent men to find me to all the corners of the world, to beg me to come home. But that place, that castle with its rivers and its secrets, was not my home, and I hid when I heard them call. They told him that they found geese and girls, but not both, and with a bent head he went out of the world, and out of our story.
I went to find the thread of our mother’s tale and tuck it back into the stitching. Thus, I found a Quest after all. Perhaps it runs in the blood. I chased the tale into the high mountains tipped with snow like wise men’s beards, and down to the sea, laid before me smooth as a dress. The world is wider than anyone guesses. It took years, and along the way, I had something like the education my great-grandmother might have given me. I learned the ways of the grass-and-leaves witch; I learned how to make love potions and cold cures and gout-softeners for those who could pay me, and to look up at the sky to tell a young girl whether her husband would have light or dark hair, and to deliver her baby when the time was right for it, and to bury her when the time was right for that. Silver came again to my temples, a silver like feathers. I did not mind the time, or the distance. That is what an education means.
Finally I went where I ought to have gone to begin with, to a burnt-out ring of trees and old huts half reclaimed by the golden grasses, where a wildcat hide was still hanging on a branch, and goose feathers blew like ashes through the paths that led from hut to hut. How many times the flock must have come to this place to mourn themselves! The blackened dome-frames smelled of horse tallow and scorched wood. The sun was bright and hard as I walked through the ruins, the old red sash of Leucrotta skin flapping against my hips. The place was not even big enough for anyone to plunder, and I wept for my mother for the thousandth time.
When the sun had drained itself into the western hills, I heard a colt snort in the distance, and found, not far off, a small black horse chewing the long, dry grass. It was not special—it was not the great black Mare I longed to see—but it was not afraid of me, and it nosed my pockets for apples. Ascertaining that I had none, it trotted off, and with a horsewoman’s logic, I followed after. Soon I was at a dead run, streaming sweat just to keep her in sight. Often she would wait for me to catch up and then canter off again, and in this way we came, at length, to a great hollow cave. By the time I came to the crevice in the cliff wall, the colt was nowhere to be seen.
The cave was as empty as the razed village. How I wanted to see the Mare! Even the horrid Fox! But the chamber was empty, and the walls were smooth, with no little door to let me pass, and no wolves came to greet me. If the Sleepers still lay within, there was no longer any path to them. I sat on the earthen floor of the cave and called out. My voice hardly even echoed.
My old bones were so weary, and I had come so far. I will admit to tears.
I fell asleep there on the dirt, my fists clenched like a baby’s against my mud-streaked face. He was crouching above me when I woke.
“Why are you here?” he said, and his voice echoed—oh, how it echoed. He was a man whose skin was like paper, whiter than paper, paler than any mortal skin, like snow over snow. His hair fell long and straight to his waist, and over his shoulder was slung a large and barbed harpoon of bone. His eyes glowered golden, and his bent legs were covered in silvery tattoos, a whipping, curving tongue I could not read. Now, I know my grass and I know my leaves and I know my stories. Laakea the Harpoon-Star could hardly stare me in the face but I would know him. “Why do you come to this place?” he demanded. “It is not for you, not anymore. Go home,” he spat. His scorn burned me as surely as a flame.
“I… I came because of my mother, to find the Wolf-Star, and the light…”
“You do not have claim to that light any longer. It is all used up. Go back to your love potions and leave us alone; we are not a fountain at which you may casually drink.”
“Where did she go? The Wolf? The Sleepers? Where is the Mare?”
