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“Simeon!” they hailed me—for everyone knew me by that time, the Giant Who Stayed.
“Hello, small folk,” I said warmly, and squatted down so they would not have to crane their necks so much.
“We are bound for Muireann, where the whale fur thatches the roofs, and the roads are paved with mother-of-pearl.” Their girl giggled and reached up to me—I gave her my pinkie to hold, as big in her arms as the trunk of a tree her own age.
“I wish you well of it,” I said.
“This place is dead. There is nothing for us now; our pepper plants withered and died, and there are no corns for our little girl to grind when she is grown. She will spear seals and narwhal instead, and sleep in a bed made of their spiraling horns! We will bounce our grandchildren on knees chilled by snow and sea—won’t that be something!”
I smiled at them. Ajanabh was so warm and wet, it tended to make one forget what snow was—I only dimly remembered breaking through the frost with a shovel to get the bulbs in back home. They walked off, down toward the harbor where the ships bellied up to the dock every day, and left the city that loved them. Sometimes I imagined I could hear Ajanabh weeping, a poor lady distraught that her babies abandoned her when she grew old and dry.
Finally, I put my plow aside, and sat on my last field, knees drawn up to my chest, looking at the city. There were no lights in the houses piled up like red beehives, and no sounds of laws being worked out in the streets. No bells tolled out the hours, there being no one to ring them. My city was empty, and so I decided that no one should really mind if I were to take up my residence there. No one could tell me I was too big anymore, and I would sleep under a blanket of spice-smog, as I had once or twice dreamed, snoring after the giant-feasts of home.
I stepped over the rotted gate, long since claimed by mold and sea air, and into the steep hills and alley-dells of a city which was built up and up, with streets that jackknifed sharply down and diagonal and straight up and any way they pleased, the cobbles being as lawless as anything else in Ajanabh. I walked with my hands in my pockets, sniffing the air, still delicious and dark as ever, save that the sour smell of people had gone, and left only the spices to scent the night. I grinned, my big teeth like a moon above the city. I tried not to step on anything that wasn’t meant to be stepped on—but I had to squeeze, sometimes.
I thought, again, that I could hear my girl, my city, weeping, lost and lonely.
“I’m still here, my lady,” I whispered.
But there was something—there was a sound. It wasn’t my fool head playing games as it does when the plowing is boring and the sun is high. It was high and piercing and sad as anything, like a voice but not a voice. I had never heard anything so beautiful in all my days—and the giantesses can play the bassoon like nothing you’ve known, when the mules are fat and the coconut-wine has a good head on it. I followed the sound, careful not to crush anything too much, up and down the weird maze of streets that makes Ajanabh seem all alley, and finally to the center of the city, a little courtyard all humped up in the middle, with a fountain that has green water shooting about like vines and all manner of vines shooting about like water. It’s got a little figure in the middle of it, too, which I think is supposed to be the Cinnamon-Star all cavorting in the stream, but her eyes fell out a long time ago, and her knees aren’t so good, and I never could tell if she’s got the Bark of Plenty in her hands or some old toys the children stuck in there when they got bored with them.
In front of the fountain was a lady, and I was six kinds of shamed to see I was wrong, and ten kinds of tickled that I wasn’t the only one who stayed. But she wasn’t like any lady I’d seen before. She had a red dress on, not much more than a slip, and she was dancing—but that wasn’t too odd. Ajanabh never was poor of dancers and singers and that sort. It was her hands, well, her hands and her hair, but without the hands the hair wouldn’t have struck me. She had no fingers at all, but violin bows, fiddle bows, strapped on where her fingers ought to be, and the strips of leather went all around her forearms and up to her shoulders, to keep the bows on tight. Her black hair was stiff as catgut, and she danced so quick and light that it flew out in all directions, long and wide enough that I swear to you that woman was playing her own hair with each hand, five bows together, whipping her head from side to side to change the length, like a fiddler presses on his frets. With bare feet she slapped the cobbles, her toes all bound in copper rings, and the sound of her playing was the sound I had heard, swift and terrible and lovely.
When she stopped her scales for a moment to oil the bows, I cleared my throat. “I thought you had all gone.”
The woman looked up, her eyes green as palm leaves under the ecstatic shocks of hair. “Not all,” she said mischievously. “Some of us will never go.”
I looked at the beehive-houses, and indeed, in some of those round windows, faces peeked out, looking for the violin-girl, wondering why she had stopped her song.
“My name is Agrafena,” she said, and put her bows very gingerly into my great hand. “I am the song of Ajanabh. I am staying, and so are they.”
“But who are they?”
The woman spun around on one heel, sending her hair flying again. “We are those who loved this place enough to hold her hand through death, and watch her come out the other side. We stayed to record her dying, each in our way, painters and poets and calligraphers, singers and dancers and violinists, sculptors and acrobats, jewelers and jugglers, glassblowers, pantomimes, orators, and toy-makers, novelists and layers of mosaics, mask-makers and players of scenes. We stayed. We wrote and painted and chiseled and sang her death, and we have found, now that the crowds have gone, that like a fallen tree, she has enough for us, we mushrooms and mosses, we spiders and glowworms. The dancers tamp down the seeds in our little city gardens, and there are carrots and blackberries enough to feed us. The lion-tamers find little clutches of cattle preposterously easy work, and there is meat enough to fill us. We take empty houses and apartments, parlors and sitting rooms, and there are more than enough—there are few locks in Ajanabh these days. An empty city is a paradise, and here all Vstreychas now end. There is even a wine-maker who stayed to press out the last vintage, the famed cardamom wine which is now ours alone to savor.”
I hung my head. “Then I am sad, Agrafena, for I stayed, and yet I know no art but the pounding of paprika and the cutting of vanilla beans. I can give nothing to the new Ajanabh, except my bulk, which is not welcome.”
She turned her head to one side, as if sizing me for a new pair of shoes. “Poor Simeon! Our last giant! But if you are willing, and if you love your city, I know a thing you can do which is harder than any of the little acts we perform in her name.”
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
“SHE TOLD ME,” THE GREAT GATE SAID POINTEDLY, “that now that Ajanabh had not so many laws prowling her streets, and not so much wealth with which to throw on armor when needed, sooner or later, folk would come who did not juggle or sing, but carried things bright and sharp, swords and arrows and others besides.” He glared at me with his brass eyes. “She bade me stretch myself as far as I could and lie around my city so that she would be safe. I worried about my skin, as surely these sharp things will be flung at me in the hurly-burly, and I should not make a very good wall then. But she calmed me with her sweet bows and called to her side stonemasons and brass-workers and tanners, and directed them to shore me up on all sides with red rock and brass buckles and leather straps, so that I should be a proper Gate, and safe withal. I went to the outside of my city, and kissing her topmost turrets, bent back my legs as far as I could, and stretched up through my ribs as tall as I could, until my ankles met and my head cast a shadow on the courtyard, and not a few pelicans dropped fish into the
salt sea in surprise at such a sudden mountain in their midst. Then I crossed my arms, and closed up the Gate of Ajanabh, which is who I am now, and not Simeon any longer.”
I bit my lip. “But if there are only artists inside—”
“They will all be slaughtered. We have an armorer, an old water rat living in a leaky garret with dozens of empty suits lining his wall—but what are dozens to your assembled horde?” His smile was hard and cruel. “But never you worry about it, you drafty old thing. No sword will pass my fingers, and they will be safe. Ajanabh will provide for them.”
“I did not want to come,” I muttered sullenly. “No one asked me, they just whisked me here and put a cup of brandy in my hand.”
