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That was for him.
The Wizard was holding my feather when I flew into the turret room—I knew he would be. I had felt his hands on my fringe for years, waiting for a need. The moon was a slash on his collar when I alighted on the sill, pale and sharp. Need stood in the corner, with a great, round belly swathed in an elaborate yellow coat, the color of daffodils with the first sunlight of all sunlights on their petals. It was epauletted in gold, and spangled in gold, and buttoned in gold, and belted in gold. The lapels were fringed in a green so bright it wearied the eye, and his stockings and high-heeled boots matched to the toe. He had a thin, long sword with a graceful basket looped into his belt, festooned with ribbons, the expensive, poised kind of sword that lets one know immediately that the bearer doesn’t mean anything by it. He had a black wig that glossed and curled opulently to his waist, and over his face he wore an angular dancing-mask, painted with gold leaf like a manuscript, with extraordinary peacock feathers fanning out from the hollow eye sockets, their dazzling fronds bedecked with violet eyes. The mouth was a hard little slit.
In his green-gloved hand was a sack of spices, so rich and fragrant they had wet the bag through and filled the room with heady scents.
“Listen well, my young partridge. This is Kostya of Vareni-side, and he will shortly be the possessor of your feather, and you must be a good little parakeet and obey him as well as you have obeyed me by flying all the way here in the dark and cold, and leaving such a lovely, lithe goose crying in your wake.”
“There is no need to gloat, Omir,” said Kostya, his voice hollowed by the slit in his mask, but still eel-soft and insinuating. “It is poor form. I’m sure he is quite wretched enough without your help. I shall take him, and keep him dry, and feed him so many charming things to eat. All the mice he could hope to gobble up, served on platters of glass and gold. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Lantern?”
The man in the yellow coat put his hand on my wing, and it seemed to writhe beneath the glove. I shuddered, and my colors flared worry and warning, blue on white. I said nothing.
But the deal had been struck, and the Wizard took his bag of spices, inhaling with delight. Kostya of Vareni-side stroked the edge of my feather with an intimate little sigh, his breath ragged and rattled as he fingered the fringes—and then opened the door of a tall ivory cage, and gestured inside.
What could I have done?
The journey to Ajanabh was a long one, and to the rim of the desert, the best route is by river. Being a river man of long acquaintance, Kostya chartered a lavish barge the colors of pumpkins and blood, and I was set in my cage at the prow, to watch the foaming green rivers of the mountain country gurgle by. The barge teetered under my weight, but held without too much complaint.
The river was wide, wider than I had expected. I could see the far green shores, lit up with fireflies and spackled with mosquitoes, but they were not very near at all, and the water foamed brown and weedy around the barge. Beside me on the deck sat a large glass goblet set into a firm wooden hold, and in the goblet was a fat goldfish, snapping her veil-thin tail around her. Her scales caught the river light and her black eyes blinked slowly, one after the other. The cut crystal turned her skin into prisms.
“Are you enjoying the river?” she said, her voice bubbling in the water. “I could speak to the pole men, if the flow is not smooth enough.”
“I barely feel the motion of the river,” I said gloomily. “It is as smooth as I could ask for, but I did not ask, and I do not wish to go where the river wends.”
“I am sorry. It is the nature of animals to be caged and cupped whenever a curious man happens by. This is tragic, but one must take a philosophical outlook. The river is long; the glass is fragile.”
I ground my beak. “Ajanabh is wide, and the cage is strong.”
The fish brightened; her scales shimmered with pleasure. “Are you going to Ajanabh? I am only taking you so far as the river wanders. How lovely! I have relatives in Ajanabh, you know.”
“How wonderful for you. I am not looking forward to it. The peacock-man in the yellow coat says he will feed me mice there, but I think a man with a longing to feed mice to birds may pursue that interest anywhere. If he wants to take me by river to a city I have hardly heard of, there will be more than mice when we arrive.”
“But the river there tastes like palm sugar! I do love these cold mountain routes, but when the night is very blue, I think of the Vareni, and how it would have felt in my mouth.” She turned lazily in her water, brushing the glass with her fins. “Every morning, they pour me out into this river, and I taste the water—it is like frozen moss this far up in the heights—I taste its current and its depth, the direction of its flow, I find the safe channel, I discover whether or not the trout are spawning this month. And they scoop me back up into my glass, and I chart their course through the flavors of the river.”
“They might have given you a bigger glass.”
“Men are inconsiderate. I am sure they believe my wine goblet to be an ocean bounded in glass. But I am the pilot of this barge, and they can do nothing without me.” Her face, such as a fish’s face may be, turned mischievous and sly. “But once, you know, I was a dragon.”
I laughed. The sound rang out over the quick water. “You must have been the smallest dragon ever to pick a maiden’s apron from your claws.”
She colored angrily. “Don’t laugh! I was a dragon! And bigger than you are, by far…”
THE RIVER
PILOT’S TALE
I WAS SPAWNED IN A GROANING LOCK ON THIS very river. It was an accident—the water swirls up, the water swirls down, and every so often a handful of gold specks are caught in the sucking whirlpools, and make do in the pockets and eddies beneath the algae-slick walls. We are the lock-children: I and all of my brothers and sisters are called Lock, and it is only confusing in mating season.
The mountains here hunch and bow like old men’s shoulders, and everywhere there are clouds and mists and trees bent low to the water, so low that they grow and grow beneath the tiny waves until the river floor is nothing but trees from either bank tangled up in each other, threshing the mud between their leaves. The water is cold and fast, and in the crags where ice creeps in along the sand, seizing the bowing trees, leaving only the middle of the river to run and chase as it is accustomed to do, there is a waterfall.
I do not rightly know where the first goldfish heard that this waterfall was anything but an unfortunate drop in the river table. But gossip travels among us quickly; this is the nature of fish. And some red-finn
ed fellow had heard it whispered by the trout, who had it from the pike, who had been assured by the thorny-boned catfish, who had listened rapt to the drumfish’s clacking tongue, who knew the eel would never lie, who was in awe of the adventures of the bass. And all of these agreed, that if a goldfish could but leap over this waterfall, she would become a dragon.
Many of the Locks disbelieved this: what a preposterous idea. Dragons are made from eggs and fire and in far-off countries which no polite fish has ever heard of, and besides, who has even seen a dragon in these days, let alone heard rumor of smoke or scorched maidens dipping their blackened hair in the river to cool it? But then, we Locks were born separate from the other goldfish, and are a recalcitrant and ornery breed. I alone went with the goldfish who were born in the open water to the foot of the fall, to stare into the mist and the pounding, thumping water, to wonder how a goldfish could ever manage to leap so far, if anyone had done it, what it would feel like to have hard green scales instead of soft gold ones, what it would feel like to breathe fire—would you choke on your own smoke? Would it burn your tongue? What does fire taste like? Most important, we gathered in orange and white and red clusters and wondered what it would be like to fly.
We had heard that dragons had wings. The sunfish and the walleye had assured us that they had seen hundreds of dragons in their time, and each of them had lovely leathery wings, sometimes brown, but more often outlandish colors, like our own skin. They were graceful, they looped and corkscrewed in the air, they tasted the wind like we tasted water and everyone, just everyone knew how beautiful a dragon was. Flying was like a long leap, the sunfish explained. So if you could leap over the waterfall, you would just keep soaring and rising, and bony wings would unfold from your back like fishing poles.
This sounded far better to us than to be small and unremarked fish, known only for a color we could not help. We wanted to fly, and scorch things with our breath! What would the fishermen say when we were dragons, and could roast them mightily? If we could put their little ones into glass bowls and feed them whenever we pleased—or not at all, if that amused us!—and laugh at how small a grown man will be if you raise him in a bowl and never let him out, not even on holidays. They would not say very much, we all agreed. And we wouldn’t listen to them if they did.
