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In the church which was not a church, there were mice. This is not really surprising, as all churches are so plagued. Outside the radiant seat where Xide wove, and the rows of silkworm boxes, the place was terribly dusty and ill kept. Dust covered everything, turned it gray and dun and dull—after all, it is a rare celestial who will notice the state of the floor. Only I, who walked upon it, noticed. And in the corners where the mice lived, the dust was so thick and deep that if I was not careful I would sink into it like soft ash, and never be heard from again. The mice were much bigger, and walked through this fog of dust as though it were air, and saw little at all but the varying shades of dust, and became like roving drafts of dust themselves.
I spoke to them from time to time, for they were in awe of the Weaver-Star, and her worms, and her spider, and dared not approach her—but they longed to touch her, how they longed to touch her!
One was very large, his muscles trained on dust-wading. Deep in the summer evening he said to me, stroking his whiskers with gray paws:
“She is so bright!”
“I suppose she is. Imagine what she looked like in the beginning, though! All that light!”
The mouse frowned. “She is brighter than anything we know,” he said.
“She is no brighter than you or I. Her light is spooled out, thread by thread.”
“She is bright on the inside!” the mouse snapped irritably. “We have been talking in the dust, and we think we would like to eat her.”
I could not speak for a moment, my voice closed up in horror. “Is this what becomes of living in the dust? You cannot eat her!”
“If we all bit her at once, we could.”
“I will not allow it.”
The mouse grinned. “You have enough poison for five, perhaps six of us if you are very angry. But the rest of us would get to drink all of her! How bright! How sweet! How bright we would become!”
“Please! You cannot! What would we be without her?”
“You may be what you like. We will be bright, bright as no mouse has dreamt!”
THE TALE
OF THE KINGDOM
OF MICE
IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS DUST, AND IN the end there will be Dust, and in the middle there is Dust, Dust, Dust!
The Church-mice know that Dust is the substance of all possible things. We have heard that in the impossible land beyond the Church-door there are folk who believe that fire is the substance of all things, or water, or ether, or tiny specks of light no one can see. We cannot believe such folly exists.
Though there are some of us who have heard—ah, if only they had never begun to imagine such a thing!—there is a burning ball outside these walls called the sun, and it is the brightest thing there is.
We will eat that, too, if it exists.
In the Dust, nothing is bright. There is only the gray and the dun, and the soft, ashy smell of it brushing your whiskers at every moment. We hate it, but we did not know, for a long time, how it could be escaped. When I was a pinkie at my mother’s teat, I heard the old gray uncles talking about Baldtail, who was the Viceroy of Mice in days gone by—for there can be no King of the Dust, which is all there is, which gives us life and death. The Dust is King over us all. Baldtail was brave, the bravest mouse the Dust will ever allow. He, cloaked in Dust, went forward from the Corners, as Viceroys sometimes do, being valiant rulers who do not shirk adventure. He saw the worms in their boxes—perversion!—and the threads waving, and the copper bowls which surround the Weaver. He rose up on his hind legs to peer into the bowls, to see what they could contain, and his whiskers whickered back and forth, showering bits of Dust into the bowl.
As I have said, Baldtail was brave. And so he rashly rose up onto his tiptoes, and pulled the copper bowl over onto himself, and the dye which is the magical and alien stuff the Weaver keeps by her side soaked him from his paws to the end of his bare tail. He was Yellow from eyeball to ear-twitch, a brighter Yellow even than this thing they call the sun could possibly be. The dye washed away the Dust, and alone of all mice, Baldtail was free of it; Baldtail shed the substance of mortality and became golden.
Baldtail returned to the Dust-pillowed Corners, and told all the mice what he had seen and done. At first they recoiled from his yellow body in revulsion and terror. He hurt their eyes, which had never seen anything but Dust, and their fellow mice roving in the Dust, lumps of gray among the gray. But there Baldtail blazed! Yellow! Can you imagine the uproar, the consternation? There were now two things in the universe: Dust and Yellow!
The more the mice looked at Baldtail, the more they envied him. One or two ventured to lick his gleaming fur with their pink tongues flashing through Dust-covered teeth. He tasted so bright, they said. So bright, and so warm. For his part, Baldtail exhorted us to go forth too and discover the bowls for ourselves.
“The Weaver sees nothing but her thread and her worms!” he argued. “She will not hurt us! Become bright! Become other than Dust!”
But we were afraid of the Weaver then. She seemed so very large and cunning. But it was decided that we should become bright, after all, and so we all agreed in the corners of the Corners to eat Baldtail all up, and then we should all be Yellow, and triumph over the Dust. We way-laid the Viceroy in the thickest, dankest mires of Dust, and with our teeth tore him haunch from long, bald tail. He tasted like any other mouse.
But oh, how it felt! We could feel his brightness in us, his Yellow. It slid in our bellies like butter, like we dreamt the sun would slide. Those of us who ate of Baldtail were exalted among mice, and we began to think as no other mouse had done before: What if there were more than two things in the universe? What if there were more than Dust and Yellow? We could not begin to calculate what these things might be, but we hungered for more brightness, for more light, for more Yellow! Those mice who had not tasted Yellow mourned their loss, and they were more eager than any of us to find these other things.
Some few of them went out from the Corners and tilted her bowls over their heads. They came running back, scampering with glee, to show us that a thing called Green existed, too, and also the almost unfathomable Purple! We gasped, we choked in awe and ecstasy, we could not believe the universe had room for these things and also Dust. And we leapt upon them and slurped Green and Purple from their fur like meat from bone—of course we slurped meat from bone, too. Those were heady days—I cannot begin to tell you of the Feast of Red!
But we do not wish to waste any more time lapping at her bowls. Why beg for crumbs when the roast is in plain sight? We know that the Weaver is the source of all Yellowness, all Greenness, all Purpleness, all Redness, all that is not Dust, and we will eat her up as we ate up Baldtail, and Blackwhisker, and Dustbelly, and Manglepaw, and how bright we shall be then!
