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“I could tell you a story, if you like,” the girl said, a deep blush rising in her cheeks—but she did not cast her eyes down. I didn’t imagine Lantern had taught her how to do that.
The Firebird nudged her a little, pressing his warm head to her back. “There’s time before dawn,” he said, proud as any father of his precocious girl. “Tell the bad old devil a tale if you like.”
She giggled, a sound that from another child might have been precious, but hers was genuine and dear. “Very well! I shall tell you how I learned to dance…”
THE
FIRE-DANCER’S
TALE
BY THE TIME I WAS OLD ENOUGH TO DANCE, Ajanabh was well and truly dead. I was weary of the bell tower, but even in a city of artists, I was not brave enough—not quite yet—to go down into the streets without my papa to find out what it is that a girl ought to do. Even a dead city has ghosts, and I could hear them at night, howling and singing and dancing on this great red grave.
I only came out to watch Papa dance at the Carnival of the Dawn. He was so beautiful, with his tail waving high and low, fluttering like a rain of stars. I wanted to stand in his tail while he danced, stomping his big claws down on the courtyard, throwing his plumes back in the first light, flaring that tail like a lady’s gown. I wanted to stand there and see all that fire moving around me, and listen to the sound of it—fire makes this great, roaring, snarling sound when it spins and leaps, did you know that? I hear it in my dreams.
One day when I was roasting a mouse and a few dates for breakfast, Sleeve clattered up the stairs as she will sometimes do, grumbling and grousing as she often does.
“Lantern, you are raising this child to be as wild as a kitten lost in the jungle! You must let her find other lit
tle girls and learn what it is that girls like, what they eat, what they do when they are happy, what they do when they are sad! Would you have her be like me? The other spiders think my webs are strange, even now.”
“I don’t like other little girls,” I piped. “They are silly and taller than me and they have no flames at all.” I chewed a mouse bone and Sleeve gestured in righteous indignation.
“See? She’s a wolf-girl.”
“I’m a Firebird!” I insisted. I suppose I feel a bit ridiculous about that, now, but you let me believe it, Papa, so I cannot be blamed for having done just as you told me.
“Lantern, let me take her down into the city. If she is to live here, she must learn an art, or she will be shunned, and a shunned girl cries very much, and you will never hear the end. I shall take her to the calligrapher in the high shop, for that is the closest thing to a little girl I know—he has similar parts, at least—and we will find out what it is that is right and proper for a girl to do.”
“I am not a girl.” I frowned. Oh, Papa. You should have told me. I should not have made such a very big fool of myself otherwise. Poor Sleeve!
But true to her word we went first to the calligrapher in the high shop, with his hat of blue and buckles, and his ink-stained fingers, and his many podiums with beautiful books open to beautiful pages of writing, with pearl-handled magnifying glasses resting in their spines.
“What is it, Master Calligrapher, that little girls do in the way that spiders weave?” Sleeve asked primly.
The calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: “It is right and proper,” he said, “for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones.”
Sleeve beamed at me, pleased that we had discovered the answer in our first try. So it was that I went every day for a whole month to the calligrapher’s shop and read his books, which had lovely pictures in gold leaf and letters like swans in flight. I liked the books very much, but it was so quiet in his shop, and all his shutters were closed, so that the vellum would not be damaged by the sun. It was terribly dark and the calligrapher squinted, his face close to his pages. He never talked to me at all. If I stay here much longer, I thought, I shall become as weak and thin as a book’s page, and then one flick of my papa’s tail will set me alight!
Very politely, as politely as I knew how, I asked if I couldn’t take a few of the books with me—the very sturdy ones, mind you, with not so very many golden pictures—and read them myself in the sunlight, or in the bell tower, or anywhere at all but that dark, dreary, dusty place. Besides, I knew to be wary of dust. My papa told me so. The calligrapher agreed, glad to me rid of me, I think, and I ran from his shop with three volumes clutched to my chest, my favorites of all his collection, the ones about lost girls and lost beasts and grotesques. And so I was sitting up against a mangrove tree reading about saints and centaurs when Sleeve came clattering up.
“What are you doing! You should be with your calligrapher!”
“It was dark, and he never spoke to me. Lantern speaks to me every day! How was I to concentrate on the books in all that silence?”
“But he was a man; he could have taught you all you needed to know about being a little girl!”
“But he is not a little girl,” I pointed out, I thought very wisely. “What does he know? His books know more than he does, and I took some with me, so I think I shall be all right.”
Sleeve threw up four of her legs in digust. “How am I to become acquainted with real and actual girls? There are not so many little ones left in Ajanabh, and those there are often think it is right and proper for girls to crush spiders.”
So we went to the creatures with which Sleeve was acquainted. We came first to the ants, their little mandibles gleaming red and their hill a great mass of straw and stone.
“We think it is right and proper for a girl to enter into soldiery as soon as possible,” they said in unison. “No need to shelter the child—winter is coming, lean and toothed.”
“But there are no soldiers left in Ajanabh,” I pointed out. One very large ant huffed angrily and said: “What nonsense! We are here!”
And so we went to the worms, who writhed and churned in the dry red soil. They turned over in their muck and smiled in their wormy way, white and fat and eyeless.
