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Orfea reached out her rag-bandaged hands to the statue’s face. “Good girl,” she said with a sigh, “good girl, you found her, my darling, my old friend.” She nestled herself into the crook-armed embrace of the red stone, her withered cheek against its rough, stiff face. “Do you think they can hear her singing?” she said. “The others, do you think they can hear her, in their stony ears?”
“Of course,” said Solace kindly, stroking the old woman’s hair just as I had done. “I can hear her now. She is so beautiful, when she sings up the sun.”
The child drew me away then, and we left the two women there, stone and flesh. As we turned our backs, I could hear Orfea singing with her broken voice, and my throat closed on fiery tears that burned to fall.
And as we passed the last statue, the farthest out, a sandstone child in her mother’s dress, tripping over the hem, I saw it, clutched in a red, rough hand, what was meant to be a snuffbox but which was not, just like the church which was not a church: a box of carnelian, no bigger than my own hand. I pried it out of the coarse-fingered child, and it was not heavy, not nearly heavy enough.
“What is this?” I said urgently. I grabbed Solace’s arm and showed her the box.
“How should I know? Just some junk the Duchess used for her little zoo. She uses everything; you must have seen just as well as I.” Solace rubbed her arm, a pale pink hand-shaped scald rising where I had touched her—I had not been careful. I pled her forgiveness. “Surely there are many boxes in all these dead hands. How can you know this one is special?” she grumbled, cradling her arm.
But I knew. I looked at its polished surface, its design of curling, corkscrewing, arching grasses worked into the lid, its tiny claw feet, its minute, gold-speckled latch.
“Well? Open it!” said Solace.
“Should I? Kohinoor said it belonged to her. Perhaps it is not right that I should open it.”
“Then I will open it! Come, you cannot resist it—don’t you want to know what’s inside? They never told you anything a Queen should know. What do you owe them?”
I looked sharply at the young girl with her gleaming black tattoos and bare belly. “I thought you were sleeping,” I said suspiciously.
The girl grinned sidelong, her hair hanging down into her wolf-keen face. “Open it,” she coaxed.
And so help me, I did. I slid the flame of one thin fingernail into the lock and turned it, listening to the click of the carnelian tumblers. The lid popped up slightly, and I lifted it gingerly. Lantern peered over from behind a statue of a young man slaughtering a stag, and Solace stood on her toes to see inside.
I let the casket fall open, and lying within, no bigger than a finger, was a woman made all of grass, her hair a mass of curled seeds, her form woven reeds braided together, one over the other. Her meadow-eyes were serenely shut, her tiny blade-hands folded over a dress of straw and light. No part of her did not shine with this light, silver and sere, and it pooled in the box as though I were holding a red candle in my hand. The three of us stood staring at her, the little green woman in the box.
“Is she going to wake up?” Solace asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know why Kohinoor could possibly want her,” I answered.
With infinite care, I put my finger into the box and stroked the side of the grass-woman’s face with my smoke. She turned to it like a child suckling its mother and breathed the black of my skin. Her eyes opened lazily; they were green as a pasture. She sat up in her box, seed-hair falling behind her, and looked up at the faces of a Djinn, a Firebird, and a curious little girl.
“Oh,” she groaned, “let me go back to sleep…”
“I’m sorry,” I said quietly, so as not to hurt her reedy ears, “but it’s terribly important. Who are you?”
She turned her face to mine, grassy eyes blinking miserably.
“I’m no one, not now.” She sighed like prairies waving in the night winds. “Not anymore…”
THE TALE
OF THE
CARNELIAN BOX
IT IS A LONG WAY TO FALL, FROM THE SKY TO THE earth. It is a long way to fall, in the dark, and the space between is cold.
I do not blame her. It is not in my nature to blame. But I did not want to go. The others all chose, to stay or to fall, to burn or to gutter and darken. I could not choose. A Star walked among us with legs like pillars of fire, before she wove, before the red city, and we were uprooted from the soft black, uprooted from the earth which is the Sky, and I wonder if she even saw us crumple beneath her, if she even saw us fall. So many were trampled and shattered that day, so many fell in shivering slivers, a slaughter of broken rain howling through the Sky like a shower of glass, but I was lucky. I lost only my feet under hers, and fell more or less whole, my ears able to hear all the screams of the Grass-Stars around me, sheared into nothingness, their light splattered across the fields.
I know that if I had been allowed to stay, the black thing that bore me would have come back. Mothers always come back. I chose to be grass for her, I chose to lie at the bottom of the Sky, so that she would see how humble I was, so that she would see that I wanted only to be a thing that would please her. These things I was allowed to choose, and if I could have stayed, I would have felt her gentle face above me, I would have put my hands to her dark cheeks. I would have cried—children always cry—but I would have told her: See, Mother, I waited for you. I knew you would not abandon us. I knew you loved us still. I knew if I was faithful, you would come home. And she would have kissed me, and told me I was her best-loved daughter, and I would have known her smell and her skin, I would have known what she looked like, I would have known my mother at the end of all things.
But I was not allowed to choose.
I landed in a great field of sugarcane and my broken stumps burned the stalks. They crumpled and sizzled beneath me; smoke and shadows leapt up from their fractured, boiling leaves. I’m sorry! I cried as I walked; I wept as I walked, and as I walked I began to scream, for I walked nowhere that I did not burn, that did not incinerate beneath me, that did not fall into flames at the touch of my skin. I’m sorry, I wailed, for I scalded them to nothing, ash and shadows, and they could not choose any more than I. I tried to walk lightly, I tried to run, but shadows and smoke leapt up at my every step, until I stumbled onto mute stone, and huddled against a jagged cliff face, burning nothing, sobbing and afraid. It was there I lived, terrified to move, terrified to sear all beneath me, until even the stone had blackened to a slick, scalded glass, and the light in me was dim and hidden.
That was how he found me. When it was all over, he would call me Li, and if I had a name before that, he spoke the name of Li so many times that I have forgotten it.
