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His shoulders were draped in a tiger’s slashing skin, and from the edges of this hung talons of hawk and lizard. He was a big man, but his face was young, clear, and eager, and his lips trembled.
“He did not lie!” the man marveled. “He did not lie to me! You are here, and real, and alive, and mine!”
“Do not touch me!” I shrieked.
He drew back, hurt. “Of course not, if you tell me I must not.”
“You will burn,” I mumbled.
“But you ar
e my wish! You could not harm me!”
“I assure you, I can. And what can you mean? What did you wish for?”
The man smiled with such joy and hope that my throat tightened in the face of it. “Why, what else? I wished for a wife…”
THE TALE
OF THE
TIGER HARP
IS THIS NOT A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY? YOU COULD be happy here. I would build you a den of wattles and tiles, and bring you sacks of down from the river geese for your blankets. I would do both these things for you, and more besides.
When I was a boy, my father taught me to hunt, how to be very silent on my feet, how to strangle partridges and cut open deer in such a way that it hurts them little enough. When nineteen of my winters had left me living, I killed a tigress. This is very difficult, as tigers are clever, and my father was proud. He dressed her and gave me her heart to eat, steaming red in the snow. It was wet and soft; it tasted of old arrowheads and marrow. Then he gave me her liver, then her bones to suck. He told me to name the tiger I had killed, and remember her taste, how tall she had been, how many cubs watched us from the bracken. He told me to make a thing from her body every day for a year, so that I would know my tiger as well as I knew anything in our house. Soup and coats and sausages and rattles and roasts and gloves and lyre strings. All these I made and more. I worked all the year through, and grieved for my tiger.
I called my tiger Li. It is a common name in this country. After the year of my tiger had passed, I saw in our village a girl fairer by far than tiger-ink. She had hair like black stripes, and eyes black as a cat’s, and her hands were soft and deft; she wove beautiful things, and she tasted like lemons, and warm stones. Her mother was a planter of crocuses, and a threader of the priceless saffron culled from their blossoms. Her land was wide, almost endless. Her name was Li. I have told you it was common. Li was so wealthy, I thought I could never wed her, being a boy who knew little but the secret taste of a tiger’s heart. But I loved the crocus-girl, even as I hunted silent and kind, even as my father died of chill and my mother of fever, even as I cared for my house alone, and made each tiger I killed last for a year, in soups and coats and sausages and rattles and roasts and gloves.
There came a day when my cupboards were bare and I went into the birch-bracken to hunt. As I followed the tracks of a broad-shouldered tiger, in motions I had practiced as a dancer does her favorite reels, I heard beside me other footsteps, just as practiced. As I came upon the tiger, who snarled as cats will do, the other hunter came into the clearing, and before I could loose my bow, shot a crow-fletched arrow, straight and true, into the tiger’s heart.
You will not be surprised to know it was Li. She stood with her long legs apart, her hair flat and straight, her arms cradling her bow easily. She turned to me and smiled.
“What do you think I ought to name my kill?” she said. “Shall I call it Lem? It seems only fair.”
“Yes,” I breathed, “call him Lem.”
Together we cut open the white fur of his belly, and I gave Li his heart to eat, wet and soft. She said it tasted like her own skin. I gave her his liver, and also his bones, and together we took the carcass back to my house, where I showed her how to make tiger soup.
Li’s mother was not altogether angry, but she did withhold her crocuses from our wedding, since her permission had not been asked. I accepted this as just, but I leapt over her stone wall and stole a single yellow flower for Li to wear in her hair, my crocus-girl, my tiger-girl. Li made tiger soup in my house, and tiger coats and tiger sausage and tiger rattles, tiger roasts rich as cake, and she played upon a tiger harp songs so sweet and strange that on warm nights there would gather around the threshold wild and striped creatures, nosing the air curiously and twitching their long, white whiskers.
But Li was not happy. After a year she stopped hunting with me; after two she would not make the tiger soup.
“What is the matter, my beloved, my crocus, my cat?” I said, taking her head in my arms.
“Outside our door the tigers come to hear me sing, and I cannot make the stew of their bones, no matter how much saffron, and thyme, and marigold roots I grind into it, without tasting not my own skin, but my own song, which they love well enough to gather around the house of those who sharpen their arrows to pierce striped flesh.”
“I need not hunt only tigers, Li. Deer are easier prey, and rabbits, and bear.”
My wife turned her wide-cheeked face to mine. “And what will happen when I make the deer soup, and the rabbit soup, and the bear soup? What will happen when I play the harp of deer, the harp of rabbit, the harp of bear?”
And so I hunted still the tiger, and made the soup myself. But Li still played the harp, and still the tigers gathered. One evening, when the sky was as deep a blue as any crocus may own, I brought her a wooden bowl with a soup of thyme and marigold, and no tiger at all. She drank it, and then took up her harp of bone and gut. She stood and opened the door to our house—I tried to stop her, but she laughed and shooed me back, and so I watched from the window as Li sat on a stump among the crocuses her mother had finally sent to us years after our wedding, and played to the moon and the bracken.
It was terrible, what she played. It hurt me to hear it, the strings plucked in longing, the melody foreign and savage and toothed. She put her head back, and the moon glossed her scalp, and I did not know her in that moment, not really, the woman who slept beside me with her cheek on my chest.
Slowly, the tigers came. There were nine of them, I remember that. Their muzzles were white and ghostly in the dark. Their stripes cut the night apart. Li played, and they listened, their heads cocked, tails stiff. One by one, they threw back their heads and howled. You will say cats do not howl, only wolves do as much; cats screech or hiss, but do not howl. But you are wrong. Cats can howl, and nine cats can howl like a choir of demons. Their voices joined with Li’s strings at feral angles, their fangs gleamed yellow, their throats ululated, and beneath their paws a hundred crocuses were crushed.
Tears ran down Li’s face. She stopped playing, staring with wonder and ecstasy at the throng. One by one, they ceased their howls and looked steadily back at my wife. She opened her arms to them, and I understood her—never tell me I did not understand my wife. She opened her arms, pleading for forgiveness, pleading for feline clemency, for what grace tigers can give.
