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They leapt as one beast into her arms, and devoured her: her heart, her liver, her bones. She did not last a year.
THE TALE
OF THE
CARNELIAN BOX,
CONTINUED
“I AM SORRY FOR YOU,” I SAID WEAKLY.
“I ate nothing but crocuses for months. I hunted all nine tigers and boiled their hearts. It did not help. I watched them eat her, and I could not go on.” Lem’s voice was rough and hard-used, as though he had never known the end of weeping. “But it is all right now. He granted me a new wife, and you are here!”
“I do not know of any promises made to you, but I am not your wife.”
“It was not a promise, it was a wish. And you are here. You are here. This is a beautiful country. You could be happy here. I would build you a safe den, away from the water and the storms. I would make for you the tiger soup. I would be as grass for you, humble beneath your feet.”
I started, and met his eyes. I should not have moved from my rock. But I knew nothing of the world, I was alone. I did not know not to look into his face, so eager and needing.
“I cannot walk,” I protested. “My feet are broken off. And still you must not touch me, for you will burn.”
“My darling, my Li, I will make you new feet of pure, pale silver, and I will not ask for your touch.”
“I am not Li. I am not her. Look at me. I am made of grass and light—I am nothing like her.”
He looked at me sadly, great dark eyes wrung dry with yearning. “It is a common name in this country.”
He would not meet my gaze, and stared at the rock floor, speaking very quietly,
his voice tremulous as an infant sparrow. “But I knew that if I waited, if I was faithful, you would come back. Wives always come back. If I chose to become very still, to play the ghost-harp on a stump of hazelwood, you would come to the door, and I would feel again, in my own hands, your gentle face above me. I would put my palms to your dark hair. I would cry—widowers always cry—but I would be able to say to you: See, wife my own, I waited for you. I knew you would not abandon me. I knew you loved me still. I knew if I was faithful, you would come home. And you would kiss me, and tell me I was your own husband dear, and I would know your smell and your skin once more after all these years; I would know my wife again, at the end of all things.”
After a long while looking at his bent and penitent head, I sighed. “I do know something about that.”
But still, I wept as we walked, and the grasses burned beneath my tears.
His house was low and its roof was sound. I stood outside and would not go in, for I would burn his thatch, too; I knew it. I was fallen from my mother, and could touch nothing without harm. But in all the windows and the grassy roof, in the crocuses of the little garden, lizards blinked up at me, tiny lizards of blue and green and black.
“What are they?” I asked.
“Oh!” He laughed distractedly, putting his hand into his thick hair. “They are my lizards. Even tiger-hunting is sometimes tedious, and I learned from one of your uncles—” he blushed “—you remember, darling, the one who never married, and keeps all those skinny dogs—that lizards are pleasant and keep the insects away. But he did not know what I do, that the markings on their backs are strange and complicated. One of them had an incantation written on his scales. He is the only one, so far, but I have hope. It is how I made my wish, how I summoned him.”
“Summoned who?”
“Kashkash. He gave you back to me. Bless his beard! One day I shall take my bull-lizard to the Queen and show her the marvels in his skin, but I am not ready.” He smiled shyly. “And I have a wife to look after.”
And so he went into his little house and began to prepare the soup of tiger meat and thyme and saffron and marigold roots, singing a little to himself, happy as a roosting hen. I stood outside, and shivered in the frost. My hidden silver leached into the earth even then, into the stump, into the lizards, who gathered around me as if around a drinking-hole, and my light flowed out of me over their scales. Before the night was done, I ventured in, burning nothing, never again, to his choking gladness. There was still light in me, but it was cold, then, and thin. I ate the orange soup from a bowl of wood. I could not decide if I was sorry that the hut did not go up in flames. But I was walled up within it, true and tight. By winter, true to his word, he had made me new feet, all of silver, and set my green and broken ankles into their hollows. I tried to make him a soup of light, but he would not touch it, pressing me with his cat meat and his fingers. I tried to believe that it was as good to wait upon the earth as in the Sky.
But I was not happy. I did not wish to hunt the striped cats. I did not wish to learn to make the soup. I did not wish to learn to play the harp—the deer harp, the rabbit harp, the bear harp, even the tiger harp, which Lem would not let me touch. But I did not wish to touch it. I sat ever in the dark corners of the house, trying to feel as I had felt in the endless night-pastures of the Sky. He did not like this, and though he coaxed me toward the hearth, and the knitting chair, and the bed, I would not go. I wept, and scratched at the reedy flesh of my arms, and forgot my name in his grief.
One evening, he touched my face with his big, gentle hands, and his palms grew greasy with light, and he said:
“What is the matter, Li, my beloved, my crocus, my cat?”
“I am unhappy,” I said.
“How can you be unhappy? I have made for you the tiger soup and banked the fire so pleasantly, I have crushed thyme flowers into the bed linens so that it smells sweet. I have kept your crocuses bright as little candles in the soil. What else may I do?”
I said nothing, stubborn and sullen. Why did I stay, you may ask me? Why did I not leave him to his muddled soup and his silver feet? I am accustomed to lying still and waiting, I would say to you. But how could my mother see me, down there on the ground, with the crocuses and the lizards?
