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I nuzzled shyly into her palm. “Take me with you. I have your breath; I am your leopard. You cannot leave me. You must name me and love me and lick my fur into behaving itself. It is very necessary.”
She laughed. “You are not bothered by my eyes, the molt of my skin?”
“How could I be? You are the first woman I have ever seen.”
And so it was that we went together, and my legs grew very long, gold and black and wiry. I loved my mistress, and once, just once, when our fire was very low and she looked out across the empty plains between Ajanabh and Urim, I put my unruly head in h
er lap, and she licked my fur to shining.
We came to Urim in the night, and all things in the city were black. It was a city mourning itself, and how dark were its vestments! We entered; there was no sentry. Urim is not often visited. All things slept, and we sat at the center of the city, waiting for dawn on the lip of a great memorial: a pure white man resting on a bier, his face beatific. On the lip of this slab was carved:
FORGIVE US, FOR WE WERE IN NEED.
Against this nameless man and his nameless bed we huddled; I wrapped my tail around my haunches, and the sky wheeled by over our heads. Sometime before sunrise, a strange creature came walking from a distant road, its footsteps scraping the pale cobbles. It was a woman all of wicker, of brambles and stick, of hazel and red osier, green and pliant willow. It moved smoothly and gracefully for all that, and bowed low to us.
“That is an uncomfortable place to sleep,” she said, her voice hard, like branches snapping. “Perhaps it brings you hope, however?” Her eyes were sappy blossom nubs, rose-colored and wet.
Ruin stirred and adjusted her veils quickly, covering her exposed cheek. “We await the day, and the Urimites, to tell us how to live in this place. We are… in need.”
“So are we all,” answered the wicker-wight. “But he”—the woman indicated the statue—“is the answer to need…”
THE TALE
OF THE
CATTLE MERCHANT
AND THE APPLE
EVERY POOR, LOST CREATURE OF URIM KNOWS this tale, gathers around this pale casket in hope so hot and bright it would burn any who did not know that Urim itself flames with such hope, that you can look nowhere in the city without being blinded.
Long ago there was a man with three daughters. This man lived in a country which bordered a sea so salty it foamed white on the sand, a country full of rich grass and cloudy skies. This man was a cattle merchant, and as all merchants did in those days, he traveled often to Shadukiam to trade. On one such occasion, when he was in need of such sundries as merchants long for: cloth, jewels, food which could not dream of growing in their own countries, he asked his daughters what they would like from the great city.
“A dress which shines as brightly as the last moon of winter!” cried his first daughter, who was called Ubalda, and who loved such things.
“A golden ball, as lovely and round as the first sun of summer!” cried his second daughter, who was called Ushmila. He frowned at her for a long time before he agreed.
“If it please you, Father,” said his blushing third daughter, who was called Urim, “I should like an apple.”
“No more?” said the merchant, who had certainly not raised his daughters to ask for such silly, simple things. A merchant expects certain tastes from his children, and he was mightily disappointed.
“No more,” answered the girl, whose hair was very red, red as the rarest salamander hide, and whose eyes were very blue, blue as the most costly dolphin skin.
“Very well,” said the merchant, and went in search of the meager fortunes which Shadukiam grants to foreigners: enough to snare them, but not enough to make them stay.
Now, as often befalls merchants with one meek daughter and two haughty, fortune did not smile on the cattle merchant. He drove his flock before him, sheep of such fleeces as your mother might have heard of in the oldest stories she knew, and when he crossed into Shadukiam, he was promptly set upon by minor city officials and relieved of his livestock. His throat bled out into the Varil like a sheep cut down for supper, and we would weep for him, save that we have quite enough to do with weeping for our own misfortunes.
As the cattle merchant’s body lay drifting into steam below turrets of diamond and bowers of roses, its blood called as it might to a shark, and as the moon rose milk-thick and silent, one of her children approached. He was very tall and thin as a length of paper. His skin and cloaks were the color of the moon—not the romantic, lover’s moon, but the true lunar geography: gray and pockmarked, full of secret craters, frigid peaks, and blasted expanses. His eyes had no color in them save for a pinpoint pupil like a spindle’s wound—the rest was pure, milk—moon white. He bent over the slaughtered cattle merchant and smiled.
Perhaps you have heard of the Yi. We envy them—how much we would like to shed our bodies when they shrivel to pockmarks and craters. But we cannot.
The Man Dressed in the Moon stepped into the cattle merchant’s body like another man steps into his winter coat, and he walked away warm and snug in this new face. And as the Yi are perverse, it amused him to drive the merchant’s cart out of the city of Shadukiam with a dress as bright as the last moon of winter, a golden ball as lovely and round as the first sun of summer, and an apple, a simple, silly apple. He remembered these things in the bones of the cattle merchant’s legs, in the veins of his fingertips.
His daughters greeted him with kisses and exclamations of delight, for he kept a scarf at his throat and his skin was still more or less whole and pink. The slight gray pallor they ignored as daughters eager for presents will. He gave Ubalda her dress of deep blue and silver, and Ushmila her golden ball, and urged her to run along and play, and he produced with a flourish the silly, simple apple for pretty little Urim, with her red hair like foreign suns and her blue eyes like foreign seas.
“But, Father, this is not an apple,” said the girl, her sweet brow furrowing.
“Ah, but in Shadukiam, this is what is called an apple,” the Man Dressed in the Moon crooned.
