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THE TALE
OF THE WASTE,
CONCLUDED
“I SNARLED AND LEAPT AND TRIED TO BITE them, but I am only a cat, and I was not raised to hunt, only to walk with her in the waste.” Rend raised a paw over her eyes. “They chained me to her, so that my thrashing would only harm my mistress, and left us battered against the white casket. They took her tongue gingerly, in gloved hands, to see if it could be boiled into medicine. After a long while, she stirred as if dreaming, and I pulled her from the city. She is dead; she did not bleed. I am as near to dead as makes no difference among leopards; I did not bleed. The silver chain suits us, we find. We are bound, she and I, and now we go home, to Ajanabh, where there are red spices and no cures, where she may lie down again in the earth and rest, and I may mourn my mother. When she has gone to stone entirely, I shall carry her on my back into the city, and place her before the House of Red Spices, and sparrows shall live in her hair, and I shall live at her feet.”
Ruin wept, and in her tears tiny specks of flesh washed away. Rend looked at her with huge black eyes full of feline grief.
The Djinn looked at the black-veiled woman as well, her red eyes dim with despair.
“I cannot give you back your tongue,” Scald said slowly, her hair clearing from her flaming face, “but I could heal you.” She cleared her burning throat. “Well, I could try. My wishing days are done, the Khaighal saw to that. But if you would free me, I could try.”
“How could we open such a cage?” the leopard said.
“I suspect that if your mistress were to touch the bars, they would turn to stone, and could be as easily broken as any other stone.”
“And what would you do, if we were to set you free?” The leopard clawed the ground uncertainly.
Scald looked into the east, across the cracked earth with its ruined gold and scurrying mice. “Kohinoor was right. I am old now, nearly fourteen. I have not long left. I would go home, to Ajanabh, and converse with my friend spider, and dance with the Sirens, and burn in Lantern’s tail, and let my hand fall once or twice on Solace’s hair. I would watch the Carnival, and listen to Agrafena every morning as the sun graces her bows. I would see how my wives had got on. I would tell Hour such a story, such a story!” The Djinn-Queen closed her fire-rimmed eyes. “I would swim in the Vareni, and hear the bells ring out, and when all was done I would put my cheek to Simeon’s fingers, and rest.”
Tears flooding her rheumy eyes, Ruin raised her arms and threw back her black cowl. Beneath it was sparse hair and skin like shavings of bone. Her skull showed through black strands, and her cheeks were hollow, translucent. She was made of glass, glass which was fainting back into sand. Her mouth was dry and white and chapped, and though she opened it, no sound came. She reached out with both hands toward the cage, and as her fingers grazed the Djinn-bones, the bone-bars flushed red and porous, Basilisk-bright. Wordless laughter erupted from Ruin’s broken mouth, and it mingled with her wrenching cries. The cage shivered red, at the end of all things, as red as Ruin’s house, her shoes, her father. And as she released the bars, Scald put her incandescent palms to them, and they sloughed to molten white. The Djinn emerged, her smoke-hair spreading free around her, with no baskets to contain it, like spilled water.
“What will you do to her?” whispered the cat nervously, inching close to her mistress.
“My darling cat.” The Djinn smiled. “I shall breathe into her, and bring her to life. There is no stone that cannot be rendered like the fat of a cow in fire—if the fire is hot enough.”
“Will it hurt her?” Rend’s spotted, gold-furred head lolled anxiously on the earth.
“Very much.”
Scald drew a long breath, and the desert seemed to shimmer into her. Her chest cracked, and beneath the black skin embers flushed bright as two suns, then in her arms, and in her cheeks, and how she blazed, then, her face puffed and ready, her breath held, her painted palms phosphorescent. She blew out her breath, and the wind and fire of it was white as a Star at the center of a city, engulfing Ruin in light. Rend cowered and scrabbled away, singeing her tail. Ruin burned, a red candle in the blasted waste, and even after Scald had wheezed and coughed her last flames, the dead girl stood with her arms raised to the sky, her flesh peeling off in blazing strips like the ash that floats from a summer bonfire.
It was hours before she stopped.
Once, in the wasteland between Urim and Ajanabh, three long shadows were cast on the thirsty earth, whose dark cracks forked out in all directions like vines searching for the smallest trickle of water. Three long shadows lay black and sere on that fractured desert. A woman, a Djinn, and a leopard stared at each other over the golden earth, and the woman fell to her knees, her body burned and pink and blistered, but whole. Her hair was burned away, her bald head shone in the last rays of the sun, and she put her living, blood-bright hands to her soft belly and screamed into the ground, screamed, and laughed, and wept.
In the Garden
IT WAS NEARLY DAWN. A GHOSTLY BLUE LIGHT LAY ON THE CHILDREN, stippled with stars. Long shadows lay on the snow, and the fires had gone out in the center of the Garden, and the braziers at the Gate had guttered to smoking embers. The courtiers wandered back into the Palace, full of rhinoceros horn and cinnamon wine, dogs with bells on their collars leaping at their mistresses’ hems. The laces which held the chestnut boughs in the shape of a chapel were loosed, and sprang back with red-barked relief into their accustomed fork-boughed shapes. The wood beyond the Gate was dark and deep, and in it nightingales and starlings sang, pecking in the snow in search of the sun. The lake with its frozen reeds was still, as still as the world becomes before dawn, a hesitant hare testing the ice for thickness with its forepaw.
The boy and the girl sat together, huddled for warmth. The world before dawn is very still, but also very cold, and it seemed as though everything had been conquered by blue, even the girl’s shivering lips.
“That is all,” the boy said. “There is no more.”
The girl opened her eyes, her hair wet with melted snow, her scarlet gown black in the dark. “That was a wonderful story,” she said, a smile opening like a lily on her face.
The boy frowned, his face suddenly grown-up and very serious. “And there will be no others, no more strange and no more wonderful. It is over.”
The g
irl touched his face gently, putting her cold hands on his cheeks. “Do you wish you had never asked me, that day, why my eyes were dark, like the lake before the dawn?”
“No… but I thought… I thought something would happen. There would be lightning and thunder or a terrible pillar of smoke and something dreadful would come out.”
“I don’t know,” the girl said. “I never knew what would happen.”
“Maybe,” the boy whispered eagerly, “nothing will happen. I can come to you every day until I am Sultan, and then you can come to me, in the Palace, and sit at my table without a veil.”
