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My eyes drooped and my shoulders fell. I touched my sisters’ bellies with affection and sorrow. “And I am not to go with you.”
“Pangiota.” Legiota’s eyes softened and creased their corners, trying to make her words as gentle as she could. “You are the least of us. Never has the Serpent-Star seen you or touched you; she only knows of you as our sister. You only speak, and she does not care for human speech. For the Sorella, you are vital; for the Serpent, you do not exist. And the Stars have determined that the Sorella should be broken.”
These words hit me like a bellow of hot wind—but I knew them to be true. I was nothing, only a mouthpiece, a mute pipe into which my sisters’ breath flowed. I bent my head and nodded, knowing how small I was in their presence. Magiota threw her arms around my waist and pressed her fluttering ears to my lips. It was an intimacy we three rarely shared, the touch of lash to lip and lobe.
“We will go; we love our god as w
e love you. But we have decided together that we cannot let the Sorella pass from the world. We have sat vigil in this cave, searching out a path which would allow us to stay with you, to stay Sorella, and to birth another three which will carry on our memory past the death of the Star. No caravan should be left blind and deaf, mute and helpless. And we have found a way.” Magiota smiled and drew a small knife from her skirts, a curving silver blade with a handle of bone.
“What has been ours will be yours, Pangiota. We will cut out our eyes and ears and give them to you to swallow. The power will be passed to you, all the Sorella in one body. And you will leave the caravan, you will leave the horses whose smell you know like your own, and go into a city covered in a dome of roses, and there you will wait for the beast to cry out to you. I have seen this already; I have seen you walking under white petals.” Legiota’s eyes gleamed from her navel like green torches in the dark.
“You will swallow the child of the beast as you will swallow our flesh, and bear the creature within you like your own daughter. In this way two races will be saved, and the three of us will be always together, beyond the death of the Star. We will go into seclusion, and you will go into the wicked city, and give birth to us over again.” Magiota stroked her ears quietly.
“I do not understand,” I cried, unwilling to devour my own sisters, terrified of their strange words.
“Of course not, of course not, but you will. Prophecy is such a difficult thing, but we know that there is no other way to preserve the Sorella, and we will not refuse the call of the Serpent.”
Oh, how I wept while I watched them! Naked as animals, they performed this surgery before my eyes: Magiota seized the knife and plunged it into her belly—it entered her with the sickening slick sound of a finger passed through running water—and slowly cut her sacred ears from her stomach, sweating and crying out quietly as she worked. She tried to keep her smile, so as not to frighten me, but I could not bear the sight; I retched in a corner of the cave while her whimpering sounded in my own ears. Legiota carved out her eyes next, never allowing herself to moan, but her breath was ragged as a torn dress, and her hands when I turned back to them were shiny and wet with blood.
They placed the lumps of pitiful flesh in front of me like servants laying out an exquisite cake for their lady. Both still bled, yet they smiled and smiled, unbraiding my hair with almost maternal care, just as they used to do when we were girls together. They pulled the long sheaves of hair aside and put their arms around me, cradling my body with their own and stroking my face with sticky red hands, urging me to swallow them, to close my eyes and do it before the organs cooled and died. I screamed and screamed in their arms, my voice echoing in the rocky chamber until it seemed as though we were surrounded by a chorus of shrieking ghosts. They hushed me and held me close, and finally through my screams I seized the bloody clumps of my sisters and pressed them into my mouth, gagging, swallowing, gagging again. I forced it down my belly-throat, and my tears mingled with their blood until all I could taste was salt.
It was quiet afterwards.
I lay on the cool rock and they lay over me, blood drying on our skin like paint. We lay like lovers, tangled together in pain and sorrow. Legiota pushed the matted hair from my ear and said:
“Now we will never leave you; you are all of us, and you will go on. We will leave the world; you will go into its steaming heart. But remember that you are always Sorella. It is your duty to guide the caravan, the ramshackle train of kindred that crawls over the face of the earth, scrabbling at the dirt for fruit, scrabbling at the skies for revelation. When the beast has gone from the city and you have done your duty by her, you must be Sorella for all the caravans, and perform our duty for them. They will come to you, and you must see for them, and hear for them, and speak for them. Cut your hair when you go into the city, wear their threads and not your own, but when you have finished your maternity, when you are ready, braid it again into our holy dress. We will be with you, inside you, and we will love you for all the days of this body.”
With these words, Legiota and Magiota laid their heads on my breasts like daughters and died, their spirits, their light, rising like steam to join the Serpent in seclusion.
I wept alone in the dark.
GIOTA’S EYES WERE DRY AND DULL.
“By the time I reached the diamond turrets of Shadukiam, I could hear their voices in me; I could hear the Stars singing in their choirs and I could see the path stretching out before me like a golden ribbon. I was not Pangiota any longer; I was only Giota, all of us and none of us. It is difficult to keep it straight—sometimes I seem to speak to them, sometimes to myself, sometimes to the dead air. I have done my duty by the beast, by the Griffin, and now I must do my duty by my sisters, I must be the Sorella of Shadukiam, the Anchorite, the Oracle.”
I stared dumbfounded at her, humbled by the expanse of what I had not guessed about her. “But why must you chain yourself to the wall? You can be an oracle anywhere; there are towers full of them! You could stay in my nest and the folk of the city could come out to you.”
Giota looked at me with wild eyes, vulnerable as a lamb beneath a wolf’s teeth. Though I knew her mouth was free and wide in her belly, the featureless skin where it should have been made it seem as though she was gagged with some terrible rope.
“I am so frightened, Quri. If I do not do this thing now I will not stay. I will go with you and I will abandon my sisters. All my life I prayed to have their power, and I am so frightened of it now. Do not begrudge me this: It is who I am; just as you will one day have your gold and your eggs to look after, I must look after them.” She raised her hand to stroke my face—such a small hand!—and then lowered it to peeling off her dress. “Help me, my daughter. Help me braid my hair again.”
I lowered my head to those long, coarse strands, their familiar smell overwhelming me, and lifted one bundle of hair over another with my beak, slowly, clumsily, weaving her habit down to her ankles. My tears fell onto the strange fabric, and left great golden stains on the braids.
“Mother”—and with the word a swollen river burst in my heart—“will I truly have gold of my own and eggs to tend? I cannot really believe it; I cannot believe that the race of Griffins will go on. If you are an oracle now, if you are the Anchorite, then you must tell me the truth; you cannot reassure me with lies.”
“Quri, your brother lives, and while he does, you have a duty to perform as much as I do. He will quicken your eggs, and you will have three chicks to warm with the fur of your haunches. Go, return to the Red Mountain, and find him.”
With this Giota clamped her chains around her wrists and took her place at the wall. I left her, though my bones mourned, and turned to the plains of Nuru, to find my brother’s blue plumage again and obey my mother, as good children do.
In the Garden
IT WAS STILL DARK. THE SKY HUNG HEAVY ABOVE THEM LIKE A NOMAD’S tent, lanterned with stars and buffeted by quiet winds. The boy’s head lay in the girl’s lap—he had at first thought himself brave to lie thus, but she seemed to welcome it, and tousled his hair with a nervous hand.
“I’ll be clever tonight,” he whispered, “and I will not be caught.”
The girl laughed like rain trickling through palm leaves.
“I will! I will not let your tale keep me until light breaks the sky like a pitcher! I will leave now, while the stars are still bright, and return to the blacksmith. Then Dinarzad will know nothing, and I will be able to come all the earlier tomorrow!”
