In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente
It was not so far as we had imagined from Al-a-Nur to Shadukiam—it seems, when you rest in the arms of the Dreaming City, that all things outside her walls belong to another universe, impossible to reach by the mere motion of one foot before the other.
The land between the two cities is pleasant.
How we joked and bounded across those well-tilled fields! How we gorged ourselves on wild strawberries and oranges like little flames flashing in the morning fog! Barnabas especially reveled in the open spaces, cavorting ahead of us on his quick, flat feet. “Come on!” he cried. “There is no reason not to enjoy ourselves along the way, even if the task ahead is dreary and dire. The Bough says: Heed not the dark before, behind, and beside; dwell always in the light of the open heart. And the blueberries are so sweet on the road at first light!” Bartholomew was his usual self, staring fretfully at the night stars. Balthazar allowed Barnabas to cheer him, and the two played and wrestled together beside our nightly fires.
How cordially we were received at the sun-dappled wall of Shadukiam! How brightly her diamond turrets glittered against the great wicker dome that arches over the city, alive with a thick latticework of roses trailing over the slick surface, obscenely red dotted with the most delicate of pinks and whites. The guards let us enter without question, and our appointment with the Papess (it was terribly difficult to bite off all our accustomed prefixes, not to call her Black or False or Apostate—but we wrangled our words into a genial array) was arranged smoothly and with great courtesy. Of course, they beamed. The Papess welcomes all her sons and daughters to her bosom, they assured us. She yearns to bring her family together under the Rose Dome and heal the breaches between them, they said. Her only concern is for their souls. They bowed and scraped.
How easy it was to hate her, little sister.
We needed to smuggle no weapons into her vaulted hall; our daggers were borne in plain view, the sharp teeth of our hunter heritage which had known no flesh but that of apples and peaches. It seemed only a moment cavorting through orchards and we were here, ushered into her private antechamber, kneeling before her strange throne, which seemed to be made of the same roses that covered the city dome—yet they were alive, and writhed against her body with lascivious familiarity.
Her face was obscured by her hair as we knelt—she did not greet us or ask us to rise—the long white-gold length of it falling over her cheeks like a nun’s veil. On her wrists were the golden manacles, the chains idly brushing her bared knees; the famous violet gown showed much of her pale body, the low rim of her right breast was bare, patches of her hips and belly gleamed balefully from the ancient fabric.
I wonder, sister, if it was easier because she looked so precisely like the ghoul we had been warned of—if she had appeared without those oft-rumored accoutrements, might we have been moved by that beauty, might we have hesitated? But she was the very image of herself, unmistakable and pure.
“Welcome home, O errant sons,” she said, her voice deep and cloying as a many-storied honeycomb. She did not lift her head. “The house is ever strengthened when all its children return to its hearth. It warms me to receive you.”
“We are honored, Mother.” Barnabas spat the honorific at her, the taste of it surely bitter as lime leaves in his mouth. “Yashna has sent us with missives of peace—”
She raised her eyes suddenly, their black lights flaring like sparks from an ancient anvil. “Yashna has sent you to kill me. To rid your pestilential city of an inconvenient woman. If my attendants are fools leaping to the hope that Al-a-Nur will accept us, do not make the mistake of looking for me to leap with them. I am Ragnhild—I have felt the press of Al-a-Nur’s hand before.”
We exchanged nervous looks—Bartholomew licked his dark jaw. If she was truly mad enough to believe herself the dead Apostate reborn, perhaps death would be a mercy. I tried to sound the depths of her delusion, murmuring, “I know that your predecessor suffered greatly after the war—”
“No, my son. Not she. I. I lay on the rocks and the sun gnawed at my flesh. I pleaded for my life with a useless stump of a tongue. I watched your precious Cveti close up my severed breasts in a silver box. And I listened to the soldiers praise her false name—Ghyfran! Ghyfran! The whore who betrayed her god for power. This body is new, but I am Ragnhild, first of my name, and I am the plague which will burn through the marrow of the Anointed City. The crowds will turn east to Shadukiam to look upon the faces of the gods; they will bow to the Rose Dome in wonder and awe. The ruins of your corrupt Towers will become a curiosity, where children are brought to tell the tale of that decadent and wasteful clutch of nearsighted monks, and how my purifying vengeance brought them low. I will not even be slowed by your lumpish, deformed bodies crunching under my feet—Yashna is a senile, drooling serving wench, and her lapdogs are nothing to me.”
“You must know,” Bartholomew said slowly, “that the purifying vengeance is not yours, but the Caliph’s. He is using you to take the wealth of our city for his own. Why do you think he has installed you so near the treasuries, the granaries, the little men counting diamonds in darkened rooms? What has Shadukiam ever been but a bank vault, a plate for the Caliph to feed from? If you are truly Ragnhild, if you have such power, you must know that the blame lies with the Caliphate and their greed—why not loose your hatred upon he who led you like a little calf to the broad-faced butcher? What offense has Al-a-Nur given, save that we have endured in peace and prosperity, that we have worshipped our gods with piety, that we have built beauty into a barren world? Yet the Caliph has used you like a painted whore, dressing you up in a corpse’s clothes and reaching out with your hand to clutch handfuls of Nurian gold.”
“The Caliph is a dog licking himself on a tin chair,” she snapped. “The first time, I was a fool, and he whispered in my ear that I could be holy, I could wash my skin in crushed sapphires; he kissed my throat and promised to make me the Queen of Heaven. This time I came to Shadukiam with him crawling before me on a silken leash…”
I WAS THE CALIPH’S LOVER FROM THE AGE OF sixteen—the first time I was Ragnhild, and the first Caliph I loved. I went happily to him—he was dark of eye and leg, and smelled of spices at whose names I could not be gin to guess. He loved that my skin showed bruises so prettily, he loved that my hair was the color of wealth. And one evening, when his war with the Southern Kingdoms had raised a cacophony of metallic death in the desert, he kissed the mole on my calf and asked me if I would like to be a god.
I was a little fool. Anything my Caliph offered me, I took with grateful trembling and adulation. He stroked my lips and said that he required the gold of Al-a-Nur to continue the war, and that their succession was in doubt. He would put a cloak of fur and shining bronze on my shoulders and a diadem on my head. He promised me a city—me, who had spent my childhood learning to breed goats on a wretched patch of scrub-brush! He promised me the diamond turrets of Shadukiam, if I would call myself Papess and take the holiness of the Dreaming City for my own.
I understood nothing of politics, but I cherished every rich meal and soft dress. I was carried on a litter overland to my new home, and my name was sung by a hundred castrati as I entered under the Dome of Roses, the sun filtering pink and flame-red through those petals. What could Al-a-Nur have to compare with the beauty I saw that first day? I was closed into a house grander than a Palace, and took my vows dizzy with sweet, black wine. I made my mark on requisitions to be filled by the Caliph’s men at Al-a-Nur, on conscriptions and taxations—my hands ached every night. I knew nothing of the city whose riches I was allocating, or whether the requests were acknowledged; I simply knew the days of rustling paper and the nights when the Caliph would return from the capital and press his face into my neck.
Until the day I was told that there was another Papess, that she had made some great sacrifice for the Twelve Towers—little did I know that she had damned herself for a hat and a sword. She had called me Apostate, they said. She had called me the Black Papess and led even
But the Caliph had gone—his little gambit had failed. He could not beat back the new Ghyfran’s army and continue to hold the desert line. He had abandoned me in my filigreed Palace with only the piles of my ignored proclamations to guard me. I do not now believe he was ever serious about obtaining the Papacy—he was not a serious man. I was a bauble, no more than expendable. If I could hold my chair, so be it; if I lost it, the cost to the throne was less than that of a modest feast.
I cowered in my antechamber, ill with terror, rocking back and forth while my hair fell out in my hands. Every creak of the floor seized my heart in its fist and wrenched cries from my lips. I did not eat; I slept clutching a knife. I fancied that I could hear the ivory trumpets of the Nurian horde each day at dawn, and before my eyes at nightfall was the unchangeable image of their slavering faces—everyone knew that strange beasts lived in the Anointed City, and their grotesqueries floated through my dreams, leaving furrows in my flesh.
When I had been told that the army, the Draghi Celesti—words I could barely pronounce—were encamped but a day’s march from the city gates, a boy came to me. He found me quivering behind the dais, and stroked my hair as though I was his lost daughter, yet he was no more than a child, ruddy-faced and ruddy-haired.
“What if I told you,” he crooned, “that you could survive this?”
I stared like a wounded fawn at his pink cheeks. “Surely you don’t mean to be my protector, do you? You’re no more than an oversized housecat! The Papess will kill me and bathe in my blood. It’s what they do, you know.” The boy frowned.
“Well, perhaps ?survive’ was hyperbole. But I am not exactly what I appear. Bodies, you see, are as cheap as daffodils in a spring market. This boy died of a fever not more than a week past—and I enjoy being a child. My name is Marsili. I traffic in the dead, in vacant flesh. I cannot technically save you from what the turncoat Papess will commit upon your pretty limbs, but I can keep your spirit safe until the world’s wheel turns again and you might have a chance for vengeance. Or to live a nameless life among goats, if that is your preference. Do I hear a yes or a no?”
His green eyes seemed to wriggle into me like twin serpents seeking out their mother’s cool skin. “You would do this for me?” I gasped.
“Well, not without payment, of course! This is Shadukiam, the counting house festooned with weeds! What cannot be bought here, what cannot be sold for a handful of copper and silver, a palm piled with blue gems, what cannot be had if the having is worth the cost? Every divinity and perversion is hung up with leather straps in our markets like dead geese in winter, the toes of those myriad desires pointing heavenwards, washed in haggling shouts, desperate cries! This place has always been my home; there is nothing I require that it cannot provide—every day a sweet-faced youth dies for the love of a rich girl, or starves, having gambled his few coins on a footrace! And when they have gone, the beautiful bodies are mine to wear like new-pressed shirts. What I ask of you is so small compared to the magic I can perform. There has never been a greater practitioner of the dead arts than I.”
My curiosity wrestled with my fear. “How did you come by this power? Not even the priests of the Dead in Al-a-Nur know such a spell.”
He looked at me strangely, stroking with one slim hand a beard he did not have. And then, he began to speak, as the city burned around us.
WHEN I WAS BORN, I WAS NO LARGER THAN A farmer’s plough-splayed thumb.
My mother was bitterly disappointed—she and my father had waited so long for a son, and yet she had finally given birth to nothing more than a freak. My noble parents sought to sell me to every passing circus—but the elephants stampeded and the lions took sick with palsy whenever they brought my miniature cradle near. Gypsies made the sign of the evil eye and placed small charms on our threshold in the night to ward against devils. Neither Towers nor Temples would take me—what kind of cleric would I make, who could never hope to grip a quill? I could not tillland; I could not sell goods.
My father began to believe that I was not only deformed, but a demon.
Every day they went into the market and offered me to anyone who would spare a coin for my wretched little body. My mother would not nurse me. She fed me on scraps of chewed meat and pauper’s gruel. She suggested to passersby that I might be used for snake-training, to spy on relations, or as an exotic fish-bait. As for myself, I was shrunken and misshapen, but my mind was sharp and fiery as blacksmith’s tongs, and I could speak perfectly well by the time I was three days old. Before I reached a full week I also spoke the dialect of the gypsies. Before a month there was hardly a word in that market I did not understand. But I held my tongue against the roof of my mouth and let no word escape—if my mother knew, it would only drive up her price, and I wished her no profit.
Finally, when I was twenty weeks of age and had not grown at all, a buyer appeared. 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 I had heard whispered by Sun-and-Moon Nurians come to buy glass for their strange sky-spying tools: gray and pockmarked, full of secret craters, frigid peaks, and blasted expanses. His eyes had no color in them save for a pinpoint pupillike a spindle’s wound—the rest was pure, milky white. He passed three solid gold pieces over my mother’s palm, and she shuddered in revulsion at his touch when the money changed hands. She handed me over eagerly, examining the coins like a fat pig snuffling at its supper slop. From then on I belonged to the Man Dressed in the Moon, and my mother, no doubt, got a fine dun cow or pair of oxen out of the bargain.
The Man Dressed in the Moon held me gently in his hand as we navigated the market towards his house. His skin was cool and dry; it smelled of leather and gardenias. When we reached his doorstep, I noted that the house was colored exactly as his clothes were: gray and blistered with depressions, as if some celestial grapeshot had been fired at the façade. The door was no more than a blasted hole covered in oilcloth, and there were other smells blowing through it as we passed through, a whisper of ice and withered flesh.
The Man Dressed in the Moon set me upon a smooth tabletop in his study and peered at my tiny eyes.
“Well, young man,” he said, his voice rolling like boulders down a lunar cliffside, “I know you can speak, so let us dispense with the coy little game where I pretend I do not know your worth, and you pretend that you are not glad to be rid of your family.”
I shrugged amiably.
“I do not find it useful to have a homunculus about the house—I manage to keep it clean enough, and I do not have troublesome relations to spy upon, lest they make off with my wealth. But I do find your stature valuable—it is new, I have not seen such a thing before. Bodies are a specialty of mine. How would you like to get out of yours?”
I looked down at my hands, no bigger than acorns, my delicate fairy-feet, my tiny body which would never be able to walk through a street without danger of being gobbled up by a passing sparrow. “Such a thing cannot be, sir, much as I might wish it could.”
For the first time the Man Dressed in the Moon smiled, and his face opened up like a pomegranate cracking. “On the contrary, my diminutive friend. And call me Father. I think that’s best, considering, don’t you?”
He gathered me into his cool, colorless palm again, and together we passed through a thick door and down a long, winding staircase that doubled over and back upon itself, so that it seemed to ascend and descend at the same time. I could not tell where we were, except that the walls became rocky and damp, and I had the sense of being very deep underground. Finally, we emerged into a room filled with people of all shapes,
The Man Dressed in the Moon gestured expansively at his collection. “Choose! Every possible combination of features is represented here—will you have breasts or a beard? Will you have the dark skin of an Eastern Prince? Will you have a child’s slender arms? All you must do is give up that wretched little form and I will dress you in a new one, sewn up as tightly as a bride’s bodice! It is no more effort to me than shifting a lamp from one table to another. We must simply kill you, snuff out your little breath, and all will be well. Let me tell you how it is done…”
MY PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS HAD RIGHTS OVER THE bodies of humans. We were born when the first rays of Mother Moon glided over the surface of the first ocean’s face. From the primal water the Yi rose, and we suckled at the rim of the Moon, which in those days touched the sea and churned the salt waves beneath.
Moon taught us how to die. We had to learn it by rote and practice—it is not an easy thing for us. The others, the sun-children, die so naturally and gracefully; for us it is like solving a difficult equation without pen or paper.