In the Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente
Agrafena took up her bows and began to play a slow, gliding lullaby, all blue and silver and kind, and she did not cry at all, not at all. The Ajans rushed forward to put their hands to Simeon, to whisper and stroke him and press their cheeks to his back. I went to him, too, and put my palms, split by flowing fire, to the inside of his thumb.
“Let me go,” I whispered, and his fingers parted for me to pass through.
On the other side of the wall I could see the army with their proud plumes, their raven and their swan helmets, their horses with chests belted and bolted in bronze, their shields with a thousand seals and crests that I would never remember. I could see Simeon’s brass eyes lonely and afraid, trying not to weep louder than he already did. Kohinoor stood some ways off from me, astride a great salamander. We have little enough choices in mounts, and salamanders are sweet as kittens, really. They do not mind the smoke, and bear their saddles with grace. His beady eyes flicked between his mistress and me, and his skin glimmered like an oil slick. Beside her were all the others, Khaamil the Hearth-King, his one eye glinting, and beside him the Kindling-King and the Tinder-Queen with her blazing yellow face, and the King of Flint and Steel with his sparks snapping in the wind. Behind them, I saw the wispy white smoke of the Khaighal, anticipating punishments before the day was done. Catapults lazily flopped forward and back, empty. They were angry; it was not difficult to see, though a Djinn looks often angry, even when she is asleep. It seemed wise not to let them begin the lecture, or the execution, and so I spoke before she could; I spoke standing in a wreckage of shattered terra-cotta, splattered in oily, viscous stuff which burned like a Queen’s hair.
“I have it,” I cried, and held up the box in my orange-lined hand.
Kohinoor goggled. “What? How can you have it? The Ajans would not give it up!”
“The Ajans never knew where it was, you old fireplace. But I have it, and I will give it to you if you do not hurt the poor wall further, and go home like a cat who has played all night, and now hears the breakfast bell ring.”
The Ash-Queen’s eyes narrowed to gray and smoky slits. “Give it to me, and we shall see.”
I had not been Queen long enough to be cleverer than she was. She drove her salamander forward, her hair streaming behind her like burning trees. I put the red, gleaming box into her hands; she snatched it away and turned her back to the others, as if to keep it for her own, to look first into it, and share the honor with no one.
She did not howl with rage, or scream curses on my name, or strike me with her black fists. She did not even look at me.
“Where is she?” she said quietly.
“She is gone. She is home. She is beyond you, or Lem, or Kashkash, or any snarling tiger. She is safe.”
Kohinoor shook her head. “How could you?” she half-sobbed, hurt stitching her voice like a dress.
THE
ASH-QUEEN’S
TALE
DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MUST HAVE TO BECOME the Ash-Queen? As you have your hair, and Khaamil has his low and lovely voice, harmonious as two nightingales singing together?
Nothing.
You must have no fire at all in you. You must have no spark, no breath of scarlet, not the slightest shuddering sigh of embers. You must be cold, and gray, and hollow. And so I was. I blew on my hands endlessly, hoping for light, hoping for warmth. I did not want to be Queen, I wanted to flame. I shivered always, I was thin, an orphan, a burnt, discarded branch.
Do you know that without fire you cannot wish? I doubt you have even thought of it. It is true. I wished so hard when I was a child, I wished for everything I could think of—but most often I wished for fire. Eventually, in my desperation, I wished without letting a Khaigha scribe it in his book: I wished for a bird to love, to hold in my hand, with a blue head and wings of ice. I wished for the briefest life of all Djinn. I wished for a mother, a real mother, with fire in her eyes.
But still I was alone and scrabbling in the ash while other children blazed on the boulevard of beryl like ridiculous, idiotic fireflies. Someone noticed the smudge of black against the carnelian wall and I was made Queen before I was two years old. There was no competition—no Djinn had been born dead of flame in years. I sat alone in my Alcazar, inching closer to the fire, trying to catch a sleeve aflame.
Khaamil was as newly crowned as I. He was entirely perplexed as to what to do with the vast hearth that was the central hall of his Palace, and I tried to help him—those born to fire are so often useless with it. I helped him to keep it clear of ash, to keep it banked and ruddy, to keep the black streaks off his brass pillars. He told me wild stories about his wishing exploits: He loved a woman in the north with horse-hooves, and blessed her with an unfailing orchard of limes; he loathed a man who stole three of the green fruits and cursed him with never-ending hunger. I flushed black with jealousy; he mocked me, mocked my lack. He told me tales about the wind-Djinns and the water-Djinns—and I had no idea what he meant.
“Who raised you, girl? Djinn that come from Star-burned winds, Djinn that steamed up from Star-scalded oceans. We all have our tribe, everyone knows that, and now that we’ve the libraries to ourselves, we can discover just exactly who is who—imagine! I could know the very name of the wind that bore my grandfathers!”
“No one raised me,” I mumbled. “My mother burned out bearing me. My father wished himself after her.”
Khaamil started. “That’s not approved!”
I smiled wryly. “What can they do to him?”
“Well, let’s find out who you are, then! Where you come from! Genealogy is such a lot of fun.”
I looked at him dumbly, rather taken aback at the idea that poring through a lot of old books with more dust than pages could be fun. But then, it probably was, for them. The excitement of knowing that at any moment, a stray lock of hair could ignite the whole library. But the pages would stay cold and pulpy beneath my fingers, and I would smudge them black. I followed him into the vaults of my Alcazar, for where else would we keep such fragile records but in the cold and the black, in the halls of my house? We are obsessive about records—how can we be otherwise? We live such a brief time, and it is so easy to forget.
The library was drafty; its ceilings were high as the topmost branches of a sandalwood tree. The rafters were blasted black with forgotten fires, with the handprints of the Djinn who had once hollowed out this place, when Kash was made of dirt and daub, instead of carnelian and brass. Those scorch-marks mocked me, howled their derision in the high, screeching voices of white-eyed rats. There were no shelves, only iron grates which might have held an evening’s fire, but instead held books, old and dead. The Djinn do not write fanciful tales or epic poems of valor and sacrifice—what glory is it when one flame consumes another? No more than that which graces any pile of wood and scrap of spark. Kashkash forbade us to write of any exploits but his, and the poets tired quickly of this. Thus our books are few, and precious. I ran my fingers over them, and tried to ignore the insult of the rafters. The pages were fine as ash, made from the skin of salamanders, and the words were charcoal.
Khaamil hovered over me as I read, played with my sleeve. I curled a tendril of smoky hair behind my ear, and looked backward through the books, back and back, parents and grandparents, with names I could hardly pronounce, while Khaamil exclaimed in delight if he saw a Djinn that connected us, that made us cousins a hundred times removed. As I pored into older books, sewn together from ash and soot, I saw my ancestors shrink, become drier, burn hotter. I saw them wither back into the grass they had been, I saw them blow seed and wave in a wheat-scented wind. And I saw a Star fall, with broken feet, and I saw her stumble weeping through a field, and I saw shadows fly up from her footsteps.
Khaamil’s eyes widened. Tears trickled down my face—mute salt water, not fire, not flame. I cannot even cry like a Djinn.
“But that’s Kashkash’s book, it’s his line. You’re descended from the same scald, the same Star. I think that makes him—”
I slammed the book closed. I did not want to know. I did not ask to know. And in the days to come Khaamil learned not to ask me about it. I may lack flame, but I can smother the fire of any of them in ash. Only once did he put his hand to my hair and tell me he had fire for both of us, that he would make me burn. I put my hand into his smoke, and he felt my cold, he felt the softness of ash falling on his heart, and shuddered, and did not suggest it again.
But as I drifted through my own halls, as my pillars grew gray with ash, I could not forget the Grass-Star, how sad she had seemed in the beautiful illuminations, rimmed in fire on the page, her eyes flaming tears, real tears of naphtha and boil, how her poor, broken feet had bled on the grass. Did I come from the blood, or the tears? Did I come from her shattered stumps? Or did I come later, when that man had wrung her out, and she was dark as I—did she touch some insignificant blade of grass with her last pathetic press of light, and did some sickly, flameless shadow issue, and was this my grandmother? In my dreams, the Grass-Star spat at her husband, and her saliva rolled itself into a pale and bloodless baby who cried for her, though she did not hear, and that sodden child was I. When I did not dream, I searched the books of the gratings and the blasted vaults for her—where might she lie now, a deathless Star at the core of the world?
Khaamil was worried about me. His flames make him soft. While I slept on the finger-scalded floors of the vaults, and blind, gray-clawed doves pecked at my hair, he hovered like a grandmother, twisting his beard in his hands.
“Kohinoor,” he said one night when I knelt by a grate whose claw-feet had rusted red as heart’s fire, “let me help.” He swallowed, his flame-eyes wide and dear. “Let me wish for you, and I will take what punishment the Khaighal can find in their white tails.” He took my hands and I looked up into his face, bright and eager as a young salamander in his first saddle.
“I just want to know her, Khaamil. She ought to be here, in Kash, with her children, seated on a cushion of silk like blue fire, hearing their voices sing new songs, songs which make the ears glow. She ought to be piled with red jewels, and red fruits, and held to the bosom of so many Djinn who would love her. She would put her hands to me and I would burn, I would have her silver fire licking at my ribs, and we would sing together of the dark at the beginning of the world.”
My eyes ran with hideous salt tears, wet and colorless and useless. Khaamil put his painted palms together and raised his eyes to the rafters. The rats squealed and ran—and on a golden grating we had never seen before was a book of such colors that in that blackened place it seemed a peacock among sparrows. It was bound in lambskin and malachite, and its pages were written in clam-ink—the story of a carnelian box, and a crocus-farmer who kept it in her family, down and down the years. But flowers have poor memories, and the book only knew that the box had passed out of its home country, and into some lowly, unkempt city at the bottom of the world whose towers were red and hideous, and who did not deserve her.
The next day the Khaighal took Khaamil’s eye.
THE TALE OF THE
CAGE OF IVORY
AND THE
CAGE OF IRON,
CONTINUED
KOHINOOR GLARED AT ME OVER THE TOP OF HER salamander’s wide, mottled head. “The Ajans never once answered me. The Duke did not respond to a single missive. When the Khaighal investigated, they discovered the degenerate state of the city, and determined that Kashkash would not have let such a rich corpse lie in the desert, picked over by flies. Though the knowledge came through Khaamil’s well-meant treason, they agreed that we should be allowed to invade. I would find her. I would touch her.” The Ash-Queen’s voice deepened into a canine snarl. “And then the old Queen died, and an ignorant gutter-coal took her place, who could care no more for history than a flame cares for a match.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” I said. “She is gone.”
“She was mine,” Kohinoor whispered, her gray eyes pleading. “How could you take her from me?”
“She wasn’t your mother. Or mine. It was an accident, the Djinn that came from her steps, just an accident. You had no right to her.”
“Neither did you!”
I hung my head, made myself as humble in her sight as I could. “Let us go home, Kohinoor. Let us go back to our Alcazars and drink coalwine and sing new songs. Songs of Ajanabh and Stars and the hearts of tigers.”
She shook her hair back, and her salamander stamped its dry feet. “This is her city. I will take it, and I will live in her footsteps, held in these red stones as she was held, and I will climb every tower to the sky until I find where you have hidden her, until I can look her in the eye, until I can have my fire, and she her children.”
I straightened, and put my hands on my silver hip-baskets. “This ignorant gutter-coal thinks you will not.”
“Have you spent so long within that giant’s fat knuckles that you have gone mad? This is the decision of the Kings, the Queens, and the Khaighal, and you can do nothing.”
I tried to smile, as I imagined a Queen in full possession of herself would. I imagine it came out a sickly snarl, a kitten hissing at a lion. But I could not let the Ajans burn. I could not.
“I can make a wish,” I said.
The Khaighal roared. “You may not! It is not permitted! Nothing you could wish is in our books! Kashkash would never wish for defeat; he would never wish to lose a battle, to lose a city! We will shrivel your tongue in your mouth before you can utter a single word!”
“But if I could,” I said sharply, holding up my hands, their orange and black flaring in the faces of the crimson Khaighal salamanders, “if I could wish for a thing permitted, if I could wish for something that Kashkash himself would have drawn from his beard with such glee that the heavens would flame in answer, would you let my tongue rest in my mouth, would you let my wish disturb the air?”
“You cannot wish for the salvation of this place,” they said. “Nothing in your wish can touch our will.”
“Nevertheless?”
“If it is in our books, it is permitted. This is the law of the Khaighal. We are accountants, not senators.”
Then I did smile; I could smile. My teeth flared white-hot and I pressed my palms together. “My wish is the simplest thing there is, something Kashkash wished for a man in a little hut so long ago that the trees who witnessed it are dust. I wish”—my smile broadened—“for my wife.”
They looked puzzled; their pale beards flushed blue and yellow. Kohinoor rolled her ashen eyes. Khaamil raised his mangled eyebrow. And there was a peculiar sound in the supply train, a grinding, rumbling, inexorable sound, like the wheels of a catapult grinding against the earth. The salamanders stomped nervously, and Kohinoor struggled with her reins.
When they came, I had never seen anything more radiant. The sun caught their brows, their eyes, their shoulders as they rounded the front lines, all my wives, alive and walking to me, men and women of stone: emerald and ruby and turquoise, tourmaline and hematite and granite, garnet and topaz and jasper, diamond and brass, silver and quartz, copper and malachite, and carnelian, so many red carnelian faces glittering in the morning. They came to me one by one and kissed my cheeks, and by the time the fiftieth of them came, and the hundredth, and more and more, I was weeping, my cheeks wet with flame. They kissed me and they took their places along the wall as I asked them to, a fabulous skirt for Simeon, for his poor, bleeding chest, for his poor city.
“The simplest thing there is,” I said. “They will not let you in—after all, a wife’s love is absolute, eternal, untouchable as breath. Come near them and they will smother your fires in stone.”
Kohinoor looked at me, her expression curiously like a child’s: hurt, uncomprehending.
“She was my mother. I only wanted to touch her
“So are we all, sister.” The hands of my wives tightened on mine.
I would like to say the Djinn dispersed before the day was out, that the army of Kings and Queens was sent to their well-curtained homes and their many-pronged crowns. But it was weeks before they determined that my wives would not move, that the Khaighal would find no precedent for repeal. They went slowly; they went cursing. And on the day when the fields of Ajanabh were empty of all and dry, Simeon opened his hands entirely, and my jeweled wives were let inside, hesitant as infants, reaching for the folk of the Carnival, to touch them and know their names. I let them go; I let them wander. They were not truly mine. They clung to me at first as kits will cling to a vixen, but soon enough they took names, and tried their first, stumbling dances, and asked after lovely fauns and chorus boys they had seen.