In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  To show us this, they went to the villages of men, and asked to be taken in, like beggar-women, dressed in rags and poor as empty plates. They were sure they would be welcomed, and we would see that the second litter of the Mare would call us sisters and brothers and even wives, and there would be family between the first and the last. Of course their light still spangled all around them, but who could refuse a beautiful girl who barely owned her own dress no matter how brightly she glowed? Who could refuse seven?

  The first house they went to was the palace of a King—such as palaces were in those days, which is to say the large mud hut on a hill above smaller mud huts. The King sent his men to see to the commotion at his door, and they found there the bone-ragged Manikarnika: Jade and Granite and Opal with their many-colored, speckled skin, Garnet red as blushing, Shale and Iron Ore gleaming silver and bright as water, and little Diamond, small and pale and delicate as the slenderest strand of a spider’s web. They clung together pitifully, and asked to be brought inside the mud-brick walls, to be fed and clothed, to be loved.

  The King’s men shuddered at their strange light, and bolted their wooden gates against them.

  Undeterred, they went next to the cluster of small mud huts and knocked at the door of a poor widow’s house. Surely, her husband dead and her children grown, she would take them in and call them daughters. The old widow opened her hidebound door and saw there the Manikarnika: Jade and Granite and Opal with their smooth, polished arms, Garnet sharp-elbowed, Shale and Iron Ore darkly glinting, and little Diamond, clear as morning. They huddled together mournfully, asking to be let in out of the cold, given soup, given warm arms and soft words.

  The widow shuddered at their strange light and began to weep for all her lost ones, and in her weeping let the hidebound door fall shut against them.

  But they did not give up. They went out beyond the mud huts to the mud-haired people who moved from place to place across the open steppes with wagons and horses and sleds. They went to one of the tents, unremarkable as any of the others, and called out to the young girl who lived there with her new infant. The girl opened the flap of her tent and saw there the Manikarnika: Jade and Granite and Opal cool as wind-smoothed snow, Garnet hot as sun-battered sand, Shale and Iron Ore freezing till their toes were black, and little Diamond, light and sweet as rain. They leaned one against the other, exhausted, and asked to be let in from the wild, covered in fur and given milk.

  The girl laughed and said that she had plenty to spare. The sisters smiled like seven dawns breaking, and triumphant they lay down, curled together with the nomad girl on the floor of a plain tent. And they were happy, and the ground beneath them was only a little darkened with the weight of their light.

  By morning, they were dead.

  IN THE DUNGEON, DUST AND STRAW COVERED THE dank floor and no slanting sliver of light crept in. There was no sound but the soft dripping of water from damp ceiling to damp floor. Scraps of unfamiliar meat and swamp brown water had been pushed under the door—I had heard nothing but my grandmother’s voice. She put a withered hand on my head, stroking the thick hair with a gentleness practiced on dozens of children. I looked up at her cracked lips, her cracked face. In the deep shadow I curled into my grandmother’s lap, trying to spread my meager, ragged dress over her painfully thin legs. She smiled down at me and shrugged off the cloth as though it meant nothing to her, and though her lips were split and spotted with dried blood, her face was lit like a festival lantern. I wished that I could be as brave as she was, that whatever strength she had earned in the cave had been mine, too.

  I handed her the beaten jug of dirty water from near the door, trying to be happy in serving her, as I used to be. But she refused it and with hands broken and bloodied by whoever had dragged her here, she worked at the leather knots of her robe until she could peel the filthy cloth away from her shoulder. The flesh there was mangled and pitted, a long, twisting scar that punctured and poisoned her brown skin. I stared.

  “So that you know what I tell you is true.” She chuckled as she bound up her dress again.

  “I… I didn’t doubt…”

  My grandmother touched my cheek lightly. “No, no, of course you didn’t. You were always a good girl. And so, you see, I have broken my promise. I disobey the Fox, and tell you all these things I was meant to keep secret as a green-eyed baby in a brown-eyed man’s house. But I have never much cared what that old red beast thought. And do you know? Now, the Mare comes to me in my dreams, and I do ride her, I ride her over the blanched steppes, with the sun gold and hot on our backs.”

  She didn’t need to say it—I felt it, deep in my stomach, that the Mare would never come for me, and I would never feel that hide between my calves.

  Grandmother Bent-Bow coughed like an arrow striking a tree. “Forgive me, little Knife, that I haven’t spent this time rocking you in my arms and singing the songs of our mothers. It is too important that you learn what I suffered in the cave; we both know that you will never face those tests. There is no one now to guide you to the cave-mouth, no one to kiss you and call you their best and prettiest goat. There will never be anyone to take you home when it is over, shaking and shivering in rough blankets, no one for you, and no one for the child you are carrying, as tiny within you as a mayfly on the slow river. So instead of a sweet reunion with your old grandmother, you get a lesson, and you had better learn it, and learn it well.”

  My breath caught, knotted like new yarn in my dry throat. I had not even known that my belly had taken a child from the body of my husband before he died. But in that moment I knew she told the truth. I fought to keep still at her side. Shakily, I whispered, “I am listening, Grandmother. I am trying to walk with you and learn your steps.”

  Her wrinkled eyelids slid closed and as she spoke they quivered, as though tiny wolves were leaping beneath her skin.

  THE YOUNG GIRL WOKE HER CAMP SCREAMING. MEN came running—they opened her tent to find her huddled against her baby, sobbing, covered in light.

  Light dripped from her hair, down the bridge of her nose, from the lobes of her ears. It trickled into her mouth, splashed her child’s forehead, pooled sickly between her breasts. Pale and bright as the whites of a maiden’s eyes, it drenched the front of her hide-dress—it spattered the walls and soaked the earthen floor of the tent into glowing, churning mud.

  Around her lay seven stone bodies, and they did not glow, or shimmer, or gleam. Jade and Granite and Opal, dark and hollow as old trees, Garnet leeched and empty, Shale and Iron Ore pale as paper, and Diamond, little Diamond, nothing left of her but a cicada shell, crystalline, clear, and nothing left within her, not even dead bone.

  They had come, the girl wept, in the night. The King’s men who had known what had come begging at their door, known and called it strange and wicked. They had held her arms behind her while they cut open the pitiful sisters, who did not even cry out while the light was let out of them—and it sprayed from them like blood, she cried, and she tasted it as it spurted warm over her face, and it tasted of sweet water and clover. They opened the throats of the Stars and when they left, she tried to hold her hands against the wounds, but there were too many and she was not strong enough, and who among them knew how to heal a thing that is drowning in its own light which is blood which is light?

  The tribe was afraid and uncertain of what to do, but they washed the light from the poor girl, and took the seven stone bodies out into a great field waving with poppies, and gave them what funeral rites they knew.

  And so it was that the Stars learned that we could die, the biggest thing we could do, and those who were left vanished from the world, into the crevices and secret places of the earth, terrified as rabbits.

  It was not long after that that the girl and her black-eyed baby looked into the sky through the gaps in the still-wet ceiling of her tent and saw new stars there—seven of them, clinging together like sisters.

  LIULFR THE WOLF- STAR HAD NOT MOVED ONE OF her golden muscles while she
spoke. Her voice had not lifted up nor dipped down. She just stared straight ahead.

  “We do not know where they go, the ones that die. Where we go. Their bodies stay here and new stars peek out of the sky, but where are they?”

  What should I have said to comfort her?

  “That girl, that poor nomad girl, had been nearly drowned in light, the light of seven bodies. She had choked on it and her baby had sputtered in it—no other thing had ever known so much. Her children and her children’s children were nearly mad with it, and as time went on, they began to seek us out, though each child had less and less of the Manikarnika’s sheen on them. They came and they came, predictable as tides, and now you come—granddaughter dangling at the end of so many granddaughters, one after the other like a chain of folk passing a bucket of water between them. A little more spills out whenever it changes hands.” She shook her great, shaggy head. “We don’t mind anymore. It is almost like having our cousins back.”

  The polished quartz wall in which I had first seen my wolf-self slowly melted into nothing, revealing a long tunnel into the black earth. She sighed with exhausted resignation and nudged me gently with her snout like a mother showing her pup the way to fresh water. The mingled light of our fur disappeared into the wall.

  Liulfr trotted silently ahead of me, her paws steady and sure. She flickered like a brass lamp. The tunnel was longer than the other, so black that I had to stifle a yelp of despair when first I saw it. We crept on our bellies through the rock like a piece of bread stuck in a long throat, forepaws scrabbling on the soil, hind legs crouched and aching.

  The throat opened into a room whose corners and rafters were washed with light, scoured with it, brighter than day, a lather of light like soap rubbed furiously in the hand. I could hardly see, the change was so sudden, and in the center of it, the wolf-creature like a sun, gently blazing.

  The cavern was not empty. Seven biers were laid out in curving rows, each bearing a woman, asleep or dead, fourteen slender hands closed over fourteen frozen breasts. Their hair swept over their pedestals as though it had grown a thousand years; their limbs were covered in jewels, more than I had ever seen together, piled up like apples at harvest. Piles of jade and granite and opal, of garnet bright as blood, of shale and iron ore, and of diamond, tiny diamonds glittering like snow.

  In the Garden

  WAKENED NOW, THE BOY CHEWED SLOWLY ON AN APPLE CORE, MESMERIZED. Wolves bounded gracefully through his mind, nosing the wind. He stretched his long arms, yawned, and pulled from his pack a rich red blanket edged in gold thread and embroidered with lilies. He wrapped it around his shoulders and edged gingerly towards the girl, as a man would move towards a skittish colt. They huddled together under their scarlet tent, and she lowered her lashes earthward when his hand brushed her knee, snatching the water flask and drawing it in. They were very close; he could smell the musk of her hair, cedar and jasmine.

  The first lights of dawn, luminous and blue, filtered down through the fine fabric of leaves, writing in rose and silver shadows on their skin.

  It is very still, the world at dawn, under its glittering net of dew. In their little thicket, the pair of children who were very nearly finished with childhood sat dry and warm, and the girl’s voice had fallen as silent as a cat’s paw on pine needles. The infant sun brushed the boy’s hair from his face with a shimmering, cherubic hand. He did not move from the girl’s side, but it was nearing light, and his sister would be rising soon, her face growing stormy at the sight of his empty bed.

  “I have to go,” he rasped finally. “I have to get back before the household wakes up.”

  The girl nodded, suddenly shy, drawing back into herself after all this long night of spinning out her heart like flax, straw into gold.

  “But I will come back,” he reassured her, “as the flocks of river birds do, at sunset. I will bring us another supper and you will tell me all the rest about the grandmother in her cave.”

  He touched her face, and his hand on her cheek was soft as a hare’s paw. The girl smiled into his palm, and nodded. Her luminous eyes lifted and long lashes closed briefly, exposing the swirling black of the birthmark covering her eyelids, inky and deep, a night without stars. The boy marked that he did not find it un-beautiful, now that he knew her a little. He dipped his tousled golden head a little, to meet her eyes as they slid open again.

  “I will come every night, to hear your stories. Every night,” he declared quietly, and ran into the striations of mist covering the gardens, catching in the jasmine and aster, and the apple trees.

  The girl bent to the remains of their evening meal and gathered together the flasks and crusts of bread to feed the crows and gulls. She then rose from her little bower, shaking a few errant petals from her hair in a shower lit by the strong red-gold beams of the day.

  When the sun had lain down in the west and covered itself with long blue blankets, and the girl sat cross-legged under the silver-lavender jasmine branches, she saw the boy’s eager shadow racing across the thick emerald lawn to her. He burst into her thicket, industriously setting out her dinner. She had been sure he would not come.

  He brought dark bread and pale cheeses, a slice of roasted lamb and a cluster of berries bulging with juice, several small roasted potatoes, a cold green apple and a slice of chocolate, precious as myrrh.

  “I thought I would leave the wine tonight, so that I do not steal off to sleep again,” he admitted bashfully, extending his water flask instead.

  “No, no, it’s all right, what you brought is more than enough,” she assured him with a nervous laugh. They fussed with the food and did not speak, the boy as eager for her tale as a bear seeking salmon in the frothing river. As she ate, her face grew brighter, as though she were a small sun, rising just as the great golden one went down.

  “How did you live all these years in the Garden?” The boy munched on a fat chunk of apple.

  The girl looked around. “The Sultan has more than enough fruit trees to feed one child, and the water in the fountains is clear and clean. I have had enough. The Palace throws away more than I could ever use. Once in a while there is even an amira’s old dress tossed on the refuse pile. And when the winters have been harsh, the birds have brought me mice and rabbits. I am cared for. The Garden raised me; it is my mother and my father, and mothers and fathers always find a way to feed and clothe their children.”

  “The birds…?” The boy was incredulous.

  She shrugged. “All creatures are lonely. They are drawn to me and I am drawn to them, and we warm each other in the snow. You should know better—weren’t you drawn, too? And I feed you my stories like morsels of meat roasted in a fire.”

  The boy blushed deeply, turning his eyes away from her. They finished their meal in silence.

  Finally, when lamb and fruit had been eaten, sweet water had been drunk, and each of them had found a comfortable place in the flower thicket to lean on their sides, heads bent inwards like conspirators, the girl spoke, and her voice filled up the boy like cream splashing in a silver bowl.

  FROM THE LONG, UNMOVING SHADOWS BEYOND THE last of the seven bodies, my silent guide made a small, rustling sound with her beautiful tail.

  “We brought them back here, from the field of poppies and old, sodden wheat. They weighed nothing at all, like carrying moths. And we kept them here, where my dark brother and my pale sister and some few others came to hide ourselves. What else was there to do? There are no graveyards for us, no rites, no songs, no fires. We had their shells in our hands, and we didn’t know what to do, we just didn’t know.” Liulfr nosed the faceted face of the one buried in diamonds. Her voice was a whisper thick as wet wool. “The new stars up there, the stars that flare up when we die, they’re just markers. It’s not them. This isn’t them. We don’t know where they are. You look up into the sky, little girl: it’s a mausoleum, and those new, bright lights are tombs, but they are not there. But they are not here, either.”

  The Wolf-Star fixed me with
her yellow eyes. I padded quietly across the room and sat down heavily before the jewel-girl, pale and dead. I was not sure what was expected of me. It was very warm, the light rubbing against my hindquarters and nuzzling my fur lazily. The glassy wound at the diamond-woman’s throat seemed to grow in my vision, like a second mouth grinning horribly below the first. I nosed at it and it was neither warm nor cold, but hard, nothing like flesh.

  Beneath my silver fur the wound the Mare had made throbbed, and the smaller cut from the Fox just below it stung like the quick needle of a wasp. Liulfr simply watched me, offering no help at all. This, then, was my test. I got to my paws and half climbed over the poor girl, half kneeled on her slippery drift of gems. I put my muzzle to my chest and gnawed open the space between the wounds, so that the scabs broke and they flowed freely into each other, one long, deep gash: a hole chewed in flesh, the first bite of the world.

  The blood came dark and ugly at first, and I was dizzy—dizzy and so hot in that close, dark room!—and it splashed on the empty corpse like ink spilled over a mirror. But after a long while it began to flow clear, and then filled with a gentle light, soft and sweet-smelling as sugared pears in a copper dish, cold, so cold, and the color of the moon. Half faint, I wearily pressed my bleeding breast hard against the woman’s cut throat.

  I thought she would wake up. I really did. I thought that all in a rush she would gasp and cry out, her back would arch like a drawn bow, her eyes would suddenly open, and she would cough. She would draw ragged breaths, and all those diamonds would clatter to the floor as she finally bolted upright, face beaming bright as morning.

  She did not move. The light trickled out of me and into her, and I watched it foam at the bottom of her back, like a cup of water tossed into a deep bathtub. The shadows draped the room, and the blood which was light slowed and stopped.