In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Moon taught us that it was our right to take the bodies of the dead—we were hers, and just as the night was her province, the cold and the dead were ours. It was her gift to us, you understand, so that we could taste every kind of life, from the meanest to the most exalted. All the secrets of bloodless flesh she showed to us in the first days of the world. She showed us that it is possible to swim through bodies as a fish through coral; death clears a place for us. But one cannot swim through a living sea; the swimmer and the water must be equally mortified. So, in order to pass from flesh to flesh, we had to learn to die.

  The first of us did not succeed—they went under the waves and breathed easily, instinctively. They went into the fire and became incandescent. They dove from high cliffs and their shoulder blades unfolded into wings like origami breaking. They cut open their veins with bone knives and found themselves only lightened and made translucent as diamonds by the lack of blood. We began to despair. The sun-children were prodigies: They died easily all around us, like daisies in winter.

  I was the first to discover it. I sat beneath Moon with my mouth on her icy fingers, considering the problem. It seemed to me that we were a race of suicides—it was only our own bodies we flagellated, our own skin we removed like clothing. If we instead helped each other into death, if we made of it a sacrament, then perhaps we could manage the feat.

  I went to one of my sisters and knelt before her, begging her to strangle me, to put out my eyes and burn my heart in a clay kiln. My theory babbled out of me like a brook flooding down a mountain, so eager was I to become the first of my people to master the art of death. She, too, was eager and curious, and put her slim, blue-white fingers around my throat, squeezing until I crumpled at her feet like a discarded blanket.

  Thus was the first murder committed among the Yi. The celebration lasted for seven days and nights; the silver lanterns swayed and sweet waltzes were played on chalcedony pipes. Our star-spattered world was suddenly a cacophony of death as we leapt from our bodies into the bright limbs of the sun-children. Of course, once we had died the first time, we lost the adamant moon-flesh which was ours by birthright. But we found that the longer we remained in our new bodies, the more they came to resemble our old ones: The color seeped from the eyes and the skin grew pale as shadowless craters. After a few years in the body of a milkmaid, we looked quite ourselves again.

  Of course, the sun-children, both human and monster, were terrified by this power. I cannot say why—certainly they had left the bodies, they no longer had any rights to them, and Moon had granted them to us by perfectly legal charter. But they turned from us in horror and forced us to wear gray, pockmarked cloaks so that they could tell us apart from their dead beloveds in the years before we turned the flesh back into our own. Once, they captured a boy not long dead while the Yi in him was weak and did not know his new muscles well enough to resist them. They kept him in a dark well, away from the eye of Mother Moon, and tortured him with boiling oil and thumbscrews and insidious poisons until he revealed some part of our secrets—though never, of course, the technique of traveling into cold flesh. These torturers went to Al-a-Nur and poured mortar into the foundations of the Tower of the Dead, where they practice a mutilated form of our art.

  In the midst of our ecstatic dance from corpse to corpse, Moon came down to us while we slept, and spoke into the shell-ear of each Yi. She promised that when one of us—just one—had tasted every kind of life the garden of the sun’s world could prepare for us, we could return to her, and dwell in a sea of light, cradled forever in her opaline arms.

  And so we leap high, our starlit toes touching briefly on each form, human and monster—and we seek out every shade of claw and eye, so that we may return to the night and Moon’s primal pale.

  THE MAN DRESSED IN THE MOON LOOKED DOWN at me with his blanched eyes and smiled, the sparse hairs on his chin quivering.

  “I am a great collector, you see. I hold all these bodies in trust for my brothers and sisters, so that they may have a ready supply when they tire of their current ones. Quite a steady stream of Yi come and go from me like a river whistling its water under the moon—come an old crone and leave a young man, come an ice-haired northerner, go a southerner with cinnamon skin. The discards—well, all things must eat, and there is a feast day here every fort night. But you! We have seen nothing like you! We must add your body to our treasury—in exchange you may have one of your choice.”

  I suppose I might have been shocked, but all I could think of was long, lithe limbs and a height which would tower over my father’s. I agreed as easily as if he had offered to trade me a wooden wheel for a pair of chickens.

  He held me up to each row of faces in a most considerate fashion, and I pondered them all in turn. I finally settled upon a youth with skin the color of aged brandy-wine, whose eyebrows arched in a noble, bemused way over his smoke-lashed eyes. He was very tall.

  “Ah, excellent choice, my son! That was Marsili—long ago he was a Sultan’s son, betrothed to a maiden of unearthly beauty, whose eyes were yellow as a wolf’s. But he angered his father in some way or another—gambling or whoring, most likely; young men are so prone to such vices—and the Sultan in his wisdom sold the boy to me and married the girl himself. I’m told there is a whole dynasty of wolf-eyed Sultans somewhere in the East. And he is no loss to us. Believe me, we long ago exhausted the tawdry experiences of a spoiled Prince.” He pushed up his gray sleeves. “Shall we begin?”

  I blinked twice, my heart thumping in me like an overworked bellows. “But I… I cannot strangle you, Father, I haven’t anything like the strength.”

  His face broadened amiably.

  “Oh, I needn’t be dead—I am not going to take your body myself. The Yi are communal. It is just as well that any other of my race uses it. A simple process and a cold room keep the bodies intact until they are needed. Only you must die. It will be a very small death, I promise. It will feellike you have swallowed a great portion of bread that has become stuck in your throat, somewhere between your mouth and your belly. Of course, a simple drink of water would push the bread down where it ought to go, but there is a curious feeling of stretching, of bulging. That is what a small death is like.”

  This did not sound so very terrible. I straightened myself to my full height—no larger than a grasshopper—and locked my arms as I imagined brave soldiers in war must.

  “I am ready, Father. You may kill me now.”

  “Mustn’t damage the body!” he chirped happily, and clamped his great clammy hand over my nose and mouth. He held it there, the smell of gardenias cloying, while I struggled and sucked at the skin for air. Finally, I slackened and slumped into the curve of his thumb.

  He was right, it was very like swallowing too much bread. First the alarm and panic, then the curious stretching, then the sliding release of bread into the belly. I did not float above my body as some say one does—I stood beside it, very calmly, as though I had simply been doubled. I watched the Man Dressed in the Moon pass my tiny body through a wash of strange, viscous fluid the color of costly ink. Then, pulling the slack form of Marsili from the ranks, he anointed its forehead with a musky-smelling oil. Finally, he placed an oblong white stone in the corpse’s mouth and whispered a few words I could not hear over its bent head.

  It was as though I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, they were Marsili’s eyes. When I flexed my hands they were Marsili’s hands. When I spoke it was with Marsili’s honey-wine voice, cultured by years of tutors. The stone had vanished from my mouth.

  “I am… I am him!” I cried, looking the Man Dressed in the Moon directly in the eye. It was a silly thing to say, of course, but I could almost have wept for the joy of touching the cool ceiling with my fingers.

  From that day I begged to be his apprentice, to learn this magic so that I would never have to die a big death. He saw no point, as the Moon was no mother to me. I could not but stand at the foot of the Yi’s long ladder to her. But after some time he re
lented, being lonely or curious or both, and I began my long education. Any sacrament can be practiced by unbelievers, he always said. It’s usually nothing more than eating and drinking, anyway. I could drink all I liked, and nothing I ever drank would become the Moon in my mouth—but drinking is pleasant enough without the promises of religion. And I was always pleasant to him.

  I kept the name of my first other-body. It amused me, as it seemed neither male nor female, and there were many more forms to follow, of both sorts. I am not Yi: The bodies do not crumble around me. I simply move to the next fleshly costume when I tire of them. I do not truly understand what it is in the spirit of a Yi which corrupts a body around it, but I was never to suffer that dissolution. I was a good student; eventually, I even helped the Man Dressed in the Moon to pass to his next body. I knelt reverently and cut open his stomach, and prepared the next body for his passing. I placed the white stone on his new tongue; I was the first face he saw with his new eyes—which were wide and violet as a field of lilacs, the eyes of a still-lovely dowager who had died of chill.

  It was in that body that the Man Dressed in the Moon became my lover. The Yi are in truth neither male nor female, but follow the desires of their host bodies—and there never was a dowager who did not yearn to have a young Prince as her paramour. We passed many years in this way, and even when the dowager’s flesh became gray and cratered, I did not mind. I kissed those peeling, pockmarked limbs, and they were sweet, sweet as dried gardenias. We continued in this way until we exhausted each other—for neither was there ever a dowager who did not eventually grow bored with her beardless playmate—and I went from that house into the world.

  All this I learned; all this I performed. When I left his house, no Nurian corpse-wrangler could have approached my knowledge, though her lust for it might burn like winter timber. When my parents died, I took their bodies—ah, the debauch to which I subjected those limbs! I punished them in their own skin.

  But I am not Yi. I do not take bodies in order to achieve some mystical union with a mythical Moon. What I do, I do for pleasure, and for profit, and it is pleasant enough. I am not bound by their laws, I need wear no barnacled cloak, and so I move among the people of Shadukiam unknown and unmarked—and only once or twice have I been too impatient to wait for a creature to die.

  For I am not Yi; I can take them while they still breathe.

  I am not Yi; I will go on forever, in whatever body I choose, and the Moon will never take me.

  “SO PUT YOUR DAINTY LITTLE MARK ON ONE OF those famous parchments. It has always been true that a figurehead’s only power lies in her golden seal—no one cares what you say, but we all care what you sign. Give me access to the Caliph’s rose-tinted gold, sign open the door to the great vault, and I will keep your spirit safe until the time comes for you to return in a body as ravishing or de formed as you wish, until your name is forgotten by all but the most dotard librarians in the Dreaming City, and no one will drag an army after you again.”

  “You don’t want…” I looked down, blushing.

  “What? Your firstborn child? Use of those lissome limbs? I’m not a monster out of some child’s tale. I have no need of living bodies, and children are more costly and troublesome than beasts twice their size. Do you think there is a pleasure of the flesh I have not sampled? I do not need the Caliph’s trash. I am a magician—it is a vocation like any other, and I require remuneration for my services, as any other tradesman would. Would you try to pay for grain with unborn babes? I think not. Do not insult me; I am no less skilled than a miller grinding his seed.”

  I nodded humbly, and the necromancer kissed my shuddering lips then, and my brow, my hair, my chin. It was not in lust that his lips brushed my face, but as a strange sort of seal on the bargain as I eagerly scrawled his demand onto a used and crumpled leaf of paper—on the one side it demanded that the merchant-monks of the Coral Tower open their vaults to the Caliph; on the other it demanded that the vault of the Caliph be opened to Marsili.

  “What do I do now? How do I know you will keep your promise?” I asked, clutching my elbows to my sides.

  “You will know because I have sworn it, and you are the trusting kind. You may want to work on that, the next time you see this city from the inside. This is Shadukiam, after all. Here the trusting are found every morning in one gutter or another. You need do nothing more, sweet Ragnhild, little ragged girl, left all alone.” He reached forward and wound a thin length of my hair through his fingers, then, with a sharp flick of his wrist, tore it from my head. “Wait to die.” With that, he retreated from the antechamber, bowing gratuitously as he went.

  And die I did. The Nurian Papess dragged me from my seat by the ear as though I were no more than a misbehaving child and forced me to my knees before my own altar. With a strange, curving silver knife she cut my tongue from my mouth, and the taste of blood, the meaty, metallic taste of my blood, flooded my mouth. I screamed, I screamed—I thought there would never be an end to the screaming. She moved the knife in the air speculatively; with ridiculous attention I noted its sickle shape, its hilt, the fine engraving. In the midst of pain like stones breaking open the knife filled my vision. I thought then it would be my nose next, or my eyes. I did not understand yet the shape of zealotry.

  Ghyfran, the savior of Al-a-Nur, ripped my dress from collar to waist, and cut my breasts from my body as if carving a roasted bird for her supper. But when they had sloughed to the floor with a sickly, wet sigh, she leaned into me, her breath brushing my ear.

  “I have saved you, poor, wretched pawn. Now you may go to the dark as a sacred Androgyne, and no door of alabaster or diamond will be closed to you.”

  That is your heroine-priest, this lying whore who forswore her god in order to kill an innocent—then forswore her oaths of office with her adherence to her mad faith. What is Al-a-Nur but a bedchamber where you may luxuriate in lies and blasphemies, convincing yourselves that they are virtues?

  They tied me to that wet, grassy hill, pressing up under my back like the bones of the moon, and the soldiers dangled these chains in my face, mocking me—it was the only gold, they said, I would ever get from Al-a-Nur.

  The rest is simple, unutterably common. The sun took my flesh away in its arms, and the moon whitened my bones to dust. I fell away from myself, into some deep well of dreaming—I recall nothing from the last gasp until I awoke, washed in gray light. The necromancer Marsili had bound me bodiless in some strange glass vial, and I watched him as the years flew by like blackbirds—sometimes he was a woman, sometimes a man, sometimes a child as he had been when first he came to me. But I learned to recognize him in each body, the upturn of the eye, the cruel crooked mouth, the gestures of his hands. I learned, and more than that. The necromancer performed many horrible things in his workshop, and I learned from him all the magic he learned from his bodies. After all, he was the only thing I saw for all those years. I had nothing to do but become a student of his every sigh and gesture.

  And yet, he waited, he waited for so long. I thought he had forgotten me, that I would be stuck in a bottle like a scrawled note forever. But one midnight, when I had almost lost the memory of what it was to feel my own flesh, he picked up my vial and brought it to a long table, where a golden-haired corpse lay stiff and still.

  “You are only a legend now, Ragnhild. It is safe to come out; it is safe to live. The world remembers you only as a ghost in the closet, a wight on the grassy hills.” He gestured at the glassy-eyed corpse on his knotted elm-wood table. “I keep my word, as any merchant does. She loved a boy her parents could not accept and starved herself to death for the lack of him. Terribly romantic. Are you ready, is she sufficient?”

  He sensed my consent in some fashion of his own, and when I woke again, my lids were fringed in lashes pale as raw flax, the weight of a body pulled once more at my bones, and the last vapors of a white stone were still dissolving on my tongue.

  RAGNHILD LOOKED DOWN AT US, ANGER STREAMING from her as though
from a dying star. “This time I went to no man’s bed. I have had time, and time piled high upon time, to consider how I would spend my new body—and I chose to be in truth what I was before only in jest. I will be your Black Papess, and take Al-a-Nur for my own. I bought the Caliph’s blessing on my ascension with Marsili’s gold, and came to Shadukiam, not on a litter like some pampered babe, but walking on the stony earth, and I did not lower my eyes when I saw once more the Dome of Roses.”

  I swallowed hard. “And Marsili? He gave over his wealth just to bring you back to this little room?”

  Her face folded into a satisfied smile, and the Black Papess rose from her flowered chair, the violet gown shifting and trailing obscenely over her skin. She walked past us slowly, without fear, and drew aside a thick cream-colored curtain covering an alcove behind us.

  On a deep green cushion edged in silver rested the head of a young, dark-haired beauty, the line of her nose clearly noble, the shape of her lips suggesting an ineffable refinement. The colors of death spoiled her skin into a bluish ravage, and dried blood clotted around her severed neck. Ragnhild turned her head delicately as though appraising the artistry of a statue.

  “I watched him for five hundred years, trapped in that glass like an ant in amber. I hated him. The first real hate I had ever known—the first of many. I have begun to keep a catalogue of hatreds, and this was the first in my ledger: the hatred of the trapped thing. He waited so long. I think he would have left me there if he were not bound by love of this city to provide the service he was contracted for. That is the soul of Shadukiam, after all. He was my first act in this flesh—I took his head and his gold in one stroke. You mustn’t pity him. What kind of a man seduces a child into centuries of death-which-is-not-death for a few rubies from the Caliph’s table? He was a fool and a glutton.”