In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “When the sun’s down, you can find your way out to the Garden through the sorrel’s stall. There’s a loose board and a little crawling passage. If you just manage to come back before dawn, she might not catch you. Take the girl some of my lunch—I don’t eat much these days and she’s a growing thing.”

  The boy, stunned, nodded and ducked into the great black gelding’s stall, dropping several nails.

  He found, to his surprise, that he liked working with the horses. Most were patient as parishioners, lifting their hooves in a bored manner and nosing his chest for apples. He liked their smell, their big barrel ribs, their sloping heads, the softness of their throats. He liked their blustering noises and their quiet company. He felt, truly, like one of the Witch Knife’s tribe, tending his horses on the steppes, preparing for a raid on an offending village. That tale seemed so long past, now, but he immersed himself in it again, and passed the hours in a merry haze.

  When the sun’s rays had grown long and red as ruby tongues, he bundled up the food the blacksmith had left and started off through the door at the far end of the black-eyed sorrel’s stall. He felt a little foolish—of course all the servants would know about the girl. What scandal passed under the many roofs of a Palace that some servant did not know it and tell it to another? They might even feel badly for her and wish to take her in as their own daughter, raise her to bake bread and sew gowns, but could not for fear of the Sultan or the girl’s parents, whichever of the diamond-strewn nobles they might be. All the same, he had begun to think of her as his, his secret, his own friend who belonged to no one else. He was almost sorry that she had friends among the cooks and blacksmiths.

  Cursing such ungenerous thoughts, he searched out the cypress path, where the thick green trees pointed skyward like minarets reaching up to the first twinkling stars. The path was a complicated mosaic commissioned when he was no more than a baby—the pebbles were arranged in every color imaginable, illustrating a scene from one of the Sultan’s great victories. He found the place where it was red for several steps together—the blood of an unfortunate barbarian—and saw that the girl had already arrived, leaning on a cypress as though she had waited for hours.

  “I meant to bring you better, but my sister gave me to a blacksmith and I could not get to the kitchens.” He held out the horse-keeper’s thick crust of bread and yellow cheese, and a fat peach.

  “You don’t have to bring me anything at all, you know. You don’t have to supper for your song.” She laughed at her own awkward joke, a high, startled sound like a spooked horse.

  The boy shrugged and set out their small supper on a square of linen in the midst of the scarlet pebbles. “Of course, you might be high above me in rank, in which case I’d have to serve you; it would be my duty. I’ve no idea which of the men at court is your father—no one will admit to it. They talk as if you sprang into being out of the air like a Djinn! You might even be my sister! The Sultan has many wives, after all—”

  The girl laughed. It was a hard laugh, like the edge of a plate rolling over a stone floor. “I am not your sister.” The boy was a little abashed.

  “I just like to bring you things, that’s all.”

  “You like to hear my stories, and supper is their price. A noble boy cannot think of anything but cost.”

  The boy started as though she had struck him. “Are you so angry that you cut me because your eyes are dark and mine are not, because I sleep in a house and you in a bower?”

  Her eyes softened immediately, chagrined, and the dark shadows of her lids seemed to glow silver and black, like the shapes of fish underwater. She put her arms around his slim neck, and for the first time, embraced the boy. His breath caught, and they stood awkwardly for a moment in the sea of red pebbles.

  “I’m not angry, I’m not. I am sorry. Let me tell you what Sigrid found below the decks of the pirate ship…”

  SIGRID DUCKED AND STEPPED GINGERLY ONTO THE first stair leading to the innards of the Maidenhead. The interior was dark as a belly, dusty and filled with strange noises—the knocking and creaking of a ship which Sigrid had not yet come to know as her own heartbeat. Suddenly, a face appeared out of the dark swirl of dust motes—wide and open, with a huge flaring nose and great green eyes the color of a deep-thatched forest. All around the grinning face were tight curls of deep brown hair, almost as tightly curled as the fleece of a sheep or the fur of a wild dog. The shaggy mane fell long past the chin, and Sigrid peered closer to see the body attached to the face floating before her like a lantern.

  “Hullo!” it cried, and pulled Sigrid down into the ship by her forearm. She saw that the face belonged to the woman she had been sent to find—the curly hair bunched and knotted all the way to her waist, where she ceased to be a woman and became a strange goatlike creature. Her haunches were thickly furred in brown and red, tapering to delicate hooves that had clearly been polished to their current bronze shine. She kicked them against the floorboards for good measure.

  “Satyr! Yew copse, to be specific—but then that won’t mean a thing to you. Welcome, little one! You’ve nothing to fear now. Eshkol’s got you clamped to her side and Tommy’s at the wheel. You’re safe as a vault! Now, you must make yourself useful and earn your board and at the moment you’re useless at anything the least bit nautical—so you and I are going to play nursemaid to our pigheaded passengers!”

  Sigrid went along amiably, admiring Eshkol’s hooves. Indeed, they were shiny as mirrors, copper-colored and clearly strong as a mule’s kick.

  “I admit I shine ’em up every morning,” Eshkol said with a laugh, “but at sea you tend to cling to little vanities. Besides, I can still kick a hole in solid silver with the blessed things! Now, the thing you must remember about passengers, paying or otherwise, is that they think they own the ship. They fret about this or that and snipe at us about the rigging, or the sail material, or the type of wood in the mast. Best to humor them if they’re paying, best to show them the plank if they aren’t.” The shaggy woman stopped and turned quickly to her charge. “Not that we have a plank, you understand! We just keep a good solid board below and tell folks it’s a plank to scare them into giving us some peace! If we wanted to kill them, we’d be proper about it and put a blade in their guts like any civilized crew.”

  Eshkol led Sigrid through an astonishing labyrinth of rooms and stairs—so intricate that Sigrid could hardly believe they could still be on the Maidenhead. Finally, they arrived at a heavy wooden door from which issued the unmistakable sounds of a hearty dinner in progress.

  “Part of the fun of it, you know,” Eshkol explained. “The Maid’s a bit bigger belowdecks than above. I don’t ask questions about that—I’m not a shipwright, it’s none of mine. Now, these are the ones directing our prow for the season—Arimaspians. They’re a bit frightening to look at and Lord knows I told Tommy it’s bad luck to have a man aboard, but they pay in gold and they keep to themselves, and that’s the best you can hope for from anyone. Now take this beer in and mind their needs and I’ll see you in the evening—you’ll bunk with me in the stern.”

  Eshkol disappeared as suddenly as she had arrived, and Sigrid was left face-to-face with the thick door, a clay pitcher of frothing black beer in her hand. She did not quite fancy being a serving wench to whatever monsters lay on the other side, but she hoped that it would only be for the night, that in the morning Tommy would assign her to sew sails or some other thing which befitted a sailor. She slipped into the room and stood dumbly at the threshold, staring at the inhabitants.

  At her entrance, six or so of them had scurried behind a seventh, clearly their leader. He was enormous as a bull elephant, shoulders and chest straining with muscle, and black—not the ruddy brown of Sigrid’s own people, but true black, the color of midnight and lightless rooms, as though he had been cut from a block of onyx. His hair was braided in complicated patterns and threaded with gold, falling down his back like a woman’s. His eye cut into her, no less black than his body—but he had
only one true eye. The other was an eye fashioned out of gold and set into his skull like a diamond into a ring. It was a perfect likeness; one almost expected it to blink. She could see that his companions also had but one eye each, though their artificial eyes were not of gold, but of silver and bronze and copper and crystal. Sigrid felt reasonably certain of her guess and curtsied before the mountainous man as she would before a King.

  “I am Oluwakim, King of the Arimaspian Oculos. Who is this insect who presents me with drink as if she were fit to serve me?”

  “I… I am Sigrid, my lord. Of Ajanabh.”

  The King looked skeptically at her, his eye roving over her slight form like a hawk surveying the geography of a mouse’s haunch.

  “Are you human? You look like a human, girl. I will not be served by humans.”

  Sigrid stared determinedly at her feet. “I’m not entirely sure, sire. I see what you see when I look into the mirror, but I have a deformity—”

  “Long-Eared Tomomo sends me mangled humans to pour my drink?”

  “No, no, I am whole, it is only that I was born with three breasts instead of two. My parents were ashamed of me, Tomomo—Tommy—took me from the barges of Ajanabh.”

  Oluwakim blinked with his one colossal eye—once, twice.

  “That is a meager qualification. I suppose your provincial modesty would preclude you from showing me this miraculous breast, and so I must take you at your word. Yet who would dare lie in the presence of the Ocular? Very well, I accept you as a decent enough monster; you may pour the ale.”

  He settled himself at the head of the table, a gesture that was not unlike a boulder settling onto a valley floor. His companions seemed to come to life and went about their business, ignoring Sigrid completely. She poured for the King and stood silently aside, waiting for him to finish his cup. He had finished three before he spoke again.

  “Come, Sigrid. Sit.”

  Obediently, she sat, a safe space away from the blue-black monarch.

  “We have chartered the Maidenhead for our Hunt—you know what it is the Arimaspians hunt, do you not?”

  “No, sire.”

  “Ignorant Sigrid, your education does not befit the serving-girl of a King. We hunt the Griffin, the White Beast of the Hidden Isle…”

  THE GRIFFIN AND THE ARIMASPIANS HAVE BEEN enemies since the birth of the World-Eye at the center of the heavens. For them, the World-Eye blinked three times: They received the strength of both Eagle and Lion, and the size of Elephant. For us, the World-Eye blinked four: we received the strength of Bull, the beauty of Wildcat, the skill of Spider, and the secret of forging the Great Ocular, which is the golden eye you see in my skull, the mark of the King and of the Oluwa clan, the magical iris which grants power beyond the dreams of little deformed girls. These other eyes of bronze and silver are merely fashion, imitations of glory. It is only the Ocular which confers power, only the Ocular which is the heart of our people, who come into this world one-eyed, in the image of the World-Eye which is our beloved parent.

  The Griffin have always been jealous of the Fourth Blink.

  We have learned through the ages to wage a civilized kind of war with them: In the spring, they steal our horses for their suppers; in the winter, we steal their gold to adorn our hair and to fashion the Ocular—for all Griffin love gold as they do their own lion-haunched chicks. Their nests are woven of the stuff, their beaks and talons are solid metal, they bathe in underground pools of liquid light. But though they love the sight of gold, they cannot eat it. Their favorite meal is horse—it is to them as chocolate and peppermint are to children. They snatch the beasts by the bellies and devour them in midair. A Griffin-Raid is truly a sight to see: The sky is alive with wheeling wings of red and violet and slashing paws of tawny yellow, stained with horse blood.

  Our horses were the largest of chest and powerful of leg, great behemoths of horse-kind. Each of us possessed what the other desired. And so it went in this way, in the proper way, for century upon century. The Griffin were careful to leave enough horses for the next spring’s colts to thrive; we took only what gold we needed for our rites, for it is well known that when a Griffin’s gold is gone, it perishes of despair.

  But the fathers of our fathers became greedy as dogs in a pig’s trough. They began to take more and more gold from the nests of the Griffin, and to hunt them down when the season was not right, when the sun blazed in the sky instead of hiding its face under the snow’s crossed spears. The Griffin took their revenge—they gobbled up our herds, mare and stallion. They slurped the marrow and lapped up the eyes of our most magnificent animals. When we had no more horses, the Griffin began to take the beautiful maidens of our tribe, whose dark shoulders glinted like the pelts of cats and whose voices were sweet as autumn harvests.

  When I was born, there were only a few Griffin left in the world, hidden away in mountains and forgotten mines, in vales concealed by sheets of ice, in the desert where the wind burns. Likewise, there were only a few maidens left in the Ocular—and no horses at all. When the time came for the Ritual of Ob, which would make me a man and allow me to take the place of my father, Oluwatobi the Ever-Watchful, as King of the Arimaspians, there were but two remaining Griffin. One dwelt on the Hidden Isle, in the Boiling Sea, whose water steams with constant bubbles. The other hid itself away in an aerie atop the great Mount Nuru, a mountain made entirely of ruby, whose light blinds all who approach it.

  Oluwatobi gave me a choice of these dangers, for the Ocular must be forged of Griffin-gold according to the ancient rites or else it is no more than a lump of slag pressed into a man’s face. Of course we bent under the guilt of our fathers’ fathers’ lust for gold, but we could not defy the traditions of our people. We had to have the gold, whatever the cost to the Griffin—it is our right, you understand. The Ocular is all things; without it we are like a leopard without a head. I could no more deny the Ritual of Ob than I could deny my own limbs. And after all, we had no more horses left; the scale would not be balanced until the Griffin had no gold. In the end, I chose the ruby crags, for we are not a seafaring people. With the blessing of my father I clothed myself in the spotted skins of wildcats and the mirror-bright breastplate of the sons of Oluwa, forged from the gold of the first Griffin’s hoard. I went out from the Arimaspian veldt, and sought out the Red Mountain of Nuru.

  In those days I carried in my head an eye of beryl, which is the mark of the heir, for the Griffin lay eggs of beryl, and the gold of their yolks is the purest of all. I traveled easily in my strength, and ate the meat of young deer at my night fire. The Red Mountain was not far from the boundaries of the Oculos—indeed its scarlet lights could be glimpsed from my father’s hut when the sun set low in the winter sky, shining through the peak like arrows dripping with blood. I followed the light of Nuru, but in my heart I quailed, for I did not know how I could protect my precious fleshly eye from the scalding prisms of its faceted stones.

  But the World-Eye does not close on its favored children, and on the ninth day of my travels, I sighted another creature hobbling through the smoke-scented brush. As I drew closer, I began to perceive what sort of beast it was, and guess at its shape. It was a Monopod, a race of beings who live further to the East than even my people, and whose lower bodies are twisted into a single huge calf and foot—the foot itself so large that legend tells of a bygone age when fleets of Monopods sailed the ocean on those huge, curving soles. My fellow traveler was just this sort of man, but not being on the waves his gait was somewhat less than graceful. He was hopping and shuffling merrily along, dressed in a beautiful vest of many colors and a strange kind of skirt which accommodated his fleshy leg, kicking up a great cloud of broken leaves and dust.

  “Hail, Monopod!” I cried, and held up both hands as a gesture of friendship.

  “Hail, Cyclops!” he cried in return, turning towards me with a toothy grin. Indeed, several of his teeth were missing, and his hair was a disaster of curls darkened by the dirt of the road.

&n
bsp; “You are mistaken, Stump-Leg,” answered I with some indignant pride. “The Cyclops is an island-dweller and a drunkard besides. They are not even cousins, the sheep-herding simpletons, but an embarrassment to all one-eyed folk. I am the heir to the Arimaspian Oculos, Oluwakim by name.”

  The Monopod looked shrewdly at me, his blue eyes glinting like gems in a vault. “Then you’ll be headed for the Red Mountain, yes? For Jin’s nest. I did not realize the old Oluwa had grown so ancient.”

  “He is still hale, but the generations increase in the sight of the Eye, and the time of Ob has come again. I aim for the red peak of Nuru, and the Griffin—I did not know his name.”

  The Monopod seemed to consider something private, and come to a decision I could not guess. “Well, then! I offer myself as companion and guide to the honorable son of the Oluwa! Chayim is my name, and I am bound for the aerie myself, so it will be no trouble to walk alongside you. With your one eye and my one foot, we almost make a full man! Certainly together we can both get what we want.” He clapped me on the back with his splay-fingered hand and rocked back and forth on his great foot. I agreed—I was glad of the company, I will admit.

  “Why do you seek the Griffin?” I asked as we walked—rather, as I walked, and he hobbled.

  “Well, that’s quite a story, my young Prince…”

  I WAS BORN FAR FROM HERE IN THE SILVER-RICH city of Shadukiam, in the year that the Rose Dome was erected and the diamond turrets were completed in their perfect beauty—all things built with tax money are beautiful: so we must think or go mad. My family was modest—like all Shaduki Monopods we lived in the Ghetto of Moss and Root, a great expanse of open land on the north edge of the Dome. There we were allowed to live as our ancestors had, without the painful constriction of human houses—which we wreck with our clumsiness and which scab our feet with their difficult corners and edges. In the Root we lived out our days on the open moss under the moon that shines like the white rim of a toenail. When the night pulls on her dark socks, we lie on our backs, and our curving feet arch over our heads, protecting us from cold and rain. During the days we work side by side, makers of the famous Rose Vintage, the delicate wines of Shadukiam, whose tiny white grapes we are uniquely equipped to crush.