In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  But it is one thing to agree that a thing sounds fine, and another to accomplish it. We waved our tails at the foot of the falls and looked up at the mossy crags. They were so far. Some tried; every day a goldfish or two screwed up her courage and her tail muscles and shot out of the water like a flaming dart, higher and farther than any goldfish had done before—and she always fell back to the frothing pool, nowhere near the crest and just as much a goldfish as she had been a moment before.

  Naturally, I wondered if a Lock might be superior. Every day we fought to stay in our homes as the water drained. We swam against the sucking flow, our muscles were tight and golden and we were bigger than the others, with all our constant struggle. But a child loves its mother’s breast, and so we loved the lock.

  I made my attempts at night, when the others were off feeding, so that I would not be ashamed to fall. But I leapt so far, farther than any of them, and with every leap the crest was nearer to my fins. I could taste the wind and the fire in me, swollen and ready. And then, one night when no one was looking, and even the eel and the drumfish were nosing in the mud, I leapt up, waving my tail in the wind as much like leathery, bony wings as I could imagine—and cleared the falls.

  I fell with a great splash into the upper river, and had to right myself quickly to avoid going over again. I was awkward in the water, floundering as I had never had to do, with a fish’s instinct for swimming being such that we have never in all the lives of fish had a word for “swimming.” There is no need. I dragged myself up by a bent oak branch and lay gasping on the soil, air burning my chest, gill-less and finless and goldless, coughing and spitting and cold.

  I was a dragon.

  But what kind of dragon I could not begin to say. I had no wings at all, and my flesh was not scaled and green but pink and soft, and I had two legs and long, wet hair that stuck to my arms and all that came out of my mouth was bile and river, and no fire at all. But, I thought, no one has seen a dragon for so long. Perhaps this is what a dragon looks like. Everything that lives outside the water looks more or less the same, anyhow, and sunfish and walleye were often mistaken. Perhaps a dragon does have little dainty toes and blunt, sleek teeth. Who was I to argue? I had leapt the fall; I must now be a dragon, however strange a dragon that may be.

  I walked down the mountain shakily, my dragon’s feet soft and pale and unused to rocky jags and pebbles. I came upon a village, as dragons are wont to do, and—just like the stories!—their eyes widened and their jaws went slack and they sputtered and ran from me. But they came back with trousers and a long, loose shirt and a belt and a hat, and told me that I could not simply walk around naked.

  “Dragons may do whatever they wish,” I said haughtily. “And nakedness is no worry for me. I am sorry if it is a worry for you.”

  But they pulled me into a little house and showed me a long, oval mirror. In it I was, I presumed, a dragon. A dragon with long hair the color of goldfish scales, and small, round breasts, and eyes blue as a river in summer, and a mole at the base of her throat. I saw nothing the matter.

  “That is what dragons look like.” I shrugged, sounding more sure than I felt. I cleared my new throat. “I’m surprised at your provincial ignorance. But if the color of my scales bothers you, I will take your silly clothes.”

  They laughed nervously and eyed me from the corners of the room—as well they might!—but I dressed, and with great, hard-soled shoes, walked at my leisure down and out of the mountain.

  Summer wound golden around me as I ventured into the world. I ate rabbits and rats, breathing on them until they just stopped running and stared at me while I puffed out my cheeks and became very red in the face. I sighed and snatched them with my hands. I was very disappointed in a dragon’s lot. In my darkest moments, when the night was damp and the wolves crooned ballads to each other in the far-off hills, I allowed myself to consider that perhaps I was something slightly less than a dragon, but certainly more than a goldfish.

  One morning when the sun was thin and bright on the blackberries, a hunting party came into the valley and caught no hart, but snared a dragon. My face was stained with blackberry juice and I did not know what to say, but the leader of the party was handsome and dark, and though I snarled at him, he did not seem bothered.

  “I am a dragon.” I sighed, almost pleading with them to believe me. “You ought to run and scatter like ants.”

  The man looked at me quite seriously. “No,” he said, “you are not. My father has a dragon head in his hall, and though it is quite dusty and one nostril has a mouse living in it, I should never mistake it for a maiden.”

  “But I leapt the falls!” I hissed desperately. “No one else has ever done it! I! A lock-fish!”

  “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about, but a young girl like you should not be out in the wilderness with nothing between you and the brambles but some uncle’s trousers.”

  “My uncles don’t wear trousers—”

  I protested, but his fellow hunters surrounded me in a moment like hares around a fox, and ushered me firmly onto a horse, and the horse galloped through the dilapidated gate of a city all of red towers. As we rode, he told me of the glory of Ajanabh, the greatest city which had yet graced the earth, great in all things, including the currency.

  “Did you know,” he said, his gray eyes flashing like a minnow in an eddy, “we have the most extraordinary coins! Each coin, blue and bright as your own eyes, has two perfect holes in its center! It is such a marvelous country—you could be happy there…”

  THE TALE OF

  THE AJAN COIN

  LONG BEFORE EVEN MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S day, the coin was whole, and solid yellow gold, and prized as all coins are. There was no Duke in those days, and Ajanabh ground along like a clock: more or less on time, hoping someone will think to wind it, but unable to be truly concerned. Currency was what had been stolen from other cities, or brought by the river bargers. Nothing was minted here.

  In this raucous place lived a man by the name of Amilcar, and this man was a fisherman on the Vareni. He caught pike and carp—Why do you look so pale, my dear?—of the most fabulous colors, bright yellow and deep green and eye-aching blue. Now this fisherman was wiser than the fishermen of the degenerate tales of the north, and he spent his evenings with a horn of brass and bone, whose rim he used to rub with oil and light, to chase away the river insects. He played the most delicate, lovely music in his little hut, lighting the banks of the many-colored river with his flaming horn.

  Now, Amilcar was quite lonely, and even a clever fisherman still reeks of fish. Beyond the local prostitutes, his prospects were few. And so, each evening, he would wet a sheet of music in gloss and place it against his rocking chair. As time went by, the tea-and-sturgeon-stained sheets with their notes like spider’s legs thickened and grew into the shape of a lovely wife, all of music. And each evening Amilcar would sit opposite his prize and wish for it to open treble-clef eyes or eighth-note lips and live for him. He played the music of his wife with his flaming horn of brass and bone, but it did not wake.

  And if this were a perverse northern tale, it would, eventually, and love him all its days. But we are more practical, in the country of palm and cinnamon.

  Now, the Vareni, being more or less made of dye, attracts very strange sorts of fish, and very strange sorts of other things which are not fish at all, and so it was that a Lamia called Vachya watched Amilcar at his music, and loved him. He was not unhandsome, and as a Lamia is more or less a sea serpent with three blue breasts and the head and arms of a woman, she was not over-concerned about the reek of fish.

  One early morning, before the sun had set about setting his cloudlures, Amilcar caught a great carp, the greatest one he had yet snared. This carp was all spangled silver, having once swallowed a great quantity of expensive thread. The carp was most displeased at having been caught—Why do you laugh, my dear?—and rolled over in Amilcar’s net, a baleen hook stuck into his lip, and said in a frot
hy, gurgling voice:

  “Amilcar, who soothes the clapping clams with his radiant horn, whose flames flash over the water! Hearken to me! If you should let me live, I shall tell you of a great treasure which crouches by your window every night!”

  Amilcar thought this was very fine indeed, and was wise enough to know the ways of such fish. He agreed immediately.

  “Vachya watches you, Amilcar, and besides being a sure sight better than a rocking chair full of old paper, she is a Lamia, and the gills of a Lamia are full of gold.”

  The fisherman let loose his carp, and when he returned home that night, he played his flaming horn as he was accustomed, peering at the breasts of his paper-wife for his song. But just when he was playing so beautifully that even the tone-deaf eel was leaning out of the water to hear, he leapt from his chair with his horn in one hand, and with the other threw open the window, where Vachya was curled, her many-fringed tail as blue as dye, and her piscine eyes blinking in surprise.

  “I have never seen a Lamia before,” said the fisherman. “Why do you come to my window?”

  “I heard you, on the open ocean, where the ships break the spume like whales’ heads…”

  THE TALE OF

  THE BLUE SERPENT

  DO NOT GO TO THE RIVER’S MOUTH, THE mother-Lamia say. It will gobble you up, and then where will you be?

  On maps they always mark us, the hoops of our blue tails humping out of the sea, demarcating the places where you must not go. But who will tell us? The Lamia were born in the beginning of the dark of the world, when there was nothing but a great black sea. Some will say there was always green land, just as there was always black sea, but these are the lies of the landlocked, and we who breathe it know that the sea is greater than the land, ever and always, and cannot have been anything but the primeval blood of the world. The Lamia are old, older than salt. Our three breasts are called morning, evening, and midnight, and we encompass the heavens in our coils.

  In the land of the Lamia, all things are blue. The waves lend their own color, and I cannot recall a time when blue was not the sum of my sight. Fields of blue coral where turquoise fins flashed, wavering fronds of cobalt seaweed and blue-black undersea mountains tipped in the last sapphire light where the moon pierced deepest into the water. The Lamia were the bluest of all blue things, our fins snapping bright, our skin like an ink spill, our lures glowing ghostly, blue light in the blue dark. When the tides were shocking and new, and the Lamia sucked the blood from the fat blue fish of the sea depths, my grandmother many times floated on the water, bathing in the moonlight, letting it turn her skin to silver and azure. From this vantage she saw a terrible thing, and her cerulean heart froze in her breast.

  It was a ship, and it was bleached brown and white, riding high on the waves, and it was in no part blue. Fascinated, my grandmother followed it, her thick tail looping through the water. She spied on its decks creatures of no tail and no lure, whose skin was dry and salt-cracked. She followed until the ship wrecked itself, for if one watches a vessel long enough, one is surely to witness catastrophe sooner or later. And from the waves she pulled a single sailor, whose eyes were properly blue. Being a fish, she did not moon over his handsome features for too long before fixing her mouth to his throat and taking her supper. We are practical creatures, who live on the sea, and know that serendipitous food is to be savored, for it may not come again. In his thin blood she tasted the green land and sheer rocks which were new in the world, and shuddered.

  She returned to the blue depths, and there, in the usual time, discovered that she was with child. She was disgusted and afraid: There are no male Lamia, and the old mothers, long-lived as they were, had given little thought to children. But when she was delivered of a happily wriggling sea serpent, the blue elders decided that it was the new blood, the rocky, grass-riddled blood, which had quickened her. Thus it was that ever since, when a Lamia felt the pull of daughters, she sought out a sailor and devoured him.

  In this way was I born, from the slashed chest of a rum-wrangler.

  Do not go to the river’s mouth, our mothers say. It will gobble you up, and then where will you be?

  Do not go there. There are monsters there, their harpoons curving up out of the deep, black places. But I was young and foolish as a tad-pole. I rejoiced in the soft blue-black water, the cold at the ocean floor, the light of my lures glittering in my hair, drawing my luncheons to me. We are deep-water fish, the Lamia. We drink blood and eat sand, and our skin does not see sun. I was strong; my tail whipped through the water. When I was grown, I went before the oldest Lamia, who is crusted with barnacles so thick it is as though she is no flesh at all, but hoary rock. I sang to her as the young ones will, a recital to please our common grandmother, my voice filled the waves with quivering delight, with my desire for the river and the rock, my curious tail drifting toward their foreign currents.

  The old Lamia yawned. Pieces of coral fractured off her jaw and floated up to the surface.

  “Fine, fine,” she croaked, “but could you not sing something blue?”

  Why should I not go to the river’s mouth? I thought to myself, furious, as I snapped away from her grotto. Why should I not see the grass and the clearer water, with pink fish and gold fish, and the sun like a great burning clam?

  I went to ask my mother, who was sleek and so dark in her blue scales that she was nearly black, curling around a rock at the bottom of the world, gnawing on its stony roots: “I wish to see the river,” I said.

  “Do not hurt your poor old mother so.”

  “I am quite fierce enough to brave the river!” I cried.

  Children must have been invented to vex and defy by turns. “Ask the swordfish, then; he will tell you where to go.”

  I went to the swordfish, silver and blue, his horn glinting in the shallower sea.

  “Swim until the water turns warm, and tastes of cod, and then seek out the carp,” he said.

  I swam and swam, and finally the water became warm, and tasted light and flowery, like the white flesh of the cod. It was then that I heard the first thin, fiery tendrils of a song playing somewhere far off, like a beckoning. I sought out the carp, and found him chewing krill by an overturned galleon which had three sharks living in it.

  “You must go until the water changes color,” he said. “It will become so many things other than blue, and it will be warm as an otter’s skin. That is the river. But I would not recommend it. There are monsters in the river.”

  With a trumpet of glee I sought out the green water, and found it flowing into the sea like silt. I leapt into the green, rolled in it, my starry lures waving in their eddies. The song was so loud, then! I sang with it, exultant. I slithered onto the shore and left a long lock of my blue hair waving on the grass, to say that I was there; alone of Lamia I was braver than any forbidding map. The water warmed my flesh, and I found I was not so dark when the ocean did not chill me—I was turquoise and silver and cobalt, all at once, and this was delightful to me.

  But then there was the singing, and I remembered what my mother had said about Sirens, but I could not help it. I swam upriver, through violet and gold currents, green and red and orange currents, and I played guessing games with the eels, and rhyming games with the osprey, and I tried to pretend no one sang. But each day I inched up the river, and each day there was singing rippling the water like a wind.

  Until I came to this hut, and saw that no bird or Siren sang, but a horn, and the horn flamed white and red, its reflection gleaming golden on the water.

  Do not go to the river’s mouth. It will gobble you up, and then where will you be?

  THE TALE OF

  THE AJAN COIN,

  CONTINUED

  “WHERE WILL I BE?” VACHYA SAID SHYLY, AND the fisherman helped her up into his house, where her startlingly blue tail wrapped his walls three times and then began to climb up through his chimney flue.

  And so Amilcar was happy, for a time. He would not set fire to the sheet-music
wife, as Vachya asked, but in the spirit of marital compromise, kept her politely in a closet. But Vachya was a wild thing, and though it was true that her gills were made of gold, it was a foreign gold with an eerie blue tint to the metal. And they could not very well sell her gills at the market. She thrashed her tail at the good china, and though her kisses were sweet as sturgeon eggs, they were hard and violent and Amilcar quailed in her embrace. But he loved her yet, and she sang with his horn so passionately that the eels fell dead in a swoon, and the river moved toward their hut to hear. She sang of sailor blood and blue milk and great blue eggs; she sang of the moon beaming with such strength on her breasts that she felt ice form on her cobalt nipples. He looked on her with wonder, and she smiled.

  Now, as husbands sometimes will, Amilcar was seized with an unfortunate folly as some men are seized with leprosy. You may think this is an overstatement, but not so when one’s wife is a Lamia. Amilcar traded often with the river bargers, his fish for their pots and pans and tinkered scissors, for their spice and their tales. It so happened that Amilcar desired the wife of one of the bargers, whose hair gleamed like a great store of all the spices of Ajanabh. She looked on him fondly, but was pregnant with her fifth child, and had no time for amorous fishermen. Amilcar loved her as he had once loved his music-wife, but she did not want him.

  One evening, Amilcar returned to his hut with the day’s catch—a bundle of carp which did not speak or promise wives—and Vachya sat very quietly in the chair which had held the mute and voiceless wife of music. Her hair was deep blue, and tiny light shone in it, like stars, though Amilcar knew them by now for her dark-water lures, meant to catch wary fish in their enchanting lights. Her tail coiled around the entire room, huge and thick and ridged with silver-blue fins.