In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “It is my pleasure,” demurred the Dancing-Master.

  I could feel the sides of the root-shoes squeezing my feet, trying to hold on. “It is time for me to go now,” I said uncertainly.

  “There is no need to leave me down here in the dark. Think how well we could dance together, in the candelabra halos! Think how beautiful all men would think you, in your cinnamon shoes, with your long legs dancing like a Gaselli!”

  The shoes were strangling now, trying to hold on to me, trying to keep me fast inside them. “I… I think I should like to feel my own feet on the cobblestones, if it’s all the same.”

  “It is not the same,” cried the Dancing-Master, squeezing tighter, like a snake around a mongoose. “I am tired of lying empty in the dark, waiting for girls to come and fill me up for a moment, only to run away when they are finished! I like you as well as I have liked anyone since the dead girl, and I want to dance again, in the Duke’s Palace, in the Duke’s garden, with perfume in the air!”

  I scraped at the shoes, trying to get them off, tears of pain springing to my eyes. “Please! I don’t want to dance at the Duke’s Palace!”

  “But I know, pretty little bird’s daughter! I know what it is right and proper for girls to do! I can answer your question!” The shoes ground tighter against my bones. “Girls are meant to dance, and spin until their skirts flare like petals, and look more beautiful than ruby-rimmed roses at balls which never end; they are meant to live for the revels; they are meant to bat their eyelashes and whirl in the arms of handsome men!” Tighter still the cinnamon shoes pinched and pulled. “They are meant to drink bubbling wine and laugh like finches singing and dash into the shadows to be kissed! They are meant to blush and curtsey! They are meant to swoon! But they are meant to dance, most of all; they are meant to dance, dead or alive, cold or hot; they are meant to dance until their bones crack! They are meant to care only for the dance, only for the whirl of shining gowns and the sashes on young men’s chests. They are meant to spin in men’s arms for all their days, until their heel bones strike sparks on the dance floor!”

  The voice of the Dancing-Master spiraled higher and higher, more and more shrill. I was weeping as the shoes wrenched, crushed my feet into the red roots, and my fingers scrabbled against them uselessly. I drew a hitching breath, my chest searing and tight, and leapt up into the air, just as the maze had taught me, a high, strong leap, and came down as hard as I could on the flats of my feet. The landing shivered my calf bones and I bit my cheek in a sharp-edged wince, but the careening voice ceased abruptly, like a door slamming shut.

  The shoes were broken into pieces on the stone floor of the cistern, lying around me in sweet-smelling cinnamon shards.

  “No,” I said simply, and turned back to the long tunnel, back up to the air and the light.

  When I emerged from the grate, it was nearly light. Sleeve was there, snoring lightly, as spiders will snore. It takes a long time to learn to hear a spider’s snore, but by then my ears were keen as an owl’s, and I heard her little wheezing, in and out, in and out. She woke with a shudder when I stroked her back, and looked up at me with her glittering black eyes.

  “And how did we do this time? Same as the rest?”

  “More or less.” I shrugged.

  “Well, come on with you, then. It’s nearly time for Lantern to dance.”

  As the sun blinked sleepily over the Sirens’ tower, Lantern stood in the courtyard with the gurgling fountain, amid the shouting and singing of the Carnival, and danced. His flaming tail tossed scarlet and yellow up into the air and down again like a fan, each frond of peacock-bright feathers wavering as if each one was a separate dancer. His huge feathered feet lifted up and stomped down in a quick rhythm, one I had always loved. A dozen violins and trumpets and flutes played his music, and he turned his face to the new sun, his bronze beak catching the first light, sending it into the fountain in a shower of gold. I wanted, as I have always wanted, to see the world from within his tail, and that morning of all mornings, I stepped shyly up to my dazzling, burning father as he hopped up onto one claw and spun to the delighted gasps of the musicians.

  “Papa,” I said, and I wish my voice had not wavered; I wish my cheeks had not been so red and hot! “Let me dance with you.”

  He smiled, as only a bird the size of a house can smile, and I stepped into his tail.

  The world through flaming feathers is washed in gold, scrubbed to gleaming by fire, and the sound of it roars ocean-fierce. I moved my feet as though the maze were still red and wide beneath me, I moved my arms like wings, and I danced in my papa’s tail like a Firebird.

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED

  SOLACE GRINNED, HER FACE BRIGHTER EVEN than her father’s. “I shall not dance until my bones crack,” she said. “I shall dance every morning until my heart catches on the sun, and I fill up with gold like a crystal cup! And I shall never wear a proper dress, no matter how many Sleeve shows me, all a-spangle with green and silver!” Lantern nuzzled his huge head under her arm and she kissed his burnished plumage. “Of course, my hair burned up completely that first time! It has grown back just like Papa’s tail, and I have had to learn since how to dance without catching fire. It is not too difficult, once you get the trick of it.” She pulled hard on one of his feathers and the great bird squawked like a common duck. “But you should have told me, you rotten old seagull. What a trial I have been for my poor spider.”

  “Yes,” Lantern said simply, and turned to me as though I had only just arrived. “That is all we have to tell,” said the Firebird. “You may go or stay as you like, now. But the sun will be up soon, and we are for the Carnival.”

  I pursed my smoke-lips. “I am not sure what Simeon meant me to know of you,” I confessed.

  “Perhaps only that there is a Star in Ajanabh, and beside her, spiders and birds and girls which do not wish to be burned.”

  Solace hopped down lightly from the scorched cage and extended her hand.

  “Do you want to go to the Carnival?” she asked, her tattoos gleaming up at me as fiercely as her eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, and slipped my black fingers into hers.

  In the Garden

  THE AFTERNOON WAS LATE AND GRAY ON THE SNOW. IT HAD BEGUN TO melt, and ice flowed everywhere in silent little rivers. The lake in which the girl had bathed—so long ago now!—had frozen silver and smoky. The sun wore a veil that day, and it shone only fitfully through the thick, gauzy clouds. The Gate glittered with hard little knots of ice, and the boy, who had never seen such cold in his life, ran his fingers over them in wonder.

  “You must go now,” the girl said. “Do not think you ought to linger here.”

  “I don’t,” he said, and shut his eyes while he fingered the ice. It melted to water against his skin. “What,” he added thoughtfully, as casually as he could manage, “happened to the Papess, do you think?”

  The girl furrowed her brow. She, too, touched the ice, and shook her head as her fingers stuck to the hard little globes that clung to the iron. “I do not know,” she said, as though he had asked her what the inside of her eyelids looked like. “If there is something more about her written on my skin, you must read it, not I. I did not create her; I cannot arrange her footsteps through the world like a basket of flowers.”

  “What do you think, though?”

  “I do not know, I told you. And it is time for you to run back to the courtyards, where your sister will be saying very serious vows, and eating, and dancing.”

  The boy smiled broadly, like the moon emerging from the horizon. “You are absolutely right!” he cried, and seized her hand in his.

  “What are you doing? Let me go!”

  “No,” said the boy firmly. “You are a child of the Palace, and that gives you the right to dance at the wedding of Dinarzad, just like the others. In fact,” he added with a crooked grin, “as a child of the Pa
lace, you really haven’t much choice in the matter.”

  He led her to the frozen lake, with its icy cattails waving still and shattering against each other from time to time. The ferns were white and shivering, and long naked branches bowed black and deep. From behind a rock crowned with bright mosses he drew a little bundle, just where she had said it would be, and presented it to the girl with all the pride of a cat who has managed, at long last, to catch a blackbird in flight, and brought it back to its mistress. The girl looked blankly at it, and he opened it for her, drawing the strings slowly open.

  Inside was a dress. It was red, like her cloak, and overlaid with the most delicate mesh of gold, knotted into elaborate roses and birds soaring past ripe fields. The netting made a little train, and there was a belt of tiger’s-eyes and golden chains, and a necklace of garnets, and lastly, a golden circlet which held up a soft scarlet veil.

  “I told you not to,” she said gently, but he saw her lip shaking.

  “No one will know,” the boy whispered, his voice as full of coaxing as a mother’s who wishes her child to eat. “The veil will keep you hidden, and I shall brush your hair clean of leaves and snow. No one will know, and you can eat at the table, and stand by my side all the night long, and dance, like Solace, like a Firebird.”

  The girl was weeping, her shoulders quivering as she tried valiantly not to.

  And so the boy helped her arrange the netting of the dress. He fastened her belt of tiger’s eyes. He laid the necklace of garnets around her neck. He brushed her hair with his own fingers until it was soft and gleaming, and he braided it as best he could manage. He fixed the circlet on her brow, and let the veil fall over her face. He stood back and looked at her, blood-bright against the snow, the gold already catching new snowflakes like threads of silk.

  “It was hers, you know,” he said, “when she was our age. She let me have it. She is…” The boy swallowed. “Not quite so awful as I thought, my sister.” He squared his shoulders and shook his snow-dappled hair back. “But I was younger then, and much more foolish.”

  He took her hand, which was terribly cold in his, and thinner than bones, but he smoothed her hair, just a little, before he remembered that it was not terribly polite, and withdrew his hand quickly. The boy and the girl walked together across the snowy orchards, toward the chestnut chapel, where firelight was already leaping toward the sky.

  No one knew. He showed her the table, with its roasted birds and roasted beasts, with its wine and its steaming stews and its chocolates, with its slices of rough, red hippopotamus meat and its shaved camel-hump, wet and glistening. He showed her the crocodile, its sawtooth jaws propped open with silver bolts, and stuffed with sugared pears. He showed her the rhinoceros horn dripping with honey and salt. She laughed shyly, and ate as much as she pleased, and no one took any notice of her at all in all the milling children with their colored plumage.

  The girl watched Dinarzad very curiously while she was wed, and she saw the trembling of her, and heard the breathlessness of her. The boy watched, too, but he tried not to see these things, for he did not wish to shame his sister by weeping.

  And in the light of a hundred torches, under a sky full of hard, cold stars like ice on an iron gate, they danced. She was uncertain at first, but he showed her easy steps, and led her into the center of the throng, where the laughter and the voices and golden, whirling bodies were thickest, and the boy danced with the demon girl in the sight of all his relations, turning her faster and faster, until Dinarzad’s dress was a red-gold blur. He could see the tears fall from her chin beneath the veil, and his hands were wet with them. The boy’s sisters and cousins and matronly old aunts spun by and laughed as they spun, their voices thick with wine.

  In the midst of the dance, the Sultan gestured from his holiday throne of ivory and plum-branches dipped in bronze. The boy looked nervously to his veiled friend, but could not refuse. He walked slowly to his father’s seat with her frightened hand clutched in his. Over the Sultan’s black beard he looked at them, his eyes reflecting the firelight like a Djinn’s.

  “What a beautiful little friend you have found, my son. She is quite striking, just as red as a demon.”

  “Y… yes, Father.”

  “Is she one of mine? It is so hard to tell, these days!”

  “N… no, Father. She is visiting the court for the wedding, like so many others.”

  “Then, welcome, child! Be sure to speak well of us when you return to your foreign court. Tell them how good my son has been to you. Tell them my daughter welcomed you at her wedding. Tell them,” his voice faltered slightly, but so slightly no one would have thought it was anything but the good, sweet wine, “tell them we were kind to you.”

  “I am sure she will, Father.”

  The Sultan leaned in to the two tremulous children, his long, curled hair wafting its scent of cedar and frankincense into their eyes. “And,” he whispered, “look after my son, young lady. A boy can get his head turned quite around on an evening such as this.”

  The girl nodded, her voice long having fled her throat. The Sultan nodded their dismissal, and the boy led his scarlet friend onto the dance floor again, but the girl could not go on. Her weeping and her shaking was too great, and the boy took her away from the crowds, away from the chestnut canopies, and into the snow again, where she thrust her hands down into it, watching it melt under her heat. She looked up at the boy and he lifted her veil gingerly. Her face was streaked with tears, her eyelids shining like ink.

  “If I weep long enough,” she whispered, “do you think the ink might wash away, like a painting left in the rain? Do you think I could walk among those fiery people every day, among your drunken aunts, and your cousins, do you think I could sit beside your father and be called beautiful without my veil?”

  “No,” he answered gently, “I do not think that.”

  She laughed shortly and wiped her nose. “Neither do I.”

  He drew her cloak close around her and dried her tears with the corner of his sleeve. The porphyry bracelet knocked lightly against her cheek. She looked up at him with a stare full of red-rimmed urgency, and closed her eyes.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

  THE TALE OF THE

  CAGE OF IVORY

  AND THE

  CAGE OF IRON,

  CONTINUED

  THE FIREBIRD AND HIS DAUGHTER AND I WALKED through an empty city. I saw those places the night’s tales had laid out in my heart: the Dressmaker’s Parish, the opera house, the Clock-makers’ Square and the little house with so many locks, the church which was not a church, the churning river in more colors than I could count if I had a ledger and a thousand years. I thought I could see the Sirens’ tower, impossibly high, off on the east end of the clustered red edifices.

  We walked a wide and well-kept street, which skewed and counter-skewed as everything else in Ajanabh does, but this one, it seemed, less than usual. In fact, as we went, it widened, until we passed through an ample court peopled with a hundred silent statues, each face frozen and perfect in red stone, fluttering slate fans and clutching snuffboxes of agate and marble and malachite. It was the same one Agrafena had led me through, and once again I was chilled. But the Firebird did not seem to even notice them, and walked around the menagerie as Solace and I, being more graceful of foot, walked through, marveling at the sad, exact faces, each its own, with flared noses and slender ones, high brows and glowering, lips full and meager. We touched their cheeks, and the stone was full of little flecks of quartz that flickered in the dim predawn light. They were hard and warm and unyielding.

  “They look like wives,” I said, laughing, and Solace looked at me as though I were well and truly mad.

  I would have left that grove of folk and thought no more of it than I had the first time, a wonder in a nest of wonders, if I had not heard her scrabbling in the corner of the square, mumbling frantically, a chisel in each hand.

  She was probably beautiful, when she was youn
g. Her hair was long and stringy and white, showered with stone dust, her worn face lined like a discarded map when no one is any longer interested in the treasure it promises. She had a snaggle-edged shawl knotted over her head, and her rags were brown and stiff and filthy. She was missing a tooth, and her feet were bare on the road.

  “I suppose we ought to be glad she never grew up!” the old woman barked. I think her voice was fine once, but it sounded now like a harp with a broken spine.

  “I’m sorry, old mother, I do not know what you mean,” I answered her, keeping my distance.

  “He told me once, when there was a shipment of brandy in and it was very, very late. That’s when he liked to talk, you know, by the big fireplace, under that stupid, ugly old head. He told me where his wife went, and I suppose we ought to be glad she never grew up, or it would have gone badly for the butcher’s boy when she turned up all green and fire-breathed!”

  Solace covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes wide. The old woman trundled over and chiseled a bit of a spindle-waisted statue’s eyebrow. “I made these for her, all of them. Over the years, you know. I didn’t,” her voice thickened like cream, “I didn’t want her to be lonely, you see. I couldn’t bear for her to be lonely. I couldn’t bear for her to be like me. She’s here somewhere, in the crowd, where she always liked to be. She’s here somewhere… but I forgot.” The crone’s blue eyes, filmed and rheumy, were full of tears as she looked around her. “I just forgot,” she whispered.

  Solace dashed off without a word and I was left with the madwoman, as she scratched at her scalp, her eyes lost and dark. “Where is my Basilisk,” she hissed at me. “Where is my baby rock-foot? Why didn’t he come back for me? Why doesn’t he look at me the way he looked at her?” She stumbled a little on her thick feet and I caught her, though she choked and sputtered in my smoke. She righted herself and set to the sandstone bustle of another figure. “Where are you, you old lizard?” she choked. “Why don’t you come back?”