The Midnight Circus

by Jane Yolen

  “I will do for you, Father, as you did for me,” she whispered to the moon. She prayed to the goddess for the strength to accomplish what she had just promised.

  Then foot by slow foot, she crept onto the field, searching in the red moon’s light for the father who had fallen. She made slits of her eyes so she would not see the full horror around her. She breathed through her mouth so that she would not smell all the deaths. She never once thought of the Great Graxyx who lived—so she truly believed—in the black cave of her dressing room. Or any of the hundred and six gibbering children Graxyx had sired. She crept across the landscape made into a horror by the enemy hordes. All the dead men looked alike. She found her father by his boots.

  She made her way up from the boots, past the gaping wound that had taken him from her, to his face which looked peaceful and familiar enough, except for the staring eyes. He had never stared like that. Rather his eyes had always been slotted, against the hot sun of the gods, against the lies of men. She closed his lids with trembling fingers and put her head down on his chest, where the stillness of the heart told her what she already knew.

  And then she began to sing to him.

  She sang of life, not death, and the small gods of new things. Of bees in the hive and birds on the summer wind. She sang of foxes denning and bears shrugging off winter. She sang of fish in the sparkling rivers and the first green uncurlings of fern in spring. She did not mention dying, blood, or wounds, or the awful stench of death. Her father already knew this well and did not need to be recalled to it.

  And when she was done with her song, it was as if his corpse gave a great sigh, one last breath, though of course he was dead already half the night and made no sound at all. But she heard what she needed to hear.

  By then it was morning and the crows came. The human crows as well as the black birds, poking and prying and feeding on the dead.

  So she turned and went home and everyone wondered why she did not weep. But she had left her tears out on the battlefield.

  She was seven years old.

  Dogs bark, but the caravan goes on.

  Before the men who had killed her father and who had killed her brothers could come to take all the women away to serve them, she had her maid cut her black hair as short as a boy’s. The maid was a trembling sort, and the hair cut was ragged. But it would do.

  She waited until the maid had turned around and leaned down to put away the shears. Then she put her arm around the woman, and with a quick knife’s cut across her throat, killed her, before the woman could tell on her. It was a mercy, really, for she was old and ugly and would be used brutally by the soldiers before being slaughtered, probably in a slow and terrible manner. So her father had warned before he left for battle.

  Then she went into the room of her youngest brother, dead in the field and lying by her father’s right hand. In his great wooden chest she found a pair of trews that had probably been too small for him, but were nonetheless too long for her. With the still-bloody knife she sheared the legs of the trews a hand’s width, rolled and sewed them with a quick seam. The women of her house could sew well, even when it had to be done quickly. Even when it had to be done through half-closed eyes. Even when the hem was wet with blood. Even then.

  When she put on the trews, they fit, though she had to pull the drawstring around the waist quite tight and tie the rib bands twice around her. She shrugged into one of her brother’s shirts as well, tucking it down into the waistband. Then she slipped her bloody knife into the shirt sleeve. She wore her own riding boots—which could not be told from a boy’s—for her brother’s boots were many times too big for her.

  Then she went out through the window her brother always used when he set out to court one of the young and pretty maids. She had watched him often enough though he had never known she was there, hiding beside the bed, a dark little figure as still as the night.

  Climbing down the vine, hand over hand, was no great trouble either. She had done it before, following after him. Really, what a man and a maid did together was most interesting, if a bit odd. And certainly noisier than it needed to be.

  She reached the ground in moments, crossed the garden, climbed over the outside wall by using a tree as her ladder. When she dropped to the ground, she twisted her ankle a bit, but she made not the slightest whimper. She was a boy now. And she knew they did not cry.

  In the west, a cone of dark dust was rising up and advancing on the fortress, blotting out the sky. She knew it for the storm that many hooves make as horses race across the plains. The earth trembled beneath her feet. Behind her, in their rooms, the women had begun to wail. The sound was thin, like a gold filament thrust in to her breast. She plugged her ears that their cries could not recall her to her old life, for such was not her plan.

  Circling around the stone skirting of the fortress, in the shadow so no one could see her, she started around toward the east. It was not a direction she knew. All she knew was that it was away from the horses of the enemy.

  Once, she glanced back at the fortress that had been the only home she had ever known. Her mother, her sisters, the other women stood on the battlements looking toward the west and the storm of riders. She could hear their wailing, could see the movement of their arms as they beat upon their breasts. She did not know if that was a plea or an invitation.

  She did not turn to look again.

  To become a warrior, forget the past.

  Three years she worked as a serving lad in a fortress not unlike her own but many days’ travel away. She learned to clean and to carry, she learned to work after a night of little sleep. Her arms and legs grew strong. Three years she worked as the cook’s boy. She learned to prepare geese and rabbit and bear for the pot, and learned which parts were salty, which sweet. She could tell good mushrooms from bad and which greens might make the toughest meat palatable.

  And then she knew she could no longer disguise the fact that she was a girl, for her body had begun to change in ways that would give her away. So she left the fortress, starting east once more, taking only her knife and a long loop of rope, which she wound around her waist seven times.

  She was many days hungry, many days cold, but she did not turn back. Fear is a great incentive.

  She taught herself to throw the knife and hit what she aimed at. Hunger is a great teacher.

  She climbed trees when she found them in order to sleep safe at night. The rope made such passages easier.

  She was so long by herself, she almost forgot how to speak. But she never forgot how to sing. In her dreams she sang to her father on the battlefield. Her songs made him live again. Awake she knew the truth was otherwise. He was dead. The worms had taken him. His spirit was with the goddess, drinking milk from her great pap, milk that tasted like honey wine.

  She did not dream of her mother or of her sisters or of any of the women in her father’s fortress. If they died, it had been with little honor. If they still lived, it was with less.

  So she came at last to a huge forest with oaks thick as a goddess’s waist. Over all was a green canopy of leaves that scarcely let in the sun. Here were many streams, rivulets that ran cold and clear, torrents that crashed against rocks, and pools that were full of silver trout whose meat was sweet. She taught herself to fish and to swim, and it would be hard to say which gave her the greater pleasure. Here, too, were nests of birds, and that meant eggs. Ferns curled and then opened, and she knew how to steam them using a basket made of willow strips and start a fire from rubbing sticks against one another. She followed bees to their hives, squirrels to their hidden nuts, ducks to their watered beds.

  She grew strong, and brown, and—though she did not know it—very beautiful.

  Beauty is a danger, to women as well as to men. To warriors, most of all. It steers them away from the path of killing. It softens the soul.

  When you are in a tree, be a tree.

  She was three years alone in the forest and grew to trust the sky, the earth, the river,
the trees, the way she trusted her knife. They did not lie to her. They did not kill wantonly. They gave her shelter, food, courage. She did not remember her father except as some sort of warrior god, with staring eyes, looking as she had seen him last. She did not remember her mother or sisters or aunts at all.

  It had been so long since she had spoken to anyone, it was as if she could not speak at all. She knew words: they were in her head, but not in her mouth, on her tongue, in her throat. Instead she made the sounds she heard every day—the grunt of boar, the whistle of duck, the trilling of thrush, the settled cooing of the wood pigeon on its nest.

  If anyone had asked her if she was content, she would have nodded.

  Content.

  Not happy. Not satisfied. Not done with her life’s work.

  Content.

  And then one early evening a new sound entered her domain. A drumming on the ground, from many miles away. A strange halloing, thin, insistent, whining. The voices of some new animal, packed like wolves, singing out together.

  She trembled. She did not know why. She did not remember why. But to be safe from the thing that made her tremble, she climbed a tree, the great oak that was in the very center of her world.

  She used the rope ladder she had made, and pulled the ladder up after. Then she shrank back against the trunk of the tree to wait. She tried to be the brown of the bark, the green of the leaves, and in this she almost succeeded.

  It was in the first soft moments of dark, with the woods outlined in muzzy black, that the pack ran yapping, howling, belling into the clearing around the oak.

  In that instant she remembered dogs.

  There were twenty of them, some large, lanky grays; some stumpy browns with long muzzles; some stiff-legged spotted with pushed-in noses; some thick-coated; some smooth. Her father, the god of war, had had such a motley pack. He had hunted boar and stag and hare with such. They had found him bear and fox and wolf with ease.

  Still, she did not know why the dog pack was here, circling her tree. Their jaws were raised so that she could see their iron teeth, could hear the tolling of her death with their long tongues.

  She used the single word she could remember. She said it with great authority, with trembling.

  “Avaunt!”

  At the sound of her voice, the animals all sat down on their haunches to stare up at her, their own tongues silenced. Except for one, a rat terrier, small and springy and unable to be still. He raced back up the path toward the west like some small spy going to report to his master.

  Love comes like a thief, stealing the heart’s gold away.

  It was in the deeper dark that the dogs’ master came, with his men behind him, their horses’ hooves thrumming the forest paths. They trampled the grass, the foxglove’s pink bells and the purple florets of self-heal, the winecolored burdock flowers and the sprays of yellow goldenrod equally under the horses’ heavy feet. The woods were wounded by their passage. The grass did not spring back nor the flowers raise up again.

  She heard them and began trembling anew as they thrashed their way across her green haven and into the very heart of the wood.

  Ahead of them raced the little terrier, his tail flagging them on, ’til he led them right to the circle of dogs waiting patiently beneath her tree.

  “Look, my lord, they have found something,” said one man.

  “Odd they should be so quiet,” said another.

  But the one they called lord dismounted, waded through the sea of dogs, and stood at the very foot of the oak, his feet crunching on the fallen acorns. He stared up, and up, and up through the green leaves and at first saw nothing but brown and green.

  One of the large gray dogs stood, walked over to his side, raised its great muzzle to the tree, and howled.

  The sound made her shiver anew.

  “See, my lord, see—high up. There is a trembling in the foliage,” one of the men cried.

  “You fool,” the lord cried, “that is no trembling of leaves. It is a girl. She is dressed all in brown and green. See how she makes the very tree shimmer.” Though how he could see her so well in the dark, she was never to understand.

  “Come down, child, we will not harm you.”

  She did not come down. Not then. Not until the morning fully revealed her. And then, if she was to eat, if she was to relieve herself, she had to come down. So she did, dropping the rope ladder, and skinning down it quickly. She kept her knife tucked up in her waist, out where they could see it and be afraid.

  They did not touch her but watched her every movement, like a pack of dogs. When she went to the river to drink, they watched. When she ate the bit of journeycake the lord offered her, they watched. And even when she relieved herself, the lord watched. He would let no one else look then, which she knew honored her, though she did not care.

  And when after several days he thought he had tamed her, the lord took her on his horse before him and rode with her back to the far west where he lived. By then he loved her, and knew that she loved him in return, though she had yet to speak a word to him.

  “But then, what have words to do with love?” he whispered to her as they rode.

  He guessed by her carriage, by the way her eyes met his, that she was a princess of some sort, only badly used. He loved her for the past which she could not speak of, for her courage which showed in her face, and for her beauty. He would have loved her for much less, having found her in the tree, for she was something out of a story, out of a prophecy, out of a dream.

  “I loved you at once,” he whispered. “When I knew you from the tree.”

  She did not answer. Love was not yet in her vocabulary. But she did not say the one word she could speak: avaunt. She did not want him to go.

  When the cat wants to eat her kittens, she says they look like mice.

  His father was not so quick to love her.

  His mother, thankfully, was long dead.

  She knew his father at once, by the way his eyes were slotted against the hot sun of the gods, against the lies of men. She knew him to be a king if only by that.

  And when she recognized her mother and her sisters in his retinue, she knew who it was she faced. They did not know her, of course. She was no longer seven but nearly seventeen. Her life had browned her, bronzed her, made her into such steel as they had never known. She could have told them but she had only contempt for their lives. As they had contempt now for her, thinking her some drudge run off to the forest, some sinister throwling from a forgotten clan.

  When the king gave his grudging permission for their marriage, when the prince’s advisers set down in long scrolls what she should and should not have, she only smiled at them. It was a tree’s smile, giving away not a bit of the bark.

  She waited until the night of her wedding to the prince when they were couched together, the servants a-giggle outside their door. She waited until he had covered her face with kisses, when he had touched her in secret places that made her tremble, when he had brought blood between her legs. She waited until he had done all the things she had once watched her brother do to the maids, and she cried out with pleasure as she had heard them do. She waited until he laid asleep, smiling happily in his dreams, because she did love him in her warrior way.

  Then she took her knife and slit his throat, efficiently and without cruelty, as she would a deer for her dinner.

  “Your father killed my father,” she whispered, soft as a love token in his ear as the knife carved a smile on his neck.

  She stripped the bed of its bloody offering and handed it to the servants who thought it the effusions of the night. Then she walked down the hall to her father-in-law’s room.

  He was bedded with her mother, riding her like one old wave atop another.

  “Here!” he cried as he realized someone was in the room. “You!” he said when he realized who it was.

  Her mother looked at her with half opened eyes and, for the first time, saw who she really was, for she had her father’s face, fierce a
nd determined.

  “No!” her mother cried. ‘‘Avaunt!’’ But it was a cry that was ten years late.

  She killed the king with as much ease as she had killed his son, but she let the knife linger longer to give him a great deal of pain. Then she sliced off one of his ears and put it gently in her mother’s hand.

  In all this she had said not one word. But wearing the blood of the king on her gown, she walked out of the palace and back to the woods, though she was many days getting there.

  No one tried to stop her, for no one saw her. She was a flower in the meadow, a rock by the roadside, a reed by the river, a tree in the forest.

  And a warrior’s mother by the spring of the year.

  An Infestation of Angels

  THE ANGELS CAME AGAIN TODAY, filthy things, dropping golden-hard wing feathers and turds as big and brown as camel dung. This time one of them took Isak, clamping him from behind with massive talons. We could hear him screaming long after the covey was out of sight. His blood stained the doorpost where they took him. We left it there, part warning, part desperate memorial, with the dropped feathers nailed above. In a time of plagues, this infestation of angels was the worst.

  We did not want to stay in the land of the Gipts, but slaves must do as their masters command. And though we were not slaves in the traditional sense, only hirelings, we had signed contracts and the Gipts are great believers in contracts. It was a saying of theirs that “One who goes back on his signed word is no better than a thief.” What they do to thieves is considered grotesque even in this godforsaken desert-land.

  So we were trapped here, under skies that rained frogs, amid sparse fields that bred locusts, beneath a sun that raised rashes and blisters on our sensitive skins. It was a year of unnature. Yet if anyone of us complained, the leader of the Gipts, the faró, waved the contract high over his head, causing his followers to break into that high ululation they mis-call laughter.

  We stayed.