“Of course—who am I to shirk the duty of entertaining visiting royalty? Follow me; it is not far.”
We moved quickly through the angled alleys, and the shadows were deep and scented below the rounded towers of Ajanabh. I thought I could smell that spice-smog that Simeon had loved so, or the ghost of it, the faintest sigh of cardamom and cumin and cinnamon breathing through the night. As we passed windows and doors, I could see jugglers throwing candelabra high in dimly lit rooms, and hear heartbreaking soliloquies delivered earnestly to tall mirrors. The night was full of voices, and every now and then, a lone and tamed lion would pad by on the cracked road, his collar kept clean and crisp. Surely there was a great ring somewhere, a great stage, and I was missing even now the Ajan carnival in its full waxing. We passed through a wide square peopled with red sandstone statues, each face precise and perfect in scarlet stone, clutching granite mirrors and marble parasols. We wound through them on tiptoe, for I was certain one of them would reach out at any moment to grip my arm. But the violin player walked tall and did not err in her steps, even when the stone crowd was far behind us. Agrafena’s hair stood straight out behind her even when she was not whirling about, and I could not see her face for its mass. I suppose I was not one to talk, with my ungainly baskets.
Shyly, I ventured: “Your hands…”
“Yes?”
“How did you come to have your bows? It must have been very painful.”
“Not so much as you might think.” She stopped and though we could not fit through the alleys abreast, she looked over her shoulder at me. “We have time yet in your night before we reach the roost, if you are genuinely curious—”
I nodded eagerly. She drew me out of the little alley and sat me beside a persimmon tree caught up in a rusty iron trunk-gate, to protect it from climbing children.
“Well enough, then. I have told you already that my grandfather was a Djinn…”
THE
VIOLINIST’S
TALE
HE WAS BORN IN KASH, LIKE THE REST OF YOU. His cradle was carnelian and brass. His smoke was bilious and soot-riddled, even as an infant, and his eyes dripped orange flame when he cried out for his mother. My grandfather, whose name was Suhail, was dissatisfied by the silent finery of Kash, however, and chafed against the Khaighal, which was the life charted for him by the best astrologers. He wanted to find a princess with a wicked wish for a dark and handsome stranger to whisk her away and sing to her on a balcony surrounded by swans and imps.
So that is just what he did.
My grandmother had a long braid the color of fire, and very green eyes. As all folk know, this coloring indicates a deviant and difficult disposition, and indeed, she spent her nights at her tapered window, wishing for a dark and handsome stranger to come and whisk her away from a boring life of embroidery and afterbirth, and sing to her on a balcony surrounded by swans and imps. She was not entirely sure what she meant by singing, but in her books, suitors always sang to their ladies, and she was determined to hear a song for herself, even if it did seem a little dreary. My grandmother, whose name was Glaucia, laced her dress very tightly and sighed loudly at her window, just as the woodcuts in her books always depicted such ladies.
My grandfather, lately run off from Kash with a silk sash like blue fire, heard her sighing and needed no Khaighal to grant her wish. He obliged her most vigorously, and the swans trumpeted, and the imps snickered, and Glaucia discovered that singing was not so very dreary after all.
As it tends to do, time produced a child, a daughter with green eyes and very polite, soft black hair that never—not even once!—snaked out to strangle a parrot in flight. Suhail did not know what to do. He could not send her to be educated properly in Kash, for they would burn her and drown her in short order, and universities tended to also ask for pedigrees. But she was a mild and sweet girl, to the astonishment and consternation of both her parents, and she found a mild and sweet boy to build her a house, and was happy enough for someone who couldn’t even strangle a parrot properly.
Her only unhappiness was that her marriage could not be consummated. Whenever her husband drew up the covers over them both—oh, how Glaucia rolled her eyes when her daughter recounted that!—and reached for her, the poor girl’s body melted into black smoke, every bit as oily and soot-riddled as her father’s. Her husband fell right into her and found his face pressed into his own pillow. There was no end to the weeping and storming in their little house.
But it seemed not to matter, for she came down with child just like any other woman, and in the usual span produced me, whose hair immediately throttled the nearest turtledove, to the relief and joy of my grandfather, who burst into grateful and incendiary tears at the sight.
My parents settled in Ajanabh and put down a modest basil field. Everything in my childhood smelled of basil, soapy and green. But I did not love basil, nor the few small squares of garlic my father put into the ground. I loved music, and I sang before I spoke. This delighted my grandmother when she visited. She did not mind that my voice sounded much more like a rabbit roasting alive in a crackling hearth than sweet tiralees. But I would not give up, and when my grandfather brought me a fiddle of lava rock with a long, thin blue flame for a bow, I threw my arms around his black and bilious neck and squeezed until he could not breathe. I learned that fiddle like some children learn their figures—it was as simple and easy to me as adding up a column of numbers and presenting the tidy, graceful sum at the bottom of the page. My mother said I played too fast, and my father said that true virtuosos certainly did not dance that way while they played, but I would not stop, or slow.
At last, when the basil fields were still high and bright and green, I reached the limit of my abilities. I could not play faster, or sweeter, I could not move my fingers in more complex patterns. My parents thought I would be satisfied then, to be the best I could, but my grandfather winked at me on his winter visit, and I knew my hands were not yet happy. Once the family had feasted and were snoring in four-part harmony I crept from the farmhouse and into the city proper, which was then as lawless as a ship without a brig. I sought out the cottage of Folio, who was the author, so they said, of every wonder in Ajanabh.
Her door was a menagerie of locks. Every possible type and size, from huge brass bolts to tiny, intricate silver keyholes no wider than a needle, wooden locks with gaping slots and golden locks with birds carved into their faces, iron locks and crystal locks and copper locks and locks so old and worn that only rust was left where the metal might once have been, bronze locks and locks fashioned out of antlers, crude slate locks and locks in the shape of open, staring eyes blown from purest, clearest glass.
I had no key, and there was no spare splinter of door left on which to knock. Being a clever child, I pressed my fingers into ten varied locks, no two of the same stuff, and heard a dozen little bells cascade their chimes through the hunched hut, alone among the campaniles of Ajanabh a short, squat, stairless shack. The door creaked open in just the manner one would expect a mysterious door to creak, and the light within was rust-colored, reeking of oil and copper and burnt air. I stepped gingerly inside; the door behind me swung closed, the locks merrily going about their slotting and turning.
Folio sat at her workbench, an old fig-wood plank with vises set into it and open books lying brazenly a-splay. There were sketches on the walls, and scraps of metal in various states of molten and hard leaning against chairs and baseboards or puddled in molds; loose gears and pendulums and countless clocks, their innards violently exposed, metronomes endlessly ticking away; and many things whose use I could not guess: machines of metal precious and cheap, black with oil or draped in cloth, metallic wings and pens which wrote hurriedly with no hand to guide them, little clockwork lumberjacks who chopped ineffectually at iron stumps, and a spinning wheel whose spindle whirled contentedly all on its own.
Folio had a hunchback and skin the color of fig seeds, and her spectacles—for it is well known that all inventors w
ear spectacles—were fashioned from clock hands which stuck out every which way from the round glass. Behind them, her dark blue eyes, the color of good dye, were luminous and calm. She was rather old and her white hair, braided in tiny strips, hundreds upon hundreds of them, piled onto each other like bridge ropes. Her lips were thin and almost blue from pressing them whilst deep in thought, and her hands, those famous hands, had eight joints each. Her nails were very short, but her spidery hands were so delicate, plying gently a little copper sphere that spun over a fountain of steam.
“It’s a pretty toy for a dull child, but I’ve been thinking about a mechanical horse,” she said happily, her voice crisp as clockwork. “But you surely do not care much about horses, even if they could be made of silver and weep fire from their eyes.”
I shrugged. “My grandfather weeps fire.”
“Well,” she said archly, looking up from her spinning ball, “it wouldn’t be the same thing at all. My horses would have a weeping switch that you could turn on and off. Young people are so hard to impress these days.”
“I am sure they would be wonderful. They say you make all the wonderful things in the world.”
“That is certainly a lie. Such strange birds folk are—make a few flying machines, purely by commission, and everyone starts telling stories about you. Which is of course what brought you here—come to buy a wonder, I presume.”
I blushed a bit. “Not to buy, I’m afraid. I haven’t any money.”
“To beg a wonder, then. And what sort of miracle am I expected to produce for free from behind my ear?”
“My violin, madam. I wish to play it as no one has played a violin before.”
“Practice,” she humphed.
“I can already play better than a Satyr plays her pipes,” I said hotly. “But you should understand. What does the world need with a mechanical horse when every farmer has his own old gray nag? Who needs a horse made of silver, weeping fire? No one—but you’ll make them anyway, one day or another. I would be to other violinists as your horse will be to a bent-back dapple with flies in her nose!”
She glanced at my fingers. “Very well said, girl. I think perhaps we can do something for you, but we will have to consider it for a while. I did not think of the horse until I watched the ball spin—who knows where I may find your wonder?”
I swallowed hard. “I should rather stay, madam, and help where I can.”
“I do not need an apprentice, nor am I a hospice.”
“Of course not! I didn’t mean to say—”
There was a rummaging, clanking sound from behind a large stone furnace, and what spit a girl whose blood is a quarter fire can claim dried in my mouth. An extraordinary thing emerged from behind the furnace: a woman all of silver and bronze, whose body was a mass of gears and bolts and plates, with no flesh at all on her, only metal, endless metal, and her eyes were two rolling balls of gold. She had no hair, silver or otherwise, but an oblong head all spiked with joints and gears. Her hands ended in long, many-knuckled fingers, just like Folio’s. The inventor turned to the creature and smiled fondly.
“Hour, darling, you know you’re not supposed to come out when company is present.”
The silvery woman turned and began to burrow behind the furnace again, pulling a dropcloth over her head and piling scrap on her shoulders. Folio laughed.
“We can still see you, Hour.”
“All right, Mother,” came a muffled, curiously flat voice. A bronze hand flashed out and dragged a large wing of tin plates over itself.
“No, darling, come out; you’ve spoiled your hiding already.” There was a great clatter as she emerged again and the scrap fell to the flag-stone floor. She stood there, hanging her head. Gears whirred softly.
“I am sorry I came out. But she has bad hands,” said the bronze woman, and her unmuffled voice was peculiar, something between a clock chime and a whetstone spinning.
Folio turned her eyes, but none of the rest of her, and looked at my hands. “Not everyone can be so blessed as we,” she demurred.
“She has bad hands,” the woman repeated. “Fix her hands. Violins and bows go together, not violins and hands.”
“Interesting!”
“Madam Folio!” I cried in alarm. “What is that thing?”
“She is not a thing, thank you very much! She is to a person what my horse will be to a nag, what you would be to a violinist. Kindly show a little respect—and don’t you go telling anyone either, or there’ll be no end to the outlandish strangers who will come fingering my locks for miracles.”
“How can you have made such a thing, that talks and walks?”
“You believe with all your smoky little heart that I can make you a virtuoso, but you wonder at this smallest of things? I made her; she is my daughter. There is nothing simpler in the world than that…”
THE TALE OF THE
ROOSTER-MAKER’S
DAUGHTER
WHERE I GREW UP, THE SEA SOMETIMES FREEZES.
Just the edges, mind you, like a puddle freezes, from the edge-side in. The waves would go so cold that their foam came tinkling down in a shower of ice, and the beaches were hard and clear as glass. When I was a girl, I would collect the foam shards like shells, but no matter how quickly I hurried back to my house with its wide porch, I would come to the door clutching a pail of water and nothing more.
My father had a very fine house. The whole dwelling was full of white curlicues and delicate fluting, breaking over the face of the house like frozen foam. But the walls were thick and solid, as they had to be, for it was cold in Muireann, as often cold as Ajanabh is hot.
When I was not trying to ferry ice from the sea to my bedroom, I was fiddling, as my mother called it. My father did not think there was very much odd about a child fiddling, as he was a fiddler himself, by trade, and fiddling had bought our curlicued house. He worked with four other men and women in Muireann at a peculiar export which, not being fish, was not much noticed among the other products of the great seaside city. Between the five of them, they produced the most extraordinary clockwork roosters that crowed out the morning with golden beaks. This was their summer crop. In the winter they trolled the oyster beds and carved the tropical birds of their dreams from the pearls. My father made the eyes, which flicked open and shut—not by any mechanism, you understand, simply by eyelids that rolled back and forth as you turned the little golden bird in your hands. His was a simpler trade than mine—but that is the way of parents and children.
My mother was a poet, who wrote long, dreamy stanzas about broken masts and hungry seas. Once she spent a year recording every shade of gray that the palette of the Muireann sky produced. She cried out her poems at the harborfront, and young girls threw pennies at her feet. She threw up her hands like pennies when I fiddled, but once, just once, she held her hands in the freezing well water for hours and hours, and then, running to the sea and back again, brought me in her blue and shaking fingers one perfect shard of foam.
My father let me have a few of the finished roosters, and I took them apart in my room when I ought to have been sleeping, until my floor was full of broken birds—but I put them back together again, too, learning how the crowing sound was made by a tiny bellow in the breast, and piecing the poor fellows together in ways my father would have found horrifying, making great, huge cockerels with four or five beaks crowing in harmony. I read endless books with onionskin pages concerning the great fiddlers of old: the Kappa and the Lizard-Breeders, who made such things as I could never dream to touch, who wrote out the whole universe in scales on an iguana’s back. Where had they gone, that no one could now see much on an iguana but ill temper? Where had they gone that the world was now so slow and dark, when turtles once grew trees of light in their skulls? I pondered this for hours, alone as I was content to be.
Eventually I exhausted the practical lessons of roosters. My parents wanted to introduce me to society, and served lavish teas with silver plates and watercress and costly oranges s
o that the white-wigged, whalebone-necklaced girls of Muireann would come and think highly of me, and introduce me in turn to their brothers. More than a few of them I induced to remove their wigs so I could count the hairs sewn into the cloth. Beyond that, I had no interest in them, as they were neither made of gold nor able to crow out the morning hours, nor did their eyelids roll back and forth if you tilted their heads.
Then, of course, there were my hands. It is true that my mother had an extra joint on her smallest finger, but that seemed no good reason to have a daughter with fingers like the legs of grass-spiders. They were very good for fiddling, hopeless at pouring tea, and excellent for making rich young women scream. The glove-makers shuddered in horror and turned me away. I did not care—who can feel a bird’s toothed guts with gloved hands?
Finally one of the rooster women died—the one who made the red tails—and I humbly submitted my petition to take her place. I had my own little house then, with a few small curlicues which my father assured me would reproduce in time, and from my uppermost windows I could see the crumbling sea. And tails are easy enough. I had generous portions of my days left over when those golden feathers were lined up on the shelves like red candles. And so I set aside a rooster in my sitting room, and set about fiddling with it. I am sure a Kappa would have found my wonders tawdry and plain. But I am here and they are not, and I have done the best I can.
First, I taught it to crow not only the morning but every hour of the day. This took quite some time, for I first had to teach it what an hour was. Once it reliably marked the time, I taught it to crow a great many melodies, like a little music box, and to sing a different tune for each hour. Intricate minuets for morning; slow, sighing sonatas in the afternoon; and rolling nocturnes, naturally, for the evening. Then, because I was lonely and even my father did not often visit, I taught it to sing words as it had sung tunes, and this took a very long time indeed, for there is a great difference between a note and a word.
The Orphan's Tales Page 68
