Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  CANTO

  THE THREE

  21

  My fingers curved like ram’s horns, beryl-green and hard.

  Osprey-claws, and how the green, green willow branches of my arms do look black in the sallow moon! How sequence like a tumor pure and white multiplies in my throat. How I must swallow it, the thick mushroom flesh, swallow it all. Downdowndown. How that sensual slither of must snake-coils over my larynx, squeezing—how it all goes and I with it, no more than a wicker raft seeping water like cyanide.

  I am Death, oh yes, with my pretty green eyes. I can smell it, oozing from my emerald pores, stink of blood and spent semen, mustard-gas and alleys thick with crooked, greasy pink lipstick, the musky scent of headstones slowly sinking into mud, fingernails disintegrating, bile rising in a thousand throats, sparrows with necks broken like slender arrows, rot of trees, rot of splayed limb, rot of stale whiskey in a rusted flask, worms suckling at breasts blooming like corpse-daffodils, the sickly trail of black milk trickling from a molded nipple. What you smell coming from you when you are Death, when you are dying, when you are exiting your own flesh, stage left, stage right, exeunt, exeunt. The left hand and the right fly apart.

  The body becomes all things, the stage and the player and the entrance, the foil tipped in poison and the exit pursued by a bear, the return carrying a severed head, my own pretty severed head trailing cobra-hair and blood of jade, never to be monarch again, Medusa in repose at last. It is the mistaken identity and the lovers united, it is the climax repeated until it is the denouement, the soliloquy of folded hands and pointed toes, act twelve borne on the silver tray of a flat belly. When you are leaving it, how beautiful the platforms and stairs of the body seem, the trick Doors and velvet curtains, the skein painted pastoral and scaffolding of bones, musty costumes hung in the closet on ribcage-rungs, the proscenium arch seems to vault upwards to the damned, the orchestra pit down to the divine. It is all so graceful and well-conceived a creature, so realized a character, fleshed out in all its roles from ingénue to crone, so comfortable a body, so desired, when it is flying away from you like a migratory bird. It is everything, yet I cannot connect to it, I seem to move my legs and hands from a long distance. My sight, unblinking and yawned, remains, the beam of stage-light from blank eyes like grass on a grave.

  I want to lean against a tree (a willow, bright and pale, and a boy with the sun in his hair?) and wait for madness and death, pretty sleek hounds worrying my meaty bones between them, gnawing the marrow and howling at the tree-roots. I care for Nothing. Indeed I tend it like a favored rose, nuzzled and cupped a motherly hand around its dark petals, breathed the sharp incense of its exhalations and coaxed them skyward with the ministrations of a patient monk, gardening into eternity with a luminous rake. I pulled out the green shoots of Purpose and Center, held off the marauding winds and ate their fruits, juice dripping from my chin. And now I have lost my charming grail, the woolen Nothingness that warmed me so well.

  Am I green now, malachite and woven leaves over rounded shoulders and unpierced heels because of life or death? Because tendrils of red-fruit vines loved my skin, because the wide, furry leaves of violets and spears of rosemary are infatuated with my hair and my knee-caps? Or because mold and decay have dressed me in their ball gown with its plunging neckline, clad my feet in algae-slippers and circled my neck in grave-grass like a string of pearls? I could not say, I could not say. I am so tired, I do not care. And he cannot make me, the golden Beast with stiletto eyes, this little homunculus dogging my steps, snapping at my heels, vomiting words from his long-toothed mouth, vomiting truisms and riddles like tubercular phlegm-blood. He cannot make me, he cannot make me. I am too full of the fat black-palmed baby of my Death to allow him within me, I am too near the coughing morning of its birth. Its teeth join the needles of the Compass, snagging on my womb.

  I am within my verdant body as it is within the Labyrinth. We find our Way. The sylph that is “I” is vanishing slowly, a daguerreotype dissolving under a spill of phosphor, image of eyes like stone wells seeping from the page. My body will remain, and the Compass within, magnetized, aborted daughter, but I will be eaten at last by the Labyrinth in a triumphant swallow—I will be a high Wall or a fair-thighed fountain. I will be remade into the flat expanse of the Road, my pointing arm extending into geometric perfection towards the horizon.

  And the golden golem Monkey will keep swinging and hooing with his iconic smile, as content to preside over my dissolution as my baptism. As long as he can anoint my colored forehead with oil and announce me to the invisible multitude, corpse or Queen, it matters not. He hates a poor, doomed toy in the desert because it showed me what he would not, because it did not incline its head humbly toward his paw. I hurl my bitterness at his chest like a pistol shot at dawn. Pace off ten steps and fire true.

  Ezekiel, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky? A burning woman, a bullet fired from the mouth of a star, streaming green fire into the sucking earth.

  “Darlinggreen,” came his rasping voice like a silver spade in the soil, “You don’t mean that. Hoo.”

  22

  Oh, I don’t mean anything.

  Whether you are here or not matters less than nothing to me. Sun-creature, I never asked you to come. You attach to my flank like a lamprey and want me to love the slow drain of my blood from the wound. Leave me to the copper bit and the foaming mouth, the pulverized teeth and the jaw of frayed wire. Leave me to drown in the rice-fields, when I have become blue again they will eat pearly slivers from the delicate dish of my mouth. Leave me to go mad alone. It is such a private thing.

  “I know you are glad of me, it matters nothing what you say,” The Monkey patted my bent head and I simply breathed. There was nothing else my body could manage. Under the curtain of my agate hair I could smell a strangeness growing like a bladed weed, sharp and thick, sweat and smoking bones. Ezekiel tugged on my glowing limbs.

  “Visitor,” he murmured.

  Through strands and curls like living vines, through my heaving breaths ragged and strangled, I saw now a massive Bear, thickly-furred and broad-headed, lying on his side with a great sucking wound in his flank. He whimpered and bellowed at turns, black blood seeping onto the papery earth. The Monkey scampered up onto the mountain of his hip, examining the gash.

  “It has always been like that,” the Bear moaned. “It never heals. I have tried poultices of laurel and banana, honeybees’ wings and birch bark, bird-marrow and Wall-dust. Nothing helps. It laughs at me, with it bloody lips. But I have come to love it, now. It is warm and bright and pretty. It never fails me. Would you like to come and touch it?”

  I said nothing, moved not an inch. The Monkey looked at me expectantly.

  “If I put my hands on him,” I whispered, “he will only die like the rest.”

  “You touch me, beloved Darlinggreen, and I am not dead,” Ezekiel crowed softly.

  “Yes, see? Perhaps not, perhaps not, girl,” the mournful Bear brightened hopefully. “Come closer. I am very beautiful reflected in your skin.” His wound did reflect black and red on my thighs, pulsing like a womb, open and quivering as if to speak. He stared at himself reflected and refracted in me, preening. I did not move, frozen by a manic disgust.

  “Don’t be afraid. If you are very, very good, you could have a wound, too. I would even administer it myself. My teeth are the color of the stars, aesthetically perfect. Orthodontia is so expensive. But see the results! Wouldn’t you like to have them in your nice green flesh? Be sweet to me and I will make you beautiful, paint your belly with blood.” He struggled to rise and come near me, but I backed away as best as my weak leafbody could manage, bile rising in me like the tide. The Monkey had also clambered off, and returned to me, protective and proprietary, grimacing at the beast. It kept on its imploring way:

  “Don’t run away. You haven’t seen the pointillist masterpieces of my intestinal tract, the glory of my bruises, the majesty of my swollen tongue! You are very ugly now, girl, with n
o breaks in your body. All revolting solidity. Come, come, I will make you splendid, seraphic, gloriana in the highest! I will make you the Queen of Capillaries, Empress of Bones! Don’t you want to be beautiful? I will love you forever, I will write masterpieces on your flesh!” I began to cry through my suffocation, drawing dagger-breath, loathing his nearness, the warmth of his mewling breath.

  “Come closer, I cannot see myself in your mirrorbody any longer. You are too far off. I am being very generous. It is not polite to refuse.”

  I broke and ran, stumbling and weeping. The Monkey sprinted after me, trying to keep up.

  “Come back! It is useless to run, the Door is on your heels! One way or another, you will be like me, and bleed! We will all be beautiful before dawn!” His howls echoed after us, choking my poor neck.

  But he was right, I could hear it now, clanging copper pots in my skull—

  (—nam vos mutastis et illas—)

  Latinate clams clattering in the water, their vulgate symphony of clicking nails and meaningless morse code, which translated reads as a meaningless clam-tongue, pink and meaty. The Door-tongue, the Hinge-dialect.

  I cannot run far enough, ever and ever.

  The sea takes back its stones. My limbs crumble. There is black mud under my nails, secret and ashamed. Such a private place I inhabit, with no Rosetta Stone to help you make sense of it, of my ceilings and windows. I never asked for comprehension.

  Mask yourself, Ezekiel, with that knowing look, and pretend you can read the scroll. Pretend you know what we are doing. What do you see in the sky? You cannot say because you do not see. I with my irisless eyes swallow the vaulted air under an eyelid. You see nothing. You would sell my bones for katana hilts in some furtive bazaar, my eyes for jewels in heraldic shields, my ears for pincushions, ninepence each. you would hawk my green brocade skin for upholstery, my knees for inkwells, my hair for quills, my lips for slide rules, my breasts for goblets. Abandon me to a thousand hungry Beasts, partitioned and packaged, given away like a bride, devoured and burrowed-within, until I am no more.

  (—In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora—)

  But the language of the Doors clangs in my swollen head like a busy dockside, I can feel it behind us, the black circle, divining our tracks with a velvet nose. Is it past the Board in the desert now? Has it come past the coffin-body of the Queen? Its strange trilled consonants move over me like diamondback snakes, the rhythmic phrases like the charmer’s straw basket in the musky market, sidewinding somewhere in our shadow. With each pianowire strangle of sentence, a new lacerating chord is strummed in my thick-pooled brain, with each bevelled vowel, brightened under a glass cutter’s knife, finds its mark and pierces me like a gold-fletched arrow, and the Door turns towards the church-bell tone of word striking flesh. In this way I can feel it drawing closer, the heat of its black body like a secret sun.

  (—torpor gravis occupat artus: mollia cinguntur tenui praecordia libro—)

  Oh, it bears down like a woman giving birth, the pressing, all those massive hands on me, pushing down into the swallowing earth! And among those thousandthousand hands can I not detect a bull’s solid amber hooves? Can I not see ivory horns tossing above me, tips gilded with hemlock? The Minotaur at last, the monstrum lurking, the monster-that-is-not, hunting with powerful thighs my steps like crocus shoots in the spring, the Center of the Labyrinth that I know cannot be stealing along the Road, stalking me as though that Center were I. We circle each other, a fleshy yinyang covered in blood and dust and sapphires crushed like blueberries, seeking each other, spiraling like sumo wrestlers, stamping our fat feet in the sacred salt. And when one of us is perished, gored through like a potter’s wet vase, will not that crusted salt be found on our howling mouth?

  (—pes modo tam velox pigris radicibus haeret—)

  Black eyed Bull behind me, lowing at the moon, fatal light flickering on his gold nose-ring, his blood shouting with the nearness of our meeting. As though that Center were I, as though I were what he sought, my presence in his belly the very completion of his bovine existence. As though it were not I that sought him, sought the terrible Center of death, as though I were not the Seeker-After, as though I were not aware of his breath smelling of sour mash and clay kilns, as though I were fleeing the inky ripple of muscle and not waiting for his milky teeth on my breast.

  (—in frondem crines, in ramos bracchia crescunt—)

  And still this hypnotic chanting in the confessional of my ear, the hissing syllables wreathed in smoky incense, the intimacy of his rust-red tongue lapping at my calves, a lover’s searching fingers grasping for me in the dark. These savage incantations meant to bind me still as nightwater or to warn? He is so close now, the wild smell of his mouth is so near. Perhaps I will lay down on this Road, covered in soft leaves how like a bed, perhaps I will lay down and let him slam shut over me, his Bull’s mouth clamp down at last on my emerald humanflesh. Perhaps I will not fight. Perhaps I would be more beautiful Devoured. Perhaps victory means collapsing in mid-stride, knowing the precise moment to give in. It is the fight which comes at the end of a Quest, is it not? Even a Quest-which-is-not. If I do not fight, there is no Quest. Perhaps then I will not. The Compass beats a steady time, a sparrow-waltz, ticking towards the north of my glacial eyes. It wants us Devoured, within that meaty belly; Compass-child Within me Within the Bull-Door, all of us together like a Russian doll.

  (—ora cacumen habet; remanet nitor unus in illa—)

  Come then, poor Beast, I am not afraid. You must admit I was a challenge; I have eluded you for such a long time. You do not need to ensorcell me with these murmured verses, black and red. I am still already, soft and quiet as a hedgerow in infinite fields like skies, dotted with lambs as with stars. I will sit and wait, draped in green, cypress-candle, palms resting on my knees in fertile quiescence. If I am yours, you are mine, wheelswithinwheels, and we will gobble each other up as though we were hook-nosed witches feasting on the plump calves of naughty children, gleefully sucking delicate bones and our long, greasy fingers.

  I collapsed and knew nothing but a long expanse of blackness.

  23

  Fat raindrops like children’s hands slap my face.

  I rose cork-like into watchfulness. I could hear the slip-slush-thud of his hooves, of his sliding threshold still gritty with desert sand. He is just behind us, close now, our faithful and patient hunter never daring to disappoint. The Monkey tastes the rain with a long, cicada-seeking tongue.

  “It’s coming. It’s here. Did the Door and swifter than I. Are you wakeful? Will you keep running?”

  “He. He is coming,” I murmured, swaying slightly.

  “He, then. I am sorry for what I have not told you. Hoo, Darlinggreen, I am sorry. Get up, now, my dear, there is further to go. He is coming.” Ezekiel stroked my olive hand and coaxed gently.

  “Sooner or later, there must be a Door, there must be a Minotaur, even if there is not. I choose this Door, and no other. So I win. I will lay down at his threshold. What is eaten also eats. If I choose him, I will never be caught. I will win the Game. It will stop.”

  The Monkey shook his coppery head. “I will go with you, you know. I will always go with you, at your side, my Darlinggreen. Hoo.” His gaze was loving and soft and forgiving as a glove sewn of feathers.

  We sat for a time, listening for his approach and combing each other, my fingers twined in his fur and his rubbing my cypress-skin like oiled cloth.

  “I do not know,” he admitted, “what it will lead to. This is our first capture, the gaining of a Third. It is something new, for the first time in alltime, something new. But it is also older than all. It may take us to the Angel and her white lips, but it may not.”

  “I know.”

  “I am quite sure you do not. Hoo.”

  Silence. The sky overhead was a profound blue, blue as once I was, the cobalt flesh of longago, perhaps not so longago, but I could not say. I was melting, and I cannot say anything. I have c
ome to this, I accept.

  And then he comes over the horizon like a black moon, simply, soundlessly, dark as a pupil, gliding gracefully towards our little tableau, knowing that he no longer needs to conceal his movements. It is an elegant entrance, without trumpets or heraldry. The silver Bull’s head knocker, a tarnished and terrible sky-gray, leers, diamonds dripping like saliva from his great teeth. He is so beautiful, coming towards me, coming towards us, slightly ajar as though his mouth were open in anticipation, the eyes of the Minotaur as blank and irisless as mine. My handsome Death, gargantuan, profound, and I am proud of it. I am its green-veiled bride, reclined and waiting.

  The Monkey looks at me with warm eyes, squeezing my hand. But I am not afraid. It is leaning over us now, a devouring eclipse, breathing heavily and watching to see if we will run. I laugh softly, a glutted and velveteen chuckle. I am stretched beneath him, body curved into a crescent moon, with the Monkey nestled in the swerve of my waist like a glinting jewel. I can feel the Minotaur’s mouth on me, his muscled arms gathering me towards his inevitable throat/threshold, the beaten earth littered with bones at the Center-which-is-a-lie, the dry fires of his digestion, furnace leaping towards me, to conflagrate and Devour my limbs in a rush of fire and slamming wood. How tender Death and the Monster can be, if you do not fight. I hold open my arms in second position, remembered from some mirrored room impossibly longago, to take him in and tear into his flesh as he tears into mine.

  As the great black Door slams shut, he breaths a sigh of relief and release, a hot rush of that fermentfire air as he rasps his words in a rush, orgasmic larynx shredded by my jade nails as we fall, downdowndowndowndown.

  “ —hanc quoque Phoebus amat. Carissima! Ederis!”

  24

  Rain of rice-clouds as we pass through him.

  The thick throat full of bats and chewed rope flies by, and it is not so much down as through. Through the twisted body of the Minotaur, skating on bulbous intestines and pancreatic oil-paints, slicing his flesh with katana-limbs as I go, Devouring what flanks and flesh-handfuls I can seize, savoring the smoky meat, full of fennel and scorched crow’s wings, his black blood dripping from my willow-chin as mine did from the Angel’s. I enjoy now the biting and tasting as she did, the cello-bow slide of flesh into my belly. It is Power. With each sink of my teeth into him, his teeth into me, I hear him hiss like a kettle, the low comfort-hoo of the Monkey at my side, and my own triumphant wolf-cub yelps. What a lovely little concerto we make, the three of us in the dark. But as it is begun I can see that I was mistaken.