Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  As the water bubbled and she made tinkling domestic noises with mugs, I heard her mumbling like an incantation: “This is my house. This is my bed. That is my wine-glass which does not drain, that is my fruit-bowl. I have put those violet flowers in their vase, I have set the saki-cups and the tea-cups and the flour-cups on the table, I have cleaned the mirrors. I have swept the threshold and the closet-floor. I have tended the Library. This is my house, where I have cleared a space for my sickness to curl up like a cat. I am half-sick of shadows—I won’t give it to her, I won’t.”

  This last was underscored by the dreaming trickle of brew into a goblet, and her shuffling bare feet moving back to the fire. She sets one clay cup before me, shooting a gruff look at the Monkey, and kept the other for herself, collapsing back into her enormous chair/throne with relief.

  “You get none,” she clucked, “because you are a nasty little Beast who talks when he shouldn’t.” I drank, and it was bitter. Piquant leaves and rainy soil, the tang of acorn mash and copper filings.

  With his large eyes like equatorial bats, the Monkey looked up into mine. “Look at these Walls, look at the Path from kitchen to fire, look around at the Doors and the Creature in her chair. Hoo, darling, it is the Maze writ small, yet and still holding you within. This is not your home, you cannot stay.”

  “But I am so tired, I want to sleep, I want to stay. I could get better if I slept.”

  The crone nodded over her pulpy supper. “Let the girl stay if she wants to, I have plenty of room. But it will not help you to sleep. I have slept and slept, until I could not dream, but it is no balm, it does not heal. You came here because you are sick and this is a plague house, where lepers like us must eventually find our Way. This is where you belong.”

  “I am too weak, grandmother, too weak. You are right, I am Sickness, I am Death. I ought to go no further. I deserve to be buried in your book-shreds and disappear.”

  The Monkey stamped his foot. “Hoo! Stop this! You are the color of my birth-tree, it cannot be long now. Come out again into the moon. You will heal, and she loves the smell of her own rot. How many times must I pull you along like a mule? You would not listen before, and you killed all those beautiful Queens and Rooks and Knights. Listen now, the Road is calling like a mating swan.” He stopped, breathing heavily. “Please, do not leave me,” he murmured, as though he did not want to be heard.

  I pretended I had not. “Yes, I killed them,” I wept with heaving breasts, “they were kind to me and I killed them.”

  “Hoo! They were not kind! They could have killed you with that terrible vision, they could have stolen you away! You barely escaped with your lunacy intact! You are separating faster because of them, your seams popping like an old mattress. And now you cannot even move your treebody from a filthy hut.”

  “I killed them . . . ” I slipped into my accustomed, guilty sea, gentle and welcoming, flagellating my back with pilgrim’s whips. The crone’s eyes glittered blackly, her teeth flashing in the fire light and the growing morning.

  “Stay, girl, with your body full of green lesions. There is nothing for you but your disease. It will be a good friend, it will be a faithful hound, it will love you and stroke your hands at night. Remember the Bear, and how his wound was a comfort, how it made him beautiful. It is beautiful to Stop and Rest, to recline and drink one’s tea. I will be your mother and tend to your ravaged body as if it were my own. I will mop your brow when you fever, and wrap you in furs when you are chilled. I will lance your boils and clean the blood from your lips. I will rub your feet with oil and make you brews to calm your stomach. I will clean your vomit from the floor and cradle your head in my lap, I will tell you stories and kiss you goodnight. I will love you and check your soft skin for buboes, I will press my fingers into your flesh with tenderness. Stay and be warmed here. We are alike—we carry Death like a swaddled child, with her black eyes. We owe a penance. This is where you belong, here with me.”

  With her great gnarled hands like walnut branches she pulled a heavy volume from the shelf, bound in leather like silk, dust like gold plate over its cover. Embossed in silver on its surface was a great glimmering hammer, heavy and deadly as though it might truly crack open my skull like a chest of coins. She opened it and ripped a long piece of parchment, stuffing it into her wet mouth. The old woman, face kind and pitying, held it out to me like a Eucharist, pages opened and waiting, offering its papery throat meekly. I reached out a hand to tear a morsel from the thick spine, and saw the proffered page, and the word written across it like a brand on a bull’s thigh.

  KORE

  I drew back my moldavite fingers sharply, my mouth parting like a pond beneath a ducks feet. I gazed at the Monkey, struggling to understands why the word was spinning through me like a drill tipped in yellow naphtha. He smiled, slow and wide.

  “Yes, yes, Darlinggreen, you see. Because you choose a course once, because you choose one sequence out of many possible, do not think it is the only time. You must choose it again and again. Will you take this thing and dwell within forward-motion or take it and wrap yourself in woolen death until you cannot tell if you are a corpse or a woman? You will take it, but will you Stop or Go, and here is stillness, will you rescind it? Kore, Kore, you are the Maiden, the Maiden and the Monster and the Blade, the Sleeper and the Castle and the Kiss, the Apple and the Mouth, the Damsel and the Dragon, the Witch and the Spell. Wake now and take the name she hoards like a fat gem, the old lizard.”

  Between their gazes, one milky and rheumy as a new moon, the other black and fierce, I keeled like a ringing buoy. How long had I swum within the whale and known my Will was nothing, no meaning, capsized? It would sicken me further, I knew, to go on, to take this name, to reach out and make a gesture, drive me further from what I was when I was myself and no other. It would fly through me like a row of teeth, madness carousing and glad, faster and faster. She wanted me to take it and throw it into the flames, lose it forever, repudiate it and kill it. But I would not, of course, of course, because that is not what a Seeker does, what a Maiden does, she ever after eats the apple and the pomegranate and impales herself on a spindle, its sparkling tip emerging from the crown of her dappled head.

  And so I extended again that brocade hand and tore the name from its book, in a long rip of infant thunder. Without removing my eyes from the crone’s hungry face, I folded it in two and placed it on my tongue like a sugar cube, and closed my dark mouth over its edges. It melted like chocolate, slightly chalky and full of oil, the taste of gold ink flowing down my throat, coating my organs, liquefied manuscripts with the sweat of pale-eyelashed scholars permeating, incense and myrrh like waves, smoke of burning horsemeat and overripe peaches, the name turning end over end, falling into my belly, downdowndowndowndown.

  The Compass needles tore it into frenzied pieces, and it floated on pointed toes into my veins, inseminating my body like a blown milkweed, vanishing into each cell as simply and quietly as closing a Door. It crawled in my fingers, flushing warm in my calves, the name taking hold and sinking like a galleon into my bone-reefs.

  I smiled, though behind glimmered the mad lolling of a wolf’s leer, I smiled.

  I stood without a word and took the Monkey’s paw, walking softly towards the next Door, round and rough-hewn. The crone snarled and called after me and wept all at once, her voice breaking open with sorrow like a fruit, pulling at her thin white hair, clacking her rotted teeth like guillotines. Behind us I could hear her ravenous, clawing at the books and shoving them into her. I could hear her strangling grunts as she pushed them into her throat with both hands, choking on chapters and indices, cutting her wrists with glossaries and footnoted, poisoning herself, verse by verse.

  The wooden Door opened smoothly and elegantly, sighing a little, and closed behind us with a satisfied jamb-smacking, smothering her coughing gasps. As I stepped into the sunlight, I could see my feet below me, following each other down the Road, and each toe shone pure gold in the auroral grass.


  28

  I knelt heavily in the little meadow.

  Scalp burning, eyes crackling thorn-violet, feeling a hundred hands on me, judging the Void that is me to be common and poor. Hair hung in a tangled saffron morass, seaweed drying on the beach, lost in gladiatorial sand, foam clinging to the curls and tendrils, smelling of salt and starfish. Walls surrounded the clipped green, covered in salmon-colored roses and lilies of the valley. The air cloyed a too-sweet perfume. The long grass-stalks full of milk lay restful and sweet, as though a woman’s hand had smoothed a taffeta dress over her slender knees. The alpine virtue, the perfection and peace. (Which is illusion, it is only that it wishes itself so.)

  And I was not peaceful in its center, (perhaps because I do not wish myself so. Is it wishing that makes the world, glaring and broken?) full of my own bubbling streams and thrusting trees, full of harsh-branched gorse and cattle-hides. And the Maze doesn’t care, it is impassive and huge, it mocks and waits.

  The Monkey’s fingers twirled clockwise in my sorrowful hair, shifting from his terrible requiring self to the warm lickings of a mother lion in a flash. Curls now the same shade as his rough fur, burnished gold to my jasper waist, my warm-shaded hips. I was a womansun, high breasts with nipples like coins, mouth like a reliquary. I shone with faceted light, blinding, pure. My skin radiated. I could have warmed a hundred ragged-eyed children, huddled together on every inch of me, trying to cover me like a subway vent. My flesh crackled, an orb of dilated copper.

  But my eyes are true, still featureless and blank, plates of gold armor set in my face.

  “Kore, Kore, my Darlinggold, it is not much further. I see the sun in the sky and its light.” I nodded dumbly, sleep pulling my head earthward, exhaustion creeping with her feline tail, sweat in arcane snail-tracks around my knees, my wrists.

  “I am so tired, Ezekiel. You must let me sleep. She would have let me sleep. There is no “I” anymore, the scarlet letter to mark my position on the Map-which-is-not, the “I’s” which cross within the hermetic “X”, not unlike a Compass, under which must be buried something of value; I am only pulled along like a ship on a tether, pulled into port with a shattered hull. Please, let my poor “I” choose sleep without your prodding and gnashing teeth. I must, I must, I cannot . . . ”

  I was nearly asleep already, and as I laid my head down on the cool grass I heard him crooning his loving “hoos” like a lullaby.

  29

  In the dark, the dream-self bleeds.

  Dreams of the interior, standing on a rib, balanced on one foot, looking up into an esophagus-sky. Catching as it passes the brief light of a boy with hair like cut wheat—and then it is gone, and I am falling into poison sweat-lodge dreams rubbed with white sage, with buffalo blood, with rattlesnake bile.

  And, oh, I am under him again, the Stone with the Inquisitor’s cragandjag face, and he with the rack under me, bending (as though for a shield) my spine into a circle, diameter twice radius, π2, numbers marching like ants up and down my bleached bones, the queen and her thousand daughters perched upon black and white ladders and staircases that smell of opium, velvet slant of plush-lipped opiates, slant, slant, slant, slant of perpendicular bones, the geometry of bruises and burst lips. His marble mouth next to my ear, words like grave worms, like winged insects, like mocking plague rats. The Stone torments me:

  Go ahead, Darlinggold, precious. Scream in the sunlight and scream in the moonlight and scream in the starlight and lakelight and cloudlight and fishlight and gooselight and rowanlight and dawn’s rosy fingers, Rosicrucian dawn, Templar aurora, Maltese cross blazing across the sky like the outline of a corpse: In this sign thou shalt conquer . . . To the gold dust of the desert, to the streets of the Maze, feel the cool stucco on your burning back, feel the lick and tickle of the flames while we burn you, burn you, burn you, witch in the Holy Land, cat-woman, you smell like the sage-garden and didn’t we see you dancing naked with the devil in the orange groves last midnight Thursday? Can’t deny, can’t deny, but my did the oranges taste nice, my didn’t their juice taste cold and sweet, my didn’t he make music on that drum, didn’t he make you a percussion/tympani, beat on the copper bellied skin of your back, songs to wake the stones, blow into your bones and out came symphonies?

  (—They cannot finde that path, which firste was showne,

  But wander too and fro in wayes unknowne—)

  How can you deny your possession, your Assassination, with all those jabbering voices in your head, pretty young thing? Aren’t you the devil’s pan-flute, woman? Confess, confess, confess and we will merely strangle you, and the hooded executioner will hide his erection from the crowd, the excitement from seeing your lips burst open like sea amenones, eyes go wide as though in the throes of orgasm, his hands intimate on your lily throat, oh and he’ll turn aside at the last minute so no one will see. Confess and be saved. Or we’ll we’ll hang you from the hawthorn tree, burn you at the stake like venison and eat your pretty limbs at a banquet attended by twelve Kings and no less, twelve Queens to drink your blood from teacups, for I say unto you that the body of a witch mortified and vanquished in the name of God is yea verily as sacred as the body of Christ, and it shall melt on our tongues like unto the very Communion wafer, and we shall feast upon it as on the tender breasts of doves, and suck the holy marrow from her bones. Our hounds will gnaw the severed feet and be blessed in the hunt. the children will suck your knuckles like cherry candy. A burning is always cause for celebration: the village eats for a week. Quick as a spring hare you won’t escape, we know all the best hiding places.

  (—Furthest from end then, when they nearest weene

  That makes them doubt, their wits be not their owne—)

  Oh, ho! Indeed, you are far from salvation, from rescue and release. I am the Path that pierces you, my body gores you like a matador, and how I burn inside you as though you were a censer with all your pretty gold finish. Never think there is anything else but you and I alone in the dark.

  Oh you Salome-witch, with the blood of that glass-bellied Queen on your painted fingers, dance here in the Dungeon as you danced in your heathen grove, and we will merely crush your skull with a stone. We will take a sliver of flesh from your dancing heels and plant the wisteria with them, and oh! How purple they shall grow in the spring! Walked you on the desert Road like the shadow of a hawk, but you can never, never escape it, it trails you like squid ink, trails you like a credit report, chases you like wolves after caribou, clings to you like jellyfish. We knew you when you came, we knew the moment your black foot touched Holy Ground. Perhaps we will only drown you, drowning in the Sea will salt the meat, and your lungs will fill up with scrolls before you die, the parchment will choke your cilia, papyrus in your ivory nostrils, (and tell us, tell us how nice the oranges tasted!) Aramaic letters smearing on the Walls of your esophagus; oh, how pure you’ll be! HOLY, CLEAN, PURE, white the color of divinity, and you all stained RED, RED, RED, blackberry juice on pricked fingers, pricked like that famous beauty’s finger, only you weren’t ever a beauty, were you? Oh no, not with that dress, not with those shoes, not with that ratty hair!

  Oh, you though you could charm even with that dreadful time-release skin moldering into all sorts of decayed shades, your stupid mewling mouth gibbering with black vomit on your lips, the vomit of your sickness, your unclean brain, cramped and filthy, and yes, oh, yes, precious, aren’t you the Monster after all, deformed and grotesque, commedia dell arte devil with bells for horns, weak but ugly, oh isn’t that you in the proverbial nutshell! Isn’t that JUST PEACHY? Your little piglet haunches all scrunched up in your dank corner picking at the lice eggs of true reality and how they GROW on you like fruit!

  Oh don’t cry, little bird, don’t cry. Aren’t you a NICE GIRL after all with your lolling eyes and your mouth full of smoke and your sloppy eye-make up, aren’t you really a NICE GIRL at heart, oh yes, of course, precious, we know, we know.

  And we’ll crust you in salt like a diamond dress, how p
retty and NICE you’ll be for the feast! All dressed up. With three fingers (for the Trinity, of course) we will scoop the mound of salt from your contorted mouth and remove your teeth to play dice with, and scrape it from your cheeks as though from a fat side of salmon. In the afterglow of your ascension we will dance and dance.

  (—That path they take, that beaten seemed most bare—)

  Oh, you foolish girl. I am beyond everything that you are. You should not have come, not have come, to the walls of the Labyrinth with its mosaics and cisterns like the vaults of heaven. So becoming with your clear eyes. Yet you could not see the Way. Come and dance for us, Jezebel-witch, Delilah-daemon, show us the calves famed in Gaul and Britannia Ultima, show us the white-armed dervish of the orange groves.

  (—This is the wandring wood, this the Errours den—)

  This is the end. You know nothing. Do not pretend. You are mine, my very own.

  And in my dream, in my sacred madness I see his face how like a stalactite lit by the light of bat’s eyes. The callow face of the Stone, cutting me like an obsidian arrowhead, surgically slicing, glutting himself on me, glowering, gloating. Now that I have chosen sleep he can have me entire.

  Oh, but know that I will wake as dreamers do and you will slip back into the white pebble in a macaque-stomach, and I will lurch onwards.

  Will you now?

  Oh yes. I accept. Here and there, my body is all sweet flesh and curve, ready for the witch’s oven, ready for the gingerbread hut, ready for the peppermint banisters and butterscotch windowpanes, the cinnamon-gummy rugs and white chocolate stairs. Ready for the black licorice whip oven grill and cotton candy pillows, the pumpkin pie floors and caramel apple chandeliers, the lemon-ice wash basin and the cider bath water. But I’ll wake. And in the end, won’t I make a lovely pie, cinnamon crust with a honey glaze, twenty-four blackbirds baked inside, to lend sugar and mystique to my bones? Won’t that be a dainty dish to set before the King? When I lie souffléd at his bedside and he runs his tongue over my soft grape-flavored centre? Won’t I then be the best dish the witch ever served to his Majesty under a silver dome?