Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Oh, we are just SALIVATING, darling, positively DRIPPING.

  You will see. If I accept, if I do not fight, I will prevail.

  (—‘Yea but,’ quoth she, ‘the perill of this place

  I better know than you—’)

  30

  Hoo.

  I am watching you sleep, Kore, Darlinggold, watching your eyes flutter like bees’ nests, watching your breath whistle through the grass like a scythe. I am watching your coppery chest riseandfallriseandfall, tidal motion of your stomach concealing and cricket-breathing. I am watching your forehead crease like an envelope, lost in dreams I do not share, but can guess.

  Oh, womanchild, I have walked beside you and I have chosen to, not because you were weak and needed my padding footsteps next to yours, but because I heard your voice echoed off the faces of every Wall, and came to you drawn as a furry-feelered moth. I dragged my Temple along the Road to you as though it were a plow, as though I were a black-shouldered ox, and I let you breakfast on its fruit. I let you kill my beautiful, simple-minded chess set because even in your delirium you dazzled above all their cut crystal. I let you go mad in my arms. I have pulled you quietly and surely along the Road, to give you what you desire, because you were bright and new against the mud-brick. Just as Maidens cannot help but eat anything they are offered, Beasts cannot resist the pull of Maidens, irrefutable and fierce. We lumber towards you out of our black corners and dripping dungeons, drawn and caught, even when we know it is so. Oh, especially when we know. And I came to you, you and no other, out of the grey of the Temple.

  Soon it will be over, my Kore. Soon there will be a blue Door and a Key you do not think I know you have. We have played this scene so many times. Soon there will be a shaft of light through you like a lance and we will part, because that is also the way of Beasts and Maidens. I know. I accept. I have, after all, set this sequence in motion. But as you sleep I am filled like a pitcher with sorrow, because I love you and do not wish to see the last of your many-colored shapes against the sky. But it is the course of these things, and I will follow the tale I know to be ours.

  You shift in your sleep and I know it is because of the Stone, the Stone I carry inside me and thus keep close by you, so that it can do its work and change you one last time. You did not want a sequence, but I have given it to you, you were content, and I have given you pain in a silver bowl, for as I love you it is also my nature to harm you, to torture you, to push you along the Road that passes through me and present you amid fanfare with new twists and snarls, with new bottomless wells and dead ends, with Angels and Hares and Lobsters with colored shells. Without pain, there is no progress. Though you cannot see it now, though I am only the little golden Monkey who nuzzles your face, I am also the Stone and the Inquisitor, the Camels and the Carried Women, the Man and the Bar. I am the Voice that Recites verses inside you, from a place you will never remember. I am even the Road itself. I adore you and I worship the presence of you within me, yet I have borne horrors to you on my back, given them like presents. It is the Way, and I have fulfilled it.

  I have brought you this far, through the acetylene torch of Walls shrieking a beckoning call, drawing the orange streaks of your soul towards it, to absorb into itself all the cardinal colors, to bring together the reds and yellows and white-heats and oranges, to conflagrate in some Compass Rose which lies at the center of you though you cannot believe in a Center. Nothing grows in this place that cannot carry its own water, the cactus that blooms at night, the single lemon-yellow flower. And you carry seas inside you, the salt and the tide of blood and plasma.

  So you walked and became purified, and ascended poles that dwindled skyward like fabled towers covered in thorns, the sky opening like a womb to enfold, envelope, encase, entwine, entreat. The burning blue furnace of heaven, where the world is battered on a white anvil, poured molten into a Labyrinth-shaped mold, spattered with red sparks that become stars and iron-oxide rich soil. You turned your salt-crusted face upwards, creased eyes and parched lips, hands blistered from making corn cakes on the searing rocks, toes calloused from walking through caves with the dark, seductive rustling of bats overhead and the maddening smell of water within, you raised your eyes to the vault of sky, and I saw you like a first revelation. You are so beautiful, Kore, Kore, my Darlinggold, painted with metallic dye, extended arms thinned to thread by hunger and ascension.

  The balance of one foot on the pole, like a parchment-colored flamingo, will be as it ever is upset by your arms in second position, and you will falter as you must, feel the hot wind rush up from earth and down from heaven, and as you step off into space, into unknown and unknowable, flesh carved with hawk-claws and pictographs, shaded by the great image of the desert snake etched in sunburn on your back, and I will vanish gratefully in a puff of raven feathers. Their Plutonian violet-black will float in a sudden hush down to the red rock below, and I will leave you to do this all over again, for that is also the Way, the cry of events sounding again and again like the tide, full-throated. We have walked together before how many times and will again. So it is not really farewell, though each time my heart tells me that it is. You cannot teach the body to know the lay of the Maze, it will insist always on its own telling. You will not remember me in my golden fur, you never do, with your shivering eyes, and next time I will not be a Temple-Monkey. But you will be a humanchild, fevered, forever and ever, for it is your tale in which I am the villain and helpful guide and the scenery and even the shuffling prop master.

  There is no end and no beginning. There is only we two, alone in the dark, for always.

  31

  She wakes, with sand in her eyes, for it is the last day.

  It is a silver sun, full of diamond sunspots and a nacreous corona, beatific, filling the sky like a supernova. The Monkey, fur made into jewels by the brilliant light, makes her a last breakfast of robin’s eggs and wild turnips. Terns wheel overhead, with their lonely cries, watching the gold woman and the gold animal go about their morning tasks. She washes her gleaming face in a fountain, water trickling off her features in sweet rivulets. Her blank eyes have become beautiful, have become hers, and they are polished like copper pots. She eats the steaming turnips and salty eggs slowly, not entirely knowing why she savors them so. The Monkey grooms her (savoring himself this last contact with her wild, coriander-scented mane) and she allows his touch on her bronzed hair, calmed of her night terrors by his deft fingers.

  They are near a long Wall, stretching lazily beyond sight in either direction. It is made of living vines and long tendrils of ivy, tangled together like the woman’s hair, over and under, over and under. Here and there a fat white blossom opens and shuts with a flutter, like a hand. It is well-kept, tended by some loyal hand. There is no stone beneath, the Wall is entirely leaf and stem, entirely alive, displaying its green like a lady her colored fan.

  It is the last morning of all mornings until the next, with its cold light and misty breath, the last grooming and the last fountain-washing. Her limbs creak slightly as though she were truly made of gold, a molten statue-woman walking far from her pedestal. She is pure now, in her lionbody and named, and her flesh is liquid light where the sun strikes her, striding like a flame-deva down the Road which is sullen, ashen, carrying Direction inside her, so that she faces herself on all sides. The Monkey clambers up her smooth back and takes his place on her glittering shoulder.

  Is it indulgent, perhaps, to take a moment to admire them, their pairing, their shapes against the tooth-white sky, the comfortable lie of his tail around her fleur-de-lis neck, the confident rhythm of her bare feet, the precise matching shades of her skin and his pelt? Is it a distraction to give them this last tableau, this last snapshot under a spring morning, under a willow tree with her eyes laughing?

  Let it be. We must make allowances.

  CANTO

  THE FOURTH

  32

  Forward.

  I move forward. There is comfort in my feet, pads thick as ra
in-boots. I woke up, after all, with the Monkey murmuring over my head. The Wall smells of ambergris and its flowers are weighted like suicides. Hunting the old emerald self, dingy facets of a forgotten sapphire elbow or garnet knee, merrily we go along hunting the sloughed shells of me on this corpulent Road, we highwaymen looking to rob ourselves. Once perhaps I was a streak of charcoal painting the Road like a cannibal, but I could not say. My mind is a laundry line, flapping white wings as a rinsed sky, drops on a tin washboard. (But are there welts on my back, measured kisses of the rack? Oh, yes.)

  Here we go round, here we go round and what do I expect from the svelte malarial dawn but another suspense of hours? There is comfort in a tail around one’s neck, I suppose. I walk looking down, trying to see what the Grasshopper saw, the prim insects that once were Walls. Trying to see the next step on the Path, trying to see where in these muddy tracks the spider-leg pinpricks twist, trying to divine subsequence as though it were water. (It is as though a thing has been taken from me, now that I am named, now that I am gold. I slip, I cannot hold a thought.

  But I am not concerned. The sun shines through me like a sieve, I cannot hold the ragged tuxedo tails of my dream, I slide easily along the Path, a little chipped-paint boat. I cannot think, I can hardly feel my body, the only weight being the fat rose-green Compass resting as solidly as a breadloaf in my spacious belly. I am made of air, suddenly, constructed of my own breath. Because of a name which somehow takes as it is given? Because of a border, a limit, a Wall which walks with me, cradling close.

  Call me by name and inchoate I will sidle up to your princely thigh, call me by name and be made an alms-cup, be made mendicant on my Temple steps, be beggared and crippled because I cannot be a word, only a word, a tongue-curl which is me, a flick of lip, a syllable or two, certainly not three, and is this me after all, chained to the sea floor by a creeping sound, vermin of aural combinations? It is not so pretty a madness when it is named, then it is a patient, wrapped in white and pinned to a butterfly board. Then it does not blaze or consume and I am not, I am named and still as Stone, it is not what I wanted, what I came for, no, not what the contract stated, but I will take it with grace—)

  “Do you smell it?” The Monkey sniffs the air, alert and aroused, face banging into the air like a hickory switch. “I smell the chlorinated honey-grim, I smell the hominy and loam. Hoo! It is the End.”

  I looked where he did, and saw nothing but the linear Wall stretching like a cat’s claw, and the tallow of the horizon.

  “It is an empty day, Monkey. It is a day for walking. I do not think we will find anything. It is a day for Skimming Over, cream from milk.”

  The Monkey bit his lip and ventured a resigned little chuckle.

  “If you like. But I can smell sap and plum sauce. We are Nearing.”

  “Oh, stop,” I sighed, “Can you not speak to me outside of riddle-realm?”

  “Should I speak of the Bear we abandoned to his beauty? Should I speak of your visions? Should I preach the Gospel of the Man and the Bar?” He paused like an insect on a leaf. “Should I speak of how I do not wish it, after all this, to be the End?”

  “Do you not?” He looked earthward, blushing if a Monkey could blush.

  “No. I am accustomed to you now. I should not be surprised. It is always like this, and I am always sad. Hoo. It is the smell of the sky on your shoulders that does it, that roots me to you at the last of all possible moments. Let us try to be quiet. Words spoil everything.”

  And so we went, softly and methodically, Monkey dozing off on my shoulder and politely remaining smugly silent. And of course I could not see what was ahead, could not see the terminus, the road sign marking the last detour, could not see its nailed boards and blue shadow until we nearly tripped over it.

  “I told you, I told you,” hooted the Monkey, clapping his little hands. “I smelled it miles ago! Humangirl, your nose is a poor servant. The End! The Uttermost End.” He danced a little, though less happily than he once did, when in the delicious throes of proving me wrong.

  It was nothing more than a little Door, no higher than my wedding-band waist, arching to a delicate point at its crown, like a Bishop’s miter. Deep blue, was the Door, expanse of India ink, flowing tempura-thick over boards knotted and hewn with a dull axe. Vaporous frescoed stars floated around its rim, edges blurred and fading into the expansive blue, giving each a pale aureole, a vague corona. I felt myself falling into the color, as though it were truly a lake and if touched would ripple outwards from my finger. But there was no knob anywhere on its ornate surface, and it did not leap out or gobble us where we stood. In fact, it had not even been following us. We had stumbled on it quiescent and still, and even now it made no move to seize us.

  “Why doesn’t it want us, Ezekiel?” I marveled, slightly disappointed.

  “Do you want it?”

  “Well, no, of course not, it’s dreadful . . . but . . . I cannot quite say . . . yes, I think I do. It is Not Like the Others.”

  “No, my Kore, my love, it is not. It is the Last Door, Your Door, and this is the last day. Not the cream but the last dregs of milk. And I must leave you to it.” He smiled wanly and scratched his elbow.

  “You are a slippery little thing. You come when I do not want you and go when you please. You drag me out of the crone’s hut only to leave me here, when I don’t even know how to open a Door I shouldn’t want ajar. I am nearly dead, if my jaundiced skin didn’t advertise it, and you will go and leave this bird’s wing Door as my headstone.”

  I wept a little, but it was cursory, the shedding of such valuable tears as my own metallic drops. (Collect them and be a sultan, be a banker, be a thief of forty) I knew it all along. When long, long now before I lay beneath the radiating Angel I was alone with her, in her arms so cold they burned, and it would be so again. I am the Maiden, and when the Maiden faces the Queen it is alone, so no one will see that she thinks the monarch beautiful and worthy of love, even as she seizes what is hers from those white arms.

  “Hoo! Darlinggold, if you think you have been carrying a Key all this Way for any other purpose but to open a Door, then you are a silly girl and you do not know how these stories go. It is the Uttermost End. Everything is simple from here on out.” I tried to hide my surprise that he knew of the Lobster’s little Key, which I still had nestled in my pack.

  “As for the rest, at the end, you are always alone, it is inevitable. The Maiden goes on, the Beast stays behind and catches tears in his whiskers. But as I have tried to tell you, even this is only an event, not a true end. It is the borderland of a sequence of events, but there is no revelation to be had. There is no conceivable end in this place, it goes onandonandon, past the last permutation of a chess game, past the last rose that ever grew. ‘Last’ and ‘End’ are meaningless here, and when you go through the Door you will find nothing more than the Road stretching on, downdowndown, past where you thought it must end. I have played my part for you, within you. Now it is done and I will go back to what dark corners Beasts originate from, and you to the cloistered courtyard that all Maidens find behind the last Door, even if it is not truly the last. But perhaps it is, after all,” his eyes twinkled. “I have been known to lie.”

  “There is still so much I do not understand,” I said softly. “I do not even know, truly, who you are.” He threw his skinny arms around my neck and stared into my marble eyes.

  “Oh, my darling, I am myself and no other, no other unto the nexus of all possible endings. Look deep enough into my eyes and you will see Roads and Walls extending infinitely, in my pupils lie every twist you have ever walked. I am secretive, I will not give you answers, but there they lie, scattered about like shrapnel.”

  I swallowed thickly, seeing in those black pools all the miles upon miles, the spurt of a thousandthousand fountains and the right angles of hedge Walls, and the wide Road, extending its massive Avenue like an artery into the body of the Monkey, knotting and turning and opening onto itself, another thick sna
ke breakfasting on his tail, sautéed and served with tea.

  “Good-bye, then, Beast,” I whispered, awed.

  “Good-bye, Kore, my Beauty, my Darlinggold.”

  “Oh, Ezekiel, what do you see in the sky?”

  “Air. Air, all around, like wings.”

  He covered my face with his hand briefly, tenderly, and I could smell the wheatfields and fallen autumnal apples on his leathery skin. And then he was gone, vaulting over the Wall in an artful leap, tail disappearing over the wild green.

  33

  I turned, creaking like a hinge, back to the Door.

  So blue, so blue, and I could hear it panting slightly under its veneer of silence, struggling to wait quietly, like a good girl, and fold her hands under her legs. And I stare, into and at, unable to move when at last it comes to it. It seems such a large step, the span between two sparkling feet.

  I draw the Key out of my pack where it had lain since the millennia past when the Lobster clattered. And it too had changed, once the indigo of his baroque claw and my impressionist belly, it had shivered into gold like an autumn tree, nearly disappearing into my palm creased like a map of some lost continent. But the surface of the Door lay as smooth as a child’s mouth, no Keyhole marring its oceanic sheen with black.

  (—For the straightforward pathway had been lost.