Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  The silkworm colony of the village suddenly ceased to produce their fine white thread. From the morning of Ayako’s last dream on the Mountain, the generation which were then thriving in the house of the silk weavers produced nothing but a thick, viscous black fluid, which did not dry properly, leaving a strange, knotted coil. For seven worm-generations after this there was no good silk in the village, only the black cocoon-stuff. In the dreams of children the silkworms sang as they birthed it, and whispered that they were weaving a shroud for the death-festival of a ghost.

  The boy saw this and was troubled. For no reason he thought of his beast-dream, and wondered what riddle would have this scythe-silk as its answer.

  The villagers burned the dream-thread in the spring, and the smell of it lingered into midsummer, clinging to the temple bell-ropes and the granary doors.

  Magpies Nest

  The bones of Ayako still dreamed, but her lips had flushed blue and her body was cold. She had dreamed herself out of her shell, and it remained like a pale gem, slowly becoming dust on the highest floor of the dream-pagoda. She/I/we had composed our song, and moved away from the cocoon-tower to open our throats in the mountains. We left the meadow of shells-within-shells, where we lived within the body which lived within the pagoda which lived within the Mountain.

  Perhaps one day there will be tower-shells and Mountain-shells glittering, too, on the grass.

  We are finished. Our smile is beatific and mouthless. We have no more body to puzzle us, and our voices multiply in infinite combinations, through the trees and stones and snow:

  When one possible woman dies, it is as though a shutter closes, and the light from a certain window is snuffed out. There are many more windows, and really, since the window had already been opened and shut an infinite number of times, since in potential it occupies both the states of Open and Shut, nothing changes at all. This process is indefinite, and cannot be charted.

  The Pheasant Calls to Its Mate

  The dream-bones of Ayako were not found until the next summer, when the boy whose lot it was to bring the ghost her offerings could not find her. He had not lost the lottery this year, but had traded a bowl of rice and three jade beads to the girl who had, so that he could see the old woman again, and ask her about his dreams.

  When he climbed the pagoda and discovered her small heap of pearl-white bones, he was overcome, and wept for the woman who had told him about the dream of the Mountain. He could not decide what would be the correct thing to do with her bones—for it was now clear she had not actually been a ghost, even if she had since become one. So he gathered them up and placed them with some incense and the sack of rice in one of Mountain’s secret clefts.

  Until he was forty, and appointed, through his father’s influence, to the royal court at Kyoto, the boy brought incense and rice to her bones at the death of each summer, faithful as a wife.

  He would dream of her often, even in his city apartments hung with curtains he had ordered made from the black silk thread of that terrible year. And in his dreams she was young, a child, hiding under a wheelbarrow. She peered out, whispered to him that the fire-goddess had fallen in love with the village.

  The dream interpreters would not speak with him.

  Chickens Brood

  The I-that-is-Ayako tells you these things. It is my lesson, and I have told it. River heard, and Fox. Gate and Juniper listened, and Moth heard rumor of it.

  The you-that-is-Ayako has heard it, too.

  The Eaglehawk Flies Furiously High

  There was a storm the day the boy interred my bones within Mountain. The rain curled down to him in spirals, and the air crackled with the potential of lightning. The stones could hear the song my bones sang, the slight, susurring song of the discarded body. I felt them press in to hear, and the juniper trees bent to catch it.

  The Waters and Swamps Are Thick And Hard

  Alone, with the mist creeping in like a pale-mouthed thief, Mountain wept.

  THE

  GRASS-CUTTING

  SWORD

  A field of mustard,

  no whale in sight,

  the sea darkening.

  —Buson

  0

  IZUMO

  Descent is a peculiar behavior.

  There is a sensation of being dragged by the glisten of the bowels. There is a sensation of being pushed at the crown of the skull by a lead-etched palm. There is a silence, and there is a detonation of air, a detonation of sudden light. A new fontanel beats nebulous and netted at the place where tectonic bone-plates converge, a gauze of flesh pink and shimmering, a trembling crevice where before there was only wholeness.

  I set these symptoms down for those who might descend after me, for those other red-chested colossi expelled by the sun-woman, cast out by her bronze hands, the boil-blaze of her justice. For it is certain my sister will find fault in others as she found fault in me; some blue-black kernel of my nature which, buried at the depth of sinew, scratched against the red-gold bead of hers.

  But I am magnanimous—I grant that our two natures could not inhabit a single heaven. I forgave her, even as she burned against my fog-limbs, even as her ribcage irradiated mine with its feathered fire, even as the salt-sea was dried from my mouth by her banishing blow.

  After all, we are family, she and I.

  Of course, I thought of none of this then. Then, there was only the air and the light, and the fall through tiers of star and ether, the light of her golden heels receding above me, and the earth below, green and checkered with watery rice-fields, their squares made radiant by the reflection of my descent. I understood nothing but the sky-roar and the grass-beckon: I did not even comprehend my name—the last brassy exhalation of Ama-Terasu obliterated it from my mind, and replaced what had been my name with a devouring whirlpool, black and spinning—and it was this, finally, which cut me from heaven as a spleen is cut from a diseased body.

  One hopes it will cure the patient, but one cannot be sure.

  The grass-leaves of Izumo were the first I ever touched with feet enfleshed. It was there my heel-pads first bent and crushed green things, there I first opened up my lungs like windows and breathed the air of the world. I was naked, my hair unpinned. I was a man, and my knees were knot-strong. I was surprised, of course. Mine was the first descent of all the Kami, I had neither map nor report of a wild-toed predecessor to direct me on my way—and so all things were bright and sharp, painful in their novelty, colors that scalded my eyes, as though a pan of steaming water had been flung at me. I believe I might have stood, knowing nothing but that I had fallen, but not what or whom had done the falling, until the moon flickered and snuffed itself out, had I not heard a terrible sound: wails and ululations like the keening of roosters who know they are to be slaughtered for soup.

  I followed the terrible sound until I came upon a long river, winding through the quiet fields in the pleasant way that well-tamed rivers will. It was unremarkable as rivers go, its water more or less greenish-brown, its current neither quick nor sluggish, its span perhaps that of four or five men laid head to foot. Having by now seen many rivers and their tributaries, their deltas, their silt and their sand, I think it was rather paltry, but it was to me on that first day the most beautiful of all possible rivers, sparkling in the morning like a stream of jewels tumbling down to the sea. So enraptured was I that I forgot the piercing cries I had sought, and stared transfixed at the splashing eddies, struck dumb with admiration. And so it was only when the shrieks ceased, as if cut off with a choking fist, that I looked up, startled from my dream of perfect rivers, and saw the first humans my incarnate-eyes had known.

  Like the river, they were neither lovely nor hideous, but plain and peasant-colored, quite aged, clothed in simple kimono the hues of which were not unlike the earthy shades of the river-bank where they knelt, tearing their hair in unworded grief.

  Green and brown their clothing folded; green and brown the river ran.

  They looked from me to each
other, and back to me, some strange calculation clicking away in their furtive eyes. Their wrinkles fascinated me, etching their skin with rippling lines like hiragana, and I admit I spent some minutes trying to read the secrets of their senescence, the withered psalms written on their tired limbs. I was like a babe in those first hours—everything enchanted me, absorbed me utterly, until the next wonder tore my attention violently from the first marvel. And so it was that I was deep in the study of their wrinkled cheeks when one of them, the male, spoke to me—the first voice to flood itself into my ears.

  “O, Lord of the Wind! You have deigned to appear to this old man! I have done no deed worthy of such an honor!” He pressed his brow to the cool grass, and the female swiftly did the same, as if answering some unheard cue, crying out as she did so, though her quavering voice was muffled, since she spoke into the blades:

  “Susanoo-no-Mikoto, Heavenly Ocean-Father! How we have prayed for this day!”

  It was at this that I knew myself, the utterance of the crone scrubbing aside the scorch-black of my sister’s rage, allowing me to see the walls of my godhead, the ceilings and floors of my name, my being, my history. It is always the peasants who know what they see—they are not befuddled by opium or intellect, as the city-dweller so often is. It took them not a moment to see past the gloss of my hair and the beauty of my new flesh and know that they were in the presence of the Sea-God, the sibling of Heaven, the seed of all storms. In the palaces of Hiroshima to the south, I would have had to tie on a great blue mask with a demoniac grimace and a nose like a bludgeoning club, trailing rainclouds behind me like a woman’s robes to make myself known. But this woman needed no theatrics, and calling me by name she gave me my name; and naming me she made me myself, and myself, named, knew for the first time the tang of exile, the shiver of loamy air untinged by golden vapors.

  The taste of sorrow is the taste of broth which has grown a skin and begun to attract mayflies—it sticks in the throat, fecund and foul. Did I even then love my sister, forgive her, long, perhaps, for her ember-bronze arms slung round my shoulders again? For the taste of her cakes in the evening, the perfect seams of the robes she wove in the days when she was inclined to gift-giving? I worried the question between my jaws like a meat-ribboned bone.

  I decided I did not. Let her have the skies—the earth would lay itself out under me like a wife. And what new storms would I make when I was my right self again! Typhoons like spinning sunflowers would flutter against these sands, winds and seas as I had never before attempted would rise up like carved columns under the roof of heaven. She would not restrain me here, not if I could find my way from this heavy flesh to my old radiance.

  I was disturbed in these pleasurable thoughts by the peasants, still kneeling at the river. It was strange to me that they had not gone, having served such divine purpose as they had already done, but still they wept and beat their chests, their throats open to the rainless air. I was compassionate—it is easy to be compassionate.

  “Why do you weep?” I said softly, with infinite grace, putting my hands, knuckles raw and new, to the poor couple’s heads.

  “It is our daughter, Storm-King,” the man said bitterly. “Kushinada, whose hair was dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, whose skin was pale as new-sewn silk! She was our only happiness—one by one, our daughters have disappeared into the air, but she, at least, was left to us, fair enough to marry an Emperor, if she cast her eyes to his throne! But she would not look so high, for our girl was humble as a mound of straw, and asked for no more than to cook simple rice-mash, and fish-eye soup, and serve weak tea to her poor parents.”

  “And where has this marvelous daughter gone?”

  “Gone? She would not go,” said the mother indignantly, “she was meek, meek as a deer startled by the moon’s weight on a maple leaf. She was taken, taken from us by a beast with eight heads—it will swallow her as it swallowed our seven daughters before, and now we will never see our Kushinada more.”

  I considered this. Maidens are prone to kidnapping, and the loss of theirs was no more or less tragic than the scores of sailors whose brains I had dashed out on the brine-pink reefs—but Kushinada seemed to me worthy enough, and to kill a thing is always pleasant work. My sister never understood that, but destruction is a peculiar skill, and I longed to practice it, to know if its flavor was different in the skin of a man.

  “If you wish, I will go after this beast, and bring the maid Kushinada back to this very river, to make your rice-mash, and your eye-soup, and pour your weak tea for all her days.”

  The ancient couple fell again upon their faces and wept.

  “We dared not pray for such an honor as this! Surely nothing can stand where the Tide-Lord rises! We cannot pile up the jewels a god deserves, or weave for him a robe fit to be worn at the throne of his sister, the Queen of Heaven!”

  The woman wrung her robe between her hands and spoke through teeth yellowed and grinding. It was then that she baited the trap they had cleverly set with their fine words and high praise for the virtues of the missing girl.

  “Bring her back to us and we will give her to you to wife—she is the best of all women. Her limbs are young and will please you; she will make your rice-mash and serve your tea, and smile only when you permit it.”

  I laughed, but that gurgling belly seethed at my sister’s name. This body could not turn from such bait, even when the teeth of the trap were plain.

  “Tell me what sort of beast it was and I will disappear it, I will pass over it like a cloud and it will be no more. In your virtue, you called me by name, and I will repay it.”

  The wife looked at her husband and shook her silvering head. “It was a serpent—but it was not a serpent. Its heads were terrible, and each different. The husband of our other daughter said that he could not keep his eyes on it; they slid off of its skin as though he were staring into the sun. It seemed to be plumed in fire, yet its body was wet and slick as a worm’s, mottled green and brown, with patches of blue, patches of black, patches of gold, patches of slime and flame. Its eyes were red, sixteen pupils like black chrysanthemums, and it had a tail for each head, thick as a woman’s waist. Its body muscled and knotted in the center, with its mass of heads and tails spreading out before and behind like a doubled fan. On its back grows a strange snarl of trees and grasses, and some say there are eyes along its spine, blinking. Yet it does not slither on the ground like a snake, but has legs like a bird—save that there are four—gnarled with muscle, green as bile. It drags itself along the ground by these legs, and from its belly a great font of blood flows, and stains the land.”

  I bowed only slightly—in acceptance, not deference, you understand. I thought nothing of the beast itself, only wondered vaguely if that blood would be warm or cool flowing over my wrists.

  They fussed over me, insisted on piling my hands with rice-balls—the last of Kushinada’s excellent cooking—and draping me with their own rough robes. They tied sandals onto my feet and belted my slim waist tightly. Only when I was thoroughly uncomfortable did they let me go, directing me southward, into a range of mountains lying on the earth like a severed jaw, its jagged teeth sawing the sky, crusted over with ice. Beyond Mt. Hiba, they said, the beast snorted and feasted its nights into day. Beyond Mt. Hiba, Kushinada lay naked on a stone table, her sweet skin ready to be carved into meat for each of the eight slavering heads.

  And so I went out from that first river, that first knot of grass.

  Behind my heels trailed wisps of grey sea-fog, curling into the summer air like ink dissolving into water.

  EIGHT

  Call me Monster.

  I am exactly as you imagine I will be. Green on black on green on black, whicker-snack in the dark, slapping binary scales—greenblackgreengreengreenblack—against cavern-aurochs, against shaggy reindeer and whizzing arrows and cicadas like wet brown seeds, against walls, always walls, caves within caves upon caves, against granite, basalt, maiden.

  I am Eight. We ar
e Eight. Lying on my side, if you prefer the symbolism. Eight heads, eight tails, eight snakes susurring against each other like auto-asphyxiating lovers, joined at the torso—circus grotesque, unseparated octuplets in a jar of formaldehyde, jumbled trunk a snaggletoothed muscle with the brawn of a circus strongman, and all the bells ringing, ringing, ringing in the gloam. Eight-all-together rattle eight diamond heads, heavy and flat, a clutch of serpent-castanets, and oh, the music I-and-we make, music for the maidens, music for the midden we made of our caves, music for the bones, the old rolled bones, rooster bones and buffalo bones and fox bones and tigress bones, bones like bellows and bones like cudgels, bones like whistles and bones like pillows.

  Oh, the music, oh, the bed of bones.

  I eat light, vomit scripture. Eat maiden; retch hymn. Eat hero; hawk meadhall. The natural reptilian digestion is alchemical: eight chambered stomachs bubbling like beakers, intestines looping between, above and below, logos-calligraphy whispering recipes between celestial spheres swollen with bile and flesh. Our body is proto-Ptolemaic, constructed all of hoops and circles, perfect circles, without beginning or end—mouth, eye, neck-elongate, poison-sac, egg. We swim in ourselves, we chew our tails, we exude diamond-slime and drink it from puddles in the pocked cavefloor, our every process is filthy with beatitude, we are exalted by excrement, transfigured by mucus-mandala. We have to eat, after all.

  You will, no doubt, see us and cry: It is a snake, and horrible to see.

  This is because your processes are redundant, revolting—eat maiden; shit sludge.

  But we are witch-doctors, we are medicine, and all around us the maidens waver like ghosts chained to a lakefloor, coronal, illuminate, perfected into daughters of my flesh (greenblackgreengreenblack) breech-angled, nestled in the sandy soil of our tapering body. We carry them like daughters-strapped-to-the-back, we drag them along like sacks of corn, corn-women, gone down into darkness and up again, down again and up again, and there is no asphodel like the cilia of our viscera, there is no pomegranate like our colossal heart, sixteen-chambered, ventricles lines in white fiber, seeded in bloody rubies, slowly erupting, slowly retreating.