The Bread We Eat in Dreams

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Mallow knew better than to get into a strange carriage with a strange man who might or might not love thievery better than his own mother, but no other seemed forthcoming, and attendance was, after all, mandatory. She felt that if she had to, she could thump this skinny fellow solidly, get out, and walk the rest of the way if the whole business became entirely too winning.

  The interior of the Horse glowed with the light of a little red lantern; the walls shone cream and damask, the seats a plush scarlet. It was all anyone could want of a carriage, save that they rode inside the body of another creature, which unsettled Mallow. A slender horn curlicuing down from the roof allowed Mabry to tell the beast to be off. He called it Peppercorn, and it harrumphed gruffly back that they would rest for dinner in two hours, and to please not bother it, as it had to concentrate.

  “Shall we play Bezique? Or Nightjack? I’ve cards, or chess if you prefer, but I’ve always found chess to be a bit too much like real life to provide much enjoyment as a game.”

  Mallow did not play cards, as that often led to losing things, since Fairies cheated as a matter of honor. It’s not a game if you don’t cheat, Carolingus Crumblecap would have told her, had she opened the book to On Taking Tricks. It’s just two sods making a mess with fifty-two pieces of paper. But Mallow did not open her newest literary acquisition. “How long have you lived in Winesap?” she countered instead.

  “Oh, off and on, off and on, for nearly just about forever,” answered Mabry in a dreamy tone. “Since my love vanished, at least, and before that, too, I think, though it gets jumbled the further back one goes. When you’ve lost your girl, it doesn’t much matter where you live. Everywhere is just The Place She Isn’t, and that’s the front and back of it.”

  Mallow looked out the window into the rolling golden valley, the winerows and the red sundown. Not a Fairy living didn’t have a tale of love lost or found. They traded them like money. Mallow had always found love to be like a spindle or bobbin she could take up for a time—when her sorcerer friend visited, for example. But she could always put it down when she liked, and be quite all right until the time came to dust it off again. The endless reeling affairs of Fairies exhausted her. But all the many social circles of Fairyland held in agreement that if one brings up the subject of one’s love, the other party is obligated to ask after it and listen to whatever ballad might follow. To do otherwise would be just terrible manners.

  “Tell me about your love,” Mallow sighed, observing form.

  Mabry Muscat looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Oh, it’s a long and exciting story, sure to charm and make you swoon over me. Let’s call custom satisfied and skip the tale, shall we?”

  Mallow’s attention sharpened to a point. “It must be a very good story if you don’t want to tell it. Everyone wants to tell theirs. When I first set up my house I could hardly keep Myfanwy Redbean from reciting the tale of the boy she loved for seven years before some kirtle-tying trollop named Janet stole him away. In alliterative verse. With a tambourine.”

  “It is the very best of stories. She left me for a cat and a cloud, ring down the bluebells-o. She left me for a storm and a coat of green. Down fall the lilies-o.” His voice was so sad and gentle that Mallow felt tears coming to her eyes all unbidden.

  “But that was a hundred years ago if it was a minute past.” Mabry shook himself like a wet bird and came up as bright and beguiling as before. “And what matters it if a girl runs off, or gets done in by pirates, or gets a better job than her lesser half? Let us speak of something less common and more thrilling. What news have you of the World’s Foul? The delegates are already there, I’ve heard, filling up the hotels and mumming in the streets. And at the end of it all! King Goldmouth’s Tithe. Back to tradition, he says. Time-tested values and solid, Fairylike customs. We’ll be giving people donkey’s heads next, I suppose. I don’t think he’ll go through with it, myself. Tithing is such a revolting, old-fashioned practice. Of course one goes through the motions for the sake of culture, pour out a tenth of a glass of wine every couple of years if you must or I suppose if you have ten children one of them might go into government, which is the same as losing a child really, but a real Tithe? Disgusting—and unsanitary if you ask me. I think in the end it’ll all be a ruse, a trick done with mirrors. Somehow it’ll all end in laughter and a chocolate for each of us, mark me.”

  “What is a Tithe? Not even the Scotch-nymph who lives in the north crannies of my whiskey lake knew, and she’s the oldest thing I’ve met.”

  Mabry Muscat rubbed his long fingers, and Mallow felt certain he was a Jack-in-the-Green. His cravat glowed the crimson shade of the seat cushions, but his hair had gone as deep a blue as the sky outside. She could hardly see him. “I am older still, dear Mallow. And old as I am, I can just barely remember, when I was a child with my mother’s milk on my chin and my father’s holly upon my bed, the last Tithe Fairyland could stomach. It’s a blood price, paid once every seven years, or ten, or a hundred, or seven hundred, depending on who you ask and how sick folk feel about it at the time. Every Tithe looks different—we’ll see what this one will grow up to be, I suppose. I hope there will be fireworks, at least. Perhaps a commemorative spoon. These are days of old barbary and new revivals.” He fell quiet for a while. Finally, when she could see the night hills showing on his inky skin, Muscat said: “Have you a love you wish to sing? Tell me who you are, pretty Mallow, sweet Mallow, my practical rose in a sea of silly daisies.”

  Mallow looked him levelly in the eye, and hardly a soul in the world has yet to be half-smitten and half-frightened by a level look from that girl. She told him the truth. “I have never lost a love and I do not intend to. One can only lose love if one is careless, and I am never careless. You might say, really, that of anything I am best at caring, at paying close attention and minding what I’ve got. The King says I must go to the Foul—very well, I shall go. And I hope to find a Wet Magician or two while I am there, and learn, and buy several new books if I can.”

  “Ah! She does want something! Well—it’s easy enough. Find the Nephelo tents, where the great cats of that city laze and lie. They practice the Wet Arts as well as any soul in Fairyland, and will let you have a saucer of milk besides. Perhaps I shall even go with you. I once lived in Nephelo after all, and one is always homesick for places where one came to grief.”

  Outside, the night road to Pandemonium ran smooth and swift through the northern counties of Fairyland. Valleys bloomed around them, full of gnarled egg trees and waving coalflowers, falling away into meadows full of brownie villages bustling and bright-heeled river-nymphs lassoing their blue currents around distant hills. The notion of a blood price, the very words Mabry Muscat has spoken, hung between them inside the Horse, too hot and terrible and heavy to be touched. They did not touch it, but after a day and a lunch and an apple for the Horse, Mallow consented to play Bezique—as long as they played for no bets. Later they tried Fool’s Hand as well, but that’s no fun at all without a wager. All the cards had Mabry’s face on one side, and Mallow’s on the other. She did not find this unsettling or charming, which clearly saddened Muscat deeply.

  Occasionally, when they were very bored, they would open up Carolingus to a random page and listen to him holler: Never marry a Fairy Queen! They’re murder on the digestion and you’ll never get a career girl to care about the tarts you spent all day slaving over a hot stove to make. On a stop-in to a village hostel, Mabry let Mallow open up the Carriageless Horse’s neck and peer at the workings inside, which popped and hissed and burbled away, white and pink and green. I recognize some of the thought that went into the beast, Mallow said. It’s quite high-end Questing Physicks. See the vials of Purposeful Syrop, and the Hero’s Alembic? Mabry did see, and the Horse felt terribly pleased to be so regarded by such wise people.

  Only once did Muscat ask if he might kiss her. Mallow declined, very reluctantly, more out of favor to that mysterious vanished love of his than because she did not wish to be kis
sed. He simply dealt the cards once more, and Mallow called the next trick.

  Once or twice along the way, she heard ducks hooting, and held her books tight to her chest.

  Pandemonium, after much fuss and many tantrums thrown and tears shed, had agreed to settle down in one place for the duration of the Foul. The capital of Fairyland has always been accustomed to moving however it pleased, drifting across glaciers or beaches or long, wheat-filled meadows. It moved at the need and pace of narrative, being a Fairy city and thus always sharply aware of where it stood in relation to every story unfolding in Fairyland at every moment. The King’s pets, as he called his soldiers, had persuaded the city to put down roots, if only for a little while. Already, the streets seethed with restlessness and the signposts quivered with barely contained energy. The King’s pets were, of course, large, lithe, rain-dark and snow-light clouds, lassoed and captured by several lightning-wights before being pressed into royal service. Even the thin, jagged-hearted Hobwolves of the Sniggering Mountains quailed in the face of those canine, long-toothed clouds.

  But the sky shone glassy and gleaming on the day Mabry Muscat and Mallow rode into the capital, quite late, having started so far away. Only two days remained till Applemas and the Tithe. The Carriageless Horse clopped over a charming ivory bridge spanning the spinning Barleybroom River which surrounds the city, pointing and marveling and grinning wide-eyed at the great number of creatures flying, swimming, riding, striding, and leaping across to Pandemonium. Overhead, a huge, motley-colored, silk-ballooned zeppelin drifted majestically over the river. From a hanging basket beneath it, an Ifrit girl with burning hair played a fiery and furious mandolin. Music came from all corners, barghests squeezing accordions, satyrs blowing pipes, and drums everywhere, pounded, tapped, rat-a-tatted, and booming out across the plain where Pandemonium had come to rest, chained to the earth with long bronze links.

  Mallow had never seen anything so wildly, savagely, noisily beautiful in all her days.

  But when they finally crossed into the city proper with the throng, her bones ached and her heart could hardly bear the sight of it. The buildings of Pandemonium must have been lovely once, must have been diamond towers and golden storefronts and winding wrought-vine balconies, open flowers and briars and mosses genteelly drooping trees, violet peony-windows and blue lobelia-doorsteps. It must once have bloomed, the whole city, fruits and flowers with gem-spires and silver streets winking and glittering through the fertile, greening riot of the living capital. But no longer. Leaves had gone brown, vines had shriveled, flowers shrunk and wrinkled up, thorns gone dull and mosses gone grey. Where stone and jewel and metal showed through, the flank of a bakery or terrace of a bank or clerestory of a grand theatre, huge, gaping holes showed through, as though some awful giant had taken bites out of the city itself, in its highest and deepest and most secret and most open places. Applemas approached, high summer, and yet Pandemonium seemed to live in the dregs of autumn, when the brilliant colors have gone and left only brown sticks waiting for snow.

  But for all that, Fairyland would not let her city go ungarlanded. The World’s Foul had swung through, leaving red and violet and green ribbons streaming from streetlamps, bundles of wildflowers and clovers on every cornice, the streets lined with booths and stalls hoisting gaily painted signs: The Famous Dancing Silkworms of Mararhadorium! Guess Your Death for a Nickel, Very Accurate! See the Crocodile-Beauty of Bitterblue Ridge! Test Your Morals, Everyone Gets a Prize! Feats of Queer Physicks Performed, Two Bits! Lamia’s Kissing Booth, No Refunds!

  And in the center of the city, on a long, wide lawn, a clutch of kobolds had erected a miniature model of Pandemonium as it was, blooming and glorious and whole. The Green City, they called it, for no longer could the capital bear the name herself.

  Mallow wondered if Fairyland had always been like this—this loud and fast and frightening and wonderful—and she had only forgotten, letting the pleasantness of Winesap seep into her bones. She wanted to do everything—to watch the worms dance and the crocodile-girl preen and oh, especially to see the Queer Physicks which she had been curious about for so long, and to test her morals, and to kiss a lamia. All of it, and eat a slab of honeycomb from the bee-nymphs of Pennyroyal Pond to top it all.

  But instead, they lashed the Carriageless Horse to the post outside Groangyre Tower, where Belinda Cabbage and the rest of the Mad Inventors’ Society made their laboratory, and Mabry Muscat completed a vellum questionnaire the Horse thoughtfully provided.

  “Allow me to take you for a special treat,” Muscat implored, and Mallow, who felt quite warm toward the dashing Jack, took his arm. He guided her directly, as though he’d a compass in his heart, to a little pavilion carved out of ice, with chaises and thrones and fountains all of frost and snow, and a furry tent covering it all. Huge cats lounged on every surface—Tigers and Lynxes and Panthers and Lions and skinny Cheetahs licking at what appeared to be lemon popsicles. Richly dressed folk petted and conversed with them, their hands full of thick, steaming mugs of something herbal and fragrant. In the center of all of them, a great solemn Leopard watched her with deep, liquid eyes.

  “Hullo, Imogen,” Mabry Muscat cried joyously, and flung his arms around the great cat’s neck. For her part, she purred contentedly, and nuzzled his head with a soft thump. “I have brought you a friend! This,” he indicated the Leopard, who interrupted him with a long, rough lick across her chops, “is Imogen, the Leopard of Little Breezes. You’ll see her brother Iago, the Panther of Rough Storms, over by the fishbroth fountain. And there’s Cymbeline, the Tiger of Wild Flurries, and Caliban, the Unce of Sudden Blizzards—Unce is French for Snow Leopard you know, but Imogen and Caliban had a wrestling match over the L-word and my girl won. Oh, you’ll meet them all sooner or later. And that lady in the shimmery sneeze of a gown is the Silver Wind, that gentleman with the sapphire belt is the Blue Wind, and this ravishing thing is the Red Wind, come to meet you, Mallow, and learn your name.”

  The Red Wind stood before Mallow, very tall and very beautiful, her long black hair hanging down one side of her face, spilling over an ancient coat of beaten beast hide of a deep, dark shade, dyed many times, the color of wine. Creases and long marks like blade-blows crisscrossed the cloth. Around the neck a ruff of black and silver fur bristled forbiddingly. Her fingers were covered in rubies and garnets and carnelian and coral. Iago the Panther padded up to her and the Red Wind lost her fingers in his fur. The black cat stared at Mallow for a while, as if waiting for something. And perhaps that something was the lady standing behind them, for when Mabry Muscat saw her his voice went still and quick all at once, and the expression on his face was like stars suddenly appearing out of the darkness.

  “And this is the Green Wind,” he said softly.

  The Green Wind wore a long dress of perfect emerald, springtime green, belted with a length of peridots sewn on green brocade, and over that a long green coat, green snowshoes, and green jewels threaded all through her green hair. She stood quietly, her eyes clear and bright. Finally, she shivered and held out her arms. Mabry went to her inside two steps, and not the Red Wind nor the Blue nor the Silver nor any cat watched their embrace, but turned away to give them peace. When Mabry Muscat touched the Green Wind, his suit flushed the color of jade and oak leaves. Mallow smiled to herself, with a pang of regret. She did not think she would get any kisses of him now.

  “Oh my love,” said the Green Wind, wiping glad tears from her lovely cheeks. “I had hoped, if we all had to be here together to witness this poor joke, that I’d find you in the crowd. Thank Pan for the smaller blessings.”

  The Leopard of Little Breezes trotted across the ice and plunked down on her haunches between Mallow and the lovers. “She was called Jenny Chicory, when her hair was brown,” the cat said with a rumbly, velvety voice. “She’s my mistress and I love her. But I let her love him for a little while, when he happens by. I’m a generous cat.”

  “Is that his love, then? And you are the cat she left
him for. Why may they not be together—they seem able to touch and speak, and no Sour Magic crackles between them.”

  Imogen shrugged her spotted shoulders. “Our work bears no competition, and our home bears ill will toward anyone not of the family—the cold and harsh air would strip even him to his bones.”

  It bears mentioning that Winds in Fairyland have little in common with the faceless, invisible breezes of our world. Whenever a storm or a tornado or a gust happens by, a sudden shower or snow flurry, somewhere in all that rushing air is a wild soul seated on a wild cat, whipping the sky into a riot, and singing the storm all the way down. They are a rare and feral sort, and no one knows their customs but they themselves. The Winds live in Westerly above the clouds, but the cats call Nephelo home, their village of ice and starlight, far up in the most vicious of Fairyland mountains. They come together when they please, and part only when they must. Between the two cities the Many-Colored Moon Bridge once hung, but that was long ago, and today is not yesterday.

  Mallow spent her first night in Pandemonium in the Nephelese tent and much of the day after, sipping the hot, resinous wine of the Winds and wrestling the great cats, who all seemed to enjoy it, and only Iago bit her, but very gently, and she did not bleed. The great Panther took her up into the sky upon his dark back, to show off the strength of his flying. Mallow held on to his fur, and waved to Imogen below, and whooped over the towers of the city. They swooped low to sample real moonkin pastries from the far south, and met a sweet young Wyvern who confessed with a blush to her spring-green scales that she had, of late, become betrothed to an eligible young Library.

  All the while the horns played and the lamias kissed and Mabry and the Green Wind played croquet with balls of thunder and snow. They talked the quiet talk of old lovers. They sang the evening ballad together, while the rest of Pandemonium sang their own sundown songs, all together in what ought to have been cacophony, but melted into the saddest and sweetest of harmonies.