Green

by Jay Lake

  Federo came again that day. He was afoot instead of ahorse this time, and appeared wrung out. The sea had stained his clothes so that his velvet finery was ragged, while the sun had colored his skin so he less resembled a maggot and more a ripening berry.

  He found me in the courtyard with Mistress Leonie and the loom. She excused herself as soon as she noticed Federo and went in search of Mistress Tirelle, or so I presumed. He sat on her little padded bench and stared at me awhile.

  I offered him the small smile that was all I ever let out.

  “How is it with you, Girl?” he finally asked.

  “I learn.”

  “Good.” Federo reached out and took up my hand. He turned it back and forth, looking first at my wrist then my fingers, at my palm then the back. “Do you learn well?”

  “Some lessons are harder than others.”

  “Which of the Mistresses do you favor most?”

  A real smile escaped for a moment. “The Dancing Mistress.”

  His smile answered. “Good.”

  “I have a question.” I had not yet found the nerve to broach this one to her.

  “You may ask it,” Federo said formally.

  “Why do all my Mistresses have names save her? She has only a title.” And not a squarely accurate one, I thought.

  “A fair question.” He tilted his head slightly. I could see a bloom of blood marring one eye, as if his face had recently been struck. “Her people are a race of few numbers, scattered far. The pardines do not give their names away even to each other. It is their way, what they call the paths of their souls, to keep their true selves hidden. It is said those selves are so deep that they survive braided among the soulpaths of other pardines long after the death of the body.” He shrugged. “In any event, whatever the state of their souls, some have titles. Others might be called by the color of their eyes or their favored food.”

  “I do not have a name.” Though I did once. “Yet my true self is not hidden at all. These Mistresses stare at every aspect of me all the time. They are remaking me by inches and days.”

  The last of his pleasure fled as a bird before a storm. “It is not a lesson to be taken. Your circumstances and hers are as different as the stars are from the lamps of your house.”

  “Both light the night.”

  He touched my hair a moment. “Never forget who you are.”

  “I am not yours,” I said in the language of my birth.

  “Silence is your friend,” he answered in the same words.

  I watched him walk slowly into the court to speak with Mistress Tirelle. After a short time, Mistress Leonie came out to resume my instruction in the textile arts.

  There were stranger lessons to be learned as well. In my readings I came across the same story in two very different forms amidst Mistress Danae’s books. That tales of the gods could be told and retold was itself a sort of revelation, given how much priestly writing seemed concerned with assurance and certainty.

  The first I found was a man’s story about the goddesses who made it their business to care for women. Much later in life, this tale would give me long pause for other reasons, but then it was simply the view of the world that caught my attention.

  THE FATHERS’ TALE

  Long ago, the world was a garden and each race of being and kind of creature grew in neat little rows tended by the titanic gods. Father Sunbones, first among them, walked each day among the rows and remarked upon the health of the crop. Mother Mooneyes came by night to prune the shoots and claim the harvest.

  Desire, their third daughter, was allowed to play among the fish-trees and the bird-vines, but forbidden the rows of anything that had fur or hair. “Your nature will wake them out of time,” Mother Mooneyes said as they feasted in the Blue Hall of the Sky. “Stay rather with the cold waterbreathers and the thoughtless fliers who will not feel your pull.”

  “It is not fair,” Desire complained in the manner of children everywhere.

  “Nothing is fair,” rumbled Father Sunbones. “We are lucky if we merely find order in this world, let alone fairness. Your brother Time complains of being denied the fish-trees for himself. He whines constantly of fairness as he walks among the trellises where the souled ones grow.”

  It was the souled ones Desire wished to sport among, those with two arms and two legs and thatches of forbidden, lovely, unruly hair. Though their eyes were not yet open and their souls had not yet flowered, she imagined embracing one then another, pressing her lips to theirs, touching their bodies with hers, until she hung like they from their trellises to voice her lust to her cousins the stars.

  “I know your thoughts,” whispered her brother Time. “Later, I will help you.”

  “It is always ‘later’ with you,” Desire hissed. “I want what I want.”

  “My power is in passage, not fulfillment.” Her brother smiled with faint promise. “Take me for what you will.”

  Desire could not keep her thoughts from the men in all their colors, as well as the ogres and fey and sprites and all their close-kinned kind, so she sought Time in his observatory tower at that part of the day where Father Sunbones and Mother Mooneyes exchanged their pleasantries in the privacy of the horizon’s blanket.

  “What is this help you offer me?”

  Time smiled again, the promise in his face a little larger. “Lie with me, for the fulfillment of my dreams, and in return I will grant you stolen hours to lie in the garden with the souled ones.”

  “Lie with you?” Desire laughed. “You are a stripling boy with a hollow chest and eyes as dark as Uncle Ocean’s dreams.” She touched her generous breasts through her shift, lifting them toward Time in mockery. “Why would I share my bounty with you?”

  Time smiled yet again. The promise had become great. “Because Desire will always be subject to Time. Absent in an infant, unformed in a child, raging in a youth, unfulfilled in an elder. My grant of hours to you will return a hundredfold in the world that is to come when Father and Mother awaken the garden.”

  So Desire lifted her shift above her head and showed her body to her brother Time. She was the perfection of woman, hair every color, eyes flashing so bright they were no color at all, lips as full and rich as the lily between her legs, skin smooth as a new-ripened peach. And though Time was hollow-chested and pale, and his manhood not so great, he could hold himself at stiff readiness forever if he chose–the power of his Name–and so he rode his sister long into the night, until her cries of pleasure became pleas for release. For even Desire can eventually pale of her appetites.

  Time finally spent the last of his seed upon her breasts. He rose, tore a strip from the nail of his least left finger and pressed it into his sister’s shivering hand. “Take this into the garden with you. Keep it close to your person always, and the time you need will be yours there.”

  Desire was so tired and sore that she shuddered to imagine another penis coming near her body. But she burned to put Time’s promise to the test. Gathering her shift over one arm, for she ached too much to reach up and draw it onto her body, Desire limped slowly into the garden.

  She smelled so of sex and fulfillment that even the cold fishes in their trees stirred at her passing. Birds thrashed on their vines, hungry for her flesh or just the hard salty scents on her breath. When Desire walked among the furred animals, they strained and bellowed, disturbed within their dreams.

  But when she came to the trellises where hung the fathers and mothers of all the souled races, their eyes flickered open pair by pair. Penises rose erect, nipples sprang from firm breasts, tongues crossed lips. Every being in that garden smelled her, wanted her, lusted for her.

  In her soreness and fatigue, Desire took fright and fled to the Hall of the Blue Sky. She dropped her shift and Time’s nail paring in the garden as she ran. Later when Father Sunbones came to check his crops, he found the souled ones awake and the animals disturbed. He also discovered the evidence of Desire’s passage and Time’s complicity.

  �
��The damage is done,” Father Sunbones told Mother Mooneyes. “Our children have roused the souled ones. The newcomers will go into the world with their spirits unformed.” He wept golden tears that seared the soil.

  Mother Mooneyes peeked out from the daylit heavens. “Perhaps that is well enough. Each can find his own path. Each can grow his own soul fit to suit who he is.”

  “But so many will be lost. Heartless, vicious, cruel.”

  “You name more of our children, Father. Not every child is Loyalty or Truth. Let the souled ones have their lives.”

  Father Sunbones listened to the counsel of his wife. He threw open the gates of the garden, plucked all that they had grown there, and herded his charges into the world. The fish fell into the rivers, lakes, and oceans. The birds took wing into the spring sky of a new world. Animals bellowed and fled across the land. And the souled ones took themselves to those places that suited each best and began to make towns and farms and tell each other stories of the hot dreams that invaded their long nights’ sleep.

  Then Father Sunbones went to Time’s observatory tower and cursed his son’s disloyalty. Ever more Time’s strength wanes with the year so that he passes all the pains of a life between each winter solstice. This is his punishment for lying with his sister Desire.

  Then Father Sunbones went to the Hall of the Blue Sky and banished Desire to her chambers for a year and day, so that she might not come out until her brother’s curse had fulfilled its first round and she could learn what had been done to him.

  But Desire had quickened with Time’s seed. While she stayed hidden in her chambers, she gave birth to a torrent of sisters, one for each little animalcule that her brother had spent within her womb. She fed the daughters from the seed that still lay upon her breasts, so that they drank milk of both man and woman. These thousands of sisters became the goddesses of women and spread out into the world in the aid of midwives and mothers and sapphists and prostitutes and girl children everywhere.

  Ever after, the gods of men made it their business to send these sisters home to Father Sunbones whenever and however they could, though it is a terrible and difficult thing to kill a goddess. The gods who were most passionate about this errand each gave a scrap of themselves to a holy order that raised the Saffron Tower in dedication to restoring the purity of souls and righting the wrongs of Desire.

  I was quite taken with the contrast between this strange story and the other, which I found a month or so later, the latter a woman’s view of what were obviously the same events. Mistress Danae could not tell me if these were true history or teaching stories, but as she said, did it matter? She also told me that I should have a theology Mistress, but that was never in the Factor’s plans, and so she gave me more books to read that discussed the strengths and failings of the gods.

  For my part, I learned something from both these tales.

  THE MOTHERS’ TALE

  Once when the world was new, Mother Mooneyes ruled the skies as first among the titanics. Father Sunbones had not yet woken to his place at her right hand as consort, but rather slept endlessly on a bed of burning sand beneath her ivory-walled halls. Mother Mooneyes sometimes went to him when she rested from her labors in the heavens. Even in his sleep, she could draw forth Father Sunbones’ seed to make her children.

  Mother Mooneyes’ favored daughter was Desire. Desire was possessed of a beauty which challenged even that of her mother. Desire’s hair was the gold of summer wheat and the brown of autumn leaves and the black of winter ice and the palest rose blush of spring all at once. Her skin shone with the luster of starlight and the richness of cream. Her lips were more sweet than honey with the heady fullness of wine. Every portion of Desire mirrored the perfection of the morning of the world.

  Now it happened that Mother Mooneyes kept a garden in the lands around her ivory halls. This garden held all the promise of the world to come, ripening on vine and root and tree. To the east, cattle lowed and snuffled within their cradles of soil. Other beasts of the field were clustered around them, each with its own stalk and stem. To the north were the cold creatures and those on the wing, which partake of the world without fur or fang or thinking. To the south were the hot animals, those that would hunt and feast on the flesh of others once they stalked beneath the bright regard of Father Sunbones.

  Mother Mooneyes knew that to harvest the garden, she would have to wake her consort. Like all men, Father Sunbones would take counsel from his loins as much as from his thoughts. She held that dread day in abeyance as long as possible.

  In the west of the garden was the plot where the souled ones grew. Each lay at sleeping ease upon a bed of soft leaves. Each was watered and cleaned by a sweet spring. These were Mother Mooneyes’ special care, that the world would be populous and happy. There were men there in all their colors and shapes–aelfkin and dwerrowkin; nixie, pixie, and sprite; giant and troll–all the manifold imaginings of Mother Mooneyes’ busy hands in the long shadows of the morning of the world.

  Just as men had their sibs, so did Mother Mooneyes’ children. Desire sported with Love and Understanding, the twins Truth and Mercy, Justice, Obedience, and all her sisters. Outside their windows along the lawns of the ivory halls, their brothers wrestled and fought and hunted each other with arrows tipped with sky-iron.

  Watching the boys at their play, Desire had formed a lust for her brother Time. He was a likely lad, robust with all the years of the world on his broad shoulders. One day when Mother Mooneyes was about her travels in the heavens, Desire invited Time into her chambers.

  “Brother, come, I have a game to show you,” she said as they met upon the western steps. Desire licked her lips so that Time might not mistake her intent.

  “Is it a manly game?” he asked, for while men are ruled by their loins, those loins have two small brains each no larger than an olive and thus do not think well.

  Desire touched her breast and smiled. “The manliest of all.” Surely he could not misunderstand.

  “Then I shall invite my brothers!” Time declared. He turned to spread the word.

  Desire grasped his arm and pulled him close, as she set her other hand upon his sex. “A private game of man and woman,” she whispered in his ear.

  At last Time came to understand what she wanted of him. He followed Desire to her chambers, but was so eager in his lust that he pushed aside both her shift and her needs with a sweep of his hand and spent himself in moments of careless thrusting. She cast him from her chamber with hard words, chasing her brother out to the western steps. There he fled laughing.

  Desire’s breasts were heavy with need, and her loins were hot with the quick touch of her brother Time. She took herself into the west of the garden, where the souled ones were couched in their rest, and there she lay with them one by one, male and female alike, to slake her appetites. Each smiled in their sleep as she quickened their sex. Each murmured their thanks and slipped into the pleasant dreams of lust to which we all are heir.

  Finally Desire returned to the ivory halls. Though filled with seed and the scent of all the souled ones of the garden, her loins still quivered. She went beneath the earth to her father’s bed of burning sand and there took the guise of her mother. Desire rode him harder than any mortal man could bear, making her use of his godly strength, so that Father Sunbones woke fully in the midst of their coupling. Thinking he saw his wife, Father Sunbones drew Desire closer and made her body his toy in all the ways that a woman can be used.

  Mother Mooneyes came home to find much moaning in the west end of the garden, and giggling among her sons. She stalked quickly into her house, where Father Sunbones’ radiance already painted the walls with dawn’s orange glow. She found Desire coupled with Father Sunbones and in her wrath banished her daughter to her chambers for a year and day. Then Mother Mooneyes lay with Father Sunbones herself, to see if she could coax him back to sleep.

  It was too late. Desire had woken the world. Men stirred in their lust, and Father Sunbones rose from his
bed aflame with heat and leapt to the skies. Much that is ill in this world comes from those early awakenings, but perhaps the good also. Desire’s daughters were born to her in her chambers, some for each of the races of the souled ones. She taught them all she knew–the lists of who had grown in the garden, the names and powers of her brothers and sisters, the constancy of Mother Mooneyes in her unvarying cycles–and sent them into the world to watch over the women of the souled races, whom she had mistakenly betrayed in the innocence of her lust.

  Ever after, the goddesses of women made it their business to shelter females from the predations of men and turn male urges to their advantage. The marriage bond, when wrought well, can bind a man to a woman’s bed. A coin spent for an hour’s fancy can at the least sap his anger away. The choice to lie only in the company of other women is another comfort and safety. Always these goddesses watch over their shoulders, for there is ever an angry man or his god at the window. And so the temples of women have thick walls and heavy doors.

  Books and cooking carried me through the winter, but the following spring, the Dancing Mistress found a much better way to occupy my time. Our nighttime runs around the courtyard had long since grown sure-footed and stretched sometimes into hours. She also had me climbing the pomegranate tree for time, to see how fast I could go and how much I could better my previous records. We danced along a low wooden bar she had brought into the practice room, along lines of cobbles in the courtyard, up and down the stairs until Mistress Tirelle shouted for us to stop ruining her house.