In the Night Garden

PRELUDE

ONCE THERE WAS A CHILD WHOSE FACE WAS LIKE THE NEW MOON SHINING on cypress trees and the feathers of waterbirds. She was a strange child, full of secrets. She would sit alone in the great Palace Garden on winter nights, pressing her hands into the snow and watching it melt under her heat. She wore a crown of garlic greens and wisteria; she drank from the silver fountains studded with lapis; she ate cold pears under a canopy of pines on rainy afternoons.

Now this child had a strange and wonderful birthmark, in that her eyelids and the flesh around her eyes were stained a deep indigo-black, like ink pooled in china pots. It gave her the mysterious, taciturn look of an owl on ivory rafters, or a raccoon drinking from the swift-flowing river. It colored her eyes such that when she was grown she would never have to smoke her eyelashes with kohl.

For this mark she was feared, and from her earliest days, the girl was abandoned to wander the Garden around the many-towered Palace. Her parents regarded her with trepidation and terror, wondering if her deformity reflected poorly on their virtue. The other nobles firmly believed she was a demon, sent to destroy the glittering court. Their children, who often roamed the Garden like a flock of wild geese, kept away from her, lest she curse them with her terrible powers. The Sultan could not decide

—after all, if she were a demon, it would not do to offend her infernal kin by doing away with her like so much cut grass. In the end, all preferred that she simply remain silent and far away, so that none would have to confront the dilemma.

And so it went like this for many years, while thirteen summers like fat orange roses sprang and withered.

But one day another child came near to her, though not too near, hesitant as a deer about to bolt into the shadows. His face was like a winter sun, his form like a river reed. He stood before the girl in her tattered silk dress and shabby cloak which had once been white, and touched her eyelids with his sweet-scented forefinger. She found, to her surprise, that she endured his touch, for she was lonely and ever full of sorrow.

“Are you really a spirit? A very wicked spirit? Why are your eyes dark like that, like the lake before the dawn?” The pretty boy-child cocked his head to one side, an ibis in midstream. The girl said nothing.

“I am not afraid of you!” The boy stood his ground but his voice broke hoarsely. The girl continued to stare at him while the willow trees wavered in the east wind. When she spoke her voice was the low hum of cicadas in the far-misted hills.

“Why not?”

“I am very brave. One day I will be a great General and wear a scarlet cloak.” At this there was almost a smile on the girl’s pale lips.

“And you have come to slay the great girl-demon who haunts the Garden?” she whispered.

“Oh, no, I…” The boy spread his hands, feeling suddenly that he had shown very bad form somewhere along the way.

“No one has spoken so many words to me since I saw the winter snows through a warm window draped in furs.” The girl stared again, impossibly still. All at once, a tiny light stole through her dusky eyes and she seemed to make a decision within herself. “Shall I tell you the truth, then? Tell you my secret? You of all the children who wear ruby rings and smell of olive soap?” Her voice had gone so quiet it was almost without breath.

“I asked, didn’t I? I can keep secrets. My sister says I am very good at it, like the King of the Thieves in the nursery story.” There was another long silence, as clouds covered the sun. And the girl began to speak very softly, almost afraid to hear her own voice.

“On an evening, when I was a very small child, an old woman came to the great silver gate, and twisting her hands among the rose roots told me this: I was not born with this mark. A spirit came into my cradle on the seventh day of the seventh month of my life, and while my mother slept in her snow white bed, the spirit touched my face, and left there many tales and spells, like the tattoos of sailors. The verses and songs were so great in number and so closely written that they appeared as one long, unbroken streak of jet on my eyelids. But they are the words of the river and the marsh, the lake and the wind. Together they make a great magic, and when the tales are all read out, and heard end to shining end, to the last syllable, the spirit will return and judge me.

“After the old woman vanished into the blue-faced night, I spent each day hidden in a thicket of jasmine and oleander, trying to read what I could in a cast-off bronze mirror, or in the reflections of the Garden pools. But it is difficult; I must read them backwards, and I can only read one eye at a time.” She stopped, and the last was no louder than a spider weaving its opaline threads.

“And there is no one to listen.”

The boy stared. He looked closely and could see wavering lines in the solid black of her eyelid, hints of alphabets and letters he could not imagine. The closer he looked, the more the shapes seemed to leap at him, clutch at him, until he was quite dizzy.

He licked his lips. They were all whispers now, the two of them, conspirators and thieves. The other children had all gone, and they stood alone under the braided whips of a gnarled willow.

“Tell me? Tell me one of the tales from your eyelids. Please. Just one.” He was terrified that she would rebuke him and run, like the hound which is often beaten. But she only continued to look at him with those strange, dark eyes.

“You are kind to me when no one else will come near. And my tales are all I have to give as thanks. But you must come away from the open Garden, into my hiding place, for I would have no one else know. You would surely be punished, and they would take my mirror and my knife, which are all I own, and lock me away to keep the demon spirit from hollowing their fine house.”

And so they crept away from the yellow-tinged willow, across the endless rows of roses. They ducked under an arch of chestnut blossoms and were suddenly enveloped in a bower of white petals, the perfume touching them like hands. Red branches had thatched themselves into a kind of low roof, and there was ample room on the soft, compact earth thatched with leaves for them both to sit.

“I will tell you the first tale I was able to read, from the crease of my left eyelid.”

The boy sat very still, listening like a silk-eared hare deep in the forest.

“Once in a far away there was a restless Prince, who was not satisfied by his father’s riches, or the beauty of the Palace women, or the diversions of the banquet hall. This Prince was called Leander, after the tawny lion that bounds across the steppes like a fearful wind. One night he crept out of the vine-covered walls of the great Castle like a hawk on the hunt, to find a quest and silence the gnaw of discontent in his breast…”

NOW THE PRINCE STOLE INTO THE NIGHT, THE shadows wrapping around him like slippery river eels, and his footfalls were black and soundless on the pine needles. He journeyed through the Forest, stars flooding overhead as though they had burst through some gilded dam, having no particular plan except to get as far from the Palace as possible before the sun rose up and his father’s hounds were set on his scent. The trees made a roof of many tiles over his head, a scented mosaic studded with blue clouds. For the first time in his young life, the Prince felt a fierce kind of happiness, rimmed with light.

As dawn swept up behind him like a clever thief, he rested against the trunk of a great baobab, leaning his head against the knotted wood. He breakfasted on cheese and dried meat he had stolen from the kitchens. The salt of the meat was more delicious than anything he had ever tasted, and he slept for a few hours under the sky which bloomed in the colors of wisteria and lilies.

Traveling on, it was not long before he came to a little hut in a pleasant meadow with a thatched roof and a well-made wooden door, round with solid brass studs. The chimney smoked cheerily, smelling of sage and cedar. Milling around the house was a flock of gray-feathered geese, circling like cirrus clouds, ethereal and wild. They were very fine animals and beautiful, squawking and ruffling their feathers under the curling eaves of camphor and fresh straw.

Now the Prince was young and resourceful, but not very wise, and he had taken only a little food from the kitchens and a few apples from the orchards. He had assumed that he could forage easily, for the whole world must be as fertile as his father’s lands, and all trees must be as full of jeweled fruit, all animals as docile and savory, all peasants as agreeable and generous. It was beginning to be clear that this might not be the case, and his stomach growled noisily. He resolved to replenish his pack before he went further. There were, after all, so many geese, and certainly whatever warm and festive creatures dwelt in that fine hut, they would not even notice if one of the long-necked animals disappeared.

The Prince had been trained to hunt and sneak from his earliest childhood, and he crept silently on well-muscled thighs from his hiding place. He stole behind a great plow and waited among the high summer grasses, searching for the right moment, controlling his breathing and slowing his hammering heart. The midmorning sun was hot on his neck. His hair crawled with sweat, trickling down into his collar, but he did not move at all until, finally, one of the lovely geese wandered away from the pack, peering around the blade of the plow and fixing him with wide black eyes. Her gaze was very strange, endless and deep as the autumn moon, pupilless and knowing.

But swift as a sleek wolf, the Prince escaped her gaze. He c