In the Night Garden

I watched her and listened, her words closing over me like a pool of cold water, rocking me and cooling my flushed skin. Her eyes glinted like an owl’s, and her face was calm as the moon.

“Now, you listen. Before they come to separate us, I must tell you the

story of my apprenticeship, so that you can come to know what I know, what you would have learned on your own, and your sisters too, if the King had not landed on us like a rock dropped from a great height. As it is, you must take what you can from these old bones.”

The girl stopped her tale with a press of her gentle lips, looking off into the night with eyes of shadow and woven web.

“You stop and start like a stubborn tortoise,” the boy said flatly, “always pulling your head in just when I want to hear more. It is very frustrating.”

The girl smiled wanly, as though she meant to apologize, but could not quite manage it. She licked her lips delicately, forlornly tasting the last vestiges of the roasted dove.

“But I must rest a little. We can sleep for an hour, then I will continue.” She paused, blushing to the tips of her temples. “You can lie beside me if you want; it gets cold here at night.”

She made a space in the long grass and the boy awkwardly lay against her. For long moments, neither of them slept, stiff and tense against each other as though the one had not slept every night of his life beside a brother or a sister, and the other had not spent every night of hers in blossom bowers and tree hollows. He watched her, the wind rustling her hair like river rushes, until finally, she was asleep, and then, the softening of her limbs a kind of permission, drifted away himself.

But it was not very long until he was shaking her awake, thirsty for her stories as a beggar in an endless desert.

THE TALE OF MY LONG YEARS OF STUDY IS TOO much to impart to you in this small, dark time we have together, my child. What I will tell you is the story of a single night, the last night of my formal apprenticeship, the last night of my girlhood. It is a good story to tell here in the shadowed corners of the earth, in this deep-within-deep place, where the sun falters.

My mother died in a horse raid when I was very young, and her mother had died in childbirth, and so when I came of age there was no one to teach me, to show me the secret ways, to give me a place in the tribe. Instead, I was sent away, packed into a cart with hides and jewelry to pay for my fostering in a neighboring village, to be taught by the witch-woman of their people. My hair was thick and red, then, bright as a fire ripping through the steppes. My limbs were smooth and hard as hooves—the jangling cart bouncing across the wide emptiness between villages hardly affected me.

When I arrived, my mistress seemed to me fierce and beautiful and terrifying. Thurayya was very strict—she distrusted my foreignness, my red hair, and my simple name, and most of all my stubbornness. For one year I did nothing but serve her; sweep her hut, polish her blades, carry her water, comb her horses. She said nothing to me. I slept outside the hut, under the stars and cushioned by dry grass. Only in the second year did she allow me to sleep beside her, and begin my education. Is this the proper way to teach a girl? I don’t know. But I could not bear to bring you up, or Quiver, or Sheath, that way. Perhaps I am not, in the end, as strong as my old mistress.

The first night of that second year, I lay stiffly against her old, musty skin, her sharp bones and stringy white hair turned almost my own shade by the last embers of fire, and without looking at me, she suddenly spoke.

“Listen, Bent-Bow, you little goat. See if you can’t learn something besides milking yaks…”

OPEN YOUR EARS, AND LET THE SKY IN.

In the beginning, before you were the spark in the dream of a lice-shagged goat and a lonely farmhand, there was nothing but sky. It was black, and vast, and all the other things you might expect a sky with nothing floating around in it to be. But the sky was only a sky if you looked at it slantwise—if you looked at it straight, which of course, no one could, because there wasn’t anyone to look any way, it was the long, slippery flank of a Mare.

The Mare was black, and vast, and all the other things you would expect a horse the size of everything to be.

After a long while, the Mare chewed a hole in herself, for reasons she has kept as her own. The hole filled up with light the way a hole in you or me would fill up with blood, and this was called a Star. They were the first, true children of the Mare, made of the flesh of her own body. And because she liked the light, and the company, she chewed other holes, roughly in the shapes of Badgers and Plows and Deer and Knives and Snails and Foxes and Grass and Water and suchlike, and so on until the Mare was ablaze with holes, and all the holes were Stars, and the sky was not very empty at all anymore.

Now, the holes were up and walking around like you and me by this time, and one, in roughly the shape of a Rider, climbed over the Mare and she became full, as full and huge as a horse the size of everything can be, until she foaled the whole world in a rush of light and milk and black, black blood from the most secret depths of the sky. The grass and the rivers and the stones and women and horses and more Stars and men and clouds and birds and trees came dancing through the afterbirth of the Mare, and swam happily in her milk and stopped up her secret blood, and the world was made, and the oceans washed the shore, and the Mare went cantering into the corners of herself, which just barely showed through the burning field of her Stars, and lay in a pasture neither you nor I could guess at, and chewed her favorite Grass-Stars in peace.

Now the holes which were Stars were still full of light, and still walking around the sky, awkward as three-legged dogs. Without the Mare, the black was just black, and not a flank, not a hide, not a thing with smell and salt and fur. Naturally, this frightened the holes, since up until then they had always had the smell of the Mare in their noses and the feel of her at their backs. A few of the holes looked down on all the things which had come out of the Mare before she went off away from them, and thought that it seemed less terrible and dark than the sky—and besides, there were things like themselves there: badgers and plows and deer and knives and snails and foxes and grass and water. And even horses, which were like the Mare they remembered, only much smaller, and of many different colors.

And, my mange-ridden little goat, there they lived, just like you and I do, while the less brave of their brothers and sisters stayed up in the sky to light their way. And they were teachers and students and mothers and daughters and brothers and uncles and crabby old men. And they couldn’t help it: everywhere they walked they carried their light, the light which, you remember, wasn’t really light, but the Mare-blood of the first days of the world.

Now, in the beginning, they were so full of this blood-light that everything they touched went silver and white with it—it flowed out of them like sweat and all kinds of things were wet with it. But as time went on, there was less of the light to spill, and they began to be afraid that they would lose the last thing the Mare their mother had ever given them. But they were more afraid of the great black motherless sky, and would not leave the world again. So they went away into little clutches, like flowers growing in rocks, into the caves and the hills and the rivers and the valleys, far off from anyone else, and touched only each other, for between them the light only pooled, and rippled, and did not leak from their bodies.

But after the Stars hid themselves away, the things they touched were still where they had left them, full of light, the light which was blood, and they glowed with the silver and white of it. And these things were special, flea-bed mine—where they were stones or plants they passed their light into deeper stones and into their seeds, and where they were people, they passed the light to their children, which diminished just as it had when the Stars first touched the world and the blood went out of them. It was not long before no one could tell what had been touched in the first days and what had not. The light was buried and secret.

But it was not gone. In many things and many people it is still glowing, deep down in their guts, and this, my scraggly, milk-bellied kid, is what magic is.

I LISTENED TO HER STORY, AND IN MY SECRET heart I thought she smelled sweet, of blood and milk and hide, like the Mare herself, and I allowed my body to inch, ever so slightly, closer to hers. She said nothing more that night.

I grew under her frown for many years like a sleek colt, learning to find the glowing thing in my gut, to control its light and strength, to be its bridle and bit. The world moved under me like a flowing field beneath amber hooves, and I could feel the blood-light in me pulsing, its life in my body like a newborn—and I had to deliver many, my girl, both under Thurayya’s direction and alone.

I exulted in it, the pooling of light in my heart. I learned to make it into medicine, and spells, and charms, to push it out of me and fashion it into shapes. How many nights did I spend with her under the lightning and the black clouds, her hair streaming like frenzied serpents, her thin arms extended towards the raging sky? I learned without the light, too: the way of animals, and the way of the steppes. I learned how to deliver a colt who has become strangled in its mother’s womb, and how to catch and milk the shaggy cattle that chewed the prairie grass. The time went quickly, when I was young, and I loved my mistress, and there was so much yet to know.

But one night Thurayya came to me and the moon crowned her with silver and black.

“Bent-Bow,” she hissed, “goat-of-my-heart. You must come with me now. For once in your life, do not question me.”

I opened, thought better of it, and closed my ever-busy mouth, to take my pack and follow the thin shape of the witch away over a long meadow which bordered the village. Her form swayed ahead of me, blurred, as the miles we crossed began to carry me into a half-dream, the sky and the cutting winter air skimming along past my cheeks.