In the Night Garden

“Can you not see? The Griffin are all dead. There is no hunt, whether I declare it or not. But if you would argue with me, or challenge my Ocular, you will find yourself as dead and rotting as my father. If I do not fear to sink my knife in his back, please believe I will not hesitate to bury it in yours.” The man fell into sullen silence, and Oluwafunmike shook her head in sorrow. “They are all dead, son of the Ofira. Dead and cold as winter in the great desert. The Eye blessed us, yes, but we have not been worthy of its Gaze.”

As if to answer her, a cascade of sound echoed suddenly over the beach. A quick, rustling noise could be heard, and it deepened into a cracking, clawing cacophony, like wood splintering under a silver axe. Tomomo and the princess started like pheasants in an autumn field, trying to discern the source. The Arimaspians looked

suddenly ashen and fearful, as though they expected the ghost of their King to appear and punish them for submitting to his daughter. But Sigrid understood immediately: The eggs beneath her, still nestled in the golden nest, were hatching, and all at once, first of all the things which should not have been. Their marbled blue and white surfaces fractured like sapphire bones, and the last of the glittering golden yolk dribbled out.

Out of the cerulean ruins of the eggshells rose shakily three infant Griffin—two so deeply blue they were almost black, and one whose feathers shone whiter than the first snow in the first winter of the world. They were the size of wildcats, and power already rippled beneath their colored skins. They shook themselves like pigeons, spattering Sigrid’s face with shimmering yolk droplets. There was no sound on the windswept beach, no sound but the wind battering the shoulders of a dozen people, none of whom dared to move or speak. The silence was unbroken, untouched, a block of obsidian.

Then the keening began. The newborn Griffin turned their delicate heads to the brooding sky and shrieked, their throats ululating with a terrible cry, like claws rending a mirror into ribbons. None could bear the sound—the Arimaspian horde fell weeping to the sand, scratching at their aching ears. Sigrid alone was not afraid, and the sound which to the others, even Tomomo and her princess, was a horror, was to her the simple and beautiful sound of birds singing up the sun. She crawled to the howling children and tentatively put out her arms to them. They quieted immediately and curled themselves into her small brown hands, snuffling at her to catch her scent, and still weeping softly.

It was then that Sigrid saw it, and her mouth hung open like a broken door in dismay and wonder.

The Griffin were deformed, misshapen. The larger of the two blue lion-birds had no eyes where they ought to shine—they blinked instead from his downy chest. The chest of the smaller creature bore two tiny holes: the ears of an eagle. And the white had no beak. Sigrid gently touched the pale bird’s breast, in which a human mouth opened and closed weakly, its pink lips shining with golden tears.

“What’s wrong with them?” Oluwafunmike asked, creeping forward to study the bizarre arrangement of their features. Tomomo inched tentatively forward beside her friend.

Sigrid shook her head softly, and for a moment, she seemed almost an Arimaspian, so coated was her long hair in golden yolk. She spoke in hushed tones, almost in the tenor of a prayer. “They are the Sorella. The new Sorella. Don’t you see? When Giota carried the Griffin within her, she must have passed her sisters, and some sliver of herself, into the White Beast. And now the last Griffin are bound to the last Sorella—and Griffin are bound to humans.”

The birds mewled helplessly and climbed into Sigrid’s lap. The blue siblings began to pick at her vest, pulling at the rough stitches with their beaks. They tore at the cloth eagerly, in a fury, and soon Sigrid was left in the dead Griffin’s nest with no more to hide her nakedness than the leather wrappings she had used to bind her breasts. She began to cry in shame, tears trickling down her sand-spattered face, trying to cover her deformity with her thin arms. But the Griffin were not satisfied. The white infant pushed her head under Sigrid’s arms—patiently, without violence—and severed the leather straps with a single pass of her glittering talon.

Sigrid suppressed a wracking sob; her three breasts were suddenly exposed, and all the unfortunate spectators of the Griffin’s beach were witness to her freakish body. There was nowhere she could look where she did not meet the eyes of a near-stranger gawking at her bare flesh. She pulled at the ruined wrappings uselessly. Yet even then, she was not afraid of the clustered birds. They pressed nearer to her, cooing affectionately, even purring with pleasure. Her breasts were suddenly heavy, and she could feel the skin which had never seen the sun stretch and tighten strangely.

The white Griffin laid itself against her and nuzzled her ear, clucking and chirruping gently. She wrapped her long neck around Sigrid’s, and with infinite gentleness, her human mouth opened to suckle at the rightmost breast. Her blue brothers hungrily followed suit, fastening their beaks onto the second and third breasts. They were too rough at first, unused to human women, and bit her tender skin with their greedy beaks.

Sigrid put her arms around the three infants in awe, her tears flowing like streams from hidden mountains, falling to mingle with the blood the starving beasts had drawn, and finally with the milk which rushed freely from her body to feed the last of all Griffin.

Quietly, like a clock beginning to chime, Saint Sigrid of the Nest began to laugh.

“THAT WAS THE FIRST MIRACLE OF SAINT SIGRID,” the great bald woman said as the last red rays of the sun faded like drying blood into the horizon. The light seemed to slide along her tattoos and puddle on her broad face. “The others you will learn as you ascend the Tower—the Miracle of the Beard, the Miracle of the Waterless Sea, the Miracle of the Sacking of Amberabad.”

“What?” I cried. “How can you tell me only part of a story? Did Sigrid stay to mother the Griffin or return to the ship with Long-Eared Tomomo and live her life as a pirate? Did Oluwafumike keep the Ocular? Was there war? Did the Griffin survive? I have heard they are extinct—are they not? Are they hidden in some aerie no man has seen?”

“Stories,” the green-eyed Sigrid said, unperturbed, “are like prayers. It does not matter when you begin, or when you end, only that you bend a knee and say the words. And when we tell Saint Sigrid’s story, we open ourselves to her—we cannot close ourselves, even if the story must continue on another day. Each miracle of the Saint is guarded by the women on one floor of the Tower. Should you choose to study with us, you will ascend physically as you become enlightened by the example of Sigrid.” The great woman rose then and snuffed out the lantern at the door of the Tower.

“At least tell me how she died. Was it a very heroic death? Did she die saving the Griffin, or her shipmates? Surely a woman’s death is a thing which all may know.”

The Sigrid laughed. “A woman’s death is the most precious thing she owns. But I will tell you, if you have decided that our Tower is to be your home and your mother for all your days.”

“I have,” I answered breathlessly. Surely these women who possessed such tales were the strongest and wisest of all possible women.

“Saint Sigrid of the Nest disappeared in her fiftieth year. Tomomo, though an excellent Captain, was not indefatigable. She eventually retired and passed the helm of her ship to Sigrid, her most beloved monster. Yet, some years hence, the Maidenhead was lost at sea, devoured by the Echeneis, a sea monster whose sheer size beggars the mind. It is said that whole cities could fit within its belly, and that its hide is like the shell of a turtle, impervious to all spears. It is the color of the sea itself, so that a ship may be swallowed before her captain is even alerted to the presence of the beast, though its girth mocks even the Griffin. This is the thing that swallowed the Saint of the Boiling Sea. All hands were lost.”

I stood in the blue twilight, aghast. How could such a woman as Sigrid not have died crossing swords or defending the innocent?

I was very young.

The Sigrid rubbed her bald head thoughtfully, frowning at me, as if struggling with a secret. “Some in the Tower believe in a prophecy we refer to as the Heresy of the Lost. It is said by these women that Sigrid is not dead, but only lost, adrift within the cavernous belly of the Echeneis-whale, and that she lives still.” She coughed, clearly thinking this particular tale nonsense not fit for the ears of novices. “They fasten their hopes to a fragment of an ancient song which was passed from mother to child in the north of the world, where the Maidenhead was lost.”

She closed her eyes and sang softly:

O, sing of the ship with the mast of leaves

And the maiden who stood at her wheel!

Long ago, it is said, she was drowned until dead

And her red ship was split at the keel!

But she never went under, the old mothers know