In the Night Garden

IF IT PLEASES YOU TO KNOW IT, I AM VHUMMIM of Marrow, third daughter of Orris, who was the grand niece of the seventeenth Chrysoprase, which is how our rulers were titled in the days before the Wasting. From the degenerated wealth of that long-dead personage, Orris-My-Benefactor inherited an apple cart and a fetish stand. In my turn I took proprietorship of these things, and added to them a meat-pit. Among wealth I was not wealthy, but beyond the rolls of the Asaad, the Great Market, I would be envied for the gold at my throat and the silk at my feet. So were we all, envied and envying, in the glory of Marrow-That-Was.

When I was a child, the Asaad was the heart of my heart, and in this I was not unique. How high its canopies flew, how bright those draping oranges, those greens, those deep blues! Frankincense bubbled thick and brown in high-rimmed cauldrons, black-faced sheep babbled in their pens, gold was measured out into black purses great and small. How sweet was the sound of creaking cart wheels, the sound of bartering, the sound of coins solid in the palm! The blessed sky over the Asaad was always blue, the polished stones of the square ever shining. For my own part, I was eager to sell our apples, our little figurines, and so proud to acquire the flame-pit and roasting tongs, to add to my family’s economy. All citizens took part in the Asaad, or one of the smaller satellite markets, if one could not afford the stall rent demanded in the city center. To shirk one’s duty to economy was a crime punishable by scalding irons applied to the arches of the feet. So it was that each morning the entire city—the city that mattered, anyway—crowded under canopies to play out the grand procession of commerce.

My apples were crisp between hundreds upon hundreds of teeth; my jade and onyx and garnet fetishes bought themselves thrice over in luck: bears and snakes and spiders and storks, elephants and crows, and an endless, grotesque variety of Stars. I oiled my hair, the pride of my beauty, with the most expensive attar of emerald—a very intricate process, to press oil from gems, but once, in this place, we knew how to do it. My scalp shone green and black. My neck was short, my thighs round. I was even a bit fat, not an easy thing to avoid in the Asaad, where any taste is answered by twelve more rarified. I preferred date-stuffed serpents with a drizzle of rose-glâce, in my day. The juice of pepper-crusted dormice and honey-mashed snail shell ground finer than diamond dust ran down my sisters’ chins. Little songbirds basted in raspberry sugar and bees’ wings made sticky my brothers’ fingers. In the fruit-sellers’ quarter, pomegranate skins were packed with the tiniest of edible rubies, so small they melted on the tongue like cubes of sugar. Even more complex is the process by which foodstuff is made from the raw material of wealth, but we had mastered this, too, in the days when we knew all things. Once I ate a topaz the size of my father’s fist, and its skin split under my teeth like my own apples. The sun was so warm, that day, I thought it would shine through me. My father encouraged me gently, pushed the golden thing to my lips. It tasted of summer-baked wheat and the palest of peaches.

In the Asaad we ate everything we could buy and we could buy anything. Nothing did not answer our hunger, nothing did not have its price.

I first heard of it during the third luncheon shift—the whole market could not cease because we are inclined to be hungry in the middle of the day. We ate in shifts so that commerce never truly paused. That day I reclined on a red sofa beneath a violet canopy spangled with silver crescents, drinking spiced chocolate in a cup of plain gold. I was young then; I could not have expected more. A rind of citrine floated in my drink, and I prodded it with one long, frost-painted fingernail as the quince-seller whispered:

“Have you heard? It’s all the way up to the Rhukmini shops now.”

A particularly corpulent merchant, who had a few years earlier developed an astonishing and popular hybrid of plum and amethyst, yawned and slapped iridescent blue flies from his own cup. “So? They’ll block off the street and we’ll go about our business. Rhukmini was a fishmongers’ slum, anyway, you old melon-wort, a pale and piecemeal shadow of the Asaad—I call it a blessing. No more lifting one’s pant leg to avoid the squid ink and ice-chunked cod blood.”

The plum-breeder had taken to the latest fashion of grafting various extraneous limbs to his body—his face was gray, contorting slowly into a small elephant’s trunk which sloped over his mustache. He was quite proud of the infant appendage, and made sure all in the Asaad knew it would surely grow much larger by the end of the season. He was a man of considerable size, after all.

“What’s happened?” I asked, curious. I smoothed a shimmering strand of hair over my forehead—the heat pooled sweat and gem oil together, and a few green trickles warmed my neck. The quince cart-woman turned to me, her nose rings glittering.

“It’s gone,” she said triumphantly. “The entire Rhukmini.” Second only to our goods is our command of gossip—and she had the upper hand in this other economy. Her short hair was slicked in garnet, and she never sweat.

“Gone?” I was never a conversationalist.

“Well,” the plum-breeder cut in, stroking his lazuli-coated mustache with his thumb and his fledgling trunk with his forefinger, “not entirely. There’s bits of it left, blowing around. But I daresay no one will be bashing out octopus skulls there anytime soon.”

I must have gaped—who would not have gaped? My agate-tattooed teeth (but one art in a city which contained all possible arts) showed behind my thick painted lips. I could see the plum-breeder nakedly calculate whether my teeth trumped his trunk in the hierarchy of opulence, which shifted and slid with each new process, alchemy, or mechanick the Asaad supplied. He seemed to decide his little gray appendage was safely superior.

“Why don’t you go down Rhuk-side and see for yourself? I’ll have my boys watch your cart; they’re as honest as a skulk of foxes, which is to say not particularly, but they sell as well as they steal, and what more can anyone ask of the young?”

I frowned. True, they would steal, but his sons had quick tongues and I was young enough to be curious about the city beyond the canopies, young enough to think the stinking alley full of empty crab claws and squabbling gulls flapping in off the river might be worth the loss of a few apples and knuckles of meat.

I went—who would not have gone?

In the Garden

THE BOY SHIVERED.

“I don’t like this story,” he whispered. A low wind blew through the Garden, throwing old flowers up into dervishes and clattering one branch agai

nst another. “I liked the pirates better.”

The girl shrugged. “I cannot change what is written on my skin, any more than I can change my skin itself.”

The evening was now full of mist and blue, rolling through the Garden paths like a regiment clothed in starlight. The girl picked at the deep moss and looked toward the Palace, which was as full of light as ever, light and voices. Her fingertips were colorless. She spoke as if from a long way off, and hidden behind a wall of marble and glass.

“If I had not these marks on me, if I were not a raccoon-demon scampering over a Garden rich in scraps, I might have been called Dinarzad, and had pearls strung onto my hair, and married a man who owned golden roosters. It is very strange to think about.”

The boy furrowed his clear brow.

“I do not think you would like the man with the roosters.”

The girl grinned like a hare who knows it has escaped. “I am not a fool. Most of the time, I am glad not to be called Dinarzad. But the cold is sometimes like dying, and then I think it would not be so bad.”

The boy started as though he were a young cat seizing upon a mouse for the first time. “What is your name, my friend? I am ashamed I did not ask it before!”

The girl looked down toward the moss and her freezing hand on it like a blight. She made her face very still, still as water, still as stars, so that he would not see her bitterness, hard as hawthorn bark. “How should I know my name? Who was there to call me so, to call me anything but demon, urchin, raccoon? If I have a name I do not own it—someone else must have it folded away in some strange purse, and my eyes will never see it.”

Chagrined, the boy followed her gaze to the Palace and they sat in silence for a time. It did not seem right for him to offer his own name when she had nothing to give him in return. He did not want to show her once more all the things he possessed that she did not.

The first dead leaves left their trees and floated down, their stems noiseless against the wet stones. Somewhere behind her, the girl could hear the slow rippling of the pond where the boy had caught her bathing, had caught her under the moon. There were low, wild roses around their cairn of rocks, but they had lost their color to rain and wind, and lay ruined at the children’s feet like torn pages.