Nevinnost hesitated, sidling to me and away just as she had done when she first approached, neighing softly and reaching out her long, bloodied head to me, then drawing it back. Finally, she began to graze at the black strands, just like grass, and in the dew-frozen morning, she severed my hair at its roots, murmuring as she did, in pleasure or in pain I could not tell. But she was somewhat overzealous, and she chewed my hair right to my scalp in her hunger and eagerness. I did not mind. Long after I could move again I let her keep at her meal, leaning forward when she could not reach me.
“You taste like the moon, so cold and so pure,” she whispered in my ear, and began to kick at the sod bricks, by now turned to iron plates by the frost. I tumbled out of the house that my golden ball built—for I still and always thought of him as mine, and my ball—at Nevinnost’s feet.
“You said you could help me,” she said, still in a half-swoon.
I turned and clawed in the hard soil around those unnumbered quills, gold and silver and copper and iron and quartz and diamond and emerald and sapphire. I dug deep and as I dug I wept and grunted and cried out, all those months walled into the sod tower rushing from me like frogs from a good girl’s mouth. My fingers were hooked and grimed, but finally I held out to her a bouquet of dirt-clung bristles, in every metal imaginable.
“It is enough,” I said, sobs hitching in my voice, “for a new horn.”
Nevinnost bent her head and nuzzled me very lightly. “My horn is a colored cup on a table far off from here. I cannot take another while it still lives—what would it say? But should it break, in lands I will never see, perhaps, perhaps, I shall know what wholeness is.”
Very slowly, she sank to the ground and lowered her ruined head onto my lap. Blood had begun to ooze again, just a few drops, from the scabs on her severed horn. She closed her eyes and breathed very deeply through her soft nose.
I lay beneath her, feeling her weight, heavy as guilt.
THE TALE
OF THE
TWELVE COINS,
CONTINUED
OUBLIETTE RUBBED HER SHORN HEAD ABSENTLY. “She took my innocence, what there was, into her, and then not only was I wicked, and ugly, and at the mercy of anyone who decided he loved me, but I was a grown woman, too, and bald as a vulture. I had hardly stumbled out of the field where Ciriaco had built his house of sod and child when the city blew in, and the Pra-Ita seized me up, knowing, as my ball did, that no one would come looking for me.”
“I don’t think they know—they just gather whatever the wind scours up—”
“They know.”
I could say nothing. Instead, I slipped out of bed and hopped quickly around to the other side, the floor icy beneath my soles. I climbed in again, behind her. Gingerly and gently, I put my arms around her—I was a man, and ought to know how to do this—and pressed my skinny body against her bark-back, holding her and rocking her like my own child.
“You are not ugly or wicked or at anyone’s mercy,” I whispered. “Though you are bald.”
She laughed a little, but as she warmed beside me, I felt her crying, quiet as pages rustling.
We worked at the Mint for seven years.
She kept her hair short, cutting it with the side of a sharpened gear. It was short and ragged, but thick, dark, over her head. When I asked about it, she shrugged and said: “My hair is hers now.”
I cannot begin to tell how often the wind carried us, or to what crevices of the world. Sometimes it seemed that beyond the tattered borders of the city, it snowed. Other times I seemed to smell a sage-and-stone desert. There was never a lack of materials for the Mint. Mostly, we did not have time to look at those borders, or anything outside the walls of that place. We worked. We ate—opals and garnets and pearls and chalcedony and hematite and lapis lazuli and malachite dark and green. Vhummim was right: A topaz tastes like a peach. Once, when the quota for the day had been exceeded, we were given diamonds. They tasted like frozen lemons.
Occasionally, we slept.
They watched us whenever we ate, stroking their long necks in time to our chewing. The dead city traded and bustled, but ate nothing, drank nothing. They watched us like a play, and salivated. Some of us grew up—many did not. Like any machine the Mint was fickle and thirsty. Fingers were crushed and arms were
torn from sockets; not infrequently an entire child fell or was pushed or jumped—ah, so many jumped!—into the gears and stamps. The first time it happened, I cried out, and my cry in that huge, silent hall was like a knife through the air. Everyone stopped, turned to stare. But they stared at me, and not the child who had swooned into the coin stamp and left a bloody stain on the boards. I had cried out; I had called attention to myself. They hissed at me to be quiet, and the Mint ground on.
By the time I was fourteen, only Oubliette was older than I. And by then, we thought we were strong enough, and clever enough, to escape. Gems are not nutritious, but the Mint gave us a dim and sallow strength, turning and twisting as we had to, shoving the stamps down, as she did, or shoveling dead children onto the boards, as I did. We did the same work for seven years.
And we shared a bed—not as lovers, you understand. I think I would have married her, eventually, except that marrying her would have been like plowing a river with a perch-drawn plate: I wouldn’t know how to begin, and what would be the point? When I looked at her body I did not see breasts or hips or even a tail and rough gray bark. I saw money. I saw coins piled up in a basket. I saw the money her bones could make. This is not the stuff of husbands. Some things you cannot put behind you and forget as though a golden curtain had closed on them. We shared our bed for warmth and company and if we had not I think one of us would have gone headlong into the gears long before. I scratched her bark and burls; she rubbed my neck. We helped each other return to ourselves when the work was done. After a while, we stopped sneaking about, and just filed into a common bed at shift’s end. The Pra-Ita said nothing. There was always a new child for an empty bed.
On that night of all nights, as I cradled my tree-girl in my arms, she spoke, quieter than a single drop of water dripping from a roof:
“I am going into the machine tomorrow.”
I started, turned her to face me, her dark eyes wide and calm. “What? Why? Why would you leave me here?”
“Hush, I’m not leaving you. I have found us a way out. I am going to crush my arm in the stamps tomorrow, after the shift bell. I will creep back onto the floor and put my arm on the boards. I will let the great glossy stamp sever it. I will make with it the dhheiba we need to buy our way out. An arm is not so much; I have another. But I will need your help to run the rest of the Mint—the scrapers and scrubbers and cutters and board-runners. I think if we are quick we can do it.”