“I’m thirsty!” whined my father Femi. “What did I have a daughter for! Fetch me some water!”
“There is no clean water to be had, Father. Be patient, and perhaps we will pass a stream.”
“But there is rain pooled in the leopard tracks here!” he said, pointing at some broad, deep pawprints.
“It is not safe, Father Femi. Remember what your wife, my mother said: ‘Drink from the feet of a beast and win those feet for your own.’”
After a long while, as the jungle became thinner, and the mud turned to pebbles underfoot, and still we only saw the burnt leaves and steaming mist of their passing, my father Femi cried again:
“I am thirsty! Find me some water, girl! What did I have a daughter for?”
“There is no clean water to be had, Father. Be patient, and perhaps we will come to a lake.”
“But there is rain pooled in the tiger tracks right here!” he said, pointing at more deep, broad pawprints.
“Remember what your wife, my mother said: ‘Drink from a footprint and it will not go well with your own scraggle-toes!’”
“Your mother is off whoring herself to the Raja,” my father snapped, “eating sugar pies and lamb fat and sleeping in silk every night!” His face was red as a boil. Tears leaped to my eyes.
“She didn’t want to go! The procurers came and you wouldn’t beat them back with your fis
ts or your club or your bricks, you only slept on your stove and refused to budge! ‘What did we have a daughter for?’ you said. ‘You get her back, if you want her so much,’ you said!”
We walked after the Stars in sullen silence after that. High red berries glittered, and I was thirsty, too, but I obeyed my mother. Finally, my father wailed, a long, wretched sound.
“I am so thirsty the sides of my throat stick together!” he moaned. “There is water in the boar-prints—let me drink, cruel Mesinyane!”
I turned to him and planted my hands on my tiny hips. My face was flushed and sweat-stung, my arms itchy from biting vermin, my feet a bloody ache. We were losing their scent, even as he dawdled. “Fine!” I cried. “Drink from the hoofprints, Father, drink your fill, if you will just be quiet and do as you’re told!”
Happily, my father Femi set to scooping the coppery water from the deep pig-prints. “Perhaps, when we catch them, the Stars will give me a new stove, with smooth bricks which do not leave marks on my back,” he chortled. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for him to finish.
As I watched him gulp down the rainwater, mud trickled down his chin, and before it could drip back again onto the churned earth, my father Femi’s chin was considerably hairier and broader than it had been before. The filthy water frothed suddenly between two yellow tusks, his thick hair twisted into a forelock, his eyes grown tiny and beady. Before my eyes my father twisted and grew until he was a great, huge, lumbering boar, and though I didn’t mean to, I laughed at him squealing in the forest, still thirsty even after all his slurping.
THE
MANTICORE’S TALE,
CONTINUED
“AND HERE HE IS, THE OLD BEAST, WITH NO stove at all anymore!” laughed the pig-tamer; and gave her boar a little slap on the rump. He moaned, and through his snorting he seemed to say:
“Why must you pester me so, Mesinyane?”
The blue-haired woman grinned at us. “We lost their trail—I have an idea where they were going, but a Star lost stays lost. I decided to make the best of it, and worked out this little act, which keeps me out of huts with stoves and in thick shoes. But I had to dress him up in ribbons and hats—folk don’t believe it’s a tamed beast if it doesn’t have the right costume. All tamed things are made a bit ridiculous in the process, you know.”
Immacolata was ashen, twisting her red ribbons with a shaking hand. “It was Zmeya, wasn’t it? She’s dead, somehow, she’s dead!”
“That’s the story we tell—and you’ll find that story told quite a bit in the Vstreycha. After she ate up her wicked husband Indrajit, the kingdom fell into the hands of the harem, who knew best what goes on in the palace, and through a complicated chain of ears, what goes on everywhere. The old perfumed queens run things in the city of pigs these days. They make sure the tale spreads far and wide, of what wronged wives may wreak. It was bad there for a while though,” she mused, “while they made their way to the throne. There was a terrible spate of poisonings. Some of us here do poison from time to time, if work is hard. I’ve heard such things from them—they love to see Father Femi and his pretty bows. Maybe one day we’ll trudge back to the jungle and let Mother see what became of you, eh?” She prodded the great pig and he moaned again.
“Where do you think they were going?” whispered Immacolata.
Mesinyane shrugged. “Fools are a keen old pack of crows. There is a fool for every scrap of knowledge in the world, I’d bet, and they talk to each other. I think they went to the Isle of the Dead; I think he went to bury her, to do as much as one Star does for another in the way of funeral rites.”
I thought I saw tears in the odalisque’s dark eyes, but I could not imagine why. She had known the woman for a moment, and so what if she was a Star? The Sun was my father, and he never slept on a stove.
“Can I offer you supper?” said the gold-eyed pygmy cheerfully. “I have a nice rasher of bacon back in my tent.” She grinned, and her teeth were small, small and sharp.
Once Mesinyane had filled us with bacon and rhyming songs about the laziness of pigs and men, we wandered alone through the Vstreycha. Taglio and Immacolata learned many new tricks with their cards and silks, and they purchased a ramshackle cart with a particularly moving rendition of “The Rape of Amberabad,” which we shall perform for you, if you like. It was a favorite of Hind’s and of mine, especially the part when the red ship sails up the harbor—which we made with fluttering blue gauze—and the three-breasted captain cuts the palace into amber coins for her hold. They bought this broken cart and Taglio painted it blue to match my eyes, and Immacolata fixed its silver stars in their firmament. Finally, we found an amber-seller in a tall black hat with a long golden feather flopping on its side, and Hind asked eagerly for news of home, of her frog-spitting sister, of her father with his silly lessons. I told her she should not care, but she only smiled sheepishly and pressed the bearded fellow for gossip.