Through those same spaces ran two black lizards, chasing each other up and down his barrel–rib cage like squirrels around an oak tree. They chattered and hissed as they passed, flicking their tongues at his clavicle, his pelvis. Their eyes were white, like the eyes of blind men, and once in a while, one would pause briefly, as though he had found a walnut, and gnaw on one of the ferryman’s vertebra.
Idyll looked chagrined. He pulled his robe back over the racing lizards. “It’s not so bad, really. I’ve gotten used to them. But I suppose that they require an explanation as surely as a bone coin…”
THE
FERRYMAN’S
TALE
THERE ARE SOME WHO SAY THE MOON IS DEAD, that only the dead trace their lineage there. They are wrong, and if you would believe the scripture of such creatures, you would surely believe anything.
The Moon is ever fertile. She cannot turn to look at herself in the ocean’s mirror but that a peony with crystal edges blooms from her navel. When she speaks, oysters fall from her mouth, oysters and tadpoles with wiggling tails. In the dark of the world before there were eyes to open and call it black, she was whole, and perfect, and did not change her shape through the month. But in the dark as in anything else, there were drifting winds and currents, and these blew gently against the ribs and shoulders of Moon, causing her to slowly spin in the sky, her arms outstretched as a child will do when she floats upon a clear and blue-green inland sea, letting the little kissing waves push against her body.
When the Stars left the sky—folk do not lie on that score, at least—their going left sucking holes in the dark, and winds issued from them as from a burst balloon. Poor Moon was battered on all sides by these whistling winds, and she began to spin faster and faster. As she spun in the sky like a dervish, the winds were so fierce that they began to peel off slivers of her flesh, pale and translucent and shimmering. These slivers drifted dreaming to earth, feather-slow and fragile as petals.
Finally, Moon had nothing left for the empty sky to peel away. The little black core of her rested at last in a lightless hollow, no bigger or brighter than a speck of soot. But as all things will do when they are allowed some respite, Moon began to grow again, for she cannot help her fecundity. She turned this way and that, and peonies bloomed from her navel, chrysanthemums exploded from her palms. Oysters and tadpoles fell out of her mouth. Pine boughs snaked around her waist. In her hair saplings writhed and danced in blind ecstasy. It was not long before Moon was full and vast again, as she had been. But the Star-sparse sky had become like a river flowing between a few sharp rocks, the currents more fierce than they had ever been, and no sooner was she round and bright but they began to peel off her flesh again.
And so the Moon waxes and wanes, from a swell of light to a speck of soot. Poor, lost little Moon, who gets only the briefest moments of respite. We are sorry for her, we feathers, we petals, we sloughed-off children. Moon skins the Hsien are, cast away like plum skins. We are the drifting shells the black winds blow from her, silver-dim as the shadow cast by a foxglove at moonrise, clear and hard as frozen glass.
Once we waged a holy war against the rotting heretics who cling to a false Moon, but they do not mourn for their dead as we do. Attrition is a terrible thing when you must bear it alone. Long ago we gave in—if they wish to amuse themselves with morbid fairy tales, we will not spoil their games. We persevere, knowing the truth, even in the face of their perversion.
I am sure that I have given the impression of maleness to you—it seems to suit the work. But we are not male, and neither female. The petals of the Moon have no sex, no children, no marriage. More of us drop each month from her flesh, and if they survive, like turtles sent across the sand into the welcoming sea, then we are replenished. We are not equipped for children; we are tiny moons, and moons do not couple, do not increase the number of aggregate moons. Neither do we eat the five cereals as men do, but suckle wind and drink dew. We age slowly as stones, and it is difficult for us to die, though it does happen, as it is possible to smash a quartz-riddled rock.
Thus it is that I am old enough to be able to tell you that I raised the Rose Dome of Shadukiam over the diamond turrets of the city in the days before it withered into Marrow. I was an architect then, and I was sought out by the city fathers to cap their walls with flowers, flowers which would not fade, nor wilt, nor fall. It was thought by some that a walking sliver of the Moon would know something about permanence. I was promised a wine vat filled with opals and silver as payment—they were always decadent, nothing has truly changed.
In those days Shadukiam was a spiky forest of scaffolding. They were still cutting slabs of earth away to plant buildings like saplings in the wet black soil—how the city of metal and merchants began obsessed with growing things! The diamond turrets were only lately erected, their facets still tapped and chiseled by workmen with no fear of heights. The roads were tamped with feet, not rolling stones of gold and silver. The Asaad was canopied in wool. How we match, you and I! I remember the city before it was Marrow; you remember it after. This is history before history, boy, and I was there.
I instructed some few of my siblings to make their nests on the sparkling turrets or the platforms below them and await me, while I flew into the world to seek out an imperishable rose.
In the Garden
THE GIRL HAD WATCHED THE BOY DISAPPEAR INTO THE PALACE LIKE a bee buzzing into the mouth of an alligator. She had followed as close as she might, wanting to extend—just a little longer!—the time in which she was not alone, not cold, not silent. While he went into that shadowy, many-towered place, that place she would never go, the girl paced out the square that was to hold Dinarzad and her husband with her little feet. The scaffolding was half up, the chestnuts bent forward and around, their bare stick-limbs thatched and wired with gold to make a canopy thick enough to shield Dinarzad’s veiled head from the eye of heaven. The girl wondered what the eye of
heaven might see through so many branches and layers of silk. The sun was not quite up, but she and the boy had either become much better at their little game, or Dinarzad had become much less vigilant. Her friend was safe in his warm bed, she was sure, piled with fox fur and wool. Perhaps the dew wet his hair at the brow, perhaps not.
The peacocks wandered around the Garden, their green-violet tails dragging in the flower beds, their blue heads popping up behind clusters of late-fruiting berries. The girl and the peacocks had always been wary of each other—they did not know how to sing, and she did not know how to affect an ostentatious display. Peacocks are not entirely wild, and she was not entirely tame. But on this day of all days, she made peace, and tightened her throat enough to make a squeaking peahen’s cry. A cobalt bird ventured out from its briar, and after nipping her fingers once or twice nestled its head in her hands. She longed for the lake, but she longed more for her birds, her geese, the untamed ones that dipped into the Garden for flowers and glittering insects and then went on when the winter came. The long emerald feathers brushed her cheeks as the creature gesticulated, and she laughed, low and piping, an owl’s evening cry.
“Is there anything that does not do as you say?” came a voice behind her.
The boy emerged from the chestnut chapel, and the peacock started, hissed in his direction, and huffed off, its tail held in high indignation.
“Many things. Gardeners, sisters, Sultans.”
“Well, you have yet to learn their mating cries. I’m sure you’ll get it eventually.”
The girl grinned sidelong. “You should be in bed. You will get us in trouble again.”
“There is another banquet today, for my sister’s new family, her suitor’s mother and father and thirty-seven brothers and sisters, if you can believe it. I haven’t even tried to count the cousins.” He gave a short, sharp laugh, like a bow twanging. “They killed a giraffe! I had never even seen one, but they brought the spotted thing in through the back gate, so that they can all feast on the neck. Do you think a neck will taste good? I’ll try to bring you some, if you like. But truly, no one will care if I’ve run off again—they’re used to it by now, and she can hardly throw a fit in front of her new relations. They’ll be dancing and eating until their feet or their tongues wear through—one or the other.”
The girl began her pacing again, wiping her peacock-warm hands on her skirt.
“Would you tell me a tale in the daytime?” the boy said shyly. “Does it not seem strange even to ask, to talk by first light instead of last?”
“Is there anything that does not do as you say?” the girl asked archly. He blushed.
“You know my cry. I do not know yours,” he mumbled, not meeting her gaze.
A thin kind of sunlight, not so very different from moonlight, seeped through the clouds as through a cheesecloth, tipped the trees in wet light, and slanted down the edge of the girl’s long, straight nose. Her hands were cold with morning, the Garden paths damp and shivering. She drew him away from the newborn shadows cast by the chestnut chapel, and into a thorny, bloomless bramble, not unlike the first one they had shared, save that this was bare and brown, the thorns overhead dripping dew. The boy settled himself with sure habit, and reached for her hands to warm them as he would have with one of his younger siblings. She let him rub the skin of her fingers until they tingled red and hot, and began again.