In the Night Garden

I am very large, but a cloak is thick with layers, and when my tail was gone, and I naked and shamed, it was still not enough. Thus I had to wait, and so did he, until it grew back, and could be plucked again. Sleeve, being but a little seamstress, could only weave so fast, and between these two happenstances, the weaving of the cloak spanned more than two years. I felt myself growing dim and old with loss of blood and flight and sour, golden tears. Three times he plucked my tail, and in the meantime the bell tower became piled with shining things, with jars of silver and braziers of copper, with coins and endless jackets, all of yellow and each brighter still than the others, with bolts of cloth that seemed to glow, with fruit that sparkled in the firelight—and the remains of this I was allowed to eat when Kostya had finished: apples and pomegranates and plantains and slick, wet dates. Occasionally, true to his word, there were mice, snatched from the corners of the tower and dangled into my cage: Why should he weep over mice who had not eaten Yellow or Green, who had not been reared in the Dust, who did not live in his casing of silk?

Finally, when I had no strength left, so often had I been plucked and stripped, so often had my joy and my will gone floating up to the bell, Kostya came home from his evening sport shaking and giggling with anticipation. I could hardly lift my head without his ordering me to do so.

“Lantern, perk up! It is ready, I am sure it is! The brightest thing I have ever known! I shall be brighter even than you!”

I thumped my sparse red tufts feebly. A few sparks crackled against the bars.

“What a sullen brat you are,” he admonished, adjusting his golden peacock mask. “Sleeve! Sleeve! Is not my cloak ready? Send it down! I have waited so long! You promised! If you do not present it immediately I shall run at quick speed all the way back to the Church-door!”

Out of the rim of the bell came a sheen of gold which grew and grew. Even I was stunned, dazzled by it: the cloak of feathers, finished beyond imagination, so long that it would flare out behind the wearer in a regal pool of feather-silk. It shone with gold and red and orange and white, each feather layered upon others, the eyelets almost too bright to look at. It had a little, stiff collar of my shortest feathers, which would cuff the face jauntily, and it glowed with my own light, my own colors, fringed and lovely, lovely beyond the dreams of the highest-born tailor. I could not imagine a Queen, an Emperor, a dandy who would not be made small and mean and dark in that cloak. It was like the very sun woven into the shape of shoulders.

Kostya squeaked in ecstasy. But as he examined it closely, he began to frown.

“It was brighter before,” he groused.

Sleeve ran down the length of the hanging cloth, still wavering fr

om the bell. “His feathers will only flame when they are attached—he is the fire, not they. But he is too big to wear as a shoulder brooch—no cloak has ever been made which could be its equal, Kostya, my friend.” She clicked her needles and swallowed hard. “You are brighter even than she,” she spat finally.

At that, Kostya leapt into the air, dancing a jerky but joyful little step, clicking his emerald-booted heel against his emerald-stockinged calf. “Help me!” he giggled. “Help me put it on!”

He stepped into the cowl of the cloak, and Sleeve, with her needle legs and a great deal of struggle, heaved the shimmering thing over Kostya’s squirming shoulders, ignoring his chirps of lust and the wringing of his gloved fingers. It lay on him like a huge, fiery hand, and in the moment that Sleeve pulled the left side up onto his body and fastened the clasp of my own talon, clipped and carved, the man of mice began to scream.

He writhed in the cloak, but his mask kept his face impassive, the little slit of mouth neither moving nor twisting. Terrible and high the first voice came, and then hundreds, thousands, shrieking tinny voices, a chorus of mice in agony—and they began to pour out of the eyes of the mask, out of the mouth, out of the wig, chewing through the green stockings, the boots, rushing from the brocaded belly, tearing the yellow coat to filthy shreds. The mice poured out of their body, but as they ran, blind, desperate, they began to die, two by two, falling onto the floor-boards with small, wretched thumps, one by one. Sleeve ran among them, piercing them with her needles and crying in her own hoarse, thready way, terrified and triumphant. It took a long time for her to make sure they were dead, dead as dust.

When she was finished, she hooked the cage key from his polished belt onto one of her legs and dragged it to me. I am not so dexterous with my beak as a rule, but I certainly had the grace to let myself free of that thing which had kept me for years on end.

“I have been thinking,” panted the spider, “that perhaps mice ought not to be indulged. Perhaps a Star does not really need a spider to look after her. Perhaps I have lived in a bell long enough.”

“I do not understand,” I said in wonder, stretching my wings from wall to wall.

“It took me two years to infuse every feather with my poison. I am only one spider, after all. It steamed with the stuff by the time I was done, though you could not see it. They breathed in my vapors, and in their panic—one can always depend upon the panic of mice—chewed through their clothes and the bottom layer of feathers, and swallowed all my poisons as eagerly as they have swallowed everything else. My poison is not bright, but it is quick.”

Weeping and laughing together, Sleeve and I walked through the wreckage of mice. I crushed them underfoot, one by one, making little rings on the boards like ghastly cups. She sat on my shoulder, stroking my feathers as my breath heaved in grief and relief.

When we had finished, I let my sparking tufts light the cloak, and we watched it burn, the poison leaping bright and green in the flames. We watched it burn until it was clean, and then Sleeve asked me to break the bell.

“I cannot turn that lock,” she said. “Surely you will do this thing for me.”

I looked up into the disappearing rafters, so broken and high that the sky poured in like a bottle of black ink. I gave a few flaps of my wings to meet it, and though without my tail I was awkward, I managed to shiver it to bronze splinters with a blow of my beak.

“Thank you,” Sleeve said, and began slowly to walk down the staircase, her satisfied needles clicking all the way down.

THE TALE OF THE

CAGE OF IVORY

AND THE

CAGE OF IRON,

CONTINUED

“OBVIOUSLY IT GREW BACK AGAIN,” I SAID, eyeing his full, thick tail, glowing cheerfully in the dark. It lit the room like a hearth.

“Obviously,” he said.

“But this place has hurt you so—why would you stay? And in that same cushioned cage? What a morbid beast you must be!”