In the Night Garden

“My old friends, you must help me! Tell me what it is that a girl does in the way that a spider weaves, so that Solace will not grow up to be the wrong sort of girl.”

We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.

“Please.” Sleeve sighed. “You needn’t be a bunch of silly, flea-bitten birds for my benefit.”

“I’m a Firebird, anyway,” I grumbled under my breath.

We think, went their flowing feet, their dancing penmanship, that girls ought to sing. They ought to sing, and dance while they’re singing. But we are not girls, and so can be almost certain that we know nothing about the matter. But we let you try, so why not her?

The sisters seized me with their wings—theirs were cool and dry, not like Papa’s, but a wing is the right sort of thing, that I knew. Everything good in the world has feathers and wings and claws. They led me to the ink-wash and passed my feet through, and then began to whirl me between them. It was a mess of legs and wings and beaks, but it slowly became a dance. They lifted my feet with deftly turned ankles, moved my arms in time with their wings. We danced together, the Sirens and I, but they never sang, never once, and I spun with them in silence, faster and faster.

When it was over, the four of us looked down at the paper floor, the expanse of swirling ink, trying to read the tale we had written there—something lovely, I hoped, with no castles at all and a great many birds—the tale our feet had dragged behind us in our swift, complicated dance.

There was a scribble, a scrawl, a jagged mess. The sisters had managed a few words here and there, but in their instruction they could not manage both the steps and the tale. There was nothing of note. They leapt up again and fluttered to a fresh corner.

You are hopeless at letters, they wrote, that is very sad.

“But the dancing!” I cried. “The dancing! I want to dance like that!”

Try the Dancing-Master, they suggested with a flourish. We only know how to dance with each other, how to dance the letters. We suspect perhaps one ought only to dance with one’s sisters.

Sleeve sighed. Her poor needle legs were so tired of walking. But she was determined, more determined, certainly, than I, who after all had little interest in the fates of girls. We wound down from the Sirens and into the streets again, the winding, circular streets of my home. This time she led me down, down the tight, thin alleys and down streets wider than Lantern’s wings, but we went up no hills, turning and twisting to remain pointed downward, until we came to a little grating in a high wall, the side, I thought, of the opera house, which even the opera singers barely used anymore, since they now had the whole city happy to stand in for any courts of intrigue or enchanted pastorals they could dream of. It was nearly dark by the time we found it.

The grate was small, and it led into a darkness without depth, but I was little then: I could wriggle through the bars, and darkness was darkness, and could not hurt me—Lantern taught me that, blazing as he did against the fears of any crawling shadow.

“Come with me!” I said to my spider, who hovered around the copper bars, and looked suspiciously into the murk.

“No,” said Sleeve slowly, shaking her head. “This is where the Dancing-Master lives. There is another entrance by Simeon’s knee, but that is farther. I thought this one best, and I brought you, but I know very well how to dance.”

I shrugged. I was not very concerned. I walked into the dark with a straight back. The mud was warm on my feet, and as I descended the air became cooler and cooler, and the ceiling higher and higher, until I knew I was nowhere near the opera house any longer, and even if I put my arms straight overhead, there was nothing above me but dark air, swirling and thick.

At last, the mud slackened, and a real path hardened beneath me, lit by a sudden bank of torches which burned low and sullen on the walls. Wider and wider the path grew, until it opened into a vast vault, whose stone walls vanished into bronze domes, arching up and up and up, spangled with painted dolphins with intricate eyes and faded white stars near the peaks of the many domes. The sides were scored with ancient watermarks, ascending the walls like the rings of a tree.

At my feet was a maze. It was low and small and intricate, but no challenge at all, really, for you could jump over any of the walls as easy as you please. The tallest one came up to my waist. They were made of rock and bone, the little walls, Ajanabh’s familiar red rock with chicken bones and duck bones and common gull bones pressed into the sharp corners. It angled off into the distance, over the entire floor of the vault, polished bones glinting in the firelight.

“These used to be cisterns,” came a voice like footsteps echoing in a marble hall, “when Ajans cared to worry about such things as sieges. There was once enough water here to keep the city drinking tea well into any war, slurping at their scarlet cups while the army outside ate itself into defeat. You used to be able to put your ear to the street and hear the gentle sloshing of the dark water—it was a comforting sound, for so many people. Now it is empty, it is drunk all up, and no one thinks about sieges anymore.”

I looked but could see no one. I began to step over the first wall of the maze—and almost stepped on them.

At the entrance to the maze was a pair of shoes. They were twisted out of the roots of cassia trees, curling wildly at the toe and the heel, the red roots snarling and looping like an embroidered hem. The scent of them was rich and dark and sweet: expensive cinnamon floating in a cup of black tea.

“Don’t be afraid,” came the voice again. “I am for wearing—no one will punish you.”

I raised my foot to slip it inside, and stopped. “I am supposed to learn to dance. And find out what girls are meant to do, the way a spider is meant to weave.”

“Ah, but not all spiders weave, so your question is a bit foolish on the face of it, don’t you think?”

I blushed. “Sleeve wanted to know. It doesn’t make any difference to me,” I mumbled.

“As for dancing, there is nothing easier. Put your feet in my care. I am not called the Dancing-Master for nothing.”

“You are the Dancing-Master?”

“Of course. What else could teach so well as I? But I do not teach alone: This maze is laid out such that should you step through the correct path, by its end you will have learned the most extraordinary dance, such that any coronation would be proud to see at the height of its feast, such that any holy dervish would weep and call you his devotion.”

“I think this is very strange—”

“All things are strange which are worth knowing. Come, I have asked a third time. Step into me and while you walk the maze I shall tell you how a pair of empty shoes came to be at the bottom of a cistern.”