It was a ruby as deep and darkly shaded as a true apple, and at its ebony stem was an emerald leaf, thin enough to flutter in the wind.
“How shall I eat it, Father?” Urim said.
“Put your teeth into it, girl, like a wolf biting into a reindeer’s cheek.”
And so the girl did. It tasted, she said, of brandy and cider and the reddest berries she had ever known. Because she was a good child, she shared the fruit with her sisters, and all of them agreed it was lovely, and their father the best of all possible fathers. They ate only half, and kept the rest for the dreary winter. But foreign produce does not often sit well with the provincial daughters of cattle merchants, and the girls sickened, the jewels in their stomachs pricking at their flesh, refusing to dissolve.
And all the while they sickened, their father grew gray and silver and pockmarked, frozen peaks appearing on his cheeks, craters on his arms, and his eyes grew white, white as the salt sea of their home. Now, the daughters of this man, though weak of digestion, were not weak of will, and between them were wise enough to know their father was not their own, and that Shadukiam, as often as it gives, takes and takes and takes. Ushmila was overfond of books, and she saw the marks of the Yi on her father. Ubalda was overfond of sharp things, scissors and knives and diamonds, and brought her collection to her sisters. It was decided that Urim of the red hair like apple skins and the blue eyes like moonlight would discover the truth of the matter. And so the clever child brought her father the uneaten half of the Shaduki apple, jeweled and wet.
“Father, I am sick, and close to death,” said Urim, her face pale as wasting.
The Man Dressed in the Moon smiled hungrily. “How wonderful,” he said.
“Surely you do not mean that, Papa!” cried Urim.
“Of course not, my darling! Forgive an old man—his mind runs away without him sometimes.”
Urim cast her eyes down, and mourned her father.
“Will you not share this apple with me? It would comfort me, in my dying, for though it hurts me so, I have never tasted anything so sweet.”
The Man Dressed in the Moon’s face softened as much as it might, for he believed well in the greed of young girls, and he folded her into his arms. “It would delight me, my darling daughter.”
Urim cut a slice of apple for the pocked Yi, and he chewed it with the relish of an alligator sucking the bones of a finch. But soon enough he began to cough, and choke, for Urim had poisoned her foreign apple, and the daughters of the cattle merchant, Ubalda and Ushmila, rushed from the shadows and leapt upon the gray-skinned creature, cutting into him over and over—but never enough to kill. They had no Griffin’s talon, and could not hope for death. Urim sliced his cheeks with the faceted edges of her apple, grinning wildly into the face that had once been her father’s.
“Let it never be said,” she cried, “that the daughters of a cattle merchant do not know how to put an animal down!”
THE TALE
OF THE LEPRESS
AND THE LEOPARD,
CONTINUED
“THEY WERE AS CLEVER AS A PACK OF HYENAS, those girls,” the wicker-wight said. “They did not kill the Yi, but opened his skin and took the thinnest shavings of his bones—how they must have shone, like shards of the moon itself!—and these Urim instructed them to place on their tongues. The bones melted to vapor and the girls were healed, the sharp apple-jewels in their bellies melting to nothing. And Urim, wise child, kept her father barely alive, collecting his blood in the glass jars they had used for sheep’s milk, and put his body into a casket of white stone.” She nodded at the memorial. “A city grew around this casket, on the edge of the white and salted sea, and when folk were in need, shavings were carefully taken from his bones, placed on their tongues, and the casket sealed up again. After one hundred years, the Man Dressed in the Moon stopped screaming.” The wicker-wight looked down, ashamed. “Urim, named for that clever girl who wanted only an apple, became famous. More and more came. I came. My branches were drier than the skull of a lion left in the waste when I finally arrived at the gates. My skin was gone; all that remains was what you see. How this came to pass is not important—is the beginning of illness ever remembered so clearly as its boils and blood and broken, aching bones? The moment when you breathe your last clear air? One never remembers it. I am afflicted; so are we all. When first I came I was sure that Urim would hold me in its black-clothed embrace, look on me with her gray and mothering eyes, and brush my brow with her lips. She would give me an apple and a shaving of bone. I would walk from her whole. But there are so few cures in Urim, these days. The Yi’s bones are not infinite. They are precious. We do not all deserve them.”
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I yawned. Of course my mistress deserved all things. “Will you wait with us, for the dawn?” I asked the poor, empty woman.
“Of course.”
I have told you what happened. The dawn came. Black-robed lepers came hobbling on canes of ash and hazel, having heard that one of their number had arrived, and they embraced us as sisters. Their hands safe on Ruin’s veils, they told us we were loved, that flowers would be rubbed into our wounds, that there were altars ready for our knees. If we were fortunate, if we were worthy, perhaps we would be granted a sliver of bone. A leper with one leg reached out to cup Ruin’s face in his rotted hands, his eyes alight with joy. He said:
“There are no veils in Urim, my dear. Show us your affliction—we do not care for beauty.”
With a stifled cry of relief, Ruin pulled her veils from her face, and with it came peels of skin like pages torn from a book, and the lepers recoiled.
“You are not a leper!” one cried, covering her mouth with one putrid hand, green mold springy and thick in the webbing of her fingers.
“She is dead,” whispered the first. “She is dead, already dead, and her death will spread among us like plague.”
A third, his nose a crusted red gape in his face, hissed: “She shall not have the bones! They are ours! She cannot have them!”
A fourth wondered if perhaps she was not Yi herself, with bones for their tongues.
Lepers know well not to touch the sick—they embraced her thinking her like them, but they could not risk contracting whatever other vile illness she bore. They beat her with their canes and slashed out her tongue, so that she could not give their names to the night.