“It was very clever of you, Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening. I will tell everyone that it was you and not me who discovered it,” she chirruped, skipping down the breeding house steps like a child.
We walked out of the womb-warm hall and into a clear, freezing day.
The sun streaked through heavy clouds and played chasing games with the grass. And very lightly, it began to snow. We laughed and stuck out our tongues, feeling very strange indeed to feel snowflakes falling into our skull-water. We turned back to look at the bright, tiled roof all covered in white, and saw at the door a beautiful, sad-eyed young woman, all of glass. Her hair fell in crystal rivers to her waist, and her dress was crisply cut, frosted at the elbows. Her hands were slender and tipped in blue, her cheeks jeweled and clear, a little glass mole on the side of her transparent nose. She waved us farewell, her mouth a wide, sparkling smile through which the sun blazed.
At her feet was a huge, fat lizard on a glittering leash, his glass belly rippling, crystalline and swollen, his fringe sharp enough to cut, his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a glass bookmark.
THE
FERRYMAN’S TALE,
CONTINUED
“OUR LITTLE CORAL BULL WAS A SENSATION IN the Greater Kappa. His lesson, which became our lesson, was enough to catch the breath of all the turtles with their feet tangled in cucumbers. How to make a rose which would never die or wilt, which would lose one petal in a century, whose gloss and shine were like glass, which would last until all the glass of the world were turned back to sand.”
“This is the rose I seek.”
The Kappa gestured toward the glass houses. “It is there. I told you we chose this place—we chose because of Yazo, darling Yazo, Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter. By the time we had become famous, by the time the Upas and the Ixora grew tall in the thesis-fields, and the corral was full of rolling Manticore, fat and furry as kittens, and fluttering Firebirds, she had almost no skin on her. Her webbing hung from her fingers in shreds, her eyes were sunken, her hair had all fallen out. She did not know her name—but I told it to her every day. I woke her and whispered in her green ear: ‘You are Yazo, who is beautiful, and was born at the bottom of winter, and my friend.’ Everything I did, the great grafts and splices that made my name—I told everyone that she was the senior of us, that she was my collaborator, my indispensable partner. Her name rose with mine, even as she forgot it entirely, and nothing I said in the morning mattered. She prodded our kittens listlessly, and did not notice if they nipped her thumbs. But she did what she meant to: She proved to them the danger of losing the skull-water, that it was more than a few days of blear and blight. She pleaded with us to move the Greater Kappa to a safe place, a place where horrid villagers would not be forever bowing to us, and laughing at our spill, where we could be sure that we would not lose ourselves as she did.”
Yoi led me to the houses, whose shattering traced lines over every pane of glassy ice. Shapes moved inside, but she did not invite me to enter.
“The Greater Kappa is all around you,” she said gently. “These are greenhouses. Here on the roof of the world our water freezes and does not flow out—by her we are saved, and the best minds of the Kappa are preserved against the depredations of the average vicious child.”
“I am glad for you,” I said, putting my hand on her little shoulder, where the rim of her shell met flesh. “Though your houses seem to be in disrepair. Perhaps I can help with that, if you give me what I need.”
She snorted. “We do not need your help.”
Pushing the door of one of the larger houses open, I was thrust into a world of green, green plants and green turtles, and a sea of heads glittering blue, liquid water rippling bright. Hundreds of eyes turned to me, and regarded me with calm.
“The cold took the houses, but in most cases, ice is as good as glass. Here it is warm, here we may be intimate with each other, and let our skulls thaw. Here we teach our lessons as we always have, and our catalogue grows. But we keep ourselves to ourselves, and the world comes no more begging bouquets at our door. Until you.” Her expression grew grave and sad. “But the cucumbers—for some reason the cucumbers detest the climate, and they refuse to grow. We have all the blossoms we could want, but their taste is inferior to the fruit.”
“I have brought you so many varieties, surely you can breed a cucumber with a heart of ice. All I ask is my rose.” I kept my wings folded neatly back and stooped under the ice roof, trying to be as small and familiar as it is possible to be as a swan among turtles.
“Yes, well, you must wait,” huffed Yoi. “We hardly keep mature specimens on hand for the pleasure of whatever outlandish flying thing finds its way to our doorstep. But we would enjoy the cucumbers now, of course.” She grinned, finally, and her teeth were small and brown and neat, like a wooden model of a child’s teeth.
I handed over my sack amiably, and the Kappa scurried forward like cats to cream, sorting those to eat from those to dissect, and chewing greedily at the unfortunate fruits which were deemed too common to breed. And as they ate, Yoi beckoned each of them away from the feast and to her, touching the water of their skulls and whispering. When the meal was done, I was sent away, told to meditate on the wonders of succeeding generations of plant life, and wait. A glass house was provided for my comfort, an empty cottage at the far corner of the village.
“Why do you have an empty house, if you do not expect visitors?” I asked as I was gently but firmly pushed toward the door by a dozen webbed hands. Yoi answered me, her f
ace downcast.
“It is Yazo’s house, who died the day we came to this mountain. We keep it in her honor, and you must treat it kindly.”
It was a long while to wait. I wrapped my wings around myself in the low-raftered house of Yazo, slowly opening and closing them in imitation of the poor, lonely moon. This is the Hsien’s way of meditating, and when her light shone through the shattered panes, my skin was covered in her, covered in long lines of blue like a mother’s arms. I considered many things, though not often among them was the nature of succeeding generations of plant life. In my mind, lightened by the nearness of the moon, I designed the Dome of Shadukiam, shaped it petal by frame until it stood erect and perfect within me.
When it was done, Yoi came to collect me. She wore a little black cap which I took to be a sign of respect for her absent comrade in whose house I trespassed. She did not explain it. I followed her up the snow-pat street and into the greenhouse where I had first seen rippling water in the depths of her tonsure. Within were countless Kappa, all respectfully standing at attention, their hands clasped together.
In the head of each one floated a flawless rose, pink and white and red, without blemish or brown. Yoi slowly removed her cap, and beneath it, too, was a large and spotless flower, as true a scarlet as any I have seen before or since. I must have looked surprised, for she laughed, a small, musical sound like wooden drums pattered upon by rain.
“How did you think we grew things? In the soil like farmers? Every lesson I have taught, from lily-berry to Ixora, was grown first in my own head. Where else should I trust it? Take these things, Idyll-who-supposes-he-was-born-at-night, and do not let our work be forgotten in the world below.”
One by one the Kappa reached into their skulls and plucked their flowers, careful not to spill a drop, and one by one they piled them into my sack, until it was brimful with roses.
“Farewell, Yoi-who-was-born-in-the-evening,” I said, and as I ducked out of the glass house, I saw the smallest of cucumbers budding from the walls.
And so was finally built the Rose Dome of Shadukiam. As I had constructed it in the house of Yazo-who-was-born-at-the-bottom-of-winter, so it blossomed over the infant city, its colors reflected in the cart tracks of the mud streets. My siblings and I flew back and forth over the apex, nets full of immaculate flowers suspended from our shoulders, sewing them to the superstructure with infinite care, with a thread of diamonds and iron. And the stalks which arched so high and bore their roses with grace long enough that no one can now speak of Shadukiam without her roses? Glass, all of glass, perfect and pure as ice, perfect and pure as a young woman’s face.
And once in a century, there would be a strange, soft rain as each rose lost a petal and the petals would drift to streets that were mud, then stone, then silver, not unlike a Hsien peeled off from the face of the moon.