I am tired, the boar’s tooth said.
I am sorry for you, I answered.
I was only hungry. I didn’t mean to eat all those maidens, all those boys, all those horses. But I was so hungry. What beast is blamed for its hunger? Only me. He cut me up like breakfast and pulled all these creatures out of me, and now I am hungrier still, I eat for a hundred and forty-five, my belly growls in one hundred and forty-five skins, and I am so tired.
I am sorry for you, I said in the depths of those hundred and forty-five. He cut me up, too, like supper, and pulled children out of me, and I am tired, too.
If I were myself again, I would eat him, and be sated.
Would you like me to help you?
Yes, oh yes.
But surely you know this story. Surely you danced it, or sang it, or heard it at your mother’s breast. I am in everyone’s mouth these days, just as I was then.
My brother saw to my body. It is in a cave somewhere, I think—sometimes I smell dripping water, and old stones, even now. I came again to the lakeside, and this time no one put a hand to my chest, or a wail to my ear. It was empty, and the wind wheedled the stones. No one came for me. I was alone. The dock had been painted. The sandpipers seemed fat. My hair was wet this time, wet with belly and tears. I waited a long time, but the ferry came, dragging dark water behind it.
I came from the lake to the Isle. I came from the Isle to the thing which is not a village nor a town nor a city. I huddled in the low gray houses, cold and alone. It was not pleasant, but it was not unpleasant. At least he was gone, and I only moved my own eyes, and not one hundred and forty-five pairs of eyes. I called out for my mother, but she did not answer. I called out for my children, but they did not answer—though a low scratching came at the ramshackle door.
I opened the door, my own hand so bright against the gray. I do not know what I expected, but what I saw was a young woman whose body was covered in diamonds so that she had no skin which was not jewels, no pink or brown about her. Her hair was a river of ice. Around her were fourteen slips of light with no faces, like candles lit in a chapel.
“I’m sorry,” the diamond girl said, and her voice was so familiar to me, though I had never heard it. “They never grew up, you know. They wanted to find you, they are drawn to you, Mother-moth, but they don’t really understand, they don’t really speak. They are just light, light which knows it was once something else, but which cannot quite recall. But you called them, and I brought them. They did want to come.”
My children glowed around me in a ring, and little Diamond, bright as a burning pyre, smallest of the Manikarnika, folded me into her arms.
There are so few of us who ever died, this is a sparse and lonely place. But we are all together, and some reflection of our light floats around us, like lamps shining in a pool. My girls are here, my Grass-Snake-Stars and my Copperhead-Stars and my Cobra-Stars, my loves and my oracles, and we wander as we used to, our little cloister. I am never alone.
“Who built the houses?” I asked Diamond once. She shook her head.
“They were here. How should we know how to build houses? I think—” She blushed, and the diamonds in her face flushed into rubies for a moment. “I think Idyll built them for us. Surely there must be days when no one dies.”
I would like to say time passed, but I cannot be sure. I would like to say, “One day I met two men walking between the birch trees.” But what is day? What is night? It is always dark here, some anonymous kindness, to remind us of the cradle of the Sky. And so all I can say is that it happened sometime, and somewhere, among the white trees, in the dark. Two came walking hand in hand. They were both bright as I, but I did not know them. Their skin was red and deeply grained, like wood, and when we clasped hands in greeting, their fingers were hard as a raft’s planks. They wore sailors’ rags over identical bodies, and their eyes were wood-warm and gentle, lined a little at the corners—but perhaps that was just the grain of their skin. Reddish hair flopped over twin foreheads like thready bark.
“We are Itto,” they said in unison. One’s voice was deep, and the other’s high, like a child’s, but beyond that they were the same in every fashion. “We were the Twinned Star once, and in this place, we have been made to walk two by two. We do not find it unpleasant.”
They spoke always together, and it was only strange to me for a while. He had been translated into twins, as I had into my half-snake self, and their skin had gone the shade of their raft. They told me the tale of their raft, and their death, and their fox-girl, and I held them while they cried for the lost craft and the lost world—we are all so lost; we are all so broken, the least of us would hold the smallest as they wept. I told them the tale of my husband, and my children, who still followed me like confused will-o’-the-wisps. The two young men looked at me with chagrined, resigned eyes, as though they expected no more than this, and held four red arms out to me. I did not know what they meant. I told them of the boar-men, and how the voice of the boar-tooth sounded, and how the women stopped me at the shore. They folded me into their wooden arms on the floor of the forest, and I lay stiffly against them. I did not cry—snakes do not—but I was grateful for them, for their circuit of arms and because they had not sought me out, to show me their love, to make certain I was not alone, to show me some ill-got devotion, to disturb me in the dark. I softened against them, and they stroked my hair. I told them how I was just once alone, on the lakeside, the second time, when no one came for me.
My children lay around us in a ring, like glowing, insensate mushrooms.
“I am not a raft,” I said, and the twins chuckled.
“We are not a King,” they answered.
It was difficult to tell them apart unless they spoke, which was not often. One of them became my lover, and his deep voice sounded in my bones. The other was harder, more raftlike, and he was simply kind to me, his child’s voice rare and thin. He helped me molt, and once, when there was almost something like a moon above the Isle, he came to me, having cut himself on the hinge of my door, and touched my lips with a light-smeared thumb. It tasted of salt, and wood. The other twin was with me always, and his kisses were red and dusty and gentle. They tasted like the sea. We walked in the wood, and once in a while red fruit appeared on the trees like ambassadors from some far-off spring, and we all ate together. I was not alone. I am not alone. Who could think I have ever been alone?
But a girl came with a bloody stump where her tail should have been, telling me how lonely I am with her huge, needing eyes, clutching a leaf in her hand. I knew the leaf in a moment—I had seen it in the tea-woman, the distant child of the leaves I had crushed when first I fell. She brought it to me as though it would mean something to return my own light to me, like a child’s doll which was discarded long ago, one eye missing, one arm empty of stuffing. I placed the leaf against my skin and it melted back into me where it belonged. I thought no more of it, and offered the girl my house, my red fruit, though she would not eat, the ungrateful thing. But perhaps it did mean something after all, because it was only afterwards that my belly grew.
I cannot tell if it was the light of one twin or the kisses of the other or the leaf itself or the girl who brought it that filled me up with child again. Perhaps it was all of them. Perhaps none. But I am not alone, even in my own skin.
THE TALE
OF THE CROSSING,
CONTINUED
“HOW IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE IN THIS PLACE?” Zmeya cried, cradling her stomach in her arms. “What will come out of me, that was born with the dead for midwives, a dead mother, a dead father?”
Oubliette looked down in shame. Tears were hot on her face, steaming into the air. She glanced up at Seven ruefully. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wanted to save you. To save her, the tea girl. I was just silly.”