In the Night Garden

THE TALE OF

THE AJAN COIN,

CONTINUED

“WHERE WILL I BE?” VACHYA SAID SHYLY, AND the fisherman helped her up into his house, where her startlingly blue tail wrapped his walls three times and then began to climb up through his chimney flue.

And so Amilcar was happy, for a time. He would not set fire to the sheet-music

wife, as Vachya asked, but in the spirit of marital compromise, kept her politely in a closet. But Vachya was a wild thing, and though it was true that her gills were made of gold, it was a foreign gold with an eerie blue tint to the metal. And they could not very well sell her gills at the market. She thrashed her tail at the good china, and though her kisses were sweet as sturgeon eggs, they were hard and violent and Amilcar quailed in her embrace. But he loved her yet, and she sang with his horn so passionately that the eels fell dead in a swoon, and the river moved toward their hut to hear. She sang of sailor blood and blue milk and great blue eggs; she sang of the moon beaming with such strength on her breasts that she felt ice form on her cobalt nipples. He looked on her with wonder, and she smiled.

Now, as husbands sometimes will, Amilcar was seized with an unfortunate folly as some men are seized with leprosy. You may think this is an overstatement, but not so when one’s wife is a Lamia. Amilcar traded often with the river bargers, his fish for their pots and pans and tinkered scissors, for their spice and their tales. It so happened that Amilcar desired the wife of one of the bargers, whose hair gleamed like a great store of all the spices of Ajanabh. She looked on him fondly, but was pregnant with her fifth child, and had no time for amorous fishermen. Amilcar loved her as he had once loved his music-wife, but she did not want him.

One evening, Amilcar returned to his hut with the day’s catch—a bundle of carp which did not speak or promise wives—and Vachya sat very quietly in the chair which had held the mute and voiceless wife of music. Her hair was deep blue, and tiny light shone in it, like stars, though Amilcar knew them by now for her dark-water lures, meant to catch wary fish in their enchanting lights. Her tail coiled around the entire room, huge and thick and ridged with silver-blue fins.

“How many wives do you wish to have, Amilcar?” she hissed.

“Three,” he confessed, his hands shaking. “I wish to have you in my house, and the barger’s wife in my bed, and my glossy wife of paper by my horn when I play.”

In a rage, Vachya rose out of the roof of the house and flew in a blue streak to the river bargers. The lures in her hair shone bright as lamps. She found, in the great spice barge, the woman Amilcar loved, sleeping on her broad back, her belly barely showing. Vachya had never asked for a child, and when she saw the little swell of the spicer’s belly, she thought in her heart that Amilcar had put it there, opening his throat to the brazen woman and letting her suckle at his grass-scented blood. Her tail burned white with shame and rage. The woman did not wake, for a Lamia’s lures lull even whales to slumber, and Vachya in her fury pressed her hands to the woman’s gravid belly, leaving two livid blue handprints that had faded by morning. The child was crushed to death beneath the sea serpent’s palms.

Now, in some tales it is said that the child did not die, but was born deformed, a Lamia’s half-breed, with three breasts and a very difficult life ahead of her, but this is surely fanciful.

When Vachya returned to her husband, she scrabbled at Amilcar’s neck for the marks of his adultery, and it was not long before she could not tell the difference between the wounds of her hands and any mark the barger’s wife might have left. Her sobs hitched like sailor’s knots, and she threw open the closet, where the bedraggled, neglected paper-wife lay. She tore it into pieces with her hands before her husband’s eyes, and swallowed each bit of music, each bit of wife, in grief and bitterness. Amilcar was shocked, but what can a man do who married a serpent? And this tale would have ended there, with perhaps a more loyal Amilcar and a more kindhearted Vachya, had the Lamia not, just then, coughed with the last mouthful of music.

Out of her turquoise mouth came a golden coin, tinged the color of a drowned sailor’s throat.

Still reeling, Amilcar stared dumbly at the coin. “Do it again!” he cried.

Vachya coughed again, and out came another gold coin. This time, she did not wish to give it to him, and bit into it as he tried to pry it from her mouth, leaving two perfectly round holes in its center.

THE RIVER

PILOT’S TALE,

CONTINUED

“AMILCAR BECAME VERY WEALTHY, AND KEPT his wife in cold rooms, so that her throat was always a-rattle. Eventually he built a great house on the river, and kept her in the lower rooms, near the water, where there is always a chill to rattle the chest. And thus Vachya became the first mint of Ajanabh, and Amilcar its first Duke! Even now our coins are tinged with blue, and bear those two distinctive holes in their center!”

I looked, horrified, at my captor. He beamed, having told what he considered to be an excellent story.

“I am a dragon, not a bank,” I said softly.

“I keep telling you, lovely girl, you are neither.”

He took me through the gate of a house with as many rooms as a river has branches lying on its floor, and he sat me near a great fire grate with a dragon’s head nodding over it, stuffed like an elk’s.

“Now,” he said, taking my hand in his and kneeling on a spotless marble floor, “that is a dragon. It is very old and very dead. You are very young and very alive, and a maiden with hair the likes of which I have never seen. I think you are marvelous, and radiant as coins in the sun. And if you are not entirely mad, I would be happy to keep you in this house and dress you in something other than stained breeches and a shirt far too big for you and feed you soup and make you my wife.”

The other members of the household seemed to think this was rather sudden, and all the city was dutifully scandalized. But I am a fish. I lay my eggs twice a year by the dozens, and it is none of my care if they survive. If food is scarce, I will even nibble on a few—this is the nature of goldfish, the nature of rivers. Mating is easy—it hardly takes as long as lunch. I have had so many children, and I have forgotten them all, so they their own children, and their grandchildren. A goldfish has a golden heart, and with all that gold, there is no room for sentiment.

And so I married him. It seemed a rather lot of fuss just to spawn. I wore a dress like a thousand spiderwebs trailing over my maiden’s body. Perhaps, I thought, a fish becoming a maiden is nearly as extraordinary as her becoming a dragon. Incense swung in censers and bearded men anointed foreheads. But then, maidens did seem to take more fuss over things than fish, and there was a wedding bed with an embroidered coverlet where there ought to have been a nice clump of twigs and a bit of shade. And instead of glistening little eggs I never had to think on again, stuck to the side of the lock, there was a big belly, and it went on for months, until I thought I would spawn forever.

But as my belly grew, my skin began to peel. I had become used to the pink and the soft, and was alarmed. I went to the doctor who lived ensconced in his rooms in the great estate, and lay on his table. He plied me with leeches and poultices for a long while, but still my skin peeled. At last some piece of my foot sloughed off its last shred of maiden skin, and beneath it, gleaming and glistening on the spotless marble floor, were three long black claws, and green scales like emerald shavings.

THE TALE OF THE

CLOAK OF FEATHERS,