CONTINUED
“I UNDERSTOOD IN A MOMENT.” THE GOLDFISH laughed, a stream of bubbles breaking on the surface of her goblet. “After all, an infant goldfish looks more or less like a golden eyelash floating on the water—nothing like the full-grown fish. I leapt over the falls and began an infant’s life. Once I had spawned, I was mature, and therefore I entered my adult phase—scales, wings, fire, and all. Did you never wonder why the old books are so full of dragons chasing after maidens? The serpents think the girls are orphans, and long to get them away in a lair so that they may grow up strong and tall.”
“What happened to your child?” I said gently.
Lock shrugged, rising and falling slightly in the water. “I am afraid that during its birth I completed my molting and rose immediately from childbed and out of the great country house, my long green tail corkscrewing behind me. I bellowed fire at the moon in sheer joy—and then bellowed fire at the house, at its lowest rooms. And as I flew faster than a river barge, I glimpsed behind me something great and blue disappearing into the river.
“I flew as fast as my fishpole-wings could carry me, up into the mountains and back to my river and my lock. I thought nothing of the child. I do not even know if it was a boy or a girl. I thought nothing of its father, either. Mates do not last more than one season; that’s obscene. And eggs will survive or fail in their own way. The best a mother can do is keep the males from eating them for a time, and then leave them to the river. I came here, to the other goldfish, to show them how it was done, that it could be done. I soared over the foaming, frothing edge of the falls, my tail snapping like a green flag, my nostrils flared to taste the wind—oh! It tasted like brine shrimp and broken stones! My spine ridge ruffled white and blue, blue as the poor Lamia. I called out to them, the lock fish, the goldfish, the trout, the pike, the thorny-boned catfish, the clacking drumfish, the eels who would never lie, the bass.
“And as I cleared the waterfall, I felt my scales squeeze in, and my claws seize up, and I snapped back into a goldfish, just as quick as the flick of a fin. I fell into the pool with a loud splash.”
I could not help it. I laughed, cawing against the bars of my cage. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be cruel. It must have been very sad for you.”
The fish gave her piscine shrug again. “They laughed, too. But they saw me, some of them, pike and eel and trout and lock-fish. They saw that I was a dragon.”
“Couldn’t you leap back over?”
“I suppose. But it was not long after that that the barge men came scooping fish up in their goblets, explaining to them what they would pay and how large the glass would be, and it seemed to me very satisfactory work, tasting the riv
er. I travel as far as any dragon on these routes. And I don’t think I should like to go through the infant stage again—it was not nearly so marvelous as the last part, and I do not really like the color pink.”
Lock and I had many fine conversations on the deck of the river barge, but all rivers end. This one was very long and its passage took a great many months—and it was not even half the journey to Ajanabh. When the water had finally narrowed so far as to be impassable, I had nearly forgotten I was in a cage, so kind and piccolo-cheerful was her voice, so bright were her scales in the crystal goblet. I thought often of my goose, her flapping orange feet, her hooting cry. When I wept, Lock was kind enough to look away. But she bade me farewell with a slosh of her water, and only looked sad for a moment when Kostya loaded me onto a cart, and though I bounced and flashed my tail, scorching the bars, the lock, and Kostya’s hems, there was little I could do to keep myself clear of the red city. I had only to wait.
The Vareni was quite as splendid as Lock had promised, and the bridges rattled under our cart, tossing red dust into the current. But I hardly saw the colors in the glare of Kostya’s yellow coat, in the gray mire of my own misery. And when he steered his cart through the Dressmaker’s Parish, I was certain I knew where he had gotten that coat.
Every window and hovel door was slung with clothes, the dyes glossy and intense, even the simplest apron glowing goldfish-bright. Troughs of dye lined the streets like gutters in scarlet and yellow and blue, and a few merry folk, far too few for the number of troughs, dipped in their skirts, their trousers, their hats, their fine, long coats. Spools of costly thread stood like lampposts here and there, with a child selling lengths with her own pair of shining scissors. There were few enough people, but clothes there were in plenty. Far off there sounded laughter and screaming and jostling and spilling, the crunching of bones and the tearing of silk, the singing of songs and the dancing of feet—Ajanabh was only lately dead, and the wake still raged on. Kostya did not look at me, but stood straight and tall and proud with his prize, as a child or two stopped and stared up at me in mud-cheeked wonder. His gait was awkward—he limped, as fashionable noblemen often do, and until we came to the bell tower by the east bank of the Vareni, far from the crowd and the dresses hung up like curtains, I thought nothing of it.
The bell was whole, then, but much of the rest was as you see it, as many things are on the banks of the Vareni, following their natural inclination downward, sliding slowly into the river. Everything was boarded, broken, dusty, dim. The bell never rang and the floors creaked, and my cage was set just where you see it, and never moved again. Kostya opened his arms expansively, as if presenting me with a very great gift, wrapped up in a bow.
“This is where we shall work, my good friend. It is a lovely place, with a great many corners for hiding things in.”
“What work is it you wish me to do?”
“Nothing, nothing! Sit very still while I do what I must. I should have no use for a slave of such a very great size.”
And Kostya, with his gold mask gleaming beneath its peacock fringe, bent low, and plucked a single long feather from my tail. I screamed, the sudden, short pain of it; only Ravhija, my pumpkin-dear, my gardener-girl who caught me stealing and plucked her punishment, had ever dared such a thing before. I bled and stared at him, hurt and uncomprehending. He already had me in his grasp. What could another feather avail him? It smoked and hissed against his glove. He quickly threw it up into the belly of the bell, and it remained there.
“So bright!” he cried. “Bright as Stars in the heavens!”
So it went every morning, like a clock chiming dawn. He came and plucked a feather from me, dripping scarlet blood in a circle under the bell, from whence they never returned. His glee increased with every feather, and with every feather I was weaker, wept more bitterly, until I could hardly stand in my cage, and had to be given cushions on which to lie as my tail depleted, morning by morning. The space below my cage was stained with blood and golden tears, as though someone had left a ghastly cup there on the boards.
What Kostya did with his nights I could never say. He went into the city, I presumed to drink and sing and whore as men in wigs will do. But my own nights were dark and damp and full of river sounds, the sloshing currents lapping at the stairs. There were clicking sounds in the bell, but they were no company. My tail was half plucked, my heart half dead. I longed for the glimpse of a silver feather through the tapered windows, a long neck speckled with moon. But she did not come—it was foolish to think she could come.
In my thick and knotted despair, there came a scratching noise, a clattering and a scraping. Out of the bell floated a few of my feathers. I sang happily at them, so overjoyed was I to see them again. Their flames had gone out, of course, long gone from the heat of my body, but the gold sparkled still. After them came a long length of pale thread, and along this came a quiet brown spider, the size of a child’s fist, whose legs were eight delicate, glittering needles, their eyes jutting out sharply at the joints where they met her thin true legs, and in each eye trailed threads of scarlet and gold.
“Good evening, oh fabric of mine, oh spinner of my best silks,” said the spider in a voice like pages rubbing together. Her manifold eyes regarded me seriously.
“You must be mistaken, for I am quite sure that you are the spinner of silks between us.”
“On the contrary,” she said, swaying a little on her silky lead, “Kostya has asked me to make him a cloak of feathers, the brightest the world has seen, and you are my cloth, my model, my thread, and my pattern all together.”
I looked at her in horror. “Why would you agree to such a thing?”
She shrugged. “Kostya has always paid me well—and well he might. We have known each other since I was barely out of my egg sac and he was adorned in whiskers and fur. I am Sleeve, the Bell Spider, famed the Parish over for my gowns and jackets. Who would not come to me with such a commission? Who else would do the materials justice?”
“I am not materials,” I said quietly, my eyes cast to the ring of tears and blood.
“This is Ajanabh,” she answered, her voice stitched thick with apology. “Everyone is materials.” And at this she waved four of her needle-legs.