In the Night Garden

It was hours before they could sit up, and I was well healed by then. They did not thank me, still black in their misery, but the snakes of their hair hissed sweet and comforting in my direction. Wading in their sorrow like drunkards, they moved off into the desert, past the trees, swaying from side to side, clutching each other.

As they passed my cairn of seeds, the youngest of them kicked it over, and they vanished in the flash of spark and thick smoke.

HE HAD FINISHED HIS TALE.

“Oh!” I interrupted, “the poor Basilisk! Has he no tongue at all now? What a wretched fate! He sang so beautifully last Equinox when I visited his caves!” Laakea glared sternly at me, making it quite clear that the hap penstance of my friend the Basilisk was of no concern to him.

“So you understand, Bird-Brother. When the creature comes, you must stop him.”

“How to stop a creature on a Quest? What do you expect me to do? Spoil the hospitality of my hall?”

Laakea snorted. “I do not care. Kill him. Lock him away in a tree trunk. I trust in your wisdom. But I must bid you farewell. Much have I neglected in my journey to your marsh—I must attend to the funeral rites of our sister.”

“It is not the place of any of us to interfere in the Quests of men. They insist on them—they are as fond of Quests as of their own hearts.”

“Who is to say it will be a man?” Laakea answered, bored as a babe.

With this the white-clad Star left my hall, scorching the grass once more as he walked southward, sending up veils of mist that dissipated like a memory when he had gone and not even his footfalls could be heard.

“SO YOU SEE, MY DEAR LAD, THE DILEMMA.” THE Marsh King crossed his reedlike legs in a curiously fey gesture. “In no way can I allow you to do what you intend. It is not personal, of course. It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance. Those who meddle are seldom thanked—take my dear Harpoon’s story as exemplum! Now. I don’t suppose I can convince you to scurry on home and be a good bear from now on?”

I shifted on my paws and murdered my tears where they stood. “I cannot simply give up! I will go on, whether or not you tell me the truth. If she can contrive her own revenge from the grave, perhaps she can grant me the small thing I ask. Why would the gods conspire to rob me of a mate? Is it such a terrible thing to mate?”

“It is, in fact, quite insignificant,” the Marsh King said gently. “The gods, if you insist on calling them such, do not conspire, but events themselves order the world like a pack of cards, and there is little you or I can do to change the cut of the deck. We must learn to accept personal loss gracefully. Duty is a noble word, after all.”

I stamped in frustration and the branches of the hall shook wildly. “There must be a way! I have begun a Quest! Quests do not simply end. You win or you lose; it is not just suddenly over.”

“I believe that you have, so to speak, put your finger on it. I see that it is not possible for you to accept that, this time, you simply lose. It is because a Quest is not a natural thing for your kind—nor mine, for that matter. A Quest is a thing for men. It is their invention, their monstrous pet, their addiction. They own all the rights in perpetuity. Every step you take, my dear Eyvind, you are robbing men of their most dearly bought treasure. It is sad for them, that they have only the machinery of Questing to sustain them. But they are a sad race. We must weep for them, but not too much. And we certainly must not take on their ridiculous penchant for self-destructive behavior. Therefore, I have devised a way to prevent you from reaching the land of my late sister and yet preserve a small chance for you to achieve the end you desire. I shall make you into the very model of a Quest—I shall make you a man.”

My mouth gaped. Horror shuddered through my fur and sweat dampened my great white jowls. “A man? Why must you punish me so?”

“It is not a punishment, you sorry beast,” the Marsh King scoffed. “You took on a Quest, which is a thing only men—and exceedingly stupid men, usually—do. So you must become a man if you wish to continue on that doomed path. It is all really very simple and nicely symmetrical, if you think about it. And a man is not such a hideous shape to find oneself in.”

“But if I am a man, the Snake-Star will not listen to me; Stars run from men, they hide away from their sweat and their stink. I can never see my beloved again! She would run from me herself, she would think me a hunter. I could not bear to see her run from me, and—”

“Oh, calm yourself. I did not say it would be permanent. You know, you might consider that a mate is not strictly necessary to survival. Look at Beast and me! We live together quite happily in blissful bachelorhood and we are not at all bothered by the lack of great, galumphing girl-bears about the house.”

At this, Beast looked up from quietly playing a game of bark-piece backgammon against himself. “Mmm? Oh, yes, quite happily. Except for the flies, you know. His Majesty does tend to diet on a rather eclectic selection—quite nauseating to watch.” He settled back into the game, which he was earnestly but decidedly losing.

“Well,” the Marsh King pursed his beak politely, “at any rate, your manliness need only last for a relatively brief period. I have already discussed this in detail with some of the lower Stars—white dwarfs and the like. I shall bundle you up tight as a mitten in a human skin until,” and here he cleared his long blue throat dramatically, “the Virgin is devoured, the sea turns to gold, and the saints migrate west on the wings of henless eggs.”

“In the Stars’ name, what does that mean?” I gasped.

“I haven’t the faintest idea! Isn’t it marvelous? Oracles always have the best poetry! I only repeated what I was told—it is rather rude of you to expect magic, prophecy, and interpretation. That’s asking quite a lot, even from a King.” He appeared quite flustered, feathers blushing up into an indignant violet. “Just, well, keep a lookout for that sort of thing, don’t you know. Sea turning to gold. Hard to miss, I’d say. Rather. Lucky to have such obvious signs. I should think you would be grateful. Now hold still, and let us get on with our business.”

“Wait! I haven’t agreed to anyth—” I meant to protest further, but I found my tongue no longer worked entirely well; it was short and stumpy and stuck to the roof of my mouth. Horrified, I glanced down at my mighty and beautiful paws only to find wretched, pasty feet covered with a scraggly down, stuck ridiculously at the bottom of skinny legs. With one touch of his wing, the Marsh King had made me hideously, but certainly, a man.

Yet the sovereign had changed as well. He was no longer a tall and regal bird with a respectably threatening wingspan, but a bent old man with a long beard that flashed all the colors of the swamp—green and brown and a brackish gray. He appeared somewhat fishlike, with sallow, damp skin and a wide, pale mouth.

“What is this?” I mumbled as best I could with my worthless tongue.

“Eh? What? Of course, I am sorry, I should have explained. When you were an animal, I appeared as a suitably noble animal. As you are now a man, I appear to you as a grandfatherly old type meant to inspire the proper respect from your new breed of creature. It is a courtesy I extend. Think nothing of it.”

“But Beast?” I inquired helplessly, for the scarlet-hoofed creature was quite the same as before.

“Beast is just Beast. He is always Beast,” came the

monarch’s bored but affectionate reply.