In the Night Garden

GOOD DAUGHTER

I HAD A NAME BEFORE I DIED. I KNOW I DID. I can taste it on my tongue like the ghost of sugar. But I cannot remember it. Ruin I became and Ruin I am. My father said I was an angel, seraphic, holy as myrrh. It was never so, but I tried so hard, I tried for his sake, but Ruin is the whole of me.

Our house was full of bundled spices, yarrow and cinnamon and paprika, bright red turmeric flowers bunched by the windows. My father wore red robes, and taught me to pour out the freezing water into our carnelian font, and put wild celery flowers in my hair, so pungent in their scent that my eyes itched. Everything in our world was

red. Red, my father said, was the color of heaven, the color of Stars falling. Red was the color of piety, and so he swathed my crib in it, and my body when I rose from that crib. I knew nothing that was not red.

Is it surprising then that I kept to red things, in the House of Red Spices? Is this piety, to never step outside the shade of your bedclothes? I bathed in the frozen font each day, and I learned, after a very long while of gritted teeth and chattering, to love the blue feeling of its splash on my skin, which was not red, which was nothing like red. Under my bed I collected green things: grass, jade, green silk, clover. White things: chalk, alabaster, dust, daisies. Blue things: lapis, blue crinoline, scraps of paper from the indigo dyers’ shops, ice. The ice always melted, but I kept it in vials of crystal, and in some lights, these too were blue. I would take these things and hold them to my chest in the night and dream about water which was warm as a heart.

And then the fields began to die. I did not understand why—I was so young, innocent of everything outside our house; I could not have even matched my stockings if everything I owned had not been red. But I watched them wither and die from the tower windows curtained in scarlet, and I wanted to see the green and the white and the blue and the gold and the violet of them before they were gone. I wanted to lie down in everything not red and feel them crawling over me as they rushed to escape from the world.

I went from my father’s door with prayers weighing my wrists. I pulled the earth over me like a hood. I waited. Roots nosed my elbows, the hollows of my knees—and something deep in me hardened into stone. It sat in me, spreading and chewing, and I closed my eyes in the earth. I saw no red, but black.

It hurt so much. That is what I remember. The shoes were wedged onto my feet and in the place within me which had turned to stone, the place which was pumice and sandstone, wrenched in anguish. My skin softened, blood flowed back into flesh, dragging knives behind it. On my red bier my limbs became heavy, prickling like a forgotten finger. I could not even groan for the sear of it. Even when I woke, and stood over my father, tired and empty of piety, the blood in me bellowed, enraged that it was no longer stone, not black, that it was forced into red once more. Every step in my gnarled, twisted cinnamon shoes was filled with the bright, piercing cries of my blood, blood which remembered being stone, which howled to be stone again.

And the shoes, through the howling, whispered. They whispered of the light in the far corners of the city, they whispered that there would be no pain if only I could move fast enough on my feet, if only I could dance, if only the world could whirl around me, swift enough to carry any stone away.

The shoes lied. I danced, I danced every night, and I went to no services, held no red candle until my father dragged me to the altars and tied my ankles to them under my red, red skirts. I danced, endlessly, and every step, every whirl, screamed. As I danced the stone left me, scouring me empty as it went, but it did go. My hair became long and bright again, my cheeks red, my legs nimble. And on one night of all nights, when there was almost no pain left, only the nagging, grinding ache of my belly, where the stone had begun, I lost my shoes.

I did not mean to lose them: Though they lied and chose their own path, they were good and lovely shoes. I did not feel them when they fell from my heels. I did not go back, searching through the brush and the ruin of courtly orchids trampled by revelers to find them. Some other girl could have them now, I thought: I was well. But as I lay in my red blankets, in my bed so like a bier, the thing in me which had turned to stone as I lay in the earth pricked once more, and hardened a little, like a fist clenching.

My father told me it was nothing.

“Do not think on it,” he said, “and it will go away, just as it did before.”

“Before,” I mumbled, “I had my shoes, red and dusty.”

“Perhaps,” said he, stern as stone, “you should take up your ablutions again. Perhaps this is your punishment for such unseemly things as you did in the Duke’s old Palace.”

“I told you, Father, I only danced.”

“I will search the city for the sacred shoe that fits your foot,” he announced, and though I protested, he turned his back and called his heralds.

But I did as he said, fearful of the hard thing in me like a pit in a plum. I tried to scrub it away in the clear, hard morning water, frantic to melt it back to blood. My father saw this with pleasure, and held up my hair while I shivered. I held the red candle at the altar, and after a time he removed my stays. In the evening he rubbed red spices into my belly and mixed them with his tears. The spices burned, left blisters, trickled from my stomach to the linens.

And all the while, every shoemaker in Ajanabh, which was, certainly, fewer shoemakers than there had been, came to the House of Red Spices. They brought their finest heels and laces, of the twisted roots of tamarisk with rosettes of aloe, scraggle-toed banyan shoes, cedar and pomegranate-wood, date palm and sandalwood, camphor and wet ginger-shrouded shoes that burned my soles. They brought delicate black vanilla-bean shoes and fragrant maydi-shoes, shoes of nutmeg seeds and shoes of cardamom pods white as pearls. They even brought cinnamon shoes, dusty as my own, but none of these helped, and still my stomach hardened.

And my skin began to peel. Like onion skin, it fell from me. The stone wished to come out as I wished it to wither. I woke in the morning, my flesh sloughed off in the night, the skin beneath new and raw. My father exclaimed—I was healed, I must be healed, such a thing was a miracle of the candle and the altar. My skin lay around me, translucent and dead. But as the days went on, the skin beneath peeled, too, and beneath it was not new skin, red and bright, but more peeling, thin and terrible, like plum rind, sliced away, ruined. My father sent to the Duke’s old Palace for every set of cast-off shoes, for every maid that danced, but they were gone, vanished, shredded to flavor some beauty’s tea or danced to pieces on a floor I knew as well as my bed.

And still my skin peeled. There seemed to be no end to me, or to the peeling, and my belly was hard and cold, waiting to emerge.

THE TALE

OF THE LEPRESS

AND THE LEOPARD,

CONTINUED

“ONE DAY, MY FEET BARE AMONG A DOZEN PAIRS of shoes, I said to my father:

“‘This must stop. I am dead, Father, I am dead and you seek to cure it, but there is no cure here. I shall go to Urim, where all cures reside on shelves of obsidian and pearl. I shall go to the pale white sea, which washes the hem of Urim with all the salt of the world. The dead will walk in the desert—our place is not in the city.’

“And so I came, little cat, peeling and shedding my skin like a snake. I wrapped myself in black so that I would not frighten anyone, and so that the gate of Urim would know me as a pestilent. The stone in me is so heavy, now. Anything I touch hardens. Anyone I touch becomes art, becomes sculpture.” Ruin laughed wryly. “Perhaps I have found my calling. But you pierce my skin, you see that I have no blood left but stone, and yet you are soft and sweet and spotted as ever.”

I coughed, a tinny kitten’s cough. “You breathed into me. I… I am not a leopard, I am not alive. My mother did not give me her breath. You did, a corpse walking wide. Thus, I think, I am dead, still, dead as I was born, as dead as you. We are dead together. How could you harm me? Do you believe, in Urim, there is a salve for you?”

Ruin regarded me calmly, her eyes red and serene. “No. But we always hope.”