For the first time the Man Dressed in the Moon smiled, and his face opened up like a pomegranate cracking. “On the contrary, my diminutive friend. And call me Father. I think that’s best, considering, don’t you?”
He gathered me into his cool, colorless palm again, and together we passed through a thick door and down a long, winding staircase that doubled over and back upon itself, so that it seemed to ascend and descend at the same time. I could not tell where we were, except that the walls became rocky and damp, and I had the sense of being very deep underground. Finally, we emerged into a room filled with people of all shapes,
sexes, and descriptions. They were leaned against the walls like rolls of carpet, blond maiden against gray-haired grandfather against sweet-skinned child. In and among the human beauties were strange creatures: Basilisks and Leucrotta and Monopods with their single huge, twisted feet jutting awkwardly into the freezing air—for the room was chill as a witch’s heart, and frost spackled the ceiling. Their eyes were serenely shut.
The Man Dressed in the Moon gestured expansively at his collection. “Choose! Every possible combination of features is represented here—will you have breasts or a beard? Will you have the dark skin of an Eastern Prince? Will you have a child’s slender arms? All you must do is give up that wretched little form and I will dress you in a new one, sewn up as tightly as a bride’s bodice! It is no more effort to me than shifting a lamp from one table to another. We must simply kill you, snuff out your little breath, and all will be well. Let me tell you how it is done…”
MY PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS HAD RIGHTS OVER THE bodies of humans. We were born when the first rays of Mother Moon glided over the surface of the first ocean’s face. From the primal water the Yi rose, and we suckled at the rim of the Moon, which in those days touched the sea and churned the salt waves beneath.
Moon taught us how to die. We had to learn it by rote and practice—it is not an easy thing for us. The others, the sun-children, die so naturally and gracefully; for us it is like solving a difficult equation without pen or paper.
Moon taught us that it was our right to take the bodies of the dead—we were hers, and just as the night was her province, the cold and the dead were ours. It was her gift to us, you understand, so that we could taste every kind of life, from the meanest to the most exalted. All the secrets of bloodless flesh she showed to us in the first days of the world. She showed us that it is possible to swim through bodies as a fish through coral; death clears a place for us. But one cannot swim through a living sea; the swimmer and the water must be equally mortified. So, in order to pass from flesh to flesh, we had to learn to die.
The first of us did not succeed—they went under the waves and breathed easily, instinctively. They went into the fire and became incandescent. They dove from high cliffs and their shoulder blades unfolded into wings like origami breaking. They cut open their veins with bone knives and found themselves only lightened and made translucent as diamonds by the lack of blood. We began to despair. The sun-children were prodigies: They died easily all around us, like daisies in winter.
I was the first to discover it. I sat beneath Moon with my mouth on her icy fingers, considering the problem. It seemed to me that we were a race of suicides—it was only our own bodies we flagellated, our own skin we removed like clothing. If we instead helped each other into death, if we made of it a sacrament, then perhaps we could manage the feat.
I went to one of my sisters and knelt before her, begging her to strangle me, to put out my eyes and burn my heart in a clay kiln. My theory babbled out of me like a brook flooding down a mountain, so eager was I to become the first of my people to master the art of death. She, too, was eager and curious, and put her slim, blue-white fingers around my throat, squeezing until I crumpled at her feet like a discarded blanket.
Thus was the first murder committed among the Yi. The celebration lasted for seven days and nights; the silver lanterns swayed and sweet waltzes were played on chalcedony pipes. Our star-spattered world was suddenly a cacophony of death as we leapt from our bodies into the bright limbs of the sun-children. Of course, once we had died the first time, we lost the adamant moon-flesh which was ours by birthright. But we found that the longer we remained in our new bodies, the more they came to resemble our old ones: The color seeped from the eyes and the skin grew pale as shadowless craters. After a few years in the body of a milkmaid, we looked quite ourselves again.
Of course, the sun-children, both human and monster, were terrified by this power. I cannot say why—certainly they had left the bodies, they no longer had any rights to them, and Moon had granted them to us by perfectly legal charter. But they turned from us in horror and forced us to wear gray, pockmarked cloaks so that they could tell us apart from their dead beloveds in the years before we turned the flesh back into our own. Once, they captured a boy not long dead while the Yi in him was weak and did not know his new muscles well enough to resist them. They kept him in a dark well, away from the eye of Mother Moon, and tortured him with boiling oil and thumbscrews and insidious poisons until he revealed some part of our secrets—though never, of course, the technique of traveling into cold flesh. These torturers went to Al-a-Nur and poured mortar into the foundations of the Tower of the Dead, where they practice a mutilated form of our art.
In the midst of our ecstatic dance from corpse to corpse, Moon came down to us while we slept, and spoke into the shell-ear of each Yi. She promised that when one of us—just one—had tasted every kind of life the garden of the sun’s world could prepare for us, we could return to her, and dwell in a sea of light, cradled forever in her opaline arms.
And so we leap high, our starlit toes touching briefly on each form, human and monster—and we seek out every shade of claw and eye, so that we may return to the night and Moon’s primal pale.
THE MAN DRESSED IN THE MOON LOOKED DOWN at me with his blanched eyes and smiled, the sparse hairs on his chin quivering.
“I am a great collector, you see. I hold all these bodies in trust for my brothers and sisters, so that they may have a ready supply when they tire of their current ones. Quite a steady stream of Yi come and go from me like a river whistling its water under the moon—come an old crone and leave a young man, come an ice-haired northerner, go a southerner with cinnamon skin. The discards—well, all things must eat, and there is a feast day here every fort night. But you! We have seen nothing like you! We must add your body to our treasury—in exchange you may have one of your choice.”
I suppose I might have been shocked, but all I could think of was long, lithe limbs and a height which would tower over my father’s. I agreed as easily as if he had offered to trade me a wooden wheel for a pair of chickens.
He held me up to each row of faces in a most considerate fashion, and I pondered them all in turn. I finally settled upon a youth with skin the color of aged brandy-wine, whose eyebrows arched in a noble, bemused way over his smoke-lashed eyes. He was very tall.
“Ah, excellent choice, my son! That was Marsili—long ago he was a Sultan’s son, betrothed to a maiden of unearthly beauty, whose eyes were yellow as a wolf’s. But he angered his father in some way or another—gambling or whoring, most likely; young men are so prone to such vices—and the Sultan in his wisdom sold the boy to me and married the girl himself. I’m told there is a whole dynasty of wolf-eyed Sultans somewhere in the East. And he is no loss to us. Believe me, we long ago exhausted the tawdry experiences of a spoiled Prince.” He pushed up his gray sleeves. “Shall we begin?”
I blinked twice, my heart thumping in me like an overworked bellows. “But I… I cannot strangle you, Father, I haven’t anything like the strength.”
His face broadened amiably.
“Oh, I needn’t be dead—I am not going to take your body myself. The Yi are communal. It is just as well that any other of my race uses it. A simple process and a cold room keep the bodies intact until they are needed. Only you must die. It will be a very small death, I promise. It will feellike you have swallowed a great portion of bread that has become stuck in your throat, somewhere between your mouth and your belly. Of course, a simple drink of water would push the bread down where it ought to go, but there is a curious feeling of stretching, of bulging. That is what a small death is like.”
This did not sound so very terrible. I straightened myself to my full height—no larger than a grasshopper—and locked my arms as I imagined brave soldiers in war must.
“I am ready, Father. You may kill me now.”
“Mustn’t damage the body!” he chirped happily, and clamped his great clammy hand over my nose and mouth. He held it there, the smell of gardenias cloying, while I struggled and sucked at the skin for air. Finally, I slackened and slumped into the curve of his thumb.
He was right, it was very like swallowing too much bread. First the alarm and panic, then the curious stretching, then the sliding release of bread into the belly. I did not float above my body as some say one does—I stood beside it, very calmly, as though I had simply been doubled. I watched the Man Dressed in the Moon pass my tiny body through a wash of strange, viscous fluid the color of costly ink. Then, pulling the slack form of Marsili from the ranks, he anointed its forehead with a musky-smelling oil. Finally, he placed an oblong white stone in the corpse’s mouth and whispered a few words I could not hear over its bent head.
It was as though I blinked, and when I opened my eyes again, they were Marsili’s eyes. When I flexed my hands they were Marsili’s hands. When I spoke it was with Marsili’s honey-wine voice, cultured by years of tutors. The stone had vanished from my mouth.
“I am… I am him!” I cried, looking the Man Dressed in the Moon directly in the eye. It was a silly thing to say, of course, but I could almost have wept for the joy of touching the cool ceiling with my fingers.
From that day I begged to be his apprentice, to learn this magic so that I would never have to die a big death. He saw no point, as the Moon was no mother to me. I could not but stand at the foot of the Yi’s long ladder to her. But after some time he re
lented, being lonely or curious or both, and I began my long education. Any sacrament can be practiced by unbelievers, he always said. It’s usually nothing more than eating and drinking, anyway. I could drink all I liked, and nothing I ever drank would become the Moon in my mouth—but drinking is pleasant enough without the promises of religion. And I was always pleasant to him.