In the Night Garden

Looking back now, I think I hardly slept at all—wolves don’t need a night’s full sack of sleep. I startled awake though there was no sound to disturb me, and saw three tall figures standing a polite distance away.

The first was a white wolf with sloping ears and gentle eyes the color of rain, her fur gleaming nearly blue, like the new moon on snowy branches. Her tail waved slowly behind her, a stream of ice, drawing patterns in the soil.

The second was black as midwinter’s night, his eyes of storm clouds cut with lightning, fur thick and dark as the depths of a mountain lake.

The third was every shade of gold as I was every shade of silver, from the white of flame to deep bronze, flowing and braiding together like liquid fire. Her eyes were the same flickering color, leaping and sparking.

My mouth was horribly dry and I could not swallow. It took all of my newfound wolfness not to bolt from their terrible faces. I struggled and grasped for my reason, my girl-self in the mounds and layers of wolf. They spoke then in unison, their muzzles shaping the words strangely, but beautifully, a growling gentleness.

“Welcome, little dog. Which of us will you have?”

I tried to speak, but it was impossible. I stuttered and gasped and yelped, trying to form words out of my silky muzzle and dagger-teeth. My silver brow furrowed with the effort.

“Child,” the white one said, her voice was the wind off the mountains, welcoming and sweet, “you must choose. If you cannot manage to speak, you may simply come to one of us, and touch our fur with your nose. We are wolves, after all; we do not overvalue speech.”

“She doesn’t understand, sister.” The black one interrupted, his words like saplings felled by bronze axes. He turned to me with brittle, proud eyes, and spoke slowly, as if to a very stupid and stubborn horse. “A guide, little dog. You have to choose one of us as your guide. You must know how these things are done.” The black beast snorted, clearly too bored to continue.

I looked at them, tall and terrible, the white and the black. And the third, the soft and rippling gold one, who had not spoken, but whose tail swayed lazily from side to side, her calm eyes like jeweled moons. I padded over to her and pressed my wet nose into her neck like a field of daffodils. Her fur smelled good, and sweet, which was all I could think of—that she smelled right, and smelling, after all, is everything. I could swear she smiled at me. And when I pulled back from her warm-smelling body, the other two had gone. She looked at me with eyes like the spaces in a honeycomb, and glanced away past me, where her pack-mates had gone.

“We got so lost, you know,” she whispered.

I didn’t understand—how could I begin to guess?—but I pushed my snout up under hers reassuringly, and shut my eyes, washed in her smell. She growled deep in her throat, though not a threat-growl, a soft pup-growl that rattled in my bones.

“We never meant to get so lost…”

IN THE FIRST DAYS, WHEN WE CAME WALKING OVER the first grass, we burned it, no matter how lightly we tried to step. It went up in long white rows of flame, and even we were afraid of it, afraid of what we could do to this place. We tried to walk on stone only—mute, dead stone, you understand, and mute, dead grass, not the living blade and rock that—oh, it doesn’t matter. Our feet killed it, whatever we touched, and we huddled in fear of the fires that we couldn’t stop.

But whether the grass got stronger or we got weaker, it was not long before we just left scorch marks. Black and ugly, yes, but there were no more holocausts in our tracks, and we began to explore the world that the Mare had left for us when she left the sky.

I was as young as we all were. We named everything; we named ourselves. The Bee-Star, which was so bright and small and happier than any of us—that little sun yellow speck who never had to kill grass or stone just to walk from one place to another—called me Liulfr, and whenever he buzzed around my ears I heard the whirr of my name in his wings.

It was more confused than you might think. There were so many of us—but so many more of them. The Mare’s real children were so much wilder and more numerous than we were, the ones that came flying out of her body still clung with moon-grease and sky-spittle. We were just holes, after all, holes filled up with light, and deep in our secret hearts we worried that we were an accident, nothing more than puddles who stood up and gave each other names, and the lightless creatures which could walk (so easily, so easily!) were the only things that were meant to be born.

So we watched them; we followed them and tried to imitate them. Some of them looked like some of us—holes in the shapes of men and holes in the shapes of animals and holes in the shapes of plants and tools and stones—and naturally we clung to those that seemed most like us; but above all things we tried to imitate men and women, who seemed the most intended of all the things that came out of the Mare, who came out speaking and naming and plowing and stomping, just as we had.

But they were afraid of us, of how we burned, and how we set to flame what they thought was good and beautiful. They called us ghosts and worse, but we couldn’t leave them—they had been inside the Mare, after all, and we had never known that, never known what she looked like from under rib and heart. We wanted to know; we wanted, in her absence, to love what had been part of her.

And yes, we saw our light passing into them, into the men and the plants and the tools and the stones, and many of us left then, went into conclaves of like-with-like, Rose-Stars with Bee-Stars and Worm-Stars with Snail-Stars, determined to keep safe and whole.

But some of us, like whipped dogs following behind a cruel master, kept near people, and tried to look like them, for we had discovered, just as they had discovered how to seed a field and leave one part fallow, that just b

ecause we had been chewed into a certain shape did not mean we had to keep it. It always hurt the first time, to shiver off the shape our mother gave us, but it got easier. It was the biggest thing we knew how to do, but we were learning.

We were just children, and we played with the world like blocks and dolls, like blocks and dolls, but our siblings did not want to play with us.

And so it was that the Manikarnika met their fate, and we learned a thing we could do that was much bigger and more terrible than changing our skin.

I would like to say I knew them, and I did, in the sense that second cousins in a large family know each other—which is to say hardly at all. They were not like me—they were Stone-Stars, while I was a Wolf-Star, and they changed to women, while after a few experiments I stubbornly kept the paws and the tail that my mother gave me.

But there is not one among us who does not know this story.

The Manikarnika were seven sisters, and when they were gnawed from the flesh of the Mare, they were Stones. Jade and Granite and Opal, Garnet and Shale and Iron Ore and little Diamond, pale as a milk-soaked paw.

They were horrified when they tried to roll and clatter on the dead stone and burned it, melted it, fused it together into glittering, molten rivers. When they learned to walk on two legs, they avoided the mountains like sickness, refusing to harm anything that was so like their first bodies. I tell you this so you will know they were gentle, that the burning was not what any of us meant—but accidents will breed accidents, you know. We couldn’t help it. They couldn’t help it.

After the first of us started to dim, and the first of us went into exile beyond the swamps and hills, the Manikarnika stayed. They were not jealous of their light, and were determined to show us that we could live in the world the Mare had made, that it was meant for us as well as for her true children.

To show us this, they went to the villages of men, and asked to be taken in, like beggar-women, dressed in rags and poor as empty plates. They were sure they would be welcomed, and we would see that the second litter of the Mare would call us sisters and brothers and even wives, and there would be family between the first and the last. Of course their light still spangled all around them, but who could refuse a beautiful girl who barely owned her own dress no matter how brightly she glowed? Who could refuse seven?