I WAS BORN UNDER THE ROSE DOME OF SHADUKIAM. Alone of all Griffin, a woman carried me in her belly, like a human child, and from her my egg issued, and from her I was born. It is a famous story—I will not repeat it.
My Griffin-mother always told me not to return to Shadukiam, the city of my birth. It is a wicked place, she said, a man who keeps his knife hidden when others show theirs plain. I wanted to obey; I wanted to be happy on the heights of Nuru, happy as Jin was, nestled under our mother’s wing with the moon on his cerulean feathers.
But I could not. I was drawn back and back again to the strange, sweet smell of decaying roses, to the mildewed walls which tapered into diamond turrets, to the dark gutters swollen with rain. I was drawn back to Giota, to the scent of her, which smelled more like mother to me than the soft golden straw of the nest. I followed that smell, the smell of blood and violets crushed underfoot, the smell of Giota’s mouth. I did not remember, exactly, being inside her, but my heart knew that it had once beat beside another heart. I followed the memory of my heartbeat through the silver streets of Shadukiam, the lacy shadows cast by the diamond turrets, until I found her, the woman who gave me birth, sleeping on a rubbish heap outside a ramshackle inn. My throat was tight and I lay next to her, covering her body with my wings, weeping tears of gold into her hair.
I flew over the plains between Nuru and
the city many times. Giota was always pleased to see me, though we rarely spoke. We pressed our heads together in the shade of wide-armed trees; we nuzzled each other and picked leaves, I from her ever-growing hair, she from my pelt. It was rarely necessary for us to speak, only to be together, in secret, mother and daughter who could never call each other by those names.
Jin did not understand, of course he did not, who never grew in the womb of a woman, but he never betrayed me, and my true mother thought me hers and hers alone until the day she was slaughtered and her beak cut from her face to decorate an Arimaspian head. We hid ourselves away in the blinding cliffs, for we were still young and could not defend ourselves against so many. Jin covered my face with his wings as the last screams of our mother echoed through the crystalline crater.
On that day I left him to the nest that was his, and went into Shadukiam to console myself on the breast of Giota. I could not stay under the Rose Dome—I was far too large to comfortably live in a city—but I built my nest of cedar and camphor outside that blooming arch, and each day one of us went to the other to hold our quiet communion. We were happy together, for a while.
I wept the day she forged her chain and beat the bolts into the wall of the great Basilica. I did not understand. I could not bear the thought of never sleeping again with her tiny heart beating against mine in my nest of red woods. She tried to tell me it would be no different, that I could still come to her in this strange churchyard—which was so near to the place where she bore me. But I knew, I knew it would be different, that something was ending before my eyes and I could not stop it. I stared into her dark eyes, my own lost in tears.
“Am I not enough?” I whispered hoarsely. “Can I not make you happy?”
“Oh, my darling,” she answered, her mouth muffled by her rumpled, wet dress. She put her hands into my feathers as I longed for her to do. “You have always made your Giota happy. But I am not a Griffin; I have allegiances which are not to gold or egg. And I have this duty to perform.”
“I have no gold to watch over. I have only you.” I tried to press my head against hers, but she turned away, opening the hidden seam in her black frock so that the mouth in her belly—the mouth that bore me—could speak freely.
“You will, Quri. You will have a clutch of eggs and a nest of gold, as all Griffins do, one day. We must each tend to the talismans of our people—you to your gold and Giota to her wall.”
“You have never told me the name of your people. I know nothing of you, of your ways and your blood. If you are leaving me for a wall and a chain, at least tell me why; tell me what burden calls to you from what tribe to do this thing. Tell me who you are!”
She grunted and leaned against the crumbling, moss-covered wall, holding her belly in her hands as she had done on the few days when she had spoken to me for longer than a few affectionate sighs—days I remember now like feasts, holidays, festivals of her voice. She turned her lipless face to the sky and shut her black eyes, and the tongue in her belly began to tell its tale…
I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING. THAT SOMEWHERE in the world there is a race of people who carry their mouths in their bellies; that somewhere there is a tribe in which I would seem unremarkable.
There is not.
I am only a woman, born from a woman, sister to women. Alas, women were rare in the wild, honey-colored expanse of my home—vast grass-swept expanses of land spotted with tree and horse. Thus, my caravan was always small. Sons were born easily, brothers quickly had, husbands too numerous for the few wives. Each woman had many—men fought for the honor of marrying into her bed. The women born were always powerful, almost to a girl a witch or a warrior. The birth of a daughter was celebrated by three nights of feasting on the meat of skinny hawks and blue-bellied lizards. The birth of twin daughters was considered a miracle sent by the blessed Stars.
Triplets occurred once in a generation, when the Snake-Star aligned with the Harpoon-Star, and the light of the Pierced Serpent fell on the yellow grass. These star-born triplets are the emblem of the caravan—we were known for them; they were prized; without these sacred births we were no more than a ragtag band of horse-traders peddling chicken feet as love charms from town to town.
The triplets are called the Sorella, and I am the youngest of mine—I was born a full minute after my sisters. We are special, we are sacred: The oldest of each triad carries her eyes in her belly, the middle her ears, and the youngest her mouth. The organs are erased from their right places, but not gouged out, not torn. It is simply as though some god passed her hand over our faces and washed away our eyes, our ears, our mouth. We were the Seer, the Listener, and the Speaker.
We were Pangiota, Legiota, and Magiota. We were sisters, and with one mind we guided the path of our caravan—for Legiota saw the path, Magiota heard the Stars’ commands, and I spoke the path. We could not lie; we could not guide our people falsely. If the Sorella were consulted, only I could reply, and I could not fail to answer truly, to tell the tale of what my sisters saw and heard. We were more than an oracle: Our faces were the valleys on which the Star-gods walked. We braided our hair into sacred habits, for our bodies were the vessels of the Stars’ light, and no woven cloth could be more holy. It was whispered that the Sorella were the same women in each generation, that the spirits of one set of sisters simply stepped into the bodies of the next. I know nothing of that—I am Pangiota; I have always been. More than that no one can tell.
I often envied my sisters. After all, I only reported what they told me, what Legiota saw and what Magiota heard. I, too, wanted to turn a secret ear to the sky and hear the white-hot words of the Stars pouring into me like burning honey. I, too, wanted to see the path of truth extending from my lashes like a golden ribbon. But I could only open my hair like a curtain and let my hidden mouth speak. The gods touched my sisters, they did not touch me. I used to pray that we could trade powers, that I could, just once, be the woman who laid out her body under the Stars and let their light spill onto her belly.
Children make prayers so thoughtlessly, building them up like sand castles—and they are always surprised when suddenly the castle becomes real, and the iron gate grinds shut.
One day, which was not unlike any other day on the steppes, when the honey cakes boiled in their pans and men shot lazy arrows at raccoons and voles who were little more than little bundles of dry bones, Legiota and Magiota called me to them in our secret place. We crouched in a cavern of black rock hidden in the flank of the orange-and-white-banded cliffs which marked the edges of the grassland, of our home. In the shadows, the sound of water dripping from the stone ceiling made us sleepy and calm—but that day my sisters were awake and nervous as foxes that scent a huntsman. They had unbraided their hair from crown to toe, and sat naked in the cave, their bellies displayed like jewels.
“I have seen a new path,” Legiota whispered.
“I have heard the footsteps of the Stars diverting from their courses,” Magiota added, clutching my hands in hers. I realized suddenly that they were frightened.
“There will be no more Sorella after us. The caravan is dying. There will be more daughters soon than ever were born to us, and mothers will no longer pray for them. There will be no more triple births. The Harpoon-Star has refused to pluck out the eyes, ears, and mouths of any other daughters, and the Snake-Star will not plant them in other wombs. They will give us generations of daughters as compensation, but all of them will be plain. They will not be born with power; they will have to wrest it from this cave, which is deeper dug in the earth than even we had guessed. We will be forgotten, and when the last gray-haired grandmother who remembers us bleeds her blackest blood onto the earth, the caravan will hunger, and thirst, and die.”
Legiota spoke matter-of-factly, as though she spoke of the average rainfall on the flats. “A man has been born whose great-great-grandson will murder the Snake-Star, and there is no longer any path the Serpent of Heaven can take which will not lead to her death. She has told me this, and she mourns herself under the black veil of the sky. The Sorella were her handmaids while she lived; we cannot serve her when she is dead—she has told me that she will take other Stars as her own, little snakes to be her pallbearers, and remove herself to a temple far removed from the cursed city, to wait for her doom to come on heavy feet.” Magiota’s eyes filled with tears, and they dripped onto the shell-like ears in her belly.
“Pangiota, my sister, I am afraid of death,” Legiota rasped.
“Why should you fear to die?” I asked. “If this will not come to pass until the prime of the grandson, we will not see the Serpent perish from the sky. We will not see the new handmaids take our place. We are safe, if no longer blessed.”
My sisters exchanged glances, and Legiota passed her hand over the smooth expanse where her eyes might have been. “You do not understand. We two are her handmaids. We will go into seclusion with her, and give our strength to hers, our sight and our hearing to the little snakes, so that in five generations, her light will be so great that she will rise again from her own murder.”