Kushinada and I were alone in the flotsam of the eight-headed serpent. The sun was almost gone, but still glittered redly behind flax-clouds. Kushinada sat in the grass, her naked form covered in blood like a dress, holding one of the severed heads in her lap, crooning at it and rocking back and forth.

I watched her for a long while, and smelled with some interest the metallic tang of death hovering over the manifold fence. Is that, I wondered, what Mother’s hair will smell like?

“I have solved it,” I called to my bride, “I know now the path to Ne no Kuni, and all because of this brainless drunkard of a snake.”

Kushinada wept into the mottled head.

“Would you like to know it? Your husband-to-be is the cleverest of all possible men—will it please you to hear how I have solved this puzzle?”

Kushinada sniffled like a child, and wiped at her bloodied face with bloodied hands. She said nothing.

“You see,” I said softly, sitting gingerly next to her as one will sit next to a feral cat one hopes to pet, “I descended not far from here, my first footprints on the earth made their impressions in the dust of Hiroshima and Izumo, and Yasugi and Mt. Hiba. I descended and was made a man, and from that moment I could not find my way into Yomi, the land of shadows.”

I turned her face towards me, and the whites of her eyes showed.

“I could not find my way, you understand, because I am a man. No man knows the way. But sitting in all this blood, stepping through the corpse-geography of the serpent of Izumo as my father must have stepped through my mother in the light of his comb, I have solved it: I may go to her as easily as any man, if I am willing to die for her. Who can go into the kingdom of the dead while he is living? Only my father, first of all things that trespassed, and I am not he.”

Kushinada’s eyes searched mine. “Then . . . then you will let me go?”

I laughed. “Oh, no, you are promised to me—I will die, I will go to the slopes of Mt. Hiba and I will go down into the earth, I will claw the roof of hell until mother lets me in, I will eat earth, I will eat loam and clay until I choke, and she will take me in, and I will become in her primordial womb my old self, crowned in clouds. I will rule beside her in the kingdom of the dead, and when I have shed this flesh I will come back for you.”

She crumbled into my lap; her legs tangled in the jaws of the snakehead, and shuddered. “You are neither old nor young, handsome nor ugly; you are neither man nor god, you are neither alive nor dead, and after all this, after all this, I will be the only one of us taken to wife.”

I patted her head comfortingly. “It will not be so bad, my love, my love—when I am myself again I will turn you into a beautiful jeweled comb, so that you can come into the land of the dead while you yet live, as my father brought his comb. And I will place you in my headdress, and your teeth will lie close to my scalp, always, so that I know you are there, and that you love me. And every now and then, a jewel will fall from its setting, and those jewels will be our children, and they will grow up to be wonders: your rubies will be samurai and your sapphires will be court poets, your emeralds will be concubines and your diamonds will be magicians, and your silver will be empresses, and your gold will be emperors. They will fall like colored rain onto the radiant flesh of Izanami, and everyone will marvel at the glittering children of Kushinada!”

The mother of all emperors bent double on the wet earth, clutched her belly and opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came, nothing came but spittle and strangled gasps, and then she began that tiresome rocking, rocking and crooning.

I left her there, kissed h

er forehead like a dutiful husband, and told her I would return. I walked away from the manifold fence with a straight back and a cool brow—I looked back only once to see her with two of the massive, broken heads barely contained within her skinny arms, kissing their gory skin and sobbing.

The guttering sparks of the sun lay over Hiroshima far below, and I thought—only for a moment—that, as if I had already walked there, already eaten and drunk and slept and wakened there, I could see my footprints flaming over the city, burning white and sere, like an afterimage, and a hot wind followed after them.

XI

YOMI

“Mother!” he called to the bloody-flowered acacia.

“Mother!” he called to the top-knots of snow.

“Mother!” he called to the stones from the barrels of earth.

And it was the stones that answered.

“Here,” they murmured in their grinding, “here.”

Susanoo-no-Mikoto pushed stone aside from stone, slate from shale.

“Here,” they sighed, and moved from their loam, “here.”

He clawed at the mud, tearing thick furrows in the ground.

“Mother!” he wheezed, falling onto his face, beating his fists against the soil.

And in the long shadows of the night whose shape the sun cannot guess, the black earth closed her arms over her son.

UNDER

Tags: Catherynne M. Valente Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net