The throat opened into a room whose corners and rafters were washed with light, scoured with it, brighter than day, a lather of light like soap rubbed furiously in the hand. I could hardly see, the change was so sudden, and in the center of it, the wolf-creature like a sun, gently blazing.
The cavern was not empty. Seven biers were laid out in curving rows, each bearing a woman, asleep or dead, fourteen slender hands closed over fourteen frozen breasts. Their hair swept over their pedestals as though it had grown a thousand years; their limbs were covered in jewels, more than I had ever seen together, piled up like apples at harvest. Piles of jade and granite and opal, of garnet bright as blood, of shale and iron ore, and of diamond, tiny diamonds glittering like snow.
In the Garden
WAKENED NOW, THE BOY CHEWED SLOWLY ON AN APPLE CORE, MESMERIZED. Wolves bounded gracefully through his mind, nosing the wind. He stretched his long arms, yawned, and pulled from his pack a rich red blanket edged in gold thread and embroidered with lilies. He wrapped it around his shoulders and edged gingerly towards the girl, as a man would move towards a skittish colt. They huddled together under their scarlet tent, and she lowered her lashes earthward when his hand brushed her knee, snatching the water flask and drawing it in. They were very close; he could smell the musk of her hair, cedar and jasmine.
The first lights of dawn, luminous and blue, filtered down through the fine fabric of leaves, writing in rose and silver shadows on their skin.
It is very still, the world at dawn, under its glittering net of dew. In their little thicket, the pair of children who were very nearly finished with childhood sat dry and warm, and the girl’s voice had fallen as silent as a cat’s paw on pine needles. The infant sun brushed the boy’s hair from his face with a shimmering, cherubic hand. He did not move from the girl’s side, but it was nearing light, and his sister would be rising soon, her face growing stormy at the sight of his empty bed.
“I have to go,” he rasped finally. “I have to get back before the household wakes up.”
The girl nodded, suddenly shy, drawing back into herself after all this long night of spinning out her heart like flax, straw into gold.
“But I will come back,” he reassured her, “as the flocks of river birds do, at sunset. I will bring us another supper and you will tell me all the rest about the grandmother in her cave.”
He touched her face, and his hand on her cheek was soft as a hare’s paw. The girl smiled into his palm, and nodded. Her luminous eyes lifted and long lashes closed briefly, exposing the swirling black of the birthmark covering her eyelids, inky and deep, a night without stars. The boy marked that he did not find it un-beautiful, now that he knew her a little. He dipped his tousled golden head a little, to meet her eyes as they slid open again.
“I will come every night, to hear your stories. Every night,” he declared quietly, and ran into the striations of mist covering the gardens, catching in the jasmine and aster, and the apple trees.
The girl bent to the remains of their evening meal and gathered together the flasks and crusts of bread to feed the crows and gulls. She then rose from her little bower, shaking a few errant petals from her hair in a shower lit by the strong red-gold beams of the day.
When the sun had lain down in the west and covered itself with long blue blankets, and the girl sat cross-legged under the silver-lavender jasmine branches, she saw the boy’s eager shadow racing across the thick emerald lawn to her. He burst into her thicket, industriously setting out her dinner. She had been sure he would not come.
He brought dark bread and pale cheeses, a slice of roasted lamb and a cluster of berries bulging with juice, several small roasted potatoes, a cold green apple and a slice of chocolate, precious as myrrh.
“I thought I would leave the wine tonight, so that I do not steal off to sleep again,” he admitted bashfully, extending his water flask instead.
“No, no, it’s all right, what you brought is more than enough,” she assured him with a nervous laugh. They fussed with the food and did not speak, the boy as eager for her tale as a bear seeking salmon in the frothing river. As she ate, her face grew brighter, as though she were a small sun, rising just as the great golden one went down.
“How did you live all these years in the Garden?” The boy munched on a fat chunk of apple.
The girl looked around. “The Sultan has more than enough fruit trees to feed one child, and the water in the fountains is clear and clean. I have had enough. The Palace throws away more than I could ever use. Once in a while there is even an amira’s old dress tossed on the refuse pile. And when the winters have been harsh, the birds have brought me mice and rabbits. I am cared for. The Garden raised me; it is my mother and my father, and mothers and fathers always find a way to feed and clothe their children.”
“The birds…?” The boy was incredulous.
She shrugged. “All creatures are lonely. They are drawn to me and I am drawn to them, and we warm each other in the snow. You should know better—weren’t you drawn, too? And I feed you my stories like morsels of meat roasted in a fire.”
The boy blushed deeply, turning his eyes away from her. They finished their meal in silence.
Finally, when lamb and fruit had been eaten, sweet water had been drunk, and each of them had found a comfortable place in the flower thicket to lean on their sides, heads bent inwards like conspirators, the girl spoke, and her voice filled up the boy like cream splashing in a silver bowl.
FROM THE LONG, UNMOVING SHADOWS BEYOND THE last of the seven bodies, my silent guide made a small, rustling sound with her beautiful tail.
“We brought them back here, from the field of poppies and old, sodden wheat. They weighed nothing at all, like carrying moths. And we kept them here, where my dark brother and my pale sister and some few others came to hide ourselves. What else was there to do? There are no graveyards for us, no rites, no songs, no fires. We had their shells in our hands, and we didn’t know what to do, we just didn’t know.” Liulfr nosed the faceted face of the one buried in diamonds. Her voice was a whisper thick as wet wool. “The new stars up there, the stars that flare up when we die, they’re just markers. It’s not them. This isn’t them. We don’t know where they are. You look up into the sky, little girl: it’s a mausoleum, and those new, bright lights are tombs, but they are not there. But they are not here, either.”
The Wolf-Star fixed me with
her yellow eyes. I padded quietly across the room and sat down heavily before the jewel-girl, pale and dead. I was not sure what was expected of me. It was very warm, the light rubbing against my hindquarters and nuzzling my fur lazily. The glassy wound at the diamond-woman’s throat seemed to grow in my vision, like a second mouth grinning horribly below the first. I nosed at it and it was neither warm nor cold, but hard, nothing like flesh.
Beneath my silver fur the wound the Mare had made throbbed, and the smaller cut from the Fox just below it stung like the quick needle of a wasp. Liulfr simply watched me, offering no help at all. This, then, was my test. I got to my paws and half climbed over the poor girl, half kneeled on her slippery drift of gems. I put my muzzle to my chest and gnawed open the space between the wounds, so that the scabs broke and they flowed freely into each other, one long, deep gash: a hole chewed in flesh, the first bite of the world.
The blood came dark and ugly at first, and I was dizzy—dizzy and so hot in that close, dark room!—and it splashed on the empty corpse like ink spilled over a mirror. But after a long while it began to flow clear, and then filled with a gentle light, soft and sweet-smelling as sugared pears in a copper dish, cold, so cold, and the color of the moon. Half faint, I wearily pressed my bleeding breast hard against the woman’s cut throat.
I thought she would wake up. I really did. I thought that all in a rush she would gasp and cry out, her back would arch like a drawn bow, her eyes would suddenly open, and she would cough. She would draw ragged breaths, and all those diamonds would clatter to the floor as she finally bolted upright, face beaming bright as morning.
She did not move. The light trickled out of me and into her, and I watched it foam at the bottom of her back, like a cup of water tossed into a deep bathtub. The shadows draped the room, and the blood which was light slowed and stopped.