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“Ask where an Ajan three-piece comes from, the answer is obvious. Ask where Shaduki silver was minted—you have answered your own question in the asking. Ask after my dhheiba—it must be plain what I will answer. I have been to the city of Marrow, and I have come out again…”
Once I ate a topaz the size of my father’s fist, and its skin split under my teeth like my own apples. The sun was so warm, that day, I thought it would shine through me. My father encouraged me gently, pushed the golden thing to my lips. It tasted of summer-baked wheat and the palest of peaches.
“I speak the tongues of death,” she whispered, her voice mingling with the wind. “I am translated, and I do not know myself, save that I have become what I have eaten, and it has become me.
all beautiful things are both more and less than their bodies.
For the present wealth of Amberabad was amber, which is so plentiful in those parts that one may walk along the narrow, rust-colored beaches and pluck wet, glistening stones from the sand. Some even fish for it, with fine nets of nettle and flax, drawing red-golden gems like salmon from the frothing water. The city smelled richly of resin, and strangely of burning jewels, and cast its shadow in pale yellow streaks on the earth, for Amberabad was a city in the sky, suspended between the trunks of the great seaside cedars.
We worked. We ate—opals and garnets and pearls and chalcedony and hematite and lapis lazuli and malachite dark and green. Vhummim was right: A topaz tastes like a peach. Once, when the quota for the day had been exceeded, we were given diamonds. They tasted like frozen lemons.
“Because you know a corpse does not mean you knew the man.”
These are my people, and we are well sung. We hunt the campfires out in the low dells, and do we dance? Do we sing sweeter than any twanging country harp? Bet on it. Are we lissome and lithe, are our faces fair, do we kiss like poets imagine they do? And are there one or two gone in the morning? Bet on that, too. By our green you shall know us, our green coats and our green skirts, trailing behind us so that only those who know to look will see those boot-black hooves a-gleaming.
Faith is always embarrassing in the morning.
MY mother told me this story, and then my father told it to me, and it was the same story, so I am sure that it is true, or at least that they have agreed upon it.
Happiness, when you look back on it, seems so brief, but then, with her, my whole life seemed to pass by under the flitting cedar shadows.
All tamed things are made a bit ridiculous in the process, you know.”
There are many ways of being happy. We will find ours.”
She danced as though she could dance her way out of the sod tower, and the golden ball, and the ghost city, and the hedgehog’s love.
“I FOLLOWED HER. I HAVE ALWAYS FOLLOWED her. She is there, on that island, I know she is, and I am going to save her. We save each other; it’s what we have always done. I was made to save her; she was made to save me.”
We are very good at instructing the world to bend and bow to us—it learns such things from us, things it would never have thought to try on its own.
On the hunt he called me holy; in the dance I knew I was divine.
These are the things a mother does—did not the Sky once wipe our noses and tell us to stand up straight, did not the blackness of our mother admonish us to raise our voices and be curious, be bold, to look after one another when curiosity and boldness failed? Did she not tell us she loved us, that we were never alone?
He danced on the crumbling tips of the towers with his fires wreathing his eyes and sparking in the stinking wind and cried poetry to the blood-riddled sunsets, cried ho! For the thousand-year holocaust of the Djinn! And far below the tenements screamed their adoration through the squalor.
“This is still my story,” said the girl, drawing away. “My last story. It is not yours simply because it sits in your mouth awhile.”
Do you know what it means to sing? Are there songs of the spiders, gossamer and glissand? It means to open up your mouth and unstop your chest and push your heart, your blood, your marrow, and your breath out of you like children.
and she loved me dear as diamonds.
There are many ways of being happy. We might have found ours.”
Her face loomed huge above, young as a bride’s, her eyes full of laughter and light—but they had no pupil and no iris, being all white, smooth as a statue’s. “Fate,” she said, putting her head to one shoulder as her arms wove on, “is a blind weaver, they say. Did you know that? Have you lived long enough in the world to hear how she cuts and spins and stitches, how she never ceases, even for a moment?” “No, Lady.” “It is a very silly story. For one thing, I have never cut a thread in my life…”
The calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and said: “It is right and proper,” he said, “for a girl to read as many books as there are bricks in this city, and then, when she is finished, to begin to write new ones which are made out of the old ones, as this city is made of those stones.”
Tell me what it is that a girl does in the way that a spider weaves, so that Solace will not grow up to be the wrong sort of girl.” We like the wrong sorts of girls, they wrote. They are usually the ones worth writing about.
“All things are strange which are worth knowing.
Even in penance is beauty; blessed are all the ocean’s drowned!
Your name is Sorrow, my little bird, my dear-as-diamonds, and you have been loved all your days.”
Come into the world, into the land beyond wishing, where, I swear to you, there are miracles: a multitude of Griffins, and a Papess at prayer, and lost girls found, and a Satyr laughing in a cottage by the sea.”
She stood there, her hand clasped tight in Solace’s painted hand, a Djinn at her shoulder, a Firebird at her back, a spider at her feet, and an old grandmother with her hand resting on her shoulder.
