Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,109

I smiled, I smiled as you took me in, I was only frightened for a moment—} He was weeping, shaking terribly—he understood, perhaps, what passion is. He hated my flesh and loved it, he cannot possess it, but it is possible he desired it, desired the thing glutted with the bodies of his wives, and knew that he was weak, that I could possess him, and their purity was no shield.

{I} you {can hear} me {you, always, even if I do not like to listen. Sometimes I} you {touch the gullet-flesh} my body {with my} your {tongue, like an icicle, and it burns me} it thrills through me

{it tastes sweet, like the old soup.}

V

NE NO KUNI

Izanagi was alone on Onogoro.

The jellyfish had gone, somehow, learning at last what was and was not ocean, or at least, failing their lessons elsewhere. The strand was silent, and the ruins of the house of the pillar rose up like broken black jaws on the bluff. The pillar still stood, blasted and tall, and it seemed to laugh at him.

“Izanami!” He called to the cinders.

“Izanami!” He called to the empty shore.

“Izanami!” He called to the churning sea, and to the Heaven-Spanning Bridge, whose girded underside he could still glimpse, on clear days, far up behind the blue of the sky.

First of all things that are left behind, Izanagi could not think where she might have got to. He put Kagu-tsuchi, and his sisters to bed in the rushes and asked them what happened to women when they burned—they being the source of fire, and the death, and there being no one else to ask.

Kagu-tsuchi did not know. He sucked his thumb like a match-head.

Midzu-ha-no-me did not know. She sucked her thumb like a faucet.

Hani-yama-hime did not know. She sucked her thumb like a stalk of grass.

With the shadow of the bridge thin and receding on the shoals, Izanagi lashed together the trunks of eight young trees, and taking a lock of his son’s hair to light his way, tucked the three bright-eyed children of Izanami’s flesh away in the charred shell of the house with the last of the jellyfish to give them suck. On his raft of trees, the first widower of all things bereft set out across the churning sea, across the foam and the tipped waves, across the violet water and the black.

When he ran aground on Honshu, his beard was tangled and clotted with salt. He marveled at how Honshu-his-child had grown, how the acacia had brambled, how the mountains had grown braids and top-knots of snow. How the stones had rolled up from the barrels of earth. And he wandered.

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

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

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

And it was the stones that answered.

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

Izanagi pushed stone aside from stone, slate from shale.

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

Behind a certain stone, there was a hole, tangled with roots and sifting soil, tangled with the dead-skin bells of mushroom and the sinuous movements of centipedes retreating from the light.

“Come in,” sighed the centipedes as their ruby tails vanished, “this is Ne no Kuni, the Root-Country. She is here, she is here.”

It was small, only wide enough for his shoulders, for his own hips, and it was open and dark as a mouth.

“Izanami?” he whispered.

No answer came, and thus, second of all things that go under the earth, Izanagi wriggled through the scrim of mud into Ne no Kuni.

In the Root-Country, there is no light. Even before there was land, there was light, and Izanagi crawled through the sludge trying to taste the dark, to breathe it, to understand how so complete and utter a thing could have come to be without his knowledge. The darkness grew around him until he no longer felt the wet earth stroking his limbs, but was simply over-hung with it, like curtains and veils, and he could see nothing, first of all blinded things. His feet squelched in a kind of softness underfoot; his hands groped in a mist like breath. There was no sound but himself and the darkness, which seemed to draw into itself and out again.

He pulled a comb from his hair, fashioned in the days before Kagu-tsuchi from pieces of the tortoise-floor, days Izanagi recalled as happy, when Izanami was quiet and fat with islands. He fumbled in the black with the curl of his son’s hair, and