Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,127

trembled beautifully in my arms. I brushed her hair from her face, tenderly and dear.

“You are not alone, Kushinada. I am here, and I have saved you.”

But she kept weeping, soft as a mouse, and shaking her head, whimpering:

“No, no.”

It became tiresome.

I gave her over to the monks to clean and comfort, for a thing had caught my eye. Kushinada—jewel among maidens!—had clung to the serpent’s spine as though it would save her. It gleamed white as a tooth in the slough, the vertebrae knobbled and arched almost in the shape of a sword. I knelt in the sodden grass and pulled the bone from the muscle, ligaments popping and cartilage cracking as it came free. With the blunt and heavy edge of the abbot’s sword I hacked at the length of it until it shone with a terrible edge, and a hilt which as so bright and pale as to seem nearly hewn out of diamond.

I sweated in the deepening twilight, but I was proud of my work. I gave the blade a flourish and with one blow halved the trunks of eight tall weeds sprouting from the serpent’s corpse. Kushinada gave a sharp yelp like a kicked cat, and fell to her knees, tears steaming on her perfect cheeks.

“That is the flesh of my sisters, flesh of my flesh, bone of our body!”

“No,” I answered her, “it is mine, I have made it, it is fine, and I will call it Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi, the Grass-Cutting Sword.”

I brandished the sword again, and put it into the hands of the abbot.

“Take this to the temple of my sister, Ama-Terasu. Give it to her priests and her cawing roosters, and perhaps the old wretch will make white-haired boys out of it this time. And perhaps she will forgive me the Piebald Colt, who was a good beast, after all.”

The abbot nodded and folded up his relic, fading into the city streets, as monks are wont to do.

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