Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,133

a valley opening up below me like a green lap, and there was a low mist of gold hanging over it, and I cannot but descend into it—I am comically made and even before the plates were fixed to me I walked straight through a river without noticing I was wet.

Yea, I have walked through the valley, and it was the valley of ribbons, swarming everywhere like Eden-exiled serpents, whispering so loud I could hardly hold on to my own, nosing at my feet, at my mouth, at my back. The green valley was choked with them, a paper sea writhing undulate and crisp, slicing characters from each other as easily as scales. I shuddered. Is this where the ribbons are born, this valley of glass grinding against glass, this valley of murmuring directives, of worker-commands without eyes navigating invisible corridors? Is this where they begin, the rustling things, where he found them in the days before he meted them out to us like tickets to a fair? Did he find this place before us all and pass through? What is a king but the source of commands? Am I wrong to remember a brother who let caterpillars sit on his shoulders, as though there was any life before the buzz and hum of Camelot?

There is a sea beyond the ribbons, and they sigh in protest as I walk through the grassy crackle—they cannot find any point of entry. I am my brother’s servant, and I have room for no more in me than him.

The light is dimmer now, the water deep and blue. I have seen octopi sloughing by, bulbous heads nodding like proper gentlemen. There is kelp like meadow grass above me, and what sun might be seen is filtered by dark green leaves, the color of the queen’s sleeves, descending and descending.

Evening, Fifth Day

I do not know why I expected this place to be full, full of people and things—I suppose I imagined it to be the source of all objects, all quests. Surely the things my brother asks for must be piled up under the streetlamps here like old leaves: girdles, women, swords, grails, wrapped around the light-post, wet and clinging.

But there is only warm air, and empty shops and empty tables and empty streets, and I should have known that the underworld would be a ghost town. Stray ribbons snake through the blazing white buildings like tumbleweed, and there is no sound but the distant sea pounding the distant sand.

Why does he want this boy? This boy who sits cross-legged in the blue, his fine hair blown turquoise, his eyes the dead white of deepwater fish? Mabon ap Modron, my ribbon says. But this is nonsense, it means nothing, only words: Son of a Mother. He wants a nameless orphan boy who was born with the sun behind his head, stolen to the sea three days after his birth on the back of a green-foam boar.

We all know the story; it is an easy story to know. What country in the world does not have its virgin birth, its martyred babe, its innocent dragged down to the dark depths? They stamp them out like a sheet of cookies these days, little gingerbread boys, all in a row. Why should I hold my breath for one?

But he is my brother, that hemmed-in king. Still trying not to look into the corners of his rooms where a black-haired woman who is not bolted to any dais touches the cheek of another clean-shaven knight. He is my brother and perhaps after all this time I know him, a little. I forgive him for stepping in front of me, and though I was so much taller, obscuring me forever. He sees the stolen child, the sun in his hair. He sees himself, before the ribbons, before the chair and the plates he fastened to his friends. His mother lost him, or gave him to us, I was never sure, being only a breath older than he when they dumped him like a pile of gold on our stoop.

Once my brother might have come himself, breath or no breath, whickering through the ribbons to make this boy a fabled knight with an epithet and a fellow besides—but that time is over. Once the kingdom is won it descends to us, the dumb, mute limbs of a king to push at its edges like soldiers against an iron gate. So I go after the boy, the doppelganger covered in brine, and