Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,142

orange and black, and my feet upon it are light as wort-roots. I am a heart full of foliage—nothing in me is not flower, stamen, thorn, pistil, blossom, blossom, rose. I am a fool, and I am a knight, and my horse is hawthorne and hyssop. I gallop; I canter. They laugh at my silken shoes and sword of campion and rue.

But I see the queen with her girdle of roses—the roses whisper scarlet and white, of where her hips last thrust and blushed, of how her hair whipped linen. I see the best of the knights with his plume of crocus—the crocus murmurs yellow and violet, of how he keeps his eyes open when he kisses her.

I see, I see, and I sing, and snowdrops fall out of my mouth. But I sing of my love and my sweetheart and my kisses full tender—always mine, never theirs—and they think I do not see how their cups flame from the touch of two such burning mouths. But after all, it was a court, it was a starry floor where silk-haired apes danced and wrestled—and such things will happen among apes. Their dance was never a secret, never as high-flown a trespass as lesser poets than I would claim, just so that their verses could scan.

I looked on the queen, too. I marked her honeycomb-hair and her thimble-bright eyes. Like all men my velvets tightened—a fool still owns his blood!—but I sang and sang, and came not near.

Tan-dara-dei.

II.

She came a-walking through the violets

And how did she call to me?

With honeysuckle and meadowsweet and bryony.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

She made a place in the wheat for me

and what did she show me there?

Willow whips and strawberry leaves

and fingers clasped in prayer.

Tan-dara-dei.

There was a girl made of flowers, too—the floor was fertile that year. She came up with her black hair all strung with foxglove, and her toes were ringed in coltsfoot. I loved her, I did, but flower calls to flower. She did not sing; I sang for us both. On each of her berry-brown toes was an ivory bell, and I shook them like lilies-of-the-valley, and with buttercups in her eyelashes she laughed like a thrush. The others played at cards which turned up a king, a queen, with lances leaning in, but we played our fools’ dice, and were troubled by no dour high-born faces.

Come, Dagonet! Give us a song! Come, Dagonet, show us how you fought a dragon with both hands tied and hopping on one foot!

Ah, gentlemen, I am full tired tonight, and the wine is in my head like a copper tub sloshing over.

Come, Dagonet! Show us how the king looks when he wakes too early!

Ah, gentlemen, methinks the king has drunk enough to wake late for a fortnight.

Come, Dagonet! Tell us a tale, anything, anything! The night is dark, the wine is done.

One tale, then. A fool must earn his penny.

Once, gentle lords, and you ladies with your hair in one thousand knots! Once, there was a poor tile-maker, and his hands were red from the dust of terra cotta, from the dust of all those roof-tiles you see along the road, glittering on wattle houses like a fine scarlet cap! This tile-maker wandered across patches of land like the patches on my own cloak, scouring the earth for bits of bone and feather, stone and glass and seeds like hard little jewels, leaves and hide and fine, sifted soil, husks and bark and jewels like hard little seeds. With these motley things he made mosaics that caught the breath of any who saw them and spun that breath into a shower of golden stars. He laid out the crystalline zodiac on floors and ceilings, with planets of bone and gem-scattered orbital tracks creeping across the rafters.

But it was not often that he could truly ply his art, for such things are expensive, as well you know, my lords. More often the noonday sun found him hammering one red tile to another on the roof of a tavern, swatting at bees that thrummed anxiously around his head. And so the man went in his way until a certain palace spat out its foundations on a certain stretch of green sward, and certain men inhabited it as surely as a honeycomb, thrumming anxiously in their way. These men called upon the tile-maker and begged him to create for them such a floor that any who stepped upon it would be possessed totally by its vision, and compelled by its beauty to