Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,156

in that rancid cream-voice, putting no more than a hand on your shoulder and urging you to be more careful (oh, brother, we do tilt at every living thing, don’t we? Is there a tree, a sapling in all the world that is safe from us?) and eating a little bread at your side. I wanted to be back at my tower, at my red woman, at my beans and my lettuce—already I had forgotten the lost daughter.

I wish then I had told you to stay in the valley where the pumpkins grow like little suns, where the orange trees groan with their measure of sugared gold. It was better for you there—you should never have come to the isles, to the mist and the cedars that hide countless towers, that hide countless cursed women, that hide legions of barge-fostered daughters.

You could always take me, brother, twin, my double. I believed in the Red, I believed she loved me. I believed she loved the way her hair could wend around my arm. I believed her hair covered me when I went out to meet any other man, that it arced over my head like a wedding canopy, and that I was safe. I carried my shield with her limbs emblazoned on it, woman rampant, and I believed in the tower, and the dwarves, and the beans and the lettuce.

It is not so incredible, I suppose, that our blood should mix in the dry grass, that we should be clasped, hand to hand as if in prayer, one body again, as we began. Your wound is not so great as mine. (Is it strange to think a wound is like a mouth, to wish it would speak, explain itself, ask forgiveness for its redness?) But your wound is lower, and the seep is darker. Our little pieta, so full of stigmata that there is nothing left but holes, and we fall out of ourselves. Who holds who? Who is the winner? After all this, I still want to beat you once, little brother—yes, little. Do you forget I was born first? Seven minutes, seven minutes before you. I had seven minutes alone with our mother before you came ripping your way free of her.

If I die first, will that even the score?

Balin

It isn’t supposed to be like this. Women are supposed to hold us, and give succor, and dry our tears with their veils. How can I give succor to you? How can a pieta stand, when both figures are shivering with blood loss and shock? This isn’t the tableau I was meant for, trying to help you into death as if it were as simple as opening a door or throwing a coat over a puddle, trying not to embarrass myself by dying first. Pellam would turn up his nose at this wreck of a death scene—the old man always had a fetish for protocol, for the mos maiorum, for good manners in all things—and we are dying in a terribly rude fashion, are we not?

His palace was the height of fashion, Cinderella-spired and Alhambra-fountained, chandeliers from Waterford and spiral banisters carved from solid California oak. It bordered the land where the mist and hulking trees change a man to a beast, the Otherland where quests always seem to lead—the rear walls of the place dropped off with a sickening shear, falling into fog and forest. I was brought in—if you could have tasted the feast, Balan! Of course he had the best—the workers in his fields live on rinds and dimes, but he supped on roasted dove and deer, corn and plum-wine and peaches, carrot soup, strawberries, oranges, potatoes like russet fists, new cream and mint leaves and wild thyme, brandy and port and chocolate dark as the devil’s throat. There is nothing that does not grow or breed in that perfect valley, the San Joaquin, heaven’s heart. Pellam’s table shuddered under the weight of it. And the apples! How can I have forgotten the apples? Pyramids of red and yellow, crowned, each, with a bright green fruit, simmering at the summit like the lamp of a lighthouse.

He began as ritual would have it—as though he would let a chance for ritual slip by! The impeccably dressed (powder blue accented with cobalt) monarch rose at the head of the cherrywood table and recited the litany of begats which charted the genetic drift between himself and the Christ child, tectonic plates buoying continents of paternity, a tree so complex and