Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,163

themselves. I could see no one, only the murk of dun and gray creeping along empty, plantless ways. I rode into the Underworld on the singing angle of my golden sextant, eyes open, charts asplay, and yet, and yet. I suppose I ought to have known. The place wore all the vestments of hell: smoke closed around me, red as eyes—floats of yellow-gold flared and sputtered in the waft, and my feet crushed the moss, and my fingers groped for a gate. But there was no gate, no lock like a gape-mouth slavering for its key. There was no dog—I was quite hoping there would be a dog. I would have liked to scruff it behind the ear and call it a nice pup, a good chap. I would have liked to take dictation, to note down its long tale of service and meals of damned marrow thrice daily. But there was no asphodel, and no moon-eyed wolf. I lay down on a couch of flesh, and there was a discord of music, a silvern jangle that slid over scales as though cut by them. Smoke vomited itself from glass pipes, from ivory lips, from pools of paint like open veins. I fell, I fell so far, and the green fields of Dover frayed into emerald string, into the spines of serpents corkscrewing in the airless sky, slips of tongues like letters snapping through their phonemes. I seemed to see a woman’s face above mine, her black hair drawing its curtains around my jaw, and she put a flute of whalebone into my throat. When she blew, I filled with her white exhalation, fat as bellows, and my navel burst in a spray of star-sputum.

I fell. I fell so far. And the Beast was there at the bottom, a belly as big as the world, banded in nacre, rolling on his back, a beached turtle on black sands.

He did not look at me—of course not. I was a mote in his perfect eye, flashing in the dim, yes, but no more than a flash. His forelegs clutched at the downbreath of Stygian air, mottled green and yellow as cholera—his bunched hindlegs flexed lazily, muscles bulbous-blue. As if in water, his jaws opened and shut, clacking together desultorily, without hunger or malice. At last I saw the pink of his cheeks, his gullet, his marvelous tail slapping heavily on some unguessable floor. A leathery plume sprouted braggart-red from his head, and oh, it was so like the plumes of those poor, ruined dolls winding down their clockwork way, fused to horses, prancing in a jerky sort of grace towards their fossil-frieze.

It was so like the plumes I wore.

Beast! Oh, Beast, when you leave me, I am so lost. I cannot paste the pages of my manuscripts together to make anything like your shape. If you were to look at me—I do not ask for more than a glance!—I would be young again for you, a boy hunting his favorite lizard across the hot stones, pricked over with bright burrs. I would be gray of eye and gold of hair for you, the height of scientific fashion. I would be hotheaded and rash, I would forget the cubic measure, I would forget, even, to note the circumference of your jeweled skull. I would be just your own lagging lord—but what is a Beast without his Huntsman?

Surely we are connected, the Beast and I, surely within that geologic musculature he knows he is mine, my Quarry. Surely his bones know that he is captive, that we are locked together in step and follow—it cannot be that he has ambled on his way and never heard a desperate pant not far—not far at all—behind.

I fell. I fell and he never glanced up, never heard the whistle of my descent, of the air through all my ticking instruments. I only fell, and fell into him, into the globe of his stomach, and the skin, the spotted, spackled, glowing skin, only gave a little before breaking under the needles of graphometers, refractometers, hydrometers, cliometers, galvanometers, and azimuths, all bristling from me like natural defenses, and they tore into him, they opened him up like an egg, and I went down into the swim of his viscous self, I went down through the banded gate, and my face was erased in the acid of him. He saw me then I am sure, I know it. His eye rolled downward to me, expressionless, yes, but he witnessed my