Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,25

to frighten her. Walk carefully, little sister, I have seen birds about,” he warned. The Grasshopper flushed pale.

“Well enough, then. Goodbye, redwoman. Look down as you go, you will see more that way. Downdowndown.”

She scurried away in a jitter of opalescence.

17

The night swells up with visions, its regular chore.

Oh, golden Monkey, darlinggold, Companion though I would have none, can you see it? Walk beside me and guard me against the marauding Doors, (and say what you will, I shall not be caught) but can you see? The gold-skinned camels sluicing through the snow-crusted Road, their breath like pale puffing mushrooms in the grey air? Utterly confounded by the cold softness of this not-quite-sand, stamping in bewilderment and fear. Mercurial rivulets trickle from their wide footprints, and their muzzles crust over with a multitude of icicles. I can see, I can see them marching upwards, over the pass, packed with Bedouin blankets and tassels, humps swollen as for the first time they know water-plenty. Their trembling cries like blown glass, trying to be brave in the midst of all this terrifying whiteness. Poor animal, nothing is clear any longer, nowhere is home with beautiful gleaming dunes and a sky like liquefied diamonds. The heat that was your mother has fled and the idea of winter is slowly birthing Revelations of Ice in your chambered heart. The mirrored glacier is playing midwife to a shivering Apocrypha of Snow, written on your long scroll-tongue.

Is it a (vision), is it hereandnow? I could not say, I could not say. The men trudging beside their great woolly beasts, carrying woven leather leads covered in an elaborate wind chime of icicles. But in their left hands they hold a strange burden. Blue fingers drag in the snow, bruise the Road, covered in agate rings and hieroglyphics. Eyes show all whites, shimmering in perfection and exaltation, insensate and exalted, hecatombs rising in their lashes. They are carried by the rag-wrapped men, whose hands wrap tightly around the handles that protrude from bowed backs, black handles of painted glass, fused with flesh. Sublimity crackles in the places where slickness joins skin, that precious desert-mothered silicate sand scalded into clarity of form. Oh, where, where are they going?

They are women, women converted into carryon luggage, their curved handles as lovely as their curved hips, such symmetry and style, these ascended seraphs scrawled all from brow to womb with the Scripture of Hoar Frost, lifted to the frozen peaks to deliver their in-spired, in-breathed, in-gested prose, each in a separate language. The First in Romanian, the Second in Portuguese, the Third in Breton, the Fourth in Phoenician, the Fifth in Zulu, the Sixth in Maori, and the Seventh in English, the savage English of fire-tipped arrows and impenetrable forests. Will I find that I can speak that fire-English, that I can bear to hold it in my mouth?

The women are still bent, their noses brushing soft snow, voices swallowed by the mountain and the earth, words diving and arcing in the ground, wrapping the root of every tree in their rhythm? The camels leaping from the sharp heights into searing wind to carry the verses into the dark earth, loyal beasts carrying their burden to journey’s end? Every glade and meadow that ever grows will speak with azure tongues in seven languages. Will I hear it? Will we be fortunate enough to come across the fields of violets and lingonberries that whisper of the Seventh Verse? Or will it be the yucca and agave of the Fifth, and lost to the shell of our ears that was formed only for the last and most subtle lines? Is this my Gospel, my false prophecy, the Myth of the Carried Women?

I must Walk By. Believe if I can that it was only the wind in your fur. Believe that it is only the madness coming on, a smattering of random and meaningless images firing in my brain, fading into un-reality and darkness. But how can I when I feel the oily leather of a handle breaking the skin rising from my back like the curve of a whale in the sea?

Can you see? Can you hear?

The Monkey’s fletched eyes wrinkled nervously, flicking back and forth from my blood-skin to the empty Road. They, of course, are gone, and my flesh is whole. I cannot see where I am going, night waves like a rice field, the Road is a pavilion of ash. I am grateful for his dry, leathery palm in mine,