Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,31

by strand or lock. They stared at each other, the opposing armies, ever at the instant before battle, before the Knight slides on his severed ankle to his appointed square, never truly fighting, shattering, slivering, poised forever on the edgemoment, the timebefore. The weight of their anticipation creased the wind. Ezekiel snarled and spat, noises bubbling up from his throat as from an ancient cauldron, rimmed in leather and studded with iron slugs. He growled under that stream of sound, “Now, now, now, now. We must go. They will take you away from me.” I knelt and held him, as he had held me, stroked his coarse yellow fur into silk, whispered and pressed my waxwet cheek to his shoulder.

“No, I will stay, I will hear. I have to. I stayed for you, Ezekiel, I stayed to hear you. Perhaps everything ought to be spoiled.”

He seemed to calm, the smooth of rippling muscles under alarmed skin, ruffle of bird’s wing ligaments and joints like mouths. He touched my face with something like tenderness, resigned and hopeless. But his flesh only leapt and hardened again when they spoke, fluttering in the wake of that sapphire music, thirty-two voices striking like a dulcimer hammer.

“This is our mind: the quill-hand is the noble, the tooth-hand indolent. The left foot knows the blistered sky, the right foot treads the leavened Road. This is what we see when we look through the glass-that-is-you. Separation and shattering lie like lovers below your fifth vertebrae. The right hand and the left hand fly apart.”

The Monkey’s shrill vibratory words cut through theirs. “You see? They know nothing, they are lunatics. You can learn nothing from headless pieces who can never Play.” He spat like a woman’s curse.

“Oh, my Ezekiel, but I am a lunatic, too.” My face was an ocean, flowing in its own tidal reds, the effusion of tears eroding the shoals of my cheekbones. My mouth hung open, collecting the leaden drops, lips full and loose, gleaming with salt.

“Magus,” came the glissando of the chessboard, “why do you hate us? We do not harm. We do not lie. We could never harm her, of course not, no, never, never.” It was as though the pieces asked and answered themselves, though they spoke in that same fractured unison.

“That name is not mine. It is a lie.” The Monkey smelted his words like a twisted blade. “It is, it is!” They sang gladly, “The falcon told us, with his leather hood, and the desert mice! You are the Magus, with hands like stars, who walks the sacred marshes with crane-feet, who ate his name. He who made us and has come again.”

If they could have danced, they would have made their chessboard into a ballroom. Their glass flesh glistened and flowed over invisible bones like the currents of a hundred rivers. The long calves of the Knights wanted desperately to tremble, the fingers of the Bishops, arched like flying buttresses, lusted for movement.

“What else could it mean, that you bring her with you, excreting Want like sweat, she who will kiss the belly of our Queen, the Seeker-After, the Player?”

“No one brought me. I came on my own feet,” I protested.

“All that matters, humanchild, is that you came. You came and you will make us whole, you will mend what he built, give with both hands what he held back from us. He knows you will, he knows. That’s why he snarls at us, who never hurt him.”

I looked helplessly at the inscrutable Monkey, his eyes like rosary beads, glinting dangerously between the shield-lines of crystal figures, his little copper body like a smoking hookah. I fell between their words, clinging to cliff-phrases, slipping on the algae of predicate nominative, tearing my fingernails to the quick. I could not understand.

“Ignore them, continue on. We must stay on the Path. Forward motion, endless if, but still we must. You know the Door lies behind us. They are foolish.” He was already walking away, leaving me, expecting me to follow—how soon had he come to believe me a loyal child, an acolyte, a modest student with the moon-scalp between her braids illuminating humility! I straightened my scarlet spine and called out to his back, “Are you what they say? Did you make them? Who are you?” I whispered the last. His warm, autumn shoulders slumped, and he spoke to the wind, without turning towards me.

“I am myself and no other. But in the beginning, before the Walls and the Road,