Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,33

time it was the great Queen’s alone, her powerful shoulders squared and assured now of her position, hips flared provocatively, thighs in a feline crouch. “Come, humanchild, come here.” Her tone had grown leaves of command and the language had lost its surreality—she knew now she was royalty. I walked through the forest of erect glass, mirrored in the limbs, a bleed of woman through perfected flesh. They towered, crackling with silence.

I knelt before her, because that is what one does in the presence of Queens. Headless her beauty seemed more annihilating and lightning-edged, full now of new power and surety, knowledge that she was the key piece in the precious Game. Though she had no hands to stroke my face, her voice nevertheless caressed me like a favorite daughter, smoothing my hair and drying my face of tears like blood.

“Darling, it is not so dreadful as that. Oh, my dear, my dear one,” she crooned, as though rocking a sweet-faced princess to sleep after a nightmare. “Look into me, now, into the canvas of my belly, see what you have purchased, yourself and no other. Look deep, downdowndown. It is yours, our sight is yours. Don’t cry, don’t cry, my precious girl.”

I placed my hands on the vase-curved of her waist and stared into the curved mirror of her stomach, the crystal womb within, and a strange fog was there, forming into a scene, projected against her uterine Wall like an amorphous child, slowly sprouting fingers and organs like a night-lily. This is what I saw in the Queen’s womb, with the anointment of oracular sight on my brow as I pressed against the coolness of her skin:

A girl and a boy, sitting lazily cross-legged under a pale green willow, picking at the grass. She is lying with her head in his lap, long red hair fanned against his knee. Her skin is not my unnatural red but like honeyed cream. She grins up at him, his eyes the color of an evergreen forest, of dragonfly wings, his corn-gold, too-long hair falling over his forehead. And she laughs. When she does her back, her throat arches slightly, and he blushes. He smells of wheat fields and fallen autumn apples soft against the earth, and it is a smell she knows like her own. Under the filmy reed-curtain of the old willow tree, they hold hands and talk quietly, shoes discarded like peach pits. The sun is low in the sky, warm and orange-gold on their young faces, their strong white smiles and freshly washed hair. The light spills onto their shoulders like water from a well. There are sharp-smelling rosemary branches braided into her hair, with their little blue blossoms, and the oil is on their brown fingers. The boy whispers something in the girl’s ear, and she closes her eyes, lashes smoking cheekbones like bundles of sage.

They rise from the thick grass. They lean, arm in arm against the tree, that melting sun illuminating their youthful forms, her smallish hips, his long legs all rimmed in summerlight. Just before the image fades into the looking-glass womb again, I can see him tenderly brush a strand of hair from her face, full of uncertain care. And then they are gone. They know nothing of any aftertime, any night in the long line of nights ahead, and they are beautiful, simply. I cry after them, hands and face flush against the crystal-ball belly of the Queen. I choked and sobbed, clawing after the vanished watercolor, trying to hold it to me like a doll.

“There, there,” the Queen murmured. “It is what you came for, after all. To know that you are more than you were. Poor thing. But you must go now, for we are ready to Play at last, and we are terribly excited.” Indeed, she seemed to wriggle in her space.

Stumbling across the Board I blindly sought the edge, and as I passed the last Pawn with his flowing hair, I heard him whisper sorrowfully, “I think you were very beautiful when you were young—”

And then they were lost in a rush of light as a Knight leapt over the row of Pawns and the Game commenced, so swift and violent that a sharp-paged wind was thrown up by the whirring movement of the pieces. I could not even see them, only their phosphor-trails, streaming glasslight behind them as they looped threads of infinite patterns over the Board. Knight to take Bishop, Pawn to become Queen, Rook streaming