Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,46

My flesh crackled, an orb of dilated copper.

But my eyes are true, still featureless and blank, plates of gold armor set in my face.

“Kore, Kore, my Darlinggold, it is not much further. I see the sun in the sky and its light.” I nodded dumbly, sleep pulling my head earthward, exhaustion creeping with her feline tail, sweat in arcane snail-tracks around my knees, my wrists.

“I am so tired, Ezekiel. You must let me sleep. She would have let me sleep. There is no “I” anymore, the scarlet letter to mark my position on the Map-which-is-not, the “I’s” which cross within the hermetic “X”, not unlike a Compass, under which must be buried something of value; I am only pulled along like a ship on a tether, pulled into port with a shattered hull. Please, let my poor “I” choose sleep without your prodding and gnashing teeth. I must, I must, I cannot . . . ”

I was nearly asleep already, and as I laid my head down on the cool grass I heard him crooning his loving “hoos” like a lullaby.

29

In the dark, the dream-self bleeds.

Dreams of the interior, standing on a rib, balanced on one foot, looking up into an esophagus-sky. Catching as it passes the brief light of a boy with hair like cut wheat—and then it is gone, and I am falling into poison sweat-lodge dreams rubbed with white sage, with buffalo blood, with rattlesnake bile.

And, oh, I am under him again, the Stone with the Inquisitor’s cragandjag face, and he with the rack under me, bending (as though for a shield) my spine into a circle, diameter twice radius, π2, numbers marching like ants up and down my bleached bones, the queen and her thousand daughters perched upon black and white ladders and staircases that smell of opium, velvet slant of plush-lipped opiates, slant, slant, slant, slant of perpendicular bones, the geometry of bruises and burst lips. His marble mouth next to my ear, words like grave worms, like winged insects, like mocking plague rats. The Stone torments me:

Go ahead, Darlinggold, precious. Scream in the sunlight and scream in the moonlight and scream in the starlight and lakelight and cloudlight and fishlight and gooselight and rowanlight and dawn’s rosy fingers, Rosicrucian dawn, Templar aurora, Maltese cross blazing across the sky like the outline of a corpse: In this sign thou shalt conquer . . . To the gold dust of the desert, to the streets of the Maze, feel the cool stucco on your burning back, feel the lick and tickle of the flames while we burn you, burn you, burn you, witch in the Holy Land, cat-woman, you smell like the sage-garden and didn’t we see you dancing naked with the devil in the orange groves last midnight Thursday? Can’t deny, can’t deny, but my did the oranges taste nice, my didn’t their juice taste cold and sweet, my didn’t he make music on that drum, didn’t he make you a percussion/tympani, beat on the copper bellied skin of your back, songs to wake the stones, blow into your bones and out came symphonies?

(—They cannot finde that path, which firste was showne,

But wander too and fro in wayes unknowne—)

How can you deny your possession, your Assassination, with all those jabbering voices in your head, pretty young thing? Aren’t you the devil’s pan-flute, woman? Confess, confess, confess and we will merely strangle you, and the hooded executioner will hide his erection from the crowd, the excitement from seeing your lips burst open like sea amenones, eyes go wide as though in the throes of orgasm, his hands intimate on your lily throat, oh and he’ll turn aside at the last minute so no one will see. Confess and be saved. Or we’ll we’ll hang you from the hawthorn tree, burn you at the stake like venison and eat your pretty limbs at a banquet attended by twelve Kings and no less, twelve Queens to drink your blood from teacups, for I say unto you that the body of a witch mortified and vanquished in the name of God is yea verily as sacred as the body of Christ, and it shall melt on our tongues like unto the very Communion wafer, and we shall feast upon it as on the tender breasts of doves, and suck the holy marrow from her bones. Our hounds will gnaw the severed feet and be blessed in the hunt. the children will suck your knuckles like cherry candy. A burning