Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,48

for the witch’s oven, ready for the gingerbread hut, ready for the peppermint banisters and butterscotch windowpanes, the cinnamon-gummy rugs and white chocolate stairs. Ready for the black licorice whip oven grill and cotton candy pillows, the pumpkin pie floors and caramel apple chandeliers, the lemon-ice wash basin and the cider bath water. But I’ll wake. And in the end, won’t I make a lovely pie, cinnamon crust with a honey glaze, twenty-four blackbirds baked inside, to lend sugar and mystique to my bones? Won’t that be a dainty dish to set before the King? When I lie souffléd at his bedside and he runs his tongue over my soft grape-flavored centre? Won’t I then be the best dish the witch ever served to his Majesty under a silver dome?

Oh, we are just SALIVATING, darling, positively DRIPPING.

You will see. If I accept, if I do not fight, I will prevail.

(—‘Yea but,’ quoth she, ‘the perill of this place

I better know than you—’)

30

Hoo.

I am watching you sleep, Kore, Darlinggold, watching your eyes flutter like bees’ nests, watching your breath whistle through the grass like a scythe. I am watching your coppery chest riseandfallriseandfall, tidal motion of your stomach concealing and cricket-breathing. I am watching your forehead crease like an envelope, lost in dreams I do not share, but can guess.

Oh, womanchild, I have walked beside you and I have chosen to, not because you were weak and needed my padding footsteps next to yours, but because I heard your voice echoed off the faces of every Wall, and came to you drawn as a furry-feelered moth. I dragged my Temple along the Road to you as though it were a plow, as though I were a black-shouldered ox, and I let you breakfast on its fruit. I let you kill my beautiful, simple-minded chess set because even in your delirium you dazzled above all their cut crystal. I let you go mad in my arms. I have pulled you quietly and surely along the Road, to give you what you desire, because you were bright and new against the mud-brick. Just as Maidens cannot help but eat anything they are offered, Beasts cannot resist the pull of Maidens, irrefutable and fierce. We lumber towards you out of our black corners and dripping dungeons, drawn and caught, even when we know it is so. Oh, especially when we know. And I came to you, you and no other, out of the grey of the Temple.

Soon it will be over, my Kore. Soon there will be a blue Door and a Key you do not think I know you have. We have played this scene so many times. Soon there will be a shaft of light through you like a lance and we will part, because that is also the way of Beasts and Maidens. I know. I accept. I have, after all, set this sequence in motion. But as you sleep I am filled like a pitcher with sorrow, because I love you and do not wish to see the last of your many-colored shapes against the sky. But it is the course of these things, and I will follow the tale I know to be ours.

You shift in your sleep and I know it is because of the Stone, the Stone I carry inside me and thus keep close by you, so that it can do its work and change you one last time. You did not want a sequence, but I have given it to you, you were content, and I have given you pain in a silver bowl, for as I love you it is also my nature to harm you, to torture you, to push you along the Road that passes through me and present you amid fanfare with new twists and snarls, with new bottomless wells and dead ends, with Angels and Hares and Lobsters with colored shells. Without pain, there is no progress. Though you cannot see it now, though I am only the little golden Monkey who nuzzles your face, I am also the Stone and the Inquisitor, the Camels and the Carried Women, the Man and the Bar. I am the Voice that Recites verses inside you, from a place you will never remember. I am even the Road itself. I adore you and I worship the presence of you within me, yet I have borne horrors to you on my back, given them like presents. It is the Way, and I have fulfilled