Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,50

last fountain-washing. Her limbs creak slightly as though she were truly made of gold, a molten statue-woman walking far from her pedestal. She is pure now, in her lionbody and named, and her flesh is liquid light where the sun strikes her, striding like a flame-deva down the Road which is sullen, ashen, carrying Direction inside her, so that she faces herself on all sides. The Monkey clambers up her smooth back and takes his place on her glittering shoulder.

Is it indulgent, perhaps, to take a moment to admire them, their pairing, their shapes against the tooth-white sky, the comfortable lie of his tail around her fleur-de-lis neck, the confident rhythm of her bare feet, the precise matching shades of her skin and his pelt? Is it a distraction to give them this last tableau, this last snapshot under a spring morning, under a willow tree with her eyes laughing?

Let it be. We must make allowances.

CANTO

THE FOURTH

32

Forward.

I move forward. There is comfort in my feet, pads thick as rain-boots. I woke up, after all, with the Monkey murmuring over my head. The Wall smells of ambergris and its flowers are weighted like suicides. Hunting the old emerald self, dingy facets of a forgotten sapphire elbow or garnet knee, merrily we go along hunting the sloughed shells of me on this corpulent Road, we highwaymen looking to rob ourselves. Once perhaps I was a streak of charcoal painting the Road like a cannibal, but I could not say. My mind is a laundry line, flapping white wings as a rinsed sky, drops on a tin washboard. (But are there welts on my back, measured kisses of the rack? Oh, yes.)

Here we go round, here we go round and what do I expect from the svelte malarial dawn but another suspense of hours? There is comfort in a tail around one’s neck, I suppose. I walk looking down, trying to see what the Grasshopper saw, the prim insects that once were Walls. Trying to see the next step on the Path, trying to see where in these muddy tracks the spider-leg pinpricks twist, trying to divine subsequence as though it were water. (It is as though a thing has been taken from me, now that I am named, now that I am gold. I slip, I cannot hold a thought.

But I am not concerned. The sun shines through me like a sieve, I cannot hold the ragged tuxedo tails of my dream, I slide easily along the Path, a little chipped-paint boat. I cannot think, I can hardly feel my body, the only weight being the fat rose-green Compass resting as solidly as a breadloaf in my spacious belly. I am made of air, suddenly, constructed of my own breath. Because of a name which somehow takes as it is given? Because of a border, a limit, a Wall which walks with me, cradling close.

Call me by name and inchoate I will sidle up to your princely thigh, call me by name and be made an alms-cup, be made mendicant on my Temple steps, be beggared and crippled because I cannot be a word, only a word, a tongue-curl which is me, a flick of lip, a syllable or two, certainly not three, and is this me after all, chained to the sea floor by a creeping sound, vermin of aural combinations? It is not so pretty a madness when it is named, then it is a patient, wrapped in white and pinned to a butterfly board. Then it does not blaze or consume and I am not, I am named and still as Stone, it is not what I wanted, what I came for, no, not what the contract stated, but I will take it with grace—)

“Do you smell it?” The Monkey sniffs the air, alert and aroused, face banging into the air like a hickory switch. “I smell the chlorinated honey-grim, I smell the hominy and loam. Hoo! It is the End.”

I looked where he did, and saw nothing but the linear Wall stretching like a cat’s claw, and the tallow of the horizon.

“It is an empty day, Monkey. It is a day for walking. I do not think we will find anything. It is a day for Skimming Over, cream from milk.”

The Monkey bit his lip and ventured a resigned little chuckle.

“If you like. But I can smell sap and plum sauce. We are Nearing.”

“Oh, stop,” I sighed, “Can you not speak to me outside of riddle-realm?”

“Should I speak