In the Night Garden

BENEATH ME, THE Q UEEN OF THE L OONS WAS WARM. Above me, the night was cold as dead hands, and those hands pulled at me, at my thin nightrobe and my bare, unbound feet. I buried my face in her feathers.

“He doesn’t even speak anymore,” she crooned, and clouds whisked across her beak. “He just sits up there in the frost and stares. I don’t think you can do much, but I have hope. He’s heavy, so if you have to carry him, it’ll be tough going.”

“Did he speak much in the beginning?”

Sekka lowered her dark head. Her webbed feet opened and closed beneath her. “We talked all the way to the top of the mountain. Sweet things and soft things and sighing and whispering, and stories of the dark at the beginning of the world, stories of the eggs at the beginning of the season. Rakko doesn’t listen too well—except when I told him how to be King—but Itto listened, and I didn’t have to tell him any tricks just to get him to stop interrupting me like a fur-brained fool. And after I left him in the cold at the roof of the world, I used to fly back up when the drakes stopped squalling for mates, and then we’d sigh sweetly and whisper softly again, and tell stories about the dark and the eggs. But after a few seasons, I was the only one talking, and nothing about him was sweet or soft anymore. Now he sits on the rocks and there’s nothing but him holding his head together and looking at the black. I haven’t been back since the last girl Majo brought, who gave up after only an hour.”

“I won’t give up,” I whispered, soft and sweet.

I cannot say how long it took to reach the top of the mountain, though it seemed that some number of suns rose and set on my wind-whipped skin. At the peak, though, it was always night, as dark as the belly of a blackbird. And Sekka set me down in that endless murk, on the craggy summit. The summit of a mountain is smaller than you think, and there was hardly enough room for me and Itto—for there he was, knees drawn up to his chest, hands pressing two faces towards each other—to sit side by side. Sekka roosted on a lower rock and waited for me to fail.

“Hello,” I said, for lack of a better word.

The Star said nothing.

“I’ve come to get you down from here, away from here. It’s cold as still blood, and your Sekka wants you.”

The Star said nothing.

Well, she had said he wouldn’t. So I pulled at his limbs and tried to put him over my shoulder—I was skinny, but so was he, and not much larger than I was. I was sure I’d be able to do it. A fox carries a kit in her mouth, doesn’t she? But he was much heavier than he seemed, like a sack of iron slugs, and I could not budge him, no matter how I pushed and pulled.

The Star said nothing.

So I said nothing. I sat and looked where he was looking. It was a long expanse of black, marked with seven stars all in a tight cluster, leaning one against the other. It was very boring.

“I can do a trick; would you like to see?”

The Star said nothing, but his right eyes flickered a little. I gathered a lump of snow from the gray rock of the summit and warmed it in my hands till it became water. I held it out between us, and, leaning over the little pool in my palms, I showed him my fox face with its creamy tufts of fur at the ears, and smart black nose.

He laughed a little, a sound like water trickling off of high stones. “That’s a good trick,” he said, his throats hoarse from cold and silence, and he did speak, just as the otter said, in unison with himself, one voice high and one low.

“I’ve only just learned it,” I confessed, “and now that you’re speaking, won’t you please come off the mountain?”

“There isn’t a good enough trick played by the best of all tricksters to make me do that.” He sighed. “I’m holding vigil, and a vigil doesn’t vanish because one’s toes are frozen blue.”

“Why are you holding vigil?”

“Do you see those seven stars there?” he asked. I did, of course—there was little enough to look at but those glittering specks. “You might say those are my cousins. Of course, you might not.” He coughed and rubbed at his four temples with his fingers. “I came up here because I was afraid. I was afraid to let go of my head, afraid to die, even though I should be dead. I came up here to see if the seven stars in the sky were my cousins, who died so long ago I hardly remember what they looked like, safe home and no worse for death. If they were, if they were safe as rabbits in a hutch, then I wouldn’t be afraid, then I could let go of my head and drift up. This is the roof of the world, and you can almost touch the tiles. I wouldn’t have so far to go.”

He looked at my still-wet hands, just beginning to frost over, and I think if he could have he would have taken them in his. I reached up, as I imagined he wanted me to, I reached up on my toes to touch the sky—and I did touch it, I did; my fingers pressed into the black and oh, it felt like flesh! It felt like skin and a soft, glistening leg or belly behind the skin, and a diamond bone behind that. I could not guess whose skin it might be, but it was warm under my chilled fingertips, so warm. And when I touched it I saw the seven stars as he must have, and they were nothing like stars at all, but just seven troughs dug in the sky, pale as sea-bleached bones.

“They’re graves,” he whispered, “nothing but graves, and their light is nothing but a headstone, and they are not there, not there at all, the sky is a tomb and I cannot die, because I am still so afraid. Where do we go if not here? I am so afraid, and so alone, and all I have ever loved is a pathetic broken raft, and it is all that has ever loved me.”

Itto was weeping then, great hot tears from each of his four eyes, and they froze on his cheeks as they fell.

I crouched on my knees before the Star and took his huge, misshapen head into my hands. I stroked his brittle, snow-crusted hair and pressed my face to his. I said nothing; I crooned like a bird, or how I thought a bird would sound, and I held him for a very long while. I did not know how to get him down, but I supposed that I did, in the end, know how to steal him from himself.

I wrapped my numbed fingers around his wrists and began to pry his hands from his faces. He stiffened and shrunk away. “No!” he gasped. “I can’t!”

“It’s all right,” I said, and I said it over and over. “It’s all right. You’re hurting your Sekka, who loves you like a raft, and would rather see you snug under the forest loam, safe and no worse for death, than alone on a crag feeling sorry for yourself. It’s all right, I’m here, and I know you’re too afraid to do it, but I’ll help you.”

His lips were dry against my arms as I pulled at his hands. “But couldn’t I stay like this, forever, in the freeze?” His doubled voice was plaintive as a child asking for a sweet and a man asking for a sweetheart—but he answered himself. “No, I am tired, so tired, and my arms ache from holding myself to myself.”

“I know a good trick, Itto,” I whispered, “a very good trick.”

He turned his head so that one of his faces could see me, his great dark eyes sweet and soft. I kissed him, very lightly, on each face and his lips under mine were cracked and torn as old paper. It was my first kiss, and my second, and they tasted of snow.

He went slack, and let me pull his hands from his head. I folded them in his lap. He stayed whole for a moment, and then his head opened into two halves, like an iris opening in the sunlight. Black fluid poured out of him, cold and ugly, over my hands and my robe, lumpish, dead stuff which had no scent at all. His body slumped forward onto me, and finally, after I had been soaked in his blood which was not exactly blood, two tiny silver drops of light squeezed out from the center of him, falling onto my hand like tears. I closed my fingers over them.

Sekka turned her head away when she saw my dress spattered black. She sent up a long, low cry, that strange loon-cry that makes the moon weep. She took me again on her back, and though she sang her funeral dirge to every passing cloud for all the days and nights it took to descend from the tiled roof of the world, there was a kind of happiness in it, a relief, sweet and soft in the lowest notes of her song.

And I must have done well, for she told me where the raft was buried just before we landed softly by Majo’s snoring form, her house-pack creaking in time to her grunts and snorts. She woke with a start and saw my fluid-stained dress clinging to my thighs, and nodded as if it was all no more than she expected. And Sekka left us, tottering down the beachhead to the long and lonely pier.

But I did not go to the forest that morning, or the next. I stayed with Majo, and nearly forgot about the plank of wood planted in the earth. I aged slowly, but when I asked, she only shrugged, grunting that each creature lives out its natural term. I learned much—though I was always hopeless with magic. I could no more fashion a charm than a horse could knit its own saddle blanket. My talent was in the hunt and the chase, and in the kill. These things Majo taught me with pleasure, and my skill grew great. I had too much fox in me, she would say sadly over countless night fires. I could perform only fox magic, which was ever the magic of stalking, invisible in the shadows, and the snatching of prey from the air. The truth is that there are many kinds of magic, and her kind, the magic of precisely ground herbs and charms bound at the right phase of the moon, lay in the human half, not the animal. What use a fox’s paws in the lashing of seven-knotted spells? It knows only the magic of hot blood and swift fur—and these are powerful, so powerful they need no little satchel of leaves to help them along. But the fox is not overfond of tools.

“We can be certain,” she would cackle, “that you would have been a most dull and tedious woman. It is the fox that saves you from total idiocy.”

But it was clear that Majo was not the guardian of my destiny. I wanted her to be; I wanted to be a good Witch and carry her cart for her over silver fields and slushing marshes in the early morning light. But I could never accomplish more than a simple tincture or poultice for a slashed ear. In her eyes I saw the truth: We would soon part. She would find a better student, and I would find a life that contained no carts or eager women begging for love spells.

The day we parted she showed no more emotion than the day we met; she was bemused, proud of herself, conspiratorial. She took me walking as we often did, and the sun was crisp as apple skin on my back. It was not long before we reached the edge of a forest, the very forest I had told her Sekka said contained the buried plank. I had forgotten, like the summer forgets the snow. Majo grinned. “You were always an absentminded girl. Try to work on that.”

She tapped my right hand with her finger and I opened it—lying on my palm were the two drops of silver light, shining like tears, which had long ago seeped into my skin and disappeared. I looked up at her, wonder written as plainly on my face as a tattoo. She gripped my hand in her withered old claws and tipped the palm so that the tears fell onto the earth, and then embraced me, I knew for the last time, as a kit always knows when it is time for her to catch mice by herself and not trouble the vixen any longer.

The two tears wet the rust-red soil beneath me, pooling there like rain in a cottage gutter. But they did not seep into the ground as they had once disappeared into my skin—they began to trickle away from me, faster and faster. I held Majo tightly for a moment, tears clouding my last vision of her face like the trunk of a great tree, and then, eyes dry, I chased after them with a cry of excitement.

I looked over my shoulder only once as I ran—and soon I was running as fast as I could go—to see Majo trundling away with her house on her back like some ridiculous turtle, and it seemed to me that there was a kind of light at her heels, silver as the old woman’s hair.

But the twin tracks of salt tears were swiftly disappearing into the distance, and perhaps it was only a trick of the sun. I rushed after them for almost an hour, ducking under bough, leaping over root. It was a marvelous hunt. Finally, they stopped and parted, each streaming around the trunk of an extraordinary tree.

At first, I did not even realize it was a tree. The drops of Itto’s light had grown as they flowed on, until they surrounded it as a knee-deep moat, rippling in the dim light. A tree rose out of that water which was not water, yet it was not a tree, either, but a menagerie of ship-shards, twisted together into the shape of a trunk, of branches, of roots arching into the moat of tears. Prows jutted angrily from the base, masts and keels winding around each other, chasing rudders and booms of colorful wood, ruddy and golden. An enormous oaken forecastle hung from one side of the tree, while smooth wheels spun lazily in the wind on high and low. There were only a few dusky green leaves hanging from the branches; instead, they were hung with lines and rigging, and sails half tangled in the crows’ nests that served as the topmost boughs. Lazy breezes filled them and left them sagging as they liked. The forest was filled with the sound of billowing sails and creaking wood. In the center of the trunk was a figurehead whose paint had been faded by sun and salt: a sea-goat with a curling tail and furry breasts, a wisp of a beard at her chin, her arms braced against the jumble of tree and ship, her large eyes cast heavenward, mouth agape.

The wood of the tree was a deep, glossy red, the grain of it like veins filled with blood.

As I gawked at the spectacle of the Ship-Tree, her eyes rolled slowly down from the sky, like a stone rolling across the mouth of a cave, and her jaw unlocked to speak.

“Is that you?” she said softly, her voice rustling like leaves, or sails.

“No,” I said, “I don’t think it is.”

“Oh.” The tree sighed. “It never is. I’m used to it by now. When I was a sapling I was sure he’d come any day. Is that…is that seawater?” she gasped, her timber-flanked body quivering with surprise. “The real thing? From a port full of drunkards and thieves and shipwrights’ sons? Drawn from a pier full of crab fishermen with nets like giants’ bracelets? Oh, is it?”

“No,” I answered, “it’s the last thing the Star left behind him: blood which is not blood, light which is not light, water which is not water.”

The masthead’s face became as soft as wood can manage, and tears of sap flowed down her face. She spoke to the moat around her.

“Itto? Itto? Do you see how big and tall I’ve become? I’m a real ship now, not a silly broken raft. Aren’t you proud of me?”

I thought, then, that I had done what I came to do, and that no one who knew the Star could have asked more. I turned to leave the Ship-Tree alone with the tears.

“Oh, please, oh, please wait!” The figurehead writhed towards me, and it seemed at any moment she would twist right off the tree and tumble into my arms. But the Ship-Tree moved with her, and the sound of creaking grew even louder, accompanied by the rusted squeaking of the hanging rigging. I climbed up a little onto a keel-root.

“I’m here.”

She blushed, her red wood becoming even darker and more crimson. “Thank you for the water,” she said.

“I would like to give you something too, even though you never rode me through the dark water—I would have done it for him, but I can still do it for you, I can bear fruit for you, just like all the other trees.”

I was immediately unsure. “What sort of fruit do you have, Ship?”

She smiled, her bright cheeks quivering with barely held tears. “It’s my present to you: the best dream of a lonely raft, everything I ever wanted to be when I slept wrapped in oilskin.”

The Ship-Tree seemed to bulge, and its groans vibrated through the forest. The sails twisted together, the rigging knotted itself into half-hitches and bowlines, the keels and prows clattered together like branches tapping against a window. The figurehead kept laughing, louder and more shrilly until I felt my ears would burst from the sound. The creaking and cracking of wood was like a storm rolling across the wood, and all the while, the moat of tears was spreading and growing deeper, until I was trying desperately to swim as little waves sloshed over my chin. The tree was so large then that I feared it would engulf me entire, if I did not drown first.

But I did neither. From the topmost branches of the Ship-Tree, a thing began to take shape. A prow, a mast, a jib, then a hull, a keel. A bright wheel spun into being like a sunflower opening. A ship, full-grown, descended from the branches like an apple falling, and came to rest comfortably on the now swift-flowing river of tears. The figurehead quieted herself, and drew one of her huge wooden hooves from the side of the trunk, scooping me out of the still-rising water by the scruff of the neck.

“Don’t wreck her too quickly,” the figurehead said worriedly, and set me down at the new ship’s wheel.

When my feet touched the newborn wood of the decks, I felt suddenly at home. It was not a question of which line to pull taut or which sail to trim; the sleek schooner was as familiar to me as my own limbs. The ship was mine, made for my hand as surely as a child of my own womb.

And the river of tears, now deeper than the fruit-ship’s keel, moved gently away from the tree which was once a raft, flowing ahead of itself, carrying me along the forest floor in silence, save for soft ripples against the hull, like a child kissing her mother’s cheek.

And slowly, ever so slowly, it bore me past the edge of the wood, down through ripe fields of wheat, over grass and salt and the huts of the makers of hard, round cheeses, past houses with tiled roofs and the countless grains of sand on a pale beach, past a long, lonely pier and into the sea.