Myths of Origin (36 page)

“Let us have a contest of childbearing,” she said coyly, her golden smile smirking, “and if you should bring forth sons, I will know your intentions are good. But if you should bring forth daughters, I will know you bear me ill—girls are such trouble, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” I chuckled, “I quite agree. The first troubles of all things troubling. Very well, if this is what you require of me, I will gladly give it.”

I moved my palm to her cheek, and tilted her heat-radiating face to mine for a kiss. Was this what I had come for? I could not for certain say no. Her breath smelt of deserts and sweet grasses. I confess it, yes, I confess that for the first time—though hardly first of all things that lusted—my body was moved by a thing which was not grief.

And at the moment that our lips touched, cloud to sun, she broke free of my arms and pulled my sword from its knotted sash. I watched in rain-soaked horror as the bright-belted bitch broke it over her knee in five places—the sound of the shatter was like birds’ wings snapping. Her grin was a cracked yellow gourd and her hands moved so fast, so fast, sweeps of light over the metal. Out of the five pieces she fashioned five strong boys, with limbs of quicksilver and eyes like hilts glinting. Their hair was iron; it hung in clanging choruses around their identical faces. Each was sullen as a sword, and each had my eyes, the line of my nose.

I pushed her back from my boys and snatched the red beads from her neck—a burst of scarlet gushed from her, blood-quick—a thousand stones popping from her throat like seeds from a bean pod. I sneered at her; she laughed at me—this is the way of siblings. From her broken necklace I took five beads and stretched them into five children, red of arm and calf—but no matter how I prodded the jewels, they would not make the angles of sons, only curves and breasts like apples, hair unfolding over their ruby skulls like silk. They looked up at me through five identical sets of long, rosy lashes, and snickered behind their hands, mocking and slattern-red as their dam.

“Daughters!” Ama-Terasu crowed, rooster-preening. “I knew you came to harm—you would never come for any other purpose, crow-brother.” How she loves to be right!

“Daughters, yes,” I said slowly, playing at the craft of an ingenuous smile, “but daughters from your necklace. From my sword, from my body, you see five stalwart boys. They are my issue, these blushing five are yours.”

She seemed to waver, unsure of my explanation, but the alchemy between siblings bubbled already away within her as in me, and I could see that she too wanted a brother, that she never saw the moon, and missed the communion of the waste-children, the children out of the Root-Country. She took me by the hand, up the last of the stair and into the corona of the sun.

Behind us walked five daughters and five sons, beautiful as gallows.

I want it understood that I did not intend, at first, to be anything but a sweet and loyal brother to Ama-Terasu. I helped her to comb the water of her paddies for rice; we laughed together when the storm-clouds around my head flashed blue and gold when splashed by the Speckled River-Trout of Heaven. Our ten children followed behind us through the high plains, and we thought them very fine; we broke the Piebald Colt of Heaven into his saddle, and held hands for the first time with real affection while feeding our dun-colored foal apples and sugar.

She blushed in the morning fog as he nuzzled her palm. I stroked her burning hair.

She poured in the evenings a tea all of light, and kept her blazing orange sleeves carefully out of the steam. I roasted octopus for her when she complained of fever. We were happy, brother and sister in one house.

I was bored beyond dreams of leisure.

She thought the rice harvest too meager, the colt not swift enough in its growth. She sniped at me, she taught her sons to reflect the crackling bolts of my storms with their mirror-limbs, taught her daughters to smile behind their hands when I had gone from them. She denied me her gleaming flesh and would not be moved even a step closer to me than she pleased, though we had all these ridiculous babes at our feet. I could not have drunk another cup of tea without gagging on it, and she retched at the thought of octopus.

She was not Mother. Mother would not try me the way she did, would not willfully thwart my devotion. Mother would not exhaust me to the point of the silly tricks I played, would not spend her nights laughing at me behind her hand, when my desire shivered and snapped between us like a lightning-struck tree.

In her hall of pearl and jasper, laid out in flecks from one side of heaven to the other, I pissed out her whistling tea, I squatted and shat out her awful, starchy rice—the pearl stank and the jasper steamed and I was well pleased. She pretended not to notice. She sent our boys to clean it, and the clang of their iron hands on the lacquer scraped my ears spotless.

I walked through the rice paddies we had planted together, hands in the mud, and hers so bright under the sludge that I thought the sludge was itself gold, and what rice would grow from such soil! With my belt of cirrus flashing black, I kicked through her retaining walls and jumped from terrace to terrace, splashing in the sudden water as paddy flooded into paddy, and the rice—not so different than any other farmer’s rice—spoiled in the blinding light of Takamagahara. At this she did cry out, and sent our boys to shore up the walls again, but their ore-padded knees rusted in the standing wreckage. Her face was wide and twisted, shining in terrace after ruined terrace. I laughed—the Rice of Heaven was not even good for wine.

But she did nothing to me, she knelt and poured the tea that evening as though nothing had happened, as though she had Mother’s patience, and I could not see her stomach flaring through her robes, and her hunger. Yellow-faced fool, she could not touch Mother’s patience with the longest of her beams.

Sometimes I feel as though there is something else living within me, a smoke-mouthed and sneer-eyed creature which is me-but-not-me, and I cannot speak to it, but it drives me, drives me after dragons and Mothers and causes me, in its salt-in-wound morbidity, to push further than even I would have if it did not sit like a crow on my spleen, cinching in my guts with its claws. And so I think it was this thing which saw the Piebald Colt of Heaven prancing it its bronze pen, which saw the colt and hopped, horribly, from one black foot to the other.

It must have been this thing in me which opened the pen and put out its hand for the colt to nose, which brought an apple and a lump of sugar and murmured to the beast as it chewed the sweet, wet meat. It could not have been I who stroked its blond mane, called him a good beast, and a kind beast, and put a nose to his. It, and not I, must have felt his hot breath on its cheeks and heard the soft snort as it cut into his flesh, peeling that gold pelt from the muscle, all in one apple-swift strip. I could not have watched the blood of the Piebald Colt of Heaven seep into the celestial plain, the creature I had raised with my sister, had called gentle, and lovely, and ours.

Perhaps it was this thing which had had statues made of it, which stomped snakes with clay soles.

It could not have been I who threw it into the chambers of Ama-Terasu, who laughed at the sodden slap of the carcass on her polished floor, at the high, flute-pale screams of our daughters as they leapt from their sewing, red hair flying, red eyes flashing.

It must have been the storm-seed inside me, for I could never do those things to such a woman as the sun became.

SEVENTH HEAD

I am dragging blood behind me like menses—the grass is full of it, clotted with it, hungry for it, and I pick myself up over the hillocks and dells with a belly bloody and inflamed, a mass of maidenheads burst and gaping
*we sit on the floor of the monster like a blister of blood, heavy and black, and we seep through, we seep through, and stamp our wet wombprints on the path from what was once our house to what is now our nest*
I did not mean for this to happen
*did you think you could eat a thing and not become it? We always knew, we who have eaten the soup of eyes every day from birth; what is there we have not seen between the eight of us?*
Kaori, Kaori, it hurts
*yes, it always hurts, we knew that, too, but blood is blood, blood is a portent, and you are beautiful when you bleed, when you bleed for us, and with us, and in us, and around us*

I was so weak when I came to you, Kaori, so weak with the blood bellowing out of me
*and your back, your poor back. None of the rest of them saw you as I did, your jeweled skin cracked open, your stomach ruined. No seduction there, only a monster, and terrible
* I could not even cry, the sounds which came out of me were a cacophony, all those voices, all that screeching, I could not hide for the blood and the vomit of voices
*It didn’t matter anyway, there were only two of us left, and mother would let neither of us go to the man who was neither well nor sick. His face was moon-blanched when morning found it, his voice gone with my sisters, and he was turned out of our house like a dog, but there was nothing left of him to whip, nothing left but food for other dogs*
There are roots in my vertebrae, twisting and gobbling bone, and I am become the Root-Country, I am Ne no Kuni, all these throats stoppered up with women, women lodged in them like corks and the pain, the pain
*I hung behind my mother’s skirts, too young even to look him in the face, and whispered to her that I felt so sorry for him. It was not his fault the snake had taken all his wives, and why should I not have my chance as his wife, when all the others had? I could be a good wife, I told her, I know how to make the soup, I know how to arrange the grass on the floor—why should I not be allowed to wear the rich, thick kimono my sisters had worn?*
Kaori, the blood, where does it come from?
*I was a silly girl, but pity sat in me like a fat baby.*
Something is growing from my shoulder blades, I cannot see it, I cannot see it, but it is there, and its roots seize my eight livers, and its thirst, its thirst—

*It didn’t matter, in the end. The man who was neither alive nor dead cut his belly open on our stoop before the day was out. He had seen the snake too many times, I suppose. Mother sighed and sat heavily against the house—I was safe. Kushinada was safe. She had two daughters left to her, and the snake would not come, she thought, now that the offending husband was a cairn of meat on our steps.*
It was not him, it was never him, but the blood, the blood sang for you, Kaori, it throbbed hot and thick, and called your name: Ka-o-ri!
*I sat out in front of our little house that night, that warm night, and looked at the stain his suicide had made on the stones. It was such a sad little mark.*

They are sticking out of me like pins, and I can smell them, yes, the trees, all their trees, plum and cherry and dogwood and waist-high reeds persimmon and even the eyes, Kyoko’s eyes, they blink on the shell of my back, among the trees, and the trees split me open, they witness my second birth, no longer snake but woman
*And my trees, the orange trees of Kaori, white as paroxysms, which saw my birth in the garden, my hardly-marked birth, seventh among daughters, my mother’s womb barely felt me leave it, so oiled and hinged by other births was the poor, wrung-dry thing*
yes, yours too, and the fruit is heavy, round as suns, so heavy and I can hardly drag myself among the hills, down to the city, and I know the fruits have no sugar to give, only more blood, more blood, and they will burst and wet the roots again, and they will grow taller and it will go on and on
* but she gave me the meat of the orange to suck, her breasts gone dry with too much milking, and I was calmed by the sweetness of it, the stinging gold of summer, and she sang to me as I nursed the thready fruit, my eyes sliding shut in her arms.*

I slid through the empty streets after a virgin like an opium-eater after a den. *
I wondered, I remember, I wondered if you would come anyway
* and I saw you sitting as though you expected me, and the blood was so thick on the alleys and I moaned and all these voices came out of me, you turned as though you knew them
*I knew the voice of Kazuyo, and Kameko, and Kiyomi, and Kyoko, and Kaya, and little Koto, I knew them like my own, and standing on the mark of their dead husband I saw the terrible thing that had eaten them, with their love pouring out of its mouths*
I tried to say ‘come to me,’ and it came out ‘sister, wife, be our sister, be our wife.’
* and I knew them for what they were, and I saw the saplings on your poor back, and I knew them for the birth-wardens of my family, and I would not be left out, I would not be left behind, they wanted me, and I ran to you*
you ran to me, and your hair flew like veins behind you
*I ran to you with open arms, and you were so weak*
I could not eat, though the Mouth churned in itself, demanded you, throbbed your name in the midst of all that blood: Ka-o-ri!
*you could not take me; I opened your seventh head myself, and the air from within you smelled of orange blossoms, I patted your head, your blistered, root-ridden, suffering head*
and you stepped inside me with all the trust of a lost child who sees the end of the wood
*and darkness closed around me, but not silence, never silence.*

It took all night to stumble out of the village, my belly so bloodied it might have been a heart, but we were safe, all of us, beyond the blue ridges by the time the sun rose
*They married me to him anyway, of course. It was felt that propriety demanded a final marriage for both lost souls—I had said I wanted him, had I not? And he so fond of our family. He should not go down into Ne no Kuni alone.*
We watched, our heads resting thoughtfully on a boulder, as the ghost-wedding proceeded through the village, and a priest said words over empty space, and a feast was eaten while weeping, and an empty bed laid out, clean and white, for the weight of ghosts to rest upon.

*I laughed, and the orange trees on my*
our
*back shook, to see my*
our
*sepulchral maidenhead vanish into the cloth*