The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [15]
I crawled up into my mother’s lap and laid my thin chest between her breasts as we waited for our turn. I felt her lashes on my shoulders; the wind beat at us with both fists, the ropes swinging wildly below. Finally, hand over hand, our red skirts snapping against our legs, we balanced on the thinnest of rock-spindles, our toes sliding off the shale into the ether, and we crossed to the well, to the Fountain.
Apples grew there, withered and brown, branches tangled in the masonry of the well. The stone snarled like ugly, purpled roots chewing their way out of the ground to make a vaguely well-shaped hole. I thought it looked like the mountain’s mouth, sneering at me, grimace-twisted. The apples slowly swelled as I watched them, thickening red and fat and glossy, huge as hearts, even budding a glisten of dew. Then they shriveled again, extinguished, sallow and past cider-making. As I ran my fingers over their soft, rotten faces, they began to rouse once more, billowing up hard and scarlet. They stuck through the cracks of the well like tongues. Ctiste ignored them and knelt by the well where the Oinokha sat, a woman in scarlet wool with a swan’s head undulating out from her thin and narrow shoulders, her feathers buffeted by the winds.
The Oinokha pulled me forward and fixed my hands to the twisted blue-violet stone of the well. I looked within—and the roots of the mountain twisted in the pool like jealous fingers, still and sharp and violet-grey, pulling the water away from a thirsty wind. The Fountain was a low puddle in a sulking, recalcitrant cistern opened up in the crags by a hand I could not imagine. The water oozed thick and oily, globbed with algae and the eggs of improbable mayflies, one corner wriggling with unseen tadpoles. It glowered, bracken-green with tracks of brown streaked through it, unmoving, putrid, a slick skin of frothy detritus over water which had sat motionless for all time at the bottom of a dank hole.
I had imagined the water would be so clear, clear and clean as a gem. I thought it would be so sweet.
The Oinokha put her hand over mine, the palest hand I have ever seen, as white as if it had been frozen, and her blood turned to frost. Her fingernails shone black.
“Somewhere very far away,” she said, her voice playing underneath the wind like a violin bow caught up in a sand-dervish, “a mountain rises out of a long, wide plain and an ocean of olive trees. Clouds as white as my thumb cover its peak. On top of this mountain lives a crone in a pale dress that falls around her body in crisp folds, like marble cut into the shape of a woman. She lives alone among eleven broken columns, and her eyes shine so clear and grey, grey as the tip of her spear, grey as the feathers of the owl that lives in the place where her neck curves into her shoulder, his broad, breathless cheek against hers, talons always gentle on her collarbone. I know her—she likes her olives a little under-ripe, so that they slide hard and oily beneath her tongue. There are people who call this mountain Olympos, but they do not guess that mountains have roots like trees, and the purple stone of Olympos reaches under the earth to join with the gnarled, senescent root-system of volcano and sea-drowned range, foothill and impossible cliff. Under everything, they knot and wind, whispering as old folk will do, chewing darkness like mint-leaf and grumbling about the state of the world. Olympos is far away, my child, but she splays out here, like an oak whose smallest root humps up a mile from any acorn. Sometimes, when I press my head to the stone, I can hear the crone and her owl spitting olive pits at little laughing rills.”
The Oinokha gripped the roots with her strong, pale hands, and bent her head into the well. I could not breathe—I had never seen a meta-collinarum before, the swan-maidens who stayed so private and silent when, rarely, so rarely, they graced Shirshya with their swaying steps. Her feathers puffed and separated in the wind as she pecked at the apple-leaves