The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [41]
In his despair, Astolfo did not agree with my generous assessment of the virtue of Queen Abir.
“She was a despot. A tyrant. What right had she to give over our lives to chance?”
“Everyone agreed to it. They voted, with tiny carbuncles for their chits, and into a black basin and a clear one they plinked their stones. You know this. In the end the black basin was empty save one speck of ruby, and the clear basin was full.” I let the heaviness of my breasts fall against his shoulder, and blinked my eyelashes there, against his skin, the tiniest of kisses. I believe we both thought on that solitary red gem glinting in a dark bowl at that moment. We did not need to say it; we knew whose stone it had been.
“It’s not fair. I wasn’t born yet. I had no say.” He frowned more deeply, the massive line of his jaw setting into a full grimace. He had no trouble speaking with his mouth full of ink—like pelicans, an amyctrya’s throat is deep and two-chambered.
“But if not for the Abir, we would not have each other, Asto,” said I, for I was young, and I was in love, and we all say foolish things when the world seems well-ordered. But he relaxed in my arms. I settled into our long bed, and absently he stroked the soft place where my head is not, his fingers on the rough hoop of bones that do not quite meet, as if our bodies meant to have a head, but simply never got around to it.
“How wicked must men have been,” my husband marveled, his green eyes shadowed, “if this was the remedy?”
I touched the corner of his mouth with my finger and tasted the ink there. Not ready, too tannic, not nearly ready.
“Did you mother ever read The Scarlet Nursery to you, when you were a child?” I whispered. When one lies in bed at such an hour, every word seems a secret.
“Oh, yes,” he smiled, his ink-stained lips shining in the dark. “I haven’t thought about those stories in years. I think I spent most of my youth in love with Imtithal. In my first Abir, I prayed to be matched with a panoti. I wanted to be wrapped up in those ears, and told tales, and kissed by a cold mouth. I could have killed Houd for his cruelty to her.”
I bit him playfully on the hip.
“Think of it, Asto. She lived through the first Abir, when it would have been hardest, most agonizing to endure. When no one knew how to keep from calling out to their former mother in the street or embracing their former husbands at the market. When no one knew how it was done. And she chose to live by the queen’s law, not to return to the snow and her family, to cast her lot with us.” I moved sleepily against my new husband. “We do not think of Imtithal the sherpa, leading pilgrims into the mountain peaks, though we know she lived that way before, or Imtithal the lamplighter, though we know she lived that way after. We love Imtithal the storyteller, and wish she had been our butterfly. But the Lottery chose that for her, chance chose it—and who knows when it may choose a life for us that will lead to glory and love, and tales told over and over by a thousand fires? What if this life holds wonder for you, my love, and you pull blackness over your eyes, down and down until you cannot see it?”
“But the queen cheated,” Astolfo countered. “She wanted Imtithal for a nurse for her children, and that’s what the barrel chose. How could that have been true chance? No, she rigged it, to have her way.”
“You don’t know that,” I sighed. It was an old debate, even then. “Chance is a kind of god, and what ought to be generally comes to pass. We love her now, so she had to be a nurse then, or we wouldn’t be talking about her in our safe, rosy house.” I looked out at the warm, orange-gold moon, hung like a gourd drying in the sky. “And what if the old queen did cheat? It was worth it, if our Butterfly came in the bargain.”
Oh, my memory. I wish you would soften, I wish I could hang a veil over those times and remember only whispering and love in the dark. Instead, my