The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [87]
The children felt the excitement, but they did not know why anyone was excited. This is an apt summary of all of childhood, I think. One feels, and does not understand. They were getting big—Lamis was such a beauty, her orange eyes like gourd-skin, healthy and bright, and how she loved her books, and how I loved her. Ikram could break a young tree in two with her massive hands and had had pygmy designs tattooed around her biceps. She was so strong I wondered if we ought not to send her away to study with the giants in their gargantuan city, just to give her a challenge. And Houd was Houd, but more himself than ever. He brooded; he would be tall.
One day, when the bronze thing in the ballroom was but half-built, Houd finally managed to dislodge one of the golden apples from the sardian serpent’s mouth, and an ivory fang with it. He whooped with joy, and did a little dance, and the color in his cheeks shot up. The apple dashed against the porphyry courtyard, and he marveled that it contained machinery, a tiny pumping bellow, delicate wheels. The girls pressed in to stare at it, to try to guess at its purpose, before turning to me. They were drifting, and I knew it, wanting to stretch the time between discovery and explanation, stretch it like sap, to prolong the pleasure of the mystery. But the apple eluded them, and they came running to find me as I was having my private luncheon: the song of the green kingfishers in the peach tree that afternoon, when the clouds brushed by one another, and the moon had begun to come up, as it sometimes does on summer days, hanging in the sky all pale and gauzy, like a ghost of itself.
Houd, Who Wanted Me to Be Proud of Him for Breaking the Apple: Butterfly! Look what I have done!
Ikram, Who Wished She Had Been the One to Break It: Don’t be boastful! Anyone could have done it.
Lamis, Who Felt Deep Shame, That a Thing Should Be Broken, and She Had Not Stopped It: Make it better, Butterfly. Make it well.
I told them that to make it well I would have to tell their mother, and she would have to send a messenger to Chandai, where the great goldsmith Gahmuret lives, and he would have to rouse his daughter Gahmureen, who was a finer goldsmith even than he, though the weight of her genius was such that she had to sleep one full year to save up the vigor to create one perfect work. And Gahmureen would have to wash her face, and drink very strong tea with cinnamon in it, and try to forget her dreams, and then sit at her workbench and stare at this thoroughly broken apple until her mind could contain it, all its workings and meanings, and only then would she be able to fix it, but at the price of whatever wonderful invention she might have fashioned that year, if it were not for Houd becoming quite a good shot.
Lamis, Who Was Beginning to Cry: Oh, please, can you not fix it yourself! You know everything!
Ikram, Who Was Beginning to Be Very Cross With Her Brother: See what you did!
Houd, Who Was Beginning to Doubt My Tales: But what is it? What does it do up there in the snake’s mouth?
And perhaps they were finally old enough to know that we live too long. They knew their mother would live forever, and so would they and so would I—and they presumed that meant that we would all live forever as we were then, in the nursery with its thick pillows and red walls, and me right there to explain away every distressing thing, and their mother to rule, and never cease. They believed it because they were happy there—if they had been miserable, they would already have known what the apples are for.
Children, I said to them, my darlingest, do you have ambitions?
Lamis, Who Did Not Know the Word: Did Rastno bring me one?
Ikram, Who Thought of Little Else: I should like to be queen after mother is finished with it.
Houd, Who Thought the Chief Attribute of Ambitions is That They Were Secret, Reluctantly: I should like to be a soldier. But I don’t really