Myths of Origin (28 page)

“Why do you weep?” I said softly, with infinite grace, putting my hands, knuckles raw and new, to the poor couple’s heads.

“It is our daughter, Storm-King,” the man said bitterly. “Kushinada, whose hair was dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, whose skin was pale as new-sewn silk! She was our only happiness—one by one, our daughters have disappeared into the air, but she, at least, was left to us, fair enough to marry an Emperor, if she cast her eyes to his throne! But she would not look so high, for our girl was humble as a mound of straw, and asked for no more than to cook simple rice-mash, and fish-eye soup, and serve weak tea to her poor parents.”

“And where has this marvelous daughter gone?”

“Gone? She would not
go
,” said the mother indignantly, “she was meek, meek as a deer startled by the moon’s weight on a maple leaf. She was
taken
, taken from us by a beast with eight heads—it will swallow her as it swallowed our seven daughters before, and now we will never see our Kushinada more.”

I considered this. Maidens are prone to kidnapping, and the loss of theirs was no more or less tragic than the scores of sailors whose brains I had dashed out on the brine-pink reefs—but Kushinada seemed to me worthy enough, and to kill a thing is always pleasant work. My sister never understood that, but destruction is a peculiar skill, and I longed to practice it, to know if its flavor was different in the skin of a man.

“If you wish, I will go after this beast, and bring the maid Kushinada back to this very river, to make your rice-mash, and your eye-soup, and pour your weak tea for all her days.”

The ancient couple fell again upon their faces and wept.

“We dared not pray for such an honor as this! Surely nothing can stand where the Tide-Lord rises! We cannot pile up the jewels a god deserves, or weave for him a robe fit to be worn at the throne of his sister, the Queen of Heaven!”

The woman wrung her robe between her hands and spoke through teeth yellowed and grinding. It was then that she baited the trap they had cleverly set with their fine words and high praise for the virtues of the missing girl.

“Bring her back to us and we will give her to you to wife—she is the best of all women. Her limbs are young and will please you; she will make your rice-mash and serve your tea, and smile only when you permit it.”

I laughed, but that gurgling belly seethed at my sister’s name. This body could not turn from such bait, even when the teeth of the trap were plain.

“Tell me what sort of beast it was and I will disappear it, I will pass over it like a cloud and it will be no more. In your virtue, you called me by name, and I will repay it.”

The wife looked at her husband and shook her silvering head. “It was a serpent—but it was not a serpent. Its heads were terrible, and each different. The husband of our other daughter said that he could not keep his eyes on it; they slid off of its skin as though he were staring into the sun. It seemed to be plumed in fire, yet its body was wet and slick as a worm’s, mottled green and brown, with patches of blue, patches of black, patches of gold, patches of slime and flame. Its eyes were red, sixteen pupils like black chrysanthemums, and it had a tail for each head, thick as a woman’s waist. Its body muscled and knotted in the center, with its mass of heads and tails spreading out before and behind like a doubled fan. On its back grows a strange snarl of trees and grasses, and some say there are eyes along its spine, blinking. Yet it does not slither on the ground like a snake, but has legs like a bird—save that there are four—gnarled with muscle, green as bile. It drags itself along the ground by these legs, and from its belly a great font of blood flows, and stains the land.”

I bowed only slightly—in acceptance, not deference, you understand. I thought nothing of the beast itself, only wondered vaguely if that blood would be warm or cool flowing over my wrists.

They fussed over me, insisted on piling my hands with rice-balls—the last of Kushinada’s excellent cooking—and draping me with their own rough robes. They tied sandals onto my feet and belted my slim waist tightly. Only when I was thoroughly uncomfortable did they let me go, directing me southward, into a range of mountains lying on the earth like a severed jaw, its jagged teeth sawing the sky, crusted over with ice. Beyond Mt. Hiba, they said, the beast snorted and feasted its nights into day. Beyond Mt. Hiba, Kushinada lay naked on a stone table, her sweet skin ready to be carved into meat for each of the eight slavering heads.

And so I went out from that first river, that first knot of grass.

Behind my heels trailed wisps of grey sea-fog, curling into the summer air like ink dissolving into water.

EIGHT

Call me Monster.

I am exactly as you imagine I will be. Green on black on green on black, whicker-snack in the dark, slapping binary scales—greenblackgreengreengreenblack—against cavern-aurochs, against shaggy reindeer and whizzing arrows and cicadas like wet brown seeds, against walls, always walls, caves within caves upon caves, against granite, basalt, maiden.

I am Eight. We are Eight. Lying on my side, if you prefer the symbolism. Eight heads, eight tails, eight snakes susurring against each other like auto-asphyxiating lovers, joined at the torso—circus grotesque, unseparated octuplets in a jar of formaldehyde, jumbled trunk a snaggletoothed muscle with the brawn of a circus strongman, and all the bells ringing, ringing, ringing in the gloam. Eight-all-together rattle eight diamond heads, heavy and flat, a clutch of serpent-castanets, and oh, the music I-and-we make, music for the maidens, music for the midden we made of our caves, music for the bones, the old rolled bones, rooster bones and buffalo bones and fox bones and tigress bones, bones like bellows and bones like cudgels, bones like whistles and bones like pillows.

Oh, the music, oh, the bed of bones.

I eat light, vomit scripture. Eat maiden; retch hymn. Eat hero; hawk meadhall. The natural reptilian digestion is alchemical: eight chambered stomachs bubbling like beakers, intestines looping between, above and below, logos-calligraphy whispering recipes between celestial spheres swollen with bile and flesh. Our body is proto-Ptolemaic, constructed all of hoops and circles, perfect circles, without beginning or end—mouth, eye, neck-elongate, poison-sac, egg. We swim in ourselves, we chew our tails, we exude diamond-slime and drink it from puddles in the pocked cavefloor, our every process is filthy with beatitude, we are exalted by excrement, transfigured by mucus-mandala. We have to eat, after all.

You will, no doubt, see us and cry:
It is a snake, and horrible to see
.

This is because your processes are redundant, revolting—eat maiden; shit sludge.

But we are witch-doctors, we are medicine, and all around us the maidens waver like ghosts chained to a lakefloor, coronal, illuminate, perfected into daughters of my flesh (greenblackgreengreenblack) breech-angled, nestled in the sandy soil of our tapering body. We carry them like daughters-strapped-to-the-back, we drag them along like sacks of corn, corn-women, gone down into darkness and up again, down again and up again, and there is no asphodel like the cilia of our viscera, there is no pomegranate like our colossal heart, sixteen-chambered, ventricles lines in white fiber, seeded in bloody rubies, slowly erupting, slowly retreating.

That there were eight of them you might call providential, if you believe in that sort of thing-but I don’t imagine you do. What use is providence to a god? Of course, tradition demands seven only, seven brides for seven brothers, seven maids for seven monsters. But Kushinada, Kushinada, she was the false Pleiad, the Eighth, and her hair was so black. I am not ashamed—her sisters cried out for her in their cradles of snakemeat, the Eight-all-together ululated in our stony crèche, we all beat the earth with our bodies and ate up her name in her absence: Kushinada, Kushinada!

Family wants family, and I have all these mouths to feed.

Seven-eighths is no good; we want the whole set, perfect little dolls lined up in a row, and how pretty their birthday-obi gleam in the filtered algaelight this cave allows. She sits with her legs crossed on the mound of bones, sits like a student doing sums, and looks up at us, at the wallowing serpent, the slime and sere, the strange sister-shapes moving beneath the un-molt. We make this tableau each morning after breakfast, girl and creature, primate and reptile, evolution in miniature, titans terrible in contemplation of our splendor.

Every evening after tea, she pulls a scale from my throat, great and clear as a shaving from the emerald at the heart of the world, and with delicate lips—pink, so pink!—she nibbles at it, cake-sweet and swarthy with the taste of trees, and swallows with relish. I do not know yet what she can make of me in that strange pale oven of her body—much, I suppose, depends on it, but I-and-we are patient; love makes us so. This is the school of snakes, and she is my best pupil yet.

You recoil, but you can’t deny it’s compelling—this folkloric blueprint, handprint, angel in the snow, and oh, I certainly could not have made such a shape, not with these whips and flails, tongues and tails. You must have done it; any angel of mine would be an oceanic horror, waving its unspeakable heads at a punctured moon. This has arms, legs, an anatomy so simple and profound you cannot even recognize it as a single body: snake, cave, virgin.

It is your prurient nature which makes such things into miasma, it is you who holds up a glass and views her and I, our stainless acts, through the darkly of your clutching, it is you who lie on the grassy floor, redolent with oil and full of someone else’s food, and tell the mustachioed man-god-father that you dream, you dream of the great eight-headed phallus looming over—is she smiling or screaming?—a schoolgirl in her best dress.

You dream of the cave’s moss-veiled crevice, and the girl vanishing into it, and the snake vanishing into her, around and around and around, and you do not know why it reminds you of your mother.

Look at your angel in the ice, arms fanned out like spying stares.

It has your stink all over it.

I
HOKI

Walking is unpleasant. The muscles of my calves bunch new and raw like
fundoshi
, and my toes are flattening with use.

It is undignified.

My throat forces me to stop and soothe it at filthy wells lined in algae as thick as under-robes, but the water only runs out of me again, oily, seeping up through my skin like ink through rice paper.

I have had to piss several times; sour steam rises from the wet grass. The whole business is revolting.

Prefectural monks rub their heads furiously when I pass—they have not heard of the dragon, certainly such a blight would not befall their villages, blessed as they are of the Kami (and if I were in my right state I would haul seven or so typhoons from my left pocket to splash away those smug, simpering smiles—oh how I miss my limbs of thrashing palm trees and splintering camphor!) but they are assuredly grieved that the poor family of Kushinada, whose hair even here they have heard was as dark as ink pooled in the belly of a crow, should be made to suffer so.

Give me rice, brainless holy, and get back to your kneeling—the sun does love to see you scrape. As for me, my stomach will not shut up, and wants fish. It is not used to itself—ridiculous sack of meat which is always too empty for its own liking. I once had innards of pure light, intestines that served only to translate wind to sky. Where did the other body go when I fell from the floor of my sister’s house? Is it caught in the clouds, in the slats of her golden
tatami
, light tangled up in light? I want it back, I want my storm-tongue and my oceanic muscles, unfolding like wings, black on blue on silver—she cannot have it, she has no right to keep it from me and leave me with only this stinking, mewling flesh dripping its slime over the earth like sacraments—why cannot I wring my hands and be rid of it as I would any other putrid mire?

The bitch always stole my things.

Even pride of the eldest—who ever heard of a girl born first? But there it was—she came sliding out of Father’s eye like golden pus, and the pillar of the world was lit up with her, Mother-Below was lit up with her, the sky was lit—everything went up like a torch tossed into a barn, a barn perfectly contented to stay a barn and keep its straw unsinged. Only Father saw her for what she was: a silly girl preening in her shining hair, who would never amount to anything more than a paper lantern.

Then came the moon, sick-silver, oozing from Father’s other eye like a wet and shell-less snail. There he was, our paternity weeping luminate, his face made into a gaping wound . . . my brother sloughing light from one fringe of lashes and my sister bursting from the other divine cornea . . .

What a relief I must have been—the rush of cold water and darkness, the mere and the gloam, the wind drying stray drops of effluvia on his open mouth. Out of his nose I came, and from whence should I have come but the curved nostril, in my sharp air and exhalation—I came up from the crystalline lungs like a waft of smoke and curled from my Father with a grace sun and moon could not begin to imitate.

Or I was sneezed out, snot and phlegm, a waste of leftover junk, a tickle in his nose that had to be expelled, but was never meant to be a child. After all, I am not made of light, like the others. The sky does not want me. What use am I? This is what my sister took pains to tell me every day of our youth among the jewel-islands, Shikoku and Ogi and Tsukusi, Iki and Awazi and great, bulbous Honshu, curved like the edge of a spoon. So my brother told me every evening before bed, with his white sneer gleaming.

Only Mother-Below did not worship their light, did not pile up psalms at their feet like jointed toys. She knew I was the best of them, she knew I was beautiful, too. Mother-Below, Izanami-no-Kami, the Inviting Woman, who did not shame me for having the misfortune of being born from a hairy nostril.