Volume I - Prelude

Once there was a child, whose face was like the new moon shining on cypress trees and the feathers of water-birds. She was a strange child, full of secrets. She would sit alone in the great Palace Gardens on winter nights, pressing her hands into the snow like crisp rice paper and watching it melt under her heat. She wore a crown of garlic-greens and wisteria, she drank from the silver fountains studded with lapis, she ate cold pears under the canopy of pines on rainy afternoons.

Now this child had a strange and wonderful birthmark, in that her eyelids and the flesh around her eyes was stained a deep indigo-black, like china pots filled with ink. It gave her the mysterious, taciturn look of an owl on ivory rafters, or a raccoon drinking from the swift-flowing river. It colored her eyes so that when she was grown she would never have to smoke her eyelashes with kohl.

For this mark she was feared, and from her earliest days, the girl was abandoned to wander the Gardens around the many-towered Palace. Her parents regarded her with trepidation and terror, wondering if her deformity reflected poorly on their virtue. The other nobles firmly believed she was a demon, sent to destroy the glittering court. Their children, who often roamed the Gardens like a flock of wild geese under the autumn moon, kept away from her, lest she curse them with her terrible powers. The Sultan could not decide, and all preferred that she simply remain silent and far away, so that none would have to confront the dilemma.

And so it went like this for many years, until thirteen summers like fat orange roses had sprung up and withered.

But one day another child came near to her, though not too near, pensive as a deer about to bolt into the shadows. His face was like a winter sun, his form like a river-reed. He stood before the girl in her tattered silk  tunic and shabby cloak which had once been white, and touched her eyelids with his sweet-scented forefinger. She found, to her surprise, that she endured his touch, for she was lonely and ever full of sorrow.

"Are you really a spirit? A very wicked spirit? Why are your eyes dark like the lake before the dawn?" The pretty boy-child cocked his head to one side, an  ibis in mid-stream. The girl said nothing.

"I am not afraid of you!" The boy stood his ground but his voice broke hoarsely. The girl continued to stare at him while the willow trees wavered in the east wind. When she spoke her voice was the low hum of cicadas in the far misted hills, buzzing over the water which showed a rippled reflection of the north star. "Why not?"

"I am very brave. One day I will be a great General and wear a scarlet cloak." At this there was almost a smile on the girl's pale lips.

"And you have come to slay the great girl-demon who haunts the Garden?" she whispered throatily.

"Oh, no, I..." The boy spread his hands, feeling suddenly that he had shown very bad form somewhere along the way.

"No one has spoken so many words to me since I saw the winter snows through a warm window draped in furs." The girl stared again, impossibly still. She seemed to leave the boy, though her body remained. All at once, a tiny light stole through her dusky eyes and she seemed to make a decision within herself. "Shall I tell you the truth, then? Tell you my secret? You of all the children who wear ruby rings and smell of olive soap?" Her voice had gone so quiet it was almost without breath.

"I asked, didn’t I? I can keep secrets. My sister says I am very good at it, like the King of the Thieves in the nursery story." There was another long silence, as though midnight had stolen the sun. And the girl began to speak very softly, as if afraid to hear her own voice.

"On an evening when I was a very small child an old woman came to the great silver gate, and twisting her hands among the rose-roots told me this: I was not born with this mark. A spirit came into my cradle on the seventh day of the seventh month of my life, and while my mother slept in her snow-white bed, the spirit touched my face, and left there many tales and spells, like the tattoos of sailors. The verses and songs were so great in number and so closely written that they appeared as one long, unbroken streak of indigo on my eyelids. But they are the words of the river and the marsh, the lake and the delta. They comprise a great magic, and when the tales are all read out, and heard end to shining end, to the last syllable, the spirit will return and judge me. After she vanished into the blue-faced night, I spent each day hidden in a thicket of jasmine and oleander, trying to read what I could in my bronze mirror. But it is difficult, I must read them backwards, and I can only read one eye at a time." She stopped, and the last was no louder than a spider weaving its opaline threads.

"And there is no one to listen."

The boy stared. He looked closely and could see wavering lines in the solid black of her eye-flesh, hints of alphabets and letters he could not imagine. He licked his lips. They were all whispers now, conspirators and thieves. The other children had all gone, and they stood alone under the braided whips of a gnarled willow.

"Tell me? Tell me one of the tales from your eyelids. Please. Just one." He was terrified that she would rebuke him and run like the swift hound which is often beaten. But she only continued to look at him with those strange, dark eyes, like pools in the depths of glittering caverns.

"You are kind to me when no one else will come near. And my tales are all I have to give as thanks. But you must come away from the open Garden, into my hiding place, for I would have no one else know. You would surely be punished, and they would take my mirror and my knife and lock me away to keep the demon spirit from hollowing their fine house."

And so they crept away from the yellow-tinged willow, across the endless rows of roses. They  ducked under an arch of chestnut blossoms suddenly were enveloped in a bower of white petals, the perfume touching them like hands. Red branches had thatched themselves into a kind of low roof, and there was ample room on the soft, compact earth thatched with oleander leaves for them both to sit.

"I will tell you the first tale I was able to read, from the crease of my left eyelid."

The boy sat very still, so as not to disturb his beautiful new discovery, listening like a silk-eared hare deep in the forest.

"Once in a far away there was a restless prince, who was not satisfied by his father's riches, or the beauty of the Palace women, or the diversions of the banquet hall. This prince was called Leander, after the tawny lion that bounds across the steppes like a fearful wind. One night he crept out of the vine-covered walls of the great castle like a hawk on the hunt, to find a quest and silence the gnaw of discontent in his breast..."