Chapter 1: Chance

He found her one leaf-blown night and she was on a rock, looking at her reflection in the black lake near the house. He’d been celebrating his fake birthday party in the big, stone house. She must have been there, must have been clapping with the others when he’d cut his mammoth cake, must have been clapping along with the beat of the thunderstorm of claps, but she must have seen that she couldn’t handle the people and so she ran out.

He didn’t notice her at first—he’d been flirting with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter—but when she went out and the leaf-wind blew her hair and white dress, he knew her at once. He followed her, though going through the crowd for him by that time was like cutting through syrup. He brushed off sticky people with old, gentle politeness and when he stepped into the darkness and peered through the curtain of his own tangling hair he saw her belly-flat on a rock, staring at the drowned version of herself in the lake.

“It’s my birthday party,” he called out. When she shivered but didn’t turn around, he clambered up on the rock and folded himself near her windmilling legs.

She looked up at him then. Her face was moonlight, silver, and blue. Liquid movement shimmered at the corner of her eyes, and a chance drift of air brought a premonition of the sea to his nostrils. “Happy birthday,” she rasped, tilting her head away.

It was to her turned cheek that he said, “I gave birth to my only child on a night like this.” Her legs stopped moving and the intensity of the look she turned on him made his bird’s bones quiver. “Yes,” he continued, “the exact same breed of night. Cold, the wind shrieking like a girl with a stillborn baby. I gave birth in a spider-webbed church, and the dead god was lying beside me with his jaws gaping and red ants crawling in and out. The god was beside me, when the wind blew leaves into his abandoned church and I gave birth to my own little child on his altar.” Wind rippled the lake with twigs.

“Were they small leaves? Like the ones we see now?” she asked, after a while.

“Small-tiny, tinier than these; they were the leaves of the raintree.”

“Was there a nice smell?” Almost shy, she added, “Was it sweet, like the smell of your hair?” She’d dropped her gaze and was concentrating fiercely on a line her finger was tracing on the rock.

He started; surprised, flattered, and confused. He didn’t know the smell of his own hair, had never noticed it. At a loss for the right words (Yes? No?), he said, “It smelled of sap and cobwebs. It smelled like an attic after you’ve opened the rusted window and let the light and fresh air come rolling in from the mountains.” He thought very carefully. “I did catch a whiff of something sweet, very unbearably sweet, but I thought it was just happiness.”

Her head jerked up and turned to the west, where the lake spilled down and the forest grew unchecked and no men made their homes. She stared into pitch darkness, searching for his final word as it drifted away on the wind’s back. “Tell me more. Tell me everything.”

The memory suppurated. He whispered like a man in pain, “It was a night just like this, in a humiliated church that had been desecrated by its own builders. There were bats, resting in the arch of the ceiling. There were statues with smeared faces—and you could imagine what the smears were: could have been blood, could have been shit. It was hard to tell because it all smelled of nothing but dust. And the sweetness that followed me from the outside when I opened the door to come in. Nevertheless, I felt it to be an evil place. Raintrees surrounded the church—old raintrees, already ancient even back when the god was born—and I was frightened of them and the rattling, open door. I was frightened of everything really, of my own blood, of the ants. Most of all, I was frightened of the legless lady, the asuang, for I knew, I just knew, she was hiding in one of the raintree trunks and was burning to take away my baby.” His heart ached.

“No one took away your baby.”

“Yes,” he agreed. He’d never heard his voice sound so weak. “No one.” The silence stretched, then it yawned, bored. He stretched, then laid on his stomach beside her (flinching at the cold of the rock), windmilling his legs so that the hem of his new, silver robe slid down to bare his thighs. Together, he and she, they stared at the twin faces staring gravely at them from the eye of the lake.

It was she who first looked away, who cracked the eggshell silence. “Then why did you give me away?” she asked, and though her voice was tame, the night became noiselessly feral. He squinted at the lake, pretending insouciance, but the vision that met him ate at his bravado. The girl-face in the lake was crying, her right eyelid mashed against the cheek of the old, old, beautiful young boy beside her, and the boy was holding her against him, trembling more with shame than with awe.

He blinked and image blurred into leaf-ridden ripples.

The girl on the rock remained sedately staring off into the distance. Without accusation, she said, marveling, as if it had never occurred to her before in all her bitter years, “Why did you give me away?” She was a lioness, lazily comporting herself on a rock. Arrogance incarnate. Only he could have known that she was bleeding inside; because he was, as well.

He’d been waiting for this question for much longer than his entire life.

He was frantic in his mind; weighing words, poetry, seeking after rhyme if not a good reason, calculating probabilities. He cursed the night for its sudden silence, for the muteness of the insects, the timidity of the leaf-rustles, the departure of the wind—the feral quiet weighed heavy on him, as if all were cynically waiting for his answer and not just his own, only child. And still his mind fled in circles.

And soon, the quiet faded into a great moan as the wind returned and played autistically with fallen leaves.

Only then did it occur to him that he could have used his body. He could have taken her in his arms and kissed her tenderly and stroked her hair and drawn her and himself into a stupor with love words that had no meaning but adoration.

But the moment had passed. He shivered and felt something snap within him. “Gorgeous night isn’t it?” he cried, reckless with despair. “I love it when it’s cold and dark! Terribly romantic.”

“Oh yes!” she said, matching his nervous cheer note for note. It was impossible for him not to taste her irony. “I could just see the black-swathed, tortured Genius, looking off into the far and away, his perfect profile outlined by starlight as tears creep down his cheek. Thinking: What have I done, What have I done, What have I done. Only it’s never very important, that thing he did. That’s what romance is: something’s always pretty and sad, but never important.”

All throughout her spiteful ranting he followed her in spirit, his eyes never wavering from her averted face. “There are some important things,” he said vacuously into the vacuum that came after the angry, meaningless buzz of her words. “But what am I saying? It isn’t as if you truly believe what you’ve just said, I’m sure! I think you’re making it up!—stringing together pieces of fluff you’ve only heard from slightly smart people. Come back to the party with me and live a little. There will be singers. And dancers. And people who can do both at the same time, they tell me! There will be performing animals, and clowns, and tame demons. There will be showers of money, care of a friend of mine in government (money that should have been used in arming the Fourth Cavalry really, but who am I to complain?) There will be whores and priests-of-no-religion and shepherds, philosophers all. There might even be a murder or two later on, spontaneous, of course. So much entertainment!”

“I like watching the leaves better,” she said tonelessly after he had finished his bright-eyed advertisements.

Subdued, he said, “I like watching the leaves too.” He sighed, still looking at her who refused to look at him. Then, with a light shining through his skin as if an idea had just brought morning into him, he angled himself close and moved his left hand to hover above hers. As the sudden warmth on her flesh made her look up, he caught her gaze in wry triumph. “But I’d like you to come back with me.”

Resentment animated her. She darted her hand up to enclose his and yanked it down in a fury, little caring about his grimace of pain. Violence and salt mingled with the wind. Midway through her movement though, she forgot what she’d intended to do, so fascinated was she by the silken paper of his skin, the miniature ridges and ranges sculpted by his veins. She drew the hand against her breast, tenderly exploring it with her fingertips; and he, he watched her through the palm fronds of his lashes, feeling a strange wetness in his mouth. When she expressed a choked sound and dragged the back of his hand against her cheek, there was wetness there too.

She was utterly quiescent when he led her back toward the light. Her eyes were cast down, her hand imprisoned with his in a knot that went beyond three dimensions. The curve of her cheek was a nest of shadows, which scattered like cave bats when he opened the door into the gaiety and life of the house.

There was a chorus of greetings as he and she entered the hall. He felt her hand shaking against his as she fought not to shriek at the sudden press of humanity. It was one of those extremes in her, as if she were a little bird on the verge of spontaneous combustion, that so endeared her to him. He knew no one else would tolerate her neuroses: she was all his, all his. He squeezed her hand and laughed with the mockers as a Death Clown, more enthusiastic than the others, flopped forward to shove an explosion of balloons and spiders down their heads.

Immediately, she buried her face against his draggling sleeve in a spasm of terror. Then peeked out and seared her big, black eyes—his eyes on a girl-child’s face—into their mirror images. “Papa,” she said reprovingly.

He went on laughing, tossing back his quicksilver river of hair and gesturing for maximum effect. She would be there tonight, and tomorrow’s night, he would make sure of it. It was the guests he needed to please for the moment. “It’s nothing, you silly ass! Those spiders—they’re not real!”

A glissando of laughter trailed after his remark, as if it were an insight that would usher in a new millennium of thought. He acknowledged his audience’s adulation as if he believed it too, choosing to ignore the hurt look his child flicked to him with a rustle of eyelashes.

“Silver, tell us a tale!” came the inevitable cry from the flowerbed of simpers.

“Dance on your birthday, Silkfingers!” urged another.

“Spin us a yarn, Sunglint.” This, from the Death Clown and his webbed balloons and sad, sad mouth. “Sing us a story!”

Only she, who was his child and intimately acquainted with his innards, comprehended the contempt in the joyful laughter that he used to answer his admirers. A coy reply of “Another time,” was all he paused for, and then the man who’d been called Silver was off on his promenade once again, his daughter following quietly after like the ground-shadow of an aeroplane gliding in the heaven.

The man whose name could be Silver or Silkfingers seated himself and his child on a couch nearest the glass doors to the inner garden. Immediately, a flood of admirers surged over them, squeezing them closer to the middle of the couch, and draping perfumed bodies over the armrests. Mascaraed lashes and limp wrists encased in lace fanned them. Giggles and chortles, guffaws at trivialities, and barbed witticisms that meant nothing washed at their senses and lapped at their toes. She heard seagulls and the ceaseless crash of waves; he heard worshipful admiration, insincere admiration, gossip, and general nastiness. It was the same.

During a lull in the storm of sound, she crept under his hair and whispered, “Should I make the effort to like your friends?”

He ducked under his hair as well, showering the silvery strands against both their faces, and whispered back, “None of them are my friends.”

The laughter they shared was inaudible.

A snide question drew them both back. “But who’s the girl? Have you decided to go straight, Hermes’aphrodite?” The question traveled on the lips of all present, ringing out in varying tones: some wondering, some mocking, some teasing, some chiding, some skeptical of so a plain girl in so august a company.

“My daughter,” was Silkfingers’ calm reply.

The expressions of disbelief were universal. Finally, one of the cat-masked women called out, “But what’s her name?”

He felt the tightening of his little white girl’s hands around fistfuls of his shirt and whispered peace into her ear. He began to speak, to tell them some false, generic name so that the one he’d given her at her birth would remain unsullied, but she spoke before he could. “My name is Lesser.”

It was nothing witty, nothing profound, yet the assembly hushed. Silver (or Silkfingers or Sunglint) felt the slightest irritation. He could sense his guests’ tiny minds calculating, wondering, pondering; and all this was being done over words that were not his. And on his birthday too!

He would not, could not, admit to himself that his indignation was all against her, for refusing his protection and speaking for herself. He could not admit his fear that she might not need him anymore, that again, he would lose his…no, it was not fear, not fear of anything at all. He was fearless, by nature. Therefore: what he felt was resentment at not being the center of attention! Of course it was, what with him being such an incorrigibly loveable narcissist and all! Coughing delicately, he cried, “Well! So she names herself. Very modest creature, my girl.” He paused slyly. “Takes after her father.”

The storm of relieved giggles drowned out the memory of that single, silencing word “Lesser”, and the world was all the better for it.

It had been an unprepossessing word, from the mouth of a barely passably presentable child, but tone had been its undoing. There’d been such bitterness in it—unpardonably vulgar bitterness, not one in the party failed to mark that—but there was also fatalism, submission, and most disturbing of all there was love: blind, obsessive, adoring love. And none but two knew what to make of it.

They spoke of it later, when the party was over and the lovely people had made their farewells (leaving their bottles and empty cases of Happy-Drugs strewn on the floor, leaving the man they named Silver and the girl who named herself Lesser twined on the couch). Their arms ringed each other’s necks, as the moonglow, made bold by the death of the lights and the departure of laughter, entered the big house, drifted over the couch, and powdered their skin with the purest midnight-blue.

Against her lips, he said, “Why name yourself that?”

Into his eyes, she said, “You know.”

And he did. And they spoke no more. And then they kissed so hard they lost consciousness, and woke up very late in the morning.