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Through those sa each other up and down his barrel–rib cage like squirrels around an oak tree They chattered and hissed as they passed, flicking their tongues at his clavicle, his pelvis Their eyes hite, like the eyes of blind h he had found a walnut, and gnaw on one of the ferryman’s vertebra

Idyll looked chagrined He pulled his robe back over the racing lizards “It’s not so bad, really I’ve gotten used to them But I suppose that they require an explanation as surely as a bone coin…”

THE

FERRYMAN’S

TALE

THERE ARE SOME WHO SAY THE MOON IS DEAD, that only the dead trace their lineage there They are wrong, and if you would believe the scripture of such creatures, you would surely believe anything

The Moon is ever fertile She cannot turn to look at herself in the ocean’s es blooms from her navel When she speaks, oysters fall fro tails In the dark of the world before there were eyes to open and call it black, she hole, and perfect, and did not change her shape through theelse, there were drifting winds and currents, and these blew gently against the ribs and shoulders of Moon, causing her to slowly spin in the sky, her arms outstretched as a child will do when she floats upon a clear and blue-green inland sea, letting the little kissing waves push against her body

When the Stars left the sky—folk do not lie on that score, at least—their going left sucking holes in the dark, and winds issued from them as from a burst balloon Poor Moon was battered on all sides by these whistling winds, and she began to spin faster and faster As she spun in the sky like a dervish, the winds were so fierce that they began to peel off slivers of her flesh, pale and translucent and shi to earth, feather-slow and fragile as petals

Finally, Moon had nothing left for the empty sky to peel away The little black core of her rested at last in a lightless hollow, no bigger or brighter than a speck of soot But as all things will do when they are allowed soain, for she cannot help her fecundity She turned this way and that, and peonies bloomed from her navel, chrysanthemums exploded from her palhs snaked around her waist In her hair saplings writhed and danced in blind ecstasy It was not long before Moon was full and vast again, as she had been But the Star-sparse sky had beco between a few sharp rocks, the currents more fierce than they had ever been, and no sooner was she round and bright but they began to peel off her flesh again

And so the Moon waxes and wanes, froht to a speck of soot Poor, lost little Moon, who gets only the briefest moments of respite We are sorry for her, we feathers, we petals, we sloughed-off children Moon skins the Hsien are, cast away like plu shells the black winds blow frolove at lass

Once aged a holy war against the rotting heretics who cling to a false Moon, but they do notwhen you ave in—if they wish to amuse thea the truth, even in the face of their perversion

I aiven the impression of maleness to you—it seems to suit the work But we are not male, and neither female The petals of the Moon have no sex, no children, no e More of us drop each month from her flesh, and if they survive, like turtles sent across the sand into the welco sea, then we are replenished We are not equipped for children; we are tiny moons, and ate moons Neither do we eat the five cereals as e slowly as stones, and it is difficult for us to die, though it does happen, as it is possible to smash a quartz-riddled rock

Thus it is that I ah to be able to tell you that I raised the Rose Dome of Shadukiam over the diamond turrets of the city in the days before it withered into Marroas an architect then, and I was sought out by the city fathers to cap their walls with flowers, flohich would not fade, nor wilt, nor fall It was thought by so about permanence I was promised a wine vat filled with opals and silver as payed

In those days Shadukia slabs of earth away to plant buildings like saplings in the wet black soil—how the city of s! The diamond turrets were only lately erected, their facets still tapped and chiseled by workhts The roads were taold and silver The Asaad was canopied in wool Hoe match, you and I! I remember the city before it was Marrow; you remember it after This is history before history, boy, and I was there

I instructed so turrets or the platforms below them and await me, while I flew into the world to seek out an imperishable rose