“There is but one rule in my wood,” he growled. “Speak truth.”
Ayama thought of trying to explain her family and the offer of the chests of gold and silk, but the truth was far simpler than all of that. “No one else would come.”
“Not the king’s brave soldiers?”
She shook her head.
“Not the perfect human prince?” he asked.
“No.”
The beast’s laugh rang out again, and it was as if Ayama could hear the grinding of bones in its echoes.
But now that she had remembered her voice, Ayama found she was eager to use it again. She had not suffered miles of thirst and boredom and blistered feet to be laughed at. So she pushed her fear aside, summoned her courage, planted her flat feet, and said, blaring and clear as a trumpet, “I have been sent to ask you to stop slaughtering our herds.”
The beast left off his laughing. “Why should I?”
“Because we are hungry!”
“What do I care for your hunger?” he snarled, pacing the glade. “Did you care for my aching belly when I was a child left alone in the labyrinth? Did you use that loud voice to petition the king for mercy then, little messenger?”
Ayama twisted the strings of her apron. She had been but a child herself at the time, but it was true that she had never heard her parents or a single resident of the valley spare a sympathetic word for the beast.
“No,” said the monster, answering his own question. “You did not. Let the good king feed you from his royal herds if he worries so much for his people.”
It was possible the king should do just that, but it was not Ayama’s place to say so. “I have been sent to bargain with you.”
“The king has nothing I want.”
“Then perhaps you might show mercy freely.”
“My father never taught me mercy.”
“And can you not learn?”
The beast stopped his prowling and turned very slowly toward Ayama, who did her best not to tremble even as his bloody eyes fastened upon her. His smile was sly.
“I have a bargain for you, little messenger, not the king. Tell me a tale that can make me feel more than anger, and if you manage it, I may let you live.”
Ayama did not know what to make of such an offer. It might be a trick or simply an impossible task. The beast might be feeling generous or he might just be full after his last meal and in need of some idle entertainment. Then again, Ayama had spent much of her life neither speaking nor being spoken to. She supposed it was possible the beast might simply long for conversation.
She cleared her throat. “And you will cease troubling our herds?”
The beast snorted. “If you do not bore me. But you are already boring me.”
Ayama took a steadying breath. It was very hard to think with such a creature looming over her.
“Would you sit?” she said, gesturing to the ground.
The beast growled but obliged, settling himself by the water with a great thump that sent birds scattering from the dark trees.
Ayama sat down on the ground a good distance away and arranged her apron around her, tucking her shoes back onto her feet. She closed her eyes to shut out the sight of the beast curled beside the stream, already licking his chops.
“You’re stalling,” he said.
“I’m only trying to make sure I tell the story right.”
He laughed a low, ugly laugh. “Speak truth, little messenger.”
Ayama shivered, for she was not sure which of Ma Zil’s stories were true and which were false. Besides, the prospect of dying made it hard to think of anything at all. But just because no one bothered to listen to Ayama didn’t mean she had nothing to say. In fact, she had plenty. And if it was true that the beast was happy to be spoken to, then perhaps it was also true that Ayama was glad to be heard.
THE FIRST TALE
“Once there was a boy who ate and ate but could not get full. He consumed flocks of geese without stopping to rid them of their feathers. He drank whole lakes, consumed all the fish within them, and belched out the rocks. He filled his mouth with a dozen eggs in a single bite, then had one thousand head of cattle roasted on one thousand spits and ate them one after another, pausing only for a short nap. But still he woke with a hungry rumble in his gut. He devoured entire fields of corn and grain but was as famished when he reached the last row as he had been when he started the first.
“This hunger made him miserable, for it was always with him, a terrible hollow, and sometimes it seemed so big and wide that he could swear he felt the wind blow right through him. His family despaired, for they could not afford to feed him, and the boy was desperate for a cure, but no medik or zowa healer could help. His story was passed around as stories always are, and eventually a young girl in a faraway town heard it. Immediately she went to her father, who was a doctor of many arts and the wisest man she knew. He had traveled the whole of the world and gathered secrets everywhere he went. She knew he would be able to find a cure, so they packed their bags and set out for the boy’s village. When they saw fields of cornstalks eaten down to their roots and rivers emptied of their fish, they knew they must be drawing close.
“At last they reached the village and told the boy’s family they’d come to offer their help. The boy was not hopeful, but he let the doctor look into his eyes and ears and when the doctor asked to peer down his throat, the boy tipped his head back obligingly.
“‘Aha!’ said the wise doctor, once he’d gotten a look at the boy’s gullet. ‘When your mother carried you in her womb, did she sleep with her window open?’ The boy’s mother said that she had, for it had been a very hot summer that year. ‘Well then,’ said the doctor, ‘it is simple. In her sleep, your mother swallowed a bit of night sky, and all of that empty is still inside you. Just eat a bit of the sun to fill the sky and you will feel empty no longer.’
“The doctor claimed that it was simple. The boy was not so sure. There was no tree or ladder high enough to reach the sun, and soon he fell even deeper into despair. But the doctor’s daughter was as smart as she was kind, and she knew that every night the sun sank low enough to touch the sea and turn the water gold. So she built them a little boat and they sailed west together. They traveled many miles, and the boy ate two whales along the way, and at last they reached the golden place where the sun met the sea. The girl took a white ash ladle from her pocket and scooped up a bit of the sun from the water. When the boy drank it down—”
The beast released a rumbling growl and Ayama jumped, for she’d been so caught up in the story and the pleasure of being listened to that she’d almost forgotten where she was.
“Let me guess,” snarled the beast. “The miserable boy swallowed a gulp of the sea and ever after that he was a contented, happy fellow who returned to his village, and married the doctor’s pretty daughter, and had many children to help him till the fields around his home.”