“How beautiful,” the painter said. “It is my greatest treasure, beyond my deserving.”
He crafted a pedestal and painted it white, the better to contrast the heart’s crimson veins and bronze wood. And there the heart rested in its loveliness, but under the elements, with time, began to fade. “I will travel to the white rivers of the far mountains and bring a font of crystal water,” the painter said. But this was a great undertaking and there were many things he must do first.
While he planned the heart began to dwindle, its crimson veins collapsing slowly to rust powder; the painter wept for it, but his tears were of salt that could not quench its thirst, and at last it died. The painter remained captured by the memory of its beauty, and stayed by the pedestal singing songs of its loss. His high voice haunted the whispering forest, and the dryad, with a deep quiet spreading through her, could not remain.
Beyond the borders of the forest thick snows had blanketed the roads, so the dryad did not stumble, and in their stiffness her feet no longer felt the cold. In time it seemed that the brightness of the snow under the dove grey sky was soothing and complete. Why not linger with the ice, succumb to the quietude that filled two thirds of her hollow breast? To her last heart the silent arms of the still forest beckoned.
But it could not be, for nothing mythical can rest, and there remained only the road ahead and the one behind. She was a creature of nature, and hers was not to retreat, though the forest with its dark warmth compelled. With no sun in the sky she followed the road, and with time the shadows of the still forest faded behind her.
Across her path passed a cloaked traveler, and his charcoal steed was an old work horse. They shared the road, and in that companionship the cloaked man told of his travels, and asked the dryad of hers. For the first time she tested a throat that had known no sound, and learned her voice.
“How old is the sky?” she asked him, when the stories of their travels were done. For it seemed as though she had walked the earth for centuries, and the sky had always been there.
The traveler thought on this for many miles. Finally he said that he did not know, and though he had met many wise men on his travels, none had been older than the sky. But he spoke of places where the sky had been the burning scarlet of young flame, or painted with strokes of colors so luminous they had no names. And he spoke of what he did know, of trees that swayed beneath autumn ghost moons, and of the stars that had been his compass.
The dryad’s third heart came forth so red that it was almost black, the color of summer grapes in the shade, and of winter pomegranates. The traveler’s dark eyes were serious as his weathered hands closed around it. Many more leagues they traveled together, the cloaked man, the dryad, and the grey horse.
“It grows dry,” the cloaked man said of the heart one day, and from a skin at his saddle he poured a careful measure of water upon it. Its wood drank deeply and stretched, growing two slender limbs that reached to the sky. Deep in her empty chest the dryad surged with life, cool and heady. This sustained the heart, and something within the dryad began to awaken. But the traveler with this was not satisfied. “It needs the sun,” he said, indicating buds that dotted the heart’s reaching arms, the color of polished wood, and his eyes. “We will go west, to the summer country.”
After three days the clouds broke and branches of sunlight reached down to melt the snow. As it ran away in rivulets that etched the spongy ground the dryad felt startled warmth returning to her feet.
And when the sun touched the dryad’s heart, its buds grew palest spring green before exploding into violet flowers. Its blooming arms lengthened, and downward stretched roots that found the ground and grew steady upon it. At last it opened eyes of charcoal grey, eyes that shone with the newness of spring. Within the dryad’s chest new life bloomed, a new warmth that carried its own sunlight within, and fed upon the air.
The dryad and her daughter did not have much time, for the younger could not remain still, even in the warmth of the summer country. The older dryad warned of alchemists that would measure a dryad’s heart and find it wanting, of painters that lived trapped in an image worshiped greater than life. And she told her of gentle travelers, who knew what it was to seek the sun. The traveler told the new dryad of the ways of the road, and the importance of caring for one’s steed. With this advice they were rueful, for they knew as they watched her that her heart was her own, neither spring green nor the violet of winter pomegranates, and it would require its own language, a language of sun and snow and withering.
As they watched the dryad’s daughter begin her journey south, the traveler shed his cloak and folded it across the grey horse’s saddle. “You dryads are fortunate to have three hearts,” he said. “Men have but one, and it can never leave us.”
“Then it should be carefully tended,” the dryad said, and placed his hand in hers. Beneath the traveler’s skin a new life stirred, life that had grown a dryad’s heart. “For it must last through all the seasons of the world.”
PINIONS
The Authors
Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and five books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, Oracles and A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award and the Million Writers Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the Rhysling and Spectrum Awards, and the World Fantasy Award. She currently lives in Northeastern Ohio with her partner and two dogs. She says, “I began writing ‘The City of Blind Delight’ after reading several medieval legends of the land of Cockaigne. I was fascinated by the details, such as the roasted calf and the houses of cakes. How do you live in the land of plenty? What is desire there? Add to this that trains are one of my constant obsessions, and you have Gris and his ticket. I want these places to be real, I want them to have always been real, as real as any other city on the railroad, and as accessible.”
David Sandner has published in Realms of Fantasy, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, the Mammoth Book of Sorcerer’s Tales, and Baseball Fantastic, among other odd gatherings of words. He is Associate Professor of English at Cal State Fullerton, where his purview is Romanticism, children’s literature and the fantastic. He wrote The Fantastic Sublime and edited Fantastic Literature: A Critical Reader. He wrote “Old Foss is the Name of His Cat” in honor of the complete nonsense of Edward Lear who, he hopes, needs no introduction but is, nevertheless, too often in the shadow of that other famous nonsense poet of the Victorian era. Like Mr. Lear, David knows what it is to be friends with a cat, what it means to fear losing someone, and what it is to be unable to stop contemplating the ever-present mystery of impossible things and other such realities.
John Grant is author of some seventy books, of which about twenty-five are fiction, including The Far-Enough Window, The World, and The Dragons of Manhattan. His “book-length fiction” Dragonhenge, illustrated by Bob Eggleton, was shortlisted for a Hugo Award in 2003; its successor was The Stardragons. His first story collection, Take No Prisoners, appeared in 2004. He is editor of the recent anthology New Writings in the Fantastic. Among his nonfictions are The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Clute), Masters of Animation, and The Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters, as well as the recent Discarded Science and Corrupted Science; he is currently working on a companion volume to these two, Bogus Science, on a book about film noir, and on “a cute book for kids about a velociraptor.” His powerful mosaic novel Leaving Fortusa is to be published by Norilana in the fall of 2008.