Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

He touches me, later, with fingers and lips and coils, making my heart hammer and my breath quicken with something other than fear. I run my fingers over coffee-bean skin, trying to find where it turns into scales.

Naga do not marry.

They may build a home together, raise children together, create their lives together; but their ceremonies are only for birth and naming and death.

They tell a story about this: long ago, when the snake people married, a fair Naga girl was to marry a handsome youth. But at the wedding, with all the village gathered, her musk attracted and maddened the groom’s younger brother, who claimed her for himself. The brothers fought over her, long and hard and viciously, and each died of the other’s poison. In grief and shame the girl ran away, and never was seen again. The snake people have had no marriage since that day, and no true fights in mating season.

But my Nani considered herself married. “Once the gods have been called,” she said, “we cannot pretend that they were not here.”

His lips brush against my neck. “Asha, play for me.” We are in the garden again, among the dappled green scents and shadows, as we have been more often than is wise.

I find my voice. “Why.” It sounds dusty.

“You know I love your music,” he whispers in my ear. My breath catches at his voice, his closeness, his hands on my stomach, his heartbeat against my back; but his words are not the words I want.

I love your voice, I want to say. I love the way you move, the way you smell, the nonexistent point where skin becomes scale. I love the way you shimmer between forms, as I cannot and ache to and never will. I love the curves and the planes of your body, and I love your shifting face. I want to know who you are, and that is who I want to keep with me. Do you only love my music?

There are too many words. They jostle and clog in my throat. I shake my head.

“You know I do,” he says, “and you know you will.”

The air squeezes from my lungs. Have I no say in what I do? How dare he think so? I take a breath and start to play Nana’s song.

He grows rigid, his heartbeat quickening. His hands drop away from me. “No,” he says.

I turn to him; see terror, adoration; remember the way Nani looked at Nana. I stop playing.

He watches my eyes, my hands. He looks at me like I’m Vikram.

I will not be Vikram.

“No,” I agree. “Go free.”

His eyes widen. He shimmers, becomes first a cobra, then merely another shadow. I play then, play him the words I could not speak before, but only the shadows hear.

Shruti started haunting the garden, playing eerie, melancholy tunes that made the babies cry. Or so the neighbors said. Vikram said she was probably making their mothers cry, too. And souring their milk, and rotting the mangoes and bananas on the branches. Auntie wanted to know why, if that girl would not make pleasant music, she was allowed to play that flute at all.

Papa told Shruti to stay out of the garden.

Two days before the full moon, she bought a child’s recorder made of bright blue plastic.

I have been mostly alone when I’ve played. But not every time. He must need the music like I need to shift, to escape. Unfair that he may have what he needs; but my lack is not his fault.

I touch the moonlight, feel my leaden form struggle for a moment to become fluid, to shed its skin. Feel it give up. I settle at the base of the coconut palm and play until the forest is listening. Then I pull out the recorder, play a simple tune.

“Gift,” I say in my dusty, unused voice.

I set it aside and get up. When I look down again, it is gone.

Anywhere three trees grow together, the land’s invisible border rubs thin, and the great forest grows so close that it sometimes spills over.

The forest has no edge, but it has many, many frayed borders. It likes opening into our world for a beckoning, teasing, deadly instant. It is fully alive, this forest, with giant trees draped with giant vines, their leaves bigger than me; with dirt-colored flowers and flower-colored birds and sleek, silent predators. Naga live in the rivers, in the wet earth, and in hollow trees; the monkey people claim the canopy. Garuda sometimes nest on the highest branches, which border on their realm.

It is home to great beauty, the forest, in form and scent and movement, but the only music found there is the music of the natural world, calls and cries and falling rain.

So my Nani told me.

“Why?” I asked.

“We do not make music.”

“Why not?”

“Perhaps we have not the skill.”

“I do.”

“It is not something we learn, Asha. We do not live as you do here.” She smiled sadly, but she said no more.

I play to myself in the punishing afternoon, when I know I will be alone. To myself and to the forest beyond. I play with my eyes closed, letting the world paint itself in touch and smell. Overripe bananas, frying onions and cumin, my own sweat beaded on my forehead and dampening my clothes. The occasional breeze, warm, bringing the stench of exhaust and burning garbage. My fingers, slippery on the flute.

The taste of his musk, of earth after rainfall, brings my eyes half-open. I watch for him through my eyelashes, and let my fingers and breath sing him a lonely mood. He drifts into view, shifting uncertainly from half form to cobra and back; he starts to dance and stops again.

When I draw breath, he shifts to full man, naked, too wild for modesty. I look away, shame and lust burning my cheeks.

“Show me?”

I look back. His gaze is wary, but he holds the little blue recorder as though it were precious. I hold out a hand. He edges forward. I grasp his wrist to pull him closer. He jerks back, shifts to cobra, disappears.

I pick up the recorder. Will he come back for it, if not for me? I play a note. Sniff and blink tears away. Whisper, “Come back.”

I hear lorry and rickshaw horns in the silence. Then his voice, behind me. “Will you charm me?”

I shake my head.

“How can I know?”

I turn to look at him. “Could kill me,” I suggest.

He stares for a second, then slides forward till I can feel his warmth. His tail curls around my ankle. “I would not.” I keep looking at him, and eventually his lips twist into something that might be a smile. “But how can you know?”

I nod.

“What should we do?”

I reach out again to take his hand, and this time he does not start. I shape it around the recorder, showing his long fingers where to be.

He laughs, silently and a bit raggedly. “That is. not quite the answer I was expecting.”

The monkey people are territorial. Sooner steal a Garuda’s egg than seek the monkeys’ great city in the trees.

Not so the Naga. They care little about land, only one race frightens them, and that race cannot find their homes.