A Dirge for Preston John, Page 22

  “That’s them you feel,” the peacock said, “the pair of them, always leaning on the Gate, hoping it’ll fail. Old bastards. Haven’t you got anything better to do back there?”

  John required explanation. He always did. But I could not bear to repeat the whole long tale of Alisaunder and the building of the Gates, not now. Let Hajji tell him. Let anyone. I couldn’t care. I did not come traipsing across half the known world to tell fairy tales to a prudish fool. Not fairy tales, and not history either. He’d be dead in forty years. What did he need to know? How to wrinkle up and go blind. I had confidence in his abilities to manage that without my help.

  I wish now I had been the one to tell him. What I would not give to be able to tell him one more thing he did not know, to tell one story after sunset, and hear him disbelieve me.

  “Ghayth,” I said, and I felt my smile in my belly so wide, pulling my skin taut. I shouldn’t have said it. I should have greeted him as a stranger. But I could not help myself. “Ghayth Below-the-Wall.”

  The peacock blinked, and cocked his black head to one side. The Gates thrummed with heat, flooding out over the long road behind us.

  “Hagia,” whispered Hajji desperately, clutching the sides of her long ears tight around her so that the blue veins shone. “Don’t. Please don’t.”

  But Ghayth was Ghayth, and he would not deny it. I kept my smile, valiantly—when one has disrupted protocol, it is best to follow it through. The peacock-historian snapped his great tail up; it arrayed in a huge fan around him, the streaks of green and violet snaking like oil through his black feathers.

  “A reader!” he crowed, his plume bobbing. “A student! You must love my work considerably to speak so out of turn!”

  And there it was, thrown down between us. I had thought only of myself, my joy at meeting him. We are not allowed to speak to one another of who we once were, Abirs past. We are now who we are now. We must inhabit it fully, or else what is the point of going through it at all? If I saw my mother on the road, I would have to greet her as a stranger. I knew Ctiste before. I do not know her now. She is not the same person. It is not the same world. Etiquette is all we have.

  “I’m sure Hagia has mistaken you for someone else,” Fortunatus said quickly.

  “No, no, she has it! Come now, I could pretend I take offense, but look where you are! By any measure, this is the edge of the world. On the other side is hell and horror. This is the end of civilized space, so let’s have done with civility. Yes, I was Ghayth, and am. The last Abir made me a writer of fiction, can you imagine it?” Ghayth unselfconsciouly pecked at the black dust of the street and came up with a twisted yellow worm, which he slurped down. “I have to imagine things that never happened, and then arrange them in a pleasing order, and then write them down! And they have to be connected with themes and metaphors and motifs! Motifs, I tell you! What rot. I miss being Ghayth Below-the-Wall. Now I am Ghayth Who-Makes-Things-Up-and-Fusses-With-Motifs.” He spat the head of the worm. “Give me a history again! Solid, verifiable, respectable! Let me record the ravages of Gog once more! Let me count the ships in a harbor, or how long a certain copper coin has circulated! Do you know my last masterwork featured two young religions, barely out of their own prophets’ diapers, one of whom crossed half a continent to slaughter the other, only to get bored halfway there and slaughter a city that had nothing to do with either of them? Come, that’s fancy, that’s satire, it’s practically a drunkard’s ballad! I just made it up! I was bored! I had to write something! I can’t be blamed! But my public says it’s my best yet.”

  “Pray tell, who is your public, bird?” John said, and I do think he meant to be polite.

  “Well, Azenach, of course. That’s where you are. If you had a map, it would say Azenach: Here There Be Cannibals. Also Peacocks. Sleep Elsewhere. They put on my fictions down in the amphitheater—quite something, they’ve masks and pulleys and all manner of machines to make things frightening. They’re mainly interested in the frightening. They built a whole trebuchet once, for the battle scenes. Painted it green, in my honor. I suppose it’s a bit fun. No one ever put on my histories.”

  “I copied your histories, for all sorts of people,” I said, suddenly shy. “Once for the great library, in the al-Qasr.”

  “And did you spoil my prose, and add vowels, and make the dialogue much prettier than it would have been in life, and leave off whole episodes?”

  “I never changed a word.”

  “Good woman! For that, I’ll feed the lot of you—though I can’t promise our local dishes will be to your liking.”

  Out of the dim, dark houses, each of them little more than curtains and poles, resting in the wash of heat off of the diamond Gates, eyes and hands could now be seen, moving slightly, nervous.

  “They elected me Welcomer to Foreigners,” Ghayth explained. “The Azenach make people anxious.”

  A small figure toddled up to us, and for a moment I thought the Azenach might be pygmies—but no, it was a child, a little girl shaped much like John, save that her skin was striped as a tiger’s, and her teeth gleamed very sharp.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said solemnly. “We only eat each other.”

  “Oh, please!” danced Ghayth, hopping from one three-toed foot to another, his tail wavering beautifully in the diamond-light. “Oh, please, let me tell them! A chance to be a historian again! To tell the truth, a long and honest narrative of real things!”

  Several others had drifted out, all striped, all silent and wary. “Yes,” some said. “Must you?” sighed others.

  “I don’t like telling stories, anyway,” said the girl, who we would learn was called Yat, and who had only eaten a very little bit of anyone in her life. “We already know who we are. What’s the point?”

  “The point is that they don’t, so there is a keen pleasure in sharing knowledge. When you’ve done, they know, and you know, and you can know together, and make quite good jokes a little while later.”

  “I want to watch,” insisted Yat, and so she did, as the rest of us paid close attention, settling onto patient haunches. All except Hajji, who clutched John’s hand, and breathed shallowly, and seemed to be trying to make herself as small as possible, which is to say very small indeed. But I would not make the same blunder twice and cause her worse embarrassment. I made a great show of giving her space, crouching nowhere near her or John, hoping she would know I meant her no harm.

  Ghayth lifted one foot in a professorial gesture. “The Azenach got shut behind the Gates, when the giants Holbd and Gufdal closed in the wicked twins, Gog and Magog, and doomed the copper-spired city of Simurgh, along with several other tribes.”

  John looked sharply at the striped child. “Do you mean to say she has seen Gog and Magog with her own eyes?”

  Yat laughed. “Stupid! I wasn’t born.”

  Ghayth stared meaningfully, his beady eyes narrowed. “I had forgotten—when you write a book, no one interrupts you. It is extremely irritating. Now! Many were caught in the closing of the Wall, and the Azenach were but one. For some time, they made their lives as best they could on the other side, but their neighbors were dreadful company. If a family managed a house or a barn, Gog would bite it in half, and Magog would gobble the remainder. Being siblings, they share and share alike. A phoenix—split down the middle. A fast-hold of Fommeperi, sister-tribe to the Azenach—equal warriors for each, portioned out precisely. When they blasted the earth and burnt the soil so no tree could ever grow again, even the specks of dirt showed their equality: half blighted by Gog, half by Magog.”

  “I have to share with my sister,” Yat whispered. “Even when she’s bad.”

  Ghayth nipped at her hair affectionately. “Yes, that’s certainly exactly the same thing.” He pressed his long neck to Yat’s cheek. “It is possible to live alongside darkness and still feast, still have children and sing and celebrate the moon. But not beside those two, one of which takes your left side in tithe, the other of which takes your right. And ev
en worse—those caught on the leeward side of the Wall found themselves cut off from the Fountain. Though they could live forever still, they would now watch their children grow old and die, for their progeny could not drink, nor be preserved. Who could bend under that fate, and yield to it?

  Now, it so happens that the Azenach are cannibals. I have not mentioned until now because it tends to prejudice the audience against them, when truly, you are in no danger at all. A cannibal eats her own kind—you are none of theirs, not you, blemmye, nor you, panoti, nor gryphon, nor lion, nor anthropteron, nor whatever sort of pet that one is,” he said, indicating John with his head. “As well, they only eat the dead. They have a very ornate ritual in which each of the family members devour a portion of the deceased which represents their connection. Students of the poor soul would share out her brain, those who in their youth scrapped with her, or had been protected by her fierce temper and love for the small, would quite solemnly swallow the meat of her muscles. Her children would eat of her womb, her husband of her heart. They have quite a complicated liturgy of anatomy—fear, for example, resides in the stomach, anger in the spleen, grace in the foot. I could keep you here all night explicating the Azenach body, and all its humors. Love makes residence in the heart, naturally, but also the soldierly arts. What seemed most powerful in an Azenach must be eaten after death. You might think this disgusting, but it is really quite obvious: they loved whomever it was that died, and would have her with them always. It is very respectful, I promise. The whole process is left over from pre-Fountain folklore, but still, occasionally an Azenach would perish out of violence or plague, and religious habits are difficult to shake.”

  Yat smiled, showing all her razor teeth. “I ate my friend Ott’s hand when an ox gored him, because when I was scared at night, he held my hand till I fell asleep again. It didn’t taste very good, but I didn’t feel so sad, after.”

  “Well, one by one, the young ones on the other side of the Wall grew into old ones, and the Azenach mothers and fathers looked on, horrified, for they had forgotten that bodies perform that stumbling chorus. And when these mortal children perished, their parents planted their remains, when the bodies had been shared out enough to satisfy both grief and faith. Little by little, the children’s bodies grew under the earth, their roots and shoots moving toward the heat that spilled so fervently from the other side of the Gate, intensified by the adamant gems there. And one day, a pale, striped sapling sprang up, outside the Wall. Then another, and another. And they sent out trunks and leaves and blossoms and one day the blossoms opened and a whole generation of Azenach leapt out laughing. Of course, having been shared out as the holy meal before burial, some of them had no brains, and didn’t laugh but fell down dead like dumb fruit dropped. Some had no wombs, and never had any children of their own. Some had no spleen, having aggrieved many people in their other lives on the far side of the Gate. But those who had fallen dead before they could even draw breath seemed to have enough for the others to share, and they patched themselves up reasonably well, swallowing their siblings’ organs into their bodies. They do, well and truly, take the strength of what they eat. On one side of the Wall, it is a metaphor. On the other, it is fact. Only a few of them have no hearts now—their blood seems to move about in a fashion more like sap, and they are pacifists.”

  “I can hear my grandfather on the other side of the Wall,” said Yat. She twisted her streaked hands. “He misses me.”

  “They stay here, close to the Wall, even now that new children have been born in the more usual fashion, like Yat, waiting for the day when the Gate will open and they will be one tribe again. But you mustn’t believe her,” the peacock sighed. “She can’t hear her grandfather. Not even sound breeches the Wall. The Azenach on the other side do not even know this colony exists.”

  “Don’t tell lies!” Yat shouted, leaping up. “I can hear him! I can! He says: Soon, soon. And the Wall gets hot.”

  I shivered. I did not think it was her grandfather, either.

  “Oh, Yat, my darling, you must stay away from the Gates. No good will come of you listening to whispers leaking through, and your grandfather does not live in that country alone.”

  “What do you know? You’ve never eaten anyone at all!” The child stormed off, and Ghayth made his apologies. The older Azenach held her while she wept dramatically. They all glared at us across the black road. Silently, the Azenach began to light the torches along the way, and while they did it, Yat sucked her thumb. Ghayth stretched his short legs.

  “It was good, though, to tell a true tale again! You will stay, won’t you? Tomorrow the young persons’ chorus will perform my Romaunce of Twelve Infidels and an Exquisite Rhinoceros. I don’t mean to boast, but I think the motifs are quite adequate. I have nearly mastered the art of the denouement.”

  “No,” whispered Hajji. “We have to go.”

  Ghayth looked at her suddenly, and the little panoti blanched, if such a thing were possible for a creature the color of the snow.

  “Don’t look at me,” she said desperately. “Stop it.”

  “But you’re her,” he said wonderingly. “You’re her.”

  “Please!” she wailed. “I don’t want to be!”

  “If your headless friend here saw fit to shred the veil of modesty and drag me out, I don’t see why you should get to stay demure,” he sniffed. But he turned to me, unable to conceal his pride: “You see, I am getting the flowery speech down to a science. I can do it for fifteen minutes at a stretch.”

  The panoti disengaged herself from John and crept up to Ghayth. She put her hands on his avian face, where he had large, handsome white circles under his eyes.

  “Please,” she whispered, and tears filled up her eyes. “Let me be Hajji. Let me stay Hajji.”

  THE CONFESSIONS OF

  HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699

  I have tried to re-compose the text as I imagine it to be—that is part of the work of a scribe, to gracefully transmit the document as though no error ever occurred, as though no single letter were in doubt. But if my Brothers could read this as I saw it in that cell with the bold sunlight seeking purchase on the walls, their heart would fall and fail.

  The Lord my God knows what those pages said. I will never know. Why did You not send me an angel to dictate the perfect, undiluted tale to me, as You did to Your chosen scribes in the old days? To Paul and Matthew and Mark, to John and Luke? Why did You not simply inhabit me with Your light, if You wanted these things uncovered, known? It seems to me more efficient.

  The red-violet rot had begun to steal letters again by the point of Ghayth’s sad tale of the cannibals, even whole words. I would not be worth my beer if I could not surmise that between an Our Lord in Heaven and Thy kingdom Come there must be an Art in Heaven, but I confess the tremendous difficulty of constituting a whole narrative when the pages in my hands soften and shift, and I had to guess at Yat’s tears, when perhaps the word (of which I have but a t and an s) may be something else entirely, for who knows if an Azenach weeps?

  And yet, in my secret soul, which I did not even share with Alaric, I was struck dumb by the beauty of it, of the corruption itself, how it made these pages seem not only to speak but to bleed, like stigmata, the blood of some terrible divinity seeping up onto my fingers, staining my hands with its own hungry heart.

  If the panoti said more, if the troupe ate at the cannibal feast, if they met the child’s parents, if they comforted her—it all disappeared into a soft wing of carmine, staining upward from the bottom edge of the sweet-smelling page.

  I tried so hard. I tried to make it all run smoothly, so that I could bind Prester John up in a tome and send it to Luzerne as consummate and reasoned as you deserve. But I felt as the sun grew heavier in the day as though I chased a mercurial hart, and every step deeper into the woods was a step further from my desire.

  Yet I could not stop. I could not cease. I reached out for its pelt—and grasped nothing.

  The green encroached from
the corners of Imtithal’s book like four winds, blowing away the ephemeral words. Alaric and I tied cloths onto our mouths so that our breath did not further the process, but it proceeded, always, apace. There was much following the passage I copied out here, but it sank away, only a character or two swimming up out of the verdant sea lapping at the page. A. M. O. Nothing I could catch or hold. The patterns of the mold began to entrance me, and I fancied I could see their slow advance, each tiny portion of story sloughing away. When Alaric turned to his work, I tasted the corner of my smallest finger, smeared with the stuff. It tasted like spring sap.

  THE SCARLET NURSERY

  On the day Houd went to the Fountain for the second time, I woke early, to wash him while the boy still slept, which is the only time I found it reasonable to wash Houd at all. With the help of Lamis, my dear conspirator, we lifted him bodily out of bed. He slept naked, for he had read that the cametenna warriors of ages long gone slept so, and announced that, like Aleus the Closed Fist, he would greet his dreams shameless and ready. Ikram laughed, and he pinched her viciously, for I do not allow striking with hands such as they own. But it is good for children to feel they have gotten away with something wicked against a sibling, now and then.

  In the porphyry tub, we sunk him into a soapy bath, and scrubbed his sleepy skin with rushes fresh-cut, combed the grime from his hair and scented it with rose-apple, rubbed him down with myrrh and amber. He woke as I smoothed the snarls in his hair, but let me believe he still slept. Houd behaved very stoically as I laid out his clothes—all black, as he preferred, though somewhat less sanguine was he about the beads of jasper and long ribbons I tied into his hair. I painted his eyes myself, and gave him coins for his shoes, for luck. His mother would go with him, but I would make him ready, and despite his taciturn nature, I loved the boy, who was no longer really a boy at all and would soon be out of my care entirely. Perhaps I loved him even more fiercely because he turned away my embraces, because he crouched in corners and would not speak, because he was reticent, and dour. Lamis and Ikram’s laughter came easy, and we were close as roses on one vine—but how terribly sweet, when the boy who never laughed gave me one faint smile.