A Dirge for Preston John, Page 46

  “I have not heard a sound in these halls but my own breath!”

  The hexakyk looked at each other and clasped their middle hands. “We think you do not understand. We cannot leave the Mount. Save for four days a year, when the roads are good, and that was when we found you. The unicorn hunt was our last day.”

  “Why can you not leave the Mount?”

  Again, the twins exchanged glances. “We are sick,” they said together. “We have a pain, an illness. We do not like to discuss it.”

  “You seem perfectly healthy to me.”

  “It is not a sickness of the outside. We are…” They squeezed their hands and joined their lower pair, as if seeking strength from the other. “We are allergic to a substance in our kingdom, and while it abounds we are not well, and cannot be away from our home, or we will wither and die.”

  “What is it you are allergic to?”

  Ymra’s lovely eyes filled with tears, which plashed upon her jeweled belt.

  “Diamonds,” she whispered.

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  Tell them right away that we did not kill him. They can’t think for a moment we would. We did nothing of the sort. We did not even bite Salah ad-Din for luck.

  I know. But perhaps you do not know how close we came, daughter. I believe had it not been for Brother Dawud… Of course, I said no immediately—I laughed in the abbot’s face. But John might have agreed to it, just to be loved by a man who knew his name and thought him good. A man who could dip his fingers in oil and forgive him everything. A man who could say: May the Lord move His Hand over the waters of thy life and make it smooth. What would any of us give to be forgiven all?

  But Brother Dawud lived and breathed—

  —and died

  And died, yes, but before that he was a merry young man, somewhat gone to fat, with cheerful cheeks and unusually blue eyes, which contrasted greatly with his dark complexion, so like ours. Brother Dawud, as soon as the abbot had gone to await John’s answer in solitude, bade me remove my veil and did not look askance at my nakedness. He only marveled that my body did not overheat, not having the distance from the heart that a prominent head provides. I did not want to solve the mystery for him, for I knew what he would say—had not John said it, and worse, long ago? But he pressed, his frank and open face only curious, not teasing, and I admitted that the blemmyae pant as hounds do. I made the comparison for him, so that he would not have to call me a dog. That was how humiliated I felt at that moment, how low, bandaged in veils and kept silent, that I called myself a dog, who was a queen—but Brother Dawud only said: fascinating! And asked after the circulatory system of the gryphon. I believe there is nothing in this world Brother Dawud did not wish to know utterly, to understand completely, and to each thing I told him he only had exclamations of delight, that God’s work could be so varied and complex.

  John loved him as I did, immediately and wholly. Dawud was kind to us, brought us water and a flat, chewy bread with boiled eggs from black, skinny hens he tended to himself.

  “I am only a novice,” he said bashfully. “I do not get the plum work. One day I hope to be allowed to illuminate something, or help with the winemaking.”

  “I…” I paused. We do not mention our previous Abirs, but how could poor Dawud understand all that? “I was a scribe, once. I have illuminated many poems and treatises. I have even used gold paint, for clouds, and crushed carnelian, for blood.” Dawud positively clapped his hands with delight, and we discussed inks and glues, about which I knew much more than he, and the dreams of one day drawing in the corners of a Bible lit his eyes. He said he would endeavor, should he ever earn the honor, to draw both me and a gryphon, for he thought our forms the most beautiful of our ranks.

  You are a scribe now, even if you wear a crown. Writing our war for us. An Abir in reverse, making us all what we were long ago.

  With John he discussed Nestorius, the founder of their sect, whom John had known personally, which confirmed for me how long it had truly been since he left home, and for Dawud that we had come from God, specially to that spot. He asked after Nestorius’ person, how he sounded when he spoke, was he right or left handed, did he like dates or quinces, was he a harsh teacher or an affectionate one, and all these John answered with hearty laughter and excitement. I felt some discomfiture—I had certainly never listened to his tales so attentively, nor made him feel so valued and wise. But then, he had not done so much for any of us, either.

  It was when John spoke of his old friend Kostas that Brother Dawud frowned and sunk deep into thought. I recalled that name—a young man who had run errands for John in Constantinople, with whom he had been close, as close as anyone John had known before Pentexore, who had taught him, supposedly, gentleness and service. Perhaps one day I will see John express these lessons.

  He is different now. After everything. Perhaps we will all see it.

  Brother Dawud’s sweet, earnest face drew in as John spoke. I know he loved that Kostas, and it does not trouble me. I have loved many—I still love Hadulph, and still he shares my tent and my heart and John does not even think on it, that is how long he has lived in Pentexore. And have I not loved women in my time? The world is generous with love.

  “I believe,” Brother Dawud said, “that you should know something of the founding of our order, and this place. Our first abbot wrote a lengthy work on the subject, for the abbots who came after to study and know the tale of our beginning—for you must know we are on the very outposts of Christendom, if we can be said to dwell in Christendom at all. It is not an easy place to establish a see, nor to maintain one. If Father Jibril is hard, do understand that he came into the seat young, because his father has wealth and only two sons, and from the moment he was called Father the mullahs in Mosul have entreated him to close the abbey and come into the arms of Islam, and entreaty comes in many forms. In return, also in many forms, Father Jibril has entreated them to come to the bosom of Christ. It is a song with an old refrain, and the more a man sings it, the harder goes his soul. Father Jibril has spent a long time in the choir. But I was speaking of our first brothers, and how they came through north to put stones into the square that became St. Elijah’s.”

  Brother Dawud went from us and returned some time later with a large, ornate book with many crosses stamped on its cover, and set with some dull precious stones—beryl and sard—in need of care and polish. Brother Dawud held it open and bade John read, which he did until he could speak no more, for his throat betrayed him to grief.

  I believe that every life is an icon. An exquisitely rendered miniature of the life of Christ or His Mother, closed up in fragrant wood or oiled metal, and upon death God opens this small and perfect relic, and a soul may see which path he walked. This may be heresy—what is not heresy these days? It would only be the twelfth or fifteenth most heretical thing I have declared in my life—but you see the evidence all around you. We are Christ; Christ is us. Each life follows the path of His life, or sometimes that of His Immaculate Mother, an exemplum from which we cannot deviate, no matter how we might try. The word never was a name, but always a verb, anointing, anointed, and Christ the Man and Christ the Spirit can as easily be called Christ the noun and Christ the verb, Christ that exists and Christ that acts.

  It’s a simple thing; it happens to all of us. We are born, we perform the miracles of our youth, which are speech, movement, feeling, and moral will. We become teachers of men, we become righteous and sometimes inflexible, intolerant of those who are old and slow and cannot understand how the world has changed—for the world is always changing, and every generation is the last and the first. We draw together some number of companions, whether they be twelve or two. We perform the miracles of adulthood, which are love, forgiveness, perspective, and terrible, painful sacrifice. We sacrifice ourselves, even wicked men do it, carving up their capacities for pleasure and gentleness in order to obtain power. We all bleed, we all die, it is unavoidable. And perhaps we create some
thing new and wonderful, perhaps we manage to pull a new thing into the world from Heaven. A child, a book, a revolution, a sturdy table, a monastery. When we bleed we are Christ. When we create we are Mary. Yet when we bleed we are also Mary, who suffered for her Son, and when we create we are Christ, who built a new Heaven and a new Earth like a good, level table and a solid, smooth chair.

  I came to this place so that I would never have to hear again that the vital thing is whether or not drawing a picture of God condemns the soul. I came to this place so that I could hear the Word more clearly, for the Word is not a thing you bring to others, it is being itself, repeated over and over in every aspect of the world, the Word which creates, the Word which bleeds, and my ears are not so good these days. I must have a very profound quiet to hear it, and even then, even then. Even then there are two kinds of old men, and the one is full of grace, performing that miracle of perspective and the long glance backward, and the other is brittle and bitter, a hard seed from which no green thing will grow again. Some days I am the one, some days I am the other. Struggle never ends, even in peace. Even in the lovely country where men have lived since the first wandering days of Eve in her rags and her misery. Even here, I can only forgive my life for having happened to me three or four days of any week. On the other days, I cannot let any of it be.

  The young monks ask me if a saint can know he is a saint while he lives and still remain one. The knowing of it must lead to pride, they think, which would disqualify. I tell them to eat their breakfasts. Who cares what a saint knows? Saints are like storms—you cannot predict or control them, you can only hope they pass you by unscathed. And, well. I certainly know the state of my sainthood and that is very poor. A saint acts because he is moved by God. I acted to fill the time, for that which I loved passed from the world. I had a childhood, like any man, and in that childhood I had a mother with too many children to worry too much about one resourceful son. I ran wild, I became a young jackal, trotting along the streets of Constantinople and screaming every now and again just to hear how it echoed. I fell in with a feral and savage crowd—heretical thinkers and Nestorian Christians, drinking in the Logos by the savage moonlight, drunk on an idea of God that meant we could hold the end of an unbroken chain that began with the world-beginning Word and passed through Jesus Christ Our Lord and through our own hands, on through the ages of men, down and down and down. That meant there were two of everything. The world itself has a twin. We all do, our better selves, the parts of us which are immortal and forever young, which abound with plenty. The good, serene soul in which any thing one plants may grow into the loveliest and strangest tree, so that we end our lives the caretakers of an orchard which gives fruit to every committed act. A life has so many fruits, so many flowers, and at the end of mine they all seem to tangle and root in Constantinople, when I was young, when I was so sure of the right way of thinking, and I had a friend named John.

  When I consider it now I don’t think John himself mattered as much to me as his leaving. My memories of him are hazy and dim: sitting on the long harbor wall cracking quinces on my knee, listening to him talk simply for the rhythms of his voice, of the dusk and the fishermen and a gentle discourse on the division between soul and body. Running for paper rolled up and tied with rushes for him, interested and excited by the strength of my legs, how fast I could dart through the inner city, the clipped, lightfooted dance of haggling with the papyrus-master. Meeting his mother, once, sharing bread with her, eating their eggs and their preserved fish. I remember loving him as one loves an older brother who can do everything right and well, determined to be like him, to impress him, to be approved of and blessed by his notice. I was not a child, but I was young and like a bird would have been fiercely loyal to any creature who showed me love; it happened to be him, and so it was. I know many men who had such friendships—sometimes they were savory and sometimes less so. It was Constantinople at the beginning of a new Rome! Everything was permitted, nothing was true. I would not have said no, and perhaps that is my sin to atone for, a bright burning orange hanging from my tree that I must explain in the end, but nothing came of it. He rested his hand on mine, once or twice. He kissed my brow, one time, in the late evening when the stars were full as moons, and I had brought him both a jug of wine and a treatise on transfiguration he had been asking for all over town, and I felt it on my head like a pain. But love is like that, it is hard and awful and, usually, it is not contagious.

  Life with John was warm and smelled of men and books and olive dust, and I liked it. I sought them out when I performed that other miracle of maturity—seeking, striving, stretching. But his leaving landed in the center of my world and left a crater, one it took me years to climb out of, to scale rickety, crumbling sides and emerge my own self. He went to find the tomb of the Apostle Thomas, as many did, and establish an order there, or near there. He would send for me when he could—or at least I imagine he said that, promised that. I may have confused it, thought ambivalence to be permission. But no word came, and time passed, and finally some silk-seller with his cart full of orange and blue bolts sold me, under much duress, a piece of a ship he had found in the desert. It had a word on it—Theo, God, and I knew it for a fragment of John’s ship, which had been called the Theotokos, I recognized the woodcarving and the workmanship. John had left me and died and there would be no close, modest monastery in the mountains, no mild contemplation of Nestorius’ teachings or Mary’s travails. Not unless I made it so. Not unless I became the man I guessed John might have become, good and stalwart and a little reticent, not given to long speeches or faint praise, made excellent by works and deeds. I do not pretend that conclusion came primarily to mind. After much time spent borrowing against a fortune I did not have and locating the most interesting things to befuddle my brains, I dreamed in my haze and when I woke I dedicated myself to something both better and worse than a ghost—a shade of he who never was. I changed my name, though I could not quite bear changing it to John, for that is a state—the state of Johnness which he seemed always to occupy perfectly and without questioning—that I will not attempt. Grace, perhaps. My old friend? Well. There must always be two of things. Everything in the world has a twin. Kostas died and was buried with myrrh and palm leaves. I, however that I can be figured when so much has passed, walked out of Constantinople and from that all else came.

  Once there was a nymph named Calypso. Not really, of course. It’s a pagan story, and pagan stories only guess at how the world works. But Odysseus, on his way home from war, stopped at her island and lived with her as her lover for nine years—and that’s long enough for anyone to call her his wife. She wanted him to stay with her forever, and gave him a choice: live on the isle with her, eternally young and immortal, or leave her to wither and die with his mortal (and legal) wife in Ithaca. Odysseus chose and he chose for us all, as Christ chose for us all—to die is important, it gives shape to living. In God’s Kingdom is immortality and unceasing vigor, but not before. I wonder sometimes if he chose well. If, should John have washed up on another isle, and loved another nymph, and she offered him the same bargain, if he would choose as Odysseus did, or as I would have. Yes, I would have taken it. I would have made the other pact. I am weak and human and I have wanted love in my life. In that, perhaps Calypso was the more human of the two of them, for all she wanted was for her love to stay, and he left her without a backward glance. I wanted my love to stay. Instead, I am Odysseus’ son, withering in the rocky heights of a dry country, and remembering the wars I fought when I was young.

  John passed his hand over his eyes; Brother Dawud insisted that he had hardly begun to read—so much more remained, this was merely a kind of brief personal comment on the events to come. But John pushed the boards of the book closed. “Everything human I have loved is dead,” he whispered. “I will not be the death of more. Salah ad-Din is a good man. Kostas was a good man. I am a good man, on the brighter, better days, when Hagia laughs at the cameleopards racing or the early sp
ring rain, when my daughter speaks only out of her right-hand mouth, when the peacocks lift up their tails in the dawn. Then I am a good man. I can be that man today, just for a moment. I can not bleed, today.”

  Brother Dawud pursed his pink, full lips. “Salah ad-Din—he lets me call him Yusuf, sometimes, when I am running messages—is a good man. It is easy to love one man. One infidel. It is not easy to love a nation of them.”

  I smiled ruefully. “How wise you are, Dawud. For I have learned to love one Christian man, but have found the nation of them thorny. When John thinks as a man, he likes my laughing and my peacocks and my child and my early rains and my hibiscus flowers and my honeyed walnuts on his plate, he thinks of Pentexore as the real world and he calls poor Vidyut by his name instead of Archbishop. When he thinks as a nation he renames all our cities, and starts up the Lenten mass nonsense again.”

  Brother Dawud’s eyes grew soft and serious. “Jibril will hurt you for it, you know. He must look out for all of us. He always thinks as a nation, as St. Elijah’s and Nestorians. I don’t think he will let the world hear that Prester John declined to strike down a Muslim when it would be easy to do it, that he brought cameleopards and gryphons but did not fight.”

  Did it matter, that he warned you? Did you draw back your breath and think it might be better to hold your nose and do it?

  John could say what he liked. I said no before him—but no one in his world listens to a woman. Even their god did not. Who asked poor Mary if she wanted to loose a son on the world, an arrow of diamond catching fire as it flew? She said no, I’m sure of it. And yet, the future fell on her in the night all the same.

  THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

  THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

  A nest of bodies can grow deep and hot, such that no one wants to leave it. When a story is done, another must chain on, to keep all those skins together. “Tell me another story,” Sefalet coughed. Her right hand had gone frail and had a tremor. Her left lay firm, silent, over her thin chest, in a smug position, not speaking, but able to whenever it liked.