The Habitation of the Blessed

  “Go now, my son. I forgive you all that is to come.”

  The golden sphere descended, and I felt it press on the bones of my back, crushing me with its impossible weight, its solemn light.

  Many years later, in the green-curtained bedroom I shared with my wife, I told her of this dream. She did not care for it. She would have liked to forget those first days. You were so ugly then, she said. You forgive yourself in your dreams. What if I do not forgive you?

  I put my hands to the soft space between her collarbone and her shoulder-blades, where another woman’s head might be. I kissed it, and pressed my face to her warm brown shoulder. Outside, the summer rains steamed down from a heavy sky.

  If you do not forgive me, I will be lost.

  THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN

  When we first found him, he lay face-down in the pepper-fields, his skin blazed to a cracked and blistered scarlet, his hair sparse as thirsty grass. It might have been anyone.

  King Abibas had chosen us, a fair sampling of nations, to investigate the thing that had manifested in the farm-speckled suburbs of Nural.

  I was two hundred and fifty-eight years old.

  I should mention that in those days our king was Abibas, a blue mule. Blue mules are not, of course, truly blue, but more of an ashen color. However, they swear that their primal ancestor, Urytal, could walk unseen through the summer world, for his coat was the color of the sky. Other than this, Urytal’s main characteristic was a rampant priapism, and the ability to sire children simply by coughing. When a brace of mules related this tale to John during his mania for origin stories, he told them this was mere wishful thinking and ridiculous, masking their shame at being unable to produce offspring themselves. Abibas bit him. Rather, three of the Abibas-fruits on the funeral tree bit him.

  For in the midst of his reign, Abibas died in a duel, which seemed to him the best way to resolve a certain issue of personal honor. Duels do not normally proceed to the death, but mules, after all, do not normally leave well enough alone. He was buried with much pomp, and in due course his tree sprang up and he continued to rule very much as before. And when the stranger arrived, the returned Abibas, his first blossoms just starting to show, chose us as his representatives: Hadulph, myself, and a pair of pygmy twins. He might have chosen anyone, and when I think on it now I wonder, had I not been chosen, if I would have cared even a little what happened to the piece of human flotsam we inherited from the unforgiving Rimal.

  I am a Pentexoran. I am a loyal and darling child of luck. I submit to it, like a dog. But it terrifies me, sometimes, how near we come, every moment, to living some other life beyond imagining. In my heart’s eye there are two Hagias. One standing above the man I did not yet even know was called John, and one home safe with Astolfo, eating hazelnuts in the orchard, kissing his broad jaw and never once thinking of a city called Constantinople. I feel my entire self separated in that moment, prodding John’s body with my foot, the sun burning my shoulders, a kind of tableau we did not know was a tableau, because no one can ever know when the world changes. It just happens—you cannot feel it shift, you are only suddenly unbalanced, tumbling headlong toward something, something new.

  The pygmies wanted to eat him.

  “He must have been strong to have wandered this far, from whatever strange country,” the girl-twin reasoned, tugging her beaded beard. “We should have the right to bisect his liver and take the strength into our tribe.”

  “Don’t be selfish,” I said, still watching his motionless form. We had not yet even turned him over.

  “Selfish? Us?” the boy-twin scowled, his tiny face bitter. “I have not tasted strength in some time, I’ll have you know. There are rules. We are prepared to receive his vitality, and bear it into our family. You don’t need it. Let us have it!”

  Hadulph nosed the man’s maimed feet, and snuffled at his dark clothes.

  “He smells of salt water and pressed flour,” the red lion announced, “and he who smells of pressed flour knows the taste of baked bread, and he who knows the taste of baked bread is civilized, and we do not eat the civilized, unless they are already dead and related to us, which is a matter of religion and none of anyone’s business.”

  I looked down at the man’s shape between the black and red pepper plants, laid in their long rows like a chessboard. It looked like the end of a game to me: I, the broad-shouldered knight standing over the toppled kingpiece. I stroked the fontanel above my collarbone, considering the wreckage that the desert wind had washed onto our beach of black peppercorns. He did not look dangerous at all—soft, and unclawed, and shaped more or less like a very small giant. Perhaps the giants would adopt him as a pet. But I did not say this, nor side with the pygmies. Instead, I chose for all of us, and so, if blame is to be had, I will take it. I said:

  “He is wretched, like a baby, wrinkled and prone and motherless. Take him to the al-Qasr, and iron him out until he is smooth,” I said quietly, and the pygmies grumbled, gnashing their tattooed teeth.

  Hadulph took the stranger on his broad and rosy back, where the fur bristles between his great shoulder blades, and that is how our world ended.

  We laid the strange man on one of the fallen pillars in the central hall of the al-Qasr—the smooth tower of violet stone had crashed to the floor one day as the quarter-moon market bustled in the portico. When it fell, tile-shards of gold and splinters of ebony came tumbling after it, and now one could see the stars through the hole it made, like coins dropped into the hand of heaven. I was there that day: A brace of tigers looked up from arguing with a two-faced apothecary about whether she should be allowed to sell the powdered testicles of greater feline castrati as aphrodisiacs; the lamia paused in their venom-dance; I placed an arm beneath my breasts and lifted my eyes from the scribe-work before me to the ceiling. We all looked back and forth from the fallen pillar to the hole in the roof, up and down, up and down: work to sky to ruined architecture.

  This is how memory works, when you live forever. You lay a man on a stone, and you see the man and you see the stone but you also see the history of the stone, as you saw it when it was whole and polished, when it was cracked and poorly cared for, when most everyone knew it was going to go, when it stuttered, when it fell. You remember who built the stone pillar, the debate over the color of it, whether or not it was garish. You think of the books you know that deal in pillar-hood, perhaps Yuliana of Babel’s architectural poetry. Perhaps the sciopods’ ranting about the decline in quality construction. And because you have seen so many patterns shape and ravel and unspool, you also see, flickering just out of reach, the possibilities inherent in a stranger with such small ears, such a small nose, such a tiny jaw. You see, dancing at the edges of his shape, what he might become. What you might become.

  On the night the pillar fell, I was busy at my stall, writing for coin. After Astolfo’s illness, he had found a kind of grudging love for the groves of parchment-trees and the long hoops for drying skin in the sun. Finally, he ignored me completely, dwelling among them always, happy and silent, in a kind of communion with them of which I had no part. I began to take our vellum and ink to the quarter-moon market, and it began to grow famous and desired, for it was always fine, and I have a good hand. A lovely script makes any paper shine.

  Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes, I had copied out from one greenish sheet of pepper-leaf paper to another. It was a passage from the Anti-Aristotle of Chandrakant, which a widowed gryphon by the name of Fortunatus bade me make into a small book for him. The Anti-Aristotle, you see, was himself famously widowed in his youth, and suffered bitterly, as his wife had drowned, and no body remained to bury. All of the philosopher’s passion he poured into his master-work, the Physikai Akroaskeos, and when he had finished, he fell into such a grief that no one could come near him without being quite clawed and wet with tears.

  The philosopher went to the mussel-shell, and the old men there, but could not tell them he wished to be healed
. Words failed him. He walked into the west and did not return.

  The night the pillar fell, with the market clamoring all around me, I wrote smoothly: Animals and their variegated parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies exist, and we say that these and the like exist by nature.

  The pillar chipped its complex torus, and tottered on the onyx floor. I ignored the sound. Distraction is the enemy of perfection.

  All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are constituted by art. Each of them has within itself a principle of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration).

  The constellation of Taurus-in-Extremis, the Slaughtered Cow, could be seen winking through the broken wood. Ebony dust drifted down on a soft breeze off of the river.

  Even motion can be called a kind of stationariness if it is compulsive and unending, as in the motion of the gryphon’s heart or the bamboo’s growth. On the other hand, a bed or a coat or anything else of that sort, insofar as it is a product of art, has innate impulses to change.

  The stone column crashed down; rich black earth spurted up through the ruptured floor. The pillar’s belly shuddered in it, and cracked from side to side, loud and unignorable. But I dutifully finished my line, so as not to lose my place: as an indication of this, take the well-known Antinoë’s Experiment: if you plant a bed and the rotting wood and the worm-bitten sheets in the deep earth, it will certainly and with the hesitation of no more than a season, which is to say no more than an ear of corn or a stalk of barley, send up shoots.

  Past the ruin of the pillar, I could just glimpse the edge of the sardis-snake that guarded the entrance of the al-Qasr, ensuring that no folk who are not lamia and therefore licensed, could never bring poison under its roof. Behind it and far off, the Cricket-star flickered as if in chirruping song.

  The quarter-moon market gave a collective shrug and went about itself, stepping over the purple column and leaving it where it had fallen—wasn’t it better, the cyclops murmured, to let a little light in, and have a nice place to stretch one’s feet? I glanced back at my thrice-copied treatise, tiresome as all secondhand treatises are, and finished the page.

  However, since this experiment may be repeated with bamboo or gryphon or meta-collinarum or trilobite, perhaps it is fairer to say that animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies are artifice, brother to the bed and the coat, and that nature is constituted only in the substance in which these things may be buried—that is to say, soil and water, and no more.

  I laid a man on a stone and watched a stone fall and there was no separation between the two nights. I did both things, and I thought while the pillar fell over and over in my heart:

  He is so unlike us. What does that mean?

  By the time we laid the stranger out on the pillar, it had grown over with phlox and kudzu and lavender and pepperwort, and we rested his battered head on a thatch of banana leaves. He moaned and retched like a sailor coughing up the sea, and I held him while he wracked himself clean. I held him like a child, and felt myself drift upward, and backward, through my memory, as his sickness ebbed and flowed. It is tiresome to nurse someone, though no nurse would admit it. Illness has a certain sameness, the cycle of purging, fevering, chilling, purging again. I had had enough of it with my husband. I had no patience left for a stranger’s travail—yet I managed to hold him, not very heavy at all, as folk gathered around—Grisalba, a wealthy lamia, shouldered in, and behind her the widowed Fortunatus, and I thought on how his golden fur shone that day when the pillar broke, how red his eyes from weeping. I tried to think of anything but the wet bodily palpitations of that stranger, so helpless in my grasp.

  It was some ways past the fishing hour when his eyes slitted open and his moth-voice rasped:

  “Thomas…”

  “Is that your name, boy?” growled Hadulph, who by dint of his size could call anyone boy.

  “Ah,” the man coughed, dust and ash spattering my arm. “No, my name… my name is John.”

  The name should have echoed. We all should have stopped to let it pass between us like a premonition. But we did not. We watered his blistered lips instead, and he had not yet noticed that I held him in my arms, propped against the breasts he would soon enough call demonic and unnatural. But he had not yet called us all demons, succubi, inferni—he only asked for bread, and more water.

  He had not yet screamed when Hadulph spoke, or trembled when the crickets chirped in iambic rhymes. He had not yet called us all damned, demanded tribute to kings we had never heard of, forbade anyone not made in God’s image to touch his flesh.

  He had not yet castigated us for our ignorance of the Trinity, or preached the Virgin Birth during our mating season. He had not yet searched the lowlands for a fig tree we ought not to touch, or gibbered in the antechamber, broken by our calm and curious gazes, which we fixed on our pet day and night, waiting for him to perform some new and interesting trick.

  He had not yet dried his tears, and seen how the al-Qasr was not unlike a Basilica, and how the giants were not unlike Nephilim, and how Hadulph was not unlike the avatar of St. Mark, and the valley of our nations was not unlike Eden. He had not yet decided that all of the creatures of our world were not unlike holy things—except for the blemmyae, except for me, whose ugliness could not be born by any sacred sight. He had not yet called us his mission, and followed Grisalba the lamia home trying to explain transubstantiation, which she, being the niece-by-marriage of a cannibal-dervish, understood well enough, but pretended to misconstrue so that he would follow her home.

  He had not yet called her a whore and tried to make her do penance with a taper in each hand. She had not yet sunk her teeth into his cheek, and sent him purpled and pustulant back to Hadulph.

  Hadulph had not yet licked him clean, roughly and patiently, as cats will, and called him his errant cub. He had not yet fallen asleep against the scarlet haunch of the lion.

  He had not yet retreated into the al-Qasr to study our natures and embrace humility, ashamed of his pronouncements and his pride. I had not yet brought him barley-bread and black wine, or watched over him through three fevers, or showed him, when he despaired, how my collarbone opens into a sliver of skin like clouds stretched over a loom.

  He had not yet come crawling through the dark, shame-scalded, to hear my belly speak, and read to him from the green pepper-papyrus of my daily calligraphy, just to hear the way I said my vowels. He had not yet said that my accent sounded of seraphim.

  This is how memory works, when you live forever. You look back from a perch of years and it all seems to happen at once.

  “My name is John,” he said, “I… I think I have become lost. I know that I came searching for Thomas and his tomb. The Apostle, where is the Apostle? Take me to him, if you are a Christian soul.”

  Hadulph and I exchanged glances.

  “What is an Apostle?” the lion said.

  THE SCARLET NURSERY

  In the wake of any visit from the phoenix, the children descended into an orgy of new ambitions and phraseologies and wild dreams, all balanced on the pyramid of toys and baubles Rastno brought them, half of which would be broken inside of a month, the other half ensconced among the most treasured toys of our little creche. I never devised a method of predicting which way any single glass ball or cage or crystal lamia with her tail flaming bright orange and blue would go. He was a great glassblower, Rastno. He reasoned that his glass should be finest of all, since he feared no flame but his own. And true to this he filled the capital with beads and baubles and bowls and chalices, plates and amphorae and children’s toys. And mirrors, mirrors of every shape. The children prepared for weeks for his visits. Nevermind that he came to meet their mother, and inform her of much sadness and more fear; for my dears he came only to dazzle them. His scarlet and cream feathers arced and curved in a dance for their delight; the golden plume of his brow bobbed in interest when they shared their small triumphs and betray
als. He was hardly bigger than Lamis, if you excused her hands, but to them he was big as a mountain.

  The dead moon slid low in the sky; we had prepared a night-picnic for her rebirth. Ikram had boiled mint and berries all afternoon to make jam—it appealed to her nature, the fire, the bubbling, the pain of scalding her thumbs. Lamis had rolled out little cakes as round as the living moon, the dough eggy and yellow, very quietly and diligently, as if with her own virtue encouraging the new moon to rise. Houd had brewed coffee for all of us in a silver pot, crushing the beans with his prodigious fist, already as strong as a mallet. He peered at it with some excitement: dark, bitter, hot, smelling deeply of cinnamon and earth and even a little of the blue flowers the queen keeps ever at her bedside. All because, as Houd said: the moon likes these things best.

  And so we sat under the stars, on a hill behind the al-Qasr, just high enough that we could peer over the sardian tips of her towers, and their crowns of bronze stars that silhouetted against the real and blazing ones. The cakes tasted a bit of anise, and I praised Lamis, for she often needed praise, being young and unsure of everything in the world. We waited for the moon to rise. I sang a song about the gentle manners of the cyclops.

  Ikram, to Whom Rastno Gave a Glass Horn: Butterfly, why is Rastno the phoenix so sad?

  Lamis, to Whom Rastno Gave a Glass Flower: He tries to be sunny for us, but he cries beneath his wing. Even I have seen it.