A Dirge for Preston John, Page 20

  One day, when the bronze thing in the ballroom was but half-built, Houd finally managed to dislodge one of the golden apples from the sardian serpent’s mouth, and an ivory fang with it. He whooped with joy, and did a little dance, and the color in his cheeks shot up. The apple dashed against the porphyry courtyard, and he marveled that it contained machinery, a tiny pumping bellow, delicate wheels. The girls pressed in to stare at it, to try to guess at its purpose, before turning to me. They were drifting, and I knew it, wanting to stretch the time between discovery and explanation, stretch it like sap, to prolong the pleasure of the mystery. But the apple eluded them, and they came running to find me as I was having my private luncheon: the song of the green kingfishers in the peach tree that afternoon, when the clouds brushed by one another, and the moon had begun to come up, as it sometimes does on summer days, hanging in the sky all pale and gauzy, like a ghost of itself.

  Houd, Who Wanted Me to Be Proud of Him for Breaking the Apple: Butterfly! Look what I have done!

  Ikram, Who Wished She Had Been the One to Break It: Don’t be boastful! Anyone could have done it.

  Lamis, Who Felt Deep Shame, That a Thing Should Be Broken, and She Had Not Stopped It: Make it better, Butterfly. Make it well.

  I told them that to make it well I would have to tell their mother, and she would have to send a messenger to Chandai, where the great goldsmith Gahmuret lives, and he would have to rouse his daughter Gahmureen, who was a finer goldsmith even than he, though the weight of her genius was such that she had to sleep one full year to save up the vigor to create one perfect work. And Gahmureen would have to wash her face, and drink very strong tea with cinnamon in it, and try to forget her dreams, and then sit at her workbench and stare at this thoroughly broken apple until her mind could contain it, all its workings and meanings, and only then would she be able to fix it, but at the price of whatever wonderful invention she might have fashioned that year, if it were not for Houd becoming quite a good shot.

  Lamis, Who Was Beginning to Cry: Oh, please, can you not fix it yourself! You know everything!

  Ikram, Who Was Beginning to Be Very Cross With Her Brother: See what you did!

  Houd, Who Was Beginning to Doubt My Tales: But what is it? What does it do up there in the snake’s mouth?

  And perhaps they were finally old enough to know that we live too long. They knew their mother would live forever, and so would they and so would I—and they presumed that meant that we would all live forever as we were then, in the nursery with its thick pillows and red walls, and me right there to explain away every distressing thing, and their mother to rule, and never cease. They believed it because they were happy there—if they had been miserable, they would already have known what the apples are for.

  Children, I said to them, my darlingest, do you have ambitions?

  Lamis, Who Did Not Know the Word: Did Rastno bring me one?

  Ikram, Who Thought of Little Else: I should like to be queen after mother is finished with it.

  Houd, Who Thought the Chief Attribute of Ambitions is That They Were Secret, Reluctantly: I should like to be a soldier. But I don’t really care.

  Of course there are many soldiers already, and a full queen with strong hands. What do you suppose queens do when someone else wants to be queen, and she is still as potent as ever? Or the soldiers who never need cease being soldiers, who have Fountain-water in their veins, who stay young, strong, who need never give it up if they do not wish to?

  Now they understood it. I saw it in the children’s uncertain, widening eyes.

  Death is the mother of ambition, and we are all orphans here. Everyone wants, everyone strives, but we trip over infinitude. If a monarch lives forever, how shall anything ever change? How shall any brilliant creature rise? If the monarch tends toward the despot, how shall we free ourselves?

  I leaned in close to the children, so that I could not be overheard, but they would not mistake me.

  How do you think your mother became queen?

  The meta-collinara discovered the Fountain themselves, as they drew further and further away from the busy settlements of those unlike them, those loud, boisterous, hungry, keen. The swan-headed folk were gentle, and wished nothing but to dwell together and twine their necks, to count their eggs and eat silence. When they found that crevice we all now know so well, they showed us the way and left one of their own there to administer the water—a great sacrifice, for her to be so left behind, while the rest drew further and further away, telling no one the name of their new city. And so the history of Pentexore diverted from the one begun in the Ship of Bones, when they still feared death, and had so little time.

  Suddenly, the world possessed an abundance of time. And because we are neither pure nor perfect, we treated it viciously.

  Once, some time after the Fountain but before Abir was born (yes, such a cosmos existed, that did not contain her!) there lived a king and a queen in the al-Qasr. What I mean to say is, one man who was king, and one woman who wished he were not. The king, Senebaut, was a vartula-man and so possessed instead of your charming orange eyes, a ring of many-colored eyes around his brow. The aspirant queen, Giraud, was a cyclops maid, with only one eye in her forehead, but that an unusually clear and bright one, which saw far off for many leagues.

  Now, ruling Pentexore had for sometime been a brutal business—for if a monarch is merely stabbed or dropped from a great height, she may be buried and, if her tree does not sprout bearing only hair or fingernails, continue to rule as well or poorly as she ever did. To truly eradicate one’s predecessor, the body needed to be done away with entirely, obliterated. And perhaps, if she had possessed a more violent nature, Giraud might have been willing to cut Senebaut into as many pieces as she could and confine them in one of the long silver vessels that line the great hall—what did you think they contained? Not spice, nor gold.

  Don’t cry. History is like this, sometimes.

  But even had she liked to cut folk into meat, a vartula-man is never easily caught out, seeing as he does both before and behind. Giraud would find another way.

  Houd, Who Felt Sick, Though He Would Not Show Me: Was Senebaut a bad king? Did he arrest people? Did he keep his wives in the cellar?

  You might think so, but he was no better or worse than any king. He wanted things his own way—which is the primary trait of a king. He disliked both porridge and economic philosophy. But he threw many festivals, and asked only enough taxes to build a bridge over the Physon, and employed several chroniclers, sculptors, and painters to fashion what they pleased with no requirement that they exalt him in particular.

  Giraud was a prodigy of government—ever since she was small she had lorded over the other cyclopes, and with great cleverness and subtlety made certain that they played only the games she enjoyed—though she did not insist on winning, for she had a practical disposition. When she lost, she sank into contemplation for days, until she could pinpoint exactly how the losing occurred. As she grew, she set suitors impossible tasks, such as fetching rings from the peaks of mountains and standing guard for a cycle of the moon without sleep. She did not ask these things because she wanted them done, no, but because she was interested in the exercise of power, in whether they would attempt her tasks, in whether she had power enough over them to compel it. Her single eye burned with purpose, and she became so deft at the leveraging of her own strength that she exhausted all opportunities to test herself save one—and Senebaut alone stood in her way.

  It was only that she wanted to be queen. Sometimes we want things, and we cannot quite say why, except that somehow we were made to want them. She was not the first to decide to kill a king—all those silver vessels speak to such considerations. Without natural death to put a flourish at the end of a reign, it was common as cake, and not just for kings, but any profession a creature longed after. True, a country may support many more blacksmiths than kings—however, there is a limit to the number of possible blacksmiths, and sooner or later someone wou
ld think of those silver vessels, and one passing afternoon a sooty face would be replaced by another in the Pavilion, looking fair pleased with itself, and that would be that.

  Now, my little cygnets, I exhorted them, before I tell you how the vartula-man was brought low, tell me what death is. Speak up, don’t be bashful.

  Ikram, Who Had Read About Such Things: Grandmother died. Nobody else, though.

  Lamis, Who Was Badly Frightened: I don’t know! I don’t want it! Make it stop!

  Houd, Whose Curiosity Flushed His Cheeks: People go away and unless they get planted they never come back. I don’t know where they go. I haven’t figured that out yet. Somewhere where they can’t talk anymore, or be seen, and maybe they live there like normal and maybe they don’t, I don’t know.

  No one can know. I have listened to many stories and I think we are all more frightened of death because we can avoid it. A mortal girl, if she is uncareful and manages to die early, might lose fifty years or so. Less. We lose time without counting, without end.

  And so Senebaut lost.

  For Giraud was patient. In a space of rich black mud she planted every noxious thing she could find: hooded serpents and mushrooms and spiders with green spots on their bellies, poppies with black pollen, rice gone sour and prickled with colorful rot. She bent her will to these trees as she had to everything else. She tended them with tears to coax their bitterness, with blood to swell their cruelty. And by and by, a tree rose up in her orchard full of odd, blackish, custardy fruits that not only killed the moths she kept for this purpose, but dissolved their little bodies to a bit of wet dust.

  The immortal can afford to wait. Giraud was very beautiful, her single eye fringed with dark lashes, her wit quick, and she had never accepted a suitor. She presented herself as a prospect to the king, with her warm kiss said to him: I will be queen when you are dead.

  Children, she married him, and every night when he kissed her she told him this, and he laughed, and so did she, for royal folk have a peculiar sense of humor, and for many years they were happy.

  Lamis, Who Believed She Would Never Marry: Why would he marry her if she wanted to kill him?

  We are more frightened of death than mortals, and also more enamored of it. Perhaps he didn’t believe her. Perhaps he thought wifehood would mollify her. Perhaps he looked into her one eye with all his own, and saw the beckoning of the dark. But she bore a child to him, and then another, so that she could be certain no one would deny her the throne when he had gone, and then one night, she lay down beside him, her long hair covering his skin, and gave him a rich tea, full of her own soft fruits. Perhaps he even knew it, as he drank, perhaps he held her close as his flesh went to dust. But he did drink, and she became queen, and ruled well and kindly enough in her time—no worse than Senebaut, no better. She, too, liked things her own way. Kings change not because the country needs them to, but because a body wants to be king. Ambition is the source of all change.

  As soon as she was fitted for the crown, the new queen went into Chandai where Gahmuret lived, and asked him to keep her safe from poisons of all kinds, for Giraud was never a fool. Gahmuret sat at his workbench for one year, considering how this should be done. In the end, he could not do it. He scried the stars himself and determined that he and his wife ought to conceive a child, and this child might grow to encompass the task the queen set. And so Gahmureen was born some time later, and born asleep. Her parents cared for her as she slept on and on, growing and dreaming and growing again. When she turned sixteen, Gahmureen woke with a start and commenced to build two great serpent-statues, each with an apple in its mouth, and in each apple a carbuncle that would go black in the presence of noxious poisons, and in the apple skin an alarm that would screech and hiss if the carbuncle darkened. Giraud rewarded the inventor’s daughter with a rich bed, piled with down and silk, for her cleverness, and there she sleeps today, in Chandai, where we would have to wake her now, to repair what Houd had broken.

  And so went the exchange of kings and queens, one bartered for another, right up until today, with a bronze contraption growing bigger by the day down in the Pavilion.

  [It began, finally, here, too, in the margins of Imtithal’s text, long curls of pale green slime, coiling like lace, encroaching, stretching toward the text as if to tease me, as if to say: If I wish I can take it all. Even these sweet little stories, even these. My heart saw some allegory in this, the corrupt world dissolving pure mind, the invisible demons of air that delight disintegration of these books, the angels of our better nature, racing to preserve purity, wholeness.]

  Faster, Hiob, faster.

  THE WORD IN THE QUINCE

  Chapter the Seventh: in Which Our Companions Discover a Certain Tower and Its Ruins and Feel Very Fondly Towards It, and in Which a Priest Struggles with the Convergence of Heart and Flesh.

  Between Thule and the ruins lay an endless wood—at least it seemed endless, and all the worse for my dreams, which had gone dark and wordless of late. I dreamed of Hagia, and sometimes she had a head, and sometimes a child, and everything so washed with light I was blinded, and sunk into darkness with only her hands on me, only her breath, to let me know I still lived on the Earth and had not been transfigured into Heaven. The heat in my dreams moved on me like deep water. I told no one of any of it, and when I think now on all that has passed I know we were all lost in our own dreams, but then I thought myself specially plagued. I often thought myself special in those early years—I cannot be blamed, I don’t think. Everyone was grotesque, save me, everyone knew the lore of the land, save me. Everyone served some false god, or none. But the digging man had renewed my faith; Thomas came here, Thomas died here, and I would find his grave, and pray, and he would tell me what to do. That’s what saints are for—to guide us, who are lost on Earth.

  Did I lust after her? I did. I confessed my sins to the stars every night, but my desire was not lifted from me. Then, it hurt me like a blade, not that I should swell and need, but that I should be unable to turn away from it, no matter how deformed the object. I should have been stronger. Now, I believe I wanted her at first because her aspect was most clearly demonic. Grisalba, I needed only look away from her tail to think her a mild mortal woman; the gentleness of Hajji excused her monstrous ears, and the male leonines I could love, for God made men for companionship and we find it easy among our own. After all, Daniel walked among lions, and was well. Qaspiel, figured like an angel, caused me no distress at all. But I could not ignore her body, and how like a thing of hell in the margins of a book of virtue she appeared, and how little gentleness dwelt in her spirit, all feminine virtues replaced with boldness, knowingness, and a laugh like a roar. But as Hell strikes fear, so also fills the air with temptation, and she tempted me sorely. For that I tried again not to speak to her, nor look, and treated her unaccountably cruel. But once love is released in a field of red silk flowers, one cannot crush any of it back into the ribs, and deny it ever broke free.

  And her mouth moved in her belly like my dream of St. Thomas, and I could not tell what that meant, but it unnerved me and provoked me all at once.

  In the night, when all slept, I reached out my hand to her, and felt the warmth of her naked back, and if she knew my touch she did not turn, but I fought myself, and God knows my travail.

  I tried not to. That is all Heaven may ask of a man.

  I tried also not to know her intimacy with the red lion Hadulph. I could not begin to imagine how they might manage concourse, but they were joined at the heart, and the lion did not need to deny her as I did. In some strange fashion their connection brought to me the truth of Pentexore. For a woman to lie beneath a lion and exult in soft murmurs, in secret pleasures, would rest somewhere beyond obscene and into the realms of madness. I would have thought nothing of locking away any Christian woman who performed such an act of devilry.

  But Hadulph spoke, he reasoned, he had moods, he preferred mangoes to bitter-melons, and Hagia to nearly everyone else. If in all ways t
he lion comported himself as a man, the laws concerning his mating could not be the same, could they? For the lions in Christendom snarl and chase and have no soul, no nature at all beyond the savage. And if that most basic law could be laid aside, that the angelic nature of man should never mix with the vicious bestial, what else might be permitted?

  But in the endless wood beyond Thule, I could not allow myself those thoughts. Not yet. Not when Hadulph and Hajji rejoined us on the other side of the great chasm, not when the forest closed in, each tree heavy with silk cloth, spooling down in bright orange, gold, green, already woven, and no worm in sight. Not with Thomas somewhere ahead, somewhere secret, waiting only for me to persevere.

  We came upon the ruins near dawn, for the silk forest emanated a perfume that filled us with vigor and wakefulness, and we walked through the night with the moon casting fluttering shadows through the draping, shimmering cloth. I wondered idly what lady had buried her dresses here, to birth such a wood. Hadulph nosed Hagia with affection, and I wished that he would speak again of his mother, or that we might stumble upon her somehow, so that she could absolve me of Hagia entirely, tell me it was not my fault: Love is hungry, love is severe. Qaspiel broke out singing, with no words at all, but like a bird, like a trumpeting swan, with much honking and chirruping and clicking that nonetheless seemed a pleasing song, though melancholy, in the silvery evening.

  “Why did you come, Qaspiel?” I asked that night, after it had finished its nightingale song. “What do you hope to achieve? Thomas is of no account to you.”