A Dirge for Preston John, Page 28
Catherynne M. Valente
Houd, Who Would One Day Die in Jerusalem: There, Butterfly, there. Beginning tomorrow I will love you for all the rest of my life.
[There is more, so much more, but it all dissolved into nothing, in a slither of green and pale blue fungus that tears the living page from my hand and left me with nothing, nothing, no end and no answers, only that lonely boy and his need, and no bud for me, either, to follow Hiob into stillness and dreams and escape the disappointment, the loss of it. I had been widowed by these books, and abandoned. The soft weight of the spine cracked as I threw it, useless, against the wall. I wanted to know, curse them. I wanted to know everything.]
ADDENDUM TO THE CONFESSIONS OF
HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699
Brothers, I send this back to you knowing in no fashion what tomorrow might bring. I send back Marcel and Abelard over the mountains to bear back this manuscript. Hiob felt at ease speaking to God, comfortably, two aged grandfathers exchanging tales. I can speak only to the page. I write knowing in no fashion what tomorrow may bring. For my own part, I will stay. Hiob cannot be moved, and I cannot leave him.
I have asked the woman in yellow to bear me back to the Tree of Books, so that I may attempt this tale again, make it more whole, fill the places the mold took from us. It is my intent to build a small hut there, on that plain, so as to lose no time transporting the manuscripts back here. It is not for love of Prester John I do this, but for love of Hiob, who should wake to illumination.
Oh, but I lie. I also want to know the rest, I also burn to learn what followed, I also find my heart grown bitter with having those books stolen from me too soon by the mere villainies of air and light. How those volumes corrupt in their turn, so that I feel within me tendrils of green, and red, and gold, swarming over my heart, eating me whole. Take me back, I said to her, take me back, I cannot bear it.
The woman in yellow, Theotokos, I suppose I must call her, looked intently at me for a long while.
“I will consider it,” she said finally.
“Abbas will support me. It is not yours to decide.”
The woman turned her head to one side, and I believe she almost smiled.
“It is my tree,” she said softly. “It belongs to no one but me. Not Abbas, and not you. Go to him if you like. He rules at my pleasure.”
And she made a curious gesture, stroking the skin of her neck, the space just above her collarbone, unselfconscious, bare.
And so I wait. I wait for her to convey me back to that place. I wait and think of Hagia, and Imtithal, and the strangeness of women. I wait and think of how the world was made. I make sure Marcel and Abelard are well stocked with eggs and meat and oranges, and send them off into the ashy day. I eat Abbas’ chickens, and pray. Oh, how I pray. I pray you will not condemn us, at home, in those familiar halls, with those sweet chestnuts in the garden. Nothing was as we expected. We are but mortal men. We cannot be blamed for the shape and history of the world.
One further thing I must relate, and then Abelard is eager to depart, for he hates this place, and has the patience of a gadfly. But I have no explanation for what I wish to tell, and no knowledge of its meaning or purpose. I can only say, as John might: It happened, no denying would stop it from having happened.
Yesterday, as I sat beside Hiob’s slab, dizzy with the scent of the flowery garlands, my master opened his mouth. I started, relief flooding me. He would wake, it would be all right. All would be well and all would be well—but he did not wake. His jaw cracked open, and out of his mouth a small, forked branch emerged, its foliage wet and wrinkled like newborn butterflies, its fruit nearly invisible, finer than dust. It grew out of him, slowly, a delicate stripling, studded with leaves like emeralds, glowing gently against his grey, senseless skin.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When addressing the delicate issue of a book’s genealogy, one has to begin at the beginning. I owe a great debt of thanks to Deborah Schwartz, my medieval studies professor at Cal Poly, who awakened in this lapsed Classicist a grand love of the medieval world that went far beyond the ersatz RenFaires of my youth and into something altogether stranger and deeper. Though I bear the shame of having failed to complete my graduate program, Dr. Schwartz rekindled my passion for Arthuriana, Chaucer, romances, and through all of that, finally, led me to the Kingdom of Prester John and all the wonders hidden there. Without her I would never have found my way.
Thank you also to my usual cohort: my husband Dmitri, who not only read every draft and loved them until I loved them too, but checked me into a hotel in the wilds of Maine until I finished this beast. To Elizabeth McClellan, who offered a kind beta read and reassured my frazzled soul, to SJ Tucker, my sister in crimes of art, to Tiffin Staib, Amal El-Mohtar, Deborah Castellano, and Evelyn Kriete, without whom I would be lost. To everyone who has helped me stand up, keep moving, keep smiling, never give up, never fail. You are my tribe; you are my blessed kingdom of monsters and angels.
To my agent, Howard Morhaim, I am forever grateful—he is the Dumbledore to all my bedraggled children, finding them magical homes when I despair. To my team of editors and copyeditors, Jeremy Lassen, Juliet Ulman, and Marty Halpern, all of whom taught me a great deal in the course of processing this book into the form you hold in your hands.
Finally, thank you to the anonymous student who once turned in a very bad poem about the priest-king in the East, and caused me to say to an empty office: Prester John deserves better.
The Habitation of the Blessed
© 2010 by Catherynne M. Valente
This edition of The Habitation of the Blessed
© 2010 by Night Shade Books
Cover art by Rebecca Guay
Cover design by Cody Tilson
Map by Marc Scheff
Interior layout and design by Ross E. Lockhart
All rights reserved
First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-59780-199-7
Printed in Canada
Night Shade Books
http://www.nightshadebooks.com
Contents
Dedication
Maps
Epigraphs
The Confessions
Saturn, Cold and Dry
The Book of the Ruby
The Confessions
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Confessions
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
The Confessions
The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
Jupiter, Hot and Moist
The Confessions
The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
The Confessions
The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
Mars, Hot and Dry
The Confessions
The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
The Confessions
Acknowledgments
Copyright
For Deborah Schwartz and Kat Howard,
my medievalist darlings, the invisible audience
for all my subtle clevernesses, stalwart
And for my tribe, all those for whom
the world is worth folding in half, in quarters,
in eighths, and more.
Those who were strangers are now natives; and he who was a sojourner now has become a resident… for those who were poor there, here God makes rich. Those who had few coins, here possess countless besants; and those who had not had a villa, here, by the gift of God, already possess a city. Therefore why should one who has found the East so favorable return to the West? God does not wish those to suffer want who, carrying their crosses, have vowed to follow Him, nay even unto the end.
—The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres, 1099
Enjoy the scent of the ox-eye plant of Najd, for after this evening it will come no more.
—A tutor in the Egyptian court of
Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi
THE CONFESSIONS
I have felt it necessary to remove the name of my master from these documents, as, if he is not dead he is certainly not living, and confessions are the province of living men. It is rightly to be called ours now, and not merely his, our confessions, our book, our unsettling and unbearable tale. I look on these pages, their hasty script, their untidy gaps, and they seem to me like a fierce and unruly child of whom Hiob had the raising, and I had the troubled marriage. Yet it does not feel correct to give it my own name. These are not the Confessions of Alaric of Rouen, they are only a confession, at no kind of altar. As exemplars of their kind, they are mostly a disaster of poor choices made in the dark, and miserable happenings that might have been avoided if someone or other were less of an idiot than he proved to be.
I expected to return home more quickly than has proved possible. The passage through the mountains surrounding Lavapuri clotted up with mud driven by heavy rains, and of course Hiob himself has become something more like a relic we will soon be forced to bear homeward in a lovely box than the venerable leader of our mission. For my brother suffers still the effects of his rather unwise ingestion of a lurid blossom which rose up from the rotting fruit of the book-tree that grows still in a distant part of this province. I am often angry with him for playing the fool and the glutton, though it is unworthy of me to allow my mind to wallow in such judgments, for I cannot understand how such a wise man could think no ill effects would befall him if he but ate some alien plant he knew nothing about. As I write Brother Hiob lies like the princess of the country tale, on a hard bier wrapped in flowers and vines and thorns. The blossom continued to grow out of his mouth after he fell into his current swoon, and now its orange and red flowers open up in many places on his body, and I cannot tell if they are rooted in his flesh or if they all spring from the vine that wedges open his withered throat, around which I each day pour water and a mash of the local grain, proper fruits, and milk. As of late I have had to massage the corners of his lips to open wider in order to feed him, for the emerald stem has swelled fat and healthy in such pious and fertile soil as my brother. The whole business is enormously unpleasant and not a little obscene. The tendrils of the thing have wound around his fingers like rings, and a curtain of pollen drifts round him day and night, blowsy and golden. It makes me sneeze; I cannot abide unruly life.
Hiob, my brother, you have left me, and I am alone. How could you be so thoughtless?
And then, of course, there is always the woman in yellow, called Theotokos though I will never call her so, haunting my steps and tending to Hiob as though he were her own son, and never leaving me though I would have her gone, I would have her gone, for she torments my heart and my mind altogether, and I am not so young that these two organs sit surely in my body, but rather in her presence rattle around like old teeth. She lifts his withered arms to wash him, his legs, and her hands on his insensate flesh lead my thoughts in spirals whose center points I dare not even consider.
I am not in the main troubled by women as many of my brothers are. God made them, and while it is true He also made serpents and scorpions and sharks, I am quite certain that in the kingdom of sharks there is a morality, a virtue, a justice, no less than in our own. It is only that we cannot effectively communicate with the shark save by extremely significant bite or equally emphatic harpoon, and so debates on the nature of selachian philosophy are rare. So it is that the outline of the woman in yellow when the sun moves behind her chills me in the same fashion as the outline of a shark in clear water would do—I see in it a clear presage of my own demise.
And yet even as I lay out argument, I recall the metaphor of Prester John, and how he called Christ a shark, and the Logos a lamprey affixed to its side. I thought I saw some truth in this unlovely image, though undoubtedly it is a heresy, and perhaps both women and God can be called creatures of the deep. And having thought of those former books, my heart comes round again to Hiob and his situation, and sinks once more into a dark and freezing tide whose ebb I cannot hope for.
With the permission of all concerned, I began the building of an anchorhold some fortnight ago. The boughs of the great tree bend over it, and I intend there to continue my brother Hiob’s work for two reasons. Firstly, I have no reason to think he will ever awake, yet no reason to think he will not, and between the two of them I believe this work must fall to someone, and I say without pride it is obvious I am best suited. If he did awake, I confess I would have not the first idea how to remove the plant matter from his body. I try not to think about it. My own throat itches in sympathy.
Secondly, there is little enough else to do here.
It is a simple affair: I hewed a good measure of camphor wood, whose fragrance pierces my mind, and with fastening and burying their stumps much like a puzzle, wedged them firmly one against the other until a structure quite humble but serviceable emerged. Its roof I thatched from fragrant leaves, slick and wide and green. I sweat profusely, for the heat is unbearable in this place, and there is not an inch of my dwelling which does not bear my sweat or my blood. That is as it should be. A bed of rushes I have, and a desk of piled extraneous wood, broad enough to serve my purposes. A stool the woman in yellow allowed me to take from her, but asked me for a curious exchange.
I will give you a chair, she said to me, and more books besides, for surely you have not forgotten that they are not yours to take but mine to give, but you must spend a night with me.
I am chaste, I protested, but my heart—no, something deeper than my heart, some dark, squamous knot of viscera—leapt up.
She gave me a pitying look, as one gives to a child who has interrupted his teacher to give the answer before the question is asked and thus blurted out that Jerusalem was the chief city of Russia.
I do not desire you. I do desire that a man who demands so much of us, our treasure, our food, our goodwill, our chairs, give to me whatever I ask, and I ask for a night. I want to know who you are, Alaric of Rouen, and who Hiob is, and how you dare appear as if out of a dream and put your hands around us, squeezing until you have all you desire. Of course you speak to me of desire, desire is all you are made of. And though you may not trespass the bounds of my body, you will certainly trespass anywhere else you please, and yet have the temerity to call yourself chaste while you thrust against my world.
Women and sharks both flay one alive, but only women can shame a man while they slice out his heart.
I agreed; it is a small price. The boredom of the contemplative life will give her a meager coin—I doubt she will be able to stay awake through my accounts of learning to read Latin and assisting Brother Vridel in the herbiary. The life cycle of fennel is such a fascinating subject. But what night she would ask of me she kept to herself as all other things, and allowed me to chose once more from the tree. However, I would not make Hiob’s mistake. I do not have his pride, and I did not care if I were the one to read the tree’s strange fruit first. Before I took my first steps towards the orchard, I drew together two of the younger novices, Brother Reinolt and Brother Goswin, neither of whom I cared for pe
rsonally (thus I would not be weakened by affection, but have the strength to be cruel to them). Each of them had an elegant hand and an obedient enough ear, and both showed signs of a dangerous sort of boredom. Their eyes had become canine, tracking the young women of the village as they went about their livelihoods. Novices, until they have burst their last pimple, are consistently engorged and constantly besieged with temptation. Best to put them to work.
Copy as quickly as you can. Do not make mistakes. Do not put your head in your hand and read dreamily. These books will rot and you must beat them at the race, to take their tales before they puff out in a cloud of spores. If you feel your heart moved by the story, your mind drifting to distant lands all full of fantastical creatures, think on Hiob, and how that vine will feel in your own mouth, cracking your teeth.
The choice was mine this time. It sat heavily with me; Hiob chose so well I cannot believe it was anything other than Providence. What if I should chose nothing specially of interest to us, some chronologue of tree sap and yearly rainfall? What if I should fail and spoil all my preparation? Why could there not be some kind-hearted librarian cloistered away in the village, with a reliable catalogue of all the books the tree could be relied upon to produce? How I should like to meet that man; all would be made clear and easy. Instead I was made to stand at the doubled-up root of the devilish tree, looking up into its boughs, terribly full and bright, the afternoon sun impossibly golden, filtering through the scarlet leaves and full, ripe fruit: in squares and scrolls, in red and green and blue and violet and silver, a hundred books and more in which I was meant to discover the fate of the Kingdom of Prester John, and ransom Hiob from his insensate and rapturous sleep.
In the end it seemed better to chose at random and trust in God than try to somehow apply strategy to such a great mystery. I climbed a little, shut my eyes, thrust out my hand, climbed a little more, did much the same, and tumbled back down the tree with three books clutched to my chest, out of breath, their perfume pulling at me with dusky fingers. Only then did I dare to look at my catch, my net of strange fish hooked out of the sky.
