A Dirge for Preston John, Page 34

  3. On the Mount

  The Mount rises out of a wide violet wood whose trees have a kind of fruit shaped terribly like hands covered in blue ink in swirls and patterns, held up in gestures of prayer or supplication, all of which aim for the palace. The castle itself, if I may call it a castle, seems not so much to have been built but grown, each wing or tower or buttress winding slowly out of the main body like blossoms. Indeed, the tips of the towers open very like camellia blooms, stone petals wide and graceful, with marble stamens arching up to fashion delicate courtyards on the topmost heights. Lanterns in every window give a tremendous glow, thousands of pricks of light, as though the Mount had called down all the stars of heaven and compelled them to burn only there, bright and pale and captive. Black stone, marble and granite and perhaps some gems, even, onyx and black sapphire, make up the entire edifice, which might frighten and domineer if not for the extreme loveliness of it all, how the palace seems to lean in to listen to the quiet prayers of the wood, and the moon positions herself just so as to be the crown of that dark stony maiden of the vale, as if she could not help but take her place in the grand design.

  Once, in Spain, I had cause to walk among the singing fountains and pristine arches of the Alhambra, to converse with a woman who dressed as a man, who kept her hair shorn and her face unpainted, and this woman was a student of the heavens, not an astrologer but dedicated to recording the movements of the heavenly bodies for no other purpose than to understand them, not to predict weddings or imperial pratfalls. I loved her abjectly, though I and the rest of the court accepted with sadness that she was most likely a witch. What can you do in this degenerate age? Women are either nuns, mothers, or witches. If she’s a nun you’ll never have her, if she’s a mother she died a-bed, and your best chance, lad, lies with the witch. A Christian man abhors such things, but I say it’s good to have a trade.

  She would not take me to bed, however, for I did not like to ply the woman’s part and she knew only the man’s. We merely kissed, for kissing is egalitarian. Had I spent another fortnight there I am sure I would have played the salamander’s part if it might have won her. But between kisses she told me her favorite theory, for she had such favorites as other women have among their lapdogs, and she said to me that if a great house could be built so that its every arch and cornice and wall and gate lay on the earth as the orbit of the sphere of Saturn or Jupiter lay in the heavens, the house could take on the attributes of its celestial twin, such that the house of Saturn would be cold and imperious, and its lord would devour his children and beat his wife before bedding her, and the house of Jupiter would be decadent and worldly, its lord having many wives and lovers and children all trampling over the place, but merry as anything.

  When first I saw the Mount I felt the memory of that Spaniard rise up in my chest, but I could not yet say what sphere might own that house.

  THE CONFESSIONS

  I cannot say if I find it a comfort that Hiob lives still in his dreaming, that some spark of his intellect has survived his trance. I want to know, of course, I want to know what he dreams, what he thinks, what he knows if he knows anything at all. I remember his going on about Seth and the grains of Paradise, that he ate the seeds of the great tree of Eden and a great tree grew in his mouth, from whence such marvelous wood was harvested. If I were to cull the woody fibers that lash Hiob to his bier, what could I build of them? Would anyone ask whence they came if I sent up a chapel of green vines and twisted half-lily monstrosities, if I honored God with the fruits of my brother’s flesh?

  Such strange thoughts invade me with the perfume of the Hiob-hedge. I tried to cut the leaves from his face, where two white blooms had opened in the place of his eyes, their centers shining red. They possessed a horrible verisimilitude to his own steady gaze. But the leaves swarmed back as thick as ever, as soon as the blade’s shadow ceased to fall on them.

  And yet, perhaps it cannot safely be said that what writes on that parchment is Hiob. It is an automatic thing, what he does, and perhaps the book Hiob devoured burned him quite away, scoured his flesh clean of anything that was the man, and left only itself, only its words and spores and fruiting seeds, only its memories of a land long dead. The book still wrote itself through him. Those blank spaces that so maddened my brother—well, he has them now.

  And I note that all thought of this having been some strange fiction fled me sometime after I saw the tree with my own eyes, after a girl with one white wing spoke of war.

  I could hardly concentrate on my translation, hardly give attention to that hideous child of John’s—and how Hiob would have balked at that. Bad enough John had a wife, but two deformed half-breed children, neither of them sons, neither of them whole, both damned by their monstrous mothers. I imagined my brother shaking his head, flattening his hand on the page as if to make it not have happened by sheer force of his desire not to know it.

  In our little house the evening shadows, rimmed with orange and shot with violet, had grown long. I bade Reinolt and Goswin to eat, and each of them dutifully supped on boiled eggs, some mashed red root I had discovered the woman in yellow paring and cooking under the embers of her fire, and quaffed down a yeasty beer I could not myself stomach. I changed the page beneath Hiob’s withered hand, braceleted as a woman’s in a lattice of vines studded with tiny yellow blossoms. I could spare little time to check his work—soon enough our own books would start to rot, and we would all ride the same ship across the same sea, towards perdition and flowers in the sockets of our eyes. But I am weak, after all—I could not help glimpsing the passage he scribbled, and I recalled it, that thousand-year past night when we raced the red mold together, and he brought me to his side to marvel at the colors, the colors moving as if with fell purpose, to defeat us and keep what is secret secret.

  Qaspiel held out its long-fingered hand, and made its palm flat. Out of the flesh a single, stark red passion-flower sprang up, its petals ruffling slightly in the night breeze.

  I confess I was at a loss to speak. Hagia laughed cruelly, and the passion-flower began to move, a sinuous writhing, and from it a kind of music came, though like little music I had ever heard. It was a plucked string, a lyre, but also a thing with breath, a flute or a trumpet or both together—but so soft, so quiet, and all of it came from Qaspiel’s body, and all of it filled the night around us, slowly, water dripping into a goblet until it brims over.

  “It is my voice,” Qaspiel said gently. “My second voice, the voice of my self that was once part of a bird that was part of a woman. It is not less than my first voice, but only more fragile.”

  I took up my work once more. I had only one voice, and it owed allegiance to Hiob’s work, to the finishing of it. Whatever singing blossom is Alaric’s own voice, it is drowned in the bombast of Hagia, and Vyala, and that other John, the trickster-fool Mandeville—and that is the scribe’s lot, the translator’s fate. I do not envy Hagia in the least—it is a horrible and painful thing, to stand naked on a page before the world, without someone else’s passions to protect you.

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  Now tell them how we crossed the Rimal. Tell them about the sharks. It’s very exciting; it’ll set the right tone—they will feel what we felt, thrilled and interested in the world beyond, not thinking for a moment of death or darkness or a door beyond which we could not pass, a river we could not cross.

  She would have me skip over the hedge. I had intended to tell that next. I think she does not wish to remember it—nor I, nor I.

  John told me a story once, just after we were married. He was sunk in a black mood, as he had attempted to give the Eucharist to Fortunatus and a few other gryphons who had stumbled upon his lonely Mass—he had been delighted to have parishioners, but they only gobbled up his bread and drank his wine and snuffled for more beneath the altar cloth. This story happened long before his Christ, and perhaps John longed for that world, when he would not have been burdened with the terrible and thirsty work of con
version.

  There was a great war, he told me while we cut pages for his improved Bible. Some say it was over a woman, some say over trade routes. I did not understand why anyone would fight a war over a woman. She chooses the mate she chooses. You cannot force her, I insisted, but John promised me you could. Anyway, a certain pleasant country was situated on the mouth of a great sea, and had grown rich because of it, so the whole business with a queen called Helen and how she had left her husband for a prince of that pleasant country was probably a pretty thin excuse to do what everyone wanted to in the first place. But when all the armies were assembled and all the warships painted with dread and glowing eyes upon their prows, and all the nations come to a place called Aulis, where they would launch their fleet, no wind would come. And some of the generals believed the wind had died because the gods thought the war unjust.

  “Christ thought it unjust?” I asked.

  “No, no,” John said. “Christ had not yet been born. They believed in gods called Athena and Zeus and Ares. They were infidels, but it could not be helped—they were born, grew up, fought in twenty-year wars and died before Christ came to redeem man. They could not know the truth of the world.”

  “I have heard of Athene, and of the lightning-god Zeus. Alisaunder’s gods—did Christ kill them?”

  “You misunderstand, my love. They were lies; they never existed. People were afraid and lonely and they made up false stories to stand between them and the dark, until the truth came upon the face of the world.”

  “I don’t think so—some of the centaurs worship Athene, and the astomii, too. And besides, how can you tell a false god from a real one? They all promise the same general sorts of things, and hold the same things sacred, and are generally in agreement on how we are to behave.”

  “Christ is the only true god,” but his voice was less sure than it had once been on that subject, and he cast down his eyes from mine when he said it.

  In any event it seems that the wind had turned against the ancient Christless armies, and no matter how they burned meat and bone and sang to their gods (who were never real) it refused to blow. Finally, a gaggle of priests had a revelation, that a certain maiden should be sacrificed to the moon-goddess, as it was certainly not the war that had offended heaven, but the fact that a pair of soldiers, bored and hungry, had killed a doe sacred to that same goddess, and she demanded blood for blood on this matter. Well, it so happened that the king’s wife and daughter had come to bid him farewell, and the king had a cold heart. He chose his own daughter to sacrifice, which sent his wife mad and began a whole awful tale which would not end until twenty years later, and perhaps more than that. They tied the maiden onto a broad, flat stone, and unknotted her hair so it fell back loosely over the stone, raised a long knife, and plunged it into the girl’s heart. She screamed, then she died. As though her last breath had the strength of a storm, the wind began to blow. Some people, John said, said later that they saw a fawn substituted at the last moment for the king’s daughter, and that she was spirited away to a temple at the end of the world, but most likely they only wanted to make it all less miserable, and comfort the queen, whose fists clenched in the deafening wind.

  I thought of that story when we came to the edge of the Rimal, which is the rim of the world I knew and loved, the world which had loved me and brought me up and given me golden fruit to eat and a mountain’s blood to drink and promised me I would never have to grow old; I would never have to die. If I crossed the sandy sea, I wondered, would the spell break? Would I wither up into a crone, a husk of a crone, all my years collapsing upon my spine until it shattered? I did not exactly fear such fate, but I did not feel so confident that it did not occur to my heart, that I did not think of myself as that girl upon the slab.

  I am the king’s daughter. If there had been no wind, it would not have been you with your hair unloosed.

  But it looked so like the scene John had painted for me of that other war—our little army standing with our ships, ships planted and grown in our dear soil, pieces of John’s old qarib, the Tokos, torn apart and planted in the dark, giving earth, coaxed and wheedled into fast fruiting, so that on some of the ships you could still glimpse a raw, green shine to the black wood, and one or two spring blossoms still fell from their prows and sails the color of green wood.

  The wind blew stiff and strong.

  But of course we could not leave until the astronomers said that the road across the Rimal was nearing its apex, when it would lead to the Western world, that other place full of Johns, and not simply in circles, over and over again, concentric, leading back to the land of the cranes and Pentexore, which would perhaps have served us all better, in the end. The astronomer in question was a stout fellow, a minotaur called Sukut who wore silver caps on his horns to show his docility. When he moved they jangled slightly, so that he always announced his presence. A week, he said, two at the outmost. But if you asked his advice, we’d have all gone right home and had stew and wine and called it a very nice, long walk to the seaside.

  “But we shall be able to wrestle with humans, and feast with them after!” laughed a satyr, his grape-leaf waistcoat starting to brown at the edges. “What could be more fun?”

  Sukut shook his enormous bovine head. “The stars say: Sukut, your stew is getting cold.”

  “Do they always talk to you like that? Wouldn’t you rather something more concrete, to impress the king with?” The satyr was already bored, however, and eyeing an amyctrya girl over the astronomer’s shoulder, her huge jaw brimming with wine. The satyr made no attempt to conceal his rising interest.

  “The stars speak how they speak, and they speak to me, and they say stew is better than war, for only one has nice carrots in it.” Sukut looked up into the heavens and nodded glumly as if to say: Might as well rest your argument, I’ve heard it before.

  You’re talking around the ugly part. You’re telling nice stories about the camp—but we spent the whole two weeks talking to the hedge, all the time, and only Sukut was talking to anything else at all.

  Perhaps if she’d warned us. Perhaps if Anglitora had said: I should mention that in addition to a lonely helmet washing up with a letter in its mouth, a great number of bones and bits of armor have gotten wedged in the beach, and taken root there, and grown into a great hedge of knights leering at the horizon, trying to get home.

  Perhaps if I had. But if I had made anything sound difficult or ugly, no one would have come.

  Well, the hedge stood between us and the West. The hedge of knights, tangled with faces and muscled arms and sticks like bones, sword-blades tangled up with plumes, leaves of banner-colors and heraldic shades, fluttering in the sea air, and each of those faces helmed and wide-eyed, staring, able to speak and eager to, their arms twisting away from the blades in pain. Green ooze dropped from their skin. This morass of men stretched down the beach in either direction—so many dead, so many washed away to us, to the end of the world, as John kept calling us, though really, we were as much the beginning as the end.

  Christ preserve us! Cried some. Allahu akbar! Cried others, though we could see no real difference between them. Perhaps their leaves shone greener and more silver than purple and gold. But they all looked like John and they all wished to talk endlessly like John, and we could not tell them apart.

  Some of the younger blemmyae, noting as I had once done so long ago that their own appearance proved especially upsetting to John’s folk, lit upon a game that soon became all the fashion in our little two-week nation. A female, so as to be most alarming, since none of the knights seemed to be on speaking terms with naked flesh, would saunter up to one of the heads on the hedge and ask it to tell her the nature of God, or whether one ought to draw pictures of God, or how many fingers one ought to bless oneself with. They came up with endless variations.

  One would howl: “The Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, all in one and one in all, the Father who made the world out of the void, the Son born of Mary who die
d for our sins, the Spirit who moves in all things!” Or some version of that. And at least this was succinct.

  But another head would contort in fury and cry out: “Allah is the only God, and Mohammed is his prophet! Christ was a man only, and when Sarah could not bear children she gave her handmaid Hagar to Abraham and Hagar produced a son—” Rarely did the second head get that far before the first would attempt to leap out of the hedge and bite him, which he could certainly not do, being a plant and possessed of minimal locomotion. But the furor incited in that part of the hedge would spread up and down until the whole thing quavered and shook, and those heads on the far end had no notion of what the original argument had been, but they snarled and spat all the same. The blemmyae girls and their friends fell into fits of giggles, and soon the better part of the army spent their delight in tormenting the hedge. We could not even understand half of the words they said. The pleasure was in their fury, as when you watch two beasts fight from a safe distance.

  Once, at night, when the moon was high and everyone slept, I went to a face and spoke to it. It had a handsome gaze, and I sensed he had been young, like me.

  “Who are you?” I said to the face, and then: “Who were you, before you were a hedge?”

  And he said: “I was called Yusuf, and I lived in Edessa, which is a city like on a hill, terraced and lovely, where my table forever groaned with olives and pomegranates and almonds, and I had two wives, Sarai and Fatima, who did not quarrel with one another, and out of them I had two daughters and two sons. I loved the daughters best, though I know that sons are the favor of Allah. But my daughters saved honeycomb for me and made my shirts with their deft little hands, and what did my sons ever do but wait for me to die so they could inherit the olives and the pomegranates and the almonds and the honeycomb and all my shirts? My eldest daughter could play the psaltery, even the most difficult fingerings, and she played it each day at sunset, every day without fail, so that in my memory every note is gold and red.”