A Dirge for Preston John, Page 39

  Well, call John not a coward! Many long hours did I walk down that dark stair, which grew so wide I could not see either end of each step. I passed other souls along my way, but they did not look up at me nor pause in their walking, which was much slower than mine. Eventually I came upon a kind of landing in the stair, and a cameleopard greeted me, though its flesh was black and it possessed three heads. It trumpeted: Wilt thou wrestle me, John? And so I did, though its three monstrous necks twined around me and tried to strangle me, though its breath stank of the dead and ancient sorrows, though its hooves were iron and its teeth were ice, I strove with that odd Cerberus until I locked two of its heads with my arms and a third with my thigh, well muscled from battling my wife Simon in every damned thing, and the creature cried mercy.

  I had a pleasant holiday in the underworld, where I soon discovered that everyone has three heads—one for the Father, one for the Son, one for the Spirit—one for Past, one for Present, one for Future—one for Child, one for Grown, one for Withered—one for Good, one for Evil, and one for Threading the Needle. I made the acquaintance of Persephone, who has three heads, one black, one scarlet, and one silver, which rotate in the morning, evening, and midnight. I preferred her silver visage, for in that guise she plied me with kisses and riddles and promises. I must be true! I cried. I must be true to my wives! What would Mark say if she could see me in your silvery arms! Let me plight my shield to you instead, and write ballads in your name, and slay a dragon or a navy for thee! But then I only kissed her the more, and more fervently.

  Hades took me hunting on his estate, with his dogs, tiny things, like a noblewoman’s lapdogs, silky and high-voiced, but with tongues of fire, running along behind as we rode black stags through the wood, seeking his chosen quarry: the souls of aristocrats. What you give to my wife you must give half to me, said the King of the Dead, and fair is fair, so I kissed my lord with half my mouth.

  Finally, I longed to see the sun the more. I packed what I had brought with me—my honor, my name, my troth, my kisses, and made to pass three-necked Cerberus once more.

  But, came the voice of the Cold Queen. You have eaten of the pomegranate.

  Rather a lot of pomegranate, said the Fiery King. And some grapes as well. And venison.

  What is the punishment? said I.

  To stay as many months of the year as you have eaten, Persephone laughed, and was glad, to trick as she had been tricked. Every girl deserves her day.

  Ah, but I have bargained with Death, and she has vouchsafed me fifty years in the land of the living, I countered. I will return when I have done with Death’s sentence, and serve out my time with my Lord and my Lady.

  They called it good, and so did I, and we spat in our hands on the bargain. I walked up the long stair once more and into the French wood, where I found my fellow mummers but waking from their night’s sleep and ready to press on to the next town after a few sausages and pears had been enjoyed over a morning’s fire.

  My father, like his son, bed, wed, and bred; some of these better than others, some worse.

  As many days as seeds I eat.

  I am quite sure the sun and the earth have worked it out between the two of them, and like a good babe I do not meddle in the quarrels of my parents.

  Of a certainty. I knew a vampire once in Kiev, who would only drink the blood of Boyars. He ate their beards, too, leaving them quite enervated and foolish-looking. They would present themselves to their Tsar only to find their laws unwritten, their advice unheard, and their taxes due. My vampire friend, who was called Robertus, passed unnoticed through their ranks, drinking blood and influence until he was quite fat and unpresentable in society. But by then the Mongols had come with their short beards and horses and disinterest in writing laws. Robertus had drunk so much influence that all simply presumed him to be the Tsar of Rus, even the Tsar Ivan and his wife Yelena, who bowed to him and hoped he might marry one of their daughters. Unfortunately, this meant the Khan had Robertus beheaded with a quickness. When they took off his head, however, they discovered his body was empty save the hair of a century’s worth of long, pointed beards, which spilled out over the floor, and all the Boyars seized them once more. The beards affixed themselves gratefully to the lords’ chins, and all was as it had been except that they were all Mongols now and no longer Rus.

  Poor bastard—but let us have it as a lesson to move with the times!

  I am a light sleeper, madam, and every time sleep tries to take a century from me the turning of January startles me awake.

  I have seventeen daughters—ten wicked, five fair, and two bishops.

  I believe Simon had at them with a spoon until they agreed to be courtesans like their father wanted.

  I have heard of the Wall, but am assured that I could never stand near it, for I would be burnt quite up.

  The state of my soul is my private affair. But look, come near, I will open my mouth as children do for the village doctor, and you may glimpse a bit of my soul sticking out, and judge for yourself if it possesses sufficiency.

  As long as my wives do not miss me.

  As many months as caskets of wine resting in the dark.

  Fifty years, of which I have forty remaining. Possibly thirty. Oh, how the time goes on ahead of a man, such horses dragging his cart through the mud and the rain and the sun and the snow.

  JUPITER, HOT AND MOIST

  When we go to war, we have fourteen golden and bejeweled crosses borne before us instead of banners. Each of these crosses is followed by ten thousand horsemen and one hundred thousand foot soldiers, fully armed, without reckoning those in charge of the luggage and provision.

  When we ride abroad plainly we have a wooden, unadorned cross without gold or gems about it, borne before us in order that we meditate on the sufferings of our Lord Jesus Christ; also a golden bowl filled with earth to remind us of that whence we sprung and that to which we must return; but besides these there is borne a silver bowl full of gold as a token to all that we are the Lord of Lords.

  —The Letter of Prester John

  1165

  THE CONFESSIONS

  A rhythm formed; I felt mechanized. My eyes flitted, back and forth, from the blue book and its pale violet pages swimming with perfume, swimming with bluebell and plum and a deep, unsettling musk. My gaze was steady, fluid—the blue pages to mine, over and over, my attention a little silver spoon dipping into the war, into the winged girl and the bull-astronomer and emptying itself onto my own solid, assured page, in my own solid, assured hand, a page the color pages are meant to be, the ink smelling a little of iron, a little of wax, and that’s all.

  The danger of rhythm is its lull. I found myself soon drifting to sleep, as the moon came down, drifting to dreams and the long, lightless river that flows along the bottom of unconsciousness. In and out, the spoon moving, the man still, and all scribes know that distant feeling, as though he hovers over his text in a silk balloon—he knows what he is writing, can feel the text moving through his brain, but it is just so separate from him. His hand cribbing along looks like the hand of another man; his breath comes so slowly, and he can almost guess what the next line of the original will be before he glances over to capture it. Mechanized, perfect, oh, we will waste no ink this time! No scratching out, no imperfectly declined nouns, why, you could almost do it sleeping.

  I was only a man. I am only a man. It was only that I was so tired. So much to do, so little time, and my body drifted away from my purpose. I dreamt.

  Hiob stands beside me, and he stands in a river, a river of impossible colors, so many and flowing so quickly I cannot even name them before they’re gone.

  “Not as easy as it looked, is it?” he says ruefully and I am just so grateful to see him again, without vines and blossoms like worms devouring his flesh. He holds out his hands. “It’s the Year of Our Lord 1699 and the end of the world.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” I say.

  “It’s always the end of the world. Why
do you think they keep predicting it? Christ said some that heard him speak would see the end of days. Paul thought he would stand at the throne of the new city. And everyone since just can’t wait for it all to come down. No one wants to be impolitely early to the ball, and fashionably late just won’t do this time.” Brother Hiob looks so happy, as though he has slept for a fortnight and awakened to a breakfast fit for a bear.

  “The world isn’t ending,” I say again. My dream-mind moves slowly, syrupy, a blue sludge.

  “Every day a world ends. Just not yours. Well, every week at least. Bimonthly at the outside. Circles close, trajectories complete. A new world is coming, and we are reading its conception. Really, it’s rather prurient stuff. This is why one doesn’t draw pictures of bodies tangling and merging—the beginnings of things should always be secrets.”

  “I don’t remember anything about that.”

  “Oh, well, that’s all right, Alaric. I already know how it ends. Privileges of seniority and all.”

  And it is not Hiob in the river, but it is my mother, wearing Hiob’s habit, and her hair hangs so long and thick and bright I almost cannot look at it; it is like seeing her naked.

  “To begin to tell the history of a thing is to begin to tell a lie about it,” she says, and her voice is everything I remember.

  “Is none of it true then?”

  “Everything is true, and everything is permitted.” She smiles and holds out her arms, and I remember saying that very thing to Hiob, uttering that strange and sacred dream of an impossibly generous and permissive world. “God is a cloud,” she says. “He comes without warning, and His Mind is not a human mind, it is as different as your intellect from a tiny snail creeping across the floor of the sea. The snail thinks the sea is all the world. And in the mind of God there is softness, and there is lightning.”

  I weep and move to embrace her in the water, moving so fast around her, dazzling multicolored foam catching in her habit, a roar of water rising around her, and suddenly her head vanishes, and the habit falls away and within it is a blemmye, her wide eyes flashing in heavy breasts, and around her waist is a long yellow dress, and in her mouth is a mirror, and in the mirror is a child, fat and grinning, and he rips page after page from a book, stuffing them into his mouth and giggling as the rainbow waters rise—

  I woke.

  My brothers had sunk so deep in their own work they did not see my head droop and fall. My face stuck to the blue book and when I pulled it away the tiniest wisps of fragrant spore appeared where my cheek, my chin, my eyelash had been.

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  A man stands on the prow of a ship. Not old, not young, poised between like a jester with a good trick in his bag: watch him change faces in the blink of an eye—any eye, your eye, his eye. The sun makes his face look healthy, bright—he is clean-shaven, his eyes piercing, his hair neatly lashed with leather. You would not call the man a demon. You would say: there stands a just man, because no one living can escape the fallacy of the outside and the inside and a man with a piercing steady gaze and neat hair and a straight spine must be just, must know his worth and the worth of his world.

  A man stands at the prow of his ship.

  You have not wanted to talk about him. You have moved all around him, orbiting, and hardly touched him.

  A man stands at the prow of his ship. He is not a man, not really. Not my husband, not a king, not a priest. At the prow of that ship, at the rim of that sea, where in my memory he stands forever, and nothing has yet happened on the other side of the sea, he has not yet even touched the hand of another human soul, at the prow of that ship stands not a man but a touchstone. Strike us all against it and see if we are true gold.

  I was so young. Can you believe how young I was? I thought he was so wise. Is that what everyone thinks of their fathers? If he would only look at me, really look at me, he would see that I was wise, too. I wasn’t, of course, but neither was he, so we both come out even.

  A man stands at the prow of a ship forever. And he stands at a mirror and watches a city burn. He watches, watches, watches, and the world moves around him because he says: God, please, move the world for me. I said to him when he first saw his home through that mirror:

  “Don’t ask us. Don’t say we must go. Because we will go, all of us, we won’t think twice—novelty is the richest coin possible when you live forever. It won’t be so bad that you asked us, but we will want to go. We will say to each other that our king has devised such a game for us. And I don’t know what will happen—probably nothing, probably no harm will fall on the smallest of our heads, but we will have learned that your world is fun, and you will have taught your world that we are here. And no one will know how badly it’s all gone until the gates of Jerusalem are ringed with empty pikes—one for every blemmye whose head they could not take.”

  “But Hagia,” he whispered, already standing on the prow of his ship, “it’s my home. It’s my home and everyone is dying. What would you do, if you had come, starving, bleeding, to the beaches of Constantinople, and I had taken you in, washed you and fed you fish and grapes and taught you to read Greek and to haggle for butter—if I made you queen, if I made you Empress, and maybe not everyone felt sure of that, the Jews and the Greeks especially, but you were mild and soon pregnant and everyone forgave you for being foreign? And then, finally, one day, through magic or with a wonderful machine, it doesn’t matter, but one day you could see—not just hear from a messenger but really see—Pentexore in flames, and Hadulph on fire, burning to death, and Fortunatus cut open on a wheel, and Qaspiel with its wings shorn off and weeping for mercy? If all that occurred, could I say anything at all that would keep you from going to them? More, rousing the whole Byzantine army with blades and pitch and shields and hell on horseback to ride behind you and obliterate whoever laid their smallest finger upon your home?”

  What answer could I have made to that which would have altered our course? A king, if he is a good king, tells the truth when he wants something badly enough. He only lies to win advantage—and to win the game entire he flays his own heart and lays it before the tribunal. And the tribunal was me, and I said yes, and so it is all my fault, really. Everything that happened. If my crane-girl had never come with your helmet and your letter, still he would have stood at that prow. Nothing could move him from it.

  Oh, Hagia.

  And in our little tent, past the end of the war, where I am writing and she is reading over my shoulder, the candles gutter and the silks all look black, so black I have forgotten what color they ever were, and my stepdaughter is crying, and I want to sleep forever and wake up at home, never having done anything but stretch parchment on a wide hoop in the sun.

  Cranes have a secret, Hagia. Inside them—near the heart, but not too near, in the mess of viscera somewhere, we have a little stone. When cranes die, their mates take the stone and add it to the nest’s long line. We pray with them, looping the line of stones around our throats like a necklace, and we remember everyone, everyone we loved, everyone who has gone to the Clouds and the Sedge of Heaven. We don’t care for their other use. They are touchstones, that we keep in our hearts, that are our hearts. For every time you have struck my heart, Hagia, I have called you gold. All of us, golden, a long line of stones, wrapping around and around.

  In my heart John always stands on that ship. And in my heart the rest of us pull the ships across the hardpack road of the Rimal, ropes knotted over our shoulders that were so strong, strong enough to any task, dragging as one body the great galleons from one world to another. We are there forever, with the sun at our backs, and the drum-beat keeps the time of our hauling.

  The Physon flows through the upper cliffs of Nural, grinding the pink rock there year by year. A river, yes, but we have many rivers. The Physon flows through all the world, and I think John’s world, too. Catacalon, when he was a philosopher, said that the Physon dwells underground in most lands, moving through the earth, the breath of the e
arth, rumbling and coughing and rasping. But in Nural, and a few other places, it breaks the surface like a whale, and we see this breath in motion, rocks tumbling over one another, basalt and schist and granite and slate, crashing, rolling, roaring. Time smoothes the stones and grinds down the cliffs, but always we can see new, rough rock surfacing. A river of stones, its current never slowing, stopping, or breaking into tributaries or marshes. The Physon is constant.

  Sometimes I think the road through the Rimal is only the Physon, finally slowing somewhere, pausing for a moment before rushing on through the flesh of the earth. A held breath. Since the Physon rolls through the body of the world, it could leave us anywhere, anywhere it flows beneath the sunlit land, in the dark, where we cannot hear or see. I should be grateful it spared us a long walk through the desert, which would certainly have been amusing, the first time we tried to plant our dried yak and peach-bread in order to have supplies for the trip home. Instead, the Physon, or the Rimal road, whichever pleases the geographer in you, brought us to another river, wide and blue, with eddies of golden silt shivering down its banks. A new river, and a bright day, and river-birds crying and calling overhead, so white and small. On the opposite shore, some ways south, we could see the dim, tiny shapes of a white city, white as the seabirds, shimmering and prickling with minarets and crosses perched atop the buildings. The wharf sang with movement, but the river yawned between us.