A Dirge for Preston John, Page 42

  Do not call us beasts. Did I say that? I would like to have said that.

  Let us say she said it. Who is to know? Perhaps I put aside the insult, offered him a sword from our saplings, and quoted him a poem of the lamia Gnoskil, which went: Listening to the constellation of the ox-cart, my heart is full of trinkets: a pair of scissors, an oil-jar, a jeweled comb. All of them are me, and the ox-cart, too. And perhaps he took the sword, and gave me in return a blossom from the gardens of Mosul, which was white, and said: O friend, seest thou the lightning—there, and then gone, as though two hands raised up together over a pillar of cloud. And Anglitora smiled, because of the cloud he spoke of, and because once two souls have exchanged poetry they must love one another forever, as all know. So we gave him our tea as well, and shared a lunch of olives and oranges. Sukut offered to read the stars on his behalf. It happened something like that, after all. Until he said to John:

  “Why do you not pray for God to open the river to you?”

  And John the Priest was ashamed, for he had not thought of it. He could eat no more. He scowled into his chest. What sort of priest was he now, that he had not even attempted to call Christ to his side?

  “We are all very curious,” I said, to turn the tide of our talking, “to know what an infidel is. John called us that a great deal in the old days, and there was a good deal of private debate—some said it meant a person who has four legs. Some said it meant a person who interrupts John when he is speaking. Some insisted it obviously referred to a camel. But you are an infidel, and neither four-legged, nor impolite, nor a camel. Nor very much like us.”

  “He is a Muslim,” John said bluntly. “I am a Christian.”

  Sukut tossed his cream-colored horns. “Easy then. Different systems of magic.”

  Both Salah ad-Din and John spluttered and began to talk very quickly, over one another.

  “It is by no means magic!” cried John. “I spent years instructing all of you to accept Christ and honor Him and that is what you took from it? That He is some sort of wizard?”

  The green knight insisted: “There is but one God and He is not a magician, but the Creator of All and Father of Prophets!”

  “Ah, but prophecy, that’s magic,” lowed Sukut with his gentle, firm voice. “And did you not just ask our king to pray for the river’s good graces? Well, I’ll tell you what he’s going to do just as soon as we’re finished here. He’s going to go into his tent and light candles and quiet his mind and say words in Latin, special words that he has taught us all, and he will chant them over and over again until he feels strong, and then he will whisper what he wants into the darkness, and say some more Latin things—he likes Latin a great deal—and then expect, fully and utterly expect to see his wishes made manifest. If that is not magic I am a fish, sir.”

  Salah ad-Din grinned impishly. “Well, perhaps when a Christian man does it, it is magic.”

  Sukut scratched at his brown hand. “Why do you not call your own wizards and ask them to break the spell of the river? It is not our river. We do not know it; we did not grow up with it or confess secrets near it; we have not washed clothes in it or carried it in buckets to boil. It is a stranger to us—we do not even know its name. Best to let family look after family.”

  “Yes,” laughed John. “Call your wizards.” He held up his hands. “Oh, please, do try to explain it to them. We’ll be here for ninety years, and at the end of it they’ll be quite certain you’ve told them that Mohammed is a turtle with an excellent singing voice. May you have better luck than I!”

  Salah ad-Din pursed his lips. “When a horse pulls a plow through the furrow, you do not call it magic—it is only what the horse was made to do. He is fulfilling his purpose on earth. When a man prays, it is the same.”

  “Horses were not meant to pull plows,” argued Sukut. “They are meant to be horses. That’s all. The plow is useful to the owner of the horse, but not to the horse himself. Also, the farmer does not insist that the horse call himself bad and sinful and wicked all the while he pulls the plow, and in between abusing himself and laboring for the comfort of his owner, praise the farmer as beneficent and all-powerful.”

  Salah ad-Din slapped his knee. “I have always said that what marks out the civilized from the uncivilized is a love of arguing! What a wonderful country you must have, where horses need not labor if they do not wish to, and men eat well all the same.”

  Sukut blinked. “Well, yes,” he said.

  Much explanation was needed then, and showing of the trees in their barrels, how their mace-apples gleamed with spikes and bronzeflowers with five arrowhead petals each. Salah ad-Din became very quiet. I put my hand upon his wrist and asked the matter, for I liked him, how soft-spoken he was, even when laughing, and how he seemed to handle things very carefully in his heart before he said them.

  “I was only possessed by an image, blemmye. That if Nineveh had died and been buried under her grassy hill in your country, then we might walk now through a forest of stone lions whose leaves were the beards of dead kings. An almond grove might shade my head while I recited poems to the sun, and their branches might form the fifteen gates of Nineveh, and nothing would ever be forgotten, no, in the long life of the world.”

  And the green knight seemed so moved by this thought that had he been alone, he might have wept.

  Did you wish he had come to Pentexore in John’s place?

  Forgive me, daughter, but that day I did.

  THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

  THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

  I met Adab on the Fountain road, on my final walk. Oh, yes, I forgot. They’re pilgrimages now, aren’t they? I did not love her till much later, when she looked familiar, and I had to spend a fortnight working out where I had known her before. Deep in my memory I finally recalled that we were young women together on that long path. Adab was a sciopod, which is an excellent species for a stylite, when you think about it. The traditional pose—up on one foot, balanced, poised—posed no trouble for them. Posed no trouble for her. On that long trail of lanterns, swinging back and forth in the warm, rind-scented night, I saw her hopping ahead, her hair in a hundred complex looping braids, her gait so eager.

  “If I recall,” I said to her, by way of introduction, “it tastes foul and looks like a lamia’s sick. In such a hurry to taste it?”

  And she turned to me with black eyes shining and said: “When I have swallowed it I shall climb a pillar and never come down, not until I am so wise the wind could go through me and come out the other side an adept in three disciplines.”

  In all the time Sefalet had spoken with her parents’ tree, she had not had her fits nor extruded that awful light from her limbs. I was grateful. We all were. But once Elif and I had her fully to ourselves once more, it began again. She slept against my flank and her left hand cried in her dreams (The ropes, the ropes! Ah, it’s all coming down!) and her tremors woke me, and then the light poured out over all of us.

  “She is broken,” said Elif softly.

  I could not answer him. In her misery and her fervor, Sefalet arched her back, wrenching her body—and flung herself upon me. Her arms locked around my neck and her light tumbled over me like a snow drift. Her weight was much more than her size, as though someone had opened her mouth and poured silver into her, and now it was all coming out.

  “I broke once,” Elif said, touching the hem of the princess’s dress. “Gahmuret, Gahmureen’s father, took me with him to the market and a child pulled my arm too hard. She didn’t mean it; she didn’t know I’m alive. Sometimes I don’t even know it. How could she? But my arm snapped off and the girl started crying. I wanted her to stop and I wanted to be fixed, and so these seemed like the same thing to me. When Gahmuret got me tooled and oiled and well again, I waited until the family got boisterous and busy with their projects and crept out of the house. I went all the way back to the market to find the little girl, whose mother owned the strained cheese stall. I showed her my new arm and told her to stop crying now, but
it was not very satisfying because she had stopped days ago and did not know what I meant.” Elif touched his arm slightly, and I thought he might be considering whether breaking it himself might work some sort of sympathetic, retrograde magic and stop Sefalet’s pain.

  “No,” I said firmly. And the girl went still.

  “Kalavya fell off the malachite stair,” the left-hand mouth whispered. “She dashed her brains out on the ground.”

  “Ride upon me, Adab,” I said, and she obliged me. “Tell me what wisdom looks like to you.”

  “Wisdom is a pane of red glass,” she said. “It colors everything—and you must be careful, because you can forget that the world is not colored red, if you only look through the glass all the time. I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted.”

  This seemed like very pretty nonsense to me. But I did not yet understand. When I look through my glass now I see everything colored by knowing about love, by having studied it with rigor.

  “Why must you do it on a pole?” I asked. I was very young.

  “I suppose I could do it on a lion,” she said, and then blushed at her own boldness.

  The stones continued to speak. Distant, always, and hard to hear, but laughter and weeping and dreaming of what life at the top of the Tower might be came wafting out of the blue bricks of our cathedral.

  Do you think it’s true what the giants say? That the moon is a girl, a duchess of their old kingdom, and when we build the Tower high enough we will discover her court, full of huge thrones and chandeliers and hunting trophies, the black and starry heads of the beasts who roam the heavens?

  That’s ridiculous. The Spheres will open up and show us a new earth within them, more beautiful than you can imagine, with a thousand crystal cities ready for us.

  I like our earth. I liked having my feet on it, my toes in it. I want to go home.

  And among all the voices, and Kalavya and Drona, too, Kalavya who was always putting on her yellow dress, always ready for the next day when they would go up the stair with her gold skirts blowing wild in the wind, among all of them sometimes the Hagia-and-John tree would call up. Sometimes they called for Sefalet. Sometimes for Qaspiel or Fortunatus. Sometimes for someone named Kostas. The cathedral sang with dreams and ghosts and all Gahmureen would say was that living leaves a mark.

  I held Adab while she drank from the Fountain; the stylite held me.

  “What I want,” she said as we walked back down the mountain, “Is to have a little space where no one else can touch me. I’ll own the space at the top of the pillar. The space will get to know me and I’ll get to know it. The air of it will live inside me. I’ll be so alone, but I’ll be thinking all the time, and the space will be becoming more and more me until I—Adab—expand out like a star. And that’s what the forest is, all those stars, radiating. And one of the stars is a physician and one is an alchemist and one is a historian and one is a poet. But we are all philosophers, and on one foot we will think so loudly it will be like music.”

  “What I want is you,” I said.

  Elif came to me one day. Fortunatus nuzzled my whiskers and the sun came filtering in through the silk tent.

  “Sefalet says the unicorn died,” Elif said.

  Fortunatus yawned, his pink tongue showing. “Don’t be silly. There are no unicorns anymore. Not since the Wall.”

  “She says it died, and Gahmureen says Fortunatus has to muster at the nave just like everyone else, because all winged workers were supposed to be there at dawn.”

  The princess slipped through the curtain of our little house. She held her left hand behind her back. When Hadulph was a cub he used to roll on his back while he thought about things, as though he needed to shake the solution free. Sefalet squeezed her hands to keep her thoughts in.

  I loved her when she clasped her arms around me in her agony. I know that now. The flash and sharpness of that instant is always impossible to see until they’re gone. But that was the moment.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I purred. “I know everything about you, Sefalet. Your body cannot hurt or horrify me. I will hold you when you shake and listen when you say cruel things—I will not believe them, no matter what. I will let your left-hand words wash over me with no more weight or importance than seafoam.”

  Slowly, grinding the teeth in her palms, Sefalet drew out her hands.

  “There’s a hole in the sky,” said the left mouth. “She’s here.” And it began to laugh.

  “I’ll love you when you can join me in the forest,” said Adab. “When you have earned a pillar.”

  I was barely grown. I wanted her now. I wanted to roll her in the snow. I didn’t want to stand on a pillar and take up a discipline.

  “If you don’t become adept at something, you’ll go mad,” she said, and her dark eyes were so serious. “We live so long. You have to pick something that will take forever to get really good at it. It’s the only salvation—study and love something terribly difficult. That or the Abir, but… for me that would be taking the easy path. The path of no resistance. I want to know this world so well it does what I say just to make me happy.”

  “What I want is you,” I repeated. It was not a very good courtship. But it was my first. I did finally grasp the way to do it.

  I sat on my haunches below her pillow, a wide, winnowed, wind-broken lash of stone. “All right,” I roared up to her, my chest so full of her beauty up there, with the sun shining through her as if it wanted to climb inside her skin. “Teach me what you know.”

  The woman had collapsed on the north end of the building site, where the curls of stone the masons had chiseled and hammered off piled up in mountains of blue shards. Already the cathedral cast a long shadow—I remember John saying these took generations to build, that a little boy might be born, he might grow up strong with golden hair and grey eyes, might learn a trade, blacksmithing or glassworking, might go to war in the Levant and lose his blessing fingers in a battle with pirates, might marry a woman with a limp because she knew how to read and he did not, might have four children, one a son, and that son have a daughter who married a minor lord, elevating the whole family, and her daughter might marry an earl and own a strand of pearls that cost more than her grandfather had earned in his life, and in all that time still a cathedral would only be begun. Yet we were meant to have it done and dusted by the time the human king got home.

  Already Gahmureen had begun to plan a long, winding stair to wrap the whole building, spiraling up and up, made of malachite with its endless green swirls. I suppose the gryphons helped it along, and the stones wanted to be together, after all, as they had once been. As soon as you brought two together the day seemed a little brighter. We’d done so much. Those mounds of stone chips towered, cast their own shadows.

  And in one of them we found her. Very lovely, in a ragged dress that showed most of one breast and no shoes, her long dark hair tangled and matted, her skin ruddy and dark, but not healthy. Windburned and chapped, her poor legs had been slashed with tiny strokes, as though a thousand needles had scored her.

  The cametenna lay as though dead, her huge hands thrown up over her face as if to hide herself from heaven.

  THE VIRTUE OF THINGS

  IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM

  12. On Emeralds

  Several enormous emeralds rolled along the hallways of the Mount. They were approximately the size of a healthy man, his limbs extended to make a wheel, should you run ribbon from his head to his hands to his feet. I was sometimes able to tell them apart by their inclusions, but often they simply dazzled me, or the late afternoon sun would stream through them, showering the chambers with green prisms. I counted at least seven that I knew by sight—there might have been more, indeed this seems very likely.

  The unicorn was bad enough, I hear you say, and some of our visiting female cousins had to turn their eyes from the page when you mentioned his horn. And now you would have
us believe in locomotive gemstones?

  I have told you before, good readers, that when the world presents itself, properly dressed in its strangeness, I need embroider nothing with fancy.

  As all men know, emeralds have great healing powers, but demons love them. A terrible trade for a mystic, but I have never been muchly concerned with demons. I met one while snowbound in Ecbatana and he seemed a nice enough fellow. Very long fingers, as I recall. A whiff of myrrh about his person. Other than that he kept to himself, wrote several very good poems, shot game, and with a great deal of sadness took a lord’s youngest daughter to wed in remuneration for having cured the man’s tumors. I remember the demon sighing: I did not look to get married so young. I might have liked to have seen Pandemonium first, or finish my book. Nothing ever goes to plan, in the end.

  The emeralds do not have a language as such. However, they are more than capable of communication—in fact, their method commands much more attention than merely shouting down the hall. The gems glow with a great green fire, and their feelings flow forth within the flames—when the light touches the flesh, you feel what the emerald feels and have little choice in the matter. There they go, the grinding, glittering wheels, flashing here and there, sending a beam of well-being here, of anger and bitterness there, of love unrequited and unlooked for—whatever private operas play out among the jewels.

  This was how I discovered that, after the unicorn hunt, I was no longer permitted to move about the Mount as I pleased. I attempted to leave my room and a queen emerald, one I thought of as Cabochon, for that was her cut (I assume she was a she—I suppose she could be a he as easily, or a nothing at all since emeralds are hardly sticklers on social points, but I prefer women’s company so I shall call my Cab what I like), rolled across the door, shining with a strong sense of not a chance, my friend. I implored, but Cab’s light did not change.