A Dirge for Preston John, Page 43

  Cabochon seemed to be a sort of pack leader—an alpha gem, along with the one I thought of as Trillion, again, for the cut of him, a broad bull emerald. But Cab could spin down the halls at such speeds, and Trillion, with his points, had a slower, more plodding, more meditative pace through the world. She would roll around him with such merriment, throwing out rainbows of teasing delight, like a puppy nipping at a litter mate, and he would simply glow.

  Having little else to do with a gigantic jewel wedged in my door, sparkling with regret and chagrin, I asked her several questions I had been considering, but too interested in my friend Agneya’s eggs (one had gone totally black—this is apparently considered an omen of great good luck) and the ever-distant Bonfire and the disturbing events of the hunt to interview the rolling gems.

  “Do emeralds alone grow to such great size, or are there rubies and sapphires, too, roaming the hills in packs, jasper prides digging trails through the brush, carnelian wheels spinning along the seashore?”

  Cabochon glowed pride: only us, we alone.

  “Do you have a mother, a father?”

  My sweet Cab flickered—too complex.

  “Are you born?”

  Green warmth: yes.

  “From another jewel, a parent gem?”

  Cabochon grew cool and dim: no.

  “The mountain then. The mountain is your mother?”

  A blaze of grassy color—Indeed! A dark piney flash: more I cannot say.

  “Are you servants here? Like dogs set to guard a treasure? Or are you citizens of Simurgh, being fiery, after a fashion?”

  Cab rolled back and forth, distressed. Her light took on a bluish cast. The Masters will hear.

  “I do not mean to discomfit you! Let us move on to easier topics. Do you have art among you? Music, theater, epic and historical poetry?”

  A bashful flood of dappled color: yes, secret rites, secret dances.

  “Have you been to see the Wall?”

  Several quick, angry peacock shades glared in succession: the Wall hurts us.

  “Are you a Christian ornament?”

  A spray of prisms: Cab’s laughter.

  “Pagan then? Perhaps a Jewish gem?”

  And a kind of light came from my friend which I can only call sharp—clear and freezing cold and perfect, almost blinding, but as if all of those qualities of light were in fact emotions that could be felt by the heart, and this I understood as the approximation of religious feeling among emeralds.

  God is a stone.

  13. On Imprisonment

  I knew a man named Boethius once. I find myself thinking of him quite often these days. He found himself in prison for one of the several reasons good men find themselves in prison—he offended a magistrate, refused to convert, intersected with someone’s daughter in one fashion or another. I don’t really recall—the reasons men stumble into jail are less interesting than what they do once they hear those doors clang shut. I, for example, have been writing this very long and interesting catalogue of my adventures in Pentexore. Boethius was a man of higher virtue than myself (not difficult) and wrote philosophy.

  The pious old bastard cheated, though, when you think about it. See, the goddess of Philosophy has very little to do these days. Most of our best thinkers have gone over entirely to Theology, who, as a paramour, dresses less excitingly and will contort herself into fewer positions, but has a certain respectability—you can take her home to meet your mother and no one will be accused of wasting their time laying about uselessly on couches drinking wine. Thus, Miss Philosophy found herself bored and started visiting Boethius in his cell. I can tell you, I would have thought of something better to do with a girl of good figure who could slip in and out of cages unnoticed. But not Boethius—he just sat on his miserable chair and talked with her about justice or something, writing it all down, until even she’d had enough of him.

  If Madame History or Madame Literature showed up to keep me company, this would certainly be a more interesting book. Or perhaps the both of them, lascivious and rigorous all at once, their bodies draped in chitons of pages, the ink leaving snaking violet trails on their skin. Then folk years hence would say: I knew a man named John Mandeville once, and that would be enough to ensure their listeners that the speaker was a man of authority and wisdom as well as good connections.

  The truth is, confinement wears on the bones and the brain. Men write in prison because they’ve nothing else to do. I do not even quite understand why I have been closed away with only my gentle Cab for company. I killed the unicorn when asked. They cannot demand that I also feel no remorse for it. They cannot demand I relish the memory.

  “Cabochon,” I called, and my green friend rolled into view, nervously peeking round the door.

  “Was the unicorn important somehow?”

  A sad springtime glow: very.

  I suppose they always are. I suppose if you take all the pretty story away, they were always innocent young boys laying their horns in maidens’ laps. I suppose it was always about virginity. The blood and the collar and the girl in the wood. The horn and the wildness of the hunt. The piercing. And I suppose we all knew what the allegory meant, or it wouldn’t be much of an allegory. And an allegory is just a civilized way of lying.

  If you take away the lie, the truth remains at the bottom of it, and the truth is shaped like a dead boy.

  The sun comes up and the sun goes down. My tapestries change, though I cannot catch them in the act. No longer do I see my spaniels or my tidy English hills. Now I see my twelve wives, all of them in blue, their faces holy and upturned, as though they were in truth the Apostles whose names they bear. I see Death in a judge’s wig taking the years off of a robust man like thread coming off a spool. I see Boethius, wretched, ragged, starving—but at least he had a visitor.

  I do not have twelve wives. I have never stood at Death’s bench, nor even owned a spaniel. The tapestries show nothing true, only what I have told them. To be totally honest I am not wholly sure I was ever English. I might have been born in Bourgogne. I have lied about myself more than anything else, for more than any other thing in this world, I have failed to be as fantastical as I might have been. I remember that unicorn and his terrified expression and he seems so like me. Everyone said he was a magical beast, but in the end he was but a boy whose desire showed in every aspect of his body—my desire shows in my mind, that is the difference if there is any at all. Take away the lie of the horse and all you have is the horn, throbbing and painful and yearning toward it knows not what.

  Outside my window, it is a long way down. The phoenix and salamanders are piling up dry wood and leaves. They are breaking their tripods for kindling. The Bonfire is coming.

  THE CONFESSIONS

  She came for me. I did not want to go. I had work, I had so much more to do. The mold had begun to creep back—slowly, but we were taking too long, we had to go faster, faster! I had no time for girls’ games in the dark. Woman, leave me be. Woman, tend to thine own.

  But the woman in yellow said: “I am owed. Leave your men to work. Give me my night.”

  What could I have said? If there is a currency in such places, one must pay the tariffs. Knowledge has an ugly tax. She drew me out and sat beneath the branches of books for all the world like the heathen Buddha beneath his Bo tree, shadows on her hands and in her lap.

  “You came to convert us to Christ, yet you say nothing of your God, and only devour our books, only say: give us food and everything you know, let us gorge ourselves, fill us up, fill us up! Are you such empty men? Tell me about the wonders of Jesus Christ Your Lord. Tell me the good news. Tell me he has risen and I am saved. Do you think we have never met your like before? Every several years some troupe of you, yearning after sainthood or martyrhood, comes babbling about doves.”

  I was ashamed. When asked to minister, it all went to ash in me. I wanted only to return to the books, to know everything they had in them, and failing that I wanted, improbably, for the woman in yellow
to look kindly on me and sit close to me, to take me into her confidence. The starlight played on the pale, thin down of her skin.

  “You know we came for Prester John,” I said. “Why humiliate me this way?”

  “Do you think it is not humiliating to be valued only for what passed in one’s country, long ago?”

  “Who are you? Why are you called Theotokos? What god is your child? You must know that only Mary bears that title—and if you are not Christian, whence comes this Christian name?” I longed to put out my hands to her—I would still have said then that I did not want her in a sinful way—such thoughts had long ago seeped from my collection of recognizable states.

  “No, Alaric. Who are you? Tell me the secrets of the country of Alaric. Pluck the books of his heart for me. Read them while they rot.”

  The only way back to my books—yes, I called them mine in my heart—was through. If I flayed myself for her I could be excused from her presence. I did not speak to be shriven, and yet, what would you call it, when a man sits in shade and tells his history?

  I told her of my mother. It seemed the thing most likely to please her. I told her that when I learned my Greek letters I thought Aristotle would save me from the maternal influence, because he felt contempt for women, and wrote that they were not fully human—and that is how I felt toward my mother. That she was made of some stuff other than what made me, that she was an animal or a spirit, something wild and untouchable which came and went like a cloud, which one could not predict. I followed Aristotle into the company of men, where the memory of her could not come.

  “I do not care about your mother,” said the woman in yellow. “Blame women for your loneliness and misery—that is your business. Tell me a thing that is true, that is at the heart of you. Something as true as the things you copy.”

  “Why? Is everything in those books true? Am I to believe John Mandeville really wrote that black book? A separate and secret one that he left in this place? Well, some of it may be true but there is a lot of allegory in there, and the faux Mandeville lies as though it will save his soul.”

  “Perhaps it did.”

  “Do you know what is written there? Have you read the books yourself? Don’t you want to know the history of your own country?”

  She looked amused for a moment, staring me down. “Why do you assume I am ignorant of it? As you assume I am no god’s mother, as you assume I am an animal, as you assume all we have is yours to take.”

  “You are angry.”

  “No, I am human, and I am beset by animals.”

  I could say nothing to answer that. I took a deep breath. The air tasted like apples and wood and the pages of books, blowing down from the tree.

  “When I had just taken my orders,” I said slowly, “I heard the older monks talking in the refectory. They drank the autumn’s first beer and ate the summer’s dried mushrooms and I wanted so to be older, to be one of them, to be learned. And they said the same name over and over: Prester John. Prester John. I think it was a game, really, by then. After all, the story is five hundred years old now. It has lost a little of its sheen. But everyone still played the game: What fantastical thing can you make everyone believe is really there, in that impossible kingdom? And they would weave wilder and wilder stories until someone asked for textual authority on the point of jaguars having souls, and they would dissolve into laughter. I watched them from the door the way a child watches his parents in their marriage bed—furtively, curiously, with shame and a kind of foreknowledge growing in one’s breast. I felt towards the game of Prester John very like I felt toward the sexual act, in fact. I hated it because it was silly and old-fashioned and so earnest; it had no intellect, only base desire. Yet I longed for it terribly, to be part of its rites, to be welcomed, and I felt if I could seize one or the other or both I would finally understand something about the world. But somehow, somehow I missed it. Like a gear slipping, failing to catch. I could never make up a new beast for Prester John’s pantheon, I could not make puns about gryphons. I could not be like the other boys. I could not even sneak out of the abbey as they did and into the village—my attempts ended with me red-faced and ashamed, on the outside, telling myself everything they said was a lie designed to cause pain to anyone not in on the joke. I could be neither in Prester John’s kingdom nor in our own. The cameleopards and unicorns were not for me. They occupied another country, the same country my mother occupied, one where everyone spoke the language but me, where I could never belong. It got tangled up inside me, the body and Prester John and my mother. And when Hiob and the rest were chosen for this mission, I seethed, furious, hating them as they dug out all the old tales and drank the old beer and chewed the old mushrooms and it was all weeping crocodiles and phoenix again, fountains of youth and amethyst palaces.”

  “Then why did you come?”

  “Because they chose me. The country of unicorns and mothers turned its head and looked at me at last. Hiob said: ‘You are my friend and my best linguist. You are strong in faith. Come with me, take the chance that more in the world is truth than lies.’ And for a moment I believed that I could belong to that place, that place where everything is true.”

  The woman in yellow kept her silence. Did I imagine it, that her expression softened, just a little?

  “But it is Hiob’s country, still. It is all through him, that country of lies and mothers and beasts and village girls. Eating him from the inside, making him into a grotesquerie. I do his work, but I am still on the outside.”

  Finally, she said: “The world is not made of countries and outsiders. We are all just humans, and most of us fools, and all of us longing for more than we have, to know more than we know—and yet even that is not enough, for if we knew everything we would only be disappointed that there was not one more secret to uncover. You would be disappointed. Your whole faith depends upon uncovering a suddenly, violently magical country at the end of the world, full of lakes of fire and ten-headed beasts and broken seals and trumpets. It has never happened, it will never happen, and instead of being relieved that humans will all live on and not be destroyed, you are all bitterly sad that the world goes on.”

  How many of us had come through her village that she knew her Revelations, that she could be cynical about it? I felt suddenly like the hundredth suitor in some foreign princess’s court. All the good miracles had been performed by men before me. Her face seemed large as a moon, looming before me, her golden dress aglow in the stars, a jaguar with a soul, and I did not even know what I was doing, did not even know that I had moved, before I was kissing her, and if it was not my first kiss I could not remember another, her mouth hard and unyielding beneath mine, but warm, and I insisted—I could walk in that country, that confused, generous country and her mouth parted slightly, nothing more than slightly, but as soon as it had I knew I had done wrong; I had trespassed, and when our tongues touched, a cry went up from the little house where my brothers worked away, an anguished, choking cry.

  Hiob, waking, strangling in his vines.

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  The wizards came at dusk.

  Father said not to call them wizards.

  Men in robes came for us and they carried golden crosses atop long staffs, whispering in Latin, making arcane signs at us with their hands, and in their center was a man somewhat older than John, handsome, his face weathered and almost kind, wearing a glittering and ornate diadem. I do not know what to call them but wizards. They whispered at us in Latin and we could not cross the water.

  Just because they whispered in Latin and we could not cross the water does not mean we could not cross the water because they whispered at us in Latin. We could not cross before.

  Spells need reinforcement. Nothing lasts forever. They came to shore up the sides of their curses. It is Christian magic. The same magic that says: put a veil over her and she will be human. That says: say these words and your soul will be saved. That says: wear a cross and we will pretend we are
kin. No different than the kind John knows, that says: speak Latin and you are Christian, be Christian and you are saved, be saved and you are real, worthy of notice, worthy of love.

  And what of Salah ad-Din’s magic?

  Not much different, but incanted in a kinder tone.

  “I could not get you into Mosul,” the green knight said, “even if you could manage the river. If I could get into Mosul I’d be there now, and eating pomegranates in the muslin-sellers markets! But there is a monastery, on this side, St. Elijah’s. The Nestorian see keeps it, and pilgrims come for Mar Elia in November, when the oranges are small and green on the trees.”

  And John wept with joy, as in his books they say men of old did. “Surely God has led me here, to find a Nestorian hold in the wide desert. Take me, Salah ad-Din, give me over to my brothers and I will call us bonded, call us brethren, never one to harm the other.”

  Anglitora flexed her wide wing. “We do not especially wish to be given over to Nestorians, Father. We came to fight. We came to deliver a city. Not to nap in a monastery.”

  “Daughter, I need to rest,” John said desperately, as desperate to get to those monks as a man to a lover. “I am so tired of being a stranger.”

  Salah ad-Din cleared his lovely throat. “I will be happy to do it, John, but if we are brothers, I would ask my brother a favor. Sieges are long and costly; they merely put off the inevitable. If your winged countrymen wish to deliver a city, they could deliver Mosul to me.”

  “But the river,” protested Anglitora.

  “Oh, I don’t need you to actually fly over the walls. Just show yourselves, in sight of the Hamdanids, and they will surrender immediately, I promise. Who would not, in the face of so many gryphons and, well, I am not certain what to call the other flying folk among you. But we have nothing like them here, and strategy sometimes consists of showing one’s hand rather than closing it into a fist.”