A Dirge for Prester John

There, there, belly of mine. Be peaceable. I look after you, don’t I?

I took up the scarlet tome, with its embossed eyes staring, staring, pricking up my marrow with their gaze. It possessed a bloody scent, lurid, like a pomegranate, or bubbling sugar, or beer when it is still so sweet, and the yeast bellows up from the barrel, soft and thick as skin.

I reminded myself: when a book lies unopened it might contain anything in the world, anything imaginable. It therefore, in that pregnant moment before opening, contains everything. Every possibility, both perfect and putrid. Surely such mysteries are the most enticing things You grant us in this mortal mere—the fruit in the garden, too, was like this. Unknown, and therefore infinite. Eve and her mate swallowed eternity, every possible thing, and made the world between them.

But oh, those eyes, they did hound me, and I feared them.

THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN

an Account of Her Life. Composed by Hagia of the Blemmyae Without Other Assistance

When I was born my mother cut off her smallest finger and treated the skin with a parchmenter’s oils. She stretched it on a miniature frame of hummingbird bones, making a tiny book in which she recorded one word for each year of my life with her—the tiny pages left room for no more. It was a strange thing, a little horrible, but I often asked her to take it down from the shelf so that I could look inside it. Hagia, it said on the first page. Cry, on the second. Lymph, on the third. Silence, the fourth. I did not understand. But I understood the tenth page, which said Fountain in Ctiste’s tight, angular hand. No child could mistake such a word, written in such a year. I would go to the Fountain, and I would drink.

My mother tied red skirts below my mouth and, though I protested, buried the little book she made me in a patch of wet, cakey soil ringed in henna bushes. I wept and scrabbled at the dirt for my book, but she would not be moved, and she had buried it deep. With red eyes I clung to her as we walked together over the Shirshya fields, past our donkeys and cows, past the skin-trees waving, past the brindles and reds and whites.

As we walked, I considered my life, as solemnly as a child may weigh her slight ten years in the world on each of her small hands. Our family tended groves of vellum-trees, sprouting out of the earth with bark of gold leaf, their boughs bearing strips of pure skin, translucent and wavering in the peppery wind. Each year, when the harvest lay stretched on hoops in the fields, tightening in the sun, we would cut squares of skin from our dumb, mute beasts and bury them in the earth to sleep until spring: donkeys, calves, camels. Up their skin-trees would come when the winter released the soil: white skins for scripture, brindle for scientific treatises, red for poetry, black for medical texts, dun for romances. Spotted for tragedies, striped for ballad-sheets. The skin of each shows differently when it is stretched and treated and cut, and we knew how the infinite gradations of literature may be strained and made more perfect through the skin of a cow.

Despite my muscular memory, which may easily lift both my mother’s laugh and my husband’s psalms and still have strength for my own long-buried desires and soliloquies, despite the coming darkness and the urgency of my pen, this thing beneath my hand is a difficult book to write. I have been all my life a scribe. I have personally translated and copied the works of the Anti-Aristotle, Artavastus, Catacalon of Silverhair, Stylite the False Lover, Pachymeres-who-spoke-against-Thales, Ghayth Below-the-Wall, Yuliana of Babel, and countless catalogues of poisons, harvests, sexual adventures, and pilgrimages to the Fountain.

It is strange. I have forgotten when we began to call them that—pilgrimages.

I have copied out the great works of our nation in ultramarine, walnut gall, and cuttlefish. Very occasionally, for the most precious volumes, I have crafted my own tincture of zebra-fat and mule-musk, the soot of frankincense and errata pages, and tears. It is this last I use now, though I thought for a long while that something humbler might be best, as I do not consider myself an author, and therefore cannot expect to be allowed to use the finer tools. But in the end, as I attempt, with clumsy but earnest need, to compose and not to copy, perhaps the quality of the ink will stand in my place, and lend some small beauty where I, of necessity, must fail.

As I write, it is morning in New Byzantium. I am comforted, as I have always been, by the scrape of quill against parchment, something like the scratching of chickens in dust—it seems full of tranquil meaning, though the next dancing rooster shall erase the work of all those white and fluttering hens, and the next scribe with her pumice stone will someday take up these pages and make room for a decade’s record of the Physon’s chalky inundations. I am not entirely at peace with this. But I shall have my comeuppance and must be sanguine in the face of it—for I have scoured my own healthy share of careful calligraphy from donkey-skin. It is the natural life-cycle of literature, whether I like it or not.

I live now in a red minaret whose netted windows let in a kind of glassy light, cut by palm-fronds and the tips of quince-trees into fitful scales of shadow, scattering this stack of neat lion-skin pages. My friend Hadulph cut them for me with much solemnity out of his uncle, who fell into a chasm and spilled out the gift of the Font into the dust. Hadulph’s claws were quite sharp enough to the task, but he wept, and the pages are spotted with feline grief. This is not, I think, unapt to my tale. When my pen passes over the stretched and chalk-dulled tracks of my friend’s tears, it goes soft and silent, and so must I.

In truth, I do not rightly know where to begin. I want to speak of my childhood; I want to speak of those terrible events that occurred when I was grown. In my head, in my heart, it all happens at once, one moment lying on top of the other, a palimpsest of days. But that is no way to write a book, and if it is a choice between beginning with him or beginning with myself, I must turn my back on the shade of the man who was once my husband and abjure his usual assumption that all things in the firmament are primarily concerned with his person. I am sure he will be affronted; I feel the wind off of the persimmon groves chill and bristle.

Quiet, John. Quiet, my love. The world existed before you came. We lived; we ate—we even managed to laugh and have a few children before we knew your name.

Bells ring low and sweet in the al-Qasr. It will be warm today, and the wind will bring roses.

When my mother took me to the Fountain for the first time, when I was ten years of age, I felt nothing in the world could be hard or cold or implacable. These days we would call our long walk a pilgrimage, but I did not know the word pilgrim then. No one did. What could such a thing possibly mean? But I knew that my mother was called Ctiste and that she had a waist like a betel-tree and high, small breasts tipped in green eyes like mine—for the blemmyae carry their faces in their chests and have no heads as men do. But we are capable of beauty, whatever you will hear men say. Ctiste was beautiful, and I loved her. I remember her best bent over her parchmenter’s work, and so too my father, working the hoops of laurel wood outside our house, fragrant and white, stretching piebald skins over their curvature. My parents set the pegs true under boughs of champaka flowers; pale orange shadows flitted on their long, muscled arms, the mouths in their flat stomachs no more than hard, thin lines.

I held her hand very tightly as we walked from the city—for you must always walk to the Fountain. If your feet are not road-filthy when you arrive, you have not suffered enough to be worthy of the water. My mother was very strict about this, stopping every few miles to rub red, clay

ey mud onto the soles of my bare feet, in case I was not sufficiently squalid. The Fountain bubbles and flows quite far from what is now Ephesus Segundus—then sweet, gently dilapidated Shirshya, where no one wrote their name without touching my family, our work, our skin.

The Fountain-road astonished me. Such an extraordinary thing for a child to tread. So long, so bright, so loud! Tight as a girl’s hair it curled northward from Shirshya, cutting through fields of spiky kusha grass like brown bones. Pink-violet lotus floated on pools of white sand like lakewater, pale green leaves tucked neatly up beneath their petals. Around her ample waist my mother had tied a belt of books for barter; the spines and boards thudded dully against her hips as we walked, and the smell of the dry grass smoked the air. Ctiste wore red, too. We all wear red on the pilgrim road.

A road can be a city, no less than Shirshya, no less than Constantinople. The Fountain-road formed a long, wending capital—we must all walk it, and so it became our own sweet home, no matter where we were born. Every mile was occupied as firmly as war-won territory, by lamia selling venom and lemon cakes, by fauns selling respite in their arms, by tigers selling tinctures of their claws and eyelashes, by gryphons selling blank-faced idols of chrysolite and cedar. The turbaned tensevetes, their flat, frozen faces gleaming, let their cheeks drip and melt slowly into amethyst vessels, which are then sold to the peregrinating multitudes as holy and magical draughts. At the time we thought them charlatans, but now, when my journeys Fountainward are long done, I think on those cerulean hermits and suppose they never did lie. They let their bodies flow out to ease the throats of the faithful, and that is holiness true, even if it was never more than water. We drank those purple phials; we paid the sharp-toothed tensevete with a novel about a river of ice flowing deep within the earth, peopled with the ghosts of jewel-divers who lived upon the pearls that line the river-floor, feasting on them in misery. It was written on silvery sealskin, and clasped to Ctiste’s belt with an ivory buckle.

At night, the road stretched on forever, up into the mountains, lit by countless lanterns, a thin, spiraling line of lights, moving slowly in the mere, buffeted by gentle laughing and gentler singing. The lotus fields turned to turmeric and coriander, wide and green, and the sharp, fresh scent wound among our silver lights, wound among the shadows, wound among a thousand and more arms swinging in time to a thousand and more steps. Where the land grew rocky, we helped each other climb—a man with stag’s horns and a chest thin as balsam lifted my mother onto a high ledge dotted with shoe-flowers, glinting wrinkled and red in the dark, and placed me beside her with a chaste wink. I carried a bronze-eyed woman’s child for several miles, pulling the girl’s braid and telling her stories about headless heroes with stomachs like beaten brass.

When the turmeric died away, and the rocks grudgingly allowed only moss and the occasional lonely pea-plant, we came upon a cart owned by an astomi, her gigantic nose twitching to catch the faintest aroma on the wind, her prodigious nostrils grazing her own breast. Her cart brimmed full of the most extraordinary wares—at least to the eye of a girl who had seen only parchment-trees and the Shirshyan toymakers’ wooden baubles. The cart-woman’s nostrils shone; astomii have no mouths, but eat scent from the air itself, sniffing apples and turmeric and girlflesh with abandon. Ignoring my impatient mother, as a canny merchant will, she showed me a miniature model of the universe, no bigger than a walnut, impossibly intricate, all in gems dredged from the Physon’s glittering inundations.

“The crystalline spheres,” the astomi said, her voice coming pinched and nasal from the vast tunnels of her nose. “With Pentexore at the center, bounded by her sea of sand—rendered in topaz—and ringed in jeweled orbits: opal for the Moon’s circuit, gold, of course, for the Sun, carbuncle for Mars, emerald for unfeeling Saturn. The cosmos on a chain around your neck—excuse me, charming blemmye, your waist—and, if you’ll allow…”

She turned a tiny silver key in the base of the device, and the spheres began to click and whirl slowly around the plain of Pentexore, where I could make out a thin sapphire river and specks of carnelian mountains like pin-heads. Oh, how shamelessly I begged for this thing! How wickedly I wheedled! But Ctiste was merciful, as indulgent as any mother on a holiday. Quiet as ever, and more patient than I deserved, she unhooked a volume from her belt: a dissertation on the matriarchal social structure of the scent-farmers of the plains, bounded in bone boards, and into the bargain the astomi threw a little ring of lapis and opal which my mother slipped over the stump of her severed finger.

I wore the cosmos on a belt around my waist. Even now as I write, it dangles in my lap like a rosary, and the slow clicking of the spheres calms me.

I fear this must be tedious: any child in Pentexore could tell the same story, describe the same road, the same lanterns, the same trinket-bearing nose-maiden. There is comfort, there was always comfort in the uniformity of our experience. Yes, my child, says each grandmother, I walked that road, my blisters pained me just the same as yours. I saw the line of lights; I broke my feet on the same boulders.

John, too, walked this road, our dilapidated priest—do not believe otherwise, no matter what he assured certain of his own folk. Who does not elide their private matters in the presence of family? But no—no matter how his shade rattles the quince for attention and demands I perform as graceful amanuensis for his gospel, this is not his story. It is mine. He cannot have this, too.

The air of the Fountain howled thin and high, blue as death, giddy. A rock-table wedged itself in the ring of mountains like a gem in a terrible crown, and in the rock-table sunk a well, deep and cold. The table allowed room for only a few folk at once on that narrow summit. Just as well, for each creature’s experience of the Fountain remains their own, uninterrupted by the rapture of another. Thick, grassy ropes edged the last stony paths, so that our lives might not be entrusted to disloyal feet. Clutching these, clutching the rocks themselves, we climbed, we climbed so far, by our fingernails, by our teeth, panting in the ragged wind. The silence loomed so great there, so great and vast, wind and breath alone polishing the faces of the mountains. It was hard. Of course it was hard. All pilgrimage is difficult, or what use would it be?