A Dirge for Prester John

I have no answer, except that nothing can stay as it is forever, no matter how sweet, no matter how bright in the black. No matter how much we might wish that all we love could stop and hold its breath in our arms, things will insist on happening. Catastrophe is natural, my darlings, perhaps the only natural thing. And so, though there can be no reason it occurred at the moment it did and not another moment, or another, one of the Spheres cracked.

It was the Crystalline Heaven who did it, as best folk very much wiser than your Imtithal can measure it. Why the Crystalline Heaven and not the Benevolent Gold of the Sun’s Sphere, or the Base Metal of the Leaden Spheres? Lean in, and I will tell you a secret: because the Heaven was lonely, and it had a weakness in its upper hemisphere, due to some trauma in its mysterious infancy. It is important that you know this. That loneliness and weakness were always part of us.

The Sphere of Heaven ground slowly through the windy pitch, and crushed against the Benevolent Silver of the Sphere of the Moon. All along its rose-colored meridians, the orb of Heaven cracked, and splintered, and shivered. Lines of gold like fire appeared in its great face; glass formed and bubbled in long rivers, and in the beginning of everything it cried out as the Sphere of the Moon passed into the Sphere of Heaven. Where the Moon had entered, so the Sun followed, and Mercury Lined with Quicksilver, Jupiter Hot and Moist, and all of the Planetary Spheres and Elemental Spheres, one after the other, like one of Ikram’s poor dolls. The Crystalline Heaven swelled with all it contained, and lost all its rosy color, becoming instead the color of black glass. Thus when we look upward in the evening, we see the very furthest rim of Heaven that can be seen from where we stand, on the last and smallest and best of the Spheres, the Habitation of the Blessed, our own dear Earth.

Being lowest, it falls to us to anchor the rest. In a place utterly hidden, somewhere in our gentle world, a pin is fixed that keeps all things turning. The pin is called the Spindle of Necessity, and all the rest whirls around it, bound, tethered by invisible strands. But each of those Spheres is studded with a world like our own, as a ring is studded with a gem, and though we may not go there, we can imagine how, perhaps on furthest silvery Saturn, another Imtithal speaks softly to another Lamis, another Ikram. But not another Houd, for on no heavenly Sphere is there a Houd who likes stories or can keep quiet.

All you see and can be seen is fashioned from the stuff of the Spheres. The sea is where the Benevolent Silver of the Moon meets Venus, Cold and Moist. The panotii are the children of Saturn, Cold and Dry, and the Fixed and Colorless Stars, who dwell in the deeps. You cametenna carry shards of Jupiter, Hot and Moist, and Mars, Hot and Dry, within you, the Jasper and Ruby Spheres of such hot hearted worlds, born in the strange circling of Spheres within Spheres, that motion which only the panotii can hear.

I can hear it now, ever so softly, the flowing music, like a sea, a tide moving round and round and round us, singing its private songs as it goes. It says: go to bed, little ones, fold your great hands over your small hearts, and listen to your nurse.

Houd, Who Did Not Like Being Teased, Even in a Story: Imtithal, what was there before the Spheres? Did someone make them? Is there someone out there, beyond the Spheres, who made everything, and watches us, and loves us and punishes us?

And I thought on this a long time, for some many folk do think so, and tell such stories: of gods with swords that drip with flowers, of the moon walking upon the earth in a dress of deerskin—but to that child I owed nothing more or less than my whole heart, and all I believed and knew to be true, and this is what I said to him:

No, my golden-eyes. There is only us, making and watching and loving and punishing. Only us, sleeping below the stars.

THE CONFESSIONS OF

HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699

Full of the strength of supper, I sprang from book to book, from Imtithal’s odd Sanskrit dialect back to the marvelous clarity of Hagia’s charmingly creaky Greek. Excitement flowed in a constant circuit from my left hand turning pages to my hungry eyes to my right hand scratching a translated copy with admirably few mistakes. The work, in those early hours, seemed a pleasure, and I found my rhythm in it, my body remembering old days in the library, adorning manuscripts with golden cameleopards and angels with the heads of lions. Stopping for lunches of a few apples and bits of bread soaked in milk, and then back into the breach, into the sub-clauses and hexameters, into the lions’ heads and allegorical bodies. I touched the Word of Christ—Thy Word, O Lord. I put my hands on it and it was as warm as if it lived. I felt so close to the Divine, to You. As close as a calf and its mother. I could not help but touch the pages of John and Hagia’s books the same way, with the same thrill of recognition—and these books did live, and have scent, and browned slightly beneath my fingers like true fruit. Then, I felt it was all a kind of sanctified play, and that feeling returned in the little hut, surrounded by books reeking of fruit, my candle burning, my ink-cup brimming, and Hiob with a young man’s ardor.

Pride has always been my sin. On Your Sea of Glass You must know this, and chuckle at my stating so plainly what should be obvious to the king of All. Indulgently, I hope, as Your servant compares Your Own Writ with the mortal work of these tarnished, motley souls. But at first, I was so happy, just to be in the presence of those volumes, hearing their confessions as though administering, at last, the great rites to their dust.

No longer did I take the time to rest my knuckles and stretch my back and think on how Mary was like a cow and Hagia was like Mary—I leapt like a faun between the tomes, without a break between them, and my pace quickened where I had been certain I would fail. Truly, You were with me then, Lord, and guided my hand and my eye. I dwelt in Grace for a few sweet hours before my doom came on me.

THE WORD IN THE QUINCE

Chapter the Second, in Which the Borders of a Strange Country are Explored, the Name of the Country Revealed to a Stranger by a Bird of Very Great Size, a Peculiar War Commences, and a Brusque Hospitality Offered.

Sand washed up onto sand. Golden skeletons skittered onto the shore, the points of their ribs finer than needles. I dreamed, face down on the beach, and while I dreamed the sun peeled my skin from me, pink, then red, and no wave came to cool my flesh. I dreamed that I swam in the cisterns underneath Constantinople, through that underwater city with columns carved as precisely as if men meant to live there, frescoes stippled into the wall as if some fish-faced, green-eyed lady might come to view them. But it was never so—black water covered all like a drop-cloth. In my dream I swam near the ceiling, in the space between the slow little waves and the roof of the busy streets, washed in slant-light from bronze grates.

And Kostas was there, by my side, with a spearful of blue mackerel and a smile. His white te

eth hurt my heart. I wanted to tell him I was sorry I left, that the iconoclasts had returned to the Patriarch’s roost, and they painted over every Christ-face in the city. I could not stay, not each night filling with the wet sounds of hooded fools knifing painters of a mild-eyed Christ, not with the unpaintable Logos so strong at my back, burning into me, burning me crimson, burning me white. Not when I myself had painted the Mother of God, and made myself a criminal.

We are heretics now, I whispered to Kostas as we floated on our backs and looked up through the grates at passing hooves and cart-wheels. Or, I should say, we are heretics again. Who can remember if on Tuesday we are damned and on Thursday we are saved? My soul is weary of wars of art.

Kostas shrugged and ate a blind cistern-fish raw, the dark entrails wriggling into his brown mouth. He understood. Kostas always understood. He held the dead fish out to me, its pale belly ruptured and torn. In the dream, I wanted to eat it, to take all that Kostas offered, ever offered, and I tried furiously to remember that there was no beauty in a body. Flesh was no more than corrupt, dead meat. The divine self has no hunger for such a thing. Kostas was no more beautiful than the poor fish with its tiny blackish liver splashing into the cistern. I was no better.

Dreams scrape everything up from the underside of the heart. It is rarely lovely, the sludge that comes dripping out. I am a good man. I am a good man.

I dove down beneath the dark dream-water, down through the lightless ripples, past the shadowy columns with their intricate capitals, the frescoes with their leaping dolphins and bared breasts: I saw them, I marked them, and coral quietly covered the faces of dancing nymphs. I dove deeper, until there was no breath in me. In the place of breath, a light grew, pushing my lungs out like hands. Deeper still sun-deprived fish glided by, their tongues glowing ghostly against the walls. In their tongue-light, unwholesome and pale, a mockery of moonlight, I saw the depths of the cisterns and the colossal stone feet of Constantinople herself, still delicate and graceful in their enormity, sandaled demurely, holding up the city. Mussels clustered at her heels; mold greened her nails. I touched the stone of her toes. They prickled like flesh, and I took her warm marble ankle in my pitifully insufficient arms, weeping against the impassive limb. I opened my mouth to call her name, and the cistern flooded through me, black and cold.

I woke at night, my skin hot and tight enough to crack like the shell of an egg. My mouth was full of sand, my chest scoured raw. The sand brought me back to myself, and I was relieved to find I still remembered Kostas and Constantinople, still clutched them in my heart’s hands like two tiny marble figures. Much else had spilled out into the sea. My heart was a net of fish torn open. I came for something, didn’t I? To find something. Images flickered and died: a tomb, a cross, a face with hollow eyes. I thought that I had a purpose, once.

The moon lay long and silver on the planks of dead ships on the beach-head, masts tangled with golden seaweed. Far off, in the shadows, I thought I saw the broken, useless hulk of a lighthouse, its thin, fiery beam illuminating only the endless sand. Dark cliffs hunched behind it, circled by silent birds battling the wind through a heaven crowded with unfamiliar stars, a flock without their shepherd, wheeling wide, constellations broken open against a sharp sky. I moved towards the black mountains, my bones weeping in my flesh, begging to be allowed to lie down on the shore of the sand and perish.

In this way shall I grind sin from my soul, I thought then, for the desert was always the redeemer of folly and flesh. Who under the copper domes will not laugh when I find my way home, and tell them of these far places? The purity blazing from my scalp will blind them! It will force their gaze aside, and crown me in silver! When I crest that range I shall sit upon it as on the wall of the world, and the Logos will sit on my shoulder like a keen-eyed crow. I shall feel its claws in my bones.

Thus I made my way, babbling to myself, imagining the wonder and envy of distant monks, and found grace for my blistered feet: a smooth rock path through the cliffside, winding thin and reluctant, slowly upward. The sandy sea pounded below, its gold turned to white by the moon gliding through her sphere. Waves sent sprays of glittering mica into the wind. Long cries, like unhurried arrows arced through the sky, low and sweet along the crystal breakers. If not for the sand and my bleeding back, the land would have seemed something like the coast of the Bosphorus in the summer, if lacking a thousand colored tents gleaming in the heat.

Dawn was nearly on me when I saw them—there had not been enough light before, or too much mountain. A line of stone cranes peered down at me from the heights, their long beaks beaten out of the golden cliffside rock, fronds of waving palm crowning their small, curious heads. They were fitted to the crest of the crags like a small fence, and as I squinted it seemed to me that real cranes crept cautiously up between them: scarlet faces and long, lithe bodies all of blue, fine, thin feathers like gold thread spiking from their delicate heads. They frowned grimly, like nothing so much as the front face of a phalanx staring me down, stone pupils and black, wet eyes alternating.

“You’re too big!” one cried out, the largest of all, whose cobalt feathers shone even in the thin light of just-before-dawn. “It would be Unfair Advantage!” It snapped its long beak several times, like drum-strikes.

I finally struggled up the last rough stair of stone and stood upon the summit, the sea of sand whirring and heaving far below, my face welted with yesterday’s heat, my rags scant comfort against the high winds that tore at me with their bony fingers in place of the moon’s flat, hard palm. The great crane stomped in consternation and danced up to me. With its neck fully erect, it nearly rose to my chin.