To write my own words is more kin to reaching out into the darkness and commanding the shadows to coalesce into a marble figure the dimensions of whose face I cannot imagine, even for myself. I lie alone with no friendly ghost-hand on my knuckles, and am buffeted by didacticism, digression, daydreams. I imagine that when I look up from this work at last, there will be nothing left of the world but an old clock long run down, as useless as my old heart.
Time stretches out so far before and behind me. No clock could demarcate a tenth of my memory. Yet in this wasteland of the hours, Time still seeks some hold, and we in Pentexore do know a kind of calendar.
The Great Queen Abir reigned over the Age of Tallow and Tines, in which the Fountain was first discovered and the Oinokha set in her place like a jewel fast in a ring. With her wide hoof Abir marked out the laws which have kept us aright as little ships in a great storm.
I recall once that John asked me if I knew the tale of Eve in Paradise. To which I gave his favorite reply: “I know nothing of this.”
He did so love to lecture, and he told me straightaway of the apple and the named animals and the flaming sword set across the gate. In those days it was his theory that we Pentexorans dwelt yet in Eden, no matter how many times the lions showed him the several gates of our country and not a one of them with a sword stuck through the bars.
His allegory spent, I took his head between my breasts, and he clasped his arms about my waist. While the glass bells rang out high as a hummingbird’s song in the al-Qasr, I told him the truth of his story. Sometimes I think that was my greatest use to him, to take his ugly tales and teach him the gorgeous truth hidden in them.
I said: “Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness.”
John did not think I interpreted the text correctly, and he scribbled for days in the corners of the palace in the strange, patchwork Bible he had compiled from memory, trying to make right his story of Eden. It was some time after this, his memory coming and going like a vicious tide, that he gave in to my theory and presented me with the gift of the clock: time to the timeless.
And this is what Queen Abir gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom—without which we might all have leapt into the Rimal within a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchmenters become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys. Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Pentexore folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion—and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up into the air once more and land in some other pattern. If not for this, how fastened, how frozen we would be, bound to one self, forever a mother, forever a child. We anticipate this refurbishing of the world like children at a holiday. We never know what we will be, who we will love in our new, brave life, how deeply we will wish and yearn and hope for who knows what impossible thing!
Well, we anticipate it. There is fear too, and grief. There is shaking, and a worry deep in the bone.
Only the Oinokha remains herself for all time—that is her sacrifice for us.
There is sadness in all this, of course—and poets with long, elegant noses have sung ballads full of tears that break at one blow the hearts of a flock of passing crows! But even the most ardent lover or doting father has only two hundred years to wait until he may try again at the wheel of the world, and perhaps the wheel will return his wife or his son to him. Perhaps not. Wheels, and worlds, are cruel.
Time to the timeless, apples to those who live without hunger. There is nothing so sweet and so bitter, nothing so fine and so sharp.
My first Abir came for me when I was quite young. I had only sixty years, practically an infant, still full of my third draught of the Fountain. Festival flowers swept scarlet and green through the square of Shirshya, violins of orange-wood and cinnamon played songs both heavy and sweet. My mother and father kissed my eyelids and rubbed the soft, empty space above my collarbone—like a fontanel, it pulsates silkily, a
mesh of shadow and meat under the skin, never quite closed. Each blemmye finds their own way with it, protective or permissive. But often others catch us, deep in thought, stroking the place where our head is not. My parents caressed that place quietly, and kissed it, too. They embraced each other with abandoned tears beneath the vellum-trees, and left their parchment fields to the next family, thoughtfully sown and ready for new hands.
The bronze Lottery bell spun in the courtyard; we drew our stones, our old selves vanished.
Ctiste drew a small amethyst, and went north to crush grapes and sell wine on the Fountain-road; my father drew a pearl, and walked west to dive for sapphires in the cold, depthless Physon. They trembled with joy and sorrow, but my stomach was as full of fear as of breakfast, for I was unready to lose them, and it was my first Abir. I did not yet know how to bend with grace beneath it. My mother looked so beautiful, so young, her black skirts flapping, her eyes bright and wet! She already thirsted for swollen purple grapes, for a new man beneath her and new children at her heels. I wept, as the innocent will do, and envied her first new daughter.
I changed too, that day. I drew an amber bead and married an amyctrya named Astolfo, who had bright green eyes and a great huge mouth like an empty barrel, in which he brewed tea and stew and poisons and perfumes, squatting and stirring draughts in his deep jaw with an iron ladle. I married him in a yellow crown, and on that day he became an ink-maker, to brew walnut-leech behind his teeth, and I no longer a child at play but the keeper of all our groves, which stood still and pale and waving, a long and shady library waiting for Astolfo and I to read it all. The Lottery went gentle with me that year. It did not send me far. My heart tore open and was stitched back together in one stroke, and this is the way of the Abir. It has a wisdom we cannot know or guess at.
After the yellow crown was quite ruined in the mud by the laughing, eager thrusting common to all newly married folk, I went walking. My skin flushed with heat and memory, I wound through the groves to find the place where my mother had buried my little book, the one she had made of her smallest finger. She was no longer my mother, and could say nothing about it. I ate dry and spicy page-berries as I strode, and my shoulders were already red with summer.
I found it, after some searching, between a pomegranate-quill tree, hunched and spiked, and a tall, stately glue-pine. My breath caught, and I clasped my hands to my belly.
It was small, hardly as tall as I, its bark smooth as a front-board, pearlescent as a fingernail. Its leaves drooped, rustling faintly in the lazy wind. It bore few fruit, peeking from the page-leaves: the soft brown hands of my mother, with her long, graceful fingers, the oft-traced lines of her palm. I knelt beneath the little tree, and one of the dear, familiar hands turned slowly on the branch, as an apple will turn in a wavering breeze. It cradled my breast, wiping the tears from the eye at its tip, and another caressed gently the empty space above my collarbone. The hands of the tree held me so tenderly, and later I would swear to Astolfo that I could hear her old humming in the branches.
Cradled so, I looked up into those boughs, clustered with pale pages, and read on each the same word, the single word of my thirty-first year:
Forget.
THE SCARLET NURSERY
Children wish to know where they come from. It is a burning, terrible question for them, and they will phrase it a hundred ways: Why is the grass green? (Why am I not green?) Why does the wind blow? (Why do I blow and blow and make no storms or snap flowers from the stem?) Why do we live in a city? (Why am I myself and not some other child?)
It was always my part to answer, little by little, the questions they asked and did not ask, until they woke up grown.
One evening, Ikram, who liked the bloody parts best, gathered up all the bones of her supper and brought them into the Scarlet Nursery. I believe she had the entire skeleton of their delicious black swan in her enormous hand. Her fingers had been quite scratched by her brother earlier in the morning over the not-insignificant matter of a toy gryphon and his missing feathers. I myself had dined already, as I am accustomed to do, upon several savory dishes: the sound of their laughing, of the bones rubbing together in Ikram’s brown hand like a witch casting her eye, the whispers of the moon moving over the floor of the nursery, the snorting of the camels in the stables, the little harp a queensmaid played that afternoon in a far room of the al-Qasr, plucking to herself a little ballad in which some lover or another suffered calamity. It was a rich meal; I groaned with the weight of it. I sat in the center of the red room, the walls soft and crimson, the pillows of the floor sewn with ruby silk, even the bowls of the lamps lacquered as red as burning hearts. Everything large, everything strong, everything shaped to their mountainous hands, and meant never to break except on purpose.
I sat while they ate below, opening my ears to their full span, which is to say I filled the room entire, my ears waving softly in the red light like sweet fishes’ fins, sampling a few notes of the roof creaking as a dessert. Only in solitude do I eat, and open myself so far, so wide. I have only to listen and I am nourished; my food is the sound of the world.
If I was forced to eat with the children, I chewed demurely upon a flute of bamboo or stick of cinnamon. I never wished to be rude.
That evening, Ikram set out all her supper-bones, according to size. She was an exact child, and very orderly when it came to things like bones and pinching and other things that might result in tears out of her siblings. Lamis watched her carefully, her long fingers twitching as if to help, in secret. Cametenna may have hands like boulders, but their fingers are deft, and Ikram cleaned each bone of meat, washed it, and set it beside its brothers.