ake up stories because you are lonely and bray about it all day long?”
“You are a beast, and do not have a soul. Worse, you seem to be a sort of plant as well. What purpose could there be in ministering to you?”
“That’s the loser’s argument if I ever heard it,” smirked the ram, and chewed at a bit of leaf.
I felt it best to inquire after some other subject—I have never been a missionary, or aimed at that golden felicity of tongue that such men possess. When I attempted it, I used too many words or too few, and no one was converted by peals of light exuding from my inspired mouth. In the world I knew, in the world I loved best, the world of Constantinople, painted blue domes and artichokes and quinces and loyal, simple men with God’s own devotion in their eyes, everyone knew what God looks like. We may have disagreed on points of scripture, we may even have divided a room and called some heretics and some pure on the basis of a single verb, but no one argued that Christ reigned in Heaven as king, that His Crown was Many-Storied, that Mary was His Mother and He Died to Rise Again. Except the heathen Saracen, or even more perverse Easterner. I often thought in those days that deviance and perversity must increase the further one ventured eastward. But even in the east they admitted that Christ was holy, His Birth miraculous. When the argument centered not on whether Christ lived as one being and one flesh or separate in the Word, His Breath and Spirit, and the Flesh, His Earthly Body, but whether or not a gargantuan sheep had appeared to another sheep in some blasted farmyard, there could be no real discourse.
I tried another tack, less successful even than the first. “You said ‘when I lived.’ Are you dead, now, then? I confess I would prefer you to say you are, for then the logical conclusion would be that I have died myself and blundered into some heretofore uncharted sphere of Hell, and that would explain much to my heart.”
The sheep marveled at me, his yellowish-green eyes wide and rolling. By now the other heads had roused themselves and regarded me with the drowsy interest common to their kind.
“Of course I am dead. What kind of simpleton are you?”
One of the black-faced ewes snapped at the scrap of fleece that ringed the ram’s neck like a collar.
“He’s a stranger,” she bleated. “Can’t you smell it on him? It’s a wonder you lived as long as you did, old hoof-rot.” She turned back to me. “A sheep knows three smells best: master-bearing-food, stranger, and master-bearing-a-blade.”
The ram snorted. “I lived to a fat old age with a patch of ewes to my name and more young than I could count. I and the missuses made a good mutton for our master’s table, and they buried the bones like sensible farmers. They still come to collect the wool off of the trees, though not so much these days—most humans find this a sad and ugly place, on account of the war.”
“I am sorry,” I said, shading my eyes from the sun which would not let me be, not for a moment, dazzling my vision and my wits. “But you are a tree, are you not?”
“Certainly,” sniffed the ram. His horns gleamed bronze.
The ewe chortled to herself. “I suppose you weren’t well brought up? No education to speak of? Never read the classicks, I’ll warrant. Never learned your letters.”
“Not at all,” I protested. “I read very well, in four tongues and half a fifth. I have read Scripture and much more, Augustine, even pagan books. I know my Plato and my Aristotle.” Forgive my pride, O Lord, but the learning of tongues was hard-won for me, and a man may treasure that which he bled to gain.
The ewe wrinkled her dark, soft muzzle. “But it is Aristotle who teaches: If you plant a bed and the rotting wood and the worm-bitten sheets in the deep earth, it will certainly and with the hesitation of no more than a season, which is to say no more than an ear of corn or a stalk of barley, send up shoots. A bed-tree will come up out of the fertile land, its fruit four-postered, and its leaves will unfurl as green pillows, and its stalk will be a deep cushion on which any hermit might rest. I remember the master’s daughter reciting that for her lessons while she spun my wool, I do. She said it so many times I can’t help but remember, even all these years down the warp.”
“But Aristotle didn’t say that at all! He said a bed-tree could never grow, even if you planted a bed deep in the earth, because a bed is made by man and a seed is grown by nature, and that is how one may tell the difference.” I stumbled in my argument. “If I had a place to sleep in the shade and water, I might recall the quotation exactly.” I felt myself blushing.
“And yet, we are talking, you and I,” the ram opined, cutting the ewe quite out. “So someone here has Aristotle wrong and I rather think it’s the one who thinks God isn’t a sheep.”
My head pounded and ached. “No, I know I have it right, I know it.”
“When you bury a thing, you must tend its tree. You gave it life, and owe it obligation. Achyut, the Saint Under the Root said that,” bleated the ewe, but she was beginning to nod off again. “I know a lot of quotations. The master’s daughter was very clever. They buried our bones, and we grew, and we remember being their sheep, but now we drink rain and feel very fat about things generally, as there’s no chance of being mutton any longer.”
The ram eyed me with suspicion. “We aren’t good to eat if you were considering it. Of course, a man who’ll eat a cannon-ball…”
“Well, at least I didn’t eat the horse-heads!” I pleaded. “And who buried cannons and engines and horses here? What happened that such a vicious orchard was ever planted?”
Behind me, one of those damned horses neighed softly, mournfully, and the wind clanked armor against bough.
“It was before the Wall,” the ram whispered, and cast his eyes away. “Gog and Magog walked here, and where they walked fire followed, and towers rose, and there was no sun or moon but the blaze of their hearts, which they wore outside their bones, like jewels on their chests. When it was all done, the earth covered the wreckage, and nature took its course.”
My mouth dried and the pulp of the cannon-fruit went sour within me. I could not think where I had beached myself. It was as though every story I had ever heard had broken itself on the shores of this place like blind, brittle whales, and I walked among their shards, that could never be made whole again.
I passed out of that forest with the laughter of sheep following me, and into lands so blasted I thought I walked on ash alone, with no rock to bear me up, only the void opening beneath my blistered feet. I saw the moon both day and night and thirsted so sharply that in the depths of those wastes I opened the vein of my arm and drank my own blood, as the sheep ate the leaves of their own tree. I thought of nothing. Not the wild dreams and visions of the great sand sea, not my mother or her black eyes that are Mary’s eyes that are my mother’s eyes, nothing at all. My mind became sifting ash, ash upon ash, and where the grit of my intellect fell, there too was ash, and the whole world burned and I burned with it and when I think of it now I see nothing but grey before and behind and beside; grey, and the scalded, terrible face of the moon stripping the life from me.
It seemed to me, near the end, that I smelled costly spices, pepper and myrrh, and I thought: I am dying and it is as my mother always said, after all. The sanctified dead smell sweet, and on their beloved breasts the living array spice and perfume.
I cannot say how many days and nights wound their way around this earth before I possessed a calm thought again, or knew my name.
THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN
The close of day has a kind of music to it. The descending blue, the rising silver stars, the parrots croaking their paeans to their own reflections, the market below my minaret closing up, clapping board to board, the boil of their last huge stew, full of every unsold thing. And my pen, always my pen, scratch-scratching away the last minutes of the world, little clock of my pen. The branches of the quince and the pomegranate began to snake through the upper rooms of my minaret some years back. I find them friendly, and now and again they have fruit for me, red and cracked as a heart, green and new as faith.
The fish-sellers call up to me. Hagia, come down and try my oysters, they’ll turn your guts to pearl! The artichoke-mongers, too, who know, still, after all these years, to keep the heaviest for John, and now for me. It doesn’t matter, him or me. They keep them back out of habit, for someone who loves them best. He loved the fruit because they brought his home back to him. I love it because they bring him back to me.