“Think of it, Asto. She lived through the first Abir, when it would have been hardest, most agonizing to endure. When no one knew how to keep from calling out to their former mother in the street or embracing their former husbands at the market. When no one knew how it was done. And she chose to live by the queen’s law, not to return to the snow and her family, to cast her lot with us.” I moved sleepily against my new husband. “We do not think of Imtithal the sherpa, leading pilgrims into the mountain peaks, though we know she lived that way before, or Imtithal the lamplighter, though we know she lived that way after. We love Imtithal the storyteller, and wish she had been our butterfly. But the Lottery chose that for her, chance chose it—and who knows when it may choose a life for us that will lead to glory and love, and tales told over and over by a thousand fires? What if this life holds wonder for you, my love, and you pull blackness over your eyes, down and down until you cannot see it?”
“But the queen cheated,” Astolfo countered. “She wanted Imtithal for a nurse for her children, and that’s what the barrel chose. How could that have been true chance? No, she rigged it, to have her way.”
“You don’t know that,” I sighed. It was an old debate, even then. “Chance is a kind of god, and what ought to be generally comes to pass. We love her now, so she had to be a nurse then, or we wouldn’t be talking about her in our safe, rosy house.” I looked out at the warm, orange-gold moon, hung like a gourd drying in the sky. “And what if the old queen did cheat? It was worth it, if our Butterfly came in the bargain.”
Oh, my memory. I wish you would soften, I wish I could hang a veil over those times and remember only whispering and love in the dark. Instead, my own words mock me, and pierce me to the very quick.
And in the morning, Hadulph came for his monthly pamphlets, and nuzzled my shoulder, and asked what sucked my belly thin and turned my eyes red.
“My husband does not love his life,” I answered, and that was the first day Hadulph and I went into the pepper fields and I learned how his tangled mane bristled, and how rough his tongue could be, and that some coupling among Pentexoran goes easier than others. Ours was difficult, and brief, and earnest, and fierce. I did not care, I only knew that with the lion I was not alone, I did not have to coax him to love this world. I did not know how much I could come to love that old beast, and how far we would go, he and I. For it would not be the last time. I told Astolfo of it that night. He had no jealousy, only interest in how we managed to contort ourselves enough to accomplish it.
I have told you. An infinity of time crafts a much different soul than a few anxious years. I knew that Astolfo had at least once visited his old vineyards and seduced a panoti girl there among the grapes. He told me how her ears enclosed his whole body, and I marveled, even envied him. Envy and jealousy are sisters, but not twins. Anyway, the first years of a change are hard, and we soon had other griefs than fidelity—for in time my husband grew sick, and though we do not age much past thirty, sickness we do know, even if it is rare, and disease, and plague. His face lost all color, and I drained the ink from his gullet, for he could no longer hold it all in. His weakness sparked such fear in me; I trembled with it, as with a child, knowing that it must sooner or later come to term. He slept often and rarely woke, and my arms ached from the stretching of every parchment alone.
Finally, I lifted him from our bed and strapped him onto Hadulph’s broad crimson back. We walked thus, Astolfo as silent in his illness as in death, and the sun overhead dim and diffident. The tall banana trees let us pass, and the mukta flowers, clusters of pearls heavy as peas on their stalks, bent under our feet and shattered, the rain came and just as quickly went. More than once, I fell to the ground weeping, so tired and thirsty and afraid. It was a long road—but like the road to the Fountain, if it were not long it would be worth nothing, and I find it hard to speak of such a private thing as that journey.
As Imtithal said, weakness has always been a part of us, from the beginning. And so the world knows how to answer weakness. There are many secret places in Pentexore, many answers. I knew the place I sought, deep in the forest, a still white pool, like milk but not milk, where two old men stood knee-deep in the chalky water. Cattails of glass would bob and chime there, but no birds. The two old men, whose white mustaches had grown so long that they braided them in huge spirals like wheels of hay, hummed a single note, forever, unbroken unless a broken body came before them. I knew the place, so did Hadulph, though we had no name for it. He bore Astolfo’s body stoically, and never once complained.
In that pool, a mussel-shell taller than a camel rested, dark blue, crusted with barnacles like lace. The two men, so old their wrinkles pressed on their eyes until they could not see at all, guarded it and tested the patient. They wore identical gowns of long grass. I propped Astolfo up on his feet; he groaned, his head sagging under the weight of his jaw. I staggered beneath his heavy body, which stank of sickness, sickness I thought bloomed from his despair as a nut from a nut-tree. If he had not despaired he would not be sick now, I was sure.
“Do you wish to be healed?” said the first man. It would be their only question.
Astolfo moaned and struggled to open his eyes in the thin sunlight.
“Do you wish to be healed?” said the other.
If he lied, the water would turn black and nothing the mussel-shell could do would help him. Faced with the gaze of the ancient men, many say no. They realize they want death, rest, not to be well and go on with living. Not everyone wishes to be well, in their hearts. Some wish to vanish. The question is not an empty one, no matter what John said later. Some reach out for darkness instead, and find it.
But Astolfo murmured: “Yes. Please, help me.” His body could summon up no further word, not even one.
The men opened the mussel along its edge with their fingernails, grown long and orange with age. Within, it showed pinkish-white wetness, like soaked silk, and a kind of pearly sweat seeping from the flesh of the shell. I helped my love forward, my poor creature, my lost one. He stepped into the deep blue mussel; it closed up after him. He did not emerge for four days, and all the while I kept vigil, leaning against Hadulph’s flank, watching the stars wheel, warm and certain in their spheres. I tasted the milky water once—it tasted like skin. Once, as we waited and the old men hummed, Hadulph asked me:
“Do you wish the Abir had gone another way? That it had paired you and I, or you and some less delicate soul?”
After a long while I answered: “No. I wish everything to happen exactly as it did, for if it had not, it would not, and what trouble we would be in then. And after all, I have you anyway.” And I rubbed his soft muzzle.
When he emerged, Astolfo was whole and flush, and such joy shone from his eyes that I felt it as a blow, heavy and pleasant against my breast.
And from that day, he never spoke again.
The shell takes its trade, always.
THE SCARLET NURSERY
The summer rain ran rivers around the al-Qasr. Rain is a melancholy animal. It pads after one in the late afternoon, when all is soft and dim, pricking the spirit with silver darts. When I looked out of the nursery window all curtained with thick red and tied back with crimson cord, I always wished it were snow instead. In the wide basin of Nural, the great capital city, the city of sard and onyx, home but not my home, it never snowed.
One morning some years past I woke to find the water in our chapel’s lustral basin lig
htly iced over, the barest whisper of ice, so that one touch of my fingertip shattered it. I was filled with such delight on that day; I walked through every hall and street full-up, as though carrying a wonderful secret. But it was a single crystal bead in an endless strand of hot stones. In Nural, clinging warmth was our constant companion, clinging to papaya leaves and baobabs, milkberry vines and bleeding roses. The great rains circled the summer solstice like a great golden drain, and though every flower opened up on the streets like beggars’ hands, I drooped in the warmth. The children could not play outside, and in their thwarted wildness broke a dozen toys and several other objects which were not toys, such as my snowshoes, and all before noon.
This is how it went with us:
Houd, Who Was Mainly To Blame for the Snowshoes: I shan’t apologize, either! You oughtn’t to have such ugly things! It never snows here!
Ikram, Who Broke Three Clay Soldiers Herself: One day she might go home, Houd. Especially since she has to look after beastly things like you.
Lamis, Who Broke Nothing and Was Mild: No, never! Mother would never allow it! You must never go home! You are our Butterfly, and no one else’s, and I shall thump anyone who says different right in the face!
Children, you must understand, are monsters. They are ravenous, ravening, they lope over the countryside with slavering mouths, seeking love to devour. Even when they find it, even if they roll about in it and gorge themselves, still it will never be enough. Their hunger for it is greater than any heart to satisfy. You mustn’t think poorly of them for it—we are all monsters that way, it is only that when we are grown, we learn more subtle methods to snatch it up, and secretly slurp our fingers clean in dark corners, relishing even the last dregs. All children know is a clumsy sort of pouncing after love. They often miss, but that is how they learn.