A Dirge for Prester John

Their hands are so big, so big, because they need so much. They reach out and out and you could disappear in their grip.

I know all this now, for I am much older. Then, I felt that I might cry, I missed the snow and the ice and the cold so terribly much. I missed my old life, and the girl I had been. I did not want to be shut into that oppressively dark and blood-colored chamber any more than they did. But you cannot show weakness to monsters, even small ones. Still, my snowshoes lay splintered on the floor and all three of the children studiously avoided looking at them. I summoned a deep pool of peace within myself, and iced it over until I could speak to the beasts again. Sweetly, with love, as much love as I had. Sometimes when you are sad all you can do is tell a story about sadness, so that by some obscure law, sorrow will cancel itself out and the rain will clear.

Besides—all royal children should know that they are not the center of the universe, despite all the evidence of their senses.

Darlings, I said to them, do you know that there is a world very far away from our own? With domed cities like herds of jeweled camels and towers so tall you cannot see their tips for all the creamy orange clouds?

Houd, Who Knew Everything: That is a lie. You shouldn’t lie.

Ikram, Who Felt Very Poorly About the Soldiers: Says the lyingest liar who ever lied!

Lamis, Who Wanted the World to Be Big: Are there children there, like us? With big hands, and orange eyes?

There are children everywhere. And some of them, logically, must have hands like yours. But you should ask me, instead: How do I know such a world exists if I have never been there nor ever so much as seen a cup made by a man from across the sea?

Houd, Who Would Have Smashed Such a Cup: I don’t care.

Lamis and Ikram, Whose Eyes Had Gotten Very Big: How do you know, Butterfly?

The rain said plink, plink, hush. I said:

Once, a very long time ago, before your mother was queen and before she pulled a bronze barrel into the Pavilion and spun all our lives inside, a man came to Pentexore from this other world. I was very young, not much older than you are now, and my ears had not yet turned white. When panotii are young our ears are blue—so blue they look black in the moonlight, like water. I lived in Nimat-Under-the-Snow then, and I had two mothers and a lobe-father. Not everyone is like cametenna, with their one greatmother and a dozen mating males, those dear and mute boys, dancing at night under rose-colored tents!

This strange man came into our city, wretched, starving, his toes near black with frostbite. He had not eaten in days, and when we fed him ox-tea he choked on it; he could not get enough. Perhaps I shall make this for you one day. In a cup of white tea, the sort that looks like silver sewing needles before it is picked, you pour ox-blood and honey, and add a lump of ox-butter to melt in the brewing. Nothing is better for starving souls.

Ikram, Who Ate Three Quince-Jellies That Morning and Was a Bit Ill: Ugh! I shall never drink that!

Houd, Who Liked the Sound of the Blood: I shall.

I was the only child in Nimat in those days, for we bear young infrequently, and the mating trio must be chosen from among all the village. In this way, a child is assured the protection of not only their parents but so many souls, and Nimat never grew too crowded nor too lean. Everyone adored me, and I adored everyone. We, all panotii, remember such overwhelming love, and it is from this memory that we draw up our kindness and patience with those who never knew what it was to be cuddled and kissed by every grocer, nursed at the breast of every blacksmith. When we are tried, by lovers or queens or pestering children who break everything in sight, into that full well we must immediately dive to cool our tempers.

Lamis, Who Was the Youngest, and Most Often Forgotten: I should like to be loved like that.

I ran wild, and rolled in the gardens until my blue-black ears got all covered in snowflakes. I sang, and everyone listened, called songs charming and dear. I loved in my turn a little white fox, who ran about my ankles and slept in my lobes. And when the starving man came into Nimat, with his huge dark eyes and his long beard, I went running to him, as I ran to everyone, knowing as any child of Nimat knew that he would catch me up in his arms and kiss me and give me some gimelflowers to suck. My ears flapped in the winter wind and I leapt, so sure I would be caught—and he dropped me. He tried to catch me, he did, but I was heavy, and he was weak.

I sat on the snow. Nothing like this had ever occurred before. I had been dropped. I looked up into the man’s eyes, and they were strange to me; they had a whiteness circling a deep, dark well, instead of a panoti’s total white. It seemed to me that he had an open void in his eyes, I was afraid of another soul for the first time. His cheeks sucked in, so hollow! He stared down at me, a little blue-black creature with great huge ears like an elephant’s, her furry clothes all stuck with snow, about to start crying for the clumsiness of a stranger. And the man, with a great effort, picked me up and soothed me. He stroked my ears, which is very pleasant for panoti, and in language prickly and soft all at once, told me all was well. I understood him, though some of the words echoed weird and warped. It was as though we spoke languages that had been siblings, but separated at birth, and left to grow up on their own without knowing that the other had a passion for diphthongs or certain ornate verb tenses.

His name was Didymus Tau’ma, he said, and who was I?

Imt’al, I whispered, now in terror, hardly able to say my own name. He smelled hot, and faraway, like baking sand. Do you have any gimelflowers?

He didn’t. My mothers and my father made him the ox-tea and listened to his tale: he had come from a place I could not even pronounce, called Yerushalayim, where all the domes were made of gold, and olive trees grew all full of oil and fruit. When he spoke of his city, even though his accent jangled strangely, I sat slack-jawed, as though I could see it before my eyes: dusty streets and palm dates smashed on the earth, evening prayer-songs like swans calling, and a man called Yeshua, who Didymus said was his brother, and Yeshua had died because the governor said he must. But three days later he rose out of his tomb and ate bread and drank wine somewhat gone to vinegar and spoke with all of them. Didymus himself had needed to tou

ch Yeshua’s wounds, half-scabbed and half-healed, warped and ropy with scars, before he could call him brother, and believe it true.

You must have planted him deep and well, one of my mothers said, for him to sprout so quickly. The foreign man stared at her and she stared at him and even I could see that he did not understand in any part what she meant. But neither asked further, not wishing to be rude.

While Yeshua’s friends ate and drank and told old jokes concerning donkeys, Didymus looked toward the sun for a moment, just for a moment, and when he looked back to the table his brother had gone, never more to return to the living. Yeshua had returned to them—and all Didymus had done was doubt and frown. He was ashamed. Didymus Tau’ma dwelt deep in grief, he said. He would never see his brother again, not until he died himself, and perhaps then he would know how to smile.

If you die here, my lobe-father said, putting a slim arm around the stranger’s shoulders, we will see to it that you are buried near your brother’s tree, even if we must walk all the way to Yerushalayim.

Didymus Tau’ma thanked him, but he did not understand. He did not yet know where he was.

Now, as you know, there is a sea that surrounds our country, a sea of sand, and it is called the Rimal, and I know you have drawn pictures of it in your lesson books, and used up all the yellow paint. But four days a year a path forms in the sand, which might lead someone lost at sea to our shores. Such a thing happened when the Ship of Bones beached here. But there is another way, I think, through the mountains, the way my friend Didymus Tau’ma came.

He stayed with us for many years, and came down into Nural to see the al-Qasr, and tell the story of his brother to the king, who was called Kantilal and was one of the astomii, with a nose as big as your hands. Didymus made a house for himself of ox-skin and the great long bones one sometimes uncovers on the slopes of the Axle of Heaven. Every day I went to him, for I was deathly curious about the single soul in all the world who did not love me—though that did not last long. Soon enough I pounced upon him and kissed his face and he scratched my skull where I had begun to molt and show my new snowy coat beneath the blue. When I had grown and another family was busily swelling up with Nimat’s next child, my friend often blushed when I greeted him in the fashion of the panotii when among intimate family: wrapping my legs around his waist to sit in his lap, closing him up entirely in the expanse of my pale ears. He whispered to me, in that sacred space my body makes, that it was not right that we should sit so, that it was bold and shameless.

I was confused. Why should there be any shame within a family? You are Nimat now, and one of mine. It is not my fault your Yeshua had such small ears and could not teach you proper manners or sit in your lap.