A Dirge for Prester John

Many years later, in the green-curtained bedroom I shared with my wife, I told her of this dream. She did not care for it. She would have liked to forget those first days. You were so ugly then, she said. You forgive yourself in your dreams. What if I do not forgive you?

I put my hands to the soft space between her collarbone and her shoulder-blades, where another woman’s head might be. I kissed it, and pressed my face to her warm brown shoulder. Outside, the summer rains steamed down from a heavy sky.

If you do not forgive me, I will be lost.

THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN

When we first found him, he lay face-down in the pepper-fields, his skin blazed to a cracked and blistered scarlet, his hair sparse as thirsty grass. It might have been anyone.

King Abibas had chosen us, a fair sampling of nations, to investigate the thing that had manifested in the farm-speckled suburbs of Nural.

I was two hundred and fifty-eight years old.

I should mention that in those days our king was Abibas, a blue mule. Blue mules are not, of course, truly blue, but more of an ashen color. However, they swear that their primal ancestor, Urytal, could walk unseen through the summer world, for his coat was the color of the sky. Other than this, Urytal’s main characteristic was a rampant priapism, and the ability to sire children simply by coughing. When a brace of mules related this tale to John during his mania for origin stories, he told them this was mere wishful thinking and ridiculous, masking their shame at being unable to produce offspring themselves. Abibas bit him. Rather, three of the Abibas-fruits on the funeral tree bit him.

For in the midst of his reign, Abibas died in a duel, which seemed to him the best way to resolve a certain issue of personal honor. Duels do not normally proceed to the death, but mules, after all, do not normally leave well enough alone. He was buried with much pomp, and in due course his tree sprang up and he continued to rule very much as before. And when the stranger arrived, the returned Abibas, his first blossoms just starting to show, chose us as his representatives: Hadulph, myself, and a pair of pygmy twins. He might have chosen anyone, and when I think on it now I wonder, had I not been chosen, if I would have cared even a little what happened to the piece of human flotsam we inherited from the unforgiving Rimal.

I am a Pentexoran. I am a loyal and darling child of luck. I submit to it, like a dog. But it terrifies me, sometimes, how near we come, every moment, to living some other life beyond imagining. In my heart’s eye there are two Hagias. One standing above the man I did not yet even know was called John, and one home safe with Astolfo, eating hazelnuts in the orchard, kissing his broad jaw and never once thinking of a city called Constantinople. I feel my entire self separated in that moment, prodding John’s body with my foot, the sun burning my shoulders, a kind of tableau we did not know was a tableau, because no one can ever know when the world changes. It just happens—you cannot feel it shift, you are only suddenly unbalanced, tumbling headlong toward something, something new.

The pygmies wanted to eat him.

“He must have been strong to have wandered this far, from whatever strange country,” the girl-twin reasoned, tugging her beaded beard. “We should have the right to bisect his liver and take the strength into our tribe.”

“Don’t be selfish,” I said, still watching his motionless form. We had not yet even turned him over.

“Selfish? Us?” the boy-twin scowled, his tiny face bitter. “I have not tasted strength in some time, I’ll have you know. There are rules. We are prepared to receive his vitality, and bear it into our family. You don’t need it. Let us have it!”

Hadulph nosed the man’s maimed feet, and snuffled at his dark clothes.

“He smells of salt water and pressed flour,” the red lion announced, “and he who smells of pressed flour knows the taste of baked bread, and he who knows the taste of baked bread is civilized, and we do not eat the civilized, unless they are already dead and related to us, which is a matter of religion and none of anyone’s business.”

I looked down at the man’s shape between the black and red pepper plants, laid in their long rows like a chessboard. It looked like the end of a game to me: I, the broad-shouldered knight standing over the toppled kingpiece. I stroked the fontanel above my collarbone, considering the wreckage that the desert wind had washed onto our beach of black peppercorns. He did not look dangerous at all—soft, and unclawed, and shaped more or less like a very small giant. Perhaps the giants would adopt him as a pet. But I did not say this, nor side with the pygmies. Instead, I chose for all of us, and so, if blame is to be had, I will take it. I said:

“He is wretched, like a baby, wrinkled and prone and motherless. Take him to the al-Qasr, and iron him out until he is smooth,” I said quietly, and the pygmies grumbled, gnashing their tattooed teeth.

Hadulph took the stranger on his broad and rosy back, where the fur bristles between his great shoulder blades, and that is how our world ended.

We laid the strange man on one of the fallen pillars in the central hall of the al-Qasr—the smooth tower of violet stone had crashed to the floor one day as the quarter-moon market bustled in the portico. When it fell, tile-shards of gold and splinters of ebony came tumbling after it, and now one could see the stars through the hole it made, like coins dropped into the hand of heaven. I was there that day: A brace of tigers looked up from arguing with a two-faced apothecary about whether she should be allowed to sell the powdered testicles of greater feline castrati as aphrodisiacs; the lamia paused in their venom-dance; I placed an arm beneath my breasts and lifted my eyes from the scribe-work before me to the ceiling. We all looked back and forth from the fallen pillar to the hole in the roof, up and down, up and down: work to sky to ruined architecture.

This is how memory works, when you live forever. You lay a man on a stone, and you see the man and you see the stone but you also see the history of the stone, as you saw it when it was whole and polished, when it was cracked and poorly cared for, when most everyone knew it was going to go, when it stuttered, when it fell. You remember who built the stone pillar, the debate over the color of it, whether or not it was garish. You think of the books you know that deal in pillar-hood, perhaps Yuliana of Babel’s architectural poetry. Perhaps the sciopods’ ranting about the decline in quality construction. And because you have seen so many patterns shape and ravel and unspool, you also see, flickering just out of reach, the possibilities inherent in a stranger with such small ears, such a small nose, such a tiny jaw. You see, dancing at the edges of his shape, what he might become. What you might become.

On the night the pillar fell, I was busy at my stall, writing for coin. After Astolfo’s illness, he had found a kind of grudging love for the groves of parchment-trees and the long hoops for drying skin in the sun. Finally, he ignored me completely, dwelling among them always, happy and silent, in a kind of communion with them of which I had no part. I began to take our vellum and ink to the quarter-moon market, and it began to grow famous and desired, for it was always fine, and I have a good hand. A lovely script makes any paper shine.

Of things that exist, some exist by nature, some from other causes, I had copied out from one greenish sheet of pepper-leaf paper to another. It wa

s a passage from the Anti-Aristotle of Chandrakant, which a widowed gryphon by the name of Fortunatus bade me make into a small book for him. The Anti-Aristotle, you see, was himself famously widowed in his youth, and suffered bitterly, as his wife had drowned, and no body remained to bury. All of the philosopher’s passion he poured into his master-work, the Physikai Akroaskeos, and when he had finished, he fell into such a grief that no one could come near him without being quite clawed and wet with tears.

The philosopher went to the mussel-shell, and the old men there, but could not tell them he wished to be healed. Words failed him. He walked into the west and did not return.

The night the pillar fell, with the market clamoring all around me, I wrote smoothly: Animals and their variegated parts exist, and the plants and the simple bodies exist, and we say that these and the like exist by nature.

The pillar chipped its complex torus, and tottered on the onyx floor. I ignored the sound. Distraction is the enemy of perfection.

All the things mentioned present a feature in which they differ from things which are constituted by art. Each of them has within itself a principle of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration).

The constellation of Taurus-in-Extremis, the Slaughtered Cow, could be seen winking through the broken wood. Ebony dust drifted down on a soft breeze off of the river.

Even motion can be called a kind of stationariness if it is compulsive and unending, as in the motion of the gryphon’s heart or the bamboo’s growth. On the other hand, a bed or a coat or anything else of that sort, insofar as it is a product of art, has innate impulses to change.