The stone column crashed down; rich black earth spurted up through the ruptured floor. The pillar’s belly shuddered in it, and cracked from side to side, loud and unignorable. But I dutifully finished my line, so as not to lose my place: as an indication of this, take the well-known Antinoë’s Experiment: 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.
Past the ruin of the pillar, I could just glimpse the edge of the sardis-snake that guarded the entrance of the al-Qasr, ensuring that no folk who are not lamia and therefore licensed, could never bring poison under its roof. Behind it and far off, the Cricket-star flickered as if in chirruping song.
The quarter-moon market gave a collective shrug and went about itself, stepping over the purple column and leaving it where it had fallen—wasn’t it better, the cyclops murmured, to let a little light in, and have a nice place to stretch one’s feet? I glanced back at my thrice-copied treatise, tiresome as all secondhand treatises are, and finished the page.
However, since this experiment may be repeated with bamboo or gryphon or meta-collinarum or trilobite, perhaps it is fairer to say that animals and their parts, plants and simple bodies are artifice, brother to the bed and the coat, and that nature is constituted only in the substance in which these things may be buried—that is to say, soil and water, and no more.
I laid a man on a stone and watched a stone fall and there was no separation between the two nights. I did both things, and I thought while the pillar fell over and over in my heart:
He is so unlike us. What does that mean?
By the time we laid the stranger out on the pillar, it had grown over with phlox and kudzu and lavender and pepperwort, and we rested his battered head on a thatch of banana leaves. He moaned and retched like a sailor coughing up the sea, and I held him while he wracked himself clean. I held him like a child, and felt myself drift upward, and backward, through my memory, as his sickness ebbed and flowed. It is tiresome to nurse someone, though no nurse would admit it. Illness has a certain sameness, the cycle of purging, fevering, chilling, purging again. I had had enough of it with my husband. I had no patience left for a stranger’s travail—yet I managed to hold him, not very heavy at all, as folk gathered around—Grisalba, a wealthy lamia, shouldered in, and behind her the widowed Fortunatus, and I thought on how his golden fur shone that day when the pillar broke, how red his eyes from weeping. I tried to think of anything but the wet bodily palpitations of that stranger, so helpless in my grasp.
It was some ways past the fishing hour when his eyes slitted open and his moth-voice rasped:
“Thomas…”
“Is that your name, boy?” growled Hadulph, who by dint of his size could call anyone boy.
“Ah,” the man coughed, dust and ash spattering my arm. “No, my name… my name is John.”
The name should have echoed. We all should have stopped to let it pass between us like a premonition. But we did not. We watered his blistered lips instead, and he had not yet noticed that I held him in my arms, propped against the breasts he would soon enough call demonic and unnatural. But he had not yet called us all demons, succubi, inferni—he only asked for bread, and more water.
He had not yet screamed when Hadulph spoke, or trembled when the crickets chirped in iambic rhymes. He had not yet called us all damned, demanded tribute to kings we had never heard of, forbade anyone not made in God’s image to touch his flesh.
He had not yet castigated us for our ignorance of the Trinity, or preached the Virgin Birth during our mating season. He had not yet searched the lowlands for a fig tree we ought not to touch, or gibbered in the antechamber, broken by our calm and curious gazes, which we fixed on our pet day and night, waiting for him to perform some new and interesting trick.
He had not yet dried his tears, and seen how the al-Qasr was not unlike a Basilica, and how the giants were not unlike Nephilim, and how Hadulph was not unlike the avatar of St. Mark, and the valley of our nations was not unlike Eden. He had not yet decided that all of the creatures of our world were not unlike holy things—except for the blemmyae, except for me, whose ugliness could not be born by any sacred sight. He had not yet called us his mission, and followed Grisalba the lamia home trying to explain transubstantiation, which she, being the niece-by-marriage of a cannibal-dervish, understood well enough, but pretended to misconstrue so that he would follow her home.
He had not yet called her a whore and tried to make her do penance with a taper in each hand. She had not yet sunk her teeth into his cheek, and sent him purpled and pustulant back to Hadulph.
Hadulph had not yet licked him clean, roughly and patiently, as cats will, and called him his errant cub. He had not yet fallen asleep against the scarlet haunch of the lion.
He had not yet retreated into the al-Qasr to study our natures and embrace humility, ashamed of his pronouncements and his pride. I had not yet brought him barley-bread and black wine, or watched over him through three fevers, or showed him, when he despaired, how my collarbone opens into a sliver of skin like clouds stretched over a loom.
He had not yet come crawling through the dark, shame-scalded, to hear my belly speak, and read to him from the green pepper-papyrus of my daily calligraphy, just to hear the way I said my vowels. He had not yet said that my accent sounded of seraphim.
This is how memory works, when you live forever. You look back from a perch of years and it all seems to happen at once.
“My name is John,” he said, “I… I think I have become lost. I know that I came searching for Thomas and his tomb. The Apostle, where is the Apostle? Take me to him, if you are a Christian soul.”
Hadulph and I exchanged glances.
“What is an Apostle?” the lion said.
THE SCARLET NURSERY
In the wake of any visit from the phoenix, the children descended into an orgy of new ambitions and phraseologies and wild dreams, all balanced on the pyramid of toys and baubles Rastno brought them, half of which would be broken inside of a month, the other half ensconced among the most treasured toys of our little creche. I never devised a method of predicting which way any single glass ball or cage or crystal lamia with her tail flaming bright orange and blue would go. He
was a great glassblower, Rastno. He reasoned that his glass should be finest of all, since he feared no flame but his own. And true to this he filled the capital with beads and baubles and bowls and chalices, plates and amphorae and children’s toys. And mirrors, mirrors of every shape. The children prepared for weeks for his visits. Nevermind that he came to meet their mother, and inform her of much sadness and more fear; for my dears he came only to dazzle them. His scarlet and cream feathers arced and curved in a dance for their delight; the golden plume of his brow bobbed in interest when they shared their small triumphs and betrayals. He was hardly bigger than Lamis, if you excused her hands, but to them he was big as a mountain.
The dead moon slid low in the sky; we had prepared a night-picnic for her rebirth. Ikram had boiled mint and berries all afternoon to make jam—it appealed to her nature, the fire, the bubbling, the pain of scalding her thumbs. Lamis had rolled out little cakes as round as the living moon, the dough eggy and yellow, very quietly and diligently, as if with her own virtue encouraging the new moon to rise. Houd had brewed coffee for all of us in a silver pot, crushing the beans with his prodigious fist, already as strong as a mallet. He peered at it with some excitement: dark, bitter, hot, smelling deeply of cinnamon and earth and even a little of the blue flowers the queen keeps ever at her bedside. All because, as Houd said: the moon likes these things best.
And so we sat under the stars, on a hill behind the al-Qasr, just high enough that we could peer over the sardian tips of her towers, and their crowns of bronze stars that silhouetted against the real and blazing ones. The cakes tasted a bit of anise, and I praised Lamis, for she often needed praise, being young and unsure of everything in the world. We waited for the moon to rise. I sang a song about the gentle manners of the cyclops.
Ikram, to Whom Rastno Gave a Glass Horn: Butterfly, why is Rastno the phoenix so sad?
Lamis, to Whom Rastno Gave a Glass Flower: He tries to be sunny for us, but he cries beneath his wing. Even I have seen it.