A Dirge for Prester John

h of my revelation. The beer came up in my throat, in such turmoil dwelt my flesh. I would simply have to rise up, become the missionary I had never been, find somewhere in this kingdom so full of miracles the golden tongue I never possessed. I would learn their ways and fit them into Scripture. Like Paul, I would interpret the Word for them, so that they could come to God.

You may smile at me now, you who read this, who know how it all came out. Who know what a fool I was.

I began, as my Greek teachers would have, questioning and learning, learning so as to teach: “You tell me, then, how was the world made?”

Fortunatus rolled his tongue in his beak and clacked it twice.

“A gryphon’s heart beats at the center of the world…”

THE CONFESSIONS OF

HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699

I cried out in protest, in agony; the sound ripped from me. No, no, no!

The page below the gryphon’s last words had gone brown and soggy, all its text rotted away. My fingers came away stained with the mush of the book, rich-smelling and soft. Lord, why would you punish me so? Why did you give me these riches and snatch them away so cruelly? What did I do to offend You? I admit, I am old; I am not fast enough, I cannot outrun putrefaction. But have I not been a good man, Your servant?

If what John recorded was so, and this strange country possessed all things without corruption and in their fullness, it certainly did no longer, for the rot veined through Hagia’s beautiful letters even as I watched.

It would have been heresy. Of course. How could it be anything else, the foundational myth of a gryphon? But I felt a hole form in my heart where that tale might have been. Did I believe that Prester John had held discourse with a gryphon? I could not say. I certainly countenanced that such beasts might exist, or have existed, though it is preposterous to think they possessed human reason, any more than the pigs of the yard. It was not impossible that allegory ruled the text, and that dialogue passed between John and a foreign man with great personal strength and some brand of spiritual wisdom, after his way and not being a Christian, and John chose to represent him with the symbol of the gryphon. Perhaps some further key to the metaphor lay in that ruined page, but I would never find it, or know.

I cursed my meal with Alaric, which had stolen precious time from these books. I was a wolf, a dragon, snapping over my treasure, unwilling to share. But I could no longer hoard the privilege of this fruit. I summoned Alaric to my side once more—I chose him specially for this journey, for I had known him since he was a boy, delicate of face, almost punishably gentle of heart, good for nothing but books. I had taken him under my wing and taught him his Greek, but also Aramaic, the ululating tongue of Araby, the slushing envowelation of the Rus, and the more piquant dialects I knew: Phoenician, Aethiop, Welsh. With his Latin and our local French and German, Alaric had become nearly my equal in translation. He took the same deep, thorny pleasure in the puzzle of it. His favorite was always Aristotle, a pagan, yes, but hardly a man alive has constructed more maddening sentences. I recall so many days when we pledged to make certain the other ate and drank throughout his work, since we were wont to forget the needs of the flesh. We were so alike—and I argued strongly for his inclusion in our delegation, despite his inexperience with and total disinterest in missionary work.

Once, on the long road to this blasted wasteland of dust and roosters and its bruised sun, Alaric and I ate a clutch of wild eggs together we had found in foraging. A small sin: we did not share with the others, but instead squatted beneath a gnarled, many-rooted baobab and spoke in our favorite fashion: switching, sentence by sentence, between the tongues we knew. The game went thusly: I would begin in Greek, and shift to Latin, then to Egyptian, Alaric would then begin in Egyptian, nimbly moving into French, and so on. If we felt particularly clever, we would begin to trade dialects of a single language.

“Brother Hiob,” he began in Hebrew. “Do you believe the world is infinite?”

“Nothing is infinite but God,” I answered in Latin.

“The universe is infinite in space but not in time,” Alaric whispered in English, the one language he knew that I did not. But that line I recognized. “Of course,” he re-asserted himself, side-stepping into Greek, “but by extension, could not all God’s works be called infinite? How can finitude proceed from an infinite source?”

“What are you getting at, Brother Alaric?” I asked in old French, sucking down a golden yolk.

“Nothing. I only wonder if the world itself, not the universe, but this world, is infinite, infinite enough to contain what we seek. Abyssinia is conquered, the New World found and no dragons there, vanilla and saffron in the East but no wonderful king. I wonder if the world is not very much poorer than we hoped, and smaller. There are so few places left to look where anything might be kept secret. Unless it is infinite, and the further we sail the more and more New Worlds we will discover, each full of pumpkins and chocolate and potatoes and slaves. What a beautiful solution that would be, a world without end, a reversal of those awful words of the heathen philosopher—a world where everything is true and everything is permitted.” This impressive speech, conducted in Spanish, Amharic, Aramaic, and finally Arabic, to quote the old assassin Hassan-i Sabbah, seemed to take the wind from my young friend. “That is the kind of world I would like to believe I live in,” he finished in our own honest Swiss-German. “And I think the only sort of world in which we could find Prester John.”

I considered the mess of a sunset, lurid and orange, light sifting through the ashy dust. “Infinity, I think, is not a matter of outward space, but inward depth. We all of us spiral in and in and in, towards the spark of divinity buried at our core, and this slow spiral has no end. I think the world is like that—bounded, but deeper still than death.” I chose Akkadian for that last, and felt well-satisfied at having check-mated such an extraordinarily difficult tongue. “How very fond I am of you, Brother,” I said in Sindhi, one of the local dialects we had been practicing. “Have the last egg.”

He demurred, and that is the way between friends. I could have borne no other hand touching the books of that tree of awe I saw waving in the wind. I shuddered to even think of those red leaves. I shuddered to think of another reading my books—yet it had to be done.

As Alaric entered, head bent, humble before his elder, I saw the blue-yellow creep of dawn behind his cowled head. I showed the novice the ruined pages—they were several, but not the whole book. Between us we could do our work faster, and I gave him materials to do as I did, and we used palm-needles to lift the remaining pages of the tomes, so that the oils of our hands would not hasten their moldering. We gently cut away the ruined pages, scooped their mush into a small clay cup and set them aside, holy, full of regret. I began again in Hagia’s recount, which reeked of oversweet wine, the mealy pages now streaked with long strips of red. My heart hurt: already I could not read her flowing hand in places.

Alaric took up John’s narrative. It was my gift to him, to surrender John’s book. The last egg.

But after a moment I could not bear it. I apologized profusely, and took it back, helplessly stroking the cover as if it were a sweet little hound that could love me back. I am jealous. God on High, if You Yourself admit to that sin, I cannot be blamed that I was not more virtuous than You.

THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN

I held back from him. The newcomer disquieted me. Most everyone else, it seemed, considered him a marvelous new toy: it talked and walked and made such charming noises when proven wrong. Imagine! The poor thing did not know about trees or the Fountain, did not know about the mussel-shell or even what an astomi was! It became a popular pastime to drag some specimen before the priest that would shock him—the greater John’s shock the more puffed-up the exhibitor would get. He seemed to dislike the tensevetes the most, their huge icy faces brushing the soil like shields, their silent regard of him unsettling. I cannot blame him. They are peculiar, even to me.

I remember when Fortunatus brought his friend Qaspiel to the al-Qasr to meet John. Since our king Abibas had been planted primly in the center of the Lapis Pavilion and no longer required a royal palace, the al-Qasr was now open to everyone, the curtains thrown wide, the rooms made bright for any soul who needed it. In the scarlet nursery of fable, a perfumer plied his trade, and every pillow smelled of crocus. In the throne room children’s games ran wild round the great chairs.

Qaspiel and I knew each other well and dearly—I met it on my final sojourn to the Fountain, which I undertook by myself, a grown woman, solitary and serious—so I fancied myself. I first saw Qaspiel buying long sleeves for its wings so that the heights of the mountain would not freeze them. We spoke of little things, as pilgrims do, even when they are not called pilgrims yet. It looked forward to having a twin, for anthropteron do not give birth, rather, they manufacture a substance in a certain gland when in heat, something like royal jelly. They remove this stuff, colored like snow, and apply it to the space between their wings. In due course a growth begins there, and the poor anthropteron must eat vast quantities to sustain it. Qaspiel said it already felt a strong desire for coconuts. Finally, the growth completes, and another creature, whole and adult, steps away from its parent and twin, and immediately tends to the wound of separation that the parent-sibling suffers. Each heals the other, of loneliness, of pain.

Qaspiel worked then as a vanilla-farmer, and it smelled rich with spice. I held it while it drank; it held me. When we returned home it lifted me up in its arms and we flew over all the towns I knew, spinning and spinning like an arrow in the air, and its pale body was the whole of my vision. The thick, green water of the Fountain soared in me, and we soared together, the first day of our infinite lives.

And so with the joy of recognition of an old friend I greeted Qaspiel as the gryphon brought him before John. Its delicate feet hardly left depressions in the thick black soil of Nural, not unlike the fine, moist sand of vanilla deep within the pod. It had shorn its hair since I had seen it last, and strewn its short locks with little beads of hematite for the occasion. Its dress gleamed nearly colorless, a cobweb that would flatten and spread out in flight—and its wings, taller than itself, were a deep sort of cobalt that played tr

icks with the eye. I went to embrace my friend, but before I could hold out my arms, John fell to his knees between us. I stared at him as he wept, his jaw slack, his body shaking in a kind of rapture.