A Dirge for Prester John

[Here corruption had eaten up three passages, a fuzzy deep red kind of mold that devoured text and left no small word for me. Nothing of it remained legible except for a few spare lines which none could help but recognize, in the second passage: And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled an angel with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said: Let me go, for the day breaketh.

The text became clearer some pages thereafter, and I could not find more concerning John’s words with his angel. The text began again thusly:]

Behind the ivory-and-amethyst pillars of the al-Qasr, which so much later John would insist we rename the Basilica of St. Thomas, I sat with my hands demurely in my lap, fingering Hadulph’s flame-colored tail on the one side, Astolfo silent and still on the other. We sat in rows like children—the pygmies picked at their ears, a phoenix ran sticks of cinnamon through her beak, the sciopods relaxed on their backs, wide feet thrust overhead, each toe ringed with silver and emerald. Grisalba combed her long black hair, looking bored.

John the Priest tried not to look at me. His hair had grown back, but it was white, whiter than a man his age should own.

I told him once, many years later while he ran his tongue over the small of my back, that the sun had taken all his blood, and left him with nothing in his veins but light.

Ever the good teacher, John tried to meet each of our eyes in turn, but he could not look at mine, he could not look down to the full curve of my high, brown breasts, and the green eyes that stared calmly from their tips under a thick fringe of lashes. He always tried to avoid looking at me, or any of the other female blemmyae. But something about me in particular seemed to shame him. Perhaps because I had found him, seen him weak, nursed him. He blushed like a child when he accidentally looked me in the eye. Later I teased him about it, but he did not laugh. Of course I could not look at you. You were naked.

But I did not understand his morality. Even when I did understand it I looked on it much as a dead thing whose stench I had to endure. I was shamed, to be singled out so, to be ignored. I blinked often, to interrupt his droning, to draw his gaze, but he tried to look only at where my head might be if I were a woman.

A-ve.

He repeated these words as if they had any meaning for us, sounding each syllable. We did not like Latin. It sat on our tongues like an old orange, sweet-sour and rind-ridden.

A. Ve.

A-ve Ma-ri-a.

A. Ve. Mari. A.

Grisalba yawned and picked at her tail, lazily slapping its tip against the chalcedony floor. Hadulph chuckled and bit into the consonants like elbow joints. In the front row, a little panoti with her ears drawn in listened intently, with her whole being. But then, that is how panotii listen. I could see the bluish blood pulsing in the delicate skin of her lobes.

A-ve Ma-ri-a gra-ti-a ple-na. Ti like she. Ple like play. She plays, gratia plena, Maria plays, Ave Maria gratia plena.

A. Ve. Mari. A. Gra. Tea. A. Plea. Na.

“I wonder what his sweat tastes like?” Grisalba murmured beside me. I grinned, but the priest could not chide me, for that would mean glancing down past my nipple-eyes to the mouth-that-is-a-navel, and he would not risk it. I wondered too. I wondered what his stranger’s kiss would be like. But it was an idle thought, a summer’s cloudy dreaming.

No, no. She plays. She; play. Shall we try the Pater Noster instead then?

Pa. Tear. No. Star.

[Another slab of fungus and putridity stole the blemmye’s words from me. That time it swallowed up a whole page, of which all I could rescue was a measly exchange already turning purple in the lines of the characters. The M of Maria was blackened with rot:

I understood that this Maria business vaguely referred to a virgin who had had a child. I did not think this particularly impressive. Qaspiel, after all, had managed it. “Virginity confers strength,” John said during one of his lectures. “It is the pearl that purchases paradise.” None of us understood this.

“What paradise do you mean?” said Grisalba angrily, when he tried to explain the necessity of chastity. “What pleasure there can be bought with misery here? John, look around you! What do you need that the paradise of our home, which we so generously share with you, does not amply give?”

He looked at me as he answered: “Virtue.”]

Did I want him because he hated me? I do not like to think so. I want to believe better of myself than that. But perhaps it is true after all. The priest loved to walk with Qaspiel and speak with it, even to hear its voice, which was always musical, kind, fluid. Qaspiel did not even know what John meant by the word angel, but he allowed that if it pleased the stranger, he might call it one. He broke bread with Fortunatus and sipped the juice of the blackbulb fruit, which he liked specially. I like it, too. The fruit is small and soft, the flesh deep purple, the pit like a single pearl. Children love it specially, and must be kept away, for it brings rich and terrifying dreams. I marveled that Fortunatus let him indulge so often. I thought perhaps the gryphon had a more decadent heart than I had guessed, but when I asked him, he said only: “He is not my child and I will not scold him.”

Even in Grisalba he found a sort of friend. She let him believe her a convert for a while, because it amused her. She even wore a veil, when he asked her to. She prayed with him on the Sabbath, with one eye open. She even filled several goblets with the poisons and drugs her body could produce, so that he might know her better. She had seven in all, and was very proud of their colors. She showed him everything about her people, with pride, with grace and eloquence. But one evening, when he was instructing her in eschatology, she leaned forward and kissed him. When she told me about it, she said he kissed her back, even after she had eaten her dinner in front of him, which I cannot imagine he took with aplomb, as her nature was unavoidably serpentine. Thus she would have been compelled to dislodge her jaw to take her meal whole and alive. Lamia kiss in much the same way. She twined her tail around him, squeezing his skinny frame, her teeth on his lips, a hungry kiss and he all hers. But John pushed her away, and his eyes filled up with tears, and he called her a whore and clawed at her tail like a wild thing. She shouted at him that he was useless, a eunuch, a dog, and bit his cheek savagely—even to the day he died he bore a pale violet scar there, almost as though the kiss never left him.

He fled from her passion to the al-Qasr, where more or less all of Nural sprawled in the late summer heat, the drowsy slow sweetness of it, with the fountains trickling thin and quiet. Hadulph tended to the priest, and John was much mocked by several monkeys hanging from a six-armed statue of some forgotten god. Finally, when the day had got on in hours, Grisalba came looking for him, her cheeks flared green, anger decking her like gems. She snarled at him in full view of the better part of our nation.

“I am a serpent, and I do not care what you think. Yes, I have a great hunger for mating, and for many other things besides. Yes, I drink blood—not because I am wicked but because my body is made in its every part to want blood, to digest it, to take life from it. You cannot help that you take life from cakes and stews and roasts. You drink your God’s blood! What right have you to judge my lunch? Try living on wood and then tell me my habits are filthy and sinful. And yes, I devour my own eggs. There’s nothing wrong with it; it’s part of our most private rites. The child finishes its growth within me. The egg begets the snake half, the womb the human half, and I really think a little less queasiness about the biology of your betters would look good on you. I live after my nature, and if your God made everything then he made me and you shouldn’t be such a baby about a little kiss.” She sat down, her coppery tail curled around her. “Now, if you want me to say a rosary, I will

. But that will be the last I ever say to your God, because it seems to me he is a very specific God, and has nothing to do with anyone but you. If you want to stay a virgin and turn up your nose, that’s your business, but don’t ever call me a whore again, just for doing what is right and good and natural. It’s bad manners.”

Thus Grisalba, nominally, remained John’s one convert, for he never made her say that final prayer. From then on they were easy together, and he blessed her eggs when they came, after she had found a more suitable lover, who brought her turmeric flowers to decorate his own clean, sweet flesh.

John even loved the little panoti I saw at his lesson. She followed him everywhere, and learned Latin so well that they conversed together, a secret language, and I could not help it—I felt envy. My husband could not speak to me, and everyone had gone so mad for that useless stranger, and I was lonely. But I alone he would not tolerate, would not even acknowledge. I once saw him play with a little blemmye child. Her name was Oro; I knew her, a little prodigy of mathematics, and a great pride to us. John tickled her, and they both laughed, and I felt the sting of it, that he could look at her, her skinny, undeveloped chest with bright brown eyes blinking up at him, her navel with its pretty mouth, but not at me. She recited theorems to impress him and he behaved exactly as though she had babbled an infant’s nothings. He smiled in a fatherly way and patted her shoulder. I cast down my eyes and suffered such shame.

One day I happened upon John’s own lessons at Fortunatus’ paw, in the long, shaded library of the al-Qasr, the scrolls in their alcoves like long clusters of citron.