Lamis, Who Was Nearly Sleeping: You are so light, Butterfly. I can hardly feel you on my hand. It’s like you’re made of wind.
THE WORD IN THE QUINCE
Chapter the Sixth: in Which Three Tales Are Told Concerning the Nature of Love, and a Very Lovely Country Is Crossed.
A parade of well-wishers followed us onto the long, thin road out of Nural, tossing tortoise-flowers and guava-seeds and wet green rice over our heads in blessing, ringing copper bells, stamping hooves and hands and feet and singing traveling songs, lascivious songs, any song of which they all knew the chorus. Once a throng of jangling dervishes spun so fast their bells flew off like sparkling blossoms. They sang my name: John, John, John. It sounded foreign and lovely in their mouths. Finally, all had gone still and they all stood, simply waving goodbye until we vanished over the rills.
We avoided the pilgrim-road to the Fountain. I had no wish to go near that devilish place; the source of all their strength could not be the source of mine. The little panoti, who called herself Hajji, insisted that she knew where to take us, if not to find the saint’s tomb, at least to discover where it might be. But she would not say where she aimed, and when I tried to ask her about her name, which I could not help but recognize, having heard it from the mouths of many Saracen pilgrims streaming into the Holy Land, she narrowed her clear white eyes and refused to speak at all.
“Are you a pilgrim, then?” I tried to say, and she rebuffed me, her small, snow-colored back turning away, her bare, rough feet scrambling up the stony road like the inscrutable goat who nursed the baby Zeus.
Pentexore brings to mind every old story. I took them out like laundry, to hold them up to this new sun, and see if they looked threadbare, or whole. As we journeyed out from Nural, three tales were told—one in sleep, one in waking, and one in love. I wish to record them here. I remember them like reliefs in crystal, so strongly they struck me, then and now.
On our first night we decamped beneath the curling, arching roots of a great banyan tree, each knurled, woody tentacle a torture of bumps and crevices. The roots soared so high we passed beneath them and craned our necks to see their apexes. I thought some sweet, thin mist coalesced there on the heights, as on the tips of some hills. The braided, woven canopy of roots the color of baked bread could have sheltered a city entire—
“And does it not?” said Hadulph the great red lion, whose muzzle and golden whiskers loomed larger than my head and the better part of my shoulders. “The ants have nations, too, and also the worms their empire. The moths rule over a vast collective, greatly concerned with the accumulation of light. Even the asparagus shoots we shall roast for our supper, and the amla fruits with their green rind, even they are dukes and viscounts in a potent vegetable court, whose customs we cannot know. Woe betide those who by ignorance or malice cross the laws of the tulip bulbs they suck for sweet syrup.”
“Are you being quite serious?” With these folk it is impossible to tell, and worse if they have any cat about them, as in the tufted tails of Fortunatus and Hadulph.
Hadulph shrugged—and I had already learned that this shrug, rippling down from his broad shoulders and across his colossal back, was his primary expression of any sort of emotion. “When you lived in your Konstantinii,” the lion habitually blundered the ending of Constantinople, “with all your domes and mackerels and crosses, did you think that if you took the wrong turn on the Bosphorus that there might be a place where sheep trees grow and lions talk? Well, that is how we stand to the cities of the banyan. We do not have the luxury of believing ourselves the only world in the world. Perhaps if you and your own had better senses of direction, we could wallow in solipsism as you do.”
“Do you not like me, Hadulph?”
“I neither like you nor dislike you, John. Fortunatus tells me your God says we live under your dominion already, by nature and fate, so it doesn’t matter what I think, does it?”
“Then why did you volunteer yourself? Surely you had better things to do.”
“I came for Hagia,” he growled simply, and I fell silent. I had not yet spoken to the monstrous woman, nor even, truly, glanced her way.
No, I should not lie. I glanced at her, and more, when she could not see my gaze drift. If she turned her back she could almost be human, her broad brown muscles working, her strong arms, her thick waist. If I did not look up to her shoulders—ah, but I always did, and always shuddered. If she turned toward me, the horror of her breasts and her belly hit me like a blow, and I could not bear it. She wore nothing above the waist, could wear nothing, or else be blinded, but still the indecency of it shocked me, how brazenly she wore her nakedness, the bigness of her—for she stood a head and a half taller than I, and no farm-horse could have been stronger. In all her body and soul dwelled not a drop of shame. I could not look on her; I could not look away. She wore a beautiful belt, dark goat-leather all studded with opaque gems: agate, carnelian, obsidian, malachite, in patterns like constellations, and from it hung an ornament like an orrery in miniature, turning and clicking as she walked. When—terrible moment!—she caught me staring at her, I took shelter in pretense, and studied her belt intently.
Did I want her then, already? No, of course not. I was still a priest. I was a good man.
I always wanted her. I was a fool.
While Qaspiel prepared us the promised roast salad of young asparagus, amla fruit, tulip bulbs, and salted yak we had brought from Nural’s endless stores, Hadulph settled down in the grass, like a gargantuan ruby statue, roots thatching and crossing behind him. We all ate; Hagia laughed and joked with Qaspiel, to whom it—ah, how difficult it was for me to use the neuter, as they all gently reminded me to do! I wanted to say him, when Qaspiel looked fierce and brutal, in the manner of angels, her when Qaspiel looked gentle and loving, as it did that night, singing a song to Hagia to make her smile, a song about fairies that plagued the vanilla harvest, stealing the beans to make their long lyres. I know Qaspiel said it was not an angel, did not even know the word. And yet I could help but tremble in my bones when it sang.
Night drew on, and I took comfort in knowing some few of the spangled stars overhead, the whole sky like a jewel-box spilled out on a black cloth. Qaspiel slept on the high roots, its wings closed over its face like a bat. Fortunatus slept close to the fire, snoring a strange hooting, chirping snore. Hajji, the panoti, kept her own counsel and put a peach to her lips, listening to some hymn I could not hear. Hagia concealed herself in the shadows and I knew not where she lay. But the red lion sat impassively where he had settled, and sleepless, restless, I turned toward him, only to see that his eyes remained open, glittering white as stones in the dark, though a deep, rumbling snore bubbled up from his chest, escaped, and boiled up again.
“Do you wake or do you sleep, lion?” I whispered, but he did not answer. I crawled closer, between his huge paws, and repeated my question.
Baroom, his snore answered. Buroom.
Bats squeaked overhead, flitting over the hot stars.
“How can he be one of us?” the lion said, his voice so much deeper than usual. I could not tell if he spoke in his sleep or knew I stood there listening. “He has never loved anyone but God. What kind of man is that?”
“I did, though,” I whispered, in the truth-trance that deep night brings. “I loved a boy named Kostas, and he loved me. I should not call him a boy. But his face was so narrow and youthful I could never think of him as quite grown. In the end I suppose he was only a few years younger than I. It was simple—love is service, and he served me. Love is nourishment—and I fed him. Love is knowledge—we taught each other. I gave him his letters, he gave me all the secret places of his city.”
“Love is love,” hummed the great lion, and as he spoke his voice went lower and lower, and his language became the language of dreaming, more and more like that of a child. “That’s all. I love Hagia; she loves me. I don’t have to love her forever. I love her now. I love many others, too. My mother was so good at loving that other cats would come to her and beg her to teach them her devotions, the rituals and practice of her loving, so that they could become magi. Her eyes shone golden and spun like mandalas as she told them what she knew. She said: Love is hungry and severe. Love is not unselfish or bashful or servile or gentle. Love demands everything. Love is not serene, and it keeps no records. Love sometimes gives up, loses faith, even hope, and it cannot endure everything. Love, sometimes, ends. But its memory lasts forever, and forever it may come again. Love is not a mountain, it is a wheel. No harsher praxis exists in this world. There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl—faith, hope, and love—and the cruelest of these is love.”
I blinked, recognizing a bizarre inversion of psalms I knew by heart. The lion went on, as though speaking to someone else in his dreaming, someone he truste
d, someone he loved. “At my mother’s breast I learned best of all. I was still a cub when a tensevete came to her, and his name went: Tajala. The cub that was me was afraid of his icy face, like a crag chipped off a mountain, flat and violet like frostbite, and his whole head bigger than his chest. Tajala wept; his lover didn’t want him anymore. When he loved her, they melted together until they became a lavender pool under the moon, and there was no ending to them. I shuddered, hearing this private thing. The Abir came, and his lover drew an emerald with a red flaw out of the bronze barrel, and that meant: Go to the plains of Aamra and cultivate the green mango, learn the significance of its five-petalled blossom, of its leaves changing from rosy to red to green, of its hairy, hidden seed. Take ecstasy in weeping onto their roots, so that they may be watered. Do this with Rasaala, not Tajala, and be happy. Bedeck yourself in mango blossoms, count your wealth in pits sticky with rind. I felt glad for her, since I loved mangoes. Tajala drew a black stone with no flaw, and this meant: Go to the Axle of Heaven, and spin wool from the fur of the very stubborn musk-ox who love to munch the blue poppies there. Do this with no mate, learn the psalms of solitude. I was glad also for him, as musk-oxen are funny, and make us laugh.
Tajala said: She will not look at me as if she knows me. She melts with Rasaala now. She could leave him and we could be lovers in our new lives, I could spin covers for her trees to keep the frost off, but she won’t. I want to die.
Mother said: The Abir is difficult.