A Dirge for Prester John

She fell silent. “I have seen you discourse with other blemmyae. With Oro.”

I felt myself blushing furiously then, and gave thanks for the dark of night, and the flutter of moths on orange flowers, that hid me. “Oro is… unformed yet. She is innocent. And the males of your kind… they are not voluptuous. A man’s naked breast is made in the image of God. A woman…”

I knew she would not like such an argument, but I could not help but make it. What should I have said? It is only you I cannot bear, and I cannot yet face the reasons why? I wonder if you have any kind of mind or soul, when you have no head, the seat of reason? I fear you have only a ferocious heart, and that it, like your belly, has teeth.

Through clenched teeth she answered me, cold and hard: “I cannot help how I am made, John. I do not ask you to put your face away before I can summon up the strength to speak to you. I do not ask you to go blind for my comfort. A body is just a body, and all bodies are naked before God—how could any God count as shameful her own creations?”

“God is not a her.”

“So you say. Neither are you—I cannot think this is a coincidence.”

Hagia moved swiftly across the gap between us—despite her size, she moved so quickly, like the turtle who sees the spider, suddenly, and dashes. She seized me by the shoulders and then the cheeks and dragged my eyes to her breasts, her full and heavy breasts, and the eyes at their tips, black in the dim starlight, fringed with long lashes, and her lips below them, the mouth in her flat belly, and oh, I tried to look at her belt, and I feel such shame now at my shame then, when I prayed fervently in my heart that God should preserve me and pluck out my eyes to spare my soul one glance at her.

“John, look at me, look at me. I am not ugly, I am not a demon, I am Hagia, just Hagia. I copy manuscripts and I know how to take care of trees and I’ve read everything you can even think of. I am no different than a woman of your kind. I wear cucumber flowers around my waist sometimes, because I like the smell of them, and how they are just a little green, as though they know what they will become. I loved my mother and my father, just as you did, and I came with you, I came, first of anyone, to help you find your saint, to find your way. Qaspiel itself, whom you revere, has flown with me in its arms and you will not even look at me, please John, look at me.”

I looked. I believe God has forgiven me for it. She looked back, her eyes wide and clear. I let my eyes move over her, taking in everything I had refused to see. Her muscled shoulders, her arms and her hands stronger than my own. A place where her head might have been, (and I wondered then what she might have looked like with a face like mine—would she have been beautiful, plain?), where some shadow moved beneath her skin, a fluttering. Her powerful legs crouched near me, sheathed in their flowing black trousers, her jeweled belt. And her mouth, frank and friendly, her body warm and smelling of something odd and soft, cucumber blossoms perhaps, and ash from the dinner-fire. The night moved over us, and I was moved.

She took my hands and I tried to hold them back from her, but not much, I confess it, not much. She held my palms to the round undersides of her breasts, and their weight was not so much, not so.

“Just flesh,” she said. “It cannot hurt you.”

“Oh, of course it can,” I laughed a little. “It can obliterate me.”

And yet I could not take back my hands. She began to speak slowly.

THE CONFESSIONS OF

HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699

And there a gentle flush of amber stained the page, erasing whatever Hagia might have said to him, whatever tale she might have told. Small veins of silver shot through it, and in my hands it had the feel of wet ash. And yet, that loss alone of this whole sad affair did not grieve me. It was a private thing which passed between them, whatever Hagia might have said that changed everything, whatever secret she might have given him like a gift—I have never had a wife, but even I know that a curtain must sometimes draw over that moment when some interior door opens and the world between bodies is no longer innocent, no longer empty and without need.

An amber curtain, shot through with silver.

I hoped she said something beautiful—I knew she did. Maybe something about her mother’s tree, and what word it bore for that year of her life. Maybe something about her husband. Maybe something totally unknowable, a fable of the pygmies or lament for the soul of an ant-lion. There is nothing I would not believe concealed beneath that suffusion of amber. And perhaps it was only because I could not see it that I believed it so fiercely to be perfect, to be the incandescent syllables of love that would move even me, that mysterious key which would induce any priest to rescind his vows. It could not have been less, to court Prester John. It could not have been less than the most splendid and piercing of pleas, of arguments for the world, for the body, for life.

And nothing perfect can be seen.

Alaric looked up from his book. “Are you well?”

I will never be well again, I thought.

You know what she said, my God. That is enough.

How do I know that she seduced him, somewhere beneath that amber moss of decay and sweet, fading fruit? Because as the chapter ended in a mass of gold, only this remained, slowly disappearing, seeping into the mold:

And I lay in the silk-flowers with her weight above me, and I kissed her mouth, and felt her lashes on my face, and I thought of the cranes, and we both wept.

“Say it, Hagia,” I whispered, and her voice floated quiet and warm, up to the stars:

“Ave Maria,” she said, stroking my face, and she said it perfectly, without hesitation. “Gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus…”

Dawn came full and bestial. I sunk my face in my hands. Only Imtithal’s neat green book remained untouched by the corruption of the air. Its sharp herbal scent had dimmed, perhaps, grown less piquant, less eye-wateringly fresh. Its pages still gleamed pale gold-white, its letters still stood prim and brown against the flesh of the fruit. Like the third portion of the Trinity, it was immaculate, incorruptible. Small favors, and thanks be unto You, O Lord. The others were not destroyed yet, but stood at the brink.

I should have given thanks to You as well for the blessings of those pages I had left, those that stayed unmarred; here and there a word or three had rotted through, but I had not spent half my life bent over desks in inadequate candle-light without picking up the tricks of the scribe. I needed only half a sentence to make a whole—or I had, when I did not care whether my Cicero were perfectly accurate. But John’s words inspired more care than old Marcus Tullius. Yet my heart was hungry—yes, hungry and severe, like a lion’s love, and the streak of golden corruption obliterating everything dredged up only rage that I had this much, and yet no more, that each page brought me closer to the last, and yet I could not even reach the end for the poisonous, invisible air. Alaric tried to calm me, and I began to hate him a little for it, the young man with his carefully patient voice, raised up a register and sweetened, cultivated to calm the elderly, like talking to an irascible child.

That was unworthy. I could scratch it out, but You would not be fooled, and John’s honesty provoked an equal virtue in me.

I have failed, I thought, and then said: It is over. Who cares for children’s tales? But A