A Dirge for Prester John

and over the stiff parchment—almost, but not quite, as stiff as a toenail—wondering where, in the alchemy of the earth, the slant of the penmanship on this map was decided. Babel, it looped. Ultima Thule. And more mysterious still, it showed the banyan tree, and the field of red-silk cotton flowers, and small figures whose shapes I did not want to guess at.

“Do you love the priest, even though he wants to convert you?” I asked. I did not know if I sought the gryphon’s answer or my own.

“I pity him. Pity is a cousin to love. When he forgets himself, he can be dear, like a baby. He made me soup one afternoon, all onions and no meat, because, he said, he did not know what could be killed for meat here, as according to his God I am a beast, but at least he knows that I should not be eaten. It was not a good soup, but it was meant well, and I think that is John in sum.”

We walked in companionable silence, and after a while, Fortunatus picked me up by my belt and hauled me onto his back. I smiled—gryphons are not vocal with their affection, but you can’t miss it, when you’re ankle deep in golden fur. Nor are they so sensitive about being ridden as red lions.

Not long after that, we came to a high cliff, which dropped away below us into a hazy mist, and a soft rushing sound. Trees jutted from the rock, twisting up to get at the thin light that filtered down. We all peered over the edge. Hajji, to whom I had not yet said a word and would not until she spoke to me, tossed a chip of rock down. It tumbled end over end in the air until it sank into the mist—where it hung, stuck, suspended in the cool fog. It still descended, but so slowly we could barely see it move.

“Thule,” sighed Hajji, and rolled over onto her back, her ears stretching out on the weedy grass. “A friend with very steady eyes once told me about the place. There is no longer any land or air or sea, but a mixture of all of these, which is in consistency like the body of a jellyfish, and holds all of Thule together. Something happened here, to mix up the world this way. Thule is reachable, findable: but once found, it is impossible to move, to step further than a few stumbling feet onto the glassy shore. It is impossible to penetrate the heart of Thule, impossible to progress, pilgrim or no, impossible to leave. At least, I have heard it is impossible. I do not know everything under the sun.”

I knew of it, dimly. I wanted to know more, to beg Hajji to tell us everything, to tell us about the smallest soul who lived down there, or her friend with steady eyes. Anything. But I kept quiet. It is only manners, and manners are all we have. Still, it was the most I had ever heard her say.

“Perhaps if we flew in very fast,” Fortunatus mused. “A well might open up—all air possesses patterns, currents, even this gluey fog, and certainly at some time or another the aether must billow aside, must part, and allow some leaf or nut to drift down onto some parapets—rounded, I should think, and bulbous, palaces built to bear the weight of the miasma. I could fly; I could spy out a bubble that might carry us down, to see what is there—” he paused and remembered his friend John, who had little interest in new and exciting locales of which one could tell wonderful tales of back home. “To see if they know anything of the Ap-oss-el, if anyone is living at all down there. At any rate, going through is always faster than around—this chasm cracks for miles.”

“You might also get stuck like that pebble, and then we should all laugh at you, and spend a month tying up a rope to drag you back up,” remarked Hadulph.

“I, too, could fly,” said Qaspiel. “We are both very quick. Fortunatus could take John on his back, and I have flown Hagia before. Perhaps even Hajji could ride behind John? I’m afraid I don’t know how to get you across, my leonine friend.”

Hadulph wrinkled his muzzle. “I expect we could manage it, if anyone meant to get across. But look at all those eyes shining to get down, get in, get to. I believe I will take the lion’s lot, which is to say the practical route, and walk the chasm until I find a way around, or a bridge. I shall see you all on the other side if you don’t dash your brains out or get stuck in an eternal mist.”

Hajji said nothing, but scrambled nimbly up the lion’s crimson haunch, and though he growled protest—but the white lion in his nature took rough pleasure in a panoti on his back. The pair began their quieter journey, the panoti flopped on his enormous back, looking up at the clouds.

Qaspiel took me in his arms and lifted me up, safely over the mist, into the fresh, biting air. For a long, spiraling, wind-ragged moment, I didn’t think about John at all, and felt some small peace in me, like a pebble suspended in mist.

Just as the sun slipped past noon and into the falling golden hours of afternoon, Qaspiel did spy a bubble below us, or at least a hole in the mist. It whooped with success and several unseen parrots echoed it back to Qaspiel with an extra harmonic scale of irritation. Through the gap, the four of us saw little—darkness, maybe, but it might have been shadows. Rooftops, perhaps, but perhaps only more mist. A road? A statue? I was certain I saw a garden all full of silver champak flowers and heavy iron pomegranates, their dew frozen, their leaves edged in ice. I saw it so clearly for a moment, and then I could not be sure. But John cried out, and the parrots shouted him down.

“A church!” he shouted over the rushing wind between us. “I see a church there, in the mist! I’m certain of it! A cross all of silver and opals, frozen in ice! A chapel! We must go down, whatever the risk. A church, Hagia!” He met my eyes and I saw a pleading, a silent barter, that if there was a church, not to tell its priest nor any other Christian soul what had passed between us. I set my mouth, and my heart beat angrily. I would not be ashamed, not of the sweetness of those flowers against his skin, of any small shiver that might have moved between our bodies, one to the other, like a secret, or a promise. That was his world.

I did not want to talk about it with anyone, truthfully. I had not yet decided where to place it within myself, in the heart or in the gut, as Hadulph might have said. What you put in your heart remains. What you put in your gut is digested and forgotten. It adds its energy to the whole, but vanishes in the process. Where to hide the smell of those flowers, and how I did, finally, speak his Latin out loud, speak it into his skin and his mouth? Presently I was keeping it somewhere dark and safe, for later brooding. Did I even want him? I didn’t know. I wanted—yes, I wanted to show him his wrongness, my beauty, even to corrupt him, as he claimed, but not in a wicked way. In the way that says: this world will swallow you, and I am first in line. Everyone else was fascinated, but I broke him. The one he hated; the one he would not see. That reasoning suffices for one night, but for more? I could not say. And that red field was behind me—before me lay Thule, something new and thrilling—we might even be in danger. I snuggled into Qaspiel’s cool grip. All of us felt it, except perhaps John, little more than forty and still a baby. Who knew if he felt anything, if he had the capacity to sense the friction of a story approaching, one of our very own, one we might be able to tell and re-tell and exaggerate and demure for at least a century. Oh, you don’t want to hear that old thing again! Well, if you insist.

The man was digging.

“Oh, la!” he sang, and dug further, his bronze shovel rising from the smooth, featureless street laden with piles of diaphanous, milky mist, which he piled up beside him in a sagging pile, like old snow. “Oh, la, the world is made of sugar—see? And I am a cup of tea. Oh, la, oh, la, the world is made of cobwebs—aye, and I am a little black fly.”

He had a pleasant, high voice, especially given the difficulty of a goat’s head and long tongue. His horns whorled impressively, his grey fur curling in the damp. His legs were human, but covered in goat-hair trousers that matched his waist-up pelt. Only his large, flat, man’s feet and his thick fingers revealed any ungoaty nature. His big arms had found a kind of halfway point, covered in sparse, coarse fur that showed through to brown skin beneath. His body stretched and bunched with labor, altogether shaggy and impressive. I didn’t think he meant to sing out loud, but the tune bubbled up out of him, the sort of nonsense song that served to pass interminable work.

We called out to him; he greeted us with glad hands and a goaty, frank smile.

“Oh, hello, hello! Oh, la, I didn’t hear you come down! If I’d known company was coming, I’d have shoveled faster—oh, but it is good to see a soul!” He embraced us all, kissing faces, paws, hands, his humor high, his name Knyz, his profession digging, his home this very city.

“But where is everyone?” I said—we could see only ourselves, and Knyz with his shovel, its pearly handle wet with condensation. The rest faded into fog and cold, a few rounded lumps, shapeless shadows. We heard no sound but the amiable scrape of the spade.

“You’re in my bubble,” bleated Knyz. “It’s terribly hard work to keep it going—stuff just slides back in. Thule abhors a void, you know.” He indicated one of the huge, fog-shrouded humps behind him. “Someday I’ll reach the palace. There are probably others, too, with bubbles. Though no more than two or three, or we would have met by now—at first I thought you all were Thulites and we’d finally managed to thwack into one another! But alas—no shovels.”

“I saw a church,” John said breathlessly, and I rolled my eyes. He couldn’t even see the wonder of it, stuck in his longing for home and God. I felt an embarrassment for him, the priest being too dense to feel it himself.

But Knyz nodded, his horns spattering dew. “Near the palace, where it won’t hurt anyone. And if there are tunnels in Thule like mine, they all went towards the palace. Like blind worms we nose toward our sightless queen, oh, la. And if along the way little airy mineshafts collapse, and the bodies of old sciopods drop down out of the mist, dazed, if travelers drift in, well, then, hurrah. But I don’t stop digging. The chief industry of Thule is digging, digging toward the queen. And perhaps the queen has a black spade in her own hands, too, but sits still by the window in the heavy air, barely able to dig out her own front door. It’s like when it used to snow, and you couldn’t open a gate for the slush of it.”

“What happened?” Qaspiel asked, running its hands over and through the jellied fog.

“Oh, la,” grinned Knyz sheepishly. “Gog and Magog, I suppose. They bled here, on their way back beyond the Gate. No one meant it, but they’d got wounded and a few drops fell—cau

ght us all by surprise, and everything coalesced like cream in a bucket, and here we are. I don’t blame anyone, though. Times give and times take.”

“Even their blood is so caustic?” Fortunatus clucked. “Even their blood.”

“Oh, no,” Knyz said, “you don’t understand. They can’t help it. Just like you can’t help those big long feathers there. Someone made them that way, and set them going, and they just keep being that way, just like I keep digging. You’d be surprised how digging makes a soul sanguine about such matters.” This chilled me, for it was my own argument thrown back at me.