Don’t cry. History is like this, sometimes.
But even had she liked to cut folk into meat, a vartula-man is never easily caught out, seeing as he does both before and behind. Giraud would find another way.
Houd, Who Felt Sick, Though He Would Not Show Me: Was Senebaut a bad king? Did he arrest people? Did he keep his wives in the cellar?
You might think so, but he was no better or worse than any king. He wanted things his own way—which is the primary trait of a king. He disliked both porridge and economic philosophy. But he threw many festivals, and asked only enough taxes to build a bridge over the Physon, and employed several chroniclers, sculptors, and painters to fashion what they pleased with no requirement that they exalt him in particular.
Giraud was a prodigy of government—ever since she was small she had lorded over the other cyclopes, and with great cleverness and subtlety made certain that they played only the games she enjoyed—though she did not insist on winning, for she had a practical disposition. When she lost, she sank into contemplation for days, until she could pinpoint exactly how the losing occurred. As she grew, she set suitors impossible tasks, such as fetching rings from the peaks of mountains and standing guard for a cycle of the moon without sleep. She did not ask these things because she wanted them done, no, but because she was interested in the exercise of power, in whether they would attempt her tasks, in whether she had power enough over them to compel it. Her single eye burned with purpose, and she became so deft at the leveraging of her own strength that she exhausted all opportunities to test herself save one—and Senebaut alone stood in her way.
It was only that she wanted to be queen. Sometimes we want things, and we cannot quite say why, except that somehow we were made to want them. She was not the first to decide to kill a king—all those silver vessels speak to such considerations. Without natural death to put a flourish at the end of a reign, it was common as cake, and not just for kings, but any profession a creature longed after. True, a country may support many more blacksmiths than kings—however, there is a limit to the number of possible blacksmiths, and sooner or later someone wou
ld think of those silver vessels, and one passing afternoon a sooty face would be replaced by another in the Pavilion, looking fair pleased with itself, and that would be that.
Now, my little cygnets, I exhorted them, before I tell you how the vartula-man was brought low, tell me what death is. Speak up, don’t be bashful.
Ikram, Who Had Read About Such Things: Grandmother died. Nobody else, though.
Lamis, Who Was Badly Frightened: I don’t know! I don’t want it! Make it stop!
Houd, Whose Curiosity Flushed His Cheeks: People go away and unless they get planted they never come back. I don’t know where they go. I haven’t figured that out yet. Somewhere where they can’t talk anymore, or be seen, and maybe they live there like normal and maybe they don’t, I don’t know.
No one can know. I have listened to many stories and I think we are all more frightened of death because we can avoid it. A mortal girl, if she is uncareful and manages to die early, might lose fifty years or so. Less. We lose time without counting, without end.
And so Senebaut lost.
For Giraud was patient. In a space of rich black mud she planted every noxious thing she could find: hooded serpents and mushrooms and spiders with green spots on their bellies, poppies with black pollen, rice gone sour and prickled with colorful rot. She bent her will to these trees as she had to everything else. She tended them with tears to coax their bitterness, with blood to swell their cruelty. And by and by, a tree rose up in her orchard full of odd, blackish, custardy fruits that not only killed the moths she kept for this purpose, but dissolved their little bodies to a bit of wet dust.
The immortal can afford to wait. Giraud was very beautiful, her single eye fringed with dark lashes, her wit quick, and she had never accepted a suitor. She presented herself as a prospect to the king, with her warm kiss said to him: I will be queen when you are dead.
Children, she married him, and every night when he kissed her she told him this, and he laughed, and so did she, for royal folk have a peculiar sense of humor, and for many years they were happy.
Lamis, Who Believed She Would Never Marry: Why would he marry her if she wanted to kill him?
We are more frightened of death than mortals, and also more enamored of it. Perhaps he didn’t believe her. Perhaps he thought wifehood would mollify her. Perhaps he looked into her one eye with all his own, and saw the beckoning of the dark. But she bore a child to him, and then another, so that she could be certain no one would deny her the throne when he had gone, and then one night, she lay down beside him, her long hair covering his skin, and gave him a rich tea, full of her own soft fruits. Perhaps he even knew it, as he drank, perhaps he held her close as his flesh went to dust. But he did drink, and she became queen, and ruled well and kindly enough in her time—no worse than Senebaut, no better. She, too, liked things her own way. Kings change not because the country needs them to, but because a body wants to be king. Ambition is the source of all change.
As soon as she was fitted for the crown, the new queen went into Chandai where Gahmuret lived, and asked him to keep her safe from poisons of all kinds, for Giraud was never a fool. Gahmuret sat at his workbench for one year, considering how this should be done. In the end, he could not do it. He scried the stars himself and determined that he and his wife ought to conceive a child, and this child might grow to encompass the task the queen set. And so Gahmureen was born some time later, and born asleep. Her parents cared for her as she slept on and on, growing and dreaming and growing again. When she turned sixteen, Gahmureen woke with a start and commenced to build two great serpent-statues, each with an apple in its mouth, and in each apple a carbuncle that would go black in the presence of noxious poisons, and in the apple skin an alarm that would screech and hiss if the carbuncle darkened. Giraud rewarded the inventor’s daughter with a rich bed, piled with down and silk, for her cleverness, and there she sleeps today, in Chandai, where we would have to wake her now, to repair what Houd had broken.
And so went the exchange of kings and queens, one bartered for another, right up until today, with a bronze contraption growing bigger by the day down in the Pavilion.
[It began, finally, here, too, in the margins of Imtithal’s text, long curls of pale green slime, coiling like lace, encroaching, stretching toward the text as if to tease me, as if to say: If I wish I can take it all. Even these sweet little stories, even these. My heart saw some allegory in this, the corrupt world dissolving pure mind, the invisible demons of air that delight disintegration of these books, the angels of our better nature, racing to preserve purity, wholeness.]
Faster, Hiob, faster.
THE WORD IN THE QUINCE
Chapter the Seventh: in Which Our Companions Discover a Certain Tower and Its Ruins and Feel Very Fondly Towards It, and in Which a Priest Struggles with the Convergence of Heart and Flesh.
Between Thule and the ruins lay an endless wood—at least it seemed endless, and all the worse for my dreams, which had gone dark and wordless of late. I dreamed of Hagia, and sometimes she had a head, and sometimes a child, and everything so washed with light I was blinded, and sunk into darkness with only her hands on me, only her breath, to let me know I still lived on the Earth and had not been transfigured into Heaven. The heat in my dreams moved on me like deep water. I told no one of any of it, and when I think now on all that has passed I know we were all lost in our own dreams, but then I thought myself specially plagued. I often thought myself special in those early years—I cannot be blamed, I don’t think. Everyone was grotesque, save me, everyone knew the lore of the land, save me. Everyone served some false god, or none. But the digging man had renewed my faith; Thomas came here, Thomas died here, and I would find his grave, and pray, and he would tell me what to do. That’s what saints are for—to guide us, who are lost on Earth.
Did I lust after her? I did. I confessed my sins to the stars every night, but my desire was not lifted from me. Then, it hurt me like a blade, not that I should swell and need, but that I should be unable to turn away from it, no matter how deformed the object. I should have been stronger. Now, I believe I wanted her at first because her aspect was most clearly demonic. Grisalba, I needed only look away from her tail to think her a mild mortal woman; the gentleness of Hajji excused her monstrous ears, and the male leonines I could love, for God made men for companionship and we find it easy among our own. After all, Daniel walked among lions, and was well. Qaspiel, figured like an angel, caused me no distress at all. But I could not ignore her body, and how like a thing of hell in the margins of a book of virtue she appeared, and how little gentleness dwelt in her spirit, all feminine virtues replaced with boldness, knowingness, and a laugh like a roar. But as Hell strikes fear, so also fills the air with temptation, and she tempted me sorely. For that I tried again not to speak to her, nor look, and treated her unaccountably cruel. But once love is released in a field of red silk flowers, one cannot crush any of it back into the ribs, and deny it ever broke free.
And her mouth moved in her belly like my dream of St. Thomas, and I could not tell what that meant, but it unnerved me and provoked me all at once.
In the night, when all slept, I reached out my hand to her, and felt the warmth of her naked back, and if she knew my touch she did not turn, but I fought myself, and God knows my travail.
I tried not to. That is all Heaven may ask of a man.
I tried also not to know her intimacy with the red lion Hadulph. I could not begin to imagine how they might manage concourse, but they were joined at the heart, and the lion did not need to deny her as I did. In some strange fashion their connection brought to me the truth of Pentexore. For a woman to lie beneath a lion and exult in soft murmurs, in secret pleasures, would rest somewhere beyond obscene and into the realms of madness. I would have thought nothing of locking away any Christian woman who performed such an act of devilry.