A Dirge for Prester John

John required explanation. He always did. But I could not bear to repeat the whole long tale of Alisaunder and the building of the Gates, not now. Let Hajji tell him. Let anyone. I couldn’t care. I did not come traipsing across half the known world to tell fairy tales to a prudish fool. Not fairy tales, and not history either. He’d be dead in forty years. What did he need to know? How to wrinkle up and go blind. I had confidence in his abilities to manage that without my help.

I wish now I had been the one to tell him. What I would not give to be able to tell him one more thing he did not know, to tell one story after sunset, and hear him disbelieve me.

“Ghayth,” I said, and I felt my smile in my belly so wide, pulling my skin taut. I shouldn’t have said it. I should have greeted him as a stranger. But I could not help myself. “Ghayth Below-the-Wall.”

The peacock blinked, and cocked his black head to one side. The Gates thrummed with heat, flooding out over the long road behind us.

“Hagia,” whispered Hajji desperately, clutching the sides of her long ears tight around her so that the blue veins shone. “Don’t. Please don’t.”

But Ghayth was Ghayth, and he would not deny it. I kept my smile, valiantly—when one has disrupted protocol, it is best to follow it through. The peacock-historian snapped his great tail up; it arrayed in a huge fan around him, the streaks of green and violet snaking like oil through his black feathers.

“A reader!” he crowed, his plume bobbing. “A student! You must love my work considerably to speak so out of turn!”

And there it was, thrown down between us. I had thought only of myself, my joy at meeting him. We are not allowed to speak to one another of who we once were, Abirs past. We are now who we are now. We must inhabit it fully, or else what is the point of going through it at all? If I saw my mother on the road, I would have to greet her as a stranger. I knew Ctiste before. I do not know her now. She is not the same person. It is not the same world. Etiquette is all we have.

“I’m sure Hagia has mistaken you for someone else,” Fortunatus said quickly.

“No, no, she has it! Come now, I could pretend I take offense, but look where you are! By any measure, this is the edge of the world. On the other side is hell and horror. This is the end of civilized space, so let’s have done with civility. Yes, I was Ghayth, and am. The last Abir made me a writer of fiction, can you imagine it?” Ghayth unselfconsciouly pecked at the black dust of the street and came up with a twisted yellow worm, which he slurped down. “I have to imagine things that never happened, and then arrange them in a pleasing order, and then write them down! And they have to be connected with themes and metaphors and motifs! Motifs, I tell you! What rot. I miss being Ghayth Below-the-Wall. Now I am Ghayth Who-Makes-Things-Up-and-Fusses-With-Motifs.” He spat the head of the worm. “Give me a history again! Solid, verifiable, respectable! Let me record the ravages of Gog once more! Let me count the ships in a harbor, or how long a certain copper coin has circulated! Do you know my last masterwork featured two young religions, barely out of their own prophets’ diapers, one of whom crossed half a continent to slaughter the other, only to get bored halfway there and slaughter a city that had nothing to do with either of them? Come, that’s fancy, that’s satire, it’s practically a drunkard’s ballad! I just made it up! I was bored! I had to write something! I can’t be blamed! But my public says it’s my best yet.”

“Pray tell, who is your public, bird?” John said, and I do think he meant to be polite.

“Well, Azenach, of course. That’s where you are. If you had a map, it would say Azenach: Here There Be Cannibals. Also Peacocks. Sleep Elsewhere. They put on my fictions down in the amphitheater—quite something, they’ve masks and pulleys and all manner of machines to make things frightening. They’re mainly interested in the frightening. They built a whole trebuchet once, for the battle scenes. Painted it green, in my honor. I suppose it’s a bit fun. No one ever put on my histories.”

“I copied your histories, for all sorts of people,” I said, suddenly shy. “Once for the great library, in the al-Qasr.”

“And did you spoil my prose, and add vowels, and make the dialogue much prettier than it would have been in life, and leave off whole episodes?”

“I never changed a word.”

“Good woman! For that, I’ll feed the lot of you—though I can’t promise our local dishes will be to your liking.”

Out of the dim, dark houses, each of them little more than curtains and poles, resting in the wash of heat off of the diamond Gates, eyes and hands could now be seen, moving slightly, nervous.

“They elected me Welcomer to Foreigners,” Ghayth explained. “The Azenach make people anxious.”

A small figure toddled up to us, and for a moment I thought the Azenach might be pygmies—but no, it was a child, a little girl shaped much like John, save that her skin was striped as a tiger’s, and her teeth gleamed very sharp.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said solemnly. “We only eat each other.”

“Oh, please!” danced Ghayth, hopping from one three-toed foot to another, his tail wavering beautifully in the diamond-light. “Oh, please, let me tell them! A chance to be a historian again! To tell the truth, a long and honest narrative of real things!”

Several others had drifted out, all striped, all silent and wary. “Yes,” some said. “Must you?” sighed others.

“I don’t like telling stories, anyway,” said the girl, who we would learn was called Yat, and who had only eaten a very little bit of anyone in her life. “We already know who we are. What’s the point?”

“The point is that they don’t, so there is a keen pleasure in sharing knowledge. When you’ve done, they know, and you know, and you can know together, and make quite good jokes a little while later.”

“I want to watch,” insisted Yat, and so she did, as the rest of us paid close attention, settling onto patient haunches. All except Hajji, who clutched John’s hand, and breathed shallowly, and seemed to be trying to make herself as small as possible, which is to say very small indeed. But I would not make the same blunder twice and cause her worse embarrassment. I made a great show of giving her space, crouching nowhere near her or John, hoping she would know I meant her no harm.

Ghayth lifted one foot in a professorial gesture. “The Azenach got shut behind the Gates, when the giants Holbd and Gufdal closed in the wicked twins, Gog and Magog, and doomed the copper-spired city of Simurgh, along with several other tribes.”

John looked sharply at the striped child. “Do you mean to say she has seen Gog and Magog with her own eyes?”

Yat laughed. “Stupid! I wasn’t born.”

Ghayth stared meaningfully, his beady eyes narrowed. “I had forgotten—when you write a book, no one interrupts you. It is extremely irritating. Now! Many were caught in the closing of the Wall, and the Azenach were but one. For some time, they made their lives as best they could on the other side, but their neighbors were dreadful company. If a family managed a house or a barn, Gog would bite it in half, and Magog would gobble the remainder. Being siblings, they share and share alike. A phoenix—split down the middle. A fast-hold of Fommeperi, sister-tribe to the Azenach—equal warriors for each, portioned out precisely. When they blasted the earth and burnt the soil so no tree could ever grow again, even the specks of dirt showed their equality: half blighted by Gog, half by Magog.”

“I have to share with my sister,” Yat whispered. “Even when she’s bad.”