A Dirge for Prester John

Ghayth nipped at her hair affectionately. “Yes, that’s certainly exactly the same thing.” He pressed his long neck to Yat’s cheek. “It is possible to live alongside darkness and still feast, still have children and sing and celebrate the moon. But not beside those two, one of which takes your left side in tithe, the other of which takes your right. And ev

en worse—those caught on the leeward side of the Wall found themselves cut off from the Fountain. Though they could live forever still, they would now watch their children grow old and die, for their progeny could not drink, nor be preserved. Who could bend under that fate, and yield to it?

Now, it so happens that the Azenach are cannibals. I have not mentioned until now because it tends to prejudice the audience against them, when truly, you are in no danger at all. A cannibal eats her own kind—you are none of theirs, not you, blemmye, nor you, panoti, nor gryphon, nor lion, nor anthropteron, nor whatever sort of pet that one is,” he said, indicating John with his head. “As well, they only eat the dead. They have a very ornate ritual in which each of the family members devour a portion of the deceased which represents their connection. Students of the poor soul would share out her brain, those who in their youth scrapped with her, or had been protected by her fierce temper and love for the small, would quite solemnly swallow the meat of her muscles. Her children would eat of her womb, her husband of her heart. They have quite a complicated liturgy of anatomy—fear, for example, resides in the stomach, anger in the spleen, grace in the foot. I could keep you here all night explicating the Azenach body, and all its humors. Love makes residence in the heart, naturally, but also the soldierly arts. What seemed most powerful in an Azenach must be eaten after death. You might think this disgusting, but it is really quite obvious: they loved whomever it was that died, and would have her with them always. It is very respectful, I promise. The whole process is left over from pre-Fountain folklore, but still, occasionally an Azenach would perish out of violence or plague, and religious habits are difficult to shake.”

Yat smiled, showing all her razor teeth. “I ate my friend Ott’s hand when an ox gored him, because when I was scared at night, he held my hand till I fell asleep again. It didn’t taste very good, but I didn’t feel so sad, after.”

“Well, one by one, the young ones on the other side of the Wall grew into old ones, and the Azenach mothers and fathers looked on, horrified, for they had forgotten that bodies perform that stumbling chorus. And when these mortal children perished, their parents planted their remains, when the bodies had been shared out enough to satisfy both grief and faith. Little by little, the children’s bodies grew under the earth, their roots and shoots moving toward the heat that spilled so fervently from the other side of the Gate, intensified by the adamant gems there. And one day, a pale, striped sapling sprang up, outside the Wall. Then another, and another. And they sent out trunks and leaves and blossoms and one day the blossoms opened and a whole generation of Azenach leapt out laughing. Of course, having been shared out as the holy meal before burial, some of them had no brains, and didn’t laugh but fell down dead like dumb fruit dropped. Some had no wombs, and never had any children of their own. Some had no spleen, having aggrieved many people in their other lives on the far side of the Gate. But those who had fallen dead before they could even draw breath seemed to have enough for the others to share, and they patched themselves up reasonably well, swallowing their siblings’ organs into their bodies. They do, well and truly, take the strength of what they eat. On one side of the Wall, it is a metaphor. On the other, it is fact. Only a few of them have no hearts now—their blood seems to move about in a fashion more like sap, and they are pacifists.”

“I can hear my grandfather on the other side of the Wall,” said Yat. She twisted her streaked hands. “He misses me.”

“They stay here, close to the Wall, even now that new children have been born in the more usual fashion, like Yat, waiting for the day when the Gate will open and they will be one tribe again. But you mustn’t believe her,” the peacock sighed. “She can’t hear her grandfather. Not even sound breeches the Wall. The Azenach on the other side do not even know this colony exists.”

“Don’t tell lies!” Yat shouted, leaping up. “I can hear him! I can! He says: Soon, soon. And the Wall gets hot.”

I shivered. I did not think it was her grandfather, either.

“Oh, Yat, my darling, you must stay away from the Gates. No good will come of you listening to whispers leaking through, and your grandfather does not live in that country alone.”

“What do you know? You’ve never eaten anyone at all!” The child stormed off, and Ghayth made his apologies. The older Azenach held her while she wept dramatically. They all glared at us across the black road. Silently, the Azenach began to light the torches along the way, and while they did it, Yat sucked her thumb. Ghayth stretched his short legs.

“It was good, though, to tell a true tale again! You will stay, won’t you? Tomorrow the young persons’ chorus will perform my Romaunce of Twelve Infidels and an Exquisite Rhinoceros. I don’t mean to boast, but I think the motifs are quite adequate. I have nearly mastered the art of the denouement.”

“No,” whispered Hajji. “We have to go.”

Ghayth looked at her suddenly, and the little panoti blanched, if such a thing were possible for a creature the color of the snow.

“Don’t look at me,” she said desperately. “Stop it.”

“But you’re her,” he said wonderingly. “You’re her.”

“Please!” she wailed. “I don’t want to be!”

“If your headless friend here saw fit to shred the veil of modesty and drag me out, I don’t see why you should get to stay demure,” he sniffed. But he turned to me, unable to conceal his pride: “You see, I am getting the flowery speech down to a science. I can do it for fifteen minutes at a stretch.”

The panoti disengaged herself from John and crept up to Ghayth. She put her hands on his avian face, where he had large, handsome white circles under his eyes.

“Please,” she whispered, and tears filled up her eyes. “Let me be Hajji. Let me stay Hajji.”

THE CONFESSIONS OF

HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699

I have tried to re-compose the text as I imagine it to be—that is part of the work of a scribe, to gracefully transmit the document as though no error ever occurred, as though no single letter were in doubt. But if my Brothers could read this as I saw it in that cell with the bold sunlight seeking purchase on the walls, their heart would fall and fail.

The Lord my God knows what those pages said. I will never know. Why did You not send me an angel to dictate the perfect, undiluted tale to me, as You did to Your chosen scribes in the old days? To Paul and Matthew and Mark, to John and Luke? Why did You not simply inhabit me with Your light, if You wanted these things uncovered, known? It seems to me more efficient.

The red-violet rot had begun to steal letters again by the point of Ghayth’s sad tale of the cannibals, even whole words. I would not be worth my beer if I could not surmise that between an Our Lord in Heaven and Thy kingdom Come there must be an Art in Heaven, but I confess the tremendous difficulty of constituting a whole narrative when the pages in my hands soften and shift, and I had to guess at Yat’s tears, when perhaps the word (of which I have but a t and an s) may be something else entirely, for who knows if an Azenach weeps?

And yet, in my secret soul, which I did not even share with Alaric, I was struck dumb by the beauty of it, of the corruption itself, how it made these pages seem not only to speak but to bleed, like stigmata, the blood of some terrible divinity seeping up onto my fingers, staining my hands with its own hungry heart.

If the panoti said more, if the troupe ate at the cannibal feast, if they met the child’s parents, if they comforted her—it all disappeared into a soft wing of carmine, staining upward from the bottom edge of the sweet-smelling page.

I tried so hard. I tried to make it all run smoothly, so that I could bind Prester John up in a tome and send it to Luzerne as consummate and reasoned as you deserve. But I felt as the sun grew heavier in the day as though I chased a mercurial hart, and every step deeper into the woods was a step further from my desire.

Yet I could not stop. I could not cease. I reached out for its pelt—and grasped nothing.

The green encroached from