A Dirge for Prester John

“In Christ there is also peace,” I said, and the angel said nothing.

Several panotii lived in Nimat yet—in all my days I had never seen a village so elderly, so dwindled. Many houses had simply begun to sink into the icy earth. They emerged like moths from the snow-packed doors of their little yurts, and Hajji embraced them, her ears flowing around one after the other. This one is my thrice-cousin Isoud, she said of one. This one is my friend who painted the frescoes in the al-Qasr a hundred years ago, and her name is Mara. They looked so ephemeral, so small, like snowflakes, hardly coming to Hagia’s waist, their ears open and friendly, diaphanous. In the cold I pitied the blemmye, for though she wrapped a wolflet pelt around her shoulders, her sight obliged her to keep her breasts bare, and gooseflesh rose on them as the wind made her eyes water.

I had decided to love her. Somewhere on that awful ascent, scrabbling on the crags, my skin freezing into a shell, I had decided it was better to love her than not to. It is possible to decide this, to take mastery of the heart, before one passes beyond all questions of mastery. Better to make the choice than to be swept away. I could not enter her body and not love her. It was not in me. I had decided it, before we ever reached Nimat. There would be no more discussion, nor any more nights secluded away from the others, until I could decide further what was to be done with the whole of it.

The one called Glepham, whom Hajji introduced as the ivorysmith she liked best, when she was in the market for ivory, which was very rarely, brought us all a hot, thick, goaty milk swimming with lavender seeds. He explained that the panotii had dispersed, slowly, one by one, “like water dripping from a glass, down into the lowlands, into the capital, to find work and warmth and of course each passing Abir spreads them further, but Nimat is still our home, and here we do not turn the Lottery barrel. In all other cities the panotii remember Nimat-their-touchstone, the way you remember which side of the sky the sun comes up in. We are so pleased to have our little sister back in our arms, to wrap our ears around her and share heat.”

I could not in any way account for the distress Hajji clearly suffered. She shook; her eyes darted; she tugged her ears tight around herself. She moved as though she expected some terror to crash down upon her at any moment. She smiled, but her smile was an animal’s bared teeth, cornered, desperate.

“We came to see him,” she kept saying to Glepham, who demurred—one more cup of milk, sister. One more tale of how Mara upset the white lions by letting the beer boil too long and spoiling it all—one more tale of how dearly the white lions love their black, black beer. I thought of Hadulph’s mother. I wondered what her name was. I wondered if she lived here. I thought: Love is not a mountain; it is a wheel. No harsher praxis exists in this world. There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl—faith, hope, and love—and the cruelest of these is love. I wondered if, tonight, when the red lion slept, he would repeat his mother’s mystifying and beautiful inversion of Paul, and if he would miss her. Again, my thoughts came round and round to it: either this is the devil’s country or it is God’s. They invert everything I know to be true. But whatever they say is proven real by my eyes, my ears, my hands.

And moored in these thoughts I saw her, in the whipping snow, a monolith of white—Hadulph bounded toward the figure, and pressed his nose to hers. I shielded my eyes from the wind. Their growling came soft and wordless.

“Vyala,” Glepham nodded happily. “She knew he was coming. She collected many tears to shed when she saw him again.”

“John,” said Hajji. “Let us go. You will want to see him by moonlight. It is best that way. His humors are up, at night.”

“Who do you mean?”

Hajji shook her head, quivering with anxious energy. “They will stay if you tell them. Or come. It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Hajji!” I said, half laughing. “Stop it! Who is it you mean?”

“Thomas,” she said wretchedly. “You said you wanted to see him. He is here. He is here because here is where I left him.”

Hajji led me as if I were her own meek child. Up, up, further even than Nimat, into the thin air and the ice. I shivered; my beard took on icy beads that jangled in the wind. The others stayed with the hot milk and the lavender and Vyala, whom Hagia especially had longed to meet, and whom Hadulph was passing pleased to present. I had never seen the blaze on his scarlet chest puffed so high. In the end I took only Hajji, though more truly Hajji took me. The others would not understand, or I should hardly see the tomb I came so far to find for pausing to explicate the finer points of the history of Christendom. I was not unaware that they had tried to be patient with my ignorance—but I could not bear their disinterest just then. I longed for the presence of God, for the touch of the pale light of the Logos in my soul, the peace that I had lost.

Hajji squeezed through a gap in the high stones hung all with icicles; I followed her with some difficulty, for the country, even Nimat, ran too rich and fertile not to pad my belly considerably.

All of a sudden, the wind died, the snow vanished, the cold steamed to nothing. We stood in a round clearing flowing with deep grass, and a black sky overhead, hung with stars like crystal censers. And with the wind, and the snow, and the cold, my heart lurched and stopped, and I fell to my knees, and could not even cry.

In the center of the clearing a great tree sprawled, its long, dark roots splaying over the earth like skirts, its leaves arrayed in patterns of silver and amber, catching the dim light, wavering slightly in a warm breeze. The trunk of the thing was bigger around than six men might manage to join arms, the bark wri

nkled and slick, burls open here and there, where fragrant myrrh oozed, and the smell of it was sweet as the bodies of saints were said to be, in every book I knew.

It had but one fruit, huge, ripe, growing in the place where two of the great branches meet in a crook, framed all around with amber and silver leaves, three-pointed and shadowy beneath. The fruit was a face, the face of a bearded man, his gaze serene and kind, the lines in his face showing care and grief, but acceptance, too, and in his beard I saw birds, tiny as flies, their white wings glittering in the starlight.

“Thomas,” I whispered.

“Imtithal,” he sighed. And Hajji ran to him, her ears floating wide, and she stood on her tiptoes to press her cheek against his, her face running with tears, and his too, but his tears were perfume and sap. She put her hands to his beard, his eyelids, and they whispered between them so that I could not hear.

“I came seeking the tomb of Saint Thomas the Doubter,” I said—or pleaded.

“And you have found it,” said the tree.

My face burned—why could Hajji take such intimacies with that awful face? I came for communion, and Hajji had it, and I did not.

“Who is the panoti to you? Why do you call her Imtithal?”

The face looked mild and curious, his dark eyebrows rising. “She is my wife, and that is her name.”

Hajji looked across the clearing at me, her eyes huge and deep. “John, you must not speak of this to the others. I could not bear it. Do you promise?”

I nodded, numb, even in that terribly sweet place.

“You know that we change, in each Abir, life to life. It is more sacred than sacred, and the luck of the draw is law. I am far older than Hagia, or Hadulph, or even Qaspiel. The gryphon is a child next to me. And in my first life, I was called Imtithal, and I married, and became a widow. And I cared for three children whom I loved to distraction, and when they had grown, I wrote down all the stories I ever told them, so that I would not forget the children, nor they me. But John, every one of them down in Nimat drinking Glepham’s milk and listening to the great white lion—they grew up reading the stories I told to those little ones. We do love our stories in Pentexore, and our histories, and our fictions. They grew up imagining I was their mother, their Butterfly. They all get to keep their names and no one breaks the rules; they cut up their hearts and keep the pieces in a thousand separate boxes—but I had to change mine, just to keep that light from striking in their eyes every time I spoke. Despite the Abir, they cannot stop wanting to be loved, wanting me to love them, and I didn’t want to tell stories anymore. I didn’t want to love children anymore. I didn’t want to be everyone’s mother. Thomas died, and the children—” the panoti put her face into her hands and shook once, profoundly. “Sometimes you’re in a story, and also telling it, and it is the worst thing, because you can’t change the ending, you can only live through it. John, all this time they’ve barely been able to contain themselves from embracing me and calling me by my name and begging me to sing them to sleep at night. You saw Hagia and Ghayth—she had only to meet someone she loved enough and all customs evaporate. I suspect she wanted me to scold her, like the nurse I was, so she could have a moment under my rule. Only the most tenuous thread of law keeps them from doing it. I am not the only one—do you think Queen Abir, who began all this, is dead? No one dies—or hardly anyone. Everyone keeps going, forever and ever. But you—” she spread her hands beseechingly, “you’ve never heard of Imtithal. You could love me as Hajji, just as a no one who knew her way through the mountains, you could love me and never ask me to tell you a story in all of your days. You could love me like Didymus did, while he lived, and I could rest.”

“Saint Thomas didn’t have a wife,” I said, only half understanding her.