I sought God, and crowned myself Hell’s one king.
I wept.
The letters bubbled and broke, the legs and ladders of the characters snapping and turning as if caught in a whirlpool. I watched in horror; I watched in awe. Out of the wreckage of the book, the golden miasma, a single bulb formed in the mire and rose up on a stalk. The bud shone deep, gemlike black, and when it opened, I saw, concealed, an amber seed. It wavered on its stem, back and forth, like a serpent in its market basket. I did not make the choice; I was lost, cast far from myself. You could have saved me, Lord, but You let me devour that fruit—I suppose that is what You have always done. I fell upon it, maddened, devouring the bud, the stalk, the slime of the book, slurping it from my fingers, ravenous to have it within me, to keep it for myself, so selfish, so selfish, but I was always a selfish man. I ate it all, all, like Seth and the grains of paradise; my throat worked and I took it all into my belly, all of it, all of it, and oh, my God, it tasted like light, like light, and I lost everything.]
THE CONFESSIONS OF
HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699
I regret that I, Alaric of Rouen, must take up Hiob’s narrative at this point. As I write, ensconced with him in the personal house of the woman in yellow, who will not reveal her name no matter how I have asked, or offered her several ivory beads I obtained upon my journey to Africa some years ago, Brother Hiob lies insensate on a slab of stone, his skin sallow, his breath thin.
The local king, Abbas, has ordered a great number of flowers brought to the slab to garland my friend, though I have explained numerous times that he is not dead. I believe Hiob mentioned Abbas somewhat earlier in his account (please do not blame me personally for the disarray in his notes, I have tried my best to put them together, in an order pleasing to God, but the chaos of it all quite shocked me—though I am afraid what we have to report is disjointed, incredible, and beyond a doubt heretical, even if it were possible to place it all in the correct order and fashion it into anything like a usual book—forgive me. I am only his secretary). The king is uncommonly devoted to the woman in yellow, and when I inquired after her name, he would only call her Theotokos, a word I asked him to repeat, for it took me quite aback, as I am certain it will strike anyone reading my poor notes, for it is not a name at all, but a title: Mother of God. If Prester John was a committed Nestorian as there seems little doubt now that he must have been, this word seems all the more striking, as it is one Nestorius sought to divest the Virgin of during his tenure as Patriarch of the Eastern Church. The better part of his heresy was to teach that Mary was only the mother of Christ, and not of the divine portion of His nature. It defeats utterly both my powers of reason and translation to understand why Abbas would insist on calling this slip of a girl by that name. I honestly do not believe he knows what the word means—he has no Greek whatsoever—and she answers to it only when he calls her thus. She responds to my using it in no fashion.
But I was speaking of Hiob—his talent for digression has infected me muchly in our travels. I ought to have stopped him, but my shock was so great I could only stare as he devoured the book. I have tried to understand it since—I feel no compunction myself to eat the remaining manuscripts. But Hiob has been a mystery to me since I first met him. How little there seems to be of the man which is not languages and God. I wish but once I had caught him playing at dice. I feel I would have known a great deal more about him, if I could have seen how he threw. However, in the end, his obsession with Prester John was always greater than mine. It is a story, a very charming story, like those tales of girls and spindles and mirrors old women tell. But we do not go searching in earnest for the spindles. I found this mission odd and sad from the beginning, my Brothers, I will not be shy to say it. I came because my friend bade me serve him, and in service I find a path to God, thin, silver, humble.
And yet, and yet. I have touched these very books. I have smelled them, their sharp, over-rich, winey smells. I have seen that woman called Theotokos move in the dark, and there is a weirdness on her I cannot begin to name. I have not seen the tree Hiob reported, but I expect I shall sooner than later, if he does not wake. I have read everything, now, both his copies and my own, everything save the destroyed conclusion of John’s book. Do I believe. I think I must. At least that there was a man named John, and he lived among strangers—perhaps even in this same place where the sun comes so very near to the earth.
But in my heart I ask: Does John mean truly that he lived among blemmyae, gryphons, panotii? In my youth, when I read the account of Prester John, I thought these to be allegory. The panotii representing the virtue of listening to the voice of God, the headless blemmyae of the dangers of abandoning reason, the gryphon in their triune nature symbolizing the Trinity, the amyctryae with their enormous mouth testifying to the glutton’s path, the great lions to the division of spirit and flesh. I do not see a reason yet to assume these metaphors are not metaphors, but true beasts. Because a thing is written does not make it so. Am I to take it as fact that somewhere a giant tree grows with the head of St. Thomas hanging on it like a cocoa-nut?
That letter, my Brothers, that promised deliverance of Jerusalem is nearly six hundred years old. Surely he would have come by now, if such a man lived. It is the Year of Our Lord 1699, and we are modern men.
Half of my heart says this. Half longs to see the al-Qasr and all her amethyst pillars. Half of it looks at the woman in yellow with her downy skin, and dreads that every single thing in this world might be true.
And what am I to do with the Gospel of the Tree set forth in this manuscript? Shall I send it back to Luzerne to be packed away with other interesting heresies that no one but old Georg in the library ought to see, peering through his eyebrows at it all? John might as well have been talking to a cabbage and reporting the minutes of the meeting. The opinions of vegetables are evidence of nothing. How am I to defend any of this?
And what now? Is this to become my confession as well? How long until he wakes and I may return to my own prayers and works? Like Hagia, I do not enjoy composition.
Hiob spoke to God here—a hubris that beggars reason to contemplate. I cannot do the same. I cannot bring myself to believe I am worthy of such an audience. I write only to inform my Brothers at home what has happened to us here. I will be my Brother’s marginalia, his annotator, his loyal secretary to the last.
I clean Hiob as best I can each morning. It is not difficult. I worry—he has not moved his bowels nor voided since he fell into this swoon, and that cannot serve him well. It is as though he is wholly stopped. His limbs are twined in chamomile and mango blossoms, and they have tried to rouse him with both that fruit and that tea to no avail. I have read many medical texts, but my practical experience began the moment Hiob decided to eat his book. I tend him; I serve him, as I always have.
As to the books, I have occupied all my time not devoted to the care of Hiob’s mortal form in finishing his work. The oxidation of the pages proceeds, though not as viciously as with John’s manuscript—there seems to be little law in the progress of the rot. Sometimes I think I will lose Hagia’s text entirely, sometimes it does not swell up for hours. For a long time, Imtithal’s sweet tales showed the least inclination to corrupt—but now we have passed some invisible door and the green fingers of it dash and pry at each paragraph I transcribe. I will endeavor to organize the final chapters in such a way that you, my Brothers, are spared the confusion and chaos of reading through a scrim of pink and green fungus. There is enough strangeness in this tale.
I am nearly finished. I confess my heart swells with the possibility. When I am done, will he wake? Will we go home? Will he be pleased? Will I have served well?
Will she tell me her name?
THE CRYSTALLINE HEAVEN
In the three Indies our Magnificence rules, and our land extends beyond India, where rests the body of the holy apostle Thomas; it reaches towards the sunrise over the wastes, and it trends toward deserted Babylon near the Tower of Babel. Seventy-two provinces, of which only a few are Christian, serve us. Each has its own king, but all are tributary to us. And they set not by battles, nor quarrels, nor know of deceit.
—The Letter of Prester John, 1165
THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN
[I could do nothing to preserve the first portion of this chapter, nor much of its middle sections. While Hiob fell into a seizure and then into his peculiar rictus, it shriveled into a purple lump and fell onto the floor with an ugly, wet sound. If I could have saved it, I would have. But my friend was in pain. I begin again as cleanly as I may:]
As I write, it is night in Susa’s Shadow. Outside the cross-hatched screen of my thin minaret-room, the stars rest like tiny birds in the arms of the quince trees. Shadows make no sound. The wind off of the great stony river is hot and dry; it wafts of basalt, and old, old leaves. The moon has gotten fat, an orange egg in the sky, filled full with what strange bird? Everything is so quiet—so few of us are left. Soon it will be only me, and then it will be no one. Dr
ied palm fronds blow across the chalcedony courtyard. The al-Qasr sits as empty as it did in those long-gone days when Abibas the Mule-king ruled kindly from his tree in the sciopod forest, and most of Nural seemed to live there, in the open rooms, the long halls, the drifting curtains. How happy I seem to recall it, all of us playing in the palace like children.
My silver pot scrapes—the ink is nearly gone. And yet the flood of it crests in me, all at once, everything happening at once, the weight behind my eyes, the memory of it. I understand Imtithal now—Hajji. I understand Hajji now. The world is a place of suffering, and the root of all suffering is memory. When you live long enough, the mass of memory is greater than any moon, any sun, so bright and awful and scalding in the dark, scalding—
[A wide swath of garnet-colored mucus devoured the text that followed—I saw what I feared to be a second bud coalescing out of the miasma of it, rising up to release whatever perfume befuddled Hiob. I crushed the page beneath my hand and scooped away the pulp until the calligraphy showed clear once more. I could not afford my Brother’s ecstasy—I had to hew to my reason.]
—the gilt edge of the bronze barrel, so full of our little stones, our possible lives. The sard and amethyst of the glazed Pavilion glowed that day, polished with silk flowers and oil. The gryphons had hung every spire and pole with citron blossoms and bright custard-apples like rosy lanterns, boughs of mango blossoms and chamomile fragrant as a mother’s skin, and bells, bells in among them, tinny and laughing, hidden in the leaves, invisible music. As Fortunatus had been chosen by Abibas, in his last royal act, to conduct the Lottery, the Great Abir, the gryphons were obligated to prepare the stage. But much visible music I saw, too—gourd drums and lyres the size of wine barrels plucked by cametenna with their huge hands. Singers ululated and danced, the dervishes stamping, stamping, stamping their tattooed feet.
I saw my mother there, Ctiste, in her best scarlet trousers and her belt of silver. I saw the cannibal children playing at jumps; I saw Ghayth, letting young astomi pet his tail. I felt Hadulph’s warmth at my side, and I saw Qaspiel, too, its hair long for the occasion, and Hajji, Hajji sweet and silent in a swing of roses.