And that was when I knew he had.
I remember that ivory chair in the night; it curls at its ends into arm-rests in the shape of ram’s horns, severed from the sea-goat when the first caravan settled in this endless valley, the first enclave of bird and monopod and gryphon and cricket and phoenix and collinara—and blemmye. And they camped on the beach-head and pulled from the sea with their silver spears a fatted kid, and ate the fat of its tail sizzling from the driftwood fire, and in time those first horns were affixed to the long chaise which became a sacrificial plank which became an altar which became a throne which became my pillow and it all happens at once as his weight pressed the small of my back against the cold ivory—
“I don’t want it,” I said, and thrust the diamond out to Astolfo. “Take it,” I said, tears pricking my eyes. “Marry him yourself. Let me draw again. I don’t want it. I want to go back to my mother’s fields and stretch parchment over hoops and feel her tree of hands on my face. What will it say for this year? No, no, no.”
And my mother, so young and lovely, stepped out of the crowd to put her hand, her real and warm hand, to me, to comfort, even though the rules did not quite permit it, the day of the Abir is liminal, and perhaps there is grace hidden there.
“You cannot give away your fate, my girl. Nor your luck.”
“Please,” John said later, and wept, for he had tried so hard not to, tried not to brush his palm against my eyelid, tried not to run his fingers across the teeth in my belly, tried not to glance at the soft place where my head is not. He had tried to resist his passion to come to that place when he lifted me onto the nacreous chair, and tried not to enter me like a postulant sliding his hands into the reliquary to grip the dry bone. Virginity confers strength, I remember he said when we all took our lessons with him and it was all a game. It is the pearl which purchases paradise.
“I love you, my daughter,” Ctiste said, and her smile cut me. I had refused my fate—that salved all question of dishonesty. No one could imagine it, anyway. The Abir was the pillar of the world. No one would even conceive the idea of harming it, of making it cheap and false. Then, I did not even quite understand what Qaspiel meant by cheated. How could you cheat the Lottery? I only thought: Now that he is king, what will happen to us?
Now, I understand. I know many wicked things, of which this was the first.
Astolfo reached out for me, his miserable jaw working, his mute protest, his silent need. And I might have turned away right then from all that happened later, might have held him and said I was sorry until my throat tore and I could not speak either. But Hajji appeared by me, as if she had always been. She went to him, her little body standing between my sorrow and his rage. She pushed him backward, and he fell like a feather. The panoti climbed into his lap, wrapping her ears around him, and within her embrace I saw him shuddering with tears. Her grace stopped my heart, and I remembered too that night when we had spoken of Imtithal and how he had loved her when he was a boy.
And I think of her closing Astolfo up and it happens together with the summer night when I led John to the edge of the stone river, the Physon, which possesses no water, only boulders, basalt churning against schist. The roar of it, rocks cracking and thundering, drowned out every sound. The priest sat upon his knees and I stood above him, so our faces could touch. I kissed him, I kissed him because he was my husband and my king and my body betrayed me with its want. I kissed him and took my favorite lapis-and-opal ring from my finger, the one my mother had given me, so long ago, in another life. I moved his hand as I would a child’s, digging the furrow by moonlight and the river’s din, placing the ring in the earth, covering it with moist, warm soil. This is my paradise, I said, bought so much dearer than pearls.
The cheer went up in the Pavilion, uncertain at first, then stronger—the world must go on, we must have a king, and deceit was a foreigner here. Abibas the Mule-king was brought out by two young centaurs, hanging in his basket, having been uprooted for the occasion. He blessed us. I felt nothing. And when I think of the sound of the crowd I think of the sound of the river, the stone shattering there, and how I took him later, so much later, to show him the thing we had made: a sapling, whose stem was of silver, whose leaves curled deep and blue, lapis dark as eyes, veined in quartz flaws. Tiny fruits of white opal hung glittering from its slender branches, and the moon washed it in christening light. I stroked the jeweled tree, and showed him too my belly, and the other thing we had made—already swelling a little, already growing. He touched the place where my head is not, the soft and pulsing shadowy absence, the skin stretched and taut, and beneath our tree of blue stone he had spilled his seed into me—it seemed safer than to spill it into the ground.
“Say it, John, say it,” I said, as the muscles of his neck strained in his cry, and I held his face in my hands, and his tears rolled over my knuckles, and I lay quietly under him, with the river deafening beyond. “Say it.”
“I cheated,” he whispered, with our child between us. “I palmed the king’s chit—Fortunatus helped me. A Christian king, a priest who is also a king—God wanted me to do this.”
“How can you know that?”
“I did not fix your gem, only my own. But I prayed, I prayed like a white flame steaming—and God gave you to me.”
It is night in Susa’s Shadow, and they are all gone, every one of them now, and I could have destroyed him. I could have broken his secret, and they would have eaten him and none of the rest
might have befallen us.
That is my sin, and I beg forgiveness.
There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl—faith, hope, and love—and the cruelest of these is love.
THE SCARLET NURSERY
Near the sciopods’ forest (which they call the Foothold) there lies a broad plain, covered in a fine black powder. Each morning, the dawn strikes the earth like an arrow, and the most ornate flowers twist up out of the soil. Colored like molten glass, they coil and creep toward the light, and by noon have grown as tall as a man, each blossom with four large petals like lips open, fiery. Once the noon-moment has passed, they begin to slump and shrivel, and by night have crawled back into the earth to dream, and in the morning will come up again. This repeats, over and over, forever. All my life I was warned not to eat the flowers, that they are fey and unwholesome. Thus, I have always wanted to eat one. I don’t need to eat flowers or fruits, but I can, and I am sometimes curious—what is it like to swallow something that way? To feel it’s weight inside you? But I am more or less at peace, having not done so.
Nevertheless, once in a long while, when the children had some pressing lesson or were away visiting relatives, writing back to me about the color of plantain soup, and how the cameleopards are very difficult to ride, even for Houd, who could ride anything, I would walk out from Nural and not stop until I had reached the black field. I would watch the flowers come up and down in their mystifying cycle, and I would eat the sound of them falling. I would watch the flowers and think that this is the time I will be brave enough to pull off one of the thick glassy petals and taste it. But then I would recall how some cousin or aunt said that the addiction could never be broken, and no wine could compete for the dizzying of the head. Sometimes I wondered how they could know.
One day, a day of my own, a day to myself, I watched the sun setting behind the drooping blossoms, their leaves grazing the black powder. And on that day a woman sat down next to me, quiet and beautiful, without a word. Did I know she followed me? Of course. I hear everything. But a queen ought to believe she can prowl so silently—it was not for me to belie her.
Abir’s gargantuan hands closed gently over her bent knees as she settled into the greyish grass that bordered the field. They covered her body entirely, a shield of fingers.
Abir, Who Was Older Than She Seems: I am grateful for what you have done for my children, Imtithal. They will be grown soon, and better for you, I think. Even Houd.
I, Who Hurt With Love of Them: Do not think so badly of him. He cannot bear it, not really.
Abir, Who Knew: I wanted to speak with you, far from the al-Qasr and the Nursery. I promised to tell you my story, and I believe the time has come—I am certain, for in a few weeks I will not be able to tell it any longer.
I, Who Had Been Paid Enough: I wait. I am good at waiting.
Abir, Whose Hair Was So Black, Whose Eyes Were the Color of Rich Gourds, Who Wore a Dress of a Black Deerskin and Three Jewels: Come, Imtithal. Sit in my lap as you did that day in Nimat. Let me be wrapped in your ears again.
And I settled into her, and I wrapped her in the pale shroud of my body. I looked into her wide, exquisite face, her full lips and her savage eyes, and I tried to remember this moment forever. The flowers shrank down behind us, and she began to speak.