A Dirge for Prester John

Abir, Who Would Change the World: I was born in Nural. You have never seen the cametenna birth-hall—I know you have not, for we keep it to ourselves. The males are fragile when they are in heat. Their skin goes clear and delicate, like thin glass, and on the surface of that skin they project—oh, it is beyond beauty—a play of color and light, shapes like frost shivering over their elbows, their chests, but the frost glimmers like prisms, and the chosen greatmother must breathe deeply to control her desire. But in such a state, if a male were even to trip and fall, he would shatter. So when the time comes, they cloister, under rosy domes and draped tents, a luxurious place where the males eat and drink and play upon small jade flutes—for when the heat comes upon them they go mute, all their energy going to their skin, their seed.

I suppose one day Houd will turn to glass, and go into the hall. I cannot begin to imagine him mute.

It takes twelve males to impregnate a greatmother—the process is gentle, and complex, and takes a full year, after which we emerge gravid and birth follows some time later. We do not speak of it to outsiders. But I will tell you, Imtithal—the children call you Butterfly, don’t they? I will tell you, the pleasure of it is profound, and so too the great flooding of the heart.

My mother was prolific—she produced six young. But I was the strongest, and the only female. She was a judge in the court of the queen at that time—an astomi called Cai, Kantilal’s grand-daughter. My mother’s judgment held sound and absolute in Pentexore—but she earned that, with her wisdom, her severity, and also her mercy. At the quarter-moon market she sat at an ivory podium and heard complaints. Cai loved her well; they were great friends, and drank the white lions’ beer together when each day’s work was done. I hardly knew the queen—Cai moved beyond my circle of brothers and teachers.

I believe, if we are civilized and do not ask after the other’s age, that I am younger than you. But you lived in Nimat, among the panotii and the lions, and a peculiar peace has always held sway there. Here, in Nural, in Pentexore, when I was young—it was a vicious place. Two of my brothers killed each other over a racing debt; kings and queens changed like hands of cards. I saw more of this than most, because of my mother. She would bundle me in a long green swath of silk, and I heard her cases, too. Afterward, she would say: Abir, what would you have decided? And I would say: That bad man stole from the other one. The other one should get to steal anything he likes that belongs to the first man, which is a child’s idea of justice. Or she would say: Abir, would you steal, if your friend had more than you, and you envied her? And I would say: Yes, but I would not get caught. The Fountain made everyone certain they could do anything they liked; they had no fear of death, no shame. They had lived so long that life became boring, and more and more cruel pleasures were needed to make them feel alive. I recall one male pushed another cametenna against a wall while he was in estrus—the male shattered and died. After the mating season had passed, my mother demanded a reason. The male said: I wanted to see what it would look like.

People have not changed since I was a girl, not really, but I felt the savage blood of Nural so keenly then, sitting with my mother at her podium, and it frightened me, when a blemmye-man looked at me lasciviously, that perhaps if my mother were not looking, he would take me, for I was not much less pretty then than I am now, and who would stop him? I was small and weak, I could not hurt back. I wanted to hurt back. I was no different.

But children grow up, even when they are afraid. And I went to the Fountain, and my hair grew so long I braided it into ropes, and I watched, and learned. I watched the queen, I confess, more than I ought to have. I watched how she ascertained those who lied to her, those who meant ill, by smelling with her prodigious nose their sweat, their anxious, mean humors. She could even smell their dreams, their ambitions, and when she looked at me, when she breathed, she grew disturbed, and grave. But still I watched her, and wished I had a nose like that.

I was chosen to be a greatmother early, because my mother had birthed so many, because my brothers had died that year, because I was strong and unmarried. I remember the nervous preparations—the baths and endless soaking, to prepare my skin and make it porous. I remember unbraiding my hair until it fell to the floor, and entering the hall, where I could choose males of my liking. And they were all so beautiful, the bold frost on their shoulders, their quiet hope and adoration. I chose, I fell among them, all twelve, and their kind eyes rejoiced, and more I shall not say of this, for it passes the bounds of decorum.

You must understand, when a cametenna is pregnant, she possesses a strength hardly imaginable. All the vigor of her children yet to be and their dozen fathers moves in her, and if s

he is not careful her feet will rend the floor and her idlest gesture will shatter bones. This is why she cannot give birth in the hall. She would kill her mates, though she never meant to touch them. I carried my three offspring, that you know so well, not being so prolific as my mother. My head swam with the power my body concealed, and closeted with my mother, who knew all this well, I confessed that I had conceived not only young but a gnawing ambition: I wished to be queen. I wished to be safe, and make my children safe. I wished to play a very long game, at the end of which Pentexore would be utterly transformed. Was this myself or the voice of my gravid strength in me?

My mother said: You know how these things are done. Cai owns a cleverness and wariness few could claim. And it is all uglier than you know.

And in my mother’s reply I heard the necessity of it—for her child she would betray even her friend to death. I do not like that world.

And so I did kill the queen before me. I have heard that you told my children this. I wish they did not know it—but there it is. It was not as hard as I expected. She smelled me coming, but pregnant I was too fast and strong, and I tore her limb from limb in the throneroom as easily as breaking a toy. Her guards watched—she had done the same to the king before her; they could not interfere. The release of the awful strength in my limbs made me shudder—I had held it in check so long. At the end of it her blood drenched me, and at the core of the wreckage of the queen I saw the drop of the Font her flesh clutched so dearly trickle out onto the floor and steam away. It was over. A silver vessel lay empty and waiting, in the hall. I interred her myself—it was only right.

And I birthed my young, and worried that some other ambitious whelp would destroy me when my strength had ebbed, and so departed. I took up my palanquin and my elephants and traveled my country to discover a city where folk did not consider that living forever meant drowning in the worst cruelties they could fashion. Where despair was not the only law. And I found you.

I, Who Had Desired Cruelty, Too, in My Time: Majesty, there are many in Nimat who have no good qualities.

Abir, Who Did Not Believe Me, Not Really: But not in you. And I brought you here, and the rest you know. Save for what I intend. And what I intend is to break immortality over my knee. I had to wait, you see, until my children were grown, so that no one would think me selfish. I would take wealth and power from my own young, too, not just theirs.

You do not understand.

I will remain queen at the next quarter-moon. No one else will be the same. We will have a wonderful Lottery, and in it will go all possible lives, and we will draw from among them. Whatever the Lottery dictates, so we will live, for three centuries, and then change again. I will only remain queen until the second Lottery, to minister and salve, for it will be difficult. But my children will draw lots, and go where they are bidden. And so, I hope, will you. Can you see it? Boredom will cease and there will be pain, terrible pain, when the Lottery separates families and lovers and children and friends. But that pain will take the place in us that lies fallow now—in a thousand years, in two thousand, Pentexore will forget deceit and rough instincts. They will forget, even, that Imtithal the Butterfly was not chosen for a nursemaid by a spinning barrel, and debate how else your fate might have gone. History is an old, confused crone. But she has her lessons, and her mercies.

They will understand that you must let go quarrels—for the Lottery will erase them, regardless. They will understand the essential truth of the Fountain: if we do not love each other, forever is intolerable. We will find a rhythm. We will create a heaven. It will be done, and no other queen need rot in those silver vessels.

I kept my silence. I did not really think it would work. Memory works its way.

Abir, Whose Face Was Illuminated By the Last of the Sun: Do you know the god of the cametenna? She is nameless, faceless, the seven-bodied goddess of luck, who with three hands throws dice, and with four prays to herself. The Lottery will be a devotion to her. I will sacrifice a whole nation to her holy games, and she will bless us, and protect us, and guide us on the correct path.

You will join the Lottery, will you not? You came from so far. If you draw a stone, many others will know it is a thing of virtue.

And she was my queen. My service belonged to her.

As we rose to leave, Queen Abir strode out onto the field of black powder. With a grace I would not have imagined in those massive hands, she bent and plucked a single petal from one of the blooms, small and miserable now, almost shriveled back into the earth. She held out the wrinkled, glowing thing to me. Its pollen smeared her fingers. As though I meant to tell her a story, I climbed up into her palm, knelt, and she placed the petal in my mouth as I closed my eyes and in that moment I was her child, and I trusted her.

The petal tasted, oh, it tasted like light.

THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN

I admit it was I who showed him the mirror.

I thought nothing of it—only a mirror, and I am not vain. Rastno the Glassblower made it, long ago, when he was but young, and so clever with glass and all burning things. It hung up in the portico before the pillar fell, draped in damask, for its visions were distracting—but for Rastno’s sake we did not wish to dishonor his best-beloved child.

Rastno is gone now, wherever phoenix go when they die and cannot find their way to Heliopolis to bury their old ashes. He who reasoned that his glass should be so terribly, ineffably fine, since no flame but his own could make him tremble. And true to this he filled the capital with every wonderful thing that could be made of glass. And mirrors, of course, mirrors of every shape. But the mirror I showed to John was his last work. Rastno went into the flame and did not come out again. Laughing before he sparked his embers, he said that the mirror he fired in his own feathers would be a wonder beyond even the Physon, the churning river of stone.

When they dragged the shard of glass from the charred bones and blowing ashes of his pearl-lined nest, when they cleared from it the blackened ends of Rastno’s beak and talons, and scraped the boiled eye-wet and blood from its surface, they found a sheet of silvery glass limned with mercury, so pure that it showed the whole world, wherever anyone wished to look, into any dragon-ridden corner of the planed earth.