A Dirge for Prester John

It disturbed them all, for no one could understand what they saw, the many four-limbed creatures, the strange cities. The mirror taught only that their land was best, best by a length of ten giants, and they covered the mirror up again—but hung it in the hall all the same, as a funerary rite.

“Why did you not bury his remains, if that is what you do with your dead?” John asked, when I rolled the bronze-set glass from its resting place behind a bolt of salamander-silk. I shuddered.

“Would you love a tree whose trunk was ash, whose foliage was burnt and blistered flesh, black with flames you cannot see, but the tree remembers? What terrible fruit it would bear! Better that he be eaten, as the dervishes are, or given to the river, than to suffer such a planting.”

I showed John the mirror—but he was happy in those years, and his belly was fat, and he gripped me gleefully by the hips in the late afternoons and kissed the place where my head is not, opened my legs and said his favorite mass. He hardly even insisted I speak Latin anymore, or take any saltless Eucharist he might fashion, and only cried the name of his Apostle in his sleep. How could I know?

He put off a second journey to the Fountain. Every year, he was too busy. He did not age, or lessen, but I knew it would have to be soon. And every year I would ask: Why did you do what you did? And he would not answer me anymore, as though silence would wash the deed clean.

And once I asked: When I took you to the Fountain, were you truly weak? Or did you let me believe you were, to soften my heart and make certain I would enter you in the Abir?

He would not answer that either.

John absorbed himself in a great work soon after taking the throne—at least he considered it to be a great work and whatever a king considers to be a great work meets with general enthusiasm. He called all the separate kinds of Pentexore together, and asked that they send a delegation, to tell to him their own stories of how the world was made, what god ruled it, how their bodies had been formed. He meant to fit all of these together with his own faith, to create a great new Gospel that would witness to all he had seen here, that would fit Fortunatus and Hajji and the Tree of St. Thomas and me into Christ’s universe.

“What is it you want from us, John?” I asked of him, as he sat at his desk making notes toward an expanded Genesis. “What would satisfy you? I have sunk to my knees as you asked, I have said your Latin, but it is not enough.”

“You did it without faith, Hagia,” he said.

“Are there magical words you wish me to say? What would a converted Pentexore look like, to you? Can you not just let us be?”

John set down his pen. “It would look like a brilliance of light, Heaven on earth, immortal and also saved by their knowledge of Christ. It would be the City of God spoken of in Revelations. It would be the city on the hill, free of the flotsam and miasma of humanity.”

“You are human.”

But he did not hear me. “God would look upon it and be even Himself exalted. Pentexore as one would live on her knees, eyes cast to Heaven, the Earthly bride of Christ in the form of a nation—Israel in truth, for no country can be said to have been chosen more than this. Each city will recall the name of a City of Man—Nural will become New Byzantium, Shirshya will be baptized Ephesus Segundus. I will remake the world, more perfect, more pure. Everything will have to be re-written, Hagia. Everything. And at the end of it all, I will be a saint and a king, and God will forgive me my sins, and no man on earth but His own Son will have done more to ransom the world. You cannot possibly understand, Hagia. You cannot know what it will mean to my people, to know that magic exists, and perpetual youth.” His eyes flamed with passion and excitement—I hardly knew him. “I have begun a letter, wife. A letter home.

To tell them the wonders I have suffered here. Don’t worry. I told them that I converted the land, and the cameleopards say the Ave as well as anyone. I told them this was a Christian land, and utterly at peace. I have written it all out, the Rimal, the Physon, all of it. I do not know how I will send it, but I shall.” He paused, and gently brushed the place where my head is not with his soft fingers. “I know you don’t mean it, and I knew it, I knew when you put out your tongue for your first communion that you had no faith in your heart, but I did not care, because my fingers could touch your tongue, the sweet tongue of your belly, and I would have given a hundred false communions for that tongue. I left that part out of the letter. But they would not understand, they would think you were devils, just as I first did, and I could not bear for a friar to look on my Hagia and spit at her.”

And I thought to myself of those things Imtithal wrote, that men would come from Thomas’ country and they would be greedy, and they would be cruel, and they would break us between them like bread. But I kept silent, and yes, you may blame me for my silence. I will take the shame of that. No king had ever really harmed us. How could a king do harm? Old as we all were, we were too young to guess. How could I know? How could I know?

And so the people of Pentexore came, handful by handful, to tell John how the world was made. The cametenna orated for seven hours on the pivotal nature of luck, and how its currents and habits could be charted on blue cloth with a kind of holy chalk, and that luck had made everything. Only those with hands large enough to manipulate these currents were the beloved children of that nameless goddess. The gryphon said that a gryphon’s heart beat in the center of the world, which was truly an egg balanced on the star-nest of Am, the mother, and one day the Earth would hatch and a wonderful child would be born. The astomi explained very logically that scent was the only true element in the universe, and all the rest illusions sent by Saillot-Mar, the master of falsity, who sought to trick us all into believing the world was real. The amyctryae, led by Astolfo, though true to the Abir I did not behave as though I knew him, said that the stars were teeth in the mouth of Grandhorm, the Utter Jaw, and the world was His tongue, speaking without ceasing until the end of days.

They came, endlessly, even the apes of the high hills, who communicated by signs that the true masters of the world were the bamboo forests that thought and whispered, and they owed nothing but service to them, who fed and sheltered their favorite children. Even the cameleopards, who said: You are not worthy to hear it.

And John refused a scribe, even me, but wrote these all down himself, in his cramped, tiny hand. And those who shared their tales, he rewarded with words of his own, which none of us understood. He named them abbots and dukes and marshals and viscounts, counts, marquises, and bishops, deacons, and cardinals. One of the apes he called a proto-pope, one of the gryphons an arch-pope, and once John had gone to rest himself with wine and blackbulb, the delegations traded these words like coins, and mixed them all up entirely. But in John’s presence they behaved as though they were very honored by them.

The kingship of John consisted of a wild mating with his blemmye wife and a wild writing of a thing which none of us read. As long as he worked upon it, I reasoned, he could not devise methods of sending that letter, of bringing his world down upon us. But he seemed happy, and when I knew I was with child, I kept it secret for a year and more, to enjoy that quiet thing I knew and he did not. Blemmyae take five years to birth a child—nearly as fascinated with our many ways of reproducing as with our creation stories, John still kept himself mostly ignorant of my own rhythms, and so it came as a surprise. When I finally did tell him, he smiled at first, as a new father should. But later, as he considered all that had passed he grew silent and grave, and did not speak to me for days. At last he broke free of whatever oppressed him, knelt by me and kissed me several times.

“You must understand, Hagia, I never thought to give up my chastity at all. To have a child is witness to my impurity forever.” He shut his eyes. “But perhaps that is past, now.”

He smiled. And some weeks later, as a present, I showed him the mirror.

Anywhere you like, I said. Just think about it, and it will show you.

He stood for a long time, and nothing showed in the dark glass.

Finally, a flame. An orange spark, growing swiftly to a blaze that burned my eyes. A city burned in the mirror, red and black and white, and we heard screaming there. John stood perfectly still, watching a city with domes of dust and crosses of gold and chalcedony flicker by, watching its stony streets run rivulets of blood like the porches of a dozen butchers, watched horses clatter over altars and books burn like phoenix, curling black at the edges and never return. He watched it all burn, impassive. He watched bodies twist on blades, and horrors I cannot begin to record, having seen nothing like it in all my days. I knew that city not at all, but I mourned it, I mourned it, so far away, so far and so lost.

John stood with the drawn damask clutched in his white hand, and watched a sullen orange sun set on the city of dust, and his beard grew even in that moment, his scalp showed pink through his hair, and his spine became a bent scythe, until he was an old man in my sight, and he wept like a nursing mother.

[Hagia’s book perishes here. The red-violet mold defeated me, growing and devouring, sending out their lurid tendrils. No bulb rose up; I ate nothing. I felt only a sadness, an emptiness, as though I had been scraped clean by it all, and left with nothing. Though chapters follow, I will never know them. Pages turned instead to sludge and misery and spilled out over the table and onto my lap like a font of blood.]

THE SCARLET NURSERY

It is years, and they are grown.

I saw one of them in later days, dancing, his muscles straining with sweat, in service to a very lovely lady—the Lottery, infinite humor, had made Houd a dancer. He was very good at it, actually, and I had seen him perform for his mistress, who always wore a black veil. My throat stopped up with tears, seeing his back arch, his great hands move. I was in that life a brewer of milk-beer, and with my arms full of hops I wept openly, my child, my poor, reticent Houd, beautiful and graceful, moving like a lion, his eyes so bright.