Children can be so difficult.
In all of the stories from John’s country, the great concern is: who should be king? Will it be this young, earnest prince or that cruel, decadent duke? Will it be the correct boy, who has lineage, father to father, or this upstart who has not paid his genealogical dues? It seems to me that in that place where John is not unusual, where he is home and hearth and an everyday sort of man, kingmaking must be a kind of sport. All the people of his nation must come to see it happen, to make bets on the players, to wear the colors of their preferred champion and cheer when the lesser contenders fall down in the dust with their heads sliced off or poison dribbling from their lips. It must be very exciting—but the stories usually end with someone being king. That’s the whole purpose of the story. The next tale picks up with another throne, another young, pure-hearted knight robbed of his birthright, another black-greaved usurper. For all that they love to make kings, John’s folk seem to have little interest in the actual business of ruling anything. They like to become, they do not like to be.
John insists that I do not understand these stories. That is probably true. I tell him pointedly it is no one’s fault who their father is. One can neither blame nor credit them for the habits of the creature who flopped about on their mother. John enjoys, I think, being shocked by me. He would not admit it, but he likes the blows I give his heart. He says Christ is king, and all earthly kings strive to be like him, and thus, as Christ’s tale is one of rising from lowly beginnings to take His rightful place at His Father’s hand, of course the histories follow this natural course.
It is hard to understand what foreigners mean, even when they have been so kind as to learn the local language. But now John is king, and it is with some dry amusement that I note how his world gave him only tools to want a crown, not to wear one.
The girl is not my daughter. But she is mine. Her name is Anglitora. I should have said that at the first. I told her that this was her story, but if she had been my daughter she would not be so hopeless when it came to letters. I would have taught her to write her own history, how writing is like giving birth to yourself—no one can do
it for you without making a mess. I have tried to give her her letters, and she knows enough to disapprove of my progress. Enough to scowl at me, her long, muscled neck shining bronze in the candlelight. She cannot help her father or mother either, she hoots when she is upset and passes a hand over her eyes and oh, how like John she looks when she does it:
You must get to the point. If you do not get to the point quickly, people will get confused. The point is the war, not that father was foolish when he was young. The point is how I came to the al-Qasr and the sun was so bright it bounced off the helmet in my arms and father winced, and so did you, and all the birds cried out because they are birds of omen and you cannot be made of omen without knowing the future. Just say: one day a man named John came to Pentexore, and he was a stranger but you were all kind to him anyway, and when the Abir rolled up like a great stone he became king and you became his wife, but you already loved him, so that was all right. It’s easy, really. It only starts to get interesting when I come across the desert.
I laugh in the dark, and it is the first time I have laughed in so long. She is still such a child, hardly even forty, and this is what children think: the story only begins once they enter the action. Nothing came before them and what came after is only distant, indistinct, seen through a haze and a veil. I’m sure I think this way as well, though I seem virtuous to myself, in that I believe the story of Prester John began when I found him lying face down in a pepper-field. This is a mountain in the path of the story—you cannot assail it or walk around it. We discovered him and brought him home. Myself and Hadulph the red lion and Fortunatus the gryphon and two pygmies whose names I have forgotten. That was how it started.
Anglitora disagrees—it began with a crane, obviously.
But I have said it is her tale, and I only have the telling of it. I bow to her will.
I do recall that it was morning. A pure light fell down through the banana leaves and papaya trees, turning the sun and shadows green at the edges, turning the air clear and sweet, and we had not yet opened the court for the day’s doings—John ate his breakfast of red rice and blackbulb, conferring with one of his advisors, whom he called a proto-pope and who was truly called Vidyut, a vaguely confused but well-spoken orangutan with a passion for philosophy. John called Grisalba, my dear friend and a lamia, an archbishop, and she liked that very fine. I was queen; everyone called me so, though it never sat right with me. A queen should be more than I was in those days: just holding on, to John, to Hadulph (whom John called an abbot), to Fortunatus (a cup-bearer) and Qaspiel (a cardinal) and all I loved, and to my poor child who wept so bitterly and could not make herself understood, even as she howled on her mother’s throne. For I had a child, a princess for our kingmaking tale, before Anglitora came.
I must stop for a moment. To speak of my child strangles my heart, which is already throttled half to death. If another woman were writing this, she would say: Queen Hagia had two daughters, one fair and one monstrous. But I am writing it, and the fair one puts her warm human hand on my knee and her cool crane’s wing over my hair and whispers:
How fares my sister, do you think, with all of us gone? I remember how you loved her, then. I remember how she laughed at my arm.
Do not ask me. I cannot know. It was morning, I know it was morning, that is all I remember. It was morning when she came, striding up to the door and the court like you belonged there, like you knew us all so well and even despised us a little. I remember how you looked, how tall and strong, the muscles in your legs and your good arm, this girl with long blue-black hair and skin the color of the Rimal at sunset and a gaze that cut us so deeply we understood you without any need to speak. That arm spoke so loudly: a girl in amber armor, her breastplate full of golden veins and bubbles, one arm strong and human, one arm a long, pale wing, a crane’s wing, its longest feathers grazing her knee. And in her arms like a child: a bronze helmet. And the sun hit it like a blow, glancing off and hitting us each with a closed, glowing fist.
Yes, that’s how it was. That’s it.
John’s face moved horribly—continents of memory drifted there, and I watched him work out the lineage involved, how her jaw looked so like his, her nose, and how that wing, that tell-tale wing called out his sin and could not be denied.
“Kukyk,” he whispered, and that was Anglitora’s mother’s name. I am her stepmother, but if the crane had the rearing of the child, I had the rearing of the woman. Perhaps it is truer to say that the crane-girl had two mothers and no father to speak of.
It’s no one’s fault who their father is.
I cannot say if I was hurt. I was not jealous—John had told me the tale of the crane and how he made love to her while the nation of birds fought and mated with the nation of pygmies in the valley below them. I thought it was a beautiful story, one which made sense, had a good beginning, a logical progression of events and a satisfying conclusion, unlike his endless parade of paladins becoming king to no good end. I did not think of a child. I did not think of an epilogue. John and his crane-maid did not battle, they only mated. But the crane must win that fight, to determine whether the bird or the pygmy owns the get. Without blood drawn, their offspring could never be one or the other, human or crane, but both, confused, in one body. How hard her life must have been. I do not think I was hurt, not in the way women are hurt in John’s stories when their men mate with others. I had had a husband before him. We all have our histories. I think I only looked on her and envied her strength and beauty, for my own child fell into one of her convulsions even as her crane-sister set the helmet before us.
This is what Anglitora of the Gharaniq said to us:
“Never mind how embarrassing this must be for the king. I am here to embarrass. Take it, fold it up in your pocket, and consider it later. Pay attention now. I have brought this thing and it is a war helmet. I have taken the skull out of it to make this business cleaner. In the teeth of the skull was a letter. I have brought them both so that you will not think I am lying. For a year now this bronze flotsam, and iron too, have washed up on the shore of the Rimal, in my mother’s country. Sometimes heads are still stuck in them, and breasts in breastplates. Our beaches are clotted with them. There can only be one conclusion—something is happening on the other side of the great sand sea, and it is ugly and bloody and full of death. The drakes determined that I was best suited to deliver this news, to shame you, if I needed to, into considering how full of danger and blackness this single helmet is. It brims, my father, it spills over. How long before living men come piling up, living men who also want to be king, who are like the men Alisaunder and Didymus Tau’ma spoke of? How long before the Rimal is not an ocean but a road?”
And we quailed, all of us. We thought of every tale we had heard of John’s world. And I, I thought of the mirror I had shown him, the mirror of the phoenix, and all those domes burning, all those palm fronds red with flame. I thought of the unspooling of grief within him, and how it had undone much of what love had sewn up.
My father had gone mad, you mean to say.
No, not mad. Let us say he had come apart, and one half of him was my husband, and one half of him was his former self, and the two did not enjoy their own company. Like the Word and the Flesh of his unfortunate, torn-apart god, and I wish I could say which of them I had to mate. If only I could have simply destroyed the man from Constantinople and kept for myself his better parts, his kindness and his big, round laugh, his curiosity about each of us, his excitement concerning the birth of our child. But where his two parts met stood the mirror, the glass showing all the darknesses of his former life, lit with fire and shouting for help.
Each day John sat at the phoenix’s mirror, watching a city burn, a city I did not know, could never know, with domes and spires and crosses and crescents. As he watched, the city burned over and over. His face grew ruddy with the flames, his eyes empty as he listened to the screaming and the thundering of horses on city streets, yet he would not let it be. Perhaps a phoenix’s
mirror only shows that which burns, I tried to argue, but he could not hear me. Cross-legged before the high glass he strove with his great work, a rewriting of his Bible that could include us, all of us, without breaking the Word of God over his knee.
And in the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, he wrote. And between the two a land where the Heaven could embrace the Earth and merge with it, as man with woman and beast with beast. And the Earth was without form, and void, and the Heaven was without end and border, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the sea of sand. And God said let there be light, and there was light and the light was the word and the word had form.
“It’s this part that I can’t work out,” he said once, before the mirror kindled his brain. “Where dominion comes into it. I can keep God blessing us and saying be fruitful and multiply, that’s all right, but if He gives man dominion over all the beasts and the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and every living thing, where does that leave Fortunatus and Qaspiel and little Hajji? Where does it leave you?”
“Not long ago you would have said ‘under your dominion’ and been satisfied,” I mused, and stretched my arms above my shoulders.
John seemed discomfited, as the part of him that loved me warred with the part of him that had come over the Rimal seeking God.