“But someone has to have dominion, do they not? We cannot simply have no dominion at all, and moving on the face of the deep and the water and the sand and everything with no hierarchy, no sure knowledge of the natural order. Perhaps speaking things can have dominion over things which do not speak. That seems reasonable. After all, you eat beef and mutton and do not ask their permission.”
“Is that what dominion means? The privilege of eating things without asking first?”
Hagia, you are digressing. Are you not glad I am here to marshal you and march you straight?
Of course. I am too easily caught in remembering. John never finished the work; what is unfinished cannot be important.
The crane-girl put the helmet down on the purple stones of the al-Qasr. It clanged and my child began to weep. Well she might.
The crane went on: “You may blame me, if you like. You’ll find it easier, to blame me for bothering you with the troubles of the cranes. I will take that blame. She who tells a truth must take responsibility for it. She owns the life of that truth, and must see to the caring and feeding of it, the rearing of it, the use of it. And she must see it through to the end. Say what you like—I will not abandon this thing I brought with me over the waste. I will stay by its side, to the very and most bitter last.”
And so began the war, which had ended and yet not ended, was won and yet bitterly lost, upon us yet far off. She brought it to us, but we took it from her, and how it blossomed in our hands.
I am sorry. Perhaps if we had closed our eyes and refused to treat with that war we would have stayed secret and safe. But I became the creature I was made to be: half my mother and half my father, screeching to the moon and striding over the sand. I was determined before I was born. I was always going to be Anglitora, forever meant to be her, unable to be any other one, even if I wanted to be. When I face the west I am my father’s daughter, and there is blood everywhere that I cannot staunch, and there is gold and myrrh too, the stuff of life and death, and secrets and buried things. When I face the east I am my mother’s child, and I am free, and I do not care whom I hurt, for pain and joy come walking hand in hand together across the desert, and I cannot tell them apart.
And when you face straight ahead, Gli? When you face the dawn on the Rimal with me, when you face the sun and the long days ahead?
Then, Hagia, then I am yours.
THE CONFESSIONS
The bones of my back popped and stretched—but I confess that it was a pleasure to find I had done well in choosing my book off the great tree. Hagia’s voice looped and wrote neatly upon my brain once more, and I felt I had come to know her a little, as one comes to know a cousin one did not grow up with, but discovered as a grown man and found to be pleasant company. Yet it could not escape my notice that this was a younger Hagia, one full of sadness and anger, instead of the intelligent and melancholic matron Hiob and I had encountered in the scarlet book with those searching eyes embossed on its cover. Yet there was a pleasure in that too, to witness this other Hagia, not so resigned to her life and her husband’s death—not even yet aware of his death. It was something akin to meeting one’s mother as a girl. Knowing all that would happen to her, but unable to tell her. And the child, the child haunting the margins of that wiser, gentler Hagia’s tale, the full belly of the blemmye’s last rotting chapters, now born and broken and hidden away.
I shuddered; a cold shadow had come on me.
Brothers Reinolt and Goswin bent their heads over their pages; I could see their pates gleaming like eggs in the nests of their hair. What wonders were they reading? I crushed this thought in me—I would not go Hiob’s way, I would not be jealous of the texts; they were not mine to be jealous of. Yet my resistance had less resilience than I’d hoped—I called out and asked them at least the authors of their books. They could not help but absorb that much, even if I had instructed them not to read for pleasure but for the work of copying.
“I believe it is some sort of lion,” said Brother Reinolt. “There is much concerning a deformed child.”
“I could not possibly say,” sighed Brother Goswin with some irritation. “He has not identified himself as of yet save as a knight of St. Albans, and it all appears to be some sort of encyclopedia. I cannot make heads nor tails of it, Brother Alaric, if I am an honest man.”
So sated, I ate some small scrap of bread and availed myself of water. Not for the first time I praised Hiob in my heart, for scribe’s work is hard on all the parts of a man’s body, yet he seemed never to tire. I have always been the lazier of us—but I keep my laziness in a box at the bottom of my heart, and dance with vigor to distract anyone from seeing that weak boy at the core of me who wants only to dream and rest. When I was a youth in the abbey I used to dream out of the cloister window at the chestnut trees in the courtyard, how white their blossoms or how rich-looking their nuts, depending on the season, wishing for any diversion but the illuminated page before me, wishing to do any work but writing out one more word with my cramped and aching hand. Of course now those days seem sweet to me, when I was but learning my Greek and my Aramaic, when Brother Hiob was a junior in our ranks and ruddy of face, insisting upon exercising in the yard each morning to keep himself hale though no wrinkle had yet marked his face. Alaric, he said, if you do not serve your flesh it will never serve you. It is no honor to God to absent your attention from his greatest gift. Eat, but do not indulge, be strong, but not proud, and for the Lord’s love sit up straight at your podium or I shall whip your calves.
It is possible I ought to have listened more intently. He was in a real sense my father, as Anglitora, whatever her matrilineal unsavoriness, was Hagia’s daughter. A child of the heart. My true father thought little of giving me up to the abbey at Luzern and writing me but never; of my mother I know only that she was whispered to be a witch, capable of healing a cough or cursing cattle merely by pulling some herb with her right hand or her left. She was said to be beautiful, but likely with some southern blood in her, this accounting for my own olive skin and dark eyes. She died—put to death or perished in some other wise. My father did not keep me long enough to say and on the subject my memory is silent. Hiob was my parent, and later my brother. His was the only soul who stood guard for mine, and spoke well of it to Heaven.
And I see now that I already speak of him as though he were gone, and believe it, would prefer it to the idea that one day he might wake with that flowered vine in his mouth. I would have him spared that knowledge, that pain, if the sparing of pain were mine to give and not Our Lord’s. His bier stood silent near us, the scratching of our work and the reedy breathing of our brother sawing in time to one another. It was a terrible thing to have so near, but I wanted him close and safe—and well it might serve as a warning and stauncher of passion should these books too, inevitably, begin their foul blooming.
And thus I did not, could not hear, when Hiob’s withered, beleaguered hand began to move, whispering over the petals of a blue and violet flower, his finger moving in swirling patterns while we, yet unsensing, wrote on into the eve.
THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,
THE RIGHT-HAND EYE
Being the Works and Days of Vyala the White Lion, who was Hadulph’s Mother, and also Guardian to Sefalet, the Royal Child, During the War which took the King and Queen to Far Off Places. Written Afterward with the Help of Qaspiel the Anthropteron, as Claws are Poor Claspers of Quills.
Love is a practice. It is a yogic stance; it is lying upon nails; it is walking over coals, or water. It comes naturally to no one, though that is a great secret. One who is learned might say: does not a babe in her mother’s arms love? From her first breath does she not know how to love as surely as her mouth can find the breast? And I would respond: have you ever met a child? A cub may find the breast but not latch upon it, she may bite her mother, or become sick with her milk. So too, the utter dependence of a tiny and helpless thing upon those who feed and warm her is not love. It is fierce and needful; it has a power all its own and that power is terrible, but it is not love. Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language—and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.
If love were not all of this, I would not have devoted my mind, which is large and generous an
d certainly could have done much else, to it for all these centuries.
If love were not all of this, I would never have known that wretched, radiant little girl, nor let her learn her teeth on my heart, which children can find with more sureness than ever they could clasp the breast, and latch upon it, and bite, and become sick, and make ill, and all the worst of the six ails of loving, which are to lose it, to find it, to break it, to outlive it, to vanish inside it, and to see it through to the end.
First I should say that I had no desire to raise another child. Hadulph was my joy, red in chest and mane, and he was enough. As a cub he was all-demanding, his redness a smear of blood against my fur, and when he slept his tail made patterns in the snow of Nimat. His father had been red, too, and sometimes I think all the brightnesses of my life have been banners of scarlet in the winter. Hatha was the father of Hadulph, and though there is little breeding among the white and red lions, he came to Nimat-Under-the-Snow lean and bold, and when he bit the scruff of my neck I was pleased. That is not love, either, not the child suckling nor the sire biting, but oh, it is sweet, and Hatha told me afterward the sutra of Yiwa, his antelope goddess, and among his words were: we are all devoured by the world. Everything we want consumes us in turn, and we drown in wanting forever. That was almost as good as the son he gave me, though I was as surprised as any to bear a single cat and not a litter. Perhaps the heart of Hadulph was so hungry he drank up all his possible brothers and sisters. My heart is like that.
When I was born my mother said: well, you’re alive. What will you do about it? And that was all she taught me of the world. That is a cat’s education—a bit of leonine milk and a short introduction to killing things weaker than oneself and off you go, kitten, into the snow, into the mountains, into the pine barrens and a forest of hearts and weeping. You see, perhaps, how I came to the notion that love is learned, not inborn. My sire was not much better—a big strapping fellow with a cream-colored tuft on the end of his tail, he gave me my name, Vyala, and said: if you want to be cuddled, find a panoti. The world is a toothed place, and I am busy.
I am not resentful. We all move and speak according to the dictates of our blood, our quiet, unalterable drives, and if a lion is gruff with his children, that is because his gruffness was so deep etched he could not erase it if he wished too. Perhaps the folk of the warm valleys are right about their Abir; perhaps my mother and father would have learned gentler thoughts if they had changed their lives like gowns. But the white lions abstain from the great lottery, and I am only myself, only Vyala, for all time, and they were only themselves, and all of us together could summon about a mouthful of feeling for each other, no more.