A Dirge for Prester John

I think I was waiting, in those early years. Love can be spent out, spooled onto the earth and lost. I was saving up my capacities. For Hadulph, for all those who came to sleep in the curve of my ribs and be eased of their sorrows, for the royal child to come. They asked so much of me. I had to be alone for a century or two, just to store up fat against the love they would claim. Still, even still, I have that core of feline hardness that is my birthright, and if I do not wish to be moved, I am not moved. I often think that is the only power in the world, to chose whether one’s own soul is swayed or stands stony and unwavering.

And so when my son came to me in my frozen cave and told me what he would have of me, I stretched my paws and yawned and chuckled. Why should I care that the queen had had a broken child? She should have thought better of letting a human breed her. It was never going to go well, a blemmye and a man. They took their chances and came up with a monster—too bad, none of my concern.

“Don’t be cold,” he said to me, and I laughed again. His friends were not my friends. “War is coming. Someone must stay behind.”

I would stay, but not to be a nursemaid to whatever the creature was that ran stumbling down the halls of the al-Qasr. I did not want to know about men over the Rimal, I did not want to see what the mirror had shown. We do not live on the Axle of Heaven because we wish to be part of the affairs of Nural. Those who live in the heat have no delicate feelings; the sun burns it out of them. They think their own destinies are the destinies of all.

“Come and see her,” he said. “Come and see her and decide then.”

My son had spent too long at court, where no one speaks their desires. Where they coax and wheedle instead of wearing their hearts before them like a white blaze on red fur. He had forgotten how to speak to me, how to tell me that he loved Hagia and always would, and her child by the foreigner was his own child, too, for when her belly was great he bit the scruff of her broad back and she said his name with such tenderness it cut him, and he loved that child because it was broken, because with every breath the child said: John and Hagia should have let each other alone.

I understood him without his needing to growl out his passion into the snow. I chose to be moved. I would go. What harm could it do me? Ah, poor Vyala. Even you can be fooled—love can always hurt you.

I settled on the amethyst floor of the al-Qasr. The sethym columns twisted with silver rising up like bones around me, and the smell of incense and bowls of banana flowers in my nostrils, and my claws clicked on the stone. They brought her to me, in a little palanquin of emerald and black silk—draped with a weight of coppery veils which served to hide her face. The child could not have been more than ten or twelve years of age. Neither Hagia nor John came with her, only servants, and at the time I thought this cruel. Later I understood that if they were to leave her with me they wanted to know how we two would behave toward each other in their absence; as with two cats who are strangers, often one must simply place them in a room and let them have at it, if ever peace is to be hoped for afterward.

“This is ridiculous,” I growled. “Take off her veils. She is not a leper.”

The servants, a pair of bull-headed boys, drew back the cloth and for the first time I regarded Sefalet, the daughter of Prester John and Hagia of the Blemmyae, princess of Pentexore.

I confess that when I heard of the results of the Abir that throned them, I wondered how their child would fare. A blemmye has no head and a chest full of her own face, and a man most certainly does have a head, and a blind, mute chest without so much as an eyebrow on it. That afternoon I had my answer: Sefalet had a head, but it was bald, and had no features upon it—no eyes, no mouth, hardly a nose at all, perhaps a ridge of bone beneath the flesh, but the rest smooth and blank as a page unwritten. It was certainly very unsettling. Her dress, all copper-colored like her veils, fell loosely enough that I could see no face upon her body. Poor lamb, to be deaf and dumb and faceless. But had we not all seen stranger? A tensevete has a body of ice—why should she be so singled out and veiled away?

The girl put her hands up over her face where her eyes ought to have been. On the backs of her hands opened a pair of calm and beautiful green eyes, though red and wet from some past crying. She watched me for some time out of these strange eyes before turning over her left hand and placing it where her mouth would have been, had she been born her father’s daughter. On the palm opened a mouth, with dark lips and teeth gleaming.

Out of the left-hand mouth she screamed horribly, a scream from the very bottom of her being, where all had gone black. She let her left hand fall and put her right over her mouthless face, and out of a second mouth on her right-hand palm she cried out: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!

In her distress, the princess crawled toward me from her palanquin, the mouths of her hands kissing the floor, her blank face nodding miserably, her fingernails breaking against the amethyst, and I could not help it, I growled at her, my muzzle drawing up, my teeth showing in the shadows. What could I ever do for this tiny maiden? The growl came without my meaning it to, as one growls when a tiger is near, a cat as great as oneself, as capable of rending, of ruining. I feel shame now, when I think that the first sound I gave that girl was a rumbling snarl.

Sefalet collapsed at the sound of my growling, flat onto the floor, as if b

y sinking into it she might escape forever. And as I watched her, she began to shake and quiver, a kind of fit taking over her body, and out of her hands and feet poured a kind of awful light, illuminating the corners of the hall, the palanquin, the bull-headed servants, and me, turning us all the color of the moon.

When she had done, and by the expression on the servants’ faces I knew this was not the first time she had quaked or shone, I rose and padded over to where the child lay, her faceless face pressed into the floor, her arms and legs spread out like the spokes of a wheel.

“Well,” I said to her, “you’re alive. What will you do about it?”

I settled down on my haunches before the girl, waiting patiently. A cat is good at waiting; perhaps the best. I lashed my tail from side to side. The bull servants watched me, and I watched her. Finally Sefalet lifted her head and put one hand over her face so that her eye regarded me coolly.

“Tell me your griefs,” I purred to her. “I know that your body is strange and that you suffer fits—you may skip those. Tell me what is wrong with you. Tell me and I will take it away.”

“You can’t take it away,” said the left-hand mouth.

“I can, though. It will be a long journey, and at the end of it perhaps you will not be Sefalet anymore, but I can take grief and bury it under a stone.”

“That would do no good, a sorrow-tree would only grow in its place, full of little unripe princesses weeping sap,” said the right-hand mouth.

“How old are you, child?”

“I am nine years old.”

“And tell me the truth, the lion’s truth, which has teeth and delights in blood: do you know what afflicts you?”

She held out her palms to me: the left-hand mouth smiled, and the right-hand mouth frowned.

And at that moment I agreed to care for her.

Her mother left with John and Anglitora and the rest of that long chain of fools dancing along their sandy dunes with death at their head, laughing all the way to Jerusalem. That tale is none of mine and I do not want it told in my presence. It does not matter what happened out there in the desert. Let the historians have duels over who gets the writing of that mess. In my heart, where it is always snowing and a girl with no face is always weeping, it matters only what happened in the al-Qasr, between a gryphon, a lamia, and a white lion; it matters only what happened to a child-princess in her violet tower.

THE CONFESSIONS