A Dirge for Prester John

Who stays and who goes? Who goes and who stays?

We lined up on the shore of the Rimal in our best finery. War was a game, after all. What happens when you go to war?

You kiss a pygmy boy, you dance a little, maybe you bite a corporal if it is a very serious battle.

Oh, of course we know better now. But then wars in which folk actually died were so far in the past as to be hilarious tales of fools and blowhards, and we were not like them. John was ou

r king—of course we would rescue his people! Of course we would set our banners flying and march on Jerusalem! Why not? What a delightful sport! What a lovely idea! We would be back in a fortnight still covered in the flowers the humans showered upon us. We could already feel roses on our shoulders, red and white, white and red.

You all wanted to be chosen for the army, as if John were choosing guests for a dinner party. Even I, even I, for what did I know but that war meant mating and keening, the promise of a new drake between my legs and silver for my belt. How we must have seemed to my father; a nation of virgins, sure it would all go well enough once we were in the thick of it. Instinct would take over. What tales we would tell of our prowess.

In the end, a lottery seemed fairest. We are sometimes a people with little imagination. The bronze barrel of the Abir was draped in blue silk and filled with red and white stones. Red meant go, white meant stay. I held Sefalet in my arms, and she put her hands up so that she could whisper to me.

“Mama,” she said out of her right-hand mouth, “everyone looks so pretty!”

“You’re all going to die,” growled her left-hand mouth. I winced. My daughter, my girl, whose mouths dropped such words into the well of my heart. Red stones and white, red stones and white, and I never knew which she would bring me. The way I loved her was like a bruise. It blossomed black and golden; it hurt me so. And when my stone came red, I was not sorry, and for this I am ashamed, even now.

And I, too, for I was the easier daughter to love. I had no second mouth to harm you, only my single, frank self. And with that self I fought at your back. If there was shame in our leaving we have all been punished for it.

One by one they came and drew their stone. Dressed as if for a play, in armor dug up from a cellar or hastily made from sheets of glittering sea glass or hardy ginger-flowers sewn together. One faun drew her stone hesitantly from the barrel, wearing a breastplate of antlers cast off that spring in the molting season, crisscrossed over her slender torso. When the pebble gleamed white in her hand she wept bitterly.

Fortunatus the gryphon drew a white stone; Hadulph drew red. Qaspiel my winged friend would put a sword on its hip, and Grisalba the lamia would stay behind. Hajji the panoti, her ears drawn close around her, kept her fist tight over her scarlet stone, peeking at it and shuddering. Our little court, divided along invisible lines. Most would stay, and I would like to think, oh, how I would like to believe that the war lottery was fair, that John did not seed his friends to come with him, his wife, his favorites. I choose to believe that. The rest lies easier if I believe it.

Sefalet struggled out of my arms and ran to the barrel, thrusting both her hands inside. I called out to her but she ignored me. She raised her fists high in the air and when she opened them we all saw that clamped between the teeth of her right palm she held a white stone, and in the teeth of her left a red one. She laughed out of both mouths, but tears dripped off of her wrists as her green eyes wept, turned away from us.

When Sefalet was only just learning to speak, we took her to the blue mussel shell. At first I could not do it. She was what she was, unique, alone, but not sick. Just ours, unavoidably and unutterably ours. John said to me: “She is broken. She is miserable. We will make her well.”

If you ask what convinced me I will tell you that one day she looked up from her toys, a little golden cockatrice that whistled when you pulled its tail and a cedar ship with sails of silk. She put her right hand over her chin.

“When I am grown,” she said with that mouth, “will I be queen like you?”

But then she let her right hand fall and raised up her left, and out of that mouth came a voice as deep as a man’s, with a growl to it, a cruelness:

“Everything you love will pass from the earth,” my daughter said with her second mouth, “and only one tree will remain, in a field of empty dirt. You can be queen of that, if it makes you happy.”

And at those words she began to shake all over. Light poured out of her body, beading like sweat and trickling, then streaming, so much, so fast. Wherever the light touched me my flesh went cold and frosted over, and I screamed in fear of my own child. John came to her and put his hands on her forehead, but she would not be stilled. He trembled, too, and prayed, and who knows what his god said to him but we took her to the mussel, for that is what one does when a body is ill.

The two old men guarded it as they always had, their mustaches so long they trailed in the swampy, lily-clotted water of the pool, their wrinkles so heavy their eyes sank shut under their weight, and they said to my daughter: “Do you wish to be healed?”

My husband said to them: “Instead you should ask, ‘do you accept Christ?’ and if they answer correctly, heal them, and if not, turn them away.”

The twin old men glared stonily at him, even beneath their wrinkles. In those days we treated John’s missionary work as a charming quirk, as you will do with a friend who has become suddenly fascinated with astrology or some obscure historical period and cannot cease discussing it. Yes, he was king and some of us had been baptized—which seemed to consist of putting our heads underwater, which is more or less pleasant and thus no trouble to us—and it seemed to make him happy. He was king and that meant we were Christian, but this meant little more to any of us than when Xenophy the sciopod queen made us hop on one foot for a century or two so as not to make her nation feel self-conscious concerning their anatomy. Kings enjoy it when a nation imitates them. It makes them feel less alone. We hopped on one foot, we swore by Christ, but it meant nothing. John found few takers for his dreams of empire. We behaved towards him as water towards a staff—we flowed around, however hard he tried to direct us.

However, you cannot move the wind with a lyre, and the old men of the mussel were far too ancient and hoary to care who sat on any throne. They did not hop; they did not say the Ave.

“Do you wish to be healed?” they said to Sefalet, and she replied with her left-hand mouth:

“I am not sick. It is the rest of them you should pile into that shell.”

And her right-hand mouth only trembled a little, saying nothing. That was that—if you do not ask for healing the shell can do nothing for you.

My father told me once that he believed he had not fathered the girl at all. That when he moved in you the Word of God, the Logos, stirred in him. Into the darkness between your bodies the light of the Word poured out, and it was that which made Sefalet, not his seed. I asked him: would that not make her a christ, and you the mother of god? He became angry and told me there was but one Christ and one Mother of God, and if the body is not perfect the soul must be marred. I felt his words on my cheeks, stinging like hands. I lifted my wing, my imperfect body, and he was sorry, but I think I only reminded him that he could not sire a whole child.

She was mine and his. That’s all. Curse enough for any child.

John drew all who would stay behind together in the Lapis Pavilion while the stars pricked the night sky with wounds. He was flushed and happy, a health in his cheeks I had never seen. He was going home. What man would not rejoice? I looked into the violet evening and felt nothing but shadows on me, dread whispering in my daughter’s left-hand mouth as she moved it against my shoulder. I suppose I ought to have denounced him. I suppose I ought to have said: Wait, I remember from stories what it means to be dead. But if all men in the nation of John were as small and weak as he there could be no possible trouble, and if he saw his home and greeted his friends with claps upon the shoulders and tales of old times, well, perhaps he would come home satisfied, ready to settle and take his last walk to the Fountain and be one of us in truth. Leave us be on the subject of God and live forever like everyone else. I did not believe, as many did, that war would be a delight. But I thought it would salve him.

Perhaps there is no salve for my father; perhaps the wound is part of his nature.