A Dirge for Prester John

I do not even remember what he said to them, so deep was I sunk in my own thoughts, my desire to stay warring with my longing to see

the places he dreamed of, Constantinople with her endless cisterns and golden domes, Yerushalayim where Imtithal’s love had lost his brother. Autumn strewn with palm fronds and quince-wine, where my husband was a child.

I remember. He told them that they could not be idle while he fought his happy war. That the Devil sought idle hands for His own work. He told them to go to the ruins of the Tower of Babel, where you had taken him years past.

Where we first were lovers under the crescent moon, among the scarlet flowers.

He told them to go to that place and with the stones of it raise up a cathedral to rival any in Christendom. When he returned he expected it finished, and would dedicate it to Thomas and Mary, Mother and Child.

Yes. I recall it now. And I remember a man with huge hands and dark eyes, who stood tall and brown in the night, and he said to John: “Just because that letter says we have converted, and the letter you wrote lied and called us Christians, does not mean anything at all. Two letters have lied to each other—so what? This is not Christendom just because you call it so. Call me Gundoforus, it does not mean that is my name.”

John colored darkly then and said to the young man: “I am your King.” And no one could argue. Being king is also a kind of game. The governed pretend that the king has power; the king pretends he is loved, and as long as no one breaks the mummer’s dance, all is peaceful.

All I could think that night in the strange flat bed you gave me was: how long does he expect us to be gone?

I went to my daughter after all had wandered into sleep. I opened the veils of her bed and crawled in with her. I held her tight, and she put her arms around my neck. She smelled sweetly of child and tiredness, and as I always did when she was quiet I thought: how I love her. How mine she is. Usually she interrupted such thoughts with screaming and hissing about how the sciopods would have their feet severed and bleed out onto the hands of Christian men—but not this time. She nuzzled my shoulder with her blank face, and as she had when she was small, her hands sought my breasts, her mouth needing me, and I felt the old pull of my nursing self, and also of the grief Sefalet called up in me. I began to weep, tears seeping up from my flesh and into her mouth, which worked greedily, as though she starved for me. She drank my tears as she once drank my milk, and the sacrament of it was terrible, but still, what communion I could have I took, and my body shook, and so did hers. I suppose she did starve for me. I did not mean to be such a poor mother. Perhaps I should have severed my finger and buried it as my mother did, or kept a little book for her—but how many times could I hear my daughter predict my death by gruesome means before I began to fear her?

She will forgive you. I know it.

But she could not help but see that I chose the new daughter, the crane-girl with the lovely, normal face over her. When we come home, she will see that we fought together and love each other, that there is no fear between us. And it will cut her.

To be a child is a terrible thing. To be a mother worse.

For a moment, with her mouth on my breast like a helpless babe, I resolved to take her with us. After all, it was a holiday, really. No one would be hurt. John was so frail—his countrymen would take one look at us and fall into a rictus of terror. And then, with a smacking sound, Sefalet pulled her left hand from me and said sweetly: “Everything and everyone you love is going to die, and you will see it all happen, and be spared nothing.”

I cannot bear to think of how it must have been for her when she woke. I was gone. She was motherless, suddenly. I suppose, for her, it was the first Abir of her life.

THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

This is how I began to understand Sefalet: she came upon me sleeping in the great gardens of the palace, between a peach tree and a mango, and the stars jangled overhead and the perfume of the many fountains trickled down the throat of the night. The child walked so silently that I did not wake until she leapt upon me like a tiny animal, and put her hands over my ears. She told me two tales that night, and the next day the capital as one body moved to Babel and everything happened as it happened and not otherwise. It was a moment between girl and lion and darkness, all three of us, before. The first I heard through my right ear, and the second through my left.

I wasn’t always this way, Lion. I mean, yes, I was always this way—my eyes and my mouths were always arranged like this and I never had a face. But when I was little I had only one voice, and it was my right-hand voice, and no one thought I was awful and I didn’t have fits. I don’t remember how old I was but I remember the lilyfruit tree outside my window didn’t come all the way up into my room the way it does now. I started to have dreams. In my dreams it was cold and dogs ran everywhere around me, sleek ones with narrow heads, and they had marvelous leashes, the most extraordinary leashes and collars, too, crusted with black gems but soft and coiling, so that when the dogs leapt into the air the leashes snapped and curled like ribbons. The dogs had a huge black bowl filled with the ocean, and I have never seen the ocean but I know what it is meant to look like, how the waves crest with little white hats made of foam, and how it is purple and blue and black all together. The dogs lapped at the bowlful of ocean and looked at me as if I were being terribly rude not to drink as well. The earth below the bowl crackled with ice and tiny pale snapping bits of lightning. On a shard of ice I saw a black collar and leash just my size. The dogs continued to stare as if they could not believe my manners. I dreamed this dream over and over, night after night, until one night in the dream I put the collar around my own neck, and the leash of gems pulled taut, and I bent my head to drink the ocean from the bowl, and the ocean tasted bitter and heavy as iron. After that my left hand began speaking, and I couldn’t stop it, or even understand it most of the time, but if I had not drunk the ocean it would never have happened, so I think I am as wicked as they say, after all.

I was always this way and will always be this way and I cannot escape anymore than anyone can escape who they were born to be. Where I was before I was born it was cold and the sky was always dark. I saw the same stars turning in a thin, tight wheel over the top of my head. I do not remember how old I was (I am a rope attached to nothing, a black line on a black background, I have no beginning or end) when I began to have bad dreams (I am the eye that dreams of opening). I dreamed of a girl in a bed in a high room where a lilyfruit tree did not quite reach, and the girl had a body she was not using, and the girl had been a twin but I slowed her sister down until she melted away into the girl (time is like that, you can pull the leash from very far away) and now I can be her twin, I can be her sister, and you cannot blame me, she wasn’t using that mouth for anything, and I needed it. I dreamed of a girl on both sides of a wall. I dreamed of twins. The universe is its own twin, and the two of them walk hand in hand down a golden road, into the impossible distance of space, and that is where I came from if I came from anywhere, the end of that golden road, and I tell the truth but no one listens to me, and that is more or less how it always has to go—if people listened, nothing would turn out as it should. If you ask my name I will tell you it is Sefalet and I will not be lying; if you ask why I am hurting the girl I will say I am not, I am her, and she is me, and we are twins but we are not mirrors, if she lifts her right hand I lift my right hand, if she lifts her left hand, I lift my left hand. When she kisses her first kiss I will kiss mine. Did you ever hear of a girl named Cassandra? She had it so easy.

The peach tree dropped a fruit; the mango tree moved its leaves in the night wind. I didn’t understand most of what she said and she would not explain, only curled up between my paws and went to sleep, where I cannot imagine what she dreamed: of the dogs or the child dreaming of the dogs, dreamer and dreaming turning around each other like two huge wheels in one little body.

Love begins as it ends. The beginning is only a mirror held up to the end. Thus, you must pay good attention to how love first appears—what it is wearing, how it stands, with what colors and objects it decks itself, and in this way the rough prophecy of love may be practiced. It does not take an expert to predict that, in the end, I would understand little of anything that had happened, and no one would explain it to me. I accepted that, and hid the girl from the world beneath my chin.

In the morning Sefalet claimed no memory of her speech to me, and in fact seemed quite horrified at the idea that she could speak with both mouths at once. She asked very shyly to ride upon my back as the advance architectural parties went out to the Tower Waste to survey the ground and I took this as an excellent prognosis for our uneasy new world, populated only with lion and girl—the gryphon and the lamia and the inventor were still to come. We would have much time together to do the work of love, which is mainly the work of knot-making, tying breast to breast, binding and hauling tight. I could see how she struggled to speak only with her right-hand mouth: it was a dear and awful thing to see. I spoke to the princess as I would any soul who came to my crags and my caves seeking to understand as I did, and it seemed to delight her, to be treated as though she were not about to say something dreadful at any moment.

“When I was a cub I wanted to love something, but I did not have anything to love, my parents having gone their own way,” I began.

“My parents have gone their way,” whispered Sefalet’s right-hand mouth. “But I’m not angry about it! Who can blame them?”

“Do you know, I think it is a parent’s job to be unsatisfactory in some way? Then a child has something to hurt about

early on, and such irritants usually produce heroes. Children who never hurt grow up to be many things, but rarely do they vanquish much, or start revolutions, or have extraordinary love affairs. If you have nothing to hurt you have nothing to heal with battling or politics or mating.”

“How are you hurt, Vyala?”

“I will only tell you my first hurt today. I have four, but three will wait. The first was that my parents were solitary lions and treated me as a solitary lion, though they didn’t mean anything cruel by it. As I have told many folk: love is a thing you can learn. But if you do not apply yourself to your lessons you will be as good at is as at mathematics you never took the time to squint at. The result of my solitariness was that the thing in me which could love (some call this a heart and I suppose that’s well enough for poetry, but a heart’s main use is to bleed, not to love) hung out of me like invisible ribbons, all loose and tangled. I was so young, I only felt the pain of them, and how they longed to be knotted together with others. These ropes hung out of my chest and streamed before me like braids, but I did not know what to do with them. I had to learn. Just as you do. Your mother and father love you but they are afraid of you—for every knot they tie, another slips loose. That’s not your fault and it’s not theirs. Fortunately I am not terribly invested in anything below the snowline, so you do not frighten me. My knots usually hold fast. I think we shall be able to get on quite well for however long this nonsense with the war lasts.”

“It will never be over,” hissed her left-hand mouth, and Sefalet clutched it with her right hand, her large green eyes filling with tears.

We rested in a town called Ecbatana Secunda, which a gryphon named Fortunatus said used to be called Shirshya, before John renamed everything. Gryphons are cousins to the lion; I smelled Hadulph around him like a red halo, and knew they must have been friends. We would have spoken and shared our dinner, which we cats prefer somewhat more raw than most, had Sefalet not bolted at the sound of the word Shirshya. We sprang after her, darting down little roads and into darkened orchards where the shadows made chessboards on the earth. Everything smelled of skin, and in the thin moonlight I saw trees full of parchment, some with tiny hoops already stretched with pelts ready to become pages, some heavy with ink-berries, some dropping pinecones full of shimmery silk that cracked open when they struck the ground. The gryphon and I rounded a tree heavily laden with scrolls shaped like thick papayas, their skins green and ripe and ready for the harvest.