“If you are a king and a queen, what are you doing out here in the countryside with no retinue and no servants, no palanquin or canopy to keep out the rain, no jesters or cards to amuse you?”
“Why, we were waiting for you,” the girl breathed.
And that was how I came to meet Ysra and Ymra, twin monarchs of Pentexore. I must, however, point out that I never met any other hexakyk, and thus cannot say if they all bore the characteristics of Ysra and Ymra, only that the monarchs told me all hexakyk possess the following attributes: six arms, long life, great appetites, imperviousness to fire, a taste for poultry, excellent skill at games of chance, pleasant singing voices, and an organ somewhat to the left of the liver for storing up grudges to be dealt with at a later and more convenient time. I certainly found all of those claims to be accurate.
I confess that nowhere in the world did I have it quite so good as I did in Pentexore. No sooner did I wish a thing than that I found it around a corner—no quicker than I became irritated with walking alongside my diminutive hosts when a proper king might have had at least a horse and preferably more than one but that Ymra, the long-haired queen, took my hand and squeezed it and a palace of extraordinary complexity and good features rose up before us.
3. On the Mount
The Mount rises out of a wide violet wood whose trees have a kind of fruit shaped terribly like hands covered in blue ink in swirls and patterns, held up in gestures of prayer or supplication, all of which aim for the palace. The castle itself, if I may call it a castle, seems not so much to have been built but grown, each wing or tower or buttress winding slowly out of the main body like blossoms. Indeed, the tips of the towers open very like camellia blooms, stone petals wide and graceful, with marble stamens arching up to fashion delicate courtyards on the topmost heights. Lanterns in every window give a tremendous glow, thousands of pricks of light, as though the Mount had called down all the stars of heaven and compelled them to burn only there, bright and pale and captive. Black stone, marble and granite and perhaps some gems, even, onyx and black sapphire, make up the entire edifice, which might frighten and domineer if not for the extreme loveliness of it all, how the palace seems to lean in to listen to the quiet prayers of the wood, and the moon positions herself just so as to be the crown of that dark stony maiden of the vale, as if she could not help but take her place in the grand design.
Once, in Spain, I had cause to walk among the singing fountains and pristine arches of the Alhambra, to converse with a woman who dressed as a man, who kept her hair shorn and her face unpainted, and this woman was a student of the heavens, not an astrologer but dedicated to recording the movements of the heavenly bodies for no other purpose than to understand them, not to predict weddings or imperial pratfalls. I loved her abjectly, though I and the rest of the court accepted with sadness that she was most likely a witch. What can you do in this degenerate age? Women are either nuns, mothers, or witches. If she’s a nun you’ll never have her, if she’s a mother she died a-bed, and your best chance, lad, lies with the witch. A Christian man abhors such things, but I say it’s good to have a trade.
She would not take me to bed, however, for I did not like to ply the woman’s part and she knew only the man’s. We merely kissed, for kissing is egalitarian. Had I spent another fortnight there I am sure I would have played the salamander’s part if it might have won her. But between kisses she told me her favorite theory, for she had such favorites as other women have among their lapdogs, and she said to me that if a great house could be built so that its every arch and cornice and wall and gate lay on the earth as the orbit of the sphere of Saturn or Jupiter lay in the heavens, the house could take on the attributes of its celestial twin, such that the house of Saturn would be cold and imperious, and its lord would devour his children and beat his wife before bedding her, and the house of Jupiter would be decadent and worldly, its lord having many wives and lovers and children all trampling over the place, but merry as anything.
When first I saw the Mount I felt the memory of that Spaniard rise up in my chest, but I could not yet say what sphere might own that house.
THE CONFESSIONS
I cannot say if I find it a comfort that Hiob lives still in his dreaming, that some spark of his intellect has survived his trance. I want to know, of course, I want to know what he dreams, what he thinks, what he knows if he knows anything at all. I remember his going on about Seth and the grains of Paradise, that he ate the seeds of the great tree of Eden and a great tree grew in his mouth, from whence such marvelous wood was harvested. If I were to cull the woody fibers that lash Hiob to his bier, what could I build of them? Would anyone ask whence they came if I sent up a chapel of green vines and twisted half-lily monstrosities, if I honored God with the fruits of my brother’s flesh?
Such strange thoughts invade me with the perfume of the Hiob-hedge. I tried to cut the leaves from his face, where two white blooms had opened in the place of his eyes, their centers shining red. They possessed a horrible verisimilitude to his own steady gaze. But the leaves swarmed back as thick as ever, as soon as the blade’s shadow ceased to fall on them.
And yet, perhaps it cannot safely be said that what writes on that parchment is Hiob. It is an automatic thing, what he does, and perhaps the book Hiob devoured burned him quite away, scoured his flesh clean of anything that was the man, and left only itself, only its words and spores and fruiting seeds, only its memories of a land long dead. The book still wrote itself through him. Those blank spaces that so maddened my brother—well, he has them now.
And I note that all thought of this having been some strange fiction fled me sometime after I saw the tree with my own eyes, after a girl with one white wing spoke of war.
I could hardly concentrate on my translation, hardly give attention to that hideous child of John’s—and how Hiob would have balked at that. Bad enough John had a wife, but two deformed half-breed children, neither of them sons, neither of them whole, both damned by their monstrous mothers. I imagined my brother shaking his head, flattening his hand on the page as if to make it not have happened by sheer force of his desire not to know it.
In our little house the evening shadows, rimmed with orange and shot with violet, had grown long. I bade Reinolt and Goswin to eat, and each of them dutifully supped on boiled eggs, some mashed red root I had discovered the woman in yellow paring and cooking under the embers of her fire, and quaffed down a yeasty beer I could not myself stomach. I changed the page beneath Hiob’s withered hand, braceleted as a woman’s in a lattice of vines studded with tiny yellow blossoms. I could spare little time to check his work—soon enough our own books would start to rot, and we would all ride the same ship across the same sea, towards perdition and flowers in the sockets of our eyes. But I am weak, after all—I could not help glimpsing the passage he scribbled, and I recalled it, that thousand-year past night when we raced the red mold together, and he brought me to his side to marvel at the colors, the colors moving as if with fell purpose, to defeat us and keep what is secret secret.
Qaspiel held out its long-fingered hand, and made its palm flat. Out of the flesh a single, stark red passion-flower sprang up, its petals ruffling slightly in the night breeze.
I confess I was at a loss to speak. Hagia laughed cruelly, and the passion-flower began to move, a sinuous writhing, and from it a kind of music came, though like little music I had ever heard. It was a plucked string, a lyre, but also a thing with breath, a flute or a trumpet or both together—but so soft, so quiet, and all of it came from Qaspiel’s body, and all of it filled the night around us, slowly, water dripping into a goblet until it brims over.
“It is my voice,” Qaspiel said gently. “My second voice, the voice of my self that was once part of a bird that was part of a woman. It is not less than my first voice, but only more fragile.”
I took up my work once more. I had only one voice, and it owed allegiance to Hiob’s work, to the finishing of it. Whatever singing blossom is Alaric’s own voice, it is drowned in the bombast of Hagia, and Vyala, and that other John, the trickster-fool Mandeville—and that is the scribe’s lot, the translator’s fate. I do not envy Hagia in the least—it is a horrible and painful thing, to stand naked on a page before the world, without someone else’s passions to protect you.
THE BOOK
OF THE RUBY
Now tell them how we crossed the Rimal. Tell them about the sharks. It’s very exciting; it’ll set the right tone—they will feel what we felt, thrilled and interested in the world beyond, not thinking for a moment of death or darkness or a door beyond which we could not pass, a river we could not cross.
She would have me skip over the hedge. I had intended to tell that next. I think she does not wish to remember it—nor I, nor I.
John told me a story once, just after we were married. He was sunk in a black mood, as he had attempted to give the Eucharist to Fortunatus and a few other gryphons who had stumbled upon his lonely Mass—he had been delighted to have parishioners, but they only gobbled up his bread and drank his wine and snuffled for more beneath the altar cloth. This story happened long before his Christ, and perhaps John longed for that world, when he would not have been burdened with the terrible and thirsty work of con
version.
There was a great war, he told me while we cut pages for his improved Bible. Some say it was over a woman, some say over trade routes. I did not understand why anyone would fight a war over a woman. She chooses the mate she chooses. You cannot force her, I insisted, but John promised me you could. Anyway, a certain pleasant country was situated on the mouth of a great sea, and had grown rich because of it, so the whole business with a queen called Helen and how she had left her husband for a prince of that pleasant country was probably a pretty thin excuse to do what everyone wanted to in the first place. But when all the armies were assembled and all the warships painted with dread and glowing eyes upon their prows, and all the nations come to a place called Aulis, where they would launch their fleet, no wind would come. And some of the generals believed the wind had died because the gods thought the war unjust.
“Christ thought it unjust?” I asked.
“No, no,” John said. “Christ had not yet been born. They believed in gods called Athena and Zeus and Ares. They were infidels, but it could not be helped—they were born, grew up, fought in twenty-year wars and died before Christ came to redeem man. They could not know the truth of the world.”
“I have heard of Athene, and of the lightning-god Zeus. Alisaunder’s gods—did Christ kill them?”