“You misunderstand, my love. They were lies; they never existed. People were afraid and lonely and they made up false stories to stand between them and the dark, until the truth came upon the face of the world.”
“I don’t think so—some of the centaurs worship Athene, and the astomii, too. And besides, how can you tell a false god from a real one? They all promise the same general sorts of things, and hold the same things sacred, and are generally in agreement on how we are to behave.”
“Christ is the only true god,” but his voice was less sure than it had once been on that subject, and he cast down his eyes from mine when he said it.
In any event it seems that the wind had turned against the ancient Christless armies, and no matter how they burned meat and bone and sang to their gods (who were never real) it refused to blow. Finally, a gaggle of priests had a revelation, that a certain maiden should be sacrificed to the moon-goddess, as it was certainly not the war that had offended heaven, but the fact that a pair of soldiers, bored and hungry, had killed a doe sacred to that same goddess, and she demanded blood for blood on this matter. Well, it so happened that the king’s wife and daughter had come to bid him farewell, and the king had a cold heart. He chose his own daughter to sacrifice, which sent his wife mad and began a whole awful tale which would not end until twenty years later, and perhaps more than that. They tied the maiden onto a broad, flat stone, and unknotted her hair so it fell back loosely over the stone, raised a long knife, and plunged it into the girl’s heart. She screamed, then she died. As though her last breath had the strength of a storm, the wind began to blow. Some people, John said, said later that they saw a fawn substituted at the last moment for the king’s daughter, and that she was spirited away to a temple at the end of the world, but most likely they only wanted to make it all less miserable, and comfort the queen, whose fists clenched in the deafening wind.
I thought of that story when we came to the edge of the Rimal, which is the rim of the world I knew and loved, the world which had loved me and brought me up and given me golden fruit to eat and a mountain’s blood to drink and promised me I would never have to grow old; I would never have to die. If I crossed the sandy sea, I wondered, would the spell break? Would I wither up into a crone, a husk of a crone, all my years collapsing upon my spine until it shattered? I did not exactly fear such fate, but I did not feel so confident that it did not occur to my heart, that I did not think of myself as that girl upon the slab.
I am the king’s daughter. If there had been no wind, it would not have been you with your hair unloosed.
But it looked so like the scene John had painted for me of that other war—our little army standing with our ships, ships planted and grown in our dear soil, pieces of John’s old qarib, the Tokos, torn apart and planted in the dark, giving earth, coaxed and wheedled into fast fruiting, so that on some of the ships you could still glimpse a raw, green shine to the black wood, and one or two spring blossoms still fell from their prows and sails the color of green wood.
The wind blew stiff and strong.
But of course we could not leave until the astronomers said that the road across the Rimal was nearing its apex, when it would lead to the Western world, that other place full of Johns, and not simply in circles, over and over again, concentric, leading back to the land of the cranes and Pentexore, which would perhaps have served us all better, in the end. The astronomer in question was a stout fellow, a minotaur called Sukut who wore silver caps on his horns to show his docility. When he moved they jangled slightly, so that he always announced his presence. A week, he said, two at the outmost. But if you asked his advice, we’d have all gone right home and had stew and wine and called it a very nice, long walk to the seaside.
“But we shall be able to wrestle with humans, and feast with them after!” laughed a satyr, his grape-leaf waistcoat starting to brown at the edges. “What could be more fun?”
Sukut shook his enormous bovine head. “The stars say: Sukut, your stew is getting cold.”
“Do they always talk to you like that? Wouldn’t you rather something more concrete, to impress the king with?” The satyr was already bored, however, and eyeing an amyctrya girl over the astronomer’s shoulder, her huge jaw brimming with wine. The satyr made no attempt to conceal his rising interest.
“The stars speak how they speak, and they speak to me, and they say stew is better than war, for only one has nice carrots in it.” Sukut looked up into the heavens and nodded glumly as if to say: Might as well rest your argument, I’ve heard it before.
You’re talking around the ugly part. You’re telling nice stories about the camp—but we spent the whole two weeks talking to the hedge, all the time, and only Sukut was talking to anything else at all.
Perhaps if she’d warned us. Perhaps if Anglitora had said: I should mention that in addition to a lonely helmet washing up with a letter in its mouth, a great number of bones and bits of armor have gotten wedged in the beach, and taken root there, and grown into a great hedge of knights leering at the horizon, trying to get home.
Perhaps if I had. But if I had made anything sound difficult or ugly, no one would have come.
Well, the hedge stood between us and the West. The hedge of knights, tangled with faces and muscled arms and sticks like bones, sword-blades tangled up with plumes, leaves of banner-colors and heraldic shades, fluttering in the sea air, and each of those faces helmed and wide-eyed, staring, able to speak and eager to, their arms twisting away from the blades in pain. Green ooze dropped from their skin. This morass of men stretched down the beach in either direction—so many dead, so many washed away to us, to the end of the world, as John kept calling us, though really, we were as much the beginning as the end.
Christ preserve us! Cried some. Allahu akbar! Cried others, though we could see no real difference between them. Perhaps their leaves shone greener and more silver than purple and gold. But they all looked like John and they all wished to talk endlessly like John, and we could not tell them apart.
Some of the younger blemmyae, noting as I had once done so long ago that their own appearance proved especially upsetting to John’s folk, lit upon a game that soon became all the fashion in our little two-week nation. A female, so as to be most alarming, since none of the knights seemed to be on speaking terms with naked flesh, would saunter up to one of the heads on the hedge and ask it to tell her the nature of God, or whether one ought to draw pictures of God, or how many fingers one ought to bless oneself with. They came up with endless variations.
One would howl: “The Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Spirit, all in one and one in all, the Father who made the world out of the void, the Son born of Mary who die
d for our sins, the Spirit who moves in all things!” Or some version of that. And at least this was succinct.
But another head would contort in fury and cry out: “Allah is the only God, and Mohammed is his prophet! Christ was a man only, and when Sarah could not bear children she gave her handmaid Hagar to Abraham and Hagar produced a son—” Rarely did the second head get that far before the first would attempt to leap out of the hedge and bite him, which he could certainly not do, being a plant and possessed of minimal locomotion. But the furor incited in that part of the hedge would spread up and down until the whole thing quavered and shook, and those heads on the far end had no notion of what the original argument had been, but they snarled and spat all the same. The blemmyae girls and their friends fell into fits of giggles, and soon the better part of the army spent their delight in tormenting the hedge. We could not even understand half of the words they said. The pleasure was in their fury, as when you watch two beasts fight from a safe distance.
Once, at night, when the moon was high and everyone slept, I went to a face and spoke to it. It had a handsome gaze, and I sensed he had been young, like me.
“Who are you?” I said to the face, and then: “Who were you, before you were a hedge?”
And he said: “I was called Yusuf, and I lived in Edessa, which is a city like on a hill, terraced and lovely, where my table forever groaned with olives and pomegranates and almonds, and I had two wives, Sarai and Fatima, who did not quarrel with one another, and out of them I had two daughters and two sons. I loved the daughters best, though I know that sons are the favor of Allah. But my daughters saved honeycomb for me and made my shirts with their deft little hands, and what did my sons ever do but wait for me to die so they could inherit the olives and the pomegranates and the almonds and the honeycomb and all my shirts? My eldest daughter could play the psaltery, even the most difficult fingerings, and she played it each day at sunset, every day without fail, so that in my memory every note is gold and red.”
“Why do you hate the other heads?”
“They are Christian heads.”
“Our king is Christian.”
“I am sorry for you, then. It is hard to live beneath such a king. If I were still living we would probably be enemies.”
“But Christians are harmless. Our king is annoying, and tries to get us to play games with him involving crossing oneself a certain number of times with a certain number of fingers, but that’s no worse than chess. It’s nothing to do with us, really.”