“Then he is a bad king,” the head sighed. “If he lets you believe it is only a game. He has counted your souls in his ledger already, I promise. If you are truly going West, you will find this out soon enough, and so will he, I wager.”
“Did the other heads convert you?”
“The other heads came thundering into Edessa with horses beneath them and golden hair upon their heads, and they broke my table and ate my olives and my pomegranates and my honeycomb, and took my daughters to bed and made my eldest play her psaltery for them, and wore my shirts and made my sons swear to a cross. They turned out my home looking for gold, but I was rich only in family. So they dragged my wives behind their horses for sport.”
And then one of the other heads strained toward Yusuf and hissed: “And did you do less when your cursed people took Edessa from us? I had a fine house there, and everything had begun to quiet down—Edessa accepted us, and I married a Saracen woman who took Christ as her Lord, and she was as beautiful as any Gallic girl, and we had a baby son, and our table, too, had enough brown bread and yellow oil and black vinegar and green limes. We went to Mass, we rested on Sunday, Edessa was becoming a virtuous place before you trampled in with your filthy, shitting horses and your burning oil and you drove us into the wilderness and cut my head off in front of my wife!”
“That house was not yours, Baldwin! Not the house, nor the wife, nor the son, nor the brown bread nor the yellow oil nor the black vinegar nor the green limes! Not even the table! What kind of shitting craven wolf complains because what he stole was stolen back from him? You slaughtered us because your Pope was bored one Tuesday! You are demons, all of you, demons and pigs.”
Their rage threatened to burst the skin of their cheeks. “Oh, stop,” I whispered, “please stop. Why did you not just plant your own lime trees and bread trees and oil trees? Why could you not plant your wives’ bodies and love them still? Why do you fight over food and gold? Surely nothing could be easier to come by.”
And they stared at me as though I had suggested they fly to the moon. Oh, what was going on in that world, that even its dead cannot stop arguing over it?
In the end, I tried to make peace. “What is the difference between a Christian and a Muslim?”
Yusuf said: “A Christian takes what is not his and calls it God’s will. A Muslim is a civilized man.”
Baldwin said: “A Muslim takes what is not his and calls it God’s will. A Christian is a civilized man.”
And I wept for both of them, and for myself who understood nothing.
John never told me who won Helen’s war. I suppose it was only important how the war began. Wars end how they begin. The beginning is only a mirror held up to the end.
THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,
THE RIGHT-HAND EYE
The child is driven to the ground of her making, Fortunatus said. Without her mother she is unanchored, and bolts to anything that reeks of maternity. Let her have comfort in those hands.
Gryphons are sentimental. Sefalet would not be moved, even for food or water. When finally she fell asleep, we gathered her up and the winged cat carried her on his back. Behind us, the tree of hands made mute, miserable, grasping motions after the girl, the pale of its palms receding in shadow.
Some mornings later, the better part of the architectural expedition turned off the well-planted road in order to reach the Tower ruins—but Fortunatus and Sefalet and myself went on down into a silent town without a name, and the gryphon said this was in order to wake the architect.
John had left us no plans for this cathedral, no preferences for this or that many gargoyles, towers, flying buttresses, what style he envisioned for it, or how many folk he meant to be able to fit into the place. We were, in humble fact, somewhat unclear on the meaning of the words cathedral, gargoyle, and buttress. Therefore, Fortunatus had settled upon a plan to rouse a strange girl from a strange sleep, and as if sensing a kind of sister, Sefalet shrieked and wept until it was agreed that she could be the one to whisper in the sleeping architect’s ear. She would wake and do our work for us, and all would be well. I would hold tight to her left hand so that the poor genius might not be terrified by some guttural song of death and horror blurting from the princess’s palm.
The town shone at the bottom of a valley, a wash of blue. Every house had been painted some shade of deep, lovely inky blue, from cobalt and indigo to a pale sort of sky color, and each roof had been woven by a blue-mad thatching of lavender and vanilla leaves. Not a sound issued from the wide, single street, no market dinned in the center square, no man put out his washing; no woman tanned her kill in the runnels. When Fortunatus whispered, it echoed like a shout.
“It is on account of Gahmureen,” he said, pawing the earth. “Her father was a great goldsmith, perhaps the greatest, until his daughter was born. She dismantled her cradle and built a mechanical knight to protect her mother from roving lizards when she went out to hunt. It could not speak very well, but still, such a wonderful thing! And that when she was but a child! However, the works of Gahmureen are so intricate and so great that she falls into a depthless sleep as soon as she completes them. After building the cradle-knight (who doddled after her mother all through the forests and did not let the lizards bite her) Gahmureen did not wake again for a whole summer. Her father thought her dead until she woke when the first autumn apple fell and asked for breakfast and if they did not need the roof mended. She has invented many astonishing things over the many years, and she never seems to be awake during the Abir. Of course her parents draw their chit from the barrel along with the rest and have gone off to be blacksmiths and pearl-divers and who knows what else. For a long while, a little machine woke her every century or so. But she has not come up out of dreaming in many years, for all built things wind down. Still, we have always known where she was, if we needed her. She sleeps deep and soundless at the bottom of her valley, in her blue village, Chandai, where folk left her in peace, dreaming of machines and waiting to be woken by her father or her mother or her clock, none of whom will ever come now. But we will come! And she has slept so long that surely she can build a cathedral—am I saying it right this time?—which will amaze John into shutting up and leaving us alone. This is my hope. I also hope she is kind, and does not snap at her assistants, and perhaps that she has green eyes like Hagia, whom I miss so.”
For myself I hoped she would be good enough at her job that I could laze in the sun with Sefalet on my belly and have very little to do with it. Lions, lacking thumbs, are not greatly interested in architecture until it is finished and ready for us to nap in.
We crept through the village and toward a great cobalt house with a round black door and a number of flourishes at the windows, the chimney, and the corners of the roof—I could only call them flourishes, but they clearly had a purpose and just as clearly I could not understand what they might be. One flourish was a knot of pulleys and empty water-spouts folded together and rusted to unusability. One was a serpent with an apple in its mouth, all of sapphire. As we came to the door a flourish hidden in the hinges creakingly unfolded and rose up to regard us: a face of bluish ceramic, with silver eyes that opened and closed at intervals, and a mouth that opened through a series of weights and bellows, which also, I supposed, produced the voice that wheezed at us while blue dust spilled out of the mouth.
“Shhhh,” the face said. “Gahmureen sleeps.”
“We have come to wake her,” Fortunatus said. Sefalet kept quite still, her
hands clapped over her face so that her eyes could take it all in, large and round and roused. The face seemed to think.
“You are not Gahmuret, the father. Nor Gahmural, the mother.”
I could tell that the gryphon meant to have a conversation with the face, to discuss with it why we should be allowed in, and keep up his manners all the while. It is a good way to be. But I had been living in the mountains so long, with only such company as sought me out, and perhaps now I feel I could have behaved differently, but then I simply nosed the face aside and pushed the door open with the flat of my head. Sefalet reached mutely for the face as though she meant to console it for its failure to keep the threshold fast, but I, crouching, pressed forward into the blue house towards a great blue bed. It took nearly the whole space of the central room. A stove puffed away near it, keeping the sleeping inventor warm in her rich bed, piled with turquoise pillows and purple coverlets, ashen silks and ink-colored blankets. Gahmureen slept unpeacefully, on her side with her knees brought up to her chest, one bare leg tangled in the cerulean linens, one arm thrown over her head, as though her dreams tormented her. Her temple shone damp with the night-sweats of countless years. Two straight horns, pearly and bright, the horn twisted around itself but straight as a staff, came up from her head, and each of them had impaled a pillow. Her black hair wound around the horns many times, tangled, drifting in the breeze through the door.
Sefalet climbed down from my back, keeping her left hand up so that her mouth was clamped shut but her eye stayed open, afraid of the lovely woman in the bed, her great horns, her very likely poor temper at having been woken. She reached out her right hand tentatively, as if to a wild dog, and placed the mouth of her palm next to Gahmureen’s ear.
“Wake up, lady,” she whispered. “Don’t you want to build something beautiful?”
The inventor stirred in her sleep; she moaned lightly, as though her dream had torn at the edges.