A Dirge for Prester John

“Wake up,” Sefalet whispered again, more loudly. “Don’t you want to see how high a tower can go?”

Gahmureen turned toward the voice but did not wake. Her arm fell limply to the coverlet, and her brow creased, as though her dream bled and pained her.

“Wake up,” growled Sefalet’s left-hand mouth, pressed against her face, but not so tightly that the words did not echo perfectly clear. “It’s time to do the Devil’s work.”

And the horned woman sat up straight in her bed, her hair falling over her naked breasts, her eyes utterly clear and sharp.

“Did you say something, child?” she said, and her voice sounded hard and bright as first light.

I had to ask her. You would have asked too, if you’d been her lion, her great cat. I didn’t even love her yet, but I had to know, because worry comes before love. Doesn’t mean I wanted the answer.

I let her eat first, I’m not cruel. I can afford to wait—so can we all, forever if it takes so long. I said: One more grape, girl. You have to keep your color up. I said: If you don’t eat your meat you’ll have bad dreams. I said: Sit back in my tent, royal child, there are pillows here for you, and a bowl of water to wash your hair in.

And around our dinner a city rose up, bustling, makeshift, the thousand tents of the cathedral town to come, ready to work when Gahmureen could hold the whole thing in her head, when she could see it building itself under her long hands with their black nails. Torches lit, blue tents and green and gold along the wide plain, and the red moths gathered around the flames in their own concentric cities, and adzes were cleaned and axes were sharpened and the grinding of blades floated around our little space where grapes and meat and clean hair met.

I asked. I had to ask. “You used a word, before. Devil. Do you know what it means?” Because of course I knew. When John says devil, he means us.

“Yes, Father told me,” said Sefalet shyly, her right hand clamped over her face. I was always making her talk, and she could never be sure which of her would answer. It made her nervous and it made her stutter. But a child must speak, or how will the world know how to behave in its presence?

“What did your father tell you?”

“The Devil lives in the other place. He tempts us into sin.”

“Where is the other place?”

“I don’t know. Father didn’t say. Maybe it’s beyond the wall,” Sefalet said sullenly, and balled her left hand into a fist.

“What does the Devil look like?”

Beneath the girl’s hand, a dark circle of tears grew. “Like Qaspiel, he said. Only black and red all over and with wings like a terrible bat, and horns, too. But Vyala, Qaspiel is beautiful, and I’ve seen Utior, its friend, and its wings are black like a bat’s, and it has horns that are just so awfully red! And Utior is beautiful, too, and gave me a ride on his shoulders, and didn’t even flinch when my left hand told it that it would mourn forever and still be weeping at the end of days. Everyone has horns and wings and a tail and everyone lives in another place and everyone sins—”

“What’s sinning, little one?”

Sefalet wailed: “When you do something that Father’s book says you oughtn’t! But everyone does, and so maybe this is hell and the other place and me and mama are the Devil too! I don’t want to be the Devil!”

“Hush, love, hush, my cublet. What did you mean, then, when you called the cathedral the Devil’s work?”

And finally her left hand won out, and seized her right with vicious claws, throwing it aside to clutch her jaw like a hideous starfish and tell me:

“The Devil’s work is entropy. Don’t know what that word means? It’s beyond a lion’s ken. The Devil’s work is time and death. The Devil’s work is not the building of a tower to heaven but the throwing down of it—his work is the cracking of the world, and we will build but the guardhouse over the chasm. But don’t let Father convince you there’s a morality to it. The Devil just is. Entropy occurs. Extropy, too, and you can call that God if you’re lonely. Want another answer? The other place is Constantinople, and the Devil sits on a purple throne.”

The child turned her blank head upward, abject in her shame and her unhappiness. I padded to her and let her fall into my chest—it is a big chest, and deep, and sometimes a body needs a place to fall. I tucked my chin over her poor, bald head.

“I wanted to be good for you,” she whispered. “You had never met me, and if I could only be the right-hand Sefalet all the time, you would love me, and never be afraid of me or angry with me, and my life would be clean, with no awful things in it.”

“Oh, child,” I purred. “No one’s life is like that.”

Grisalba the lamia came for us in the morning, a flaming orange chiton concealing her coppery tail and revealing her more human beauty, and though I don’t believe Grisalba knows anything but stern expressions, she gave her softest one to the sleeping princess.

“Bring the girl,” she said. “This won’t be pretty, but better it’s now than if she finds it on her own.”

I roused her, nipping the scruff of her dress and bidding her sink her hands in cold water and eat the last of the fat green grapes, grown warm and soft overnight. The three of us went peaceably through the work camp, and I marveled that Pentexore could remember how to build things when growing them was so much easier. John had a lecture about the greater virtue of sweat and labor that he kept for such occasions. Anyway I was not even sure one could grow something so large as a cathedral. The al-Qasr had always been there, since before we came. Certainly half the purpose of this church of Thomas and Mary was to outstrip our native palace, a thing greater than the land could gift.

Breakfast fires crackled, and the smell of sizzling fruit and fatty lamb made the air rich. The huge black stones of the Tower ruins lay strewn about, slabs of darkness in the dry, sweet grass. Some had grown pelts of rope and hooks already, ready to be moved on Gahmureen’s command—only she had not yet presented herself or made known her desire.

Grisalba said nothing. She did not like me, I suspect, the newcomer in their l

ittle family, stranger, who had not seen the great man come. She stopped finally and gestured at a tree that sprang up in the center of the ruins like the root of the Tower itself.