A Dirge for Prester John

He seemed so kind, now that we were at war. At peace, even joyful.

That is how humans are built, I think.

The sharks came in the evening of the fourth day at sea. We had encountered a calm patch in the wind, and lashed the ships together so that folk could move from one to the other, clap their comrades’ shoulders, share some wine, practice with their new weapons.

You have forgotten to say how we brought barrels full of black, soft earth and how we had planted in them swords and bows and arrows and axes and polearms, hoping for the best. This is how Pentexore plans for war—they become farmers. The bushes had begun to bud just as we set out, so the smallest of us, pygmies, cannibals, panotii, plucked green swords, still hard and unripe, bows with a pinkish cherry-cast to them, polearms barely as long as your leg and smelling strongly of green apples. Only enough to train with—the rest to be given their due time to bloom.

It was as you say. I was only hurrying to get to the sharks more quickly.

We had a lovely supper of fish and brandy and all had enough to eat (how I relish the thought of that now). The panotii were showing off their bows when Sukut spied them—glassy strange shapes moving in the sand. I did not and do not know if you could rightly call them sharks but the effect was the same. Nearly transparent in the dusk, they seemed truly to be made of glass: Teeth, gills, fins and all. The setting sun exploded through their bodies, and they surrounded us, terrible crystal fire-fish.

But no fear came over us—had we not come to prick flesh and draw blood? The hardy green polearms flew from a dozen hands—anything that could reasonably be called a harpoon shot out from our city of lashed ships and into the diamond bodies of the sharks. The poor wretches took bolts and arrows and blades in their flanks, and they cried out—

Like bells ringing—

—Like goblets pinging against one another when a toast is called. Everyone shouted and hallooed—well, not I, who could not credit how fast Pentexorans could become something else entirely, and fling weapons at beasts they did not know. Not Anglitora, who did not fight what she could not mate with. And not John, whose face went white before he pressed his brow into my shoulder and whispered:

“I had forgotten, when I crossed, how terrible is the life of the sea.”

The blemmye boys whose arms bulged to the task hauled the corpses on board. They sliced into them with triumphant yells, hacking and cutting at the stubborn stuff, only to find the creatures quite hollow save for a translucent swim-bladder and some vestigial digestive flotsam with little more to it than a scrap of silk twisted into a rope. These tossed aside, the skins proved hard and not at all as prone to shattering as glass, and big enough to make an impressive number of breastplates and cuirasses.

A great success, the first victory of the war. Never mind how we heard those ponging, bell-like wails of despair following us across the sea, never ceasing till we made landfall, an endless, impotent weeping.

A young phoenix made berth on the flagship with us. Her name was Niobe, and unusual among phoenix, her plumage shone pale blue with flecks of gold, much as some terribly hot flames glow. She clutched a pot in her talons, and sat upon it most of the time, protecting it jealously. Though I could see how seasick she often felt, being unused to ships when she might well have just flown and saved herself the trouble, she never let the little jar go.

Do you suppose there is a road through the sky over the Rimal, too? If some crane flew west, would she find herself back in Pentexore unless she flew at some special time of year, when a path through the clouds might open and lead her to Jerusalem? I suppose I shall never know, flightless maid that I am.

“What is in your pot, Niobe?” I asked her one hot afternoon, when the glare off the sand slashed like blades at my eyes. The pot gleamed, several metals winding around each other, silver and gold and copper and tin, with veins of malachite and carnelian and other gems.

“It is myself, queen Hagia,” she answered, and I begged her not to call me so.

The blue bird went on, her golden gaze cast low. “Only four of us remain, now. Rastno is gone, the wall stands firm, and the phoenix have no hope of finding Heliopolis more. By this I mean the city of the sun, where we must inter our old ashes, stand watch at our own funeral. We met in the dark, we four, under wide and fragrant trees, and I had the least to stay for. I have had no chicks, nor did I wish for any. I have devoted myself to diving for gems into the crevasses of the earth—it is good work and the Abir chose it for me, but others will take up my slack. And—well. I was Rastno’s mate, years and nights and ages ago. We burned a cloud to death in our passion and when I mourned for him I screamed so loudly a lake boiled away. I should seek out his birthright if anyone should. You know he was our king? We say Bazil. He should have held the secret of Heliopolis in trust for us. Instead we died and died and died. It is our secret shame. Alone among you the phoenix are short-lived. The Fountain has nothing for us. But if I can find Heliopolis we will all be saved. We can go on. We can have children. Lakes may live. I made my nest of pearls and cinnamon and roses and sugar cane, and burned myself—I had held back for centuries, as long as I could, for without the rites in Heliopolis even the resurrected phoenix must waste and die. In this pot are my ashes. I have hope that the city of the sun lies in the West, and I might find it among the wreckage of the king’s country. It is a small hope but small can be good and I am cheerful—the air is very sweet at sea.”

I remember her. It always shocked me how big the phoenix grow—I had never seen one; I had always wanted to. Among birds they are considered the best and most beautiful. And Niobe did shine. Nearly as tall as John—and that tail! I wish I had a tail so bright.

The crossing was full of people telling stories. Telling their lives to anyone who would listen. To strangers they hoped would be friends, to friends who might have forgotten. That was how I discovered that Ummo the sciopod had won all the foot races in his village as a child, only to suffer a knee injury while truffle-hunting—but thankfully the next Abir had made him a herald, at which he felt he had aptitude, being louder than any of his siblings. It was how I heard the tale of Aya the astomi, who took the veil in her third century, tattooing her nose with extraordinary patterns like starry ferns and buds. She showed us the markings that indicated her as an adept, a huntress of the first order, sworn and bound. Even those I knew well could not resist the fish-pot and the circle of tales—I had not heard that John had occupied much of his childhood running errands for the bustling, big-armed fishermen of the harbor, on a sea called the Bosphorus, bringing chopped or rotten or otherwise undesirable fish for bait, gutting mackerel, selling baskets of blue tails to wives of little means. Some told of their journeys to the Fountain, and how they had choked on the water, and how they had got some bauble of a tigress or anthropteron along the way. Some told of their last Abir, and how the barrel had spun, and how they had held their breath—oh, the anticipation of it!—and how they had kissed their mates and learned to make cloth or laws or soup, as their glittering stones commanded. Some of the stories were dear, some plain, some boring and poorly told. But the telling of them passed the time, and when we ran out of true tales, we made up new ones, and they were also dear and exciting and plain and boring and poorly told, but how we laughed at every one.

We bet with them. When we played Knuckle with Niobe’s glass beads. If you lost, you gave up a secret. Aya never cashed in, she saved up the secrets they owed her. You never know when I’ll need them, she said, and her eyes shone. I think by the time we made land she had a fortune in secrets.

There was a serious young man named Houd with enormous hands, his body like a dancer’s, and he told two tales—the one he spoke, in which he worked as a glassblower and loved it, because his breath permeated everything he made, his own, private breath that moved like

a secret in the glass that gathered dust in homes and huts and palaces, and how he had once known a phoenix who saw his work and called him a good boy. And another, one we all knew but which he did not tell so much as allow to sit beside him while he talked of glass. Of a nursery, and two sisters, and a governess. None of us could call out that second tale. The Abir forbids mention of other lives, other selves once we have passed the barrel and into the new century. But we all knew him, even though we did not say, and I saw Hajji weeping by the stew-pot. Later, in the dark below decks, I saw her wrap her ears around him, and him close his great hands around her tiny body.

And then there was Sukut, who adjusted the silver ring in his nose and the golden one in his furry ear as he spoke in his slow gravelly way, how would I have come to know and love him if he had not ladled out his portion of stew one night and lowed:

“My mother was a maze-maker. It’s a traditional line of work for my kind. Even my cradle, the size of a little boat, full of twists and turns I had to solve before I found her at the end, her breasts heavy with milk for me, her expression proud and mild. As a calf I was always looking for her, seeking her, and everything in the world was a maze. At the center of every maze, warm arms and a furry cheek and praise and sugar-reeds to suck. My bull-father would hide in the corners and leap out, snarling and roaring until he could stand it no more and collapsed into laughing and ruffling my hair. I was fully grown before I realized some roads just run straight, with no turns at all. Some houses don’t have traps and puzzles to solve to get to the kitchen and supper in a clay bowl. To tell you the truth I miss it. I’m always looking for the false wall and the invisible lever. Nothing seems quite real unless you had to seek it out, peek under rocks for the key to it. I thought I’d be a mazer as well—I was brought up to the business, I had an aptitude. But the Abir said: No, instead, an astronomer and a seer, and no calves, either. I went down to the al-Qasr to find the last astronomer, a salamander called Lyx, and I asked her to train me, so that I could be good at seeing, and be happy in my life. Lyx wanted her belly rubbed, for this is a sign of fraternity among salamanders, and I was honored to do it—her skin felt like baking bread, hard and soft and hot all together. Cow, she said while I scratched her, and I didn’t mind it, I am a cow, at least half of one. Cow, she said, you have to make the fire yourself. And don’t be stingy; if it’s not hot enough, the portents will freeze to death. I asked if astronomy didn’t mainly have to do with the stars. Lyx laughed, which sounds like crackling, sparking branches when a salamander does it. Listen, cow. The Abir’s just a bunch of rocks in a box. If you want to be happy, you have to interpret the text a little broadly. Stare at the stars if you like. I am what I am and what that is is a fiery lizard, and I say astronomy is mainly to do with fire. What else are stars made of? And you know, when I did use the broken old looking glasses and spying lenses to see the sky, I found that the heavens are a maze, the most beautiful and perfect and difficult one you can imagine. And astronomy, I say, is mainly to do with mazes, and the solving of them, and the finding, in the center, warm arms and a furry cheek and breasts heavy with milk, and praise—and also trapdoors and invisible levers and roaring and snarling. It all depends on which way you turn.”

Oh, Sukut. You smelled like new grass.

It was that night, after he told us about the sky and the salamander. That was the night the cloud came.

I should have known it for an omen.

The moon rose up so high, like a hole in the sky we might slip through. Nearly all slept; I had the night watch, and you boiled grasses to keep me waking. It came down like a curtain, as golden as the sand, a mist so thick I could hardly breathe in it. But in the mist I saw lights, like distant lanterns, pale and green or bright and glittering amber, floating lazily in the fog. And my stepdaughter’s face, I remember her face so clearly—

It was not a cloud. It was a Cloud. Descending to the sandy sea to close me up in its arms, me, who could not fly to meet it, most unworthy child of the Sedge of Heaven, it surrounded me and made an agony of my skin but also a hideous pleasure, an ecstasy like death and like birth and like the breaking of the egg. The Cloud spoke and did not speak, it loved and loathed and longed for unnameable things, and this is what God is like, what John thinks he understands but does not, that clouds and gods land like luck or bloody mishap. All you can do is survive them—

I looked up into the lights and felt the weight of them, heard voices and heard nothing, and when I turned Niobe filled my vision, her wings outspread so huge and so wide, her body illuminated, burning and not burning, her head thrown back and her beak aglow, and rapture was everywhere but I could not touch it—