Gahmureen retired to her tent, a tall, narrow affair of yellow and orange silks with the ceramic face who guarded her house mounted at its apex. If its eyes opened, she was within, if they closed, she had left for the building site. She napped. When she emerged she announced that they would build the cathedral around the tree, preserving it, and the sun would enter through a maze of glass holes, finding its way eventually down to a soft silver pool wherein the tree would grow forever.
Sefalet looked at her feet, and then at her tree, somewhat mollified, though still eager to bite anyone who came near her. I sat a short distance away, and we made a tableaux, the three of us: the child, the leafy parent, and the lion, half-drowsy in the hot sun.
Gahmureen and the cathedral loved each other. The horned woman, so tall and lithe, her hands always still, but with the impression that they moved so fast they only appeared still to us. She was full of her cathedral, the panes of its windows were her eyes, the heights of its spires her spiral horns. It loomed so great inside her that she could hardly speak to anyone about it, or she would weep with the beauty of it that only she could see. It took her a week to explain that the foundations should be laid out in the shape of a star. Another to direct the clutch of six-armed hexakyk in the sculpting of the gates, which should depict a tree bursting with fruit—every people of Pentexore should hang happy and serene from a branch, all of us together on the black sethym wood. I found her presence peaceful. She owned purpose, even her blood owned it, and love is purpose. She loved that church even if she did not care that it was a church or had to have a certain number of crosses in it. I knew she didn’t care because she called the crosses compasses, as if they merely showed the directions, and Fortunatus had to tell her many times not to tilt them all so that they pointed north together.
Once, at night, when the moon fell on everyone sleeping and the glistening stones of the foundations, she said to me: “When I slept, I dreamed of my mother Gahmural, and every time she laughed, a cathedral came out of her mouth, and I wore them all around my neck like jewels. I will never make anything else so huge and perfect as this, but no one will know it, for it will belong to a god who has never come to court me.”
After we had been hauling rocks for a fortnight, out of the tangled briar-wood a little creature came toddling, creaking and squeaking as he went. Finally it accomplished the long plain and clasped Gahmureen’s pale bluish hand in his. The architect looked down, surprised, and beheld a little knight made of pieces of cradle: rocking runners and good red wood and a carved canopy and bits of swaddling to keep his joints together, looking up at her with adoring yellow wood eyes. The cradle-knight she had made to protect her long-gone mother had returned, and it remembered her. She smiled and squeezed its hand. I thought the tiny warrior might shake himself apart with joy.
The tree spoke often. The Hagia trunk said things like:
You are so beautiful and clever. I think you will grow up to be like a gourd, hard on the outside, for hungry elephants are always about, but on the inside soft and orange and sweet. I love you, my gourd-girl. It was so thoughtful of you to visit me.
Do you have brothers and sisters?
I am not a monster. Now I am divine, like the Ophanim, and God is a kiss.
Did the Hagia who is not a tree teach you this song? All the blemmyae sing it. It is about the hero Guro, who had shoulders so big they gave her the Axle of Heaven to hold up so it could steal a kiss from the sun.
The crosses with their mouths that spoke in John’s voice, clinking against each other in the wind, said things like:
You are so beautiful! Why, you look just like me, with all your mouths! Who could doubt you are my daughter?
My sweetest, the Logos is the Word and God is a Word, and the Logos is light, and when Christ was a boy he suffered fits, too, because his body was not big enough to hold the light. There is no shame in it. Perhaps you will grow up to be a saint. What an addition to the family crest that would make.
This is Eden, Sefalet. This is the navel of the world. Somewhere, somewhere here, I promise you, there is a gate of gold, and a sword thrust through it, blackened and burnt, its flames long since gone out. Somewhere there is an apple no one was ever meant to eat.
I love you, my child. I will never leave you.
No wonder Sefalet could not part herself from it. This is what every child dreams of—a parent who cannot leave them, who loves only them, who knows songs and rhymes and tells them they are wonderful over and over. The tree was not John nor Hagia—it was their love, it grew out of love, it was only their loving portions, only the parts of them that made a child. What they gave her was not mammal love but tree love—permanent, unchanging, growing but slowly, asking for nothing but a bit of water in return. But it sounds like mammal love, and it binds like love, and by the time you notice it is bitter, it’s the only kind of love you can hear or see.
I wanted to get the girl free of it. But what could I offer against her parents, come home to her, kinder and simpler than they ever were?
Her left mouth had said nothing for days. She was happy. But she did not eat, she did not call for water, she did not even speak back to the tree. She only listened, and wept, and ate all the love they could drop from their boughs, asking for more all the while.
THE VIRTUE OF THINGS
IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM
7. Some Questions I Was Asked in Pentexore
by Phoenix, Salamanders, and Hexakyk
Are you a Christian man?
Do you understand Christ to be more like an ox (excuse us, three oxen) or more like a door?
Do you find our country pleasant?
Do you think the world, having had a beginning, must have an end?
Do you need help to build your nest?
Do you believe in the holy apostolic Church?
Are you the male or female of your kind?
> How long will you stay?