“Not as easy as it looked, is it?” he says ruefully and I am just so grateful to see him again, without vines and blossoms like worms devouring his flesh. He holds out his hands. “It’s the Year of Our Lord 1699 and the end of the world.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” I say.
“It’s always the end of the world. Why
do you think they keep predicting it? Christ said some that heard him speak would see the end of days. Paul thought he would stand at the throne of the new city. And everyone since just can’t wait for it all to come down. No one wants to be impolitely early to the ball, and fashionably late just won’t do this time.” Brother Hiob looks so happy, as though he has slept for a fortnight and awakened to a breakfast fit for a bear.
“The world isn’t ending,” I say again. My dream-mind moves slowly, syrupy, a blue sludge.
“Every day a world ends. Just not yours. Well, every week at least. Bimonthly at the outside. Circles close, trajectories complete. A new world is coming, and we are reading its conception. Really, it’s rather prurient stuff. This is why one doesn’t draw pictures of bodies tangling and merging—the beginnings of things should always be secrets.”
“I don’t remember anything about that.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right, Alaric. I already know how it ends. Privileges of seniority and all.”
And it is not Hiob in the river, but it is my mother, wearing Hiob’s habit, and her hair hangs so long and thick and bright I almost cannot look at it; it is like seeing her naked.
“To begin to tell the history of a thing is to begin to tell a lie about it,” she says, and her voice is everything I remember.
“Is none of it true then?”
“Everything is true, and everything is permitted.” She smiles and holds out her arms, and I remember saying that very thing to Hiob, uttering that strange and sacred dream of an impossibly generous and permissive world. “God is a cloud,” she says. “He comes without warning, and His Mind is not a human mind, it is as different as your intellect from a tiny snail creeping across the floor of the sea. The snail thinks the sea is all the world. And in the mind of God there is softness, and there is lightning.”
I weep and move to embrace her in the water, moving so fast around her, dazzling multicolored foam catching in her habit, a roar of water rising around her, and suddenly her head vanishes, and the habit falls away and within it is a blemmye, her wide eyes flashing in heavy breasts, and around her waist is a long yellow dress, and in her mouth is a mirror, and in the mirror is a child, fat and grinning, and he rips page after page from a book, stuffing them into his mouth and giggling as the rainbow waters rise—
I woke.
My brothers had sunk so deep in their own work they did not see my head droop and fall. My face stuck to the blue book and when I pulled it away the tiniest wisps of fragrant spore appeared where my cheek, my chin, my eyelash had been.
THE BOOK
OF THE RUBY
A man stands on the prow of a ship. Not old, not young, poised between like a jester with a good trick in his bag: watch him change faces in the blink of an eye—any eye, your eye, his eye. The sun makes his face look healthy, bright—he is clean-shaven, his eyes piercing, his hair neatly lashed with leather. You would not call the man a demon. You would say: there stands a just man, because no one living can escape the fallacy of the outside and the inside and a man with a piercing steady gaze and neat hair and a straight spine must be just, must know his worth and the worth of his world.
A man stands at the prow of his ship.
You have not wanted to talk about him. You have moved all around him, orbiting, and hardly touched him.
A man stands at the prow of his ship. He is not a man, not really. Not my husband, not a king, not a priest. At the prow of that ship, at the rim of that sea, where in my memory he stands forever, and nothing has yet happened on the other side of the sea, he has not yet even touched the hand of another human soul, at the prow of that ship stands not a man but a touchstone. Strike us all against it and see if we are true gold.
I was so young. Can you believe how young I was? I thought he was so wise. Is that what everyone thinks of their fathers? If he would only look at me, really look at me, he would see that I was wise, too. I wasn’t, of course, but neither was he, so we both come out even.
A man stands at the prow of a ship forever. And he stands at a mirror and watches a city burn. He watches, watches, watches, and the world moves around him because he says: God, please, move the world for me. I said to him when he first saw his home through that mirror:
“Don’t ask us. Don’t say we must go. Because we will go, all of us, we won’t think twice—novelty is the richest coin possible when you live forever. It won’t be so bad that you asked us, but we will want to go. We will say to each other that our king has devised such a game for us. And I don’t know what will happen—probably nothing, probably no harm will fall on the smallest of our heads, but we will have learned that your world is fun, and you will have taught your world that we are here. And no one will know how badly it’s all gone until the gates of Jerusalem are ringed with empty pikes—one for every blemmye whose head they could not take.”
“But Hagia,” he whispered, already standing on the prow of his ship, “it’s my home. It’s my home and everyone is dying. What would you do, if you had come, starving, bleeding, to the beaches of Constantinople, and I had taken you in, washed you and fed you fish and grapes and taught you to read Greek and to haggle for butter—if I made you queen, if I made you Empress, and maybe not everyone felt sure of that, the Jews and the Greeks especially, but you were mild and soon pregnant and everyone forgave you for being foreign? And then, finally, one day, through magic or with a wonderful machine, it doesn’t matter, but one day you could see—not just hear from a messenger but really see—Pentexore in flames, and Hadulph on fire, burning to death, and Fortunatus cut open on a wheel, and Qaspiel with its wings shorn off and weeping for mercy? If all that occurred, could I say anything at all that would keep you from going to them? More, rousing the whole Byzantine army with blades and pitch and shields and hell on horseback to ride behind you and obliterate whoever laid their smallest finger upon your home?”
What answer could I have made to that which would have altered our course? A king, if he is a good king, tells the truth when he wants something badly enough. He only lies to win advantage—and to win the game entire he flays his own heart and lays it before the tribunal. And the tribunal was me, and I said yes, and so it is all my fault, really. Everything that happened. If my crane-girl had never come with your helmet and your letter, still he would have stood at that prow. Nothing could move him from it.
Oh, Hagia.
And in our little tent, past the end of the war, where I am writing and she is reading over my shoulder, the candles gutter and the silks all look black, so black I have forgotten what color they ever were, and my stepdaughter is crying, and I want to sleep forever and wake up at home, never having done anything but stretch parchment on a wide hoop in the sun.
Cranes have a secret, Hagia. Inside them—near the heart, but not too near, in the mess of viscera somewhere, we have a little stone. When cranes die, their mates take the stone and add it to the nest’s long line. We pray with them, looping the line of stones around our throats like a necklace, and we remember everyone, everyone we loved, everyone who has gone to the Clouds and the Sedge of Heaven. We don’t care for their other use. They are touchstones, that we keep in our hearts, that are our hearts. For every time you have struck my heart, Hagia, I have called you gold. All of us, golden, a long line of stones, wrapping around and around.
In my heart John always stands on that ship. And in my heart the rest of us pull the ships across the hardpack road of the Rimal, ropes knotted over our shoulders that were so strong, strong enough to any task, dragging as one body the great galleons from one world to another. We are there forever, with the sun at our backs, and the drum-beat keeps the time of our hauling.