A Dirge for Prester John

“No,” Sefalet hissed through her right-hand mouth. Both of them were truculent now, angry and turned inward. “They’re my parents. Leave me alone.”

“Stop acting like a baby,” Elif said. His voice was soft and whispery, like the wind in leaves. “Only babies have trees for toys.”

“I’m not a baby!” The right-hand mouth.

“Gahmureen says you’re like a baby sucking your thumb. If you don’t stop, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“I don’t care what Gahmureen says! You’re not even alive.”

“Neither is the tree.”

“That’s not true! They talk!” The right-hand mouth, again.

“I talk.”

“They have names!”

“I have a name.”

“They love me,” Sefalet pleaded.

“I could do that.”

The tree did not argue its own case, and perhaps in the end that damned it. If it had said: Sefalet, you are our girl and we will never let you go, she would never have budged from that spot, until the sun went out like a snuffed lantern. But trees are funny things. They are alive, Elif had it wrong there. They grow, they eat light and drink rain. But no matter how much they remember or seem to, they are not quite who they were before. They are at least half earth, and the Earth is a very strange creature, who often speaks nonsense and even more often says nothing. They do not have preferences anymore. The tree was deeply, wholly happy to have Sefalet. It was deeply, wholly happy to be alone. This is why Abibas was a better king after he was planted—he could not be swayed by passions or angers, by revenges or the desire to curry favor. He was deeply, wholly happy, and governed from a place of utter contentment, without grasping, without striving.

An extravagant wind bellowed down the plain; I watched it slip through the joins of Elif’s elbows and ribs and knees; I watched it fill him up and make him creak.

“If all you require is someone to say: Sefalet is good and beautiful and I love her, I can do that,” said the little knight. “I could be so good at it.”

Sefalet

blushed deeply, her blank head coloring from crown to chin. “No, that’s not all.” Her left-hand mouth growled; it made her fingers twitch. “The only love we need is the kind shaped like a knife. You are shaped like a fool.”

“I would be better at it than a tree. I was built to watch over, forever. I am missing a thing to watch over. Gahmureen built me to protect her mother from tigers and other striped things. She built me out of her cradle. But she did not know what my cradle was built out of. Gahmural told me when we hunted together, and I rode on her back because she could run faster than me. I would ride on your back if you would like it. Gahmural was pregnant with Gahmureen—did you know that’s how people make more people? It took me quite a long time to work that out. I hadn’t any scratch paper. Gahmural was pregnant with Gahmureen and she walked a long way east, almost to the sea, where she knew a forest—but not a forest of trees. A forest of poles sticking out of the ground and on the top of every one lived a wise creature standing on one leg, whose job it was to think about things until their thinking was bigger than the original thing.”

“Stylites,” I said helpfully. “The Forest of Stylites.”

“They are called that?” mused Elif.

“Yes. I lived there for a long time.” I had, and felt a spreading pleasure at hearing my old home spoken of. I had learned at the foot of a thousand poles, until I found one who knew about love. Her name was Adab, and her fingernails had grown so long that they pierced the earth below her pole. I sat below her and listened for a hundred years, eating an unfortunate blackbird every month when the moon grew dim, but no more. Vyala, she called down, I love you because you starve for me.

“Gahmural asked each stylite to slice off a piece of their pole,” the cradle-knight was saying, “and whisper their sutras into it, and give them over to her to make her daughter’s bed. I am made of very interesting sayings, very hard-won knowings. I need a hunter to watch over or else I feel useless and despondent. It is a flaw in my making.”

“I have a flaw in my making,” whispered Sefalet.

The wind died; the golden grasses and red flowers stilled, and Elif slumped a little, out of breath, having spoken so much, much more than he had yet done. Sefalet crawled over to him, hesitantly, her mouths kissing the earth. She lifted her right hand and blew gently on the little man, and he swelled up a little.

“Sefalet,” he wheezed, “you are beautiful and good. I will keep you safe from tigers.”

From then on the three of us rarely parted company. Occasionally, Elif would look up at me, quite concerned, as though I might be classifiable as a tiger. Fortunately, I have no stripes, and that seemed to be a deciding factor in the categorization of threats according to Elif. Occasionally I looked down at him, and wondered what part of his body had belonged to Adab’s pole.

As we built it, the cathedral slowly closed around John and Hagia’s tree. In similar fashion, Sefalet held Elif tight, and I wrapped my tail close round her.

In the circuit of her arms Elif whispered: “Qutuz the stylite said: every creature is an infinite tower—her head knows not where her feet trod, and her dark cellars know nothing of the moon on her spires.”

Fortunatus came to me in the nights. “I had a wife,” he said. “I had a daughter. Then I had a friend called John and I loved him so much I made him king, just so he could be happy. I gave him a wife who gave him a daughter—those are the best things I know. Now everyone is gone, and it’s either Grisalba’s green fluids to make me dream or you. I only ever wanted to lie in the al-Qasr with all my dear ones, showing our bellies in the paths of sunbeams, and now the palace is empty. Even I left it. Hadulph said you were wise. That you bite broken cats by the scruff of the neck and drag the pieces of them back together. I was a good gryphon, I said yes whenever anyone asked me a thing, and somehow my whole heart got onto a ship and sailed away over the sand.”

I purred and bit him gently. Tears flowed over his bronze beak. I offered him my scruff; he took it. It is not the only salve I know, but it is quick.