A Dirge for Prester John

The clerestory started talking first.

Work proceeded well, Gahmureen’s motifs were spirals, circles, and leaves, coils of leaves, tendrils of stone moving around and up and opening into more and higher belltowers, turrets, whole floors with their own green altars and naves, suspended between the spires of the previous level. It looked like it could all come down if you breathed upon it. It never swayed, even in fierce wind.

You could hardly hear it at first. A whistling, a whispering, but only if you stood quite near the stones on the scaffolding, or flew up to them like my gryphon, who told us of the voices, and flapped his great golden wings impatiently while I and my charge and her knight scrabbled up the scaffolds to press our ears to the cobalt stone.

Elif offered: “Usha the stylite said: only by saying a thing does it become real. However, realness spreads out in a disc, and changes everything that hears it becoming.”

“Shhh, Elif,” Sefalet hissed, “I’m trying to listen.” And the little man was abashed.

We pressed our ears to the clerestory stones as if to shells to hear the ocean. Even so, it was so dim and quiet we had to strain to hear the gentle voices, as if they had come a long way.

Do you remember living on the ground, Kalavya? came a male voice, and it sounded as though he spoke underwater. I have already forgotten what we meant when we said grass or beach.

I think those were your cousins, Drona, answered a woman. The twins, with moles on their cheeks in just the same place?

Of course, how could I have forgotten?

Next week a new level will be finished, my love. We will all be going up the malachite stair. I hear the leopards have stowed away dried mangoes and quince and even lamb fat to celebrate, and we will sing as we climb, one of the old songs from level five, about the moon falling in love with Jupiter. I will put on my yellow dress, that I got when Bhaga fell off. Kalavya’s voice drifted in and out, louder and softer.

I only hope the clouds stay off this time, Drona sighed. Remember the last time we walked the stair, up to the floor where we made those rose mosaics? The clouds gathered so thick I could hardly get my foot up onto the next step. Almost like they hated the Tower, but no one hates the Tower, that’s just ridiculous. Do you remember what tide meant?

Isn’t that a sort of sunshade you hold over your head?

You’ve got a memory big enough for the both of us, Drona laughed, and then it all started over again: Do you remember living on the ground, Kalavya?

We drew away wonderingly.

Sefalet’s left hand flew to her face in a moment of inattention. “It’ll all come down, just like before,” it snarled. “Let me kiss that wall and watch it swoon.”

THE VIRTUE OF THINGS

IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM

9. On the Origins of Hatred

Between the Two Pentexores

A salamander by the name of Agneya made my friendship. I have only encountered female salamanders, though they assure me they have males, but apparently maleness is a thing easily misplaced, or spoiled, or forgotten. They only think about it when new eggs need making, at which point males seem to spring up just everywhere, getting underfoot. When the eggs are viable and the roasting time begins, along with the season for salamander racing, a favored sport, the males seem to wander off somewhere, but it doesn’t worry anyone unduly.

I asked Agneya while I helped her turn her eggs in their fire why the land on the other side of the Wall hated us so much as to keep the Fountain of Youth from their brothers and sisters here. My friend confessed she did not know. However, she had heard the following tale from a sciopod:

The world has a twin. It burst at the same time as our world. It has similar features; it had hopes and dreams and ambitions not unlike the hopes and dreams and ambitions of the world. It has a body consisting of spheres and stars and moons and orbits; it has a gender. (The genders of world are complex, and the possibilities number twelve or none at all. Our world is female,

obviously; its twin can best be called third neuter.) The world did not mean to be a twin. It was an accident with no morality attached to it. The pair grew up together, side by side, developing temperaments, vocations, loves and hates. They expanded together into the infinite wasteland of the previous world, which had perished after a long and mostly uneventful life. They chased each other into the grey corridors of the spherical void, they laughed the laughter of worlds, and their stars winked in and out of being.

But the twins also possessed a tragedy, for they could not touch or embrace as siblings long to do. They could not merge or know what the other experienced in its infancy or adolescence. They could not feast together as family. They tried it several times, and found that when the world’s twin touched its sister, holes rimmed in pink fire opened up in the surface of her, holes which later filled up with brackish, strange water, or sand like a sea, or a river full of stones. Wherever the twin tried to reach out, things in our world became confused, and if the twin happened to touch a thinking creature by accident, that creature’s limbs broke into pieces or rearranged themselves in odd ways. But the world’s twin moved very slowly, and managed for a little while to hold our world tightly in what passes for its arms. When the membrane between them finally broke, shards of the world’s twin splintered from its arms and fell down like rain. The shards ran off in many directions at once, and wherever they walked, our world erupted in pink fire and seas boiled and air clotted. The shards did not mean to do harm; worlds break, nothing to be done. Later folk in the other Pentexore called the shards demons and trapped them behind a terrible wall all of diamonds, but we have had no trouble from them, and in many years no one has even heard their names.

“That sounds very fanciful to me,” I said.

Agneya snorted. “Well, yes, sciopods have some notions that fly right over my head. I heard one say we were all just specks of I don’t know what spinning around bits of I don’t know who, and the spinning gets so fast it looks like sitting still, and that’s why I can say: what a fine calf my John has, and you can say: my, Agneya, you’re looking green today. They can have it. I know about fire and fire knows about me. But they do say we used to have demons here. Lousy with them, we were meant to be. But do you see demons loping about, I ask you? No, just wholesome salamanders roasting their eggs, and some very flamboyant birds.”

10. On the Unicorn

I have, in the course of my travels, taken part in many a unicorn hunt. Usually, they end quite merrily, with the horses and dogs exhausted, the men lying about in a forest clearing with a goodly number of wineskins open and a few kerchiefs of strawberries and walnuts and brown bread spread out on the orange leaves. The virgin, if we’d got a good one, sang a song or, if we’d got a very good one, danced in her white dress, spinning until the leaves flew around her like a little flame-colored storm. Unicorn hunts always struck me as civilized sorts of things, so long as no actual unicorns show up and spoil the fun. I’ve seen it happen—the beast all pale as bone, with a collar fastened round its throat from its last captivity. It fell on the maiden and upset the strawberries, spilling the wine and sending the poor dogs quite mad. I shouldn’t like to think what the creature meant to do to that wretched girl, but I fired my arrow true and had both the horn of the beast for a trophy and, before the night was out, the trophy of the maid. Still, it’s a nasty business when the quarry insists on being involved in the hunting.

Unicorns in this part of the world are discomfiting and I do not like them in the least. Ysra and Ymra asked me to a hunt on the equinox, when the cinnamon forest had gone entirely fragrant and scarlet. They put on green hunting jackets and long knives, which ought to have been my first clue, as everyone knows arrows are the preferred weapon, if not a pole-ax. I packed up my kerchiefs and my wineskins and felt quite ensured of a pleasant afternoon.

I learned the following points of interest with regards to the unicorn while on the forest path with the king and queen, who rode no horses nor even salamanders but walked hand in hand. I never saw them use any other means of transport.