Let us say she said it. Who is to know? Perhaps I put aside the insult, offered him a sword from our saplings, and quoted him a poem of the lamia Gnoskil, which went: Listening to the constellation of the ox-cart, my heart is full of trinkets: a pair of scissors, an oil-jar, a jeweled comb. All of them are me, and the ox-cart, too. And perhaps he took the sword, and gave me in return a blossom from the gardens of Mosul, which was white, and said: O friend, seest thou the lightning—there, and then gone, as though two hands raised up together over a pillar of cloud. And Anglitora smiled, because of the cloud he spoke of, and because once two souls have exchanged poetry they must love one another forever, as all know. So we gave him our tea as well, and shared a lunch of olives and oranges. Sukut offered to read the stars on his behalf. It happened something like that, after all. Until he said to John:
“Why do you not pray for God to open the river to you?”
And John the Priest was ashamed, for he had not thought of it. He could eat no more. He scowled into his chest. What sort of priest was he now, that he had not even attempted to call Christ to his side?
“We are all very curious,” I said, to turn the tide of our talking, “to know what an infidel is. John called us that a great deal in the old days, and there was a good deal of private debate—some said it meant a person who has four legs. Some said it meant a person who interrupts John when he is speaking. Some insisted it obviously referred to a camel. But you are an infidel, and neither four-legged, nor impolite, nor a camel. Nor very much like us.”
“He is a Muslim,” John said bluntly. “I am a Christian.”
Sukut tossed his cream-colored horns. “Easy then. Different systems of magic.”
Both Salah ad-Din and John spluttered and began to talk very quickly, over one another.
“It is by no means magic!” cried John. “I spent years instructing all of you to accept Christ and honor Him and that is what you took from it? That He is some sort of wizard?”
The green knight insisted: “There is but one God and He is not a magician, but the Creator of All and Father of Prophets!”
“Ah, but prophecy, that’s magic,” lowed Sukut with his gentle, firm voice. “And did you not just ask our king to pray for the river’s good graces? Well, I’ll tell you what he’s going to do just as soon as we’re finished here. He’s going to go into his tent and light candles and quiet his mind and say words in Latin, special words that he has taught us all, and he will chant them over and over again until he feels strong, and then he will whisper what he wants into the darkness, and say some more Latin things—he likes Latin a great deal—and then expect, fully and utterly expect to see his wishes made manifest. If that is not magic I am a fish, sir.”
Salah ad-Din grinned impishly. “Well, perhaps when a Christian man does it, it is magic.”
Sukut scratched at his brown hand. “Why do you not call your own wizards and ask them to break the spell of the river? It is not our river. We do not know it; we did not grow up with it or confess secrets near it; we have not washed clothes in it or carried it in buckets to boil. It is a stranger to us—we do not even know its name. Best to let family look after family.”
“Yes,” laughed John. “Call your wizards.” He held up his hands. “Oh, please, do try to explain it to them. We’ll be here for ninety years, and at the end of it they’ll be quite certain you’ve told them that Mohammed is a turtle with an excellent singing voice. May you have better luck than I!”
Salah ad-Din pursed his lips. “When a horse pulls a plow through the furrow, you do not call it magic—it is only what the horse was made to do. He is fulfilling his purpose on earth. When a man prays, it is the same.”
“Horses were not meant to pull plows,” argued Sukut. “They are meant to be horses. That’s all. The plow is useful to the owner of the horse, but not to the horse himself. Also, the farmer does not insist that the horse call himself bad and sinful and wicked all the while he pulls the plow, and in between abusing himself and laboring for the comfort of his owner, praise the farmer as beneficent and all-powerful.”
Salah ad-Din slapped his knee. “I have always said that what marks out the civilized from the uncivilized is a love of arguing! What a wonderful country you must have, where horses need not labor if they do not wish to, and men eat well all the same.”
Sukut blinked. “Well, yes,” he said.
Much explanation was needed then, and showing of the trees in their barrels, how their mace-apples gleamed with spikes and bronzeflowers with five arrowhead petals each. Salah ad-Din became very quiet. I put my hand upon his wrist and asked the matter, for I liked him, how soft-spoken he was, even when laughing, and how he seemed to handle things very carefully in his heart before he said them.
“I was only possessed by an image, blemmye. That if Nineveh had died and been buried under her grassy hill in your country, then we might walk now through a forest of stone lions whose leaves were the beards of dead kings. An almond grove might shade my head while I recited poems to the sun, and their branches might form the fifteen gates of Nineveh, and nothing would ever be forgotten, no, in the long life of the world.”
And the green knight seemed so moved by this thought that had he been alone, he might have wept.
Did you wish he had come to Pentexore in John’s place?
Forgive me, daughter, but that day I did.
THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,
THE RIGHT-HAND EYE
I met Adab on the Fountain road, on my final walk. Oh, yes, I forgot. They’re pilgrimages now, aren’t they? I did not love her till much later, when she looked familiar, and I had to spend a fortnight working out where I had known her before. Deep in my memory I finally recalled that we were young women together on that long path. Adab was a sciopod, which is an excellent species for a stylite, when you think about it. The traditional pose—up on one foot, balanced, poised—posed no trouble for them. Posed no trouble for her. On that long trail of lanterns, swinging back and forth in the warm, rind-scented night, I saw her hopping ahead, her hair in a hundred complex looping braids, her gait so eager.
“If I recall,” I said to her, by way of introduction, “it tastes foul and looks like a lamia’s sick. In such a hurry to taste it?”
And she turned to me with black eyes shining and said: “When I have swallowed it I shall climb a pillar and never come down, not until I am so wise the wind could go through me and come out the other side an adept in three disciplines.”
In all the time Sefalet had spoken with her parents’ tree, she had not had her fits nor extruded that awful light from her limbs. I was grateful. We all were. But once Elif and I had her fully to ourselves once more, it began again. She slept against my flank and her left hand cried in her dreams (The ropes, the ropes! Ah, it’s all coming down!) and her tremors woke me, and then the light poured out over all of us.
“She is broken,” said Elif softly.
I could not answer him. In her misery and her fervor, Sefalet arched her back, wrenching her body—and flung herself upon me. Her arms locked around my neck and her light tumbled over me like a snow drift. Her weight was much more than her size, as though someone had opened her mouth and poured silver into her, and now it was all coming out.