“Who are you? Why are you called Theotokos? What god is your child? You must know that only Mary bears that title—and if you are not Christian, whence comes this Christian name?” I longed to put out my hands to her—I would still have said then that I did not want her in a sinful way—such thoughts had long ago seeped from my collection of recognizable states.
“No, Alaric. Who are you? Tell me the secrets of the country of Alaric. Pluck the books of his heart for me. Read them while they rot.”
The only way back to my books—yes, I called them mine in my heart—was through. If I flayed myself for her I could be excused from her presence. I did not speak to be shriven, and yet, what would you call it, when a man sits in shade and tells his history?
I told her of my mother. It seemed the thing most likely to please her. I told her that when I learned my Greek letters I thought Aristotle would save me from the maternal influence, because he felt contempt for women, and wrote that they were not fully human—and that is how I felt toward my mother. That she was made of some stuff other than what made me, that she was an animal or a spirit, something wild and untouchable which came and went like a cloud, which one could not predict. I followed Aristotle into the company of men, where the memory of her could not come.
“I do not care about your mother,” said the woman in yellow. “Blame women for your loneliness and misery—that is your business. Tell me a thing that is true, that is at the heart of you. Something as true as the things you copy.”
“Why? Is everything in those books true? Am I to believe John Mandeville really wrote that black book? A separate and secret one that he left in this place? Well, some of it may be true but there is a lot of allegory in there, and the faux Mandeville lies as though it will save his soul.”
“Perhaps it did.”
“Do you know what is written there? Have you read the books yourself? Don’t you want to know the history of your own country?”
She looked amused for a moment, staring me down. “Why do you assume I am ignorant of it? As you assume I am no god’s mother, as you assume I am an animal, as you assume all we have is yours to take.”
“You are angry.”
“No, I am human, and I am beset by animals.”
I could say nothing to answer that. I took a deep breath. The air tasted like apples and wood and the pages of books, blowing down from the tree.
“When I had just taken my orders,” I said slowly, “I heard the older monks talking in the refectory. They drank the autumn’s first beer and ate the summer’s dried mushrooms and I wanted so to be older, to be one of them, to be learned. And they said the same name over and over: Prester John. Prester John. I think it was a game, really, by then. After all, the story is five hundred years old now. It has lost a little of its sheen. But everyone still played the game: What fantastical thing can you make everyone believe is really there, in that impossible kingdom? And they would weave wilder and wilder stories until someone asked for textual authority on the point of jaguars having souls, and they would dissolve into laughter. I watched them from the door the way a child watches his parents in their marriage bed—furtively, curiously, with shame and a kind of foreknowledge growing in one’s breast. I felt towards the game of Prester John very like I felt toward the sexual act, in fact. I hated it because it was silly and old-fashioned and so earnest; it had no intellect, only base desire. Yet I longed for it terribly, to be part of its rites, to be welcomed, and I felt if I could seize one or the other or both I would finally understand something about the world. But somehow, somehow I missed it. Like a gear slipping, failing to catch. I could never make up a new beast for Prester John’s pantheon, I could not make puns about gryphons. I could not be like the other boys. I could not even sneak out of the abbey as they did and into the village—my attempts ended with me red-faced and ashamed, on the outside, telling myself everything they said was a lie designed to cause pain to anyone not in on the joke. I could be neither in Prester John’s kingdom nor in our own. The cameleopards and unicorns were not for me. They occupied another country, the same country my mother occupied, one where everyone spoke the language but me, where I could never belong. It got tangled up inside me, the body and Prester John and my mother. And when Hiob and the rest were chosen for this mission, I seethed, furious, hating them as they dug out all the old tales and drank the old beer and chewed the old mushrooms and it was all weeping crocodiles and phoenix again, fountains of youth and amethyst palaces.”
“Then why did you come?”
“Because they chose me. The country of unicorns and mothers turned its head and looked at me at last. Hiob said: ‘You are my friend and my best linguist. You are strong in faith. Come with me, take the chance that more in the world is truth than lies.’ And for a moment I believed that I could belong to that place, that place where everything is true.”
The woman in yellow kept her silence. Did I imagine it, that her expression softened, just a little?
“But it is Hiob’s country, still. It is all through him, that country of lies and mothers and beasts and village girls. Eating him from the inside, making him into a grotesquerie. I do his work, but I am still on the outside.”
Finally, she said: “The world is not made of countries and outsiders. We are all just humans, and most of us fools, and all of us longing for more than we have, to know more than we know—and yet even that is not enough, for if we knew everything we would only be disappointed that there was not one more secret to uncover. You would be disappointed. Your whole faith depends upon uncovering a suddenly, violently magical country at the end of the world, full of lakes of fire and ten-headed beasts and broken seals and trumpets. It has never happened, it will never happen, and instead of being relieved that humans will all live on and not be destroyed, you are all bitterly sad that the world goes on.”
How many of us had come through her village that she knew her Revelations, that she could be cynical about it? I felt suddenly like the hundredth suitor in some foreign princess’s court. All the good miracles had been performed by men before me. Her face seemed large as a moon, looming before me, her golden dress aglow in the stars, a jaguar with a soul, and I did not even know what I was doing, did not even know that I had moved, before I was kissing her, and if it was not my first kiss I could not remember another, her mouth hard and unyielding beneath mine, but warm, and I insisted—I could walk in that country, that confused, generous country and her mouth parted slightly, nothing more than slightly, but as soon as it had I knew I had done wrong; I had trespassed, and when our tongues touched, a cry went up from the little house where my brothers worked away, an anguished, choking cry.
Hiob, waking, strangling in his vines.
THE BOOK
OF THE RUBY
The wizards came at dusk.
Father said not to call them wizards.
Men in robes came for us and they carried golden crosses atop long staffs, whispering in Latin, making arcane signs at us with their hands, and in their center was a man somewhat older than John, handsome, his face weathered and almost kind, wearing a glittering and ornate diadem. I do not know what to call them but wizards. They whispered at us in Latin and we could not cross the water.
Just because they whispered in Latin and we could not cross the water does not mean we could not cross the water because they whispered at us in Latin. We could not cross before.
Spells need reinforcement. Nothing lasts forever. They came to shore up the sides of their curses. It is Christian magic. The same magic that says: put a veil over her and she will be human. That says: say these words and your soul will be saved. That says: wear a cross and we will pretend we are
kin. No different than the kind John knows, that says: speak Latin and you are Christian, be Christian and you are saved, be saved and you are real, worthy of notice, worthy of love.
And what of Salah ad-Din’s magic?
Not much different, but incanted in a kinder tone.