A Dirge for Prester John

Brother Dawud pursed his pink, full lips. “Salah ad-Din—he lets me call him Yusuf, sometimes, when I am running messages—is a good man. It is easy to love one man. One infidel. It is not easy to love a nation of them.”

I smiled ruefully. “How wise you are, Dawud. For I have learned to love one Christian man, but have found the nation of them thorny. When John thinks as a man, he likes my laughing and my peacocks and my child and my early rains and my hibiscus flowers and my honeyed walnuts on his plate, he thinks of Pentexore as the real world and he calls poor Vidyut by his name instead of Archbishop. When he thinks as a nation he renames all our cities, and starts up the Lenten mass nonsense again.”

Brother Dawud’s eyes grew soft and serious. “Jibril will hurt you for it, you know. He must look out for all of us. He always thinks as a nation, as St. Elijah’s and Nestorians. I don’t think he will let the world hear that Prester John declined to strike down a Muslim when it would be easy to do it, that he brought cameleopards and gryphons but did not fight.”

Did it matter, that he warned you? Did you draw back your breath and think it might be better to hold your nose and do it?

John could say what he liked. I said no before him—but no one in his world listens to a woman. Even their god did not. Who asked poor Mary if she wanted to loose a son on the world, an arrow of diamond catching fire as it flew? She said no, I’m sure of it. And yet, the future fell on her in the night all the same.

THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

A nest of bodies can grow deep and hot, such that no one wants to leave it. When a story is done, another must chain on, to keep all those skins together. “Tell me another story,” Sefalet coughed. Her right hand had gone frail and had a tremor. Her left lay firm, silent, over her thin chest, in a smug position, not speaking, but able to whenever it liked.

“I don’t know any stories,” I answered, because I was tired and I am not always the best of lions. “I only know things that have happened. That’s not the same thing as a story, which is a thing made up to pass the time or repeated because you heard it once a long time ago and it sounded pretty.”

“Tell us a story,” said Lamis, queen of Thule, with her huge hands under her small chin. “Some stories are things that really happened.”

Sefalet had fallen sick. She had nearly fallen off the cathedral—and I must remind myself to say cathedral and not tower, though my heart wants to call it a tower, though no church ever had so many floors, or was that color of blue-black, or had a girl named Kalavya speaking out of its cornerstones. I shot a bird today, and it had leathery skin and wings like a bat, only with pinkish feathers and wild white eyes. It is another country up here above the cloudline, Drona, with other citizens, other songs, other holidays. Sometimes I think I could just take one step off the ledge and fly myself, up and away to the sphere of the stars, where I would step on their silver heads in my dancing. Sefalet had leaned in to hear the speaker, though her left hand lashed out, gnashing with its teeth at the stone, hissing: “She died, she died, she died, she didn’t fly, she fell forever, and so will we all, when we get our first kiss, our princess kiss, to wake the world.” And then she swooned, shivering all over, dizzy and upset, and if not for Fortunatus catching her on his broad, furry back, she would have plummeted all the way down. It did not seem to be an illness we could catch—rather, her left hand had become her whole body, and it rebelled against her, her heart speaking hideous words to her bones, her spleen telling lies to her lungs. She kept saying: “I want to run, I want to run!” and trying to bolt out of the flap of Gahmureen’s blue tent, the only one big enough for all of us, myself and Lamis and Fortunatus and Elif. We take up a great deal of space. We are expansive beasts, and savage. The inventor worked at a wide, tilted table that I knew from experience she could fold up small enough to carry with her like a book. She ran her hand up her spiral horns from time to time, building the cathedral in her mind, in her heart. I wondered: How long would she sleep when this was done?

“Don’t be broken,” Elif said to her. “I will tell a story if it will make you better. If stories are the same thing as medicine.” He moved his stubby camphor-wood hands over her forehead and the wood darkened with the princess’s sweat. “Once a wooden man loved a girl without a face. So the wooden man said: I will get you a face from the Prince of the Beautiful Mountain, because the wooden man liked to be useful. He left the girl tied to a tree so she could not get away and get lost and walked all the way to the Beautiful Mountain, which is almost all the way to the Gate of Alisaunder. The Prince of the Mountain, who was an ant-lion and therefore very knowledgeable about bodies and all the things they do, said: Go into the world and get me all the component parts of a face and I will assemble it for you. So the wooden man thought for a long time about what faces were made of. A face is what makes a person look familiar to you, he thought. But the girl was already familiar to him. A face is what laughs and cries and looks pensive, it is what you breathe out of and eat with, and it covers your mind so dust and seeds and other irritants cannot get in. But the girl could laugh and cry and she could look pensive better than anyone the wooden man knew. She breathed and ate and never complained about dust. A face is what is beautiful or ugly about the outside of a person. But the girl was already the most beautiful thing he had met. And so the wooden man was forced to return to the Prince of the Beautiful Mountain, who was an ant-lion and therefore very knowledgeable about circular reasoning and tautologies. The wooden man said: A face has no component parts. All the objectives of a face can be accomplished by my girl, because I love her, but she still frightens me, and that is the whole point of faces, to communicate love and terror by turns so that long ago when people weren’t people, they could bare their teeth and scare off tigers, or bare their teeth and let ones like them know they were safe. My girl has passed beyond the need for a face, for she is more frightening and more of her is bare than anyone who has lived. And the ant-lion said the wooden man was wise, and had acquitted himself as well as a man who was not wooden, and so the wooden man went home to the girl without a face and untied her and they had a picnic.”

“That was wonderful,” cried Lamis, who drank the story like water. “Except for the tying up part.”

“How else do you get people to sit still?” Elif answered.

“That’s an excellent point,” I purred. “And I am amazed that you can tell a story so well, being as you are.”

“Stories are easy,” said Elif, and Sefalet blew weakly upon him. It could not have helped much, but he puffed up his balsam chest, grateful. “You just take everything that has happened to you and change it so that it looks as though it happened to someone else. If you like, you can change the names to something nicer, and pretend something you only thought about actually happened in the real world, with ant-lions involved.”

Sefalet’s left hand turned over. The lips were dark and full. “We are going to run,” it sighed.

“I doubt it,” I growled. “We could always take Elif’s advice on keeping humans where one wants them.”

With her clammy right hand, the princess rasped: “Didn’t you used to have a baby like me? A red one, who was soft and sharp and warm? And didn’t he sometimes want to run so badly, and so far, that he broke away from you and bolted over the snow? Running is the best thing there is, I think. I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate it before. I want to run so much, so fast, so far, like a red lion on the snow. And I will, I feel that I will. The left-hand girl will run further than the right.”

I licked her face roughly. It is the only way a lion licks. “Hadulph did love to run, yes. He was a little flame on the ice, bounding and leaping, with his tail snapping around in circles like a red whip. He would spring out across the squares of Nimat, and his passing would make the panotii’s ears fly up into the air. He would roar as he ran, as if his voice wanted to get there first.”

“My voice wants to get there first.”

“But Sefalet, I could always catch him. I was always faster. I was the snow, and he could not run far enough that I would not be there already, to pick him up by the scruff of his neck when he panted so hard I thought his breath would fall out of him. And I will be faster than you, too, when you are a flame on the snow.”

But of course I did not catch her.

When you sit on a high mountain and folk decide you are wise enough to visit from time to time, wise enough to lay flowers and fish over your feet, wise enough to ask how to stitch up a person and make them unbroken, you know you will sometimes fail. I have always known it. Grisalba thought I was full of myself. She kept a sharp eye out, to see when I would falter. I could have saved her the effort—I have failures piled up in my cold cave like bones. Creatures who left me with pieces of them missing, when I was so sure I had put them back together. Sons still running so far and so fast. Part of living is failing to do what you are really very good at, every day, every night, what you have worked so hard to bend between your paws like soft metal. Every other day but this one. Today is always the trouble. Love and storytelling and caring for the sick and catching kittens bounding through the snow—they must be repeatable or they are nothing. And sooner or later that repeatable thing will stop repeating. We are none of us deft enough to avoid that. Yet it hurts like strangling, and it hurts the same every time.

And that day, when the sun was a hot red tear and the lamia were enervated, baking on flat stones, when even the thin little voices in the stones were lulled to sleep, I lost her.

No one took her. I don’t think I know any villains, really, in the end. Anyone I can point to and say—they ruined it for us. Oh yes, there is John, but you cannot hold idiots accountable. Sefalet took herself. She said she would run and she ran. Her left-hand mouth, which no one believed, had been snarling and shrieking, promising to eat her, to eat

all of us, calling for her sisters though she had but one soul she could ever call a sister and the two had barely traded three words between them. She howled like a dog. The light seeped out of her like sweat, like pus, like it was a fever she might break. I buried my face in Fortunatus’ neck—I could not listen to it anymore. Even Elif put his wooden hands over his ears. But sometime in the night the ugliness in her did break, and we all slept. We all slept long enough for her to creep out into the wet grass and the silent blue-lit camp, into the woods and out of sight. We woke and the sleeping princess had vanished. All that failure bound up in an empty bed.

It wasn’t hard to guess where she’d gone. Hadn’t she been screaming it all night? Hadn’t we gotten to know it so well it might have been our names? I would go, and Elif would go, and we would not be fast enough to catch her before she fell.

I will run to the Wall, to the Wall, and you will never catch me.

THE VIRTUE OF THINGS