A Dirge for Prester John

“God is another way of talking about the power to break things, that’s all. When you mean to break a goblet or a bone, well, just do it and be done. But when the things to be broken get big enough you have to start talking about God. As far as a witch, well, perhaps when we say witch we mean: a creature who can still be broken herself, but she is learning to be the breaker. And wickedness, well, you tell me. I don’t think I’m wicked. I am what I am. That I am, if you want to get classical. Intent is everything. If I touch something and it withers, does that make me wicked? If I didn’t mean to do it any harm? If it did not offend me, and I didn’t know it was going to happen?” Ymra looked pleadingly at me, and her voice shook a little. “If I only wanted to touch it, as any creature wants to touch things. Sick and wicked are not the same thing.”

“You seem so healthy!”

“Yet the choice is: we are sick or the world is sick. One cannot bear the other. If one is true the other is false.” She looked down. “Or perhaps we just do not know what we are. Who told you you were human? Or did you just assume it, because everyone who looked like you was also called human? Those who look like us are called hexakyk. But does that mean we are hexakyk? So much easier just to say we are sick. We meant no harm, and we made a hospice when we finally diagnosed ourselves. And we want to live, just to live, like always, like anyone. The Bonfire will help. And we would like you to help the Bonfire.”

“I don’t really feel I understand any of what is happening well enough to help.” In my experience, the ignorant foreigner who meddles in local politics usually ends up roasting alive on one stake or another.

“You are an obscure ingredient, is not that enough?” Ymra smiled. In all my days I had never seen a smile so knowing. “Do you not like me? Do you not want to please me? And my brother, too? We would never hurt you, John. We treasure Johns and want to keep them whole. They are so useful.”

“What are you going to do at the Bonfire, Ymra?”

Her smile widened into a wolfish, hangdog grin. “We are going to break something big.”

MARS, HOT AND DRY

Theses and similar nations were shut in behind lofty mountains by Alexander the Great, towards the north… Those accursed fifteen nations will burst forth from the four quarters of the earth at the end of the world, in the times of the Antichrist, and overrun all the abodes of the saints as well as the great city Rome, which, by the way, we are prepared to give to our child who will be born, along with all Italy, Germany, the two Gauls, Britain, and Scotland. We shall also give him Spain and all of the land as far as the icy sea.

The nations to which I have alluded, according to the words of the prophet, shall not stand in the judgement on account of their offensive practices, but will be consumed to ashes by a fire which will fall on them from heaven.

—The Letter of Prester John

1165

THE CONFESSIONS

But Hiob had not wakened.

He writhed on his bier, but the vines held him fast. He made sounds, but the swollen stem in his throat stoppered them. His eyes did not open; he did not speak; he did not stand up. As a man dreaming strange dreams he moved in his sleep. His hands fluttered—they had swollen their pages already with words and Reinolt and Goswin had been lax in changing them.

“The battle must be coming soon,” Reinolt said guiltily.

“And the Bonfire,” added Goswin.

“You are both children,” I snapped, angry, thwarted, ashamed. I should not have kissed her. She did not like it. Her expression when our faces parted was cold pity. I am not Hagia, she had whispered. I am not here to bring you warmly into a place where you do not belong. Through the bars of that country a sword was thrust in my childhood, and it flamed still. I changed the parchment beneath Hiob’s wrinkled and frantic hand.

The al-Qasr sits as empty as it did in those long-gone days when Abibas the Mule-King ruled kindly from his tree in the sciopod forest, and most of Nural seemed to live there, in the open rooms, the long halls, the drifting curtains. How happy I seem to recall it, all of us playing in the palace like children.

My silver pot scrapes—the ink is nearly gone. And yet the flood of it crests in me, all at once, everything happening at once, the weight behind my eyes, the memory of it. I understand Imtithal now—Hajji. I understand Hajji now. The world is a place of suffering, and the root of all suffering is memory. When you live long enough, the mass of memory is greater than any moon, any sun, so bright and awful and scalding in the dark, scalding the inside of my skull, dragging me down into living, down into remembering, and every time I look on a thing I see only what it has been before, what it will be after. The future and the past encroach on the artifacts of the present, the artifacts of myself, like a kind of richly colored mold, softening my vision, burning away its edges, slushing everything together into one knot of being which I can never transcend, but also, can neither descend, sinking into a low country where everything is only as it is, now, in this one singular moment. What a lonely way of seeing that would be.

I tried to shave down the vine in Hiob’s mouth, to give him some relief. I rubbed oil into his stretched lips. Like a father I tended him, like a son I feared for him. The book was inside him, that was clear. He could write out the missing passages, out of order, phrases here and there, all of it confused in him, but there, hidden in his body. Perhaps he saw as Hagia saw—everything happening all at once, together, on top of itself, like the strata in stone. Perhaps one day, when I was old, I could sort out his writing and fit it into the first books, fit it into his own confessions, make a whole document. I looked up at the door and the woman in yellow stood there, hovering, a deer about to bolt into the brush—and I already knew I would not. Prester John’s kingdom was a country of fragments, all strung together to look like a whole. The kingdom of memory, the kingdom of time. Against our own world, hurtling forward, always forward, we could only lay those fragments gently, as a flower against a tomb.

When I first crept at the edges of the refectory, listening to the men’s conversation, those hushed male voices, so sure and thrilled and vibrating with desire, I thought they were mad. How could there be any joy in telling tales that were surely false? Brother Johan had said last week than in Prester John’s kingdom men had many wives, and the wives had many husbands, and all of them were priests, though they married and bore chil

dren. But the next week he said the whole of the nation hewed to celibacy, and thence came their incredible longevity. Both could not be true, but both were greeted with the same awed, breathy belief. If such a place existed, it could only be one thing. And it either existed or it did not—they seemed to revel in the in-between place, the might-be, and that was neither faith nor fact, so I could not understand it.

I looked down at my book. It was my shift on Hagia’s volume, and a cerulean fuzz played at its corners, teasing me, sending tendrils toward the text. Fragments. A mountain of them, all adding up to a place that was and was not. I turned from the tome, daring it to dissolve in my absence. I declared my freedom from it—it felt dizzy, mad, dangerous, to risk losing such a document, a document so many had sought. But it was only ever fragments, I was only ever fragments, and if I did not find what I wanted in this book, there were others, hanging pendulous from the tree, heavy with juice. I ducked my head out of the little house. The woman in yellow burned at me from the shadows.

“Who are you?” I said outright. “Who was your mother, your grandmother, your great-great-grandmother? Blood tells the tale, forever.”

She looked at me, silent, savage, not an animal, but not human. And then she grinned, her cutting teeth showing. The whites of her eyes shone. Then she ran, the soles of her feet flashing up like lanterns, vanishing into the gloam.

THE BOOK

OF THE RUBY

They fell upon us. I think that’s the best way to say it.

That is how it happened. They fell, as if from a great height, and all their weight came down upon us.