I wish it had been a battle. I wish we had ridden down a long green hill riding the cameleopards and singing war songs, singing songs written by Niobe the phoenix which would in years hence become hearthside songs, songs sung by grandchildren who barely understood the bit about the green knight, or held the tune quite right. Instead, some hooded man fell on me in the night, his body heavy and hot on my back, and the sounds of the camp became the sounds of screaming. I confused my attacker—he could not strangle me or cut my throat, and I was so much bigger than he. Still, he cut me, slashed at my ribs. We wrestled on the floor of my tent, breathing hard, and I could not see John, only the arms twisting in my arms and the man’s shadowy strong leg wrapping around my waist and the flash of the skin over my ribs splitting open. I had presence enough to think: You’re not very good at this, boy. We breathed at each other and our breaths still had dinner on them. Onions and fried bread and sweet black wine, the dinner we had shared with the monks of St. Elijah, and I felt deep disgust. What kind of creature shares food with someone on one side of the sun and a blade with them on the other? I turned my waist so that my weight turned him—I felt his leg break under me and he cried out.
I was angry. He had hurt me. He had broken faith. I didn’t even know him, I couldn’t see his face, but I took his knife and stuck it up through his chin, and when I did it I felt it crunch up into his brain, and my anger stopped short, as though it had struck something harder and colder than itself.
I found you, covered in blood. Everyone was screaming and running—braziers had fallen over. Tents began to burn. I said: Are you all right? Is Father dead? But he was not. His face had gone slack and still, and you both sat there, stunned and identical, your hands black with that ugly, deep blood that means someone has died. I remember thinking that I suddenly knew what you must have looked like the day you got married.
We fought together. Anglitora and I, not mother and daughter but mother and daughter still.
We fought together. I am good at fighting. The wing gives an advantage—men fight me as though I am a cripple, but my wing dances, and where it hits them they crumple. You and I kept our backs to one another, and the monks had no faces, but they had blood.
I killed five men.
So few. So many. I saw Sukut gore a young novice. I saw Niobe puff out her chest and leak an ooze of fire over the blades of her tormentors—the metal bubbled, their skin peeled back. I saw Houd crushing priests’ skulls in his huge hands. His face so faraway, as though he was dreaming about something bare and quiet, a winter forest, a lake of ice. I saw the amyctryae biting into throats. There was no strategy—how I had planned for strategy! How we would approach an impregnable city, how we could breach its walls. But this was just hands and teeth and claws, wrangling in the mud. And you know, it didn’t look so different from the wrangling I remember, the cranes and the pygmies kissing and writhing—mating and killing look much the same in the dark.
I saw Brother Dawud come running out of the abbey, waving his arms, his round, kind face contorted, his mouth open, crying out to his brothers to stop, stop, stop. That word—stop, an impossibility, nothing could stop yet, not enough people were dead yet. His Christian brothers did not want to stop and heaven help me, John’s or yours or anyone’s, I did not want to stop, either. They had no reason to hurt us, they should be hurt in return. The heat of blood washing over my skin meant winning, meant I was better than they. In war I was a child. I only liked how it felt, I could only feel it, I could not think it or know it or talk to it. The last war in Pentexore ended a thousand years before I was born. How could I know how good and awful it could be, to hurt those who had hurt us? To feel the us-ness of it so wholly, and how us had to go on, and they had to stop. Stop, stop, stop.
I want to confess something. Now that it’s all over and quiet. Please do not think badly of me. War has always meant mating. Pleasures of the skin and the body, a rising cascade. I still felt it, when I leapt upon a monk who had just stabbed a poor faun so many times she had no face left. I threw him to the ground and seized his hips between my knees and kissed him on the mouth with blood everywhere, everywhere, and I pushed my knife into him, over and over, out and in again, and he moaned underneath me and I liked it, I liked how he moved, and cried out, and died.
I forgive you, daughter.
I forgive you, mother.
That was when I became her mother, on that plain, by that river, with her shoulders against mine and everything so new and sharp, and I fell over the body of something in the dark, it might have been one of them, or one of us, and she caught me. Father Jibril rushed up behind her and I threw a blade, slippery with monk, into his shoulder. We were both born in all that blood, squelching and black and stinking, and what do you ever call that but family, when the sun shows it all and you need to make it hurt less?
Who killed Jibril, in the end?
I knocked him down and you crushed his throat with your foot, and John, poor John, John who had to pick a side in the end, came running to his wife and his daughter panting over that priest, and he kicked him, he kicked and cried and screamed in his face: “Why? Why? Why?”
But none of us killed him. He lived. I saw him as we were leaving, and boys were tending to him in the sunlight. I hope he never spoke again. When you count up the dead, the ones you want to see are never there.
And Salah ad-Din, he fought with us. Better than us; he knew that kind of battle, where the knives come from behind and you believed you were safe. When he spun, the moon caught on his sword, his helmet, the silver in his tunic. He was made of silver.
He killed Brother Dawud.
That, too.
When the novice came out crying stop, stop, stop, the green knight pulled a short axe from a dead astomi and hurled it at his head. Dawud went down without a sound. Stop, stop, stop. I have no anger on it—Salah ad-Din could not know. It does not matter. Everything falls apart. Everyone dies.
I know you don’t want to say it. But you have to. You can’t tell the story without it. It wouldn’t be a true story then. It would be a story told to hide something.
If I write that, if I put into letters on this page it will have happened again, and again, and again, and every time a pair of eyes reads it it will be happening again and he will never stop dying. He will never stop. I’ll be killing him a hundred times.
You have to write it. I will hold your han
d. Write his name: Hadulph.
Before Jibril—I will not call him Father, no, not that. Before Jibril came for my daughter he came for my lover, my lion. Events go forward and back in my memory, turning in circles so that it never has to see again that scene in the dark, full of roars. It should not even have been a contest, Hadulph should have swallowed his whole head before the bastard priest got his wretched short sticking blade out, but Jibril is a devil and tall, he is a devil and wiry, he is a devil and quick. He got in under Hadulph, into his soft red belly, and other monks leapt onto his back, and they cut into him over and over, they could not stop, he was too big a prize, to be able to say later they took down an infidel lion, and I heard them laughing while they did it.
I laughed—it gets confused like that. Your body does everything all at once, it laughs and bleeds and screams and shits and runs and stops.
I could not get there fast enough. I could not catch him when he fell.
I forgive you.
It didn’t take very long, the fighting, not really. We killed most of them. They retreated into their monastery and Salah ad-Din brokered our peace, our ugly, cold peace, wherein we were allowed to see to our dead and board our ships.
It took my whole life, and all the rest of my life as well.
The worst part was the funerals.