A Dirge for Prester John

Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi took Hajji, who was once Imtithal, onto his shoulder without a word. Without a word he consented to her tale.

Her pale ears trailed down like a priestess’s stole. I watched them walk out and up, over the grassy hill that once was Nineveh, the Shamash Gate and the stone lions, back to his army and her long road. The light settled down on them, heavy and old.

It is done. We are the living. Everything can go back now, to how it was before. I will introduce you to my mother Kukyk, and you can exchange amusing stories about John. I will take my sister for walks and teach her about the Sedge of Heaven. I will eat everything wonderful that grows in Nural. I will sleep for a year. It is over and now we can be happy. Can’t we? That was the battle of Nineveh, and it is over now.

No. That was the battle of Jerusalem. When we come home we will tell them we saw the holy land, and fought there, and that all is well in that part of the world. I will not let Hadulph and Houd and all the rest have died for utterly nothing. For less than nothing, for a story John wanted to tell himself, and that sickens even he. Sickens all of us, as we rode home over the waves for a year and a day. The rotting sickness that comes at sea. And no island with a welcoming nymph to make love to our old war-bones and offer us universes. Just a long, flat horizon and the endless clatter of stones in a cup. Never stopping. Stop, stop, never stop.

I am the one writing this, and that makes it so. That was Jerusalem, and we bled there. Where we died, that was holy land.

THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

Run. Four paws on the green earth.

“It’s my fault,” Elif said into my ear as he rode me, the little cradle-knight, toward the Wall and the girl and the end. “I should have tied her up.”

Run. One, two, three, four. Paws eat the distance.

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I didn’t listen to her left-hand mouth. You don’t listen when a child says she hates you. If you listened every time they said things like that you’d die of shame. It’s like the voices coming out of the old stone. They can’t help it, so you just keep working, no matter what whispers out. Children are old stones. Ancient flecks of crystal compacted together so fiercely that they remember who they were before, and talk like their parents and their grandparents.”

Run. Pad and claw in the moss, in the swamp, in the sand. Wind chafe on the nose, in the eye. Keep running. Never stop. She is so far ahead already.

[Silver-black corruption caught Sefalet up and turned her the color of night. The dark fuzz was tipped with glowing spores, waving lightly, promising a bier for me, too. My great fear was suddenly not that I would lose the tale but that a black blossom would spring up and compel me to devour it as Hiob had. I raced to finish before it could send up its rose. I raced to finish before the book could make me part of it, could drag me inside its sweet-smelling spoil, into a luxurious bed of death.]

Sefalet stood near the Wall. She shivered and clamped her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth. The Wall looked sickly, half-violet, overgrown. Shadows came streaming around the cliffs and the diamond gates and the little huts of the cannibal village at the foot of that terrible gap in the stone, so quiet, as though no one had ever lived there. Elif started to run toward her in his tripping, clopping way. But oh, we had to be careful. There was so much we did not know.

“Sefalet,” Elif called to her. “Don’t run. You’ll get tired out and break.”

“I am broken,” said both of the princess’s mouths.

“No, no,” I said, and closed the distance between us, pressing my forehead to the top of hers. Behind me I could hear doors creak as the villagers peered out to see what would happen. “Only sick, my love. Never broken. Now tell your lion why you came running so far. Why you wanted to be here. You see you’ve arrived and there is nothing unusual, everything is as it has always been. What did you want to do?”

Sefalet put her hands up so that she could look at me with her huge eyes, so like Hagia’s. She dropped one—her left.

“To break something big,” she whispered. She clapped both hands over her chin, a gesture that in any other girl would have been meant to stifle herself, to keep the words in, but they came so fast I knew they must have hurt coming out, each one a thin, sharp slicing wound.

The right-hand mouth wept: I think it’s a real place, the place I see when I dream, the place where the dogs live, and drink from their black bowl. It is somewhere cold, and there are other girls there, two of them. Sometimes I can almost see them, but then they slip away. I think it is a real place and I am there and they didn’t mean to hurt me, they only saw I had an empty mouth and they needed it, they needed someone to come here to the Wall and make this happen, because you can’t open something without a wedge. It is someplace far away, on the top of the world, but it is not just a dream. It’s where I was born. Not me, not really me—because I think I was a baby for a few moments, before I was Sefalet. But Sefalet was born there in the dark with a collar and a leash on her neck, drinking from a bowl of ocean, and speaking with two mouths, and born to be a wedge. But I don’t want to be a wedge. I don’t want to be the lever or the place to stand on. I want to be a princess and love Elif and Vyala and sleep with my head on my mother’s stomach. Why can’t I? Why can’t I? What did I do? Was I bad? I want to be good, I could be good, if only I could stop being myself I could be good.

The left-hand mouth spoke calm and triumphant: In the beginning was the Wall and the Wall was with God and God was a wall. Someone decided the world needed walls. Walls to keep things apart, to keep countries from meeting and mating and merging, to keep order firm and straight, to slow down time, and keep history from running on ahead, so fast, so fast you could never catch her. We can see everything, and it is a real place at the top of the world, but you are not ready to come here yet, you are not ready to know us by our names, only by our works shall you know us, and by ou

r works we will bring the new world into being, we will make it be born. Everything will meet everything else, and there will be no more walls forever, and we promise this is how it must be. We are not capricious, we are just a girl waiting for her first kiss, we are just a new heaven and a new earth waiting to be wakened from a thousand-year sleep by an enchanted princess. We are just Fate, three sisters and this one our youngest of all. That is how we have children. We find a mouth no one is using. Three who can see the one world to come, a fourth to bring it round. For the world has chosen and it says: make me whole. Think of us as just a kind of haggard Calypso, offering everything, asking the world to choose anew. But it’s a lie, really. There is only one choice and it is always the same. Only in Pentexore was any other ever possible. The world always says: I choose to wither and die, if it means love and tapestries and sons and suitors, if it means stories and wars and a thousand ships launching. And we only give the world what it wants. Wake up. Wake up.

Sefalet screamed out of both mouths, short sharp screams as though something was cutting her. She turned toward the Wall.

“Don’t,” Elif whispered. “I’m afraid.”

So was I. I tried to seize her up between my teeth, but she was faster. Still screaming, she ran toward the Wall, stumbling, falling toward it. Sunlight came pouring through the ancient, filthy, mossy diamonds of the gates. A kind of music echoed dimly, distant, and I did not realize until too late that it came from the other side of the Wall. A wild, frenetic music, without rhythm, chaotic, gorgeous, unbound. Louder and louder it came as my girl reached the Wall, drawing her breaths like knives, crying and shaking, and the sunlight was in her and she was the light and it came out of her and pooled inside her.

Sefalet put her left hand on the Wall. She went still. She stood up straight, her tears dry in a moment. Her bald head was a jewel in the sunset. Very gently, lovingly, like a bride, Sefalet kissed the diamond Wall with her left-hand mouth.

And the Wall came crashing down into a thousand thousand shards of rubble.

THE VIRTUE OF THINGS

IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM

18. On Endings