A Dirge for Prester John

The gryphon read aloud: “‘The long bones are found in the limbs, and each consists of a body or shaft and two extremities. The body, or diaphysis, is cylindrical, with a central cavity termed the medullary canal.’”

The presbyter cloistered with his companion: cross-sections of satyr and blemmye inked in delicate, costly brown inks lay spread out on a low desk of sethym wood, the male blemmye with limbs outstretched, encircled with diagrammatic symbols as though pinioned to a wheel, showing the compact perfection of his four extremities, which correspond to the elements. The satyr was bent double, clutching her hooves, a goat-haired ouroboros.

“Please concentrate, John,” begged Fortunatus, his conscripted tutor, “if you do not learn our anatomies how will you live among us? How will you help portion the harvest if you do not know that the phoenix require cassia and cardamom for their nests, while the satyr cannot eat the pepper plants that the rest of us prize? How will you build, brick upon brick, if you do not know that the blemmyae orient their houses in clusters of four, facing outward, while the sciopods have no houses at all, but lie beneath their own feet, like mice beneath toadstools? How will you sell your goods at the quarter-moon market if you do not know that the lamia especially love honeycomb still clung with lethargic bees, while the dervishes eat nothing but their dead?”

“Where I come from, all men have the same shape,” grumbled the priest, his eyes bloodshot from reading, unwilling to acknowledge me, who all in secret had become the best of his own students—his discipuli. I had done my scribe’s work and translated each of those illuminated anatomicals into Latin so that John would believe them true—for he told us that Latin was the language of truth, and the vulgar tongues are the dialects of lies. Still he would not thank me for it.

“That is a sad country, and you should give thanks to your God that you need not return there, where every face is another’s twin,” the gryphon said with a long sigh.

“All the same I long for it, and wish myself there, where nothing is strange,” John murmured to himself, and stared past me. I made myself appear busy, copying out my own scroll concerning the accounting rituals of centaurs, under the long, candle-thin windows. But out of one eye I watched him. His hair still showed scalp in patches, but the scalp itself not so scorched and peeling as it has been. And I thought: Yes, he must be homesick. He must be sad. He must wish to not be a stranger somewhere. He must still long for his Ap-oss-el. John shook himself and concentrated again on the wheels of flesh before him.

“I do not understand the blemmyae,” he announced, without turning his head to me, as though I were not even in the room. “They carry their faces in their chests and have no head—I suppose the brain is just behind the heart then, in the chest cavity—but how,” the Priest blushed, and shifted in his seat so that it was clear that he did not address the indecorous question to me, “how would she nurse a child, Fortunatus?”

The gryphon twitched his dark wings—once, twice.

“Why, she would but weep.”

At home, Astolfo was lost in his own dreams and thoughts, his eyes often glazed and happy over some distant thing I knew nothing of. He prayed often to Vishuddha, the eleven-mouthed god of his people. He carved an altar in eleven stones and spent much of his love there. Vishuddha’s worship, so full of harmonic chanting and poems in eleven parts, always made my head spin. I attended the amyctryae’s holiday services politely, for Astolfo’s sake, but could never quite embrace it. I learned the antiphonals and agons but I could not find the faith. I suppose that is something of a habit with me.

My husband could not speak to me, only to his god and his trees. I ate my soup in the silence that had become our third mate.

[Long fingers of scarlet obliterated any further mention of the husband, or John’s wonderful conversion of the lamia, or even a further discussion of anatomy—You see how I dreamed what might have been on those pages, how I guessed that it must have been wonderful, because it was invisible to me? The text turned liquid, and when it cleared again, the whole city had gathered to cast judgment on the priest.]

Fortunatus clawed the sand of our crumbling amphitheater, where the nations of our nation gathered—as much as the nations are inclined to gather, which is to say lazily and without much intent of discussing anything. The gryphon was nervous; the color in his tail low and banked, his throat dry. The hulking beast did not love speaking, and he loved less that his size bought him respect he did not feel he had earned. So everyone listened, and he hated them for listening.

“I think,” he began, his beak glittering gold in the glare of the sun, “that we ought to let him cast his chit in the Abir with us.”

“Why?” shouted Grisalba, trying to wrangle a slab of honeycomb from her sister, who had thought she was invited to a festival, and not a makeshift parliament. “He has not asked to.”

“And what if he drew the monarch’s piece?” said Hadulph, his red muzzle lifting in concern. “He would rule us. I cannot think that would go well.”

Fortunatus frowned, and the glare went out of his gold. “What if he did? Would it be worse than any of us? If Oro drew it, or Qaspiel? The Priest, at least, would not be partial—there are no other creatures like him among us, no faction for him to favor.” The gryphon cast his yellow eyes to the sand, speaking softly, “And he must be lonely. There is no one here for him, no one of his kind who understands his passion for the Ap-oss-el, no one to speak his trilled language and look him in the eye without reflecting their own strangeness back to him. A king has a thousand friends; he cannot be excluded from social events or sniffed at in disdain. I pity him—do you not?”

“If he stays, he will make us convert!” cried the sciopods, snapping their stockings in consternation. “He wants to make the al-Qasr into a church and we will all crawl around begging forgiveness for who knows what!”

Fortunatus shrugged his great, shaggy shoulders. “And when Gamaliel the Phoenix was queen, she called the al-Qasr an aerie, and set it aflame every hundred years. We rebuilt it, and called it what we pleased. This is the way of government. That is the way of the governed. How could John ask for more than Gamaliel did? Besides, the Lottery is a strange god, and he will likely end up a shoemaker or a lettuce-grocer. You cannot deny a man for what he might do, in circumstances that will almost certainly never occur.”

I held a long green canopy over my torso with both hands to keep out the sun; a pair of rooks alighted on it, and their weight dragged the warm cloth to my shoulders. I said nothing, but scowled and practiced my verbs silently.

Regno, regnas, regnat. Regnamus, regnatis, regnant.

I reign, you reign, he or she reigns over.

“He cannot take part in the Abir because he has not drunk from the Fountain,” I said loudly and clearly. Ignore me now, I thought, looking at his patchy, wretched head down there on the lower benches. Ignore that.

A murmur rippled among our folk, and Fortunatus appeared to honestly never have considered that point. He turned to John, who really needed new clothes; his habit looked worse than a cobweb.

“Are you willing to make the journey?” the gryphon said, his voice clarion in the amphitheater. “You would call it a sacrament. If you drink from the Fountain you would be wholly one of us, bound to our fortunes. You say life in your world is brief—would you reject eternity?”

John said nothing. Finally: “Life everlasting can come only through God. There is no life but in Christ. I cannot, Fortunatus. I can never repay your kindness to me, but that is too much. My God could never forgive me.”

“Then it’s settled,” I said, not bothering to hide the blade in my voice. “He will die in forty years or so. No need for an Abir.”

Fortunatus had no answer to that, but looked at me with grave, sorry eyes. We were not close in those days, not like Hadulph and I, or even Qaspiel. He thought me bitter and vicious, and perhaps I was.

Forgive me, husband. I love you now, but then you were so cruel to me.

“Wa