A Dirge for Prester John

Tajala said: I want to die.

Mother said: Do not die. Instead, love me.

And she licked him like a cub, like me. She licked him all over, all his cheeks (and they were very big) and his eyelids and his forehead and his ears (and they were very long) and all the time Tajala cried and all the time Mother purred, and then Tajala was a pool below her, lavender. Mother stepped into the pool and it covered up her whole head (and Mother is the biggest thing there is) and I was afraid again. At night Mother came out and shook her fur and the pool froze again and Tajala was there and he was not well but he was better.

Mother said: Love, sometimes, ends.

For the third time her cub was afraid.”

In the morning I asked Hadulph to explain further about his mother and the grieving tensevete. He claimed to have told me no such thing and was very abrupt with me throughout the day, though the sky swelled terribly hot and I would very much have liked to ride instead of walk, as Hagia sometimes did, but Hagia had privileges I did not, and God in His Heaven knows how she earned them.

At noon the sparrows descended.

[If this war between my eyes and the page continued much longer I felt I would scream. I could not read any faster, yet the rot battled me for sovereignty over the page. My eyes raced my brain and both of them panted, exhausted. Fat globs of soft, furry mold swarmed up and took a great swath of words, and I felt tears prick my heart. When the text picked up again, Qaspiel was already telling its tale, squatting by the fire, I imagine, those long dark wings brushing the red earth, long yellow beans in a clay pot, all of them chewing tea leaves to make the evening pleasant.]

“…so the man Herododos, whose beard was so black it shone blue, but whose head was entirely bald, and who liked tamarind beans specially, and who told excellent jokes about elephants, had a pet bird, which some say was a mynah and some say was a parrot. In either event it could speak, and in either event Herododos also had brought with him a half-wife, as he called her, from a place called Lydia, and her hair shone blue, too, and her name was Sapham. The blemmyae put passion-flowers into her braids, because the red petals looked so radiant against her hair, and she sang them a song about a man who knew everything in the world, but told it more beautiful than it really was, so that a poor Lydian maid became a queen, and marmots became giant, noble ants with souls of incorruptible gold. Everyone gave the wise man food, and everyone loved him, even if they knew he would leave them behind when he returned home to his whole-wife, no matter how many clever songs his half-wife sang. Sapham winked while she sang, but she also wept. The blemmyae took her knuckles in their mouths, for this is an affectionate gesture among them,” and there Qaspiel paused and extended its own knuckle to Hagia, who bit it gently and smiled, if you could call it a smile. “The blemmyae loved her, because she knew a very large number of clever songs, and some of them were lascivious, and those are the best kind. The mynah-or-parrot began to sing duets with her, and the blemmyae called the bird Pham, because it echoed her, and fed it plum-seeds so it would keep making its pretty harmonies.” Qaspiel spoke as though it could not bear to end a sentence, each one going on and on. It used the word and like a desperate hand, reaching back to haul its words forward.

“But one day Sapham grew sick, and no custard-apples could rouse her to her old songs, and no knuckle-chewing could delight her, and no sight of Herododos herding the cameleopards could amuse her, and her face swelled up red and sweating, and her hair fell out, and when her half-husband took her to the mussel-shell, which had only just sprung up out of the white pool, so the old twins who guard it were then young, she said she did not want to be healed, but to stay here where the blemmyae loved her and put passion-flowers in her hair, and not go back to Lydia where she would be left, lonely, while her half-husband went back to his whole-wife and had a brace of children who looked nothing like her. She made all of this into a song, as was her habit, and the twins on either side of the mussel-shell marveled, and begged her to come in and be healed, but she would not.

Sapham died, and everyone was very sorry because this does not happen much and they had all told Herododos how no one died here and there was much embarrassment. Around this time the mynah-or-parrot Pham also grew sick and the day they buried Sapham, Pham fell dead after her, echoing her to the very last, and they were closed up in the earth together, Sapham with passion-flowers in her hair and Pham with black feathers shining blue, clutched to her breast.

After a year, a tree began to grow where Sapham had been buried, and it had a kind of heavy, dark, furry fruit. Everyone waited expectantly to see what would come of it, even though Herododos had already gone home past Lydia to wherever he lived and loved his whole-wife, as foreigners seem to have trouble believing about the trees. A second year passed before the fruit split open, and I came out, and several siblings, with hair like Sapham and wings like Pham, and we have no gender because we are not animals but fruit and we like to sing, too, and we like to fly, and we like to be loyal, and we like to love. The tree opened up and flew away and when it was done only twigs and a few blue leaves remained, and then they blew away, too, and we were all born, and ready to live.” Qaspiel twisted its long fingers together, upset, I think, if I could begin to interpret. “A hundred years later the tree fruited again and we were so happy, so excited, so ready to love our new family! But Gog and Magog first appeared in those days, and their monstrous stride shadowed the plains, and the fluid of their boiling faces, their tears and saliva and snot and sweat, fell on the tree and blighted it and we thought there would never be any more of us, ever, but then the first parent, Irial, began to secrete, and we learned that we were not all fruit, but a little animal, too, and we were happy, but the tree was still dead, and no one can make songs as clever as Sapham could, and we wish we could have known her.”

I chewed a piece of salted yak and considered it all. A bit of stringy fat caught between my teeth.

“Who will tell the next tale?” I asked. I looked for the ghostly slip of the panoti, in the shadows. “Hajji?”

She pulled another fruit up close to her ear, this time a plum. “I don’t tell stories,” she said quietly.

I looked down at the last crust of yak, chagrined. When the rest of them mocked me, I could bear it. When Hajji rebuffed me, misery settled on me like a coat.

“Bury it,” Qaspiel said. “So that the next traveler will have a fine salted yak-tree to feast from.”

I dug in the soil with my fingers—I wanted Hajji to smile at me, to be charmed

at my pliability. But more, I wanted not to be a stranger anymore, to look upon that miraculous soil as they did, as something usual, every day. I wanted to do something as a native soul would do it. And perhaps that was my first acceptance of the magic that lives in this place, the first time I really believed a tree would grow where I dropped the rind of my supper.

“I know you believe what you have told me to be true, Qaspiel,” I said gently, still hoping to pull some parable out of the evening, or an allegory. I confess I was not wholly sure of the difference. “But if you would do me the courtesy, I would tell you what an angel is, and perhaps you might draw some illumination from it.”

“I am not an angel.”

But in those days I was as full of my own notions of the world as a jar of oil, so eager to pour it out all over everyone that I did not care even a little what Qaspiel thought it was. “The angels dwelt with God in the beginning of the world, when all the stars of the morning sang out together and rejoiced—”

Qaspiel held out its long-fingered hand, and made its palm flat. Out of the flesh a single, stark red passion-flower sprang up, its petals ruffling slightly in the night breeze.

My words died in me. Hagia laughed cruelly, and the passion-flower began to—

[Here the mold had so corrupted the text that it hurt my eyes—the brilliant colors of it, no longer like an apple going brown, but bright gold with fuzzy growths of violet and green, like flames shooting up through the letters, devouring, conflagrating, tipped in bitter, black degeneration. The colors, Lord, the colors! The volume voluminated with scarlet and orange, with deep magenta, with tiny fungal fronds, disturbed by his breath, a fine cloud of spore tufting up and settling on the rough table. It was getting very bad now, and I feared that the third tale of love would drop into a puddle of muck and slime and escape us forever.

From six or seven broken words (ash-basket, bitter-gourd stew, bombax, moths, stars) I surmise they made their next night-camp in an open field of red-silk cotton flowers teeming with moths, under a wheeling, starry sky, and Hagia telling the last tale.]

“John, listen to me. Look at me. No one else is awake. No one will know you acknowledged that I live.”

I suppose Saint Thomas might have looked on her without fear or shame. I could barely turn myself halfway toward her, barely place an ear in the path of her voice.

“Why won’t you look at me?” Her voice pleaded; my resolve stammered in my breast.

“You are naked,” I whispered. And those were the first words I spoke to my wife. In shame, my soul aflame.