A Dirge for Prester John

“I cannot know, Houd,” said I, for I remembered him from the ship, and liked him well enough to call him by name. His presence felt rigid and thin next to me. “I think it might be. The hedge spoke of that place, where their god was born and died, and they said ugly things, about thorns and crowns and governors.”

“I… have heard tales of it. Of autumn-time in Yerushalayim, and wonderful foods on wonderful tables, and wonderful men telling tales of a golden world.”

If my girl had been brought up by us, she would have heard tales of Houd.

For his sake I called that city Yerushalayim, and dreamed of a hundred gods walking its streets, each with bull horns and wings like mine, each garlanded with orange boughs fiery with fruit. In his sleep Houd stirred beside me, and I pulled his hands over us both.

I could not bear him any longer. I have a limited capacity for despair. It takes so much strength to be sad. My muscles ached with it. I sought out, as I ever sought when my husbands were miserable and drawn up into themselves like night-snails, when Astolfo, my first mate, scowled and frowned, when John wanted to talk about God and I wanted his body in mine, or to eat sweet things, or to dance in the pavilion, anything but contemplate the wounds of a man I never knew, and their cosmological significance, I sought out Hadulph, my red lion. He eschewed a tent, finding the air warm, and lay on the side of the river, peering into the running water, the strong, strong current. I lay down beside him; I put my hands into his fur. With John there could be kissing, but the mouths of blemmye and lion do not fit together. Instead there are hands and paws and tails, manes and tongues and claws. He growled at me, and I knew—it had been so long since I had come to him, my marriage took so much work, I hardly had the time.

John had known long before we married, and, well, I think he learned a lesson in his world, and that lesson was that a king cannot dishonor. We draw little difference between a king and a queen, and this was enough to addle his ideas about adultery a little. I had no particular ideas about adultery; I did not consider adultery. Love is love. There is time enough in the world for everything. Hadulph, I knew, loved also a tensevete out on the icy wastes, and I did not begrudge either of them. Why should I? And since I loved Hadulph before John, he was the interloper, in truth. All this meant was that he chose not to think on it, and I chose not to discuss it. Only once did he tell me I endangered my immortal soul. I said: A lion is worth a soul. And besides, I thought I didn’t have one?

Hadulph growled and rolled me as lions do, wrestling gently, biting softly. I lost myself in it, in scratching him, in the roughness of his fur, in the drawing back of his muzzle, in the light of the moon on his whiskers. I felt each tooth like all the teeth he had ever sunk in me, I heard his purring as all the purring he had ever made in my presence, all the occasions of our mating, in pepper fields and parchment fields, in palaces. I had known him almost all my life, and when he took me it was all the times he had ever taken me, that I had ever taken him, happening together, the young lion pouncing on me and knocking me to the ground, discovering the bigness of our bodies, the strength we could inflict on the other, comparing bruises and laughing so low and so long. All the wordlessness we had shared, for where John insisted on theological debates, Hadulph and I had enjoyed silence, or growling, and that seemed to contain all we needed to know. We were rooted in each other, wherever our branches grew.

Finally, we quieted. We looked into the water together. We leaned forward, pressing against whatever kept us back, the invisible wall which made us not even want to cross the river. Hadulph put out his great paw against it, flexing his claws.

“Why do you think we cannot cross?” I said. “It cannot really be that we are demons. If demons are as he says, I don’t think water would pose much trouble.”

Hadulph yawned. His vast pink tongue lolled out. “I think that they have all been praying on the banks of this river for so long that the weight of their wanting made it so. They wanted to believe the river kept them safe from anyone not them. That’s all demon means. It means not us. It’s obvious there’s no such thing as God, and that’s all right. I never felt the lack. There is so much in the world, insisting on a kindly god is greedy. But if there were I would say that God is wanting, the power of it, the incarnation of it. They all wanted to keep out the not-us. And they have.” Hadulph scratched the soil. “Of course, that means John is not-them now. You and I… we never were.”

The sun rose and fell and rose and fell as John brooded on our situation, reluctant to walk downstream and attempt to signal across the river. What if they should see us all, in our finery, in our scales and furs, and send their numbers against us at once?

I believe John simply forgot. He forgot what we looked like to him when he first arrived. How he cried out, terrified of the gryphon and the amyctryae, how he thought Grisalba a demoness, how he would not even look at me because he could not bear to look upon a woman’s naked breast. He had come to love us, and forgot that his countrymen would see us as did he, at first, not as he saw now. He had forgotten the company of those who looked like him, and we seemed in his sight as beautiful as angels. John had imagined himself riding home with an army of angels at his back. Instead, he had only us. And the river saw no difference between himself and his countrymen.

“I cannot see why I should not be able to cross,” he said weakly.

He sent Qaspiel to find a way around the river. He bade it fly north and west, to fly high so that he would not be seen, and return to us, tell us if we could walk the distance, if a path through the blue net of rivers that caught up the land John knew could be found.

“I do not wish to leave you, John. Nor Hagia—Hagia tell him, tell him I can be of use here, send a gryphon or one of the little dragons.” I could only hold it, my closed eyes against its familiar chest that still smelled faintly of vanilla, as though his years in the fields had never ended.

John looked down uncomfortably. The fullness of it was coming to him. “If you are caught,” he said, “they will not hurt you. They will think as I thought once, that you are… an angel. A gryphon alone, without me to explain, to teach them how to see her… she would be slaughtered.”

And so it understood, and so it went. And the trouble of what we were to do unraveled itself almost as soon as Qaspiel became a speck in the sky.

A man came walking over the hill.

In green and silver, with a sword and a helm under his elbow. And handsome, black curls and a long nose, a clear narrow face, a shining black beard, and he looked at us and blinked.

He was not afraid, or disgusted by us. He did not run, or laugh, or swoon. He seemed surprised. We, too, watched him, waiting for his fear, looking for our own, wondering if we would find it, if this was the enemy we had come to fight, if we would be expected to fall upon him. If he would speak kindly. If we would understand him when he spoke. Without much concern the man walked down to the river, knelt, and drank with cupped hands. He looked up at the sun, and back towards us, most especially myself, and raised his hand a little, in greeting.

“Sir,” said Houd, standing somewhat behind Anglitora, his huge hands shaking, his eyes wet and eager, “is that Yerushalayim? The city on the hill?”

The man in green looked toward the distant domes of the city and smiled. He answered us in Greek, for

which we were grateful.

“No, my lad, that is Mosul,” he answered, chuckling. “Where you stand now was once Nineveh, a thousand years ago, and five hundred more. I think you might be stepping on the Shamash Gate. Jerusalem is, oh, far to the south. But perhaps not so far. I expect only a few years away now. And in a decade, well, the distance between Mosul and Jerusalem may be small indeed.”

We looked at John, whose face had fallen. He studied the earth, his shoulders soft and defeated.

“I am John of Constantinople,” he said finally. “I came to defend Jerusalem from the Saracen, from the fire.”

“Well,” laughed the man in green, broadly now. “You’re early! I haven’t taken it yet. I am Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi, and at the moment I am besieging Mosul. When that is done, I promise, I will devote all of my love and attention to the Holy City.”

“Where is your army?” Anglitora demanded. “Where are your knights? How came you to be wandering around on the other side of the river from the thing you claim to be sieging?”

Salah ad-Din filled a flask from the river. “Have you ever commanded a siege, madam? It is a long and boring business. Mostly, you stand outside a very large wall and try to keep your own army from killing each other for lack of anything more amusing to do. Occasionally I come to the ancient city you are all roasting birds over to meditate and pray. I get bored, too. Now, since I know your aim and you know mine, tell me, does your diadem indicate you are a king? Where have you come from? How did you come across such extraordinary beasts?”

Do not call us beasts. Did I say that? I would like to have said that.