A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  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.

  She fell silent. “I have seen you discourse with other blemmyae. With Oro.”

  I felt myself blushing furiously then, and gave thanks for the dark of night, and the flutter of moths on orange flowers, that hid me. “Oro is… unformed yet. She is innocent. And the males of your kind… they are not voluptuous. A man’s naked breast is made in the image of God. A woman…”

  I knew she would not like such an argument, but I could not help but make it. What should I have said? It is only you I cannot bear, and I cannot yet face the reasons why? I wonder if you have any kind of mind or soul, when you have no head, the seat of reason? I fear you have only a ferocious heart, and that it, like your belly, has teeth.

  Through clenched teeth she answered me, cold and hard: “I cannot help how I am made, John. I do not ask you to put your face away before I can summon up the strength to speak to you. I do not ask you to go blind for my comfort. A body is just a body, and all bodies are naked before God—how could any God count as shameful her own creations?”

  “God is not a her.”

  “So you say. Neither are you—I cannot think this is a coincidence.”

  Hagia moved swiftly across the gap between us—despite her size, she moved so quickly, like the turtle who sees the spider, suddenly, and dashes. She seized me by the shoulders and then the cheeks and dragged my eyes to her breasts, her full and heavy breasts, and the eyes at their tips, black in the dim starlight, fringed with long lashes, and her lips below them, the mouth in her flat belly, and oh, I tried to look at her belt, and I feel such shame now at my shame then, when I prayed fervently in my heart that God should preserve me and pluck out my eyes to spare my soul one glance at her.

  “John, look at me, look at me. I am not ugly, I am not a demon, I am Hagia, just Hagia. I copy manuscripts and I know how to take care of trees and I’ve read everything you can even think of. I am no different than a woman of your kind. I wear cucumber flowers around my waist sometimes, because I like the smell of them, and how they are just a little green, as though they know what they will become. I loved my mother and my father, just as you did, and I came with you, I came, first of anyone, to help you find your saint, to find your way. Qaspiel itself, whom you revere, has flown with me in its arms and you will not even look at me, please John, look at me.”

  I looked. I believe God has forgiven me for it. She looked back, her eyes wide and clear. I let my eyes move over her, taking in everything I had refused to see. Her muscled shoulders, her arms and her hands stronger than my own. A place where her head might have been, (and I wondered then what she might have looked like with a face like mine—would she have been beautiful, plain?), where some shadow moved beneath her skin, a fluttering. Her powerful legs crouched near me, sheathed in their flowing black trousers, her jeweled belt. And her mouth, frank and friendly, her body warm and smelling of something odd and soft, cucumber blossoms perhaps, and ash from the dinner-fire. The night moved over us, and I was moved.

  She took my hands and I tried to hold them back from her, but not much, I confess it, not much. She held my palms to the round undersides of her breasts, and their weight was not so much, not so.

  “Just flesh,” she said. “It cannot hurt you.”

  “Oh, of course it can,” I laughed a little. “It can obliterate me.”

  And yet I could not take back my hands. She began to speak slowly.

  THE CONFESSIONS OF

  HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699

  And there a gentle flush of amber stained the page, erasing whatever Hagia might have said to him, whatever tale she might have told. Small veins of silver shot through it, and in my hands it had the feel of wet ash. And yet, that loss alone of this whole sad affair did not grieve me. It was a private thing which passed between them, whatever Hagia might have said that changed everything, whatever secret she might have given him like a gift—I have never had a wife, but even I know that a curtain must sometimes draw over that moment when some interior door opens and the world between bodies is no longer innocent, no longer empty and without need.

  An amber curtain, shot through with silver.

  I hoped she said something beautiful—I knew she did. Maybe something about her mother’s tree, and what word it bore for that year of her life. Maybe something about her husband. Maybe something totally unknowable, a fable of the pygmies or lament for the soul of an ant-lion. There is nothing I would not believe concealed beneath that suffusion of amber. And perhaps it was only because I could not see it that I believed it so fiercely to be perfect, to be the incandescent syllables of love that would move even me, that mysterious key which would induce any priest to rescind his vows. It could not have been less, to court Prester John. It could not have been less than the most splendid and piercing of pleas, of arguments for the world, for the body, for life.

  And nothing perfect can be seen.

  Alaric looked up from his book. “Are you well?”

  I will never be well again, I thought.

  You know what she said, my God. That is enough.

  How do I know that she seduced him, somewhere beneath that amber moss of decay and sweet, fading fruit? Because as the chapter ended in a mass of gold, only this remained, slowly disappearing, seeping into the mold:

  And I lay in the silk-flowers with her weight above me, and I kissed her mouth, and felt her lashes on my face, and I thought of the cranes, and we both wept.

  “Say it, Hagia,” I whispered, and her voice floated quiet and warm, up to the stars:

  “Ave Maria,” she said, stroking my face, and she said it perfectly, without hesitation. “Gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus…”

  Dawn came full and bestial. I sunk my face in my hands. Only Imtithal’s neat green book remained untouched by the corruption of the air. Its sharp herbal scent had dimmed, perhaps, grown less piquant, less eye-wateringly fresh. Its pages still gleamed pale gold-white, its letters still stood prim and brown against the flesh of the fruit. Like the third portion of the Trinity, it was immaculate, incorruptible. Small favors, and thanks be unto You, O Lord. The others were not destroyed yet, but stood at the brink.

  I should have given thanks to You as well for the blessings of those pages I had left, those that stayed unmarred; here and there a word or three had rotted through, but I had not spent half my life bent over desks in inadequate candle-light without picking up the tricks of the scribe. I needed only half a sentence to make a whole—or I had, when I did not care whether my Cicero were perfectly accurate. But John’s words inspired more care than old Marcus Tullius. Yet my heart was hungry—yes, hungry and severe, like a lion’s love, and the streak of golden corruption obliterating everything dredged up only rage that I had this much, and yet no more, that each page brought me closer to the last, and yet I could not even reach the end for the poisonous, invisible air. Alaric tried to calm me, and I began to hate him a little for it, the young man with his carefully patient voice, raised up a register and sweetened, cultivated to calm the elderly, like talking to an irascible child.

  That was unworthy. I could scratch it out, but You would not be fooled, and John’s honesty provoked an equal virtue in me.

  I have failed, I thought, and then said: It is over. Who cares for children’s tales? But A
laric, having not lost a night’s sleep to this, being younger and less prone to the rage or despair that plagues the old, we who dwell so near to the end of all striving’s worth, possessed a clearer head and heart. He left me and the puddled waxen ruin of our candle-clock, and went into the village. Some time later, as I was finishing the copy of Imtithal’s curious origin story, he returned with the woman in yellow, with her strange downy skin and topaz eyes. She regarded me calmly. I did not think that woman had ever parted with calm in all her days. She inquired as to the trouble. Speechless, I indicated the miasma of rotted fruit before me. She took in the sight.

  “You should have worked faster,” she sighed finally, and left us alone.

  “A callous thing,” remarked Alaric.

  “Who knows what they fashion hearts out of in this country,” I sniffed. “Pure red rock, no doubt.”

  “She fascinates me, I confess it,” my Brother said. “She speaks almost never, and yet when she does, I feel in my stomach as though a nail pierced me, and with much rust. It is disquieting.”

  “I am sure that our Brothers in Luzerne would prefer you not indulge your nail ideations,” I said wryly, turning back to the books to make the best of it.

  “I do not speak of love,” Alaric snapped in Aramaic. “I do not want her. You know I have never given thought to women.”

  “Then what?”

  “When she speaks, I suffer,” he said simply, and would not say more.

  To my surprise she returned to us, a basket in her arms. Her yellow dress caught on the dry reeds of the weave. She had filled it with boiled bluish eggs, strips of dried bird-flesh, and several flowers which I understood she meant us to eat.

  “It’s not breakfast that grieves me,” I protested, but my stomach disagreed. We fell to, and as we did the woman in yellow drew out of the feast a few slices of some golden substance—ginger, by the smell of it, though terribly sharper than the ginger I had known, which, fairly speaking, was never much. At Luzerne, our Abbot never considered pungent spices as virtuous fare.

  I watched as, with infinite delicacy, the woman picked up our books and rubbed their remaining fragile pages with the golden root, barely touching them, yet coating them in heady trails of oil. She scooped away the worst of it and added it to our cup of mash, and after much silence, much eating, and much application of her cure, gave the books back over to our care.

  “It will not stop the rot,” she said. “But it will slow. Perhaps you will even finish.”

  Alaric looked up at her through his hair, grown too long on the road.

  “Tell us your name,” he said softly.

  “It is not important,” she answered.

  “Please.”

  “My name is my own. You have not earned the right to hear it.”

  And she left us, the pads of her feet flashing clean and lovely as she moved.

  I cleared my throat. “I loved a girl when I was young, Alaric,” I said when I had swallowed my egg and wiped my chin. “She made the sweetest cheese you ever tasted, and her hair smelled like thyme. She had never read a book in her life, and only knew half the Lord’s Prayer. I thought she was as perfect a creature as the world might own. Here at the end of the world I will even confess to you, my dear friend, that I broke my vows and made love to her one summer among her cows, with the bright cold stars overhead and the lowing of the spotted beasts in our ears. She kissed me—well, like a lamia. I felt her tail all squeezing me in and her soul in my mouth and I loved her like fire, Alaric, I loved her like a gospel. But when the morning came and I woke with her sleeping in the grass beside me, she wasn’t a lamia or a gospel, but a simple girl with pretty skin and a good head of hair, nothing more. Nothing worth my fall. I renewed myself to God. What I mean to say is that love has natural defenses and offenses, strategies. Love wants to win, to make children, to further the world. It is nobler to stand above it. To choose to be better than a beast. To choose knowledge instead of a barrel of children and very sweet cheese. But if you break your troth with that woman, I will not betray you—it happens to us all. I am confident you will see the wisdom of my words when you have done with her. I think there is little danger of you taking up yak husbandry in this village of ash.”

  Alaric listened stonily and finally uncreased his mouth to speak. I felt a lightening of my soul, having purged that long-lost girl from it, and was reminded how great a gift Thy sacrament, confession, may be to the burdened.

  “Hiob, let us not waste breath on this. I did not mean to say I felt a yearning for her. It was only that when I hear her voice, it seems as alien and far to me as if an angel spoke from Saturn, and my bones quake with trepidation. That is not love, or its defense. Let us return to the books. We have so little time, and the light is full, and we need no candles now.”

  The lurid scarlet mold that cut into Hagia’s neat hand retreated under the woman in yellow’s ministrations. Alaric showed me: they had drawn back, into the margins, glowing there like marginalia, like an illumination, wine-stain colors, claret and grape, and gold strands like harpstrings. It made abstract patterns—if we had less reason to hurry, I think we could both have been happy simply peering into the slowly seeping decomposition, finding shapes there, like children find in clouds. There, it is a dragon. There, it is a cart full of tinker’s scissors.

  I could still see the strokes the woman in yellow had made with her odd sponge of a plant, and now it seemed to me another author had entered our three sacred books, that the woman in yellow dwelt there in the pages, too, leaving her mark, her signature, in the sweeping brush of her sure hand, showing white, healthy fruit where the rot had all but taken it. Despite Alaric’s fascination with her, I prayed for her in my heart, asked for blessings for her, her soul, her roosters, her sharp-smelling ginger and her boiled eggs, even her bright yellow dress. We returned to the books with a ravenous delight, starving sailors having found an unexpected port, safe and tidy.

  THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN

  On the eighth day, Fortunatus dropped back with me, his beak glinting glaringly in the sun. He spoke solicitously; we were nearly strangers then. “Where did you get your map?” he asked, carefully measuring his tone so as to imply no disparagement, only a professional curiosity.

  “I know a tree in one of the southern districts of Nural. Some poor cartographer buried her toenail clippings there, and the resulting teak is enormous, its trunk deep brown and stamped with directionals, its leaves all parchment-piebald and soft. When we get home, I think I will barter for a sapling, and take it as an apology to Astolfo—my husband. Before we left, when the tigers were still dancing their prayers for our good fortune, I spent hours climbing in the branches of the map-tree, looking for something we could use. The boughs sprout scrolls, but you know how unpredictable trees can be. Some of the maps lead around the whole world and back to the tree, some of them show details of Nimat before the mountain sprang up, some of them show the path to enlightenment, some show a land across the sea bigger than Pentexore, full of strange creatures. Some show a single heart or soul, diagrammed until it can be perfectly understood. I only hoped I could find our map among the harvest.”

  “Does the map show the tomb of the Ap-oss-el that John seeks?”

  I had to admit it did not. But it showed something, a long road, and portents, and menaces—the sort of thing a map is supposed to illuminate—and at the end something that looked to me like a grave, and I thought that might… be enough. For him. Any grave. We have so few, any single one might belong to anybody. “Besides,” I sighed, “I barely use it—Hajji leads the way. Where she rests, we rest. She is quiet and subtle, but surely you notice that she seems to know where we aim?” Fortunatus looked troubled, his brow-feathers furrowing—but he nodded.

  In truth I barely understood the map I carried. Delicately drawn, veined as a leaf, the mountains were tipped in silver ink and the names of the cities we meant to pass through drawn in a rich cuttlefish tincture. When I picked it from the branch, I ran my h
and over the stiff parchment—almost, but not quite, as stiff as a toenail—wondering where, in the alchemy of the earth, the slant of the penmanship on this map was decided. Babel, it looped. Ultima Thule. And more mysterious still, it showed the banyan tree, and the field of red-silk cotton flowers, and small figures whose shapes I did not want to guess at.

  “Do you love the priest, even though he wants to convert you?” I asked. I did not know if I sought the gryphon’s answer or my own.

  “I pity him. Pity is a cousin to love. When he forgets himself, he can be dear, like a baby. He made me soup one afternoon, all onions and no meat, because, he said, he did not know what could be killed for meat here, as according to his God I am a beast, but at least he knows that I should not be eaten. It was not a good soup, but it was meant well, and I think that is John in sum.”

  We walked in companionable silence, and after a while, Fortunatus picked me up by my belt and hauled me onto his back. I smiled—gryphons are not vocal with their affection, but you can’t miss it, when you’re ankle deep in golden fur. Nor are they so sensitive about being ridden as red lions.

  Not long after that, we came to a high cliff, which dropped away below us into a hazy mist, and a soft rushing sound. Trees jutted from the rock, twisting up to get at the thin light that filtered down. We all peered over the edge. Hajji, to whom I had not yet said a word and would not until she spoke to me, tossed a chip of rock down. It tumbled end over end in the air until it sank into the mist—where it hung, stuck, suspended in the cool fog. It still descended, but so slowly we could barely see it move.

  “Thule,” sighed Hajji, and rolled over onto her back, her ears stretching out on the weedy grass. “A friend with very steady eyes once told me about the place. There is no longer any land or air or sea, but a mixture of all of these, which is in consistency like the body of a jellyfish, and holds all of Thule together. Something happened here, to mix up the world this way. Thule is reachable, findable: but once found, it is impossible to move, to step further than a few stumbling feet onto the glassy shore. It is impossible to penetrate the heart of Thule, impossible to progress, pilgrim or no, impossible to leave. At least, I have heard it is impossible. I do not know everything under the sun.”