A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I knew of it, dimly. I wanted to know more, to beg Hajji to tell us everything, to tell us about the smallest soul who lived down there, or her friend with steady eyes. Anything. But I kept quiet. It is only manners, and manners are all we have. Still, it was the most I had ever heard her say.

  “Perhaps if we flew in very fast,” Fortunatus mused. “A well might open up—all air possesses patterns, currents, even this gluey fog, and certainly at some time or another the aether must billow aside, must part, and allow some leaf or nut to drift down onto some parapets—rounded, I should think, and bulbous, palaces built to bear the weight of the miasma. I could fly; I could spy out a bubble that might carry us down, to see what is there—” he paused and remembered his friend John, who had little interest in new and exciting locales of which one could tell wonderful tales of back home. “To see if they know anything of the Ap-oss-el, if anyone is living at all down there. At any rate, going through is always faster than around—this chasm cracks for miles.”

  “You might also get stuck like that pebble, and then we should all laugh at you, and spend a month tying up a rope to drag you back up,” remarked Hadulph.

  “I, too, could fly,” said Qaspiel. “We are both very quick. Fortunatus could take John on his back, and I have flown Hagia before. Perhaps even Hajji could ride behind John? I’m afraid I don’t know how to get you across, my leonine friend.”

  Hadulph wrinkled his muzzle. “I expect we could manage it, if anyone meant to get across. But look at all those eyes shining to get down, get in, get to. I believe I will take the lion’s lot, which is to say the practical route, and walk the chasm until I find a way around, or a bridge. I shall see you all on the other side if you don’t dash your brains out or get stuck in an eternal mist.”

  Hajji said nothing, but scrambled nimbly up the lion’s crimson haunch, and though he growled protest—but the white lion in his nature took rough pleasure in a panoti on his back. The pair began their quieter journey, the panoti flopped on his enormous back, looking up at the clouds.

  Qaspiel took me in his arms and lifted me up, safely over the mist, into the fresh, biting air. For a long, spiraling, wind-ragged moment, I didn’t think about John at all, and felt some small peace in me, like a pebble suspended in mist.

  Just as the sun slipped past noon and into the falling golden hours of afternoon, Qaspiel did spy a bubble below us, or at least a hole in the mist. It whooped with success and several unseen parrots echoed it back to Qaspiel with an extra harmonic scale of irritation. Through the gap, the four of us saw little—darkness, maybe, but it might have been shadows. Rooftops, perhaps, but perhaps only more mist. A road? A statue? I was certain I saw a garden all full of silver champak flowers and heavy iron pomegranates, their dew frozen, their leaves edged in ice. I saw it so clearly for a moment, and then I could not be sure. But John cried out, and the parrots shouted him down.

  “A church!” he shouted over the rushing wind between us. “I see a church there, in the mist! I’m certain of it! A cross all of silver and opals, frozen in ice! A chapel! We must go down, whatever the risk. A church, Hagia!” He met my eyes and I saw a pleading, a silent barter, that if there was a church, not to tell its priest nor any other Christian soul what had passed between us. I set my mouth, and my heart beat angrily. I would not be ashamed, not of the sweetness of those flowers against his skin, of any small shiver that might have moved between our bodies, one to the other, like a secret, or a promise. That was his world.

  I did not want to talk about it with anyone, truthfully. I had not yet decided where to place it within myself, in the heart or in the gut, as Hadulph might have said. What you put in your heart remains. What you put in your gut is digested and forgotten. It adds its energy to the whole, but vanishes in the process. Where to hide the smell of those flowers, and how I did, finally, speak his Latin out loud, speak it into his skin and his mouth? Presently I was keeping it somewhere dark and safe, for later brooding. Did I even want him? I didn’t know. I wanted—yes, I wanted to show him his wrongness, my beauty, even to corrupt him, as he claimed, but not in a wicked way. In the way that says: this world will swallow you, and I am first in line. Everyone else was fascinated, but I broke him. The one he hated; the one he would not see. That reasoning suffices for one night, but for more? I could not say. And that red field was behind me—before me lay Thule, something new and thrilling—we might even be in danger. I snuggled into Qaspiel’s cool grip. All of us felt it, except perhaps John, little more than forty and still a baby. Who knew if he felt anything, if he had the capacity to sense the friction of a story approaching, one of our very own, one we might be able to tell and re-tell and exaggerate and demure for at least a century. Oh, you don’t want to hear that old thing again! Well, if you insist.

  The man was digging.

  “Oh, la!” he sang, and dug further, his bronze shovel rising from the smooth, featureless street laden with piles of diaphanous, milky mist, which he piled up beside him in a sagging pile, like old snow. “Oh, la, the world is made of sugar—see? And I am a cup of tea. Oh, la, oh, la, the world is made of cobwebs—aye, and I am a little black fly.”

  He had a pleasant, high voice, especially given the difficulty of a goat’s head and long tongue. His horns whorled impressively, his grey fur curling in the damp. His legs were human, but covered in goat-hair trousers that matched his waist-up pelt. Only his large, flat, man’s feet and his thick fingers revealed any ungoaty nature. His big arms had found a kind of halfway point, covered in sparse, coarse fur that showed through to brown skin beneath. His body stretched and bunched with labor, altogether shaggy and impressive. I didn’t think he meant to sing out loud, but the tune bubbled up out of him, the sort of nonsense song that served to pass interminable work.

  We called out to him; he greeted us with glad hands and a goaty, frank smile.

  “Oh, hello, hello! Oh, la, I didn’t hear you come down! If I’d known company was coming, I’d have shoveled faster—oh, but it is good to see a soul!” He embraced us all, kissing faces, paws, hands, his humor high, his name Knyz, his profession digging, his home this very city.

  “But where is everyone?” I said—we could see only ourselves, and Knyz with his shovel, its pearly handle wet with condensation. The rest faded into fog and cold, a few rounded lumps, shapeless shadows. We heard no sound but the amiable scrape of the spade.

  “You’re in my bubble,” bleated Knyz. “It’s terribly hard work to keep it going—stuff just slides back in. Thule abhors a void, you know.” He indicated one of the huge, fog-shrouded humps behind him. “Someday I’ll reach the palace. There are probably others, too, with bubbles. Though no more than two or three, or we would have met by now—at first I thought you all were Thulites and we’d finally managed to thwack into one another! But alas—no shovels.”

  “I saw a church,” John said breathlessly, and I rolled my eyes. He couldn’t even see the wonder of it, stuck in his longing for home and God. I felt an embarrassment for him, the priest being too dense to feel it himself.

  But Knyz nodded, his horns spattering dew. “Near the palace, where it won’t hurt anyone. And if there are tunnels in Thule like mine, they all went towards the palace. Like blind worms we nose toward our sightless queen, oh, la. And if along the way little airy mineshafts collapse, and the bodies of old sciopods drop down out of the mist, dazed, if travelers drift in, well, then, hurrah. But I don’t stop digging. The chief industry of Thule is digging, digging toward the queen. And perhaps the queen has a black spade in her own hands, too, but sits still by the window in the heavy air, barely able to dig out her own front door. It’s like when it used to snow, and you couldn’t open a gate for the slush of it.”

  “What happened?” Qaspiel asked, running its hands over and through the jellied fog.

  “Oh, la,” grinned Knyz sheepishly. “Gog and Magog, I suppose. They bled here, on their way back beyond the Gate. No one meant it, but they’d got wounded and a few drops fell—cau
ght us all by surprise, and everything coalesced like cream in a bucket, and here we are. I don’t blame anyone, though. Times give and times take.”

  “Even their blood is so caustic?” Fortunatus clucked. “Even their blood.”

  “Oh, no,” Knyz said, “you don’t understand. They can’t help it. Just like you can’t help those big long feathers there. Someone made them that way, and set them going, and they just keep being that way, just like I keep digging. You’d be surprised how digging makes a soul sanguine about such matters.” This chilled me, for it was my own argument thrown back at me.

  “They destroyed your city!” John interrupted.

  “Oh, la, cities come and go. You’re too young to grasp the situation. Gog and Magog don’t destroy things, they change them. Thule is still here, it’s just different now. And the fog—well, we’re not stopped, just slow. They say stopped; they mean slow. They say impossible; they mean no one has. Everyone is so imprecise. When you live slow as slinking, you have so few words to call your own—you learn to be precise. Precise or pretty—you must at least choose one. Preferably both. You know, twenty years ago I broke through to a little kissing bridge over a spit of river, and two children had been caught there plaiting flowers. They’d managed six whole blooms in a thousand years! Not so quick as in the old days, but progress! And good for them, I say. They loved those flowers so. Because they spent so long plaiting them, they knew every single thing about each blossom, the smallest blemish on a petal. And when my bubble wrapped them up, they could even kiss, before the fog slid back in. Not so bad, to be able to concentrate on a kiss that way, for a thousand more years. Them on loving, me on digging. The queen on whatever queens do, which always seemed mostly sitting on thrones to me. And really, is it so different outside? I seem to remember, when Thule ran quick and bright, life still consisted mostly of waiting, moment by year, for fortune to turn my way. I lived a long time but it all seemed more or less the same. If I couldn’t do it one year, likely I wouldn’t do it the next. At least digging is consistent, and rewards effort more or less immediately. Isn’t it mostly like that everywhere: motionless, frozen, sad? Save that out there you move so fast that you don’t even know the value of a crooked arm, and what it means to struggle a decade and more to achieve a little red flower twined up in a vine.”

  I started to explain about the Abir, how what you managed one year could be upended by the next, the thrill of it, the waiting, the not knowing. But Fortunatus spoke first, his wings drooping in the dim, stale air.

  “It’s all inverted, outside Thule,” he said, as if afraid to agree or disagree with the shovel-keeper. “There, the elements stay separate, but people’s thoughts and dreams and fears are thick and syrupy, a congealed ether, and everyone digs in their spoon, coming up with a mouthful that they can call their own. There, everyone lives in the open air, but their hearts are shared, kept in the street for anyone to see. To turn in a barrel every several centuries, and mix together. It’s not better. It’s not worse. It’s harrowing, but so is Thule. And we only look fast. Some of us are slow, terribly slow, and move in our own mist, and forget, sometimes, which is a relief, but not other times, which is no relief at all.”

  But John could not hear Knyz or Fortunatus. He could not let them speak.

  “The church,” he said. “Who built the church? Give me your shovel, sir, and I will make my own way to it.”

  “Didymus Tau’ma built it. I presume that was a long time ago now—oh, la, centuries and centuries. We told him he didn’t need to fool with boards and nails. Just break off a bit of the palace and bury it. It might take a couple of seasons to get it right, but eventually you’ll have a nice little spread. Stubborn as a pit Tau’ma was, though, and he put up his own wood and wealth for it, even for the cross. And when it was done, he opened its big doors up to all of Thule and said: Today is Sunday, which is the Sabbath. I still don’t know what a Sunday is, but he opened the doors and no one came, except to peek in and see what he’d been messing with all those months. But he smiled. He smiled a lot, Tau’ma.”

  “He means Thomas,” John said to no one in particular, barely able to speak. “Didymus is Thomas. He was here, and he built churches.”

  “And no one came,” I pointed out, but he did not hear it.

  “You mean Thomas,” he said doggedly.

  “One day,” Knyz said matter-of-factly, digging into another drift of elemental sludge and hefting, “he’ll come back.”

  “Thomas is dead.”

  “Oh, la, yes, but he’ll come back all the same. And change the world again, like Gog and Magog did.”

  “Christ,” John said worriedly. “You mean Christ will come back, and change the world. In the Resurrection.”

  “I never met a man named Christ.” Knyz shrugged his woolly shoulders. “But I met Thomas, and he gave me a ginger pie.”

  “Thomas told you he would return, that he would come back from the dead?”

  “Who can remember? He said it, or someone else. No matter. So much digging to do before he comes, la!”

  John threw up his hands. “That’s heresy!” he cried helplessly. “We await Christ’s return! When the dead shall rise and the world shall be remade in the likeness of paradise!”

  Knyz dug on placidly. The rest of us tried fervently to be somewhere else while John drew nearer to tears. “That sounds lovely,” Knyz said in a conciliatory fashion. “If you’re hungry while you wait, I can make a fair mist-pie, with some mist-tea, even a good roast mist.”

  “Who is the queen you spoke of?” I said quietly, and John peered off in the direction of the chapel he could not reach, could not touch. “The world has gone by while Thule stood still. We do not remember a queen of this city.”

  “I met her when I was a small beast, la,” smiled Knyz. “Great big hands, the biggest you ever saw. She could have squeezed me into milk and a scrap of fur if she’d had a please to. She knew just everything—when Magog first stumbled towards us she saw his shadow fall on the boulevards. She spent weeks practicing sitting still, so she’d be ready.”

  John begged for the shovel. I tried to put my hand on his shoulder, to hold him back, but he just kept babbling for it, grasping for it, and if we’d let him stay he’d have dug forever, I think, for the promise of a church at the other end of his digging. He dug furiously, sweat pouring off of him and drifting away, to become part of the mist.

  “No,” Knyz kept saying, becoming more and more confused. “It’s mine. It’s all I have. If I didn’t have it, the fog would stop me, too. No, no.”

  But John would not stop. He wanted the church, any church. More important than anything, that church. I stood behind him and it stood before him and he crawled like a child and never looked at me once.

  We did nothing. We stood aside and let John break himself against the fog. With children, sometimes that is all you can do.

  “Did he die here?” the priest asked finally, helplessly, his fists wet and ugly, clenched at his sides. “Is he buried here? God showed me this place, God led me here. He must be here.”

  “He left us living—we kept his church. You don’t tear down churches. Oh, la, it’s just not done. He went back home with his wife, who sent word when he died. I think we must have disappointed him somehow.”

  “Saint Thomas did not have a wife,” spat John, incredulous.

  “If you say.” Knyz seemed quite done with our priest. Goats and fauns have a highly developed sense of propriety, and John had trampled all over it.

  “We could take you with us,” I said to the faun. “Out into the world.”

  “Oh, la, blemmye, there’s worlds within worlds. If I left, who would dig?”

  “You said there were others.”

  “But I can’t be sure of them. And all my progress would be lost. I appreciate the conversation more than you know—the quickest thing I’ve done in ages. But no, la, I live here. I see why you wouldn’t want to stay, but the queen needs me, and so does the city. Me and my sh
ovel, and that’s all anyone can want. To be needed.”

  We flew up the slow, clingy walls of the bubble, out of the misty well. John wept. I looked into the brume—and saw an arched window come briefly into view, and a dark-haired woman inside it, staring down at hands as huge as wings.

  THE SCARLET NURSERY

  In those heavy days that came rolling toward us like thunder, the al-Qasr bustled and hummed. The queen planned her great work, and ordered a great bronze barrel made, so big the smiths brought it in shards, to be assembled in one of the judgment rooms, which on warm spring days served as ballrooms, when the green shoots yawned and dancing seemed happier than the law. Chamomile blossoms garlanded the great statues that stood watch outside the door: two great serpents carved in sard and ebony, their tails twisting, their mouths open, and in each mouth a golden apple with a ruby embedded in its skin like a bruise. When the sun burned hot and no one desired work, I often saw Houd practicing his slingshot against those apples. He was never very good. I had confidence that the apples were safe.

  The children felt the excitement, but they did not know why anyone was excited. This is an apt summary of all of childhood, I think. One feels, and does not understand. They were getting big—Lamis was such a beauty, her orange eyes like gourd-skin, healthy and bright, and how she loved her books, and how I loved her. Ikram could break a young tree in two with her massive hands and had had pygmy designs tattooed around her biceps. She was so strong I wondered if we ought not to send her away to study with the giants in their gargantuan city, just to give her a challenge. And Houd was Houd, but more himself than ever. He brooded; he would be tall.