A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Houd, Who Does Not Even Like Jasper: Why must it be three times? I’ve already been once, that should be enough.

  Ikram, Who Will Go Next Year: I think you might need four.

  Who can explain such things? It is three times because it has always been three times. Perhaps in the old days, a physician lived who could have told you why. I have heard it said that once doctors were common as rose-hips. If a soul fell ill, a dozen surgeons and herbalists would appear like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and each with a phial, or a poultice, or a tincture, or a blade, each with a wonderful cure—and some of them really worked.

  Lamis, Who Is Afraid of Blood: They cut you open? To make you better?

  What would you do to save yourself, if death stood on the other side of a man with a knife? Be happy, I admonished my darling girl, that you will never have to think of it. Doctors, those strange and terrible beasts, are extinct—I heard of their dark rituals from Didymus Tau’ma, of whom I have spoken before. He often fell ill, and I had to care for him, for no one else could bear the smell of his sicknesses. I did not know what to do, but he showed me how to make a tincture, at least. Oh, certainly, we all know to wash a wound, if someone should stave in their head, or lodge a palm needle in their knee. But Didymus Tau’ma knew of things like surgery, wherein a doctor worked upon a body like a blacksmith works upon a sword. And those practitioners are long gone.

  Ikram, Who Will Play Surgery With Her Wooden Gryphon for Weeks, With Red Silk for Blood: Where did they go?

  And she opens her hands, for Ikram knows there is a story, and I sit in her palm like a stamen in a lotus, and say:

  The meta-collinarum cannot bear bluster and noise; they are mild and reclusive, and prefer their own company. Who can say why they boarded the Ship of Bones with the others? Each year they receded like a pale tide, drawing back over the hills, ranging over the mountains, looking for a place where no one else would ever come, where they could commune in secret. Some say this is on account of their swan-nature, for swans are poorly tempered and strongly bonded one to the other. Others say it is because they find it difficult to speak, with their elongated necks, and have a language of signals and signs all their own. I have only seen the Oinokha. I cannot answer this question except to say she spoke to me. Did it pain her? Who am I to know?

  An archer among them found the Fountain first—she was called Celet, and even among the collinarum she kept herself solitary, singular. She rarely spoke, except to trumpet the moonrise with her rough voice. She scrambled over stones and high places, the fur of her boots all caked with snow, and her arrows were wound with mistletoe, and her eye was grim. But for all that she was never an unhappy girl, only the furthest extension of the character of her people. And thus she explored far ahead of her nomadic band—and one day, like any other day, she discovered a crack in a towering stone, all slimed with green and foaming. She felt compelled by that effusion, and crouched down to stare at it, how the thin sunlight moved in its jellied surface, how the edges froze into green specks of ice. She touched it with her finger and tasted it—do you remember when you tasted it for the first time?

  Lamis, Who Only Drank First Last Year: I remember. It tasted like the whole earth.

  So Celet tasted, and felt a terrible, unstoppable strength move through her. The water of the Fountain is not sweet, but still she bent her head to the rock and drank hungrily, sucking the life of it from the earth, her spine moving with her pulling up the blood of the mountain from the flesh of the rock. She called together her tribe and they came to her broken trebling—the collinarum drank, one by one, and understood in their bones that they were changed. They did not know more than the strength and joy they felt filling them—they did not know to drink three times; they did not know yet that after the third they would never die. But by and by they uncovered these things, as one uncovers the inevitable end to a story. And they knew it should be shared, that though they loved not the company of the lowlanders and all their many folk, they could not keep it for themselves and dwell as immortal sages on the mountain, concealing their secret and watching other generations shrivel like leaves.

  By this we may know that the collinarum are perhaps kinder in nature than their aloofness might suggest.

  Houd, Who, Though He Looked Very Dashing, Was Still a Child Yet: I would not share, if I found it. Except with my sisters. And my mother. And perhaps you, Butterfly, if you gave me a ginger-cake for it.

  We may be grateful Celet was somewhat sweeter than Houd, then. However, when news spread of the miraculous Fountain, many folk were of your opinion. It should only be the beautiful who lived forever, or only the wise, or only the strong. Only the sciopods, or only the blemmyae. The tribe of doctors felt that they would be destroyed by this new medicine—and they called it that, medicine, so that Pentexorans would think it had all along been the province of physicians. The collinarum would not make arguments, except to say they could have kept it for themselves, if not for the pernicious presence of morality in their swan-hearts.

  There was nothing for it but to have a war. Many doctors became generals, to defend their livelihoods, and we cannot judge them, for there are many small deaths to suffer in this world, and no one behaves well when faced with a black door. For this reason it was once called the Physicians’ War, though now it is simply called the Last War. Celet proved to be a better archer than any could have known, and she crouched down in the tiny rill of the Fountain which you will all remember, how small it is there, how cramped, and no one threw her down to claim victory and suckle at the slime there, not one.

  That was the last time, children, that a large number of Pentexorans died, and I have not the memory to count the years between then and now. A thousand—more. Before Alisaunder and Herododos, before even the lions separated into the white and the red. Now, queenmaking is an ugly business, and there are cliffs to fall down and storms to crush bones, but in all your long lives, you will know perhaps a handful of deaths, and you will mourn them horribly, for their rareness. Mourning will be like a draught from the Fountain—awful, throttling, burning you all through your veins—but you will taste it but seldom, and love life better afterward, for you will have been on speaking terms with its opposite. Perhaps our long lives had to begin this way, so that no one would count it cheaply bought.

  I cannot imagine how Celet must have wept, to see from her height all that blood, all that death. I cannot imagine so much death: several bodies lying together and none of their eyes shining, none of them speaking, only bleeding into the snow, never to rise again. I can only speak of it as one tells a story one has heard so many times that it has lost all reality—yes, people die. Didymus Tau’ma died, and I watched it. But so many, so many all together—surely it cannot really happen anymore. Surely someone would stop it. But Celet saw it all below her, all those people dying, to live forever, and she clung to the crags in her grief, honking and braying as only swans may.

  And so when it was all done, the collinarum held the day with their allies—the roles of soldiers were sealed up and burned, so that no one would know who fought on which side, and no one would later seek revenge if a poor boy’s uncle thought that only cyclopes deserved the gift of the Fountain. When it was all done, the country was sick with it, and constructed a road from Nural and the provinces all the way to the great mountain, and called it a memorial, and one by one, the physicians being dead (though one of their trees, now and again, will fruit with an amazing array of bottles and droppers full of liquors of every color) and children being weak and small, each soul in Pentexore walked that long road, and drank that long drink, and all the things began which continue on this day when Houd will go, and sit with the old Oinokha, who has by now forgotten that her name was once Celet, that they once said she could shoot an arrow through the center of the moon and the moon would thank her for it.

  Houd, when you go, when she takes you in her arms to bend back your head and nurse you on that green mountain-blood, you must think of all of
this. You must remember it. That is the purpose of stories, that no matter where we walk in the world, we walk twice: once in the warm sunshine, and once in the silvery light of every tale we have ever heard, seeing each thing as it is, and also as it was.

  That is why your mother brought me from Nimat when you were but babies, all the way down the long roads lined in yellow flowers, along the blue river, all full of stones. So that you would know how to walk twice, and so that your stride would be kind.

  THE WORD IN THE QUINCE

  Nimat-Under-the-Snow. Hajji called it that, this old village half-buried in ice, and the others reacted to the name as if it leapt out of her pale mouth and struck them viciously. I did not understand—and they had stopped explaining to me. The diamond Gates had shaken them all profoundly, and I felt as though I had dropped through a hidden hole in the earth, with no guide to explain to me why any of my companions acted as they did.

  Qaspiel said: “We cannot say, John. I do not ask you to show me your mysteries. Perhaps if you had answered differently that day in the amphitheater, when Hagia asked you to take the Fountain. But now we are all stuck, and everyone knows what we are not saying, but we still cannot say it.” The creature, which I could not stop calling an angel in my heart, flicked its wings as though it wished nothing more than to be away and conversing with clouds. “To live as we do, John, life upon life, a palimpsest of experience, it is like walking twice through the same field—more than twice. An infinitude of walking, and the field is so dear and familiar, but we are always different, and the difference is all we are.”

  “If it causes you pain, why do you continue this way?”

  Fortunatus interrupted us, squinting in the snow. He turned his liquid golden eyes on me. “Why do you continue in your faith, when it means you must deny all the evidence of your senses and suffer for the promise of ever-postponed bliss? Because it is the way you have found to understand the world, to live in it and not despair. You speak of war in your country; we do not have it. You speak of jealousy, of coveting wives and wealth; we know nothing of this but in old, old tales of times we are glad we do not live in. You speak of vicious cruelty on account of whether or not to paint an image of your God; I and all of us find this obscene, and do not begin to understand it. We live forever and we live in peace and it is fragile, John. It is so fragile. And when a thing is fragile, it is best left undisturbed.”

  “In Christ there is also peace,” I said, and the angel said nothing.

  Several panotii lived in Nimat yet—in all my days I had never seen a village so elderly, so dwindled. Many houses had simply begun to sink into the icy earth. They emerged like moths from the snow-packed doors of their little yurts, and Hajji embraced them, her ears flowing around one after the other. This one is my thrice-cousin Isoud, she said of one. This one is my friend who painted the frescoes in the al-Qasr a hundred years ago, and her name is Mara. They looked so ephemeral, so small, like snowflakes, hardly coming to Hagia’s waist, their ears open and friendly, diaphanous. In the cold I pitied the blemmye, for though she wrapped a wolflet pelt around her shoulders, her sight obliged her to keep her breasts bare, and gooseflesh rose on them as the wind made her eyes water.

  I had decided to love her. Somewhere on that awful ascent, scrabbling on the crags, my skin freezing into a shell, I had decided it was better to love her than not to. It is possible to decide this, to take mastery of the heart, before one passes beyond all questions of mastery. Better to make the choice than to be swept away. I could not enter her body and not love her. It was not in me. I had decided it, before we ever reached Nimat. There would be no more discussion, nor any more nights secluded away from the others, until I could decide further what was to be done with the whole of it.

  The one called Glepham, whom Hajji introduced as the ivorysmith she liked best, when she was in the market for ivory, which was very rarely, brought us all a hot, thick, goaty milk swimming with lavender seeds. He explained that the panotii had dispersed, slowly, one by one, “like water dripping from a glass, down into the lowlands, into the capital, to find work and warmth and of course each passing Abir spreads them further, but Nimat is still our home, and here we do not turn the Lottery barrel. In all other cities the panotii remember Nimat-their-touchstone, the way you remember which side of the sky the sun comes up in. We are so pleased to have our little sister back in our arms, to wrap our ears around her and share heat.”

  I could not in any way account for the distress Hajji clearly suffered. She shook; her eyes darted; she tugged her ears tight around herself. She moved as though she expected some terror to crash down upon her at any moment. She smiled, but her smile was an animal’s bared teeth, cornered, desperate.

  “We came to see him,” she kept saying to Glepham, who demurred—one more cup of milk, sister. One more tale of how Mara upset the white lions by letting the beer boil too long and spoiling it all—one more tale of how dearly the white lions love their black, black beer. I thought of Hadulph’s mother. I wondered what her name was. I wondered if she lived here. I thought: Love is not a mountain; it is a wheel. No harsher praxis exists in this world. There are three things that will beggar the heart and make it crawl—faith, hope, and love—and the cruelest of these is love. I wondered if, tonight, when the red lion slept, he would repeat his mother’s mystifying and beautiful inversion of Paul, and if he would miss her. Again, my thoughts came round and round to it: either this is the devil’s country or it is God’s. They invert everything I know to be true. But whatever they say is proven real by my eyes, my ears, my hands.

  And moored in these thoughts I saw her, in the whipping snow, a monolith of white—Hadulph bounded toward the figure, and pressed his nose to hers. I shielded my eyes from the wind. Their growling came soft and wordless.

  “Vyala,” Glepham nodded happily. “She knew he was coming. She collected many tears to shed when she saw him again.”

  “John,” said Hajji. “Let us go. You will want to see him by moonlight. It is best that way. His humors are up, at night.”

  “Who do you mean?”

  Hajji shook her head, quivering with anxious energy. “They will stay if you tell them. Or come. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Hajji!” I said, half laughing. “Stop it! Who is it you mean?”

  “Thomas,” she said wretchedly. “You said you wanted to see him. He is here. He is here because here is where I left him.”

  Hajji led me as if I were her own meek child. Up, up, further even than Nimat, into the thin air and the ice. I shivered; my beard took on icy beads that jangled in the wind. The others stayed with the hot milk and the lavender and Vyala, whom Hagia especially had longed to meet, and whom Hadulph was passing pleased to present. I had never seen the blaze on his scarlet chest puffed so high. In the end I took only Hajji, though more truly Hajji took me. The others would not understand, or I should hardly see the tomb I came so far to find for pausing to explicate the finer points of the history of Christendom. I was not unaware that they had tried to be patient with my ignorance—but I could not bear their disinterest just then. I longed for the presence of God, for the touch of the pale light of the Logos in my soul, the peace that I had lost.

  Hajji squeezed through a gap in the high stones hung all with icicles; I followed her with some difficulty, for the country, even Nimat, ran too rich and fertile not to pad my belly considerably.

  All of a sudden, the wind died, the snow vanished, the cold steamed to nothing. We stood in a round clearing flowing with deep grass, and a black sky overhead, hung with stars like crystal censers. And with the wind, and the snow, and the cold, my heart lurched and stopped, and I fell to my knees, and could not even cry.

  In the center of the clearing a great tree sprawled, its long, dark roots splaying over the earth like skirts, its leaves arrayed in patterns of silver and amber, catching the dim light, wavering slightly in a warm breeze. The trunk of the thing was bigger around than six men might manage to join arms, the bark wri
nkled and slick, burls open here and there, where fragrant myrrh oozed, and the smell of it was sweet as the bodies of saints were said to be, in every book I knew.

  It had but one fruit, huge, ripe, growing in the place where two of the great branches meet in a crook, framed all around with amber and silver leaves, three-pointed and shadowy beneath. The fruit was a face, the face of a bearded man, his gaze serene and kind, the lines in his face showing care and grief, but acceptance, too, and in his beard I saw birds, tiny as flies, their white wings glittering in the starlight.

  “Thomas,” I whispered.

  “Imtithal,” he sighed. And Hajji ran to him, her ears floating wide, and she stood on her tiptoes to press her cheek against his, her face running with tears, and his too, but his tears were perfume and sap. She put her hands to his beard, his eyelids, and they whispered between them so that I could not hear.

  “I came seeking the tomb of Saint Thomas the Doubter,” I said—or pleaded.

  “And you have found it,” said the tree.

  My face burned—why could Hajji take such intimacies with that awful face? I came for communion, and Hajji had it, and I did not.

  “Who is the panoti to you? Why do you call her Imtithal?”

  The face looked mild and curious, his dark eyebrows rising. “She is my wife, and that is her name.”

  Hajji looked across the clearing at me, her eyes huge and deep. “John, you must not speak of this to the others. I could not bear it. Do you promise?”