A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  The first was deep blue, and on its cover a wing had been embossed, its feathers spread open like fingers.

  The second was leafed in silver, glistening dully, and on its surface I saw a hand, and in the palm of the hand there was a monstrous mouth, open as if to speak.

  The last was black, heavy and solid, and it crackled slightly as I touched it, as if it had once been burnt. On it was figured a creature with a dozen arms, arranged around its body like the spokes of a wheel.

  I shuddered and flushed all together, and I felt as I did once long ago, when a girl came to my window all bright with the night, her eyes full of stars, her lips dark and trembling with the January cold and the very nearness of sin. The image of her rose so fiercely in me; I felt towards those books the same anticipation as when she stood quite still at the threshold of my house and my body, and I suppose I was as helpless before each of them as the other. All my plans fled before me. I wanted to open them all, for everything to be open and plain and naked before me.

  The books were warm and alive in my hands. Yet the moment passed, and I could not see that lost girl in my memory any longer, nor the darkness of her lips. The day was bleeding out, and so much work to be done.

  SATURN, COLD AND DRY

  The palace in which our Supereminency resides is built after the pattern of the castle built by the apostle Thomas the Twin for the Indian king Gundoforus. Ceilings joints and architrave are of sethym wood, the roof ebony, which can never catch fire. Over the gable of the palace are, at the extremities, two golden apples, in each of which are two carbuncles, so that the gold may shine by day and the carbuncles by night. The greater gates of the palace are of sardius with the horn of the horned snake inwrought so that no one can bring poison within. The other portals are of ebony; the windows are of crystal; the tables are partly of gold, partly of amethyst; the columns supporting the tables are partly of ivory, partly of amethyst. The court in which we watch the jousting is floored with onyx in order to increase the courage of the combatants. In the palace at night, nothing is burned for light, but wicks supplied with balsam…

  Before our palace stands a mirror, the ascent to which consists of five and twenty steps of porphyry and serpentine. This mirror is guarded day and night by three thousand men. We look therein and behold all that is taking place in every province and region.

  Seven kings wait upon us monthly, in turn, with sixty-two dukes, two hundred and fifty-six counts and marquises. Twelve archbishops sit at table with us on our right and twenty bishops on the left, besides the patriarch of St. Thomas, the Sarmatian Protopope, and the Archpope of Susa… our high lord steward is a primate and king, our cup-bearer is an archbishop and king, our chamberlain a bishop and king, and our marshal a king and abbot.

  —The Letter of Prester John,

  1165

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  Being an Account of the Winning and Losing of a Great War, composed by Hagia of the Blemmyae

  Despite Protestation, as Her Daughter Anglitora, who Commanded the Forces of Her Nation, There Being No One Else About Who Knew a Damned Bit About the Business of Fighting, God Save Them All, Never Learned Her Letters.

  This is not my tale to tell.

  I am but a reluctant author—that thick, deep root which storytellers tap and from which they suck up all their strength is not mine. I have no map to it. Perhaps one day I shall have the muscular fortitude to write in truth for myself, to tell the tale of how I was born, how I lived and worked, how I drank from the Fountain and loved my mother. Of John’s coming to our country, and how I met and first loved him. How we made our child between us like a strange machine. It seems, to be frank, a gargantuan task and I am tired. When I think of the great number of words that would have to be piled upon themselves in order even to begin the long fable of his rule, my heart stills and wishes only to sleep. What a heap of useless, glittering gems those words would be! And such work to build them up, only to lose the lot if just one ruby were misplaced. No, I could not do it. It is too much. When I am older; when I have wisdom like holes where my teeth used to be, wisdom where anger and need used to be, then I will tell that tale.

  And yet here I sit, in a tent of black silk with silver stars stitched into it, the war over and everything sour, I sit and scratch parchment in the country of the cranes, hiding here, hoping not to be found. Dawn on the Rimal is a lonely thing. It is a line the sun crosses. One moment you can only see black and the next a kind of hard, sharp whiteness cuts neatly across the sand, as quiet as shears, slicing away the wool of the night. All that’s left is skin. The bald, peeled skin of the sun and the sand, mating endlessly across the expanse of the Rimal. And in the dim light the girl at my side glares at me with her black eyes with golden sparks stitched into them. She says:

  Why are you making excuses? Just say what happened. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It’s just that someone has to say it. Or else who will remember? All our friends are dead.

  The girl is my daughter. And as she sees me write this she puts out her soft pale wingtip to touch my hand so tenderly, as a daughter touches her mother when they have both been through so much, when they have hurt together like two wet ropes pulling in opposite directions, when they have fought with their shoulder blades pressed together like one flesh. This is how she touches me, but she says:

  I am not your daughter. I love you like a hard, hot knot, but you have to tell the truth. You have to write that I am John’s get but not yours, and how it hurt you, and how my real mother sounded when she spoke, and how you first met me, and what I brought to you that day, and how you didn’t forgive me for a long time. I can’t write it, so you have to. I know you can. You owe me the best words you can think of. It doesn’t have to be pretty but it has to be true.

  She brought a helmet. And I still haven’t forgiven her.

  Children can be so difficult.

  In all of the stories from John’s country, the great concern is: who should be king? Will it be this young, earnest prince or that cruel, decadent duke? Will it be the correct boy, who has lineage, father to father, or this upstart who has not paid his genealogical dues? It seems to me that in that place where John is not unusual, where he is home and hearth and an everyday sort of man, kingmaking must be a kind of sport. All the people of his nation must come to see it happen, to make bets on the players, to wear the colors of their preferred champion and cheer when the lesser contenders fall down in the dust with their heads sliced off or poison dribbling from their lips. It must be very exciting—but the stories usually end with someone being king. That’s the whole purpose of the story. The next tale picks up with another throne, another young, pure-hearted knight robbed of his birthright, another black-greaved usurper. For all that they love to make kings, John’s folk seem to have little interest in the actual business of ruling anything. They like to become, they do not like to be.

  John insists that I do not understand these stories. That is probably true. I tell him pointedly it is no one’s fault who their father is. One can neither blame nor credit them for the habits of the creature who flopped about on their mother. John enjoys, I think, being shocked by me. He would not admit it, but he likes the blows I give his heart. He says Christ is king, and all earthly kings strive to be like him, and thus, as Christ’s tale is one of rising from lowly beginnings to take His rightful place at His Father’s hand, of course the histories follow this natural course.

  It is hard to understand what foreigners mean, even when they have been so kind as to learn the local language. But now John is king, and it is with some dry amusement that I note how his world gave him only tools to want a crown, not to wear one.

  The girl is not my daughter. But she is mine. Her name is Anglitora. I should have said that at the first. I told her that this was her story, but if she had been my daughter she would not be so hopeless when it came to letters. I would have taught her to write her own history, how writing is like giving birth to yourself—no one can do
it for you without making a mess. I have tried to give her her letters, and she knows enough to disapprove of my progress. Enough to scowl at me, her long, muscled neck shining bronze in the candlelight. She cannot help her father or mother either, she hoots when she is upset and passes a hand over her eyes and oh, how like John she looks when she does it:

  You must get to the point. If you do not get to the point quickly, people will get confused. The point is the war, not that father was foolish when he was young. The point is how I came to the al-Qasr and the sun was so bright it bounced off the helmet in my arms and father winced, and so did you, and all the birds cried out because they are birds of omen and you cannot be made of omen without knowing the future. Just say: one day a man named John came to Pentexore, and he was a stranger but you were all kind to him anyway, and when the Abir rolled up like a great stone he became king and you became his wife, but you already loved him, so that was all right. It’s easy, really. It only starts to get interesting when I come across the desert.

  I laugh in the dark, and it is the first time I have laughed in so long. She is still such a child, hardly even forty, and this is what children think: the story only begins once they enter the action. Nothing came before them and what came after is only distant, indistinct, seen through a haze and a veil. I’m sure I think this way as well, though I seem virtuous to myself, in that I believe the story of Prester John began when I found him lying face down in a pepper-field. This is a mountain in the path of the story—you cannot assail it or walk around it. We discovered him and brought him home. Myself and Hadulph the red lion and Fortunatus the gryphon and two pygmies whose names I have forgotten. That was how it started.

  Anglitora disagrees—it began with a crane, obviously.

  But I have said it is her tale, and I only have the telling of it. I bow to her will.

  I do recall that it was morning. A pure light fell down through the banana leaves and papaya trees, turning the sun and shadows green at the edges, turning the air clear and sweet, and we had not yet opened the court for the day’s doings—John ate his breakfast of red rice and blackbulb, conferring with one of his advisors, whom he called a proto-pope and who was truly called Vidyut, a vaguely confused but well-spoken orangutan with a passion for philosophy. John called Grisalba, my dear friend and a lamia, an archbishop, and she liked that very fine. I was queen; everyone called me so, though it never sat right with me. A queen should be more than I was in those days: just holding on, to John, to Hadulph (whom John called an abbot), to Fortunatus (a cup-bearer) and Qaspiel (a cardinal) and all I loved, and to my poor child who wept so bitterly and could not make herself understood, even as she howled on her mother’s throne. For I had a child, a princess for our kingmaking tale, before Anglitora came.

  I must stop for a moment. To speak of my child strangles my heart, which is already throttled half to death. If another woman were writing this, she would say: Queen Hagia had two daughters, one fair and one monstrous. But I am writing it, and the fair one puts her warm human hand on my knee and her cool crane’s wing over my hair and whispers:

  How fares my sister, do you think, with all of us gone? I remember how you loved her, then. I remember how she laughed at my arm.

  Do not ask me. I cannot know. It was morning, I know it was morning, that is all I remember. It was morning when she came, striding up to the door and the court like you belonged there, like you knew us all so well and even despised us a little. I remember how you looked, how tall and strong, the muscles in your legs and your good arm, this girl with long blue-black hair and skin the color of the Rimal at sunset and a gaze that cut us so deeply we understood you without any need to speak. That arm spoke so loudly: a girl in amber armor, her breastplate full of golden veins and bubbles, one arm strong and human, one arm a long, pale wing, a crane’s wing, its longest feathers grazing her knee. And in her arms like a child: a bronze helmet. And the sun hit it like a blow, glancing off and hitting us each with a closed, glowing fist.

  Yes, that’s how it was. That’s it.

  John’s face moved horribly—continents of memory drifted there, and I watched him work out the lineage involved, how her jaw looked so like his, her nose, and how that wing, that tell-tale wing called out his sin and could not be denied.

  “Kukyk,” he whispered, and that was Anglitora’s mother’s name. I am her stepmother, but if the crane had the rearing of the child, I had the rearing of the woman. Perhaps it is truer to say that the crane-girl had two mothers and no father to speak of.

  It’s no one’s fault who their father is.

  I cannot say if I was hurt. I was not jealous—John had told me the tale of the crane and how he made love to her while the nation of birds fought and mated with the nation of pygmies in the valley below them. I thought it was a beautiful story, one which made sense, had a good beginning, a logical progression of events and a satisfying conclusion, unlike his endless parade of paladins becoming king to no good end. I did not think of a child. I did not think of an epilogue. John and his crane-maid did not battle, they only mated. But the crane must win that fight, to determine whether the bird or the pygmy owns the get. Without blood drawn, their offspring could never be one or the other, human or crane, but both, confused, in one body. How hard her life must have been. I do not think I was hurt, not in the way women are hurt in John’s stories when their men mate with others. I had had a husband before him. We all have our histories. I think I only looked on her and envied her strength and beauty, for my own child fell into one of her convulsions even as her crane-sister set the helmet before us.

  This is what Anglitora of the Gharaniq said to us:

  “Never mind how embarrassing this must be for the king. I am here to embarrass. Take it, fold it up in your pocket, and consider it later. Pay attention now. I have brought this thing and it is a war helmet. I have taken the skull out of it to make this business cleaner. In the teeth of the skull was a letter. I have brought them both so that you will not think I am lying. For a year now this bronze flotsam, and iron too, have washed up on the shore of the Rimal, in my mother’s country. Sometimes heads are still stuck in them, and breasts in breastplates. Our beaches are clotted with them. There can only be one conclusion—something is happening on the other side of the great sand sea, and it is ugly and bloody and full of death. The drakes determined that I was best suited to deliver this news, to shame you, if I needed to, into considering how full of danger and blackness this single helmet is. It brims, my father, it spills over. How long before living men come piling up, living men who also want to be king, who are like the men Alisaunder and Didymus Tau’ma spoke of? How long before the Rimal is not an ocean but a road?”

  And we quailed, all of us. We thought of every tale we had heard of John’s world. And I, I thought of the mirror I had shown him, the mirror of the phoenix, and all those domes burning, all those palm fronds red with flame. I thought of the unspooling of grief within him, and how it had undone much of what love had sewn up.

  My father had gone mad, you mean to say.

  No, not mad. Let us say he had come apart, and one half of him was my husband, and one half of him was his former self, and the two did not enjoy their own company. Like the Word and the Flesh of his unfortunate, torn-apart god, and I wish I could say which of them I had to mate. If only I could have simply destroyed the man from Constantinople and kept for myself his better parts, his kindness and his big, round laugh, his curiosity about each of us, his excitement concerning the birth of our child. But where his two parts met stood the mirror, the glass showing all the darknesses of his former life, lit with fire and shouting for help.

  Each day John sat at the phoenix’s mirror, watching a city burn, a city I did not know, could never know, with domes and spires and crosses and crescents. As he watched, the city burned over and over. His face grew ruddy with the flames, his eyes empty as he listened to the screaming and the thundering of horses on city streets, yet he would not let it be. Perhaps a phoenix’s
mirror only shows that which burns, I tried to argue, but he could not hear me. Cross-legged before the high glass he strove with his great work, a rewriting of his Bible that could include us, all of us, without breaking the Word of God over his knee.

  And in the beginning God created Heaven and Earth, he wrote. And between the two a land where the Heaven could embrace the Earth and merge with it, as man with woman and beast with beast. And the Earth was without form, and void, and the Heaven was without end and border, and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the sea of sand. And God said let there be light, and there was light and the light was the word and the word had form.

  “It’s this part that I can’t work out,” he said once, before the mirror kindled his brain. “Where dominion comes into it. I can keep God blessing us and saying be fruitful and multiply, that’s all right, but if He gives man dominion over all the beasts and the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and every living thing, where does that leave Fortunatus and Qaspiel and little Hajji? Where does it leave you?”

  “Not long ago you would have said ‘under your dominion’ and been satisfied,” I mused, and stretched my arms above my shoulders.

  John seemed discomfited, as the part of him that loved me warred with the part of him that had come over the Rimal seeking God.

  “But someone has to have dominion, do they not? We cannot simply have no dominion at all, and moving on the face of the deep and the water and the sand and everything with no hierarchy, no sure knowledge of the natural order. Perhaps speaking things can have dominion over things which do not speak. That seems reasonable. After all, you eat beef and mutton and do not ask their permission.”