A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  It went on in this way until the demon had by degrees succeeded in drawing out all the life of her besotted reader and he was discovered one morning slumped over the book, which looked as innocent as you please, while an iron ball with golden sigils worked upon it rolled discreetly away from the palace, cheerful in the sun, gaining speed as it went.

  What I mean to signify by all this scene-making is that books can harm you, and a careless John I would be if I were to let you open this volume and think you had a nice plump dog on a satin leash who would do your bidding and ask for no more than you liked to give. Books are not like that. They want to eat you up. They want you to spend yourself on their iron hearts and submit to their wills. An unsuspecting man who happens to find himself in this unfortunate world which is practically ruled by books has but two choices—give in and go under the page with the secret smile of the slattern on one’s lips, or become the thing the book spends itself upon, become himself the iron princess with horns of gold, become fantastical and gorgeous beyond measure, nearly impossible to believe, but not so impossible that the spell is broken. Become the thing the tale tells of, something so strange that some book somewhere simply bursts into being to record your supereminence.

  I have chosen this latter route in order to reign this book into the world. It is my hope that you will joust with its boisterous nature, struggle with its lack of alphabetization or order beyond my own sense of what thing should follow which; for I am a kind tyrant, and will not force such snooty, bossy schemes on you, my reader, my alchemist-astrologer, my eunuch, my most gentle concubine. You must always fight with a book, or else how do you know who has won when the last page is cut?

  I am the demon of this book. I am the book itself, and I am the iron thing lying next to you in the morning.

  1. On the Wall

  They told me it was made of diamonds. Countless enormous gems, piled one atop the other a thousand years ago and more, diamonds so massive that two giants had to lift them into place, and in raising these prisms toward the sun thus blinded an entire generation of blue-bellied lizards. They tell me all blue-bellied lizards are now blind, as the elders told the youngsters that the world was white and featureless, and out of deference the little ones went right on behaving as though they could see nothing, and now no one can tell the difference. My friends in this country enjoy perverse stories with no moral or point. It appeals to their conglomerate nature, I think. In any event, the wall was raised and put in place and now it is so clotted with moss and tangled roots and stiff leaves and fern fronds like quill pens frozen in the act and huge orange blossoms that smell like bitter tea that I could not testify to the truth of the jewels—I suppose there could be diamonds under all that verdancy. I would like to believe it, or else what happened to the poor lizards?

  According to my hosts, the Wall divides us from the fallen world on the other side; it keeps the fell knights of that world at bay and preserves our pleasant land of red stones and pomegranate orchards. On the other side of the Wall lie ugly, bloody, profane places called Nural and Nimat, called Babel and Shirshya, called Lost and Perdition and Decadence. Be happy we dwell on this side, where the phoenix still sing at dusk, they said at supper. Praise the Wall and love it, for it is all that stands between us and ruin. They touched my hands and whispered: The day it closed we could breathe, and sing, and delight again. Should it ever open, well, it is too much to think on. Everyone knows it is our shield; everyone knows those on the other side possess a monstrousness best left unconsidered by virtuous souls.

  So they regaled me when I first arrived. Isn’t it interesting, to know what everyone knows?

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  The cranes say the Sedge of Heaven was ruled over by thirteen clouds, each of them extremely complex and cold, but beautiful, frightening, heavy. In the long life of a crane one might encounter a single True cloud, drifting among the lesser and unintelligent wisps of moist or frozen air, moving stately and alien as a whale crusted over with diamonds. In her youth, before her Fall, Kukyk had come upon the Wooden Cloud, and she felt its presence like a blow against her body, as though something inside her was battered and squeezed with a hundred hands; yet the pain gave her also a ferocious pleasure, and she both forgot and remembered her name several times as the gold-tinged cloud passed by her, whispering its many canticles into her heart.

  John the Priest said the Kingdom of Heaven was ruled over by a man on a throne, seated on a sea of glass. He is unencounterable, and unknowable. He is not fertile, having only managed one child since the beginning. He should not be blamed for this—mothers are rare on the sea of glass.

  What do my stepdaughter and I have in common? The gates of both universes are closed to us. They are very pretty gates, but they cannot let us pass. We can neither of us fly, and will never find ourselves in the presence of a cloud, and—well. Our bodies are too shocking to be permitted entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven, even if we should build a ship of glass to sail it.

  What do you do with a girl with only one wing?

  Half the things you’d do to a girl with two.

  The letter Anglitora had wrested from the mouth of her soldier’s skull came among us like a True cloud, its complexities beyond us, its weight hideous but invisible, inciting a horror and an unseemly pleasure. I heard it read so many times before we launched the ships. I remember it perfectly, every word, as if it were written in oil and set blazing.

  Emanuel, prince of Constantinople and the Eastern Empire, to John, priest by the almighty power of God and the might of our Lord Jesus Christ, we send you greetings in return, and all good wishes for your health, the peace of your nation, and all the divine gifts of this Earth.

  Our Majesty has received your letter and taken it to our bosom. With great interest did we read of the glory and power of your Kingdom in the East, and with delight did we read of its great Conversion to Christ. In brotherhood therefore we greet you, Prince to Prince, and Christian to Christian. We have sent some few objects that represent our affection, made of gold and emerald and costly perfumes beside, and look forward with joy to the day when we may meet and clasp hands in true friendship.

  However, our missive is not an idle one. Having subdued a country of infidels, we trust you will have some sympathy for our plight, as we are beset on all sides by the armies of the unfaithful, and moreover the unfaithful are uncommonly prosperous and numerous, and threaten to overcome our walls and claim both Constantinople and Jerusalem under their sway. We are strong in faith but admittedly weaker in arms, and we beseech our friend John to take up his great armies and come forth from the East to defend us, leaving behind only those souls who remain undedicated to Christ. If victory follows, which surely it must, Our Majesty will be pleased to divide the spoils of the Holy City with those we hold in blessed fraternity and grant whatsoever lands, titles, and honors such men may desire.

  Surely the favor of God is with Us, whether or not Our Eastern Friend arrives to deliver Jerusalem into the bosom of the Church, however, the turning of the infidel tide would be much delayed if you do not immediately set out for our country with a great force at your command. We trust that you will accomplish this with swiftness and come to our aid no later than September, since you have at your call such flying creatures as you have described to us, which will be much use against the enemy. In utter faith we make this compact with you and take your assent as granted. We have set the table already in anticipation of your arrival, draped as you are in the blessings of the Lord.

  Who stays and who goes? Who goes and who stays?

  We lined up on the shore of the Rimal in our best finery. War was a game, after all. What happens when you go to war?

  You kiss a pygmy boy, you dance a little, maybe you bite a corporal if it is a very serious battle.

  Oh, of course we know better now. But then wars in which folk actually died were so far in the past as to be hilarious tales of fools and blowhards, and we were not like them. John was ou
r king—of course we would rescue his people! Of course we would set our banners flying and march on Jerusalem! Why not? What a delightful sport! What a lovely idea! We would be back in a fortnight still covered in the flowers the humans showered upon us. We could already feel roses on our shoulders, red and white, white and red.

  You all wanted to be chosen for the army, as if John were choosing guests for a dinner party. Even I, even I, for what did I know but that war meant mating and keening, the promise of a new drake between my legs and silver for my belt. How we must have seemed to my father; a nation of virgins, sure it would all go well enough once we were in the thick of it. Instinct would take over. What tales we would tell of our prowess.

  In the end, a lottery seemed fairest. We are sometimes a people with little imagination. The bronze barrel of the Abir was draped in blue silk and filled with red and white stones. Red meant go, white meant stay. I held Sefalet in my arms, and she put her hands up so that she could whisper to me.

  “Mama,” she said out of her right-hand mouth, “everyone looks so pretty!”

  “You’re all going to die,” growled her left-hand mouth. I winced. My daughter, my girl, whose mouths dropped such words into the well of my heart. Red stones and white, red stones and white, and I never knew which she would bring me. The way I loved her was like a bruise. It blossomed black and golden; it hurt me so. And when my stone came red, I was not sorry, and for this I am ashamed, even now.

  And I, too, for I was the easier daughter to love. I had no second mouth to harm you, only my single, frank self. And with that self I fought at your back. If there was shame in our leaving we have all been punished for it.

  One by one they came and drew their stone. Dressed as if for a play, in armor dug up from a cellar or hastily made from sheets of glittering sea glass or hardy ginger-flowers sewn together. One faun drew her stone hesitantly from the barrel, wearing a breastplate of antlers cast off that spring in the molting season, crisscrossed over her slender torso. When the pebble gleamed white in her hand she wept bitterly.

  Fortunatus the gryphon drew a white stone; Hadulph drew red. Qaspiel my winged friend would put a sword on its hip, and Grisalba the lamia would stay behind. Hajji the panoti, her ears drawn close around her, kept her fist tight over her scarlet stone, peeking at it and shuddering. Our little court, divided along invisible lines. Most would stay, and I would like to think, oh, how I would like to believe that the war lottery was fair, that John did not seed his friends to come with him, his wife, his favorites. I choose to believe that. The rest lies easier if I believe it.

  Sefalet struggled out of my arms and ran to the barrel, thrusting both her hands inside. I called out to her but she ignored me. She raised her fists high in the air and when she opened them we all saw that clamped between the teeth of her right palm she held a white stone, and in the teeth of her left a red one. She laughed out of both mouths, but tears dripped off of her wrists as her green eyes wept, turned away from us.

  When Sefalet was only just learning to speak, we took her to the blue mussel shell. At first I could not do it. She was what she was, unique, alone, but not sick. Just ours, unavoidably and unutterably ours. John said to me: “She is broken. She is miserable. We will make her well.”

  If you ask what convinced me I will tell you that one day she looked up from her toys, a little golden cockatrice that whistled when you pulled its tail and a cedar ship with sails of silk. She put her right hand over her chin.

  “When I am grown,” she said with that mouth, “will I be queen like you?”

  But then she let her right hand fall and raised up her left, and out of that mouth came a voice as deep as a man’s, with a growl to it, a cruelness:

  “Everything you love will pass from the earth,” my daughter said with her second mouth, “and only one tree will remain, in a field of empty dirt. You can be queen of that, if it makes you happy.”

  And at those words she began to shake all over. Light poured out of her body, beading like sweat and trickling, then streaming, so much, so fast. Wherever the light touched me my flesh went cold and frosted over, and I screamed in fear of my own child. John came to her and put his hands on her forehead, but she would not be stilled. He trembled, too, and prayed, and who knows what his god said to him but we took her to the mussel, for that is what one does when a body is ill.

  The two old men guarded it as they always had, their mustaches so long they trailed in the swampy, lily-clotted water of the pool, their wrinkles so heavy their eyes sank shut under their weight, and they said to my daughter: “Do you wish to be healed?”

  My husband said to them: “Instead you should ask, ‘do you accept Christ?’ and if they answer correctly, heal them, and if not, turn them away.”

  The twin old men glared stonily at him, even beneath their wrinkles. In those days we treated John’s missionary work as a charming quirk, as you will do with a friend who has become suddenly fascinated with astrology or some obscure historical period and cannot cease discussing it. Yes, he was king and some of us had been baptized—which seemed to consist of putting our heads underwater, which is more or less pleasant and thus no trouble to us—and it seemed to make him happy. He was king and that meant we were Christian, but this meant little more to any of us than when Xenophy the sciopod queen made us hop on one foot for a century or two so as not to make her nation feel self-conscious concerning their anatomy. Kings enjoy it when a nation imitates them. It makes them feel less alone. We hopped on one foot, we swore by Christ, but it meant nothing. John found few takers for his dreams of empire. We behaved towards him as water towards a staff—we flowed around, however hard he tried to direct us.

  However, you cannot move the wind with a lyre, and the old men of the mussel were far too ancient and hoary to care who sat on any throne. They did not hop; they did not say the Ave.

  “Do you wish to be healed?” they said to Sefalet, and she replied with her left-hand mouth:

  “I am not sick. It is the rest of them you should pile into that shell.”

  And her right-hand mouth only trembled a little, saying nothing. That was that—if you do not ask for healing the shell can do nothing for you.

  My father told me once that he believed he had not fathered the girl at all. That when he moved in you the Word of God, the Logos, stirred in him. Into the darkness between your bodies the light of the Word poured out, and it was that which made Sefalet, not his seed. I asked him: would that not make her a christ, and you the mother of god? He became angry and told me there was but one Christ and one Mother of God, and if the body is not perfect the soul must be marred. I felt his words on my cheeks, stinging like hands. I lifted my wing, my imperfect body, and he was sorry, but I think I only reminded him that he could not sire a whole child.

  She was mine and his. That’s all. Curse enough for any child.

  John drew all who would stay behind together in the Lapis Pavilion while the stars pricked the night sky with wounds. He was flushed and happy, a health in his cheeks I had never seen. He was going home. What man would not rejoice? I looked into the violet evening and felt nothing but shadows on me, dread whispering in my daughter’s left-hand mouth as she moved it against my shoulder. I suppose I ought to have denounced him. I suppose I ought to have said: Wait, I remember from stories what it means to be dead. But if all men in the nation of John were as small and weak as he there could be no possible trouble, and if he saw his home and greeted his friends with claps upon the shoulders and tales of old times, well, perhaps he would come home satisfied, ready to settle and take his last walk to the Fountain and be one of us in truth. Leave us be on the subject of God and live forever like everyone else. I did not believe, as many did, that war would be a delight. But I thought it would salve him.

  Perhaps there is no salve for my father; perhaps the wound is part of his nature.

  I do not even remember what he said to them, so deep was I sunk in my own thoughts, my desire to stay warring with my longing to see
the places he dreamed of, Constantinople with her endless cisterns and golden domes, Yerushalayim where Imtithal’s love had lost his brother. Autumn strewn with palm fronds and quince-wine, where my husband was a child.

  I remember. He told them that they could not be idle while he fought his happy war. That the Devil sought idle hands for His own work. He told them to go to the ruins of the Tower of Babel, where you had taken him years past.

  Where we first were lovers under the crescent moon, among the scarlet flowers.

  He told them to go to that place and with the stones of it raise up a cathedral to rival any in Christendom. When he returned he expected it finished, and would dedicate it to Thomas and Mary, Mother and Child.

  Yes. I recall it now. And I remember a man with huge hands and dark eyes, who stood tall and brown in the night, and he said to John: “Just because that letter says we have converted, and the letter you wrote lied and called us Christians, does not mean anything at all. Two letters have lied to each other—so what? This is not Christendom just because you call it so. Call me Gundoforus, it does not mean that is my name.”

  John colored darkly then and said to the young man: “I am your King.” And no one could argue. Being king is also a kind of game. The governed pretend that the king has power; the king pretends he is loved, and as long as no one breaks the mummer’s dance, all is peaceful.

  All I could think that night in the strange flat bed you gave me was: how long does he expect us to be gone?