Sefalet put her left hand on the Wall. She went still. She stood up straight, her tears dry in a moment. Her bald head was a jewel in the sunset. Very gently, lovingly, like a bride, Sefalet kissed the diamond Wall with her left-hand mouth.
And the Wall came crashing down into a thousand thousand shards of rubble.
THE VIRTUE OF THINGS
IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM
18. On Endings
There are only two ways to end a story: with a battle or with a feast. The Greeks knew that—oh, how well did they know it. It must either finish with everyone dead on the stage, full of knife-points and poison, or a marriage and everyone eating their fill, hunger and grief banished, life going on, children to be born and a future to be had. The big secret of stagecraft is that everyone at the feast will be dead soon enough, and everyone bleeding out into the audience has done their part to bring the future into being. Life goes on. Some foreign queen in a strange costume comes on to survey the damage and pass judgment on the poor bastards. She will feast. She will go on. Everyone lives. Everyone burns.
There is only one way to end a story: with a bonfire.
I do not know if I will see home again. I wish to be honest—the chances never looked good. But perhaps my little Proserpina is still seaworthy. Perhaps I shall sail yet into the west and back to a place where I am not wanted for any particular thing. If I ever do see an English hearth again, and a bowl of something bland, boiled, lumpy—if someone else’s children ask me what I have seen of the world with their big, wild eyes, I will say to them: I have seen the salamanders dance. And once I knew an emerald as wise as Solomon. They will not believe me, of course. They will laugh at old John Mandeville, and that is fair. He will be a mad old man by then, if then ever comes.
Ysra and Ymra came for me at midday. I had put on my fool’s clothes already. They approved. The king Ysra put all of his hands on my face, his expression complex and brimming with old, old feeling, the way a grandfather looks when he is reminded of his first love, lost forever. When he looked at me I felt as I did when Cabochon shone her feelings out in rays of light—he beamed his deep, dark thrill to me, and it filled me up.
“Something is going to happen,” he said finally.
“What?” I asked, and I truly did not know.
Ymra laughed, a little too wild and frantic. “We don’t know! We never know! But it will be something.”
“Is it a battle or a feast?”
“Yes,” the twins said, and before my eyes they kissed one another, in a formal, practiced way, as bride and bridegroom kiss upon their wedding.
[It was going now, the silver spores moving slowly over the pages, covering the words with light and life and softness. In the crease of the spine the mold darkened to the color of iron. An iron imp, living in the spine of a book, and when it is all done the imp will roll away down the hill and out of the tale. I felt calm. Go, I thought to the glimmering rot. It was always foolish to think I could outrace death. I understood. Nothing stays.]
In the strange way they know, Ysra and Ymra hooked their arms in mine and as soon as we had stepped outside the Mount we stepped onto a green sward before the mossy, bramble-covered Wall I had heard so much of. The salamanders had come too, and the phoenix, and the mermaids of Isos and the sciopods of Chakor and the dervishes of Summikto as well. The greenwood frame draped in copper silk stood near the Wall, and on it were dozens of black eggs.
“I thought you could not leave the Mount,” was all I could think of to say to any of it.
“We reinterpret that to mean it’s all right as long as we bring the Mount with us. We drag it along and the rules remain unbroken.”
“Are you really sick?”
“Sick is a way of saying we don’t belong,” Ymra said. And the salamanders began to dance.
They arched their backs and their green skins rippled, they hawked back and spat onto the greenwood and it burst into flame. Ululating cries broke out among the lizards, and the phoenix whistled their oldest, saddest songs. The dervishes began to spin, faster and faster. Something was happening, a battle, a feast, a wedding, a wake—the sciopods stamped their feet and threw up their hands, the mermaids writhed, and the rose-colored lions tossed their manes. Creatures kissed and fed each other red, shining things, and kissed again. The sun flowed down like a river of gold. Finally, as if entering a courtly rite, Ysra and Ymra joined in, moving slowly, radiantly, precisely in the midst of all the wildness of their country. He held her waist, turned her under his arm; she laughed richly and spun, her hair flying out, her skirts, her jeweled belt. Each of their twelve arms caught the others in complex patterns and they turned and turned around one another, wheels within wheels. Down the slope of the valley came the emeralds, rolling with joy, sending off sparks of savage triumph, with my Cabochon in the lead, and they spun around the throng, bouncing and glittering, turned to green fire by the sun. All the light of my Cab said: We are going home. We are going home.
As if from a long way off I could hear a crying—it grew louder and became a screaming, a terrified child, a girl in pain. The sound came from the other side of the Wall. I looked at the stones, which must have been beautiful once, shining so bright as to blind. Now they were merely a single living thing, choked up with vegetation and greenery, a hedge, a prison gate. I wanted to help her, the girl on the other side. The girl in the rye field. The girl trapped behind the bodies of eight eunuchs. The girl eating pomegranate seeds in the dark.
“Go,” said Ymra. Her brother-king held her by the waist and her smile glowed, awful knowing and hoping and need in that smile, but a terrible beauty, too.
“Go, said Ysra. His sister-queen fit so perfectly into his embrace, and he smiled too, tired and ancient and ready. Ready for whatever was to come.
“Go where?” I said.
Ymra laughed like water moving. “The world was not meant to be closed up behind walls. All we want is an open world, where everything can be known and there is no such thing as the end of the world, because the world is without end. We want to see the world naked—don’t you? Haven’t you always? Haven’t you always suspected that if you could just see her as she really is, she would be so beautiful that you’d never have to tell another lie? This is it, this is your moment. Breaking out is the beginning of being alive.”
“But go soon,” Ysra warned. “We can only bear the fire so long, the glow of the diamonds, the strength of the gate.”
“Go,” urged the twin monarchs.
“Go,” cried Agneya, writhing in her dance.
“Go,” said the phoenix, bursting into flame.
“Go,” gurgled the mermaids.
Go, shone Cabochon, and Trillion, and a host of emeralds like strange angels.
The music and the dancing and the light, oh, God, the light of the sun and the jewels and the flames beat at me and I did not know what I was doing. I am not sorry, now, but I am not glad. I turned to the Wall and walked toward the crying girl on the other side. “Stop,” I whispered. “Oh, stop, stop.” And I put out my hand to the Wall, a smooth sliver of diamond clear of soil and branch. Her weeping ceased and I felt, through the thick gemstone, an impossibly gentle kiss, as from the first innocent in the infancy of the world. It was a unicorn’s kiss; it was Death’s kiss.
And between the kiss and my hand, the Wall cracked sickeningly, and came roaring down in a shower of white dust.
THE CONFESSIONS
It was done; I sat slumped and drained. Only a few pages remained from each of the books, bits of an ending I could not read. I did not feel rage, only sadness and calmness and a kind of bearable hopelessness. I was not Hiob—I did not have to possess, only to touch, once, a thing which might be true.
Behind me, Brother Hiob coughed and choked miserably. The coughing had grown weaker. Soon it would stop (stop, stop). His blooms were so bright now. So bright I could almost forget there had ever been a Hiob without blossoms in his eyes. It had become usual to me, even beautiful. “Go,” I said to R
einolt and Goswin. “Go and eat and sleep and look to your body.” (Go and put your hand on the Wall.)
“What about you?” Reinolt asked me. I could not answer. What about me?
“Never mind about me. The tree bears more fruit, the year bears more days—what about me? I have work to do. What a ridiculous question.”
They scurried away. No one wants to stay with an angry monk—dangerous creatures, those. My body glowered angrily at me—bitter joints and bilious organs. It could be worse, spleen old friend. You could have a rosebush growing through you like Hiob. Quit your complaining, be happy with your lot.
Hiob cried out, his voice throttled with vines and anguish. No more, I thought. No more, I am not a cruel man. Many things, but not that. His hands shuddered frantically. I slid a page beneath it.
From the far side of the great tree spoke suddenly another head, and then another, and three Thomases looked at me with pitying eyes, and Hajji-or-Imtithal kissed them all, one by one, on the lips, with her whole mouth.
“One day you will leave me here, wife,” murmured the head of St. Thomas. “One day you will leave me and I will be so lost.”
“Never, never,” whispered Imtithal, whispered Hajji. “What could the wide world hold for me that is not here?”
“It’s all right. It was all right when my brother left, too. Humans follow patterns, it is what they are made for. And the pattern says: go, go, go.”
“I am not human,” laughed the panoti.
“Oh,” the tree smiled, on all of its faces. “You think not?”
I felt darkness creeping into the corners of my mind, an inkstain of exhaustion and disbelief and the powerful need to see something familiar, anything, anyone. A leaf I had known before. But I remember, when I pierce the skin over remembering that does not wish to be broken, I remember nothing familiar waiting for me in Nimat. I remember Hagia with snow on her shoulders, laughing, with the red lion biting her arm playfully. I remember Qaspiel dancing and leaping into the air, pelting the others with snow, and all of them giggling like children, like children making war of the winter, hitting each other with ice over and over. I remember a white stain of snow spreading over Hadulph’s scarlet pelt. I remember Vyala the pale lion opening her mouth, and how it was red inside her, and as I shuddered, insensate on the long grass, the lion-mother picked me up by the scruff, like a kitten. Her teeth on me were the last thing I knew until much later, until they had carried me down out of the mountains, out of the freeze, and into the warm valleys, where sweet water ran, and I remember drinking it. I asked Imtithal—as soon as I woke I asked: was it real, was that the truth? As if she were an oracle, and I begging for confirmation of my fortune. Everything is true and nothing is, she said. You could say this means you were right all along, and your God the most true and righteous, or you could say most men have brothers, and love them, and mourn them when they go.
Hajji-or-Imtithal went on: he told me these stories on our bridal bed, too. I half-believe them. Why not? I know winged men live and walk and speak very seriously, I know children can be born different, without any living father. I know the body can die, and return when a green leaf breaks the soil. None of those things require a God to occur. They happen every day. Why should they not have happened to him? I think you would find it remarkably freeing to leave religion aside. When you believe no one thing, everything can be true.
“Tell me what to do,” I said. “Tell me how to help you. Tell me how to face the woman in yellow again. Tell me how to keep going.”
Fate is a woman, Houd. She is three women. Young, like us, so that they will have the courage be cruel, having no weight of memory to teach temperance. Young, but so old, older than any stone. Their hair is silver, but full and long. Their eyes are black. But when they are at their work they become dogs, wolves, for they are hounds of death, and also hounds of joy. They take the strands of life in their jaws, and sometimes they are careful with their jagged teeth, and sometimes they are not. They gallop around a great monolith, the stone that pierces the earth where the meridians meet, that turns the earth and pins it in place in the world. It is called the Spindle of Necessity, and all round it the wolves of fate run, and run, and run, and the patterns of their winding are the patterns of the world. Nothing can occur without them, but they take no sides.
Is that comforting, Houd? I could also say there is such a stone, such a place, but the dogs who are women died long ago, and left the strands to fall, and we have been helpless ever since. That in a wolfless world we must find our own way. That is more comforting to me. I want my own way, I want to falter; I want to fail, and I want to be redeemed. All these things I want to spool out from the spindle that is me, not the spindle of the world. But I have heard both tales.
Ikram, Who Will One Day Pass Beyond the Gates of Alisaunder: I want to stay here, with you.
Lamis, Who Will One Day Become a Queen Like Her Mother, Shrouded in Mist: I want to be a child again, and fear nothing.
Houd, Who Will One Day Die in Jerusalem: There, Butterfly, there. Beginning tomorrow I will love you for all the rest of my life.
I wish I had been your mother, all of you. That we could have lived quiet lives together and lived them long enough to know all the secrets of the world together. In future days I think those few who decline the Abir will know strange and hidden things, they will stand outside of all of us, moving slower, seeing patterns we cannot see, who have chosen to run so fast, so fast, uncatchably quick, just two hundred years and we will be someone else, and maybe Houd will be my husband and not my son. Oh, it will hurt so much. But it will be so sweet.
The panoti have no God—we have never needed one. But I think I know. God is a time, and time is a fire. If it does not burn us from without it lights us from within.
I stood. My bones argued with me on that point. I went to the benches and gathered up the last few half-rotted pages of our dying books. Carefully and with love I arranged them around Hiob, in a corona around his head and shoulders. I scooped up the vines from the floor and piled them up onto his hands, the old dried blossoms onto his feet. With great and horrible effort I dragged the bier out of the house and onto the night-grass, a ways from the great tree of books, which waved and whistled in the dark so that it looked as though it bore starry blossoms in some kind of deep celestial spring. The wind moved with purpose and so did I. Hiob’s brow creased; his fists opened and closed like a baby.
“I have loved you, Hiob,” I whispered. Everything in the world has a twin. A priest and his novice in Constantinople, a priest and his novice here, in the dark, so close to the stars they might burn.
I left him for a moment—only a moment. When I returned I brought my lantern. The flames of it licked at his face, making his dear wrinkles into deep chasms. I cracked open the glass of it and let the oil dribble over him. I spoke the last rites softly, murmuringly, tenderly. I stood with him before the door of death, and I guided him through. I dropped the lantern—the flames caught quickly. They devoured the vines and blossoms and his threadbare habit. They raced around the tendrils of green shoots and it looked like calligraphy, green writing turning to gold. As it reddened the edges of the last pages, the heat burned off the spores and I could glimpse a few final lines, flowing around and through each other as they melted into wet ash and then dust, ringing Hiob’s head in a saint’s corona of beautifully written words:
I was the unicorn. And a girl drew me to that clearing in the wide wood, and I put my flesh against hers, and there was so much blood after. I turned to find the gaze of Ysra and Ymra, to ask if I had done well, for a shadow passed into me and did not move. But I could not see them, I could not find them. We pulled her out of the diamond rubble, and such bruises there were on her face but still she breathed, and with her in Elif’s wooden arms I looked out into a mad dancing throng, burning birds and gleaming enormous emeralds and salamanders—salamanders, whom we all thought long extinct! And in the midst of them stood a man I did not know, but he looked like J
ohn, he had the same kind of body. He too, stood bloodied and bruised but bleeding, and looked around, as though seeking someone who had been there but a moment ago—and as we lit our first campfires on the beach of the Gharaniq, the same beach John had collapsed upon so many years before, we looked out onto the Rimal and saw something dancing there. Two figures, a boy and a girl, little more than children, each of them with six hands, walking together and dancing a strange complicated dance. The sun shone upon them, on their long hair and longer shadows, and many of the older and wise among us hissed and cried out in recognition and despair. Wherever the feet of Gog and Magog touched the sandy sea, it grew hard and solid, like a road.
I did not reach for the pages to rescue them from the fire. Hiob’s bones seemed to show through his flaming skin, white and then black. Out of the pages flowers exploded, silver and black and blue, bulbs shooting out of the words, round and swollen and dying, flaming, their stamens stretching to escape the conflagration, their petals curling in like pages, quivering like animals in their extremity.
They would be together, the books and the man. He would know everything they knew. I stood in the morning, with the tree creaking and shaking and the stars wheeling and the first hush of dawn coming up over the mountains and I watched them all burn.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To correct a previous omission, my great thanks must first go to Theodora Goss and Delia Sherman, who bought the story which grew like a little tree into this trilogy for the first Interfictions anthology. Second, they must fly to the members of the Rio Hondo workshop of 2008, but most especially to Daniel Abraham and Melinda Snodgrass, who broke the plot with me on a sunny day in New Mexico over coffees, and particularly to Daniel, who has taught me so much about the practical business of being a writer, and who wrote the pitch that found a home for these strange little books.
A Dirge for Preston John Page 50