And I birthed my young, and worried that some other ambitious whelp would destroy me when my strength had ebbed, and so departed. I took up my palanquin and my elephants and traveled my country to discover a city where folk did not consider that living forever meant drowning in the worst cruelties they could fashion. Where despair was not the only law. And I found you.
I, Who Had Desired Cruelty, Too, in My Time: Majesty, there are many in Nimat who have no good qualities.
Abir, Who Did Not Believe Me, Not Really: But not in you. And I brought you here, and the rest you know. Save for what I intend. And what I intend is to break immortality over my knee. I had to wait, you see, until my children were grown, so that no one would think me selfish. I would take wealth and power from my own young, too, not just theirs.
You do not understand.
I will remain queen at the next quarter-moon. No one else will be the same. We will have a wonderful Lottery, and in it will go all possible lives, and we will draw from among them. Whatever the Lottery dictates, so we will live, for three centuries, and then change again. I will only remain queen until the second Lottery, to minister and salve, for it will be difficult. But my children will draw lots, and go where they are bidden. And so, I hope, will you. Can you see it? Boredom will cease and there will be pain, terrible pain, when the Lottery separates families and lovers and children and friends. But that pain will take the place in us that lies fallow now—in a thousand years, in two thousand, Pentexore will forget deceit and rough instincts. They will forget, even, that Imtithal the Butterfly was not chosen for a nursemaid by a spinning barrel, and debate how else your fate might have gone. History is an old, confused crone. But she has her lessons, and her mercies.
They will understand that you must let go quarrels—for the Lottery will erase them, regardless. They will understand the essential truth of the Fountain: if we do not love each other, forever is intolerable. We will find a rhythm. We will create a heaven. It will be done, and no other queen need rot in those silver vessels.
I kept my silence. I did not really think it would work. Memory works its way.
Abir, Whose Face Was Illuminated By the Last of the Sun: Do you know the god of the cametenna? She is nameless, faceless, the seven-bodied goddess of luck, who with three hands throws dice, and with four prays to herself. The Lottery will be a devotion to her. I will sacrifice a whole nation to her holy games, and she will bless us, and protect us, and guide us on the correct path.
You will join the Lottery, will you not? You came from so far. If you draw a stone, many others will know it is a thing of virtue.
And she was my queen. My service belonged to her.
As we rose to leave, Queen Abir strode out onto the field of black powder. With a grace I would not have imagined in those massive hands, she bent and plucked a single petal from one of the blooms, small and miserable now, almost shriveled back into the earth. She held out the wrinkled, glowing thing to me. Its pollen smeared her fingers. As though I meant to tell her a story, I climbed up into her palm, knelt, and she placed the petal in my mouth as I closed my eyes and in that moment I was her child, and I trusted her.
The petal tasted, oh, it tasted like light.
THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN
I admit it was I who showed him the mirror.
I thought nothing of it—only a mirror, and I am not vain. Rastno the Glassblower made it, long ago, when he was but young, and so clever with glass and all burning things. It hung up in the portico before the pillar fell, draped in damask, for its visions were distracting—but for Rastno’s sake we did not wish to dishonor his best-beloved child.
Rastno is gone now, wherever phoenix go when they die and cannot find their way to Heliopolis to bury their old ashes. He who reasoned that his glass should be so terribly, ineffably fine, since no flame but his own could make him tremble. And true to this he filled the capital with every wonderful thing that could be made of glass. And mirrors, of course, mirrors of every shape. But the mirror I showed to John was his last work. Rastno went into the flame and did not come out again. Laughing before he sparked his embers, he said that the mirror he fired in his own feathers would be a wonder beyond even the Physon, the churning river of stone.
When they dragged the shard of glass from the charred bones and blowing ashes of his pearl-lined nest, when they cleared from it the blackened ends of Rastno’s beak and talons, and scraped the boiled eye-wet and blood from its surface, they found a sheet of silvery glass limned with mercury, so pure that it showed the whole world, wherever anyone wished to look, into any dragon-ridden corner of the planed earth.
It disturbed them all, for no one could understand what they saw, the many four-limbed creatures, the strange cities. The mirror taught only that their land was best, best by a length of ten giants, and they covered the mirror up again—but hung it in the hall all the same, as a funerary rite.
“Why did you not bury his remains, if that is what you do with your dead?” John asked, when I rolled the bronze-set glass from its resting place behind a bolt of salamander-silk. I shuddered.
“Would you love a tree whose trunk was ash, whose foliage was burnt and blistered flesh, black with flames you cannot see, but the tree remembers? What terrible fruit it would bear! Better that he be eaten, as the dervishes are, or given to the river, than to suffer such a planting.”
I showed John the mirror—but he was happy in those years, and his belly was fat, and he gripped me gleefully by the hips in the late afternoons and kissed the place where my head is not, opened my legs and said his favorite mass. He hardly even insisted I speak Latin anymore, or take any saltless Eucharist he might fashion, and only cried the name of his Apostle in his sleep. How could I know?
He put off a second journey to the Fountain. Every year, he was too busy. He did not age, or lessen, but I knew it would have to be soon. And every year I would ask: Why did you do what you did? And he would not answer me anymore, as though silence would wash the deed clean.
And once I asked: When I took you to the Fountain, were you truly weak? Or did you let me believe you were, to soften my heart and make certain I would enter you in the Abir?
He would not answer that either.
John absorbed himself in a great work soon after taking the throne—at least he considered it to be a great work and whatever a king considers to be a great work meets with general enthusiasm. He called all the separate kinds of Pentexore together, and asked that they send a delegation, to tell to him their own stories of how the world was made, what god ruled it, how their bodies had been formed. He meant to fit all of these together with his own faith, to create a great new Gospel that would witness to all he had seen here, that would fit Fortunatus and Hajji and the Tree of St. Thomas and me into Christ’s universe.
“What is it you want from us, John?” I asked of him, as he sat at his desk making notes toward an expanded Genesis. “What would satisfy you? I have sunk to my knees as you asked, I have said your Latin, but it is not enough.”
“You did it without faith, Hagia,” he said.
“Are there magical words you wish me to say? What would a converted Pentexore look like, to you? Can you not just let us be?”
John set down his pen. “It would look like a brilliance of light, Heaven on earth, immortal and also saved by their knowledge of Christ. It would be the City of God spoken of in Revelations. It would be the city on the hill, free of the flotsam and miasma of humanity.”
“You are human.”
But he did not hear me. “God would look upon it and be even Himself exalted. Pentexore as one would live on her knees, eyes cast to Heaven, the Earthly bride of Christ in the form of a nation—Israel in truth, for no country can be said to have been chosen more than this. Each city will recall the name of a City of Man—Nural will become New Byzantium, Shirshya will be baptized Ephesus Segundus. I will remake the world, more perfect, more pure. Everything will have to be re-written, Hagia. Everything. And at the end of it all
, I will be a saint and a king, and God will forgive me my sins, and no man on earth but His own Son will have done more to ransom the world. You cannot possibly understand, Hagia. You cannot know what it will mean to my people, to know that magic exists, and perpetual youth.” His eyes flamed with passion and excitement—I hardly knew him. “I have begun a letter, wife. A letter home. To tell them the wonders I have suffered here. Don’t worry. I told them that I converted the land, and the cameleopards say the Ave as well as anyone. I told them this was a Christian land, and utterly at peace. I have written it all out, the Rimal, the Physon, all of it. I do not know how I will send it, but I shall.” He paused, and gently brushed the place where my head is not with his soft fingers. “I know you don’t mean it, and I knew it, I knew when you put out your tongue for your first communion that you had no faith in your heart, but I did not care, because my fingers could touch your tongue, the sweet tongue of your belly, and I would have given a hundred false communions for that tongue. I left that part out of the letter. But they would not understand, they would think you were devils, just as I first did, and I could not bear for a friar to look on my Hagia and spit at her.”
And I thought to myself of those things Imtithal wrote, that men would come from Thomas’ country and they would be greedy, and they would be cruel, and they would break us between them like bread. But I kept silent, and yes, you may blame me for my silence. I will take the shame of that. No king had ever really harmed us. How could a king do harm? Old as we all were, we were too young to guess. How could I know? How could I know?
And so the people of Pentexore came, handful by handful, to tell John how the world was made. The cametenna orated for seven hours on the pivotal nature of luck, and how its currents and habits could be charted on blue cloth with a kind of holy chalk, and that luck had made everything. Only those with hands large enough to manipulate these currents were the beloved children of that nameless goddess. The gryphon said that a gryphon’s heart beat in the center of the world, which was truly an egg balanced on the star-nest of Am, the mother, and one day the Earth would hatch and a wonderful child would be born. The astomi explained very logically that scent was the only true element in the universe, and all the rest illusions sent by Saillot-Mar, the master of falsity, who sought to trick us all into believing the world was real. The amyctryae, led by Astolfo, though true to the Abir I did not behave as though I knew him, said that the stars were teeth in the mouth of Grandhorm, the Utter Jaw, and the world was His tongue, speaking without ceasing until the end of days.
They came, endlessly, even the apes of the high hills, who communicated by signs that the true masters of the world were the bamboo forests that thought and whispered, and they owed nothing but service to them, who fed and sheltered their favorite children. Even the cameleopards, who said: You are not worthy to hear it.
And John refused a scribe, even me, but wrote these all down himself, in his cramped, tiny hand. And those who shared their tales, he rewarded with words of his own, which none of us understood. He named them abbots and dukes and marshals and viscounts, counts, marquises, and bishops, deacons, and cardinals. One of the apes he called a proto-pope, one of the gryphons an arch-pope, and once John had gone to rest himself with wine and blackbulb, the delegations traded these words like coins, and mixed them all up entirely. But in John’s presence they behaved as though they were very honored by them.
The kingship of John consisted of a wild mating with his blemmye wife and a wild writing of a thing which none of us read. As long as he worked upon it, I reasoned, he could not devise methods of sending that letter, of bringing his world down upon us. But he seemed happy, and when I knew I was with child, I kept it secret for a year and more, to enjoy that quiet thing I knew and he did not. Blemmyae take five years to birth a child—nearly as fascinated with our many ways of reproducing as with our creation stories, John still kept himself mostly ignorant of my own rhythms, and so it came as a surprise. When I finally did tell him, he smiled at first, as a new father should. But later, as he considered all that had passed he grew silent and grave, and did not speak to me for days. At last he broke free of whatever oppressed him, knelt by me and kissed me several times.
“You must understand, Hagia, I never thought to give up my chastity at all. To have a child is witness to my impurity forever.” He shut his eyes. “But perhaps that is past, now.”
He smiled. And some weeks later, as a present, I showed him the mirror.
Anywhere you like, I said. Just think about it, and it will show you.
He stood for a long time, and nothing showed in the dark glass.
Finally, a flame. An orange spark, growing swiftly to a blaze that burned my eyes. A city burned in the mirror, red and black and white, and we heard screaming there. John stood perfectly still, watching a city with domes of dust and crosses of gold and chalcedony flicker by, watching its stony streets run rivulets of blood like the porches of a dozen butchers, watched horses clatter over altars and books burn like phoenix, curling black at the edges and never return. He watched it all burn, impassive. He watched bodies twist on blades, and horrors I cannot begin to record, having seen nothing like it in all my days. I knew that city not at all, but I mourned it, I mourned it, so far away, so far and so lost.
John stood with the drawn damask clutched in his white hand, and watched a sullen orange sun set on the city of dust, and his beard grew even in that moment, his scalp showed pink through his hair, and his spine became a bent scythe, until he was an old man in my sight, and he wept like a nursing mother.
[Hagia’s book perishes here. The red-violet mold defeated me, growing and devouring, sending out their lurid tendrils. No bulb rose up; I ate nothing. I felt only a sadness, an emptiness, as though I had been scraped clean by it all, and left with nothing. Though chapters follow, I will never know them. Pages turned instead to sludge and misery and spilled out over the table and onto my lap like a font of blood.]
THE SCARLET NURSERY
It is years, and they are grown.
I saw one of them in later days, dancing, his muscles straining with sweat, in service to a very lovely lady—the Lottery, infinite humor, had made Houd a dancer. He was very good at it, actually, and I had seen him perform for his mistress, who always wore a black veil. My throat stopped up with tears, seeing his back arch, his great hands move. I was in that life a brewer of milk-beer, and with my arms full of hops I wept openly, my child, my poor, reticent Houd, beautiful and graceful, moving like a lion, his eyes so bright.
He saw me too, and some days later at the quarter-moon, he cornered me behind a huge amethyst pillar, strong and high and violet.
Houd, Who Danced Like a Flame: I miss you, Butterfly.
I demurred. I whispered he could not call me by such old, familiar endearments.
Houd, Who Didn’t Care: I will never obey that rule.
I reached up and touched his face. His skin was warm.
Houd, Who Had Grown So Tall: Come to my house tonight. Come. Swear you will.
And he was my child, and I belonged to him, and I promised. When I arrived, in his little house with a thin roof, the others were there too, and I could not speak for the joy of it, and they all held out their hands to me, wanting my weight on them, and I kissed their cheeks and we all laughed, so relieved to be together, though the room was not scarlet, nor silk.
Ikram, Who Would Dive For Sapphires in the Mountains: Oh, Butterfly, it’s so hard! I see my mother in the streets and I cannot speak to her.
Lamis, Who Would Dwell as a Lamplighter in the City of Thule: It is like we were never born. And here, with you, it’s like we never grew up.
Oh, but the pleasure of meeting in secret, children. Is it not fierce and wonderful? We could not have such delight without the Lottery your mother made.
Houd, Whose Sole Black Stone Voted Against the Whole Business, But Who Yielded in the End: I do not want to speak of it. Comfort me, instead, Butterfly. Tell us about fate, and stories tha
t must come true because they were always true, and that everything that happens has a purpose. That is what I need to hear.
And I sat in his palm, for the first time. The girls laid their hands on the floor and put their heads on my lap. A fire bloomed in the hearth, and they were still so young, and I loved them so.
Fate is a woman, I said to them. In fact, she is three women. Young, like us, so that they will have the courage to 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 our Sphere 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.
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 Would One Day Pass Beyond the Gates of Alisaunder: I want to stay here, with you.