A Dirge for Preston John

  We avoided the pilgrim-road to the Fountain. I had no wish to go near that devilish place; the source of all their strength could not be the source of mine. The little panoti, who called herself Hajji, insisted that she knew where to take us, if not to find the saint’s tomb, at least to discover where it might be. But she would not say where she aimed, and when I tried to ask her about her name, which I could not help but recognize, having heard it from the mouths of many Saracen pilgrims streaming into the Holy Land, she narrowed her clear white eyes and refused to speak at all.

  “Are you a pilgrim, then?” I tried to say, and she rebuffed me, her small, snow-colored back turning away, her bare, rough feet scrambling up the stony road like the inscrutable goat who nursed the baby Zeus.

  Pentexore brings to mind every old story. I took them out like laundry, to hold them up to this new sun, and see if they looked threadbare, or whole. As we journeyed out from Nural, three tales were told—one in sleep, one in waking, and one in love. I wish to record them here. I remember them like reliefs in crystal, so strongly they struck me, then and now.

  On our first night we decamped beneath the curling, arching roots of a great banyan tree, each knurled, woody tentacle a torture of bumps and crevices. The roots soared so high we passed beneath them and craned our necks to see their apexes. I thought some sweet, thin mist coalesced there on the heights, as on the tips of some hills. The braided, woven canopy of roots the color of baked bread could have sheltered a city entire—

  “And does it not?” said Hadulph the great red lion, whose muzzle and golden whiskers loomed larger than my head and the better part of my shoulders. “The ants have nations, too, and also the worms their empire. The moths rule over a vast collective, greatly concerned with the accumulation of light. Even the asparagus shoots we shall roast for our supper, and the amla fruits with their green rind, even they are dukes and viscounts in a potent vegetable court, whose customs we cannot know. Woe betide those who by ignorance or malice cross the laws of the tulip bulbs they suck for sweet syrup.”

  “Are you being quite serious?” With these folk it is impossible to tell, and worse if they have any cat about them, as in the tufted tails of Fortunatus and Hadulph.

  Hadulph shrugged—and I had already learned that this shrug, rippling down from his broad shoulders and across his colossal back, was his primary expression of any sort of emotion. “When you lived in your Konstantinii,” the lion habitually blundered the ending of Constantinople, “with all your domes and mackerels and crosses, did you think that if you took the wrong turn on the Bosphorus that there might be a place where sheep trees grow and lions talk? Well, that is how we stand to the cities of the banyan. We do not have the luxury of believing ourselves the only world in the world. Perhaps if you and your own had better senses of direction, we could wallow in solipsism as you do.”

  “Do you not like me, Hadulph?”

  “I neither like you nor dislike you, John. Fortunatus tells me your God says we live under your dominion already, by nature and fate, so it doesn’t matter what I think, does it?”

  “Then why did you volunteer yourself? Surely you had better things to do.”

  “I came for Hagia,” he growled simply, and I fell silent. I had not yet spoken to the monstrous woman, nor even, truly, glanced her way.

  No, I should not lie. I glanced at her, and more, when she could not see my gaze drift. If she turned her back she could almost be human, her broad brown muscles working, her strong arms, her thick waist. If I did not look up to her shoulders—ah, but I always did, and always shuddered. If she turned toward me, the horror of her breasts and her belly hit me like a blow, and I could not bear it. She wore nothing above the waist, could wear nothing, or else be blinded, but still the indecency of it shocked me, how brazenly she wore her nakedness, the bigness of her—for she stood a head and a half taller than I, and no farm-horse could have been stronger. In all her body and soul dwelled not a drop of shame. I could not look on her; I could not look away. She wore a beautiful belt, dark goat-leather all studded with opaque gems: agate, carnelian, obsidian, malachite, in patterns like constellations, and from it hung an ornament like an orrery in miniature, turning and clicking as she walked. When—terrible moment!—she caught me staring at her, I took shelter in pretense, and studied her belt intently.

  Did I want her then, already? No, of course not. I was still a priest. I was a good man.

  I always wanted her. I was a fool.

  While Qaspiel prepared us the promised roast salad of young asparagus, amla fruit, tulip bulbs, and salted yak we had brought from Nural’s endless stores, Hadulph settled down in the grass, like a gargantuan ruby statue, roots thatching and crossing behind him. We all ate; Hagia laughed and joked with Qaspiel, to whom it—ah, how difficult it was for me to use the neuter, as they all gently reminded me to do! I wanted to say him, when Qaspiel looked fierce and brutal, in the manner of angels, her when Qaspiel looked gentle and loving, as it did that night, singing a song to Hagia to make her smile, a song about fairies that plagued the vanilla harvest, stealing the beans to make their long lyres. I know Qaspiel said it was not an angel, did not even know the word. And yet I could help but tremble in my bones when it sang.

  Night drew on, and I took comfort in knowing some few of the spangled stars overhead, the whole sky like a jewel-box spilled out on a black cloth. Qaspiel slept on the high roots, its wings closed over its face like a bat. Fortunatus slept close to the fire, snoring a strange hooting, chirping snore. Hajji, the panoti, kept her own counsel and put a peach to her lips, listening to some hymn I could not hear. Hagia concealed herself in the shadows and I knew not where she lay. But the red lion sat impassively where he had settled, and sleepless, restless, I turned toward him, only to see that his eyes remained open, glittering white as stones in the dark, though a deep, rumbling snore bubbled up from his chest, escaped, and boiled up again.

  “Do you wake or do you sleep, lion?” I whispered, but he did not answer. I crawled closer, between his huge paws, and repeated my question.

  Baroom, his snore answered. Buroom.

  Bats squeaked overhead, flitting over the hot stars.

  “How can he be one of us?” the lion said, his voice so much deeper than usual. I could not tell if he spoke in his sleep or knew I stood there listening. “He has never loved anyone but God. What kind of man is that?”

  “I did, though,” I whispered, in the truth-trance that deep night brings. “I loved a boy named Kostas, and he loved me. I should not call him a boy. But his face was so narrow and youthful I could never think of him as quite grown. In the end I suppose he was only a few years younger than I. It was simple—love is service, and he served me. Love is nourishment—and I fed him. Love is knowledge—we taught each other. I gave him his letters, he gave me all the secret places of his city.”

  “Love is love,” hummed the great lion, and as he spoke his voice went lower and lower, and his language became the language of dreaming, more and more like that of a child. “That’s all. I love Hagia; she loves me. I don’t have to love her forever. I love her now. I love many others, too. My mother was so good at loving that other cats would come to her and beg her to teach them her devotions, the rituals and practice of her loving, so that they could become magi. Her eyes shone golden and spun like mandalas as she told them what she knew. She said: Love is hungry and severe. Love is not unselfish or bashful or servile or gentle. Love demands everything. Love is not serene, and it keeps no records. Love sometimes gives up, loses faith, even hope, and it cannot endure everything. Love, sometimes, ends. But its memory lasts forever, and forever it may come again. 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 blinked, recognizing a bizarre inversion of psalms I knew by heart. The lion went on, as though speaking to someone else in his dreaming, someone he truste
d, someone he loved. “At my mother’s breast I learned best of all. I was still a cub when a tensevete came to her, and his name went: Tajala. The cub that was me was afraid of his icy face, like a crag chipped off a mountain, flat and violet like frostbite, and his whole head bigger than his chest. Tajala wept; his lover didn’t want him anymore. When he loved her, they melted together until they became a lavender pool under the moon, and there was no ending to them. I shuddered, hearing this private thing. The Abir came, and his lover drew an emerald with a red flaw out of the bronze barrel, and that meant: Go to the plains of Aamra and cultivate the green mango, learn the significance of its five-petalled blossom, of its leaves changing from rosy to red to green, of its hairy, hidden seed. Take ecstasy in weeping onto their roots, so that they may be watered. Do this with Rasaala, not Tajala, and be happy. Bedeck yourself in mango blossoms, count your wealth in pits sticky with rind. I felt glad for her, since I loved mangoes. Tajala drew a black stone with no flaw, and this meant: Go to the Axle of Heaven, and spin wool from the fur of the very stubborn musk-ox who love to munch the blue poppies there. Do this with no mate, learn the psalms of solitude. I was glad also for him, as musk-oxen are funny, and make us laugh.

  Tajala said: She will not look at me as if she knows me. She melts with Rasaala now. She could leave him and we could be lovers in our new lives, I could spin covers for her trees to keep the frost off, but she won’t. I want to die.

  Mother said: The Abir is difficult.

  Tajala said: I want to die.

  Mother said: Do not die. Instead, love me.

  And she licked him like a cub, like me. She licked him all over, all his cheeks (and they were very big) and his eyelids and his forehead and his ears (and they were very long) and all the time Tajala cried and all the time Mother purred, and then Tajala was a pool below her, lavender. Mother stepped into the pool and it covered up her whole head (and Mother is the biggest thing there is) and I was afraid again. At night Mother came out and shook her fur and the pool froze again and Tajala was there and he was not well but he was better.

  Mother said: Love, sometimes, ends.

  For the third time her cub was afraid.”

  In the morning I asked Hadulph to explain further about his mother and the grieving tensevete. He claimed to have told me no such thing and was very abrupt with me throughout the day, though the sky swelled terribly hot and I would very much have liked to ride instead of walk, as Hagia sometimes did, but Hagia had privileges I did not, and God in His Heaven knows how she earned them.

  At noon the sparrows descended.

  [If this war between my eyes and the page continued much longer I felt I would scream. I could not read any faster, yet the rot battled me for sovereignty over the page. My eyes raced my brain and both of them panted, exhausted. Fat globs of soft, furry mold swarmed up and took a great swath of words, and I felt tears prick my heart. When the text picked up again, Qaspiel was already telling its tale, squatting by the fire, I imagine, those long dark wings brushing the red earth, long yellow beans in a clay pot, all of them chewing tea leaves to make the evening pleasant.]

  “…so the man Herododos, whose beard was so black it shone blue, but whose head was entirely bald, and who liked tamarind beans specially, and who told excellent jokes about elephants, had a pet bird, which some say was a mynah and some say was a parrot. In either event it could speak, and in either event Herododos also had brought with him a half-wife, as he called her, from a place called Lydia, and her hair shone blue, too, and her name was Sapham. The blemmyae put passion-flowers into her braids, because the red petals looked so radiant against her hair, and she sang them a song about a man who knew everything in the world, but told it more beautiful than it really was, so that a poor Lydian maid became a queen, and marmots became giant, noble ants with souls of incorruptible gold. Everyone gave the wise man food, and everyone loved him, even if they knew he would leave them behind when he returned home to his whole-wife, no matter how many clever songs his half-wife sang. Sapham winked while she sang, but she also wept. The blemmyae took her knuckles in their mouths, for this is an affectionate gesture among them,” and there Qaspiel paused and extended its own knuckle to Hagia, who bit it gently and smiled, if you could call it a smile. “The blemmyae loved her, because she knew a very large number of clever songs, and some of them were lascivious, and those are the best kind. The mynah-or-parrot began to sing duets with her, and the blemmyae called the bird Pham, because it echoed her, and fed it plum-seeds so it would keep making its pretty harmonies.” Qaspiel spoke as though it could not bear to end a sentence, each one going on and on. It used the word and like a desperate hand, reaching back to haul its words forward.

  “But one day Sapham grew sick, and no custard-apples could rouse her to her old songs, and no knuckle-chewing could delight her, and no sight of Herododos herding the cameleopards could amuse her, and her face swelled up red and sweating, and her hair fell out, and when her half-husband took her to the mussel-shell, which had only just sprung up out of the white pool, so the old twins who guard it were then young, she said she did not want to be healed, but to stay here where the blemmyae loved her and put passion-flowers in her hair, and not go back to Lydia where she would be left, lonely, while her half-husband went back to his whole-wife and had a brace of children who looked nothing like her. She made all of this into a song, as was her habit, and the twins on either side of the mussel-shell marveled, and begged her to come in and be healed, but she would not.

  Sapham died, and everyone was very sorry because this does not happen much and they had all told Herododos how no one died here and there was much embarrassment. Around this time the mynah-or-parrot Pham also grew sick and the day they buried Sapham, Pham fell dead after her, echoing her to the very last, and they were closed up in the earth together, Sapham with passion-flowers in her hair and Pham with black feathers shining blue, clutched to her breast.

  After a year, a tree began to grow where Sapham had been buried, and it had a kind of heavy, dark, furry fruit. Everyone waited expectantly to see what would come of it, even though Herododos had already gone home past Lydia to wherever he lived and loved his whole-wife, as foreigners seem to have trouble believing about the trees. A second year passed before the fruit split open, and I came out, and several siblings, with hair like Sapham and wings like Pham, and we have no gender because we are not animals but fruit and we like to sing, too, and we like to fly, and we like to be loyal, and we like to love. The tree opened up and flew away and when it was done only twigs and a few blue leaves remained, and then they blew away, too, and we were all born, and ready to live.” Qaspiel twisted its long fingers together, upset, I think, if I could begin to interpret. “A hundred years later the tree fruited again and we were so happy, so excited, so ready to love our new family! But Gog and Magog first appeared in those days, and their monstrous stride shadowed the plains, and the fluid of their boiling faces, their tears and saliva and snot and sweat, fell on the tree and blighted it and we thought there would never be any more of us, ever, but then the first parent, Irial, began to secrete, and we learned that we were not all fruit, but a little animal, too, and we were happy, but the tree was still dead, and no one can make songs as clever as Sapham could, and we wish we could have known her.”

  I chewed a piece of salted yak and considered it all. A bit of stringy fat caught between my teeth.

  “Who will tell the next tale?” I asked. I looked for the ghostly slip of the panoti, in the shadows. “Hajji?”

  She pulled another fruit up close to her ear, this time a plum. “I don’t tell stories,” she said quietly.

  I looked down at the last crust of yak, chagrined. When the rest of them mocked me, I could bear it. When Hajji rebuffed me, misery settled on me like a coat.

  “Bury it,” Qaspiel said. “So that the next traveler will have a fine salted yak-tree to feast from.”

  I dug in the soil with my fingers—I wanted Hajji to smile at me, to be charmed
at my pliability. But more, I wanted not to be a stranger anymore, to look upon that miraculous soil as they did, as something usual, every day. I wanted to do something as a native soul would do it. And perhaps that was my first acceptance of the magic that lives in this place, the first time I really believed a tree would grow where I dropped the rind of my supper.

  “I know you believe what you have told me to be true, Qaspiel,” I said gently, still hoping to pull some parable out of the evening, or an allegory. I confess I was not wholly sure of the difference. “But if you would do me the courtesy, I would tell you what an angel is, and perhaps you might draw some illumination from it.”

  “I am not an angel.”

  But in those days I was as full of my own notions of the world as a jar of oil, so eager to pour it out all over everyone that I did not care even a little what Qaspiel thought it was. “The angels dwelt with God in the beginning of the world, when all the stars of the morning sang out together and rejoiced—”

  Qaspiel held out its long-fingered hand, and made its palm flat. Out of the flesh a single, stark red passion-flower sprang up, its petals ruffling slightly in the night breeze.

  My words died in me. Hagia laughed cruelly, and the passion-flower began to—

  [Here the mold had so corrupted the text that it hurt my eyes—the brilliant colors of it, no longer like an apple going brown, but bright gold with fuzzy growths of violet and green, like flames shooting up through the letters, devouring, conflagrating, tipped in bitter, black degeneration. The colors, Lord, the colors! The volume voluminated with scarlet and orange, with deep magenta, with tiny fungal fronds, disturbed by his breath, a fine cloud of spore tufting up and settling on the rough table. It was getting very bad now, and I feared that the third tale of love would drop into a puddle of muck and slime and escape us forever.