A Dirge for Preston John

  “Is that what dominion means? The privilege of eating things without asking first?”

  Hagia, you are digressing. Are you not glad I am here to marshal you and march you straight?

  Of course. I am too easily caught in remembering. John never finished the work; what is unfinished cannot be important.

  The crane-girl put the helmet down on the purple stones of the al-Qasr. It clanged and my child began to weep. Well she might.

  The crane went on: “You may blame me, if you like. You’ll find it easier, to blame me for bothering you with the troubles of the cranes. I will take that blame. She who tells a truth must take responsibility for it. She owns the life of that truth, and must see to the caring and feeding of it, the rearing of it, the use of it. And she must see it through to the end. Say what you like—I will not abandon this thing I brought with me over the waste. I will stay by its side, to the very and most bitter last.”

  And so began the war, which had ended and yet not ended, was won and yet bitterly lost, upon us yet far off. She brought it to us, but we took it from her, and how it blossomed in our hands.

  I am sorry. Perhaps if we had closed our eyes and refused to treat with that war we would have stayed secret and safe. But I became the creature I was made to be: half my mother and half my father, screeching to the moon and striding over the sand. I was determined before I was born. I was always going to be Anglitora, forever meant to be her, unable to be any other one, even if I wanted to be. When I face the west I am my father’s daughter, and there is blood everywhere that I cannot staunch, and there is gold and myrrh too, the stuff of life and death, and secrets and buried things. When I face the east I am my mother’s child, and I am free, and I do not care whom I hurt, for pain and joy come walking hand in hand together across the desert, and I cannot tell them apart.

  And when you face straight ahead, Gli? When you face the dawn on the Rimal with me, when you face the sun and the long days ahead?

  Then, Hagia, then I am yours.

  THE CONFESSIONS

  The bones of my back popped and stretched—but I confess that it was a pleasure to find I had done well in choosing my book off the great tree. Hagia’s voice looped and wrote neatly upon my brain once more, and I felt I had come to know her a little, as one comes to know a cousin one did not grow up with, but discovered as a grown man and found to be pleasant company. Yet it could not escape my notice that this was a younger Hagia, one full of sadness and anger, instead of the intelligent and melancholic matron Hiob and I had encountered in the scarlet book with those searching eyes embossed on its cover. Yet there was a pleasure in that too, to witness this other Hagia, not so resigned to her life and her husband’s death—not even yet aware of his death. It was something akin to meeting one’s mother as a girl. Knowing all that would happen to her, but unable to tell her. And the child, the child haunting the margins of that wiser, gentler Hagia’s tale, the full belly of the blemmye’s last rotting chapters, now born and broken and hidden away.

  I shuddered; a cold shadow had come on me.

  Brothers Reinolt and Goswin bent their heads over their pages; I could see their pates gleaming like eggs in the nests of their hair. What wonders were they reading? I crushed this thought in me—I would not go Hiob’s way, I would not be jealous of the texts; they were not mine to be jealous of. Yet my resistance had less resilience than I’d hoped—I called out and asked them at least the authors of their books. They could not help but absorb that much, even if I had instructed them not to read for pleasure but for the work of copying.

  “I believe it is some sort of lion,” said Brother Reinolt. “There is much concerning a deformed child.”

  “I could not possibly say,” sighed Brother Goswin with some irritation. “He has not identified himself as of yet save as a knight of St. Albans, and it all appears to be some sort of encyclopedia. I cannot make heads nor tails of it, Brother Alaric, if I am an honest man.”

  So sated, I ate some small scrap of bread and availed myself of water. Not for the first time I praised Hiob in my heart, for scribe’s work is hard on all the parts of a man’s body, yet he seemed never to tire. I have always been the lazier of us—but I keep my laziness in a box at the bottom of my heart, and dance with vigor to distract anyone from seeing that weak boy at the core of me who wants only to dream and rest. When I was a youth in the abbey I used to dream out of the cloister window at the chestnut trees in the courtyard, how white their blossoms or how rich-looking their nuts, depending on the season, wishing for any diversion but the illuminated page before me, wishing to do any work but writing out one more word with my cramped and aching hand. Of course now those days seem sweet to me, when I was but learning my Greek and my Aramaic, when Brother Hiob was a junior in our ranks and ruddy of face, insisting upon exercising in the yard each morning to keep himself hale though no wrinkle had yet marked his face. Alaric, he said, if you do not serve your flesh it will never serve you. It is no honor to God to absent your attention from his greatest gift. Eat, but do not indulge, be strong, but not proud, and for the Lord’s love sit up straight at your podium or I shall whip your calves.

  It is possible I ought to have listened more intently. He was in a real sense my father, as Anglitora, whatever her matrilineal unsavoriness, was Hagia’s daughter. A child of the heart. My true father thought little of giving me up to the abbey at Luzern and writing me but never; of my mother I know only that she was whispered to be a witch, capable of healing a cough or cursing cattle merely by pulling some herb with her right hand or her left. She was said to be beautiful, but likely with some southern blood in her, this accounting for my own olive skin and dark eyes. She died—put to death or perished in some other wise. My father did not keep me long enough to say and on the subject my memory is silent. Hiob was my parent, and later my brother. His was the only soul who stood guard for mine, and spoke well of it to Heaven.

  And I see now that I already speak of him as though he were gone, and believe it, would prefer it to the idea that one day he might wake with that flowered vine in his mouth. I would have him spared that knowledge, that pain, if the sparing of pain were mine to give and not Our Lord’s. His bier stood silent near us, the scratching of our work and the reedy breathing of our brother sawing in time to one another. It was a terrible thing to have so near, but I wanted him close and safe—and well it might serve as a warning and stauncher of passion should these books too, inevitably, begin their foul blooming.

  And thus I did not, could not hear, when Hiob’s withered, beleaguered hand began to move, whispering over the petals of a blue and violet flower, his finger moving in swirling patterns while we, yet unsensing, wrote on into the eve.

  THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

  THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

  Being the Works and Days of Vyala the White Lion, who was Hadulph’s Mother, and also Guardian to Sefalet, the Royal Child, During the War which took the King and Queen to Far Off Places. Written Afterward with the Help of Qaspiel the Anthropteron, as Claws are Poor Claspers of Quills.

  Love is a practice. It is a yogic stance; it is lying upon nails; it is walking over coals, or water. It comes naturally to no one, though that is a great secret. One who is learned might say: does not a babe in her mother’s arms love? From her first breath does she not know how to love as surely as her mouth can find the breast? And I would respond: have you ever met a child? A cub may find the breast but not latch upon it, she may bite her mother, or become sick with her milk. So too, the utter dependence of a tiny and helpless thing upon those who feed and warm her is not love. It is fierce and needful; it has a power all its own and that power is terrible, but it is not love. Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language—and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.

  If love were not all of this, I would not have devoted my mind, which is large and generous an
d certainly could have done much else, to it for all these centuries.

  If love were not all of this, I would never have known that wretched, radiant little girl, nor let her learn her teeth on my heart, which children can find with more sureness than ever they could clasp the breast, and latch upon it, and bite, and become sick, and make ill, and all the worst of the six ails of loving, which are to lose it, to find it, to break it, to outlive it, to vanish inside it, and to see it through to the end.

  First I should say that I had no desire to raise another child. Hadulph was my joy, red in chest and mane, and he was enough. As a cub he was all-demanding, his redness a smear of blood against my fur, and when he slept his tail made patterns in the snow of Nimat. His father had been red, too, and sometimes I think all the brightnesses of my life have been banners of scarlet in the winter. Hatha was the father of Hadulph, and though there is little breeding among the white and red lions, he came to Nimat-Under-the-Snow lean and bold, and when he bit the scruff of my neck I was pleased. That is not love, either, not the child suckling nor the sire biting, but oh, it is sweet, and Hatha told me afterward the sutra of Yiwa, his antelope goddess, and among his words were: we are all devoured by the world. Everything we want consumes us in turn, and we drown in wanting forever. That was almost as good as the son he gave me, though I was as surprised as any to bear a single cat and not a litter. Perhaps the heart of Hadulph was so hungry he drank up all his possible brothers and sisters. My heart is like that.

  When I was born my mother said: well, you’re alive. What will you do about it? And that was all she taught me of the world. That is a cat’s education—a bit of leonine milk and a short introduction to killing things weaker than oneself and off you go, kitten, into the snow, into the mountains, into the pine barrens and a forest of hearts and weeping. You see, perhaps, how I came to the notion that love is learned, not inborn. My sire was not much better—a big strapping fellow with a cream-colored tuft on the end of his tail, he gave me my name, Vyala, and said: if you want to be cuddled, find a panoti. The world is a toothed place, and I am busy.

  I am not resentful. We all move and speak according to the dictates of our blood, our quiet, unalterable drives, and if a lion is gruff with his children, that is because his gruffness was so deep etched he could not erase it if he wished too. Perhaps the folk of the warm valleys are right about their Abir; perhaps my mother and father would have learned gentler thoughts if they had changed their lives like gowns. But the white lions abstain from the great lottery, and I am only myself, only Vyala, for all time, and they were only themselves, and all of us together could summon about a mouthful of feeling for each other, no more.

  I think I was waiting, in those early years. Love can be spent out, spooled onto the earth and lost. I was saving up my capacities. For Hadulph, for all those who came to sleep in the curve of my ribs and be eased of their sorrows, for the royal child to come. They asked so much of me. I had to be alone for a century or two, just to store up fat against the love they would claim. Still, even still, I have that core of feline hardness that is my birthright, and if I do not wish to be moved, I am not moved. I often think that is the only power in the world, to chose whether one’s own soul is swayed or stands stony and unwavering.

  And so when my son came to me in my frozen cave and told me what he would have of me, I stretched my paws and yawned and chuckled. Why should I care that the queen had had a broken child? She should have thought better of letting a human breed her. It was never going to go well, a blemmye and a man. They took their chances and came up with a monster—too bad, none of my concern.

  “Don’t be cold,” he said to me, and I laughed again. His friends were not my friends. “War is coming. Someone must stay behind.”

  I would stay, but not to be a nursemaid to whatever the creature was that ran stumbling down the halls of the al-Qasr. I did not want to know about men over the Rimal, I did not want to see what the mirror had shown. We do not live on the Axle of Heaven because we wish to be part of the affairs of Nural. Those who live in the heat have no delicate feelings; the sun burns it out of them. They think their own destinies are the destinies of all.

  “Come and see her,” he said. “Come and see her and decide then.”

  My son had spent too long at court, where no one speaks their desires. Where they coax and wheedle instead of wearing their hearts before them like a white blaze on red fur. He had forgotten how to speak to me, how to tell me that he loved Hagia and always would, and her child by the foreigner was his own child, too, for when her belly was great he bit the scruff of her broad back and she said his name with such tenderness it cut him, and he loved that child because it was broken, because with every breath the child said: John and Hagia should have let each other alone.

  I understood him without his needing to growl out his passion into the snow. I chose to be moved. I would go. What harm could it do me? Ah, poor Vyala. Even you can be fooled—love can always hurt you.

  I settled on the amethyst floor of the al-Qasr. The sethym columns twisted with silver rising up like bones around me, and the smell of incense and bowls of banana flowers in my nostrils, and my claws clicked on the stone. They brought her to me, in a little palanquin of emerald and black silk—draped with a weight of coppery veils which served to hide her face. The child could not have been more than ten or twelve years of age. Neither Hagia nor John came with her, only servants, and at the time I thought this cruel. Later I understood that if they were to leave her with me they wanted to know how we two would behave toward each other in their absence; as with two cats who are strangers, often one must simply place them in a room and let them have at it, if ever peace is to be hoped for afterward.

  “This is ridiculous,” I growled. “Take off her veils. She is not a leper.”

  The servants, a pair of bull-headed boys, drew back the cloth and for the first time I regarded Sefalet, the daughter of Prester John and Hagia of the Blemmyae, princess of Pentexore.

  I confess that when I heard of the results of the Abir that throned them, I wondered how their child would fare. A blemmye has no head and a chest full of her own face, and a man most certainly does have a head, and a blind, mute chest without so much as an eyebrow on it. That afternoon I had my answer: Sefalet had a head, but it was bald, and had no features upon it—no eyes, no mouth, hardly a nose at all, perhaps a ridge of bone beneath the flesh, but the rest smooth and blank as a page unwritten. It was certainly very unsettling. Her dress, all copper-colored like her veils, fell loosely enough that I could see no face upon her body. Poor lamb, to be deaf and dumb and faceless. But had we not all seen stranger? A tensevete has a body of ice—why should she be so singled out and veiled away?

  The girl put her hands up over her face where her eyes ought to have been. On the backs of her hands opened a pair of calm and beautiful green eyes, though red and wet from some past crying. She watched me for some time out of these strange eyes before turning over her left hand and placing it where her mouth would have been, had she been born her father’s daughter. On the palm opened a mouth, with dark lips and teeth gleaming.

  Out of the left-hand mouth she screamed horribly, a scream from the very bottom of her being, where all had gone black. She let her left hand fall and put her right over her mouthless face, and out of a second mouth on her right-hand palm she cried out: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!

  In her distress, the princess crawled toward me from her palanquin, the mouths of her hands kissing the floor, her blank face nodding miserably, her fingernails breaking against the amethyst, and I could not help it, I growled at her, my muzzle drawing up, my teeth showing in the shadows. What could I ever do for this tiny maiden? The growl came without my meaning it to, as one growls when a tiger is near, a cat as great as oneself, as capable of rending, of ruining. I feel shame now, when I think that the first sound I gave that girl was a rumbling snarl.

  Sefalet collapsed at the sound of my growling, flat onto the floor, as if b
y sinking into it she might escape forever. And as I watched her, she began to shake and quiver, a kind of fit taking over her body, and out of her hands and feet poured a kind of awful light, illuminating the corners of the hall, the palanquin, the bull-headed servants, and me, turning us all the color of the moon.

  When she had done, and by the expression on the servants’ faces I knew this was not the first time she had quaked or shone, I rose and padded over to where the child lay, her faceless face pressed into the floor, her arms and legs spread out like the spokes of a wheel.

  “Well,” I said to her, “you’re alive. What will you do about it?”

  I settled down on my haunches before the girl, waiting patiently. A cat is good at waiting; perhaps the best. I lashed my tail from side to side. The bull servants watched me, and I watched her. Finally Sefalet lifted her head and put one hand over her face so that her eye regarded me coolly.

  “Tell me your griefs,” I purred to her. “I know that your body is strange and that you suffer fits—you may skip those. Tell me what is wrong with you. Tell me and I will take it away.”

  “You can’t take it away,” said the left-hand mouth.

  “I can, though. It will be a long journey, and at the end of it perhaps you will not be Sefalet anymore, but I can take grief and bury it under a stone.”

  “That would do no good, a sorrow-tree would only grow in its place, full of little unripe princesses weeping sap,” said the right-hand mouth.

  “How old are you, child?”

  “I am nine years old.”

  “And tell me the truth, the lion’s truth, which has teeth and delights in blood: do you know what afflicts you?”

  She held out her palms to me: the left-hand mouth smiled, and the right-hand mouth frowned.