A Dirge for Preston John

  In the midst of my wondering the meal arrived, brought to my room by the king and queen themselves, though I found this quite beyond the pale. When I inquired if there were not servants to do this work, Ysra assured me they would make themselves known presently, but intimacy, rather than convenience, was what was wanted tonight. They set out my food and sat upon the floor like the children they still appeared to be in my eyes, and watched me eat.

  The food itself could not have been more alien. For each eerie and homelike tapestry on the wall, foodstuffs past my understanding glittered on ivory trays. The meat remained crusted with the skin of the beast who had given it up, broiled and roasted emerald-colored scales, as though a supper from St. George’s own quarry. Fruit there was, but each of them encased in crystal I was obliged to pry open like a glittering clam’s shell. A thorny fish course stared up at me, a piscine marvel with long, twisted horns and scales of sapphire and gold, whose meat, too, glistened like precious metal (oh, but it tasted softer and sweeter than melon or pears) accompanied by wine which might well have been blood. I found it impossible to tell the difference—either I quaffed an unusually thick, rich, and salty vintage, or with equal relish a cup of somewhat thin, sour blood. (I have nothing against blood—it can be quite a boon on a long voyage, as the nomads of Araby will happily tell you. In fact, I once, in dire need, drank the blood of a crocodile when a duel had left me so wracked and wounded that I feared death had finally noticed poor John. The crocodile did not seem to mind the cut I made in her flank, and I woke quite utterly healed and refreshed. One must not be squeamish about foreign foods.)

  “Are you sated?” asked Ymra, and I allowed that I was.

  “Are you rested?” asked Ysra, and to that I also confessed.

  At which point, they began to tell me the following tale, with a great urgency, as though it was of paramount importance that I not only hear all they had to say, but believe it wholly, as surely as they believed it, and not doubt their smallest word. I am a clever John if I am a John at all, and I know that when folk are that keen to have you swallow their tale, they are most certainly lying about some or all of it, more often all of it, but a tale follows a meal like Sunday morning follows Saturday night, and I was content to hear anything. I heard the following:

  Once, long ago, there was a war and everyone involved behaved very badly. The war is not important—war is never important. It is the same, a sort of mummery that everyone knows how to perform but agrees to pretend they can still be surprised by it. War is only ever a joint or a hinge, where the world becomes something else, swings open or swings closed. What is important comes after the war. What came after this war was twenty years of coming home. What came after this war was a man, a very clever man, so full of cleverness and schemes he could hardly open his mouth before the boldest and most beautiful lies flitted out of him like fiery green butterflies. He got lost in stormy seas, and after he lost all his companions and all hope of getting home, he ran aground on a little island, so small it had only one house and one inhabitant. The house glittered with blue-green sea glass and bits of metal and wood that looked to the clever man as if they might have come from ships like his. But he didn’t think about that. He thought only about the woman who lived on the island, who had so much black hair that it ringed the island twice and wore a net of emeralds over her naked body.

  Her name was Calypso.

  The clever man stayed with her for nine years, and told her all his secrets, how he had been weaned early to make room for a sister, how his father thought him too skinny, how he’d married a grey-eyed girl who was good at weaving, a girl he hardly knew and she’d gotten pregnant faster than he’d gotten over his wedding hangover. How he could still hear the pocking of arrows, even though the war was done. And Calypso loved him. She gave him her body, her emeralds, her house, her hair. She wept for his sorrows and cheered for his clevernesses. She did not tell him that she was a goddess, and if you ask us what a goddess is we will say: A goddess is a kind of trick the world plays. It is a good trick. The world only has good tricks.

  Why did she love a skinny, lying mortal man, this woman with a heart like a sun? That is what men like him are made for, to pick the locks inside of a woman far bigger than he.

  Finally nine years were over and Calypso asked her clever boy to make a choice. She took him in her arms and wrapped him in her black, black hair and said: You have suffered so much. Let me erase your suffering. Let me make you live forever, and never age, never hunger, never thirst, never become bored or listless. Let me make you like me, and you can stay on this island for all time—or else range over the whole world and all its oceans, one foot on each wave like a racer of the tide. Let me be generous with you; let me give you plenty of all the secret things I know.

  And the clever man said no. He said: If I go home my father will have to be proud of me. I went to war; I am a man. He will have to see that. If I go home that grey-eyed girl will have grown up and I’ll find out who she is. I’ll meet my son. I’ll be an old king like my father and have a chance to disapprove of everyone. If I stay here, if I stay here and live forever, no one will ever know my name. You can’t be famous without dying—death is what puts the final seal on a man’s life.

  But a goddess is a trick the world plays, and Calypso means to conceal and to hide. What Calypso hid was that the choice she gave her clever man had a vicious echo, and he chose for all men, and all women, and their children, too. So the world is full of those who die, and some become famous but most do not, and they certainly become bored and listless and old. Calypso called him a fool and wrapped her hair three times around her island, dragging it out of the sea and to the edges of the world where no one would refuse her, would refuse anyone, would refuse anything. A place where the only answer to any question was yes. And that place became Pentexore, when it grew up.

  The opposite of Calypso is apocalypse. And it is coming, when a trick with eyes that carry the whole sea in them will offer a choice again, and we will all drown in it. We are looking forward to it. We are setting our clocks. We are very curious to see how it all turns out.

  I drank a bit more of my wine-that-might-have-been-blood and tapped my fingernail against the goblet.

  “Now, is that true?” I said with a twinkle in my eye—I have a most effective twinkle that I can deploy at will.

  Ymra gave me back my twinkle trebled. “Not really,” she said with a smile. “But the grey-eyed girl was very good at weaving.”

  “To begin to tell the history of a thing is to begin to tell a lie about it,” said Ysra. “Tell us again about your adventures in Egypt?”

  5. On Literature in Pentexore

  I have written a great number of excellent books. In addition to the books detailing my travels I have also written charming fiction involving a circle of Italian nobles telling tales in the countryside, and a most exciting poem concerning a certain English monster and his mother. I spent two years as a bard in the court of a Carthaginian heir, compelled to tell and retell the story of Rome’s conquest of Carthage so that Hannibal and Hasdrubal won through, and marched the Scipio down the broad, palm-lined Phoenician boulevards in chains. To tell them how Aeneas did not humiliate Dido to suicide. No, when he left her after marrying her in that long-lost cave while the lightning crashed and Hera howled, Dido hunted him down through all the isles of Italy, and cut his throat in front of his new wife Lavinia, whereupon Rome was founded by Dido the queen and all of those red-cloaked bastards were Carthaginian to begin with. It was good work, and well paid, but it did not fulfill me, to constantly sing of victories that did not happen to an heir who would never sit on the throne, but longed for a world that never came to pass. It was, if I may be frank, and I think I may, depressing.

  So you see that I am quite accomplished, and one morning over the royal breakfast, in which every dish was soaked in yellow cream and rich with eggs, I announced my intentions to Ysra and Ymra.

  “When I get home I wish to write an expansi
ve account of Pentexore. No one in Christendom would not like to read of such wonders, and I do not deny wonders when I can give them, with both hands. I have already begun my preliminary notes. But I wonder if perhaps many books are written in Pentexore. Perhaps the salamanders too might like to read my thoughts on their doings.”

  Ysra and Ymra smiled identical, tight, small smiles. “What would you say about us?”

  “Oh, I would not criticize, if that’s your fear! I only want my countrymen to know what an extraordinary country you rule, what marvelous inventions and natural resources you command, how charming your daily works!”

  Ymra swirled a flat black biscuit in her creamy cup. “If we allowed this, would your people want to travel here, do you think?”

  “Most certainly!”

  Ysra looked hungrily at me. “We want that. We have heard that men visit Pentexore-Beyond-the-Wall, but you are our first foreigner. We want your country and our country to meet and court and kiss. We want to merge, to see what is extraordinary in England, what marvelous inventions and natural resources Byzantium commands, to observe the daily works of Flemish knights. We want to sniff at them, and see what they are made of, and what we could make of their world. If you think a book could accomplish this we welcome you to write it. Write it beautifully, write it so beautifully they have to come, and pay tribute to us, and build roads from Spain to Simurgh. Build ships to cross from Sweden to Summikto. We find these words so bright and alien: Sweden, England, Flanders. They sound rich enough to eat.”

  I confess I was taken aback by their enthusiasm. I had not thought much on trade between our nations. My heart unfolded like a map: a picture of a town I knew in Scotland, in which a seam of silver was discovered, rich and deep. Several dukes and princes swarmed their vassals over that town, digging out the silver and taking the women to wife and carousing until nothing remained of the village except a hollow mountain and a few burnt houses. That is how it often goes in Scotland. That is how it often goes everywhere, I suppose.

  “As for Pentexoran books,” Ymra said sweetly. “We have heard that on the other side of the Wall they are enamored of such things, but here, we find they… inflict a distressing order on the world. Surely you have noticed that once you write a thing down, it is as good as real. People aren’t strong enough to resist the spell of authority ink casts. It is a kind of magic, and we don’t generally approve. You must be so careful with that sort of thing, or else all sorts of things you never intended start becoming real, and soon you’ve no control at all anymore. I suppose, if we could enforce that folk only wrote about what was real, and virtuous, and only told good tales about their monarchs and their compatriots, it might be all right.”

  “I believe Plato would agree with you.”

  “Is she a relation of yours?”

  I laughed. “No, but he proposed just such safeguards.”

  “Perhaps then, when you write your book, Plato will come and visit us and advise us on the dangerous questions of literature.” Ymra said in a way that made me quite aware the issue had closed.

  “But you must understand,” I insisted, though I could see it annoyed them both to continue the discussion past the polite placing of the queen’s napkin on the table, “there are weak books and strong books. Yes, certainly, sometimes a man writes things not strictly true and folk have no way of knowing otherwise, or perhaps the things he wrote seemed so much bigger and brighter than anything they knew that they wanted it to be real, or perhaps a king wrote it, and could pass a law requiring people to behave as though it was true—you know, that sort of thing happened with the Bible and Constantine, though I would be struck down for saying so at home. But I told tales of Carthage Triumphant for years, and it did not unmake old Rome, it did not rewrite the history of the world, it did not do anything but sink a black-haired prince of a dead kingdom further in despair and bitterness.”

  Ysra considered. “But in that prince’s court, did everyone behave as though the tales were true? As though the kingdom were not dead and the prince puissant, Rome a meager, trollopy sort of place?”

  I answered slowly. “The prince held a ball once, where he compelled half his courtiers to dress as Romans, and the other half as old Carthaginian nobles. After the dancing and rich eating, the Carthaginians threw goblets of wine at the Romans, and beat them, at first with mock strength and much laughter, but soon with vigor and anger, and at the end of it the Romans were made to stand naked before the ‘conquerors’ and parceled out as slaves. The next day they were emancipated, but that night was pleasant for no one.”

  “There you have it,” said Ymra smugly, folding her six hands over one another. “The world is too fragile to bear the weight of books.”

  6. On the Phoenix

  I had much freedom in Simurgh, the city of the phoenix, over which the Mount looms like a great black mother bird. The phoenix do not hold Simurgh alone, but rather it is a haven for all fiery creatures, and a large population of salamanders call it home as well. It is a most pleasant city, full of green domes half-blackened with smoke and beautiful birds strutting through the streets with their tails heavy and golden behind them, for it is considered gauche to fly unless one is coming of age (and soon to conflagrate), of a rank lower than margrave, or an appointed sheriff. The salamanders, who range in size from that of a hunting dog to that of a long and undulate pony, and in color from deep beryl-green to iridescent coppery verdigris, carry crystal globes of living fire around their necks on thick chains, and when they are exhausted, they sip from the sloshing fire, and are refreshed.

  In Simurgh, two activities consumed most of her inhabitants’ energies: The making of young, and preparations for the Bonfire, a great ball held in honor of all Simurgh’s most premier folk, as well as Ymra and Ysra, who are certainly monarchs as they claimed to be, for I had yet to see any other soul move in the Mount, and whenever I mentioned their name to an incandescent bird or portly salamander, I was treated to much in the way of imprecations for their health and favor. The phoenix asked me if I have been to the Wall yet. They say: The land on the other side of the Wall is rich and beautiful, and they have a hole which is full of everlasting life, and we have none of those things, and they will not share. They are decadent and weak. In all the world there is only the land on one side of the Wall and the land on the other side, and we are in one place, and they are in the other place, and we cannot get there, and they cannot get here.

  They sang with such bitterness of the Wall. They sang for Ysra and Ymra to give them what that other land has.

  The rearing and breeding of young, however, comprised most of the economy of Simurgh. Both phoenix and salamander required a great deal of fire to effect their peculiar processes. The lizards possessed great silver urns of flame in which their worms, very like silkworms, writhed and grew until they were ready spin their cocoons. The cocoons shimmered blue, gold, amber, and deft handmaidens appeared as if out of nowhere, the only other humans I had seen, their eyes hollow and their limbs thin. They plunged their hands into the molten creche and spun out a wondrous thread from the cocoons. Their fingers were in no way scorched, so I may have to reconsider whether they are human. They certainly kept their own counsel and company, for I could not get a word from them. (Though I found in my rooms a most extraordinary suit of clothes the day after I observed this rite, with hose of fiery red and the rest golden, amber, brassy and bold.)

  The phoenix, of course, give birth to themselves every five hundred years or so. However, this is not quite sufficient for population growth, and I gathered that at some point in their past they suffered a great reduction in their numbers. Their eggs, when they lay them (a rather difficult proposition, I gather, as the hen must ingest a monstrous amount of cinnamon in order to achieve fertility—the woods surrounding Simurgh crowded thick with cassia) must be roasted for one hundred days on a bed of embers. One might imagine such a blaze would cook the egg, but I am assured the chick cannot survive without it.

  I was trea
ted as a minor celebrity and given a goodly number of ales and cakes. The streets of Simurgh glowed with red leaves shed from stately trees which never seemed to grow new green shoots nor run out of their scarlet foliage. Anything red is beloved. To date I have not seen a conflagration of phoenix, but I gather it is quite the to-do, and the main purpose of the Bonfire, to celebrate the old phoenix and the new, and to glimpse the sacred dance of the salamanders on their round and gleaming feet.

  When will this great event occur? I asked every phoenix and green salamander I met.

  Soon, they all said. If not tomorrow, surely the day after.

  I have been here for some time now. The answer is always tomorrow. Surely the next day. No longer than the day after that.

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  You don’t have to say how they sent us off. It’s embarrassing to think about now. Even my mother came—Kukyk, waving her wings in the air. How they cheered. How they blew kisses. How the wind sounded on the golden waves. How they cut the hedge apart to let us through, with axes and beaks. You can skip that part. The part where we were so happy to be going to save John’s world we pretended not to hear the heads crunching and crying under blade after blade. The part where we thought our own king would love us if only we killed a whole heap of people we had no quarrel with.

  But the sharks? I should still make that scene?

  Yes, the sharks.

  We learned from John that whichever ship bore the king was most important, the flagship. I rode upon that ship, too, along with Anglitora and Qaspiel and Hadulph and Sukut the bull-headed astronomer and many others. I could not say why then but I felt it important that we stay together. The whole business had been timed so that the road through the sand would form when we had nearly completed the crossing, so that we could sail as long as possible, so we could make good time. John seemed to have little enough idea how far it would be from the opposite shore of the Rimal to Jerusalem.