“I don’t know any stories,” I answered, because I was tired and I am not always the best of lions. “I only know things that have happened. That’s not the same thing as a story, which is a thing made up to pass the time or repeated because you heard it once a long time ago and it sounded pretty.”
“Tell us a story,” said Lamis, queen of Thule, with her huge hands under her small chin. “Some stories are things that really happened.”
Sefalet had fallen sick. She had nearly fallen off the cathedral—and I must remind myself to say cathedral and not tower, though my heart wants to call it a tower, though no church ever had so many floors, or was that color of blue-black, or had a girl named Kalavya speaking out of its cornerstones. I shot a bird today, and it had leathery skin and wings like a bat, only with pinkish feathers and wild white eyes. It is another country up here above the cloudline, Drona, with other citizens, other songs, other holidays. Sometimes I think I could just take one step off the ledge and fly myself, up and away to the sphere of the stars, where I would step on their silver heads in my dancing. Sefalet had leaned in to hear the speaker, though her left hand lashed out, gnashing with its teeth at the stone, hissing: “She died, she died, she died, she didn’t fly, she fell forever, and so will we all, when we get our first kiss, our princess kiss, to wake the world.” And then she swooned, shivering all over, dizzy and upset, and if not for Fortunatus catching her on his broad, furry back, she would have plummeted all the way down. It did not seem to be an illness we could catch—rather, her left hand had become her whole body, and it rebelled against her, her heart speaking hideous words to her bones, her spleen telling lies to her lungs. She kept saying: “I want to run, I want to run!” and trying to bolt out of the flap of Gahmureen’s blue tent, the only one big enough for all of us, myself and Lamis and Fortunatus and Elif. We take up a great deal of space. We are expansive beasts, and savage. The inventor worked at a wide, tilted table that I knew from experience she could fold up small enough to carry with her like a book. She ran her hand up her spiral horns from time to time, building the cathedral in her mind, in her heart. I wondered: How long would she sleep when this was done?
“Don’t be broken,” Elif said to her. “I will tell a story if it will make you better. If stories are the same thing as medicine.” He moved his stubby camphor-wood hands over her forehead and the wood darkened with the princess’s sweat. “Once a wooden man loved a girl without a face. So the wooden man said: I will get you a face from the Prince of the Beautiful Mountain, because the wooden man liked to be useful. He left the girl tied to a tree so she could not get away and get lost and walked all the way to the Beautiful Mountain, which is almost all the way to the Gate of Alisaunder. The Prince of the Mountain, who was an ant-lion and therefore very knowledgeable about bodies and all the things they do, said: Go into the world and get me all the component parts of a face and I will assemble it for you. So the wooden man thought for a long time about what faces were made of. A face is what makes a person look familiar to you, he thought. But the girl was already familiar to him. A face is what laughs and cries and looks pensive, it is what you breathe out of and eat with, and it covers your mind so dust and seeds and other irritants cannot get in. But the girl could laugh and cry and she could look pensive better than anyone the wooden man knew. She breathed and ate and never complained about dust. A face is what is beautiful or ugly about the outside of a person. But the girl was already the most beautiful thing he had met. And so the wooden man was forced to return to the Prince of the Beautiful Mountain, who was an ant-lion and therefore very knowledgeable about circular reasoning and tautologies. The wooden man said: A face has no component parts. All the objectives of a face can be accomplished by my girl, because I love her, but she still frightens me, and that is the whole point of faces, to communicate love and terror by turns so that long ago when people weren’t people, they could bare their teeth and scare off tigers, or bare their teeth and let ones like them know they were safe. My girl has passed beyond the need for a face, for she is more frightening and more of her is bare than anyone who has lived. And the ant-lion said the wooden man was wise, and had acquitted himself as well as a man who was not wooden, and so the wooden man went home to the girl without a face and untied her and they had a picnic.”
“That was wonderful,” cried Lamis, who drank the story like water. “Except for the tying up part.”
“How else do you get people to sit still?” Elif answered.
“That’s an excellent point,” I purred. “And I am amazed that you can tell a story so well, being as you are.”
“Stories are easy,” said Elif, and Sefalet blew weakly upon him. It could not have helped much, but he puffed up his balsam chest, grateful. “You just take everything that has happened to you and change it so that it looks as though it happened to someone else. If you like, you can change the names to something nicer, and pretend something you only thought about actually happened in the real world, with ant-lions involved.”
Sefalet’s left hand turned over. The lips were dark and full. “We are going to run,” it sighed.
“I doubt it,” I growled. “We could always take Elif’s advice on keeping humans where one wants them.”
With her clammy right hand, the princess rasped: “Didn’t you used to have a baby like me? A red one, who was soft and sharp and warm? And didn’t he sometimes want to run so badly, and so far, that he broke away from you and bolted over the snow? Running is the best thing there is, I think. I’m sorry I didn’t appreciate it before. I want to run so much, so fast, so far, like a red lion on the snow. And I will, I feel that I will. The left-hand girl will run further than the right.”
I licked her face roughly. It is the only way a lion licks. “Hadulph did love to run, yes. He was a little flame on the ice, bounding and leaping, with his tail snapping around in circles like a red whip. He would spring out across the squares of Nimat, and his passing would make the panotii’s ears fly up into the air. He would roar as he ran, as if his voice wanted to get there first.”
“My voice wants to get there first.”
“But Sefalet, I could always catch him. I was always faster. I was the snow, and he could not run far enough that I would not be there already, to pick him up by the scruff of his neck when he panted so hard I thought his breath would fall out of him. And I will be faster than you, too, when you are a flame on the snow.”
But of course I did not catch her.
When you sit on a high mountain and folk decide you are wise enough to visit from time to time, wise enough to lay flowers and fish over your feet, wise enough to ask how to stitch up a person and make them unbroken, you know you will sometimes fail. I have always known it. Grisalba thought I was full of myself. She kept a sharp eye out, to see when I would falter. I could have saved her the effort—I have failures piled up in my cold cave like bones. Creatures who left me with pieces of them missing, when I was so sure I had put them back together. Sons still running so far and so fast. Part of living is failing to do what you are really very good at, every day, every night, what you have worked so hard to bend between your paws like soft metal. Every other day but this one. Today is always the trouble. Love and storytelling and caring for the sick and catching kittens bounding through the snow—they must be repeatable or they are nothing. And sooner or later that repeatable thing will stop repeating. We are none of us deft enough to avoid that. Yet it hurts like strangling, and it hurts the same every time.
And that day, when the sun was a hot red tear and the lamia were enervated, baking on flat stones, when even the thin little voices in the stones were lulled to sleep, I lost her.
No one took her. I don’t think I know any villains, really, in the end. Anyone I can point to and say—they ruined it for us. Oh yes, there is John, but you cannot hold idiots accountable. Sefalet took herself. She said she would run and she ran. Her left-hand mouth, which no one believed, had been snarling and shrieking, promising to eat her, to eat
all of us, calling for her sisters though she had but one soul she could ever call a sister and the two had barely traded three words between them. She howled like a dog. The light seeped out of her like sweat, like pus, like it was a fever she might break. I buried my face in Fortunatus’ neck—I could not listen to it anymore. Even Elif put his wooden hands over his ears. But sometime in the night the ugliness in her did break, and we all slept. We all slept long enough for her to creep out into the wet grass and the silent blue-lit camp, into the woods and out of sight. We woke and the sleeping princess had vanished. All that failure bound up in an empty bed.
It wasn’t hard to guess where she’d gone. Hadn’t she been screaming it all night? Hadn’t we gotten to know it so well it might have been our names? I would go, and Elif would go, and we would not be fast enough to catch her before she fell.
I will run to the Wall, to the Wall, and you will never catch me.
THE VIRTUE OF THINGS
IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM
16. On All the Things I Have Told You
I feel we have become so close. I can almost see you, reading my wonderful words (and I think you must admit they are wonderful) and imagining the places and folk I have told you about, and it is almost like we have seen them together. Almost like you tied your ship next to mine on the icy dock, like you befriended a salamander and an emerald, like you killed a unicorn with me, and a partner in a terrible thing lessens the hurt of it. Almost like you were imprisoned with me, and damn the goddess Philosophy to her cuckolded boys. I’d rather have you, dear reader, I really would.
But you should know we are coming to the end now. You can see it over the hill. The ends of things always look golden to me. Golden and orange and scarlet—fire, and a following wind. I am not overjoyed at my part in what is to come. I am not angry about it either. Yes, I was tricked, a little. But I know enough to have excused myself if I really wanted excusing. I didn’t. I wanted to put my hand on Agneya’s back like a baking stone. I wanted to race Cabochon down the black halls. I still hoped, I think, in the secret recesses of John Mandeville, to seduce the queen for once. To have Ymra settle upon me, her arms enclosing me like a forest of limbs, and the inside of her would be a fire, too, nothing in this country is not a fire, but the ashes I would send into her would catch the light of her heart like snowflakes.
And yes, I say for once. I have never seduced a queen. I feel terrible about it, if you want to know the truth. What is a traveling man, a peddler of splendid tales, ready with a wink and a sly, conspiratorial arm hooked through your arm, if he has never even once managed to get a queen to throw off her ermine? No, no princesses either. I do know a secret about princesses though, and I’ll share it. Many men of my profession say they’re dullards, spiteful and ugly, big inbred noses and feet like ducks. But it’s not true. Princesses are exactly like the stories say. Their lives are hard, they know it from the moment they’re born. But they are radiant, and clever, and brave, and if they love you they will cross the world in iron shoes to bring you home. It’s only that none of them have ever loved me. I consider it my own failing. No blame to them.
I asked a queen once why she didn’t want me. She wasn’t a powerful queen, not a monarch of Spain or of Albania. Just a little kingdom of nowhere, but she married well and she had a crown. The queen of nowhere looked at me with her clear grey eyes and said: “Because I don’t want to be in a story.”
Princesses usually grow up to be queens. The cleverness sticks long after the beauty goes.
I suppose I am always in a story. I tell it; it tells me. I am only a story. I was only ever a story. There was never a John. There was never even a Mandeville. My body is all chapters, my better parts are appendixes. That’s all a heart ever was to a head, after all.
I said before I never saw Death in a field. I lied. I always lie. It’s lies all the way down to the core of me, and at the core is a little daemon made of iron, and he is telling a lie. But they are such kind lies. They have such color. When I was a boy I went to look for my sister in the rye fields. She hadn’t come home and I worried, even though she was older, a big girl, with strong arms from threshing the rye. We’d been so busy we’d hardly noticed, for I grew up on the pilgrim road, and the knights would come through on their way to the holy land, and they could not wait to drink and carouse until they got there. We’d poured out the whole winter’s supply of beer already. I went out into the rye and I found her, with blood on her belly where some cannon-shouldered Christian had not been able to wait, either. She was radiant and clever and brave and I loved her. Death is a girl, with hair of no particular color, and she holds court in a long, golden field.
In a moment I shall be telling you an amusing story about Halicarnassus and all will be light and you will say to yourself: Our John could not have meant that part about his sister. It’s another lie. He didn’t even tell us her name. And of course it is a lie. I have never suffered loss in all my days, and no hero of my stature has the temerity to have siblings. What use is a comic hero who grieves? Don’t think about it. Especially since I don’t think you will be really proud of me in the end, or feel you have been guided through this tale by a good man. That’s all right; as long as we both make it through to the end, does it matter who leads who?
17. On the Bonfire
It began a week before it began. The salamanders draped their silks over the greenwood structure at the base of the tower I had until recently occupied—the branches tore through the fabric and the whole thing glowered copper and mossy and terribly dry, spiky and toothed. Feasts appeared from nowhere on groaning tables—mainly the sorts of things phoenix and salamanders liked to eat, which are organ meats, cinnamon pies, and smaller lizards and songbirds, which is quite disturbing, if you think about it. Tremors of excitement passed through Simurgh and I could not even bear to share a room with Cabochon, for the waves of her pleasure and anticipation boiled through the air and filled my flesh with the strange desires of emeralds—and I am only a man; I was not meant to lust as gems do.
But I thought nothing of it. Whenever I had asked after the Bonfire, the answer had always been: Soon. Soon. Tomorrow. Next week at the outside. When I asked then, the answer was: Soon. Soon. Tomorrow. Next week at the outside.
For a time I lived in Halicarnassus; I knew a queen called Artemisia. Not the queen Artemisia, of course, who fought with the Medes and was Xerxes’ favorite admiral. No, merely her distant great-great-many-times-granddaughter (though by chance they bore an identical countenance). Artemisia was not a cruel queen—Halicarnassus does not, collectively, tolerate that sort terribly well. All a city can bear is one good queen. Then you can’t shut them up on the subject of excellence in government. How many navies have you crushed in our name this week? Your grandmother picked her teeth with Xerxes’ heartstrings and you can’t get a husband? Who could stand it? She was not a cruel queen but she had the kind of pragmatism that can look like cruelty if you stand somewhat to the side. A realism that slices as true as a blade. And so queen Artemisia, who pointedly ignored the question of a husband (I asked, of course. I always ask. If you always ask, eventually a queen will say yes. A princess at least.) made a decree to her city: they would go to war. The Greek states had humiliated them (a thousand years previous) and had sent a number of arrogant missives (requests for ships and oil) and really, when did a Greek ever know how to govern himself? (Unless the Greek was an Ionian, which Artemisia happened to be.) “Unpack all your helmets and your shields and your familial armor,” Artemisia said. “Polish up your swords. Let your wives sew new banners, and the firemasters mix up new flavors of things that boil and burn. Begin breeding better and swifter horses, and if any of you can invent some new and wonderful item of war, you will be rewarded.” A great thrill went through the city, and all bent to their work. Halicarnassus had not had a good war in ages. In addition to siege towers, not a few statues of their new queen were cast—and did she not look remarkably like her famous grandmother?
When
ever anyone asked when the war would commence, the answer was always: Soon. Soon. Next week at the outside. And all the while the city prospered and the soldiers were not too sorry to avoid dying while still getting to agitate against their Greek cousins and call them goat-stickers. It went on for years. In fact, when queen Artemisia lay on her deathbed at quite an advanced age, her advisors asked when they should begin the invasion. She answered them with a smile: Soon. Soon. And then she died.
So you see, I had seen the fox play this trick before. I felt I had a good handle on where the hedgehog goes.
In retrospect, perhaps the mood had gone more frantic, the plans ramped up, the songs at dusk more lustrous and full. But I had little enough basis for comparison.
Ymra, who always favored me, greeted me one morning with a new set of clothes, in a rare audience without her brother. Specially made by Agneya for me, she said—and how special they were. If King Midas had made love to a seamstress, this would have been their sartorial child. Black from toe to cap, but I could not mistake the thing—a jester’s costume. Not a garish one, no bells danced anywhere and the curls of fabric looked more like rags than fat, amusing bouncing protrusions (I have played the jester in truth more often than I care to—it is an excellent way not to die when visiting foreign courts). A subtle implication, stitched with skill, but I could not doubt it, and she did not mean me to—I was their fool, and they would clothe me so. That was all right. A fool is not witless. A fool shows the way—when I was with the mummers’ troupe I always wore the fool’s crown, and when it came time for Our Lord to perish from this earth, my fool always changed into an angel (a swapping of masks is all it takes) and led Him to Heaven. Fools tell the truth, but tell it so sharp the king bleeds.