by Paula Guran
Far to the east, in the Land of Mud and Glory, the man whom his subjects called Emperor of All the World stood in a small dark room with the seer of the imperial court. Though the Emperor was a short man and the seer was long and bony the Emperor rose high above the diviner, for he stood on stilts covered by his long robe painted with the night sky. His face was painted green and his hair was braided and waxed to stand out from his head like the rays of the sun.
Very old and thin, and dressed in a shapeless robe the color of mud, with long white hair, the seer might have been a man and might have been a woman. Not even the Emperor knew, or cared.
The two of them stared into a small three-legged cauldron where the remains of an ancient tortoise bubbled in a dark broth. “Now?” said the Emperor.
“No,” the seer said. “Not yet.”
The Emperor sighed. “Then it will not come in my lifetime.”
“Perhaps not even in the lifetime of your son. But it will come.”
“Then all is good.”
Immortal Snake ruled seventeen years, dying finally after he went out in a storm to command a tornado not to attack his city. The tornado turned aside, but the ruler became ill and his lings filled with water and he drowned in his love for his people. During his reign, with his sister and Tribute of Angels beside him, he became the living breath of compassion and wisdom. And power. The Army of Heaven extended its rule over countries and provinces and peoples no one had even known existed. Every year the other Great Powers sent money and treasure to the Nine Rings, while their young men and women imitated the styles and speech and art of the land of Immortal Snake, which was no longer Written In The Sky, but had been renamed, under the direction of the ruler’s sister, Mirror of God.
Tribute of Angels no longer spoke every night, but four times a year, at the beginning of the seasons, people gathered at sunset up and down the hills to the south of the Nine Rings. Tribute of Angels would sit cross-legged on top of the hill, wearing the slave clothes in which he’d first come before Immortal Snake. He spoke softly, yet each would hear him as if the Teller sat alongside and whispered in their ears. When morning came, the people would walk away slowly, their faces empty but their eyes lit with a secret fire, like someone who dreams that he has passed through the seven spheres and come upon the hidden throne of God.
When Immortal Snake died, panic rose up in the land. People burned their crops at night, for fear the sun had gone out and they would never be warm again. When day came others jumped off their roofs in the belief that divine messengers would lift Immortal Snake to heaven and they would be carried along. The world must end, they thought, for no Immortal Snake had ever died a natural death, and now there were no Readers to appoint a new one.
Soon, however, joy replaced terror, for the word went out from the Nine Rings that the people themselves would choose their ruler. As for the choice, no one even had to discuss it. Tribute of Angels became the new Immortal Snake. In a ceremony designed by his beloved, he lay face down on the Plaza of Celestial Glory. One by one the ministers, heads of the noble families, and even village leaders sprinkled him with rose oil, calling “Rise up, beloved of God. Rise up.” Finally, Wiser Than Heaven herself took the body in her arms, like a mother sheltering a dead child. “Rise up, rise up,” she said. “Awaken to your people. Rise up, Immortal Snake!” Now he opened his eyes, and kissed her, and the celebrations began.
Under the rule of the new Immortal Snake the land of Mirror of God became even more powerful, more loved and admired. Its empire now stretched across the world. When drought or locusts destroyed crops people everywhere suffered, except in Mirror of God, for they had taken the best of every nation’s plants and livestock and spices.
For twenty-two years Immortal Snake, who had been Tribute of Angels, ruled his people. And then the sun hid his face, for the Snake became ill.
Day after day Wiser Than Heaven sat alongside him. He lay now on the same narrow bed he’d requested for his quarters so long ago. When she joined him, there was more than enough room for both of them, for it was if each had vanished and a single being replaced them. It had always been like this. In their glory days it was as if a star came to lie among mortals. Now it looked like the union of light and shadow, for the great storyteller was nearly gone.
She was sitting alongside his bed on the tenth night of his illness when he turned toward her and whispered “Can you see the sky?”
“Yes, of course,” she said as she glanced up at the high window above the bed.
“Tell me what is written there.”
She began to cry, the first time in days. “I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he whispered. “It was all decided such a very long time ago.” He managed to turn his head and look at her. His voice so soft she had to bend close, he said “I should never have come here. I should have thrown myself into the sea.”
“No!” she said. “Don’t say that. Please.”
“I thought of it. The night before I arrived. I couldn’t do it, even then I could feel you calling to me.”
“I don’t understand.” Instead of answering he closed his eyes. His breath seemed to flutter in the air just above his mouth. Wiser Than Heaven cried out and pressed her mouth down on his, as if she could trap him inside his body. Too late. Tribute of Angels, who was now Immortal Snake, had returned forever to the world of story.
Wiser Than Heaven stayed with the body for three days. When they finally pulled her away she returned to the small room where she had lived before she met her storyteller.
Across the land, people rubbed their faces and even their entire bodies with ashes. Many refused to eat, while they stopped all work and recited stories from the authorized collections. There was no panic, however. It was God’s will, they reassured each other, and waited for the moment when the ministers and wise men would choose a new Immortal Snake.
Only—whom would they choose?
Wiser Than Heaven had three sons. The oldest said “I am the first born. By right the land and all the power should go to me.”
The middle son said “My brother only cares about himself. I have served the people all my life. The power should go to me.”
The youngest said “I was my father’s favorite. All power belongs to me.”
Each one appealed to Wiser Than Heaven but she refused to speak with them, or to the ministers who begged her for a decision. Each of the brothers gathered allies, spread rumors, made promises. The factions began to battle each other, first through rumors, and then assassinations, and soon armed crowds were fighting each other.
Battalions from the Army of Heaven rushed home, supposedly to stop the fighting, but even before they arrived, their commanders had chosen one side or another. Civil war flashed across the land. Finally, Wiser Than Heaven realized she must do something. She summoned her sons, only to have them refuse to be in the same room with each other for fear of assassination. So she saw them separately, and pleaded with each one to give up the fight for the sake of the people. Each one explained that too much had happened, that when he began the struggle he did so for his own glory, but now he continued for the good of the nation.
The conflict was never decided. In the second year, with bodies clogging rivers, and whole cities burned, and dead children tossed into the branches of trees, an even greater calamity fell upon the people. From all sides, from the sea, the mountains, the desert, a great army invaded Mirror of God, formerly known as Written In The Sky. Made up of soldiers from all the countries Mirror of God had conquered or dominated, the Grand Coalition was led by a young Emperor of Mud and Glory. He stood on a boat with black sails, his face radiant, his body raised up on stilts, and beside him, in an ancient robe thickened with dirt, stood a bent figure who may have been a man or may have been a woman.
The Coalition slaughtered the last remnants of the once terrible Army of Heaven. They killed half the women and almost all the men, and took the children as
slaves. In a short time all three brothers were executed in the Plaza of Celestial Glory. Their mother disguised herself as one of the old women who tend the fires of the dead, and threw herself on the flames of her youngest son.
The soldiers tore down the Nine Rings of Heaven and Earth, they smashed every building, every statue, they burned down farms and villages. Then they plowed salt into the cracked earth so that nothing could grow there. At the very end, the Emperor of Mud and Glory stood among the blood-soaked ashes and proclaimed “God has cursed this place forever and ever.”
That was the end of the land of Written In The Sky. Once it was the most powerful of all the world’s peoples. Now nothing remains of it but sand and misery and a hatred whose origin no one even remembers—that, and the secret traces of a storyteller who was both its glory and its destruction.
“A WOLF IN ICELAND IS THE CHILD OF A LIE”
SONYA TAAFFE
But I know the one there is, and this is not his story.
This is mine: I might have spent the summer in Tuscany, if my mother had visited Iceland in 1968. I could have found a boy in Siena with the face of an Etruscan faun and read him D. H. Lawrence among the vineyards and the oak-groves, olives silver in the sun; in Brittany, paced the stones of Carnac and the pine-dark tumuli and looked out for a reaper’s broad-brimmed hat in the bars of Carnac-Plage and La Trinitésur-Mer; maybe even, if I had accepted Rohit’s invitation to stay a few weeks in Kyoto, shared sake and fried tofu with a girl met at the foot of Fushimi Inari-taisha, her hair as fiery cinnabar as its torii, her eyes lit amber like a fox’s. In Belfast, in Brno, anyone at all. Or solitude, some postcards, a secondhand book: I could have drunk hot chocolate at the Museo del Prado and spoken to no one. Kept a diary. But my mother’s stories were there ahead of me, a planted pale of anecdotes marking out the globe more strictly than capitals or date lines, and at least in Reykjavík none of them could shadow me—student riots in Paris, endlessly feuding in-laws in Bonn, opera buskers in London and missionaries in Thessaloniki and an ill-fated shortcut across the Connemara bogs. Black, she said when I asked among their litany for a description of Iceland, black and white. Lava and ice, as stark and shuttered in time as all her photographs of that year. All she had seen was half an hour of tarmac and 707s under snowy overcast, the airport at Keflavík where every other transatlantic flight was laid over for the weather, their passengers dispersed to hostels and gistihús and their own devices, but hers flew on to Glasgow and she could only look backward at frost and fire, the earth spilling up through the sea: not blue remembered hills, but fjords and burning fells; unclaimed. She saw Zeffirelli’s Tosca at Covent Garden. She made her backpacker’s grand tour of the Continent while I dreamed sketchily of Ultima Thule, looping Sigur Rós and Thom Yorke for six hours above the North Atlantic; she learned how to say I am a good girl, leave me alone in Cretan Greek and I took a man from last call on Austurstræti back to my room at the Hjálpræðisherinn because his hair was a ramshackle gray and his face too young for the fine lines awled into it and even on the dancefloor he shivered in his overcoat, crowded up with strangers and crashing bass. Straddled under me, he looked thin and lost, as though he could not remember where to start with hands or hips or silence, his eyes painfully closed under drift-ice brows. I had to snap out the lights, draw the dormer curtains before he would unfasten his jeans, pull over his head the dark fisherman’s jersey that left his hair hackled up like winter, boyish against his bunched shoulders, and I felt all over him the scars I could not see. I could hear him in the bathroom afterward, throwing up. The solfatara smell of hot water came back to bed with him, but a cold sweat was on his shoulders and his mouth tasted rusty, tongue-bitten, and the second time we fucked was something starving: weight and nails, aftur með gaddavír sem rífur upp gamalt gróið sár, er orðinn ryðguð sál. I thought he was starting to retch again, but it was laughter. You should try my father. . . His eyes were lighter than brandy, resin-yellow. My mother brought home a moleskine of names from trams and churches, museums and pubs, and folded anonymously with my pickup in a single bunk, asleep at all the wrong angles to one another, I had my first nightmares since leaving Baltimore: scoria, torch-smoke, the seethe and mutter of spattering rock; an icefield sky-bright under freezing steam; the sun circling endlessly at the horizon’s rim. The four black paws anchored in his naked human feet, the black wolf’s head that had mimed him across the radiator, the fixtures and brackets as he reentered the room. The walls were filled with daylight where there should have been dawn. I woke in their Christ o’clock brightness, so cold I thought I was alone; startled by a feverish heat when I touched the tight bones of his back. He breathed beside me in small pants and whimpers, a badly dreaming child. Last night’s stubble showed up silvery, black-ticked, like his hair; less transparently, the old weals roped up and down his arms, streaked whitely at his throat. My Reykjavík snapshot, my rúntur souvenir. I left him sleeping in the inarguable sunlight, camera in hand to Hallgrímskirkja and the whale-bellied clouds. Whatever we had drunk up and down Laugavegur under the white-night neon reel, the waning daymoon, his shadow by morning rucked and splayed over the crumpled sheets, curled in on itself, nose to tail. When did it ever stop me, knowing someone’s name? All I had called him that night was shape-changer.
I know his story; I nearly write it sometimes. The girl at the last bedand-breakfast in Höfn named one of her sheepdogs Disraeli, after Kaori Yuki rather than Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield. I laugh when I find out, Váli eyes us both tiredly, un-bishounen in the tousling wind that shears the clouds up against the mountains, spits everyone’s hair but Ásta’s into their eyes. His hands are in his pockets, so neither of us can see his bitten nails; his head rises as though he has forgotten something at each yap and bark. In Sauðárkrókur, we drink store-bought brennivín like winos on the curbside with an archivist whose English is as flawed and fluent as his Portuguese, Icelandic, Malayalam, watching sunrise and moonset cross the same luminous sky: Váli makes a telescope of the bottle’s black-ringed glass and repeats, dreamily cursing, the names of his nephews, fire-jawed pursuers of light. He takes terrible pictures of me on the Dutch-spread bed in Kirkjubæjarklaustur, camisole straps falling down and toothpaste on my fingers. I retaliate on the asphalt-colored sands of Vík í Mýrdal, where he flinches with each wave that explodes against the basalt stacks. Between his diffident hands and the confusion of flash adjustment with shutter speeds, the better shots are jags and spurs of light, seepage and clipped signals; his profile frays into the bare blue sky. We are in Breiðdalsvík, the night he finally goes out alone. Back at Pravda, he had stared at me with eyes I took for drink-dilated hazel and said doggedly, My brother’s blood is on my hands. You don’t know. I watched them put my father away, sounding more like a medieval penitent than a bragging ex-con and I thought he was lying either way. Now he crouches away from me in the bedside light, a wet holly spray in his frost-rick of hair, scarlet-spattered across his winter-haunted face, his coat’s hem trailing as darkly as the shadow that whines and worries at his heels, and when at last I have gathered him trembling into my arms, all ribs and elbows, hot as a hawk, I can hear his heart hammering the black miles of Surtshellir. Egilsstaðir, Seyðisfjörður with its ferries and nineteenth-century clapboards and the tide rolling green up to green-springing turf, we run the ring round the island that makes a crime scene’s chalk of glaciers and it is not the last night he comes home with blood in his teeth. Sheep-killer, I think. Not hikers, backpackers: lovers some bored or aching hour under the pale sun-stifled sky. Are there girls in black mackintoshes and emptied throats, cast up under the birches of Skaftafell? Boys with surprised, wind-roughed faces billowing like ghosts in the white water of Barna-foss? The next butcher’s mess he chokes up into the sink or the shower stall, in a ditch or a byre somewhere, laid open to the heavens and the Allfather’s single eye. I am not your brother, I whisper into his sleeping mouth. He kisses me goodbye at the terminal with almost the same dazed, curious submi
ssion, as if he never bit me, or I fucked him till both of us bled. You think of these things at half past three in the morning, when the streetlight filters through frozen rain on the windows, a dead tintype wash you can just read by. Maybe it ends when he kills me. A brief mortal interlude, getting on for Götterdämmerung. Or maybe I introduce him to my mother. I shouldered my bag off the carousel at JFK and—travel-stickered, slightly hungover and still on Greenwich Mean Time—declared nothing more than a bottle of svarti dauði, duty-free, two novels in translation and a roll of unshot film. He was gone by the time I came back from the cathedral, only the sun reflecting on the very clean walls, my bruises slowly fading in; a smell of sex and iron in the sheets, as of chains cankered by the sea.
One day, the one you love will tear your throat out. One day, the sun and the moon will fall to their wolves. The earth will flash to clinker in the red-giant rush of stellar evolution, the universe drift to static and silence resolved, and the gods walk quietly across wind-hushed Iðavöllr. One night I dreamed of his father under the earth and the ice, burning in his chains at the core of the world, and I had no answers from him, either. He watched me with eyes the color of white wine, flickering softly as if a candle’s flame bobbed and drew before him. I had imagined him slight, sly and sharp-edged, not sinewy as old yew and taller than his lean-boned son, but his hair was spiky, cindery, cider-red, and the same untraceable light shadowboxed in it; I had been asking him questions, but even in the dream I could not remember what he had replied. He should have been skinned bones and screaming. No one had knelt ministering at his side in years. (She left him in 1938, when Grímsvötn’s fissures boiled over and the ice of Vatnajökull smoked, bucking in blind agonies as the earth ran. I knew this from the dream, as I knew I would never see the serpent that hung above us in coils as black as the frostbitten dead, the venom that still trickled and dropped, fire-gold, sweating a sticky sundew light, the plain, ash-wood, palm-worn bowl she had set down, carefully, to kiss her husband on the mouth where he could not feel it for the poison running from his eyes like tears. Tall as a Valkyrie, a fair-haired woman with stiffened, scarred hands, never lowering her gaze. I imagined her in Oslo or Copenhagen, looking at Viking ships or the paintings of Edvard Munch; alone of her family, looking as though she moved through time. Her eyes were not blue, but the fine gray of gulls’ wings. I do not know if any of this is true.) But the echoes of his voice had crackled to silence against the dark undercurve of stone, the smallest sounds of snowfall and settling ash; all that remained was the smile twisting among the runestone lines of his face. Implicit, inextricable. The vulnerable, catching flame. Not for the son haunting Reykjavík’s nightlife like a half-recalled einheri or the son whose guts were shackles on his father’s skin, for the wolf or the world-serpent or the daughter half-frozen in the dark, but because I had smiled so easily back, I said for the last time, “Why?” and his smile only deepened, or did not change at all.
