A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  THE CONFESSIONS OF

  HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699

  I regret that I, Alaric of Rouen, must take up Hiob’s narrative at this point. As I write, ensconced with him in the personal house of the woman in yellow, who will not reveal her name no matter how I have asked, or offered her several ivory beads I obtained upon my journey to Africa some years ago, Brother Hiob lies insensate on a slab of stone, his skin sallow, his breath thin.

  The local king, Abbas, has ordered a great number of flowers brought to the slab to garland my friend, though I have explained numerous times that he is not dead. I believe Hiob mentioned Abbas somewhat earlier in his account (please do not blame me personally for the disarray in his notes, I have tried my best to put them together, in an order pleasing to God, but the chaos of it all quite shocked me—though I am afraid what we have to report is disjointed, incredible, and beyond a doubt heretical, even if it were possible to place it all in the correct order and fashion it into anything like a usual book—forgive me. I am only his secretary). The king is uncommonly devoted to the woman in yellow, and when I inquired after her name, he would only call her Theotokos, a word I asked him to repeat, for it took me quite aback, as I am certain it will strike anyone reading my poor notes, for it is not a name at all, but a title: Mother of God. If Prester John was a committed Nestorian as there seems little doubt now that he must have been, this word seems all the more striking, as it is one Nestorius sought to divest the Virgin of during his tenure as Patriarch of the Eastern Church. The better part of his heresy was to teach that Mary was only the mother of Christ, and not of the divine portion of His nature. It defeats utterly both my powers of reason and translation to understand why Abbas would insist on calling this slip of a girl by that name. I honestly do not believe he knows what the word means—he has no Greek whatsoever—and she answers to it only when he calls her thus. She responds to my using it in no fashion.

  But I was speaking of Hiob—his talent for digression has infected me muchly in our travels. I ought to have stopped him, but my shock was so great I could only stare as he devoured the book. I have tried to understand it since—I feel no compunction myself to eat the remaining manuscripts. But Hiob has been a mystery to me since I first met him. How little there seems to be of the man which is not languages and God. I wish but once I had caught him playing at dice. I feel I would have known a great deal more about him, if I could have seen how he threw. However, in the end, his obsession with Prester John was always greater than mine. It is a story, a very charming story, like those tales of girls and spindles and mirrors old women tell. But we do not go searching in earnest for the spindles. I found this mission odd and sad from the beginning, my Brothers, I will not be shy to say it. I came because my friend bade me serve him, and in service I find a path to God, thin, silver, humble.

  And yet, and yet. I have touched these very books. I have smelled them, their sharp, over-rich, winey smells. I have seen that woman called Theotokos move in the dark, and there is a weirdness on her I cannot begin to name. I have not seen the tree Hiob reported, but I expect I shall sooner than later, if he does not wake. I have read everything, now, both his copies and my own, everything save the destroyed conclusion of John’s book. Do I believe. I think I must. At least that there was a man named John, and he lived among strangers—perhaps even in this same place where the sun comes so very near to the earth.

  But in my heart I ask: Does John mean truly that he lived among blemmyae, gryphons, panotii? In my youth, when I read the account of Prester John, I thought these to be allegory. The panotii representing the virtue of listening to the voice of God, the headless blemmyae of the dangers of abandoning reason, the gryphon in their triune nature symbolizing the Trinity, the amyctryae with their enormous mouth testifying to the glutton’s path, the great lions to the division of spirit and flesh. I do not see a reason yet to assume these metaphors are not metaphors, but true beasts. Because a thing is written does not make it so. Am I to take it as fact that somewhere a giant tree grows with the head of St. Thomas hanging on it like a cocoa-nut?

  That letter, my Brothers, that promised deliverance of Jerusalem is nearly six hundred years old. Surely he would have come by now, if such a man lived. It is the Year of Our Lord 1699, and we are modern men.

  Half of my heart says this. Half longs to see the al-Qasr and all her amethyst pillars. Half of it looks at the woman in yellow with her downy skin, and dreads that every single thing in this world might be true.

  And what am I to do with the Gospel of the Tree set forth in this manuscript? Shall I send it back to Luzerne to be packed away with other interesting heresies that no one but old Georg in the library ought to see, peering through his eyebrows at it all? John might as well have been talking to a cabbage and reporting the minutes of the meeting. The opinions of vegetables are evidence of nothing. How am I to defend any of this?

  And what now? Is this to become my confession as well? How long until he wakes and I may return to my own prayers and works? Like Hagia, I do not enjoy composition.

  Hiob spoke to God here—a hubris that beggars reason to contemplate. I cannot do the same. I cannot bring myself to believe I am worthy of such an audience. I write only to inform my Brothers at home what has happened to us here. I will be my Brother’s marginalia, his annotator, his loyal secretary to the last.

  I clean Hiob as best I can each morning. It is not difficult. I worry—he has not moved his bowels nor voided since he fell into this swoon, and that cannot serve him well. It is as though he is wholly stopped. His limbs are twined in chamomile and mango blossoms, and they have tried to rouse him with both that fruit and that tea to no avail. I have read many medical texts, but my practical experience began the moment Hiob decided to eat his book. I tend him; I serve him, as I always have.

  As to the books, I have occupied all my time not devoted to the care of Hiob’s mortal form in finishing his work. The oxidation of the pages proceeds, though not as viciously as with John’s manuscript—there seems to be little law in the progress of the rot. Sometimes I think I will lose Hagia’s text entirely, sometimes it does not swell up for hours. For a long time, Imtithal’s sweet tales showed the least inclination to corrupt—but now we have passed some invisible door and the green fingers of it dash and pry at each paragraph I transcribe. I will endeavor to organize the final chapters in such a way that you, my Brothers, are spared the confusion and chaos of reading through a scrim of pink and green fungus. There is enough strangeness in this tale.

  I am nearly finished. I confess my heart swells with the possibility. When I am done, will he wake? Will we go home? Will he be pleased? Will I have served well?

  Will she tell me her name?

  THE CRYSTALLINE HEAVEN

  In the three Indies our Magnificence rules, and our land extends beyond India, where rests the body of the holy apostle Thomas; it reaches towards the sunrise over the wastes, and it trends toward deserted Babylon near the Tower of Babel. Seventy-two provinces, of which only a few are Christian, serve us. Each has its own king, but all are tributary to us. And they set not by battles, nor quarrels, nor know of deceit.

  —The Letter of Prester John, 1165

  THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN

  [I could do nothing to preserve the first portion of this chapter, nor much of its middle sections. While Hiob fell into a seizure and then into his peculiar rictus, it shriveled into a purple lump and fell onto the floor with an ugly, wet sound. If I could have saved it, I would have. But my friend was in pain. I begin again as cleanly as I may:]

  As I write, it is night in Susa’s Shadow. Outside the cross-hatched screen of my thin minaret-room, the stars rest like tiny birds in the arms of the quince trees. Shadows make no sound. The wind off of the great stony river is hot and dry; it wafts of basalt, and old, old leaves. The moon has gotten fat, an orange egg in the sky, filled full with what strange bird? Everything is so quiet—so few of us are left. Soon it will be only me, and then it will be no one. Dr
ied palm fronds blow across the chalcedony courtyard. The al-Qasr sits as empty as it did in those long-gone days when Abibas the Mule-king ruled kindly from his tree in the sciopod forest, and most of Nural seemed to live there, in the open rooms, the long halls, the drifting curtains. How happy I seem to recall it, all of us playing in the palace like children.

  My silver pot scrapes—the ink is nearly gone. And yet the flood of it crests in me, all at once, everything happening at once, the weight behind my eyes, the memory of it. I understand Imtithal now—Hajji. I understand Hajji now. The world is a place of suffering, and the root of all suffering is memory. When you live long enough, the mass of memory is greater than any moon, any sun, so bright and awful and scalding in the dark, scalding—

  [A wide swath of garnet-colored mucus devoured the text that followed—I saw what I feared to be a second bud coalescing out of the miasma of it, rising up to release whatever perfume befuddled Hiob. I crushed the page beneath my hand and scooped away the pulp until the calligraphy showed clear once more. I could not afford my Brother’s ecstasy—I had to hew to my reason.]

  —the gilt edge of the bronze barrel, so full of our little stones, our possible lives. The sard and amethyst of the glazed Pavilion glowed that day, polished with silk flowers and oil. The gryphons had hung every spire and pole with citron blossoms and bright custard-apples like rosy lanterns, boughs of mango blossoms and chamomile fragrant as a mother’s skin, and bells, bells in among them, tinny and laughing, hidden in the leaves, invisible music. As Fortunatus had been chosen by Abibas, in his last royal act, to conduct the Lottery, the Great Abir, the gryphons were obligated to prepare the stage. But much visible music I saw, too—gourd drums and lyres the size of wine barrels plucked by cametenna with their huge hands. Singers ululated and danced, the dervishes stamping, stamping, stamping their tattooed feet.

  I saw my mother there, Ctiste, in her best scarlet trousers and her belt of silver. I saw the cannibal children playing at jumps; I saw Ghayth, letting young astomi pet his tail. I felt Hadulph’s warmth at my side, and I saw Qaspiel, too, its hair long for the occasion, and Hajji, Hajji sweet and silent in a swing of roses.

  And John, too, standing sheepish by his gryphon, practically clinging to Fortunatus’ tail, afraid of what the day might hold, his eyes hollow with sleeplessness. I pitied him. He could not decide what any of it meant. Did it mean his faith stood proven, and all things he knew real? Or that nothing he believed was now true, and all things hopeless?

  At least he had grown softer toward me. And I cannot think of how he looked that day, standing by the great gryphon, his hair clean and snowy and thick, all grown back but never the same, his color high, his back straight, not so old as all that, but not so young, and when I looked at him I knew so many stories about him it was like looking twice; I cannot think of how he looked without thinking of him in my arms as I took him to the Fountain, as I fed that green trickle through his lips like a thread. It is all one, the polished wood handle of the turning barrel, the snowy off-season Fountain road, with only a few lanterns swinging up ahead, up the mountain, only a few tensevetes selling restoratives on the pilgrim trail, and no hyenas at all. We walked alone, the six of us, and Fortunatus carried John upon his back, for after Nimat, he could not stand or speak, so deep he dwelt in despair. Hajji told us much, but I found it all confusing and not a little upsetting.

  “Does this mean his God is real? Will we never hear the end of it now? Will we have to learn our Latin in earnest?”

  Hajji sighed. “I cannot say. It is a story. Stories are both true and untrue. They are both, all the time. Do I believe Thomas had a brother he loved, and that his brother died? Of course. That’s all the story is, really. Love, and death.”

  “Why did the snow cease in that clearing? I have never seen such a thing, in the high reaches.”

  And the panoti smiled, gently, but with a ruddy pride. “Trees are bigger below ground than above, Hagia. That place is Thomas, all of it—the tree, the grass, the warmth. Even the little birds in his beard. He is very old; he has grown big.”

  And even in remembering that, I cannot help but see John on the back of the gryphon so many years later, centuries later, dead and cold, and all of us following, down the river with its crashing stones, John, John, always needing us, and Fortunatus always bearing him up. Everything echoes in my vision, back and back, a hundred times. Pulling him up the final steps, rope by rope, hand by hand, and he like a dead thing between us but breathing, me holding him, his eyes glassy, and the apples around the green and foaming Fountain with all its slime and grudge swelling and shriveling, and the wind, the wind terrible, frigid. Me, holding his head back, and the Oinokha, her feathers ruffling, the night stars a corona over her swan’s head, staring at him in fear and wonder. And how we both of us scooped the thick, bitter water from the cleft of the mountain, how the Oinokha held open his mouth as I tilted it in, and how for a moment, for a moment, I was the Oinokha for John, the water of life sliding from my body into his.

  It is hard to remember how I didn’t love him, even then. But I know I did not. I tended a sick body. And then, later, at the Abir—what could sour me at an Abir, when the world stood so eager and ready to be made again?

  And so he would stay with us, and in ten years and ten again who knew what woman or man might take him for his final journeys there, so that he could hold in his hands that life everlasting he so longed to know? And so he would take a chit in the Abir, and luck take him where she would.

  It is night, it is night in New Byzantium and the mockingbirds are singing and there is a little wine left in my glass, just the dregs, just the dregs, and that day Hadulph had to explain to him how the Abir worked, like a little boy who didn’t even know which way to hold the oil-jar.

  “The barrel is full of stones,” Hadulph said, as if John were a little boy who didn’t know which way to hold the oil-jar. The sun glittered on the skin of the custard-apples hanging low over our heads. “Each stone has flaws in it, and the flaws spell a life. For example, if Fortunatus said: John of Constantinople, adopted gryphon and foundling, come forward, and then you spun the barrel—you must spin it and no one else, it must be your own hand, so if you are not feeling strong have a cup of tea-wine and practice now—and then you spun the barrel and pulled out, say, a smoky quartz with a black flaw, a crack in the center, and a blue flaw, it would mean that you ought to be a shepherd, and marry the creature who draws the other smoky quartz with the blue flaw, and that—lucky you, you are permitted a child. See? Fortunatus has been studying for several years. He knows it all, every flaw, every crack, every stone’s meridian. He will make us proud, and afterward, we will introduce ourselves all over again, and buy him fermented eggs until we are new friends, all of us.”

  John looked dubious. He had said little since the Fountain, though every day he had grown stronger and his old wounds lighter. It was only that he rarely slept, and I knew he struggled still with himself, with his God, and I, I wanted nothing of any of that fight.

  The bone trumpets blared and the noon sun illuminated the barrel, placed just so to catch the light. Fortunatus began, from his prodigious memory, to call the names of every soul in Pentexore, all of whom, when assembled, filled the broad Pavilion in the center of Nural, and some hung out from balconies and windows and high towers, to come down when they heard their names. But there were not so many even then that this seemed onerous, to pack us all in one place.

  I remember it in flashes, as I remember my first Abir. How Grisalba drew a silver bead striped with diamond and sard, and hooted with delight for it gave her two husbands and a wife, and a silversmith’s bench besides. Hadulph drew obsidian flecked with white, and went north to become a tender of the lavender fields, with a crow for a wife—and I laughed, but there was pain in my heart, too, for though they would not manage mating, they would be wed, and he had not drawn me. I remember all of it, how Astolfo looked at me, hollow and hurt, as he walked up and drew his clear crystal,
with no flaws at all, and knew he would be a hermit, a holy man without wife or child, and through the ink stains on his face, I saw him weeping and the shame in me was heavy, so heavy, for I had left him, and I could not undo it.

  And of course I remember it. There is no forgetting in me. Fortunatus, with only a small quaver, called John forward—of Constantinople, adopted gryphon and foundling. And a great cheer went up, for he was new family then. He smiled bashfully, uncertain, and he looked beautiful in that moment, innocent, young. He spun the barrel strongly, three times round, and thrust his arm within. When he drew it out again he held his fist closed for a long moment, his eyes closed, head tilted toward the sun. His jaw worked; the bells tinkled lazily, and we all held our breath, to see who the stranger would become.

  He opened his hand. On his palm sat a bead of lapis, and in it a red smear of carnelian, but also a speck of emerald. He would have a wife. He would have a child.