A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  And at that moment I agreed to care for her.

  Her mother left with John and Anglitora and the rest of that long chain of fools dancing along their sandy dunes with death at their head, laughing all the way to Jerusalem. That tale is none of mine and I do not want it told in my presence. It does not matter what happened out there in the desert. Let the historians have duels over who gets the writing of that mess. In my heart, where it is always snowing and a girl with no face is always weeping, it matters only what happened in the al-Qasr, between a gryphon, a lamia, and a white lion; it matters only what happened to a child-princess in her violet tower.

  THE CONFESSIONS

  I recalled the white lion from John’s epistle concerning his journey to the tomb of St. Thomas, and how Hadulph discussed with him the slatternly nature of his mother and her corruption of the words of St. Paul—whose twisting inversion I confess haunted my heart: Love is hungry and severe. Love is not unselfish or bashful or servile or gentle. Love demands everything. Love is not serene, and it keeps no records. I did not like the white lion then and I liked her less when I heard her cold, pale voice echoing in my own mind, unmodulated by her kinder son. She was unfeminine; her maternal nature lacked some vital component. Something wild and untempered in her turned the gentleness of a mother’s spirit into a thing cold and utterly other. She spoke of love in such a way that I questioned my translation of the word, whether I in any way understood what the animal signified by that handful of letters.

  If I am honest, and I suppose if this is a confession in truth I must be honest—and a confession of my own now, for Hiob dreams on and on of some sacred dark and greening jungle of heaven and the heart. If I am honest, Vyala’s imperious letters bring my own mother sharply to mind. My dim memories of her, of her black hair around me like the branches of a winter forest, protecting me or threatening I could not know then. I did not love her—I was afraid of her, I lay in abject adoration of her, as of God or an archangel, for so she seemed to my tiny soul, but the lion is at least correct in that love is a thing between those who can speak and barter for the terms of love. I remember only a terror that I would be abandoned by her, a terror of her beauty and her nearness; and abandoned I was. In my memory my mother moves like a lion, soundless on dead and blackened paws.

  Into my reverie Brother Reinolt broke, his tremulous voice piercing and unwelcome.

  “Brother Hiob is moving!” he cried, and pointed at the verdant bier, still knotted with vines and flowers, and now, I saw, the beginnings of a pink and furry fruit budding here and there among the glossy green leaves. “His hand!”

  And I turned to see it, the motion of his deft fingers, not idle or twitching as an insensate man’s limbs will sometimes do, but purposeful, sure, though his eyes remained shut, his breathing labored, the huge vine no less swollen and bright. I went to my brother and tried to hold his hand in mine, to comfort him in his evident distress—but his fingers shuddered and jumped and shook in my grasp and I let him go once more, watching as he seemed to work an invisible pen over a parchment of blue flowers veined in violet and gold.

  Without being sure it was the correct thing to do, I drew some portion of my own parchment out, and a fresh quill, and the one I put into his hand and the other I put beneath the nib, to see if perhaps he wished to speak to me out of his dreaming, out of the landscapes clotted with pollen and spores and orange, tiger-colored dust that must have flitted beneath his eyes as such things grew over his body.

  “Tell me what troubles you,” I whispered to him, half in Latin and half in Aramaic, our old game of mixing tongues, hoping to rouse him, or at least inspire his hand to scrawl out some wry assurance in several dialects of the Turk.

  But I received no reply in kind. Instead, I will write here what his elegant hand scribed out on that parchment, already moist with the glittering excretions of the petals beneath it.

  Fortunatus brought Qaspiel before John, its delicate feet hardly leaving depressions in the thick black soil of Nural, which was not unlike the fine, moist sand of vanilla deep within the pod. It had shorn its hair, and strewn it with little beads of hematite for the occasion. Its dress gleamed nearly colorless, a cobweb that would flatten and spread out in flight—and its wings, taller than itself and a deep sort of cobalt that played tricks with the eye. I went to embrace my friend, but before I could hold out my arms, John fell to his knees between us. I stared at him as he wept, his jaw slack, his body shaking in a kind of rapture.

  “An angel,” he whispered.

  “Qaspiel,” the anthropteron laughed. Its wings fluttered briefly.

  I found it profoundly strange to watch another so utterly laid bare. John put his face on the earth and cried. His body seemed to fall apart; he was racked. I cannot remember ever being so wretched myself. Perhaps when I first tasted the Fountain, in my mother’s arms, her eyes against my cheek. Perhaps then I looked like that poor man, small and unable to speak at all, bowing before Qaspiel and whispering some strange prayer and making the winged creature terribly uncomfortable. He was keening, and I thought we might have to call Grisalba to concoct something to put him into some sleep. Without meaning to, I put out my hand to comfort him. His skin burned. I felt his bones beneath it. That was the first time I touched him, and the hand that smoothes this page remembers his shoulder, too, and the bones, and the heat of him, and the wind of that day under the portico, with Qaspiel’s grey gaze and its wings like long shadows.

  John raised his head. “What is this place, where I sit at the feet of an angel, with a demon touching my shoulder?”

  I drew back my hand. It would not be the first time he stung me, and specially me, among all those he loved.

  Qaspiel looked curiously at his earnest supplicant. “I do not know what an angel is,” it said gently, “but I do not think I am one.” Nevertheless it put its hand on John’s head as though it meant to bless him, and John began to shake as though sick, as if something in him had come loose and rattled all through his bones.

  “Take it away,” rasped John. “The crane and the lamia and the gryphon’s stew, all of it, everything alien I have taken into my body and everything I have entered with my body. Erase it, I know you can, I know you can smooth my soul until it is colorless and shining. Make me as I was. Make it all never have happened. Make me wake up in Constantinople with the sun on my back and my hands sticky with dates.” But Qaspiel only shook his head, and not without some sadness, for such a sorrow is awful to witness.

  “I cannot,” it whispered. “Nor would I if I could, for all those things are blessings, and I am not so cruel.”

  John answered Qaspiel: “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh.”

  THE VIRTUE OF THINGS

  IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM

  An Encyclopedia of Those Things Which Exist Beyond the Wall, Composed by a Certain Knight of St. Albans who was Also Called John, and who Also Came from the West Into the East, though this is merely a Coincidence and not a Commentary on the Lack of Imagination Shown by the World at Large.

  When I first arrived in this country I tried to lie as often as possible. I did not lie because I was a bad man—or at least not primarily because I was a bad man—but because it is in my nature to tell fictions. These are nearly always more interesting than the sad truth, which most often concerns not having enough to eat and wandering around with little enough idea of where one means to end up. Who among us wants to listen to that all day? Certainly not I—so I endeavored to falsify everything that would bear falsification. I said that my name was George and I had killed seventeen dragons on my crossing of the icy northern sea, just to best the saint. I said that my name was Geoffrey and I had married a mermaid whose tail was split in two and clinging with ice that smelled of all the perfum
es of Araby, and I loved her and had many children by her and only after she died and left me king of all the arctic oceans did I become bored with royal life and drift over the cap of the world to find myself here. I said that my name was John of Mandeville, and that I had come from England seeking delight and wealth, and along the way I had already breakfasted with both Popes and found their tables wanting, and that last was true, as far as true goes with me, which is only as far as it can pay its own way.

  As to my character in other respects, well, I admit I traveled not out of wanderlust, which is a noble sort of thing, but because I happened to have killed a certain count in my own country and needed to absent myself until his relations got over the matter and started behaving reasonably toward my person. After all, the man was a rake and a pinch-penny and short to cap it all, and it isn’t really my fault that he took such offense to a simple transaction involving sheep and a girl with red hair. A gentleman says no more. I talked my way into a ship by the pleasant name of Proserpina, mainly by claiming to be already her captain Marcus de Boin, and in quite a hurry to get after a crew in the next port. You’d like to think such simple lies wouldn’t work, that they would be too feeble to carry their own weight, but a straight back and a level gaze will purchase more or less anything you might like to possess if you are comely enough of face and sufficiently quicksilver of tongue, which I am on both counts.

  Proserpina was a fit little craft—hardly worth stealing if she were a trash heap that couldn’t crest a tide! I had a fine time in several harbors before irritating the Sultan of Egypt in the matter of his daughter. She was a tortoiseshell of a woman, all her many colors polished by her handmaids and shining: black hair with flashes of blue, lips brown and rose, skin like brandywine and, most unusual of all in that part of the world, she bore eyes bright and blue and pale among all her other features, and on her person she wore jewels to match, lapis and sapphire and the occasional enormous emerald.

  Of course I had her within half a fortnight—princesses are princesses wherever you go. They are tied down so tightly that the merest glimpse of a shear will send them into fits of passion. And I am a blade if ever there was one. I tasted her lips and they were honey; I tasted her pedigree and it was gold; I tasted her fortune and it was heaven on earth. A gentleman says no more. Since I’d spoilt her (all with her a willing and happy party to her own defloration) her father the Sultan demanded I marry the maid, and to this I was most amenable. Do not be surprised! I am not one of those cads who loves the flesh but hates the ring. I was happy to be her husband and Sultan thereafter—what man would be miserable in her arms and in her crown? But her father insisted on a knife’s point that I abandon Christ and embrace the infidel faith. This I would not do, for I am the Lord’s own child and I cannot even spell Mohammed. Thus I nobly took my leave of them in the night, leaving no trace save the wake of my ship.

  Ah, but it’s not true. You knew it even while I told the tale. Readers are always cleverer than the writer, that’s the nature of literature, which, incidentally, never pays its own way. The Sultana would have none of me, and she had very little in the way of breasts or cheek—though the blue eyes were enough to pay for all that. Her younger sister, though—no pearl of Africa ever shone so bright as that maiden, though she might as well have been locked in a prison for all that any man was allowed near her. Eight eunuchs with collars of gold and onyx stood round her at all times, though surely in their ruined anatomy she must have excited some stirring, so astonishing was her purity and beauty. I made my seduction through the gaps in their muscular arms, glimpsing her hip, her hair, her flashing eyes through the wall of male flesh between us. John, she whispered, slay them all with your sword and take me away on your ship. Until my sister is married I shall never be free of my guards, and she is so cruel with her tongue no man will have her. I shall wither to dust, surrounded by men who cannot touch me! And between the thighs of two guardians she kissed me with a sweetness like stolen gems, her pleading mouth small as a bird’s. The battle commenced and I handled myself well—a gentleman says no more. But in the end princesses are tiresome and know nothing about sailor’s knots or weathering storms at sea and I left her with a tribe of savages who knew the art of harnessing ice floes to pull their chariots and hunting the spotted seal.

  Well, the truth is I have not had a woman for many years. I am as good as a priest, or as bad as one. I have a notion that Christ is but the face of God you can drink with, and that suffices for my faith. I suppose I’d be just as happy with Mohammed sharing my table if it came with a Sultanate and a pearl of Carthage like a ring encompassing my thickest finger. Alas, as I have said, real life rarely offers such simple and delightful choices, or else we would all be Mohammedans and what would the Pope do for work?

  It so happens, however, that after not experiencing much of anything I have claimed to enjoy in Constantinople, Egypt, Russia, or Persia, I turned my vessel northward and crossed the hat of the world, where a black rock divides the waters into the four oceans and pulls all compasses towards itself. There I did not encounter a narwhal who had broken his horn on the moon, nor did I meet with the Papess of the Pole, who did not take me into her iron bedchamber nor compel my body into hers by force of her magnetized flesh, nor did the archangel Uriel (Michael is far overused, you know. You might as well just announce yourself a liar and a fool if you drag Michael into the business.) appear to me in my extremity and indicate land, land not far, his outstretched arm dripping with manna and diamonds and tiny blue fish.

  You begin to understand me. How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be. I can hardly bear my own boredom in relating how it was somewhat cloudy when I passed the Pole, and the ice not too bad, and several large black birds devoured silver fish in my sight but none even had the decency to harry my mast or transform into a maiden with a coat of feathers and a need for the love of a mortal man.

  Now, I suspect my passing was made mild by my new friends here. I suspect that whatever dwells in my nature that loves tales and falsehood and shining, pretty stories commended me to them and made me attractive, so that they drew my ship over the high blue sea and down into their country. A country, finally, strange enough that I do not have to lie in relating it to you (though I may if I am moved—I cannot be blamed, I am the man I am, and if my nature brought me here I shall follow it and not grovel to be forgiven. God made me, Christ drank my health, and the Devil took the rest).

  Given how the rest of my writings have exaggerated and aggrandized as I saw fit I did think it would be amusing to set down the very truth of the underworld in which I beached my Proserpina, and from which I have slim hope of departing. I shall make a good work, and I believe this will be a good work, to shine in the dark when I cannot.

  I shall organize my thoughts and set them down as an encyclopedia of the end of the world, after the fashion of the Spaniard Isidore who jotted down this and that about the nature of everything, and in future days perhaps you will call John Mandeville a liar, and my shade will laugh at you and say: true, true, I was, but not always, not so. When the world was good enough in my sight, when it behaved as wildly and gorgeously as I always knew it could, I told the truth of it.

  How to Use My Most Excellent Encyclopedia

  I believe the following two scenes will illuminate how I would prefer this compendium to be used by whatever poor devil comes upon it after I have gone.

  When I was a boy and avoiding my lessons for some superb reason or another, an erstwhile and much beleaguered tutor said to me: John, what is it you hate so about books?

  I replied to him as quick as a bite: Books think they can boss me about. They think they have the upper hand, and can make me read them and pay attention to them and say nice things about them after I am done. They are snooty and think they are smarter than me. They insist on being read page one
to page whathaveyou, and no stopping for good behavior. Well, I cannot be held still! I shall jump about and today read the machinations of the dark prince of Motteringdale and how he beheaded his herbalist, and tomorrow I shall read about how the herbalist wished his country to be free of taxation and red dragons, then next Thursday I shall read about how it was all an allegory concerning some early Popes I don’t care about. That’s how it is in real life, anyway! You hardly ever know anything important until the thing it was being important about is already over. Books think they can rule me, but I shall show them.

  My tutor disapproved of this first attempt at philosophy.

  And later, when I resided at the Sultan’s court, I heard from a eunuch who had it from a concubine who had it from an alchemist-astrologer with a weakness for certain pleasures that the Sultan had a great book in his innermost chamber, and in the great book lived a demon. The demon and the book could not be separated; the demon was the book and the book was the demon. The demon lived in the spine of the book, had skin of iron and golden horns, and was called something irrelevant and unpronounceable. The Sultan was utterly in thrall to the demon, who each night took the form of a maiden with those selfsame golden horns and iron flesh, and when he made love to the succubus she whispered a chapter of the book of herself in his ear, and the writing meant to be in the pages of the tome scrawled itself instead across her breasts in fiery letters, and the Sultan loved the book to distraction. All of his concubines went unused and to be honest they were glad for it, having none of them been what a generous soul could call love matches. Every night when it came time for him to sire an heir with a woman of less metallic and sulfurous disposition the Sultan whispered: only a little more. I shall just read a little more, then on to a proper bed. When asked what enthralled him so in the book the monarch could only answer: I have only just begun it, I cannot say, I cannot say. Who can say what a book is about until one has nearly finished it? Even after five years of intent study and molten lovemaking and the searing reading of the flaming chapters upon the cold iron bosom of his beloved, the Sultan would insist he had hardly begun the tale, had scarcely turned the first page.