A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Why do you hate the other heads?”

  “They are Christian heads.”

  “Our king is Christian.”

  “I am sorry for you, then. It is hard to live beneath such a king. If I were still living we would probably be enemies.”

  “But Christians are harmless. Our king is annoying, and tries to get us to play games with him involving crossing oneself a certain number of times with a certain number of fingers, but that’s no worse than chess. It’s nothing to do with us, really.”

  “Then he is a bad king,” the head sighed. “If he lets you believe it is only a game. He has counted your souls in his ledger already, I promise. If you are truly going West, you will find this out soon enough, and so will he, I wager.”

  “Did the other heads convert you?”

  “The other heads came thundering into Edessa with horses beneath them and golden hair upon their heads, and they broke my table and ate my olives and my pomegranates and my honeycomb, and took my daughters to bed and made my eldest play her psaltery for them, and wore my shirts and made my sons swear to a cross. They turned out my home looking for gold, but I was rich only in family. So they dragged my wives behind their horses for sport.”

  And then one of the other heads strained toward Yusuf and hissed: “And did you do less when your cursed people took Edessa from us? I had a fine house there, and everything had begun to quiet down—Edessa accepted us, and I married a Saracen woman who took Christ as her Lord, and she was as beautiful as any Gallic girl, and we had a baby son, and our table, too, had enough brown bread and yellow oil and black vinegar and green limes. We went to Mass, we rested on Sunday, Edessa was becoming a virtuous place before you trampled in with your filthy, shitting horses and your burning oil and you drove us into the wilderness and cut my head off in front of my wife!”

  “That house was not yours, Baldwin! Not the house, nor the wife, nor the son, nor the brown bread nor the yellow oil nor the black vinegar nor the green limes! Not even the table! What kind of shitting craven wolf complains because what he stole was stolen back from him? You slaughtered us because your Pope was bored one Tuesday! You are demons, all of you, demons and pigs.”

  Their rage threatened to burst the skin of their cheeks. “Oh, stop,” I whispered, “please stop. Why did you not just plant your own lime trees and bread trees and oil trees? Why could you not plant your wives’ bodies and love them still? Why do you fight over food and gold? Surely nothing could be easier to come by.”

  And they stared at me as though I had suggested they fly to the moon. Oh, what was going on in that world, that even its dead cannot stop arguing over it?

  In the end, I tried to make peace. “What is the difference between a Christian and a Muslim?”

  Yusuf said: “A Christian takes what is not his and calls it God’s will. A Muslim is a civilized man.”

  Baldwin said: “A Muslim takes what is not his and calls it God’s will. A Christian is a civilized man.”

  And I wept for both of them, and for myself who understood nothing.

  John never told me who won Helen’s war. I suppose it was only important how the war began. Wars end how they begin. The beginning is only a mirror held up to the end.

  THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

  THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

  The child is driven to the ground of her making, Fortunatus said. Without her mother she is unanchored, and bolts to anything that reeks of maternity. Let her have comfort in those hands.

  Gryphons are sentimental. Sefalet would not be moved, even for food or water. When finally she fell asleep, we gathered her up and the winged cat carried her on his back. Behind us, the tree of hands made mute, miserable, grasping motions after the girl, the pale of its palms receding in shadow.

  Some mornings later, the better part of the architectural expedition turned off the well-planted road in order to reach the Tower ruins—but Fortunatus and Sefalet and myself went on down into a silent town without a name, and the gryphon said this was in order to wake the architect.

  John had left us no plans for this cathedral, no preferences for this or that many gargoyles, towers, flying buttresses, what style he envisioned for it, or how many folk he meant to be able to fit into the place. We were, in humble fact, somewhat unclear on the meaning of the words cathedral, gargoyle, and buttress. Therefore, Fortunatus had settled upon a plan to rouse a strange girl from a strange sleep, and as if sensing a kind of sister, Sefalet shrieked and wept until it was agreed that she could be the one to whisper in the sleeping architect’s ear. She would wake and do our work for us, and all would be well. I would hold tight to her left hand so that the poor genius might not be terrified by some guttural song of death and horror blurting from the princess’s palm.

  The town shone at the bottom of a valley, a wash of blue. Every house had been painted some shade of deep, lovely inky blue, from cobalt and indigo to a pale sort of sky color, and each roof had been woven by a blue-mad thatching of lavender and vanilla leaves. Not a sound issued from the wide, single street, no market dinned in the center square, no man put out his washing; no woman tanned her kill in the runnels. When Fortunatus whispered, it echoed like a shout.

  “It is on account of Gahmureen,” he said, pawing the earth. “Her father was a great goldsmith, perhaps the greatest, until his daughter was born. She dismantled her cradle and built a mechanical knight to protect her mother from roving lizards when she went out to hunt. It could not speak very well, but still, such a wonderful thing! And that when she was but a child! However, the works of Gahmureen are so intricate and so great that she falls into a depthless sleep as soon as she completes them. After building the cradle-knight (who doddled after her mother all through the forests and did not let the lizards bite her) Gahmureen did not wake again for a whole summer. Her father thought her dead until she woke when the first autumn apple fell and asked for breakfast and if they did not need the roof mended. She has invented many astonishing things over the many years, and she never seems to be awake during the Abir. Of course her parents draw their chit from the barrel along with the rest and have gone off to be blacksmiths and pearl-divers and who knows what else. For a long while, a little machine woke her every century or so. But she has not come up out of dreaming in many years, for all built things wind down. Still, we have always known where she was, if we needed her. She sleeps deep and soundless at the bottom of her valley, in her blue village, Chandai, where folk left her in peace, dreaming of machines and waiting to be woken by her father or her mother or her clock, none of whom will ever come now. But we will come! And she has slept so long that surely she can build a cathedral—am I saying it right this time?—which will amaze John into shutting up and leaving us alone. This is my hope. I also hope she is kind, and does not snap at her assistants, and perhaps that she has green eyes like Hagia, whom I miss so.”

  For myself I hoped she would be good enough at her job that I could laze in the sun with Sefalet on my belly and have very little to do with it. Lions, lacking thumbs, are not greatly interested in architecture until it is finished and ready for us to nap in.

  We crept through the village and toward a great cobalt house with a round black door and a number of flourishes at the windows, the chimney, and the corners of the roof—I could only call them flourishes, but they clearly had a purpose and just as clearly I could not understand what they might be. One flourish was a knot of pulleys and empty water-spouts folded together and rusted to unusability. One was a serpent with an apple in its mouth, all of sapphire. As we came to the door a flourish hidden in the hinges creakingly unfolded and rose up to regard us: a face of bluish ceramic, with silver eyes that opened and closed at intervals, and a mouth that opened through a series of weights and bellows, which also, I supposed, produced the voice that wheezed at us while blue dust spilled out of the mouth.

  “Shhhh,” the face said. “Gahmureen sleeps.”

  “We have come to wake her,” Fortunatus said. Sefalet kept quite still, her
hands clapped over her face so that her eyes could take it all in, large and round and roused. The face seemed to think.

  “You are not Gahmuret, the father. Nor Gahmural, the mother.”

  I could tell that the gryphon meant to have a conversation with the face, to discuss with it why we should be allowed in, and keep up his manners all the while. It is a good way to be. But I had been living in the mountains so long, with only such company as sought me out, and perhaps now I feel I could have behaved differently, but then I simply nosed the face aside and pushed the door open with the flat of my head. Sefalet reached mutely for the face as though she meant to console it for its failure to keep the threshold fast, but I, crouching, pressed forward into the blue house towards a great blue bed. It took nearly the whole space of the central room. A stove puffed away near it, keeping the sleeping inventor warm in her rich bed, piled with turquoise pillows and purple coverlets, ashen silks and ink-colored blankets. Gahmureen slept unpeacefully, on her side with her knees brought up to her chest, one bare leg tangled in the cerulean linens, one arm thrown over her head, as though her dreams tormented her. Her temple shone damp with the night-sweats of countless years. Two straight horns, pearly and bright, the horn twisted around itself but straight as a staff, came up from her head, and each of them had impaled a pillow. Her black hair wound around the horns many times, tangled, drifting in the breeze through the door.

  Sefalet climbed down from my back, keeping her left hand up so that her mouth was clamped shut but her eye stayed open, afraid of the lovely woman in the bed, her great horns, her very likely poor temper at having been woken. She reached out her right hand tentatively, as if to a wild dog, and placed the mouth of her palm next to Gahmureen’s ear.

  “Wake up, lady,” she whispered. “Don’t you want to build something beautiful?”

  The inventor stirred in her sleep; she moaned lightly, as though her dream had torn at the edges.

  “Wake up,” Sefalet whispered again, more loudly. “Don’t you want to see how high a tower can go?”

  Gahmureen turned toward the voice but did not wake. Her arm fell limply to the coverlet, and her brow creased, as though her dream bled and pained her.

  “Wake up,” growled Sefalet’s left-hand mouth, pressed against her face, but not so tightly that the words did not echo perfectly clear. “It’s time to do the Devil’s work.”

  And the horned woman sat up straight in her bed, her hair falling over her naked breasts, her eyes utterly clear and sharp.

  “Did you say something, child?” she said, and her voice sounded hard and bright as first light.

  I had to ask her. You would have asked too, if you’d been her lion, her great cat. I didn’t even love her yet, but I had to know, because worry comes before love. Doesn’t mean I wanted the answer.

  I let her eat first, I’m not cruel. I can afford to wait—so can we all, forever if it takes so long. I said: One more grape, girl. You have to keep your color up. I said: If you don’t eat your meat you’ll have bad dreams. I said: Sit back in my tent, royal child, there are pillows here for you, and a bowl of water to wash your hair in.

  And around our dinner a city rose up, bustling, makeshift, the thousand tents of the cathedral town to come, ready to work when Gahmureen could hold the whole thing in her head, when she could see it building itself under her long hands with their black nails. Torches lit, blue tents and green and gold along the wide plain, and the red moths gathered around the flames in their own concentric cities, and adzes were cleaned and axes were sharpened and the grinding of blades floated around our little space where grapes and meat and clean hair met.

  I asked. I had to ask. “You used a word, before. Devil. Do you know what it means?” Because of course I knew. When John says devil, he means us.

  “Yes, Father told me,” said Sefalet shyly, her right hand clamped over her face. I was always making her talk, and she could never be sure which of her would answer. It made her nervous and it made her stutter. But a child must speak, or how will the world know how to behave in its presence?

  “What did your father tell you?”

  “The Devil lives in the other place. He tempts us into sin.”

  “Where is the other place?”

  “I don’t know. Father didn’t say. Maybe it’s beyond the wall,” Sefalet said sullenly, and balled her left hand into a fist.

  “What does the Devil look like?”

  Beneath the girl’s hand, a dark circle of tears grew. “Like Qaspiel, he said. Only black and red all over and with wings like a terrible bat, and horns, too. But Vyala, Qaspiel is beautiful, and I’ve seen Utior, its friend, and its wings are black like a bat’s, and it has horns that are just so awfully red! And Utior is beautiful, too, and gave me a ride on his shoulders, and didn’t even flinch when my left hand told it that it would mourn forever and still be weeping at the end of days. Everyone has horns and wings and a tail and everyone lives in another place and everyone sins—”

  “What’s sinning, little one?”

  Sefalet wailed: “When you do something that Father’s book says you oughtn’t! But everyone does, and so maybe this is hell and the other place and me and mama are the Devil too! I don’t want to be the Devil!”

  “Hush, love, hush, my cublet. What did you mean, then, when you called the cathedral the Devil’s work?”

  And finally her left hand won out, and seized her right with vicious claws, throwing it aside to clutch her jaw like a hideous starfish and tell me:

  “The Devil’s work is entropy. Don’t know what that word means? It’s beyond a lion’s ken. The Devil’s work is time and death. The Devil’s work is not the building of a tower to heaven but the throwing down of it—his work is the cracking of the world, and we will build but the guardhouse over the chasm. But don’t let Father convince you there’s a morality to it. The Devil just is. Entropy occurs. Extropy, too, and you can call that God if you’re lonely. Want another answer? The other place is Constantinople, and the Devil sits on a purple throne.”

  The child turned her blank head upward, abject in her shame and her unhappiness. I padded to her and let her fall into my chest—it is a big chest, and deep, and sometimes a body needs a place to fall. I tucked my chin over her poor, bald head.

  “I wanted to be good for you,” she whispered. “You had never met me, and if I could only be the right-hand Sefalet all the time, you would love me, and never be afraid of me or angry with me, and my life would be clean, with no awful things in it.”

  “Oh, child,” I purred. “No one’s life is like that.”

  Grisalba the lamia came for us in the morning, a flaming orange chiton concealing her coppery tail and revealing her more human beauty, and though I don’t believe Grisalba knows anything but stern expressions, she gave her softest one to the sleeping princess.

  “Bring the girl,” she said. “This won’t be pretty, but better it’s now than if she finds it on her own.”

  I roused her, nipping the scruff of her dress and bidding her sink her hands in cold water and eat the last of the fat green grapes, grown warm and soft overnight. The three of us went peaceably through the work camp, and I marveled that Pentexore could remember how to build things when growing them was so much easier. John had a lecture about the greater virtue of sweat and labor that he kept for such occasions. Anyway I was not even sure one could grow something so large as a cathedral. The al-Qasr had always been there, since before we came. Certainly half the purpose of this church of Thomas and Mary was to outstrip our native palace, a thing greater than the land could gift.

  Breakfast fires crackled, and the smell of sizzling fruit and fatty lamb made the air rich. The huge black stones of the Tower ruins lay strewn about, slabs of darkness in the dry, sweet grass. Some had grown pelts of rope and hooks already, ready to be moved on Gahmureen’s command—only she had not yet presented herself or made known her desire.

  Grisalba said nothing. She did not like me, I suspect, the newcomer in their l
ittle family, stranger, who had not seen the great man come. She stopped finally and gestured at a tree that sprang up in the center of the ruins like the root of the Tower itself.

  In the trunk of the tree, Hagia’s wide green eyes and her frank, laughing mouth opened in the expanse of golden-brown bark. In the leaves, the stout, short, twisted branches, among the last of the stark blue spring blossoms, golden crosses hung, tinkling in the warm wind, and in each of them was a mouth, as strange and separated from a body as Sefalet’s, and from each mouth came John’s voice, calling his daughter in a chorus of delight.

  THE VIRTUE OF THINGS

  IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM

  4. On the Creation of the World

  One cannot listen to origin stories on an empty stomach. Fortunately, my hosts understood that instinctively, and fed me in a most extraordinary fashion. I would be remiss if I did not record that first feast, for it reveals much of the nature of the country in which I found myself. I was not compelled to present myself at a long table for a stingy meal made up for with golden goblets and diamond plates, nor to stroke the dozen wretched hunting dogs of a lesser lord and comment on their obvious qualities before I could eat. Ymra, the feminine hexakyk, showed me a room appointed in a manner I can only call familiar—on the wall hung tapestries depicting a countryside that could only be my own England, green and fair, with the standard dragons and unicorns going about their allegorical business, spotted spaniels leaping that might have been my own boisterous dogs, and even an exquisite scene depicting a young woman with almond eyes peeking out through a fence of eight strong men. The bed stood sturdy and large, its posts carved from good Breton oak, its linens stitched impeccably, gold and violet upon red, my own family’s colors. I had to myself a wash basin of black marble and milled soap smoother than any I had ever seen, the color of a new and perfect rose. I should be cleaner than ever I have been, with such items at my disposal.