A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  How fine we must have looked. With our ships behind us, and our armor in the sun, our flags—do you remember how the amyctryae sewed the flags, their huge mouths full of pins, arguing over our standard and what it should depict until John insisted on the cross. But they would not be placated, and on every blazing green flag was not only a silver cross, so many stars, crescent moons, ears, mouths, horses, hands, and other symbols of the people of Pentexore that the cross was rendered all but invisible in the riot. We flew those flags so proudly, glittering with their tangles of silver thread, and the centaurs put brass covers on their hooves, and the sword-trees had borne good fruit, and we must have looked so beautiful, like we were dressed for a holiday—for Christ-mass, that festival John was always trying to get us to perform in the winter, with gifts and songs about darkness. I cannot believe anyone could have looked on us and not fallen to their knees in joy.

  And yet, the river. A blue ribbon bordering their country. I still do not understand. We meant to put our ships onto the current and sail into the white city, glorious, stately, and John would stand at the prow (forever at the prow) coming home with emeralds in his coat, and his wife and his people, a crown on his head. We all agreed he deserved that, that any of us, coming home, would want our folk to see us that way, it was a thing of the heart we were happy to give him. Rivers were never a trouble to us. In addition to the Physon the Indus belongs also to Pentexore, and its waters flow deep and green. Little rivers, some so little they have no names, and lakes, too. The ships would glide as smoothly on the river as on the Rimal, surely. They were built for water, after all. Sand was only ever a temporary dalliance.

  My father shivered, so excited, practically radiant—he would rescue them all, and they would see how lovely he was now. I understood so well. Had not I wanted John to see me that way, when I came home?

  “Anglitora,” he said to me, and my heart lurched toward him, so surprised to hear him think of me, to call my name. “Stand on my left side, when the ships sail in? Hagia will stand on my right, and I would have a daughter with me.”

  I thought I might die of his approval.

  We dug a trench to get the ships afloat. All stood ready. The sun, so low when we reached the end of the road, seemed to have flipped around in the sky so that it was merely early morning, and the light would show our wild army gorgeously as we descended like salvation, like a cadre of angels. And yet, when the trench gaped in the sand and the river moistened it, when we were so ready, everyone kept their place. We stood and stared at the river like we had never seen one before. We meant to move, to haul the ships in one by one to lash the ropes on and heave ho, but no one stepped forward.

  “Forward!” cried John, and forward we went—except we didn’t. We told our limbs to do it, but it would not be done. My body felt as though it had become a statue, built for that one spot, made for it, to watch over the river for centuries, a stone sentinel. Nothing could move me. I could not quite even feel my feet.

  The winged soldiers felt the breeze beneath their feathers and it would not lift us. The wind said: stay, stay.

  “Forward!” I cried, trying to rally us, in case our spirits had suddenly lost the taste of war.

  Had they only!

  The flags flapped in the air. A cannibal coughed nervously. I strained, willing my body to leap into the water. The blood beat in me, loudly, madly. Sweat prickled every inch of skin.

  “Backward,” John whispered.

  And without the smallest effort, we all took a firm, easy step back.

  Forward. Back. We could come to the edge of the water but not beyond it. Downstream, I saw the flicker of small boats, long white barks. Forward. Back.

  John dropped to his knees at the water’s edge. He wept so bitterly, as though his whole heart had vanished from his body and left nothing but grief in him. He clenched his fists in the wet earth. He screamed—it was awful, a voice torn in half.

  I stood on his left.

  I stood on his right. And he could not cross the river any more than we. His screaming turned to laughing and that was worse, that was ugly and we did not want to witness it.

  “Demons cannot cross water,” he laughed, and went on laughing, while the white barks drew nearer and nearer, and our green flags snapped in the blue, searing air.

  THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

  THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

  In the end, Gahmureen saved her, where I could not.

  She rose out of her tent one morning and crouched next to the cradle-knight, who was named Elif, with her chisel. I have never and I suspect will never understand what made that little imp move and speak and think. Gahmureen’s invention passes my understanding as mine passes that of a very dense tensevete. I asked her once—she said that when she was a child she invented as a child does, without knowledge of what can and cannot be done. Elif was her first invention. He had all the ambition and none of the well, perhaps we oughtn’t. She cannot remember how she did it, anymore than I can remember my dreams. Elif was a mystery, as much as the Tower, as much as the Fountain.

  I asked: “Do you know magic? Is it a charm or a spell that moves him?”

  The inventor wrapped her long fingers around one of her horns. “What is magic?” she replied. “Magic is what you call it when you cannot remember how you did something, or cannot imagine how you will do it. When you dreamed it, and then it happened. Nothing is magic. Everything performs its design.” She paused for a moment, her gaze faraway. “I think there might have been a wind-wheel involved. Spinning around in his heart. I hear it creaking, when he is thinking hard.”

  And I learned no more of Elif’s workings.

  Gahmureen slapped the cradle-knight on the back and the little automaton strode jerkily over to Sefalet and her tree. I watched with interest, padded after him. His helmet, a bit of cradle-canopy carved from red wood, gleamed from a fresh polishing.

  “Stop,” Elif said to the child.

  “No,” Sefalet hissed through her right-hand mouth. Both of them were truculent now, angry and turned inward. “They’re my parents. Leave me alone.”

  “Stop acting like a baby,” Elif said. His voice was soft and whispery, like the wind in leaves. “Only babies have trees for toys.”

  “I’m not a baby!” The right-hand mouth.

  “Gahmureen says you’re like a baby sucking your thumb. If you don’t stop, you’ll hurt yourself.”

  “I don’t care what Gahmureen says! You’re not even alive.”

  “Neither is the tree.”

  “That’s not true! They talk!” The right-hand mouth, again.

  “I talk.”

  “They have names!”

  “I have a name.”

  “They love me,” Sefalet pleaded.

  “I could do that.”

  The tree did not argue its own case, and perhaps in the end that damned it. If it had said: Sefalet, you are our girl and we will never let you go, she would never have budged from that spot, until the sun went out like a snuffed lantern. But trees are funny things. They are alive, Elif had it wrong there. They grow, they eat light and drink rain. But no matter how much they remember or seem to, they are not quite who they were before. They are at least half earth, and the Earth is a very strange creature, who often speaks nonsense and even more often says nothing. They do not have preferences anymore. The tree was deeply, wholly happy to have Sefalet. It was deeply, wholly happy to be alone. This is why Abibas was a better king after he was planted—he could not be swayed by passions or angers, by revenges or the desire to curry favor. He was deeply, wholly happy, and governed from a place of utter contentment, without grasping, without striving.

  An extravagant wind bellowed down the plain; I watched it slip through the joins of Elif’s elbows and ribs and knees; I watched it fill him up and make him creak.

  “If all you require is someone to say: Sefalet is good and beautiful and I love her, I can do that,” said the little knight. “I could be so good at it.”

  Sefalet
blushed deeply, her blank head coloring from crown to chin. “No, that’s not all.” Her left-hand mouth growled; it made her fingers twitch. “The only love we need is the kind shaped like a knife. You are shaped like a fool.”

  “I would be better at it than a tree. I was built to watch over, forever. I am missing a thing to watch over. Gahmureen built me to protect her mother from tigers and other striped things. She built me out of her cradle. But she did not know what my cradle was built out of. Gahmural told me when we hunted together, and I rode on her back because she could run faster than me. I would ride on your back if you would like it. Gahmural was pregnant with Gahmureen—did you know that’s how people make more people? It took me quite a long time to work that out. I hadn’t any scratch paper. Gahmural was pregnant with Gahmureen and she walked a long way east, almost to the sea, where she knew a forest—but not a forest of trees. A forest of poles sticking out of the ground and on the top of every one lived a wise creature standing on one leg, whose job it was to think about things until their thinking was bigger than the original thing.”

  “Stylites,” I said helpfully. “The Forest of Stylites.”

  “They are called that?” mused Elif.

  “Yes. I lived there for a long time.” I had, and felt a spreading pleasure at hearing my old home spoken of. I had learned at the foot of a thousand poles, until I found one who knew about love. Her name was Adab, and her fingernails had grown so long that they pierced the earth below her pole. I sat below her and listened for a hundred years, eating an unfortunate blackbird every month when the moon grew dim, but no more. Vyala, she called down, I love you because you starve for me.

  “Gahmural asked each stylite to slice off a piece of their pole,” the cradle-knight was saying, “and whisper their sutras into it, and give them over to her to make her daughter’s bed. I am made of very interesting sayings, very hard-won knowings. I need a hunter to watch over or else I feel useless and despondent. It is a flaw in my making.”

  “I have a flaw in my making,” whispered Sefalet.

  The wind died; the golden grasses and red flowers stilled, and Elif slumped a little, out of breath, having spoken so much, much more than he had yet done. Sefalet crawled over to him, hesitantly, her mouths kissing the earth. She lifted her right hand and blew gently on the little man, and he swelled up a little.

  “Sefalet,” he wheezed, “you are beautiful and good. I will keep you safe from tigers.”

  From then on the three of us rarely parted company. Occasionally, Elif would look up at me, quite concerned, as though I might be classifiable as a tiger. Fortunately, I have no stripes, and that seemed to be a deciding factor in the categorization of threats according to Elif. Occasionally I looked down at him, and wondered what part of his body had belonged to Adab’s pole.

  As we built it, the cathedral slowly closed around John and Hagia’s tree. In similar fashion, Sefalet held Elif tight, and I wrapped my tail close round her.

  In the circuit of her arms Elif whispered: “Qutuz the stylite said: every creature is an infinite tower—her head knows not where her feet trod, and her dark cellars know nothing of the moon on her spires.”

  Fortunatus came to me in the nights. “I had a wife,” he said. “I had a daughter. Then I had a friend called John and I loved him so much I made him king, just so he could be happy. I gave him a wife who gave him a daughter—those are the best things I know. Now everyone is gone, and it’s either Grisalba’s green fluids to make me dream or you. I only ever wanted to lie in the al-Qasr with all my dear ones, showing our bellies in the paths of sunbeams, and now the palace is empty. Even I left it. Hadulph said you were wise. That you bite broken cats by the scruff of the neck and drag the pieces of them back together. I was a good gryphon, I said yes whenever anyone asked me a thing, and somehow my whole heart got onto a ship and sailed away over the sand.”

  I purred and bit him gently. Tears flowed over his bronze beak. I offered him my scruff; he took it. It is not the only salve I know, but it is quick.

  The clerestory started talking first.

  Work proceeded well, Gahmureen’s motifs were spirals, circles, and leaves, coils of leaves, tendrils of stone moving around and up and opening into more and higher belltowers, turrets, whole floors with their own green altars and naves, suspended between the spires of the previous level. It looked like it could all come down if you breathed upon it. It never swayed, even in fierce wind.

  You could hardly hear it at first. A whistling, a whispering, but only if you stood quite near the stones on the scaffolding, or flew up to them like my gryphon, who told us of the voices, and flapped his great golden wings impatiently while I and my charge and her knight scrabbled up the scaffolds to press our ears to the cobalt stone.

  Elif offered: “Usha the stylite said: only by saying a thing does it become real. However, realness spreads out in a disc, and changes everything that hears it becoming.”

  “Shhh, Elif,” Sefalet hissed, “I’m trying to listen.” And the little man was abashed.

  We pressed our ears to the clerestory stones as if to shells to hear the ocean. Even so, it was so dim and quiet we had to strain to hear the gentle voices, as if they had come a long way.

  Do you remember living on the ground, Kalavya? came a male voice, and it sounded as though he spoke underwater. I have already forgotten what we meant when we said grass or beach.

  I think those were your cousins, Drona, answered a woman. The twins, with moles on their cheeks in just the same place?

  Of course, how could I have forgotten?

  Next week a new level will be finished, my love. We will all be going up the malachite stair. I hear the leopards have stowed away dried mangoes and quince and even lamb fat to celebrate, and we will sing as we climb, one of the old songs from level five, about the moon falling in love with Jupiter. I will put on my yellow dress, that I got when Bhaga fell off. Kalavya’s voice drifted in and out, louder and softer.

  I only hope the clouds stay off this time, Drona sighed. Remember the last time we walked the stair, up to the floor where we made those rose mosaics? The clouds gathered so thick I could hardly get my foot up onto the next step. Almost like they hated the Tower, but no one hates the Tower, that’s just ridiculous. Do you remember what tide meant?

  Isn’t that a sort of sunshade you hold over your head?

  You’ve got a memory big enough for the both of us, Drona laughed, and then it all started over again: Do you remember living on the ground, Kalavya?

  We drew away wonderingly.

  Sefalet’s left hand flew to her face in a moment of inattention. “It’ll all come down, just like before,” it snarled. “Let me kiss that wall and watch it swoon.”

  THE VIRTUE OF THINGS

  IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM

  9. On the Origins of Hatred

  Between the Two Pentexores

  A salamander by the name of Agneya made my friendship. I have only encountered female salamanders, though they assure me they have males, but apparently maleness is a thing easily misplaced, or spoiled, or forgotten. They only think about it when new eggs need making, at which point males seem to spring up just everywhere, getting underfoot. When the eggs are viable and the roasting time begins, along with the season for salamander racing, a favored sport, the males seem to wander off somewhere, but it doesn’t worry anyone unduly.

  I asked Agneya while I helped her turn her eggs in their fire why the land on the other side of the Wall hated us so much as to keep the Fountain of Youth from their brothers and sisters here. My friend confessed she did not know. However, she had heard the following tale from a sciopod:

  The world has a twin. It burst at the same time as our world. It has similar features; it had hopes and dreams and ambitions not unlike the hopes and dreams and ambitions of the world. It has a body consisting of spheres and stars and moons and orbits; it has a gender. (The genders of world are complex, and the possibilities number twelve or none at all. Our world is female,
obviously; its twin can best be called third neuter.) The world did not mean to be a twin. It was an accident with no morality attached to it. The pair grew up together, side by side, developing temperaments, vocations, loves and hates. They expanded together into the infinite wasteland of the previous world, which had perished after a long and mostly uneventful life. They chased each other into the grey corridors of the spherical void, they laughed the laughter of worlds, and their stars winked in and out of being.

  But the twins also possessed a tragedy, for they could not touch or embrace as siblings long to do. They could not merge or know what the other experienced in its infancy or adolescence. They could not feast together as family. They tried it several times, and found that when the world’s twin touched its sister, holes rimmed in pink fire opened up in the surface of her, holes which later filled up with brackish, strange water, or sand like a sea, or a river full of stones. Wherever the twin tried to reach out, things in our world became confused, and if the twin happened to touch a thinking creature by accident, that creature’s limbs broke into pieces or rearranged themselves in odd ways. But the world’s twin moved very slowly, and managed for a little while to hold our world tightly in what passes for its arms. When the membrane between them finally broke, shards of the world’s twin splintered from its arms and fell down like rain. The shards ran off in many directions at once, and wherever they walked, our world erupted in pink fire and seas boiled and air clotted. The shards did not mean to do harm; worlds break, nothing to be done. Later folk in the other Pentexore called the shards demons and trapped them behind a terrible wall all of diamonds, but we have had no trouble from them, and in many years no one has even heard their names.

  “That sounds very fanciful to me,” I said.

  Agneya snorted. “Well, yes, sciopods have some notions that fly right over my head. I heard one say we were all just specks of I don’t know what spinning around bits of I don’t know who, and the spinning gets so fast it looks like sitting still, and that’s why I can say: what a fine calf my John has, and you can say: my, Agneya, you’re looking green today. They can have it. I know about fire and fire knows about me. But they do say we used to have demons here. Lousy with them, we were meant to be. But do you see demons loping about, I ask you? No, just wholesome salamanders roasting their eggs, and some very flamboyant birds.”