A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “I would rather fight,” my winged girl said.

  “I have no doubt, though I cannot imagine what country has bred women like these, who go naked and hunger for battle. Surely when John says his is a Christian throne, he exaggerates.”

  “I would fight you,” Anglitora whispered.

  “What have I done to you, maid?” The green knight laughed.

  “Nothing, but you would fight bravely, I am certain of it.”

  “Of course I would.”

  “Then whichever of us prevailed, our children would grow up strong and whole and beautiful, and that is reason enough for war!” Her feathers fluffed and shivered slightly, turning a pale orange at the edges.

  I was such a child.

  “I fear I do not understand,” said Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi, the knight in silver and green.

  “Oh,” I said, and I smiled, but not because I thought the crane-maid silly. “It is because of the cranes. And the pygmies.”

  “Is that not what we came for?” Anglitora, the crane-knight cried. “To mate with John’s world as it came to mate with us when he took a blemmye to wife? To take the knights of Yerushalayim to our beds and keep their eggs warm through autumn?”

  I am so grateful no one laughed. Save Salah ad-Din, but he was foreign and I liked to watch him laughing. He looked so handsome when he laughed.

  “I don’t think we are here to do very much at all,” John said. “If we are at Nineveh we are terribly far from the holy land, we cannot cross the Euphrates—and that is the river’s name, if you must know it, it is the Euphrates and it hates us—and just over the hill is Salah ad-Din’s army, which will neither understand you nor countenance your ugliness. It is a whole army of men like me when I first arrived, and they will hate you. The best we can hope for is the monastery of St. Elijah, where at least I can explain to Christian brothers all that has happened, and rest, God on High, rest at last.”

  Salah ad-Din cocked his head to one side. “Why would we hate djinni, or think them ugly? Allah made them of the pure fire, and gave them free will no less than men. Surely some djinni go over to the side of wickedness, but so do some men. I see among you some figured like angels, others like chimera, and others beyond my ability to name them. But nothing Allah has not prepared me to see, nothing I have not read of in the holy books. Djinni came to Mohammed of old, why should I be terrified when they come to me?”

  We did not know the word he used for us. Nor did John.

  “And all your soldiers, they would feel the same? They would look on my wife and think her lovely, ask after her history, her interests and ambitions, ask her to dine with their wives and carry their children on her shoulders?”

  Salah ad-Din blushed. It was a very pretty thing. I do not think I have ever seen John blush.

  “Not all, no. I admit it. Though a Christian army would behave no better. Some could think of them as angels and Nephilim and Ophanim, and some could only see monsters. Men are men, everywhere.”

  “Not everywhere,” said I.

  And as if to put an end to the debate, more ranks of wizards came, the sun setting behind them, with their whispering and their horrified looks. Though it is possible their horror was more directed at Salah ad-Din than at us, we could not tell.

  John spoke to the wizards. I have come home, I have come home, my name is John and I wrote to Constantinople, have you been there, have you seen the Emperor, did he get my letter? My heart is glad to see Christian men, will you not give us sanctuary? And to him they marveled, and asked if he was Prester John, the famous priest-king, and had he come to smite down the enemies of Christ.

  Of course he had. I wanted to answer for him. Of course that is why we came. To hurt and maim—

  and mate—

  —and cut the flesh of those whom John pointed out as being enemies, for we certainly could not tell any of them apart.

  But now that the men of the cross stood there, shying away from the centaurs and nervously sidestepping the lamias’ whipping tails, John said nothing. He only asked for sanctuary.

  Sukut turned from such supplication and put his hand on the green-clad arm of Salah ad-Din.

  “You will never enter that city,” the minotaur said.

  He started. “How can you say that?”

  “I have looked into the sky and tried to solve its labyrinth. I did it last night while you slept among our tents. That is how you tell such things. You tell the stars: let the beginning of the maze be where we stand now, and let the end be the taking of Mosul by Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi, and you follow the clew, rolling down the black halls, past the starry walls. There is no path from here to there, though you seem to be a good man and the paths before you are so many, so many.”

  And the green knight said, lowly, urgently: “But to Jerusalem? Do you see a path there, even if I lose Mosul?”

  Sukut frowned. The Abir had chosen well for him—his huge eyes seem so kind, no matter what his mazes have told him.

  “To Jerusalem all the corners of the labyrinth turn, to the city on the hill, and a story there we meant to tell ourselves. It is your city already, though you will not hold it forever. You will stand atop the city with a horn in your hands, and it will call to every angry soul. They will come for you in Jerusalem, by the thousands, blond haired and ashen-hearted, and they will think you a good man, but your countrymen devils and demons, because when they look at you they see us—they see headless and heartless and half-animal and half-monster. The clew unfolds long past your living, Salah ad-Din. It snarls; I cannot see for the mess of it, the thousands of times that scrap of town will be burned and bought and buried and burned again. There will be a king who is half-lion. There will be men with awful magic. No one will ever stop telling this story: men came against good advice to this country and took it by force. It does not matter who were the men then, who they are now, who they will be. Who will take it, who will defend it, who will deliver it, who will take it once more. It is broken, it is a story that cannot stop telling itself. But if an answer is all you require—yes. Go to Jerusalem. We cannot get there to defend anyone. You will have no trouble taking it.”

  The abbot of St. Elijah was called Jibril. He paid no attention to the minotaur’s quiet counsels, but regarded John with coldness and high airs. He was the older man among the wizards, very tall (though none of John’s people were as tall as I, and among my people I am not counted enormous). He owned a powerful gaze, thick eyebrows and long, narrow cheeks. The abbot looked at me for a long time, without shame, taking in my bared breasts and the eyes that tipped them, my headless body, my unbowed posture and position at John’s right hand. He stared at me as though he could tell the whole tale of John’s life with us by how I stood with him, how I did not cover myself, how I spoke without fear.

  “You may come within our walls, John, if you are the John you claim to be. But your motley army cannot. Even if we could bear the sight of their deformities, we could not feed or house them, and you seem to have quite all you need here. The nights are not cold. They will be comfortable.”

  They seemed coolly familiar with the green knight and well appraised of the state of the siege on Mosul. They took no side, of course, being that any victor would be an infidel and as likely as the other to treat them with hostility or tolerance. It mattered nothing to them. They would treat with the master of Mosul as soon as his identity became clear. Nor did it matter much to them that John called himself a Nestorian—letters had to be written, much remained to be discussed and fully understood.

  They all knew him. They knew every word of his letter, had heard it from their fathers, had studied it and even memorized parts of it. They had dreamed of the things we know so well: the Fountain, the Mussel shell, the al-Qasr. And yet they seemed so disappointed.

  John begged for my admittance. Mine alone. They curled their lips, but he insisted. Put a veil over her, they said. For God’s sake, give her some modesty.

  When I first knew John, and we journeye
d together to a certain tomb for reasons too complicated to list here, somewhat near the end of that passage we encountered a peacock named Ghayth. He was a historian as well as a peacock, or at least, an Abir or two back, he had been. When we talked with him, below a diamond wall, he was a writer of fictions and very unhappy about it. I thought back on those days as the monks wrapped me in a black veil (the best color to conceal my breasts while allowing me some sight—you would think these men had never seen breasts, that half of their own people did not have them, that they had not suckled at them as babes! Perhaps they were envious, having none of their own, and could not bear the sight of a soul who owned them. However, I was by then sick to death of men who claimed to be great and strong rending their garments over having seen my body bare.). Thus I saw everything through a haze of black, shadowed, dim. A chamber with many reading podiums and desks, and the abbot seated before us like a king we had come to beseech, his face disapproving, so sunk in disapproval I could not believe it had ever held another expression. He must have looked up at his mother on the first day of his life and sighed disconsolately. And in that dark chamber where I could see so little, I remembered Ghayth and what he had said to me when the fires grew dim and the stars got high and everyone else had drifted to sleep.

  He flared his feathers and crooned: It’s not so bad, fiction. The trouble with history is that nobody knows the bigger picture. They can’t see it from above—and I sympathize, I do! Seeing everything from peacock-level instead of hawk-height is unfortunate, it really is. Everyone bumbles around and they have no idea what kind of story they’re telling. As a historian, you look at the disaster of it and you give it a story. You say: ah, well, see here it was a youngest son kind of story, a slay the dark beast sort of story, a love sanctions all crimes sort of story. Or you say yes, this man cheated to get what he got, but he did pretty well with it in the end. The historian’s job is to decide who gets forgiven and who doesn’t. To decide what the story was. But while you do that work all you ever see is people making a mess of everything, performing the same scenes over and over, the same lines sometimes, and they never know when the climax has come and gone and they should be well into the denouement, having sandwiches and looking back on it rather than still swinging their swords. It’s horrible, and you want to reach back in time and say: stop, just stop! You’re ruining everything! It could all be so beautiful if only you would hold your arm like this, or recite this soliloquy or move the scene with the moon goddess from here to there. But with fiction you can make it so graceful. Symmetrical. Everything knows its place. Foreshadowing works elegantly; you can change speakers if one is just not getting the work done. It’s only hard to have been a historian, and become a fictioneer. Because it all feels false, you see. You make these radiant little creatures and force them to say your words and you can make it so beautiful it would cut you down where you stand—but if they were really real, your radiant little loves would muck it up just as badly. That’s what people do. Even us, even here. It’s only that our acts are much longer and we have three, five, seventeen, forty-nine of them. So much more time to be ridiculous and sorrowful. That’s what the Abir really does, you know. It resets the stage every couple of centuries, just to make a little room in the debris. A little room to start again.

  I sat quietly while the men spoke. I tried to be demure. I tried to put a history together from their stuttering, miserable attempts.

  The trouble was, we thought we were telling a story where we came when called, to lift the burden of a city, to be loved by John’s world and loved by John, to do good and have good done to us in return. We thought the story was about how we saved the West. But the story had already been told, and we had missed our entrance.

  Jerusalem was taken—it was in Christian hands now, and had been for forty years. Emmanuel had written to us long ago, and heard no answer. No one needed our help, and besides, what were we doing here, on the edge of Mosul, an infidel city besieged by more infidels?

  “Where were you when we needed you?” Jibril cried, and his voice shook. “When my brothers were dying in the streets and horses were slipping on their innards? When we cried out to heaven and no answer came? When I starved in a cell below a hall where the enemy feasted? Why did you not come then, when any Christian soul might have had a use for you? Why now, when all is quiet and we are shoved away to the north, licking our wounds and watching your friend in green draw more and more knights to his cause, breed finer and finer horses, quote his nasty heathen poetry at his fawning generals and make more and more sons? Soon we will be drowning in little Salah ad-Dins and they will each of them eat a Christian babe for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!”

  I could not keep quiet. “I don’t think he would do that,” I said, and made an effort to keep my voice soft and high, as John said women of his country did. “He eats dates and goat, just like the rest of us.”

  I do not feel right about putting down what Jibril thought we ate in our country.

  “I am so tired.” My husband’s voice was low and broken. “I am so tired. Let me stay here and read and think and be at peace. For fourteen years I have lived as a stranger in a foreign land, where no one knew God, where no one even knew the name of the city where I was born! Where I was the ugly one, the different one, the one past all comprehension. I am so tired. I want to be shriven. I want to take confession. I am a Christian and a Nestorian, you cannot deny me these things. Put the Eucharist on my tongue and let me have some tiny sliver of ease.”

  “It was more here,” I said softly to him alone. “More than fourteen years. The Rimal brought us where it would, and the clocks that held its sand never could keep the hour right. Our time runs separately from yours, I think. We are unmoored from you, and it is unfair, but think—enough time has passed for the hedge of knights to spring up, for two wars to have brought those skulls from here to there, for your letter to have run all the way around this world twice. Ask the year, ask and he will tell you.”

  But John would not ask. He could not bear to hear it, I think, and Jibril did not offer. Instead, he behaved as though I had not spoken.

  “Did you not say you were king in this foreign land? Surely you have had ease aplenty,” sneered the abbot.

  John barked a rough laughter. “Do you want a crown? I’d be happy to give it to you. Try giving laws to them. They have lived in languor and decadence and a kind of gorgeous abundance for thousands of years. They would look on Moses’ tablets and wear them as skirts, call it a delightful fashion, and for a century or two everyone would be clothed in commandments, and then they’d forget and not even Thou Shalt Have No Other God Before Me would have sunk in. Especially that one.”

  “It is not our fault your earth is so mean with her gifts,” I said.

  And he softened. John softened! He put his hand on mine and said: “I know, my love. I know. I am not trying to slander you. Only to explain how I have not exactly managed to convert the population.”

  “I have never understood this obsession with conversion! Why does it matter so much if we say the Ave? Did you not say that the kingdom of heaven is reserved for the elect? Well, then let us be, and you will find your celestial table less crowded.”

  At that Jibril chuckled. I did not understand what a child’s scriptural argument I had made, one every novice brings up sooner or later.

  “What if I say I do not believe you?” the abbot said softly, looking up into the cracked ceiling of St. Elijah’s. “What if I say you are an angel of the Devil’s make, that you have brought an army of succubi and imps and hellhounds, that your generals are Belial and Azazel and not Hagia and Anglitora, that I believe you to have pulled the diadem of Prester John over your head like a mask and have arrived here to give help and succor to our enemies, with whom we have already observed you breaking bread and calling brother, to lead them behind our walls and lay waste to our holy brotherhood?”

  John looked down at his hands. I could not guess his thoughts.

  “I w
ould say I have no home anywhere. That in the east I am alien, and in the west I am demon, and nowhere on this earth will love or soothe me.”

  Father Jibril chewed his cheek and moved his eyes again to me, where they found I had not changed. Perhaps if I let them lash a stuffed head to my shoulders and wrap the whole thing in veils they could leave me be for an entire hour.

  “Prove to us your strength and your faith. Show us that you are Prester John, that you came for our deliverance and our relief. Set upon the man Salah ad-Din and cut his throat and when you have done that lead your people over the hill and destroy his army to the last man—you may leave the horses, as beasts have no allegiance and cannot tell Allah from the cud they chew—stave in the heads of the very last of their footsoldiers and we will call you our brother in Christ, an honest man, Prester John, and welcome you to our breast.”

  THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

  THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

  This is the tale the cametenna told. All the while she told it, she held out her huge hands, miserably, as if she wanted something from us, as if the emptiness of her hands hurt her so. I longed to smother her in my paws, to hide her in my fur. Ah! All these poor girls. How they bite at my heart! Finally, I did, as she spoke I wrapped her in my body, to shield her, and then Sefalet too climbed into her hand, at which the cametenna wept with relief, and Elif curled between us, so that Lamis, for that was her name, spoke from a nest of bodies, who pressed close together to keep her from shaking apart. That is the main thing love is for, to hold the center, to keep things from shattering. This is what she said when she lay at the center.

  Do you know how the world began?

  It began because everything got mixed up and mixed together, and couldn’t figure out how to get apart again. I guess I am glad that happened, but there is a point where the mixing stops becoming thicker and thicker and more and more complex and starts becoming thinner, and wan, and old, and I was queen of that point, and that point was called Thule.