A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  My own name is Lamis and in my first Abir I drew a pearl covered over with iridescent flecks. The pearl said: go and rule over the city called Thule which is pleasant and peaceful and makes all the things a city makes, and take no spouse and have no children, but of lovers have as many as you will. I put on the dress of a queen, which has iron sewn into the hem, so that it drags heavy on the bones. I went to Thule and all the people of the city had gathered at the glass gate of the city to welcome me, and they threw mango blossoms into the air and sang a song with one thousand harmonious parts, for that was the number of souls in the city. I laughed and the petals fell onto my hair, and they had a crown all ready. In it rode a rainbow of gems.

  Of course, the first day of a reign is always the best day. That’s when there’s so much hope you could eat it for lunch. Before you have made any mistakes, or invited other queens to eat, or set the tax rate. I did the best I could do. There was no one to teach me. I kept a little diary, for I knew I would not be queen forever. I did not want the next queen to have to learn everything over again. And in my youth I was told many stories. It became the principal way in which my thoughts were arranged.

  When I was a young queen I felt the palace to be huge and empty, though really it was much smaller than the al-Qasr. It had a pretty shade of silver to the stones, not grey but a slippery, wet color, and the joins were filled with hematite. I wrote in my book: a queen’s heart must be big enough to fill her palace, but not so big that she squeezes her people out of their homes. I felt lonely, and this was the first Abir, you know, so I did not know how not to miss my brother and my sister and my nurse. I wanted a lover as soon as possible, because I thought a lover would be brother and sister and nurse all together. I wrote in my book: a queen must find a lover immediately, for otherwise her accounting books will take her bed at night.

  Later I crossed that out. In its place I wrote: a queen must do nothing but be a good queen until her city no longer needs her.

  All the men in Thule and some few of the women lined up around the waterfalls that trickle down from the palace into the crystalline moat, to apply to be my lover. I asked them questions: Do you know how to tell good stories? Have you any interesting scars? Tell me about a time you were just. I set them tasks: Calculate the ideal tax rate for the population of Thule. Design for me an aqueduct. Solve the dispute between the red lions (races) and the blemmyae (comic theatre) over who should get to build an arena for their favorite entertainment in the prime central area of the city.

  I thought these were excellent tests of suitors and recorded them all for the benefit of the next queen. In the end, I felt that the ideal household was made up of, besides myself, two women and one man, for I was very young and did not want things to change. It was how I had been happiest, with my brother and my sister and my nurse. Only now I was not a child, and my lovers would not be children, so things would change, but not too much. Not too much for me to bear. The pearl said: take many, and so I did.

  One was an astomi called Manar, and her eyes were the color of wine. One was a minotaur called Taroob, and she had a jasper ring in her nose. And with them I took a giant called Qayz. With Manar I shared breakfast and my morning; we ate oranges and cream and fresh bread we baked together, and I would eat and she would breathe the scents in deeply, and make jokes about the moon, which is a kind of goddess to the astomi, but also a kind of maiden aunt, who gives kindly advice and raps across the knuckles by turns. Together Manar and I sang both cooking songs and governing songs, and in the governing songs (which had a call and a response) we determined the percentage of goods to keep in Thule, and the percentage to send out to trade with Nural and Nimat and Simurgh and Shirshya.

  With Taroob I took my lunches and my afternoons. We ate roast fish and bitter apples and plump rice, and she would make little mazes in the rice, through which the sauce from the fish would drip and flow. She would slurp it up and with delight when the sweet juices had solved the circuit. We put our heads together and her hands had a soft pelt, her voice a low, thrumming rhythm, and together we heard the disputes of the Thulites, and with our judges’ veils on we determined that this blacksmith owed that glassblower two new pipes, since the old ones were cheaply made and had bent. We said that since the cousins had quarreled over who should get the tame tiger they had raised together that it should instead come and live at the palace, and when it had kittens they would each get one and no more.

  With Qayz I suppered, and took my nights. In Thule it is the sacred duty of the queen to light the lamps at night, and together my giant and I went lamp to lamp, setting a little blue blaze flickering. The light played on his huge ears and we smiled at each other. When the work was done we ate a grassy soup full of tangerine and almond and milky bean curd. We determined which fields should lay fallow and which should be full of grain and house-trees. I ate my crushed flowers so that there would be no children. We were happy.

  I wrote in my book: a queen has the power to order the world as she wishes it. Thus, she must be so careful to make a good one, and to know a good one from a bad one.

  Before bed, we told stories, and you may think me childish, but there are worse things to do before bed, and how else can you get to know a new lover or three but by the stories they tell? Qayz lay along the wall, so that he could hold us all in the circuit of his body.

  Manar, Who Could Smell My Love For Her: Do you know the one about how to build a city?

  Taroob, Who Lay Down Thread So That I Could Always Find Her: Oh, that one is a little grisly.

  Qayz, Who Made Light With Me: Oh, la, grisly and allegorical is all right. Grisly and true is upsetting.

  And Manar, who had been the one to design the aqueduct, told us how cities grow like children, and like children they have to have a parent, a person who stands in the center of the heart of what will be a city like a key in a hole. As long as the key is in the hole the city thrives, so the person who started the city has to be very patient and have a rich internal life, because the work of being a key is not very interesting. The city grows so big that no one knows where the center of the heart is anymore, and they forget that a person dreaming began everything they love, the schools where little ones learn how to count on their knuckles, the festivals when the moon is red, the safe walls so terrible beast may breach. All the things there are to love about a city come from a person who decided to stay. And stay forever.

  I asked my lover if there was such a key in Thule, and she said she thought there had been, there must have been, and when she was small she heard we had a unicorn stuck in the center of the heart of our city, but when they came, they took him, though he must be alive somewhere, for Thule still lives and breathes. And all three of us lay together and looked at the dancing light in our lamp and thought about that, how wonderfully and terribly the world behaves, that it makes cities, but asks such a sacrifice.

  And all of that, just the very beginning of my life in Thule, becoming queen, taking lovers, telling one tale before bedtime, took a thousand years. Abirs came and went outside. And inside the mist slowed everyone down, the mist that chilled and thickened all the elements of the city, the mist of a few drops of Gog and Magog’s blood. But in that silver silken mist, I had a little happiness. A slow happiness, just a trickle every month or so, and more, sometimes, when we could dig out a whole room in the palace, dig out the mist and move quickly for a moment or two—oh, the lives we lived in those moments!

  But I am here now, so you must have guessed the mist is gone. I do not know what happened. One morning the mist had gone and the sun shone so bright, bright as glass. I didn’t hear it go, but I heard the rumbling. Thule rumbled as it came down. As it broke along its axes, like a star. As a pillar crushed Manar and the bridge of her perfect nose. As a stair went to dust beneath Taroob’s hooves and dropped her into darkness. As the lamps dripped their burning oil onto Qayz’s sweet hands and engulfed him. How in a moment—so fast, how can anything happen so fast?—Thule went from a city to a r
uin. The moon shines there, on a grassy, empty hill. She clucks in her fretting way. She says: Where is Manar, who always left sweets on my altars when I got full? And for the moon I have only my grief, big and round and pale. When I finished weeping—and you can finish weeping. You can cry so much that you are dry, a ruin, a dust-cloud, and then you are skinny and wracked but you can run. I ran, I ran to find someone, anyone who was not dead. I left my book, but I don’t think there will be another queen to care. The last thing I wrote was: a happy queen and a happy city clasp together like two hands. But only for a little while.

  THE VIRTUE OF THINGS

  IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM

  14. On Other Cities

  I know Pentexore contains cities other than Simurgh. Certainly, they all speak of the riches of the cities beyond the Wall, but here, too, in Ysra and Ymra’s country, this is only the capital. When I first began this section, I meant to tell you I had been to all of them. That on a palanquin drawn by six black turtles I toured the countryside. That in Habil the cyclops wreathed my head in blue silk and sang quatrains where every word began with Q, for that is the first letter of the word “eye” in their private tongue. That in Isos, by the seashore, the whales perform a long dance whose first step was taken when Egypt had not yet had her first Pharaoh. That in Summikto, statues of red stone stand tall, and their heads are women’s heads, and their bodies are those of striped horses, and when the winds of sunset come, it passes through their mouths and makes a strange song. Oh, the things I was going to tell you!

  But I am tired. I miss Agneya, I miss Ysra and Ymra, and day and night poor Cab’s light shines in on me, full of pity and regret: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  Still I know those cities thrive and bustle somewhere far off—Agneya told me as much when her black egg needed turning and I held the tongs for her. These are the Pentexoran cities I have heard of:

  Habil, which is rich in berries, copper, and satirists. Mainly lions live there, said my salamander friend. Once there were red and white ones, but they are so intermingled now that all of them are a deep rose color, which is both slightly ridiculous and exquisite. In Habil they have no stairs, for lions do not like them, and the antelope soup is highly spiced, so sour and savory it would pucker the mouth of a stranger. Houses are ordered by pride, and the rose-colored lions have a fierce loyalty to their houses, which consist of clusters of huts with a common hearth, all of which face inward and have but one outer door for all the homes. How do you spot a stranger in Habil? They do not like the soup.

  Isos, which perches on the sea. If I had more luck and a little more northerly wind, I might have docked there instead, for the icy reaches are all Isan. Half the city is underwater, half above, and hardly anyone knows anything about what life in Pentexore-Below-the-Waves is like. Maybe the whales are dancing, who is to say? Above the tideline the major industry of Isos is ice, which is their passion and their great art. Every house is a palace of ice, carved stairs and gates and dining tables. All the meals are frozen, one sucks the hardened fish and crystal fruits until they melt. Mermaids and selkies populate the city, for they can visit both halves of the town. The skin of a mermaid is hardy and tough, her muscles adamant, her gills razors, while a selkie wears her skin as a cloak when she is out of the water, and speaks a crooning, clicking language. How do you know a stranger in Isos? She cannot take off her skin.

  Summikto is a desert camp, where dervishes live, dancing, dancing, dancing forever in the centers of crimson clouds. God is a storm in Summikto, and when all the citizens come together, they make one, boiling and turning and billowing with heat and dust and wind. Most of Simurgh is made of Summikto, for they bind the dust into bricks out there in the desert, and the bricks make the buildings of the salamanders. Summikto lives as a single dervish, they are all married to one another, all parents and children of one another, they all have the same name, which is Blikhi, and often collide with one another because they cannot tell the difference between themselves and their comrade. How do you tell a stranger in Summikto? They are watching where they’re going.

  Aadi, where the science of trees, so strange to me, has been brought to its highest expression. There, they plant tears and raise trees bearing pears of pure salt, they plant nets and raise up trees of squirming pink fish, they plant beds and watch as the summer brings harvests of pillows and sweet-scented linens. It is an orchard town, and there the houses are planted, too, doors buried in the earth which shoot up into lithe green towers with a hundred passageways. Meals are communal in Aadi. In the central square is a supper-tree, where all the greatest Aadian chefs brought their finest meals, bubbling iron pots of fragrant coriander stew, platters of roast lamb drizzled in honey and soaked in beer, caskets of raisiny, resinous wine, and into a pit dug in the earth it all went, platter and pot and casket, along with embers to keep it hot and spices wrapped in linen to season the sapling. The tree gives them their feasts back a thousandfold, and each day the Aadians pluck fabulous suppers from the branches, bubbling away in little iron pots that can be eaten along with the contents. The metal crumbles like good bread, and just as savory. How do you know a stranger in Aadi? They packed their own lunch.

  Chakor is a wooded isle in the center of a lake. A colony of sciopods live there, and when they wish to visit other cities, they simply take to the water on their single wide foot, as good as a ship, paddling with sturdy wooden oars, testing the winds with their thumbs. In Chakor they trade in dreams. When a sciopod sleeps she hauls that foot over her head to keep out the rain, and the sciopods claim this is a superior sleeping position. Not all the people of Pentexore dream (for example, mermaids cannot dream) and so they come to Chakor to find out what they would dream, if they did. They cuddle in with a sciopod and the sciopods dream for them, violet waves on pink shores and four moons aligned, jungles full of blue panthers with mirrors in their mouths, walking up the Spheres like a glassy staircase, and touching the silk of the sky. You always dream better in the arms of a sciopod, even if you could dream just fine before you met one. How do you know a stranger in Chakor? They have their eyes open.

  This is the bald, quotidian, unvarnished truth of the country in which I find myself. I was tempted to exaggerate, at least a little, but I have disciplined myself mightily, and kept it only to the barest truths I could verify. I have told it as it is. So says my talking salamander. So says my glowing emerald. So say I, and you may believe what you like.

  15. On Apologies

  I have always felt that if you must apologize, better make it showy and grand. Better get on one knee. Better compose a sonnet. Better bring gifts in silver boxes with ivory accents. Better bring your best kisses.

  I once had cause to apologize to the bishop of Avignon. The bishop had a sister and the sister was cloistered in a nunnery in the country, ensconced in a sweet little pine forest where they grew mushrooms and prayed and darned Christ’s socks. It is well known that the tears of a bishop’s sister can cure certain unsavory maladies which I myself have certainly never suffered, but I resolved to procure them for a friend of mine. Being slender of figure and sparse of beard as I have always been, I concealed myself within a habit and called myself Sister Marguerite, whereupon I had no difficulty becoming a great favorite among the women, who were excessively modest and did not even disrobe while bathing in their cool mountain pond. I know my hymnal very well, and have a pleasantly high singing voice—the tale of which I shall tell another time! After I had their confidence I closeted myself with the bishop’s sister and told her that I bore sad news—her brother had died and walked this world no more. The poor girl, hardly more than a maid, wept piteously and I suggested, as bosom sisters, that we should catch up the other’s tears in vials and keep them next to our hearts, so that our grief should be thus halved and lessened. She agreed and I had my panacea—and more, for so wretchedly did the bishop’s sister throw herself upon me that my disguise was of little help, and I discovered the other truth of bishop’s sisters—that they
are often put away in nunneries on account of being young and beautiful and eager to live as men do, freely and without the manacles of their brothers’ stations.

  Obviously, I had to slip out of the abbey in the night, and some years later, when once more in Avignon and, to my chagrin, in the bishop’s company without meaning to be, I made much show of my deep repentance—so deep I had become a Franciscan brother not a year previous, giving up all my possessions to atone for my trespasses. So florid was my apology and my tears that all were forced to admit they had found themselves in the presence of a veritable Augustine, who had given up his lascivious past utterly. This is what an apology should accomplish.

  Clearly this philosophy has not yet reached Pentexore. As far as I can tell, the local method of apologizing is to simply appear after a long absence and not mention it at all. Then, if the offended party brings up the subject, one ought to pretend no knowledge at all of having kept them cooped up for days at a time, with emeralds for guards and very meager suppers indeed. Very well, kings set the manners of the country. But of course I have never had a drop of manners.

  “What crime did I commit? Did I not bathe in the unicorn’s blood or show quite enough delight?”

  The queen Ymra looked shocked. “That was a sad business. You performed your part, and we are sorry we could not do it for you. Politics are like that, sometimes. One must keep one’s hands clean.”

  “Politics? How is killing a boy in the woods politics? Where have you been these last days? I really rather think it is time for me to head back north and collect my ship. To be moving on.”

  “All will be clear at the Bonfire, we promise,” said the king Ysra. “As for where we’ve been, we have not left the Mount. And we simply will not hear of you missing our great event. After that is done you may go where you like.”