A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “The Bonfire draws near,” Ymra said.

  “Soon?”

  “Soon.”

  The queen looked at me slantways. She had a red, smeary beauty, a feeling of looseness about her, and you could never watch all six of her hands at once. “Have you enjoyed your time with us?” she said silkily. “What I mean to say is, we have heard you tell stories of other courts until we could hear no more of Egypt. Will you tell tales of us? Were we exciting enough to make a tale?”

  “Without a doubt. I will write a great book, when I return to England.”

  “But you cannot leave until after the Bonfire. It will be extraordinary. You will never forget it.”

  “You know,” I began, “when I lived in Halicarnassus…”

  “I don’t care about Halicarnassus,” Ymra said, but not cruelly. “I care about Pentexore.”

  “Tell me something. About the unicorn. About the Bonfire. I know enough to smell magic on the hearth. Are you a witch? Are you doing something wicked?”

  Ymra stretched her fingers, one by one. It took some time. She did it like a cat, prolonging the moment. “You use so many words. I don’t even know what they mean. Wicked? Magic? Witch? Just nouns, just letters all in a row like soldiers. Magic is a horrible, unpredictable thing. You do your best, of course. You seek out esoteric ingredients. You perform arcane rites. But who knows if any of it works? You might almost just as well live through whatever’s to come without it. Magic is an experiment where you don’t know what it is you want to prove. God sets the rules, and we guess at them.”

  I did not conceal my surprise. “You believe in God then?”

  “God is another way of talking about the power to break things, that’s all. When you mean to break a goblet or a bone, well, just do it and be done. But when the things to be broken get big enough you have to start talking about God. As far as a witch, well, perhaps when we say witch we mean: a creature who can still be broken herself, but she is learning to be the breaker. And wickedness, well, you tell me. I don’t think I’m wicked. I am what I am. That I am, if you want to get classical. Intent is everything. If I touch something and it withers, does that make me wicked? If I didn’t mean to do it any harm? If it did not offend me, and I didn’t know it was going to happen?” Ymra looked pleadingly at me, and her voice shook a little. “If I only wanted to touch it, as any creature wants to touch things. Sick and wicked are not the same thing.”

  “You seem so healthy!”

  “Yet the choice is: we are sick or the world is sick. One cannot bear the other. If one is true the other is false.” She looked down. “Or perhaps we just do not know what we are. Who told you you were human? Or did you just assume it, because everyone who looked like you was also called human? Those who look like us are called hexakyk. But does that mean we are hexakyk? So much easier just to say we are sick. We meant no harm, and we made a hospice when we finally diagnosed ourselves. And we want to live, just to live, like always, like anyone. The Bonfire will help. And we would like you to help the Bonfire.”

  “I don’t really feel I understand any of what is happening well enough to help.” In my experience, the ignorant foreigner who meddles in local politics usually ends up roasting alive on one stake or another.

  “You are an obscure ingredient, is not that enough?” Ymra smiled. In all my days I had never seen a smile so knowing. “Do you not like me? Do you not want to please me? And my brother, too? We would never hurt you, John. We treasure Johns and want to keep them whole. They are so useful.”

  “What are you going to do at the Bonfire, Ymra?”

  Her smile widened into a wolfish, hangdog grin. “We are going to break something big.”

  MARS, HOT AND DRY

  Theses and similar nations were shut in behind lofty mountains by Alexander the Great, towards the north… Those accursed fifteen nations will burst forth from the four quarters of the earth at the end of the world, in the times of the Antichrist, and overrun all the abodes of the saints as well as the great city Rome, which, by the way, we are prepared to give to our child who will be born, along with all Italy, Germany, the two Gauls, Britain, and Scotland. We shall also give him Spain and all of the land as far as the icy sea.

  The nations to which I have alluded, according to the words of the prophet, shall not stand in the judgement on account of their offensive practices, but will be consumed to ashes by a fire which will fall on them from heaven.

  —The Letter of Prester John

  1165

  THE CONFESSIONS

  But Hiob had not wakened.

  He writhed on his bier, but the vines held him fast. He made sounds, but the swollen stem in his throat stoppered them. His eyes did not open; he did not speak; he did not stand up. As a man dreaming strange dreams he moved in his sleep. His hands fluttered—they had swollen their pages already with words and Reinolt and Goswin had been lax in changing them.

  “The battle must be coming soon,” Reinolt said guiltily.

  “And the Bonfire,” added Goswin.

  “You are both children,” I snapped, angry, thwarted, ashamed. I should not have kissed her. She did not like it. Her expression when our faces parted was cold pity. I am not Hagia, she had whispered. I am not here to bring you warmly into a place where you do not belong. Through the bars of that country a sword was thrust in my childhood, and it flamed still. I changed the parchment beneath Hiob’s wrinkled and frantic hand.

  The al-Qasr sits as empty as it did in those long-gone days when Abibas the Mule-King ruled kindly from his tree in the sciopod forest, and most of Nural seemed to live there, in the open rooms, the long halls, the drifting curtains. How happy I seem to recall it, all of us playing in the palace like children.

  My silver pot scrapes—the ink is nearly gone. And yet the flood of it crests in me, all at once, everything happening at once, the weight behind my eyes, the memory of it. I understand Imtithal now—Hajji. I understand Hajji now. The world is a place of suffering, and the root of all suffering is memory. When you live long enough, the mass of memory is greater than any moon, any sun, so bright and awful and scalding in the dark, scalding the inside of my skull, dragging me down into living, down into remembering, and every time I look on a thing I see only what it has been before, what it will be after. The future and the past encroach on the artifacts of the present, the artifacts of myself, like a kind of richly colored mold, softening my vision, burning away its edges, slushing everything together into one knot of being which I can never transcend, but also, can neither descend, sinking into a low country where everything is only as it is, now, in this one singular moment. What a lonely way of seeing that would be.

  I tried to shave down the vine in Hiob’s mouth, to give him some relief. I rubbed oil into his stretched lips. Like a father I tended him, like a son I feared for him. The book was inside him, that was clear. He could write out the missing passages, out of order, phrases here and there, all of it confused in him, but there, hidden in his body. Perhaps he saw as Hagia saw—everything happening all at once, together, on top of itself, like the strata in stone. Perhaps one day, when I was old, I could sort out his writing and fit it into the first books, fit it into his own confessions, make a whole document. I looked up at the door and the woman in yellow stood there, hovering, a deer about to bolt into the brush—and I already knew I would not. Prester John’s kingdom was a country of fragments, all strung together to look like a whole. The kingdom of memory, the kingdom of time. Against our own world, hurtling forward, always forward, we could only lay those fragments gently, as a flower against a tomb.

  When I first crept at the edges of the refectory, listening to the men’s conversation, those hushed male voices, so sure and thrilled and vibrating with desire, I thought they were mad. How could there be any joy in telling tales that were surely false? Brother Johan had said last week than in Prester John’s kingdom men had many wives, and the wives had many husbands, and all of them were priests, though they married and bore chil
dren. But the next week he said the whole of the nation hewed to celibacy, and thence came their incredible longevity. Both could not be true, but both were greeted with the same awed, breathy belief. If such a place existed, it could only be one thing. And it either existed or it did not—they seemed to revel in the in-between place, the might-be, and that was neither faith nor fact, so I could not understand it.

  I looked down at my book. It was my shift on Hagia’s volume, and a cerulean fuzz played at its corners, teasing me, sending tendrils toward the text. Fragments. A mountain of them, all adding up to a place that was and was not. I turned from the tome, daring it to dissolve in my absence. I declared my freedom from it—it felt dizzy, mad, dangerous, to risk losing such a document, a document so many had sought. But it was only ever fragments, I was only ever fragments, and if I did not find what I wanted in this book, there were others, hanging pendulous from the tree, heavy with juice. I ducked my head out of the little house. The woman in yellow burned at me from the shadows.

  “Who are you?” I said outright. “Who was your mother, your grandmother, your great-great-grandmother? Blood tells the tale, forever.”

  She looked at me, silent, savage, not an animal, but not human. And then she grinned, her cutting teeth showing. The whites of her eyes shone. Then she ran, the soles of her feet flashing up like lanterns, vanishing into the gloam.

  THE BOOK

  OF THE RUBY

  They fell upon us. I think that’s the best way to say it.

  That is how it happened. They fell, as if from a great height, and all their weight came down upon us.

  I wish it had been a battle. I wish we had ridden down a long green hill riding the cameleopards and singing war songs, singing songs written by Niobe the phoenix which would in years hence become hearthside songs, songs sung by grandchildren who barely understood the bit about the green knight, or held the tune quite right. Instead, some hooded man fell on me in the night, his body heavy and hot on my back, and the sounds of the camp became the sounds of screaming. I confused my attacker—he could not strangle me or cut my throat, and I was so much bigger than he. Still, he cut me, slashed at my ribs. We wrestled on the floor of my tent, breathing hard, and I could not see John, only the arms twisting in my arms and the man’s shadowy strong leg wrapping around my waist and the flash of the skin over my ribs splitting open. I had presence enough to think: You’re not very good at this, boy. We breathed at each other and our breaths still had dinner on them. Onions and fried bread and sweet black wine, the dinner we had shared with the monks of St. Elijah, and I felt deep disgust. What kind of creature shares food with someone on one side of the sun and a blade with them on the other? I turned my waist so that my weight turned him—I felt his leg break under me and he cried out.

  I was angry. He had hurt me. He had broken faith. I didn’t even know him, I couldn’t see his face, but I took his knife and stuck it up through his chin, and when I did it I felt it crunch up into his brain, and my anger stopped short, as though it had struck something harder and colder than itself.

  I found you, covered in blood. Everyone was screaming and running—braziers had fallen over. Tents began to burn. I said: Are you all right? Is Father dead? But he was not. His face had gone slack and still, and you both sat there, stunned and identical, your hands black with that ugly, deep blood that means someone has died. I remember thinking that I suddenly knew what you must have looked like the day you got married.

  We fought together. Anglitora and I, not mother and daughter but mother and daughter still.

  We fought together. I am good at fighting. The wing gives an advantage—men fight me as though I am a cripple, but my wing dances, and where it hits them they crumple. You and I kept our backs to one another, and the monks had no faces, but they had blood.

  I killed five men.

  So few. So many. I saw Sukut gore a young novice. I saw Niobe puff out her chest and leak an ooze of fire over the blades of her tormentors—the metal bubbled, their skin peeled back. I saw Houd crushing priests’ skulls in his huge hands. His face so faraway, as though he was dreaming about something bare and quiet, a winter forest, a lake of ice. I saw the amyctryae biting into throats. There was no strategy—how I had planned for strategy! How we would approach an impregnable city, how we could breach its walls. But this was just hands and teeth and claws, wrangling in the mud. And you know, it didn’t look so different from the wrangling I remember, the cranes and the pygmies kissing and writhing—mating and killing look much the same in the dark.

  I saw Brother Dawud come running out of the abbey, waving his arms, his round, kind face contorted, his mouth open, crying out to his brothers to stop, stop, stop. That word—stop, an impossibility, nothing could stop yet, not enough people were dead yet. His Christian brothers did not want to stop and heaven help me, John’s or yours or anyone’s, I did not want to stop, either. They had no reason to hurt us, they should be hurt in return. The heat of blood washing over my skin meant winning, meant I was better than they. In war I was a child. I only liked how it felt, I could only feel it, I could not think it or know it or talk to it. The last war in Pentexore ended a thousand years before I was born. How could I know how good and awful it could be, to hurt those who had hurt us? To feel the us-ness of it so wholly, and how us had to go on, and they had to stop. Stop, stop, stop.

  I want to confess something. Now that it’s all over and quiet. Please do not think badly of me. War has always meant mating. Pleasures of the skin and the body, a rising cascade. I still felt it, when I leapt upon a monk who had just stabbed a poor faun so many times she had no face left. I threw him to the ground and seized his hips between my knees and kissed him on the mouth with blood everywhere, everywhere, and I pushed my knife into him, over and over, out and in again, and he moaned underneath me and I liked it, I liked how he moved, and cried out, and died.

  I forgive you, daughter.

  I forgive you, mother.

  That was when I became her mother, on that plain, by that river, with her shoulders against mine and everything so new and sharp, and I fell over the body of something in the dark, it might have been one of them, or one of us, and she caught me. Father Jibril rushed up behind her and I threw a blade, slippery with monk, into his shoulder. We were both born in all that blood, squelching and black and stinking, and what do you ever call that but family, when the sun shows it all and you need to make it hurt less?

  Who killed Jibril, in the end?

  I knocked him down and you crushed his throat with your foot, and John, poor John, John who had to pick a side in the end, came running to his wife and his daughter panting over that priest, and he kicked him, he kicked and cried and screamed in his face: “Why? Why? Why?”

  But none of us killed him. He lived. I saw him as we were leaving, and boys were tending to him in the sunlight. I hope he never spoke again. When you count up the dead, the ones you want to see are never there.

  And Salah ad-Din, he fought with us. Better than us; he knew that kind of battle, where the knives come from behind and you believed you were safe. When he spun, the moon caught on his sword, his helmet, the silver in his tunic. He was made of silver.

  He killed Brother Dawud.

  That, too.

  When the novice came out crying stop, stop, stop, the green knight pulled a short axe from a dead astomi and hurled it at his head. Dawud went down without a sound. Stop, stop, stop. I have no anger on it—Salah ad-Din could not know. It does not matter. Everything falls apart. Everyone dies.

  I know you don’t want to say it. But you have to. You can’t tell the story without it. It wouldn’t be a true story then. It would be a story told to hide something.

  If I write that, if I put into letters on this page it will have happened again, and again, and again, and every time a pair of eyes reads it it will be happening again and he will never stop dying. He will never stop. I’ll be killing him a hundred times.

  You have to write it. I will hold your han
d. Write his name: Hadulph.

  Before Jibril—I will not call him Father, no, not that. Before Jibril came for my daughter he came for my lover, my lion. Events go forward and back in my memory, turning in circles so that it never has to see again that scene in the dark, full of roars. It should not even have been a contest, Hadulph should have swallowed his whole head before the bastard priest got his wretched short sticking blade out, but Jibril is a devil and tall, he is a devil and wiry, he is a devil and quick. He got in under Hadulph, into his soft red belly, and other monks leapt onto his back, and they cut into him over and over, they could not stop, he was too big a prize, to be able to say later they took down an infidel lion, and I heard them laughing while they did it.

  I laughed—it gets confused like that. Your body does everything all at once, it laughs and bleeds and screams and shits and runs and stops.

  I could not get there fast enough. I could not catch him when he fell.

  I forgive you.

  It didn’t take very long, the fighting, not really. We killed most of them. They retreated into their monastery and Salah ad-Din brokered our peace, our ugly, cold peace, wherein we were allowed to see to our dead and board our ships.

  It took my whole life, and all the rest of my life as well.

  The worst part was the funerals.

  Those who were left buried the dead—we are civilized, we are thinking beings, we bury our dead. The amyctryae tore out the earth with their great mouths, and no one grieved, because they would come back and it would be all right, they would visit the trees in the spring and say: Why, you are looking well, my love! The new pilgrimage would be to Nineveh, where all our beloved army of fools would send up a cheer with their waving boughs when we returned over the hills. I feel as though I knew it would not work, but I think I only had a black foreboding in my chest, looking at that mean, meager soil. Not our soil. Not our impossibly generous earth.