A Dirge for Preston John

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Hajji found Houd in the morning, when the others were burying peacock-knights and cameleopards. She shrieked so horribly my ears popped. I did not know panotii could make a sound like that. She fell on him crying and bellowing, long and low and broken, like he was a son, like he was her own. I wanted to cry too, I wanted to beat his body to punish him for dying. His throat had been cut, flayed, really, back to the bone. But I could only stare, as if I watched it from a long distance.

  I will tell both my daughters someday. I will tell them how well and long Hajji loved Houd. She was still sobbing when John brought us together in the ruins of his tent. The morning mist was cold.

  The Clouds peeking in to witness.

  John the priest said: “Here, what you bury is only buried. They will not come back, none of them. They will rot before we could ever get them home. Dead means dead. You have to stop.”

  We did not understand. Aya the astomi who had hoarded all her secrets won at sea said: “You mean it will take a long time? We can wait. We can find caves to hide in, with no monks, until it happens.”

  “No,” John said, and his voice choked. “It will never work.”

  Ummo the sciopod exclaimed: “But the barrels! We brought barrels of earth, we can bury them and take them back with us. At least the smaller ones…”

  But the barrels were broken. The monks had stripped the saplings and shredded the hedges for weapons—we had cut and been cut with our own armory, for of course the priests had little enough of their own. I remember looking down, at all the black earth spilled out onto the thirsty grass. How it stained everything, and blew away in the winds.

  When we understood, no one spoke. A stillness devoured us. Dead means dead. We were children. We had never met anyone who had died. We had never thought of ambush or blades in the dark, only gamesmanship, fighting in the sun in straight lines. We had been defeated and yet barely fought at all—we could not comprehend it.

  My father said to me later: they hurt us because I was unfaithful. And they hurt us because they did not want the world to contain us. They could just barely tolerate it if we consented to act as their weapons, their blades and their arrows. If we consented to become tools. But if we would not—well, there is blood at the bottom of every heart that has never seen sunlight. They wanted their world to stay the shape they had always known it to be, the shape, the size, the substance. They could not bear to see it unfolding, containing so much. I understand it. Once I felt Pentexore was strange and other to me, and I was normal, good, a real man. Now I think there is only us, and we must get back to where we can be safe, and hidden, at the edge of everything. I will hide you from men like me. I will atone for them, who cannot even see the need to atone for themselves. Though perhaps Hagia will let me keep the city names. They are such beautiful words.”

  I took Hadulph’s bones and his eyes and his teeth. I knew I would never get his body back, but I took my relics and they are in a box of cedar in my war-chest. When we are home I will plant him. Nothing that will speak to me or love me again will come from it. It will be a tree of bone in the desert, and its leaves will be red. To love is to bury, but the world is mixed up out here, at the edge of everything. Both love and the earth are broken.

  John said: “Hurry. Hurry. We must pull the ships to the Rimal. Better that we spend a year at sea than another moment among jackals.”

  Jackals aren’t so bad. It’s only when they scream, they sound like they’re dying.

  I wish Qaspiel had never come back. I wish I had not had to see its eyes, their total incomprehension, when they lighted upon the field of dead. Had not had to hear the words die in its throat: I found a way around the river. It is so far, so far, but the river has an end. I wish I had never seen Qaspiel hold Hadulph’s great head in its lap and weep silent white tears. I wish it had just kept on flying, over the sea and on and on, to whatever lands lie beyond this one where no Pentexoran and no human have ever walked. I put my hand on its face. “I want to be a child again,” I whispered. “I want to not know anything I know now.”

  I left a smear of blood on its cheek, shaped like my hand.

  We ran away. In ships, hauling the lines over our shoulders, dragging them, our hands still sore and barely washed clean of the holy guts of holy men. Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi gave us three silver chests full of oranges. For the rotting sickness that comes at sea, he said. He embraced John, and told him never to come back, not ever, no matter what he saw in a mirror. John the king frowned, and rubbed his brow.

  “The mirror said we were not there. It said: Jerusalem burns, then Constantinople. It did not say: an army of beautiful monsters came across the sea and saved everyone.”

  “You would not have saved everyone, anyway. You would have killed me if geography had cooperated.”

  “I would have. Yes. And I would not have been sorry. Just as they are not sorry for what they did to the demons who came into their territory. God is a field with a line drawn through it, and men to each other: do not cross the line. And the line vanishes with all the boots upon it. But what I mean to say is the mirror showed what is still to come, or has already passed, or both, but what it never showed was me, coming home and putting out flames. It did not show that I was here, that I will be here—and so I never was here, and will never have been here.”

  Salah ad-Din embraced me, and I could not help it, I cried in his arms as I had not before; I cried for all of us, and him too, who had not come to our country, who held me without embarrassment as my bare breasts touched him. So easy to love one man, I thought. Easy to hate and love John, easy to love Salah ad-Din. I once feared what a nation of Johns might do to me—and I know what a nation of Salah ad-Dins will do to that city in the mirror. No one is righteous. I am not. What of a nation of Hagias? They too would roll and reek in the dirt and push a knife through a boy’s brain. On the other side of the Rimal is a place called hell. But I had finished with speaking and said none of it. The green knight embraced Sukut and the bull-seer told him: “They will love you, you know. The Christians. They will tell stories about you and the king who was half lion. They will love you for all the ways you seemed like them, which is the only reason anyone loves anyone. They will love you because it is so easy to pick out one among the enemy and say: there, there is a good devil among the horde. That is an ugly love, a vulture’s love. But that is how they will love you. The thread moves through the maze of the sky and you are the ball it streams from.”

  He embraced me, and I stole a kiss, and he blushed—I think in the end there was a limit to what he could find lovely in his djinni, for he never stopped calling us that. And I made an end with my kisses. But I do not care—I took what I wanted.

  Two stayed. When the ground softened and went to swirling eddies of sand, and the ships dipped and bobbed, buoyant suddenly, and a few birds cawed in that way that all seabirds know, two would not come.

  The first was Niobe, still clutching her pot, its jewels broken, its capstone cracked. “There is nothing left for me if I cannot find Heliopolis. I cannot bury myself at home. I am one thing, you are all another. I will take Qaspiel’s road around the river and find the city of the sun. I will find it all, and I will live.”

  Aya rubbed her prodigious nose. She righted a table on the deck of our poor flagship. She poured out the stones from the old cup. “Does anyone want to play?” she whispered. And some did. Sukut did. A few blemmye boys. The minotaur sat down at the table and put out his hand flat, palm-down. The betting pose. “Two secrets,” he said. “One about the future. One about the past.” Aya shook the stones.

  [Finally, the blue spores swirled over the paragraph and swallowed it. I felt a kind of relief—I could stop fearing that it would happen. It would. The nature of the world is decay. Everything swirls toward death, even books the color of the sky. The corners of the pages curled darkly, blue-grey, slate. Hiob moaned, and answering him, the mold intensified, gleaming turquoise, swooping down into the margins as if it meant to illuminate the
thing itself. I would not know Sukut’s secrets. Nor Aya’s. But that was always the gamble and the game. Sometimes you hoard your winnings, so as to play again.]

  “When you marry a man, do you think you marry a city, too?” Hajji whispered. Her eyes had dried, but she seemed hollow enough to knock over if you were not careful. Brittle. Scoured. “It doesn’t matter if you marry someone from the same city as you. But if you marry a foreigner. I married a man from Yerushalayim.”

  “Hajji,” I said gently. “We’re not supposed to talk about the old days.”

  The panoti whirled on me. “I don’t care. Houd is dead. I don’t care. I’ll talk about what I like. Isn’t that what you wanted all along? To have me tell you a story? Well, be silent, child. I am telling. I married a man from Yerushalayim and I married Yerushalayim. Now I am a widow but Yerushalayim still lives. I am half a widow. Houd always wanted to see Didymus Tau’ma’s city. He dreamed of it, what it would be like, how it would smell. He told his sisters he would beat them to it, that he was faster, that they could not catch him. I am going with the green knight. I will hide in one of his silver chests so that no one thinks him wicked for harboring… a djinn. When he takes Yerushalayim as Sukut says he must, as the mirror says he must, I will walk through the streets but recently burned, and I will see the places Tau’ma spoke of, where he and his brother spoke and laughed and told riddles. I will see the pomegranate garden and the table where they ate that strange and final meal. I will eat a meal there, and drink wine, and think my own thoughts alone, in a city of people who do not know my name. I will put my ears up and wrap them in silk. I will wear a veil. I will be invisible. I will be happy. I will see it all for Houd, and he will delight without sound, without form, somewhere over my left shoulder. In a thousand thousand years I will still be there, walking in the streets of a city full of awful wonders, of machines and voices and lights. I will still be there, and so Houd will still be there, and the sun and the moon and I will live as an old married triad, and that is the story of my life that I am telling and will tell forever.”

  Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi took Hajji, who was once Imtithal, onto his shoulder without a word. Without a word he consented to her tale.

  Her pale ears trailed down like a priestess’s stole. I watched them walk out and up, over the grassy hill that once was Nineveh, the Shamash Gate and the stone lions, back to his army and her long road. The light settled down on them, heavy and old.

  It is done. We are the living. Everything can go back now, to how it was before. I will introduce you to my mother Kukyk, and you can exchange amusing stories about John. I will take my sister for walks and teach her about the Sedge of Heaven. I will eat everything wonderful that grows in Nural. I will sleep for a year. It is over and now we can be happy. Can’t we? That was the battle of Nineveh, and it is over now.

  No. That was the battle of Jerusalem. When we come home we will tell them we saw the holy land, and fought there, and that all is well in that part of the world. I will not let Hadulph and Houd and all the rest have died for utterly nothing. For less than nothing, for a story John wanted to tell himself, and that sickens even he. Sickens all of us, as we rode home over the waves for a year and a day. The rotting sickness that comes at sea. And no island with a welcoming nymph to make love to our old war-bones and offer us universes. Just a long, flat horizon and the endless clatter of stones in a cup. Never stopping. Stop, stop, never stop.

  I am the one writing this, and that makes it so. That was Jerusalem, and we bled there. Where we died, that was holy land.

  THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,

  THE RIGHT-HAND EYE

  Run. Four paws on the green earth.

  “It’s my fault,” Elif said into my ear as he rode me, the little cradle-knight, toward the Wall and the girl and the end. “I should have tied her up.”

  Run. One, two, three, four. Paws eat the distance.

  “It’s my fault,” I said. “I didn’t listen to her left-hand mouth. You don’t listen when a child says she hates you. If you listened every time they said things like that you’d die of shame. It’s like the voices coming out of the old stone. They can’t help it, so you just keep working, no matter what whispers out. Children are old stones. Ancient flecks of crystal compacted together so fiercely that they remember who they were before, and talk like their parents and their grandparents.”

  Run. Pad and claw in the moss, in the swamp, in the sand. Wind chafe on the nose, in the eye. Keep running. Never stop. She is so far ahead already.

  [Silver-black corruption caught Sefalet up and turned her the color of night. The dark fuzz was tipped with glowing spores, waving lightly, promising a bier for me, too. My great fear was suddenly not that I would lose the tale but that a black blossom would spring up and compel me to devour it as Hiob had. I raced to finish before it could send up its rose. I raced to finish before the book could make me part of it, could drag me inside its sweet-smelling spoil, into a luxurious bed of death.]

  Sefalet stood near the Wall. She shivered and clamped her hands over her ears and rocked back and forth. The Wall looked sickly, half-violet, overgrown. Shadows came streaming around the cliffs and the diamond gates and the little huts of the cannibal village at the foot of that terrible gap in the stone, so quiet, as though no one had ever lived there. Elif started to run toward her in his tripping, clopping way. But oh, we had to be careful. There was so much we did not know.

  “Sefalet,” Elif called to her. “Don’t run. You’ll get tired out and break.”

  “I am broken,” said both of the princess’s mouths.

  “No, no,” I said, and closed the distance between us, pressing my forehead to the top of hers. Behind me I could hear doors creak as the villagers peered out to see what would happen. “Only sick, my love. Never broken. Now tell your lion why you came running so far. Why you wanted to be here. You see you’ve arrived and there is nothing unusual, everything is as it has always been. What did you want to do?”

  Sefalet put her hands up so that she could look at me with her huge eyes, so like Hagia’s. She dropped one—her left.

  “To break something big,” she whispered. She clapped both hands over her chin, a gesture that in any other girl would have been meant to stifle herself, to keep the words in, but they came so fast I knew they must have hurt coming out, each one a thin, sharp slicing wound.

  The right-hand mouth wept: I think it’s a real place, the place I see when I dream, the place where the dogs live, and drink from their black bowl. It is somewhere cold, and there are other girls there, two of them. Sometimes I can almost see them, but then they slip away. I think it is a real place and I am there and they didn’t mean to hurt me, they only saw I had an empty mouth and they needed it, they needed someone to come here to the Wall and make this happen, because you can’t open something without a wedge. It is someplace far away, on the top of the world, but it is not just a dream. It’s where I was born. Not me, not really me—because I think I was a baby for a few moments, before I was Sefalet. But Sefalet was born there in the dark with a collar and a leash on her neck, drinking from a bowl of ocean, and speaking with two mouths, and born to be a wedge. But I don’t want to be a wedge. I don’t want to be the lever or the place to stand on. I want to be a princess and love Elif and Vyala and sleep with my head on my mother’s stomach. Why can’t I? Why can’t I? What did I do? Was I bad? I want to be good, I could be good, if only I could stop being myself I could be good.

  The left-hand mouth spoke calm and triumphant: In the beginning was the Wall and the Wall was with God and God was a wall. Someone decided the world needed walls. Walls to keep things apart, to keep countries from meeting and mating and merging, to keep order firm and straight, to slow down time, and keep history from running on ahead, so fast, so fast you could never catch her. We can see everything, and it is a real place at the top of the world, but you are not ready to come here yet, you are not ready to know us by our names, only by our works shall you know us, and by ou
r works we will bring the new world into being, we will make it be born. Everything will meet everything else, and there will be no more walls forever, and we promise this is how it must be. We are not capricious, we are just a girl waiting for her first kiss, we are just a new heaven and a new earth waiting to be wakened from a thousand-year sleep by an enchanted princess. We are just Fate, three sisters and this one our youngest of all. That is how we have children. We find a mouth no one is using. Three who can see the one world to come, a fourth to bring it round. For the world has chosen and it says: make me whole. Think of us as just a kind of haggard Calypso, offering everything, asking the world to choose anew. But it’s a lie, really. There is only one choice and it is always the same. Only in Pentexore was any other ever possible. The world always says: I choose to wither and die, if it means love and tapestries and sons and suitors, if it means stories and wars and a thousand ships launching. And we only give the world what it wants. Wake up. Wake up.

  Sefalet screamed out of both mouths, short sharp screams as though something was cutting her. She turned toward the Wall.

  “Don’t,” Elif whispered. “I’m afraid.”

  So was I. I tried to seize her up between my teeth, but she was faster. Still screaming, she ran toward the Wall, stumbling, falling toward it. Sunlight came pouring through the ancient, filthy, mossy diamonds of the gates. A kind of music echoed dimly, distant, and I did not realize until too late that it came from the other side of the Wall. A wild, frenetic music, without rhythm, chaotic, gorgeous, unbound. Louder and louder it came as my girl reached the Wall, drawing her breaths like knives, crying and shaking, and the sunlight was in her and she was the light and it came out of her and pooled inside her.