A Dirge for Preston John Read online

  Kukyk folded me up against her, and I could smell the Rimal, the sand-sea, on her hidden, secret skin. Her heart beat very fast within her feathery breast.

  “I am the only one kept from the war, for your sake,” she breathed, “I have fed you of my body, no less than your own mother. You must feed me, too; I am so alone, the world has gone to roost and I am bereft!” She wound her neck around mine, and I felt its awful softness against my fever. “You are not so unlike a pygmy,” she whispered. “Think of Leda—it will not be so terrible.”

  THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN

  We find it difficult to demarcate the time, when time is infinite and lovely as polished silver. Even so, Pentexoran engineers once tried to make a Rimal-hourglass from copper and mahogany. The panotii polished it with their long ears until the wood was red as cinnabar paste, the copper as bright as the wet eyes of those shy folk. But when the sands were poured into the glass they stormed and raged so against their prison that the glass was shattered and the angry sand skittered away, refusing to be used so roughly.

  Thus ended our clockmaking ventures.

  But the panotii are never stymied. They fashioned from the polished shards a far more useful mechanism: a mahogany sphere top-ful of sand, pierced with copper poles, which, when held to the ear, tells us when those four blessed days of the year have arrived, and a bridge forms within the sandy sea, adamant beneath a scalded sky.

  John, my priest, my husband, made me a true clock once. It stands near the window as evening descends on our new Constantinople, wheedling through my minaret with blue and diamond fingers. I can hear the night-wine sellers in the Lapis Pavilion; the dueling songs of the prayer-callers in the north and south meeting below my window in a violet puddle of exquisite dissonance. The face of John’s clock is warped and bubbled amber, in which is trapped a most peculiar skeleton, the tiniest bird I have yet seen, its neck contorted in death. He fixed golden fish-bones as clock-hands, chiseled gears from the roots of his Relic-Tree. It was well made, and with love—but I let it wind down years ago.

  How I wish I had an imp at my shoulder to dictate each passage to me! I should stretch my feet, drink green wines and read silly poems, while she scribbles away in my place, her claws like a familiar parrot, and how much easier my work would be then! But imps are selfish and conceited creatures, and I would end in cataloguing the fathers of the kingdoms of the goblins and seasonal varieties of maiden and forget my purpose entirely.

  I prefer translation infinitely to this gross composition: the lattice-work of another woman’s text lying beneath my fingers, glowing white where I ought to choose words of passion, blue for the terminology of sorrow. The original author’s intention guides my hands, like the grain in marble that cannot be avoided even by the finest chisel—it will be a faun’s mouth, or a fish-tail, and no sculptor may defy it. In translation I feel safe. I lie by the side of the dead author, curled into the shape of their salt-sweet body, and together we whisper, and together, hand upon hand, we write. How many lovers have I had in this way! How many lovers wooed and won!

  But to have only myself to seduce, only Hagia’s story to tell—it is a meager victory.

  To write my own words is more kin to reaching out into the darkness and commanding the shadows to coalesce into a marble figure the dimensions of whose face I cannot imagine, even for myself. I lie alone with no friendly ghost-hand on my knuckles, and am buffeted by didacticism, digression, daydreams. I imagine that when I look up from this work at last, there will be nothing left of the world but an old clock long run down, as useless as my old heart.

  Time stretches out so far before and behind me. No clock could demarcate a tenth of my memory. Yet in this wasteland of the hours, Time still seeks some hold, and we in Pentexore do know a kind of calendar.

  The Great Queen Abir reigned over the Age of Tallow and Tines, in which the Fountain was first discovered and the Oinokha set in her place like a jewel fast in a ring. With her wide hoof Abir marked out the laws which have kept us aright as little ships in a great storm.

  I recall once that John asked me if I knew the tale of Eve in Paradise. To which I gave his favorite reply: “I know nothing of this.”

  He did so love to lecture, and he told me straightaway of the apple and the named animals and the flaming sword set across the gate. In those days it was his theory that we Pentexorans dwelt yet in Eden, no matter how many times the lions showed him the several gates of our country and not a one of them with a sword stuck through the bars.

  His allegory spent, I took his head between my breasts, and he clasped his arms about my waist. While the glass bells rang out high as a hummingbird’s song in the al-Qasr, I told him the truth of his story. Sometimes I think that was my greatest use to him, to take his ugly tales and teach him the gorgeous truth hidden in them.

  I said: “Your Eve was wise, John. She knew that Paradise would make her mad, if she were to live forever with Adam and know no other thing but strawberries and tigers and rivers of milk. She knew they would tire of these things, and each other. They would grow to hate every fruit, every stone, every creature they touched. Yet where could they go to find any new thing? It takes strength to live in Paradise and not collapse under the weight of it. It is every day a trial. And so Eve gave her lover the gift of time, time to the timeless, so that they could grasp at happiness.”

  John did not think I interpreted the text correctly, and he scribbled for days in the corners of the palace in the strange, patchwork Bible he had compiled from memory, trying to make right his story of Eden. It was some time after this, his memory coming and going like a vicious tide, that he gave in to my theory and presented me with the gift of the clock: time to the timeless.

  And this is what Queen Abir gave to us, her apple in the garden, her wisdom—without which we might all have leapt into the Rimal within a century. The rite bears her name still. For she knew the alchemy of demarcation far better than any clock, and decreed that every third century husbands and wives should separate, customs should shift and parchmenters become architects, architects farmers of geese and monkeys. Kings should become fishermen, and fishermen become players of scenes. Mothers and fathers should leave their children and go forth to get other sons and daughters, or to get none if that was their wish. On the roads of Pentexore folk might meet who were once famous lovers, or a mother and child of uncommon devotion—and they would laugh, and remember, but call each other by new names, and begin again as friends, or sisters, or lovers, or enemies. And some time hence all things would be tossed up into the air once more and land in some other pattern. If not for this, how fastened, how frozen we would be, bound to one self, forever a mother, forever a child. We anticipate this refurbishing of the world like children at a holiday. We never know what we will be, who we will love in our new, brave life, how deeply we will wish and yearn and hope for who knows what impossible thing!

  Well, we anticipate it. There is fear too, and grief. There is shaking, and a worry deep in the bone.

  Only the Oinokha remains herself for all time—that is her sacrifice for us.

  There is sadness in all this, of course—and poets with long, elegant noses have sung ballads full of tears that break at one blow the hearts of a flock of passing crows! But even the most ardent lover or doting father has only two hundred years to wait until he may try again at the wheel of the world, and perhaps the wheel will return his wife or his son to him. Perhaps not. Wheels, and worlds, are cruel.

  Time to the timeless, apples to those who live without hunger. There is nothing so sweet and so bitter, nothing so fine and so sharp.

  My first Abir came for me when I was quite young. I had only sixty years, practically an infant, still full of my third draught of the Fountain. Festival flowers swept scarlet and green through the square of Shirshya, violins of orange-wood and cinnamon played songs both heavy and sweet. My mother and father kissed my eyelids and rubbed the soft, empty space above my collarbone—like a fontanel, it pulsates silkily, a
mesh of shadow and meat under the skin, never quite closed. Each blemmye finds their own way with it, protective or permissive. But often others catch us, deep in thought, stroking the place where our head is not. My parents caressed that place quietly, and kissed it, too. They embraced each other with abandoned tears beneath the vellum-trees, and left their parchment fields to the next family, thoughtfully sown and ready for new hands.

  The bronze Lottery bell spun in the courtyard; we drew our stones, our old selves vanished.

  Ctiste drew a small amethyst, and went north to crush grapes and sell wine on the Fountain-road; my father drew a pearl, and walked west to dive for sapphires in the cold, depthless Physon. They trembled with joy and sorrow, but my stomach was as full of fear as of breakfast, for I was unready to lose them, and it was my first Abir. I did not yet know how to bend with grace beneath it. My mother looked so beautiful, so young, her black skirts flapping, her eyes bright and wet! She already thirsted for swollen purple grapes, for a new man beneath her and new children at her heels. I wept, as the innocent will do, and envied her first new daughter.

  I changed too, that day. I drew an amber bead and married an amyctrya named Astolfo, who had bright green eyes and a great huge mouth like an empty barrel, in which he brewed tea and stew and poisons and perfumes, squatting and stirring draughts in his deep jaw with an iron ladle. I married him in a yellow crown, and on that day he became an ink-maker, to brew walnut-leech behind his teeth, and I no longer a child at play but the keeper of all our groves, which stood still and pale and waving, a long and shady library waiting for Astolfo and I to read it all. The Lottery went gentle with me that year. It did not send me far. My heart tore open and was stitched back together in one stroke, and this is the way of the Abir. It has a wisdom we cannot know or guess at.

  After the yellow crown was quite ruined in the mud by the laughing, eager thrusting common to all newly married folk, I went walking. My skin flushed with heat and memory, I wound through the groves to find the place where my mother had buried my little book, the one she had made of her smallest finger. She was no longer my mother, and could say nothing about it. I ate dry and spicy page-berries as I strode, and my shoulders were already red with summer.

  I found it, after some searching, between a pomegranate-quill tree, hunched and spiked, and a tall, stately glue-pine. My breath caught, and I clasped my hands to my belly.

  It was small, hardly as tall as I, its bark smooth as a front-board, pearlescent as a fingernail. Its leaves drooped, rustling faintly in the lazy wind. It bore few fruit, peeking from the page-leaves: the soft brown hands of my mother, with her long, graceful fingers, the oft-traced lines of her palm. I knelt beneath the little tree, and one of the dear, familiar hands turned slowly on the branch, as an apple will turn in a wavering breeze. It cradled my breast, wiping the tears from the eye at its tip, and another caressed gently the empty space above my collarbone. The hands of the tree held me so tenderly, and later I would swear to Astolfo that I could hear her old humming in the branches.

  Cradled so, I looked up into those boughs, clustered with pale pages, and read on each the same word, the single word of my thirty-first year:

  Forget.

  THE SCARLET NURSERY

  Children wish to know where they come from. It is a burning, terrible question for them, and they will phrase it a hundred ways: Why is the grass green? (Why am I not green?) Why does the wind blow? (Why do I blow and blow and make no storms or snap flowers from the stem?) Why do we live in a city? (Why am I myself and not some other child?)

  It was always my part to answer, little by little, the questions they asked and did not ask, until they woke up grown.

  One evening, Ikram, who liked the bloody parts best, gathered up all the bones of her supper and brought them into the Scarlet Nursery. I believe she had the entire skeleton of their delicious black swan in her enormous hand. Her fingers had been quite scratched by her brother earlier in the morning over the not-insignificant matter of a toy gryphon and his missing feathers. I myself had dined already, as I am accustomed to do, upon several savory dishes: the sound of their laughing, of the bones rubbing together in Ikram’s brown hand like a witch casting her eye, the whispers of the moon moving over the floor of the nursery, the snorting of the camels in the stables, the little harp a queensmaid played that afternoon in a far room of the al-Qasr, plucking to herself a little ballad in which some lover or another suffered calamity. It was a rich meal; I groaned with the weight of it. I sat in the center of the red room, the walls soft and crimson, the pillows of the floor sewn with ruby silk, even the bowls of the lamps lacquered as red as burning hearts. Everything large, everything strong, everything shaped to their mountainous hands, and meant never to break except on purpose.

  I sat while they ate below, opening my ears to their full span, which is to say I filled the room entire, my ears waving softly in the red light like sweet fishes’ fins, sampling a few notes of the roof creaking as a dessert. Only in solitude do I eat, and open myself so far, so wide. I have only to listen and I am nourished; my food is the sound of the world.

  If I was forced to eat with the children, I chewed demurely upon a flute of bamboo or stick of cinnamon. I never wished to be rude.

  That evening, Ikram set out all her supper-bones, according to size. She was an exact child, and very orderly when it came to things like bones and pinching and other things that might result in tears out of her siblings. Lamis watched her carefully, her long fingers twitching as if to help, in secret. Cametenna may have hands like boulders, but their fingers are deft, and Ikram cleaned each bone of meat, washed it, and set it beside its brothers.

  Lamis, Who Loathed to Be Left Out: What are you doing?

  Ikram, Who Was Proud of Her Bones: Houd broke my gryphon, and since Our Butterfly says I may not break his head, I am building a new toy which only you and I may touch. It is a Houdless Toy.

  Houd, Who Hated That Gryphon Anyhow: When I am grown I shall thump you, then everyone. I don’t want your horrid old bones!

  And then Ikram showed me what she meant with her bones, and I smiled, for she was so very dear and clever. It is the Ship of Bones, she said, and my gryphon’s old feathers will serve for the sail that was virgins’ hair in the story, and I shall set it sail upon a sea of pillows, and that will be the Rimal, and I shall wiggle my fingers among the pillows and that will represent Octopuses, who are very fearsome, and if I meet one I shall make it throttle Houd, for I am very good with pets.

  I asked if I should not then tell them the tale of the Ship of Bones, and how Folk came to Pentexore, while Ikram harassed with her waggling fingers the little ship she graciously allowed her sister to pilot over the pillows. Lamis squealed and giggled when the bony boat crashed on the silken red waves. It was not a pretty vessel, but we all forgave its awkward disposition and that it smelled very strongly of roast swan.

  Houd, Who Had Been by That Time Much Maligned: I would rather a Moral Tale. One that teaches us something Grown-Up and Important, such as how sisters ought to shut up, and those who are insulted and trod upon shall inherit the Earth.

  Ikram left off her worrying of the ship and held out her palm for me. I confess that I loved those girls so when they held out their giantess-hands. It meant they wished to hear a story, they wished to listen, and in that I felt kin. I always wish to listen. That I spoke endlessly to them was my sacrifice for their joy. I settled onto her hand, nestled next to the pad of her thumb, upon which I reclined like a marvelous prince. This is what they heard:

  In the old books, the place we came from was called Ifriqiya, and also Afar. But who is to say whether those are real words and true names? Perhaps there is no more meaning in them than in Lamis calling her toy lion Grof. Sometimes, we cannot remember what a thing is called, but we pretend to, because it is better to know something than to have to admit you have forgotten it. Forgetting is sad, and knowing is sweet. But one thing is certain: all the folk we know now came from Some Other Pla
ce, though not all of them rode on the Ship of Bones. The panotii, for example, came from the icy places at the top of the world, and followed the sound of laughing and building and orating down through the many rivers until we came upon the Axle of Heaven, and there we stayed. I believe I have heard it said that the red and white lions came out of the sea, though they do not like to speak of it. And of course, the phoenix come from Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, and they tell no one else how to get there.

  But that does not mean we found Pentexore empty! At the very least, octopi were in abundance.

  Ikram, Who Feigned the State of Being an Octopus: And fearsome?

  I smiled solemnly and answered her: Very. But do you remember when I spoke of the Spheres, and that Things will insist on Happening, and nothing stays forever? Countries are like that too. Many people come and go from them, and no one can say they were the first, for before them there were at least ants and spiders and wooly beasts, but very probably the sort of beast that writes down their own history and thumps their sisters and wants to learn Grown-Up and Important Things.

  Lamis, Who Wanted Very Much to Know Everything in the World: Who was here before us?

  The crows say they have always been here. But others, too, who are no longer here to claim it, perhaps lived and died right where we sit.

  When the ragged and wretched souls who sailed the Ship of Bones across the Rimal stumbled past the wetlands and the mountain-rills and the long colorless desert, the al-Qasr waited for them, already shining, and empty, with a wind blowing through its halls. The al-Qasr, your very home, your mother’s palace, all its amethyst walls, its porphyry columns and hematite staircases, its cypress roof and endless halls. This room, Lamis, was already red. A very famous philosopher called Catacalon, who lives yet in Silverhair and has horns on his head like a ram, wrote that once a race of stone men and women lived here, their faces faceted, their skin every color, and the al-Qasr is a living child of theirs, so old it does not even move any longer, but broods and sinks in the earth and dreams of the old days when every cheek sparkled.