A Dirge for Preston John Read online

  The children breathed, even Houd, looking about at the walls, the floor, the ceiling. They fell very quiet.

  But I was speaking of the Ship of Bones, wasn’t I? Every sort of Pentexoran claims to have had an aunt or a cousin on it, but Ghayth Below-the-Wall, who was a Peacock and a Historian, tells us that the crew consisted of the sciopods, the cametenna, the astomii, the amyctryae, the meta-collinarum, and the blemmyae. Some few crickets also stowed aboard. Some argue over the list, when they are drunk or grieving or boasting in a strange city or in need of tenure. But if everyone who claimed to have been on the Ship had been, it surely would have sunk under the weight. Why these creatures and not others? It is not for your butterfly to say. Perhaps they were prisoners, set adrift with prayers of drowning, or representatives of some extremely dubious government sent to make a glorious new kingdom, or a persecuted religious sect in search of holy land, or a troupe of actors. They had but bones and hair to build their ship, and so I think they must have come from a war; they must have been so tired, and in such grief, living in some awful place where bones were as plentiful as wood to them, and hair as easy as linen to weave.

  Even if the worst of these is true, even if they were prisoners or actors, their lives were hard, so terribly hard. We must never forget, and never forget to pity them. They did not discover the Fountain in their first halting steps into the gold of this country, and so died in their time and speak to us no more, for their children did not know to plant them and have flowering branches bearing their loved ones to converse with, but instead set them in high trees according to some dreadful custom only they know. Even the heart of the roughest beast must pity them for their cold blood, for their hearts of dust.

  Houd, Who Was a Rough Beast: I don’t.

  Whoever they may have been before, they became lost upon the Rimal.

  Ikram, Who Loved Tales of Disaster: Mother tells that joke! A blemmye, a red lion, and a centaur became lost on the Rimal—

  Everyone tells such jokes. Woe to the man who is not a queen possessed of giggling children, who in his cups leans in to tell his friends of the amusing antics of a trio of mismatched fellows lost on the Rimal, for he will surely be doused in beer and shunned. Of course, our sea of sand is passable but four days a year, when a kind of road forms in the currents, and whisks ships through this golden channel and to the shore. The Rimal is a strange beast, rougher even than Houd and more cunning. It rings the blue, briny seas of other nations in mischievous and insidious ways, sending its yellow tendrils into the water and catching the rudders of foreign ships, hauling them from their familiar waves and snatching them into the sand, where the Octopi and worse have at them.

  Ghayth says that the pilot of the Ship of Bones, who was a sciopod, saw a light in the sky that called to him, a violet light so lurid and awful and beautiful the sciopod felt his arch ache and his heart pull apart within his chest. None of the others aboard the Ship believed him, or so the sciopods now say.

  Was it a star? his companions said. No, not a star.

  Was it the moon? his companions pressed. No, not the moon.

  Was it a thing like us, with eyes and a soul and a hunger for bread?

  I do not know, said the sciopod. It might have been, but I think not.

  Yet he could not unsee it, and he steered the ship towards the violet light in the sky, and sometimes he thought it was a living being like himself, but with wide wings and eyes like wounds, and sometimes he thought it was a great fire in the distance, and that when they reached the shore he would find only charred earth and more bones, more and more. The light tormented the pilot, and even when he shut his eyes, all he could see was the light that was not a star, or a moon.

  On the thirteenth night of the pilot’s watch, the Ship shuddered and quaked, and the grey-blue arms of an Octopus—

  Ikram, Who Had Been Waiting for This: Hooray!

  The grey-blue arms of an Octopus—though some say a Squid—wrapped around the hull, lapping at the rails, sucking at the sails. With great difficulty, the crew struggled to steer, and though one astomi was caught by the nose and died, they rode the Octopus into the beach and stove in his soft head against the rocks. So it was that the first meal eaten in Pentexore by our people was Octopus, raw and dripping under a very cold moon, for they were so ravenous they could not take the time to cook it. This is why we eat Octopus during Midsummer, in remembrance. Perhaps you will not slurp it down so greedily next year.

  Houd, Who Was Always Hungry: I shall. And I shall not cook it either! It will be delicious.

  Lamis, Who Had a Delicate Stomach: Ugh! It will be slimy!

  I have not finished. The sciopod-pilot woke in the night, and he saw again the violet light, brighter and more terrible than it had ever been at sea. He followed it, hopping on his single foot, over the desert hills and the wetlands and the long, long fields of wild pepper, pink and black and green, until he came upon a valley so green it shone white in the dark. There he saw the violet towers of the al-Qasr, gleaming, silent, satisfied, as if the stones themselves had called him from the other side of the world, and now held him fast.

  THE WORD IN THE QUINCE

  Chapter the Third, in Which a Certain Morbid Orchard Entraps a Pilgrim, Whereupon He Devours an Entire Cannon and Engages in Debate With Several Sheep.

  On the day I discovered the forest, the sun opened sores like kisses on my head, and I thought of my mother. Creeping knock-kneed from the satisfied and sleeping crane in whose softness I shamed myself, I found my thoughts full of the woman who bore me, far across the stony face of the world. In the places I walked, veins of red writhed through golden, half-shattered plinths and cairns—everything rock and dust, everything hard and dry, and not a little grass feathering up to feed me, not a green bulb that might hide water. I trembled beneath the weight of the sky, the bloody smear of sun that seemed to droop too close to the earth, too close, too close. Only the cairn-shadows offered solace, and that of a grim, hot sort. The colors of the place blinded me, gold and blue, a brightness like a blow.

  And yet, instead of water, instead of shade, I thought of my mother. If she had been a man I think she might have been no less honored than Nestorius himself—but she was not a man, and she lay her hands not to holy books and relics but to cloth and to water, to bread and to cheese-straining. Each of these acts she performed as exquisitely as a priest lifts his chalice, and I remember her black eyes always through a veil: the steam of a bath, or of some sweet thing cooking. All the daughters she bore my father died, and then my father, too, long before I could remember him. Only I lived, small and coughing, and every year until I took my orders she told herself to be hard and strong as bronze and bone, for that year would take me, too. Because I stood so near to the doors of this world, she fed me of her breast long past other children, and spoke to me of myrrh and aloe and the kingdom of paradise, where every possible tree grew and would sate me, where angels with wings of fiery violet and black would take me up, and call me good. Those visions filled me, and weighted me toward God.

  But she also spoke strangely, as a mystic in the desert might, balanced on his high pale pillar under the infinite stars—if a woman could stand thus, and speak thus, and bear the pain of it—which she could not.

  Shame comes upon us like lightning in summer, she whispered once, over the sound of her needle pricking a hem with a tiny pop, and though the horror of it flashes so fiercely, there is pleasure in it, too, a prickling of the skin, of the stomach. That is the danger. Like the lightning, shame shows the world in terrible colors, so that you might see, if you look closely, not only the stain of your sins as they seep into your soul, but the extent of your act, all its consequences, revealed like a thousand burning reflections, everything that was changed by the moment of your fall. Perhaps Eve saw that way, not just the fig in her hand but a hundred thousand figs, shivering forward and backward, sizzling, deadly, in that moment, through all the sorrows to come, and slipping backward through all her innocent days, tai
nting them even though they had passed.

  Even then I wondered how she could think such thoughts. Even the gossipy market-wives, their strong arms full of honey-soaked cakes and wine-jugs that we could never have hoped to buy, considered my mother pure and kind as a clutch of doves. What did she know of shame? Her heart was unfathomable to me.

  And as I walked inland—though I knew nothing of where I meant to go I could not escape the feeling of inward, of moving up and in and toward something—I thought constantly of my mother’s words, her blasted, weary black eyes, and the lightning of her shame. I felt as though I could almost see that way, something dancing at the corners of my vision, Eve’s fig, my crane, moving forward and back, to what end—or beginning—I could not then say.

  But it would not be long. Illumination came swiftly in that place, and with the heaviness of a great stone.

  The cranes had hooted vaguely in the direction of the sun, east and north, now a little more east, now a little less north. Many cities, they shrugged. That way, out there, not so far. Post-coital etiquette occupied them, and I felt desperate to leave, to stop blushing like a child, to forget it all. And so I aimed my broken body, east and north and in and up. After days wandering through the golden stylite-pillars with their pitiless shadows, days under the accusing sun and a moon that burned me no less than her brother, her great single eye like God’s own, staring at me with such disappointment, I came upon a kind of forest. My sunken chest heaved, and I wanted to die for the hideousness of it, the kind of ugly madness contained in those trees. I would have died happily, if dying would have recused me from that place, from whatever thing my mother’s black-violet angels had planned for me here. But a man cannot die his way out of Hell.

  The sky poured the first of its sweet-sour light over a copse of trees, each of them withered and twisted and grotesque in equal parts. Some trunks glowered blackly, slick with grease, and as I came near I saw them to be cannons, worked in fine designs like those of some great Emperor’s ship, and among their silvery leaves hung fruit like shot. In the wood of others I perceived arched windows and platforms on which small birds sang and pecked—these trees were fashioned like siege towers, the color of baked mudbrick, shrunken and warped as all living things may be, but nonetheless, arrows that might have flown from their heights thatched themselves into branches, and pitch-berries dripped from their boughs. Worse yet were the horse-trees, whose bark bristled like chestnut pelts, their long, whip-like leaves snapping at passing flies. The devilish fruit grinned at me: horse-heads, in full silver armor and bits, their plates clinking lightly in the wind. One snorted. I stared at the war-garden as it stared back at me, for many of the trees—which I shudder to relate—were soldier-oaks, and knight-elms, swords and helmets crowned with long white plumes sprouting from their foliage, and here and there, here and there I thought myself to see brown eyes and blue peeking among the thick green leaves.

  A good man would turn away from such a clearly infernal presence. A good man, on returning home, could say: though I starved and thirsted I did not so much as look at that serpent’s orchard. A good man would have let the sun hollow his body and think nothing of how if a thing grows it must be possible to eat it, no matter how strange, and given enough days to starve in the desert, he might succumb to that awful, awful fruit.

  But the flesh, the flesh may err, and I am not, I am not, I was never a good man.

  I dug my nails into the fleshy wood of the cannon-tree; it gave beneath my fingers, slushy, slimed, and beneath the grease I felt hard iron. I reached up and from the harsh boughs, twisted and spiked as all desert trees are, pulled a heavy fruit, round and black and pitted as any cannon-shot I have known. I tested it; it was warm, solid, a little soft. Oh, Mother of Us All, how must you have stood, at that first tree, testing the weight of a fig in your hand, wondering what world might crack open at the meeting of your jaws in that sweet, seedy thing?

  I bit. The charcoal skin of it gave, a crackly, papery crust. Within, the meat of it melted into my mouth, powdery, soft, but oh, the spice of it bloomed in my senses, a black pepper snapping on my tongue, an overwhelming, dusky sweetness, worse and better than any plum, and the metal pit tanged the flesh all through. Black juice trickled down my chin, into my beard, staining my teeth. I drank it, slurping, slovenly, and reached for more. I stripped the bark from the cannon-trunk, and this, too, I found good, a kind of coppery cinnamon. I dashed to the siege-engine tree, and chewed with relish the sticky pitch-berries, treacle-thick and bitter, bitter, as bitter as a walnut-skin. I spat. But oh, how much more terrible the weight of all that dark fruit in me. Not a fortnight in a heathen land and already I had soiled my body in several unusual ways.

  And hadn’t I come for something? Wasn’t there a reason that had driven me from olive-shadows of Constantinople and shared mackerel-slurry with Kostas in the market? Didn’t I want something, then? Why was I here?

  “He who shall eat of such a tree is like to a grave-robber,” came a soft, bleating voice from further into the awful forest. “And a grave-robber is like to a devil, and if the devil had been punished more in his youth, he’d never have come to such an end.” Silence, and the sun slashing through the leaves. “Bad!” the voice cried louder, reduced in its rage to a squeal. “Bad man! Stop! Desist! Bad, bad man! That’s not yours!”

  I peered into the wood and crept forward, afeared to find the voice and yet too curious to leave the place and press on without seeing the source of that reedy bleat. Some ways into the nodding trees I saw it, and for all the cannon-fruit heavy in my stomach and the sun-boils weeping on my skull, I sank to my knees and laughed. A man can only take so much. The grave horror of a siege-engine planted in the earth is one thing—but before me a sweet green tree shaded the cracked earth, broad leaves fluttering over several large sheep-heads, their wooly bodies like stalks of wheat puffing out below their necks before disappearing into the trunk, which seemed to be made of ram-horn. Some of the sheep had black faces, some creamy and pale, drooping lazily, half-asleep or wholly. A few sported their own curling horns and chewed at the wide leaves; the tree fed itself and on itself, round and around. One ram glared at me with a sharp look.

  “You haven’t the right, sir. Not to eat of us. Or else give me a bit of your blood in exchange—that would be only fair!”

  “The fruit of the forest belongs to God, and thus to all men,” I said softly, drawing my laughter back in.

  “Whose God is that, then?” sneered the sheep.

  “Our Lord in Heaven, and Christ at His right hand.”

  The ram snorted, and a puff of wool drifted off on his breath. “Well, I’ve never heard of such a creature, neither one of them. The Shear, who is the god of my people, and certainly far more terrifying and important than yours, who doesn’t even live here but in hefen, spake unto the first ewe and the first ram and said: Let no one enjoy the produce of thy body unless he offers his own in kind. Which we have always taken to mean: if you and your own want to spin and weave from our fleece, you owe us at the very least a nice soft pen and sweet clover and a bit of cold, clear water. I hardly think it goes differently for cannons!”

  “While it is charming that you think thus, there is certainly no God but Christ, and He gave men dominion over the land beneath His feet, the sheep and oxen, and the beasts of the fields.”

  The ram regarded me stonily. “When I lived I saw my God in his Fearful Aspect come upon the dewy field before dawn. His great black fleece blotted out my sight, and the candles of his eyes dripped tears of tallow. His teeth were gnashing shears, and with them he took up my lambs and chewed them, and I wept, but where his shadow fell clover grew, and new lambs gamboled as if in the sunlight, and I knew I would mate again. In the morning my young had been carved up for winter supper, but the spring brought more, and they grew strong. Can you say the same of your God? Did he come and sit by your bedside and offer you peace when pain came? Did you look into the candles of his eyes, smell the brume of his musk? Or do you m
ake up stories because you are lonely and bray about it all day long?”

  “You are a beast, and do not have a soul. Worse, you seem to be a sort of plant as well. What purpose could there be in ministering to you?”

  “That’s the loser’s argument if I ever heard it,” smirked the ram, and chewed at a bit of leaf.

  I felt it best to inquire after some other subject—I have never been a missionary, or aimed at that golden felicity of tongue that such men possess. When I attempted it, I used too many words or too few, and no one was converted by peals of light exuding from my inspired mouth. In the world I knew, in the world I loved best, the world of Constantinople, painted blue domes and artichokes and quinces and loyal, simple men with God’s own devotion in their eyes, everyone knew what God looks like. We may have disagreed on points of scripture, we may even have divided a room and called some heretics and some pure on the basis of a single verb, but no one argued that Christ reigned in Heaven as king, that His Crown was Many-Storied, that Mary was His Mother and He Died to Rise Again. Except the heathen Saracen, or even more perverse Easterner. I often thought in those days that deviance and perversity must increase the further one ventured eastward. But even in the east they admitted that Christ was holy, His Birth miraculous. When the argument centered not on whether Christ lived as one being and one flesh or separate in the Word, His Breath and Spirit, and the Flesh, His Earthly Body, but whether or not a gargantuan sheep had appeared to another sheep in some blasted farmyard, there could be no real discourse.