Interfictions (39 page)

"Say it,” he said. He sat me on the ivory chair and knelt at my knees, the beauty that all supplicants possess sitting full and shining on his thick features. He closed his kiss over my navel-mouth and his tears were like new wax. “Say it,” he whispered.

The ivory chair is long; it curls at its ends into arm-rests in the shape of ram's horns, severed from the sea-goat when the first caravan settled in this endless valley, the first enclave of bird and monopod and gryphon and cricket and phoenix and pygmy—and blemmye. And they camped on the beach-head and pulled from the sea with their silver spears a fatted kid, and ate the fat of its tail sizzling from the driftwood fire, and in time those first horns were affixed to the long chaise which became a sacrificial plank which became an altar which became a throne which became my pillow as his weight pressed the small of my back against the cold ivory—

"Please,” he said, and wept, for he had tried not to, tried not to brush his palm against my eyelid, tried not to run his fingers across the teeth in my belly, tried not to glance at the soft place where my head is not. He had tried not to lift me onto the nacreous chair, and tried not to enter me like a postulant sliding his hands into the reliquary to grip the dry bone.
Virginity confers strength
, he had said.
It is the pearl which purchases paradise
.

I had led him to the edge of the river which churns basalt against schist, and showed him the trick with the bed—but I had used my favorite lapis-and-opal ring. I moved his hand as I would a child's, digging the furrow by moonlight and the river's din, placing the ring in the earth, covering it with moist, warm soil.
Wait
, I had said,
till the pepper blooms black, and you will see what paradise I can purchase at the price of a ring.

We waited; I learned my Latin declensions:
rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam, rose.
The pepper harvest piled up black and red fruits; the stalks withered; the snows came and went again.
Rex. Regis. Regi. Regem. Rege.

I took him to the river which churns agate against marble and showed him the thing we had made: a sapling, whose stem was of silver, whose leaves curled deep and blue, lapis dark as eyes, veined in quartz flaws. Tiny fruits of white opal hung glittering from its slender branches, and the moon washed it in christening light.
This is hell
, he quavered, as I stroked the jeweled tree. It seemed to shrink from him in shame. I touched his face, his unyielding neck; I wrenched his head towards me, and he stared into the eyes that blink from my breasts, the cobalt leaves peeking around my ribs like the heads of curious peacocks.
At the ends of the earth is paradise; look around you, the earth is nowhere to be seen,
I had whispered
, and I do not need pearls
.

As if his hand was dragged through the night by a hook of bone, he had touched the place where my head is not, the soft and pulsing shadowy absence, the skin stretched and taut, and beneath our tree of blue stone he had spilled his seed into me for the first time—it seemed safer than to spill it into the ground.

"Say it, please, Hagia, say it,” he cried, and the muscles of his neck strained in his cry, and I held his face in my hands, and his tears rolled over my knuckles, and I sung quietly under him, and my voice filled the empty choir:

Ave Maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus—

Fortunatus clawed the sand of our crumbling amphitheater, with the nations of our nation gathered—as much as the nations are inclined to gather, which is to say lazily and without much intent of discussing anything. He was nervous; the color in his tail was low and banked, and his throat dry. The hulking beast did not love speaking, and he loved less that his size bought him respect he did not feel he had earned. So everyone listened, and he hated them for listening.

"I think,” he began, his beak glittering gold in the glare of the sun, “that we ought to make him king."

"Why?” shouted Grisalba, trying to wrangle a slab of honeycomb with her sister, who had thought she was invited to a festival, and not a makeshift parliament. “When Abibas the Mule-King died, we planted him and if we have any disputes we take it to the mule-tree and it's been as good a government as you could ask for."

Fortunatus frowned, and the glare went out of his gold. “Abibas has dropped his leaves and it has been far too long since he gave us any velvet-nosed fruit on which to hang the hopes of primogeniture. The Priest will not be partial—there are no other creatures like him among us, no faction for him to favor. And,” the gryphon cast his yellow eyes to the sand, speaking softly—yet the amphitheater did its work, and not one of us failed to hear him, “he must be lonely. There is no one here for him, no one of his kind who understands his passion for the Ap-oss-el, no one to speak his snarled language and look him in the eye without reflecting their own strangeness back to him. I pity him—do you not?"

"He will make us convert!” cried the monopods, snapping their garters in consternation. “He will make the al-Qasr into a church and we will all crawl around begging forgiveness for who knows what!"

Fortunatus shrugged his great, shaggy shoulders. “And when Gamaliel the Phoenix was queen, she called the al-Qasr an aerie, and set it aflame every hundred years. We rebuilt it, and called it what we pleased. This is the way of government. That is the way of the governed. How can he ask for more than she did? Besides, it is a lonely thing to be king, and he is the loneliest of us."

I held a long green canopy over my torso with both hands to keep out the sun; a pair of rooks alighted on it, and their weight dragged the warm cloth to my shoulders. I said nothing, but scowled and practiced my verbs silently.

Regno, regnas, regnat. Regnamus, regnatis, regnant.

I reign, you reign, he or she reigns over.

"My name is John."

His blistered lips were watered, and he had not yet noticed that I held him in my arms, propped against the breasts he would call demonic and unnatural. He had not yet called us all demons, succubi,
inferni
—he only asked for bread, and more water.

He had not yet screamed when Hadulph spoke, or trembled when the crickets chirped in iambic rhymes. He had not yet called us all damned, demanded tribute to kings we had never heard of, forbade anyone not made in God's image to touch his flesh.

He had not yet castigated us for our ignorance of the Trinity, or preached the virgin birth in our mating season. He had not yet searched the lowlands for a fig tree we ought not to touch, or gibbered in the antechamber, broken by our calm and curious gazes, which we fixed on our pet day and night, waiting for him to perform some new and interesting trick.

He had not yet dried his tears, and seen how the al-Qasr was not unlike a Basilica, and how the giants were not unlike Nephilim, and how Hadulph was not unlike the avatar of St. Mark, and the valley of our nations was not unlike Eden. He had not yet decided that all of the creatures of the world were not unlike holy things—except for the blemmyae, except for me, whose ugliness could not be borne by any sacred sight. He had not yet called us his mission, and followed Grisalba home trying to explain transubstantiation, which she, being the niece of a cannibal-dervish, understood well enough, but pretended to misconstrue so that he would follow her home.

He had not yet called her a whore and tried to make her do penance with a taper in each hand. She had not yet sunk her teeth into his cheek, and sent him purpled and pustulant back to Hadulph.

Hadulph had not yet licked him clean, roughly and patiently, as cats will, and called him his errant cub. He had not yet fallen asleep against the scarlet haunch of the lion.

He had not yet retreated into the al-Qasr to study our natures and embrace humility, ashamed of his pronouncements and his pride. I had not yet brought him barley-bread and black wine, or watched over him through three fevers, or showed him, when he despaired, how my collarbone opens into a sliver of skin like clouds stretched over a loom.

He had not yet come crawling through the dark, shame-scalded, to hear my belly speak, and read to him from the green pepper-papyrus of my daily calligraphy, just to hear the way I said my vowels. He had not yet said that my accent sounded of seraphim.

"My name is John,” he said, “I ... I think I have become lost."

The long bones are found in the limbs, and each consists of a body or shaft and two extremities. The body, or diaphysis, is cylindrical, with a central cavity termed the medullary canal.

The Presbyter cloistered: cross-sections of satyr and blemmye are spread out on a low desk of sethym wood, the male blemmye with limbs outstretched, encircled with diagrammatic symbols as though he is pinioned to a wheel, showing the compact perfection of his four extremities, which correspond to the elements. The satyr was bent double, clutching her hooves, a goat-haired ouroboros.

"Please concentrate, John,” begs Fortunatus, his conscripted tutor. “If you do not learn our anatomies how will you live among us? How will you help portion the harvest if you do not know that the phoenix require cassia and cardamom for their nests, while the satyr cannot eat the pepper plants that the rest of us prize? How will you build, brick upon brick, if you do not know that the blemmye orient their houses in clusters of four, facing outward, while the monopods have no houses at all, but lie beneath their own feet, like mice beneath toadstools? How will you sell your goods at the quarter-moon market if you do not know that the lamia especially love honeycomb still clung with lethargic bees, while the dervishes eat nothing but their dead?"

"Where I come from, all men have the same shape,” says the Presbyter, his eyes bloodshot from reading, unwilling to acknowledge the scribe, best of his own
discipuli
, who translates each of the illuminated anatomicals into Latin so that he will believe them true—for he has told them that Latin is the language of truth, and the vulgar tongues the dialects of lies.

"That is a sad country, and you should give thanks to your God that you need not return there, where every face is another's twin,” the gryphon says with a long sigh.

"All the same I long for it, and wish myself there, where nothing is strange,” John murmurs to himself, and stares past me to the long, candle-thin windows. His hair still shows scalp in patches, but the scalp itself is not so scorched and peeling as it has been. He shakes himself from dreams of Jerusalem and looks at the wheel of flesh before him.

"I do not understand the blemmyae,” he announces, without turning his head to me. “They carry their faces in their chests and have no head—I suppose the brain is just behind the heart then, in the chest cavity—but how,” the Priest blushes, and shifts in his seat so that it will be clear that he does not address the indecorous question to me, “how would she nurse a child, Fortunatus?"

The gryphon twitches his wings—once, twice.

"Why, she would but weep."

I admit it was I who showed him the mirror.

We think nothing of it—it is only a mirror, and we are not vain. Rastno the Glassblower made it soon after the al-Qasr was erected, and it was hung up in the portico before the pillar fell, draped in damask, for its visions were distracting—but for Rastno's sake we did not wish to dishonor his best-beloved child.

Rastno was a phoenix, and he reasoned that his glass should be finest of all, since he feared no flame but his own. And true to this he filled the capital with beads and baubles and bowls and chalices, plates and amphorae and children's toys. And mirrors, mirrors of every shape. But the mirror I showed to John was his last, for when Rastno lay down in his pyre he did not rise up again—we do not know why fewer of the orange and scarlet birds return each burning season; some say the cassia crop has been bad, some say they are suicides. Rastno was one of those who went into the flame and did not come out again, but laughing before he sparked his embers, he said that the mirror he fired in his own feathers would be a wonder beyond even the churning river of stone.

When we dragged the shard of glass from the charred bones and blowing ashes of his pearl-lined nest, when we cleared from it the blackened ends of Rastno's beak and talons, and scraped the boiled eye-wet and blood from its surface, we found a sheet of silver so pure that it showed the whole world, wherever we wished to look, into any dragon-ridden corner of the planed earth.

It disturbed us all, and taught us only that our land was best, best by a length of ten giants, and we covered it—but hung it in the hall all the same, as funerary rite.

"Why did you not bury his remains, if that is what you do with your dead?” John asked, when I rolled the bronze-set glass from its resting place behind a bolt of salamander-silk. I shuddered.

"Would you love a tree whose trunk was ash, whose foliage was burnt and blistered flesh, black with flames you cannot see, but the tree remembers? What terrible fruit it would bear! Better that he be eaten, as the dervishes do, or given to the river, like the blemmyae, than to suffer planting!"

I showed, him, yes, but he was happy in those years, and his belly was fat, and he gripped me gleefully by the hips in the late afternoons and kissed the place where my head is not, opened my legs and said his favorite mass. He hardly even insisted I speak Latin anymore, or take any saltless Eucharist he might fashion, and only cried the name of his Apostle in his sleep. How could I know?

He stood for a long time, watching a city with domes of dust and crosses of gold and chalcedony flicker by, watching its stony streets run rivulets of blood like the porches of a dozen butchers, watched horses clatter over altars and books burn like phoenix, curl black at the edges and never return. He stood with the drawn damask clutched in his white hand, and watched a sullen orange sun set on the city of dust, and his beard grew even in that moment, his scalp showed pink through his hair, and his spine became a bent scythe, until he was an old man in my sight, and he wept like a nursing mother.