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laric, having not lost a night’s sleep to this, being younger and less prone to the rage or despair that plagues the old, we who dwell so near to the end of all striving’s worth, possessed a clearer head and heart. He left me and the puddled waxen ruin of our candle-clock, and went into the village. Some time later, as I was finishing the copy of Imtithal’s curious origin story, he returned with the woman in yellow, with her strange downy skin and topaz eyes. She regarded me calmly. I did not think that woman had ever parted with calm in all her days. She inquired as to the trouble. Speechless, I indicated the miasma of rotted fruit before me. She took in the sight.
“You should have worked faster,” she sighed finally, and left us alone.
“A callous thing,” remarked Alaric.
“Who knows what they fashion hearts out of in this country,” I sniffed. “Pure red rock, no doubt.”
“She fascinates me, I confess it,” my Brother said. “She speaks almost never, and yet when she does, I feel in my stomach as though a nail pierced me, and with much rust. It is disquieting.”
“I am sure that our Brothers in Luzerne would prefer you not indulge your nail ideations,” I said wryly, turning back to the books to make the best of it.
“I do not speak of love,” Alaric snapped in Aramaic. “I do not want her. You know I have never given thought to women.”
“Then what?”
“When she speaks, I suffer,” he said simply, and would not say more.
To my surprise she returned to us, a basket in her arms. Her yellow dress caught on the dry reeds of the weave. She had filled it with boiled bluish eggs, strips of dried bird-flesh, and several flowers which I understood she meant us to eat.
“It’s not breakfast that grieves me,” I protested, but my stomach disagreed. We fell to, and as we did the woman in yellow drew out of the feast a few slices of some golden substance—ginger, by the smell of it, though terribly sharper than the ginger I had known, which, fairly speaking, was never much. At Luzerne, our Abbot never considered pungent spices as virtuous fare.
I watched as, with infinite delicacy, the woman picked up our books and rubbed their remaining fragile pages with the golden root, barely touching them, yet coating them in heady trails of oil. She scooped away the worst of it and added it to our cup of mash, and after much silence, much eating, and much application of her cure, gave the books back over to our care.
“It will not stop the rot,” she said. “But it will slow. Perhaps you will even finish.”
Alaric looked up at her through his hair, grown too long on the road.
“Tell us your name,” he said softly.
“It is not important,” she answered.
“Please.”
“My name is my own. You have not earned the right to hear it.”
And she left us, the pads of her feet flashing clean and lovely as she moved.
I cleared my throat. “I loved a girl when I was young, Alaric,” I said when I had swallowed my egg and wiped my chin. “She made the sweetest cheese you ever tasted, and her hair smelled like thyme. She had never read a book in her life, and only knew half the Lord’s Prayer. I thought she was as perfect a creature as the world might own. Here at the end of the world I will even confess to you, my dear friend, that I broke my vows and made love to her one summer among her cows, with the bright cold stars overhead and the lowing of the spotted beasts in our ears. She kissed me—well, like a lamia. I felt her tail all squeezing me in and her soul in my mouth and I loved her like fire, Alaric, I loved her like a gospel. But when the morning came and I woke with her sleeping in the grass beside me, she wasn’t a lamia or a gospel, but a simple girl with pretty skin and a good head of hair, nothing more. Nothing worth my fall. I renewed myself to God. What I mean to say is that love has natural defenses and offenses, strategies. Love wants to win, to make children, to further the world. It is nobler to stand above it. To choose to be better than a beast. To choose knowledge instead of a barrel of children and very sweet cheese. But if you break your troth with that woman, I will not betray you—it happens to us all. I am confident you will see the wisdom of my words when you have done with her. I think there is little danger of you taking up yak husbandry in this village of ash.”
Alaric listened stonily and finally uncreased his mouth to speak. I felt a lightening of my soul, having purged that long-lost girl from it, and was reminded how great a gift Thy sacrament, confession, may be to the burdened.
“Hiob, let us not waste breath on this. I did not mean to say I felt a yearning for her. It was only that when I hear her voice, it seems as alien and far to me as if an angel spoke from Saturn, and my bones quake with trepidation. That is not love, or its defense. Let us return to the books. We have so little time, and the light is full, and we need no candles now.”
The lurid scarlet mold that cut into Hagia’s neat hand retreated under the woman in yellow’s ministrations. Alaric showed me: they had drawn back, into the margins, glowing there like marginalia, like an illumination, wine-stain colors, claret and grape, and gold strands like harpstrings. It made abstract patterns—if we had less reason to hurry, I think we could both have been happy simply peering into the slowly seeping decomposition, finding shapes there, like children find in clouds. There, it is a dragon. There, it is a cart full of tinker’s scissors.
I could still see the strokes the woman in yellow had made with her odd sponge of a plant, and now it seemed to me another author had entered our three sacred books, that the woman in yellow dwelt there in the pages, too, leaving her mark, her signature, in the sweeping brush of her sure hand, showing white, healthy fruit where the rot had all but taken it. Despite Alaric’s fascination with her, I prayed for her in my heart, asked for blessings for her, her soul, her roosters, her sharp-smelling ginger and her boiled eggs, even her bright yellow dress. We returned to the books with a ravenous delight, starving sailors having found an unexpected port, safe and tidy.
THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN
On the eighth day, Fortunatus dropped back with me, his beak glinting glaringly in the sun. He spoke solicitously; we were nearly strangers then. “Where did you get your map?” he asked, carefully measuring his tone so as to imply no disparagement, only a professional curiosity.
“I know a tree in one of the southern districts of Nural. Some poor cartographer buried her toenail clippings there, and the resulting teak is enormous, its trunk deep brown and stamped with directionals, its leaves all parchment-piebald and soft. When we get home, I think I will barter for a sapling, and take it as an apology to Astolfo—my husband. Before we left, when the tigers were still dancing their prayers for our good fortune, I spent hours climbing in the branches of the map-tree, looking for something we could use. The boughs sprout scrolls, but you know how unpredictable trees can be. Some of the maps lead around the whole world and back to the tree, some of them show details of Nimat before the mountain sprang up, some of them show the path to enlightenment, some show a land across the sea bigger than Pentexore, full of strange creatures. Some show a single heart or soul, diagrammed until it can be perfectly understood. I only hoped I could find our map among the harvest.”
“Does the map show the tomb of the Ap-oss-el that John seeks?”
I had to admit it did not. But it showed something, a long road, and portents, and menaces—the sort of thing a map is supposed to illuminate—and at the end something that looked to me like a grave, and I thought that might… be enough. For him. Any grave. We have so few, any single one might belong to anybody. “Besides,” I sighed, “I barely use it—Hajji leads the way. Where she rests, we rest. She is quiet and subtle, but surely you notice that she seems to know where we aim?” Fortunatus looked troubled, his brow-feathers furrowing—but he nodded.
In truth I barely understood the map I carried. Delicately drawn, veined as a leaf, the mountains were tipped in silver ink and the names of the cities we meant to pass through drawn in a rich cuttlefish tincture. When I picked it from the branch, I ran my h
