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But Hadulph spoke, he reasoned, he had moods, he preferred mangoes to bitter-melons, and Hagia to nearly everyone else. If in all ways t
he lion comported himself as a man, the laws concerning his mating could not be the same, could they? For the lions in Christendom snarl and chase and have no soul, no nature at all beyond the savage. And if that most basic law could be laid aside, that the angelic nature of man should never mix with the vicious bestial, what else might be permitted?
But in the endless wood beyond Thule, I could not allow myself those thoughts. Not yet. Not when Hadulph and Hajji rejoined us on the other side of the great chasm, not when the forest closed in, each tree heavy with silk cloth, spooling down in bright orange, gold, green, already woven, and no worm in sight. Not with Thomas somewhere ahead, somewhere secret, waiting only for me to persevere.
We came upon the ruins near dawn, for the silk forest emanated a perfume that filled us with vigor and wakefulness, and we walked through the night with the moon casting fluttering shadows through the draping, shimmering cloth. I wondered idly what lady had buried her dresses here, to birth such a wood. Hadulph nosed Hagia with affection, and I wished that he would speak again of his mother, or that we might stumble upon her somehow, so that she could absolve me of Hagia entirely, tell me it was not my fault: Love is hungry, love is severe. Qaspiel broke out singing, with no words at all, but like a bird, like a trumpeting swan, with much honking and chirruping and clicking that nonetheless seemed a pleasing song, though melancholy, in the silvery evening.
“Why did you come, Qaspiel?” I asked that night, after it had finished its nightingale song. “What do you hope to achieve? Thomas is of no account to you.”
“Do you think because I do not mate, because I fly and gestated within a plant, that I am so different? I hope to be loved. I hope that in sharing your road you will be kind to me, and love me, not because you think I am an angel, but because you know I am Qaspiel, and see my heart, and protect me, when it comes to that. Fortunatus wishes to be loved, too, to be loved as his wife and his child loved him, and fill their absence with us, with you. Hadulph wants Hagia to think him brave and fair-minded, that he would stand even with one who insulted her and showed no very great liking for anything our country offers if she asked it. And Hajji—well, she hopes that you will love her for herself alone, and for that reason she learns your Latin and follows you like a hound—you are new, and the only person whose love she might believe. It’s all love, John. Even you—if your Thomas loves you and calls you worthy, you will be free, will you not? Free and released and unburdened, and worthy and safe. In the history of the world, no one has done a thing that was not done for love. You must only train yourself to see it—the canny emerald strand that connects a soul to its desire, and all the kinks and snarls in it, that might seem as though they tend toward wealth or power, but mean only: love me, love me back, love me despite everything.”
“God is love,” I said weakly, and the moon flickered through black branches. I believed then that it was so.
“When you say that, and I say that,” said Qaspiel, “I do not think we mean the same thing. You mean it only as a metaphor.”
I brooded on that, and the angel walked beside me, the hematite in its hair like black tears.
The wood yielded abruptly to pale sand and wiry green grasses tipped in black blossoms, their exposed roots caked in salt. The dawn showed bony and thin over these and also a great number of broken stones, blue-black against the pearly earth, veined with quartz. An arched doorway, leading to nothing, still stood, and cairns of stones, and not a few bronze shards, crusted in green age, were strewn over the ruins. The stones lay haphazard and crumbling over all the land I could see, no end to them, repeated over and over.
I want to say I felt a profundity there, a sense of… what? The echo of God. But the truth is I felt nothing at all but a mild curiosity and the tingle of my sunburn.
The others, however, went instantly silent and still. I believe no one expected to stumble upon that place, except perhaps Hajji, whom nothing surprised. They began to gather from among their various packs a number of items: some salted yak, some mango blossoms, a flask of water, a scrap of silk from the wood. These they piled up near the doorway, and I saw that many other dried flowers and foodstuffs had been left there, too. When I inquired, there seemed to be some confusion among them as to who would tell me the tale—they encouraged Hajji, but she bared her teeth and gnashed them. Finally, Qaspiel took up the task. The sun beat its bluish skin to grey.
“This is a very holy place, John. Long before any of us were born it was here, long before even the Ship of Bones or the Abir. This was a tower, so high you could not see the top of it, and for generations folk labored to build it—children were born on the heights whose feet never touched earth, who ate seabirds they could shoot from the clouds, and fruit might be passed up hand to hand all the way to the top, the latest and youngest of the great work, and the great workers. They built this tower hoping to reach the nearest of the crystalline spheres, John, which is the Benevolent Silver of the Sphere of the Moon.”
“Why? Was the world then so wicked they wished to escape it?”
“You ask this? Who stand before us a relic of a world none of us have seen, extraordinary for that, the fascination of every soul in Nural and more? They wanted to touch the heavens. They yearned for the world to be bigger than it was, for it all to be open and welcoming, for it to welcome them. To touch the great silver belly of the moon and know the smell of the winds there, and know whether there is water, whether some beautiful, rare monsters walk and love and give birth and eat vegetables there. Just to know, John. Just to see.”
As Qaspiel spoke I felt the borders of its tale and the borders of my own knowledge kiss and join.
“Some say they scraped the bottom of it and some say they never came close. Some say the tower stood so long that the children born at the top looked nothing like the children born at the bottom—they were small and thin, to breathe the stranger air, and their eyes saw perfectly by darkness, and their ribs grew and their stomachs shrank, for little enough food could reach the top. Their language changed so that no boy repairing the holes in the ancient foundation could understand a syllable of the girls mortaring the newest bricks at the top. Some say the moon rejected them, and some say the tower became a tunnel, connecting the Sphere of the Moon to the Sphere of the Earth and that folk did pass between them, before the great winds between Spheres destroyed the tower. Some say sabotage brought it down, from above or below, that the whole nation lived within the tower, and great-grandmothers had never seen their great-grandchildren, and this grew intolerable, or the folk at the top envied the bounty of the earth. Some say the moon offered nothing of interest, and they all went home disappointed and dismantled it all. Some say they never ought to have tried, that the Spheres are not to be bridged. Some say we ought to try again, now that we are better at architecture, and have winged folk to carry it along faster. But however it occurred, the tower fell. A great number of folk died, falling.”
“This place was called Babel, John,” said Hagia softly. I felt my belly drop out from me then, my heart quicken, and I felt I understood in a flood how their language was so familiar to me. They spoke the language. The language, the only true tongue. They were Babelites, only they did not even understand their hubris, to build that tower so high, did not even understand that God had cast their ambitions down. They were naked, and innocent, so innocent I felt their purity might burn me.
“We honor them, who strove so hard, and all before the Fountain which ransomed us from death,” Fortunatus said, nosing the boughs of dried blossoms with his beak to arrange them. “I have myself often thought of flying up and up, so high that I might glimpse that silver Sphere—but I would starve before I reached it, I would tire, and I am not so brave as they, who had only a few years to lose.”
I sat down heavily on the broad sands. A stone lay near me; I spread my palm on its warm surface, so old I could not begin to imagine its quarry. How I wished I could show this to Kostas, to my fellow priests—to Nikos, the linguist, who would delight in it, to Anastorus, the flagellant, who would be horrified. I wanted then only to share it with someone for whom it was not familiar and known, someone to share my wonder. To laugh with, for there is nothing else to do when confronted, at the end of the world, with the ruins of Babel.
That day, I felt as though I walked on the Sphere of the Moon, and the folk of that place simply stared at me, saying: Why do you gawk? Nothing could be more usual.
But for all their familiarity with it, no one seemed to want to leave. Though the morning barely showed through the orange clouds like birds along the horizon, everyone dallied, touched the stones, sifted the sand through their fingers. I saw Hajji press her lips to the doorway arch and shut her eyes in a rictus of reverence. Hadulph rolled on his back, his paws in the air, growling deep in his chest. Qaspiel walked through the remnants of the tower, its steps like a dance, scratching sweeping patterns in the sand, smiling to itself, its blue teeth gleaming. I watched them all, and I felt my separateness like a body. I knew this place, too, but I could not bring myself to tell them the truth of it, to interrupt their familial connection to those dark, dark stones—the canny emerald strands, as Qaspiel put it, that tied them here. I could not interrupt this joy with a story about God’s wrath.
You see how they took me, sin by tiny sin.
But they were so happy in the ruins.
Hagia set out a picnic, and we all ate dates and silk-berries from the cloth wood; they were rough on the tongue but tangy and sweet. We ate yet the last of Hajji’s dried yak. The panoti made small ulula
ting noises at the sky, as if calling the Sphere of the Moon to herself. Hadulph snoozed, with his eyes open as I grasped now how he always slept, and Fortunatus leaned against him, flank to flank.
“You understand, don’t you?” Hagia said to me as the day drew down and without speaking they all agreed to sleep there, with those tall shadows growing long. “This is home. The whole nation of Pentexore lived here once. So it’s home for all of us.”
“No,” I said softly, lying next to her, my body tense, for nothing could convince my flesh she meant any virtuous thing. “It’s Eden.”
“You told Fortunatus that word. You said it was where men sinned. But I am not a man, nor a woman, so I feel it has nothing to do with me.”
“But it does,” I said, eager. “I understand now. This is where Eden was, in the beginning of the world. The earth is fertile here as it could never be in Constantinople or any other city of men; there is a magic here we know nothing of, wealth and jewels that you do not even see, so workaday is their glittering to you. Those trees, those silken trees, and the tree of eyes, and the tree of sheep—could the Tree of Knowledge have been anything other than that breed? And you, and all of them—if the Nephilim could have four faces, and the Ophanim live as burning wheels set with eyes, then who is to say you could not exist?”
