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the corners of Imtithal’s book like four winds, blowing away the ephemeral words. Alaric and I tied cloths onto our mouths so that our breath did not further the process, but it proceeded, always, apace. There was much following the passage I copied out here, but it sank away, only a character or two swimming up out of the verdant sea lapping at the page. A. M. O. Nothing I could catch or hold. The patterns of the mold began to entrance me, and I fancied I could see their slow advance, each tiny portion of story sloughing away. When Alaric turned to his work, I tasted the corner of my smallest finger, smeared with the stuff. It tasted like spring sap.
THE SCARLET NURSERY
On the day Houd went to the Fountain for the second time, I woke early, to wash him while the boy still slept, which is the only time I found it reasonable to wash Houd at all. With the help of Lamis, my dear conspirator, we lifted him bodily out of bed. He slept naked, for he had read that the cametenna warriors of ages long gone slept so, and announced that, like Aleus the Closed Fist, he would greet his dreams shameless and ready. Ikram laughed, and he pinched her viciously, for I do not allow striking with hands such as they own. But it is good for children to feel they have gotten away with something wicked against a sibling, now and then.
In the porphyry tub, we sunk him into a soapy bath, and scrubbed his sleepy skin with rushes fresh-cut, combed the grime from his hair and scented it with rose-apple, rubbed him down with myrrh and amber. He woke as I smoothed the snarls in his hair, but let me believe he still slept. Houd behaved very stoically as I laid out his clothes—all black, as he preferred, though somewhat less sanguine was he about the beads of jasper and long ribbons I tied into his hair. I painted his eyes myself, and gave him coins for his shoes, for luck. His mother would go with him, but I would make him ready, and despite his taciturn nature, I loved the boy, who was no longer really a boy at all and would soon be out of my care entirely. Perhaps I loved him even more fiercely because he turned away my embraces, because he crouched in corners and would not speak, because he was reticent, and dour. Lamis and Ikram’s laughter came easy, and we were close as roses on one vine—but how terribly sweet, when the boy who never laughed gave me one faint smile.
Houd, Who Does Not Even Like Jasper: Why must it be three times? I’ve already been once, that should be enough.
Ikram, Who Will Go Next Year: I think you might need four.
Who can explain such things? It is three times because it has always been three times. Perhaps in the old days, a physician lived who could have told you why. I have heard it said that once doctors were common as rose-hips. If a soul fell ill, a dozen surgeons and herbalists would appear like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and each with a phial, or a poultice, or a tincture, or a blade, each with a wonderful cure—and some of them really worked.
Lamis, Who Is Afraid of Blood: They cut you open? To make you better?
What would you do to save yourself, if death stood on the other side of a man with a knife? Be happy, I admonished my darling girl, that you will never have to think of it. Doctors, those strange and terrible beasts, are extinct—I heard of their dark rituals from Didymus Tau’ma, of whom I have spoken before. He often fell ill, and I had to care for him, for no one else could bear the smell of his sicknesses. I did not know what to do, but he showed me how to make a tincture, at least. Oh, certainly, we all know to wash a wound, if someone should stave in their head, or lodge a palm needle in their knee. But Didymus Tau’ma knew of things like surgery, wherein a doctor worked upon a body like a blacksmith works upon a sword. And those practitioners are long gone.
Ikram, Who Will Play Surgery With Her Wooden Gryphon for Weeks, With Red Silk for Blood: Where did they go?
And she opens her hands, for Ikram knows there is a story, and I sit in her palm like a stamen in a lotus, and say:
The meta-collinarum cannot bear bluster and noise; they are mild and reclusive, and prefer their own company. Who can say why they boarded the Ship of Bones with the others? Each year they receded like a pale tide, drawing back over the hills, ranging over the mountains, looking for a place where no one else would ever come, where they could commune in secret. Some say this is on account of their swan-nature, for swans are poorly tempered and strongly bonded one to the other. Others say it is because they find it difficult to speak, with their elongated necks, and have a language of signals and signs all their own. I have only seen the Oinokha. I cannot answer this question except to say she spoke to me. Did it pain her? Who am I to know?
An archer among them found the Fountain first—she was called Celet, and even among the collinarum she kept herself solitary, singular. She rarely spoke, except to trumpet the moonrise with her rough voice. She scrambled over stones and high places, the fur of her boots all caked with snow, and her arrows were wound with mistletoe, and her eye was grim. But for all that she was never an unhappy girl, only the furthest extension of the character of her people. And thus she explored far ahead of her nomadic band—and one day, like any other day, she discovered a crack in a towering stone, all slimed with green and foaming. She felt compelled by that effusion, and crouched down to stare at it, how the thin sunlight moved in its jellied surface, how the edges froze into green specks of ice. She touched it with her finger and tasted it—do you remember when you tasted it for the first time?
Lamis, Who Only Drank First Last Year: I remember. It tasted like the whole earth.
So Celet tasted, and felt a terrible, unstoppable strength move through her. The water of the Fountain is not sweet, but still she bent her head to the rock and drank hungrily, sucking the life of it from the earth, her spine moving with her pulling up the blood of the mountain from the flesh of the rock. She called together her tribe and they came to her broken trebling—the collinarum drank, one by one, and understood in their bones that they were changed. They did not know more than the strength and joy they felt filling them—they did not know to drink three times; they did not know yet that after the third they would never die. But by and by they uncovered these things, as one uncovers the inevitable end to a story. And they knew it should be shared, that though they loved not the company of the lowlanders and all their many folk, they could not keep it for themselves and dwell as immortal sages on the mountain, concealing their secret and watching other generations shrivel like leaves.
By this we may know that the collinarum are perhaps kinder in nature than their aloofness might suggest.
Houd, Who, Though He Looked Very Dashing, Was Still a Child Yet: I would not share, if I found it. Except with my sisters. And my mother. And perhaps you, Butterfly, if you gave me a ginger-cake for it.
We may be grateful Celet was somewhat sweeter than Houd, then. However, when news spread of the miraculous Fountain, many folk were of your opinion. It should only be the beautiful who lived forever, or only the wise, or only the strong. Only the sciopods, or only the blemmyae. The tribe of doctors felt that they would be destroyed by this new medicine—and they called it that, medicine, so that Pentexorans would think it had all along been the province of physicians. The collinarum would not make arguments, except to say they could have kept it for themselves, if not for the pernicious presence of morality in their swan-hearts.
There was nothing for it but to have a war. Many doctors became generals, to defend their livelihoods, and we cannot judge them, for there are many small deaths to suffer in this world, and no one behaves well when faced with a black door. For this reason it was once called the Physicians’ War, though now it is simply called the Last War. Celet proved to be a better archer than any could have known, and she crouched down in the tiny rill of the Fountain which you will all remember, how small it is there, how cramped, and no one threw her down to claim victory and suckle at the slime there, not one.
That was the last time, children, that a large number of Pentexorans died, and I have not the memory to count the years between then and now. A thousand—more. Before Alisaunder and Herododos, before even the lions separated into the white and the red. Now, queenmaking is an ugly business, and there are cliffs to fall down and storms to crush bones, but in all your long lives, you will know perhaps a handful of deaths, and you will mourn them horribly, for their rareness. Mourning will be like a draught from the Fountain—awful, throttling, burning you all through your veins—but you will taste it but seldom, and love life better afterward, for you will have been on speaking terms with its opposite. Perhaps our long lives had to begin this way, so that no one would count it cheaply bought.
I cannot imagine how Celet must have wept, to see from her height all that blood, all that death. I cannot imagine so much death: several bodies lying together and none of their eyes shining, none of them speaking, only bleeding into the snow, never to rise again. I can only speak of it as one tells a story one has heard so many times that it has lost all reality—yes, people die. Didymus Tau’ma died, and I watched it. But so many, so many all together—surely it cannot really happen anymore. Surely someone would stop it. But Celet saw it all below her, all those people dying, to live forever, and she clung to the crags in her grief, honking and braying as only swans may.
And so when it was all done, the collinarum held the day with their allies—the roles of soldiers were sealed up and burned, so that no one would know who fought on which side, and no one would later seek revenge if a poor boy’s uncle thought that only cyclopes deserved the gift of the Fountain. When it was all done, the country was sick with it, and constructed a road from Nural and the provinces all the way to the great mountain, and called it a memorial, and one by one, the physicians being dead (though one of their trees, now and again, will fruit with an amazing array of bottles and droppers full of liquors of every color) and children being weak and small, each soul in Pentexore walked that long road, and drank that long drink, and all the things began which continue on this day when Houd will go, and sit with the old Oinokha, who has by now forgotten that her name was once Celet, that they once said she could shoot an arrow through the center of the moon and the moon would thank her for it.
Houd, when you go, when she takes you in her arms to bend back your head and nurse you on that green mountain-blood, you must think of all of
this. You must remember it. That is the purpose of stories, that no matter where we walk in the world, we walk twice: once in the warm sunshine, and once in the silvery light of every tale we have ever heard, seeing each thing as it is, and also as it was.
That is why your mother brought me from Nimat when you were but babies, all the way down the long roads lined in yellow flowers, along the blue river, all full of stones. So that you would know how to walk twice, and so that your stride would be kind.
THE WORD IN THE QUINCE
Nimat-Under-the-Snow. Hajji called it that, this old village half-buried in ice, and the others reacted to the name as if it leapt out of her pale mouth and struck them viciously. I did not understand—and they had stopped explaining to me. The diamond Gates had shaken them all profoundly, and I felt as though I had dropped through a hidden hole in the earth, with no guide to explain to me why any of my companions acted as they did.
Qaspiel said: “We cannot say, John. I do not ask you to show me your mysteries. Perhaps if you had answered differently that day in the amphitheater, when Hagia asked you to take the Fountain. But now we are all stuck, and everyone knows what we are not saying, but we still cannot say it.” The creature, which I could not stop calling an angel in my heart, flicked its wings as though it wished nothing more than to be away and conversing with clouds. “To live as we do, John, life upon life, a palimpsest of experience, it is like walking twice through the same field—more than twice. An infinitude of walking, and the field is so dear and familiar, but we are always different, and the difference is all we are.”
“If it causes you pain, why do you continue this way?”
Fortunatus interrupted us, squinting in the snow. He turned his liquid golden eyes on me. “Why do you continue in your faith, when it means you must deny all the evidence of your senses and suffer for the promise of ever-postponed bliss? Because it is the way you have found to understand the world, to live in it and not despair. You speak of war in your country; we do not have it. You speak of jealousy, of coveting wives and wealth; we know nothing of this but in old, old tales of times we are glad we do not live in. You speak of vicious cruelty on account of whether or not to paint an image of your God; I and all of us find this obscene, and do not begin to understand it. We live forever and we live in peace and it is fragile, John. It is so fragile. And when a thing is fragile, it is best left undisturbed.”
