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The Book of the Ruby
The Left-Hand Mouth, the Right-Hand Eye
The Virtue of Things Is in the Midst of Them
The Confessions
Acknowledgments
Copyright
For Deborah Schwartz and Kat Howard,
my medievalist darlings, the invisible audience
for all my subtle clevernesses, stalwart
r /> and mighty women who see the world so clear.
And for my tribe, all those for whom
the world is worth folding in half, in quarters,
in eighths, and more.
Those who were strangers are now natives; and he who was a sojourner now has become a resident… for those who were poor there, here God makes rich. Those who had few coins, here possess countless besants; and those who had not had a villa, here, by the gift of God, already possess a city. Therefore why should one who has found the East so favorable return to the West? God does not wish those to suffer want who, carrying their crosses, have vowed to follow Him, nay even unto the end.
—The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres, 1099
Enjoy the scent of the ox-eye plant of Najd, for after this evening it will come no more.
—A tutor in the Egyptian court of
Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyubi
THE CONFESSIONS
I have felt it necessary to remove the name of my master from these documents, as, if he is not dead he is certainly not living, and confessions are the province of living men. It is rightly to be called ours now, and not merely his, our confessions, our book, our unsettling and unbearable tale. I look on these pages, their hasty script, their untidy gaps, and they seem to me like a fierce and unruly child of whom Hiob had the raising, and I had the troubled marriage. Yet it does not feel correct to give it my own name. These are not the Confessions of Alaric of Rouen, they are only a confession, at no kind of altar. As exemplars of their kind, they are mostly a disaster of poor choices made in the dark, and miserable happenings that might have been avoided if someone or other were less of an idiot than he proved to be.
I expected to return home more quickly than has proved possible. The passage through the mountains surrounding Lavapuri clotted up with mud driven by heavy rains, and of course Hiob himself has become something more like a relic we will soon be forced to bear homeward in a lovely box than the venerable leader of our mission. For my brother suffers still the effects of his rather unwise ingestion of a lurid blossom which rose up from the rotting fruit of the book-tree that grows still in a distant part of this province. I am often angry with him for playing the fool and the glutton, though it is unworthy of me to allow my mind to wallow in such judgments, for I cannot understand how such a wise man could think no ill effects would befall him if he but ate some alien plant he knew nothing about. As I write Brother Hiob lies like the princess of the country tale, on a hard bier wrapped in flowers and vines and thorns. The blossom continued to grow out of his mouth after he fell into his current swoon, and now its orange and red flowers open up in many places on his body, and I cannot tell if they are rooted in his flesh or if they all spring from the vine that wedges open his withered throat, around which I each day pour water and a mash of the local grain, proper fruits, and milk. As of late I have had to massage the corners of his lips to open wider in order to feed him, for the emerald stem has swelled fat and healthy in such pious and fertile soil as my brother. The whole business is enormously unpleasant and not a little obscene. The tendrils of the thing have wound around his fingers like rings, and a curtain of pollen drifts round him day and night, blowsy and golden. It makes me sneeze; I cannot abide unruly life.
Hiob, my brother, you have left me, and I am alone. How could you be so thoughtless?
And then, of course, there is always the woman in yellow, called Theotokos though I will never call her so, haunting my steps and tending to Hiob as though he were her own son, and never leaving me though I would have her gone, I would have her gone, for she torments my heart and my mind altogether, and I am not so young that these two organs sit surely in my body, but rather in her presence rattle around like old teeth. She lifts his withered arms to wash him, his legs, and her hands on his insensate flesh lead my thoughts in spirals whose center points I dare not even consider.
I am not in the main troubled by women as many of my brothers are. God made them, and while it is true He also made serpents and scorpions and sharks, I am quite certain that in the kingdom of sharks there is a morality, a virtue, a justice, no less than in our own. It is only that we cannot effectively communicate with the shark save by extremely significant bite or equally emphatic harpoon, and so debates on the nature of selachian philosophy are rare. So it is that the outline of the woman in yellow when the sun moves behind her chills me in the same fashion as the outline of a shark in clear water would do—I see in it a clear presage of my own demise.
And yet even as I lay out argument, I recall the metaphor of Prester John, and how he called Christ a shark, and the Logos a lamprey affixed to its side. I thought I saw some truth in this unlovely image, though undoubtedly it is a heresy, and perhaps both women and God can be called creatures of the deep. And having thought of those former books, my heart comes round again to Hiob and his situation, and sinks once more into a dark and freezing tide whose ebb I cannot hope for.
With the permission of all concerned, I began the building of an anchorhold some fortnight ago. The boughs of the great tree bend over it, and I intend there to continue my brother Hiob’s work for two reasons. Firstly, I have no reason to think he will ever awake, yet no reason to think he will not, and between the two of them I believe this work must fall to someone, and I say without pride it is obvious I am best suited. If he did awake, I confess I would have not the first idea how to remove the plant matter from his body. I try not to think about it. My own throat itches in sympathy.
Secondly, there is little enough else to do here.
It is a simple affair: I hewed a good measure of camphor wood, whose fragrance pierces my mind, and with fastening and burying their stumps much like a puzzle, wedged them firmly one against the other until a structure quite humble but serviceable emerged. Its roof I thatched from fragrant leaves, slick and wide and green. I sweat profusely, for the heat is unbearable in this place, and there is not an inch of my dwelling which does not bear my sweat or my blood. That is as it should be. A bed of rushes I have, and a desk of piled extraneous wood, broad enough to serve my purposes. A stool the woman in yellow allowed me to take from her, but asked me for a curious exchange.
I will give you a chair, she said to me, and more books besides, for surely you have not forgotten that they are not yours to take but mine to give, but you must spend a night with me.
I am chaste, I protested, but my heart—no, something deeper than my heart, some dark, squamous knot of viscera—leapt up.
