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In the trunk of the tree, Hagia’s wide green eyes and her frank, laughing mouth opened in the expanse of golden-brown bark. In the leaves, the stout, short, twisted branches, among the last of the stark blue spring blossoms, golden crosses hung, tinkling in the warm wind, and in each of them was a mouth, as strange and separated from a body as Sefalet’s, and from each mouth came John’s voice, calling his daughter in a chorus of delight.
THE VIRTUE OF THINGS
IS IN THE MIDST OF THEM
4. On the Creation of the World
One cannot listen to origin stories on an empty stomach. Fortunately, my hosts understood that instinctively, and fed me in a most extraordinary fashion. I would be remiss if I did not record that first feast, for it reveals much of the nature of the country in which I found myself. I was not compelled to present myself at a long table for a stingy meal made up for with golden goblets and diamond plates, nor to stroke the dozen wretched hunting dogs of a lesser lord and comment on their obvious qualities before I could eat. Ymra, the feminine hexakyk, showed me a room appointed in a manner I can only call familiar—on the wall hung tapestries depicting a countryside that could only be my own England, green and fair, with the standard dragons and unicorns going about their allegorical business, spotted spaniels leaping that might have been my own boisterous dogs, and even an exquisite scene depicting a young woman with almond eyes peeking out through a fence of eight strong men. The bed stood sturdy and large, its posts carved from good Breton oak, its linens stitched impeccably, gold and violet upon red, my own family’s colors. I had to myself a wash basin of black marble and milled soap smoother than any I had ever seen, the color of a new and perfect rose. I should be cleaner than ever I have been, with such items at my disposal.
In the midst of my wondering the meal arrived, brought to my room by the king and queen themselves, though I found this quite beyond the pale. When I inquired if there were not servants to do this work, Ysra assured me they would make themselves known presently, but intimacy, rather than convenience, was what was wanted tonight. They set out my food and sat upon the floor like the children they still appeared to be in my eyes, and watched me eat.
The food itself could not have been more alien. For each eerie and homelike tapestry on the wall, foodstuffs past my understanding glittered on ivory trays. The meat remained crusted with the skin of the beast who had given it up, broiled and roasted emerald-colored scales, as though a supper from St. George’s own quarry. Fruit there was, but each of them encased in crystal I was obliged to pry open like a glittering clam’s shell. A thorny fish course stared up at me, a piscine marvel with long, twisted horns and scales of sapphire and gold, whose meat, too, glistened like precious metal (oh, but it tasted softer and sweeter than melon or pears) accompanied by wine which might well have been blood. I found it impossible to tell the difference—either I quaffed an unusually thick, rich, and salty vintage, or with equal relish a cup of somewhat thin, sour blood. (I have nothing against blood—it can be quite a boon on a long voyage, as the nomads of Araby will happily tell you. In fact, I once, in dire need, drank the blood of a crocodile when a duel had left me so wracked and wounded that I feared death had finally noticed poor John. The crocodile did not seem to mind the cut I made in her flank, and I woke quite utterly healed and refreshed. One must not be squeamish about foreign foods.)
“Are you sated?” asked Ymra, and I allowed that I was.
“Are you rested?” asked Ysra, and to that I also confessed.
At which point, they began to tell me the following tale, with a great urgency, as though it was of paramount importance that I not only hear all they had to say, but believe it wholly, as surely as they believed it, and not doubt their smallest word. I am a clever John if I am a John at all, and I know that when folk are that keen to have you swallow their tale, they are most certainly lying about some or all of it, more often all of it, but a tale follows a meal like Sunday morning follows Saturday night, and I was content to hear anything. I heard the following:
Once, long ago, there was a war and everyone involved behaved very badly. The war is not important—war is never important. It is the same, a sort of mummery that everyone knows how to perform but agrees to pretend they can still be surprised by it. War is only ever a joint or a hinge, where the world becomes something else, swings open or swings closed. What is important comes after the war. What came after this war was twenty years of coming home. What came after this war was a man, a very clever man, so full of cleverness and schemes he could hardly open his mouth before the boldest and most beautiful lies flitted out of him like fiery green butterflies. He got lost in stormy seas, and after he lost all his companions and all hope of getting home, he ran aground on a little island, so small it had only one house and one inhabitant. The house glittered with blue-green sea glass and bits of metal and wood that looked to the clever man as if they might have come from ships like his. But he didn’t think about that. He thought only about the woman who lived on the island, who had so much black hair that it ringed the island twice and wore a net of emeralds over her naked body.
Her name was Calypso.
The clever man stayed with her for nine years, and told her all his secrets, how he had been weaned early to make room for a sister, how his father thought him too skinny, how he’d married a grey-eyed girl who was good at weaving, a girl he hardly knew and she’d gotten pregnant faster than he’d gotten over his wedding hangover. How he could still hear the pocking of arrows, even though the war was done. And Calypso loved him. She gave him her body, her emeralds, her house, her hair. She wept for his sorrows and cheered for his clevernesses. She did not tell him that she was a goddess, and if you ask us what a goddess is we will say: A goddess is a kind of trick the world plays. It is a good trick. The world only has good tricks.
Why did she love a skinny, lying mortal man, this woman with a heart like a sun? That is what men like him are made for, to pick the locks inside of a woman far bigger than he.
Finally nine years were over and Calypso asked her clever boy to make a choice. She took him in her arms and wrapped him in her black, black hair and said: You have suffered so much. Let me erase your suffering. Let me make you live forever, and never age, never hunger, never thirst, never become bored or listless. Let me make you like me, and you can stay on this island for all time—or else range over the whole world and all its oceans, one foot on each wave like a racer of the tide. Let me be generous with you; let me give you plenty of all the secret things I know.
And the clever man said no. He said: If I go home my father will have to be proud of me. I went to war; I am a man. He will have to see that. If I go home that grey-eyed girl will have grown up and I’ll find out who she is. I’ll meet my son. I’ll be an old king like my father and have a chance to disapprove of everyone. If I stay here, if I stay here and live forever, no one will ever know my name. You can’t be famous without dying—death is what puts the final seal on a man’s life.
But a goddess is a trick the world plays, and Calypso means to conceal and to hide. What Calypso hid was that the choice she gave her clever man had a vicious echo, and he chose for all men, and all women, and their children, too. So the world is full of those who die, and some become famous but most do not, and they certainly become bored and listless and old. Calypso called him a fool and wrapped her hair three times around her island, dragging it out of the sea and to the edges of the world where no one would refuse her, would refuse anyone, would refuse anything. A place where the only answer to any question was yes. And that place became Pentexore, when it grew up.
The opposite of Calypso is apocalypse. And it is coming, when a trick with eyes that carry the whole sea in them will offer a choice again, and we will all drown in it. We are looking forward to it. We are setting our clocks. We are very curious to see how it all turns out.
I drank a bit more of my wine-that-might-have-been-blood and tapped my fingernail against the goblet.
“Now, is that true?” I said with a twinkle in my eye—I have a most effective twinkle that I can deploy at will.
Ymra gave me back my twinkle trebled. “Not really,” she said with a smile. “But the grey-eyed girl was very good at weaving.”
“To begin to tell the history of a thing is to begin to tell a lie about it,” said Ysra. “Tell us again about your adventures in Egypt?”
5. On Literature in Pentexore
I have written a great number of excellent books. In addition to the books detailing my travels I have also written charming fiction involving a circle of Italian nobles telling tales in the countryside, and a most exciting poem concerning a certain English monster and his mother. I spent two years as a bard in the court of a Carthaginian heir, compelled to tell and retell the story of Rome’s conquest of Carthage so that Hannibal and Hasdrubal won through, and marched the Scipio down the broad, palm-lined Phoenician boulevards in chains. To tell them how Aeneas did not humiliate Dido to suicide. No, when he left her after marrying her in that long-lost cave while the lightning crashed and Hera howled, Dido hunted him down through all the isles of Italy, and cut his throat in front of his new wife Lavinia, whereupon Rome was founded by Dido the queen and all of those red-cloaked bastards were Carthaginian to begin with. It was good work, and well paid, but it did not fulfill me, to constantly sing of victories that did not happen to an heir who would never sit on the throne, but longed for a world that never came to pass. It was, if I may be frank, and I think I may, depressing.
So you see that I am quite accomplished, and one morning over the royal breakfast, in which every dish was soaked in yellow cream and rich with eggs, I announced my intentions to Ysra and Ymra.
“When I get home I wish to write an expansi
ve account of Pentexore. No one in Christendom would not like to read of such wonders, and I do not deny wonders when I can give them, with both hands. I have already begun my preliminary notes. But I wonder if perhaps many books are written in Pentexore. Perhaps the salamanders too might like to read my thoughts on their doings.”
Ysra and Ymra smiled identical, tight, small smiles. “What would you say about us?”
“Oh, I would not criticize, if that’s your fear! I only want my countrymen to know what an extraordinary country you rule, what marvelous inventions and natural resources you command, how charming your daily works!”
Ymra swirled a flat black biscuit in her creamy cup. “If we allowed this, would your people want to travel here, do you think?”
