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You do not have wings, it was not for you, though you had a part in it—
—And then it was gone and the light vanished out of the world, I could breathe and I could weep, which I did, all of us did who saw it, but when I think on it now I remember a private thing, with no other soul to witness but two birds and a poor blemmye.
I have had some space to think on this now. Some distance. And I cannot decide what it meant. Why the Cloud would come to me then, and not after, when I had such great wounds. When it would have mattered so much more, when I would have felt the touch of the mist like forgiveness.
John was always wrong about God. God is not a man who looks like men, God is not even a blemmye who looks like blemmyae. God is a random event, a nexus of pain and pleasure and making and breaking. It has no sense of timing. It does not obey nice narratives like: a child is born, he grows, he performs miracles and draws companions, then sacrifices himself to redeem a previous event in an old book. That is not how anything works. God is a sphere, and only rarely does it intersect with us—and when it does, it crashes, it cracks the surface of everything. It does not part the sea at just the right time. God is too big for such precision.
Maybe it was only a cloud. Maybe the cranes don’t really know anything. My mother was not educated as the scribes in the al-Qasr are. Perhaps they all just love the sky, and sing their songs of praise to the thing they love. Maybe Hajji is right and there is nothing, only brothers and sisters and lovers and ships on the sea and mistakes on your hands like a branch of orange.
I would prefer that. It would make a better story.
THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,
THE RIGHT-HAND EYE
You must be careful of the earth in Pentexore. It is hungry. It is fertile, but like a pregnant woman, it will devour anything it can in order to feed its young. Sefalet sat at the base of the tree and would not be moved. She clapped her hands up, no mouth, all eyes, and the tree could not put arms around her, but all its mouths smiled down, and she bathed in its shadow like a turtle soaked in the sea.
“Do you suppose it’s king now, since they’re gone? Or queen? I’m unclear on the politics here.” Grisalba chewed on the end of her tail, coiled in the long grass. “It hasn’t said anything yet. We did that when Abibas died. Just planted him and let him rule from his pot.”
Fortunatus, fretting, pawed the earth. The sun played on his fur. “I suspect I know what’s happened,” he said gently. “Hagia and John mated here. It was their first time. We all pretended not to hear. They were not… careful. Even his own book says not to spill seed upon the earth! I am in wonderment that he took that not at all seriously.”
Sefalet spoke without turning. “Is it my sister, then, like the girl with one wing?”
How were we to interpret it for her? A snake, a lion, and a gryphon, to explain such signs to a child. I began to offer my best notion—the tree was like an aunt. It came of love, but of the king and queen before they were king and queen, it would not know her nor have anything useful to say, but it was pretty and friendly and from time to time we would leave her with it when we cannot think of anything better.
But the tree spoke first. Hagia, her face rosy on the golden trunk, sighed.
“My baby,” she said. “My own girl.”
“You’re so big,” sang the crosses jangling
in the branches. “Grown up, and we missed it!”
Sefalet wept from her hands, and inched closer to the tree. I believe she would have traded anything to hear herself called baby and girl and grown and big forever. Grisalba started in on me immediately, to cover her discomfort with the great naked tree, to give the child a screen of words that might grant her a sort of rough privacy.
“You know, I could have looked after her,” the lamia snorted. “They didn’t need to bring you here. What is it you do, teach people to love? That’s not a job.”
“It’s difficult,” I began to say.
“No it isn’t! I love nine people before teatime, most days. Now, making potions in your gizzard, that’s difficult. That’s a trade.”
I grinned, my muzzle drawing back. It looks alarming, but it is never meant to be. I liked the lamia—lamia are like lions. They have appetites, and are not afraid of their own teeth. I watched Sefalet, whose world consisted now of herself and the tree and nothing else.
“How do you make a potion, Grisalba? Let’s say a drug, a hallucinogen or something similar. Something spectacular and complicated.”
Grisalba flushed green with pleasure—she loved to discuss her methods. “Well, you know, making a body hallucinate is nothing, really. Bodies are made up of fluids—don’t we have a lovely illustration of that principle before us today! Adding a new fluid is as easy as kissing. Putting someone to sleep, waking them, arousing their flesh, making them see the unseen, it’s all simple, beginner’s sorts of secreting. What’s difficult, what’s really interesting is permanent change. Convincing a body to change over from producing its native fluids and humors to producing what I want it to. Making ants speak. Mushrooms, that sort of thing. Making a girl who’s devoted herself to her studies into a libertine and back again at my pleasure. Making luck that can stick to a soul. Yes, yes, I know what you meant; the higher levels are too complex for our little morning chat. Fine. If I wanted to make a body dream—hallucinating is just dreaming with your eyes open—I would eat. Radishes, for bitterness, some mangoes, for remembering, coconut or possibly butterflies if I could catch them, for depth and resonance. While I digested them I would tell my gizzard to make a liquor with a pearly sheen, using phlegmatic humors and a little of the sanguine. I would try to kiss my victim, or at least lick him, for sweat contains much I can use. Sweat is memory the body secretes. Then, when the gizzard was full I would pass the fluid into my heart, where I could let it ferment, and when the time was right I’d bring it up through my mouth, and my kiss would taste of radishes and dreams. My body condenses and distills and sorts out everything that is not the potion, that is not dreaming or waking or arousing. I am a machine for making fluids and so are you, but my machine takes instruction.”
I kneaded the ground with my paws. “Love is like that, you know. It’s easy to arouse a person or make them dream. That’s nothing. Permanence is fiendishly hard. Bodies are made up of fluids, as you say. They sizzle and they ache. Loving is aching with your eyes open. You take in all the bitterness and sweetness and remembering and depth of the thing you love and your body crushes it, distills it into a kind of lightning that keeps you living. It passes through your heart and up through your mouth and the machine of you churns along. And that’s fine, as far as it goes. When your lover opens his body to you so sweetly, or your child sleeps in your arms, or your comrades tell you their secrets, or your work comes easily. Love is easy when love is easy. What is difficult is when the machine slips, or when other machines refuse to make the fluids you wish them to, or when your lover runs off with a minotaur, or when your child has two mouths and one of them hates you. You can practice love for all your days and still, it will be hard when it is hard. Love is an unhappy beast who only smiles when it is full of meat, of hearts. You could have raised the girl true. But they hoped I would teach her left-hand mouth to love. Her left-hand heart.”
“Do you love the princess?”
“No,” answered I. “Not yet. I am only obsessed with her. There is a difference.”
“I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about,” frowned Grisalba, and shook her iridescent hair like a horse.
“Probably not,” I agreed. “It’s only that when people come to you for a thousand years asking you what love means, eventually, you’ve got to come up with an answer for them.”
Sefalet would not leave the treebed. She called it mother and father. She slept there, curled up beneath Hagia’s woody mouth, which had a burl beneath it like a mole. When Gahmureen determined that the center of the cathedral should be precisely where the tree marked, according to whatever arcane geomancy she practiced, Sefalet shrieked and wept and her left-hand mouth snapped and bit at anyone who came near. She clung to the trunk, her arms stretched in a wide half-circle around its girth, digging in with her fingernails. Her palms kissed the wood.
