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“I broke once,” Elif said, touching the hem of the princess’s dress. “Gahmuret, Gahmureen’s father, took me with him to the market and a child pulled my arm too hard. She didn’t mean it; she didn’t know I’m alive. Sometimes I don’t even know it. How could she? But my arm snapped off and the girl started crying. I wanted her to stop and I wanted to be fixed, and so these seemed like the same thing to me. When Gahmuret got me tooled and oiled and well again, I waited until the family got boisterous and busy with their projects and crept out of the house. I went all the way back to the market to find the little girl, whose mother owned the strained cheese stall. I showed her my new arm and told her to stop crying now, but
it was not very satisfying because she had stopped days ago and did not know what I meant.” Elif touched his arm slightly, and I thought he might be considering whether breaking it himself might work some sort of sympathetic, retrograde magic and stop Sefalet’s pain.
“No,” I said firmly. And the girl went still.
“Kalavya fell off the malachite stair,” the left-hand mouth whispered. “She dashed her brains out on the ground.”
“Ride upon me, Adab,” I said, and she obliged me. “Tell me what wisdom looks like to you.”
“Wisdom is a pane of red glass,” she said. “It colors everything—and you must be careful, because you can forget that the world is not colored red, if you only look through the glass all the time. I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted.”
This seemed like very pretty nonsense to me. But I did not yet understand. When I look through my glass now I see everything colored by knowing about love, by having studied it with rigor.
“Why must you do it on a pole?” I asked. I was very young.
“I suppose I could do it on a lion,” she said, and then blushed at her own boldness.
The stones continued to speak. Distant, always, and hard to hear, but laughter and weeping and dreaming of what life at the top of the Tower might be came wafting out of the blue bricks of our cathedral.
Do you think it’s true what the giants say? That the moon is a girl, a duchess of their old kingdom, and when we build the Tower high enough we will discover her court, full of huge thrones and chandeliers and hunting trophies, the black and starry heads of the beasts who roam the heavens?
That’s ridiculous. The Spheres will open up and show us a new earth within them, more beautiful than you can imagine, with a thousand crystal cities ready for us.
I like our earth. I liked having my feet on it, my toes in it. I want to go home.
And among all the voices, and Kalavya and Drona, too, Kalavya who was always putting on her yellow dress, always ready for the next day when they would go up the stair with her gold skirts blowing wild in the wind, among all of them sometimes the Hagia-and-John tree would call up. Sometimes they called for Sefalet. Sometimes for Qaspiel or Fortunatus. Sometimes for someone named Kostas. The cathedral sang with dreams and ghosts and all Gahmureen would say was that living leaves a mark.
I held Adab while she drank from the Fountain; the stylite held me.
“What I want,” she said as we walked back down the mountain, “Is to have a little space where no one else can touch me. I’ll own the space at the top of the pillar. The space will get to know me and I’ll get to know it. The air of it will live inside me. I’ll be so alone, but I’ll be thinking all the time, and the space will be becoming more and more me until I—Adab—expand out like a star. And that’s what the forest is, all those stars, radiating. And one of the stars is a physician and one is an alchemist and one is a historian and one is a poet. But we are all philosophers, and on one foot we will think so loudly it will be like music.”
“What I want is you,” I said.
Elif came to me one day. Fortunatus nuzzled my whiskers and the sun came filtering in through the silk tent.
“Sefalet says the unicorn died,” Elif said.
Fortunatus yawned, his pink tongue showing. “Don’t be silly. There are no unicorns anymore. Not since the Wall.”
“She says it died, and Gahmureen says Fortunatus has to muster at the nave just like everyone else, because all winged workers were supposed to be there at dawn.”
The princess slipped through the curtain of our little house. She held her left hand behind her back. When Hadulph was a cub he used to roll on his back while he thought about things, as though he needed to shake the solution free. Sefalet squeezed her hands to keep her thoughts in.
I loved her when she clasped her arms around me in her agony. I know that now. The flash and sharpness of that instant is always impossible to see until they’re gone. But that was the moment.
“Don’t be afraid,” I purred. “I know everything about you, Sefalet. Your body cannot hurt or horrify me. I will hold you when you shake and listen when you say cruel things—I will not believe them, no matter what. I will let your left-hand words wash over me with no more weight or importance than seafoam.”
Slowly, grinding the teeth in her palms, Sefalet drew out her hands.
“There’s a hole in the sky,” said the left mouth. “She’s here.” And it began to laugh.
“I’ll love you when you can join me in the forest,” said Adab. “When you have earned a pillar.”
I was barely grown. I wanted her now. I wanted to roll her in the snow. I didn’t want to stand on a pillar and take up a discipline.
“If you don’t become adept at something, you’ll go mad,” she said, and her dark eyes were so serious. “We live so long. You have to pick something that will take forever to get really good at it. It’s the only salvation—study and love something terribly difficult. That or the Abir, but… for me that would be taking the easy path. The path of no resistance. I want to know this world so well it does what I say just to make me happy.”
“What I want is you,” I repeated. It was not a very good courtship. But it was my first. I did finally grasp the way to do it.
