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A bashful flood of dappled color: yes, secret rites, secret dances.
“Have you been to see the Wall?”
Several quick, angry peacock shades glared in succession: the Wall hurts us.
“Are you a Christian ornament?”
A spray of prisms: Cab’s laughter.
“Pagan then? Perhaps a Jewish gem?”
And a kind of light came from my friend which I can only call sharp—clear and freezing cold and perfect, almost blinding, but as if all of those qualities of light were in fact emotions that could be felt by the heart, and this I understood as the approximation of religious feeling among emeralds.
God is a stone.
13. On Imprisonment
I knew a man named Boethius once. I find myself thinking of him quite often these days. He found himself in prison for one of the several reasons good men find themselves in prison—he offended a magistrate, refused to convert, intersected with someone’s daughter in one fashion or another. I don’t really recall—the reasons men stumble into jail are less interesting than what they do once they hear those doors clang shut. I, for example, have been writing this very long and interesting catalogue of my adventures in Pentexore. Boethius was a man of higher virtue than myself (not difficult) and wrote philosophy.
The pious old bastard cheated, though, when you think about it. See, the goddess of Philosophy has very little to do these days. Most of our best thinkers have gone over entirely to Theology, who, as a paramour, dresses less excitingly and will contort herself into fewer positions, but has a certain respectability—you can take her home to meet your mother and no one will be accused of wasting their time laying about uselessly on couches drinking wine. Thus, Miss Philosophy found herself bored and started visiting Boethius in his cell. I can tell you, I would have thought of something better to do with a girl of good figure who could slip in and out of cages unnoticed. But not Boethius—he just sat on his miserable chair and talked with her about justice or something, writing it all down, until even she’d had enough of him.
If Madame History or Madame Literature showed up to keep me company, this would certainly be a more interesting book. Or perhaps the both of them, lascivious and rigorous all at once, their bodies draped in chitons of pages, the ink leaving snaking violet trails on their skin. Then folk years hence would say: I knew a man named John Mandeville once, and that would be enough to ensure their listeners that the speaker was a man of authority and wisdom as well as good connections.
The truth is, confinement wears on the bones and the brain. Men write in prison because they’ve nothing else to do. I do not even quite understand why I have been closed away with only my gentle Cab for company. I killed the unicorn when asked. They cannot demand that I also feel no remorse for it. They cannot demand I relish the memory.
“Cabochon,” I called, and my green friend rolled into view, nervously peeking round the door.
“Was the unicorn important somehow?”
A sad springtime glow: very.
I suppose they always are. I suppose if you take all the pretty story away, they were always innocent young boys laying their horns in maidens’ laps. I suppose it was always about virginity. The blood and the collar and the girl in the wood. The horn and the wildness of the hunt. The piercing. And I suppose we all knew what the allegory meant, or it wouldn’t be much of an allegory. And an allegory is just a civilized way of lying.
If you take away the lie, the truth remains at the bottom of it, and the truth is shaped like a dead boy.
The sun comes up and the sun goes down. My tapestries change, though I cannot catch them in the act. No longer do I see my spaniels or my tidy English hills. Now I see my twelve wives, all of them in blue, their faces holy and upturned, as though they were in truth the Apostles whose names they bear. I see Death in a judge’s wig taking the years off of a robust man like thread coming off a spool. I see Boethius, wretched, ragged, starving—but at least he had a visitor.
I do not have twelve wives. I have never stood at Death’s bench, nor even owned a spaniel. The tapestries show nothing true, only what I have told them. To be totally honest I am not wholly sure I was ever English. I might have been born in Bourgogne. I have lied about myself more than anything else, for more than any other thing in this world, I have failed to be as fantastical as I might have been. I remember that unicorn and his terrified expression and he seems so like me. Everyone said he was a magical beast, but in the end he was but a boy whose desire showed in every aspect of his body—my desire shows in my mind, that is the difference if there is any at all. Take away the lie of the horse and all you have is the horn, throbbing and painful and yearning toward it knows not what.
Outside my window, it is a long way down. The phoenix and salamanders are piling up dry wood and leaves. They are breaking their tripods for kindling. The Bonfire is coming.
THE CONFESSIONS
She came for me. I did not want to go. I had work, I had so much more to do. The mold had begun to creep back—slowly, but we were taking too long, we had to go faster, faster! I had no time for girls’ games in the dark. Woman, leave me be. Woman, tend to thine own.
But the woman in yellow said: “I am owed. Leave your men to work. Give me my night.”
What could I have said? If there is a currency in such places, one must pay the tariffs. Knowledge has an ugly tax. She drew me out and sat beneath the branches of books for all the world like the heathen Buddha beneath his Bo tree, shadows on her hands and in her lap.
“You came to convert us to Christ, yet you say nothing of your God, and only devour our books, only say: give us food and everything you know, let us gorge ourselves, fill us up, fill us up! Are you such empty men? Tell me about the wonders of Jesus Christ Your Lord. Tell me the good news. Tell me he has risen and I am saved. Do you think we have never met your like before? Every several years some troupe of you, yearning after sainthood or martyrhood, comes babbling about doves.”
I was ashamed. When asked to minister, it all went to ash in me. I wanted only to return to the books, to know everything they had in them, and failing that I wanted, improbably, for the woman in yellow
to look kindly on me and sit close to me, to take me into her confidence. The starlight played on the pale, thin down of her skin.
“You know we came for Prester John,” I said. “Why humiliate me this way?”
“Do you think it is not humiliating to be valued only for what passed in one’s country, long ago?”
