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“I have never understood this obsession with conversion! Why does it matter so much if we say the Ave? Did you not say that the kingdom of heaven is reserved for the elect? Well, then let us be, and you will find your celestial table less crowded.”
At that Jibril chuckled. I did not understand what a child’s scriptural argument I had made, one every novice brings up sooner or later.
“What if I say I do not believe you?” the abbot said softly, looking up into the cracked ceiling of St. Elijah’s. “What if I say you are an angel of the Devil’s make, that you have brought an army of succubi and imps and hellhounds, that your generals are Belial and Azazel and not Hagia and Anglitora, that I believe you to have pulled the diadem of Prester John over your head like a mask and have arrived here to give help and succor to our enemies, with whom we have already observed you breaking bread and calling brother, to lead them behind our walls and lay waste to our holy brotherhood?”
John looked down at his hands. I could not guess his thoughts.
“I w
ould say I have no home anywhere. That in the east I am alien, and in the west I am demon, and nowhere on this earth will love or soothe me.”
Father Jibril chewed his cheek and moved his eyes again to me, where they found I had not changed. Perhaps if I let them lash a stuffed head to my shoulders and wrap the whole thing in veils they could leave me be for an entire hour.
“Prove to us your strength and your faith. Show us that you are Prester John, that you came for our deliverance and our relief. Set upon the man Salah ad-Din and cut his throat and when you have done that lead your people over the hill and destroy his army to the last man—you may leave the horses, as beasts have no allegiance and cannot tell Allah from the cud they chew—stave in the heads of the very last of their footsoldiers and we will call you our brother in Christ, an honest man, Prester John, and welcome you to our breast.”
THE LEFT-HAND MOUTH,
THE RIGHT-HAND EYE
This is the tale the cametenna told. All the while she told it, she held out her huge hands, miserably, as if she wanted something from us, as if the emptiness of her hands hurt her so. I longed to smother her in my paws, to hide her in my fur. Ah! All these poor girls. How they bite at my heart! Finally, I did, as she spoke I wrapped her in my body, to shield her, and then Sefalet too climbed into her hand, at which the cametenna wept with relief, and Elif curled between us, so that Lamis, for that was her name, spoke from a nest of bodies, who pressed close together to keep her from shaking apart. That is the main thing love is for, to hold the center, to keep things from shattering. This is what she said when she lay at the center.
Do you know how the world began?
It began because everything got mixed up and mixed together, and couldn’t figure out how to get apart again. I guess I am glad that happened, but there is a point where the mixing stops becoming thicker and thicker and more and more complex and starts becoming thinner, and wan, and old, and I was queen of that point, and that point was called Thule.
My own name is Lamis and in my first Abir I drew a pearl covered over with iridescent flecks. The pearl said: go and rule over the city called Thule which is pleasant and peaceful and makes all the things a city makes, and take no spouse and have no children, but of lovers have as many as you will. I put on the dress of a queen, which has iron sewn into the hem, so that it drags heavy on the bones. I went to Thule and all the people of the city had gathered at the glass gate of the city to welcome me, and they threw mango blossoms into the air and sang a song with one thousand harmonious parts, for that was the number of souls in the city. I laughed and the petals fell onto my hair, and they had a crown all ready. In it rode a rainbow of gems.
Of course, the first day of a reign is always the best day. That’s when there’s so much hope you could eat it for lunch. Before you have made any mistakes, or invited other queens to eat, or set the tax rate. I did the best I could do. There was no one to teach me. I kept a little diary, for I knew I would not be queen forever. I did not want the next queen to have to learn everything over again. And in my youth I was told many stories. It became the principal way in which my thoughts were arranged.
When I was a young queen I felt the palace to be huge and empty, though really it was much smaller than the al-Qasr. It had a pretty shade of silver to the stones, not grey but a slippery, wet color, and the joins were filled with hematite. I wrote in my book: a queen’s heart must be big enough to fill her palace, but not so big that she squeezes her people out of their homes. I felt lonely, and this was the first Abir, you know, so I did not know how not to miss my brother and my sister and my nurse. I wanted a lover as soon as possible, because I thought a lover would be brother and sister and nurse all together. I wrote in my book: a queen must find a lover immediately, for otherwise her accounting books will take her bed at night.
Later I crossed that out. In its place I wrote: a queen must do nothing but be a good queen until her city no longer needs her.
All the men in Thule and some few of the women lined up around the waterfalls that trickle down from the palace into the crystalline moat, to apply to be my lover. I asked them questions: Do you know how to tell good stories? Have you any interesting scars? Tell me about a time you were just. I set them tasks: Calculate the ideal tax rate for the population of Thule. Design for me an aqueduct. Solve the dispute between the red lions (races) and the blemmyae (comic theatre) over who should get to build an arena for their favorite entertainment in the prime central area of the city.
I thought these were excellent tests of suitors and recorded them all for the benefit of the next queen. In the end, I felt that the ideal household was made up of, besides myself, two women and one man, for I was very young and did not want things to change. It was how I had been happiest, with my brother and my sister and my nurse. Only now I was not a child, and my lovers would not be children, so things would change, but not too much. Not too much for me to bear. The pearl said: take many, and so I did.
One was an astomi called Manar, and her eyes were the color of wine. One was a minotaur called Taroob, and she had a jasper ring in her nose. And with them I took a giant called Qayz. With Manar I shared breakfast and my morning; we ate oranges and cream and fresh bread we baked together, and I would eat and she would breathe the scents in deeply, and make jokes about the moon, which is a kind of goddess to the astomi, but also a kind of maiden aunt, who gives kindly advice and raps across the knuckles by turns. Together Manar and I sang both cooking songs and governing songs, and in the governing songs (which had a call and a response) we determined the percentage of goods to keep in Thule, and the percentage to send out to trade with Nural and Nimat and Simurgh and Shirshya.
With Taroob I took my lunches and my afternoons. We ate roast fish and bitter apples and plump rice, and she would make little mazes in the rice, through which the sauce from the fish would drip and flow. She would slurp it up and with delight when the sweet juices had solved the circuit. We put our heads together and her hands had a soft pelt, her voice a low, thrumming rhythm, and together we heard the disputes of the Thulites, and with our judges’ veils on we determined that this blacksmith owed that glassblower two new pipes, since the old ones were cheaply made and had bent. We said that since the cousins had quarreled over who should get the tame tiger they had raised together that it should instead come and live at the palace, and when it had kittens they would each get one and no more.
With Qayz I suppered, and took my nights. In Thule it is the sacred duty of the queen to light the lamps at night, and together my giant and I went lamp to lamp, setting a little blue blaze flickering. The light played on his huge ears and we smiled at each other. When the work was done we ate a grassy soup full of tangerine and almond and milky bean curd. We determined which fields should lay fallow and which should be full of grain and house-trees. I ate my crushed flowers so that there would be no children. We were happy.
I wrote in my book: a queen has the power to order the world as she wishes it. Thus, she must be so careful to make a good one, and to know a good one from a bad one.
Before bed, we told stories, and you may think me childish, but there are worse things to do before bed, and how else can you get to know a new lover or three but by the stories they tell? Qayz lay along the wall, so that he could hold us all in the circuit of his body.
Manar, Who Could Smell My Love For Her: Do you know the one about how to build a city?
Taroob, Who Lay Down Thread So That I Could Always Find Her: Oh, that one is a little grisly.
Qayz, Who Made Light With Me: Oh, la, grisly and allegorical is all right. Grisly and true is upsetting.
And Manar, who had been the one to design the aqueduct, told us how cities grow like children, and like children they have to have a parent, a person who stands in the center of the heart of what will be a city like a key in a hole. As long as the key is in the hole the city thrives, so the person who started the city has to be very patient and have a rich internal life, because the work of being a key is not very interesting. The city grows so big that no one knows where the center of the heart is anymore, and they forget that a person dreaming began everything they love, the schools where little ones learn how to count on their knuckles, the festivals when the moon is red, the safe walls so terrible beast may breach. All the things there are to love about a city come from a person who decided to stay. And stay forever.
I asked my lover if there was such a key in Thule, and she said she thought there had been, there must have been, and when she was small she heard we had a unicorn stuck in the center of the heart of our city, but when they came, they took him, though he must be alive somewhere, for Thule still lives and breathes. And all three of us lay together and looked at the dancing light in our lamp and thought about that, how wonderfully and terribly the world behaves, that it makes cities, but asks such a sacrifice.
And all of that, just the very beginning of my life in Thule, becoming queen, taking lovers, telling one tale before bedtime, took a thousand years. Abirs came and went outside. And inside the mist slowed everyone down, the mist that chilled and thickened all the elements of the city, the mist of a few drops of Gog and Magog’s blood. But in that silver silken mist, I had a little happiness. A slow happiness, just a trickle every month or so, and more, sometimes, when we could dig out a whole room in the palace, dig out the mist and move quickly for a moment or two—oh, the lives we lived in those moments!
