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There are only two ways to end a story: with a battle or with a feast. The Greeks knew that—oh, how well did they know it. It must either finish with everyone dead on the stage, full of knife-points and poison, or a marriage and everyone eating their fill, hunger and grief banished, life going on, children to be born and a future to be had. The big secret of stagecraft is that everyone at the feast will be dead soon enough, and everyone bleeding out into the audience has done their part to bring the future into being. Life goes on. Some foreign queen in a strange costume comes on to survey the damage and pass judgment on the poor bastards. She will feast. She will go on. Everyone lives. Everyone burns.
There is only one way to end a story: with a bonfire.
I do not know if I will see home again. I wish to be honest—the chances never looked good. But perhaps my little Proserpina is still seaworthy. Perhaps I shall sail yet into the west and back to a place where I am not wanted for any particular thing. If I ever do see an English hearth again, and a bowl of something bland, boiled, lumpy—if someone else’s children ask me what I have seen of the world with their big, wild eyes, I will say to them: I have seen the salamanders dance. And once I knew an emerald as wise as Solomon. They will not believe me, of course. They will laugh at old John Mandeville, and that is fair. He will be a mad old man by then, if then ever comes.
Ysra and Ymra came for me at midday. I had put on my fool’s clothes already. They approved. The king Ysra put all of his hands on my face, his expression complex and brimming with old, old feeling, the way a grandfather looks when he is reminded of his first love, lost forever. When he looked at me I felt as I did when Cabochon shone her feelings out in rays of light—he beamed his deep, dark thrill to me, and it filled me up.
“Something is going to happen,” he said finally.
“What?” I asked, and I truly did not know.
Ymra laughed, a little too wild and frantic. “We don’t know! We never know! But it will be something.”
“Is it a battle or a feast?”
“Yes,” the twins said, and before my eyes they kissed one another, in a formal, practiced way, as bride and bridegroom kiss upon their wedding.
[It was going now, the silver spores moving slowly over the pages, covering the words with light and life and softness. In the crease of the spine the mold darkened to the color of iron. An iron imp, living in the spine of a book, and when it is all done the imp will roll away down the hill and out of the tale. I felt calm. Go, I thought to the glimmering rot. It was always foolish to think I could outrace death. I understood. Nothing stays.]
In the strange way they know, Ysra and Ymra hooked their arms in mine and as soon as we had stepped outside the Mount we stepped onto a green sward before the mossy, bramble-covered Wall I had heard so much of. The salamanders had come too, and the phoenix, and the mermaids of Isos and the sciopods of Chakor and the dervishes of Summikto as well. The greenwood frame draped in copper silk stood near the Wall, and on it were dozens of black eggs.
“I thought you could not leave the Mount,” was all I could think of to say to any of it.
“We reinterpret that to mean it’s all right as long as we bring the Mount with us. We drag it along and the rules remain unbroken.”
“Are you really sick?”
“Sick is a way of saying we don’t belong,” Ymra said. And the salamanders began to dance.
They arched their backs and their green skins rippled, they hawked back and spat onto the greenwood and it burst into flame. Ululating cries broke out among the lizards, and the phoenix whistled their oldest, saddest songs. The dervishes began to spin, faster and faster. Something was happening, a battle, a feast, a wedding, a wake—the sciopods stamped their feet and threw up their hands, the mermaids writhed, and the rose-colored lions tossed their manes. Creatures kissed and fed each other red, shining things, and kissed again. The sun flowed down like a river of gold. Finally, as if entering a courtly rite, Ysra and Ymra joined in, moving slowly, radiantly, precisely in the midst of all the wildness of their country. He held her waist, turned her under his arm; she laughed richly and spun, her hair flying out, her skirts, her jeweled belt. Each of their twelve arms caught the others in complex patterns and they turned and turned around one another, wheels within wheels. Down the slope of the valley came the emeralds, rolling with joy, sending off sparks of savage triumph, with my Cabochon in the lead, and they spun around the throng, bouncing and glittering, turned to green fire by the sun. All the light of my Cab said: We are going home. We are going home.
As if from a long way off I could hear a crying—it grew louder and became a screaming, a terrified child, a girl in pain. The sound came from the other side of the Wall. I looked at the stones, which must have been beautiful once, shining so bright as to blind. Now they were merely a single living thing, choked up with vegetation and greenery, a hedge, a prison gate. I wanted to help her, the girl on the other side. The girl in the rye field. The girl trapped behind the bodies of eight eunuchs. The girl eating pomegranate seeds in the dark.
“Go,” said Ymra. Her brother-king held her by the waist and her smile glowed, awful knowing and hoping and need in that smile, but a terrible beauty, too.
“Go, said Ysra. His sister-queen fit so perfectly into his embrace, and he smiled too, tired and ancient and ready. Ready for whatever was to come.
“Go where?” I said.
Ymra laughed like water moving. “The world was not meant to be closed up behind walls. All we want is an open world, where everything can be known and there is no such thing as the end of the world, because the world is without end. We want to see the world naked—don’t you? Haven’t you always? Haven’t you always suspected that if you could just see her as she really is, she would be so beautiful that you’d never have to tell another lie? This is it, this is your moment. Breaking out is the beginning of being alive.”
“But go soon,” Ysra warned. “We can only bear the fire so long, the glow of the diamonds, the strength of the gate.”
“Go,” urged the twin monarchs.
“Go,” cried Agneya, writhing in her dance.
“Go,” said the phoenix, bursting into flame.
“Go,” gurgled the mermaids.
Go, shone Cabochon, and Trillion, and a host of emeralds like strange angels.
The music and the dancing and the light, oh, God, the light of the sun and the jewels and the flames beat at me and I did not know what I was doing. I am not sorry, now, but I am not glad. I turned to the Wall and walked toward the crying girl on the other side. “Stop,” I whispered. “Oh, stop, stop.” And I put out my hand to the Wall, a smooth sliver of diamond clear of soil and branch. Her weeping ceased and I felt, through the thick gemstone, an impossibly gentle kiss, as from the first innocent in the infancy of the world. It was a unicorn’s kiss; it was Death’s kiss.
And between the kiss and my hand, the Wall cracked sickeningly, and came roaring down in a shower of white dust.
THE CONFESSIONS
