Page 49 of In the Night Garden

I must have seemed such a child to them, sitting plate-eyed and loose-mouthed at their feet, savoring the foreign tang of the word on my tongue like a spiced cake: Al-a-Nur. My mother eyed me with suspicion, but I ignored her. I begged to be told of this city, which in my heart I already knew must be the holiest city ever to sit on the earth.

“Truly, girl, you have never heard of the City of Twelve Towers?” Bartholomew stroked his fur as though it were a beard and peered at me. “Seat of the Papess, She Who Was Born in the Purple, the Anointed City which shines like a summer star?”

“Never!” I cried breathlessly.

“Very well,” he chuckled, straightening his back like a teacher about to give lessons, “your kind mother permitting, I shall tell you of the Dreaming City, enclosed in her seraphic spheres…”

LISTEN, CHILD, AND I WILL TELL YOU OF AL-A-NUR, seat of the Twelve Towers, the Anointed City. She was founded a thousand years ago, in the year Seven Hundred and Fifty-three of the Second Caliphate. The foundations of the Towers were poured in agate and porphyry, the tapered windows were chiseled into graceful arches. Clear green ponds were dug from the loamy soil, tamarinds and palms were planted, willows and pale-barked birch. Aqueducts ran with sweet water, gurgling up through fountains of silver and glass. Roads were arranged in con centric circles, according to the Lo Shen board, our sacred Game, named for the river goddess who laid her waters around the blessed City. The roads were paved in lapis and turquoise, stones which were plentiful in the surrounding mountains—even today the cobbled walkways keep their deep blue sheen.

Markets sprang to life like mushrooms after a rain, filling the closes and keeps with the scent of saffron and broiling meat; traders came to sell dolls and cabinets, sleek red horses and love charms—but they stayed to contemplate the divinity that resides in the exchange of gold in the marvelous Towers which comprised the many hearts of the City.

The Towers were themselves arrayed in the pattern of the Chang-O configuration—the ideal defensive deployment of the Lo Shen pieces. On the outer rim rose up the Tower of Sun-and-Moon, whose roof was tipped with a great diamond and a great topaz, melted into one another in an unimaginable furnace. Now one stone, it refracts the light of the heavens onto the City in a shower of prisms. There is the Tower of Patricides, bright with blood trickling between its polished stones, a thin, steady flow which pools in a glowering crimson moat at its base; and the Tower of Ice and Iron, its twisted metallic spire bruising the clouds. On the second ring lay the Coral Tower, its deep rose pocked and rippled with anemones kept moist by loving novices; the Tower of Hermaphrodites, hung with veils and inscribed with sacred ideographs, silver ink on a golden wall; the Chrysanthemum Tower, the living stone ablaze with sixteen-pointed flowers flashing gold and scarlet at the noonday sun; and the Tower of St. Sigrid, bristling with ships’ prows and wheels and masts. In the innermost circle were built the Nightingale Tower, through whose walls the wind whistled, singing as sweetly as that tiny brown bird; and the Tower of the Nine Yarrow Stalks, whose very surface was a divinatory

device, painted in a thousand shades; the pattern of sun and shadow on the colors is still interpreted daily within those walls. There also were the Towers of the Living and the Dead, which once stood straight and tall, the one walled in hawk and falcon feathers with tufts of fur thatching the roof and doors of serpent-skin, the other riddled black with catacombs and crannies—but over the centuries, they have leaned further and further from their bases, until they almost touch. Now there is a small bridge of silk and ebony between the upper rooms of the Towers, and the initiates move freely between them.

Finally, in the center of Al-a-Nur a slender, simple tower was erected, fashioned from camphor wood and the roots of rose trees, knobbed with silver nail heads glittering like constellations set into the polished walls. Its roof was thatched from willow whips, its windows shaded in soft deer-skin—and this is the Tower of the Papess, the holiest site of this holy City.

For Al-a-Nur is the seat of a dozen faiths, all presided over by the Papess, whose wisdom has guided us from our earliest days. Each Tower is a self-contained spiritual sphere, each with its liturgies and fasts and scriptures. They recognize the divine in myriad ways, but recognition of the Papess ensures peace. The Caliphate, which rules the surrounding countryside, allows Al-a-Nur complete sovereignty; and thus it has gone in prosperous and tranquil fashion across the long years. From every direction come young men and women, seeking to spend their lives in contemplation, and there, under the light of Sun-and-Moon, they find a path that suits them. Al-a-Nur is a carved box which holds the wisdom of the world, knowledge lost to all but our spindled Towers. It is the paradise of the wishful and the wise.

There have, of course, been interruptions in our peace. When Ghyfran the Forgiving died, the Caliphate elevated an outsider, Ragnhild, First of Her Name, to the Papacy and installed her in Shadukiam, a city to the east, in an attempt to draw the wealth of Al-a-Nur to itself, and transfer the religious authority which has always resided in the Twelve Towers to that apostate city, where, by no great coincidence, the treasury of the Caliph was kept. This false Papess, called the Black, was a great crisis for the Towers, for the process by which a new Papess is chosen is a complex one, requiring the consent of all the sects of the City as well as the Papal Household. Ghyfran had died suddenly, and a successor had not been confirmed.

From the Tower of Hermaphrodites a candidate arose, and while the Black Papess became more and more entrenched in Shadukiam and the minds of the people, Al-a-Nur was as filled with chaos as a winter storm with lightning. All agreed that Presbyter Cveti was highly qualified and beloved, purity of soul echoing in every spoken word and graceful movement. Nevertheless, the appointment could not be agreed upon.

As must be obvious even to you, my child, the adherents within the Tower of the Hermaphrodites reveal themselves to be neither male nor female. There is no shame in this for them; it is simply their nature, and the nature of the cosmos as they conceive it. Though each was born a daughter or a son, they clothe themselves plainly, bind up their hair, and uncover the secret of their sex to no one. For them, the most divine of all things is the merging of opposites—of light and dark, of sacred and profane, of male and female. They believe that they are blessed so long as they maintain a balance, hanging like a human pendulum between two states, uniquely able to experience the world as both man and woman, and as neither. But the Papacy is a matriarchy, has always been thus, and to some, Cveti seemed to be a sacrilege, polluting the Holy Seat. If the Presbyter was male, it was unthinkable that he could claim the seat. If female, she must declare it before all, and preserve the law of the City. The conflagration of this debate engulfed the City in red flames.

Of course Cveti’s Tower had never held that highest of offices, and felt that any refusal to accept so illustrious a candidate was a boldfaced insult to their order. Many, such as the Tower of the Patricides, themselves an all-male sect, and the Draghi Celesti of the Tower of Ice and Iron, warrior-priests utterly loyal to the traditions of the City who hide their faces behind identical ivory serpent-masks, would not support any alteration to the laws of succession, partly out of fear that their own internal customs could then be altered. No one would dare set the precedent.

Cveti, who loved Al-a-Nur above all things, feared that in the roiling furor the Papacy would be destroyed in the hands of Ragnhild and the Caliphate before a decision could be made, and withdrew from consideration. Yet no other candidate was so worthy, so capable of battle or meditation with equal ease, or so well beloved among the Towers, as Cveti of the bell-deep voice. All agreed that in that time of crisis, only Cveti could lead them against Shadukiam. It was only the shape of hip and curve of lash which was in question, never the holiness of the Presbyter, nor sincerity of faith. The whole City was at a stalemate, and Ragnhild all the while consolidated her authority, growing fat as an engorged spider in the East.

And so it came to pass that Cveti appeared one morning in the Jade Pavilion, which spread out from the Papal Tower, shimmering green and white under the thin winter clouds. She had removed the ritual clothing of her Tower and donned a dress which closed her waist into a curve and flowed over her legs to trail its dark velvet over the jade floor of the courtyard. Her breasts, which had never seen the sun, rose smooth as new paper from the embroidered bodice. She had loosed the traditional seven knots from her hair and let it fall to her shoulders, straight as virtue. She had pulled rings onto her fingers and scented her skin, painted her lips and pulled silk slippers onto her feet. She needn’t have done it—her word as to her sex would have been enough—but all that finery was the extent of her humility, showing us all how far she would go to be what the City asked her to be.

She stood before the Tower as though before the hangman’s noose, tears streaming down her proud cheeks—yet her mouth never quivered as she knelt at the feet of the Papal Household and forswore the tenets of her faith, vowing thenceforward to serve only the Papal Tower, and never again to hide her nature; in all things she would serve the greater need of the City, emulating the line of Papesses which had come before her. With stunned tears springing to their own eyes the Household accepted her pledge, and the Towers, awed and humbled, confirmed Presbyter Cveti as the seventeenth Papess of Al-a-Nur. On the day of her ascension, Cveti went into the cavernous mausoleum beneath the Tower and kissed the coffin of her predecessor with great tenderness. She announced to all in those shadowy rooms that she would take the name of Ghyfran, the dead Papess, for her own.

Ghyfran II led a great army of Draghi Celesti in their thousand identical masks against Shadukiam, and sent the tongue and breasts of the Black Papess to the Caliphate in a silver box. While on campaign, it was noted by her generals that Ghyfran always bound her hair in seven knots before riding into battle. The rest of Ragnhild she yielded to the judgment of the Draghi, who left the apostate’s body fastened to the earth with golden chains at the precise center-point between Al-a-Nur and Shadukiam.

And for five hundred years, the Caliphate quelled its desire to interfere with the succession of the Holy Seat.

I WAS SLEEPY THEN, RESTING MY HEAD ON THE rough-hewn table and letting Bartholomew’s voice roll over me like gentle water over stones. But Al-a-Nur had risen up in me in all its colors, and I could feel a yearning for it turning and warming itself in my belly. All my sib lings had gone, I was ready—why should I not leave this wretched hut, where my mother’s eyes scalded my back wherever I walked?

“Take me with you,” I whispered, sitting up, my eyes suddenly bright and calculating as a hungry little cat in the snow. “Take me to Al-a-Nur, to the Chrysanthemum Tower and the green pools under the willow. I will become wise there, just like you, you’ll see!” I clutched his hand tightly, but seeing his startled expression, let the callused fingers fall back to our table.

Bags—for so I already called him in my heart—peered closely at me, his eyes narrowing to tiny moon-slivers in the red bleed of his fur. He looked to Bartholomew and whispered, “And the wolf shall lead her astray…”

“What?” I asked, straining to hear their suddenly hushed voices. But Bartholomew grinned hugely, his ponderous tongue hanging out of his mouth in a most friendly fashion.

“Nothing, my dear,” interrupted Balthazar, shaking his ice-colored fur, “just a bit of Scripture. The Book of Carrion, chapter twenty-eight, verse ten. If you are to come with us you will learn that and much more. Certainly we will have you—we cannot turn a seeker away by the laws of our Tower. But perhaps it is not solely our decision…?”

My mother’s ponderous back was turned to us, and it shook slightly with tears—sorrow or relief I could not tell—smothered as quickly as snow sliding from a pine bough to the frozen earth. I went to her, and put my hands on her shoulders, leaning my head against her warm skin.

“Go,” she spat hoarsely. “Just go. If the Stars wish us to meet again, they will fashion the path before your feet.” She shrugged me off and disappeared from the great-room with her heavy, lumbering gait. I began to pack food for myself and my new brothers—we would need bread for the journey south.

“YOU’RE NOT BORED, ARE YOU, LOVE?” SIGRID shifted on her bench, nets knotted over her hands like silver rings. The sun was well past noon, and the sickly light of the northern summer spilled over the windless water below the quay, thin as milk.

“Oh, no,” breathed Snow, her colorless lips spreading into something like a smile. “Don’t stop! Did you ever see the Twelve Towers? Did you meet the Papess? Was she very beautiful?”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever heard you put so many words together in the same place, girl. If you’re not careful, they’ll get togeth

er and have babies, and then we’ll never shut you up.”

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