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The rest dissolved. With a wet sigh it sloughed over my palms and no more remained except this, wriggling, black on the gold, as if the letters moved and breathed and struggled for life:

I wept.

I wept.

I sought God, and crowned myself Hell’s one king.

I wept.

The letters bubbled and broke, the legs and ladders of the characters snapping and turning as if caught in a whirlpool. I watched in horror; I watched in awe. Out of the wreckage of the book, the golden miasma, a single bulb formed in the mire and rose up on a stalk. The bud shone deep, gemlike black, and when it opened, I saw, concealed, an amber seed. It wavered on its stem, back and forth, like a serpent in its market basket. I did not make the choice; I was lost, cast far from myself. You could have saved me, Lord, but You let me devour that fruit—I suppose that is what You have always done. I fell upon it, maddened, devouring the bud, the stalk, the slime of the book, slurping it from my fingers, ravenous to have it within me, to keep it for myself, so selfish, so selfish, but I was always a selfish man. I ate it all, all, like Seth and the grains of paradise; my throat worked and I took it all into my belly, all of it, all of it, and oh, my God, it tasted like light, like light, and I lost everything.]

THE CONFESSIONS OF HIOB VON LUZERN, 1699

I regret that I, Alaric of Rouen, must take up Hiob’s narrative at this point. As I write, ensconced with him in the personal house of the woman in yellow, who will not reveal her name no matter how I have asked, or offered her several ivory beads I obtained upon my journey to Africa some years ago, Brother Hiob lies insensate on a slab of stone, his skin sallow, his breath thin.

The local king, Abbas, has ordered a great number of flowers brought to the slab to garland my friend, though I have explained numerous times that he is not dead. I believe Hiob mentioned Abbas somewhat earlier in his account (please do not blame me personally for the disarray in his notes, I have tried my best to put them together, in an order pleasing to God, but the chaos of it all quite shocked me—though I am afraid what we have to report is disjointed, incredible, and beyond a doubt heretical, even if it were possible to place it all in the correct order and fashion it into anything like a usual book—forgive me. I am only his secretary). The king is uncommonly devoted to the woman in yellow, and when I inquired after her name, he would only call her Theotokos, a word I asked him to repeat, for it took me quite aback, as I am certain it will strike anyone reading my poor notes, for it is not a name at all, but a title: Mother of God. If Prester John was a committed Nestorian as there seems little doubt now that he must have been, this word seems all the more striking, as it is one Nestorius sought to divest the Virgin of during his tenure as Patriarch of the Eastern Church. The better part of his heresy was to teach that Mary was only the mother of Christ, and not of the divine portion of His nature. It defeats utterly both my powers of reason and translation to understand why Abbas would insist on calling this slip of a girl by that name. I honestly do not believe he knows what the word means—he has no Greek whatsoever—and she answers to it only when he calls her thus. She responds to my using it in no fashion.

But I was speaking of Hiob—his talent for digression has infected me muchly in our travels. I ought to have stopped him, but my shock was so great I could only stare as he devoured the book. I have tried to understand it since—I feel no compunction myself to eat the remaining manuscripts. But Hiob has been a mystery to me since I first met him. How little there seems to be of the man which is not languages and God. I wish but once I had caught him playing at dice. I feel I would have known a great deal more about him, if I could have seen how he threw. However, in the end, his obsession with Prester John was always greater than mine. It is a