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And John, too, standing sheepish by his gryphon, practically clinging to Fortunatus’ tail, afraid of what the day might hold, his eyes hollow with sleeplessness. I pitied him. He could not decide what any of it meant. Did it mean his faith stood proven, and all things he knew real? Or that nothing he believed was now true, and all things hopeless?

At least he had grown softer toward me. And I cannot think of how he looked that day, standing by the great gryphon, his hair clean and snowy and thick, all grown back but never the same, his color high, his back straight, not so old as all that, but not so young, and when I looked at him I knew so many stories about him it was like looking twice; I cannot think of how he looked without thinking of him in my arms as I took him to the Fountain, as I fed that green trickle through his lips like a thread. It is all one, the polished wood handle of the turning barrel, the snowy off-season Fountain road, with only a few lanterns swinging up ahead, up the mountain, only a few tensevetes selling restoratives on the pilgrim trail, and no hyenas at all. We walked alone, the six of us, and Fortunatus carried John upon his back, for after Nimat, he could not stand or speak, so deep he dwelt in despair. Hajji told us much, but I found it all confusing and not a little upsetting.

“Does this mean his God is real? Will we never hear the end of it now? Will we have to learn our Latin in earnest?”

Hajji sighed. “I cannot say. It is a story. Stories are both true and untrue. They are both, all the time. Do I believe Thomas had a brother he loved, and that his brother died? Of course. That’s all the story is, really. Love, and death.”

“Why did the snow cease in that clearing? I have never seen such a thing, in the high reaches.”

And the panoti smiled, gently, but with a ruddy pride. “Trees are bigger below ground than above, Hagia. That place is Thomas, all of it—the tree, the grass, the warmth. Even the little birds in his beard. He is very old; he has grown big.”

And even in remembering that, I cannot help but see John on the back of the gryphon so many years later, centuries later, dead and cold, and all of us following, down the river with its crashing stones, John, John, always needing us, and Fortunatus always bearing him up. Everything echoes in my vision, back and back, a hundred times. Pulling him up the final steps, rope by rope, hand by hand, and he like a dead thing between us but breathing, me holding him, his eyes glassy, and the apples around the green and foaming Fountain with all its slime and grudge swelling and shriveling, and the wind, the wind terrible, frigid. Me, holding his head back, and the Oinokha, her feathers ruffling, the night stars a corona over her swan’s head, staring at him in fear and wonder. And how we both of us scooped the thick, bitter water from the cleft of the mountain, how the Oinokha held open his mouth as I tilted it in, and how for a moment, for a moment, I was the Oinokha for John, the water of life sliding from my body into his.

It is hard to remember how I didn’t love him, even then. But I know I did not. I tended a sick body. And then, later, at the Abir—what could sour me at an Abir, when the world stood so eager and ready to be made again?

And so he would stay with us, and in ten years and ten again who knew what woman or man might take him for his final journeys there, so that he could hold in his hands that life everlasting he so longed to know? And so he would take a chit in the Abir, and luck take him where she would.

It is night, it is night in New Byzantium and the mockingbirds are singing and there is a little wine left in my glass, just the dregs, just the dregs, and that day Hadulph had to explain to him how the Abir worked, like a little boy who didn’t even know which way to hold the oil-jar.

“The barrel is full of stones,” Hadulph said, as if John were a little boy who didn’t know which way to hold the oil-jar. The sun glittered on the skin of the custard-apples hanging low over our heads. “Each stone has flaws in it, and