The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [120]
And she was my queen. My service belonged to her.
As we rose to leave, Queen Abir strode out onto the field of black powder. With a grace I would not have imagined in those massive hands, she bent and plucked a single petal from one of the blooms, small and miserable now, almost shriveled back into the earth. She held out the wrinkled, glowing thing to me. Its pollen smeared her fingers. As though I meant to tell her a story, I climbed up into her palm, knelt, and she placed the petal in my mouth as I closed my eyes and in that moment I was her child, and I trusted her.
The petal tasted, oh, it tasted like light.
THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN
I admit it was I who showed him the mirror.
I thought nothing of it—only a mirror, and I am not vain. Rastno the Glassblower made it, long ago, when he was but young, and so clever with glass and all burning things. It hung up in the portico before the pillar fell, draped in damask, for its visions were distracting—but for Rastno’s sake we did not wish to dishonor his best-beloved child.
Rastno is gone now, wherever phoenix go when they die and cannot find their way to Heliopolis to bury their old ashes. He who reasoned that his glass should be so terribly, ineffably fine, since no flame but his own could make him tremble. And true to this he filled the capital with every wonderful thing that could be made of glass. And mirrors, of course, mirrors of every shape. But the mirror I showed to John was his last work. Rastno went into the flame and did not come out again. Laughing before he sparked his embers, he said that the mirror he fired in his own feathers would be a wonder beyond even the Physon, the churning river of stone.
When they dragged the shard of glass from the charred bones and blowing ashes of his pearl-lined nest, when they cleared from it the blackened ends of Rastno’s beak and talons, and scraped the boiled eye-wet and blood from its surface, they found a sheet of silvery glass limned with mercury, so pure that it showed the whole world, wherever anyone wished to look, into any dragon-ridden corner of the planed earth.
It disturbed them all, for no one could understand what they saw, the many four-limbed creatures, the strange cities. The mirror taught only that their land was best, best by a length of ten giants, and they covered the mirror up again—but hung it in the hall all the same, as a funerary rite.
“Why did you not bury his remains, if that is what you do with your dead?” John asked, when I rolled the bronze-set glass from its resting place behind a bolt of salamander-silk. I shuddered.
“Would you love a tree whose trunk was ash, whose foliage was burnt and blistered flesh, black with flames you cannot see, but the tree remembers? What terrible fruit it would bear! Better that he be eaten, as the dervishes are, or given to the river, than to suffer such a planting.”
I showed John the mirror—but he was happy in those years, and his belly was fat, and he gripped me gleefully by the hips in the late afternoons and kissed the place where my head is not, opened my legs and said his favorite mass. He hardly even insisted I speak Latin anymore, or take any saltless Eucharist he might fashion, and only cried the name of his Apostle in his sleep. How could I know?
He put off a second journey to the Fountain. Every year, he was too busy. He did not age, or lessen, but I knew it would have to be soon. And every year I would ask: Why did you do what you did? And he would not answer me anymore, as though silence would wash the deed clean.
And once I asked: When I took you to the Fountain, were you truly weak? Or did you let me believe you were, to soften my heart and make certain I would enter you in the Abir?
He would not answer that either.
John absorbed himself in a great work soon after taking the throne—at least he considered it to be a great work and whatever a king considers to be a great work meets with general enthusiasm. He called all the separate kinds of Pentexore together, and asked that they send a delegation,