The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [23]
I woke at night, my skin hot and tight enough to crack like the shell of an egg. My mouth was full of sand, my chest scoured raw. The sand brought me back to myself, and I was relieved to find I still remembered Kostas and Constantinople, still clutched them in my heart’s hands like two tiny marble figures. Much else had spilled out into the sea. My heart was a net of fish torn open. I came for something, didn’t I? To find something. Images flickered and died: a tomb, a cross, a face with hollow eyes. I thought that I had a purpose, once.
The moon lay long and silver on the planks of dead ships on the beach-head, masts tangled with golden seaweed. Far off, in the shadows, I thought I saw the broken, useless hulk of a lighthouse, its thin, fiery beam illuminating only the endless sand. Dark cliffs hunched behind it, circled by silent birds battling the wind through a heaven crowded with unfamiliar stars, a flock without their shepherd, wheeling wide, constellations broken open against a sharp sky. I moved towards the black mountains, my bones weeping in my flesh, begging to be allowed to lie down on the shore of the sand and perish.
In this way shall I grind sin from my soul, I thought then, for the desert was always the redeemer of folly and flesh. Who under the copper domes will not laugh when I find my way home, and tell them of these far places? The purity blazing from my scalp will blind them! It will force their gaze aside, and crown me in silver! When I crest that range I shall sit upon it as on the wall of the world, and the Logos will sit on my shoulder like a keen-eyed crow. I shall feel its claws in my bones.
Thus I made my way, babbling to myself, imagining the wonder and envy of distant monks, and found grace for my blistered feet: a smooth rock path through the cliffside, winding thin and reluctant, slowly upward. The sandy sea pounded below, its gold turned to white by the moon gliding through her sphere. Waves sent sprays of glittering mica into the wind. Long cries, like unhurried arrows arced through the sky, low and sweet along the crystal breakers. If not for the sand and my bleeding back, the land would have seemed something like the coast of the Bosphorus in the summer, if lacking a thousand colored tents gleaming in the heat.
Dawn was nearly on me when I saw them—there had not been enough light before, or too much mountain. A line of stone cranes peered down at me from the heights, their long beaks beaten out of the golden cliffside rock, fronds of waving palm crowning their small, curious heads. They were fitted to the crest of the crags like a small fence, and as I squinted it seemed to me that real cranes crept cautiously up between them: scarlet faces and long, lithe bodies all of blue, fine, thin feathers like gold thread spiking from their delicate heads. They frowned grimly, like nothing so much as the front face of a phalanx staring me down, stone pupils and black, wet eyes alternating.
“You’re too big!” one cried out, the largest of all, whose cobalt feathers shone even in the thin light of just-before-dawn. “It would be Unfair Advantage!” It snapped its long beak several times, like drum-strikes.
I finally struggled up the last rough stair of stone and stood upon the summit, the sea of sand whirring and heaving far below, my face welted with yesterday’s heat, my rags scant comfort against the high winds that tore at me with their bony fingers in place of the moon’s flat, hard