The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [36]
“You haven’t the right, sir. Not to eat of us. Or else give me a bit of your blood in exchange—that would be only fair!”
“The fruit of the forest belongs to God, and thus to all men,” I said softly, drawing my laughter back in.
“Whose God is that, then?” sneered the sheep.
“Our Lord in Heaven, and Christ at His right hand.”
The ram snorted, and a puff of wool drifted off on his breath. “Well, I’ve never heard of such a creature, neither one of them. The Shear, who is the god of my people, and certainly far more terrifying and important than yours, who doesn’t even live here but in hefen, spake unto the first ewe and the first ram and said: Let no one enjoy the produce of thy body unless he offers his own in kind. Which we have always taken to mean: if you and your own want to spin and weave from our fleece, you owe us at the very least a nice soft pen and sweet clover and a bit of cold, clear water. I hardly think it goes differently for cannons!”
“While it is charming that you think thus, there is certainly no God but Christ, and He gave men dominion over the land beneath His feet, the sheep and oxen, and the beasts of the fields.”
The ram regarded me stonily. “When I lived I saw my God in his Fearful Aspect come upon the dewy field before dawn. His great black fleece blotted out my sight, and the candles of his eyes dripped tears of tallow. His teeth were gnashing shears, and with them he took up my lambs and chewed them, and I wept, but where his shadow fell clover grew, and new lambs gamboled as if in the sunlight, and I knew I would mate again. In the morning my young had been carved up for winter supper, but the spring brought more, and they grew strong. Can you say the same of your God? Did he come and sit by your bedside and offer you peace when pain came? Did you look into the candles of his eyes, smell the brume of his musk? Or do you make up stories because you are lonely and bray about it all day long?”
“You are a beast, and do not have a soul. Worse, you seem to be a sort of plant as well. What purpose could there be in ministering to you?”
“That’s the loser’s argument if I ever heard it,” smirked the ram, and chewed at a bit of leaf.
I felt it best to inquire after some other subject—I have never been a missionary, or aimed at that golden felicity of tongue that such men possess. When I attempted it, I used too many words or too few, and no one was converted by peals of light exuding from my inspired mouth. In the world I knew, in the world I loved best, the world of Constantinople, painted blue domes and artichokes and quinces and loyal, simple men with God’s own devotion in their eyes, everyone knew what God looks like. We may have disagreed on points of scripture, we may even have divided a room and called some heretics and some pure on the basis of a single verb, but no one argued that Christ reigned in Heaven as king, that His Crown was Many-Storied, that Mary was His Mother and He Died to Rise Again. Except the heathen Saracen, or even more perverse Easterner. I often thought in those days that deviance and perversity must increase the further one ventured eastward. But even in the east they admitted that Christ was holy, His Birth miraculous. When the argument centered not on whether Christ lived as one being and one flesh or separate in the Word, His Breath and Spirit, and the Flesh, His Earthly Body, but whether or not a gargantuan sheep had appeared to another sheep in some blasted farmyard, there could be no real discourse.
I tried another tack, less successful even than the first. “You said ‘when I lived.’ Are you dead, now, then? I confess I would prefer you to say you are, for then the logical conclusion would be that I have died myself and blundered into some heretofore uncharted sphere of Hell, and that would explain much to my heart.”
The sheep marveled at me, his yellowish-green eyes wide and rolling. By now the other heads had roused themselves