The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [38]
I passed out of that forest with the laughter of sheep following me, and into lands so blasted I thought I walked on ash alone, with no rock to bear me up, only the void opening beneath my blistered feet. I saw the moon both day and night and thirsted so sharply that in the depths of those wastes I opened the vein of my arm and drank my own blood, as the sheep ate the leaves of their own tree. I thought of nothing. Not the wild dreams and visions of the great sand sea, not my mother or her black eyes that are Mary’s eyes that are my mother’s eyes, nothing at all. My mind became sifting ash, ash upon ash, and where the grit of my intellect fell, there too was ash, and the whole world burned and I burned with it and when I think of it now I see nothing but grey before and behind and beside; grey, and the scalded, terrible face of the moon stripping the life from me.
It seemed to me, near the end, that I smelled costly spices, pepper and myrrh, and I thought: I am dying and it is as my mother always said, after all. The sanctified dead smell sweet, and on their beloved breasts the living array spice and perfume.
I cannot say how many days and nights wound their way around this earth before I possessed a calm thought again, or knew my name.
THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN
The close of day has a kind of music to it. The descending blue, the rising silver stars, the parrots croaking their paeans to their own reflections, the market below my minaret closing up, clapping board to board, the boil of their last huge stew, full of every unsold thing. And my pen, always my pen, scratch-scratching away the last minutes of the world, little clock of my pen. The branches of the quince and the pomegranate began to snake through the upper rooms of my minaret some years back. I find them friendly, and now and again they have fruit for me, red and cracked as a heart, green and new as faith.
The fish-sellers call up to me. Hagia, come down and try my oysters, they’ll turn your guts to pearl! The artichoke-mongers, too, who know, still, after all these years, to keep the heaviest for John, and now for me. It doesn’t matter, him or me. They keep them back out of habit, for someone who loves them best. He loved the fruit because they brought his home back to him. I love it because they bring him back to me.
I recall several lines of Catacalon. Sometimes my brain claps upon some phrase and I cannot shake it loose; it runs the circuit of my body, down to my stomach and my heels and all the way back—a chariot-race, and tonight the old ram of Silverhair whips his beasts on that track. Maids of amethyst there lived, and youths of jet! Each stone of our palace, not cut but born weeping from the warm womb of some crystal bride. Would but those silent bricks could reveal to me one of their names! What a betrayal is death, in the land of life.
You betrayed me, John. My love, who chose death over me. In all your world of sins, was it never shameful to reject life and all its works?
I once met the philosopher himself—who during his third Abir lived as a gem-diver in the great caverns. His eyes had grown large and waxen in the lightless caves where the strong plunge into black pools, prying jewels from those secret clefts to bring into the light. I could not bear it, the closeness, the darkness, the cold water—the colder the tide, the brighter the stone, I heard the divers say. But Catacalon said, over a plate of orange cakes, that it suited him. In the dark, he came closer than ever before to the bones of those ancients who lived in this blessed country before us. It is not polite, of course, to make much of who we have been in lives past—more than impolite, it is forbidden. But I am a wicked girl, I have always been so, and loose with my love and my memory. He let me embrace him as he was and