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“Birds and beasts must feast as men do. I do not deny them their sustenance.”

In a madness I turned from her, and in a madness I clambered up into the scarlet tree as no man my age should do, reaching for the book-fruit, stretching out my veiny fingers to them. They glittered and swung away from my grip in the hot breezes, the green and the gold fluttering, the covers stamped with serpents, with crosses, with curved swords, with a girl whose right arm was a long wing.

Below me, my guide made a sign with her long fingers. Three, her hand said. Three alone.

Of course, it must forever and always be three. Three is Thy number, O Lord, of Thy Son and Thy Spirit. How wicked of me, no better than a worm or a raven, to strip the tree for my own gorging. I breathed to calm my heart and reached out again, to the brambled deeps of the tree. I sought out the most complete volumes, in the nests of branches where no hoopoe crept, and this time my grip fell firmly on them, cool and firm as apples.

I drew forth first: a golden book bearing a three-barred cross on its cover. Second: a green antiphonal with a wax seal over its pages that showed a strange, elongated ear. Lastly I strained to pluck, furthest from my reach, a book as scarlet as the leaves of the great tree. A pair of staring eyes embossed on its cover seemed to rifle my soul for riches, finding less than they hoped for. Cradled in the fork of the tree, I opened the pages of my last ripe fruit, my prize, and on the page was the same certain hand as had recorded the strange science of Anti-Aristotle. But it was not the same book—the paper shone a pale, fresh green, and small paintings grinned and gamboled at the edges. Perhaps the same scribe had copied both—to be sure many books in our Library bear my own hand.

I bent my face close to the script, squinting—and onto that page my heart fell out, for the sweet-smelling book promised no hope.

We carried the body of my husband down to the river, he who was once called king, called Father, called, in the most distant of days, Prester John.

The river churned: basalt, granite, marble, quartz—sandstone, limestone, soapstone. Alabaster against obsidian, flint against agate. Eddies of jasper slipped by, swirls of schist, carbuncle and chrysolite, slate, beryl, and a sound like shoulders breaking.

Fortunatus the Gryphon carried the body which had been called John on his broad and fur-fringed back—how his wings were upraised like banners, gold and red and bright! Behind his snapping tail followed the wailing lamia twelve by twelve, molting their iridescent skins in grief.

Behind them came shrieking hyena and crocodiles with their great black eyes streaming tears of milk and blood.

Even still behind these came lowing tigers, their colors banked, and in their ranks sciopods wrapped in high black stockings, carrying birch-bark cages filled with green-thoraxed crickets singing out their dirges.

The panotii came behind them, their great and silken ears drawn over their bodies like mourning veils.

The astomii followed, their mouthless faces wretched, their great noses sniffing at the tear-stitched air. At their heels walked the amyctryae, their mouths pulled up over their heads as if to hide from grief.

The red and the white lions dragged their manes in the dust; centaurs buried their faces in blue-veined hands.

The meta-collinara passed, their feet clung with hill-dust, clutching their women’s breasts while their swan-heads bobbed in time to some unheard dirge of their own.

The peacocks closed the blue-green eyes of their tails.

The tensevetes came, ice glittering in their elbows, the corners of their eyelids, the webbing of their fingers, the points of their terrible teeth. And from all these places they melted, woeful water dripping into the dusty day.

The soft-nosed mules threw up their heads in broken-throated braying.

The panthers stumbled to their black and muscled knees, licking the soil from their tears.

The blue cranes shrieked and snapped their sail-like wings sorrow-ward.

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