The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [50]
I looked up at him, throned in glory. “What heresy could you have committed? You are an innocent.”
Kostas put his naked brown hand upon the head of the golden hound; the creature arched her head to meet his palm.
“I was an idolater, and you my golden bull. I wished not to be like Christ but to be like you. I worshipped you, and tried to imitate your life, instead of that of a saint who might deliver my soul. I dreamed that one day, if I performed every act perfectly, you might praise me with some small word, and that word I would have folded into a cedar box and preserved forever. That word would have been enough.”
Again, shame washed over me like a hot tide. I pressed my face once into the earth, which gave way in the dream, black and soft. Yet upon my pate a new pair of eyes opened, and I saw with them perfectly, and was not spared any sight. I whispered: “I have never heard you speak this way.”
“Well,” said the dream-image, and he removed his hand from the golden hound to caress her bone sister, who ground her teeth in pleasure. I could see her fangs through the bones of her narrow cheek. “I am not really Kostas. In the kingdom of sleep, the insomniac plays his tricks.”
Kostas turned his dear, lovely head full to one side, and when he turned it back towards me, it had become the face of an old man, but one hale of health and rosy of nose, as though he either drank much or spent his days in snowy crevices where the wind bit at his extremities. He possessed a beard, and dark hair not yet yielded up to white. His eyes shone huge and deep, lights in the dark, stars wheeling within him. All this I saw through my dream-eyes, which blinked on my skull. The golden sphere bore down on us.
“Raise your head, my son. Did you not come seeking me?”
I looked through my natural vision, but knew him not.
“I am Didymus Thomas, Thomas the Twin. I am an Apostle of Christ. Child, do you not know me?”
Thomas the Saint smiled with a tenderness so keen and sad I thought I might die there and never wake, but wander in this half-lit place forever, until in waking life my bones shivered into dust and blew down the length of some unnamed valley and out of anyone’s memory save a few damned sheep. On his throne beneath the golden sphere, Saint Thomas opened his shirt, not to beckon, but to reveal: he bore a second pair of eyes upon his chest, and a mouth in his navel. Out of this second mouth he whispered:
“Go now, my son. I forgive you all that is to come.”
The golden sphere descended, and I felt it press on the bones of my back, crushing me with its impossible weight, its solemn light.
Many years later, in the green-curtained bedroom I shared with my wife, I told her of this dream. She did not care for it. She would have liked to forget those first days. You were so ugly then, she said. You forgive yourself in your dreams. What if I do not forgive you?
I put my hands to the soft space between her collarbone and her shoulder-blades, where another woman’s head might be. I kissed it, and pressed my face to her warm brown shoulder. Outside, the summer rains steamed down from a heavy sky.
If you do not forgive me, I will be lost.
THE BOOK OF THE FOUNTAIN
When we first found him, he lay face-down in the pepper-fields, his skin blazed to a cracked and blistered scarlet, his hair sparse as thirsty grass. It might have been anyone.
King Abibas had chosen us, a fair sampling of nations, to investigate the thing that had manifested in the farm-speckled suburbs of Nural.
I was two hundred and fifty-eight years old.
I should mention that in those days our king was Abibas, a blue mule. Blue mules are not, of course, truly blue, but more of an ashen color. However, they swear that their primal ancestor, Urytal, could walk unseen through the summer world, for his coat was the color of the sky. Other than this, Urytal’s main characteristic was a rampant priapism, and the ability to sire children simply by coughing. When a brace of mules related this tale to John during his mania for origin stories,