The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [55]
Ikram, to Whom Rastno Gave a Glass Horn: Butterfly, why is Rastno the phoenix so sad?
Lamis, to Whom Rastno Gave a Glass Flower: He tries to be sunny for us, but he cries beneath his wing. Even I have seen it.
Houd, to Whom Rastno Gave a Glass Dagger: He is a grown-up. Grown-ups are always sad. It’s their hobby.
I bade them come close to me. I let my ears flow around their shoulders. I coaxed them to look down into the valley of Nural—to see the midnight flowers, how black they were, how they fluttered on the long grass like moths. The moon makes that wind, as she gets ready to be born. The trouble was not that Rastno was grown-up. It is true that we pile up sadness in our hearts like treasure—though love and happiness too, I promised them. The heart is greedy and vast. But Rastno’s sorrows were also greedy and vast—they sufficed for a whole people. And I asked while the coffee steamed, for I was always a teacher to them: What do you know about phoenix?
Lamis, Who Sang a Song for the Phoenix, When They Were Alone, About Having a Cruel Brother, and Not Being Pretty: They bring presents!
Ikram, Who Danced for the Phoenix, When They Were Alone, Mad as a Dervish, Spinning Around: They live five hundred years, and then burn themselves to death in a cinnamon nest, and rise up again, a new bird, to live a new life.
Houd, Who Said Nothing to the Phoenix When They Were Alone, But Stared Stonily at Him, and Then Wept: Like the moon. Like us, when the lottery-barrel spins.
Oh, I had such clever children. But I knew something more, and so did Rastno, and this is why he was sad.
Listen to me, now. To listen is to become like the moon, silent and full of light, a witness in the dark.
Once, so many phoenix lived in the cinnamon forests that it all seemed like a long red river. The forests nestled south of the great lake of silver that borders the city of Simurgh far to the north of Pentexore. Not so terribly far from Nimat-Under-the-Snow, but in the warm lowlands, where the great mountains of my heart can be seen bright and bold against the gentle sky. There the trunks of the trees are made of a soft, fragrant amber called frankincense, their leaves ruddy brown, sweet cinnamon flake the color of embers. Those forests once teemed with phoenix-life, and Simurgh was their city. They held autumn balls there, and at the end so much passion and such complex dances had crossed the floor that the whole palace would suddenly go up in flames, and the birds would stand outside in their finest dewcloth and applaud by stamping on the ground and crowing.
When an elderly drake and duchess—for that is how the male and female of the species are properly called—felt her time coming upon her, every soul in Simurgh would bring her gold and cassia, cinnamon and incense, tea-leaves and pepper-root to build her nest, and it would be a festival day, and they would cheer her and praise her long life before she immolated and the sky turned dark with her smoke.
Now, in those days, it was not enough to burn on a soft, sweet-smelling nest. The phoenix who reached the end of his days and wished to resurrect had a long journey ahead of him, as long and arduous as any he might take in life. Before the flame took him, the aging bird would fashion for himself an egg of myrrh, a funeral egg, and into that egg he packed not only his own ashes and charred red bones, but all of his memories and loves, his disappointments and terrors, everything that was the old bird. For days the old matron or master would sit upon the egg as if it might hatch, as if they meant to nurse the ghosts of themselves. Even when the nest burned, the egg remained, unspoiled, not even blackened, and the first task of the new phoenix would be to take the funereal egg in her talons and fly far, far off, to a city called Heliopolis, beyond the Nural, beyond Silverhair, beyond Nimat and the Axle of Heaven. Rastno said