The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [64]
If what John recorded was so, and this strange country possessed all things without corruption and in their fullness, it certainly did no longer, for the rot veined through Hagia’s beautiful letters even as I watched.
It would have been heresy. Of course. How could it be anything else, the foundational myth of a gryphon? But I felt a hole form in my heart where that tale might have been. Did I believe that Prester John had held discourse with a gryphon? I could not say. I certainly countenanced that such beasts might exist, or have existed, though it is preposterous to think they possessed human reason, any more than the pigs of the yard. It was not impossible that allegory ruled the text, and that dialogue passed between John and a foreign man with great personal strength and some brand of spiritual wisdom, after his way and not being a Christian, and John chose to represent him with the symbol of the gryphon. Perhaps some further key to the metaphor lay in that ruined page, but I would never find it, or know.
I cursed my meal with Alaric, which had stolen precious time from these books. I was a wolf, a dragon, snapping over my treasure, unwilling to share. But I could no longer hoard the privilege of this fruit. I summoned Alaric to my side once more—I chose him specially for this journey, for I had known him since he was a boy, delicate of face, almost punishably gentle of heart, good for nothing but books. I had taken him under my wing and taught him his Greek, but also Aramaic, the ululating tongue of Araby, the slushing envowelation of the Rus, and the more piquant dialects I knew: Phoenician, Aethiop, Welsh. With his Latin and our local French and German, Alaric had become nearly my equal in translation. He took the same deep, thorny pleasure in the puzzle of it. His favorite was always Aristotle, a pagan, yes, but hardly a man alive has constructed more maddening sentences. I recall so many days when we pledged to make certain the other ate and drank throughout his work, since we were wont to forget the needs of the flesh. We were so alike—and I argued strongly for his inclusion in our delegation, despite his inexperience with and total disinterest in missionary work.
Once, on the long road to this blasted wasteland of dust and roosters and its bruised sun, Alaric and I ate a clutch of wild eggs together we had found in foraging. A small sin: we did not share with the others, but instead squatted beneath a gnarled, many-rooted baobab and spoke in our favorite fashion: switching, sentence by sentence, between the tongues we knew. The game went thusly: I would begin in Greek, and shift to Latin, then to Egyptian, Alaric would then begin in Egyptian, nimbly moving into French, and so on. If we felt particularly clever, we would begin to trade dialects of a single language.
“Brother Hiob,” he began in Hebrew. “Do you believe the world is infinite?”
“Nothing is infinite but God,” I answered in Latin.
“The universe is infinite in space but not in time,” Alaric whispered in English, the one language he knew that I did not. But that line I recognized. “Of course,” he re-asserted himself, side-stepping into Greek, “but by extension, could not all God’s works be called infinite? How can finitude proceed from an infinite source?”
“What are you getting at, Brother Alaric?” I asked in old French, sucking down a golden yolk.
“Nothing. I only wonder if the world itself, not the universe, but this world, is infinite, infinite enough to contain what we seek. Abyssinia is conquered, the New World found and no dragons there, vanilla and saffron in the East but no wonderful king. I wonder if the world is not very much poorer than we hoped, and smaller. There are so few places left to look where anything might be kept secret. Unless it is infinite, and the further we sail the more and more New Worlds we will discover, each full of pumpkins and chocolate and potatoes and slaves. What a beautiful