The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [66]
Qaspiel worked then as a vanilla-farmer, and it smelled rich with spice. I held it while it drank; it held me. When we returned home it lifted me up in its arms and we flew over all the towns I knew, spinning and spinning like an arrow in the air, and its pale body was the whole of my vision. The thick, green water of the Fountain soared in me, and we soared together, the first day of our infinite lives.
And so with the joy of recognition of an old friend I greeted Qaspiel as the gryphon brought him before John. Its delicate feet hardly left depressions in the thick black soil of Nural, not unlike the fine, moist sand of vanilla deep within the pod. It had shorn its hair since I had seen it last, and strewn its short locks with little beads of hematite for the occasion. Its dress gleamed nearly colorless, a cobweb that would flatten and spread out in flight—and its wings, taller than itself, were a deep sort of cobalt that played tricks with the eye. I went to embrace my friend, but before I could hold out my arms, John fell to his knees between us. I stared at him as he wept, his jaw slack, his body shaking in a kind of rapture.
[Here corruption had eaten up three passages, a fuzzy deep red kind of mold that devoured text and left no small word for me. Nothing of it remained legible except for a few spare lines which none could help but recognize, in the second passage: And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled an angel with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said: Let me go, for the day breaketh.
The text became clearer some pages thereafter, and I could not find more concerning John’s words with his angel. The text began again thusly:]
Behind the ivory-and-amethyst pillars of the al-Qasr, which so much later John would insist we rename the Basilica of St. Thomas, I sat with my hands demurely in my lap, fingering Hadulph’s flame-colored tail on the one side, Astolfo silent and still on the other. We sat in rows like children—the pygmies picked at their ears, a phoenix ran sticks of cinnamon through her beak, the sciopods relaxed on their backs, wide feet thrust overhead, each toe ringed with silver and emerald. Grisalba combed her long black hair, looking bored.
John the Priest tried not to look at me. His hair had grown back, but it was white, whiter than a man his age should own.
I told him once, many years later while he ran his tongue over the small of my back, that the sun had taken all his blood, and left him with nothing in his veins but light.
Ever the good teacher, John tried to meet each of our eyes in turn, but he could not look at mine, he could not look down to the full curve of my high, brown breasts, and the green eyes that stared calmly from their tips under a thick fringe of lashes. He always tried to avoid looking at me, or any of the other female blemmyae. But something about me in particular seemed to shame him. Perhaps because I had found him, seen him weak, nursed him. He blushed like a child when he accidentally looked me in the eye. Later I teased him about it, but he did not laugh. Of course I could not look at you. You were naked.
But I did not understand his morality. Even when I did understand it I looked on it much as a dead thing whose stench I had to endure. I was shamed, to be singled out so, to be