The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [67]
A-ve.
He repeated these words as if they had any meaning for us, sounding each syllable. We did not like Latin. It sat on our tongues like an old orange, sweet-sour and rind-ridden.
A. Ve.
A-ve Ma-ri-a.
A. Ve. Mari. A.
Grisalba yawned and picked at her tail, lazily slapping its tip against the chalcedony floor. Hadulph chuckled and bit into the consonants like elbow joints. In the front row, a little panoti with her ears drawn in listened intently, with her whole being. But then, that is how panotii listen. I could see the bluish blood pulsing in the delicate skin of her lobes.
A-ve Ma-ri-a gra-ti-a ple-na. Ti like she. Ple like play. She plays, gratia plena, Maria plays, Ave Maria gratia plena.
A. Ve. Mari. A. Gra. Tea. A. Plea. Na.
“I wonder what his sweat tastes like?” Grisalba murmured beside me. I grinned, but the priest could not chide me, for that would mean glancing down past my nipple-eyes to the mouth-that-is-a-navel, and he would not risk it. I wondered too. I wondered what his stranger’s kiss would be like. But it was an idle thought, a summer’s cloudy dreaming.
No, no. She plays. She; play. Shall we try the Pater Noster instead then?
Pa. Tear. No. Star.
[Another slab of fungus and putridity stole the blemmye’s words from me. That time it swallowed up a whole page, of which all I could rescue was a measly exchange already turning purple in the lines of the characters. The M of Maria was blackened with rot:
I understood that this Maria business vaguely referred to a virgin who had had a child. I did not think this particularly impressive. Qaspiel, after all, had managed it. “Virginity confers strength,” John said during one of his lectures. “It is the pearl that purchases paradise.” None of us understood this.
“What paradise do you mean?” said Grisalba angrily, when he tried to explain the necessity of chastity. “What pleasure there can be bought with misery here? John, look around you! What do you need that the paradise of our home, which we so generously share with you, does not amply give?”
He looked at me as he answered: “Virtue.”]
Did I want him because he hated me? I do not like to think so. I want to believe better of myself than that. But perhaps it is true after all. The priest loved to walk with Qaspiel and speak with it, even to hear its voice, which was always musical, kind, fluid. Qaspiel did not even know what John meant by the word angel, but he allowed that if it pleased the stranger, he might call it one. He broke bread with Fortunatus and sipped the juice of the blackbulb fruit, which he liked specially. I like it, too. The fruit is small and soft, the flesh deep purple, the pit like a single pearl. Children love it specially, and must be kept away, for it brings rich and terrifying dreams. I marveled that Fortunatus let him indulge so often. I thought perhaps the gryphon had a more decadent heart than I had guessed, but when I asked him, he said only: “He is not my child and I will not scold him.”
Even in Grisalba he found a sort of friend. She let him believe her a convert for a while, because it amused her. She even wore a veil, when he asked her to. She prayed with him on the Sabbath, with one eye open. She even filled several goblets with the poisons and drugs her body could produce, so that he might know her better. She had seven in all, and was very proud of their colors. She showed him everything about her people, with pride, with grace and eloquence. But one evening, when he was instructing her in eschatology, she leaned forward and kissed him. When she told me about it, she said he kissed her back, even after she had eaten her dinner in front of him, which I cannot imagine he took with aplomb, as her nature was unavoidably serpentine. Thus she would have been compelled to dislodge her jaw to take her meal whole and alive. Lamia kiss in much the same way. She twined her tail around him, squeezing his skinny frame, her teeth