The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [68]
He fled from her passion to the al-Qasr, where more or less all of Nural sprawled in the late summer heat, the drowsy slow sweetness of it, with the fountains trickling thin and quiet. Hadulph tended to the priest, and John was much mocked by several monkeys hanging from a six-armed statue of some forgotten god. Finally, when the day had got on in hours, Grisalba came looking for him, her cheeks flared green, anger decking her like gems. She snarled at him in full view of the better part of our nation.
“I am a serpent, and I do not care what you think. Yes, I have a great hunger for mating, and for many other things besides. Yes, I drink blood—not because I am wicked but because my body is made in its every part to want blood, to digest it, to take life from it. You cannot help that you take life from cakes and stews and roasts. You drink your God’s blood! What right have you to judge my lunch? Try living on wood and then tell me my habits are filthy and sinful. And yes, I devour my own eggs. There’s nothing wrong with it; it’s part of our most private rites. The child finishes its growth within me. The egg begets the snake half, the womb the human half, and I really think a little less queasiness about the biology of your betters would look good on you. I live after my nature, and if your God made everything then he made me and you shouldn’t be such a baby about a little kiss.” She sat down, her coppery tail curled around her. “Now, if you want me to say a rosary, I will. But that will be the last I ever say to your God, because it seems to me he is a very specific God, and has nothing to do with anyone but you. If you want to stay a virgin and turn up your nose, that’s your business, but don’t ever call me a whore again, just for doing what is right and good and natural. It’s bad manners.”
Thus Grisalba, nominally, remained John’s one convert, for he never made her say that final prayer. From then on they were easy together, and he blessed her eggs when they came, after she had found a more suitable lover, who brought her turmeric flowers to decorate his own clean, sweet flesh.
John even loved the little panoti I saw at his lesson. She followed him everywhere, and learned Latin so well that they conversed together, a secret language, and I could not help it—I felt envy. My husband could not speak to me, and everyone had gone so mad for that useless stranger, and I was lonely. But I alone he would not tolerate, would not even acknowledge. I once saw him play with a little blemmye child. Her name was Oro; I knew her, a little prodigy of mathematics, and a great pride to us. John tickled her, and they both laughed, and I felt the sting of it, that he could look at her, her skinny, undeveloped chest with bright brown eyes blinking up at him, her navel with its pretty mouth, but not at me. She recited theorems to impress him and he behaved exactly as though she had babbled an infant’s nothings. He smiled in a fatherly way and patted her shoulder. I cast down my eyes and suffered such shame.
One day I happened upon John’s own lessons at Fortunatus’ paw, in the long, shaded library of the al-Qasr, the scrolls in their alcoves like long clusters of citron.
The gryphon read aloud: “‘The long bones are found in the limbs, and each consists of a body or shaft and two extremities. The body, or diaphysis, is cylindrical, with a central cavity termed the medullary canal.’”
The presbyter cloistered with his companion: cross-sections of satyr and blemmye inked in delicate, costly brown inks lay spread out on a low desk of sethym wood, the male blemmye with limbs outstretched, encircled with diagrammatic symbols as though pinioned to a wheel, showing the compact perfection of