The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [69]
“Please concentrate, John,” begged Fortunatus, his conscripted tutor, “if you do not learn our anatomies how will you live among us? How will you help portion the harvest if you do not know that the phoenix require cassia and cardamom for their nests, while the satyr cannot eat the pepper plants that the rest of us prize? How will you build, brick upon brick, if you do not know that the blemmyae orient their houses in clusters of four, facing outward, while the sciopods have no houses at all, but lie beneath their own feet, like mice beneath toadstools? How will you sell your goods at the quarter-moon market if you do not know that the lamia especially love honeycomb still clung with lethargic bees, while the dervishes eat nothing but their dead?”
“Where I come from, all men have the same shape,” grumbled the priest, his eyes bloodshot from reading, unwilling to acknowledge me, who all in secret had become the best of his own students—his discipuli. I had done my scribe’s work and translated each of those illuminated anatomicals into Latin so that John would believe them true—for he told us that Latin was the language of truth, and the vulgar tongues are the dialects of lies. Still he would not thank me for it.
“That is a sad country, and you should give thanks to your God that you need not return there, where every face is another’s twin,” the gryphon said with a long sigh.
“All the same I long for it, and wish myself there, where nothing is strange,” John murmured to himself, and stared past me. I made myself appear busy, copying out my own scroll concerning the accounting rituals of centaurs, under the long, candle-thin windows. But out of one eye I watched him. His hair still showed scalp in patches, but the scalp itself not so scorched and peeling as it has been. And I thought: Yes, he must be homesick. He must be sad. He must wish to not be a stranger somewhere. He must still long for his Ap-oss-el. John shook himself and concentrated again on the wheels of flesh before him.
“I do not understand the blemmyae,” he announced, without turning his head to me, as though I were not even in the room. “They carry their faces in their chests and have no head—I suppose the brain is just behind the heart then, in the chest cavity—but how,” the Priest blushed, and shifted in his seat so that it was clear that he did not address the indecorous question to me, “how would she nurse a child, Fortunatus?”
The gryphon twitched his dark wings—once, twice.
“Why, she would but weep.”
At home, Astolfo was lost in his own dreams and thoughts, his eyes often glazed and happy over some distant thing I knew nothing of. He prayed often to Vishuddha, the eleven-mouthed god of his people. He carved an altar in eleven stones and spent much of his love there. Vishuddha’s worship, so full of harmonic chanting and poems in eleven parts, always made my head spin. I attended the amyctryae’s holiday services politely, for Astolfo’s sake, but could never quite embrace it. I learned the antiphonals and agons but I could not find the faith. I suppose that is something of a habit with me.
My husband could not speak to me, only to his god and his trees. I ate my soup in the silence that had become our third mate.
[Long fingers of scarlet obliterated any further mention of the husband, or John’s wonderful conversion of the lamia, or even a further discussion of anatomy—You see how I dreamed what might have been on those pages, how I guessed that it must have been wonderful, because it was invisible to me? The text turned liquid, and when it cleared again, the whole city had gathered to cast judgment on the priest.]
Fortunatus clawed the sand of our crumbling amphitheater, where the nations of our nation gathered—as much as the nations are inclined to gather, which is to say lazily and without much intent of discussing anything. The gryphon was nervous; the color in his tail low and banked, his throat dry. The hulking