The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [77]
After a year, a tree began to grow where Sapham had been buried, and it had a kind of heavy, dark, furry fruit. Everyone waited expectantly to see what would come of it, even though Herododos had already gone home past Lydia to wherever he lived and loved his whole-wife, as foreigners seem to have trouble believing about the trees. A second year passed before the fruit split open, and I came out, and several siblings, with hair like Sapham and wings like Pham, and we have no gender because we are not animals but fruit and we like to sing, too, and we like to fly, and we like to be loyal, and we like to love. The tree opened up and flew away and when it was done only twigs and a few blue leaves remained, and then they blew away, too, and we were all born, and ready to live.” Qaspiel twisted its long fingers together, upset, I think, if I could begin to interpret. “A hundred years later the tree fruited again and we were so happy, so excited, so ready to love our new family! But Gog and Magog first appeared in those days, and their monstrous stride shadowed the plains, and the fluid of their boiling faces, their tears and saliva and snot and sweat, fell on the tree and blighted it and we thought there would never be any more of us, ever, but then the first parent, Irial, began to secrete, and we learned that we were not all fruit, but a little animal, too, and we were happy, but the tree was still dead, and no one can make songs as clever as Sapham could, and we wish we could have known her.”
I chewed a piece of salted yak and considered it all. A bit of stringy fat caught between my teeth.
“Who will tell the next tale?” I asked. I looked for the ghostly slip of the panoti, in the shadows. “Hajji?”
She pulled another fruit up close to her ear, this time a plum. “I don’t tell stories,” she said quietly.
I looked down at the last crust of yak, chagrined. When the rest of them mocked me, I could bear it. When Hajji rebuffed me, misery settled on me like a coat.
“Bury it,” Qaspiel said. “So that the next traveler will have a fine salted yak-tree to feast from.”
I dug in the soil with my fingers—I wanted Hajji to smile at me, to be charmed at my pliability. But more, I wanted not to be a stranger anymore, to look upon that miraculous soil as they did, as something usual, every day. I wanted to do something as a native soul would do it. And perhaps that was my first acceptance of the magic that lives in this place, the first time I really believed a tree would grow where I dropped the rind of my supper.
“I know you believe what you have told me to be true, Qaspiel,” I said gently, still hoping to pull some parable out of the evening, or an allegory. I confess I was not wholly sure of the difference. “But if you would do me the courtesy, I would tell you what an angel is, and perhaps you might draw some illumination from it.”
“I am not an angel.”
But in those days I was as full of my own notions of the world as a jar of oil, so eager to pour it out all over everyone that I did not care even a little what Qaspiel thought it was. “The angels dwelt with God in the beginning of the world, when all the stars of the morning sang out together and rejoiced—”
Qaspiel held out its long-fingered hand, and made its palm flat. Out of the flesh a single, stark red passion-flower sprang up, its petals ruffling slightly in the night breeze.
My words died in me. Hagia laughed cruelly, and the passion-flower began to—
[Here the mold had so corrupted the text that it hurt my eyes—the brilliant colors of it, no longer like an apple going brown, but bright gold with fuzzy growths of violet and green, like flames shooting up through the letters, devouring, conflagrating, tipped in bitter, black degeneration.