The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [80]
That was unworthy. I could scratch it out, but You would not be fooled, and John’s honesty provoked an equal virtue in me.
I have failed, I thought, and then said: It is over. Who cares for children’s tales? But Alaric, having not lost a night’s sleep to this, being younger and less prone to the rage or despair that plagues the old, we who dwell so near to the end of all striving’s worth, possessed a clearer head and heart. He left me and the puddled waxen ruin of our candle-clock, and went into the village. Some time later, as I was finishing the copy of Imtithal’s curious origin story, he returned with the woman in yellow, with her strange downy skin and topaz eyes. She regarded me calmly. I did not think that woman had ever parted with calm in all her days. She inquired as to the trouble. Speechless, I indicated the miasma of rotted fruit before me. She took in the sight.
“You should have worked faster,” she sighed finally, and left us alone.
“A callous thing,” remarked Alaric.
“Who knows what they fashion hearts out of in this country,” I sniffed. “Pure red rock, no doubt.”
“She fascinates me, I confess it,” my Brother said. “She speaks almost never, and yet when she does, I feel in my stomach as though a nail pierced me, and with much rust. It is disquieting.”
“I am sure that our Brothers in Luzerne would prefer you not indulge your nail ideations,” I said wryly, turning back to the books to make the best of it.
“I do not speak of love,” Alaric snapped in Aramaic. “I do not want her. You know I have never given thought to women.”
“Then what?”
“When she speaks, I suffer,” he said simply, and would not say more.
To my surprise she returned to us, a basket in her arms. Her yellow dress caught on the dry reeds of the weave. She had filled it with boiled bluish eggs, strips of dried bird-flesh, and several flowers which I understood she meant us to eat.
“It’s not breakfast that grieves me,” I protested, but my stomach disagreed. We fell to, and as we did the woman in yellow drew out of the feast a few slices of some golden substance—ginger, by the smell of it, though terribly sharper than the ginger I had known, which, fairly speaking, was never much. At Luzerne, our Abbot never considered pungent spices as virtuous fare.
I watched as, with infinite delicacy, the woman picked up our books and rubbed their remaining fragile pages with the golden root, barely touching them, yet coating them in heady trails of oil. She scooped away the worst of it and added it to our cup of mash, and after much silence, much eating, and much application of her cure, gave the books back over to our care.
“It will not stop the rot,” she said. “But it will slow. Perhaps you will even finish.”
Alaric looked up at her through his hair, grown too long on the road.
“Tell us your name,” he said softly.
“It is not important,” she answered.
“Please.”
“My name is my own. You have not earned the right to hear it.”
And she left us, the pads of her feet flashing clean and lovely as she moved.
I cleared my throat. “I loved a girl when I was young, Alaric,” I said when I had swallowed my egg and wiped my chin. “She made the sweetest cheese you ever tasted, and her hair smelled like thyme. She had never read a book in her life, and only knew half the Lord’s Prayer. I thought she was as perfect a creature as the world might own. Here at the end of the world I will even confess to you, my dear friend, that I broke my vows and made love to her one summer among her cows, with the bright cold stars overhead and the lowing of the spotted beasts in our ears. She kissed me—well, like a lamia. I felt her tail all squeezing me in and her soul in my mouth and I loved her like fire, Alaric, I loved her like a gospel. But when the morning came and I woke with her sleeping in the grass beside me, she wasn’t a lamia or a gospel, but a simple