The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [83]
“I, too, could fly,” said Qaspiel. “We are both very quick. Fortunatus could take John on his back, and I have flown Hagia before. Perhaps even Hajji could ride behind John? I’m afraid I don’t know how to get you across, my leonine friend.”
Hadulph wrinkled his muzzle. “I expect we could manage it, if anyone meant to get across. But look at all those eyes shining to get down, get in, get to. I believe I will take the lion’s lot, which is to say the practical route, and walk the chasm until I find a way around, or a bridge. I shall see you all on the other side if you don’t dash your brains out or get stuck in an eternal mist.”
Hajji said nothing, but scrambled nimbly up the lion’s crimson haunch, and though he growled protest—but the white lion in his nature took rough pleasure in a panoti on his back. The pair began their quieter journey, the panoti flopped on his enormous back, looking up at the clouds.
Qaspiel took me in his arms and lifted me up, safely over the mist, into the fresh, biting air. For a long, spiraling, wind-ragged moment, I didn’t think about John at all, and felt some small peace in me, like a pebble suspended in mist.
Just as the sun slipped past noon and into the falling golden hours of afternoon, Qaspiel did spy a bubble below us, or at least a hole in the mist. It whooped with success and several unseen parrots echoed it back to Qaspiel with an extra harmonic scale of irritation. Through the gap, the four of us saw little—darkness, maybe, but it might have been shadows. Rooftops, perhaps, but perhaps only more mist. A road? A statue? I was certain I saw a garden all full of silver champak flowers and heavy iron pomegranates, their dew frozen, their leaves edged in ice. I saw it so clearly for a moment, and then I could not be sure. But John cried out, and the parrots shouted him down.
“A church!” he shouted over the rushing wind between us. “I see a church there, in the mist! I’m certain of it! A cross all of silver and opals, frozen in ice! A chapel! We must go down, whatever the risk. A church, Hagia!” He met my eyes and I saw a pleading, a silent barter, that if there was a church, not to tell its priest nor any other Christian soul what had passed between us. I set my mouth, and my heart beat angrily. I would not be ashamed, not of the sweetness of those flowers against his skin, of any small shiver that might have moved between our bodies, one to the other, like a secret, or a promise. That was his world.
I did not want to talk about it with anyone, truthfully. I had not yet decided where to place it within myself, in the heart or in the gut, as Hadulph might have said. What you put in your heart remains. What you put in your gut is digested and forgotten. It adds its energy to the whole, but vanishes in the process. Where to hide the smell of those flowers, and how I did, finally, speak his Latin out loud, speak it into his skin and his mouth? Presently I was keeping it somewhere dark and safe, for later brooding. Did I even want him? I didn’t know. I wanted—yes, I wanted to show him his wrongness, my beauty, even to corrupt him, as he claimed, but not in a wicked way. In the way that says: this world will swallow you, and I am first in line. Everyone else was fascinated, but I broke him. The one he hated; the one he would not see. That reasoning suffices for one night, but for more? I could not say. And that red field was behind me—before me lay Thule, something new and thrilling—we might even be in danger. I snuggled into Qaspiel’s cool grip. All of us felt it, except perhaps John, little more than forty and still a baby. Who knew if he felt anything, if he had the capacity to sense the friction of a story approaching, one of our very own, one we might be able to tell and re-tell and exaggerate and demure for at least a century. Oh, you don’t want to hear that old thing again! Well, if you insist.
The man was digging.
“Oh, la!” he sang, and dug further, his bronze shovel rising from the