The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [90]
As soon as she was fitted for the crown, the new queen went into Chandai where Gahmuret lived, and asked him to keep her safe from poisons of all kinds, for Giraud was never a fool. Gahmuret sat at his workbench for one year, considering how this should be done. In the end, he could not do it. He scried the stars himself and determined that he and his wife ought to conceive a child, and this child might grow to encompass the task the queen set. And so Gahmureen was born some time later, and born asleep. Her parents cared for her as she slept on and on, growing and dreaming and growing again. When she turned sixteen, Gahmureen woke with a start and commenced to build two great serpent-statues, each with an apple in its mouth, and in each apple a carbuncle that would go black in the presence of noxious poisons, and in the apple skin an alarm that would screech and hiss if the carbuncle darkened. Giraud rewarded the inventor’s daughter with a rich bed, piled with down and silk, for her cleverness, and there she sleeps today, in Chandai, where we would have to wake her now, to repair what Houd had broken.
And so went the exchange of kings and queens, one bartered for another, right up until today, with a bronze contraption growing bigger by the day down in the Pavilion.
[It began, finally, here, too, in the margins of Imtithal’s text, long curls of pale green slime, coiling like lace, encroaching, stretching toward the text as if to tease me, as if to say: If I wish I can take it all. Even these sweet little stories, even these. My heart saw some allegory in this, the corrupt world dissolving pure mind, the invisible demons of air that delight disintegration of these books, the angels of our better nature, racing to preserve purity, wholeness.
Faster, Hiob, faster.
THE WORD IN THE QUINCE
Chapter the Seventh: in Which Our Companions Discover a Certain Tower and Its Ruins and Feel Very Fondly Towards It, and in Which a Priest Struggles with the Convergence of Heart and Flesh.
Between Thule and the ruins lay an endless wood—at least it seemed endless, and all the worse for my dreams, which had gone dark and wordless of late. I dreamed of Hagia, and sometimes she had a head, and sometimes a child, and everything so washed with light I was blinded, and sunk into darkness with only her hands on me, only her breath, to let me know I still lived on the Earth and had not been transfigured into Heaven. The heat in my dreams moved on me like deep water. I told no one of any of it, and when I think now on all that has passed I know we were all lost in our own dreams, but then I thought myself specially plagued. I often thought myself special in those early years—I cannot be blamed, I don’t think. Everyone was grotesque, save me, everyone knew the lore of the land, save me. Everyone served some false god, or none. But the digging man had renewed my faith; Thomas came here, Thomas died here, and I would find his grave, and pray, and he would tell me what to do. That’s what saints are for—to guide us, who are lost on Earth.
Did I lust after her? I did. I confessed my sins to the stars every night, but my desire was not lifted from me. Then, it hurt me like a blade, not that I should swell and need, but that I should be unable to turn away from it, no matter how deformed the object. I should have been stronger. Now, I believe I wanted her at first because her aspect was most clearly demonic. Grisalba, I needed only look away from her tail to think her a mild mortal woman; the gentleness of Hajji excused her monstrous ears, and the male leonines I could love, for God made men for companionship and we find it easy among our own. After all, Daniel walked among lions, and was well. Qaspiel, figured like an angel, caused me no distress at all. But I could not ignore her body, and how like a thing of hell in the margins of a book of virtue she appeared, and how little gentleness dwelt in her spirit, all feminine virtues replaced with boldness,