The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [93]
“This place was called Babel, John,” said Hagia softly. I felt my belly drop out from me then, my heart quicken, and I felt I understood in a flood how their language was so familiar to me. They spoke the language. The language, the only true tongue. They were Babelites, only they did not even understand their hubris, to build that tower so high, did not even understand that God had cast their ambitions down. They were naked, and innocent, so innocent I felt their purity might burn me.
“We honor them, who strove so hard, and all before the Fountain which ransomed us from death,” Fortunatus said, nosing the boughs of dried blossoms with his beak to arrange them. “I have myself often thought of flying up and up, so high that I might glimpse that silver Sphere—but I would starve before I reached it, I would tire, and I am not so brave as they, who had only a few years to lose.”
I sat down heavily on the broad sands. A stone lay near me; I spread my palm on its warm surface, so old I could not begin to imagine its quarry. How I wished I could show this to Kostas, to my fellow priests—to Nikos, the linguist, who would delight in it, to Anastorus, the flagellant, who would be horrified. I wanted then only to share it with someone for whom it was not familiar and known, someone to share my wonder. To laugh with, for there is nothing else to do when confronted, at the end of the world, with the ruins of Babel.
That day, I felt as though I walked on the Sphere of the Moon, and the folk of that place simply stared at me, saying: Why do you gawk? Nothing could be more usual.
But for all their familiarity with it, no one seemed to want to leave. Though the morning barely showed through the orange clouds like birds along the horizon, everyone dallied, touched the stones, sifted the sand through their fingers. I saw Hajji press her lips to the doorway arch and shut her eyes in a rictus of reverence. Hadulph rolled on his back, his paws in the air, growling deep in his chest. Qaspiel walked through the remnants of the tower, its steps like a dance, scratching sweeping patterns in the sand, smiling to itself, its blue teeth gleaming. I watched them all, and I felt my separateness like a body. I knew this place, too, but I could not bring myself to tell them the truth of it, to interrupt their familial connection to those dark, dark stones—the canny emerald strands, as Qaspiel put it, that tied them here. I could not interrupt this joy with a story about God’s wrath.
You see how they took me, sin by tiny sin.
But they were so happy in the ruins.
Hagia set out a picnic, and we all ate dates and silk-berries from the cloth wood; they were rough on the tongue but tangy and sweet. We ate yet the last of Hajji’s dried yak. The panoti made small ululating noises at the sky, as if calling the Sphere of the Moon to herself. Hadulph snoozed, with his eyes open as I grasped now how he always slept, and Fortunatus leaned against him, flank to flank.
“You understand, don’t you?” Hagia said to me as the day drew down and without speaking they all agreed to sleep there, with those tall shadows growing long. “This is home. The whole nation of Pentexore lived here once. So it’s home for all of us.”
“No,” I said softly, lying next to her, my body tense, for nothing could convince my flesh she meant any virtuous thing. “It’s Eden.”
“You told Fortunatus that word. You said