The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [95]
“Hadulph, I have done with him. I will only tolerate so much talk of God and my own ugliness. We will go where we are going and I hope to leave him there. He can worship a grave till he dies. I have no more patience for sneering in the daylight and ardor by moon. That is a child’s game.”
“He is a child. Only forty! Can you imagine? Can you even remember forty? At forty I still had my mother’s milk for breakfast! No wonder he is so rude; no wonder he believes uncivilized things.”
“I remember forty. Astolfo could still speak; we made love in the sun and he did not avert his eyes from me.”
“I do not avert my eyes,” growled Hadulph kindly. “But I forget, you have had only one Abir, you are still young yourself. The coming Lottery will be exciting for you—do you think we will still go into the pepper fields together, afterward?”
“I don’t know,” I said, turning my gaze to the blue sky so deep, and dusted with green leaves flying. “I cannot imagine life on the other side of the Abir. That is the point of it, I suppose. A door the other side of which is unfathomable.” My eyes grew heavy; the clouds wisped apart above me, joining again, and drowsily moving apart. “Do you suppose, Hadulph, that the world itself has Abirs? A day when everything spins around and comes out backwards, inside out, mixed up, and when it is all done, nothing is as it was? Do you suppose we could all keep living on the other side of those doors as we had before?”
Well do I remember now, in these shadowy hours I spend in my minaret, the last thing I said before Hadulph’s steady, thumping gait sent me entirely into dreams:
“I am only thankful John will have no chit in the barrel, and no poor soul will be saddled with him.”
I guessed that we actually walked parallel to the Fountain road, though a long way west of it, since I knew these spiky, fragrant weeds, and the flecks of snow that drifted aimlessly through the bright sun, portending, but not yet threatening a far-off cold. No markets sprang up here, no hyena-woman with a bauble for my penny. No draughts to refresh, no tables draped with fantastic cloth to dress my waist. It was lonely, though six of us walked that other road, that shadow road, leading not to life but to death, to tombs and graves. For many days I had suspected that we drew near the Gates of Alisaunder, near the high mountains that kept those old ghosts back. The map said so—my history lessons said so. I longed to question Hajji about the snowy lands ahead, where the panotii lived, where she must have lived. But I kept my peace.
We saw a glimmer, finally, far ahead, some weeks out of the ruins, which had stretched further than even I could have imagined. A long plain stretched out, full of black sand—not rich nor scorched, but simply colorless, lightless, dark as a sky. On one side of the vale icy mountains rose up sharply, without foothills, as if dropped there by a careless child. And in a cleft, the sunlight shone through such diamonds that rainbow prisms fell on every stone, and on our skin, and on Hajji’s ears, and on John’s half-bald pate, and on Fortunatus’ beak. Qaspiel spread its wings as if to drink the light, and the glittering refractions played a jittery chase over its feathers.
No one had carved or shaped the gems to be pleasant to visiting eyes; no one had smoothed them and chipped them into intricate designs, but only piled them loosely, crudely, and made them fast. Yet if I had not known its purpose, I would have thought the Gates more lovely than anything I had yet seen in my days. Their rough, strange grandeur outshone entirely the city that spread out below them, the lights of candles and fires sparkling already in the young evening that brought us to the mountains, huts and houses, even estates—no camp this, but a city, not so big as Nural, but something like Shirshya, with a well sunk, and a fountain gurgling, and an amphitheater for the summer rites. We, grubbed, hard-traveled