The Habitation of the Blessed - Catherynne M. Valente [96]
The gems burned me; I drew back my hand with a cry.
“Hot, eh?” came a voice behind me, and all of us looked to see an aged, aged peacock, so old his tail drooped and had gone black, splashed with vivid, searing green. His eyes still gleamed, but weariness spoke in his every feather. Those who drink from the Fountain usually stay young—at least as young as they are when they drink their third swallow of that brackish slime. But some few by chance or an ornery nature did not drink until they had already reached a stately age, and these folk grow instead into a kind of regal senescence, still hale, but colored strangely, or their voice goes rough and deep. This bird had done all this and more—his tail so full and heavy it spread behind him like an emperor’s robe. And it was by that I knew him, for what did I not know about the old peacock who chronicled the generations of the cannibal tribes so faithfully? The old rooster had not found his way to the Fountain until he was advanced in his avian years, due to a habit for blackbulb nectar, and a lazy disposition.
“That’s them you feel,” the peacock said, “the pair of them, always leaning on the Gate, hoping it’ll fail. Old bastards. Haven’t you got anything better to do back there?”
John required explanation. He always did. But I could not bear to repeat the whole long tale of Alisaunder and the building of the Gates, not now. Let Hajji tell him. Let anyone. I couldn’t care. I did not come traipsing across half the known world to tell fairy tales to a prudish fool. Not fairy tales, and not history either. He’d be dead in forty years. What did he need to know? How to wrinkle up and go blind. I had confidence in his abilities to manage that without my help.
I wish now I had been the one to tell him. What I would not give to be able to tell him one more thing he did not know, to tell one story after sunset, and hear him disbelieve me.
“Ghayth,” I said, and I felt my smile in my belly so wide, pulling my skin taut. I shouldn’t have said it. I should have greeted him as a stranger. But I could not help myself. “Ghayth Below-the-Wall.”
The peacock blinked, and cocked his black head to one side. The Gates thrummed with heat, flooding out over the long road behind us.
“Hagia,” whispered Hajji desperately, clutching the sides of her long ears tight around her so that the blue veins shone. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
But Ghayth was Ghayth, and he would not deny it. I kept my smile, valiantly—when one has disrupted protocol, it is best to follow it through. The peacock-historian snapped his great tail up; it arrayed in a huge fan around him, the streaks of green and violet snaking like oil through his black feathers.
“A reader!” he crowed, his plume bobbing. “A student! You must love my work considerably to speak so out of turn!”
And there it was, thrown down between us. I had thought only of myself, my joy at meeting him. We are not allowed to speak to one another of who we once were, Abirs past. We are now who we are now. We must inhabit it fully, or else what is the point of going through it at all? If I saw my mother on the road, I would have to greet her as a stranger. I knew Ctiste before. I do not know her now. She is not the same person. It is not the same world. Etiquette is all we have.
“I’m sure Hagia has mistaken you for someone else,” Fortunatus said quickly.
“No, no, she has it! Come now, I could pretend I take offense, but look where you are! By any measure, this is the edge of the world. On the other