Palimpsest

“I’m sorry,” Anoud whispered. “I loved her, if that matters. It’s easy for me to fall in love. You could say I’m a prodigy. I loved her, and I can love you. I can see a day not so very far distant when you bring me tea before dawn and kiss the hair from my forehead. My capacities are not less than hers.”

She kissed him truly, her tongue small and hesitant, her curly hair brushing his cheeks. She tasted strange, foreign in his mouth, like a red spice. Ludovico’s bones groaned in him. She was sweeter and smaller than Nerezza. Softer. More tamed, gentler, eager to be loved.

“Don’t you want to seeit?” Anoud breathed. “Just see the races and the feasts and the ocean? Just taste the air? Don’t you remember how sweet the wind is there? Does the city hold nothing you desire?”

Ludovico did remember, after all. Not just Lucia. He remembered the snail-seller, and the sea wind. Fine, he thought. I give in. I give in to this, if that is what is asked. If I must pay in women for the city, for all it contains. I can bend under it as under God. As I bent under Lucia, my star of the sea, my endless storm.

And so Ludo returned Anoud’s kiss. He pulled her white shirt from dark shoulders and pressed his face to her breasts, fuller than Lucia’s, with nipples like coffee beans. He cried out into her skin and she accepted his cry with a merciful quiet, letting his cry fall all the way down to her heart. She guided him onto her, moved Nerezza’s spare bathrobe aside to bring him into her, arching her back to show him the hidden smallnesses of her mouse-body, pressing her knees to his hips. Ludovico looked past her as he rocked back and forth with her motion, providing little of his own. She was so slight he hardly felt her beneath him, just the wet warmth of her around him, clutching gently. Ludo was silent, aghast in his submission, the little ring still clutched tight in his fist. He looked to Nerezza—shameless thing!—her head thrown back in Agostino’s arms as he thrust his angular body into her over and over, his braying bull-voice muffled in her neck. Her mouth was open, her face streaked with tears.

Quiescence and Rapine

PALIMPSEST POSSESSES TWO CHURCHES.They are identical in every way. They stand together, wrapping the street corner like a hinge. Seven white columns each, wound around with black characters that are not Cyrillic, but to the idle glance might seem so. Two peaked roofs of red lacquer and two stone horses with the heads of fork-tongued lizards stand guard on either side of each door. The ancient faithful built them with stones from the same quarry on the far eastern border of the city, pale green and dusty, each round and perfect as a ball. There is more mortar in the edifices than stones, mortar crushed from Casimira dragonflies donated by the vat, tufa dust, and mackerel tails. The pews are scrubbed and polished with lime oil, and each Thursday, parishioners share a communion of slivers of whale meat and ci

In one church, the coffin contains a blind man. In the other, it contains a deaf woman. Both have narwhal’s horns extending from their foreheads; both died young. The modern faithful visit these basement-saints and leave what they can at the feet of the one they love best.

Giustizia has been a devotee of the Unhearing since she was a girl—her yellow veil and turquoise-ringed thumbs are familiar to all in the Left-Hand Church; she brings the cornskins, regular as sunrise. When she dies, they will bury her here, in a coffin of her own.

She will plug your ears with wax when you enter and demand silence with a grand sweep of her forefinger. You may notice the long rattlesnake tail peeking from under her skirt and clattering on the mosaic floor, but it is not polite to mention it—when she says silence, you listen. It is the worst word she knows.

_______

Ludovico chooses the Left-Hand Church. He ca

The congregation is silent, though the pews are crowded with parishoners. Ludovico treads softly on the aisle, which is covered in chrysanthemums planted deep in the soil of the church’s most secret parts. Far above, ravens line the clerestory, and between them some few folk with long black wings, dangling their feet in the air. He stares at them in horror and enthrallment: there are no humans here. Each of the faithful is in part another thing: men with the heads of great serpents, women with shells like tortoises upon their backs. Children with long, hairy orangutan arms fidget and bent, scolding crones’ legs end in elephantine feet, or cheetah feet, or musk-ox soles, warted and blackened. A man with a giraffe neck grafted to his shoulders sits politely in the rear row, so as not to block anyone’s view. Not a few have fins protruding painfully from their backs which their aunts and uncles keep solicitously wet with the help of small and sacred cups.

At the altar, a priest with the head of an ancient, worried lion holds out her arms in mute supplication, her mouth gaping, her feline face red with the effort of her silence, tears streaming through her whiskers. A few worshippers are crying, too, and nodding as though she spoke. A little girl in the front row holds out her long, mottled arms to the priest, an octopus’s tentacles, their suckers opening and closing in mute pleas. The child opens her mouth and wails as children will do when they are grieved, but only a throttled gurgling emerges. Her parents gather her in and she buries her face in their scaly breasts.

Ludovico sinks to his knees in the flowers, overcome. Why should he care for these wretched animals? Perhaps because they are in church? He trembles—this is not like the Troposphere with its pounding mechanical horses. It is so quiet here.

Here begins the book of the nature of beasts,Ludo thinks. All the best bestiaries begin that way. If I were to write of this place, I could make a book longer than Isidore’s, greater than theEtymologiae. Here there are creatures beyond any Spaniard’s fever-dream and more, they arereal. I have seen them. I will be able to write truly that I knelt among them, I prayed with them and saw them weep as though they were possessed of souls. No Pope will ever believe me, or beatify me, or sanctify my encyclopedia, but I will know it was true.

The silence lays hands on him and Ludovico is moved beyond himself. For this church of invalids he will bear mouse-women and eel-women and anything else. He will bear Lucia’s abandonment, for this is the land of St. Isidore. Bee-crowned Isidore, who wrote the great compendium of wisdom and Christian magic, human behavior and the names of monsters that medievalists still pore over with glee—he must have seen this place. He only reported what he saw. Ludo’s hands fly to his St. Isidore’s medal. The vision of the octopus-child compels him to his knees. In his life, Ludovico has never loved a thing that did not destroy him, and he goes gladly to this third thing in his small catalogue of loves which before now was comprised of a book and a woman alone.