Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

SEVEN SCENES FROM HARRAI’S SACRED MOUNTAIN by Jennifer Crow

I first saw the sacred mountain as I lay in the blood between my mother’s legs. There are those who say this cannot be; that an infant sees only blurs, vague hints of color and form. But to this day, the smell of blood makes my stomach churn, and I remember—as clear as the sky on a summer morning—the broken pyramid, dark in the frame of the window. I recall the hushing sound of silk, a whisper from the coming night as they covered her body, and the sound of my father’s weeping. He never cried again—never in my presence.

The mountain watches over fools, and the peasants say a man who sleeps in the mountain’s arms will come home a poet or a madman. Nothing is said of women; perhaps they are thought too practical to fall to the mountain’s embrace. Or it may be that the fools who call themselves wise do not believe a woman can be a poet, and that her madness is an ordinary thing, built of thwarted love and the steady drone of days. But my first love went up to the mountain. She cut short her hair and put on her brother’s clothes, and I watched her figure grow smaller as she walked up the mountain’s flanks. She dwindled to nothing. I waited at the window for a day, two days, five. But only the mountain remained. I never saw my love again.

The summer the great ship appeared in the sky, the mountain burned. Smoke crowned it, blurred the sharp edges of its broken face. The thick, oily sap of the red-leaved thorn tree flared slowly, but burned long. For months the thorn trees died in flame, and the silver body of the ship reflected them, the scarlet and orange light reflected like a searing glance. We watched the black line creep down the mountain’s sides, the promise of destruction ever closer. On the last day of summer, with rain only a memory on our parched skin and in the dry wells and dusty courtyards, the chief judge laid himself on the steps of the temple and his eldest son folded his mantle of office and set it out of reach. And then that son took a knife born from the mountain’s heart and cut his father open. We watched the life flow out of him. In three days the rains came, a season too late, and as we buried the chief judge, the ship reflected the red silk of his bier and vanished. But unlike my love, it would return.

My first wife insisted we move house. She saw the mountain as a threat; she never believed that I would not run to it some night and leave her bereft. She wept tears stained red by the tarrac-earth she used to highlight her eyes. She lay in front of the door at night, even after we moved, in case the mountain-fever came upon me unawares. I confessed to her that I was no true poet, that I had no desire to risk madness for art. But she clung to the ties of my robe whenever we left the house, and even the slow festivals of the winter months I could not attend alone. Such lack of trust dooms a life. The swelling sickness ate her from within; four days after her death, I returned to my family’s home.

Though I swore never to approach the sacred mountain, once I broke that word, or near enough. My daughter, my light, fell ill, some slow poison in her heart that wasted her bit by bit, a fading out of life. Her skin smelled of flowers past their bloom, her hands felt cold against my fingers. I sang to her, all the old songs, the ones that sob in the throat. The chief priest came, and the chief judge, and they smoked the room with incense and ordered the spirit of illness to depart. The herb-woman brought poultices and tisanes, and still my daughter faded like a painting left too long in the sun. At last I walked out into the red sunrise and turned to face the sacred mountain. It waited, the snow on its brow like a sign of age and wisdom. I walked into the hills, listening for its song, but I heard only the birds and the wind, and at last, by the stream that runs down from the eastern side, I stopped and drank and then turned back. By the time I reached my home, the girl had died. And I took up my pen and began to write.

When the snows melt and the wind from the south freshens, an old man’s thoughts turn to war. Thus it was that I lifted the red banner with my brothers, and we marched—with the young men in a frenzy of passion beside us, and their lovers trailing behind—around the skirts of the mountain toward the city of Xerane, with its tarnished silver domes and equally tarnished morals. Under the broken dagger of the mountain, we slew their finest men and were slain in turn. In the end, they tore down our red banners and sent the survivors home. They asked for nothing but peace; we gained nothing but honor. The mountain waited in my window, a fire burning near the peak. I watched it for days, but it never died and never spread. When I showed it to the chief judge, he said the souls of our dead burned on the mountain.

The sky ship has returned with its brothers, and their red lights are searing away the top of the sacred mountain. Shorn like a harlot, it still watches over the city. But my time is past, and I wish I had not lived to see this day. I close this book, and stroke its red cover, and lay it aside. Tonight, I will wait for the mountain’s last call. And when that voice comes to me, I will turn my face one last time toward the remnants of its glory, and walk into darkness on its slopes.