Her metal headdress lay beside her. Carefully, so as not to prick herself, she began to get out of her clothes, recalcitrant wire and layers of spun steel, pulling the steel cloth down her arms and down her legs until it lay like peeled snakeskin in the grass next to her boots. She let down her hair, pulling out the pins, shaking it loose over her shoulders. And, dipping her steel skullcap into the pool, using it as a basin, she washed the makeup from her face, rubbing the white pigment into milk, so that it ran down between her breasts.

She rinsed her face, and stood, and yawned, and walked sleepily across the lawn.

She left her clothes where they lay; they were uncomfortable, and she was glad she wouldn’t have to put them on again. The bishop had more than eighty thousand suits of clothes, one for every day of the interminable year. Most she would never live to see. Some of the more delicate ones, she knew, rotted and were remade several times between wearings. It was foolishness, something for the fat old men to do, while underneath she always wore the same white slip. Blind, crippled, castrated, how could they understand? She was the bishop, and in her heart she kept the heart of love, inviolate, unsuspected, the crystal spark of the world’s faith. There was no reason to wear anything at all.

She laughed and ran up the steps into the cloister, into the sanctuary on the way to her own room. She stopped, reflexively, though she was eager to go on, eager to pull the curtains and lie down in her own bed. Yet she was unwilling ever to waste a moment in the sanctuary, walking through it as if it were just a place between two places. So she hesitated by the marble columns at the entrance of the shrine, a cave where Angkhdt had lived for one full month of his great journey, sleeping here with the so-called “black woman” (“. . . arms like night, midnight, three o’clock, dawn . . .”). Here he had written verses seventy-one through one hundred and sixteen.

Nothing remained from that time. But at the end of the altar, next to an oil lamp, sat a statue of the prophet. The marble gleamed in the light, heavy and yellow, the hard heavy shoulders, heavy thighs. The sculptor had gestured gently towards the old myth, elongating his jaw a little, putting hints of hair along his forehead and his cheeks, just a roughening of the stone. His eyes were simple slits, but besides that his face was human, and the small marks of deformity only emphasized his human parts, his wide straight nose, his marble lips.

He held out his stone hands, empty most of the year, but today they carried the holiest relic in the world, the skull of Angkhdt himself. It was broken in places and the jaw was gone, but all the cracks and joints were filled with silver, the jaw rebuilt with silver. The skull was tilted in the statue’s hands, and the stone eyes looked down into the empty sockets of bare bone as if scanning them for movement, like a dog.