The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
seemed rather much of a muchness, but he insisted that we must
“remain in character at all times,” both for continuity’s sake and
because “we never know who might be listening.” Yes, he actually said
that, just like one of those tawdry spy films they show on Sunday afternoons.
It seemed easier to relent than protest, so I relented.
On the interminable flight, Riley also insisted that I read the
dossier—“dossier” he called it, not “materials” or “papers” but
“dossier”—he had prepared on the Mediko coins, assuming that I was as
uncultured, ignorant, and crass as he. I pointed out that one of the
articles (a derivative little squawk that appeared in one of those areaspecific
journals that nobody reads, written by a turnip-shaped Greek
graduate student whose builder father had bought her way into College)
had, in fact, been written under my supervision, and I was cited four
times in its bibliography. This time he relented.
Briefly, the coins’ story is this: Medea, as he no doubt did not know
before he began preparing for this assignment, is considered one of the
matriarchs of certain arcane branches of botany, and numerous plants
of medicinal, therapeutic, or recreational value whose origins lie in the
Caucasus have been named for her. According to legend—often the most
reliable source in my field—these two coins were responsible for the
flourishing gardens at the court of King David the Builder, who ruled
Georgia at the end of the first millennium. They were given as a gift to
a certain Arab geographer whom we all know, who performed an
unnamed but valuable service involving the king’s homely daughter, a
hollowed-out tree stump filled with vermilion paint, a male donkey in
the early stages of arousal, and four handkerchiefs. When the geographer
announced his intention to carry the coins to Baghdad, David’s
only condition was that the geographer return them to Katusi after three
hundred new moons. One can safely presume that David never envisioned
the glories that would follow in Baghdad and Sicily: no one did.
No one could have, and since then no imaginative feat in gardening—
with the possible exception of Capability Brown’s designs—has matched
them. That the geographer kept his end of the bargain through no conscious
act of his own is one of the odder coincidences (or proofs, if you
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