The Emerald Circus

  “Against whom?”

  “Against the mist maidens, against the spirits of the dead.”

  “I can only stand against the abbot and those who watch at night.” I did not add that I could also take the blame. He was a man who brought out the martyr in me. Perhaps that was what had happened to his queen.

  “Will you?”

  I looked down the bed at my feet, outlined under the thin blanket in that same moonlight. My right foot was twisted so severely that, even disguised with the blanket, it was grotesque. I looked up at him, perched on my bedside. He was almost smiling at me.

  “I will,” I said. “God help me, I will.”

  He embraced me once, rose, and left the room.

  How slowly, how quickly those two days flew by. I made myself stay away from his side as if by doing so I could avert all suspicion from our coming deed. I polished the stone floors along the hall until one of the infant oblates, young Christopher of Chedworth, slipped and fell badly enough to have to remain the day under the infirmarer’s care. The abbot removed me from my duties and set me to hoeing the herb beds and washing the pots as penance.

  And the Quiet Monk did not speak to me again, nor even nod as he passed, having accomplished my complicity. Should we have known that all we did not do signaled even more clearly our intent? Should Brother Denneys, who had been a man of battle, have plotted better strategies? I realize now that as a knight he had been a solitary fighter. As a lover, he had been caught out at his amours. Yet even then, even when I most certainly was denying Him, God was looking over us and smoothing the stones in our paths.

  Matins was done and I had paid scant attention to the psalms and even less to the antiphons. Instead I watched the moon as it shone through the chapel window, illuminating the glass picture of Lazarus rising from the dead. Twice Brother Thomas had elbowed me into the proper responses and three times Father Joseph had glared down at me from above.

  But Brother Denneys never once gave me the sign I awaited, though the moon made a full halo over the lazar’s head.

  Dejected, I returned to my cell and flung myself onto my knees, a position that was doubly painful to me because of my bad leg, and prayed to the God I had neglected to deliver me from false hopes and wicked promises.

  And then I heard the slap of sandals coming down the hall. I did not move from my knees, though the pains shot up my right leg and into my groin, I waited, taking back all the prayers I had sent heavenward just moments before, and was rewarded for my faithlessness by the sight of the Quiet Monk striding into my cell.

  He did not have to speak. I pulled myself up without his help, smoothed down the skirts of my cassock so as to hide my crooked leg, and followed him wordlessly down the hall.

  It was silent in the dark dortoir, except for the noise of Brother Thomas’s strong snores and a small pop-pop-pop that punctuated the sleep of the infant oblates. I knew that later that night, the novice master would check on the sleeping boys, but he was not astir now. Only the gatekeeper was alert, snug at the front gate and waiting for a knock from Rome that might never come. But we were going out the back door and into the graveyard. No one would hear us there.

  Brother Denneys had a great shovel ready by the door. Clearly, he had been busy while I was on my knees. I owed him silence and duty. And my love.

  We walked side by side through the cemetery, threading our way past many headstones. He slowed his natural pace to my limping one, though I know he yearned to move ahead rapidly. I thanked him silently and worked hard to keep up.

  There were no mist maidens, no white robed ghosts moaning aloud beneath the moon, nor had I expected any. I knew more than most how the mind conjures up monsters. So often jokes had been played upon me as a child, and a night in the boneyard was a favorite in my part of the land. Many a chilly moon I had been left in our castle graveyard, tied up in an open pit or laid flat on a new slab. My father used to laugh at the pranks. He may even have paid the pranksters. After all, he was a great believer in the toughened spirit. But I like to think he was secretly proud that I never complained. I had often been cold and the ache settled permanently in my twisted bones, but I was never abused by ghosts and so did not credit them.

  All these memories and more marched across my mind as I followed Brother Denneys to the pyramids that bordered his hopes.

  There were no ghosts, but there were shadows, and more than once we both leaped away from them, until we came at last to the green, peaceful place where the Quiet Monk believed his lost love lay buried.

  “I will dig,” he said, “and you will stand there as guard.”

  He pointed to a spot where I could see the dark outlines of both church and housing, and in that way know quickly if anyone was coming toward us this night. So while he dug, in his quiet, competent manner, I climbed up upon a cold stone dedicated to a certain Brother Silas, and kept the watch.

  The only accompaniment to the sound of his spade thudding into the sod was the long, low whinny of a night owl on the hunt and the scream of some small animal that signaled the successful end. After that, there was only the soft thwack-thwack of the spade biting deeper and deeper into the dirt of that unproved grave.

  He must have dug for hours; I had only the moon to mark the passage of time. But he was well down into the hole with but the crown of his head showing when he cried out.

  I ran over to the edge of the pit and stared down.

  “What is it?” I asked, staring between the black shadows.

  “Some kind of wood,” he said.

  “A coffin?”

  “More like the barrel of a tree,” he said. He bent over. “Definitely a tree. Oak, I think.”

  “Then your bard was wrong,” I said. “But then, he was a Welshman.”

  “It is a Druid burial,” he said. “That is what the oak means. Merlin would have fixed it up.”

  “I thought Merlin died first. Or disappeared. You told me that. In one of your stories.”

  He shook his head. “It is a Druid trick, no doubt of it. You will see.” He started digging again, this time at a much faster pace, the dirt sailing backward and out of the pit, covering my sandals before I moved. A fleck of it hit my eye and made me cry. I was a long while digging it out, a long while weeping.

  “That’s it, then,” came his voice. “And there’s more besides.”

  I looked over into the pit once again. “More?”

  “Some sort of stone, with a cross on the bottom side.”

  “Because she was Christian?” I asked.

  He nodded. “The Druids had to give her that. They gave her little else.”

  The moon was mostly gone, but a thin line of light stretched tight across the horizon. I could hear the first bells from the abbey, which meant Brother Angelus was up and ringing them. If we were not at prayers, they would look for us. If we were not in our cells alone, I knew they would come out here. Abbot Giraldus might have been a blusterer but he was not a stupid man.

  “Hurry,” I said.

  He turned his face up to me and smiled. “All these years waiting,” he said. “All these years hoping. All these years of false graves.” Then he turned back and, using the shovel as a pry, levered open the oak cask.

  Inside were the remains of two people, not one, with the bones intertwined, as if in death they embraced with more passion than in life. One was clearly a man’s skeleton, with the long bones of the legs fully half again the length of the other’s. There was a helm such as a fighting man might wear lying crookedly near the skull. The other skeleton was marked with fine gold braids of hair, that caught the earliest bit of daylight.

  “Guenivere,” the Quiet Monk cried out in full voice for the first time, and he bent over the bones, touching the golden hair with a reverent hand.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder but did not turn around, for as I watched, the golden skein of hair turned to dust under his fingers, one instant a braid and the next a reminder of time itself.

  Brother Denneys threw h
imself onto the skeletons, weeping hysterically and I—I flung myself down into the pit, though it was a drop of at least six feet. I pulled him off the brittle, broken bones and cradled him against me until his sorrow was spent. When I looked up, the grave was ringed around with the familiar faces of my brother monks. At the foot of the grave stood the abbot himself, his face as red and as angry as a wound.

  Brother Denneys was sent away from Glastonbury, of course. He himself was a willing participant in the exile. For even though the little stone cross had the words hic iacet arthurus rex quondam rexque futurus carved upon it, he said it was not true. That the oak casket was nothing more than a boat from one of the lake villages overturned. That the hair we both saw so clearly in that early morning light was nothing more than grave mold.

  “She is somewhere else, not here,” he said, dismissing the torn earth with a wave of his hand. “And I must find her.”

  I followed him out the gate and down the road, keeping pace with him step for step. I follow him still. His hair has gotten grayer over the long years, a strand at a time, but cannot keep up with the script that now runs across my brow. The years as his squire have carved me deeply but his sorrowing face is untouched by time or the hundreds of small miracles he, all unknowing, brings with each opening of a grave: the girl in Westminster whose once blind eyes can now admit light, a Shropshire lad, dumb from birth, with a tongue that can now make rhymes.

  And I understand that he will never find this particular grail. He is in his own hell and I but chart its regions, following after him on my two straight legs. A small miracle, true. In the winter, in the deepest snow, the right one pains me, a twisting memory of the old twisted bones. When I cry out in my sleep he does not notice nor does he comfort me. And my ankle still warns of every coming storm. He is never grateful for the news. But I can walk for the most part without pain or limp, and surely every miracle maker needs a witness to his work, an apostle to send letters to the future. That is my burden. It is my duty. It is my everlasting joy.

  The Tudor antiquary Bale reported that “In Avallon in 1191, there found they the flesh bothe of Arthur and of hys wyfe Guenever turned all into duste, wythin theyr coffines of strong oke, the boneys only remaynynge. A monke of the same abbeye, standyng and behouldyng the fine broydinges of the womman’s hear as yellow as golde there still to remayne, as a man ravyshed, or more than halfe from his wyttes, he leaped into the graffe, xv fote depe, to have caughte them sodenlye. But he fayled of his purpose. For so soon as they were touched they fell all to powder.”

  By 1193, the monks at Glastonbury had money enough to work again on the rebuilding of their church, for wealthy pilgrims flocked to the relics and King Richard himself presented a sword reputed to be Excalibur to Tancred, the Norman ruler of Sicily, a few short months after the exhumation.

  The Bird

  He had purchased the damnable bird from a friend who was tired of it defecating on everything. Sitting on picture frames or the edges of bookcases, it simply let go. His library, where he gave it permission to fly free, was now painted in its awful defecatory colors, as he complained to his young cousin, Virginia.

  “That’s the trouble with you,” she told him. “You say ‘defecate’ where the rest of the world says ‘shite.’”

  Her voice went quieter when she spoke that last word. But then he loved the way she said it, like a sailor on shore leave swearing in front of his mother, the word both strong and apologetic at the same time. Tone, he thought, is all.

  “What did you want the bird for?” She sat primly, ankles crossed, her beautiful heart-shaped face and those astonishing black eyes still bright with curiosity.

  She could almost be a bird herself, he thought. Certainly hardly weighs more than one now.

  “I wanted to teach it to talk,” he said. “Ravens can, you know. The whole corvid family can vocalize human sounds—crows, rooks, jackdaws, magpies, ravens. It is said they are the smartest of birds and I am finding it so.”

  Her head canted to one side, very birdlike. “Isn’t that mere imitation?” she asked. “Do you not have to split its tongue?”

  What a curious thing to ask, he thought. She always astonished him. Had since she was a toddler, lispingly calling his name. “What have you been reading, child?” He called her that because he was a full ten years older than she, though in many ways she was the elder. Certainly the wiser. He was smart, but no one had ever thought him wise. Brilliant, perhaps. He would accept that. Inventive. A oner someone once called him. But never, alas, wise.

  She smiled. That damnable mysterious, enchanting smile.

  “’Tis a myth, you know. Splitting the corvid’s tongue. Birds do not speak as we do anyway. It is a different mechanism. A syrinx, not like ours. We have a larynx for vocalization. And they do not use their tongues . . .”

  She put her hand up to her mouth, gave a small laugh which turned into a cough that lasted far too long. The cough, damnable and damaging, had gotten worse the last few days but they never spoke about it. Looked away from it. The doctor was banished from the house so they didn’t have to think about what it presaged.

  She recovered quickly, a matter of her strong will. Smiling, she looked at him through the forest of her lashes. “And what have you been reading, dearest husband?”

  He sat down next to her and held her hand. She was always comforted by his presence. Her hand was ice but her brow, usually so pale, once again bloomed with fever, bright pink spots against the pallor of her face. It would be a long night.

  “Hush now,” he said. “I bought the bird to speak when you cannot.”

  “I can speak,” she said, laughing again. “I can always speak.”

  “Always,” he repeated the lie as if he, and not the raven, were the imitator.

  Then he added, “Well, it shall speak when you can speak never more.”

  Immediately horrified at the thought . . . that he had articulated the thought, the one they had promised one another never to talk about, he rushed forward into something else, a distraction, a switch. He was often having to reroute his thoughts these days so that his heart could keep on beating. And hers. “Now enough, I will let you hold the raven. You will like it. I have named it Mrs. E because it’s the color of sin, though I think it is a male bird. Hard to tell except for size.”

  “La,” she said now in full Southern mock, “Mrs. E’s sin is jealousy and this is not a green bird.”

  He responded in kind. “And of course the old hag is jealous—of you.” Though the real Mrs. E was hardly that old, not even his age, but he had no interest in her. His mind was ever on Virginia.

  She prinked at the compliment and gave a small moue, and he thought that only a Southern girl knew how to do that and still look lovely.

  “If it makes a mess of my dress, you shall have to buy me another,” she teased.

  “I will buy the dress in the morning,” he responded, “and take you out for tea in it.” Though she had not been outside for weeks now.

  But still game, she colluded in the small lie. “I will have Auntie do my hair special for our outing.”

  He coaxed the bird from a lamp on his desk, with a handful of nuts and raisins. The bird flew down, almost as silent as an owl, settling on his shoulder, a great brooding presence. Soon shells littered the floor around him. But the bird remained steadfastly silent.

  “It is very large,” Virginia said suddenly. “I am not certain . . .”

  “The bird is not heavy,” he assured her. “It is only that you have become so light. So made of Light. And it will serve as your muse as it already serves as mine. When it whispers, a story starts. And lines of poetry. You will see.”

  “I will hear,” she corrected, intrigued by the idea, as he had hoped she would be.

  The bird opened its beak, stretched its neck oddly, suddenly said, “Lenore.” Its voice was a clear imitation of Edgar’s, if a bit gruffer.

  As Lenore was his pet name for her, Virginia smiled broadly. “You have m
ade good use of your time with Mrs. E.”

  He placed the raven on her shoulder. The bird’s grip on her was strong and he suddenly feared her bones might snap.

  “You lied,” she told him. “It is very heavy. Like a sin.” Her laughter was a waterfall.

  “Have we not sinned enough without ravens?” he asked. Another tease.

  “I thought we called that love.” As ever, she was quicker than he in repartee.

  “Always, my dearest heart,” he assured her.

  She tried to laugh, then began another cough which she quickly suppressed.

  The raven seemed uncomfortable on Virginia’s small shoulder, which was now heaving with her coughs, but it did not leave. Rather it rode her like a boat on a wave.

  There was a sudden flurry of frantic knocks at the front door, and Edgar rose to see who was there. It was an odd time of night for a visitor.

  As soon as he left, the bird turned its head and spoke directly into Virginia’s ear in a voice that was urgent without being forced. But Edgar, now in the other room, did not hear what it said.

  He opened the door, but no one was there. It was then he realized that the frantic knocking had simply been the bird imitating the mailman at the door, not a real announcement at all.

  When he turned back, Virginia was shaking as with an ague, and the bird was flying off to the highest photogravure picture on the wall, the one of his mother, where it often perched.

  There were tears tracking down Virginia’s cheeks, whiter than her face. It took him a moment to realize what they were.

  “That pernicious bird has . . .” he shouted. Stopped. Then raged: “I will wring its miserable neck.”

  “No, no, no,” she said, wiping the white tears away with her handkerchief. “It spoke to me. Told me . . .”

  He put his hand on her shoulder, pulled her to him, held her, now shaking more than she. He knew what she was going to say, knew it was some dread prophecy, knew that the bird was the harbinger of her death, muse of melancholy, knew that he would write this tale on the longest night of his life, knew it all in one swift and awful revelation.