Evening, Fifth Day
I do not know why I expected this place to be full, full of people and things—I suppose I imagined it to be the source of all objects, all quests. Surely the things my brother asks for must be piled up under the streetlamps here like old leaves: girdles, women, swords, grails, wrapped around the light-post, wet and clinging.
But there is only warm air, and empty shops and empty tables and empty streets, and I should have known that the underworld would be a ghost town. Stray ribbons snake through the blazing white buildings like tumbleweed, and there is no sound but the distant sea pounding the distant sand.
Why does he want this boy? This boy who sits cross-legged in the blue, his fine hair blown turquoise, his eyes the dead white of deepwater fish? Mabon ap Modron, my ribbon says. But this is nonsense, it means nothing, only words: Son of a Mother. He wants a nameless orphan boy who was born with the sun behind his head, stolen to the sea three days after his birth on the back of a green-foam boar.
We all know the story; it is an easy story to know. What country in the world does not have its virgin birth, its martyred babe, its innocent dragged down to the dark depths? They stamp them out like a sheet of cookies these days, little gingerbread boys, all in a row. Why should I hold my breath for one?
But he is my brother, that hemmed-in king. Still trying not to look into the corners of his rooms where a black-haired woman who is not bolted to any dais touches the cheek of another clean-shaven knight. He is my brother and perhaps after all this time I know him, a little. I forgive him for stepping in front of me, and though I was so much taller, obscuring me forever. He sees the stolen child, the sun in his hair. He sees himself, before the ribbons, before the chair and the plates he fastened to his friends. His mother lost him, or gave him to us, I was never sure, being only a breath older than he when they dumped him like a pile of gold on our stoop.
Once my brother might have come himself, breath or no breath, whickering through the ribbons to make this boy a fabled knight with an epithet and a fellow besides—but that time is over. Once the kingdom is won it descends to us, the dumb, mute limbs of a king to push at its edges like soldiers against an iron gate. So I go after the boy, the doppelganger covered in brine, and my ribbon flutters in the sage-edged wind, in the whiskey-and-orange-tongued air, and I will gather him into my arms as my brother might have, and I will carry him on my shoulders the way Ector, our father, once did, and I will try to be happy at the weight of this sun-shot avatar, this twin of the brother-that-was. Perhaps the thing which carries him will have something of the Kay-that-was ricocheting between ether-capsules and parchment-ribbons.
Perhaps that awful sword smoothly excised the boys we were, placed them up on a shelf somewhere, locked into a cupboard. These shoulder-plates and greaves hold only out of habit the shapes of men long dead.
The character of the ocean is variable as a child’s—it is violet now, deeper than dye, and the salt is crusting in the corners of my mouth. All around me the heat of my plating causes the sea to recede, boil off. Trickles seethe in—exploratory, hesitant—and hiss into steam when they touch me. It is not quite enough to breathe, but I walk in a warm haze, and bubbles, not of breath but of heat, unbearable heat, waft up to the dark surface.
Midnight, Sixth Day
He sits in the center of the ocean, a silver boy-pin stuck in the floor—the currents move around him like Saturn’s rings. Cuttlefish weave through his hair. He opens his mouth and roe wriggle out, floating up like red bubbles.
I open my sixth capsule and stale air fills me up like a sickly bellows.
What is that? His voice ripples the water, even my coat of steam.
It is how I can come to you, boy, down here in the dark. I would lend one, but you do not seem troubled by the water.
He shrugs. A child learns to love its first milk, mother or ocean. I drink, I breathe. I have been down here a long time. No one came for me.
I have come for you. Because you look like my brother, not for yourself alone. Because in the concave mirror of his skull he looks and sees you, and wishes that you were not alone as he was alone as he is alone now.
Do you like it here? It is very blue, and the salmon are talkative.
He is a strange boy—but all boys are strange. His feet are covered in infant coral, soft and pocked. It breaks and wafts up as I pull him free, little pink fingers clutching at the thin strands of silver starlight that penetrate—how I cannot imagine—this far. He does not protest; boys this age are used to being carried to and fro and never asked.
Walk quickly, metal man, the boar is only out looking for dolphins to eat. He does not need capsules, either.
Metal man. How a knight must look to a child, plated over with silver and iron and horned helmets, leviathan-sharp. We must look like walking knives. My strides turn the ocean to steam around us, slushing through the sea-sand of the floor, the anemone and kelp-roots. He clings to the nub-antlers on my helmet, the one my brother had made in the shape of a faun’s head, as if to acknowledge our common source in bucolic forests. His little legs dangle over my shoulders.
Soon I can feel him sleeping heavily, and I trudge like St. Christopher through the sweet water, bearing the sweat-scalped innocent on my back. His weight is not so much, and he smells like a son, he smells like a brother, he smells like a tired child who has had too much excitement on Christmas night and needs an early bed.
The ribbon in my back is almost shredded. It chews itself as the quest goes on, obliterating unnecessary commands, leaving the core of what I must do. All that is left:
Retrieve. Return.
I am a worker. The factory of chivalry and quests extends ever west, and we go into it in a long, wending line, heads bent, lunches at our sides, lurching forward, lifting stones to find whatever precious object comprises the day’s labor. It is no different than the manufacture of linen or gears.
My shift is almost done.
The water is lightening already. Far, far above, I can see the paddling feet of seabirds fishing, and the bottoms of empty boats gliding by.
Dawn, Seventh Day
Arthur came to me with the sword, and he had not even cleaned the moss from it. He did not know what to do. I can say that I was not even tempted to take it for myself, but I cannot tell if that is true, if it did not flash through me like revelation that I was much bigger and stronger than my brother. That I was much bigger and stronger than anyone we knew, in those days before bigger and stronger became colorful balls that so many men fought over. I could have taken it. I choose to believe that I did not even consider it.
Put it back, I said. Put it back and no one will know and the world will go on as it always has.
Put it back and you can stay a man, with blood and skin and a stride, you will not have to turn your eyes from your wife and feed ribbons into the backs of your workers like some hellish foreman. You can go home and fish and learn to ride a horse—God knows you need the practice—and no one has to know that you pulled a sword out of a stone. No one ever has to know your name. You’re not special: you can’t hold your breath for nine days, no one has called you the greatest knight born and no one ever will. You can live in high grass and mote-riddled sunlight until you are an old man—put it back. Just put it back.
You know what happened. You know his name.
He brushed the blackberry brambles away and the swordlight was pale on his face.
Everything is turquoise now, shot through with green light and streams of bubbles. The boy I carry laughs and grabs at them, patting my helmet so that my ears ring.
You are like riding the sun. Faster, sun! Higher!
Noon, Ninth Day
Sandpipers skitter and stamp on the beach—we rise up out of the surf—whales spouting spray and my body fills with real air, so much and so golden that I feel as though I must burst.
The boy coughs and wheezes—he has never known air. For a moment I want to put him back, too. I do not want to take him to the fact
ory, I do not want to make him into a little copy of us. I take him from my shoulders and pat his back, too hard, at first, but after a long while he begins to vomit up the ocean that has lived so long in him, growing in him and coloring his skin like a pearl. The water comes and comes, the boy holding his small stomach like the Chinese brother in the fairy tale, who drinks the sea, drinks it all down so that his friend can find the tiny jewel at the bottom. Little fish come with his retching, bits of flotsam. His hands sink in the sand.
When he finally draws up, shakily, graceful as a new duckling, the sun seems to settle in him, somewhere at the base of his spine, spreading out around him like a mandorla. I have rescued the sun from the deeps. He smiles, and the beach is flooding with his gold. In the dune grasses, a few errant ribbons snake back and forth—he chases after them, untroubled, but when he touches their tales they burn up, black and ash.
Mabon ap Modron, we must return.
Return? I have always lived here.
No, boy. Home is England. This is hell.
It is beautiful in hell, then.
Yes.
He shrugs, clambers up onto my back again, and we begin the long road over the mountains. A tiny thread of ribbon streams behind us:
Return.
I am bringing the sun home to you, brother. I wonder if it will make you smile. If it will light the shadows. If it will keep us all warm when the snow comes.
Behind us, the water is an unbroken hyphen, blue as heartbreak. There are whitecaps. There is wind. Soon we will not even be able to smell the salt.
XIII DEATH
The Green Knight
And I will stand strongly on this floor
to abide his stroke if thou wilt doom him
to receive another stroke in return from me;
yet will I grant him delay.
I’ll give to him the blow,
In a twelvemonth and a day.
Now think and let me know
Dare any herein aught say.
—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Black Queen to King’s Rook Four.
The sun comes through windows dusted like vellum pages, soft and slant-wise, unable to dream of vertical space, pooling gold paint onto my fingernails. I am yellow as Midas’ best loved child, and it is winter in the world.
Outside these walls I can hear the angle of the grass under the wind, grandfather-bent, pointing east, east, east, where all things begin.
I play chess, to pass the time between Christmases. My opponent is a stable boy whose eyes glitter black and silver, the colors of saddles and bits. When the clouds shift, his skin shines horse-pale, and the light plays tricks with the board, flickering like a movie reel—the queens mock each other with sardonic lips. I cannot tell if he is real, if he is ghost or fey, if he has a soul. These things are hard to divine in Hautdesert. But it is pleasant here, in the green mires, all the colors of emeralds crushed between ivory teeth. The hill-mounds curve, humming dusky hymns of earth and root, and I sit in the center, striking a monkish pose with my hands on my mossknobbled knees, dreaming of games within games within games.
It is left to me to wait. Once the challenge has been made, the glove thrown down with all the force ritual can manage, the wager accepted, nothing can be done at all but to wait for the onrush of conclusion like the cold salt tide. So I wait. I am the reed-flute that plays itself, I am the branches waving wild, red stars of holly swelling up under shadow-green leaves, I am the secret places under the hills, where the dark swallows the light with a tender mouth, sweet as well water.
I cannot tell, some days, if I am a man at all.
I am only my shape, grotesque and beautiful, a mask with horns and a grimace. I am bounded on all sides by a light which is not light. A net of spider’s legs and gloam, held together by the sputum of diamonds. Here on the low mountains, here on the lips of a turquoise bay, I learn to have no face, to wait and be Quested For, to feel the hands of the sun on my belly.
It is as though I rest within an alchemist’s oven—liquids boil and bubble witchwise all around, in silver pots and copper pipes, steam cackles up towards a stucco ceiling and spices hang heavy in the Byzantine air—my head is haloed with these earthen fugues. This is my thatched hut, my kitchen flagstones, my grasshoppered corners and spidered rafters. This little café which burrows under the California light, the unchanging saffron-scented 4 pm sun, liquid and slow, honeycombed wind touching a multitude of skins.
Students cluster as they always have, clutches of infant cats suckling at their books, escaping the great black gates and storming towers of San Francisco in the perfumed loam, in the musk-heavy air. My little bone-china cup opens its lissome mouth to me, breathing into my throat all the satchel-herbs of East and West I long ago forgot—cardamom, cinnamon, cloves crushed like specks of coal, ginger, cocoa.
I have time for a few cups, I think, before he comes.
But each cup is a hundred other cups, journeys on horseback from Persia and India and New Orleans, far off places I relinquish so that I may have this little green hut, round as a heart. Each cup echoes forward and back, beginning and ending at the one cup which is to come—ah, but I get ahead of myself. In the midst of all this human/inhuman hush I drink, and slowly, so that none is spilt.
I can see the Chapel, far off on an island in the snow-gray sea. It has been a year since I have knelt at its altars of manzanita and rough amber, lit the tallow candles which rest in sticks of crushed spectacles, straightened the fern-tapestries and left my offerings of buckwheat flowers and white sage. All those seasons, hissing by like copper kettles, untouchable. Winter comes again on cedar paws, Christmas lights appear out of the sky as suddenly as newborn stars, glimmering red and silver and green. The year stoops and begins his long funeral, laying out a nicely tailored coffin of steel and nettles, gathering his grave goods at local thrift shops. Combing his raw-flax beard into thread, the old year sits in a great blank hall and spins the hair beautifully into silver on his tiny birch-wood wheel. Another will come—years self-regenerate like mites in a haystack. But when the rains come and my elbows ache under those storms which fall graceful and sad, my bones cannot help but whisper their age to one another, and I am weary of it all.
The knight is beginning his pilgrimage now, in his palace, his flame-rimmed cathedrals. He should be bare-foot and rag-clothed, as all pilgrims ought to begin, even if they do not end so. But I can hear the leaf-rustle of his armor and the billow of his starred shield. He knows no better. He guards himself against me—we are all so eager to guard and defend!—I defend my Chapel and he defends his flesh. For him I shall be a monster—because it is expected. If there were no great monstrum at the final castle, there would be no quest. And if no quest, what need would there be for knights at all? I am required; without me there is no kingdom.
I lie beneath their courtly cosmos of lighted halls and long-braided ladies to whom souls must be pledged. I lie under their games of adoration and betrayal—I am the wolf-belly and the dreaming trees that crowd in on all sides, the shadows and the sighing fog. I lure them out, I give them my own body to loathe so that they can fill themselves up with light like clay pitchers. I must be the darkness for them, since they fear it so. They must come to my world, and dwell in the dreamlight of my great bronze axe, so that the stars will know them ever after.
White Queen to Queen’s Bishop Four.
Smoke converts the Chapel to a bath-house, the smell of rich chocolates and drying apple peels leeches impurities from the skin. The flesh percolates, brimming with itself. Smoke and mist, these are the winter coats I wear, the best mystery-wools and strange-cheeked monk-cowls.
My beard shows best in this light, the bramble of my practiced symbology, holly and yarrow and horehound, the green tinge of next year’s wheat, blackberry and hyssop, heather culled with little white knives, shoots of bamboo and snow peas, crocuses sleeping soundly near my chin, wild rose sideburns and mustache of Italian grape and wormwood—I am all the wines ever bre
wed. It tumbles down to my basil-leaf navel, a tangle of root and branch, huckleberries peeking through and white sage smudging the skin, strawberry leaves sorrowful and low, blue crabgrass and dandelions brushing my elbows. I hide a harvest of gleaming pomegranates in my knees.
I am the Object, I am the Self-Defined. I need do nothing but exist, I draw all men to me as surely as if I were the birth-place of their salmon-hearts. The knight comes and I can hear his progression from square to square, the silky clop of his horse on black and white cobblestones I laid myself in some summer beyond this place, when I was not yet married. I can hear the snow catch in the nutmeg-colored mane, collecting on the reins and hooves when he rests, smell the slush of it in his helmet. There is no step he takes that I do not feel in my ribs and liver and the shaking thorns of my beard.
Boughs of pine hang from high-arched windows, the architecture of cathedrals repeating in this sanctuary like a story told from mother to suckling child. I dwell here, in the skipped frame, the caught film, the grandiose expanse of smelted clocks. I have chosen this place to wait until the new year gnashes its stone teeth and swallows up the old.
This is Limbo—between the first blow and the last, a head for a head for a head. I told the students when I returned last winter how my skull rolled onto the palace floor like a child’s ball or a golden apple. The callow youth stood up, his limbs betraying his shuddering heart, whose storm-ridden blood could be heard through the glassy hall. He looked so small with my axe in his hand, the shaft wound with ivy and raspberry bramble—he searched for a place to grip the bronze where thorns would not pierce his tender hands. I waited, as I wait now, patiently as a lion teaching his cub to hunt, for the quick tongue of the blade in my neck.
The spaces between stretch like light, bending their calculated arcs over bodies—the time between the lifting of the axe and the falling, the departure of the boy and the arrival. The nature of the universe is a held breath, a filled lung which never empties into the ether.