That is what he says.
I crouch here with the small of my back against the stone wall, the concrete stinking and steaming, peering into the ripples of gold, the otherworld-veils hanging from the sky. I am afraid to walk in the fog—it gnaws at my vision, and I cannot see. I am afraid to go down to the sea, into the other city, which shows against the daub and wattle of Camelot like a metallic negative: many-knived and spiraling.
It is not long before we are all—soldiers, cooks, squires, smiths—weeping like pieta in the brume, salting the earth with secret tears, pissing ourselves fearful. It comes blooming up from the city and fills our gullets like old beer, brown and sickening. The sere of it, the cough and lag and blear of it, blinds and burns, bubbling over our knuckles like bile from some wasting creature.
The roof-tiles of the city are musky and mired in the brown, as we are musky and mired on the desert rims of those ghost-streets, as the streets are musky and mired in their wheeling and spoking, out from some center I cannot guess at. The mute, silent squalor pricks at my eyes, and the horizon wavers like a lie, and there is no father in this, the throat-saw and the sour-eyed bleed. There is no order or pride, no frieze of dead lords marching, nothing but spittle and the scrub, the unending sun—I can see nothing, nothing at all.
Hinc illae lacrimae, hinc illae lacrimae.
There has never been any father, only a burning plain skirted in stone, and a boy vomiting his breakfast into the weeds.
I do not know why I am here at all.
II. Heaven
Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.
My mother has no name. Or she has dozens—but when you have so many, like jewel-boxes lined up around a great, high bed, it is just as well to say you have none. Her nameless womb crushed my body into something like a boy’s shape, something like limbs and skull and digits, something like primogeniture, something like alive. Did she have dark hair? Did she keep her milk? Did she watch the umbilicus that once connected us shrivel and blacken like a spent candlewick? Each of these things she kept in a box by her bed, boxes of silver and chalcedony and iron slugs. Each of these she kept locked away from me like a name, and I never knew them scattered clear on my hands like drops of water.
But isn’t that always the way? How we rotten, errant sons do love to drape our worm-eaten souls around our mother’s shoulders. My mother didn’t love me: the chanson of the tyrant.
My mother loved me. I believe it; that must make it so. Out of all those names I pull a woman-aggregate: she had dark hair. She played with my toes. When I took my first step, she was there to tell me I had pleased her. When I crawled under light-diffuse linens next to her, and her black hair branched all around like an old tree, there was always milk, secret and sweet, and her voice was a consonant-less hum, like bees or gray wings.
I do not remember these things, but I would like to. The other boy remembers them—he says that we looked so like her that it was whispered we had no father at all. But then, lies involving parentage are the most common of all, and he mastered that species early on. I watched them with each other: dark mother sopping at the skirts with lakewater and my double, my twin, whose tongue was all bound up in deceitful sapphires. There was always milk for him, yes, but I was always thirsty.
What was the first lie?
Do you love your mother?
Yes.
No, no, that came later, later, when there was no more milk for either of us, only empty, hardened breasts, and linens rough and unbeaten, and hair like snakes snapping. The first lie, which seeded me with my brother as though I were a woman, and she a father:
Isn’t he lovely? I am his aunt.
And the other boy formed inside me, like water freezing to the shape of its bottle. This other boy who was her nephew, who was charming, precocious, and doesn’t he look marvelous in his uniform, marching along just like a little soldier! But I was her son, inside the golden clockwork boy, pawing at her under the bedclothes, with only her sorrow-bent stare to feed me: they cannot know. If they knew they would take you from me.
But still, I was born a lie, I was made a secret, and that sort of thing can’t help but leave a mark, like a slap. How could I be anything other than this, hunkered down in the dunes with the scorpions lashing their tails at the moon? A man told his sister he loved her—what of that? Tawdry tragedy, except that a child was all hung with shadows, a child that no one could ever know about, lest it get its fool head knocked out on some unfortunate granite stairs.
I am no one.
I was not supposed to be.
I have no name, either. No one would give me one, for to name a thing means it is real, it exists, it displaces air.
Please, father, look at how I move the air around me. I am right here. Look at me.
III. Earth
Earth comprises distances, great and small;
danger and security; open ground and narrow passes;
the chances of life and death.
This is La Cienega. This is Camlann. There is a river; there is a sea; there is sand and the wend of snakes rattling through the throat-scoured soil. There is stone and a road and light like albumen floating yellow and white. I walk down to the city because I have to, because the light is also a lie, but it lies only about itself, and is holy. I have always been told that light is holy. Even I cannot quite imagine a world where the dark is sacrosanct—I am a mushroom fulminating in shit and decay, but still I acknowledge the sun, though it too lies. It lies and says it is the center of everything, the source of all possible light.
I go into the city because my mother lives there still, and my father will smell her like a deer, and go after her, hoping to find her gracefully bent in the snow, her nose snuffling out acorns under the ice. I know she would never do such a thing; I look for her as she is. This is her place, all full of glamors and illusions and images spinning.
A son told his mother he loved her. What of that? I have heard of a man in Thebes who fucked his mother—he made four children in her, two kings, two beauties, and one of those beauties was an anti-establishment revolution in a twelve-year-old’s body. Certainly this bested the previous score of one shriveled, club-footed boy, marked on that tired womb with a Greek fingernail. I confess I had hoped, too, to best my father, to people the vineyards and humble little rivers with laughing, dark-eyed revolutions. But somewhere in the city’s dark crease she found a lesson learned: no more children hung with shadow, no more lies hung upside down from a weeping woman, umbilicus black and blaming on their little throats.
No more nephews, she said to an apothecary with eyes like spinning wheels, whose counter was greasy with aqua vitae and typical tonics—what otherworld physic does not vend hemlock, belladonna, mandrake? The wheels clicked round—thirty times left, twenty times right, ten times left again, and out of a dry drawer popped her panacea, and though her legs were open to me her body was shut, and she put her hand on my face when I came to her and whispered that a ruin called to a ruin, and what were we both but stones already crumbling, and what did it matter after all, what was any of it but solace, and solace she had, solace thick as clouds.
The other boy breathed heavy and gold. The other boy told her to lie to him.
I love you, she said.
We never spoke of my father when I was young. The universal pronoun. The only possible him. He hung in our house like Cicero’s head, but we never looked, we never spoke of it, how its blood dripped on the tablecloth, spattering the spoons. Instead of a father I had two crows, pets caught out on the moor by young girls with leather cages and horsewhips at their hips. I did not call them Thought and Memory. I called them Gaheris and Agravaine for the brothers who were not brothers, and therefore would not look at me, would not speak to me, but chased the girls with the leather cages and caught them round the throat like thrushes. I called my birds brothers and they cawed in my ears, perched on my bed while I slept, shook their feathers and clacked talons against wood when my mother la
y beside me.
Gaheris and Agravaine pick through the trash which blows along the central thoroughfare of Camlann, which is Los Angeles, which is not a road but a river, which is not a river but a road—Gaheris picks up the refrain, disappearing down alleys glutted with old paper, crying: a river is a road, a river is a road—gray and flat, ripple-less, proceeding on and empty, and if she is there, if my mother is there and my father, I can catch no sight of them from here, where lights flicker behind monoliths—light of the moon? Of stars? Of sickness and electric haze? Agravaine tosses a beetle into the air and severs it with a snap of his black beak.
The sun is coming up, banging over the black hills like an old, dirty shop-sign.
IV. The Commander
The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom,
sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness.
There is a crown lying on an iron grating. It is studded with opals and cat’s eyes. A crown always watches you, you know. Watches for the smallest weakness, the smallest excuse to roll off, grinding over the ground to another bone-battered skull. It sees me, but it won’t move towards me, not the smallest inch.
The other boy would grab for it. Gaheris and Agravaine, my crows, my true brothers, snap at the blinking jewels. I hunch under a little bridge and stare at the circle of metal. The troll under the bridge—when have I been anything else? I am crypt-hidden; I am secreted, and the secreted thing wants nothing more than to come into the light—no, to be beckoned into it, to be called, to be invited. The other boy put on a coat of red and black; the other boy stood at attention and drilled the mission into me.
We are here because the old man has bound himself up in virtue, and would bind the rest of us so, would tell us how to be, how to think, would tell us what was right, what creature virtue, and no inch of space would be left for us to see behind him, beyond him, to see anything but him. He would take up our vision like a sun, a lying sun who screeches that he is the source of all possible light, and would burn our eyes under we saw nothing but holes in the sky, purple and green. Of course, those he loves, those he cannot live without will be pardoned, with a kneel and a dry kiss, for any breach.
Except us. We are unforgivable. His whoring wife has grace and we have a broken staircase and an old beehive, exile that tastes like desert weeds.
The old man worships order, and those who worship order cannot abide anything which is not-order. We are not-order. We are a cut in the immaculate flesh. We are not allowed to be; he will not let us be. He is not Hammurabi, not Moses—what right has he to hand us laws in stone?
I put my head on my knees. I want to be called into the light. I am here to be asked into the gold, to be beckoned, I am here to stand on the stone and wait for my father to tell me it was all a mistake—had he only known, had he only known.
A river is a road, caws Gaheris, down a gutter, past a courtyard which still seems to hold the refuse of pilgrims, old relics sucked dry of divinity, shoes more hole than leather, crosses dented and softened at their joint by rust and rain, swords and sackcloth and old paper, blowing in whip-wound dervishes, tentpoles and helmets and bibles empty of pages. They were here, in Camlann, on La Cienega, in Holy-Land. I am here—I should not have come down into the city. Cities connect to each other, some dark, glittering network, they know each others’ secrets, they pass each other’s fluids down sluices of concrete and thatch and creaking, swinging iron.
Once, I saw my mother as he must have seen her. She was down at the riverside, fishing with her hands. We lived alone by then, the other sons gone, the young girls she collected like butterflies alighting on her lips grown and wandering, wild as she. We were alone, she and I and that old crumbling manor with its stairs breaking off into nothing, an arm dashed at the wrist. We ate honey from her bees and wore cloth spun from her spiders and chewed the bones of her frogs and my mother was always the queen of small and creeping things—which is why she drew me from the deck for a son, I suppose.
I saw her waist-sunk in the river, her long black hair floating around her like water-snakes, her strong brown face searching the sun-flattened ripples—and now and again she would pull a squirming, gasping fish up to look it in the eye before smashing its bony head against a flat stone. She always did that, looked her fish, and her bees and her spiders and her frogs, in the eye before spilling their brains out on a stone. The light was so bright on her hair that it shone blue, and I saw, for a moment, how a brother could not care, could see nothing but the blue in her, nothing but that dancing cyan, and move staircases and rivers and worlds to touch it with one finger of his hand.
We crouched by the stump of a rotten elm, the other boy and I, unified for once in our admiration for the long lines of blue that shot back from her clear brow. We felt like our father, primeval and golden and never secret, as though we could stride towards her just then, just then, and she would welcome us as she had welcomed him. We felt as though she was constant, her blue was constant, and we had a right to the blue, inherited, just like this blasted land, from that tattered old lion we would spend every day after chasing.
That was the first night we spent in her.
In the mere, in the mire and the rubble and the slow blinking light of a street in the other-city, the fairy city I touch only now, after they have both passed before me into it, along the slow, creeping aqueducts which steal water from richer lands, I see—yes?—a flash of blue dancing forward, a long line like fishing-silk, and I will not, I will not call her name, not any of them, as I run after it, as my feet catch on old bottles and broken windows, as my breath comes hoarse with the poisoned air. I will not. The other boy makes me a fool.
He calls joyously into the shadows.
Morgan. Morgause. Morgana. Mother.
V. Method and Discipline
By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure.
A father hangs in the dark like a noose, his feet already reliquaried, his brainpan already opened to silver needles, dissection-angelic, searching for the kernel of light that must make a king a king.
But he is not dead yet and all I can see is the shape of him against the night. The smell of the desert is coming over the hills: not sweet sage and agave, but dead mice, old bones, and the droppings of buzzards. The shape of his back. Of his lie. But I am the shape of his lie and I cannot be expected to do anything in this place but stand my ground and tell him that order is inherently oppressive, as though that means anything at all when our eyes are the same shade of green, and our forefingers crook identically to the left.
The other boy’s forefinger is straight as an accusation.
There are men back there, beyond the hills, who are playing ridiculous games with rattlesnakes, baiting the poor green creatures, laughing when they snap. They came because I told them to, and I am very beautiful when I command, and they didn’t want to pay a pair of oxen to the old king when a little sweat-work might save the cow and make the new king look kindly on them.
I will not be king. I know that. Secrets aren’t kings. Genealogies are meant to be worn on one’s chest, not held under the tongue like a communion wafer. I wait for it to melt and it stays hard and sharp against my mouth. The other boy still thinks there is a destiny here. I have heard his wife never had a child; I would have given her one, if I had survived this place. If she had had blue in her hair. And that boy would have been king and no one’s nephew—but you cannot be king when you cannot, even for a moment, stand in the light. I knew it when I came here, I knew it when I walked off of the desert like sea-fog pooling in a valley, I knew it when I followed my mother to him like a hyena following the water to a wounded gazelle. The crown wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t look at me.
She is standing in the Pacific, waist-sunk. The sun is on her hair. Her dress billows like a sail. She is the ship of dre
ams.
Did you grow up strong?
Yes, the other boy lies.
I’m glad.
She reaches into the salt foam and pulls me in beside her, her cold, wet hand on the nape of my neck. She looks me in the eye.
It’s surprising how much a body weighs. I can’t remember which corpse I dragged along the beach, though it seemed like my own black insides pouring out on the sand, over the little holes the sand-mites make with their leaping. It seemed like his gut opening clam-thick. We are both so black inside, and maybe he was a secret, too. Secrets beget.
The other boy leaps and slaps his thigh in triumph, struts like a yellow-headed parrot, teaches lessons so that our father will know how wise we have become in his absence.
When seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this way: Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral Law?
This is what happens: the son replaces the father. It’s the heart of every story. But I am not in a story. I never existed, he was my uncle, wasn’t he? Silly boy, thinking you had a father, that you started in someone’s body. I stuck in my father as he stuck in my mother and there was so much black, so much red, and his eyes were so tired. I walked from his ruin, ruin from ruin, and the flags went up in the distance, the flags, and the trumpets’ long, clear calls.
Which of the two generals has most ability?
This is what happens: the king is sacrificed; the new king ascends. I didn’t want to hang him on the oak tree, I didn’t want my crows to peck at his intestines. I didn’t want to watch him remember that he had a son once before the moon ate his skull in one swallow. The other boy was so sure, so sure he was right, that this one thing was no lie: the old king was rotten, corrupt, cuckolded, senile. It was our duty. This is how histories of the kings of frozen islands are written. I stepped up, behind his body, and there was only the same oak tree, wide as the world, and waiting.