With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth?
This is what happens: a boy sees his father in the dark, and calls out to him. The father turns, not, in the end, particularly surprised. He sees blue in his son’s hair, and almost manages a smile. The other boy leaps first, and he can taste the metal of the cat’s-eye crown, and the family cuts into itself like meat. They lay together on the beach, and there are sandpipers all around, and the sun is over the horizon, whitened to a tumor by fog.
It was an accident. I meant only to show him I was strong. He was always too old for this; his bones like an string-necked chicken’s. A lung shot through with blue like a woman’s hair spat blood into his mouth. I cradled his head as if he were my son. When he died, the grief was like a child in me, though my stomach lay open and bleeding, a gift of his antler-hilted knife. I gave birth and the strangled child was death, our death, and I whispered songs to him while the gulls snapped mussels from the gray-spackled rocks.
I never touched her, you know. Did you really believe all that Oedipal nonsense? The other boy told you that—he is convincing, an orator wrapped in white. He was always the best of us. I was no Sphinx-solver, I could not fill her up with kings. I slept against her; she was so cool and soft, as if her strands of blue retreated in the night and ran all through her body. I slept against her as a son will. And once, oh, once, my breath so thick in my throat, like throttling wool, I cupped her breast in my hand and she turned that great black stare on me—father, you know that stare—it rippled with such pity. She took my chin in her hand. She looked me in the eye.
You look like your father.
Who is my father?
The man you look like.
I came to the city. I looked into a mirror of flesh and it broke, a long silver crack.
This is what happened: I killed my father. He got his knife into me when I leapt—stupid, not to keep my guard up.
The streets shine with flotsam.
XXI THE WORLD
Bedivere
Then Sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.
So Sir Bedivere came again to the king, and told him what he saw.
—Sir Thomas Malory
Le Morte d’Arthur
Therefore, said Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, take thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to the waterside, and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that water, and come again and tell me what thou there seest.
It’s amazing how heavy a sword really is. You never think about it—spend your life heaving them into wood and silk and leather, into earth and mire and stone, into bone and meat. It becomes part of you—you do not have a hand of flesh, but an arm which ends in metal, a long, curving finger which accuses, always accuses. You stop thinking about how thick and still it sits in your fist, the heft of it, the swing and the slog of it. It’s a hammer, and a club, it’s your own bone and gristle, and if the light is beautiful on the blade, if it is even like water, like a lake-edge, that does not mean that it was built for less than cutting, less than bludgeoning, less than pulling flesh from flesh.
You told me to come here, and the sea is on the shore like a tablecloth, more blue than I have seen together in all my days. I am tired, tired in my perfect sinews—recall how they used to call me that, how the women used to cheer for Bedevere, the Knight of the Perfect Sinews, and I never knew if it was mockery or not, if they snickered at my stump-wrist while praising the one hand left to me. But we were young, we were so young, and names of that sort seemed so important.
I am tired—there is no water here which is not full of salt, no wind that is not a hot clutch at the throat, a flaming sash, a flaming favor. I cannot see what color I might have been before the blood, before your son’s blood—how heavy was he, too, when I pulled him from you like a skin from an apple!—my blood, your own clotted last. The books always say that a dying man’s face is gray—I always thought that a poet’s silk-calved dream of what death might be, but your face, your face with its evening stubble stippling the skin like grass, it is gray after all, gray as the moon, and I am still so warm and red.
It is not a one-handed sword, your old blade, and I had to drag it from your body to the sea, two limping footsteps and a deep, worrying furrow in the sand. Bees buzz around my gore-stuck hair and lizards snap at fleas in my shoes. Kelp collects at the sword-tip; wet sand pulls and sucks at it, as though the earth would have it before the brine. My good arm aches as though I spent the day heaving a silver axe into cedar—you used to tease me when I filled my own wood-grate, told me you had men to do that for us.
Of course you do, Arthur, I said, you have me.
There are islands out there, beyond the sunline, but I cannot see them except as lashes of whipped light against a too-bright horizon. Dawn slants down like a glass window dropped into the whitecaps, and the whole world is waterside, how am I to know where to throw it? How am I to know where it ought to fall? How can I choose the place, who was never one of you, one of the boys who heads beamed with so much light that to look in on your suppers was to look into a painting, choked with coronae. I never wore anything on my head but my hair, and you were all too beautiful for me to feel like much more than an altarboy at some terrible, radiant Mass. I was thick at the ankle, at the waist, at the shoulder, no part of me was slender or elegant. They called me perfect and I winced at the lie, at the joke, the hulking man who could hardly cut his own meat for the mottled stump at his wrist where his hand used to be.
But I know you did not mean to be cruel. Such a thing was not in you.
Of all the places I went at your side, I never imagined this would be the last, this long strand, like a thick rope laid below the dark city, the strange half-place where the Cam whorled and looped into the not-Cam, into a road I could hardly fathom as a road—yet who could think that the dead air could empty itself in a sea so clear, so bright, that I cannot look at it, cannot look out on that perfect shore, that perfect sea.
The breeze smells of clean grass—the dunes prickle with it, curving back over the headlands. The blue batters at my skull, and out of the surf comes the strange, foreign cry of dolphins, their chirping litany, their barking lament. Their blue heads stud the water like sapphires set in steel—like the stones on the hilt of this cleaver, this hack-saw you loved so well.
I know a secret: it is your own arm I carry to the waterside, severed from you—you are like me, now, at the end, limb-hewn—embarrassed by its own jewelry, but no less your own, hung at your wrist all those years as though by joint and sinew. I have dragged it through the barnacled sand, this arm, this pommel, this elbow, this cross-guard, this shoulder with its sparse golden hair. I know it for your arm and no blade, and I cannot fling it away as though it were a scrap of palimpsest blowing through the streets of that city by the sea.
I cannot cast off this thing which has been your body, cast it into the water like a fishing line. I cannot do it. I will keep it for myself, and fold it beneath my floorboards, wrapped in rags and furs and covered in pine which does not quite match the surrounding ash, so that in the smallest of all night-hours, I may pull up the planks like exhuming a grave, prying up the coffin-splinters, so that I may uncover it like an old bone, and look into it as a mirror, lay beside it as beside dust, and know my friend is near.
I will not do it.
What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but waves and winds. That is untruly said of thee, said the king, therefore go thou lightly again, and do my commandment; as thou art to me as life and dear, spare not, but throw it in.
The sun is so high and hot that it will allow nothing green beneath it—everything here is hard and gold, hard and b
lue, hard and white. The hilt is warm in my hand; the blade is incandescent, star-shot. I am almost used to it, stranger to my palm before you turned gray and coagulate.
Lumps of city scatter off to the west, houses like red ant-cairns, roof-tiles shining back the endless light, light that must have weight, weight like shoulder-plates, like liquid, pooling silver. The sand has dried in the noon so that the furrow I leave this time is neat and sighing. Its sides trickle in behind me.
There has been a beach like this before, though never a sea like this, never a sun like this. But there was a strand—oh, does he remember it, in the long line of things he has killed which must string together in his breast like old ornaments? St. Michael, St. Michael, the castle and the tide, and the fires burning like infidels stuck on the ramparts. We went into that place, and I never came out, that place so like this one, as though all places which are not Camelot must run together into one country, long and strange and serrated, along the coast of another sea.
Arthur did not want to go. I understood immediately, because I did not want to go either. I saw in the ogre-keeper of that place my own hulking, muscle-bound form, horrible in its meat-pounding arms, its swollen legs. I did not want to go down across the green fields when the strawberries had just come through, still small and hard and pale on the stalk, I did not want to go trampling over their little beads in order to kill something so like myself. I have always pitied ungainly things, things born too big for the world. I never forgot my own inelegance, my own boar-belly.
There were a line of girls at the gate in those days, crying dirt-tears, eyes spinning in their heads like weathervanes. They held their fists between their legs and the blood had dried to black there. Mouths hung open, missing teeth, and they just stood still, all in a row, so quiet, like nuns, their breasts beaten flat. Arthur did not want to look at them: he knew their faces. He remembered that his mother looked like that every time his father came home from campaign, sweat-stung and hard, that it had never gotten better or easier for her, not the littlest bit, and he knew from the time he was hay-haired and jam-stained that she probably looked like that the morning after he was made.
Every morning there was another woman in the line, beads on an abacus, and someone, somewhere, tallying, tallying. Finally I went out to them, and found the first in that blood-wan sisterhood.
Who did this to you, Lady? You must know that this is the house of justice—we manufacture it here, like wooden toys.
Her eyes rolled back and I could see the tiny scarlet veins in the white, like the strokes of a brush.
The Beast of St. Michael pushed us open until we could not but crack. I cannot feel my spine, but I can feel him, still, inside me.
Still, he did not want to know. He did not want to remember that he could not sit on his mother’s lap for days after his father had left again, door a-slam and finally soft. He did not want to think that his own blood was full of numb spines and cracked hips. But I could not watch them add to their number, day by day, like a faucet dripping.
She is dead, and beyond him now.
He, too, is dead, sighed Arthur, and gone after her. What if still he breaks her beneath him on a rack of clouds?
I pulled on his shirt and strapped this very sword to his waist, though his limbs were frozen and heavy. I dressed him like a baby. He could not raise his head to them as we rode out, though they beat their bellies until the blood began to run red and wet again, and we were heralded in crimson all the way to the sea.
The castle stood on a strand like this one, though the sea was gray, not blue, and the sun was a white disc, not flaming as if to purify a sinning sphere. Far out into the slate waves it frowned, piled on itself like a fallen cake, sullen, gouged windows and doors bolted like torsos. Here and there, it was burning, tall, thin flames hissing as they met the damp sky, steaming in rain that slanted into the brine-pitted walls, and surely to him it must have looked like home, must have looked like his mother’s bed, must have looked like his father’s grinning face.
Of course, he would not remember the girl. Only I saw her, only I touched her. If I were a better man I would confess my sins to my king before he dies, but I cannot unstring my lips after all this time, and see his pupils widen, then shrink. I was once a good man. I was once his man.
We slayed a giant together, my friend and I, a giant with no beanstalk or harp of gold, only a wretched castle hollowed out for him by whale-speckled tides, only rough, mucus-yellow eyes and an expression like a lamp that once shone and has long gone out. The usual business of slaying occurred—we have done this before. There were bellows like shades blowing open in a storm, and once the skin of a thing is broken, I am always reminded of heifers calving on my own father’s land—my father, who never knew, as I do, how much blood you could let out of a woman and yet keep her living—arms deep in hot, swampy flesh, pulling at bone, at kicking hoof. We reached into him as into a breach-birth and pulled at his kicking spleen, pulled at his huge heart until the chambers tore one from the other in our hands.
The blood coated us, made of us red knights. We laughed, pulled greasy strips of giant-flesh from each others’ hair like apes picking lice, and set out searching for harps or geese or whatever a giant holds dear enough to build a castle to keep. My eyes were still blurred with exertion and triumph, gore still thickening and drying on each of my perfect sinews—my whole skin thrilled and pricked like a plucked guitar, as it will when you have killed a thing much bigger than yourself, and much stronger. Even my eyelashes seemed to vibrate, to sing some dark and untaught tune.
It was in this state that I found her. If I had been un-frenzied, if the giant’s blood in my mouth had not been so like boiling wine—
She was not young. Her skin was deeply lined and sunburned; her hair was matted and gray and hung like long iron bars all around her, hung in her face so that her dark eyes peered through them. She was naked, and her arms clasped above her head with chains of bone bolted in bronze, her ankles nailed through, like a crucifixion, the skin long healed and grown around the nail-shaft. She sat on a low wall, perched as well as she could with her arms pinioned so—and all through the grass-stuck mud wall march a line of small graves.
She shrieked when she saw me, so like the giant, and painted in his corpse. She shrieked, tired of shrieking, but knowing that the giant would always expect her cry. Her howl was dry and breaking, like pine needles crushed underfoot. The fires of the castle still burned in its higher terraces—the rain scissored down through dark clouds and the sound of the giant dying, of the sear of it, was still in me, battering back and forth between my bones, so loudly I could hardly hear her weep with sweat-sour relief, knowing her salvation had ridden to her bearing a silver cross.
The giant pulled up my daughter and I from our country like crickets from a hay roof.
Ah, the chains of bone! My blood sang high and taut.
He tried to have her, but she was always so pretty, and so frail, and his love broke her hips open like two halves of an apple.
Ah, how black her eyes! My blood hummed low and loose.
He fell on me then, and it has been years. I was always stronger than my girl. That is her, buried there, buried first.
The blood in me and the blood on my back seemed to stretch towards each other, and the rain and flames were so hard and bright, and I could not see anything but her splayed legs, without the smallest modesty—what blush should she have left for me?—though the stain of the giant’s last visit still streaked her skin like a tiger’s hide, black against brown. After the giant, I thought, she will hardly feel me. I have done so much for her today.
I thought that. I.
With the titan’s ruined heart still in my hand I pushed her knees open, and I did not even notice the caked blood, but I saw her clamp shut her mouth, and her eyes roll up to heaven, and you know, she never even made a sound, though I heard her old bones creak—I was so full of slanting flame, so full of blade-swings and axe-wield, so full of fur and bone a
nd bile, all thumping and throbbing within me, and I was the giant, his innards draped me like sacramental robes. I was the giant, and my boulder-knees scraped the stone wall. I was the giant, and I wanted her to cry out beneath me.
Another knight would have knelt and hoisted her to his horse, given her over to convent, washed her wounded womb in a clear river. It is what we were trained to do. How many of us failed to do it? Or was it only I who fell so far?
I rolled off of her and there were no stars behind a skirt of clouds. She stared at me, expressionless, and the blood ran from me then, and I was not the giant, I was a gristle-clung ape and I had done what apes will do. I turned and vomited into the gravestones, spattering their rough granite with sickness.
Those headstones—how bitter and terrible her growl!—are for the children I bore the giant, all the babes he threw from the ramparts to watch their skulls crack on the surf-sharpened rocks. Don’t you worry, chevalier, I’ll make sure your little one is not parted from his brothers and sisters. I am not so old yet that I can yet leave the funeral trade.
I ran from her, I ran and I screamed horse-horrid, I rode and rode and Arthur could not keep with me, and I would not answer when he asked what had bitten my heels—how could I? How could I tell him I was his father, I was the giant, I was a hundred kings before him and after? The blood was never so hot in him that he could even dream that one day he might imagine that he could grind an old woman’s back against a stone wall.
I left her there. I left her in the rain and the fire.
The winter passed and no one questioned me. Feasts were held for the giant’s death. Games and hunts. I did not hunt, or play.
I went into the forest to cut wood, I told him. It is my way, never-mind how you chide me. My silver axe and my Hephaestus-gait, dragging the ash-handle behind me, leaving a furrow in the loam. I cut oak and pine and green birch, and held each log in place with my huge gnarled hand. I watched it every time the blade fell. I watched the hand that had held her down, the hand that had bruised her mangled breast, the hand that had whipped my horse away from her, leaving her in her clutch of bone. I watched that wicked, shaming hand, I watched it curl around a log like a throat, and it seemed better to sever it like a side of beef than to let it go on dangling from me after it had played a giant’s paw.