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But perhaps not. Perhaps I am an old woman living under the water because clams and trout have better manners than kings, and I tell very beautiful lies because I just want the company, and if I lie prettily enough, you will stay and talk to me.
Perhaps I was once nothing but a very young girl, toddling down a stone wall and chasing moths with her pink fingers—and perhaps somewhere along the wet green meadow the wall became a path and the path became a road and the road became a bridge and the moths with the eyes on their wings were always just a little further off, flitting just out of reach, and perhaps the bridge became a lake and I splashed in after them. And perhaps the lake was full of swords and moths and apple trees waving in the current, and perhaps the swords said I was pretty, and the moths said it was all right to touch them, and the apple trees said wouldn’t I like to stay, wouldn’t I like to learn how to breathe water like a long, slender fish.
And perhaps I grew old down here, while my arm stayed young.
Perhaps I am nothing but a white arm, severed, stuck in the lake like a birthday candle.
Yet you see how far you had to come to find me. You cannot deny how warm it is here, how golden, how the gulls keen.
Come closer. Look in: anything could hide beneath the surface of the lake. A serpent, a woman, an arm, a sword. Anything could break the waters and call its own name. This still pool contains everything possible, every woman with necromancy inked on her tongue, every knight tilting, every castle, every grail. A lake has so many voices, you know. The flashes of light slip by on the water, in and out of each other, and each cries out in extremis, each cries out in its gleaming, and is gone. Can you hear them? I have sat at the bottom of the currents, cross-legged as a deva, and watched the green and the pale whicker by, howling, glowing, beaming. The water is so warm, when the choir sings. Lean in, lean in.
I know that I don’t matter to you; I am no more than a bucket of water from this lake, something you can take without bargaining or payment. I am the beginning—you only need me to nod my alabaster head, Madonna-gentle, and grant your life permission to commence.
Oh, I am an arm, your arm, mine, theirs, all your boys. I extend, implore, I lavish upon and commit to the deeps. I bless, I strangle. I pull up the lakefloor in the shape of a sword and say: go, boy, this story has already been told. And perhaps, when this boy reaches out to take my blue blade, shining like nothing so much as water, my fingers will brush against his—they are warm, and shaking, and he is so young.
. . . and brandish’d him three times
I.
A wide green field, and grass like water waving. There is light here, and thick soil, and hiding hills. Clouds skitter across the hedgerows like rocks skipping on a lake. There are stones: here, there, great gray things, knuckle-knobbled. They lie where the walls will be, corners and lengths and thresholds. You can almost see the glimmer of what will stand, hovering shadow-still over the slabs.
The people come swarming, hammering, boiling pitch, boiling limestone, cutting wood. The most obvious images are best: a beehive. An anthill. Gold-backed, dust-legged, wings folded against the spine, the people stir, pour, smear, nail, pile, hammer, slide. None of them know the name of the man who will live here.
The walls go up first, so that no other bee or ant might suckle at the sweetness of a roof or a palisade. There are slender gaps for arrows, and paths so that helmeted soldiers may stalk their territory like dogs, and slope-shouldered lovers may watch the sun set over the blessing hills. It is good work, and plain: solid and thick and smelling of earth. Peat and mortar, sod and lime.
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p; Second is the cathedral, whose altar was brought up from Cornwall, whose gargoyles were brought over the sea from France—years pass here, under the curling eaves, apples and capons eaten while the scaffolding weathers, a hoary skeleton. Even after the court and market are full of voices, after the stairs have been fashioned sturdy and steep, after secret rooms and passages are dug with due diligence, the cathedral will still be unfolding and spiraling up to the floor of God’s house. A father paints the pews; his son finishes the rafters; his grandson strikes the first bell, whose wide bronze bonging tones echo through the valley, now planted with wheat and potatoes and pear trees, hutches of chickens and geese, pens of cattle, now teeming with tenant farmers and broad-bellied knights and harvests of good rain and mild sunshine, harvests that see baskets full of green and gold, brown eggs and thick milk.
The bell-note rolls over all these folk, all these baskets, and some brown-browed folk look up, shading their eyes, when the bell rings its virgin music, but most are unperturbed, pulling carrots and parsnips from the earth, rubbing at sore knees.
X THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE
Kay
Nine nights and nine days his breath lasted under water, nine nights and nine days would he be without sleep. A wound from Kay’s sword no physician might heal. When it pleased him, he would be as tall as the tallest tree in the forest. When the rain was heaviest, whatever he held in his hand would be dry for a handsbreadth before and behind, because of the greatness of his heat, and, when his companions were coldest, he would be as fuel for them to light a fire.
—Culhwch and Olwen
The Mabinogion
Morning, First Day
I carry my air with me like crystal capsules—each day I slit one with the edge of my ribs and it is enough, just barely enough, to keep me walking. It is all I was meant for: walking, breathing, cutting. I am an automaton. My brother sets me walking and I keep going, clockworks grinding, bone gearshifts and blood-hydraulics, until I hit something. Sink Kay in the water—it is no matter, he is submersible, he will breathe like a salmon.
Not that I ever thought I would be more. How could I ever have thought myself special, what boy ever thinks he is more than the sum of his meat, when he is knobble-kneed and too tall with a nose that dwarfs his face? What boy thinks so when he is so often fevered that his skin is permanently flushed, and the other boys mock him for his maiden blush, and sweat clings to him like raindrops? What boy thinks so when he likes his horse and his boots and his best deer-hunting bow so much that even his father assumes he is stupid and burl-headed? I dreamed not of kingship, but that I might look up at a forest of men taller than I, a grove of straight-backed birches in which I would be but a stunted sapling.
My brother set it all going; he was a key and he slid into a great machine with jeweled parts. I wonder as I trod jerkily along, obeying his programming, if he ever wanted something more than to be a key, something more than to have opened a closed circuit by pulling a sword out of a stone. I want to say to him: do you remember when we were brothers? When were not what we are now, toy-men, Hephaestus-cast, rolling along on a track we cannot see?
But you do not say this to the bronze-footed king on his throne, even if you fear that he has become frozen there, bolted into his regalia, terrified to leave. Instead he sends us out, our quests screwed onto our backs with gold rivets, his words peeling from our tongues as though we had no voice of our own. We are his hands, we are his legs, we go out into the world and we go out of the world and we go where he tells us to go and we are lucky if we remember our names when we return.
I do not complain. It is not a brother’s place to complain.
Once he did not cling to his chair—when he was a boy, when he was human and not king. When he was an orphan and chased after me even though we were brothers only by contract, and I actually thought it made a difference whether I called him brother or foster-brother. Then, his feet were always filthy and his clothes were full of bees and frogs and dragonflies and no one paid him much attention. After all, I was the elder. He had no track, he had no rivets. It was I, instead, who sat so often astride a horse that I thought myself half-centaur, who was scrubbed and tutored and dressed up in epaulets and rapped across the knuckles until my country accent faded into rounded vowels and crisp consonants.
Plate by plate I strapped metal onto my body. (And if I was fevered before, this was worse, the sheen of sweat inside the armor, the flushed face beneath the helmet, and after years, even the metal began to blush, until I was a red knight for true, boiling the rain away from me like soup spilled on a blazing anvil.) Then I thought I was making myself a man, but I see now that they were the plates of my manufacture as a king’s worker, as the automaton I became. Year by year I bolted on a new body, plate armor like a beetle’s shell, with enough holes for that eventual demiurge to slip his orders, to feed in his unalterable programs. A space had to be made for him. A space was made.
I remember that morning, when I slipped out of the world and he slipped into it. A slab of metal in rock—how could such a thing come to mean so much? It was no more or less part of the city than a grocer’s storefront or a chipped curb, yet no one proposed that we prognosticate by those. Steel and stone and all of us agreed without speaking, made this covenant with the city streets and skies, that that knife in a rock meant more than melons in a pyramid or old yellow paint in an alley. Even when we had forgotten about it and let it grow over with dandelions and blackberry whips, it did not lose what we had so long ago given it: for my brother pulled it up and the light passed from me to him, the light and the horse and the tutor and the epaulets, which he was welcome to.
