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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:
