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To you, I would seem only a fat old man bent over a chessboard at Golden Gate Park, slapping the timer with a meaty fist. My belly would hang over patched khaki trousers, bending a leather belt in half. My blue work-shirt would be stained w
ith sour-mash sweat, curling sleeve and collar. My shoes would be bound with duct tape, and you could see the corner of a jaundiced toenail through the ragged blue-striped canvas. You would suspect lice in my beard. But you would keep coming to my table, because I beat you at every game.
On this side of the bridge, I have a flask half-filled with schnapps in my pocket, and a clutch of food stamps in my threadbare wallet. My breath reeks of week-old spinach and mothballs, my skin of rotten pages. My biceps bulge under tattoos of anchors and ziggurats, the holly-axe in black ink in the hollow of my elbow. I have a friendly rivalry with a Jewish photographer who leads with his knight, and a regular seat at the soup kitchen.
Only Gawain would know me through that grease-glamour. Only he would see the jade-thighed giant with a Bishop in each hand. Only he would see the two Queens for what they were, would perceive beneath their eyeless crowns the twin ladies of Hautdesert. You would see a blonde waitress and her elderly aunt, but he would know her for the gargantua, the ecstatic beauty that looks both ways, the star of the sea and the apple in the garden.
He is bound to me by this sight, the eyes that scour this gnarled wood of visions and golems like a water diviner. Between us, we construct a map of the world. In the forest of doubles, all geographies are present. The self refracts, into husband and wife, and we wait for our boy.
Red Queen to King’s Square.
The Chapel gapes open like a womb. The grasses tangle around it, and the walls slope into the hill. All the altars are hidden, the chalices of baleen and myrrh, the blessed water, the icebound matins of winter. But these are invisible. The Chapel leads into my body-in-hers, a hole in the earth, and it breathes in anticipation.
I spend my nights sharpening the holly-axe, finding the nirvana of the grinding blade, back and forth, the scythe slick and wet. I am the hoarfrost, I am the elk’s matted fur, the moon vanishing behind carbon-clouds. I am ready, though I seethe at my position, within her and before him, the Object, without dimension. The smoke of my id spirals against my bones, the friction scalding my beryl-blood. Death sits in my stomach like boot-crushed cigarettes.
He will hear the grind of my axe, all tangled with wild mint and willow, and his belly will clench. He will glimpse the womb-mouth and be struck dumb—neither of us can come too near it. It is her place, though she can never be inside it. She is not built that way. We must act out our morality play beyond its weeping borders. She can only surround us, make our bodies into fantastic cathedrals of flesh, but she does not touch the fall of this axe, or the fall of his. He must betray me, and adore her. But it is the betrayal which is more intimate, the sour congress of our bent throats, the symmetry of a head for a head.
We are nothing but bodies of potential. The Gawain self and the Bertilak-self, moving through seasons, easing into casements shaped to us, glass blown from each step through the witchwood, the wild-limbed Wirral. To speak of us is to enter the unknown—the embryonic. We are fraternal, we are father and son, we are lovers, we are twin salmon swimming in the wife-womb, enclosed. We never cease to be her embryos, our razor-gills brushing in the fluid sky. But within these Chapel-walls we will play our game, the Rook and the Knight. It is my axe, after all, at the end of the tale.
If I glower at the soundless church, if I wish that I were more to him than the emerald-toothed giant, it is only that, at the end of all tales, I am discontent to know my role so well. The Object should not guess its base nature until the end, its lines should not be known too well, or the questing knight will guess that it was all planned from the beginning, to secure three kisses, to secure the green swath around his hips, to secure the wound on his neck which marks him as our own.
But perhaps there is no me at all, no Bertilak, Lady or Lord, only him, gold as a coin, his purity burning the bridge as he comes. I can no longer tell.
He is coming; I am here. I think nothing more is required of me, except that I raise my axe. But in this Chapel of mud and root, in its sodden pews, I pray for his seraphic eyes to see me as I am—though I can no longer tell if that is the green-heart or the freckled flesh—and welcome the parting of his skin.
Queen’s Castle.
I am always outside the board as it was meant to be drawn. I care nothing for the mewling white-capped King. But I will not lose the Rook to my own cunning hand. I am doubled, myself and myself, who looks so like a man in his mottled red beard and skin like the white of winter fruit, the other self who knows no secret green spreading in the night like star-fed lichen. He is the singular, the Bertilak, who can move in the upper world, and hunt the fat-haunched boar, and sip tea spiced with cardamom in a chair of oak.
Sometimes I look west and east, and the eastern face is moss-laden, full of blackberry thorns. The nose is straight and fine, laced with dandelion leaves, and the hair falls in hyssop-braids to shoulders heaped in pine boughs. Its laugh is the press of forge-bellows, and it cannot doubt its magnitude. My wife made this face, as if out of clay, and lovingly. If I could dwell always in its net of bones, Gawain could pass through me like air and I would never note him.
But the western face is trimmed by smooth-legged ghost-boys from the wharf, with oiled braids and salt-flecked eyes. That face wears linen and light, its teeth are diamonds set in a cedar skull. It has never dreamt of the color green, it has never watched its arms grow thick with grass. It plays its board with aplomb, while the eastern limbs muddle their game with arcane rites. This is the face that longs, and weeps, and asks for release from duty. The quest bridges them, and for the breathless moment when the axe falls, before it touches his skin, I am both, I am whole.
Between the four of us—my wife and I with our twin selves, heads bent in conspiracy under the shadows of willows and cypress—we have devised a game for our fifth. Gawain, Gawain, who has no other self, who is pale and brotherless as the moon.
We will split him, so that he need not be alone—he will look forward and back. There will be the Gawain who was whole, whose hair was yellow as a lion encased in ice, whose troth blazed against the turquoise hood of heaven—and the wounded Gawain we will make, our girdled golem, all wrapped in gold and green, the endless green of her belly, which turns knights to feys. The haunted Gawain will return to his court, vomiting shadows into the light until he empties himself. And we will keep the gold-drenched avatar, the limpid hound, our changeling son, our lover incandescent as a scarlet star.
I will hunt the fat-haunched boar.
I will hunt the slack-eared rabbit.
I will hunt the red-toothed fox.
She will hunt him.
And I will trade the animal hearts for his lips on mine, for the lips of the Janus-wife burning through his into me. Hands full of meat and pelts, I will take him in my arms and feed him of my body as she fed me of hers, and like a trunk of apple-wood, he will split under me. I will make a cut in his throat, small and red as a mouth, and kiss the virtue from his blood. Between our bodies, the masters of Hautdesert will alter him, as surely as bread to flesh.
We will deliver the broken brother home in swaddling clothes, a newborn doppelganger, never again able to see without our eyes.
0 THE FOOL
Dagonet
Quoth Sir Dagonet: “I am King Arthur’s Fool. And whilst there are haply many in the world with no more wits than I possess, yet there are few so honest as I to confess that they are fools.”
—The Madness of Sir Tristram
Howard Pyle
