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I. Moral Law
Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler,
so that they will follow him regardless of their lives,
undismayed by any danger.
The morning before the war begins, there is not much to do but sit on a sand-choked embankment and tell yourself lies about how you got here.
I am a good liar. I have always shown a talent for it. When other children were discovering that they could paint or sing as though their little throats were coated in gold, I reached within my own skin and drew out a body of falsehood, a chalice-eyed homunculus with beautiful fingers, clasped together in saintly gesture. This other boy was more pleasing than I, he stood straighter and rode with thighs more steady. When he spoke, glittering ladies patted his scarlet cheek and called him clever; when I spoke, they yawned and asked if perhaps the room had not become uncomfortably cool. It was not long before I had given myself over entirely to him, his baroque, mincing speeches, his fantastic tales of his own marvels, his great strategies—oh, the strategies, the ambitions! Laid out like a litter of manticore at his bedside, how they grew and grew, and how their tails bulged with venom. The lies lay over my tongue like a melt of stained glass, and I was praised, I was praised for them.
I came to the desert and lied a war into the golden air. The other boy rode very high on a brown horse and hoisted a banner into the sun-hung sky. He made it look beautiful; he made it look like a war—everything glittered as it ought, everything spangled and shone the way it will before blood and lymph come slithering out onto the thirsty dust. I walked the walls—ah, those light-swallowi
ng walls!—I walked the ditches and the drainage pits, I watched the city chuff out its jeweled effluvia and starve for more than it could eat. I came to the fat city of skinny angels and tasted the salt of its sweat, and my tongue was as crystalline with lies as ever it was. The city shivered in delight; lies are her peculiar fetish.
Besides, men would hardly know how to fight a war if it did not look like a war, if the lies did not line up in formation, if lies did not sit about with rifles and knives leaning against trees, chewing black bread, cracking jokes and knuckles and hiding the shaking of their hands. If there were no lies floating through the morning fog—that strangling, choleric fog, even in the desert, even so, when the sea is not so far off, when behind the bolt of mountains sailboats in turquoise marinas dip their prows like women’s needles through the surf, that filthy, shit-sludge fog, nicotine-wet, sops up all imaginable sound—if lies did not prick through it they would not even know to blow their trumpets twice, three times. Lies stick to everything, even the sun, forcing that warm, balding brow below the horizon like the victim of a drowning.
My little fire is a recalcitrant smear of red in the brown and the gray, the unfathomable gray, and the scrub crackles on the coals, manzanita and pine, sending up a fragrant, clutching smoke which is, in the end, indistinguishable from the fog.
The other boy, with his crow-tongue a-grin, says that we are here, in the mountains where the river Cam flashes green and gold and the aqueducts glare straight and narrow through the land like cutting knives, because our father is wicked, and it is the duty of all those who carry light in their bellies to thrust something very sharp into the wicked. He says that it is the natural way, for the wild and toothed to tear apart the house of order before it freezes the world into statuary, before it spasms in a glut of compulsion, and all men walk gray and dull, in lockstep, abased before the altar of chivalry. He says our father is a goat dressed up in a tin tuxedo, and the sun ought shine on a finer beast than that, a jungle-beast, a desert-beast, a thing with red teeth and hindquarters rampant. We are here, he says, because we are the apostles of a savage virtue, and we must teach it to the old debauch.
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.
