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I saw her waist-sunk in the river, her long black hair floating around her like water-snakes, her strong brown face searching the sun-flattened ripples—and now and again she would pull a squirming, gasping fish up to look it in the eye before smashing its bony head against a flat stone. She always did that, looked her fish, and her bees and her spiders and her frogs, in the eye before spilling their brains out on a stone. The light was so bright on her hair that it shone blue, and I saw, for a moment, how a brother could not care, could see nothing but the blue in her, nothing but that dancing cyan, and move staircases and rivers and worlds to touch it with one finger of his hand.
We crouched by the stump of a rotten elm, the other boy and I, unified for once in our admiration for the long lines of blue that shot back from her clear brow. We felt like our father, primeval and golden and never secret, as though we could stride towards her just then, just then, and she would welcome us as she had welcomed him. We felt as though she was constant, her blue was constant, and we had a right to the blue, inherited, just like this blasted land, from that tattered old lion we would spend every day after chasing.
That was the first night we spent in her.
In the mere, in the mire and the rubble and the slow blinking light of a street in the other-city, the fairy city I touch only now, after they have both passed before me into it, along the slow, creeping aqueducts which steal water from richer lands, I see—yes?—a flash of blue dancing forward, a long line like fishing-silk, and I will not, I will not call her name, not any of them, as I run after it, as my feet catch on old bottles and broken windows, as my breath comes hoarse with the poisoned air. I will not. The other boy makes me a fool.
He calls joyously into the shadows.
Morgan. Morgause. Morgana. Mother.
V. Method and Discipline
By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure.
A father hangs in the dark like a noose, his feet already reliquaried, his brainpan already opened to silver needles, dissection-angelic, searching for the kernel of light that must make a king a king.
But he is not dead yet and all I can see is the shape of him against the night. The smell of the desert is coming over the hills: not sweet sage and agave, but dead mice, old bones, and the droppings of buzzards. The shape of his back. Of his lie. But I am the shape of his lie and I cannot be expected to do anything in this place but stand my ground and tell him that order is inherently oppressive, as though that means anything at all when our eyes are the same shade of green, and our forefingers crook identically to the left.
The other boy’s forefinger is straight as an accusation.
There are men back there, beyond the hills, who are playing ridiculous games with rattlesnakes, baiting the poor green creatures, laughing when they snap. They came because I told them to, and I am very beautiful when I command, and they didn’t want to pay a pair of oxen to the old king when a little sweat-work might save the cow and make the new king look kindly on them.
I will not be king. I know that. Secrets aren’t kings. Genealogies are meant to be worn on one’s chest, not held under the tongue like a communion wafer. I wait for it to melt and it stays hard and sharp against my mouth. The other boy still thinks there is a destiny here. I have heard his wife never had a child; I would have given her one, if I had survived this place. If she had had blue in her hair. And that boy would have been king and no one’s nephew—but you cannot be king when you cannot, even for a moment, stand in the light. I knew it when I came here, I knew it when I walked off of the desert like sea-fog pooling in a valley, I knew it when I followed my mother to him like a hyena following the water to a wounded gazelle. The crown wouldn’t look at me. He wouldn’t look at me.
She is standing in the Pacific, waist-sunk. The sun is on her hair. Her dress billows like a sail. She is the ship of dre
ams.
Did you grow up strong?
Yes, the other boy lies.
I’m glad.
She reaches into the salt foam and pulls me in beside her, her cold, wet hand on the nape of my neck. She looks me in the eye.
It’s surprising how much a body weighs. I can’t remember which corpse I dragged along the beach, though it seemed like my own black insides pouring out on the sand, over the little holes the sand-mites make with their leaping. It seemed like his gut opening clam-thick. We are both so black inside, and maybe he was a secret, too. Secrets beget.
The other boy leaps and slaps his thigh in triumph, struts like a yellow-headed parrot, teaches lessons so that our father will know how wise we have become in his absence.
When seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this way: Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral Law?
This is what happens: the son replaces the father. It’s the heart of every story. But I am not in a story. I never existed, he was my uncle, wasn’t he? Silly boy, thinking you had a father, that you started in someone’s body. I stuck in my father as he stuck in my mother and there was so much black, so much red, and his eyes were so tired. I walked from his ruin, ruin from ruin, and the flags went up in the distance, the flags, and the trumpets’ long, clear calls.
Which of the two generals has most ability?
This is what happens: the king is sacrificed; the new king ascends. I didn’t want to hang him on the oak tree, I didn’t want my crows to peck at his intestines. I didn’t want to watch him remember that he had a son once before the moon ate his skull in one swallow. The other boy was so sure, so sure he was right, that this one thing was no lie: the old king was rotten, corrupt, cuckolded, senile. It was our duty. This is how histories of the kings of frozen islands are written. I stepped up, behind his body, and there was only the same oak tree, wide as the world, and waiting.
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.
