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There were a line of girls at the gate in those days, crying dirt-tears, eyes spinning in their heads like weathervanes. They held their fists between their legs and the blood had dried to black there. Mouths hung open, missing teeth, and they just stood still, all in a row, so quiet, like nuns, their breasts beaten flat. Arthur did not want to look at them: he knew their faces. He remembered that his mother looked like that every time his father came home from campaign, sweat-stung and hard, that it had never gotten better or easier for her, not the littlest bit, and he knew from the time he was hay-haired and jam-stained that she probably looked like that the morning after he was made.
Every morning there was another woman in the line, beads on an abacus, and someone, somewhere, tallying, tallying. Finally I went out to them, and found the first in that blood-wan sisterhood.
Who did this to you, Lady? You must know that this is the house of justice—we manufacture it here, like wooden toys.
Her eyes rolled back and I could see the tiny scarlet veins in the white, like the strokes of a brush.
The Beast of St. Michael pushed us open until we could not but crack. I cannot feel my spine, but I can feel him, still, inside me.
Still, he did not want to know. He did not want to remember that he could not sit on his mother’s lap for days after his father had left again, door a-slam and finally soft. He did not want to think that his own blood was full of numb spines and cracked hips. But I could not watch them add to their number, day by day, like a faucet dripping.
She is dead, and beyond him now.
He, too, is dead, sighed Arthur, and gone after her. What if still he breaks her beneath him on a rack of clouds?
I pulled on his shirt and strapped this very sword to his waist, though his limbs were frozen and heavy. I dressed him like a baby. He could not raise his head to them as we rode out, though they beat their bellies until the blood began to run red and wet again, and we were heralded in crimson all the way to the sea.
The castle stood on a strand like this one, though the sea was gray, not blue, and the sun was a white disc, not flaming as if to purify a sinning sphere. Far out into the slate waves it frowned, piled on itself like a fallen cake, sullen, gouged windows and doors bolted like torsos. Here and there, it was burning, tall, thin flames hissing as they met the damp sky, steaming in rain that slanted into the brine-pitted walls, and surely to him it must have looked like home, must have looked like his mother’s bed, must have looked like his father’s grinning face.
Of course, he would not remember the girl. Only I saw her, only I touched her. If I were a better man I would confess my sins to my king before he dies, but I cannot unstring my lips after all this time, and see his pupils widen, then shrink. I was once a good man. I was once his man.
We slayed a giant together, my friend and I, a giant with no beanstalk or harp of gold, only a wretched castle hollowed out for him by whale-speckled tides, only rough, mucus-yellow eyes and an expression like a lamp that once shone and has long gone out. The usual business of slaying occurred—we have done this before. There were bellows like shades blowing open in a storm, and once the skin of a thing is broken, I am always reminded of heifers calving on my own father’s land—my father, who never knew, as I do, how much blood you could let out of a woman and yet keep her living—arms deep in hot, swampy flesh, pulling at bone, at kicking hoof. We reached into him as into a breach-birth and pulled at his kicking spleen, pulled at his huge heart until the chambers tore one from the other in our hands.
The blood coated us, made of us red knights. We laughed, pulled greasy strips of giant-flesh from each others’ hair like apes picking lice, and set out searching for harps or geese or whatever a giant holds dear enough to build a castle to keep. My eyes were still blurred with exertion and triumph, gore still thickening and drying on each of my perfect sinews—my whole skin thrilled and pricked like a plucked guitar, as it will when you have killed a thing much bigger than yourself, and much stronger. Even my eyelashes seemed to vibrate, to sing some dark and untaught tune.
It was in this state that I found her. If I had been un-frenzied, if the giant’s blood in my mouth had not been so like boiling wine—
She was not young. Her skin was deeply lined and sunburned; her hair was matted and gray and hung like long iron bars all around her, hung in her face so that her dark eyes peered through them. She was naked, and her arms clasped above her head with chains of bone bolted in bronze, her ankles nailed through, like a crucifixion, the skin long healed and grown around the nail-shaft. She sat on a low wall, perched as well as she could with her arms pinioned so—and all through the grass-stuck mud wall march a line of small graves.
She shrieked when she saw me, so like the giant, and painted in his corpse. She shrieked, tired of shrieking, but knowing that the giant would always expect her cry. Her howl was dry and breaking, like pine needles crushed underfoot. The fires of the castle still burned in its higher terraces—the rain scissored down through dark clouds and the sound of the giant dying, of the sear of it, was still in me, battering back and forth between my bones, so loudly I could hardly hear her weep with sweat-sour relief, knowing her salvation had ridden to her bearing a silver cross.
The giant pulled up my daughter and I from our country like crickets from a hay roof.
Ah, the chains of bone! My blood sang high and taut.
He tried to have her, but she was always so pretty, and so frail, and his love broke her hips open like two halves of an apple.
Ah, how black her eyes! My blood hummed low and loose.
He fell on me then, and it has been years. I was always stronger than my girl. That is her, buried there, buried first.
The blood in me and the blood on my back seemed to stretch towards each other, and the rain and flames were so hard and bright, and I could not see anything but her splayed legs, without the smallest modesty—what blush should she have left for me?—though the stain of the giant’s last visit still streaked her skin like a tiger’s hide, black against brown. After the giant, I thought, she will hardly feel me. I have done so much for her today.
I thought that. I.
With the titan’s ruined heart still in my hand I pushed her knees open, and I did not even notice the caked blood, but I saw her clamp shut her mouth, and her eyes roll up to heaven, and you know, she never even made a sound, though I heard her old bones creak—I was so full of slanting flame, so full of blade-swings and axe-wield, so full of fur and bone a
nd bile, all thumping and throbbing within me, and I was the giant, his innards draped me like sacramental robes. I was the giant, and my boulder-knees scraped the stone wall. I was the giant, and I wanted her to cry out beneath me.
Another knight would have knelt and hoisted her to his horse, given her over to convent, washed her wounded womb in a clear river. It is what we were trained to do. How many of us failed to do it? Or was it only I who fell so far?
I rolled off of her and there were no stars behind a skirt of clouds. She stared at me, expressionless, and the blood ran from me then, and I was not the giant, I was a gristle-clung ape and I had done what apes will do. I turned and vomited into the gravestones, spattering their rough granite with sickness.
Those headstones—how bitter and terrible her growl!—are for the children I bore the giant, all the babes he threw from the ramparts to watch their skulls crack on the surf-sharpened rocks. Don’t you worry, chevalier, I’ll make sure your little one is not parted from his brothers and sisters. I am not so old yet that I can yet leave the funeral trade.
I ran from her, I ran and I screamed horse-horrid, I rode and rode and Arthur could not keep with me, and I would not answer when he asked what had bitten my heels—how could I? How could I tell him I was his father, I was the giant, I was a hundred kings before him and after? The blood was never so hot in him that he could even dream that one day he might imagine that he could grind an old woman’s back against a stone wall.
I left her there. I left her in the rain and the fire.
