Myths of Origin (40 page)

The bell-note rolls over all these folk, all these baskets, and some brown-browed folk look up, shading their eyes, when the bell rings its virgin music, but most are unperturbed, pulling carrots and parsnips from the earth, rubbing at sore knees.

X THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

Kay

Nine nights and nine days his breath lasted under water, nine nights and nine days would he be without sleep. A wound from Kay’s sword no physician might heal. When it pleased him, he would be as tall as the tallest tree in the forest. When the rain was heaviest, whatever he held in his hand would be dry for a handsbreadth before and behind, because of the greatness of his heat, and, when his companions were coldest, he would be as fuel for them to light a fire.

—Culhwch and Olwen

The Mabinogion

Morning, First Day

I carry my air with me like crystal capsules—each day I slit one with the edge of my ribs and it is enough, just barely enough, to keep me walking. It is all I was meant for: walking, breathing, cutting. I am an automaton. My brother sets me walking and I keep going, clockworks grinding, bone gearshifts and blood-hydraulics, until I hit something. Sink Kay in the water—it is no matter, he is submersible, he will breathe like a salmon.

Not that I ever thought I would be more. How could I ever have thought myself special, what boy ever thinks he is more than the sum of his meat, when he is knobble-kneed and too tall with a nose that dwarfs his face? What boy thinks so when he is so often fevered that his skin is permanently flushed, and the other boys mock him for his maiden blush, and sweat clings to him like raindrops? What boy thinks so when he likes his horse and his boots and his best deer-hunting bow so much that even his father assumes he is stupid and burl-headed? I dreamed not of kingship, but that I might look up at a forest of men taller than I, a grove of straight-backed birches in which I would be but a stunted sapling.

My brother set it all going; he was a key and he slid into a great machine with jeweled parts. I wonder as I trod jerkily along, obeying his programming, if he ever wanted something more than to be a key, something more than to have opened a closed circuit by pulling a sword out of a stone. I want to say to him:
do you remember when we were brothers? When were not what we are now, toy-men, Hephaestus-cast, rolling along on a track we cannot see?

But you do not say this to the bronze-footed king on his throne, even if you fear that he has become frozen there, bolted into his regalia, terrified to leave. Instead he sends us out, our quests screwed onto our backs with gold rivets, his words peeling from our tongues as though we had no voice of our own. We are his hands, we are his legs, we go out into the world and we go out of the world and we go where he tells us to go and we are lucky if we remember our names when we return.

I do not complain. It is not a brother’s place to complain.

Once he did not cling to his chair—when he was a boy, when he was human and not king. When he was an orphan and chased after me even though we were brothers only by contract, and I actually thought it made a difference whether I called him brother or foster-brother. Then, his feet were always filthy and his clothes were full of bees and frogs and dragonflies and no one paid him much attention. After all, I was the elder. He had no track, he had no rivets. It was I, instead, who sat so often astride a horse that I thought myself half-centaur, who was scrubbed and tutored and dressed up in epaulets and rapped across the knuckles until my country accent faded into rounded vowels and crisp consonants.

Plate by plate I strapped metal onto my body. (And if I was fevered before, this was worse, the sheen of sweat inside the armor, the flushed face beneath the helmet, and after years, even the metal began to blush, until I was a red knight for true, boiling the rain away from me like soup spilled on a blazing anvil.) Then I thought I was making myself a man, but I see now that they were the plates of my manufacture as a king’s worker, as the automaton I became. Year by year I bolted on a new body, plate armor like a beetle’s shell, with enough holes for that eventual demiurge to slip his orders, to feed in his unalterable programs. A space had to be made for him. A space was made.

I remember that morning, when I slipped out of the world and he slipped into it. A slab of metal in rock—how could such a thing come to mean so much? It was no more or less part of the city than a grocer’s storefront or a chipped curb, yet no one proposed that we prognosticate by those. Steel and stone and all of us agreed without speaking, made this covenant with the city streets and skies, that that knife in a rock meant more than melons in a pyramid or old yellow paint in an alley. Even when we had forgotten about it and let it grow over with dandelions and blackberry whips, it did not lose what we had so long ago given it: for my brother pulled it up and the light passed from me to him, the light and the horse and the tutor and the epaulets, which he was welcome to.

His name became like the sword in the stone: write
Arthur
on the skin of your hand and it means more than a boy so named, it means him, always him, forever.

My name became irrelevant.

There is water over my head already, clear and green. I can see the sun, still, shining in shafts through the little waves. What a place this is, how bright, how sere. The water is warm.

Afternoon, Third Day

In my brother’s great hall there is a painting. An angel in red so bright it is nearly orange speaks to a scribe, and out of the seraphic mouth comes a long ribbon, winding and whirling and corkscrewing until it enters the scribe’s ear. On this ribbon are written divine words, undeniable words, words that originated on the sea of glass and, shard-bright, fell until they tore open the ribbon in shapes of themselves.

This is what my brother’s commands are like.

He speaks and I can almost see it, the ribbon snaking out of his mouth, yellow and black, coiling through the air to enter me at the place in my back which was made for him, made for the receipt of quests, made to ingest his desires and make them manifest. There is no sound but the ticking of this ribbon into me, the slow click of a king’s calligraphy, holes in the shapes of divine letters slotting into my sinews, whispering angelic and severe, locking my joints in place. His ribbon susurrates in me, insists that an object is required, a child stolen away to the bottom of the sea, to Annwn, the other country, which is west, and there are kabbalistic coordinates which burn themselves into my corneas—but it doesn’t matter what the object is. There is always an object. He always requires it. His hunger for them is never quiet. Nor does it matter where they are: they are always west, they are always out, they are always beyond, they are always in the otherworld, which is only to say the other world, anything that is not circumscribed by these walls, these floors, these steels and stones. The ribbon wraps my lungs, sets my constraint: nine days without breath, as near to the limit of my capsules as makes no difference—and this does not matter, either. Everything the ribbons demand extends our limits, no matter what those limits are. If I could hold my breath for ten days, the ribbon would demand ten.

Retrieve object. Return. Simple as stone. Execute.

The ribbon disappears under the plates of my armor, under the beetle-carapace of my second skin. I turn on golden heels. I walk in a straight line, unaltered and unerring until the air is so full of salt my joints cry out.

This is all I am.

West. West is the direction of blue water and gold land—we are aimed this way and thus we go, and we do not stop, we cannot stop, until the Pacific tells us that to go further is to find east and wind and light and silence. We pool in this place, in Annwn, in the otherworld which on maps purchased from salmon and seraphim is called California. Pass through fog and marsh and come out in the desert, pass through the desert and come out by the sea. I walked over the mountains and saw a valley opening up below me like a green lap, and there was a low mist of gold hanging over it, and I cannot but descend into it—I am comically made and even before the plates were fixed to me I walked straight through a river without noticing I was wet.

Yea, I have walked through the valley, and it was the valley of ribbons, swarming everywhere like Eden-exiled serpents, whispering so loud I could hardly hold on to my own, nosing at my feet, at my mouth, at my back. The green valley was choked with them, a paper sea writhing undulate and crisp, slicing characters from each other as easily as scales. I shuddered. Is this where the ribbons are born, this valley of glass grinding against glass, this valley of murmuring directives, of worker-commands without eyes navigating invisible corridors? Is this where they begin, the rustling things, where he found them in the days before he meted them out to us like tickets to a fair? Did he find this place before us all and pass through? What is a king but the source of commands? Am I wrong to remember a brother who let caterpillars sit on his shoulders, as though there was any life before the buzz and hum of Camelot?

There is a sea beyond the ribbons, and they sigh in protest as I walk through the grassy crackle—they cannot find any point of entry. I am my brother’s servant, and I have room for no more in me than him.

The light is dimmer now, the water deep and blue. I have seen octopi sloughing by, bulbous heads nodding like proper gentlemen. There is kelp like meadow grass above me, and what sun might be seen is filtered by dark green leaves, the color of the queen’s sleeves, descending and descending.

Evening, Fifth Day

I do not know why I expected this place to be full, full of people and things—I suppose I imagined it to be the source of all objects, all quests. Surely the things my brother asks for must be piled up under the streetlamps here like old leaves: girdles, women, swords, grails, wrapped around the light-post, wet and clinging.

But there is only warm air, and empty shops and empty tables and empty streets, and I should have known that the underworld would be a ghost town. Stray ribbons snake through the blazing white buildings like tumbleweed, and there is no sound but the distant sea pounding the distant sand.

Why does he want this boy? This boy who sits cross-legged in the blue, his fine hair blown turquoise, his eyes the dead white of deepwater fish?
Mabon ap Modron
, my ribbon says. But this is nonsense, it means nothing, only words:
Son of a Mother
. He wants a nameless orphan boy who was born with the sun behind his head, stolen to the sea three days after his birth on the back of a green-foam boar.

We all know the story; it is an easy story to know. What country in the world does not have its virgin birth, its martyred babe, its innocent dragged down to the dark depths? They stamp them out like a sheet of cookies these days, little gingerbread boys, all in a row. Why should I hold my breath for one?

But he is my brother, that hemmed-in king. Still trying not to look into the corners of his rooms where a black-haired woman who is not bolted to any dais touches the cheek of another clean-shaven knight. He is my brother and perhaps after all this time I know him, a little. I forgive him for stepping in front of me, and though I was so much taller, obscuring me forever. He sees the stolen child, the sun in his hair. He sees himself, before the ribbons, before the chair and the plates he fastened to his friends. His mother lost him, or gave him to us, I was never sure, being only a breath older than he when they dumped him like a pile of gold on our stoop.

Once my brother might have come himself, breath or no breath, whickering through the ribbons to make this boy a fabled knight with an epithet and a fellow besides—but that time is over. Once the kingdom is won it descends to us, the dumb, mute limbs of a king to push at its edges like soldiers against an iron gate. So I go after the boy, the doppelganger covered in brine, and my ribbon flutters in the sage-edged wind, in the whiskey-and-orange-tongued air, and I will gather him into my arms as my brother might have, and I will carry him on my shoulders the way Ector, our father, once did, and I will try to be happy at the weight of this sun-shot avatar, this twin of the brother-that-was. Perhaps the thing which carries him will have something of the Kay-that-was ricocheting between ether-capsules and parchment-ribbons.

Perhaps that awful sword smoothly excised the boys we were, placed them up on a shelf somewhere, locked into a cupboard. These shoulder-plates and greaves hold only out of habit the shapes of men long dead.

The character of the ocean is variable as a child’s—it is violet now, deeper than dye, and the salt is crusting in the corners of my mouth. All around me the heat of my plating causes the sea to recede, boil off. Trickles seethe in—exploratory, hesitant—and hiss into steam when they touch me. It is not quite enough to breathe, but I walk in a warm haze, and bubbles, not of breath but of heat, unbearable heat, waft up to the dark surface.

Midnight, Sixth Day

He sits in the center of the ocean, a silver boy-pin stuck in the floor—the currents move around him like Saturn’s rings. Cuttlefish weave through his hair. He opens his mouth and roe wriggle out, floating up like red bubbles.

I open my sixth capsule and stale air fills me up like a sickly bellows.

What is that?
His voice ripples the water, even my coat of steam.

It is how I can come to you, boy, down here in the dark. I would lend one, but you do not seem troubled by the water.

He shrugs.
A child learns to love its first milk, mother or ocean. I drink, I breathe. I have been down here a long time. No one came for me.

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.