Myths of Origin (43 page)

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

I.

Under the lime trees

I lay my love down

Under the lime trees I lay her

And when she rose up

Her mouth was so red

Sweeter than figs,

Her mouth, so red.

Tan-dara-dara-dei

Tan-dara-dei.

I am the Knave of Dreams. They smote the floor with a stalk of spiderwort and up I sprang, purple and green and all over sweet-smelling, and they tangled me up with bells and bade me dance.

I am happy to dance. The floor of my birth is spangled in stars, painted gold, painted carnelian, painted azure and orange and black, and my feet upon it are light as wort-roots. I am a heart full of foliage—nothing in me is not flower, stamen, thorn, pistil, blossom, blossom, rose. I am a fool, and I am a knight, and my horse is hawthorne and hyssop. I gallop; I canter. They laugh at my silken shoes and sword of campion and rue.

But I see the queen with her girdle of roses—the roses whisper scarlet and white, of where her hips last thrust and blushed, of how her hair whipped linen. I see the best of the knights with his plume of crocus—the crocus murmurs yellow and violet, of how he keeps his eyes open when he kisses her.

I see, I see, and I sing, and snowdrops fall out of my mouth. But I sing of
my love
and
my sweetheart
and
my kisses full tender—
always mine, never theirs—and they think I do not see how their cups flame from the touch of two such burning mouths. But after all, it was a court, it was a starry floor where silk-haired apes danced and wrestled—and such things will happen among apes. Their dance was never a secret, never as high-flown a trespass as lesser poets than I would claim, just so that their verses could scan.

I looked on the queen, too. I marked her honeycomb-hair and her thimble-bright eyes. Like all men my velvets tightened—a fool still owns his blood!—but I sang and sang, and came not near.

Tan-dara-dei.

II.

She came a-walking through the violets

And how did she call to me?

With honeysuckle and meadowsweet and bryony.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

She made a place in the wheat for me

and what did she show me there?

Willow whips and strawberry leaves

and fingers clasped in prayer.

Tan-dara-dei.

There was a girl made of flowers, too—the floor was fertile that year. She came up with her black hair all strung with foxglove, and her toes were ringed in coltsfoot. I loved her, I did, but flower calls to flower. She did not sing; I sang for us both. On each of her berry-brown toes was an ivory bell, and I shook them like lilies-of-the-valley, and with buttercups in her eyelashes she laughed like a thrush. The others played at cards which turned up a king, a queen, with lances leaning in, but we played our fools’ dice, and were troubled by no dour high-born faces.

Come, Dagonet! Give us a song! Come, Dagonet, show us how you fought a dragon with both hands tied and hopping on one foot!

Ah, gentlemen, I am full tired tonight, and the wine is in my head like a copper tub sloshing over.

Come, Dagonet! Show us how the king looks when he wakes too early!

Ah, gentlemen, methinks the king has drunk enough to wake late for a fortnight.

Come, Dagonet! Tell us a tale, anything, anything! The night is dark, the wine is done.

One tale, then. A fool must earn his penny.

Once, gentle lords, and you ladies with your hair in one thousand knots! Once, there was a poor tile-maker, and his hands were red from the dust of terra cotta, from the dust of all those roof-tiles you see along the road, glittering on wattle houses like a fine scarlet cap! This tile-maker wandered across patches of land like the patches on my own cloak, scouring the earth for bits of bone and feather, stone and glass and seeds like hard little jewels, leaves and hide and fine, sifted soil, husks and bark and jewels like hard little seeds. With these motley things he made mosaics that caught the breath of any who saw them and spun that breath into a shower of golden stars. He laid out the crystalline zodiac on floors and ceilings, with planets of bone and gem-scattered orbital tracks creeping across the rafters.

But it was not often that he could truly ply his art, for such things are expensive, as well you know, my lords. More often the noonday sun found him hammering one red tile to another on the roof of a tavern, swatting at bees that thrummed anxiously around his head. And so the man went in
his
way until a certain palace spat out its foundations on a certain stretch of green sward, and certain men inhabited it as surely as a honeycomb, thrumming anxiously in
their
way. These men called upon the tile-maker and begged him to create for them such a floor that any who stepped upon it would be possessed totally by its vision, and compelled by its beauty to love and serve those who owned it.

The tile-maker considered this for a long while. His little hut was certainly filled with enough bones and stones and skins and powders, paints and feathers and dyes to make such a floor. But he felt that he needed some last thing that he could not quite name, and so this tile-maker whose hair was no less dusty than it had been, went out into the countryside to find the center-tile of his magnificent floor, a floor while had already begun to lay itself out on the bare boards of his heart.

Are you tired already of my tale, gentlemen? You would rather I skip ahead? You do not want to hear of the bridge which spans our fair land and the golden land of the west, where all strange-liveried knights find their origin? You are bored by the nature of floor-making, and desire to hear no more of how the poor tile-maker crossed even into those golden lands to find the sweet, pale bone of a woman drowned for her love, with which to bind the center-tile? Very well—all things for my audience.

The man was ragged as a hare wolf-chased for a month when he returned over that bridge I shall tell you not of, and in his hands he clutched a long white bone, and with brown-beaten hands, boiled this bone with quicksilver in a copper pot until it was passing strange: a lacquer which shone like the very veil of death. He poured this into the core of a milk-stone star he had set in the deep blue floor, and began his work.

And well do you know, my lords, the shape of this floor: how it shows the stars in their spheres and the vines and scarlet flowers of welltilled earth, how it shows Virgo and Taurus and Pisces—glittering virgins astride bulls and fish snapping at the edges of the known world! Well do you know how many fruits and crops twine its borders in green, how many oranges and pomegranates and grapes jewel its corners, how many showers of sweet rain speckled in pebbles and feather-cartilage water how many fields of silver wheat. How many flowers, how many endless flowers, tangle through the stars and the virgins and the wheat, how many peonies and lilies and snowdrops, and yes, roses, and yes, crocuses.

Well do you know, my lords, for you walk upon it.

The tile-maker finished the great work of his life, which was no more than what the men who thrummed like bees would track mud and grass and blood over for a decade or two, and was paid as well as he hoped, retiring to his hut and living happily, if we should wish to imagine him happy, and miserably, should we choose to imagine him miserable—this is only a story, my lords and my ever-dewdrop’t ladies, and we may end it as we please.

But one more moment, I beg you, and your Dagonet will be silent as a floor in shadow.

For one evening the floor did lie in shadow—shadow pure as our queen!—and all who looked upon it, and loved, and served, had gone to their slumber or sport. It so happened on this night of all nights that the roof allowed the smallest creep of rainwater through its most noble thatch, and that drop of rain—sweet rain, sweet as golden land beneath a bridge, sweet as a maid long drowned, sweet as the sea that drowned her—fell, perfect and clear, onto that bone-lacquered star-core which the poor tile-maker had traveled so far and through such trials to find.

And what do you think happened? My lords, you will never guess it. It was I sprang from this tile, whole and entire, for there never was a fool who had any land or title, birth or name or worth beyond the grand floor on which he performs, the floor which bears him up while he makes himself ridiculous, makes himself wretched, while he loves, while he serves. The floor is all he is.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

III.

There my love made a place to lie

and was it strewn with flowers?

Yes, with violets

and bluebells

and lilies pale as hours.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

There I made my love to lie

and did I love her well?

Yes, with roses

and tulip leaves

and a bird’s song like a bell.

Tan-dara-dei.

My lady sprang, too, from that floor—for what can a fool’s lady have but the estate of her dearest? And her skirt was all a-snarl with daffodils, and roses red as mouths. We cared nothing, between us, but strode our floor back and forth like lord and lady, measuring and chronicling its every tile. I clutched her roses; she clutched my cap.

Come, Dagonet, you must hunt with us to-day! Put on Lancelot’s livery, he will not mind!

Ah, gentlemen, I am full tired this morn. No fox is in danger of me, I am sure.

Come, Dagonet! We will not hear nay! Put on Lancelot’s helmet and hoist up his shield—it is no fox we hunt this day!

Ah, gentlemen, and I am no Lancelot. Surely you would rather have a jig? A pratfall?

Come, come! Nothing would amuse us more than to see our own Dagonet dressed up as a knight like a little girl in her mother’s gown!

One hunt, then. A fool must earn his penny.

She mounted up beside me on the young knight’s horse—a back broad enough to bear Atlas in his blue chair!—and I a-clang in the young knight’s armor, a poor Patroclus, all elbows, in Achilles’ bronze breastplate. A fool’s lady shares in his acts, his pantomimes, his jokes and jibes. She is his straight-man, she is his stage-hand.

Who is to say where Lancelot was that he did not hunt with his men? Not I; not the crocuses; not the roses. Not the queen.

No fox. Not a fox. A breath of white in the linden trees, a breath of ivory and silver against the tall white birches, a breath of hair like spun glass behind a weave of glossy green leaves. Never a fox. And it was my lady who tempted the beast, whose cheeks bloomed with clover and hyacinth, though she laughed like irises opening—
I am no maid
, said she, and it was no jest. From the day the floor pushed her up like a stalk she thirsted for me and I thirsted for her and we were sunlight and water and dirt and air.

But you are a maid, for a fool is not a man, and thus.

Not a fox, not a maid, not a man.

The wood smelled of old campfires and stripped bark. Some flowers were there: mean and nameless things, little more than a smear of red or purple in the brush. Who was I to notice when the birches faded to redwoods and mist covered all things from nose to branch? I thought myself to smell the sea.

It was a unicorn they came to hunt. I tell this tale not to please.

The poor beast blundered into the sward when the apples were firm on the boughs, and was spotted—such a guileless thing cannot help but be spotted, caught, rendered into fat and bone and meat. These boys, these fine boys, a pack of young, bored lions, took themselves up after it, never expecting to find a maiden in any crook of that palace to lure a four-legged pearl from the fog. My lady was the best they could find, and I, as always, amuse them, pass the tedious stretches of a hunt which do not involve gouts of hot blood, but rather cramped muscles and waiting. How marvelous to dress me in a lion’s skin. I am a bow-kneed Hercules, and how my Nemean suit clatters and clangs.