Myths of Origin (47 page)

What was the Dolorous Stroke? They will tell me it was the spear, that I should have known it for a holy relic—but I know, I know as your body weighs on mine, that the spear was meaningless.

Balan

Red. I was Red, wasn’t I? For the tower, for the girl with basilisk-eyes, who told me how to slip in under the weak left arm of the last knight, and get my knife up under his ribs? He was red, too, I think—it was so long ago, now. Red for her lips and her cheeks (though I had always assumed girls like her didn’t blush) red for her sweet little cunt and her masses of hair that I could wind around my arm like a sleeve. Red for her blood every quarter moon, and red for the moons when it didn’t come, and red for the little screw-faced dwarves that took our daughters away after dark.

Did she tell you that I lead with my right side, brother? Was she tired of me? Or tired of all of us, this möbius strip, knight to knight to knight, and all red, all wearing the emblem of having gotten those hundred babies on her, all winding her hair around their elbows until her scalp was raw? Perhaps she saw a way to cut the strip—or perhaps you were simply better than I—after all, you have spent these years killing kings, and I have spent them sowing beans and lettuce.

But your shield—it should have been the crossed swords on a field
rempli
, why was it the cormorant
recursant volant
?

I suppose it doesn’t matter, not now.

Do you remember when I brought the dwarf to Cornwall? Bowlegged and red-nosed—the red of vodka straights, not of the tower-girl—and his many-colored hat, his deerskin vests still stinking of the animal, his fingernails caked with dirt, always picking fleas from his pony and crushing them between those sharp claws. He was one of the dwarves who performed the trick of disappearing my daughters—I followed him to the sea, and watched him, under stars like averted eyes, put my child onto a birchwood barge, with a black sail, into the arms of a woman with hair that absorbed the moon. She took the child in her arms, and smiled—her smile was a sudden snow on my bones, brother—and the barge vanished over the breakers.

I caught the curdled arm of the dwarf and demanded he call back the wild-masted raft, but he would not. Instead, he told me that you had killed a boy, that it could not be kept secret. And I stood by while he accused you in that rancid cream-voice, putting no more than a hand on your shoulder and urging you to be more careful (oh, brother, we do tilt at every living thing, don’t we? Is there a tree, a sapling in all the world that is safe from us?) and eating a little bread at your side. I wanted to be back at my tower, at my red woman, at my beans and my lettuce—already I had forgotten the lost daughter.

I wish then I had told you to stay in the valley where the pumpkins grow like little suns, where the orange trees groan with their measure of sugared gold. It was better for you there—you should never have come to the isles, to the mist and the cedars that hide countless towers, that hide countless cursed women, that hide legions of barge-fostered daughters.

You could always take me, brother, twin, my double. I believed in the Red, I believed she loved me. I believed she loved the way her hair could wend around my arm. I believed her hair covered me when I went out to meet any other man, that it arced over my head like a wedding canopy, and that I was safe. I carried my shield with her limbs emblazoned on it, woman rampant, and I believed in the tower, and the dwarves, and the beans and the lettuce.

It is not so incredible, I suppose, that our blood should mix in the dry grass, that we should be clasped, hand to hand as if in prayer, one body again, as we began. Your wound is not so great as mine. (Is it strange to think a wound is like a mouth, to wish it would speak, explain itself, ask forgiveness for its redness?) But your wound is lower, and the seep is darker. Our little pieta, so full of stigmata that there is nothing left but holes, and we fall out of ourselves. Who holds who? Who is the winner? After all this, I still want to beat you once, little brother—yes, little. Do you forget I was born first? Seven minutes, seven minutes before you. I had seven minutes alone with our mother before you came ripping your way free of her.

If I die first, will that even the score?

Balin

It isn’t supposed to be like this. Women are supposed to hold us, and give succor, and dry our tears with their veils. How can I give succor to you? How can a pieta stand, when both figures are shivering with blood loss and shock? This isn’t the tableau I was meant for, trying to help you into death as if it were as simple as opening a door or throwing a coat over a puddle, trying not to embarrass myself by dying first. Pellam would turn up his nose at this wreck of a death scene—the old man always had a fetish for protocol, for the
mos maiorum
, for good manners in all things—and we are dying in a terribly rude fashion, are we not?

His palace was the height of fashion, Cinderella-spired and Alhambra-fountained, chandeliers from Waterford and spiral banisters carved from solid California oak. It bordered the land where the mist and hulking trees change a man to a beast, the Otherland where quests always seem to lead—the rear walls of the place dropped off with a sickening shear, falling into fog and forest. I was brought in—if you could have tasted the feast, Balan! Of course he had the best—the workers in his fields live on rinds and dimes, but he supped on roasted dove and deer, corn and plum-wine and peaches, carrot soup, strawberries, oranges, potatoes like russet fists, new cream and mint leaves and wild thyme, brandy and port and chocolate dark as the devil’s throat. There is nothing that does not grow or breed in that perfect valley, the San Joaquin, heaven’s heart. Pellam’s table shuddered under the weight of it. And the apples! How can I have forgotten the apples? Pyramids of red and yellow, crowned, each, with a bright green fruit, simmering at the summit like the lamp of a lighthouse.

He began as ritual would have it—as though he would let a chance for ritual slip by! The impeccably dressed (powder blue accented with cobalt) monarch rose at the head of the cherrywood table and recited the litany of begats which charted the genetic drift between himself and the Christ child, tectonic plates buoying continents of paternity, a tree so complex and oft-grafted that Pellam himself seemed surprised had not come out half-dove.

Once the fighting broke out (I suppose you will say that was my fault, brother, that I need not take every challenge thrown up at me by flea-infested second and third sons, but I am what I am) Pellam cracked my sword against one of the perfectly appointed marble steps, and I ran to find another—I only meant to find another sword, you understand. How was I to know he had that ghastly spear hidden away? If it was very important, he would have displayed it in the hall and lectured about it for at least an hour before we were allowed to touch his precious brandy.

There was no crack of thunder when I took it from the altar, no blinding flash of folly or revelation—not even when I buried it in Pellam’s femoral artery—I use the precise term in his honor—was there any clap of
cielo furioso
.

Until the house came down.

But by then I had left the spear in Pellam, jutting up awkwardly like an inopportune erection; I didn’t connect the wobbling red lance with the sudden seizure of the architecture. Only after I was spirited out from under the Virgin Mary did I understand—the fields outside his house were a gray ruin, the migrants picking at shriveled berries that crumbled to ash at a touch. The orange trees had petrified, the corn-rows calcified, the apple orchards had dropped all their fruit in one gasp, and the wind was snatching up the stench of rot. The irrigation canals had iced over, though there was no cold. They sat sullen and blue-banked, glowering at the hapless workers with their bushels of clay and dust.

Was it his protocols and monotonous ritual that kept the land pushing plenty up through its
crown
? Or the spear in its proper place? You know I have never gotten a handle on propriety. If I had, I would have at least asked your name before charging—but I was tired, I wanted it over and done, I hoped there was a pretty maid in the tower to smile shyly and put a cool cloth on my head.

This island does not have the decency to blight at the touch of our blood. It keeps its swampy councils, and the cranes suck eels from the streams without taking notice of the tragedy nearby. You would think, would you not, my brother, that the noise of such irony as this would be deafening?

Balan

Perhaps it is the fault of our names. Balin, Balan, it hardly makes a difference, does it? Did no one ask where I had gone all those years, while you were assisting suicides and claiming more swords than you deserved? Did no one wonder what had happened to the older twin, the one who didn’t run at the other children like a rabid mountain goat, cracking horn against horn? While you were sidling up to Arthur and making battlefield eyes at his knights, did no lady with wild violets in her hair ask if you hadn’t once had a brother, and what had become of him?

What was the Dolorous Stroke? When have you made a stroke which was not?

Is she watching us, can you see? My girl? Are there eyes in that tower, feline and yellow—yellow I once thought of as gold, as lion’s pelt, as burnished bedposts. Does her red sleeve fall over the parapet—dare I hope that she is crying? I had my quest, finally, and it ended in her, her yellow eyes moving over me, appraising, as the blood of her last knight still steamed on my chest—and I can still smell the metallic tang of that blood as she pulled me down onto her, as it smeared onto her breasts, her lips, as it pooled in her navel—Balin, the smell of it, when I loved her that first day!

Can red have a smell? It must, it must—it must smell of her breath and her hungry mouth when she licked the blood from my fingers.

I cannot turn to look, you must do it for me—my legs have gone numb. If she is there, if her hair is falling over the tower stones, then she loved me and it was not that I was simply next. If she is there then she liked the taste of the beans I planted in the black soil—generations of duels will fertilize the land—she liked the sound of my children’s hearts beating against hers, she liked my heavy shape sleeping against her. If she is not—I do not know. Perhaps she betrayed me, perhaps she is at her bath, perhaps she did not hear the sounds of us cracking horn against horn.

I begin to think there is a plexus of these fairy women, a chain, a net, knotted by hundreds of hands in hundreds of towers. They must spread out like veins, collecting each other’s daughters, waiting for a chance to escape the pattern of knights and clamber onto that barge themselves.

I want her to have quit that sisterhood, to have hung up its wimple and stamped their prayer beads into glass dust. I want her to have kissed the blood from me and forgotten all her oaths to those witches, those siren-crones, those moon-addled alchemists. I want her to have never known what apples taste like, or stroked another fey-girl’s hair with those delicate hands, smooth as candles. I want her to have looked at me and loved me, and turned away from the light of their pale sylph-bodies, away from the forest where masts are cut from strong trunks, and flax crushed between plump fingers, woven into sailcloth.

But I think, even now, she is stepping onto the birchwood and taking deep breaths of the sea wind.

Balin

It was the lady of the house who gave me the shield. It was larger, she said, and more splendid. They would not send me to face the Red Knight with my own, which, she insisted, was little more than a buckler. I admit that it was fine, though the cormorant was unsettling, rising up as if to flee its station.

The old man had brought me all that way from Pellam’s castle, and the blasted heath that I had made of the two-rivered valley—I could hardly speak for hunger and tremors of exhausted muscle. The lady put morsels of duck and goose into my mouth, wiped the juice form my chin. She held a cup of hot wine to my lips, and ushered old owl-hands from the castle. Then she told me of a terrible beast who held a maiden captive on an island just a little distant from there. The rushes grew high on that isle, and no road cut through the marshes.

I am what I am, Balan.

I was not even afraid when I saw you, no bigger than I, though your armor flashed scarlet and black in the dim sun, filtered through low fog. You were like a blood-golem, bearing down on me without even a horse, bellowing some name I could not understand. If you had seen my shield, my own, with the two swords—you remember, don’t you, the girl with hair like a deer’s flank who said no man but her champion could pull the sword? And I took it from her—even Arthur could not! I took it—I alone won two swords. If you had seen the crossed blades, crossed like spears, would you have stopped and clapped me on the shoulder, called me brother, and would we have gone in to feast with your woman? It could not have happened that way, I know that.

Thou shalt strike a stroke most dolorous that man ever struck.

Oh, my brother, my other self, I did not think he meant this. Put your fingers through mine, lock them knuckle to knuckle as we used to, and do not cough so. I will not die before you, I will not go down into the earth without you. I will be your mother, I will be your
pieta
, I will hold your prone body beloved as it goes blue and stiff. I will wait for you to start down the stair, and I will follow after. I am so sorry, I wish your ribs did not show through your skin, I wish I were not so cold, that I could not feel myself emptying from myself. I wish we were whole again, safe in the womb, warm heads pressed together, waiting for a rush of phosphor, for that burst of sound and air scalding its way through new lungs, waiting for seven minutes to separate us.

Balan

I have put my beans and my lettuce to sleep in the earth, my wife to sleep in the tower, and my daughters to sleep on the barge. The cranes have put their heads beneath their wings. Everyone sleeps but us, this huddle of twins in the damp, skin flushed back to the blue of pre-breath infants, whose breath no longer even hangs in the air.