Myths of Origin (52 page)

I walked with heavy feet to the end of the pier last night, and looked into the sea which is the rim of the western world, and wondered when I accepted that this was inescapable. I still hate that you did not think me strong or clever enough to turn from this road. (And of course I was not.) But there on the pier was a little fisherman’s hut, white paint curled back by sea wind, and it glowed softly in porcelainlight.

I stood outside for a long time, and the door seemed to grow to enormity, to much for me to dare. I felt and still feel that this is all too big for me, that I am a salamander before the throne of the King of Spears. The threshold mocked me, and whispered that I was a very clever child, the strongest and cleverest of my brothers, but I would never, never be wise, there is no forest deep enough to purify me, my madness will last and last. So in the end it was pride that drove me through the door, that I would show myself to be pure enough, just barely, to finally see you.

And there you were, not so powerful-looking, an aging man, but not infirm, the gold of your hair not quite conquered by snow. You sat in a deep leather chair, your left hand held an ancient fishing-spear, your right held a cup of living glass. Yet in the lines of your body there was a darker shape, a liquid self moving behind the lines of your skin, holding black-tipped breasts out to me with both hands, like a sacrifice.

You looked at me with laughing eyes, and I saw that sleek shape moving behind them. I wondered then if I saw you with a beard because I could only give myself over to a father, to a King, and the rest was beyond my touch—pure enough for you, but not for her. I suppose it doesn’t matter, in the end—if you are doubled, if you are twinned, I will know in a moment, when the chair is mine, and I vanish into the glass.

You could not speak, that was not the ritual, it was mine to ask the question you have desired. But you laughed because you understood, of course. You know the nature of quests. You know that this has been the question, all these words to you on the road to this temple/hut. You know that my fighting has burned this body hollow, and made it ready for this. You know that the end of the quest is silence, only the quest is the sound and dancing and galloping toward.

And so I reached out, able to do nothing else but dare this thing, and touched the rim of the cup/lake.

And the burning filled my vision.

And the sea swallowed my voice.

XVI THE TOWER

Mordred

For King Arthur lay by King Lot’s wife,

the which was Arthur’s sister, and gat on her Mordred.

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions in the field:

I. Moral Law

Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler,

so that they will follow him regardless of their lives,

undismayed by any danger.

The morning before the war begins, there is not much to do but sit on a sand-choked embankment and tell yourself lies about how you got here.

I am a good liar. I have always shown a talent for it. When other children were discovering that they could paint or sing as though their little throats were coated in gold, I reached within my own skin and drew out a body of falsehood, a chalice-eyed homunculus with beautiful fingers, clasped together in saintly gesture. This other boy was more pleasing than I, he stood straighter and rode with thighs more steady. When he spoke, glittering ladies patted his scarlet cheek and called him clever; when I spoke, they yawned and asked if perhaps the room had not become uncomfortably cool. It was not long before I had given myself over entirely to him, his baroque, mincing speeches, his fantastic tales of his own marvels, his great strategies—oh, the strategies, the ambitions! Laid out like a litter of manticore at his bedside, how they grew and grew, and how their tails bulged with venom. The lies lay over my tongue like a melt of stained glass, and I was praised, I was praised for them.

I came to the desert and lied a war into the golden air. The other boy rode very high on a brown horse and hoisted a banner into the sun-hung sky. He made it look beautiful; he made it look like a war—everything glittered as it ought, everything spangled and shone the way it will before blood and lymph come slithering out onto the thirsty dust. I walked the walls—ah, those light-swallowing walls!—I walked the ditches and the drainage pits, I watched the city chuff out its jeweled effluvia and starve for more than it could eat. I came to the fat city of skinny angels and tasted the salt of its sweat, and my tongue was as crystalline with lies as ever it was. The city shivered in delight; lies are her peculiar fetish.

Besides, men would hardly know how to fight a war if it did not look like a war, if the lies did not line up in formation, if lies did not sit about with rifles and knives leaning against trees, chewing black bread, cracking jokes and knuckles and hiding the shaking of their hands. If there were no lies floating through the morning fog—that strangling, choleric fog, even in the desert, even so, when the sea is not so far off, when behind the bolt of mountains sailboats in turquoise marinas dip their prows like women’s needles through the surf, that filthy, shit-sludge fog, nicotine-wet, sops up all imaginable sound—if lies did not prick through it they would not even know to blow their trumpets twice, three times. Lies stick to everything, even the sun, forcing that warm, balding brow below the horizon like the victim of a drowning.

My little fire is a recalcitrant smear of red in the brown and the gray, the unfathomable gray, and the scrub crackles on the coals, manzanita and pine, sending up a fragrant, clutching smoke which is, in the end, indistinguishable from the fog.

The other boy, with his crow-tongue a-grin, says that we are here, in the mountains where the river Cam flashes green and gold and the aqueducts glare straight and narrow through the land like cutting knives, because our father is wicked, and it is the duty of all those who carry light in their bellies to thrust something very sharp into the wicked. He says that it is the natural way, for the wild and toothed to tear apart the house of order before it freezes the world into statuary, before it spasms in a glut of compulsion, and all men walk gray and dull, in lockstep, abased before the altar of chivalry. He says our father is a goat dressed up in a tin tuxedo, and the sun ought shine on a finer beast than that, a jungle-beast, a desert-beast, a thing with red teeth and hindquarters rampant. We are here, he says, because we are the apostles of a savage virtue, and we must teach it to the old debauch.

That is what he says.

I crouch here with the small of my back against the stone wall, the concrete stinking and steaming, peering into the ripples of gold, the otherworld-veils hanging from the sky. I am afraid to walk in the fog—it gnaws at my vision, and I cannot see. I am afraid to go down to the sea, into the other city, which shows against the daub and wattle of Camelot like a metallic negative: many-knived and spiraling.

It is not long before we are all—soldiers, cooks, squires, smiths—weeping like pieta in the brume, salting the earth with secret tears, pissing ourselves fearful. It comes blooming up from the city and fills our gullets like old beer, brown and sickening. The sere of it, the cough and lag and blear of it, blinds and burns, bubbling over our knuckles like bile from some wasting creature.

The roof-tiles of the city are musky and mired in the brown, as we are musky and mired on the desert rims of those ghost-streets, as the streets are musky and mired in their wheeling and spoking, out from some center I cannot guess at. The mute, silent squalor pricks at my eyes, and the horizon wavers like a lie, and there is no father in this, the throat-saw and the sour-eyed bleed. There is no order or pride, no frieze of dead lords marching, nothing but spittle and the scrub, the unending sun—I can see nothing, nothing at all.

Hinc illae lacrimae, hinc illae lacrimae.

There has never been any father, only a burning plain skirted in stone, and a boy vomiting his breakfast into the weeds.

I do not know why I am here at all.

II. Heaven

Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.

My mother has no name. Or she has dozens—but when you have so many, like jewel-boxes lined up around a great, high bed, it is just as well to say you have none. Her nameless womb crushed my body into something like a boy’s shape, something like limbs and skull and digits, something like primogeniture, something like alive. Did she have dark hair? Did she keep her milk? Did she watch the umbilicus that once connected us shrivel and blacken like a spent candlewick? Each of these things she kept in a box by her bed, boxes of silver and chalcedony and iron slugs. Each of these she kept locked away from me like a name, and I never knew them scattered clear on my hands like drops of water.

But isn’t that always the way? How we rotten, errant sons do love to drape our worm-eaten souls around our mother’s shoulders. My mother didn’t love me: the chanson of the tyrant.

My mother loved me. I believe it; that must make it so. Out of all those names I pull a woman-aggregate: she had dark hair. She played with my toes. When I took my first step, she was there to tell me I had pleased her. When I crawled under light-diffuse linens next to her, and her black hair branched all around like an old tree, there was always milk, secret and sweet, and her voice was a consonant-less hum, like bees or gray wings.

I do not remember these things, but I would like to. The other boy remembers them—he says that we looked so like her that it was whispered we had no father at all. But then, lies involving parentage are the most common of all, and he mastered that species early on. I watched them with each other: dark mother sopping at the skirts with lakewater and my double, my twin, whose tongue was all bound up in deceitful sapphires. There was always milk for him, yes, but I was always thirsty.

What was the first lie?

Do you love your mother?

Yes.

No, no, that came later, later, when there was no more milk for either of us, only empty, hardened breasts, and linens rough and unbeaten, and hair like snakes snapping. The first lie, which seeded me with my brother as though I were a woman, and she a father:

Isn’t he lovely? I am his aunt.

And the other boy formed inside me, like water freezing to the shape of its bottle. This other boy who was her nephew, who was charming, precocious, and doesn’t he look marvelous in his uniform, marching along just like a little soldier! But I was her son, inside the golden clockwork boy, pawing at her under the bedclothes, with only her sorrow-bent stare to feed me: they cannot know.
If they knew they would take you from me.

But still, I was born a lie, I was made a secret, and that sort of thing can’t help but leave a mark, like a slap. How could I be anything other than this, hunkered down in the dunes with the scorpions lashing their tails at the moon? A man told his sister he loved her—what of that? Tawdry tragedy, except that a child was all hung with shadows, a child that no one could ever know about, lest it get its fool head knocked out on some unfortunate granite stairs.

I am no one.

I was not supposed to be.

I have no name, either. No one would give me one, for to name a thing means it is real, it exists, it displaces air.

Please, father, look at how I move the air around me. I am right here. Look at me.

III. Earth

Earth comprises distances, great and small;

danger and security; open ground and narrow passes;

the chances of life and death.

This is La Cienega. This is Camlann. There is a river; there is a sea; there is sand and the wend of snakes rattling through the throat-scoured soil. There is stone and a road and light like albumen floating yellow and white. I walk down to the city because I have to, because the light is also a lie, but it lies only about itself, and is holy. I have always been told that light is holy. Even I cannot quite imagine a world where the dark is sacrosanct—I am a mushroom fulminating in shit and decay, but still I acknowledge the sun, though it too lies. It lies and says it is the center of everything, the source of all possible light.

I go into the city because my mother lives there still, and my father will smell her like a deer, and go after her, hoping to find her gracefully bent in the snow, her nose snuffling out acorns under the ice. I know she would never do such a thing; I look for her as she is. This is her place, all full of glamors and illusions and images spinning.

A son told his mother he loved her. What of that? I have heard of a man in Thebes who fucked his mother—he made four children in her, two kings, two beauties, and one of those beauties was an anti-establishment revolution in a twelve-year-old’s body. Certainly this bested the previous score of one shriveled, club-footed boy, marked on that tired womb with a Greek fingernail. I confess I had hoped, too, to best my father, to people the vineyards and humble little rivers with laughing, dark-eyed revolutions. But somewhere in the city’s dark crease she found a lesson learned: no more children hung with shadow, no more lies hung upside down from a weeping woman, umbilicus black and blaming on their little throats.

No more nephews
, she said to an apothecary with eyes like spinning wheels, whose counter was greasy with
aqua vitae
and typical tonics—what otherworld physic does not vend hemlock, belladonna, mandrake? The wheels clicked round—thirty times left, twenty times right, ten times left again, and out of a dry drawer popped her panacea, and though her legs were open to me her body was shut, and she put her hand on my face when I came to her and whispered that a ruin called to a ruin, and what were we both but stones already crumbling, and what did it matter after all, what was any of it but solace, and solace she had, solace thick as clouds.