Myths of Origin (55 page)

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.

The winter passed and no one questioned me. Feasts were held for the giant’s death. Games and hunts. I did not hunt, or play.

I went into the forest to cut wood, I told him. It is my way, never-mind how you chide me. My silver axe and my Hephaestus-gait, dragging the ash-handle behind me, leaving a furrow in the loam. I cut oak and pine and green birch, and held each log in place with my huge gnarled hand. I watched it every time the blade fell. I watched the hand that had held her down, the hand that had bruised her mangled breast, the hand that had whipped my horse away from her, leaving her in her clutch of bone. I watched that wicked, shaming hand, I watched it curl around a log like a throat, and it seemed better to sever it like a side of beef than to let it go on dangling from me after it had played a giant’s paw.

An accident,
I said.
It might have happened to anyone.

Yet here I stand on a shore pebbled with clams, the holiest of things clutched in the other hand—as if that hand, too, did not clamp down on her mouth, as if that hand did not hold her hip to mine. I cannot cast off this thing: if there is something in that sea which wants it, which longs for it, it would not accept tribute from me, I am a monster, a giant, a thing to be slain, a thing to stand before a real knight and be cut down in his turn. I am no bright-souled saint, to deliver the divine to the divine. I have no right even to look at my king, even to look at his blade.

I cannot do it.

What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but the waters wax and waves wan. Ah, traitor untrue, said King Arthur, now hast thou betrayed me twice. Who would have weened that, when thou that hast been to me as life and dear? And thou art named a noble knight, and would betray me for the richness of the sword. But now go again lightly, for thy long tarrying putteth me in great jeopardy of my life, for I have taken cold. And if thou do not now as I bid thee, if ever I may see thee, I shall slay thee with mine own hands; for thou wouldst for my rich sword see me dead.

There is so much light here.

I cannot bear it. I have not earned the gold of this place.

The king was shivering, this time, when I left him, dragging that old cleaver after me, that metal which must still possess the giant’s perfect sinews, some shred of his vein-stitched heart, too small to see. He does not understand. He thinks I am a magpie, over-fond of things which glitter and shine.

I think that while I stare out to sea like a child who cannot remember the simple task his father has set him, he will shudder his way out of this air, this salt, this sun. Bits of shell crackle in the furrow I leave—the sky sighs and blushes blue, blue as grace, blue as a hem. The moon is up, but not yet lit; it floats in the sky like a broken skull. Like a manacle of bone.

I am the giant, in the end. I hulk on a beach-head and keen my sorrows to the surf—I am penitent, penitent, but the wind in my mouth always and forever tastes of her, the crone I left bolted to a wall, buried in her own dead infants, and my child too—was there a child? Was there not?—squirming from her with my eyes, starving into a skeleton on the wall, another bone to link her chain. I became nothing after her joints bent under me, I only walked to her prison and exchanged seats with the colossus. If the book had but opened in another place, if I had but turned another corner in that moldering castle, come upon an empty crèche, or a sack of gold, or a giant’s broken bathtub, I might have been Lancelot, a knight of blue and silver and love perfect as pearls. The queen might have looked on me with cool black eyes and thought me the best of them all, might have loved me, too. But my pages opened onto gray hair and twelve little lumps in the earth, and I am but a hulking, bent-backed shadow of Lancelot, crouched and sneaking behind him like a starving bear.

All I have to do is throw it. Easy, yes? For any other of his boys, easy. For Lancelot, easy. I should not be the last. Some other man should remain to witness us. What loyalty can I give him who could never confess how far I fell from the gold-shot grace of his hall? The loyalty of carrying his jetsam to the sea. Am I a pall-bearer, hoisting his last living limb, or a garbage-carrier, shifting scrap-metal from one sand-dune to another?

Could I but erase myself in this, erase my name and all my deeds in this light, scrub my sinews clean. Could I but be remembered for this only, and not that other shore, that other sea, that other self. Once, I was a good man. We were young together, Arthur and I, and the catalogue of our deeds unspooled from an angel’s mouth.

So much light: the moon ignites itself, sparking into silver like an altar candle. In its shadow, I see—do I? Yes? No?—something break the sheen of sea. A hand, it must be a hand, whole, perfect, scaled in trout-mail, a hand from every story he told when he was drunk and sloshing over with sorrow, a hand open, waiting, a hand open and lying on a birch-trunk, axe-shadows playing on the lines of its palm, a hand, withered and wiry, clenching and twisting, caught in a cuff of bone.

It strains towards me. Open, beckoning. Calling me to drown, calling me to kneel and serve her as I ought to have done. Palm-lines curve away from my sight, and I want to believe that the hand does not open only for the sword, that the fish-scale nails and looping threads of silver-pregnant silk do not only rise from the foam for him. I want to believe there is forgiveness in that hand. I want to believe there is grace. I want to believe that it will take my stump in its grip, which will be soaked with brine and draped with seaweed, and that in the press of its fingers will be understanding.

Leave your giant-skin behind,
that press will say
, and become Bedevere again.

The moon glints on the sword-edge as it turns, hilt over point, in the air. The hand catches it, as I could not. The ivory chain-links jangle. The blade whirls once, twice, three times. An ocean beyond any blue I have known closes over hand and blade and all, and I am alone, on a long, low shore, in a dusk so deep and bright.

There is so much light here, unbearable light. Water which conceals a forest of crones’ hands seems to open before me, seems to promise, seems to cajole. I can almost see them in the waves, when the moon shines through them. Fingers like kelp, kelp like fingers.

The taste of the sea is so like skin, you know.

III.

A wide green field, and grass like water waving. There is dusk here, and thin, over-tilled soil, and hiding hills, still those blessing hills. Clouds skitter across the hedgerows
like rocks skipping on a lake. There are stones: here, there, great gray things, knuckle-knobbled. They lie where the walls once were, corners and lengths and thresholds. You can almost see the glimmer of what stood then, hovering shadow-still over the slabs.

There is no one here. Old, dry-clawed crows hop from stone to stone, pecking at the first blocks of the cathedral, which are also the last. A wild, shag-pelted pony wanders, chewing at the tough grass. The market has gone, so too the farms and the monks and the cows. The ground refused to give up any further beans or turnips—it was hoarse and tired and coughed up its last cucumber long ago. The wells are brackish and thick with slime; a slow drip wears away the cisterns. A withered grapevine crawls along a low line of stones, hung with yellow leaves that are almost, but not yet, dust.

The base of the old tower lasts longest—rain and wind pit and streak it until it forgets all the queens it ever knew, and dreams under the new hills, which cover the ruin like grave-mounds, snaking around the valley, eating what is left of this place, modestly drawing themselves up over the bones like shrouds.

In a century, no one will remember what this place was called. In five, someone will say that it was seventy miles south and in another country besides. Someone else will say
they have dug it up and wouldn’t you like to buy a bit of soil, a bit of rock, a bit of bone?
Someone else will say there was never a castle here—the land is too poor to support a population.

Occasionally a shepherd will try to feed his sheep on the yellow, fibrous grass that is left. The animals bleat pitifully and will not touch it: it is so bitter. The flock moves on.

Under the blessing hills, a thousand dreaming bones shiver in their sleep.

XX JUDGEMENT

Morgan le Fay

And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank was a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. Now put me into the barge, said the king. And so he did softly; and there received him three queens with great mourning; and so they set them down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head. And then that queen said: Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me?

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

Away in the apple-groves I dreamed of you, and you seemed so still and grave—once, you and I ran laughing from our mother’s house, and hid in the forest, and told each other tales of terrible boars who would snatch us away to prisons made of pomegranate and whalebone. Even then you tried to kiss me, when the afternoons were thick and yellow, and the dust-motes swam in the air.

I blushed—I was not brave enough.

They took you from me—remember how you cried? You grabbed at my dress, my hair, clung to me, trying to stay. For your safety, they said.

I cut my hair the day they took you. I burned it in our forest. The ash smelled like us.

Why have ye tarried so long from me?
Away in the mint-fields I clapped a hand against my shorn hair and learned things I will never tell you about. I did not see you again until after the crown clamped on you like a lamprey. You had married her already—and do not think I did not note her deep black eyes, so like mine.

They will say we didn’t know; they will say it was an accident. How could I not know? How could I not see how tired you had become? How could I not see your too-thick hair that still would not obey and the three little lines in your forehead—how could I not know my brother?

Do you remember how we walked together, in the forest which was not our old forest but was green enough for walking, for talking of grain and crops and how green sashes were in fashion at court that year, and I could hear the weariness in you, how it pulled at me like a hook in my throat? I stroked your head against my breast like I used to, innocent as a sister, innocent as a nun, and you kissed me again, and I was brave that time, wasn’t I? I was brave and the dust-motes floated in my hair which was not as long as it had been, and you moved against me in the shade of a old hollow oak, and your kisses became cries, and your cries became a son—

Oh, my brother, I should not speak of our son. He will say he had nothing like a mother, and I do not call him a liar, but we all try, we all try so hard. Sometimes I think it is all our trying that has brought us here, all our struggling and trying that sets up all these tragic scenes.

We grew old—did you notice? I did not. One day I had white hair instead of black and spots in my skin like a leopard. I was suddenly slow, and bowed under a woolen hood. I could not stay with you—I went over the bridge to the other world, the other Camelot that is called Avalon and hell and California. I learned to make orange-cakes, learned to make the rain come.

I learned to look both north and south.

And I tried, once every decade or so, to pull you over the bridge with me, I tried every colorful thing I knew to draw you: I sent my girls out into towers with red armor in their arms, I sent you a dream of a beast with a dragon’s head and a leopard’s skin, I took a boy down into the water not once but twice, just so that you would come after him. But you did not come. I sent my champion all wrapped in leaves and green, in a mask, with an axe. I sent unicorns; I sent giants.

But you would not come. You would not come to me no matter how I lined that bridge with sweets. You loved your wife, more fool you. You loved that place. You thought, I know, that I would always be here when you reached out in the dark to find me.

I suppose you were right.

I have missed you so. Why could you not come into the golden country with me? We would have been happy. There would be now no cold seashore and a widow’s barge. Do not laugh—the blood is too bright in the fog. Yes, I am your widow. I have mourned you all your life.

My brother, why have ye tarried so long from me?
Away in the orange groves I once made a rind-golem of you. I piled up the wet, sour peels into something like the shape of you. I was lonely, and it was an easy trick.

I gave it eyes and breath and life and it was golden like you, and sweet like you, and it looked at me with eyes of dusty green leaves and said: