Myths of Origin

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.

Quiet, now, little brother. I will go first, as I have always done, so that if you fall on the night-stair, I will catch you.

II.

There is not a stone here which has not borne up under a foot. The castle is warm with touching, with hands against walls and spines against floors. Behind the blessing hills, it nearly glows. Knees have worn cups into the floor of the cathedral, and the faithful find their favorite places, nestling into the warm indents that hold them up like palms.

Wells have been sunk. The water is sweet and clear, and tastes a little of new moss, a little of burnt wood. The river is swift and cold and neatly diverted into a hundred fields. There is talk of a new monastery—in thirty years it will be famous for barrels of thick black beer.

The market in the great courtyard passes old money around—each coin has been endlessly fondled, turned into cakes, cloth, shoe-soles, honeycombs, thick red meat strung with thyme and turning slowly on a spit. There are children who have grown up in the shade of the portcullis, and stalls which have been in the family. Seven successive queens have looked down from the topmost tower, each with black braids. Each grew old, each watched their braids turn silver, then white.

There is one up there now—look, you can see the sun on her scalp. Is she smiling? Is she crying? It is always hard to tell with queens.

The lands outside the walls bristle with vegetable, with animal. There are new breeds—someone has even grown a low trellis of grapes. In the winter, they freeze, and children suck on the hard purple fruits. Goats wander shaggy and fat, sheep bleat and roll in the long grass. The clatter of wool-carding is pleasant, and makes little girls sleepy. Taxes are high, but not too high.

Late in autumn, the taxes are not taken—some few guess why. That castle leaks men like a sieve, and they are always out searching for one thing or another. This time it’s a cup. They hear. They shrug. Well, everyone needs cups. But the tax-man is busy questing, and the king’s tithe is well-put to use in babies’ mouths, in old aunts’ jugs, in new cows and spinning wheels and a big plow-horse with a white patch on his forehead.

The valley is small and quiet, and the castle sits in its center: safe, familiar, eternal. When was there not a castle here? Curse me if I can remember.

V THE HEIROPHANT

Pellinore

Pellinore, at that time a king, followed the Questing

Beast, and after his death Sir Palomides followed it.

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

Of the approximately three thousand species of lizards in existence, only a few are very large. The legs of some lizards are greatly shortened, or vestigial, making animals such as the glass lizard or slowworm snakelike in appearance; they are distinguished from true snakes by their movable eyelids and by differences in the structure of the skull bones, especially those of the lower jaw. The bones of the two halves of a lizard’s lower jaw are firmly united; those of a snake are separable. Scales are evenly arrayed in lines down and around the body. Dorsal scales are keeled while the ventral scales are smooth; there is little overlapping. Colors are various shades of brown, green, yellow, even black—some species have lighter longitudinal stripes or variegated colors.

A fold of skin is generally noted running laterally along the length of the body—some scholars believe that this is evidence of vestigial wings, while others scoff at the idea that creatures of such size ever flew.

I will admit, I will whisper into the dust-plated corners, behind bookshelves and umbrella-racks, sheaves of woolen coats and heavy boots: it is possible that there is no such thing as a dragon.

It is not the Beast itself that matters, you understand. Leopard or lamia, there are many hides I could have taken home to Camelot by now, if it were only the Beast I wanted. I would not travel this way, if that were all, belts and sashes clanging with sextants and telescopes, magnifying glasses and monocles, nautical charts, compasses in brass and gold, graphometers, refractometers, hydrometers, cliometers, and galvanometers, azimuths and globes studded with malachite and onyx, zinc-carbon batteries, micro-manipulators and a genuine camera obscura—all of my own invention. There is a gramophone in the saddlebags. But all this apparati is not for finding—it is for looking.