Myths of Origin

Who is my father?

The man you look like.

I came to the city. I looked into a mirror of flesh and it broke, a long silver crack.

This is what happened: I killed my father. He got his knife into me when I leapt—stupid, not to keep my guard up.

The streets shine with flotsam.

XXI THE WORLD

Bedivere

Then Sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.

So Sir Bedivere came again to the king, and told him what he saw.

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

Therefore, said Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, take thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to the waterside, and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that water, and come again and tell me what thou there seest.

It’s amazing how heavy a sword really is. You never think about it—spend your life heaving them into wood and silk and leather, into earth and mire and stone, into bone and meat. It becomes part of you—you do not have a hand of flesh, but an arm which ends in metal, a long, curving finger which accuses, always accuses. You stop thinking about how thick and still it sits in your fist, the heft of it, the swing and the slog of it. It’s a hammer, and a club, it’s your own bone and gristle, and if the light is beautiful on the blade, if it is even like water, like a lake-edge, that does not mean that it was built for less than cutting, less than bludgeoning, less than pulling flesh from flesh.

You told me to come here, and the sea is on the shore like a tablecloth, more blue than I have seen together in all my days. I am tired, tired in my perfect sinews—recall how they used to call me that, how the women used to cheer for Bedevere, the Knight of the Perfect Sinews, and I never knew if it was mockery or not, if they snickered at my stump-wrist while praising the one hand left to me. But we were young, we were so young, and names of that sort seemed so important.

I am tired—there is no water here which is not full of salt, no wind that is not a hot clutch at the throat, a flaming sash, a flaming favor. I cannot see what color I might have been before the blood, before your son’s blood—how heavy was he, too, when I pulled him from you like a skin from an apple!—my blood, your own clotted last. The books always say that a dying man’s face is gray—I always thought that a poet’s silk-calved dream of what death might be, but your face, your face with its evening stubble stippling the skin like grass, it is gray after all, gray as the moon, and I am still so warm and red.

It is not a one-handed sword, your old blade, and I had to drag it from your body to the sea, two limping footsteps and a deep, worrying furrow in the sand. Bees buzz around my gore-stuck hair and lizards snap at fleas in my shoes. Kelp collects at the sword-tip; wet sand pulls and sucks at it, as though the earth would have it before the brine. My good arm aches as though I spent the day heaving a silver axe into cedar—you used to tease me when I filled my own wood-grate, told me you had men to do that for us.

Of course you do, Arthur, I said, you have me.

There are islands out there, beyond the sunline, but I cannot see them except as lashes of whipped light against a too-bright horizon. Dawn slants down like a glass window dropped into the whitecaps, and the whole world is waterside, how am I to know where to throw it? How am I to know where it ought to fall? How can I choose the place, who was never one of you, one of the boys who heads beamed with so much light that to look in on your suppers was to look into a painting, choked with coronae. I never wore anything on my head but my hair, and you were all too beautiful for me to feel like much more than an altarboy at some terrible, radiant Mass. I was thick at the ankle, at the waist, at the shoulder, no part of me was slender or elegant. They called me perfect and I winced at the lie, at the joke, the hulking man who could hardly cut his own meat for the mottled stump at his wrist where his hand used to be.

But I know you did not mean to be cruel. Such a thing was not in you.

Of all the places I went at your side, I never imagined this would be the last, this long strand, like a thick rope laid below the dark city, the strange half-place where the Cam whorled and looped into the not-Cam, into a road I could hardly fathom as a road—yet who could think that the dead air could empty itself in a sea so clear, so bright, that I cannot look at it, cannot look out on that perfect shore, that perfect sea.

The breeze smells of clean grass—the dunes prickle with it, curving back over the headlands. The blue batters at my skull, and out of the surf comes the strange, foreign cry of dolphins, their chirping litany, their barking lament. Their blue heads stud the water like sapphires set in steel—like the stones on the hilt of this cleaver, this hack-saw you loved so well.

I know a secret: it is your own arm I carry to the waterside, severed from you—you are like me, now, at the end, limb-hewn—embarrassed by its own jewelry, but no less your own, hung at your wrist all those years as though by joint and sinew. I have dragged it through the barnacled sand, this arm, this pommel, this elbow, this cross-guard, this shoulder with its sparse golden hair. I know it for your arm and no blade, and I cannot fling it away as though it were a scrap of palimpsest blowing through the streets of that city by the sea.

I cannot cast off this thing which has been your body, cast it into the water like a fishing line. I cannot do it. I will keep it for myself, and fold it beneath my floorboards, wrapped in rags and furs and covered in pine which does not quite match the surrounding ash, so that in the smallest of all night-hours, I may pull up the planks like exhuming a grave, prying up the coffin-splinters, so that I may uncover it like an old bone, and look into it as a mirror, lay beside it as beside dust, and know my friend is near.

I will not do it.

What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but waves and winds. That is untruly said of thee, said the king, therefore go thou lightly again, and do my commandment; as thou art to me as life and dear, spare not, but throw it in.

The sun is so high and hot that it will allow nothing green beneath it—everything here is hard and gold, hard and b

lue, hard and white. The hilt is warm in my hand; the blade is incandescent, star-shot. I am almost used to it, stranger to my palm before you turned gray and coagulate.

Lumps of city scatter off to the west, houses like red ant-cairns, roof-tiles shining back the endless light, light that must have weight, weight like shoulder-plates, like liquid, pooling silver. The sand has dried in the noon so that the furrow I leave this time is neat and sighing. Its sides trickle in behind me.

There has been a beach like this before, though never a sea like this, never a sun like this. But there was a strand—oh, does he remember it, in the long line of things he has killed which must string together in his breast like old ornaments? St. Michael, St. Michael, the castle and the tide, and the fires burning like infidels stuck on the ramparts. We went into that place, and I never came out, that place so like this one, as though all places which are not Camelot must run together into one country, long and strange and serrated, along the coast of another sea.

Arthur did not want to go. I understood immediately, because I did not want to go either. I saw in the ogre-keeper of that place my own hulking, muscle-bound form, horrible in its meat-pounding arms, its swollen legs. I did not want to go down across the green fields when the strawberries had just come through, still small and hard and pale on the stalk, I did not want to go trampling over their little beads in order to kill something so like myself. I have always pitied ungainly things, things born too big for the world. I never forgot my own inelegance, my own boar-belly.