A Cathedral of Myth and Bone

by Kat Howard

  I leaned back in my chair, an ache throbbing behind my eyes.

  Three days.

  • • •

  The discussions in Professor Link’s seminar grew more contentious as the semester went on. It was as if by sharing the names of the characters, we felt like we were also particularly connected to them, that their actions somehow reflected back to us, and so we had to defend them, because otherwise we were the ones who were being smeared.

  I’m not saying it made sense.

  “Here’s the thing I want to know,” Nora said. “What was actually so great about Camelot? It gets talked about like it was some sort of second Eden, this perfect paradise of happiness and good government, but none of the stories talk about Arthur’s tax policies. Or his judicial system, at least not till it’s time to burn Guinevere at the stake for treason, and I don’t really want to hold that up as a model of greatness.

  “So why do we care that Camelot fell? What’s the tragedy?”

  “Aside from all the death?” Nirali said.

  “Whatever. I’m talking about the actual tragedy here, not how to categorize Shakespeare’s plays. Why don’t we just wash our hands of Camelot like we do of every other failed monarchy? Why do we give a fuck that it’s gone?”

  “Well, Camelot was about ideals, wasn’t it?” Sabra said. “The idea that everyone sits equally at the table, no one lower or higher. That no one’s above the law, even the queen.”

  “Except the king,” Nora said.

  “What? No, Arthur sat at the Round Table too, just like everyone else.”

  “You mean, just like every other knight. There weren’t any women sitting there, not even Guinevere. And even if we ignore the sexism, it wasn’t a parliament. The Round Table wasn’t a congress or his advisory board. Arthur made the law. He may have sat with them, but he wasn’t equal.” Nora tipped back in her chair, then dropped it to the ground with a thud. “Which, honestly, makes the whole Guinevere thing worse. He could have saved her, commuted the sentence, shipped her off to a convent, whatever. Instead he’s all fake-noble. ‘The law ties my hands. Sadly, I must burn the unfaithful whore.’ He’s no better than Henry the Eighth—I mean, if Guinevere’s dead, Arthur can marry again and fix his lack of a legitimate heir problem. The whole thing is bullshit wrapped up in the name of being a nice guy.”

  “The reason we mourn isn’t about Arthur, it’s about Camelot. Camelot was about the idea that you look for miracles,” I said. “That Christmas didn’t start until a wonder had walked into the hall, that when the kingdom faltered, instead of going to war, they went on a holy quest.”

  “So religion fixes everything? Not likely,” Nora said.

  “Not religion. Myth. The numinous. Magic. The idea that there was something more, something better, and that the solution to the problem was to find that,” I said. “They went looking for something bigger than they were.”

  “Plus, they tried to be good,” Liam said. “The quests and stuff, they weren’t about going out and stealing land and conquering, they were about helping people. Protecting the oppressed.”

  “Yeah, because a system with royalty at its heart is always about protecting the oppressed. You just keep believing that, golden boy,” Nora said. She reached over and patted him on the head as if he were a puppy.

  “I think it’s about time for a break, everyone,” Professor Link broke in. “Get up, stretch, get some air. We’ll meet back here in fifteen.”

  • • •

  “Nora’s a bitch about things most of the time, but I think she’s kind of right,” Sabra said. She shouldered the recalcitrant vending machine, which then coughed up two packets of peanut butter cups. “Want one?”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m starving.”

  She unwrapped the candy and delicately bit the top layer of chocolate off. “I mean, Camelot is supposed to be this good place, with everyone equal at the Round Table, no might makes right, all that, but if it was just Arthur sitting around like everyone’s dad, telling people to be their best selves but not really doing anything to make that happen, why do we care so much?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I get Nora’s point—things weren’t perfect. The knights were supposed to defend the ladies, but ‘ladies’ meant social status as well as gender, so the serfs were still fair game. And what happened to Guinevere was shitty. But when was the last time you heard anyone in power say, ‘Be good, dream bigger, look for wonder’? Maybe the fact that Arthur did doesn’t count for everything, but it does count for something.”

  “Yeah. I just feel like I should be doing more.”

  “I?” I repeated the pronoun, waiting to see if Sabra noticed what she had said. The rush of ravens’ wings filled my ears. “I?”

  Sabra held the door for me. “You look like you’re a million miles away. Are you coming back in?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  When we reconvened, Nora’s chair was empty.

  • • •

  Here are some of the things that happened at Severn that semester: The library received a $5 million donation, to better develop its special collections, with the specific directive of acquiring works from populations traditionally underrepresented in academic libraries.

  The Molecular Biology Department was selected to be part of a multidisciplinary research push, with the objective of finding a cure for all forms of breast cancer in ten years. The department head, Dr. Kalinda Mansouri, would coordinate the research team across all participating institutions.

  A record number of grants were won by faculty across the university, in all disciplines.

  The Panhellenic Council established a “Yes Means Yes” campaign, designed to end sexual assault and harassment at social events. By all accounts, it was taken seriously, and actual assault numbers—not just the reports—went down.

  The events were background noise at the time. The good kind, to be sure—much better than announcements of yet another football player assaulting a woman, or of cuts in funding, departments unable to fulfill course offerings due to lack of faculty and hiring freezes. I remember, vaguely, getting the email announcements for all the good things that happened over the course of those fifteen weeks. Seeing the posters. Being happy. But they were nothing that made me stop, made me realize that something was going on. That things were trying to be better, that we were living in an idyll.

  • • •

  The morning of the third day came. I spent it half-distracted: listening for a chiming clock, watching for a flock of ravens, and explaining Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse to a classroom full of undergrads.

  The carillon in the center of campus chimed as class was ending, but it was nothing more than its customary song, background to campus bustle, and not accompanied by corvids.

  I stopped for coffee. When I stepped out of the small café, I nearly dropped my latte. The ravens—hundreds of them, a black cloud draping the trees—had indeed found me.

  Clock chimes rang through the air, and I glanced at my phone: 10:17. Not the normal marking of the hour. “Okay then,” I said to the ravens. “Here I am.”

  They flew. The flock so enormous its passing dimmed the sun. People held up phones, recording. The birds flew toward the lake. I followed them, and the dark-haired woman waited there, standing in a low boat, tangled in the reeds of the shore.

  “Why did you give me that book?” I asked.

  “Because in every story, Morgan is a sorceress,” she said. “And to be Morgan, you need magic.”

  “How do you know what name I have? Did Professor Link ask you to do this?”

  “Oh, no. Oh, hardly that at all.” Her mouth twisted. “But you needed the book,” she repeated. “The magic is important—necessary—for the proper ending. Giving my book to you directly was the best way to ensure you would have it.”

  “How did you know it would work—that I would be able to read it, that . . . Wait. Your book?” My voice broke over the words, over the terrible reality of speaking them a
loud.

  Ex libris Morganae.

  My head felt as if some enormous crack had opened up inside it, a chasm similar to what had just fallen away beneath my feet. The entire world was a great, ringing bell.

  She—Morgan—laughed. So loud the waiting birds all took to the air, a storm wind and hurricane rustle of wings.

  Then, still standing in the boat, she grabbed my hands. “This will be faster.”

  Something ran through me, electric, setting my hair on end, snapping my eyes back in my head. Apples. The scent of apples, so thick I could barely breathe.

  With her hands on mine, her magic coursing through me, I saw everything.

  A bright-haired boy laughing as he pulled a black-haired girl up behind him on a horse. Fencing with her, practice swords in hand, fierce grins on both faces.

  A skip then. Electricity in my head, and time passing.

  That little boy grown to adulthood, the bright hair turned ruddy. A king now. The sister grown too, and into something else altogether. The Queen of Air and Darkness. The woman who held my hands.

  Arthur and Mordred and the blood-soaked fields of Camlann and Liam somehow there too, with blood on his hands and sorrow on his face. My hands, too, were sticky-wet.

  A great, round table, cracked in two, snakes slithering in the gap, and the oval conference table in our seminar room knocked askew, chairs overturned and scattered.

  A low black barge, and an island of glass, and air that smelled like apples. On the shore, this woman. Morgan.

  On the shore, me.

  One thing and the next and the next, faces I didn’t know, and stories I did, and then our faces too: Sabra and Liam and Nora, her face turned away from all of us. Professor Link, high in her tower. Nirali, weeping.

  A body on a bier with a sword in her hands.

  I yanked my hands away, stumbling back. My breath rattled hard in my throat and my eyes burned with grit.

  Morgan watched me. She looked reduced, drawn. “I am,” she said, “almost out of time. So are you, if you are going to stop the story, change it before the ending becomes inevitable.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Arthur’s fall will rewrite itself again and again, one time after the next. It will always end the same way, unless it’s stopped. You are in the story now. You can change it. He sleeps. Wake him.”

  “Oh, is that all?” The question came out halfway between laughter and a sob.

  “Yes,” she said. “That is all. I will give you what aid I can, but you will not be unopposed.” She gasped, bent forward, clutching at her side, her face even paler than before.

  “What’s wrong?” I put my arm around her, tried to hold her steady. Apples, I thought. She smelled like apples. But something else. The smell of algae, rot, rose from the lake, choking me. The surface of the water grew rough, the waves chopped by wind.

  “Too long away.” The words dragged from her throat. “I need to go back, before she sees.”

  “Where do you need to go? I’ll help you.” Her weight heavy against me.

  “You can’t. Not yet. Change the story, Morgan.” A shove, hard, and I stumbled away from her, fell. In an explosion of ravens, she was gone.

  Once

  TOO LONG FROM MY ISLAND, and too long on the lake that is not mine, and too much magic used. My bones ache from the effort and my breath shakes. But at least she knows, my story shadow, her role in this. At least she knows what is necessary.

  The boat shakes its way onto the island’s rough beach, and I stumble from it. Pick my way on trembling legs through the trees. There is a proper orchard here now, the Isle of the Apples. Small bits in the story working their way through time, waiting for an ending.

  Better, it would be better if I could help the ones in this telling of the story, set the gears and move the pieces. But I moved too much, once, or some thought I did, and now I am bound. Now I wait and I watch and I may do so little, even in my own life.

  The story knows the way of its telling.

  The ravens land in the apple trees, dark stars in the white sky. I curl against a trunk and fall asleep.

  — 6 —

  I had no idea what to do.

  • • •

  Change the story.

  Look, we all know how the story goes, right? Once upon a time, when miracles still occurred. The kingdom is in chaos after Uther Pendragon dies, presumably without a legitimate heir. And then, somehow, just when everything is on the edge of falling apart forever, Arthur is found. Maybe he pulls a sword from a stone. Maybe the Lady of the Lake raises her samite-clad arm from the water and hands him his destiny. Either way, he gets an incontrovertible and appropriately phallic symbol that proves his paternity, and hence his right to rule.

  For a while, things seem to go well. In fact, they go better than well. Wonders occur on a regular basis. Miraculous objects are sought for and found. There is a Round Table and knights who take their seats at it, and they do good and have adventures. There is no war, no threat of invasion. Peace throughout the land, and a specific, wonderful kind of peace—so well-governed is England under Arthur that a maiden carrying a bag of gold can walk unescorted from one end of the kingdom to the other, her maidenhead and her gold both intact at the end of her journey.

  Truly, it is a golden age.

  But then, something goes wrong. Maybe it’s Mordred. Maybe it’s Guinevere and Lancelot. Maybe, in the way of all epic tragedies, it’s Arthur’s own hubris. But whatever it is, there is a worm at the heart of the apple, and Camelot destroys itself from the inside. At the end, Arthur is struck down on the field of battle—maybe Mordred means to kill him, maybe not, but the knife still lands.

  The stories tell us Arthur’s not dead, not really. That he’s rexque futurus. That in our hour of greatest need, he will return. At least, that’s how the story goes.

  Don’t let it be forgotten.

  • • •

  I stumbled through the door to my apartment, the visions heavy in my brain, throbbing like a cluster of hangovers.

  So. That was what we were, Morgan and I, bound.

  Except. No. I was still myself, solely myself, no matter that I shared a name with her.

  There was a shadow-voice that spoke another truth: that I certainly was myself, as much as she was hers, but that together we were a third, other Morgan. That this was no longer a story of once and future, but one that would weave us both in its ending.

  That night, I fell into exhausted sleep and dreamt of a sleeping king. The king from my visions, child to man. Arthur. The Pendragon. He rested on a bier of glass, so that it seemed as if he floated above the ground that was meant to embrace him. He lay with his hands across his chest, as if they had once held a sword, a still-breathing effigy.

  His bier stood on an island, and it was an island of bones. I knew, in that terrible, certain way you know things in dreams, that the bones were the remains of everyone who had ever gotten caught up in this story, the ones who had never made it back out. My own skeleton pushed closer to the skin, on its way to join them.

  The sleeping king opened his eyes and saw me, even through the dream.

  “The story ends where I do.”

  • • •

  I woke late in the day, untangled myself from the ropes of my sheets. Then climbed from bed and tried the scrying spell. Ink poured first on a world map, because there had to be some logic to the process, even though part of my brain was reminding me that I was using magic to look for a sleeping king I had seen in a dream, and the other part was telling me to just skip to the Severn campus map, because if Arthur was anywhere, he had to be here.

  I used the spell again and again, map after map, each smaller and more specific than the last. It was, of course, the campus map the spell halted at.

  Except the ink, after collecting itself on that same spot in the center of the lake where the previous spell had told me I would find Morgan, sank into the map and disappeared.

  I lifted the
piece of paper from the table. Nothing. No ink. No stain.

  Which, great. Because there was still no island—of bone or otherwise—on Lake Severn. Maybe there once was, and it sank, but Arthur hadn’t been underwater in my dream.

  Then, a welling up of ink. Not on the table, but in the air in front of me. Letters written in a hand I knew: “He sleeps out of time. Find him in the ringing of the bells.”

  The words fell, into a heap of blue-black feathers.

  Bells rang, and I started from my seat, but it was only the alarm on my phone. Class. I had to go teach.

  I brushed feathers from my hair, washed spilled ink and the shadows of dreams from my hands, and stepped back into the world.

  • • •

  Nora had missed the past three meetings of Professor Link’s seminar. I figured she’d gotten fed up and dropped. But as I called goodbye to Sabra and Nirali and pulled my scarf closer against the late-fall chill, she stepped out from against the wall.

  “So, you’re still going? Has she made any changes to the course requirements?”

  “You mean, are you suddenly going to have to write a paper instead of keeping a journal?”

  She shrugged. “Something like that.”

  “Nope, nothing. You’re fine to keep avoiding us. Though, if you’re concerned, why don’t you just drop the class? Or—and I know this may sound crazy—show up sometime and find out for yourself?”

  “Too late in the semester to drop, and besides, I need the credits. But, God, if I had to listen to that twee moralizing for one more class, I was going to throw something. I mean, who does Sabra think she is?” She rolled her eyes so hard that even in the dying light of the evening I could see it.

  “Arthur, actually,” I said.

  “Huh. Well, that was a good match of random name with person.”

  That was not the sentiment I expected. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’ve never thought of Arthur as being particularly smart. Sabra seems to get by mostly on being nice too.”

  I would have agreed with her, had we just been talking about Arthur, but her words jarred, directed at Sabra. “I assume you’re someone smarter.”