Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  The spaces between stretch like light, bending their calculated arcs over bodies—the time between the lifting of the axe and the falling, the departure of the boy and the arrival. The nature of the universe is a held breath, a filled lung which never empties into the ether.

  When his blow came, inevitable as autumn, I thought he would fall over with the weight of my weapon. The tidal edge came and my blood flowed green as sea-rot onto the vast mosaic floor. Ladies excused themselves in horror, knights vomited into their helmets, children scrambled to pick berries from my hair. The black-eyed Queen looked curiously at the flow of blood nosing her slippers like an affectionate hound. Her eyes strayed softly to a knight, a fearful falcon seeking the hunter’s arm. The king laughed too loudly and drank his mead through pale knuckles as though it would save his life.

  I lay on that floor cut in two, my own conjoined twin, enwombed and devoured, flooding into my internal seas. I felt the room become the board, the fates of the pieces shifting as the check and escape rippled into clarity. I felt the boy’s heart connect to mine.

  The separation, the ripping of my heart from my head, was so peculiar—calm spread in me like the tide through salted sand, and as though I called to it through tin cans connected by string, I whispered to my body. The colossus turned, breastplate bristling with mistletoe and strangled oak, groping the silence for purchase. I called quietly to its sinews, familiar as old harp-strings, and I blindly gripped myself by the hair.

  Nestled in my arm, I looked at that boy, gone white as whalebone, and said: Next year in the Chapel, Gawain, next year in Jerusalem, next year in the Christmastide when the stars flash red and green, next year in my castle where the apple-maid has been.

  A bet is a bet—I shall be here when he comes.

  White Queen to Queen’s Bishop Five.

  My wife has no name. She does not come to the Chapel, but lies naked as a lion and turns the sun to dust settling on her gold haunches. Is she the monster I keep in my house? Her lips part and show an endless forest. Did I bring her here, once? Or did she spring from Hautdesert like a water-choked cactus, putting forth her necromancer-flowers?

  I think I am inside her all the time.

  Even now, even then, in the court with the thousand candles, all around me I saw the walls of her body, slick and butter-warm. In the Chapel, where the altarcloth chants the vespers prayers in a voice dredged from the silt of the sea, I taste her flesh on my tongue like a communion wafer, and this is her body, unbroken for my worship, and this is her blood, poured out for my exaltation. I am a body of her body, and in her deafening heart I am transubstantiated, I become verdant, I become the deepened earth.

  When my axe split my cordwood throat, I felt only her tightening around me, her breath wavering in my vision as though I watched the boy through a shroud of heat. I felt her hands on my stomach even when my head’s wet veins grasped uselessly at the glassy floor. I wonder if I have ever walked outside the tower of her skin, if I ever really let myself go down beneath the knight’s blue scythe. Perhaps I only curl within her and dream, a fetus suckling at her sugar-womb.

  Sometimes she looks both north and south. Her northern face is a clutch of stones, slate rasping against granite. This face wears a cowl of nettles, and gnashes black flax with its teeth. From its cracked lips a sallow thread issues like a tongue; where it touches my flesh, I flush green and holly cracks open my pores. Her saliva turns my skin to soil—calendulas sprout in my knee-bones, chrysanthemums fulminate in my mouth until all I can taste is their obscene red. Ivy pierces my septum, stalks filling my body with chlorophyll, shooting through capillaries, thorns sprout from my chest, roots from my thighs—I gag, I spit, I retch in the midst of all this green.

  Her southern face is a white river. This face wears a cowl of hair like light, smelling of sage and thistle, the first gold an arthritic miner wrestled from a Californian hill. From its polished lips a thick rope spirals out—silk that was once a worm—and when it grazes my eyes like the pelt of a deer, the pupils flush with blood and smoke. She touches the leaves of my beard and calls it good, she tells me I frighten her, and her skin warms under my blooming hands. My fingers go through her as through a tidepool, and when I draw back, anemones suckle at my palms, blue as kisses. With my hands in her watery hair I am exalted, I am greened and imparadised, I am the Edenic monster.

  But I fear her other face, the hag who haunts the dust of a hundred corners.

  White Queen to King’s Bishop Eight.

  The road through the Wirral to the San Joaquin Valley is paved with pulverized magpie bones, and plated in Nevada silver. It is an endless suspension bridge, anchored with horsehair and ambergris. The root system of the bridge connects the water tables, the lightless tide of continents. Neither place is real, but the quest spans all points on all maps, and if the Gawain-child begins in Camelot, he must eventually pass through San Francisco, swallowing the foghorns as he rides.

  And in the thigh of Saint Francis I will meet him and place the sacraments between his teeth, mark his hands with my stigmata, and draw him under the hill—for the Chapel is but the opening to a body, a crevice in the dream-soil, and I am waiting within it, for him to enter her body and mine, the green lord and his two-souled wife.

  In Chinatown, the crone spat three times and shook her yarrow sticks at the sky, red and black. Her tar-clouded lungs rumbled, hissing: Lu. Ch’ien. Sun. The Seeker Descends from Heaven, and Submits to the Gentle Wind. With her hands pulling at my cheekbones like fish-hooks, she whispered the name of Gawain into my tear ducts, and I wept a tincture of salt and oleander. Am I no other than this, his object, his end? Am I this spectral mask, the giant and the beanstalk in one still-voiced body? There is nothing in it, to sit on the bridge with my holly-beard grazing the water and wait, a fire growing in his mind. I have no tongue, I have no blood. I am only the monster, the false knight, the price of his Christmas feast.

  I went across the bridge in my leaf-body because she wished it. After all, we are the witch and the monster that dwell in the glen, it is our duty to set the trials, and draw the boys from their warrens to lie with us.

  The winter dark came, and called us across the bridge, and I pulled my hag-wife over me like a coat of folded wings. I stepped into her skin and sealed up the edges with a paste of rosemary, for remembrance. Inside her, I was the Green Knight, and not Lord Bertilak, not myself. I exulted in the grotesqueries of the branch and bramble she lent me, in my seven-mile stride, in the voice that cracked steel. From inside her, I looked on the placid Queen and saw the ocean of that perfect torso twist and roil. I saw her, the king’s wife, catch her perfumed breath in fear that the Devil had come to punish her for opening her mist-midden legs.

  But it was Gawain and not that faithless who came to us with his green calves quaking, and when his pentangle shield reflected its red on the red of our eyes, we forgot the Queen and her whimpering tryst. We slid into his equation, the quest and the endpoint, we recognized our most beloved Rook, and knew peace when he separated us into heart and head.

  But I am not content bridging Christmas to Christmas, holding his purity like a plastic lotus and forcing my fingers into a sullen mudra. I am a bronze Buddha, green with age, motionless, meaningless. My eyes shed blank enlightenment, and he cannot see me as a man. My wife is the storm and the wheatfield, I am only a signpost. Without the mask of her skin I am but Bertilak, and that is less than the weight of the moon on a moth’s wing. And Gawain is a milk-brained child staring mutely at the wonders of the world. He will not even mark the passing of the bridge beneath his feet.

  Look at the three of us, our little dance. Are we not heroes, are we not terrors?

  White Knight to King’s Bishop 5th.

  The Chapel is filled with sweet smoke, the vanilla and oranges of Christmastide, peppermint candy sticky on my hands. The nave secretes opalescent sweat, flooding the floor with holy vapors. The Lady Bertilak is not here, though I look to the torturously painted tiles of the ceiling an
d see the arch of her summer-breast.

  To you, I would seem only a fat old man bent over a chessboard at Golden Gate Park, slapping the timer with a meaty fist. My belly would hang over patched khaki trousers, bending a leather belt in half. My blue work-shirt would be stained with sour-mash sweat, curling sleeve and collar. My shoes would be bound with duct tape, and you could see the corner of a jaundiced toenail through the ragged blue-striped canvas. You would suspect lice in my beard. But you would keep coming to my table, because I beat you at every game.

  On this side of the bridge, I have a flask half-filled with schnapps in my pocket, and a clutch of food stamps in my threadbare wallet. My breath reeks of week-old spinach and mothballs, my skin of rotten pages. My biceps bulge under tattoos of anchors and ziggurats, the holly-axe in black ink in the hollow of my elbow. I have a friendly rivalry with a Jewish photographer who leads with his knight, and a regular seat at the soup kitchen.

  Only Gawain would know me through that grease-glamour. Only he would see the jade-thighed giant with a Bishop in each hand. Only he would see the two Queens for what they were, would perceive beneath their eyeless crowns the twin ladies of Hautdesert. You would see a blonde waitress and her elderly aunt, but he would know her for the gargantua, the ecstatic beauty that looks both ways, the star of the sea and the apple in the garden.

  He is bound to me by this sight, the eyes that scour this gnarled wood of visions and golems like a water diviner. Between us, we construct a map of the world. In the forest of doubles, all geographies are present. The self refracts, into husband and wife, and we wait for our boy.

  Red Queen to King’s Square.

  The Chapel gapes open like a womb. The grasses tangle around it, and the walls slope into the hill. All the altars are hidden, the chalices of baleen and myrrh, the blessed water, the icebound matins of winter. But these are invisible. The Chapel leads into my body-in-hers, a hole in the earth, and it breathes in anticipation.

  I spend my nights sharpening the holly-axe, finding the nirvana of the grinding blade, back and forth, the scythe slick and wet. I am the hoarfrost, I am the elk’s matted fur, the moon vanishing behind carbon-clouds. I am ready, though I seethe at my position, within her and before him, the Object, without dimension. The smoke of my id spirals against my bones, the friction scalding my beryl-blood. Death sits in my stomach like boot-crushed cigarettes.

  He will hear the grind of my axe, all tangled with wild mint and willow, and his belly will clench. He will glimpse the womb-mouth and be struck dumb—neither of us can come too near it. It is her place, though she can never be inside it. She is not built that way. We must act out our morality play beyond its weeping borders. She can only surround us, make our bodies into fantastic cathedrals of flesh, but she does not touch the fall of this axe, or the fall of his. He must betray me, and adore her. But it is the betrayal which is more intimate, the sour congress of our bent throats, the symmetry of a head for a head.

  We are nothing but bodies of potential. The Gawain self and the Bertilak-self, moving through seasons, easing into casements shaped to us, glass blown from each step through the witchwood, the wild-limbed Wirral. To speak of us is to enter the unknown—the embryonic. We are fraternal, we are father and son, we are lovers, we are twin salmon swimming in the wife-womb, enclosed. We never cease to be her embryos, our razor-gills brushing in the fluid sky. But within these Chapel-walls we will play our game, the Rook and the Knight. It is my axe, after all, at the end of the tale.

  If I glower at the soundless church, if I wish that I were more to him than the emerald-toothed giant, it is only that, at the end of all tales, I am discontent to know my role so well. The Object should not guess its base nature until the end, its lines should not be known too well, or the questing knight will guess that it was all planned from the beginning, to secure three kisses, to secure the green swath around his hips, to secure the wound on his neck which marks him as our own.

  But perhaps there is no me at all, no Bertilak, Lady or Lord, only him, gold as a coin, his purity burning the bridge as he comes. I can no longer tell.

  He is coming; I am here. I think nothing more is required of me, except that I raise my axe. But in this Chapel of mud and root, in its sodden pews, I pray for his seraphic eyes to see me as I am—though I can no longer tell if that is the green-heart or the freckled flesh—and welcome the parting of his skin.

  Queen’s Castle.

  I am always outside the board as it was meant to be drawn. I care nothing for the mewling white-capped King. But I will not lose the Rook to my own cunning hand. I am doubled, myself and myself, who looks so like a man in his mottled red beard and skin like the white of winter fruit, the other self who knows no secret green spreading in the night like star-fed lichen. He is the singular, the Bertilak, who can move in the upper world, and hunt the fat-haunched boar, and sip tea spiced with cardamom in a chair of oak.

  Sometimes I look west and east, and the eastern face is moss-laden, full of blackberry thorns. The nose is straight and fine, laced with dandelion leaves, and the hair falls in hyssop-braids to shoulders heaped in pine boughs. Its laugh is the press of forge-bellows, and it cannot doubt its magnitude. My wife made this face, as if out of clay, and lovingly. If I could dwell always in its net of bones, Gawain could pass through me like air and I would never note him.

  But the western face is trimmed by smooth-legged ghost-boys from the wharf, with oiled braids and salt-flecked eyes. That face wears linen and light, its teeth are diamonds set in a cedar skull. It has never dreamt of the color green, it has never watched its arms grow thick with grass. It plays its board with aplomb, while the eastern limbs muddle their game with arcane rites. This is the face that longs, and weeps, and asks for release from duty. The quest bridges them, and for the breathless moment when the axe falls, before it touches his skin, I am both, I am whole.

  Between the four of us—my wife and I with our twin selves, heads bent in conspiracy under the shadows of willows and cypress—we have devised a game for our fifth. Gawain, Gawain, who has no other self, who is pale and brotherless as the moon.

  We will split him, so that he need not be alone—he will look forward and back. There will be the Gawain who was whole, whose hair was yellow as a lion encased in ice, whose troth blazed against the turquoise hood of heaven—and the wounded Gawain we will make, our girdled golem, all wrapped in gold and green, the endless green of her belly, which turns knights to feys. The haunted Gawain will return to his court, vomiting shadows into the light until he empties himself. And we will keep the gold-drenched avatar, the limpid hound, our changeling son, our lover incandescent as a scarlet star.

  I will hunt the fat-haunched boar.

  I will hunt the slack-eared rabbit.

  I will hunt the red-toothed fox.

  She will hunt him.

  And I will trade the animal hearts for his lips on mine, for the lips of the Janus-wife burning through his into me. Hands full of meat and pelts, I will take him in my arms and feed him of my body as she fed me of hers, and like a trunk of apple-wood, he will split under me. I will make a cut in his throat, small and red as a mouth, and kiss the virtue from his blood. Between our bodies, the masters of Hautdesert will alter him, as surely as bread to flesh.

  We will deliver the broken brother home in swaddling clothes, a newborn doppelganger, never again able to see without our eyes.

  0 THE FOOL

  Dagonet

  Quoth Sir Dagonet: “I am King Arthur’s Fool. And whilst there are haply many in the world with no more wits than I possess, yet there are few so honest as I to confess that they are fools.”

  —The Madness of Sir Tristram

  Howard Pyle

  I.

  Under the lime trees

  I lay my love down

  Under the lime trees I lay her

  And when she rose up

  Her mouth was so red

  Sweeter than figs,

  Her mouth, so red.

 
Tan-dara-dara-dei

  Tan-dara-dei.

  I am the Knave of Dreams. They smote the floor with a stalk of spiderwort and up I sprang, purple and green and all over sweet-smelling, and they tangled me up with bells and bade me dance.

  I am happy to dance. The floor of my birth is spangled in stars, painted gold, painted carnelian, painted azure and orange and black, and my feet upon it are light as wort-roots. I am a heart full of foliage—nothing in me is not flower, stamen, thorn, pistil, blossom, blossom, rose. I am a fool, and I am a knight, and my horse is hawthorne and hyssop. I gallop; I canter. They laugh at my silken shoes and sword of campion and rue.

  But I see the queen with her girdle of roses—the roses whisper scarlet and white, of where her hips last thrust and blushed, of how her hair whipped linen. I see the best of the knights with his plume of crocus—the crocus murmurs yellow and violet, of how he keeps his eyes open when he kisses her.

  I see, I see, and I sing, and snowdrops fall out of my mouth. But I sing of my love and my sweetheart and my kisses full tender—always mine, never theirs—and they think I do not see how their cups flame from the touch of two such burning mouths. But after all, it was a court, it was a starry floor where silk-haired apes danced and wrestled—and such things will happen among apes. Their dance was never a secret, never as high-flown a trespass as lesser poets than I would claim, just so that their verses could scan.

  I looked on the queen, too. I marked her honeycomb-hair and her thimble-bright eyes. Like all men my velvets tightened—a fool still owns his blood!—but I sang and sang, and came not near.

  Tan-dara-dei.

  II.

  She came a-walking through the violets

  And how did she call to me?

  With honeysuckle and meadowsweet and bryony.

  Tan-dara-dara-dei.

  She made a place in the wheat for me

  and what did she show me there?

  Willow whips and strawberry leaves