Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  Arthur. Guenevere.

  Nones—The Psalm of Remembering

  I walked these last days with my head skyward, until I was blinded by the bleach-boned sun and the expectation of rain. I feared it, I feared its worm-droplets burrowing under my hair, I feared the taste of it mixed with my sweat and blood-dust. I feared that it would know me, and burn at a touch, for all that I have done.

  I was not allowed eyes, or blood, or a cock. These things were not given to me the day of my oath. A sword, yes, and a title. But flesh, a tongue, desire? None of these—but when she leaned over me—she, not him, Guenevere, not Arthur—and touched me with the Lake-blade, the diamond at her throat swung forward and brushed my forehead, and I smelled her skin, which smelled of no other thing but apples, and I felt the water floating again over my face like hands, obscuring the vision of king and ceremony, until only she filled me up, the brush of her rainwater-jewel and her lion-braids hanging low like the tongues of church bells.

  And later, when I knew what her mouth tasted like, and the milk of her body, when she had miscarried twin daughters, and when her dresses smelled of us, a miasma of apple and horsehide, I could not stop, I could not breathe unless I was inside her, unless I could wend her hair in my fingers and shriek, hoarse and dry, into her neck.

  It has always been so. I am always the little boy climbing into the laps of women too big for me. And I am always surprised when they close over me, and I cannot see the sun for the ripples of their tides.

  I climbed into the lap of the desert, too, clambering over loose stones, caked in dust that should have been Aramaic, crusader’s dust, Byzantine at the least. I scrabbled under scrub-brush and hubcaps for the disc of sainthood, the nova to surround my head, the balm for my drowning, and there was nothing. There is nothing in the desert, there is nothing in women, there is no revelation to be gained by swallowing the sun or by pulling on the body of another like a shirt.

  Am I cured, then, by the birth of this homunculus, this black little cherub somewhere in my lower intestine? Should there not be a heroic burst of music, fiddles and drums and low, hooting pipes, as befits the geography? Should not the railroad keep the time, the chuffing trains play metronome to the coyote-sopranos?

  The moon is almost upside-down. I lay beneath it and it boils my skin white, white as the tail of a starving deer, white as that mange-ridden stag which bumbled into the wedding feast, gobbling the cakes and shitting noisily on the draped dais.

  The signs were there, for anyone to see who cared.

  When I left Elaine, Galahad-heavy, she saw—she saw, the most perfect of the pronouns that bury me—and Guenevere’s glance was the same as it had been on that long ago day, the day she married, when she watched a poor white deer, its mouth smeared with sugar and honey, stumbled into the feast-hall, start and cry out feebly as it was gashed by a dozen arrows. It crashed through the goblet and plate as it fell, legs spasming, spattering the altar with filth. And she watched, calmly, as they carried out the ruin of that sick beast.

  Here, too many years hence to admit, my hands still trained to the shape of her waist, I wait for it to rain. I pray, I keep the liturgy of the wolf spider, I ring out the hours on the bare rocks—I pray for the only promise I have left to show itself—that the Grail will bloom out of the desert like a blood-colored marigold, and that I will be pure enough, just enough, to fall into it and cover my body, this mewling body, the splayed thing, hung head-earthwards on a six-spoked wheel made from the twined legs of three women, this horror, cover its shame with light.

  I am not cured. I have learned to speak the dialect of the mad saint, which consists mainly of fire and bone, and printed the lexicon on my ribcage, stamped in perfectly even letters, the typewriter-hammer slamming home each time, expressing the virtue of exactitude. But when the bread and water were carried from Rome, they passed me by, deeper into the desert, towards the pepper-stand woman and the star-pack, and I, in my grubby sandals and mantis-hung beard, could not catch them. Canonization is for those who find God in the desert. I found only the smell of the earth before rain, and the memory of wetness exploding in my chest, the ecstatic drops on my blistered lips, my cracked chin.

  The moon rolled over and presented her throat to the stars; the stars closed their mouths over her white fur.

  Matins—The Psalm of the Rain

  The fruit stands packed up more quickly than I would have thought possible, collapsing into neat heaps like decks of cards. The pole-children scatter like sullen crows. And now it is truly empty here, as I imagined it, the cross-hatch of railroad tracks binding the expanse of land like a corset, the mesas that clothe the world and meet the sky, and through the heat I seem to see the air shape itself into many-towered Camelot.

  But I cannot touch it, the mirage of a well-appointed castle, a castle swollen with happiness and nobility—why would anyone claim such a thing, when we lie around its walls like corpses, genuflecting maniacally, mired in the wreck of it all?

  This is my confessional flesh, wet and kneeling even when I stand. Wet and kneeling when the moon empties herself onto my desert, my red rock and whittled canyon. Thin tracks appear over the flats, a race of rivulets, mercurial, sparse as strands of hair. Thatches of green are opening in the cliff walls like eyes, and the rush of water fills my ears, my mouth, closing over me, familiar and silent.

  There are arms now, arms in the desert, spinning like the thousand arms of copper-bellied Buddhas, spinning in cattle-horns and barbed wire and agate and gold flecks, serrano peppers burning like sacred hearts, train engines and thirst and burro-haunch, spinning until they are nothing but water, water, and she is here, she is all around me, I am inside her again, beneath the Lake, and her arms around me are as blue as those idols, Lakshmi and Kwan-Yin and the Lady, always the Lady, whose cheek presses against mine.

  Her cool skin pools in my hands, and those old black eyes croon over me as if I was a baby again, her own changeling child, down in the deep and the dark, with her and in her and over her. My mother has never said a word to me, but sung in her own liquid language, her burble and splash, her deep thrum which vibrated then in my jaw, but now quivers in my belly. I put my arms up to her, pleading, humble, begging for some surcease, some end, opening my body in supplication to her nebulous form, begging for the Grail from her hands. She gathered me to her breast, and showed me again the place to drink, tipped with black water—and I shut my eyes when she flowed into my mouth, the taste of apples and apple-petals, apple-bark and apple-sugar. I shudder, I shudder, and pull harder against her, sucking her into me, the apple-fire snaking through my veins like honeyed lightning, and the names disappear from the wind, evaporating into nothing, just meaningless letters, wafting up to the sky like ashes.

  Arthur. Guenevere. Elaine. Galahad.

  There is only the Lake, and the Lady stroking my hair with an azure hand, and my hand twisted in her lightless hair.

  When I let her fall from my mouth, and reel upwards at her moon-dark face, I am calm. She holds something in her hand, something I cannot quite see. The small of her back glints in the shadow-and-light of the water, and at the base of her spine I can see a strange root whose tendrils wrap her inky waist. It winds up, around her ribs and cupping the bottom of her heavy breast, curling at last over her shoulder and into her open palm.

  She turned to me, and the grail was nestled in her fingers—a flower which was not a cup, and a cup which was not a flower. Its squat stem opened over her hand in white stone, in bundles of white sage, in gnarled lily-roots. The chalice was not a blue blossom, and it was not a black jewel, hollowed like a gourd. Its glass-petals wavered in the current, and it held the rain perfectly still, it did not spill a drop. I looked into her mirroring body, and its light was unmistakable—the light of blood and dark caves, the light of rotted wood and iron, mother-light, the light of the womb filled with stones grinding aside. It cast no shadow, but shone simply as a star.

  I reached out for it, extending my fingers in innocenc
e, and she drew away from me, drawing the cup back into her body, under the waters of the Lake, and the light was gone from me. Her eyes (black, still black, black as dreams!) did not blink, or look away, but I knew that I was lost. I fell so far, so far. It was not for me, not her body, not the Grail. It was for the webbed hands growing in a far-off belly, and I could only see, could only watch her open herself into a Grail, and close again. I had drunk and drunk of her, but her Grail-self was forbidden to me, who had killed a deer on the day of a wedding, and clutched a hip which was a lie.

  Her hands unlocked from mine, and as fast as water disappears, as fast as the yucca bells close in the desert, her bright body receded from me, flowing back, black and blue, the wave rolling back to the sea.

  The stars became waterfalls, and the wasteland was alive with grasses blowing silver and green, brittlebrush and chicory, asters, datura, and bee-plants, verbena, milkweed, and toadflax, globemallow and Spanish needles, creosote and saltbush—and cereus, their white bowls opening with a rush of perfume. Hares snuffed at the suddenly thick air, and sleek mice pattered through the brush.

  I looked back towards the road, the great black line bisecting the desert, linear, simple, an equation.

  I opened my jaw, and the moon rolled into my mouth.

  VI THE LOVERS

  Balin and Balan

  Then afore him he saw come riding out of a castle a knight, and his horse trapped all red, and himself in the same colour. When this knight in the red beheld Balin, him thought it should be his brother Balin by cause of his two swords, but by cause he knew not his shield he deemed it was not he. And so they adventured their spears and came marvelously fast together, and they smote each other in the shields, but their spears and their course were so big that it bare down horse and man, that they lay both in a swoon.

  —Sir Thomas Malory

  Le Morte d’Arthur

  Balin

  Thou shalt strike, he said, thou shalt strike. Thou shalt strike a stroke most dolorous that man ever struck. And he put his hand, speckled like an owl’s with veins and liver spots, on my shoulder as if to absolve me, or pity me. What entrails or petrified bones did he consult? What cards, what runes, what bird-flight told him that my hand would find its way to so many throats? And why was the stroke so dolorous, of all the strokes I have made? The spear in the king’s thigh? Or you, my brother, my brother, on this crane-nested island, alone and armored all in red? My brother, my twin, my other face, how could you not have shown me the eyes I loved? How could you not have made some sign?

  But I suspect the old fortune-teller meant the spear and the wasteland. Fratricide is nothing to them, easily pardoned with the old bleach-gold words: ave maria, gratia plena, dominus tecum, benedicta tu in mulieribus—what is it to them, who never shared a womb, who never locked translucent fingers with the child whose skin was white as a mirror, who never rested within the symphony of three hearts beating?

  They all want to talk about the spear, that horrid spear, the great ash-wood thing dripping with blood, all hung with ripped altarcloths stained with sacramental wine, a paste of host wafers rubbed into the wood. Wasn’t it obvious, they say, that it was sacred? Not to be touched? It didn’t belong to you, it was plainly meant for someone purer and more pious, how could you, how could you, how could you?

  How could I? It was easy. My sword had shattered in the battle like a looking-glass, pretty and useless. Room by room I ran with the clamor of men grunting and cutting themselves into corpses rattling in my ears, until I ducked into the chapel and saw the spear.

  It was dreadful to see, slick with warm blood—but it was light, it had good balance, a solid heft. I thought nothing at all of it, I took it from its frame and sunk it into the king’s thigh—it would have been his heart, save that at the last moment my hand slipped in the blood seeping from the ash and the stroke fell awry. It went into him smoothly, as though his leg was its sheath, and I spat on his beard.

  But what is that, what is that compared to you, my brother, spitting blood into my lap? What is that king’s coarse nettle-beard next to your downy face? Oh, you were never able to grow a proper beard, it sprang up soft and sparse, moss on a classical statue, and how we used to laugh. What is his gaping thigh next to your chest sucking at the cold island wind, to the birds waiting for us to lie down and change from men to feast?

  Why should I weep for the wasteland when we are dying here, together, and the cattails are playing our dirge?

  I was there only a moment ago, it seems, in that castle, with my spear in the old man’s thigh. And then the pillars began to bleed, too, and the rafters cracked, loosing a clutch of dove-corpses—poor beasts cooked up there by the summer heat—and the thud of their bodies on the tiled floor (in the Moorish style, of course, Pellam was nothing if not stylish) was flat and wet. Then the windows gave, the glass bending horribly before shattering, a spray of pink St. Catherine’s nipples and the jaundiced yellow of a dozen angels reciting the Dialogue of the Seraphic Virgin. The shards slashed cheeks and earlobes, and the walls came down like Jericho, like the earthquake of ’06, like a blast of steel trumpets.

  And I was caught, under one of Pellam’s precious black agate busts of Mary, the back of her veil inscribed with the precise genealogy connecting his family to those barn-huddlers, out to seventh cousins and step-uncles.

  But the old man came and put his owl-hand on my shoulder, and (thou shalt strike) led me out of the wrecked manse onto the clean grass, the strawberry fields around the house, still peppered with migrants tending the irrigation and the nascent fruit. I thought he was saving me, a great hairy angel with scotch-and-water breath, taking me from the endless identical fields of the San Joaquin to the redwood-chapels, where I could heal. But he brought me to this murky delta, this chain of islands leading to your tower—how could he not tell me it was yours? And the mouse-faced little novice told me to fight the Red Knight—well, what am I for, if not bashing against things, if not doing what mousy-faced novices tell me to, what am I for, if not for the kill and the reward and the next kill down the line?

  What was the Dolorous Stroke? They will tell me it was the spear, that I should have known it for a holy relic—but I know, I know as your body weighs on mine, that the spear was meaningless.

  Balan

  Red. I was Red, wasn’t I? For the tower, for the girl with basilisk-eyes, who told me how to slip in under the weak left arm of the last knight, and get my knife up under his ribs? He was red, too, I think—it was so long ago, now. Red for her lips and her cheeks (though I had always assumed girls like her didn’t blush) red for her sweet little cunt and her masses of hair that I could wind around my arm like a sleeve. Red for her blood every quarter moon, and red for the moons when it didn’t come, and red for the little screw-faced dwarves that took our daughters away after dark.

  Did she tell you that I lead with my right side, brother? Was she tired of me? Or tired of all of us, this möbius strip, knight to knight to knight, and all red, all wearing the emblem of having gotten those hundred babies on her, all winding her hair around their elbows until her scalp was raw? Perhaps she saw a way to cut the strip—or perhaps you were simply better than I—after all, you have spent these years killing kings, and I have spent them sowing beans and lettuce.

  But your shield—it should have been the crossed swords on a field rempli, why was it the cormorant recursant volant?

  I suppose it doesn’t matter, not now.

  Do you remember when I brought the dwarf to Cornwall? Bowlegged and red-nosed—the red of vodka straights, not of the tower-girl—and his many-colored hat, his deerskin vests still stinking of the animal, his fingernails caked with dirt, always picking fleas from his pony and crushing them between those sharp claws. He was one of the dwarves who performed the trick of disappearing my daughters—I followed him to the sea, and watched him, under stars like averted eyes, put my child onto a birchwood barge, with a black sail, into the arms of a woman with hair that absorbed the moon. She
took the child in her arms, and smiled—her smile was a sudden snow on my bones, brother—and the barge vanished over the breakers.

  I caught the curdled arm of the dwarf and demanded he call back the wild-masted raft, but he would not. Instead, he told me that you had killed a boy, that it could not be kept secret. And I stood by while he accused you in that rancid cream-voice, putting no more than a hand on your shoulder and urging you to be more careful (oh, brother, we do tilt at every living thing, don’t we? Is there a tree, a sapling in all the world that is safe from us?) and eating a little bread at your side. I wanted to be back at my tower, at my red woman, at my beans and my lettuce—already I had forgotten the lost daughter.

  I wish then I had told you to stay in the valley where the pumpkins grow like little suns, where the orange trees groan with their measure of sugared gold. It was better for you there—you should never have come to the isles, to the mist and the cedars that hide countless towers, that hide countless cursed women, that hide legions of barge-fostered daughters.

  You could always take me, brother, twin, my double. I believed in the Red, I believed she loved me. I believed she loved the way her hair could wend around my arm. I believed her hair covered me when I went out to meet any other man, that it arced over my head like a wedding canopy, and that I was safe. I carried my shield with her limbs emblazoned on it, woman rampant, and I believed in the tower, and the dwarves, and the beans and the lettuce.