Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  I suppose I did, and yet now it seems as though another man asked to be seated at that table, where no Beast would ever rest its beryl hindquarters. Someone young and blonde with knuckles like fat golden rings—yet I know my beard is red. What color could it be but red? My face sprouts fire as the Beast’s does. We are brothers, sinewy and smoldering old goats trundling about on a mountain neither of us can name. Who was it that clapped Arthur on the back and ate roasted rooster’s combs? I suppose it was me. I am a Pellinore, the only one living. So, logically, it must have been me.

  Perhaps I only wish it were another man, so that I would not now be this old walnut-husk, so that I would not have walled myself away from the Beast and the storm-sky’s clamor for all those years. Perhaps I once had yellow hair, and I have forgotten it.

  I never told Arthur whether I am older or younger than he—at times I played the lad, at times I stood for the Merlin-that-was, the Merlin-before-Nimue, and put my hand on his shoulder—though it is not the owl-clutch he remembers, my hand is much too heavy for that. But it held the old man’s place for awhile.

  Do you remember, Arthur, the night you, too, dreamed of the Beast? How you said it had a pelt like a leopard—patently ridiculous, of course—and the feet of a deer—absurd!—the haunches of a lion to top it off—of all the preposterous theories! And you clutched me, sweating, clammy, and whispered that a brother had got a child on his sister, and that child was the Beast, and the brother was punished, punished, in your dream he was punished and the Beast ate him whole.

  Oh, my boy. You come to your Pellinore and tell him to wear the band of a dream-interpreter, and I know you are sorry, I know you wish it had not happened, but you needn’t tell stories about Beast to torture yourself. He is beyond such silliness. And I told you not to fear—I had hunted him for years and would take it up again for you, and I would ask him myself if all children of a brother and a sister were wicked. As if the Beast knows a thing about it, but it seemed to calm you, and that one night, you feel asleep in my arms, like a son.

  I cannot go back now—too many graves, fanning out like sunflowers around its grounds, too many wraiths in the halls, spaces whose edges still burn like cigarette-scars, spaces where people we loved used to walk, and gossip, and trade their cinnamon for lumps of brown sugar. All the men of that place are professional pallbearers now. That great, gabled hall is a death-barrow. It is a mausoleum, tightly shut, scented with bergamot and myrrh. Nothing can live closed inside.

  The Beast, oh, my Beast is life. The dragon, its skin hot as a baking stone, its tender snout nosing the air, the space where its skull-plates meet pulsing in an almost intimate rhythm, so that you almost feel ashamed to witness so private a flutter. Nothing about the creature admits the existence of cold—the pouched flaps which might be wings chuff a sirocco off of its aerie, a rush of brown and ochre nest-shreddings. And I, in my lowland hutch, speculating to an audience of three dim stars and a titmouse as to whether the Beast might have some kind of fur over its spine, as smaller lizards are reported to have, fat tufts of hoary tangles—and how would this affect any latent or actual flight abilities?

  But the castle beyond the foothills spattered with blackthorn and honey-hearted oak, the castle where the lights have gone out in the tall windows? That is a dead place, and I would never have found the Beast if I had stayed to die with it.

  . . . most lizards and many other species of reptile have the ability to rejuvenate their tails. The bright coloration of the tail, ranging from vermillion to emerald and into various shades of gold, in some species diverts the attention of predators to the expendable appendage, aiding in escape. (Image Ψ)

  Fracture points on the tail bone allow the tail to easily break away. In some lizard varieties, (Image Y), the tail can regenerate itself many times over after detachment, often in entirely different patterns of color than the original tail.

  Beast, Beast, when you leave me, I am alone.

  When I forget its color—I am almost certain it is green—when I forget that the lining of its nasal passage is coated in opaque mucus which protects the tender tissues from any stray spires of baroque flame, I wake up in the night, shivering, sweating, groping for my notes.

  I think, when I was at Arthur’s candled hearth, I did not sleep at all. The mornings were all pale as the thronging winter and twice as polluted, scarred like a map, and beyond that line there were monsters, terra incognita, alien shores of bleached dinosaur bones, lizards like gods, and I sitting lotus-full in their center, thick as meat. And I was not off the map, I was choked with parchment, when I should have been where I belonged—with the monsters and the deep, outside the grip of longitude.

  But Arthur was a beast himself in those days—the tawny bear-king slapping lazily at bees with a massive paw. I contented myself with measuring his stride and analyzing the musculature of his broad back—I told myself that was enough, to watch the lion lying on his stone slab, and his mate languid in the shadows. I told myself that there were no dragons, or if there had once been, they were long extinct, long extinguished, dead as diamonds.

  But at night, I would wake and my lungs would seize, I would scramble for my cliometer and hold it to my heaving chest. I would calculate the Beast’s probable heart rate, its respiration, its molting-day three years hence, until I was calm again. As time went by, more and more recitations were necessary to calm the panic burbling up in me like cauldron-brew. I was not Merlin, I could not be the old man of the law-bench and banquet-hall—I could only be the old man of the mountain, and that only by the grace of the Beast.

  I longed for the mountains, the mountains which hunch and huddle like my own body, clutches of wild ponderosa and star thistle grinning in the knee-joints and elbow-sockets. I longed to sniff the baroque, three-pointed footprint of the Beast, to measure it precisely and note the length of the talons in my notebook. I longed to smell a fire gobbling up the green branches, I longed to sleep on hard ground and wake to the sound of a tail whisking by, just a little further on, always a little further on.

  I didn’t even have to creep, or muffle my footsteps. By the time I heard the great gate swing closed behind me, there was no one left to care that I had gone.

  The scales of certain lizards are shaped like small beads. Only the beaded varieties are venomous; therefore, if one can get close enough to a specimen or obtain a corpse for study, this can be useful in taxonomy. Of course, dragons have no need of venom, being capable of generating streams of multicolored fire from glands corresponding approximately to lymph nodes in humans. My opponents maintain that there is a relationship between reports of fire and reports of venom—that the two have somehow become confused in folklore, and that the image of the great-winged, fire-breathing dragon so popular in the peasant psyche is, in fact, a small, bead-scaled creature no more than three feet in length capable of producing a venom which may or may not paralyze small vermin such as mice and voles.

  It is always dangerous to leave the mountains.

  If one leaves them for Camelot, one may at least be sure that one travels form linear space to linear space, that molecules and sky-motes will behave approximately as they do elsewhere.

  Any other destination is suspect.

  When I first went down from the granite cliffs, when I despaired of my Beast, when I had lost the trail of its scent (bayberry and sulfur with an underwaft of jimson weed) in the Butterfly Forest, I had meant to go to Camelot. After all, where could I find better maps, better records of past hunts, better genealogical archives which might have recorded sightings long since forgotten by the peasants—in short, I meant to go for the purposes of research. I say I meant, for Camelot did not rise to meet me, as the tales assure one that it does, cresting the hills with its golden turrets to the sound of trumpets and of flutes—I found darker places before I found Camelot, places of red smoke and hushed voices. The path which was supposed to lead up the fabled hill until Camelot itself took hold and laid itself out before the weary traveler—me—li
ke a new bride lost itself, curled on itself like the tail of the Beast, and swallowed me up. I hardly knew the pebbles underfoot had changed before I could no longer guess at the geography of England, could no longer spin my compass to the capitol.

  Around me, before I could draw breath, was a town of oak-shacks and dark seal-heads floating grim in the morning, a town full of trickling wells and streets that blew dust at themselves. I could see no one, only the murk of dun and gray creeping along empty, plantless ways. I rode into the Underworld on the singing angle of my golden sextant, eyes open, charts asplay, and yet, and yet. I suppose I ought to have known. The place wore all the vestments of hell: smoke closed around me, red as eyes—floats of yellow-gold flared and sputtered in the waft, and my feet crushed the moss, and my fingers groped for a gate. But there was no gate, no lock like a gape-mouth slavering for its key. There was no dog—I was quite hoping there would be a dog. I would have liked to scruff it behind the ear and call it a nice pup, a good chap. I would have liked to take dictation, to note down its long tale of service and meals of damned marrow thrice daily. But there was no asphodel, and no moon-eyed wolf. I lay down on a couch of flesh, and there was a discord of music, a silvern jangle that slid over scales as though cut by them. Smoke vomited itself from glass pipes, from ivory lips, from pools of paint like open veins. I fell, I fell so far, and the green fields of Dover frayed into emerald string, into the spines of serpents corkscrewing in the airless sky, slips of tongues like letters snapping through their phonemes. I seemed to see a woman’s face above mine, her black hair drawing its curtains around my jaw, and she put a flute of whalebone into my throat. When she blew, I filled with her white exhalation, fat as bellows, and my navel burst in a spray of star-sputum.

  I fell. I fell so far. And the Beast was there at the bottom, a belly as big as the world, banded in nacre, rolling on his back, a beached turtle on black sands.

  He did not look at me—of course not. I was a mote in his perfect eye, flashing in the dim, yes, but no more than a flash. His forelegs clutched at the downbreath of Stygian air, mottled green and yellow as cholera—his bunched hindlegs flexed lazily, muscles bulbous-blue. As if in water, his jaws opened and shut, clacking together desultorily, without hunger or malice. At last I saw the pink of his cheeks, his gullet, his marvelous tail slapping heavily on some unguessable floor. A leathery plume sprouted braggart-red from his head, and oh, it was so like the plumes of those poor, ruined dolls winding down their clockwork way, fused to horses, prancing in a jerky sort of grace towards their fossil-frieze.

  It was so like the plumes I wore.

  Beast! Oh, Beast, when you leave me, I am so lost. I cannot paste the pages of my manuscripts together to make anything like your shape. If you were to look at me—I do not ask for more than a glance!—I would be young again for you, a boy hunting his favorite lizard across the hot stones, pricked over with bright burrs. I would be gray of eye and gold of hair for you, the height of scientific fashion. I would be hotheaded and rash, I would forget the cubic measure, I would forget, even, to note the circumference of your jeweled skull. I would be just your own lagging lord—but what is a Beast without his Huntsman?

  Surely we are connected, the Beast and I, surely within that geologic musculature he knows he is mine, my Quarry. Surely his bones know that he is captive, that we are locked together in step and follow—it cannot be that he has ambled on his way and never heard a desperate pant not far—not far at all—behind.

  I fell. I fell and he never glanced up, never heard the whistle of my descent, of the air through all my ticking instruments. I only fell, and fell into him, into the globe of his stomach, and the skin, the spotted, spackled, glowing skin, only gave a little before breaking under the needles of graphometers, refractometers, hydrometers, cliometers, galvanometers, and azimuths, all bristling from me like natural defenses, and they tore into him, they opened him up like an egg, and I went down into the swim of his viscous self, I went down through the banded gate, and my face was erased in the acid of him. He saw me then I am sure, I know it. His eye rolled downward to me, expressionless, yes, but he witnessed my rapture, I am certain, I am certain. In his entrails primordial I was helpless, and his black blood pooled around me like a sea lapping against a ship whose loss is forgone. But he saw the wisps of my hair and the earnest gleam of my study, even proud—he must have been proud!—to allow me to finish my work, intimate, close.

  He extended that elegant snout to me and his nostrils flared sulfurous-sere. I touched it—I touched it with awe, and the warmth of his tympani-heart barreled up beneath me, slamming a sun back and forth between its sixteen ventricles, and I was a part of that violent sway.

  And then my face was wet, and the woman with curtaining hair was emptying a copper flask over me, and thin-lipped she dragged me to a veiled door. The Beast was gone, the vision detonated in a splash of algae-ridden water. His belly was sewn up without me, and I could not even find his scent in the murky air. There was no gateless void, there was no endless fall, and on my instruments there remained not one drop of precious blood to tell me its secrets. I stumbled, no better than a drunk bereft of tavern, and the black-haired creature flung me from the door, into the wood and the wold again, with nothing but mewling magpies flitting stupidly ahead of me.

  Beast, when you leave me, I am so lost.

  Lizards utilize a combination of high heat, fermentation and stomach microbes to break down their food. Dentition is a secondary mechanism, as the fiery interior of their bodies is fully capable of both killing and in some sense cooking their prey. Teeth are used only to crop large pieces of meat for ingestion and subsequent incineration.

  The structure of their gastrointestinal system is similar to that of herbivorous mammals including a greatly enlarged, elaborate colon, almost baroque in its labyrinthine design. Seared flesh passes through the small intestine into the large, cup-like anterior colon. The lizard colon contains many folds and partitions which act to slow the passage of flesh, giving increased time to fermentation and cremation while allowing time to work on the ingested foodstuff by the microbial inhabitants of the colon (protozoa, bacteria and nematodes).

  The interior of a dragon is a cathedral constantly engulfed in holy flame, and the flesh of the devoured lies within, consumed in that incorruptible holocaust.

  The wood is cool and pale; ashes from my night-fire still comb through the air, delicate as sheets of vellum escaped from some celestial library. There is gooseflesh. There are cracked lips. I crouch in the crevice between granite and juniper, and my knees creak—of course they creak. That is the office of an old man’s bones.

  It has been weeks since I found even a snapped branch that might tell of the Beast’s passing. I sold all my instruments in that strange and dreaming town, to the perplexed palms of a blacksmith who will surely melt them into slag, and then into horseshoes. Somewhere a horse will clop its way from stable to hall on hooves of golden calipers and brass clockworks. I am all that is left—but I am pure, I am ready for him, I have nothing more to learn—I only ask to be in the presence of that skin-heat, that baleful eye, to in truth be in his orbit, just a small, unassuming moon, content to radiate his verdant light.

  In the black-cake soil I illuminate, monk-intent, the text of my Beast, his lymph-canticle, the scripture of his taxonomy. The loam is my bestiary, and he is the only inhabitant of my dust-opus. The curve of his spine is there, the web of his toes. In the mire, his plume is enshrined, his terrible belly is recorded for the rain and the fog to witness. Tales of his ferocity, of his mercy, of his depthless hunger, insatiable, incomprehensible. The folklore of his birth is etched in pinecone and birchbark, the fire-birth of the cosmos, and he a crystalline sphere of ineffable green. I am his lonely scribe, who was once—but who can remember now?—the scribe of that other plumed beast, that other strutting sire at play in his menagerie, galloping among the tigers and serpents and great, graceful deer, the dancing bears and the hoopoe, the salamanders and the cro
ws snapping at the tendons of winter.

  I could not bear the noise. The contests of mating, the territorial screech. And in the end, I could not bear the meathouse slaughter, the shanks of wildcat piled red and dripping, the pearlescent feet pickled in so many glass jars.

  The Beast is blessedly silent, he has no hooting language, no raucous claim. And if I have any fealty left in me, it is owed to the gilt-lined innards of the untouchable leviathan.

  I will wait, and I will walk in the ash-strung wood.

  And in the distance, there will be, before the end, a green flash in the mere.

  IV THE HERMIT

  Galahad

  Then took he himself the Holy Vessel and came to Galahad; and he kneeled down, and there he received his Saviour.

  —Sir Thomas Malory

  Le Morte d’Arthur

  Last night I was a lily, and very purple. I sat on the water with my toes in the silt, and my petals curled darkly up at the juniper forest. Thick violet lips reflecting the light of flickering fish deep in the lake, surfacing to nibble at my lily-flesh. But I do not taste like a dragonfly, and they never eat me entire.

  A flower is very still, still in a way I can’t imitate in the suntime. I grow legs and fingers and breasts, and lost my purpleness. I begin to notice imperfections—my coffee cup is chipped, I haven’t made my bed in days, I stumble under the almost-raining sky like a doomed gazelle. And oh, the ocean here is not so wide or deep as I had hoped. It does not swallow me, or demand, or promise like the ocean I remember. When I am a lily I am not disappointed, the lake moves through me and I can let it.

  You understand, of course. You know the nature of lakes. Water passes over you in sunlight and moonlight and grasslight and fishlight and you love it for its passage. I envy you your capacity for silence, and waiting. Do you know the Question already? Or does it wait in your mind like a hibernating bear, ready at the precise aural combination to stretch its furry legs and roar out its relief? Funny how “question” contains the word “quest” inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars. You want me to push towards you, to believe in you, to want you and strive to achieve you. To be bent upon your purpose and wear white robes, passing though trees like a fiery-eyed wraith, filled with your flame. To encircle the globe with desire for you.