Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  And your father wept, for you never came again to the village.

  Perhaps that salmon was like me, not a salmon, not at home in the fish-skin, a wanderer whose journey to the sea ended in your campfire. I journey to the sea now, that’s where all these forms take me, slowly, against my will which is not strong enough, to you who wait in the forest, on the long pier in seagullight, at the end of the gray and foggy streets of Southern California. Because all these places are the same place, and I know with the certainty of an earnest seeker that the locus of the Grailcastle is nowhere/ cannot be sought, unless one eats the salmon and his insides are lit up by it like a silver-rose lantern.

  Last night I was a pen, and it was a sigh of movement. Motion, motion, linear and serene. My consciousness focused in the brass tip, fierce and sharp, devouring the parchment in swoops and whorls of black ink, diving like a seabird, in and out of the golden sea of paper, catching fat fish of verbs and participles in my metallic beak. And swept back, the rest of me flowed like a wave of light, into a long, creamy feather tipped in scarlet, I quivered and vibrated with the shivering motion of writing, illumination, conjugation, culmination of thought, spilled in a rush onto the expanse of page.

  I danced with myself: tip, quill, ink, in waltzing time, Viennese in the extreme, the vanilla of silken feather as it crossed highways of finely wrought paper, crescendo, denouement, a box-step of being, tip yielding to the forward motion of statement. I yielded, yielded, to the waxy cold of the scholar’s hand that deftly drove my length, his skin made phosphorescent by moonlight singing in through the iron-crossed window, shifted into cobalt by the stained glass. We swam in blue, were washed in it, purified as though floating in the hand of a river-nymph. The scholar’s lashes fractured the light, casting long, sweeping shadows on the page, blue within black within blue, bars of darkness breaking the expanse of watery light, as though waves blowing forwards and back, whitecaps of my own quick steps through the lines.

  It was relief. I did not have to create. The salve of his icy hands on my feather-spine, flowing over me in a blanket of snowy flesh, silencing my voice grown so hoarse with speaking, with screaming over the sea to be heard. He slid me through words, through the alpha and the theta, through the wide forest paths of chi, the violet shadows of omega. He made his letters carefully, small and delicate, dipping me into his little clay pot of ink which swirled around and into me in a rush of glistening darkness, like the Nile through the throat of a crocodile, glutted my mouth with black, with thick, with the absence of light.

  It flowed in and out of me with equal ease, in inklight and moonlight, and I could let it because I did not initiate motion, because I was an instrument and not the voice, the ever-sounding voice that could not afford silence for a second, else the world would fail. I could release something nameless and accept the passage of liquid through me, and its pouring of self onto a valley of dry and rasping manuscript. The glyphs formed so beautifully, shimmering slightly before drying. The cuneiform magic of their arch and fall sang through me.

  And yet how strange to be vertical, held upright like a heron poised on one leg, maintained in a tall line, the mast of a ship catching wind and expelling storm. How strange to feel inkblood draining out of me, all sensation focused downward as the vellum received my raven-throated exhalations. Horizontal is the direction of dreams, of the otherworld, of sharp-hoofed Time and the eventuality of death. Thus we lie on slabs and mounds of furs, on cots and grasses. We lie and gaze upwards into a sky-mirror, there to see ourselves become fantastic, become legend. Verticality denied me this, I could not cast upward to the sun. I was timeless in the hand of icicle-skin, without present, in motion so slidingly that pause by death or dream was inconceivable.

  Is this what you feel, out beyond the breakers, beyond the desert and the stream? You do not move, but are in motion, shaking with it, sylphlike in the water-shadows and reeds? Your tentacles and umbilici snake out over the miles of earth and sand, coils of bodylight snatching at the air to find a remnant of me still gasping in the wind.

  I want to shake you, as I have been shaken by you, to see the lake ripple behind your eyes and demand, demand, demand:

  “Why are you drawing me?”

  My voice is pathetic to my own ears, a whimpering, sheeting tears, child’s wet-nose:

  “Why me?”

  Why is my figure so circumnavigated in your mind, so realized and defined, drawn as surely as a an angel out of Raphael, shaded and colored by your palette alone? Why am I bound to you?

  It isn’t worth anything, protestation. In these metamorphoses how rarely do I have pockets for a few dismal coins, but no lump of copper or silver would make a single cry of negation a thing of substance or meaning. I know it, I know it, I know why this road was built, why it goes forward and not back, what lies at its end.

  I am peeled like a raw almond, bright green, down to the pure whiteness of fruit, so that you can take my skinless and shivering form into yourself and make me like you. Purity flows from your hand like a curling vine, and you will have me white or not at all. Purification, purification, scouring the sands of rivers dark and hushed from my arms, pulling the mosaic teeth of ritual crocodiles from my feet streaked with the black mud of the Delta. My body is restful and leaping and rippling like the lake that bore the sword, but it cannot yet birth such a thing.

  I hate what you want to make me. You encourage my limbs, seduce them into rigidity, into dissolution, into the silver aurora of a blade, beguile the line of my lips into the twisted gold of a hilt. Or is it the stem of a Cup into which you would have my body form itself? My mouth open to the heavy sky in its silent howl to mold the agate and ivory bowl of the chalice? Are the very fingernails of my hands to comprise the milky jewels of its rim?

  Yes, I am angry. I have floated like a barge of lashed birchwood on the fantasy of my Will, and you steal it from me. Every time you smile beneath the curtain of your briar-beard, every time your face goes benevolent and sorrowful my hatred rumbles like a sheet of tin. If I shrink into the corner of a cinnamon-scented café, if I bury my face in a chipped green cup so that the steam will encircle and hide me from you, you appear before me to ask in infinite gentleness if I want another.

  If I recede behind a bookcase in the Library, examining the bindings, you materialize to tell me that silence is mandatory in such places. I cannot escape you and I will never forgive you that. Only in the nights, as I flee into shapes and lines not my own do I find respite from your compulsion and sympathy. You see in me some core of purity beneath all that which does not exist. You will allow me no humanity.

  Last night I was a a glass of beer. I was foamy and golden, and slender and bitter-earthy. I think I was a microbrew of some kind. I sat on a coaster with a picture of a mallard flying low over a marsh on it. The marsh was wet with spilled bourbon. I sat for a while the woman who bought me talked to her suitor, laughing synthetically and stroking her swan-cheek with grape-colored fingernails.

  I wondered if I could taste myself while she regaled him with tales of her corporate dragon-slaying. If I could taste my own liquidlight, then I would know myself, whether the foreigners I feel was by the brewer’s design. But while I mused on the taste of myself, the woman stopped trying to be seduced and sipped me in silence. I felt the warmth of her throat, the slickness. I sighed into the heat of her body, letting desire pass over me in sunlight and moonlight and grasslight and fishlight, and I did not try to hold it with both hands. Soon I had passed of necessity from the beerself to the glasself, and I rested in my own emptiness, foam clinging to my cupbody. I was transparent, the clarity of my bones was sweet, and I reflected a myriad of eyes, like a crystalline Argus. And for a moment, in this glass in an antediluvian bar, in the hands of a sad and lovely woman whose belly cried inside her I was the grail, open and clear. For a moment which slid away as quickly as a strand of beerfoam, I was no longer my own ever-striving self, but a chalice of blown glass, yawning to encompass the sky and the sea, floating i
n dolphinlight, I was not a questing knight with tobacco-stained hands, I was you, the king in the forest, and I wept into my own lake, watching the ripples expand into fractal infinity.

  And then I was not a glass, or beer, or a lily, or a fish, and the grailight was gone. I was alone in the dark, and even the alcoholic fishermen who dread their children had dragged themselves home. I crumpled in the shade of a brick building, my belly betrayed my grief and I vomited the Pacific into the street, my throat flaming—I was the Chinese boy who drank the sea, and I gave it back and back until no more would come and still my body convulsed in anguish for the moment I could not keep. In fear for my sanity, in fear that I was a hallucinatory Fool with the black dog at my back, who dances in beerlight alone on the cliff edge to the tune of a man who may not/I want not to exist.

  And I was ashamed of this so-human act.

  Last night I was my father. I looked at my mother from above her body, and I saw, not her face, but the face of another woman, with hair like the spaces between stairs. I did not understand, and when her mouth shifted, red to pink, it became my mother’s mouth, the mouth I knew, and in my father’s skin I cowered, I crawled away from the slick of her belly, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.

  Last night I was my father, and I went into the desert. I yearned for the cup, the cup, always the cup, the thing you offer me so easily, that he could never hope to touch. His hands were hung with women—my hands are empty.

  You cannot bear any hands which remember other grails. They must be pure, they must have been waiting for you since they first turned brown in the sun. My father died in the desert like a man who stuffed his mouth with peyote, and when he returned, his eyes were full of dead lakes. He patted my head and draped himself over a cross until the chapel stank of his sour sweat and shit. He never spoke to me, not a scrap of scripture or drunken curse for my mother—in both his hands he gave me silence like a black ball of opium.

  But last night I squatted in his skin as though it were a sacred hut, I breathed the sage-smoke rolling off of his bones, I drew patterns in the sand which had settled on the roof of his stomach. I put my toes into the water that filled him, and writhed with him under the rain-bringing moon. I was sick with the thickness of him, I asked for nothing but escape, I longed for my salmon-skin—yet I had swum to the stream of my birth, as a salmon must, and the water choked me. I spluttered and flailed in the wake of it, trying to touch the rim of my mother, somewhere in his desert geography—but she was not there. I was not there. We did not exist for him; we were not the saguaro and the yucca. This is what I understood in his marrow—I was encased in a vial of water, and he wanted only sand.

  And now I seek the waters of you, because no black-eyed queen ever looked at me with fire cutting her fingers.

  In the cell of him, floating over my mother and the painted desert, I tasted the apple-bile of his sorrow, and forgave that cairn of murdered words. Perhaps I would not have survived that gaze.

  He should have known better than to seek you in the wild—a cup is a thing of the city, it is civilized, it sits at a hundred thousand tables and travels from wood to mouth. A cup is only needed when joined hands at the river have failed, when an adobe hut is raised up, and a stone oven shaped into the wall, and dried flowers thrown into a pot. He sought the Lady, I seek the King.

  Perhaps there is no difference, perhaps the King wears a gown of river-white, and the Lady binds her breasts under an ermine robe.

  Last night I was Lancelot, and I fathered myself on a woman I hated, and I begged forgiveness from a lake of night.

  So this is the end.

  I walked with heavy feet to the end of the pier last night, and looked into the sea which is the rim of the western world, and wondered when I accepted that this was inescapable. I still hate that you did not think me strong or clever enough to turn from this road. (And of course I was not.) But there on the pier was a little fisherman’s hut, white paint curled back by sea wind, and it glowed softly in porcelainlight.

  I stood outside for a long time, and the door seemed to grow to enormity, to much for me to dare. I felt and still feel that this is all too big for me, that I am a salamander before the throne of the King of Spears. The threshold mocked me, and whispered that I was a very clever child, the strongest and cleverest of my brothers, but I would never, never be wise, there is no forest deep enough to purify me, my madness will last and last. So in the end it was pride that drove me through the door, that I would show myself to be pure enough, just barely, to finally see you.

  And there you were, not so powerful-looking, an aging man, but not infirm, the gold of your hair not quite conquered by snow. You sat in a deep leather chair, your left hand held an ancient fishing-spear, your right held a cup of living glass. Yet in the lines of your body there was a darker shape, a liquid self moving behind the lines of your skin, holding black-tipped breasts out to me with both hands, like a sacrifice.

  You looked at me with laughing eyes, and I saw that sleek shape moving behind them. I wondered then if I saw you with a beard because I could only give myself over to a father, to a King, and the rest was beyond my touch—pure enough for you, but not for her. I suppose it doesn’t matter, in the end—if you are doubled, if you are twinned, I will know in a moment, when the chair is mine, and I vanish into the glass.

  You could not speak, that was not the ritual, it was mine to ask the question you have desired. But you laughed because you understood, of course. You know the nature of quests. You know that this has been the question, all these words to you on the road to this temple/hut. You know that my fighting has burned this body hollow, and made it ready for this. You know that the end of the quest is silence, only the quest is the sound and dancing and galloping toward.

  And so I reached out, able to do nothing else but dare this thing, and touched the rim of the cup/lake.

  And the burning filled my vision.

  And the sea swallowed my voice.

  XVI THE TOWER

  Mordred

  For King Arthur lay by King Lot’s wife,

  the which was Arthur’s sister, and gat on her Mordred.

  —Sir Thomas Malory

  Le Morte d’Arthur

  The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions in the field:

  I. Moral Law

  Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler,

  so that they will follow him regardless of their lives,

  undismayed by any danger.

  The morning before the war begins, there is not much to do but sit on a sand-choked embankment and tell yourself lies about how you got here.

  I am a good liar. I have always shown a talent for it. When other children were discovering that they could paint or sing as though their little throats were coated in gold, I reached within my own skin and drew out a body of falsehood, a chalice-eyed homunculus with beautiful fingers, clasped together in saintly gesture. This other boy was more pleasing than I, he stood straighter and rode with thighs more steady. When he spoke, glittering ladies patted his scarlet cheek and called him clever; when I spoke, they yawned and asked if perhaps the room had not become uncomfortably cool. It was not long before I had given myself over entirely to him, his baroque, mincing speeches, his fantastic tales of his own marvels, his great strategies—oh, the strategies, the ambitions! Laid out like a litter of manticore at his bedside, how they grew and grew, and how their tails bulged with venom. The lies lay over my tongue like a melt of stained glass, and I was praised, I was praised for them.

  I came to the desert and lied a war into the golden air. The other boy rode very high on a brown horse and hoisted a banner into the sun-hung sky. He made it look beautiful; he made it look like a war—everything glittered as it ought, everything spangled and shone the way it will before blood and lymph come slithering out onto the thirsty dust. I walked the walls—ah, those light-swallowi
ng walls!—I walked the ditches and the drainage pits, I watched the city chuff out its jeweled effluvia and starve for more than it could eat. I came to the fat city of skinny angels and tasted the salt of its sweat, and my tongue was as crystalline with lies as ever it was. The city shivered in delight; lies are her peculiar fetish.

  Besides, men would hardly know how to fight a war if it did not look like a war, if the lies did not line up in formation, if lies did not sit about with rifles and knives leaning against trees, chewing black bread, cracking jokes and knuckles and hiding the shaking of their hands. If there were no lies floating through the morning fog—that strangling, choleric fog, even in the desert, even so, when the sea is not so far off, when behind the bolt of mountains sailboats in turquoise marinas dip their prows like women’s needles through the surf, that filthy, shit-sludge fog, nicotine-wet, sops up all imaginable sound—if lies did not prick through it they would not even know to blow their trumpets twice, three times. Lies stick to everything, even the sun, forcing that warm, balding brow below the horizon like the victim of a drowning.

  My little fire is a recalcitrant smear of red in the brown and the gray, the unfathomable gray, and the scrub crackles on the coals, manzanita and pine, sending up a fragrant, clutching smoke which is, in the end, indistinguishable from the fog.

  The other boy, with his crow-tongue a-grin, says that we are here, in the mountains where the river Cam flashes green and gold and the aqueducts glare straight and narrow through the land like cutting knives, because our father is wicked, and it is the duty of all those who carry light in their bellies to thrust something very sharp into the wicked. He says that it is the natural way, for the wild and toothed to tear apart the house of order before it freezes the world into statuary, before it spasms in a glut of compulsion, and all men walk gray and dull, in lockstep, abased before the altar of chivalry. He says our father is a goat dressed up in a tin tuxedo, and the sun ought shine on a finer beast than that, a jungle-beast, a desert-beast, a thing with red teeth and hindquarters rampant. We are here, he says, because we are the apostles of a savage virtue, and we must teach it to the old debauch.