Myths of Origin: Four Short Novels

by Catherynne M. Valente

  An accident, I said. It might have happened to anyone.

  Yet here I stand on a shore pebbled with clams, the holiest of things clutched in the other hand—as if that hand, too, did not clamp down on her mouth, as if that hand did not hold her hip to mine. I cannot cast off this thing: if there is something in that sea which wants it, which longs for it, it would not accept tribute from me, I am a monster, a giant, a thing to be slain, a thing to stand before a real knight and be cut down in his turn. I am no bright-souled saint, to deliver the divine to the divine. I have no right even to look at my king, even to look at his blade.

  I cannot do it.

  What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but the waters wax and waves wan. Ah, traitor untrue, said King Arthur, now hast thou betrayed me twice. Who would have weened that, when thou that hast been to me as life and dear? And thou art named a noble knight, and would betray me for the richness of the sword. But now go again lightly, for thy long tarrying putteth me in great jeopardy of my life, for I have taken cold. And if thou do not now as I bid thee, if ever I may see thee, I shall slay thee with mine own hands; for thou wouldst for my rich sword see me dead.

  There is so much light here.

  I cannot bear it. I have not earned the gold of this place.

  The king was shivering, this time, when I left him, dragging that old cleaver after me, that metal which must still possess the giant’s perfect sinews, some shred of his vein-stitched heart, too small to see. He does not understand. He thinks I am a magpie, over-fond of things which glitter and shine.

  I think that while I stare out to sea like a child who cannot remember the simple task his father has set him, he will shudder his way out of this air, this salt, this sun. Bits of shell crackle in the furrow I leave—the sky sighs and blushes blue, blue as grace, blue as a hem. The moon is up, but not yet lit; it floats in the sky like a broken skull. Like a manacle of bone.

  I am the giant, in the end. I hulk on a beach-head and keen my sorrows to the surf—I am penitent, penitent, but the wind in my mouth always and forever tastes of her, the crone I left bolted to a wall, buried in her own dead infants, and my child too—was there a child? Was there not?—squirming from her with my eyes, starving into a skeleton on the wall, another bone to link her chain. I became nothing after her joints bent under me, I only walked to her prison and exchanged seats with the colossus. If the book had but opened in another place, if I had but turned another corner in that moldering castle, come upon an empty crèche, or a sack of gold, or a giant’s broken bathtub, I might have been Lancelot, a knight of blue and silver and love perfect as pearls. The queen might have looked on me with cool black eyes and thought me the best of them all, might have loved me, too. But my pages opened onto gray hair and twelve little lumps in the earth, and I am but a hulking, bent-backed shadow of Lancelot, crouched and sneaking behind him like a starving bear.

  All I have to do is throw it. Easy, yes? For any other of his boys, easy. For Lancelot, easy. I should not be the last. Some other man should remain to witness us. What loyalty can I give him who could never confess how far I fell from the gold-shot grace of his hall? The loyalty of carrying his jetsam to the sea. Am I a pall-bearer, hoisting his last living limb, or a garbage-carrier, shifting scrap-metal from one sand-dune to another?

  Could I but erase myself in this, erase my name and all my deeds in this light, scrub my sinews clean. Could I but be remembered for this only, and not that other shore, that other sea, that other self. Once, I was a good man. We were young together, Arthur and I, and the catalogue of our deeds unspooled from an angel’s mouth.

  So much light: the moon ignites itself, sparking into silver like an altar candle. In its shadow, I see—do I? Yes? No?—something break the sheen of sea. A hand, it must be a hand, whole, perfect, scaled in trout-mail, a hand from every story he told when he was drunk and sloshing over with sorrow, a hand open, waiting, a hand open and lying on a birch-trunk, axe-shadows playing on the lines of its palm, a hand, withered and wiry, clenching and twisting, caught in a cuff of bone.

  It strains towards me. Open, beckoning. Calling me to drown, calling me to kneel and serve her as I ought to have done. Palm-lines curve away from my sight, and I want to believe that the hand does not open only for the sword, that the fish-scale nails and looping threads of silver-pregnant silk do not only rise from the foam for him. I want to believe there is forgiveness in that hand. I want to believe there is grace. I want to believe that it will take my stump in its grip, which will be soaked with brine and draped with seaweed, and that in the press of its fingers will be understanding.

  Leave your giant-skin behind, that press will say, and become Bedevere again.

  The moon glints on the sword-edge as it turns, hilt over point, in the air. The hand catches it, as I could not. The ivory chain-links jangle. The blade whirls once, twice, three times. An ocean beyond any blue I have known closes over hand and blade and all, and I am alone, on a long, low shore, in a dusk so deep and bright.

  There is so much light here, unbearable light. Water which conceals a forest of crones’ hands seems to open before me, seems to promise, seems to cajole. I can almost see them in the waves, when the moon shines through them. Fingers like kelp, kelp like fingers.

  The taste of the sea is so like skin, you know.

  III.

  A wide green field, and grass like water waving. There is dusk here, and thin, over-tilled soil, and hiding hills, still those blessing hills. Clouds skitter across the hedgerows like rocks skipping on a lake. There are stones: here, there, great gray things, knuckle-knobbled. They lie where the walls once were, corners and lengths and thresholds. You can almost see the glimmer of what stood then, hovering shadow-still over the slabs.

  There is no one here. Old, dry-clawed crows hop from stone to stone, pecking at the first blocks of the cathedral, which are also the last. A wild, shag-pelted pony wanders, chewing at the tough grass. The market has gone, so too the farms and the monks and the cows. The ground refused to give up any further beans or turnips—it was hoarse and tired and coughed up its last cucumber long ago. The wells are brackish and thick with slime; a slow drip wears away the cisterns. A withered grapevine crawls along a low line of stones, hung with yellow leaves that are almost, but not yet, dust.

  The base of the old tower lasts longest—rain and wind pit and streak it until it forgets all the queens it ever knew, and dreams under the new hills, which cover the ruin like grave-mounds, snaking around the valley, eating what is left of this place, modestly drawing themselves up over the bones like shrouds.

  In a century, no one will remember what this place was called. In five, someone will say that it was seventy miles south and in another country besides. Someone else will say they have dug it up and wouldn’t you like to buy a bit of soil, a bit of rock, a bit of bone? Someone else will say there was never a castle here—the land is too poor to support a population.

  Occasionally a shepherd will try to feed his sheep on the yellow, fibrous grass that is left. The animals bleat pitifully and will not touch it: it is so bitter. The flock moves on.

  Under the blessing hills, a thousand dreaming bones shiver in their sleep.

  XX JUDGEMENT

  Morgan le Fay

  And when they were at the water side, even fast by the bank was a little barge with many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. Now put me into the barge, said the king. And so he did softly; and there received him three queens with great mourning; and so they set them down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head. And then that queen said: Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me?

  —Sir Thomas Malory

  Le Morte d’Arthur

  Away in the apple-groves I dreamed of you, and you seemed so still and grave—once, you and I ran laughing from our mother’s house, and hid in the forest, and told each other tales of terri
ble boars who would snatch us away to prisons made of pomegranate and whalebone. Even then you tried to kiss me, when the afternoons were thick and yellow, and the dust-motes swam in the air.

  I blushed—I was not brave enough.

  They took you from me—remember how you cried? You grabbed at my dress, my hair, clung to me, trying to stay. For your safety, they said.

  I cut my hair the day they took you. I burned it in our forest. The ash smelled like us.

  Why have ye tarried so long from me? Away in the mint-fields I clapped a hand against my shorn hair and learned things I will never tell you about. I did not see you again until after the crown clamped on you like a lamprey. You had married her already—and do not think I did not note her deep black eyes, so like mine.

  They will say we didn’t know; they will say it was an accident. How could I not know? How could I not see how tired you had become? How could I not see your too-thick hair that still would not obey and the three little lines in your forehead—how could I not know my brother?

  Do you remember how we walked together, in the forest which was not our old forest but was green enough for walking, for talking of grain and crops and how green sashes were in fashion at court that year, and I could hear the weariness in you, how it pulled at me like a hook in my throat? I stroked your head against my breast like I used to, innocent as a sister, innocent as a nun, and you kissed me again, and I was brave that time, wasn’t I? I was brave and the dust-motes floated in my hair which was not as long as it had been, and you moved against me in the shade of a old hollow oak, and your kisses became cries, and your cries became a son—

  Oh, my brother, I should not speak of our son. He will say he had nothing like a mother, and I do not call him a liar, but we all try, we all try so hard. Sometimes I think it is all our trying that has brought us here, all our struggling and trying that sets up all these tragic scenes.

  We grew old—did you notice? I did not. One day I had white hair instead of black and spots in my skin like a leopard. I was suddenly slow, and bowed under a woolen hood. I could not stay with you—I went over the bridge to the other world, the other Camelot that is called Avalon and hell and California. I learned to make orange-cakes, learned to make the rain come.

  I learned to look both north and south.

  And I tried, once every decade or so, to pull you over the bridge with me, I tried every colorful thing I knew to draw you: I sent my girls out into towers with red armor in their arms, I sent you a dream of a beast with a dragon’s head and a leopard’s skin, I took a boy down into the water not once but twice, just so that you would come after him. But you did not come. I sent my champion all wrapped in leaves and green, in a mask, with an axe. I sent unicorns; I sent giants.

  But you would not come. You would not come to me no matter how I lined that bridge with sweets. You loved your wife, more fool you. You loved that place. You thought, I know, that I would always be here when you reached out in the dark to find me.

  I suppose you were right.

  I have missed you so. Why could you not come into the golden country with me? We would have been happy. There would be now no cold seashore and a widow’s barge. Do not laugh—the blood is too bright in the fog. Yes, I am your widow. I have mourned you all your life.

  My brother, why have ye tarried so long from me? Away in the orange groves I once made a rind-golem of you. I piled up the wet, sour peels into something like the shape of you. I was lonely, and it was an easy trick.

  I gave it eyes and breath and life and it was golden like you, and sweet like you, and it looked at me with eyes of dusty green leaves and said:

  I forgive you.

  I forgave the orange, too, and they fell into a pile of lifeless husks, already turning brown at the edges.

  Do you see the light in the distance? That is Avalon, which is the underworld, an island in the Pacific where where I have spent my days in apple orchards and mint-fields and orange groves and rose-thickets and glistening lakes. I am your Hades, and you are my spring. I will steal you away to sit on a yew-throne and tell me stories of your knights and how you were so young, once. I will feed you pomegranates and make you a shield of whalebone, and we will chase each other through the forest on knees that do not crack or buckle, and I will be brave, always brave.

  It will be wonderful, Arthur, you’ll see, and if I was nothing but a white arm before, I am your sister now, and I love you, and I will wrap you warm in my best samite, and my white arms will carry you home.

  It is so bright, the sun on the water, on the lake, on the sea, and the dust-motes are so thick I can hardly see the shore.

  STORY NOTES

  In an odd turn of synchronicity, I sit down, by a tall window looking out on a Maine bay, to write about my first novel nearly exactly nine years after I began writing it, by another tall window, looking out on another bay, in Rhode Island. It’s pure coincidence that I started writing fiction in New England—a place haunted and possessed by its writers—and now, years down the way, I live and love and write there in a more or less permanent fashion. New England has been good to me. All those wide grey seascapes and sudden snows and endless tiny graveyards, like monuments to tribes of hobgoblins. All those winding, narrow streets and mists and cobblestones. How much like another world. How much like Europe, as seen through Poe’s eye.

  How much like a maze.

  It sounds so silly now: I wrote The Labyrinth to see if I could. To see if a piece of long fiction was something I had any facility with or ability to accomplish. I had no idea if it was. Until then I had been a poet, and not a very successful one. I had written exactly one short story, which appears, fittingly enough, as a chapter in another novel in this volume. I had no idea if I could write something longer, something more complex. I had no idea, to be honest, whether I was really a writer at all. I was planning to teach Greek at some university at some point. Like many folks right after college, I loved to write, wanted to write, but had no notion of how it was actually done. Writers seemed like superheroes to me, and the thing about superheroes is that you’re either born a mutant or you’re not. (I know that’s not really true now, but it I believed it then, and writing a novel was a kind of personal laboratory test: Did I have the mutation?) So in my little apartment, on my little computer a friend had bought me (after its predecessor had been mutilated and finally killed dead by a stray cup of coffee and a drunk freshman) because he couldn’t bear the thought of me not writing, I wrote a few words, and then a few more.

  I was twenty-two, my poems were too full of fairy tales and adjectives, and I was terribly lonely. I’d just graduated from college and moved back to the States from Scotland. My boyfriend was in the Navy, we were supposed to be getting married but I don’t think either of us really knew why, other than that the Navy offered certain concrete encouragements to do so, and I was working in Newport, RI as a fortune-teller. I was good at it—after all, it’s not much more than sizing a person up and telling them a story, guided by a few symbol-dense images, designed to evoke a feeling of surprise, recognition, and finally, revelation. And I found myself typing away between readings, in this little room in a gothic tower that used to be an armory, on a velvet covered table. The room did double duty as storage for a local theater company, and I spent my afternoons surrounded by Macbeth’s throne, Ibsenesque dressing tables, Yorick’s skull—I’m sure Chekov’s gun was in there somewhere. There, and at a local Starbucks, in case this is getting too atmospheric for you, and at a particle-board desk in an apartment with no air-conditioning, I wrote The Labyrinth.

  I wrote it quickly—I have always been fast. And when I look back I feel as though I was waiting to write it for a long time. Saving up for it, mulching. And when I actually sat down at the keyboard, I wrote what I knew to write. What formal training I’d had was as a poet, and little enough of that. I had three freshly-baccalaureated languages banging around my head and a lifetime of voracious reading, but I didn’t know the rules. I didn’t know what
I was or was not supposed to do. I didn’t know how to reign myself in in any real way. I smushed words together and I made up new ones because I liked to and it seemed to me to have meaning. I don’t think this is a bad thing—just doing it, before you know how it’s meant to be done. It was terrifying and exhilarating and I had no idea whether I could ever get it published. Later, when told it was not really a book at all, and accused of passing off some kind of neo-Beat poetry as a novel I was righteously indignant, but the truth is that’s about the size of it. I didn’t know how to write a novel. I knew how to write a two hundred page poem with no columns and my whole heart. It was, if not perfect, at least pure.

  I wrote it merely to write it, and I poured into it everything I thought I knew, all of the hurt and uncertainty and depression and mania and wildness and misery of my twenty-two years. At the time, I thought it was probably the only book I’d ever write.

  Of course, I made myself a liar almost immediately. A few days further into October, I opened up a blank file and wrote the first words of what became The Orphan’s Tales.

  It was a strange, long, inchoate summer. But out of it came everything else.

  Three Days in the Archetype Mines

  Fast forward a year and I had just gotten married, just moved to Japan, just gotten a fluffy yellow dog and a house in the suburbs of Yokosuka. I was installed in it like any housewife of 1957, meant to wait for my Naval officer husband to come home at infrequent intervals and entertain myself.