by Lavie Tidhar
‘Your name is Pellinore?’
‘It is.’
‘I’m Arthur.’
‘A pleasure, I’m sure.’
‘Sir Pellinore was Uther’s page,’ says Merlin. ‘Your father’s, Arthur.’
At this Pellinore goes still. ‘This is the boy?’
‘It is.’
‘Has it really been that long?’
‘It has.’
Pellinore examines Arthur’s face. The king bears with the scrutiny.
‘You have something of his, for sure,’ he says. ‘It’s in the eyes.’
‘I never knew my father.’
The words must hurt the king, Cath Palug thinks. There’s something so hard inside him, some cold unfathomed core, but still. He is a boy and boys do hurt. Boys need their fathers.
Cath Palug yawns, feeling sad. She strokes the face of water. The image shimmers, breaks. She’d had a mother and a father once. So many deaths, she thinks. They stay with you. Even if you didn’t know them – especially then, perhaps.
The picture shifts and changes. A castle room, high in the air, a queen sits by the window. Her long hair is like a dark waterfall. She gazes out at the moon, Sister Moon. The queen turns and sees the cat.
‘Hello there, Cath Palug,’ she says, and smiles a gentle smile.
‘My Lady Igraine,’ the cat says, and bows her head respectfully.
‘Stalking the dreams and the what-could-have-beens again, cat?’
‘I grow old and fat, my Lady Igraine, and I find watching the world from a distance more soothing than action.’
The lady nods. ‘Only the lucky grow old, Cath Palug,’ she says.
The cat hisses. ‘The game’s the game, my lady.’
‘The game’s the game.’ The lady smiles. ‘And what have you seen in your night-time wanderings?’
‘I saw a boy who would be king.’
At that the lady’s face turns sad. It makes the cat sad, too, though she does not know why it should be so.
‘Is he well, Cath Palug? Does he eat?’
‘He is well. He is eating sausages.’
This makes the lady smile, and for that the cat is happy.
‘Sausages? But that’s ridiculous, cat.’
‘I like sausages,’ the cat says. ‘And he looks like he is in need of fattening.’
‘Is he too thin?’ the lady says in worry.
‘He’s like a sapling, who might yet grow into a tree.’
‘Is he handsome? Does he yet have a wife?’
‘He is no cat, so I’m sure I couldn’t say, my lady. But he has a wizard with him.’
At this the lady’s face twists in hate. ‘He is alive still, that one?’
‘And scheming in that way that wizards have.’
‘I wish him dead.’
‘You do not like him?’
‘He took from me a thing I loved.’
The cat nods. Her paw trails in the water. ‘Perhaps he meant well…’ she says, but the water’s disturbed and the Lady Igraine vanishes.
The cat naps a while. When she awakes the scene is once again the forest, but the fire in the circle’s dead and the sun’s out, and Arthur and Merlin are rising.
‘Where did he go?’ King Arthur says.
Merlin shrugs. ‘You cannot keep him long in place, my lord. Sir Pellinore alone among the strong has given up his power. He would have been a king unto himself, your father knew it.’
‘What makes him go, then?’ Arthur says.
A look of bewilderment steals on the wizard’s face. ‘I think it love, my lord.’
‘For that, that thing?’ Kay says.
‘When Pellinore looks on the Questing Beast it is no thing he sees,’ says Merlin. ‘It is a child. Vulnerable and hurt, too easily perhaps. Yet not unloved.’
Arthur says nothing to that. But he grips the hilt of his sword, and his knuckles are white with the strain.
At last he lets go.
‘I wish him well,’ he says.
‘We have a long way still to go, sire,’ Merlin says.
‘Then let’s be about our business.’
And so they mount and ride back on the road.
The water ebbs.
The picture, for a time, is gone.
34
When she’s awake again and watching it’s another landscape and another day, she’s almost sure of it. Those boys on their horses look a little more tired, but still like boys playing with swords, out on the glens or by the stream; like boys are wont to do and girls too, until they’re stopped from dreaming in this way.
‘We can stop here.’
‘It’s pretty.’
‘It’s too cold,’ Kay complains.
They’re up a hill somewhere and it is north, the cat thinks they are getting closer. They set up camp against the side of the hill and the wizard lights a fire and prepares water to boil. Sir Kay skins a hare. Arthur rises, stretches, looks up at the horizon where the sun, gloriously, is yet to set. The sky is blue and dotted with white clouds, and the sun paints it with strokes of reds and swirling violets.
Merlin glances up. ‘Don’t wander too far,’ he says.
‘This is my land, Merlin. I shall go where I please.’
‘The land does not yet know it, sire…’ Merlin mutters, but too quietly for the king to catch.
He watches as Arthur bounds up the hill. Gestures to the bodyguards. ‘Follow him.’
The cat leans over the pool, interested now. She smells something in there, a familiar scent.
Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, that sort of thing, in a simmering stew. Witchcraft. Sorcery. The cat’s tummy rumbles.
Arthur strolls through this green and pleasant land. Purple thistles and bright yellow gorse, and heather and bluebells and primrose. He breathes in the fresh air. Somewhere nearby, the sound of running water, and he finds the brook and follows it downhill on the other side, until he comes to a small waterfall.
Oh… The cat thinks, and she places her head on her paws and stares. Oh…
He comes to the ledge above the waterfall. The stream falls over the edge and down to a small rock pool.
Under the waterfall, quite naked, stands a woman.
She looks up at Arthur and smiles. Her black hair is wet and long and clings to her back.
The boy, Arthur, seems quite drawn to her heavy bosoms.
Or perhaps it is the triangle of coarse black hair below.
‘Hello,’ the woman says. She’s cast in glamour, Cath Palug realises. When she smiles her teeth are like a shark’s, but the boy king cannot see it. Her eyes are like a fish-hawk’s but the boy sees nothing but two dreamy pools in which to drown.
Now, what are you playing at, Morgause? the cat thinks.
‘Hello,’ the boy says.
His voice sounds thick, the cat thinks. Strangely uncertain.
‘Come down,’ the woman says. ‘The water’s nice.’
The boy, almost comically, looks from side to side. Me? his face seems to say.
‘Yes, you!’ the woman says, laughing.
Arthur takes a step and then another and soon enough he’s sliding down to the bank. He stops there, staring. Transfixed.
It makes Cath Palug think of being on heat. A weird, uncomfortable feeling, an urge cats cannot fight. When it comes upon you, you are helpless in its thrust. The body wants what the body wants.
But still. The boy can’t be this dumb?
‘Take off that heavy sword,’ the woman says. She rises from the water and the drops glint on her body. She comes to him. With expert fingers she undresses him. He stands there naked as the day he was birthed, but his blade is fully grown.
‘My, my,’ Morgause says. Her fingers trail down his stomach, find his hardness, squeeze.
The boy gives a gasp of surprise or something like pain.
She leads him by his sword into the pool.
My, my, the cat thinks.
What then transpires is the sort of
thing that humans often engage in. It involves swords and sheaths, and so on, and there’s thrusting and counter-thrusting and lots of grabbing and grunting and pulling and heaving and, well—
‘There he is!’ comes a shout. Up on the hill, three men silhouetted against the setting sun. They pull out weapons and start to clumsily run. One stumbles on a rock and falls. Cath Palug almost feels sorry for him.
In the water, the Lady Morgause smiles and she bites the boy’s neck and he shudders and heaves and then it is, apparently, over. The boy stands there looking a little confused and a little bit pleased with himself, his sword drooping now, and dripping too, and the lady looks very pleased with herself for some reason. Then the men finally make it down but tumble over the edge and fall into the water and the lady flicks her fingers and they turn into voles.
They stare around themselves in some bemusement.
Then a crack of lightning out of nowhere, and Merlin materialises on the bank. He stares accusingly at the two in the pool.
‘I told you not to wander off by yourself!’
‘Well, hello again, Merlin.’
‘Morgause. I see you’ve had your fun.’
‘One must get it where one can.’
‘You didn’t bleed him dry?’
‘A little taste is all, Merlinus. He really is a meal and no mistake.’
‘Arthur, can you even hear me? Arthur!’
‘What,’ the boy says irritably.
‘Put your clothes on.’
Morgause smiles wide. ‘No second round?’
Merlin thunders, ‘Begone, witch!’
‘Fuck you too, Merlin. I’ll see you soon.’
She turns into a fish and swims away, vanishing down the brook with the setting sun glancing off her silver scales.
‘What in all the worlds possessed you, Arthur!’
The boy smiles goofily and doesn’t answer.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
Merlin waits as Arthur dresses. He snaps his fingers as an afterthought and the voles transform to men again.
‘You lot are useless,’ Merlin says.
The men are wiser than to reply.
‘This escapade will cost you dearly,’ Merlin says.
‘How so?’
‘The seeds of one’s inevitable destruction lie always in the family,’ Merlin says. But he does not elaborate, and Arthur doesn’t ask. Perhaps, the cat thinks, he simply doesn’t care.
She yawns. The picture shimmers, fades. The Hall of Seeing’s dark and quiet and the pools cast their shimmering images onto the ceiling silently. It’s rather beautiful.
Far in the distance she can hear the mermaids singing, each to each.
35
When she awakes again the song is gone and the hall is quiet and she tiptoes from pool to pool in search of something interesting to watch. There in the light of roaring flames in a grove dance Northern men, white savages inked with tribal scars as a druid chants into the flames and throws dried roots and dried dead things into the fire, evoking some nameless, dreadful deity in search of ancient power—
Oh well, she’s bored. She moves in search of something else. There, a battle between Arthur’s knights and Outham’s men, somewhere in the boggy marshes of the Tamesis estuary. Outham’s Franks are grizzled and experienced, but Arthur’s knights are reckless and they are too dumb or too poor to fear death. Agravain of the Hard Hand leads them.
Cath Palug watches for a while, but the sight of dying men no longer excites her much. For what it’s worth, Arthur’s men appear to be winning. Well, good luck to them and all that. She tunes it off and searches, but a worthy scene, annoyingly, eludes her.
For a moment, something, somewhere. An innocent young woman by a stream, and the sun lights up her hair, reflecting in her eyes, as the girl sits in the meadow and it is like an eternal spring, and perhaps, Cath Palug thinks, it’s always spring when we are innocent and young. The girl holds a daisy, a beautiful yellow-and-white daisy, and as she tears the florets off one by one she chants softly, ‘He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me little, he loves me a lot. He loves me to passion, he loves me to folly, he loves me not at all.’ And she repeats, ‘He loves me, he loves me not…’ until all the florets are torn and strewn upon the ground and the girl, laughing, twirls the yellow disc of the flower head on its stem until it rises in the air, for just a moment, and seems to fly.
This girl, so new to womanhood, she must be someone, the cat thinks.
‘Now, that is interesting,’ her mistress says, turning up behind her.
The cat purrs. The lady strokes her scales and fur.
‘And how has my little kitty been occupying herself?’
‘I watch the world beyond the walls of sleep,’ the cat tells her.
‘And what do men and their affairs concern you?’
‘They concern me little,’ the cat says. Beside her mistress she truly does feel herself a kitten, still. The little black kitten who was once loved, who had parents, before all the deaths, before she was drowned in the sea. Perhaps that’s why the girl in the pool-image captivates her. She is like Cath Palug once was. An innocent.
‘No one’s innocent,’ her mistress says, reading her mind. ‘This girl bears watching. Yes. You have done well, my kitty cat. Here, a little treat.’
She gives the cat her favourite snack. Cath Palug chews on sailor’s fingers, sucks out juice and crunches bone around the knuckles. She loves knuckles. Some fingers are white and some fingers are black and some are blue, from some merman off the Sea of Atlantis, perhaps. The world is big and it contains multitudes.
Then it is night-time again in the outside world, and her mistress is gone, and at the cat’s feet is a small pile of bones. Which is all that men ever are, when all is said and done.
She stares into the nearest seeing pool. It’s dark. A blackness that is pure. Then lights, the stars, not as they are seen from Earth but out in the place beyond. So many stars, that she must conclude that the Greek, Anaximander, was right when he postulated that the universe is infinite. And did not Aristotle write, in his Physics, that ‘It is always possible to think of a larger number: for the number of times a magnitude can be bisected is infinite. Hence the infinite is potential, never actual; the number of parts that can be taken always surpasses any assigned number.’
What. She knows her Greek and Latin. Her mistress has a most extensive library of scrolls and clay tablets and codices, all rescued from the bottom of the sea. Nimue has stores of ancient knowledge, for all that her interest lies almost exclusively in the destructive arts.
As for the cat, she likes to watch the stars.
There, the world, blue and white, and its grey pockmarked moon, Sister Moon, smiling. There Venus of the storms, there red Mars going past, and there the belt of rocks that circle the sun beyond it. Then mighty Jupiter, with raging storms, a giant in the heavens, surrounded by moons. There Saturn with her gorgeous rings. And on, and on. The cat sees what people cannot see, for she has magic, while they are yet to figure out a way to look to the beyond. Perhaps some sort of seeing glass, if they had the techne, but they don’t. So Cath Palug, alone, gazes on the planets.
She’s swept away on the solar wind. Then it’s days or hours later. The hall is quiet. The hall is always quiet. She waddles to a pool and stirs the water.
Morgause, in a grove, weaving a figure out of leaves. She looks up, smiles, says, ‘Hello, cat.’
‘Mistress Morgause,’ the cat says politely.
‘Abroad on your dream quest again, my dear?’
‘I watch,’ the cat says. ‘I watch and I listen.’
‘And what a wonderful watcher you are!’ Morgause says, with that insincere sweetness the cat hates. She remembers Morgause from the Summer Country, and she had never much liked the false bitch.
‘These men you are trying to hurt,’ the cat says, and there is the sound of unsheathed claws in her voice, ‘they are my mistress’s guests.’
‘And I would not
dream to cause them harm!’ Morgause says, still with that radiant, unstable smile. ‘Not while they are under your protection.’ The peals of laughter in her voice mock Cath Palug. ‘In fact I think on our last encounter the sapling of a boy king rather enjoyed himself. Don’t you?’
She weaves leaves and vines and twines them all together. She claps her hands and breathes on the thing, and it comes alive.
‘Why did you fuck him?’
Morgause shrugs. ‘Why not? Besides, I want his seed.’
‘For what?’
‘What do you think, cat?’
‘I… I see.’
‘A king’s a king, and a throne’s a throne,’ the sorceress says. ‘And when one’s indisposed, the other needs filling. Now fuck off, cat.’
Cath Palug hisses. Her claws strike the water. The image is broken into a thousand pieces, then gone.
Fine.
She’ll watch.
It passes the time until dying.
36
The Green Knight stalks the forest roads, his lance of thorns raised up against his enemies. The Green Knight has only a rudimentary intelligence in that thick skull of bark and sapwood, but he has deep roots, and the roots know things.
The Green Knight knows, for instance, that the Nine Sisters are abroad again, and scheming their endless schemes. He knows the land is being fought on, for blood soaks deep into the earth. And he knows that somewhere, far away, there is a great wound in the earth, and it is slowly poisoning all that is around it. But where it lies he doesn’t know.
The Green Knight doesn’t have a name, but he casts about him and decides that ‘Bercilak’ has a nice ring to it, for all that it is a pretty silly name.
The Green Knight also knows it is his job and duty to await the arrival of three men, and kill the runty one, who thinks himself a king.
The Green Knight is a king himself. In many ways, he thinks, he is the forest, the one that’s always been there on this island, primordial and dark. A forest where things lived and died, namelessly, for generations. When humans first came to this land they cut down trees and cleared farmland and built houses and roads. And that was long, long before the Romans came. And he remembers them all, for the land remembers what people forget. He remembers how big and strong he was, before the people came. And he hates the people for it.
