Myths of Origin

by Catherynne M. Valente

  By night, with noises of the northern sea.

  So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur:

  But ere he dipped the surface, rose an arm

  Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

  And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him

  Three times, and drew him under in the mere.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson

  Idylls of the King

  XVII THE STAR

  The Lady of the Lake

  So they rode till they came to a lake, which was a fair water and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was aware of an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand. With that they saw a damosel floating upon the lake. What damosel is that? said Arthur. That is the Lady of the Lake, said Merlin; and within that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any on earth, and richly beseen; and this damosel will come to you anon, and then speak ye fair to her that she will give you a sword.

  —Sir Thomas Malory

  Le Morte d’Arthur

  What damosel is this? What damosel is this? Perhaps I am nothing but a white arm. Perhaps the body which is me diffuses at the water’s surface into nothing but light, light and wetness and blue. Maybe I am nothing but samite, pregnant with silver, and out of those sleeves come endless swords, dropping like lakelight from my hems. Will you come down to me and discover if my body continues below the rippling?

  I thought not.

  Look out: the lake’s edges blur into the sky, blue to blue. All water flows into itself—this is the lake; this is the sea. River and shore and flux, we are all water together, and the moon shows in one just as in the other, a wide white face and a long white arm.

  In the quiet of the dark I have lapped milk from the dish of the moon, and thought nothing of swords. In the dark of the quiet I have opened my mouth to let the lake through, and the run-off has been afloat with stars. And I thought nothing of hilts or pommels or earnest young men with unconventional grocery lists. Take your basket through the fields—what does the boy need for his magic kingdom? A magic birth, a magic man, a magic crown, a magic sheath, a magic sword. I am last of all—you stand on my white-sand shore and all you need is the sword to set it all going, like a huge dial in some terrible wind-up clock made of women’s limbs and men’s bones and so much gold, so much gold—lift the samite drop-cloth with a flourish and it all begins, it all goes along as the best of the angels of predestination would have it. All you need is the sword. How fortunate for you that we have one in stock.

  The little waves wash over your feet, but they do not anoint them. The foam is sweet, but there is salt in the depths. Salt and me. It was good of you to come so far out of the world, so far across green squares of turnip farms and thorny apple orchards and a bridge whose suspensors are strung with the heads of all the kings who have tried to take the sword before you—covered in a sheen of melted pearl and lit up with fire. Check your map: if there are dragons here, I am a dragon, deep in the creases of my lake. Look at your map, Merlin-blessed, and see how far you have come, where the bridge leads and what it spans—it spans the distance between here and there, the rooted compass and the wheeling north, between Camelot and Faery, between the places you would drape with light until there is nothing but radiance and those places whose darkness you cannot begin to touch. Between yourself and your opposite. Between you and I. It arches through the ether; it goes to Annwn, to Avalon. To the otherworld, the otherplace, the othered place.

  It goes to the New World. The place where maps shrivel and sodden, where the earth drops into water and water drops into earth. It goes to the sharp margin of everything that is, and there the knight finds the New World, the farthest west, and learns to whisper a word he has never heard: Cal-i-forni-a. Whisper it, breathe it, drink it from the droplets of the lake. This is the name of Annwn, of Avalon, this is the name of the underworld. It is written over the gates in chalcedony and drywall. On the other side of the bridge there was no fiat lux, only this one word. Say it and it will keep you safe.

  I, too, am always at the other side, I and all my brothers and sisters, I and everything which has no place within civilized mortar-and-brick. You must come out to us, again and again, for we are the source of your magic births, your magic men, your magic crowns, your magic sheaths, and your magic swords. It is the chief industry of your reign, the commerce between your world and mine.

  But perhaps not. Perhaps I am an old woman living under the water because clams and trout have better manners than kings, and I tell very beautiful lies because I just want the company, and if I lie prettily enough, you will stay and talk to me.

  Perhaps I was once nothing but a very young girl, toddling down a stone wall and chasing moths with her pink fingers—and perhaps somewhere along the wet green meadow the wall became a path and the path became a road and the road became a bridge and the moths with the eyes on their wings were always just a little further off, flitting just out of reach, and perhaps the bridge became a lake and I splashed in after them. And perhaps the lake was full of swords and moths and apple trees waving in the current, and perhaps the swords said I was pretty, and the moths said it was all right to touch them, and the apple trees said wouldn’t I like to stay, wouldn’t I like to learn how to breathe water like a long, slender fish.

  And perhaps I grew old down here, while my arm stayed young.

  Perhaps I am nothing but a white arm, severed, stuck in the lake like a birthday candle.

  Yet you see how far you had to come to find me. You cannot deny how warm it is here, how golden, how the gulls keen.

  Come closer. Look in: anything could hide beneath the surface of the lake. A serpent, a woman, an arm, a sword. Anything could break the waters and call its own name. This still pool contains everything possible, every woman with necromancy inked on her tongue, every knight tilting, every castle, every grail. A lake has so many voices, you know. The flashes of light slip by on the water, in and out of each other, and each cries out in extremis, each cries out in its gleaming, and is gone. Can you hear them? I have sat at the bottom of the currents, cross-legged as a deva, and watched the green and the pale whicker by, howling, glowing, beaming. The water is so warm, when the choir sings. Lean in, lean in.

  I know that I don’t matter to you; I am no more than a bucket of water from this lake, something you can take without bargaining or payment. I am the beginning—you only need me to nod my alabaster head, Madonna-gentle, and grant your life permission to commence.

  Oh, I am an arm, your arm, mine, theirs, all your boys. I extend, implore, I lavish upon and commit to the deeps. I bless, I strangle. I pull up the lakefloor in the shape of a sword and say: go, boy, this story has already been told. And perhaps, when this boy reaches out to take my blue blade, shining like nothing so much as water, my fingers will brush against his—they are warm, and shaking, and he is so young.

  . . . and brandish’d him three times

  I.

  A wide green field, and grass like water waving. There is light here, and thick soil, and hiding 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 will be, corners and lengths and thresholds. You can almost see the glimmer of what will stand, hovering shadow-still over the slabs.

  The people come swarming, hammering, boiling pitch, boiling limestone, cutting wood. The most obvious images are best: a beehive. An anthill. Gold-backed, dust-legged, wings folded against the spine, the people stir, pour, smear, nail, pile, hammer, slide. None of them know the name of the man who will live here.

  The walls go up first, so that no other bee or ant might suckle at the sweetness of a roof or a palisade. There are slender gaps for arrows, and paths so that helmeted soldiers may stalk their territory like dogs, and slope-shouldered lovers may watch the sun set over the blessing hills. It is good work, and plain: solid and thick and smelling of earth. Peat and mortar, sod and lime.

&nbs
p; Second is the cathedral, whose altar was brought up from Cornwall, whose gargoyles were brought over the sea from France—years pass here, under the curling eaves, apples and capons eaten while the scaffolding weathers, a hoary skeleton. Even after the court and market are full of voices, after the stairs have been fashioned sturdy and steep, after secret rooms and passages are dug with due diligence, the cathedral will still be unfolding and spiraling up to the floor of God’s house. A father paints the pews; his son finishes the rafters; his grandson strikes the first bell, whose wide bronze bonging tones echo through the valley, now planted with wheat and potatoes and pear trees, hutches of chickens and geese, pens of cattle, now teeming with tenant farmers and broad-bellied knights and harvests of good rain and mild sunshine, harvests that see baskets full of green and gold, brown eggs and thick milk.

  The bell-note rolls over all these folk, all these baskets, and some brown-browed folk look up, shading their eyes, when the bell rings its virgin music, but most are unperturbed, pulling carrots and parsnips from the earth, rubbing at sore knees.

  X THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

  Kay

  Nine nights and nine days his breath lasted under water, nine nights and nine days would he be without sleep. A wound from Kay’s sword no physician might heal. When it pleased him, he would be as tall as the tallest tree in the forest. When the rain was heaviest, whatever he held in his hand would be dry for a handsbreadth before and behind, because of the greatness of his heat, and, when his companions were coldest, he would be as fuel for them to light a fire.

  —Culhwch and Olwen

  The Mabinogion

  Morning, First Day

  I carry my air with me like crystal capsules—each day I slit one with the edge of my ribs and it is enough, just barely enough, to keep me walking. It is all I was meant for: walking, breathing, cutting. I am an automaton. My brother sets me walking and I keep going, clockworks grinding, bone gearshifts and blood-hydraulics, until I hit something. Sink Kay in the water—it is no matter, he is submersible, he will breathe like a salmon.

  Not that I ever thought I would be more. How could I ever have thought myself special, what boy ever thinks he is more than the sum of his meat, when he is knobble-kneed and too tall with a nose that dwarfs his face? What boy thinks so when he is so often fevered that his skin is permanently flushed, and the other boys mock him for his maiden blush, and sweat clings to him like raindrops? What boy thinks so when he likes his horse and his boots and his best deer-hunting bow so much that even his father assumes he is stupid and burl-headed? I dreamed not of kingship, but that I might look up at a forest of men taller than I, a grove of straight-backed birches in which I would be but a stunted sapling.

  My brother set it all going; he was a key and he slid into a great machine with jeweled parts. I wonder as I trod jerkily along, obeying his programming, if he ever wanted something more than to be a key, something more than to have opened a closed circuit by pulling a sword out of a stone. I want to say to him: do you remember when we were brothers? When were not what we are now, toy-men, Hephaestus-cast, rolling along on a track we cannot see?

  But you do not say this to the bronze-footed king on his throne, even if you fear that he has become frozen there, bolted into his regalia, terrified to leave. Instead he sends us out, our quests screwed onto our backs with gold rivets, his words peeling from our tongues as though we had no voice of our own. We are his hands, we are his legs, we go out into the world and we go out of the world and we go where he tells us to go and we are lucky if we remember our names when we return.

  I do not complain. It is not a brother’s place to complain.

  Once he did not cling to his chair—when he was a boy, when he was human and not king. When he was an orphan and chased after me even though we were brothers only by contract, and I actually thought it made a difference whether I called him brother or foster-brother. Then, his feet were always filthy and his clothes were full of bees and frogs and dragonflies and no one paid him much attention. After all, I was the elder. He had no track, he had no rivets. It was I, instead, who sat so often astride a horse that I thought myself half-centaur, who was scrubbed and tutored and dressed up in epaulets and rapped across the knuckles until my country accent faded into rounded vowels and crisp consonants.

  Plate by plate I strapped metal onto my body. (And if I was fevered before, this was worse, the sheen of sweat inside the armor, the flushed face beneath the helmet, and after years, even the metal began to blush, until I was a red knight for true, boiling the rain away from me like soup spilled on a blazing anvil.) Then I thought I was making myself a man, but I see now that they were the plates of my manufacture as a king’s worker, as the automaton I became. Year by year I bolted on a new body, plate armor like a beetle’s shell, with enough holes for that eventual demiurge to slip his orders, to feed in his unalterable programs. A space had to be made for him. A space was made.

  I remember that morning, when I slipped out of the world and he slipped into it. A slab of metal in rock—how could such a thing come to mean so much? It was no more or less part of the city than a grocer’s storefront or a chipped curb, yet no one proposed that we prognosticate by those. Steel and stone and all of us agreed without speaking, made this covenant with the city streets and skies, that that knife in a rock meant more than melons in a pyramid or old yellow paint in an alley. Even when we had forgotten about it and let it grow over with dandelions and blackberry whips, it did not lose what we had so long ago given it: for my brother pulled it up and the light passed from me to him, the light and the horse and the tutor and the epaulets, which he was welcome to.

  His name became like the sword in the stone: write Arthur on the skin of your hand and it means more than a boy so named, it means him, always him, forever.

  My name became irrelevant.

  There is water over my head already, clear and green. I can see the sun, still, shining in shafts through the little waves. What a place this is, how bright, how sere. The water is warm.

  Afternoon, Third Day

  In my brother’s great hall there is a painting. An angel in red so bright it is nearly orange speaks to a scribe, and out of the seraphic mouth comes a long ribbon, winding and whirling and corkscrewing until it enters the scribe’s ear. On this ribbon are written divine words, undeniable words, words that originated on the sea of glass and, shard-bright, fell until they tore open the ribbon in shapes of themselves.

  This is what my brother’s commands are like.

  He speaks and I can almost see it, the ribbon snaking out of his mouth, yellow and black, coiling through the air to enter me at the place in my back which was made for him, made for the receipt of quests, made to ingest his desires and make them manifest. There is no sound but the ticking of this ribbon into me, the slow click of a king’s calligraphy, holes in the shapes of divine letters slotting into my sinews, whispering angelic and severe, locking my joints in place. His ribbon susurrates in me, insists that an object is required, a child stolen away to the bottom of the sea, to Annwn, the other country, which is west, and there are kabbalistic coordinates which burn themselves into my corneas—but it doesn’t matter what the object is. There is always an object. He always requires it. His hunger for them is never quiet. Nor does it matter where they are: they are always west, they are always out, they are always beyond, they are always in the otherworld, which is only to say the other world, anything that is not circumscribed by these walls, these floors, these steels and stones. The ribbon wraps my lungs, sets my constraint: nine days without breath, as near to the limit of my capsules as makes no difference—and this does not matter, either. Everything the ribbons demand extends our limits, no matter what those limits are. If I could hold my breath for ten days, the ribbon would demand ten.

  Retrieve object. Return. Simple as stone. Execute.

  The ribbon disappears under the plates of my armor, under the beetle-carapace of my second skin. I turn on golden heels. I walk in a straigh
t line, unaltered and unerring until the air is so full of salt my joints cry out.

  This is all I am.

  West. West is the direction of blue water and gold land—we are aimed this way and thus we go, and we do not stop, we cannot stop, until the Pacific tells us that to go further is to find east and wind and light and silence. We pool in this place, in Annwn, in the otherworld which on maps purchased from salmon and seraphim is called California. Pass through fog and marsh and come out in the desert, pass through the desert and come out by the sea. I walked over the mountains and saw a valley opening up below me like a green lap, and there was a low mist of gold hanging over it, and I cannot but descend into it—I am comically made and even before the plates were fixed to me I walked straight through a river without noticing I was wet.

  Yea, I have walked through the valley, and it was the valley of ribbons, swarming everywhere like Eden-exiled serpents, whispering so loud I could hardly hold on to my own, nosing at my feet, at my mouth, at my back. The green valley was choked with them, a paper sea writhing undulate and crisp, slicing characters from each other as easily as scales. I shuddered. Is this where the ribbons are born, this valley of glass grinding against glass, this valley of murmuring directives, of worker-commands without eyes navigating invisible corridors? Is this where they begin, the rustling things, where he found them in the days before he meted them out to us like tickets to a fair? Did he find this place before us all and pass through? What is a king but the source of commands? Am I wrong to remember a brother who let caterpillars sit on his shoulders, as though there was any life before the buzz and hum of Camelot?

  There is a sea beyond the ribbons, and they sigh in protest as I walk through the grassy crackle—they cannot find any point of entry. I am my brother’s servant, and I have room for no more in me than him.

  The light is dimmer now, the water deep and blue. I have seen octopi sloughing by, bulbous heads nodding like proper gentlemen. There is kelp like meadow grass above me, and what sun might be seen is filtered by dark green leaves, the color of the queen’s sleeves, descending and descending.