Myths of Origin

by Catherynne M. Valente

  If I die first, will that even the score?

  Balin

  It isn’t supposed to be like this. Women are supposed to hold us, and give succor, and dry our tears with their veils. How can I give succor to you? How can a pieta stand, when both figures are shivering with blood loss and shock? This isn’t the tableau I was meant for, trying to help you into death as if it were as simple as opening a door or throwing a coat over a puddle, trying not to embarrass myself by dying first. Pellam would turn up his nose at this wreck of a death scene—the old man always had a fetish for protocol, for the mos maiorum, for good manners in all things—and we are dying in a terribly rude fashion, are we not?

  His palace was the height of fashion, Cinderella-spired and Alhambra-fountained, chandeliers from Waterford and spiral banisters carved from solid California oak. It bordered the land where the mist and hulking trees change a man to a beast, the Otherland where quests always seem to lead—the rear walls of the place dropped off with a sickening shear, falling into fog and forest. I was brought in—if you could have tasted the feast, Balan! Of course he had the best—the workers in his fields live on rinds and dimes, but he supped on roasted dove and deer, corn and plum-wine and peaches, carrot soup, strawberries, oranges, potatoes like russet fists, new cream and mint leaves and wild thyme, brandy and port and chocolate dark as the devil’s throat. There is nothing that does not grow or breed in that perfect valley, the San Joaquin, heaven’s heart. Pellam’s table shuddered under the weight of it. And the apples! How can I have forgotten the apples? Pyramids of red and yellow, crowned, each, with a bright green fruit, simmering at the summit like the lamp of a lighthouse.

  He began as ritual would have it—as though he would let a chance for ritual slip by! The impeccably dressed (powder blue accented with cobalt) monarch rose at the head of the cherrywood table and recited the litany of begats which charted the genetic drift between himself and the Christ child, tectonic plates buoying continents of paternity, a tree so complex and oft-grafted that Pellam himself seemed surprised had not come out half-dove.

  Once the fighting broke out (I suppose you will say that was my fault, brother, that I need not take every challenge thrown up at me by flea-infested second and third sons, but I am what I am) Pellam cracked my sword against one of the perfectly appointed marble steps, and I ran to find another—I only meant to find another sword, you understand. How was I to know he had that ghastly spear hidden away? If it was very important, he would have displayed it in the hall and lectured about it for at least an hour before we were allowed to touch his precious brandy.

  There was no crack of thunder when I took it from the altar, no blinding flash of folly or revelation—not even when I buried it in Pellam’s femoral artery—I use the precise term in his honor—was there any clap of cielo furioso.

  Until the house came down.

  But by then I had left the spear in Pellam, jutting up awkwardly like an inopportune erection; I didn’t connect the wobbling red lance with the sudden seizure of the architecture. Only after I was spirited out from under the Virgin Mary did I understand—the fields outside his house were a gray ruin, the migrants picking at shriveled berries that crumbled to ash at a touch. The orange trees had petrified, the corn-rows calcified, the apple orchards had dropped all their fruit in one gasp, and the wind was snatching up the stench of rot. The irrigation canals had iced over, though there was no cold. They sat sullen and blue-banked, glowering at the hapless workers with their bushels of clay and dust.

  Was it his protocols and monotonous ritual that kept the land pushing plenty up through its crown? Or the spear in its proper place? You know I have never gotten a handle on propriety. If I had, I would have at least asked your name before charging—but I was tired, I wanted it over and done, I hoped there was a pretty maid in the tower to smile shyly and put a cool cloth on my head.

  This island does not have the decency to blight at the touch of our blood. It keeps its swampy councils, and the cranes suck eels from the streams without taking notice of the tragedy nearby. You would think, would you not, my brother, that the noise of such irony as this would be deafening?

  Balan

  Perhaps it is the fault of our names. Balin, Balan, it hardly makes a difference, does it? Did no one ask where I had gone all those years, while you were assisting suicides and claiming more swords than you deserved? Did no one wonder what had happened to the older twin, the one who didn’t run at the other children like a rabid mountain goat, cracking horn against horn? While you were sidling up to Arthur and making battlefield eyes at his knights, did no lady with wild violets in her hair ask if you hadn’t once had a brother, and what had become of him?

  What was the Dolorous Stroke? When have you made a stroke which was not?

  Is she watching us, can you see? My girl? Are there eyes in that tower, feline and yellow—yellow I once thought of as gold, as lion’s pelt, as burnished bedposts. Does her red sleeve fall over the parapet—dare I hope that she is crying? I had my quest, finally, and it ended in her, her yellow eyes moving over me, appraising, as the blood of her last knight still steamed on my chest—and I can still smell the metallic tang of that blood as she pulled me down onto her, as it smeared onto her breasts, her lips, as it pooled in her navel—Balin, the smell of it, when I loved her that first day!

  Can red have a smell? It must, it must—it must smell of her breath and her hungry mouth when she licked the blood from my fingers.

  I cannot turn to look, you must do it for me—my legs have gone numb. If she is there, if her hair is falling over the tower stones, then she loved me and it was not that I was simply next. If she is there then she liked the taste of the beans I planted in the black soil—generations of duels will fertilize the land—she liked the sound of my children’s hearts beating against hers, she liked my heavy shape sleeping against her. If she is not—I do not know. Perhaps she betrayed me, perhaps she is at her bath, perhaps she did not hear the sounds of us cracking horn against horn.

  I begin to think there is a plexus of these fairy women, a chain, a net, knotted by hundreds of hands in hundreds of towers. They must spread out like veins, collecting each other’s daughters, waiting for a chance to escape the pattern of knights and clamber onto that barge themselves.

  I want her to have quit that sisterhood, to have hung up its wimple and stamped their prayer beads into glass dust. I want her to have kissed the blood from me and forgotten all her oaths to those witches, those siren-crones, those moon-addled alchemists. I want her to have never known what apples taste like, or stroked another fey-girl’s hair with those delicate hands, smooth as candles. I want her to have looked at me and loved me, and turned away from the light of their pale sylph-bodies, away from the forest where masts are cut from strong trunks, and flax crushed between plump fingers, woven into sailcloth.

  But I think, even now, she is stepping onto the birchwood and taking deep breaths of the sea wind.

  Balin

  It was the lady of the house who gave me the shield. It was larger, she said, and more splendid. They would not send me to face the Red Knight with my own, which, she insisted, was little more than a buckler. I admit that it was fine, though the cormorant was unsettling, rising up as if to flee its station.

  The old man had brought me all that way from Pellam’s castle, and the blasted heath that I had made of the two-rivered valley—I could hardly speak for hunger and tremors of exhausted muscle. The lady put morsels of duck and goose into my mouth, wiped the juice form my chin. She held a cup of hot wine to my lips, and ushered old owl-hands from the castle. Then she told me of a terrible beast who held a maiden captive on an island just a little distant from there. The rushes grew high on that isle, and no road cut through the marshes.

  I am what I am, Balan.

  I was not even afraid when I saw you, no bigger than I, though your armor flashed scarlet and black in the dim sun, filtered through low fog. You were like a blood-golem, bearing down on me without
even a horse, bellowing some name I could not understand. If you had seen my shield, my own, with the two swords—you remember, don’t you, the girl with hair like a deer’s flank who said no man but her champion could pull the sword? And I took it from her—even Arthur could not! I took it—I alone won two swords. If you had seen the crossed blades, crossed like spears, would you have stopped and clapped me on the shoulder, called me brother, and would we have gone in to feast with your woman? It could not have happened that way, I know that.

  Thou shalt strike a stroke most dolorous that man ever struck.

  Oh, my brother, my other self, I did not think he meant this. Put your fingers through mine, lock them knuckle to knuckle as we used to, and do not cough so. I will not die before you, I will not go down into the earth without you. I will be your mother, I will be your pieta, I will hold your prone body beloved as it goes blue and stiff. I will wait for you to start down the stair, and I will follow after. I am so sorry, I wish your ribs did not show through your skin, I wish I were not so cold, that I could not feel myself emptying from myself. I wish we were whole again, safe in the womb, warm heads pressed together, waiting for a rush of phosphor, for that burst of sound and air scalding its way through new lungs, waiting for seven minutes to separate us.

  Balan

  I have put my beans and my lettuce to sleep in the earth, my wife to sleep in the tower, and my daughters to sleep on the barge. The cranes have put their heads beneath their wings. Everyone sleeps but us, this huddle of twins in the damp, skin flushed back to the blue of pre-breath infants, whose breath no longer even hangs in the air.

  Quiet, now, little brother. I will go first, as I have always done, so that if you fall on the night-stair, I will catch you.

  II.

  There is not a stone here which has not borne up under a foot. The castle is warm with touching, with hands against walls and spines against floors. Behind the blessing hills, it nearly glows. Knees have worn cups into the floor of the cathedral, and the faithful find their favorite places, nestling into the warm indents that hold them up like palms.

  Wells have been sunk. The water is sweet and clear, and tastes a little of new moss, a little of burnt wood. The river is swift and cold and neatly diverted into a hundred fields. There is talk of a new monastery—in thirty years it will be famous for barrels of thick black beer.

  The market in the great courtyard passes old money around—each coin has been endlessly fondled, turned into cakes, cloth, shoe-soles, honeycombs, thick red meat strung with thyme and turning slowly on a spit. There are children who have grown up in the shade of the portcullis, and stalls which have been in the family. Seven successive queens have looked down from the topmost tower, each with black braids. Each grew old, each watched their braids turn silver, then white.

  There is one up there now—look, you can see the sun on her scalp. Is she smiling? Is she crying? It is always hard to tell with queens.

  The lands outside the walls bristle with vegetable, with animal. There are new breeds—someone has even grown a low trellis of grapes. In the winter, they freeze, and children suck on the hard purple fruits. Goats wander shaggy and fat, sheep bleat and roll in the long grass. The clatter of wool-carding is pleasant, and makes little girls sleepy. Taxes are high, but not too high.

  Late in autumn, the taxes are not taken—some few guess why. That castle leaks men like a sieve, and they are always out searching for one thing or another. This time it’s a cup. They hear. They shrug. Well, everyone needs cups. But the tax-man is busy questing, and the king’s tithe is well-put to use in babies’ mouths, in old aunts’ jugs, in new cows and spinning wheels and a big plow-horse with a white patch on his forehead.

  The valley is small and quiet, and the castle sits in its center: safe, familiar, eternal. When was there not a castle here? Curse me if I can remember.

  V THE HEIROPHANT

  Pellinore

  Pellinore, at that time a king, followed the Questing

  Beast, and after his death Sir Palomides followed it.

  —Sir Thomas Malory

  Le Morte d’Arthur

  Of the approximately three thousand species of lizards in existence, only a few are very large. The legs of some lizards are greatly shortened, or vestigial, making animals such as the glass lizard or slowworm snakelike in appearance; they are distinguished from true snakes by their movable eyelids and by differences in the structure of the skull bones, especially those of the lower jaw. The bones of the two halves of a lizard’s lower jaw are firmly united; those of a snake are separable. Scales are evenly arrayed in lines down and around the body. Dorsal scales are keeled while the ventral scales are smooth; there is little overlapping. Colors are various shades of brown, green, yellow, even black—some species have lighter longitudinal stripes or variegated colors.

  A fold of skin is generally noted running laterally along the length of the body—some scholars believe that this is evidence of vestigial wings, while others scoff at the idea that creatures of such size ever flew.

  I will admit, I will whisper into the dust-plated corners, behind bookshelves and umbrella-racks, sheaves of woolen coats and heavy boots: it is possible that there is no such thing as a dragon.

  It is not the Beast itself that matters, you understand. Leopard or lamia, there are many hides I could have taken home to Camelot by now, if it were only the Beast I wanted. I would not travel this way, if that were all, belts and sashes clanging with sextants and telescopes, magnifying glasses and monocles, nautical charts, compasses in brass and gold, graphometers, refractometers, hydrometers, cliometers, and galvanometers, azimuths and globes studded with malachite and onyx, zinc-carbon batteries, micro-manipulators and a genuine camera obscura—all of my own invention. There is a gramophone in the saddlebags. But all this apparati is not for finding—it is for looking.

  That is what they do not understand, the boys who rush out wearing braggart swords on bonny hips, astride horses flashing flanks at the sun—only to hurry home as soon as the moon shows her calf. There is sanctity in simply placing one foot in front of the other, again and again, until the foot seems to remember no time when it sat still on a polished floor, and cannot recall what country birthed it—toe, heel, or arch. Devotion to the wood and the wild is a thing of beauty, devotion to the walking staff and the manzanita-bramble, devotion to the beast which may or may not breathe fire, which may or may not possess the ability to fly, which may or may not dream of its eggs, of the shell’s slippery hues, ultramarine to indigo, splintering with the pressure of a tiny speckled beak.

  In the Sierras, there are places men have never trampled a leaf underfoot. This is, after all, the othered space of fairyland, and if I am to take my chances anywhere, if I am to hope for a green leg, a variegated tail, a clutch of painted eggs, it can be nowhere else but here. I make my little fire in the shade of granite, on the moraine where a glacier once ground its ponderous, imperturbable way through, dropping boulders like shameful tears behind it. Kitchen smells urge their oily gleam through the oaky air—the tea sour and thin, bacon popping and slapping in its grease, leaving a tiny constellation of fat-burns on my forearm, a Pleiades of lard and scorched hair—the sound of it like a spill of salt onto a slick white floor. Coffee speaks its bean-tongue, and the mountains grumble a loamy rhythm of longevity.

  The sextant gleams hopefully.

  In the center of the head of many lizards is a small semi-transparent spot, which connects to an area of the brain, called the pineal body. A pineal body is a small, cone-shaped projection from the top of the midbrain of most vertebrate species. The pineal body does not appear in crocodiles or in mammals of the order Xenarthra, consisting of only a few cells even in whales and elephants. In lizards, this is a kind of “third eye,” thought to detect day length via the angles of sunlight, triggering the breeding instinct in midsummer, and hibernation in winter. It may also allow certain species of green and red lizards to detect the presence of others of their kind, suitable mat
es or rivals. It has been suggested that the pineal body would account for the reports of dragons able to eerily pinpoint the weakest part of siege-towers and other man-made defenses.

  Pellinore is a new name. Once, it was Beli Mawr, once Bile and Bel. When the Beast had not yet taught our family to disregard the year’s hemlines we came when we were called, and on boulder-strewn fields we thrust our fists against the mud. We kept death in the grasses, and when we opened our mouths, our daughter roared into birth from our jaws. We were moss-bearded giants, beasts ourselves, and our knees were large as shields. Over time, we shrunk into the usual span of height, and began to hunt others, instead of fleeing from earnest young men with nets and tridents.

  We became domesticated—it can happen to anyone.

  The muscles in our hawthorne-thighs ached with the strain of holding the down the dark. Stone huts and beds of barley-hulls began to seem sweet as mountains to us, and we lay down into the sleepiness of country lordships.

  But we still resemble boulders enfleshed—occasionally I will find a bit of lichen or milkweed growing in my beard—our skin is famously tough, elephant-coarse and the deep brown of men accustomed to carrying the sun on their shoulders. Roofs do not become us. But I took a roof onto my back, didn’t I? Didn’t I agree to put my shoulders to the beams of Camelot, didn’t I let them settle the rafters onto my neck like the fasteners of a guillotine?