Nimue waves her fingers and changes me into a lovely maiden, which is fair play, and a palpable hit. Those years were worse than the ones in which I was a prophetic stag, which was at least a form respected by other wizards. Being a lovely maiden and thus assumed to be intellectless was, as Nimue knew it would be, perfectly maddening.
Adam jolts, trying to keep his footing.
‘Old Man,’ he asks, his voice shaking. ‘You still in there? You’re pretty as a lady. What’re we at, mate? What’s going on?’ He shifts sadly. ‘I’ve still got a tail,’ he whispers. ‘It’s bunched up in my arse.’
What might I transform him into. A mouse? My subtleties feel coarse. All this magic newly returned to me, and I should be readying magics for Arthur, but I fear I do not remember what to do. I have been preparing myself for failure.
‘Can you swing a sword?’ Nimue asks Adam. ‘They may wake spoiling for a fight.’
‘I’ve played rugby,’ he says, bigging himself up. I doubt he’s done any such.
‘That’ll do,’ says Nimue.
She leaps, and takes us thistledown light onto the drill itself, while the drillers gawp. Nimue sniffs the air and takes off, running as fast as a river off a cliff. She’s a water witch, and I’m a lady in waiting, chasing after her. Adam stumbles after us both. I feel Elizabeth spinning beneath my feet, and I feel the desire for magic, forgetting then remembering that I have it.
I’m horribly confused after all this time. Still not sure what I can do, I transform back into my Merlin self, with capes and celestial robes and all that, with the lovely pointed hat she always mocked. Adam snickers and I don’t care.
I go horizontal and fly.
Halfway down the tunnel, I realise Adam’s hanging from my ankle.
‘Old Man!’ he cries.
‘Release me!’ I shout.
I can barely see Nimue. She’s springing ahead, lit by the flicking glow of Excalibur, soundtracked by the grinding of the drill.
‘I’ll stay a stoat, if I’m only her stoat,’ Adam wails. ‘Swear down!’
‘Bigger fish!’ I shout furiously. Then I, fellow-sufferer, relent, and allow him onto my back as though I’m a fucking broomstick.
God help us, I can smell the apples of Avalon, as the tip of Elizabeth pierces the wall of the cave where the king of England sleeps. I hear Nimue bursting through the rock and magic, into the orchard where Arthur and his court wait.
‘What’re we doing?’ howls Adam.
‘We have to stop King Arthur waking!’ I shout in what I realise is terror. ‘He’s there to protect us all, and with his waking comes Albion’s happy ending!’
I keep flying.
‘That,’ says Adam carefully after a moment, ‘doesn’t sound so bad?’
Poor Adam. Perhaps someone told him stories, once. Perhaps he reads and loves stories still. Perhaps it takes someone from inside a story to explain to someone from without them, that even a happy ending is an apocalypse.
I burst through the rock behind Nimue. She stands before the point of the encroaching drill, Excalibur raised high, confronting the Crossrail.
Behind her I can definitely see Arthur in his own crystal cave. He’s twitching, stirring, coming out of his rest, roots all around him, apple cores covering the ground. I can see Guinevere and Lancelot, one on either side of him, each holding his hands. And yes, Arthur’s crown still gleams, as the story lurches towards a finish.
‘BEND!’ shouts Nimue, sword trembling, magic surging from her fingertips. ‘BEND, ELIZABETH!’
The drill considers. It decides to shrug off magic, and whirrs forward at Nimue.
Adam rolls off my back, and charges the drill. He flings himself between Nimue and Elizabeth, his pale chest bared to the diamond-tipped point, offering his heart to be impaled by progress.
I fumble for my own magic, patting the pockets I have again with the habits of magicless centuries, and find my letter opener instead.
I pull it from my robes, sliding it out as smoothly as it was once, under my guidance, pulled from a stone.
‘FLEA!’ I shout, waving my own sword.
I never lost everything I had; I knew I’d find use for that neglected sword. Never as flashy as Excalibur, no, but that long marinading in the stone didn’t leave it entirely useless, you might say. I wave the nameless – and, I might add, sensibly unglowing – sword my ward tugged out of the rock. It was always the poor relation – I felt sorry for it, is the truth, when Nimue’s own blingy Excalibur turned up and turned heads. It was a bugger to find: no one ever seemed quite sure where they’d left it. So when I finally found it, I made sure to keep it close, discreetly. Now at last I can let it stretch. I imagine that old iron must be luxuriating. It is not without power.
‘Flee! Flea!’ My magic is a bit of a mess and I’m not sure if I’m trying to transmogrify the drill into an insect or to send it packing. Not without power notwithstanding, and either way, nothing happens.
All, apparently, is lost. Or won. Same thing.
Nimue calmly picks up an Avalonian apple, and tosses it into the path of the drill.
The apple slams Adam aside and is split in two, cored by a tunnel never to be.
I wave King Arthur’s original sword again, this time in conjunction with Nimue and Excalibur, and the startled drill seems to hesitate, and waits in time stretched out – until at last and with a pneumatic sigh it surrenders to these ancient obstacles, shying away in a mechanical motion that could be displacement by magic, or could be a sensibly altered route. I swear you can’t tell.
It sends sad surveys back to its operators.
You always have to take account of such archaeological finds. Elizabeth adjusts her course and tilts away from Avalon.
Behind Nimue, Arthur rolls on his rock, and takes Guinevere in his arms, and Lancelot holds Arthur in their cosy napping threesome. All the court of the King beneath the hill settles down again and gets back to dreaming.
I turn to my witch. She’s eating one half of the apple. She offers me the other. As I take the fruit, sweet as the future, sour as the past, filled with old, dirty magic, I look at her, the Lady of the Lake. I drop my sword, a letter opener again, back in my pocket.
‘Would you like to go skinnydipping?’ says Nimue. ‘There’s an underground lake somewhere down here as I recall.’
‘Roman baths too,’ I say.
‘That pine,’ she says, and glitters at me.
‘That shining tower,’ I say.
‘Old Man,’ Adam says. He stumbles to his feet and looks groggy. ‘Is this Camelot?’
MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY
Maria Dahvana Headley is a New York Times-bestselling author whose books include Magonia, Aerie, Queen of Kings, the memoir The Year of Yes, and with Kat Howard, The End of the Sentence. With Neil Gaiman, she is the #1 New York Times-bestselling editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. Upcoming is the novel The Mere Wife, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, as well as a short story collection. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated short fiction has been anthologised in many year’s bests. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, and Arte Studio Ginestrelle, among others.
“We work on each other’s stories and longform all the time, editing, structuring, mucking about in each other’s sentences, but we’ve never formally collaborated, so Dead Letters seemed like a good opportunity. The skull (China) and the mermaid (Maria) looked like two pieces of the same universe to us. The idea of a much reduced Merlin hunting his scattered magic in the Office of Dead Letters comes from a mutual interest in the snarled lovesick relationship between Merlin and his (clearly brilliant) apprentice witch Nimue, though neither of us remembers where the idea of eating the dead letters came from. From there, the parts that look like one of us wrote them were probably written by the other, in nearly all cases. One of us had a great deal of fun writing a ridiculous verse spell, and the other had an appalling amount of fun writing the line ‘I go horizontal and fly’.”
CHINA
MIÉVILLE
China Miéville is a writer of fiction and non-fiction who lives and works in London.
AND WE, SPECTATORS ALWAYS, EVERYWHERE
KIRSTEN KASCHOCK
The mother is an older mother, historically speaking. There is a streak of grey she does not dye. Her adoration of the child is like too much make-up. Her attentiveness to his every stumble in the park makes me feel nervous for him, and rushed. Will the child fall today? Irrevocably? This is the worry of her posture, as she leans forward off the bench ready to spring to him across the woodchips. Astounding – given her disquiet – that she allows the child, called Gibb, to risk splinter on the shifting ground.
I sit alone, under a tree. I do my best not to haunt the area by keeping an open book on my lap. It is Rilke.
* * *
The next day they come again. She is petite, slightly dishevelled, and has strapped him against her as if they were nomads. They are not. He is calmer than most toddlers who roam this half-acre with their nannies and blood mothers. The needless gadgets she must undo before he can be let down to join the fray frustrate me, whose job is to watch. His swinging limbs have the look of the unliving. I am familiar. When she packs him up to leave an hour later, he is more vivid, the bloom on the centre of his forehead visible even from here. She sticks a bottle in his face. He drops into a milk-fed stupor, and she re-secures the latches and belts.
Against the bark, my lower back begins to ache – an injury recalling itself. An old attachment.
To leave, she walks north through the grass. He is old enough to walk. He should be walking. Situations like this one grow only more and more untenable. He is three, it should be noted, despite the bottle. The talent for manipulation can manifest as early as eight months. Passivity, a strategy.
* * *
On the third day, they do not arrive at their usual time.
It is raining. I wander to Main Street for a poncho and a sandwich at Ipp’s, which I cannot eat. I return to find her struggling to push a stroller through muck at the far edge of the park. Her umbrella is fighting her. The wind keeps yanking the large red nylon off to the side. She is an aging matador, less bravado than pathos. The boy’s face is whipped with stinging spray, as mine almost certainly is, and his complaints cut across the field, clear as keys on glass. Why aren’t they home yet? Her apology is muffled, but it is an apology, and, to accomplish it, she hunches – her spine suddenly a dowager’s. Simultaneously, the umbrella springs upright as if sprouted from the earth. A battlefield poppy, wound-fed. As I have observed it, much of mothering involves contortion.
* * *
On the fourth day I am not there. I offer my initial report, which is incomplete.
* * *
When I see them again, something has shifted. She has had her hair cut, expensively. The boy – left longer than usual with sitter or Nana or friend – still seethes. The layering at the back is coquettish. Her neck, exposed. Someone convinced her to do this, probably citing ease. The boy requires time. Of course she should remove parts of herself to make room for that time: mothering is also truncation. How often does she shower? Whatever the frequency, it is more Victorian than her prior habit. The homes of small ones have ever received their taint from hidden food and sour female smells.
* * *
It has been a month. My tree is not as welcoming as it was at first, but I am not done with my watch. We are sentries, the tree and I. No thing must falter from the plan God has for all things. Sometimes, that means we are asked to steward one another. To cultivate, to prune. I climb up into its branches to oversee. A maple. Its red glow is buds. They are tight with their spring blood, jealously gripping it in a futile withholding of gush.
* * *
When they finally come back to the playground, the boy is in pain. He does not say so, but affects a slight limp. His left foot makes less viable connection with the balance beam than the right. She holds his hand, failing to register this new asymmetry. The boy’s gait is his first test for her and she fails. The mother clearly prides herself on attention to minutiae – so says the unnatural lift of her brow. The boy has a bruise on his heel, but it might be bone cancer. After the initial fever, polio can look like this, in other boys. In other times and countries.
Distraction is written all over. The blue sky scrawls with plane sign, and worms are fingering bottle caps and butts near the exposed roots at my feet, covered in boot. My book, soaked through days before, is illegible – each page polluted with the next, warped, stuck, tearing if turned. A buzz emanates from the mother’s purse. She checks it, smiles, and puts him down. She is no longer beside him. She is somewhere else.
* * *
The next week, she untethers the boy from her gaze. He is both upset and freed. Curious, drawn, he wanders close. He has faint freckles, a thing I did not see before. Has she applied protection? It is March, but he is truly fair and the atmosphere is not what it was. I try to detect either coconut or cocoa in the breeze that wafts past him, but cannot. The imitations smear together in a chemical blur.
“Gibb, don’t bother the nice lady.”
She has seen him seeing me. She has ascribed me a gender. She hurries towards us, to remove him from danger even as she attempts to paint me harmless.
The boy stares. It is the first time he has allowed himself this directness. They can retain some feeling of what we are, especially the ones we have been assigned.
“Give me that.”
That is the ruined book. He has spoken very clearly, and I feel compelled to reward his lack of fear. I hold it out, though not very far. She is close enough now to see my face, to see that it is not, in fact, nice.
She takes his hand as he reaches it towards me. He is still leaning out, listing towards the book with his small body, unsteady. She tugs. He makes an unpleasant but effective sound. She lets go immediately. Ashamed of her capacity for even this minor harm, she sweeps him up and away, cooing, acknowledging me no further. Except with her back.
I have ever wondered at the permutations of mothers – how they differ in discipline, training, expectation. Their samenesses are even more mystifying: the tensile strength of enveloping arms, the stamina it must take to toss the ache of a child from hip to hip, season upon season, and to love it.
The tedium.
I do not wear this body again.
* * *
She is giving birth. The boy is out in the hall with her mother, his grandmother. There are no fathers here. Not hers, not his, not his soon-sister’s. Only nurses. Even the doctor is a woman. The last time I saw the boy he was a beast – all small boys are beasts. Now he is a thief. He has taken a dollar and three quarters from his grandmother’s wallet. He is at the vending machine.
My voice comes from behind.
“What’s your poison?”
He turns to look up at me. I see a glimmer of recognition, but he shakes it off.
“Chocolate isn’t poison,” he says as he retrieves the M&Ms.
“That wasn’t your money.”
He isn’t seven yet. He flushes. He is good at sneaking but not at lying, not when he doesn’t know he’s going to have to.
“Nana always gives me money.”
“Nanas like pleases. They like thank yous. They like to be asked.”
Authority is a trigger, and mine is great. He shoots past me back through the hall to his grandmother in the waiting room. Its beige tile transforms everything that bounces off it into hollow clicks and whispers.
I sit down across from them and he pretends not to see me.
“Your grandson?” I ask her. She is smaller than her daughter, frail beneath jewellery designed for a more regal frame and bearing than she has. She must know this. Her eyes, not pointed this way, are sharp.
“It is.” She smiles through thin lips, unnaturally wet, and ruffles his hair absently, her focus on the double door.
The maternity ward. I come here, or to places like here, often. “A delivery?”
“My da
ughter’s second child. This one –” and she squeezes the boy’s arm with nails like polished talons “– is about to become a big brother.”
He does not look at me. Instead, Gibb shoves an M&M deep into the pocket of each cheek – first one and then the other. He takes grave time. He is sucking off the candy shell. The smell of American chocolate in the mouth of a child is similar to vomit.
I am allowed an occasional half-truth. “What a lucky sister you’re going to have.”
In discussions of the unborn, gender is often prematurely assumed. Nana’s eyes flicker this way. She decides my gaffe is innocent, or beneath mention.
The boy knows what is what. “I want a brother.”
“A girl will bring your mother more comfort,” I say and stand. This is known. Nana frowns. I am a man, overbearing and insensitive. Leaving.
As I pass, I brush her hand with my hand. I am able to do this quite tenderly. The old woman startles like a virgin. I can steal as well as anyone, although we don’t call it that. We call it calling home.
Nana is dead within two weeks’ time. The boy knows what is what. He does not want to envy me my power. He wants to hate me. He speaks to no one of this.
* * *
Lucy is two. Gibb, nine.
The mother is making preparations to marry Lucy’s father, a musician. All the preparations. He is younger, in most ways. The family is living in Nana’s brownstone. The mother has inherited everything. Gibb does not like Lucy’s father. Gibb does not like Lucy.
Gibb has begun to limp.
My post in the alley across is adjacent to a dumpster. My olfactory judgments are unbecoming, deemed worldly. Adjustments are underway.
This body both hurts and reeks. Its joints are beyond repair – I must stretch incessantly. The boy walks past with friends on the way to school. Lucy’s father has insisted. No coddling. Gibb’s hobble is more pronounced on the way home each afternoon. As is his hatred for the sack of flesh he has been told to call father.
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