Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,129

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,