Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,135

that is true, if it did not flash through me like revelation that I was much bigger and stronger than my brother. That I was much bigger and stronger than anyone we knew, in those days before bigger and stronger became colorful balls that so many men fought over. I could have taken it. I choose to believe that I did not even consider it.

Put it back, I said. Put it back and no one will know and the world will go on as it always has.

Put it back and you can stay a man, with blood and skin and a stride, you will not have to turn your eyes from your wife and feed ribbons into the backs of your workers like some hellish foreman. You can go home and fish and learn to ride a horse—God knows you need the practice—and no one has to know that you pulled a sword out of a stone. No one ever has to know your name. You’re not special: you can’t hold your breath for nine days, no one has called you the greatest knight born and no one ever will. You can live in high grass and mote-riddled sunlight until you are an old man—put it back. Just put it back.

You know what happened. You know his name.

He brushed the blackberry brambles away and the swordlight was pale on his face.

Everything is turquoise now, shot through with green light and streams of bubbles. The boy I carry laughs and grabs at them, patting my helmet so that my ears ring.

You are like riding the sun. Faster, sun! Higher!

Noon, Ninth Day

Sandpipers skitter and stamp on the beach—we rise up out of the surf—whales spouting spray and my body fills with real air, so much and so golden that I feel as though I must burst.

The boy coughs and wheezes—he has never known air. For a moment I want to put him back, too. I do not want to take him to the factory, I do not want to make him into a little copy of us. I take him from my shoulders and pat his back, too hard, at first, but after a long while he begins to vomit up the ocean that has lived so long in him, growing in him and coloring his skin like a pearl. The water comes and comes, the boy holding his small stomach like the Chinese brother in the fairy tale, who drinks the sea, drinks it all down so that his friend can find the tiny jewel at the bottom. Little fish come with his retching, bits of flotsam. His hands sink in the sand.

When he finally draws up, shakily, graceful as a new duckling, the sun seems to settle in him, somewhere at the base of his spine, spreading out around him like a mandorla. I have rescued the sun from the deeps. He smiles, and the beach is flooding with his gold. In the dune grasses, a few errant ribbons snake back and forth—he chases after them, untroubled, but when he touches their tales they burn up, black and ash.

Mabon ap Modron, we must return.

Return? I have always lived here.

No, boy. Home is England. This is hell.

It is beautiful in hell, then.

Yes.

He shrugs, clambers up onto my back again, and we begin the long road over the mountains. A tiny thread of ribbon streams behind us:

Return.

I am bringing the sun home to you, brother. I wonder if it will make you smile. If it will light the shadows. If it will keep us all warm when the snow comes.

Behind us, the water is an unbroken hyphen, blue as heartbreak. There are whitecaps. There is wind. Soon we will not even be able to smell the salt.

XIII DEATH

The Green Knight

And I will stand strongly on this floor

to abide his stroke if thou wilt doom him

to receive another stroke in return from me;

yet will I grant him delay.

I’ll give to him the blow,

In a twelvemonth and a day.

Now think and let me know

Dare any herein aught say.

—Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Black Queen to King’s Rook Four.

The sun comes through windows dusted like vellum pages, soft and slant-wise, unable to dream of vertical space, pooling gold paint onto my fingernails. I am yellow as Midas’ best loved child, and it is winter in the world.

Outside these walls I can hear the angle of the grass under the wind, grandfather-bent, pointing east, east, east, where all things begin.

I play chess, to pass the time