Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,137

do not end so. But I can hear the leaf-rustle of his armor and the billow of his starred shield. He knows no better. He guards himself against me—we are all so eager to guard and defend!—I defend my Chapel and he defends his flesh. For him I shall be a monster—because it is expected. If there were no great monstrum at the final castle, there would be no quest. And if no quest, what need would there be for knights at all? I am required; without me there is no kingdom.

I lie beneath their courtly cosmos of lighted halls and long-braided ladies to whom souls must be pledged. I lie under their games of adoration and betrayal—I am the wolf-belly and the dreaming trees that crowd in on all sides, the shadows and the sighing fog. I lure them out, I give them my own body to loathe so that they can fill themselves up with light like clay pitchers. I must be the darkness for them, since they fear it so. They must come to my world, and dwell in the dreamlight of my great bronze axe, so that the stars will know them ever after.

White Queen to Queen’s Bishop Four.

Smoke converts the Chapel to a bath-house, the smell of rich chocolates and drying apple peels leeches impurities from the skin. The flesh percolates, brimming with itself. Smoke and mist, these are the winter coats I wear, the best mystery-wools and strange-cheeked monk-cowls.

My beard shows best in this light, the bramble of my practiced symbology, holly and yarrow and horehound, the green tinge of next year’s wheat, blackberry and hyssop, heather culled with little white knives, shoots of bamboo and snow peas, crocuses sleeping soundly near my chin, wild rose sideburns and mustache of Italian grape and wormwood—I am all the wines ever brewed. It tumbles down to my basil-leaf navel, a tangle of root and branch, huckleberries peeking through and white sage smudging the skin, strawberry leaves sorrowful and low, blue crabgrass and dandelions brushing my elbows. I hide a harvest of gleaming pomegranates in my knees.

I am the Object, I am the Self-Defined. I need do nothing but exist, I draw all men to me as surely as if I were the birth-place of their salmon-hearts. The knight comes and I can hear his progression from square to square, the silky clop of his horse on black and white cobblestones I laid myself in some summer beyond this place, when I was not yet married. I can hear the snow catch in the nutmeg-colored mane, collecting on the reins and hooves when he rests, smell the slush of it in his helmet. There is no step he takes that I do not feel in my ribs and liver and the shaking thorns of my beard.

Boughs of pine hang from high-arched windows, the architecture of cathedrals repeating in this sanctuary like a story told from mother to suckling child. I dwell here, in the skipped frame, the caught film, the grandiose expanse of smelted clocks. I have chosen this place to wait until the new year gnashes its stone teeth and swallows up the old.

This is Limbo—between the first blow and the last, a head for a head for a head. I told the students when I returned last winter how my skull rolled onto the palace floor like a child’s ball or a golden apple. The callow youth stood up, his limbs betraying his shuddering heart, whose storm-ridden blood could be heard through the glassy hall. He looked so small with my axe in his hand, the shaft wound with ivy and raspberry bramble—he searched for a place to grip the bronze where thorns would not pierce his tender hands. I waited, as I wait now, patiently as a lion teaching his cub to hunt, for the quick tongue of the blade in my neck.

The spaces between stretch like light, bending their calculated arcs over bodies—the time between the lifting of the axe and the falling, the departure of the boy and the arrival. The nature of the universe is a held breath, a filled lung which never empties into the ether.

When his blow came, inevitable as autumn, I thought he would fall over with the weight of my weapon. The tidal edge came and my blood flowed green as sea-rot onto the vast mosaic floor. Ladies excused themselves in horror, knights vomited into their helmets, children scrambled to pick berries from my hair. The black-eyed