Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,139

King’s Bishop Eight.

The road through the Wirral to the San Joaquin Valley is paved with pulverized magpie bones, and plated in Nevada silver. It is an endless suspension bridge, anchored with horsehair and ambergris. The root system of the bridge connects the water tables, the lightless tide of continents. Neither place is real, but the quest spans all points on all maps, and if the Gawain-child begins in Camelot, he must eventually pass through San Francisco, swallowing the foghorns as he rides.

And in the thigh of Saint Francis I will meet him and place the sacraments between his teeth, mark his hands with my stigmata, and draw him under the hill—for the Chapel is but the opening to a body, a crevice in the dream-soil, and I am waiting within it, for him to enter her body and mine, the green lord and his two-souled wife.

In Chinatown, the crone spat three times and shook her yarrow sticks at the sky, red and black. Her tar-clouded lungs rumbled, hissing: Lu. Ch’ien. Sun. The Seeker Descends from Heaven, and Submits to the Gentle Wind. With her hands pulling at my cheekbones like fish-hooks, she whispered the name of Gawain into my tear ducts, and I wept a tincture of salt and oleander. Am I no other than this, his object, his end? Am I this spectral mask, the giant and the beanstalk in one still-voiced body? There is nothing in it, to sit on the bridge with my holly-beard grazing the water and wait, a fire growing in his mind. I have no tongue, I have no blood. I am only the monster, the false knight, the price of his Christmas feast.

I went across the bridge in my leaf-body because she wished it. After all, we are the witch and the monster that dwell in the glen, it is our duty to set the trials, and draw the boys from their warrens to lie with us.

The winter dark came, and called us across the bridge, and I pulled my hag-wife over me like a coat of folded wings. I stepped into her skin and sealed up the edges with a paste of rosemary, for remembrance. Inside her, I was the Green Knight, and not Lord Bertilak, not myself. I exulted in the grotesqueries of the branch and bramble she lent me, in my seven-mile stride, in the voice that cracked steel. From inside her, I looked on the placid Queen and saw the ocean of that perfect torso twist and roil. I saw her, the king’s wife, catch her perfumed breath in fear that the Devil had come to punish her for opening her mist-midden legs.

But it was Gawain and not that faithless who came to us with his green calves quaking, and when his pentangle shield reflected its red on the red of our eyes, we forgot the Queen and her whimpering tryst. We slid into his equation, the quest and the endpoint, we recognized our most beloved Rook, and knew peace when he separated us into heart and head.

But I am not content bridging Christmas to Christmas, holding his purity like a plastic lotus and forcing my fingers into a sullen mudra. I am a bronze Buddha, green with age, motionless, meaningless. My eyes shed blank enlightenment, and he cannot see me as a man. My wife is the storm and the wheatfield, I am only a signpost. Without the mask of her skin I am but Bertilak, and that is less than the weight of the moon on a moth’s wing. And Gawain is a milk-brained child staring mutely at the wonders of the world. He will not even mark the passing of the bridge beneath his feet.

Look at the three of us, our little dance. Are we not heroes, are we not terrors?

White Knight to King’s Bishop 5th.

The Chapel is filled with sweet smoke, the vanilla and oranges of Christmastide, peppermint candy sticky on my hands. The nave secretes opalescent sweat, flooding the floor with holy vapors. The Lady Bertilak is not here, though I look to the torturously painted tiles of the ceiling and see the arch of her summer-breast.

To you, I would seem only a fat old man bent over a chessboard at Golden Gate Park, slapping the timer with a meaty fist. My belly would hang over patched khaki trousers, bending a leather belt in half. My blue work-shirt would be stained with sour-mash sweat, curling sleeve and collar. My shoes would be bound with