Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,146

never caught the curve of her hip in my eyelashes, through the rain-speckled window. Did I never stand below the queen, like Gyges, and dream myself a ring slipped onto her finger? Did I never die on her cross, crucified on the gold-dusted frame of her body? Did no spear pierce my side, the wound irising closed like a cataract?

The faces confuse in my memory—was it one woman or two? I remember the waters closing over me, and a black-tipped breast brushing my lips, and milk flowing into my throat like myrrh and sapphire—but no, that was when I was a boy, when the Lake swallowed me and I saw the paintings on the walls of her belly. When the Lady of the Lake peered up out of the water and thought how well she would like to have a son. But a Lake has no womb—so she took me from my nurse whose cheeks were so fat, and taught me to breathe her blue.

I fell so far, so far. She whispered to me in the language of salmon and bullfrogs, taught my uvula to twist itself into the semblance of herons and leeches. I drank the milk of her body for twelve years, and it tasted of belladonna and lemon rinds, it tasted of verdigris, it tasted of the smoke and mist from an unnamable sea. My heart swelled with it, it replaced my blood, the secret currents of snow-bright mercury pooling in my thirsty ventricles.

She opened her mouth and the Lake rushed out of it, and I had no voice but to adore her and call her my mother, my lover, and my terror, to fall into the tide of her beckoning and kiss the brine from her wavering lips. Her cool skin was my bed and her glassy bones were my meadhall—I drank and drank and there was always more of her to fill my mouth. In the night I slept curled into the blue-black shadows of her hair, and I dreamed that once I had been a human boy, and lived in a house with a red roof, and rode a gray horse.

I live with a skein of waves over my eyes even now, and in my fracturing vision I see their faces merge and separate, the reflections of fish just below the surface, skittering out of reach. Was I, then, the Sword in the Lake? I rose from it by her hand, which dripped with the scales of newborn trout, fluttering from her arm like dandelion seeds. I rose from the water and the reeds sang their canticles. And the king took me in his hand and I have been nothing else since but a stupid sharp thing hacking at bags of blood. If I am the Sword I am innocent; steel cannot sin. If I can be nothing but a dumb blade, I can be forgiven. If I am metal, I have been always in the hand of my friend, and never smelled of his wife.

The last moment in the Lake-mother’s arms I wept, and that was the first time I felt the madness coming on, the separating of my skin, the light coughing out from my teeth. I choked, then, who had breathed the Lake for air, and the moon rolled out of my mouth. I stood on the shore, my lungs blazing like saints, and watched her black-flecked eyes disappear, sinking away from me.

Did I suckle at that woman for all my youth? Did I trade my flesh for hers? Or was it all that other she, the one for whom I am punished, the one who will not now hear my name? It is always a black-eyed woman, and I am always prone at her feet, I am always raving at the waters for the false mother—but how sweet the taste of her salt milk, for all her lies—to take me back and wash me clean, take me away from the woman I should not want, from what I have done, from the laughing throat which made me forget that I am only a tool, heavy as a hilt, and all my limbs fold together to make the sleek white edge—I am the musculature of the Lake-knife, and I am not allowed eyes, or blood, or a cock. Yet I strain towards her, always her. Even if I cannot, sometimes, tell the primal her from the secret her.

But I feel it again, I feel the light breaking from my skull like