chewed the bones of her frogs and my mother was always the queen of small and creeping things—which is why she drew me from the deck for a son, I suppose.
I saw her waist-sunk in the river, her long black hair floating around her like water-snakes, her strong brown face searching the sun-flattened ripples—and now and again she would pull a squirming, gasping fish up to look it in the eye before smashing its bony head against a flat stone. She always did that, looked her fish, and her bees and her spiders and her frogs, in the eye before spilling their brains out on a stone. The light was so bright on her hair that it shone blue, and I saw, for a moment, how a brother could not care, could see nothing but the blue in her, nothing but that dancing cyan, and move staircases and rivers and worlds to touch it with one finger of his hand.
We crouched by the stump of a rotten elm, the other boy and I, unified for once in our admiration for the long lines of blue that shot back from her clear brow. We felt like our father, primeval and golden and never secret, as though we could stride towards her just then, just then, and she would welcome us as she had welcomed him. We felt as though she was constant, her blue was constant, and we had a right to the blue, inherited, just like this blasted land, from that tattered old lion we would spend every day after chasing.
That was the first night we spent in her.
In the mere, in the mire and the rubble and the slow blinking light of a street in the other-city, the fairy city I touch only now, after they have both passed before me into it, along the slow, creeping aqueducts which steal water from richer lands, I see—yes?—a flash of blue dancing forward, a long line like fishing-silk, and I will not, I will not call her name, not any of them, as I run after it, as my feet catch on old bottles and broken windows, as my breath comes hoarse with the poisoned air. I will not. The other boy makes me a fool.
He calls joyously into the shadows.
Morgan. Morgause. Morgana. Mother.
V. Method and Discipline
By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure.
A father hangs in the dark like a noose, his feet already reliquaried, his brainpan already opened to silver needles, dissection-angelic, searching for the kernel of light that must make a king a king.
But he is not dead yet and all I can see is the shape of him against the night. The smell of the desert is coming over the hills: not sweet sage and agave, but dead mice, old bones, and the droppings of buzzards. The shape of his back. Of his lie. But I am the shape of his lie and I cannot be expected to do anything in this place but stand my ground and tell him that order is inherently oppressive, as though that means anything at all when our eyes are the same shade of green, and our forefingers crook identically to the left.
The other boy’s forefinger is straight as an accusation.
There are men back there, beyond the hills, who are playing ridiculous games with rattlesnakes, baiting the poor green creatures, laughing when they snap. They came because I told them to, and I am very beautiful when I command, and they didn’t want to pay a pair of oxen to the old king when a little sweat-work might save the cow and make the new king look kindly on them.
I will not be king. I know that. Secrets aren’t kings. Genealogies are meant to be worn on one’s chest, not held under the tongue like a communion wafer. I wait for it to melt and it stays hard and sharp against my mouth. The other boy still thinks there is a destiny here. I have heard his wife never had a child; I would have given her one, if I had survived this place. If she had had blue in her hair. And that boy would have been king and no one’s nephew—but you cannot be king when you cannot, even for a moment, stand in the light.