Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,180

on me—father, you know that stare—it rippled with such pity. She took my chin in her hand. She looked me in the eye.

You look like your father.

Who is my father?

The man you look like.

I came to the city. I looked into a mirror of flesh and it broke, a long silver crack.

This is what happened: I killed my father. He got his knife into me when I leapt—stupid, not to keep my guard up.

The streets shine with flotsam.

XXI THE WORLD

Bedivere

Then Sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.

So Sir Bedivere came again to the king, and told him what he saw.

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

Therefore, said Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, take thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to the waterside, and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that water, and come again and tell me what thou there seest.

It’s amazing how heavy a sword really is. You never think about it—spend your life heaving them into wood and silk and leather, into earth and mire and stone, into bone and meat. It becomes part of you—you do not have a hand of flesh, but an arm which ends in metal, a long, curving finger which accuses, always accuses. You stop thinking about how thick and still it sits in your fist, the heft of it, the swing and the slog of it. It’s a hammer, and a club, it’s your own bone and gristle, and if the light is beautiful on the blade, if it is even like water, like a lake-edge, that does not mean that it was built for less than cutting, less than bludgeoning, less than pulling flesh from flesh.

You told me to come here, and the sea is on the shore like a tablecloth, more blue than I have seen together in all my days. I am tired, tired in my perfect sinews—recall how they used to call me that, how the women used to cheer for Bedevere, the Knight of the Perfect Sinews, and I never knew if it was mockery or not, if they snickered at my stump-wrist while praising the one hand left to me. But we were young, we were so young, and names of that sort seemed so important.

I am tired—there is no water here which is not full of salt, no wind that is not a hot clutch at the throat, a flaming sash, a flaming favor. I cannot see what color I might have been before the blood, before your son’s blood—how heavy was he, too, when I pulled him from you like a skin from an apple!—my blood, your own clotted last. The books always say that a dying man’s face is gray—I always thought that a poet’s silk-calved dream of what death might be, but your face, your face with its evening stubble stippling the skin like grass, it is gray after all, gray as the moon, and I am still so warm and red.

It is not a one-handed sword, your old blade, and I had to drag it from your body to the sea, two limping footsteps and a deep, worrying furrow in the sand. Bees buzz around my gore-stuck hair and lizards snap at fleas in my shoes. Kelp collects at the sword-tip; wet sand pulls and sucks at it, as though the earth would have it before the brine. My good arm aches as though I spent the day heaving a silver axe into cedar—you used to tease me when I filled my own wood-grate, told me you had men to do that for us.

Of course you do, Arthur, I said, you have me.

There are islands out there, beyond the sunline, but I cannot see them except as lashes of whipped light against a too-bright horizon. Dawn slants down like a glass window dropped into the whitecaps, and the whole world is waterside, how am I to know where to throw it? How am I to know where it ought to fall? How can I choose the place, who was never one of you, one of