Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,181

the boys who heads beamed with so much light that to look in on your suppers was to look into a painting, choked with coronae. I never wore anything on my head but my hair, and you were all too beautiful for me to feel like much more than an altarboy at some terrible, radiant Mass. I was thick at the ankle, at the waist, at the shoulder, no part of me was slender or elegant. They called me perfect and I winced at the lie, at the joke, the hulking man who could hardly cut his own meat for the mottled stump at his wrist where his hand used to be.

But I know you did not mean to be cruel. Such a thing was not in you.

Of all the places I went at your side, I never imagined this would be the last, this long strand, like a thick rope laid below the dark city, the strange half-place where the Cam whorled and looped into the not-Cam, into a road I could hardly fathom as a road—yet who could think that the dead air could empty itself in a sea so clear, so bright, that I cannot look at it, cannot look out on that perfect shore, that perfect sea.

The breeze smells of clean grass—the dunes prickle with it, curving back over the headlands. The blue batters at my skull, and out of the surf comes the strange, foreign cry of dolphins, their chirping litany, their barking lament. Their blue heads stud the water like sapphires set in steel—like the stones on the hilt of this cleaver, this hack-saw you loved so well.

I know a secret: it is your own arm I carry to the waterside, severed from you—you are like me, now, at the end, limb-hewn—embarrassed by its own jewelry, but no less your own, hung at your wrist all those years as though by joint and sinew. I have dragged it through the barnacled sand, this arm, this pommel, this elbow, this cross-guard, this shoulder with its sparse golden hair. I know it for your arm and no blade, and I cannot fling it away as though it were a scrap of palimpsest blowing through the streets of that city by the sea.

I cannot cast off this thing which has been your body, cast it into the water like a fishing line. I cannot do it. I will keep it for myself, and fold it beneath my floorboards, wrapped in rags and furs and covered in pine which does not quite match the surrounding ash, so that in the smallest of all night-hours, I may pull up the planks like exhuming a grave, prying up the coffin-splinters, so that I may uncover it like an old bone, and look into it as a mirror, lay beside it as beside dust, and know my friend is near.

I will not do it.

What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but waves and winds. That is untruly said of thee, said the king, therefore go thou lightly again, and do my commandment; as thou art to me as life and dear, spare not, but throw it in.

The sun is so high and hot that it will allow nothing green beneath it—everything here is hard and gold, hard and blue, hard and white. The hilt is warm in my hand; the blade is incandescent, star-shot. I am almost used to it, stranger to my palm before you turned gray and coagulate.

Lumps of city scatter off to the west, houses like red ant-cairns, roof-tiles shining back the endless light, light that must have weight, weight like shoulder-plates, like liquid, pooling silver. The sand has dried in the noon so that the furrow I leave this time is neat and sighing. Its sides trickle in behind me.

There has been a beach like this before, though never a sea like this, never a sun like this. But there was a strand—oh, does he remember it, in the long line of things he has killed which must string together in his breast like old ornaments? St. Michael, St. Michael, the castle and the tide, and the fires burning like infidels stuck on the ramparts. We went into that place, and I never came out, that place so like this one, as though all places which are not Camelot must run together into one country, long and strange and serrated, along the coast of another sea.

Arthur did not want to go.