Myths of Origin Four Short Novels - By Catherynne M. Valente Page 0,182

I understood immediately, because I did not want to go either. I saw in the ogre-keeper of that place my own hulking, muscle-bound form, horrible in its meat-pounding arms, its swollen legs. I did not want to go down across the green fields when the strawberries had just come through, still small and hard and pale on the stalk, I did not want to go trampling over their little beads in order to kill something so like myself. I have always pitied ungainly things, things born too big for the world. I never forgot my own inelegance, my own boar-belly.

There were a line of girls at the gate in those days, crying dirt-tears, eyes spinning in their heads like weathervanes. They held their fists between their legs and the blood had dried to black there. Mouths hung open, missing teeth, and they just stood still, all in a row, so quiet, like nuns, their breasts beaten flat. Arthur did not want to look at them: he knew their faces. He remembered that his mother looked like that every time his father came home from campaign, sweat-stung and hard, that it had never gotten better or easier for her, not the littlest bit, and he knew from the time he was hay-haired and jam-stained that she probably looked like that the morning after he was made.

Every morning there was another woman in the line, beads on an abacus, and someone, somewhere, tallying, tallying. Finally I went out to them, and found the first in that blood-wan sisterhood.

Who did this to you, Lady? You must know that this is the house of justice—we manufacture it here, like wooden toys.

Her eyes rolled back and I could see the tiny scarlet veins in the white, like the strokes of a brush.

The Beast of St. Michael pushed us open until we could not but crack. I cannot feel my spine, but I can feel him, still, inside me.

Still, he did not want to know. He did not want to remember that he could not sit on his mother’s lap for days after his father had left again, door a-slam and finally soft. He did not want to think that his own blood was full of numb spines and cracked hips. But I could not watch them add to their number, day by day, like a faucet dripping.

She is dead, and beyond him now.

He, too, is dead, sighed Arthur, and gone after her. What if still he breaks her beneath him on a rack of clouds?

I pulled on his shirt and strapped this very sword to his waist, though his limbs were frozen and heavy. I dressed him like a baby. He could not raise his head to them as we rode out, though they beat their bellies until the blood began to run red and wet again, and we were heralded in crimson all the way to the sea.

The castle stood on a strand like this one, though the sea was gray, not blue, and the sun was a white disc, not flaming as if to purify a sinning sphere. Far out into the slate waves it frowned, piled on itself like a fallen cake, sullen, gouged windows and doors bolted like torsos. Here and there, it was burning, tall, thin flames hissing as they met the damp sky, steaming in rain that slanted into the brine-pitted walls, and surely to him it must have looked like home, must have looked like his mother’s bed, must have looked like his father’s grinning face.

Of course, he would not remember the girl. Only I saw her, only I touched her. If I were a better man I would confess my sins to my king before he dies, but I cannot unstring my lips after all this time, and see his pupils widen, then shrink. I was once a good man. I was once his man.

We slayed a giant together, my friend and I, a giant with no beanstalk or harp of gold, only a wretched castle hollowed out for him by whale-speckled tides, only rough, mucus-yellow eyes and an expression like a lamp that once shone and has long gone out. The usual business of slaying occurred—we have done this before. There were bellows like shades blowing open in a storm, and once the skin of a thing is broken, I am always reminded of heifers calving on my own father’s land—my father, who never knew, as I do, how much blood you could let out of