Dead Letters Anthology (39 page)

His reaction to Nimue is typical. He’s sweating, and it’s sheer temperature, as well as quickened blood. Ladies of Lakes live in lakes for reasons.

Back when I first met her, I once saw Nimue turn a loch into a steam bath, and an iceberg into a mammoth-filled mist. I never expected any lake to withstand her temperature.

When I’d managed to wrench myself out of my first tranche of various punishments and begun the process of reclaiming my magic, I heard the stories of her later doings.

Mortally wounded, Arthur had Excalibur thrown into her lake, they said, and it was her hand that rose out of the water to catch it. Then she carried him, and his court, wife, knights, and tables, off to Avalon. Which wasn’t an island. It was an apple orchard. Arthur liked apples, and so did Nimue. Anyone who’s been existent since time began likes apples. Just as that little gumball of a skull contained my knowledge, apples contain the magic of millennia. Orchards are useful places.

The orchards towards which we’re descending lie beneath Britain. There are the roots of trees that lived and thrived a thousand years ago still here, twined in the soil. Under the hill, over the wood.

For a long time now I’ve been watching the Crossrail’s progress, tracking its route, and feeling increasingly urgent. No happy ending. This is not the foretold future. The future I, among others, foretold. I once had a deal more skill. Lately, though, in my still-scattered state, I’ve been resorting to tarot. There’s a tattooed card reader in a hotel lobby in Shoreditch who’s got a bit of old magic inherited from a great-grandmother, I heard. She works Saturday nights, while all the noble children dance. On the prescribed day I came to her. I brought in the paper, showed her tarot deck the photo of the drill, and asked when the drill would break through.

‘To the other end of the line?’ she said.

‘To what sleeps below,’ I said, in my best voice. ‘And bring the end of everything.’

‘Dunno, nutter,’ she said. ‘I get my news online. You have an Instagram, Granddad? I could tag you. That beard is a piece of work. You got a bird’s nest in there?’

‘Just ask the bloody cards for the answer,’ I said, requiring, to my embarrassment, their magical boost. I, the legendary wizard of Britannia. Even the legendary, the ledge, can fail when they fall. My love story is not the one they’ve made films about. Mine was nothing so scandalous as that of Guinevere, and Lancelot, Arthur and his heartbreak. I’ve seen those films. My story was just that of a wizard and his witch, the knowledge of centuries passed onto one younger and wiser. If it knew the truth of what we got up to, though, England would blush.

The reader held out her palm, asking that she be crossed with silver, which she rejected, then paper, which I’d accumulated over the decades of foraging through dead letters. Plenty of notes stuffed into lost birthday cards.

I drew The Magician, reversed. That’s all I ever draw with tarot. Decks convert themselves. An old joke of Nimue’s I assume.

Imagine, for a moment, a wizard standing at the top of a pine tree, looking around in rapture, seeing the walls of his crystalline tower, imagining that all he will have to do, for centuries, is enjoy the silence, read the books he hasn’t read, and learn the spells he hasn’t learned. I was happy in my ‘punishment’, at first. Imagine a wizard feeling himself loved by a witch. It took a hundred years before this wizard stepped off the platform he’d imagined, and tumbled head over heels through pine cones and owl nests, not in a shining tower after all, but only abandoned.

From Adam’s pocket, I can see the glowing hilt of Excalibur. I’ve never felt that magical swords should glow. Enemies can see you coming – it’s stupid. Plus it overinvests a person in the mere fact of glow: I remember the first torch I saw and then procured in a shop. I did so because I was briefly and shamefully delighted by the possibility that it possessed powers beyond the normal; I don’t know, the capacity to cut through steel, for example. I was swiftly disabused. Its glow was just glow, from a battery. Still, I wish we had a torch now. I do not feel Nimue is to be trusted with Excalibur. She smells of mermaid and pine tar. She’s been cooped up much too long to be a reliable sorceress, and in any case I don’t know what sort of sorcery she practices these days.

We pass what’s clearly a hoard of gold and bronze buried in just a skip’s worth of dirt. Little lizards in there too. My stoat self is inclined to dig, and again, I deny myself. This is an inconveniently appetite-driven body.

Nimue rams the point of Excalibur into a wall and stops our descent. We are in a cathedral-sized hole. I see several flights of stairs, with startled workers on them, trying to convince themselves they aren’t seeing us. A tremendous passage yawns below us, and within it is that draconic drill they’ve named in questionable honour for the queen. Tunnel walls are being girded with steel. I glance up at the witch.

‘You plan to stay stoat, then?’ she says. Even a bit demagicked, still, I realise I don’t have to. I chant to shift myself into something new. Nimue gives me a look that says my new form is not appropriate. I prod the wall of the tunnel with my antlers.

Nimue waves her fingers and changes me into a lovely maiden, which is fair play, and a palpable hit. Those years were worse than the ones in which I was a prophetic stag, which was at least a form respected by other wizards. Being a lovely maiden and thus assumed to be intellectless was, as Nimue knew it would be, perfectly maddening.

Adam jolts, trying to keep his footing.

‘Old Man,’ he asks, his voice shaking. ‘You still in there? You’re pretty as a lady. What’re we at, mate? What’s going on?’ He shifts sadly. ‘I’ve still got a tail,’ he whispers. ‘It’s bunched up in my arse.’

What might I transform him into. A mouse? My subtleties feel coarse. All this magic newly returned to me, and I should be readying magics for Arthur, but I fear I do not remember what to do. I have been preparing myself for failure.

‘Can you swing a sword?’ Nimue asks Adam. ‘They may wake spoiling for a fight.’

‘I’ve played rugby,’ he says, bigging himself up. I doubt he’s done any such.

‘That’ll do,’ says Nimue.

She leaps, and takes us thistledown light onto the drill itself, while the drillers gawp. Nimue sniffs the air and takes off, running as fast as a river off a cliff. She’s a water witch, and I’m a lady in waiting, chasing after her. Adam stumbles after us both. I feel Elizabeth spinning beneath my feet, and I feel the desire for magic, forgetting then remembering that I have it.

I’m horribly confused after all this time. Still not sure what I can do, I transform back into my Merlin self, with capes and celestial robes and all that, with the lovely pointed hat she always mocked. Adam snickers and I don’t care.

I go horizontal and fly.

Halfway down the tunnel, I realise Adam’s hanging from my ankle.

‘Old Man!’ he cries.

‘Release me!’ I shout.

I can barely see Nimue. She’s springing ahead, lit by the flicking glow of Excalibur, soundtracked by the grinding of the drill.

‘I’ll stay a stoat, if I’m only her stoat,’ Adam wails. ‘Swear down!’

‘Bigger fish!’ I shout furiously. Then I, fellow-sufferer, relent, and allow him onto my back as though I’m a fucking broomstick.

God help us, I can smell the apples of Avalon, as the tip of Elizabeth pierces the wall of the cave where the king of England sleeps. I hear Nimue bursting through the rock and magic, into the orchard where Arthur and his court wait.

‘What’re we doing?’ howls Adam.

‘We have to stop King Arthur waking!’ I shout in what I realise is terror. ‘He’s there to protect us all, and with his waking comes Albion’s happy ending!’

I keep flying.

‘That,’ says Adam carefully after a moment, ‘doesn’t sound so bad?’

Poor Adam. Perhaps someone told him stories, once. Perhaps he reads and loves stories still. Perhaps it takes someone from inside a story to explain to someone from without them, that even a happy ending is an apocalypse.

I burst through the rock behind Nimue. She stands before the point of the encroaching drill, Excalibur raised high, confronting the Crossrail.

Behind her I can definitely see Arthur in his own crystal cave. He’s twitching, stirring, coming out of his rest, roots all around him, apple cores covering the ground. I can see Guinevere and Lancelot, one on either side of him, each holding his hands. And yes, Arthur’s crown still gleams, as the story lurches towards a finish.

‘BEND!’ shouts Nimue, sword trembling, magic surging from her fingertips. ‘BEND, ELIZABETH!’

The drill considers. It decides to shrug off magic, and whirrs forward at Nimue.

Adam rolls off my back, and charges the drill. He flings himself between Nimue and Elizabeth, his pale chest bared to the diamond-tipped point, offering his heart to be impaled by progress.

I fumble for my own magic, patting the pockets I have again with the habits of magicless centuries, and find my letter opener instead.

I pull it from my robes, sliding it out as smoothly as it was once, under my guidance, pulled from a stone.

‘FLEA!’ I shout, waving my own sword.

I never lost everything I had; I knew I’d find use for that neglected sword. Never as flashy as Excalibur, no, but that long marinading in the stone didn’t leave it entirely useless, you might say. I wave the nameless – and, I might add, sensibly unglowing – sword my ward tugged out of the rock. It was always the poor relation – I felt sorry for it, is the truth, when Nimue’s own blingy Excalibur turned up and turned heads. It was a bugger to find: no one ever seemed quite sure where they’d left it. So when I finally found it, I made sure to keep it close, discreetly. Now at last I can let it stretch. I imagine that old iron must be luxuriating. It is not without power.

‘Flee! Flea!’ My magic is a bit of a mess and I’m not sure if I’m trying to transmogrify the drill into an insect or to send it packing. Not without power notwithstanding, and either way, nothing happens.

All, apparently, is lost. Or won. Same thing.

Nimue calmly picks up an Avalonian apple, and tosses it into the path of the drill.

The apple slams Adam aside and is split in two, cored by a tunnel never to be.

I wave King Arthur’s original sword again, this time in conjunction with Nimue and Excalibur, and the startled drill seems to hesitate, and waits in time stretched out – until at last and with a pneumatic sigh it surrenders to these ancient obstacles, shying away in a mechanical motion that could be displacement by magic, or could be a sensibly altered route. I swear you can’t tell.

It sends sad surveys back to its operators.

You always have to take account of such archaeological finds. Elizabeth adjusts her course and tilts away from Avalon.

Behind Nimue, Arthur rolls on his rock, and takes Guinevere in his arms, and Lancelot holds Arthur in their cosy napping threesome. All the court of the King beneath the hill settles down again and gets back to dreaming.

I turn to my witch. She’s eating one half of the apple. She offers me the other. As I take the fruit, sweet as the future, sour as the past, filled with old, dirty magic, I look at her, the Lady of the Lake. I drop my sword, a letter opener again, back in my pocket.

‘Would you like to go skinnydipping?’ says Nimue. ‘There’s an underground lake somewhere down here as I recall.’

‘Roman baths too,’ I say.

‘That pine,’ she says, and glitters at me.

‘That shining tower,’ I say.

‘Old Man,’ Adam says. He stumbles to his feet and looks groggy. ‘Is this Camelot?’

Maria Dahvana Headley is a
New York Times
-bestselling author whose books include
Magonia, Aerie, Queen of Kings
, the memoir
The Year of Yes
, and with Kat Howard,
The End of the Sentence
. With Neil Gaiman, she is the #1
New York Times
-bestselling editor of the anthology
Unnatural Creatures
. Upcoming is the novel
The Mere Wife
, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, as well as a short story collection. Her Nebula and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated short fiction has been anthologised in many year’s bests. Her work has been supported by The MacDowell Colony, and Arte Studio Ginestrelle, among others.

“We work on each other’s stories and longform all the time, editing, structuring, mucking about in each other’s sentences, but we’ve never formally collaborated, so
Dead Letters
seemed like a good opportunity. The skull (China) and the mermaid (Maria) looked like two pieces of the same universe to us. The idea of a much reduced Merlin hunting his scattered magic in the Office of Dead Letters comes from a mutual interest in the snarled lovesick relationship between Merlin and his (clearly brilliant) apprentice witch Nimue, though neither of us remembers where the idea of eating the dead letters came from. From there, the parts that look like one of us wrote them were probably written by the other, in nearly all cases. One of us had a great deal of fun writing a ridiculous verse spell, and the other had an appalling amount of fun writing the line ‘I go horizontal and fly’.”

China Miéville is a writer of fiction and non-fiction who lives and works in London.

The mother is an older mother, historically speaking. There is a streak of grey she does not dye. Her adoration of the child is like too much make-up. Her attentiveness to his every stumble in the park makes me feel nervous for him, and rushed. Will the child fall today? Irrevocably? This is the worry of her posture, as she leans forward off the bench ready to spring to him across the woodchips. Astounding – given her disquiet – that she allows the child, called Gibb, to risk splinter on the shifting ground.

I sit alone, under a tree. I do my best not to haunt the area by keeping an open book on my lap. It is Rilke.

* * *

The next day they come again. She is petite, slightly dishevelled, and has strapped him against her as if they were nomads. They are not. He is calmer than most toddlers who roam this half-acre with their nannies and blood mothers. The needless gadgets she must undo before he can be let down to join the fray frustrate me, whose job is to watch. His swinging limbs have the look of the unliving. I am familiar. When she packs him up to leave an hour later, he is more vivid, the bloom on the centre of his forehead visible even from here. She sticks a bottle in his face. He drops into a milk-fed stupor, and she re-secures the latches and belts.