Myths of Origin (39 page)

“I have solved it,” I called to my bride, “I know now the path to Ne no Kuni, and all because of this brainless drunkard of a snake.”

Kushinada wept into the mottled head.

“Would you like to know it? Your husband-to-be is the cleverest of all possible men—will it please you to hear how I have solved this puzzle?”

Kushinada sniffled like a child, and wiped at her bloodied face with bloodied hands. She said nothing.

“You see,” I said softly, sitting gingerly next to her as one will sit next to a feral cat one hopes to pet, “I descended not far from here, my first footprints on the earth made their impressions in the dust of Hiroshima and Izumo, and Yasugi and Mt. Hiba. I descended and was made a man, and from that moment I could not find my way into Yomi, the land of shadows.”

I turned her face towards me, and the whites of her eyes showed.

“I could not find my way, you understand, because I am a man. No man knows the way. But sitting in all this blood, stepping through the corpse-geography of the serpent of Izumo as my father must have stepped through my mother in the light of his comb, I have solved it: I may go to her as easily as any man, if I am willing to die for her. Who can go into the kingdom of the dead while he is living? Only my father, first of all things that trespassed, and I am not he.”

Kushinada’s eyes searched mine. “Then . . . then you will let me go?”

I laughed. “Oh, no, you are promised to me—I will die, I will go to the slopes of Mt. Hiba and I will go down into the earth, I will claw the roof of hell until mother lets me in, I will eat earth, I will eat loam and clay until I choke, and she will take me in, and I will become in her primordial womb my old self, crowned in clouds. I will rule beside her in the kingdom of the dead, and when I have shed this flesh I will come back for you.”

She crumbled into my lap; her legs tangled in the jaws of the snakehead, and shuddered. “You are neither old nor young, handsome nor ugly; you are neither man nor god, you are neither alive nor dead, and after all this, after all this, I will be the only one of us taken to wife.”

I patted her head comfortingly. “It will not be so bad, my love, my love—when I am myself again I will turn you into a beautiful jeweled comb, so that you can come into the land of the dead while you yet live, as my father brought his comb. And I will place you in my headdress, and your teeth will lie close to my scalp, always, so that I know you are there, and that you love me. And every now and then, a jewel will fall from its setting, and those jewels will be our children, and they will grow up to be wonders: your rubies will be samurai and your sapphires will be court poets, your emeralds will be concubines and your diamonds will be magicians, and your silver will be empresses, and your gold will be emperors. They will fall like colored rain onto the radiant flesh of Izanami, and everyone will marvel at the glittering children of Kushinada!”

The mother of all emperors bent double on the wet earth, clutched her belly and opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came, nothing came but spittle and strangled gasps, and then she began that tiresome rocking, rocking and crooning.

I left her there, kissed her forehead like a dutiful husband, and told her I would return. I walked away from the manifold fence with a straight back and a cool brow—I looked back only once to see her with two of the massive, broken heads barely contained within her skinny arms, kissing their gory skin and sobbing.

The guttering sparks of the sun lay over Hiroshima far below, and I thought—only for a moment—that, as if I had already walked there, already eaten and drunk and slept and wakened there, I could see my footprints flaming over the city, burning white and sere, like an afterimage, and a hot wind followed after them.

XI
YOMI

“Mother!” he called to the bloody-flowered acacia.

“Mother!” he called to the top-knots of snow.

“Mother!” he called to the stones from the barrels of earth.

And it was the stones that answered.

“Here,” they murmured in their grinding, “here.”

Susanoo-no-Mikoto pushed stone aside from stone, slate from shale.

“Here,” they sighed, and moved from their loam, “here.”

He clawed at the mud, tearing thick furrows in the ground.

“Mother!” he wheezed, falling onto his face, beating his fists against the soil.

And in the long shadows of the night whose shape the sun cannot guess, the black earth closed her arms over her son.

UNDER
IN THE
MERE

Then quickly rose Sir Bedivere, and ran,
And, leaping down the ridges lightly, plunged
Among the bulrush-beds, and clutched the sword,
And strongly wheeled and threw it. The great brand
Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon,

And flashing round and round, and whirled in an arch,

Shot like a streamer of the northern morn,

Seen where the moving isles of winter shock

By night, with noises of the northern sea.

So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur:

But ere he dipped the surface, rose an arm

Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,

And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him

Three times, and drew him under in the mere.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Idylls of the King

XVII THE STAR

The Lady of the Lake

So they rode till they came to a lake, which was a fair water and broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was aware of an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword in that hand. With that they saw a damosel floating upon the lake. What damosel is that? said Arthur. That is the Lady of the Lake, said Merlin; and within that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any on earth, and richly beseen; and this damosel will come to you anon, and then speak ye fair to her that she will give you a sword.

—Sir Thomas Malory

Le Morte d’Arthur

What damosel is this? What damosel is this?
Perhaps I am nothing but a white arm. Perhaps the body which is me diffuses at the water’s surface into nothing but light, light and wetness and blue. Maybe I am nothing but samite, pregnant with silver, and out of those sleeves come endless swords, dropping like lakelight from my hems. Will you come down to me and discover if my body continues below the rippling?

I thought not.

Look out: the lake’s edges blur into the sky, blue to blue. All water flows into itself—this is the lake; this is the sea. River and shore and flux, we are all water together, and the moon shows in one just as in the other, a wide white face and a long white arm.

In the quiet of the dark I have lapped milk from the dish of the moon, and thought nothing of swords. In the dark of the quiet I have opened my mouth to let the lake through, and the run-off has been afloat with stars. And I thought nothing of hilts or pommels or earnest young men with unconventional grocery lists. Take your basket through the fields—what does the boy need for his magic kingdom? A magic birth, a magic man, a magic crown, a magic sheath, a magic sword. I am last of all—you stand on my white-sand shore and all you need is the sword to set it all going, like a huge dial in some terrible wind-up clock made of women’s limbs and men’s bones and so much gold, so much gold—lift the samite drop-cloth with a flourish and it all begins, it all goes along as the best of the angels of predestination would have it. All you need is the sword. How fortunate for you that we have one in stock.

The little waves wash over your feet, but they do not anoint them. The foam is sweet, but there is salt in the depths. Salt and me. It was good of you to come so far out of the world, so far across green squares of turnip farms and thorny apple orchards and a bridge whose suspensors are strung with the heads of all the kings who have tried to take the sword before you—covered in a sheen of melted pearl and lit up with fire. Check your map: if there are dragons here, I am a dragon, deep in the creases of my lake. Look at your map, Merlin-blessed, and see how far you have come, where the bridge leads and what it spans—it spans the distance between here and there, the rooted compass and the wheeling north, between Camelot and Faery, between the places you would drape with light until there is nothing but radiance and those places whose darkness you cannot begin to touch. Between yourself and your opposite. Between you and I. It arches through the ether; it goes to Annwn, to Avalon. To the otherworld, the otherplace, the othered place.

It goes to the New World. The place where maps shrivel and sodden, where the earth drops into water and water drops into earth. It goes to the sharp margin of everything that is, and there the knight finds the New World, the farthest west, and learns to whisper a word he has never heard:
Cal-i-forni-a
. Whisper it, breathe it, drink it from the droplets of the lake. This is the name of Annwn, of Avalon, this is the name of the underworld. It is written over the gates in chalcedony and drywall. On the other side of the bridge there was no
fiat lux
, only this one word. Say it and it will keep you safe.

I, too, am always at the other side, I and all my brothers and sisters, I and everything which has no place within civilized mortar-and-brick. You must come out to us, again and again, for we are the source of your magic births, your magic men, your magic crowns, your magic sheaths, and your magic swords. It is the chief industry of your reign, the commerce between your world and mine.

But perhaps not. Perhaps I am an old woman living under the water because clams and trout have better manners than kings, and I tell very beautiful lies because I just want the company, and if I lie prettily enough, you will stay and talk to me.

Perhaps I was once nothing but a very young girl, toddling down a stone wall and chasing moths with her pink fingers—and perhaps somewhere along the wet green meadow the wall became a path and the path became a road and the road became a bridge and the moths with the eyes on their wings were always just a little further off, flitting just out of reach, and perhaps the bridge became a lake and I splashed in after them. And perhaps the lake was full of swords and moths and apple trees waving in the current, and perhaps the swords said I was pretty, and the moths said it was all right to touch them, and the apple trees said wouldn’t I like to stay, wouldn’t I like to learn how to breathe water like a long, slender fish.

And perhaps I grew old down here, while my arm stayed young.

Perhaps I
am
nothing but a white arm, severed, stuck in the lake like a birthday candle.

Yet you see how far you had to come to find me. You cannot deny how warm it is here, how golden, how the gulls keen.

Come closer. Look in: anything could hide beneath the surface of the lake. A serpent, a woman, an arm, a sword. Anything could break the waters and call its own name. This still pool contains everything possible, every woman with necromancy inked on her tongue, every knight tilting, every castle, every grail. A lake has so many voices, you know. The flashes of light slip by on the water, in and out of each other, and each cries out in extremis, each cries out in its gleaming, and is gone. Can you hear them? I have sat at the bottom of the currents, cross-legged as a deva, and watched the green and the pale whicker by, howling, glowing, beaming. The water is so warm, when the choir sings. Lean in, lean in.

I know that I don’t matter to you; I am no more than a bucket of water from this lake, something you can take without bargaining or payment. I am the beginning—you only need me to nod my alabaster head, Madonna-gentle, and grant your life permission to commence.

Oh, I am an arm, your arm, mine, theirs, all your boys. I extend, implore, I lavish upon and commit to the deeps. I bless, I strangle. I pull up the lakefloor in the shape of a sword and say:
go, boy, this story has already been told
. And perhaps, when this boy reaches out to take my blue blade, shining like nothing so much as water, my fingers will brush against his—they are warm, and shaking, and he is so young.

. . . and brandish’d him three times

I.

A wide green field, and grass like water waving. There is light here, and thick soil, and hiding hills. Clouds skitter across the hedgerows like rocks skipping on a lake. There are stones: here, there, great gray things, knuckle-knobbled. They lie where the walls will be, corners and lengths and thresholds. You can almost see the glimmer of what will stand, hovering shadow-still over the slabs.

The people come swarming, hammering, boiling pitch, boiling limestone, cutting wood. The most obvious images are best: a beehive. An anthill. Gold-backed, dust-legged, wings folded against the spine, the people stir, pour, smear, nail, pile, hammer, slide. None of them know the name of the man who will live here.

The walls go up first, so that no other bee or ant might suckle at the sweetness of a roof or a palisade. There are slender gaps for arrows, and paths so that helmeted soldiers may stalk their territory like dogs, and slope-shouldered lovers may watch the sun set over the blessing hills. It is good work, and plain: solid and thick and smelling of earth. Peat and mortar, sod and lime.

Second is the cathedral, whose altar was brought up from Cornwall, whose gargoyles were brought over the sea from France—years pass here, under the curling eaves, apples and capons eaten while the scaffolding weathers, a hoary skeleton. Even after the court and market are full of voices, after the stairs have been fashioned sturdy and steep, after secret rooms and passages are dug with due diligence, the cathedral will still be unfolding and spiraling up to the floor of God’s house. A father paints the pews; his son finishes the rafters; his grandson strikes the first bell, whose wide bronze bonging tones echo through the valley, now planted with wheat and potatoes and pear trees, hutches of chickens and geese, pens of cattle, now teeming with tenant farmers and broad-bellied knights and harvests of good rain and mild sunshine, harvests that see baskets full of green and gold, brown eggs and thick milk.