The PowerBook (6 page)

You were sun and moon to me.

I took the iron bars in my hands and tore them out of the stone, and though I cut my hand through to the bone I never felt it, but came to you and lay with you in the darkness, in the silence, your body as white and soft as moonlight.

In the morning, when I had long since gone, and you slept late, your servant drew back the bed curtains and saw the sheets and pillows soaked in blood. It was soon known that someone must have
been with you in your room and the hissing started.

You were faithless. You were treacherous. You would be burnt.

Many times has your lord and my King, with a heavy heart, committed you to burning. Many times have I rescued you, through combat with your accuser, for the King, who is judge of all, cannot fight for his own wife.

My name is Lancelot.

‘Lancelot du Lac,’ you said, rowing your body over me.

I was the place where you anchored. I was the deep water where you could be weightless. I was the surface where you saw your own reflection. You scooped me up in your hands.

That you were married to someone else meant nothing to me. Which is more important—a dead marriage or a living love? You never chose private happiness over public duty, you asked only that
happiness be there—a view from the window, a crack in the casing—that sometimes you could ease yourself out, unclothe yourself, swim in me.

There was never a time when he called you and you did not answer. You asked—without asking—that when he did not call you, there would be no need to answer.

Then you called for me, and no hawk was swifter to the wrist.

I saved you from the fire, but the fire I could not put out was burning at our feet. Many times have you and I turned away from each other, our faces proud, our hearts seeming cold, and only our feet, which smouldered the clean stone where they trod, betrayed us.

My feet, bare and clean on the cold floor of my penance, left charcoal marks where I walked. The flagstones of your heart have become hearthstones. Wherever we stood, there was a fire at our feet.

‘One day this will destroy us,’ you said, your lips like tongs, moving the burning parts of me.

But I wondered how it could destroy us when it
was
us? We had become this love. We were not lovers. We were love.

Your marrow is in my bones. My blood is in your veins. Your cock is in my cunt. My breasts weigh under your dress. My fighting arm is sinew’d to your shoulder. Your tiny feet stand my ground. In full armour I am wearing nothing but your shift, and when you plait your hair you wind it round my head. Your eyes are green. Mine are brown. When I see through your green eyes, I see the meadows bright with grass. When you creep behind my retina, you see the flick of trout in the reeds of the lake.

I can hold you up with one hand, but you can balance me on your fingertips. Last night, angry, you split my lip with your fists, then wept over a scar from a boar.

I am not wounded unless you wound me.

I am not strong unless you are my strength.

Her name is Guinevere.

The rumours increased. There was a plot. Mordred and Agravaine warned the King against us and set to trap me in your room. I killed all twelve of those cowards who lusted after our bravery, and it is brave to love, for love is the mortal enemy of death. Love is death’s twin, born in the same moment, each fighting for mastery, and if death takes all, love would do the same. Yet it is easier to die than to love.

Death will shatter me, but in love’s service I have been shattered many times.

There was a day, I remember, when I rode after you in full armour and made my horse swim the Thames to find you. At the other side my horse was shot down.

I followed on foot, but my armour was so heavy that I made little progress, and I would have gladly torn off helmet and plates, and thrown my shield away, except that a man cannot even unbuckle his armour by himself.

Exhausted and weary, a man in iron clothes, I came at last to where you were, and killed your captors and set you free.

Then I stretched out my arms like a little child and begged you to uncouple my harness and unlace my metal gloves. I knelt down and you lifted up my visor and kissed me.

My armour off, it lay like an effigy of myself on the floor. I was naked with you, carapace of hero put aside. I was not Lancelot. I was your lover.

Why then fear death, which cannot enter the body further than you have entered mine?

Why then fear death, which cannot dissolve me more than I dissolve in you, this day, this night, always?

Death will not separate us. Love is as strong as death.

Your death was commanded for the next day.

As the soldiers were tying your hands and packing the dry straw under your bare feet, I rode up on my white mare, and I cared nothing for anyone who fell under my sword. I took you up behind me and carried you to my own castle, and begged you to come with me to France, to my lands, to my heart, for ever.

You would not break your marriage vow.

And then the wars began. The wars that ruined us all.

Most blamed you, some blamed me, but underneath the blaming of our love, hid many other wraths, restless to be vented. What began as good reason became good excuse. The war was pursued long after any advantage for either side.

I was riding through the burnt fields and bloodied streams, looking for you. My horse picked her way with delicate hooves over the bodies of the dead.

I had been told you had entered a nunnery, and I found you there at last. Dismounting from my horse, I walked to the walled garden and looked through the little grille.

You were unaware of me. You were sitting on a low stone bench with your hands in front of you, palms up, as though you were a book you were straining to read. Though you were all in black and I could not see your face, the arch of your back, your shoulders, your neck, made a curve I knew from loving you.

I looked at my own hands that had touched you everywhere, and I took hold of the grille, as I had done before, and I would have torn it out of the wall to get to you, but suddenly you looked up. You saw me. You fainted.

I ran to the Abbess and begged her to allow me into the garden. Reluctantly she did so, for you are still the Queen, and I am still Lancelot, though the meaning of those names has become a noise.

In the garden you had recovered yourself. You were tall, upright, stern. As I approached, you held up your hand, and I would gladly have plucked my heart out of my body to make you hold it as you once held it—the core of me in your hands.

‘This love has destroyed us,’ you said.

‘Not love, but others’ envy of it.’

‘I had no right to love you,’ you said.

‘But you did love me and you love me now.’

I took a step forward. She shook her head.

‘You will never see me again while I am alive.’

‘Let me kiss you.’

She shook her head.

I rode away and my tears made a lake of me, and for seven nights I rode continuously, not knowing where, under desolate cliffs and through exhausted valleys, until I came to a chapel and a hermitage.

I took the robe of hermit on me and did penance there for seven years, and in the seventh year I had a dream three times in one night.

The dream told me to take a funeral bier to Almsbury, where I should find the Queen dead. I was to walk beside her body to Glastonbury and bury her beside her lord and my King.

The next morning I set out and after two days came to my destination. The Queen had died half an hour before, saying to her women that she prayed her eyes would never have the power to see me again while she was alive.

I walked beside her, and it seemed to me that the years had sprung back and it was May again. The
Maytime when I was sent through the forest to bring Guinevere to marry King Arthur.

All that long journey we had talked and sung together, and eaten privately in a jewelled tent. I fell in love with her then, and I have never been able to stop loving her, or to stop my body leaping at the sight of her.

There is no penance that can calm love and no regret that can make it bitter.

You are closed and shuttered to me now, a room without doors or windows, and I cannot enter. But I fell in love with you under the open sky and death cannot change that.

Death can change the body but not the heart.

The great and ruinous lovers.

Lancelot and Guinevere.

Tristan and Isolde.

Siegfried and Brünnhilde.

Romeo and Juliet.

Cathy and Heathcliffe.

Vita and Violet.

Oscar and Bosie.

Burton and Taylor.

Abelard and Heloïse.

Paolo and Francesca.

There are many more. This is a list you can write yourself. Some are greater than others. Some more ruinous. Some tales have been told many times, others privately and by letter. Love’s script has no end of beginnings. The characters and the scenery change. There are three possible endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.

The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the
same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.

I do not know whether or not science will formulate its grand theory of the universe. I know that it will not make it any easier to read the plain texts of our hearts. It is plain but it seems like a secret alphabet. We train as our own Egyptologists, hoping the fragments will tell a tale. We work at night as alchemists, struggling to decipher the letters mirrored and reversed. We are people who trace with our finger a marvellous book, but when we turn to read it again the letters have vanished. Always the book must be rewritten. Sometimes a letter at a time is all we can do.

My search for you, your search for me, is a search after something that cannot be found. Only the impossible is worth the effort. What we seek is love itself, revealed now and again in human form, but pushing us beyond our humanity into animal instinct and god-like success. The love we seek overrules human nature. It has a wildness in it and
a glory that we want more than life itself. Love never counts the cost, to itself or others, and nothing is as cruel as love. There is no love that does not pierce the hands and feet.

Merely human love does not satisfy us, though we settle for it. It is an encampment on the edge of the wilderness, and we light the fire and turn up the lamp, and tell stories until late at night of those great loves lost and won.

The wilderness is not tamed. It waits—beautiful and terrible—beyond the reach of the camp-fire. Now and again someone gets up to leave, forced to read the map of themselves, hoping that the treasure is really there. A record of their journey comes back to us in note form, sometimes just a letter in a dead man’s pocket.

Love is worth death. Love is worth life. My search for you, your search for me, goes beyond life and death into one long call in the wilderness. I do not know if what I hear is an answer or an echo. Perhaps I will hear nothing. It doesn’t matter. The journey must be made.

Night. The search engines are quiet.

I keep throwing the stories overboard, like a message in a bottle, hoping you’ll read them, hoping you’ll respond.

You don’t respond.

I warned you that the story might change under my hands. I forgot that the storyteller changes too. I was under your hands.

Later, much later, there’s a plane ticket on the screen—destination Naples.

Maybe you want an opera not a story.

Maybe, but the story has already gone on ahead. There it is, competing in the waves with the hydrofoils and rich men’s yachts. It looks like a plastic bottle but there’s something inside.

You thought, didn’t you, that you could start something and stop it when you pleased? Pick it up, put it down. A little light reading. A bedtime story.

Freedom just for one night.