The Bright Sword

by Lev Grossman

It was a good story. It made him feel better. Stories were useful that way, they smoothed over the gaps and sharp edges of the world.

She was one of those vibrant people who seemed to be part of a more interesting story than he was, and when she left she took it with her and left him behind in the dreary margins.

He should’ve just gone to bed. He swore a solemn vow that if he survived this he would always, for the rest of his life, if given the choice, go to bed.

His one refuge was the smithy, a snug bolt-hole where he would retreat sometimes when it was cold or rainy or snowy out. The smith kept it dark even in the daytime; he explained that it was so he could see the heat in the metal. Sitting in a corner, hugging his knees and rocking, Collum imagined the forge as a demon—the fire was its demon brain, tormenting it with red-hot thoughts. He watched sparks scatter across the stone floor and followed their individual fates as they shone defiantly and then winked out one by one. As his father’s spark had, and his mother’s. As his own spark one day would.

“I have come many miles to swear fealty to the—!” “To the what? What? The fuckin’ table? Do you see any fuckin’ table?” Sir Villiars dropped the sharpening steel and tossed the knife over his shoulder; he did it casually but the knife spun in a precise arc and stuck upright in the tabletop with a soft tok. He flowed to his feet in one terrifyingly lithe movement.

A rumor went round that what they were witnessing was a coup, staged by Uther’s ratty old enchanter, Merlin, using gramarye and stagecraft to install a weak-willed nobody whom the wizard could then manipulate from behind the scenes.

If his royal blood was Arthur’s first revelation, this was his second: he was no figurehead, he was a warlord, a dux bellorum. He had only the most perfunctory training with a sword, but Arthur was a natural with a much more fearsome weapon, an army.

And the people looked back at him and thought, Lo, there is greatness alive in this land after all, for there stands a true king. When they saw Arthur they knew who they were, and where they belonged, and that they were home at last.

You’ve no idea how silly the game of lords and ladies looks, he once told Bedivere, when you’ve won it just by pulling a knife out of a rock.

Over the course of three and a half centuries of occupation, Bedivere’s family, like most families of any social standing whatsoever, had become thoroughly Roman. They’d learned Latin and built villas and taken up the Roman gods, and when the Romans changed their minds and became Christian, Bedivere’s people had too.

Arthur showed no discernible interest in witchwork or quarter days, standing stones or harvest festivals. Probably to him they reeked of his unhappy childhood. Probably it felt like if he so much as acknowledged them then the royal dream would vanish and he would have to go back there. So he’d buried the Old World along with the child he’d been and built King Arthur on the gravesite. But what is buried is not gone.

The Round Table came to Camelot from Guinevere’s father, King Leodegrance, as part of her dowry, and in all honesty it was a bit of a white elephant. It was so big they had to take it apart just to get it inside. They couldn’t throw it away, but what the hell to do with it? But Arthur quickly realized that the Round Table was the kind of problem that could solve several others.

These adventures were testing the knights, urging them on toward a transcendence that hovered always just out of their reach. God had personally put Arthur on the throne, and now He seemed to have come back to scrutinize his investment.

Arthur’s secret was that when he was hardly more than a child they had handed him the whole world, and that world had a flaw in it, and the flaw was him. He was conceived in sin and deception and murder, and no matter how great a king he became, how passionately he pursued perfection and devoted himself to God, he could never change that. That was the catch, that was the cost, and he could never make it right. It was like one of those cursed wounds from the stories, that would never heal.

The chase took them through the forest and out into a strange barren land they’d never seen before, a desert of dead grass and powdery gray sand like ash. They rode through groves of blasted white trees that looked like they’d been murdered by lightning and then had their bleached white skeletons twisted a half turn by some great cruel hand.

It was already late afternoon, they’d ridden away most of the day, but when Arthur was on an adventure time meant nothing to him. He would’ve ridden all night if that’s what it took. They were in dream time now, the timeless time of adventures, which had a different texture from ordinary time.

THE KNIGHT WHO FULFILLS THIS QUEST WILL NOT FULFILL THIS QUEST

Collum didn’t look at anybody, just stared straight ahead panting. Villiars died like a knight, and Collum had won like a cheating schoolboy, but it was over and he was still alive, and now the Green Knight would have to give up his secret.

was hard not to feel like, after all that, it was a bit of an anticlimax. In Baghdad there was a palace with an artificial pond at its center, and in the center of the pond was a tree made of silver. The tree had eighteen branches, and each branch sprouted innumerable twigs and leaves, and on each twig sat a mechanical bird that could, by means of a concealed mechanism, be made to sing and flutter its wings. By comparison, the great treasure of Camelot was a table in the shape of a circle.

And of course there was the universally revered Lancelot, whose dominance in the realm of personal combat was so extreme as to be almost bizarre. He pondered Arthur’s motives in keeping someone like that so close, a foreigner with the power to kill at will. If they were closer to home he would have taken Lancelot for one of the fedayeen, an assassin in deep cover.

The queen of the Britons was a tall, skinny thing with the kind of beauty that one admired more than desired. She struck Palomides as highly intelligent and dangerously bored, an unstable combination.

As befitted the center of the royal cosmos, he had a charisma that was almost solar in its intensity—even Palomides didn’t like to look at it directly, lest he be drawn in and disarmed by it like so many others.

It was June, and nature wasn’t in mourning for King Arthur.

The ocean here seemed to be made of different stuff than the dull gray water around Mull. Cornish seawater was a luminous turquoise liquid that rolled itself out on the strand in clear lustrous sheets, one after another.

Was he alive or not? Was he coming back or not? How long would it take for Avalon’s magical surgeons to heal a fatal head wound? There was no way to know, and at the same time it was hard to think about anything else. Hope was all well and good but when you only had a little of it, a tiny fragment, it nagged at you like a splinter.

“Why would he come back at all?” said Scipio. “When the party barge comes to take me to Avalon, believe me, that’ll be a one-way trip.”

Not even the druids knew what they meant, before the Romans rounded the druids up and slaughtered them. They were that old. But even Collum, zealous Christian though he was, could feel that they meant something. They were a very different proposition from Christianity, which promised you everything, peace and happiness everlasting, but in the next world, a world no one living had ever seen, and only if you kept to His rules in this world, and His rules were a pain in the ass. But the stones made no promises, so they couldn’t break any. They didn’t speak, and therefore they couldn’t lie. They asked for nothing. They just were.

“God’s knees!” he shouted. “And toes and bollocks! What in God’s Hell is this?” “The Otherworld,” the barmaid said pleasantly. “As I think I said. God’s Hell is the next world over.”

“I don’t think we were ever properly introduced,” he said. “I’m Sir Collum of the Out Isles.” “Sir Collum is it now? Well, congratulations. My name is Morgan. People call me le Fay.” He hung on to his composure, but inside him the world fell apart all over again. He’d gone through the ice and sunk deep in the cold, cold water, and now the sea monsters had arrived to devour him.

“Where is he?” “Well, I’m not just going to tell you, you have to look for him. Isn’t that how you knights play your game?” “It’s not a game!” “People always say that, right up until they lose.” Morgan le Fay sounded even less charmed by him than she had been at the inn. “As much as I revel in your wit and wisdom, Sir Collum, I’m wanted elsewhere. Just stay on the raft, if you know what’s good for you.” The bees circled Morgan three times, and on the third circuit she vanished.

Carefully he lowered himself onto the bench, the last remnant of the inn, staying well away from the edges. Deep rivers were the implacable enemy of armored knights.

There was something utterly honest about a person in a fight. You could lie with words, but swords, like angels, could only speak the truth.

“Merlin said they sent him away for his safety, but the truth was that Uther didn’t want Arthur around. He wanted a real heir, a legitimate one. And I think he reminded Igraine of what Uther did to her. She loved Arthur, I’m sure she did, but he brought it all back. It was just easier to let him go.

It was a truth to be hastened past with a certain squeamishness, a dark thread in the otherwise golden tapestry of Camelot. He’d certainly never heard it the way she told it, as an upside-down fairy tale with Morgan le Fay as the hero and High King Uther the monster. And Arthur as a footnote, the misbegotten by-product of a rape. A king who never should’ve been.

A lot of heroes hate themselves, it’s why they work so hard to make everybody love them.”

The fairy knights rose as one and advanced on him four abreast, swords drawn, a mismatched murderers’ row.

Looking at her, alone with the fairies in her glass fortress, Collum couldn’t help but see the child she was, the stolen child, her family in ruins around her, but he tore himself away—how very many thoughts we have that we can’t bear to let ourselves think—and

All else being equal he would’ve preferred to wait a little longer, and gone off somewhere and lain down and had a sleep first. Too much had happened, he needed the sorting angel of dreams to come down and sift it all into piles for him, make it into stories and tell him what it all meant and which bits he could safely forget.

Even Collum knew that if you had to fight a battle then it was better to receive the charge than to do the charging. You wanted to be the ones holding a line, not running at it trying to break it. As a result neither side wanted to go first. He wondered how long they’d been waiting here. Birds chirped sweetly and insects clicked in the creeping bentgrass. There was the smell of hot steel in the sun. The oxeye daisies and meadowsweet and a hundred other flowers he couldn’t name seemed touchingly unaware that they were about to be trampled by ten thousand human feet.

The whole of Rience’s army shifted forward like a muddy hillside losing its grip and becoming a landslide. Collum watched it come. Camelot’s archers were shooting in earnest now, straight and hard and flat, right arms dipping for arrows and nocking and drawing and loosing clothyard shafts.

The little man studied him. He seemed to be both there and not. It took Orwen a minute to figure out that he could only see him with his left eye; to the right he was invisible. In a flash—he moved unnaturally quickly—the fairy-man was right up close to him, loudly sniffing his shoulder, an animal sound.

“You said before that I had to pay. What do I have to pay?” “A boon.” “What ‘boon’?” “Part o’ the price is that ye don’ know the price.”

Whenever Orwen wasn’t training he felt like he was wasting time. He lived in an inverted universe where the world was a prison and the only freedom was in a bubble at the bottom of a pond.

Collum had killed six people today. Maybe more. You couldn’t exactly call it an accident, or unforeseeable, since it was exactly what he’d been single-mindedly training to do ever since he was a child, but till now he’d never really understood what it meant. It suddenly felt like a terrible mistake. What a great and awful power God had given to men, the power to revoke His divine gift of life, to unlock one another’s chests with the blunt key of a sword and roughly evict the ghost within. A pile of steel and guts, like Morgan said.

He’d gone past tiredness into some exalted spiritual state on the other side. The summer air felt like a calm sea he was drifting through like a jelly.

It was harmless enough as far as it went, but as he grew older Dagonet began to be gripped by nameless fears and rages and black miseries. His mind sloshed around inside his skull, always off-kilter.

The sword in the stone had made a fool a king, and the king had made a fool a knight. But the Grail would make fools of them all.

But the Orkney brothers surprised everyone by being dignified and well mannered. They spoke good Latin, and their teeth weren’t filed to points, and they didn’t try to sacrifice anybody to their strange northern gods.

Improbably enough Dagonet, who hated almost everyone, found himself becoming fond of Galahad. He was as exalted by the world as Dagonet was despised and neglected by it, but for all that Dagonet suspected they were equally lonely. Galahad had slain giants and banished demons but never kicked a ball or kissed a girl. He seemed to have been put on earth to make a point, but it was God’s point, not his. His own life wasn’t about him, he was just a helpless onlooker. He was as much a prisoner of his own strange nature as Dagonet was.

“Sirs, you will accompany us no further. Yonder is Corbenic Castle. No man may set foot there who is not pure in body and spirit, with no sins upon his conscience.”