The Bright Sword

by Lev Grossman

“Thank you for the shilling,” he said. “You were right, it did come in handy.” He couldn’t guess within a thousand miles what she thought of him. He wondered if she’d known everything already, that night in the courtyard. “I hope you spent it wisely.” “I gave it to a lady made of stone, so she would let me jump down a well.” Her bold eyebrows arched. “I hope it was worth it.” “If you trust me a little more now,” he said gallantly, “then it was worth it.”

“Elaine was a miracle, too, of course, but she was also the beginning of the end of miracles, the miracle that undid all others, because she was the first crack in my perfection, and that crack let Galahad into the world. And Galahad ended it all. “But it’s wrong to put it that way, because God must’ve wanted that crack. The crack was part of the crystal.”

Arthur had probably covered as many miles as the Grail knights, all told, a spiral quest wound in on itself, going nowhere.

She knew what people said, that the Grail was meant to be a cure for her infertility, but she didn’t believe it. She knew a poisoned chalice when she saw it. She could feel it out there somewhere, crouched in some remote grove or chapel like a silver spider in its web, a hidden thing that drew knights to it, and retreated from them as they came. One by one they burned up as they approached it, as stars did falling to earth, a whole flock of Icaruses—Icari?—descending in a cloud of feathers. And one Daedalus to mourn them all.

Power was Merlin’s real medium, even more than magic, and power, like heat, was never destroyed, only redistributed. Somebody somewhere always had it. You just had to figure out who it was and how to get close to them.

The weather changed. The great door of autumn blew open with a bang and through it came cold wind and sudden squalls splashing them with cold rain. Red and yellow leaves went streaming through the air and across fields and down lanes like lost pages from a broken book, plastering themselves on rocks and grass.

The day he arrived Scipio sat down with him for a debriefing, and the man—if you could call him that, he was one of those pussy milkwater Christians—started mumbling about the Picts and their scary guerrilla tactics and their singing and their creepy burial mounds, and finally Scipio just had to say stop. For fuck’s sake. Stop. Mars Cocidius, are you listening to yourself? Get the fuck out of here. Go home. Go on. Go home and suck some Jesus dick, you’re an embarrassment to the Imperial Army.

Caledonia ate Roman armies and shat more Picts. Eventually Rome just walled the whole place off.

People love stories, I love them, but stories are like gods, they care little for the human beings in their care.

Avalon wasn’t round, as Collum first thought, but long and thin and curved, pulled by time and tide and current into a gracefully elongated S outlined in white sand against the green sea, like a silk scarf that had been snatched away by the wind.

The past was a cursed wound. No perfect knight would ever come to heal it as if it never happened. The best you could hope for was forgiveness. And even that was cold comfort.

He saw now that the writing on it was illuminated with birds and beasts and trees and flowers and ships and stars in such detail, the lines so immensely fine, that it was as though the smith had worked all of Britain into the metal.

How stupid it was that anything of consequence should be decided like this, let alone the fate of Britain! An army of great sages should spend a lifetime of study on it, but instead you got two idiots brawling on a wet beach.

He knew it for a certainty. It was coming, and then it would have happened. Time was always stealing away bits of your future and replacing them with memories, and then the memories faded. Like trading real gold for fairy gold, and who thought that was a fair trade? But God must, or He wouldn’t have made time that way.

They left the grave unmarked. Anybody who comes looking for Merlin’s grave, Nimue said, is somebody who shouldn’t find it.

But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.