The Bright Sword

by Lev Grossman

Shitting Jesus. Thou recreant knight.

And now he was dead. And for what? Nothing. A game, played for no one, in an empty field.

Just a big boy with a sword, from a nowhere island at the edge of the world, green as grass and fresh as dew.

People were guttering candles, always on the brink of going out, from measles or pox or childbirth or a cough. They starved or shat themselves to death or were eaten by bears or wolves.

The doorway from life into death was a perilous one, fraught with misadventure,

Adventures were quick and exciting when you heard about them, but when you were inside one they happened very, very slowly.

But here in the southlands Rome had thrived and built, and its ruins were everywhere, the bleached bones of an empire.

It all seemed desperately sad, like the broken architecture of Heaven. The Romans had brought civilization to Britain. They’d brought apples and pears and glass and plumbing and fine pottery. They’d brought God and the written word. They gave Britain trade routes to the Continent and beyond, as far as India and China. The Romans brought peace too. Before they came, every man’s hand was at his neighbor’s throat. And then they were called back over the sea by their distant emperor, and the light went out.

Britain went back to being a dark, fractious, divided place. A crackwork kingdom.

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.

“Can’t have an owl running around in a knight’s body.”

“Of all the animals,” she said, “only man can feel a despair that is beyond his power to endure.”

“I find your God is a great optimist when it comes to the question of how much people can endure.

“Just don’t waste any more time, you’re late as it is. The sword’s in the sea, and the last ship has sailed.”

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.

How precarious this world was, he thought, how easily one left the straight path, even with the best of intentions. Or at any rate with pretty good ones.

None of it meant anything, or it shouldn’t have meant anything, but in the Otherworld of the night things had a way of meaning things they shouldn’t.

was entirely possible that he was about to be publicly humiliated in front of the greatest men in the kingdom.

Only circles, never lines Only movement, never still Nimbly wind and counter-wind

Long the journey to the kill

But he needed to know who he was. They had told him he was nothing and nobody, and before he died he needed to know if that was true.

Until such time as God saw fit to clarify His intentions, he would get on with his life.

There was no shortage of kings in Britain—it was a kingdom made out of kingdoms—and

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.

A new war was starting, and it was a war of wonders.

Bedivere loved God, but he loved Arthur more, and he felt nostalgic for the days when the great game of knighthood was just a game. He would have given his life to protect Arthur, but he couldn’t protect him from God. Arthur didn’t seem to want him to. The Round Table became his obsession.

A king is the father of his nation, but even a king needs a father of his own. Arthur longed for God’s attention and approval the way any son would, and every time an adventure arose, Arthur felt his father’s eyes on him. Here was the certainty he longed for, that even the sword in the stone couldn’t give him. If he could prove himself to God, he would know who he truly was.

His reign was so joyful and peaceful and prosperous that people forgot all about the Arthur that was, the terrified country squire who one morning blundered into the wrong churchyard and inadvertently detonated a miracle.

He cried easily when he was drunk.

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 world had died unexpectedly, with no prior symptoms, but its appearance hadn’t changed. All the color should’ve run out of it, all the light should have vanished, endless night should have fallen. Instead it kept on going. The only difference was that now it all meant nothing.

Collum knew he must have loved her, that his tiny heart must have been wild with uncomprehending grief, but he couldn’t remember it. He’d lost both his mother and his grief for his mother too. He sometimes wondered if it was gone completely, or if it was still there inside him somewhere, locked away in an unmarked chest with his memory of her voice, and her face, the silver key lost forever.

“You think that God still cares who wins a sword fight?

“We’re the d-dregs of Camelot. The last battle’s been fought, all the best died, and we’re what’s left.”

They spoke as if it were already a lost age.

“My friends, it’s over. Camelot was the center of the world, but the center’s gone somewhere else now, Constantinople maybe, Jerusalem. I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t one anymore.”

they were all ordinary men, their names written in sand, playing with sandcastles, and soon time would roll over them like a wave and smooth it all away to nothing.

“That’s a claim. No miracles. Just politics.”

“Listen: the longer we wait the worse it’s going to get.

“If God won’t give us a king then we’ll make our own,”

The knights stirred like heavy beasts, grateful for the animal comforts of food.

“We are in a changed world. If we are to bring back the Old World, we must first discover the nature of this new one.”

And in the air, hope. Hope for forgiveness. In the teeth of midwinter, hope for renewal.

They were in dream time now, the timeless time of adventures, which had a different texture from ordinary time.

Of course Excalibur helped, though it was a funny thing about that sword. Like all the great blades it was made by fairies, not by God. But why not? Was God, for all His power, not much of a swordsmith? Or did He fear to arm His mortal creations?

Sometimes he didn’t know if he was a brave man or a coward.

“We had no trouble here till you Christians came.”

“Do you think it was right, what God did? Punishing a man like that, and his family, and his whole country, just for attempting a task that was too hard for him.”

God is terrible, and God is merciful.

We called, but who answered? What if the world was dead, and here was its terrible ghost come to haunt them?