The Bright Sword

by Lev Grossman

“I am tired of putting my faith in things that break. I have had enough of it.”

the Table needs you as much as you need them.

There was a nagging hollowness to it all, the endless round of dinners and hunting and polo, backgammon at the club and flirting in the gardens. Wasn’t there something more—some way to make his mark on the world? He wanted to be a hero. But of what story?

It was a magnificent gesture, a pure act of will, spitting straight in the eye of fate!

Some Europeans were good, some were bad. All were tall, drunk, promiscuous, and incredibly smelly. What else did you need to know?

Apparently one reason the Britons were so obscure and mysterious was that they had long been too busy fighting one another to have much to do with the wider world beyond their misty archipelago. But under Arthur that had changed. The Britons had made peace and were becoming prosperous and mighty.

highly intelligent and dangerously bored, an unstable combination.

a curious combination of irresistible and inscrutable.

he wasn’t afflicted by that aggrieved obsession with converting others from which so many Christians suffered.

a fire that is not fed, yet still burns, must be consuming itself.

The women of King Arthur’s court were odd creatures: bold, wittering, thin of blood and pigment, they put him in mind of albino peacocks. They plucked their eyebrows and, perversely, whitened their already pale faces even further with a paste made of flour and rose water.

the tree branches met overhead forming a tunnel of leaves, the green light like the light inside the barrel of a breaking wave.

we’re in a new world now. We must divine its nature. And we must show it that our own nature has not changed.”

Britain was like a vast ship that had broached in a storm and was beginning to break up. Helmless and dismasted, its ribs cracking, seams starting and spraying seawater.

“You know what? Go fuck yourselves!” He was close to tears. “And fuck the Round Table! Where do you think you’re even going? Still a-questin’ after adventure? Grow up! You’re pathetic, everybody thinks so!”

But true love rarely comes without impediments.

one of the social quirks of upper-class British life, it turned out, was that it was considered normal, even admirable, for a knight to have passionate feelings for a married woman. They called it “courtly love,” and it represented a kind of aspiration of the heart toward an unattainable perfection.

But love ground him under its heel, humiliating and degrading him.

His love was a terrible parasite that devoured him from within.

He’d always thought of Christianity as a crude faith, mystical and rather monstrous, with its incarnation and resurrection and its bizarre triple godhead.

It was early spring and the smell was of shit and sun-spoiled blood. What a truly comprehensive calamity.

All he wanted, he thought, as he stared up at the deepening sky, was a cause that was not lost. Was that too much? But all causes were lost sooner or later. The ones he picked were just unusually expeditious about it. The problem with this clever insight was that it brought with it a terrible paralysis. He couldn’t move, because there was no longer any reason to move. There was no golden lancer to point his way.

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.

The more he saw of it the more the world seemed to Collum to be possessed of two incompatible, irreconcilable natures, the divine and the magical.

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. In the face of death you could only be who you were.

the glass floor was extremely slippery. Not very practical as a building material.

there was still power in this world that didn’t belong to God,

The atrocity wasn’t the price of his love, it was the point of it.

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

In the Otherworld it was God who sounded like a fairy tale.

poetic justice is a luxury we cannot afford.

I’m a sentimental fool, and you’re a pathetic idiot.

how very many thoughts we have that we can’t bear to let ourselves think—and

People do love to join a parade.”

“The losers are always the traitors.”

Archers weren’t knights, they didn’t give a shit about chivalry, and if they didn’t snuff out that cavalry charge before it got to them they were dead men.

All this talk talk talk about birth and blood and crowns and claims. Finally, here was something real! A sword in your head: that was a God damned claim.

The world was recovering its order, pulling itself together after its earlier disastrous collapse.

The earth was a giant bass drum, and God beat on it once.

He felt real, realer than she did, as if she were the rippling insubstantial reflection and he the real thing. She knew at that moment that she didn’t want to be insubstantial anymore, she wanted to be real. She wanted to be that boy. No, she already was him—that boy was who she’d always been. She was he.

A creeping fear began slowly consuming Orwen, a fear that no one would ever see him. He would never be at home anywhere, because his body itself was a foreign country to him, and the person who other people saw was a stranger to him. How was it not obvious to them that he was a boy? Everybody else looked like who they were. Why not him?

Alexandria, which apparently was a hotbed of holy transvestism.

I was supposed to be a boy, and something went wrong, the devil cursed me or something, and now I’m stuck in a girl’s body.”

“How do you know what bodies mean?” Orwen asked. “We’re just going to throw them away anyway when we die, like orange peels, and then at the Last Judgment we’ll be given our perfect bodies, so what does this body even mean?”

What God wrought wrong, maybe Fairy could put right.

despair and its kissing cousin, sleep.

In dreams all was fluid. Nothing was fixed. Everything, even your body, was mist.

fairies were the in-betweeners, fence-jumpers, locksmiths at the gates between realms. Surely they could open the one between girl and boy.

he had no idea what would happen next except that now everything could really begin.

“I don’t think I’m a boy,” Orwen said. “I know that I am a man.”