The Bright Sword

by Lev Grossman

Stories were useful that way, they smoothed over the gaps and sharp edges of the world.

“Can’t leave a body out like that. Spirits’ll take it. Owls, even.” “Mm-hm.” “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.”

“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.”

Fairies liked a bit of fun, but they played rough and didn’t care if their toys got broken. They’d been gods once, who’d shrunk and faded with the coming of Christ,

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.

“You don’t really think God bothered to give deer a point of view?” “Of course He did, He’s a fiend for details.”

nobody really seemed to know exactly what it was that made a man a king. How did you work the alchemy that turned human dross into royal gold? God, blood, armies, faith, luck?

I wanted to be good, and I wanted to serve God, and I found I could not do both. How can that be? When a king quarrels with God, nothing good can come of it.”

what about the waste of love? Was that not a sin too?

His prayers were greeted with an even more resounding silence than usual.

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

Orwen knew who he was now, but at the convent school he dutifully tried to stuff the whole of himself back into the small girl-shaped space life had allotted him.

How was it not obvious to them that he was a boy? Everybody else looked like who they were. Why not him?

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

“We’ll be requirin’ ye to kill Merlin.”

Bedivere massaged his forehead as if he had a sudden headache. He must get tired of being the grown-up in the room, Collum thought.

Death didn’t bother with the ordinary folk, the extras. They had it tougher, they had to keep on living, crawling forward in the dark, with no moon or even any stars to light the way.

“You’re not sulking, are you?” “I’m thinking,” Arthur said. “They can look similar to the untrained eye.

The iron vise of circumstance was closing on her, tighter and tighter, just because it could, until sooner or later the unstoppable world would make her do something unspeakable.

It’s in your eyes and your nose and your mouth now, and from there it will enter your bloodstream, and from there your brain. It will render you pliant and cheerful. “Don’t fight it. Resistance will only increase the damage.”

It was his soul that had been lost, and like so many who’d lost their souls, he had to insist the bargain was worth it and show contempt for those who still had theirs.

Jesus will always win. Because unlike you He’s not a shit.”

What can you say about a God who judges your worth by how infrequently you touch yourself?”

That man in there treated you like you were weak, like you were nothing, but he was wrong.”

“The forces of Fairy, the true spirits of this land, deny you sovereignty here. You are invaders, and you are not wanted. You will leave, tonight, forever.”

Britain might still have a king, but not like Arthur, not like it would’ve been. The dead land would not live again. Instead one man would grab a gold hat from another and put it on his head, that was all.

The wall is death. An empire that builds its walls in stone has stopped growing. And an empire that is not growing is dying.”

the first principle of courtly love is that it remain unconsummated.

“I loved him,” he said. “As you did.”

“Your father was a tenderhearted man too—Sir Bleoberys was his name,

He’d sat down, throbbing with despair, and waited for the sun to melt him into nothing.

“And to think he had finally found what he sought, and never knew it,” Palomides said. “A blessed end, and a cursed one too.”

with his ancestors roaring inside him in a chorus Collum smashed the anchor down on the rough rock with all the strength he had or ever would have.

Arthur saw the love in Bedivere, though he couldn’t return it, not in kind.

a tree grew on her grave, and another tree grew out of the hero’s grave, and their branches grew toward each other till eventually they touched, and the two trees were joined.

No tree could reach that far, so instead a great arch of stars formed, reaching from one grave all the way across the sky to the other one on the far side of the world, connecting the two lovers. And that’s the Milky Way.”

Britain was a wounded land, cloven in two, British and Roman, pagan and Christian, Stone and Grail, north and south, old and new.

It was born in blood and grief and greed, divided eternally against itself, its different natures so mixed it could never extricate itself from itself.

He was coming to understand Excalibur better, what it liked and didn’t like.

He heard his fairy blood singing in him now, and Excalibur sang with it.

“It was Mummy’s. So you remember. I love you, little brother. I hate you, but I love you too.”

That Britain with the Saxons was still Britain, it was just a different Britain, no better or worse than the old one.

why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.