The Bright Sword

by Lev Grossman

The queen of the Britons was a tall, skinny thing with the kind of beauty that one admired more than desired.

The constant wind bent the trees over like match flames.

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.

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.

He didn’t say it with his usual bravado, and Collum realized he was actually embarrassed. Some part of him must really have wanted to join the Table, but he couldn’t quite let himself do it, he couldn’t give himself that gift, like a stray cat who came to the door to be fed but was too wild to go in the house where it was warm and dry. Some deep defensive instinct, either of self-preservation or self-destruction, made him slink away instead, back out into the cold.

Even as a little boy Dagonet had had an odd manner. He was nervous and distracted. He had a mania for cleanliness and hated anything associated with any bodily function, especially eating or drinking. 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. Some days he felt vastly powerful, like an unacknowledged emperor; other times he felt revolting, a loathsome spider too degraded even to be stepped on. Often he wished to die, but he lacked the courage. Some dark god had left his heavy thumbprint on Dagonet.

“We are anti-Galahads,” Constantine declared poetically, “the sh-shadows cast by his brightness!” “If this is what God likes,” Dagonet said, “why didn’t He make us all that way?” And now that He’s finally got it right maybe he’ll stop making people forever. And crumple up all the rough drafts and throw them in the fire.

Abruptly he stepped toward her, pulled her against him, and kissed her on the mouth. Her very first kiss, as it happened. It was deeply unpleasant. His lips were hard. He smelled of nothing—he lacked a man’s smell the way cursed spirits lacked a shadow. She jerked her head back.

Somehow at this melancholy thought Arthur felt a great strength rising in him. Maybe not the strength of old, but strength enough. How late all this had come to him, but not too late. Not too late. He was only forty-three. The Romans considered dawn the start of a new day, but the British had always counted the new day from sunset.