The Bright Sword

by Lev Grossman

Beith-luis-nin meant Ogham, the old writing of the druids. More pagan stuff. Each letter was supposed to be a tree:

“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.” “I don’t know what that means,” he said, feeling stupid. “I know you don’t. I’m telling you now so that when you find out, you’ll know that I knew.”

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.

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, and now they lurked in hollow hills and at the borders and edges of things, places even God seemed to forget about or else why wouldn’t He just get rid of them?

He didn’t even dream of freedom, or rebellion, or revenge. He despised himself as much as they despised him. Collum worked and ate and slept at the bottom of a dark ocean of misery, head down, lost in the depths where no light reached him. He felt like the weight of it all would crush him.

That meant being a Christian, too, though Jesus was if anything even less popular on Mull than Collum was. Good Gaelic folk mistrusted Jesus as a newcomer who stank of the south. But King Arthur loved Jesus, and God, so Collum resolved to love Them, too, and worship Them, though he had to row across a narrow, icy strait to do it, to a tiny island off Mull that had a monastery on it.

In the art of the longsword there were fourteen guards, five major and nine minor. No more, no fewer. There were eight cuts, all linked by flowing motions and arcs that chained them together. There were four thrusts and four parries. All else arose from combinations of these fundamental elements.

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.

The tower with the curious domed top was Merlin’s Tower, which was sometimes there and sometimes not.

There was a heaviness to Bedivere—like Atlas he seemed to be bearing more of the world’s sorrows on his broad shoulders than other people did.

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

Maybe it’s a virtuous deer. If animals can be virtuous.” “I had a cat once,” Arthur mused, “who has almost certainly gone to hell.”

“Look at that,” he said. “This isn’t a hunt. It’s an adventure.”

His father, King Reitheoir of Dyfed, told Bedivere that God kept his hand because Bedivere was too precious and He couldn’t bear to let all of him go. A priest told him that the left hand was the one that did evil, and God had withheld it from Bedivere’s body as a sign that Bedivere would do only good. Privately Bedivere thought that if God thought he was so precious He had a pretty funny way of showing it, and furthermore he was confident that he could get up to any amount of evil with his right hand if he put his mind to it. But he didn’t brood about it. Until such time as God saw fit to clarify His intentions, he would get on with his life.

But before Britain could descend into civil war, a miracle occurred. A great irregular gray stone appeared in St. Paul’s churchyard in Londinium. On top of the stone rested an anvil of rough black iron, and thrust down through the anvil and into the stone was a shining steel sword, its hilt wrapped in crimson silk thread.

He was there to personally make sure that somebody pulled it out, anybody, because any succession, however farcical or contrived, would mean peace, and civil war would mean poverty and suffering. He didn’t want other people’s armies tramping across his farmland, maiming and press-ganging his peasants.

how many fucking churches did one city and one God need?

For a moment Bedivere saw Arthur as God must see him, with total understanding and compassion.

He could chill his soul down to the temperature necessary for the sacrifice of loyal men.

When they sued for peace, Arthur laughed. When they tried to retreat, he burned their boats.

Where Uther had clamped the disparate parts of Britain together crudely, with fear, Arthur welded them together with—there was no other word for it—love. People loved him. People who agreed on nothing else agreed on Arthur. The British had never in their long history been one people before; no matter where the borders were drawn, they were always at best a collection of feuding and irritable neighbors. But Arthur made the British for the first time actually want to be British.

Most people were content to be dazzled by it, but Bedivere looked deep into the flames, and he saw things there that other people didn’t. Some of those things troubled him. Arthur didn’t quite make sense. He didn’t add up. How could a man who was born with so little power wield power so effectively? How could a man who grew up unloved command the love of so many? How could the boy from nowhere and the High King of Britain be one and the same person?

From the outside Arthur’s life looked like a fantasy, the one that all children dream of: he was an orphan, raised in obscurity, who discovered that his parents had actually been a king and a queen. He was really a golden princeling and his real home was a castle. But what Bedivere came to suspect was that the fantasy came at a cost, because it meant Arthur’s whole childhood up until then, everything he thought he knew about himself, had become a lie.

Sometimes it made him doubt himself, and his own goodness. He’d been sure he was a yokel, and he was wrong, so what made him so sure now that he was a king?

Little Dunoak wasn’t just nowhere, it wasn’t even on the way to anywhere. It was a ragged village with some patchy fields, lodged deep in the guts of the Weald like Jonah in the whale, and well on its way to being digested.

The Round Table came to Camelot from Guinevere’s father, King Leodegrance, as part of her dowry, and in all honesty it was a bit of a white elephant. It was so big they had to take it apart just to get it inside. They couldn’t throw it away, but what the hell to do with it? But Arthur quickly realized that the Round Table was the kind of problem that could solve several others.

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.

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.

“You know he raped her.” Bedivere felt cold at that. These were things not spoken of. “My father killed my mother’s husband and then he raped her. And Merlin helped, and God watched and did nothing. That’s how I was born.

There was a terrible truth at the heart of his life that colored everything he did and everything he was. Maybe all men had such secrets; certainly he, Bedivere, had one. 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.

It was unimaginable, but he didn’t have to imagine it because there it was, right in front of him. The world in all its unlimited horribleness had imagined it for him. Arthur was dead. And now—he thought miserably, selfishly—who’s going to fix me?

“Britain is a waste land now, and this is not a Round Table anymore.” Palomides knocked his fingers on the tabletop. “It is a zero.” “What the fuck is a zero?” Villiars said.

“My father was a good pagan, and he sacrificed faithfully to many gods, including Jesus. He was as loath as any man to refuse a challenge. And why would the spear have come to him if he wasn’t supposed to use it? So he took it up. “This proved to be a mistake. The moment he grasped it the spear turned on him and stabbed him through both his thighs. At that very same moment the sky turned white, and the soil was bleached, and the trees died. His kingdom became a Waste Land.

north, he said.” “We had no trouble here till you Christians came.” Elidir had apparently decided to speak his mind. “Then your Jesus maimed my father with his spear, and broke our land, and now we must wait for an eternity for some other Jesus-lover to come heal him! How long will it go on? The Romans killed our druids, and without them we barely remember who we are.” He gave Bedivere a hard look. “But at least we know we are not Roman.”

He told me that one day I would be as he was, trapped between life and death. But I did it anyway. “What does it mean, Bedivere? 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.”

According to the priests, sex between men was a sin because it was not in the interest of reproduction, because it wasted the man’s seed. But what about the waste of love? Was that not a sin too?

What if the world was dead, and here was its terrible ghost come to haunt them? Only when it finally stepped out into the hall did they see it clearly.

“Haven’t we paid enough?” Constantine said. “What more does God w-want?” “He always wants more,” Palomides said. “He’s insatiable.”

Years later he would discover that in Britain it was customary for a fourth son to carry the image of a swift on his shield, because a swift was a bird that was believed to have no feet and spent its entire life on the wing, never landing, from birth to death.

What fuel kept that furnace burning so bright and so hot? All fires consume something. It seemed to Palomides that a fire that is not fed, yet still burns, must be consuming itself.

In the past year I have been falsely accused of treason, nearly executed, then abducted and finally widowed. What is it you’re hoping I have? A divine communiqué? Secret baby? A coded letter, in Arthur’s hand? When my opinion mattered most no one listened to me, and I feel disinclined to give it to you now. I will tend to my own virtue, since everyone else seems so concerned about it.”

“Per Aristotle’s Physics,” Palomides said, “the application of violence produces unnatural motion.”

“And when is ‘will be’? How long do we have to wait?”

People fell in love with Isolde the Beautiful all the time, and 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.

He was not unfamiliar with Jesus as a prophet of Islam, but he found the idea of God having a son hard to swallow. He’d always thought of Christianity as a crude faith, mystical and rather monstrous, with its incarnation and resurrection and its bizarre triple godhead.

sun still hovered at the horizon like it was nailed to the sky,

“And shiny clean Jesus Christ, that slick little Jew on a stick, became our one and only God. We’d had a wealth of gods in Cornwall, there was a god under every rock, in every tree and pool, but at Camelot we were beggars. And He was a piss-poor God at that, who never dared to show Himself. Never owned up to all the trouble He caused. The coward. “And how He hates the other gods! He has to be the only one—He wants to eat them all and then sit there, a fat little God in the middle of an empty world. When I prayed it was to the old gods. I prayed that the piskies would come and get me and take me home.

Do you know what happens when you make a child pretend to love? Oh, they’ll do it—you can make children do anything—but it has a cost, and the cost is that everything else becomes pretend.

“But you’re asking the wrong questions, Sir Collum,” Morgan went on. “You can’t change the past, so ask me what I want now. Ask me what I deserve.

“Why can’t you face it?” Morgan raised her voice for the first time. “Why can’t you face what’s right in front of you?! Arthur’s dead, God’s gone, Rome’s gone, and good riddance! You moon over the lost glory of Rome, the glass beads and the shiny coins, but you never look at what they took from us! Our gods and our druids, our crops and our metals, generations of warriors—”