The Chapel is filled with sweet smoke, the vanilla and oranges of Christmastide, peppermint candy sticky on my hands. The nave secretes opalescent sweat, flooding the floor with holy vapors. The Lady Bertilak is not here, though I look to the torturously painted tiles of the ceiling and see the arch of her summer-breast.

To you, I would seem only a fat old man bent over a chessboard at Golden Gate Park, slapping the timer with a meaty fist. My belly would hang over patched khaki trousers, bending a leather belt in half. My blue work-shirt would be stained with sour-mash sweat, curling sleeve and collar. My shoes would be bound with duct tape, and you could see the corner of a jaundiced toenail through the ragged blue-striped canvas. You would suspect lice in my beard. But you would keep coming to my table, because I beat you at every game.

On this side of the bridge, I have a flask half-filled with schnapps in my pocket, and a clutch of food stamps in my threadbare wallet. My breath reeks of week-old spinach and mothballs, my skin of rotten pages. My biceps bulge under tattoos of anchors and ziggurats, the holly-axe in black ink in the hollow of my elbow. I have a friendly rivalry with a Jewish photographer who leads with his knight, and a regular seat at the soup kitchen.

Only Gawain would know me through that grease-glamour. Only he would see the jade-thighed giant with a Bishop in each hand. Only he would see the two Queens for what they were, would perceive beneath their eyeless crowns the twin ladies of Hautdesert. You would see a blonde waitress and her elderly aunt, but he would know her for the gargantua, the ecstatic beauty that looks both ways, the star of the sea and the apple in the garden.

He is bound to me by this sight, the eyes that scour this gnarled wood of visions and golems like a water diviner. Between us, we construct a map of the world. In the forest of doubles, all geographies are present. The self refracts, into husband and wife, and we wait for our boy.

Red Queen to King's Square.

The Chapel gapes open like a womb. The grasses tangle around it, and the walls slope into the hill. All the altars are hidden, the chalices of baleen and myrrh, the blessed water, the icebound matins of winter. But these are invisible. The Chapel leads into my body-in-hers, a hole in the earth, and it breathes in anticipation.

I spend my nights sharpening the holly-axe, finding the nirvana of the grinding blade, back and forth, the scythe slick and wet. I am the hoarfrost, I am the elk's matted fur, the moon vanishing behind carbon-clouds. I am ready, though I seethe at my position, within her and before him, the Object, without dimension. The smoke of my id spirals against my bones, the friction scalding my beryl-blood. Death sits in my stomach like boot-crushed cigarettes.

He will hear the grind of my axe, all tangled with wild mint and willow, and his belly will clench. He will glimpse the womb-mouth and be struck dumb-neither of us can come too near it. It is her place, though she can never be inside it. She is not built that way. We must act out our morality play beyond its weeping borders. She can only surround us, make our bodies into fantastic cathedrals of flesh, but she does not touch the fall of this axe, or the fall of his. He must betray me, and adore her. But it is the betrayal which is more intimate, the sour congress of our bent throats, the symmetry of a head for a head.

We are nothing but bodies of potential. The Gawain self and the Bertilak-self, moving through seasons, easing into casements shaped to us, glass blown from each step through the witchwood, the wild-limbed Wirral. To speak of us is to enter the unknown-the embryonic. We are fraternal, we are father and son, we are lovers, we are twin salmon swimming in the wife-womb, enclosed. We never cease to be her embryos, our razor-gills brushing in the fluid sky. But within these Chapel-walls we will play our game, the Rook and the Knight. It is my axe, after all, at the end of the tale.

If I glower at the soundless church, if I wish that I were more to him than the emerald-toothed giant, it is only that, at the end of all tales, I am discontent to know my role so well. The Object should not guess its base nature until the end, its lines should not be known too well, or the questing knight will guess that it was all planned from the beginning, to secure three kisses, to secure the green swath around his hips, to secure the wound on his neck which marks him as our own.

But perhaps there is no me at all, no Bertilak, Lady or Lord, only him, gold as a coin, his purity burning the bridge as he comes. I can no longer tell.

He is coming; I am here. I think nothing more is required of me, except that I raise my axe. But in this Chapel of mud and root, in its sodden pews, I pray for his seraphic eyes to see me as I am-though I can no longer tell if that is the green-heart or the freckled flesh-and welcome the parting of his skin.

Queen's Castle.

I am always outside the board as it was meant to be drawn. I care nothing for the mewling white-capped King. But I will not lose the Rook to my own cunning hand. I am doubled, myself and myself, who looks so like a man in his mottled red beard and skin like the white of winter fruit, the other self who knows no secret green spreading in the night like star-fed lichen. He is the singular, the Bertilak, who can move in the upper world, and hunt the fat-haunched boar, and sip tea spiced with cardamom in a chair of oak.

Sometimes I look west and east, and the eastern face is moss-laden, full of blackberry thorns. The nose is straight and fine, laced with dandelion leaves, and the hair falls in hyssop-braids to shoulders heaped in pine boughs. Its laugh is the press of forge-bellows, and it cannot doubt its magnitude. My wife made this face, as if out of clay, and lovingly. If I could dwell always in its net of bones, Gawain could pass through me like air and I would never note him.

But the western face is trimmed by smooth-legged ghost-boys from the wharf, with oiled braids and salt-flecked eyes. That face wears linen and light, its teeth are diamonds set in a cedar skull. It has never dreamt of the color green, it has never watched its arms grow thick with grass. It plays its board with aplomb, while the eastern limbs muddle their game with arcane rites. This is the face that longs, and weeps, and asks for release from duty. The quest bridges them, and for the breathless moment when the axe falls, before it touches his skin, I am both, I am whole.

Between the four of us-my wife and I with our twin selves, heads bent in conspiracy under the shadows of willows and cypress-we have devised a game for our fifth. Gawain, Gawain, who has no other self, who is pale and brotherless as the moon.

We will split him, so that he need not be alone-he will look forward and back. There will be the Gawain who was whole, whose hair was yellow as a lion encased in ice, whose troth blazed against the turquoise hood of heaven-and the wounded Gawain we will make, our girdled golem, all wrapped in gold and green, the endless green of her belly, which turns knights to feys. The haunted Gawain will return to his court, vomiting shadows into the light until he empties himself. And we will keep the gold-drenched avatar, the limpid hound, our changeling son, our lover incandescent as a scarlet star.

I will hunt the fat-haunched boar.

I will hunt the slack-eared rabbit.

I will hunt the red-toothed fox.

She will hunt him.

And I will trade the animal hearts for his lips on mine, for the lips of the Janus-wife burning through his into me. Hands full of meat and pelts, I will take him in my arms and feed him of my body as she fed me of hers, and like a trunk of apple-wood, he will split under me. I will make a cut in his throat, small and red as a mouth, and kiss the virtue from his blood. Between our bodies, the masters of Hautdesert will alter him, as surely as bread to flesh.

We will deliver the broken brother home in swaddling clothes, a newborn doppelganger, never again able to see without our eyes.

0 THE FOOL.

Dagonet Quoth Sir Dagonet: "I am King Arthur's Fool. And whilst there are haply many in the world with no more wits than I possess, yet there are few so honest as I to confess that they are fools."

-The Madness of Sir Tristram Howard Pyle I.

Under the lime trees I lay my love down Under the lime trees I lay her And when she rose up Her mouth was so red Sweeter than figs, Her mouth, so red.

Tan-dara-dara-dei Tan-dara-dei.

I am the Knave of Dreams. They smote the floor with a stalk of spiderwort and up I sprang, purple and green and all over sweet-smelling, and they tangled me up with bells and bade me dance.

I am happy to dance. The floor of my birth is spangled in stars, painted gold, painted carnelian, painted azure and orange and black, and my feet upon it are light as wort-roots. I am a heart full of foliage-nothing in me is not flower, stamen, thorn, pistil, blossom, blossom, rose. I am a fool, and I am a knight, and my horse is hawthorne and hyssop. I gallop; I canter. They laugh at my silken shoes and sword of campion and rue.

But I see the queen with her girdle of roses-the roses whisper scarlet and white, of where her hips last thrust and blushed, of how her hair whipped linen. I see the best of the knights with his plume of crocus-the crocus murmurs yellow and violet, of how he keeps his eyes open when he kisses her.

I see, I see, and I sing, and snowdrops fall out of my mouth. But I sing of my love and my sweetheart and my kisses full tender-always mine, never theirs-and they think I do not see how their cups flame from the touch of two such burning mouths. But after all, it was a court, it was a starry floor where silk-haired apes danced and wrestled-and such things will happen among apes. Their dance was never a secret, never as high-flown a trespass as lesser poets than I would claim, just so that their verses could scan.

I looked on the queen, too. I marked her honeycomb-hair and her thimble-bright eyes. Like all men my velvets tightened-a fool still owns his blood!-but I sang and sang, and came not near.

Tan-dara-dei.

II.

She came a-walking through the violets And how did she call to me?

With honeysuckle and meadowsweet and bryony.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

She made a place in the wheat for me and what did she show me there?

Willow whips and strawberry leaves and fingers clasped in prayer.

Tan-dara-dei.

There was a girl made of flowers, too-the floor was fertile that year. She came up with her black hair all strung with foxglove, and her toes were ringed in coltsfoot. I loved her, I did, but flower calls to flower. She did not sing; I sang for us both. On each of her berry-brown toes was an ivory bell, and I shook them like lilies-of-the-valley, and with buttercups in her eyelashes she laughed like a thrush. The others played at cards which turned up a king, a queen, with lances leaning in, but we played our fools' dice, and were troubled by no dour high-born faces.

Come, Dagonet! Give us a song! Come, Dagonet, show us how you fought a dragon with both hands tied and hopping on one foot!

Ah, gentlemen, I am full tired tonight, and the wine is in my head like a copper tub sloshing over.

Come, Dagonet! Show us how the king looks when he wakes too early!

Ah, gentlemen, methinks the king has drunk enough to wake late for a fortnight.

Come, Dagonet! Tell us a tale, anything, anything! The night is dark, the wine is done.

One tale, then. A fool must earn his penny.

Once, gentle lords, and you ladies with your hair in one thousand knots! Once, there was a poor tile-maker, and his hands were red from the dust of terra cotta, from the dust of all those roof-tiles you see along the road, glittering on wattle houses like a fine scarlet cap! This tile-maker wandered across patches of land like the patches on my own cloak, scouring the earth for bits of bone and feather, stone and glass and seeds like hard little jewels, leaves and hide and fine, sifted soil, husks and bark and jewels like hard little seeds. With these motley things he made mosaics that caught the breath of any who saw them and spun that breath into a shower of golden stars. He laid out the crystalline zodiac on floors and ceilings, with planets of bone and gem-scattered orbital tracks creeping across the rafters.

But it was not often that he could truly ply his art, for such things are expensive, as well you know, my lords. More often the noonday sun found him hammering one red tile to another on the roof of a tavern, swatting at bees that thrummed anxiously around his head. And so the man went in his way until a certain palace spat out its foundations on a certain stretch of green sward, and certain men inhabited it as surely as a honeycomb, thrumming anxiously in their way. These men called upon the tile-maker and begged him to create for them such a floor that any who stepped upon it would be possessed totally by its vision, and compelled by its beauty to love and serve those who owned it.

The tile-maker considered this for a long while. His little hut was certainly filled with enough bones and stones and skins and powders, paints and feathers and dyes to make such a floor. But he felt that he needed some last thing that he could not quite name, and so this tile-maker whose hair was no less dusty than it had been, went out into the countryside to find the center-tile of his magnificent floor, a floor while had already begun to lay itself out on the bare boards of his heart.

Are you tired already of my tale, gentlemen? You would rather I skip ahead? You do not want to hear of the bridge which spans our fair land and the golden land of the west, where all strange-liveried knights find their origin? You are bored by the nature of floor-making, and desire to hear no more of how the poor tile-maker crossed even into those golden lands to find the sweet, pale bone of a woman drowned for her love, with which to bind the center-tile? Very well-all things for my audience.

The man was ragged as a hare wolf-chased for a month when he returned over that bridge I shall tell you not of, and in his hands he clutched a long white bone, and with brown-beaten hands, boiled this bone with quicksilver in a copper pot until it was passing strange: a lacquer which shone like the very veil of death. He poured this into the core of a milk-stone star he had set in the deep blue floor, and began his work.

And well do you know, my lords, the shape of this floor: how it shows the stars in their spheres and the vines and scarlet flowers of welltilled earth, how it shows Virgo and Taurus and Pisces-glittering virgins astride bulls and fish snapping at the edges of the known world! Well do you know how many fruits and crops twine its borders in green, how many oranges and pomegranates and grapes jewel its corners, how many showers of sweet rain speckled in pebbles and feather-cartilage water how many fields of silver wheat. How many flowers, how many endless flowers, tangle through the stars and the virgins and the wheat, how many peonies and lilies and snowdrops, and yes, roses, and yes, crocuses.

Well do you know, my lords, for you walk upon it.

The tile-maker finished the great work of his life, which was no more than what the men who thrummed like bees would track mud and grass and blood over for a decade or two, and was paid as well as he hoped, retiring to his hut and living happily, if we should wish to imagine him happy, and miserably, should we choose to imagine him miserable-this is only a story, my lords and my ever-dewdrop't ladies, and we may end it as we please.

But one more moment, I beg you, and your Dagonet will be silent as a floor in shadow.

For one evening the floor did lie in shadow-shadow pure as our queen!-and all who looked upon it, and loved, and served, had gone to their slumber or sport. It so happened on this night of all nights that the roof allowed the smallest creep of rainwater through its most noble thatch, and that drop of rain-sweet rain, sweet as golden land beneath a bridge, sweet as a maid long drowned, sweet as the sea that drowned her-fell, perfect and clear, onto that bone-lacquered star-core which the poor tile-maker had traveled so far and through such trials to find.

And what do you think happened? My lords, you will never guess it. It was I sprang from this tile, whole and entire, for there never was a fool who had any land or title, birth or name or worth beyond the grand floor on which he performs, the floor which bears him up while he makes himself ridiculous, makes himself wretched, while he loves, while he serves. The floor is all he is.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

III.

There my love made a place to lie and was it strewn with flowers?

Yes, with violets and bluebells and lilies pale as hours.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

There I made my love to lie and did I love her well?

Yes, with roses and tulip leaves and a bird's song like a bell.

Tan-dara-dei.

My lady sprang, too, from that floor-for what can a fool's lady have but the estate of her dearest? And her skirt was all a-snarl with daffodils, and roses red as mouths. We cared nothing, between us, but strode our floor back and forth like lord and lady, measuring and chronicling its every tile. I clutched her roses; she clutched my cap.

Come, Dagonet, you must hunt with us to-day! Put on Lancelot's livery, he will not mind!

Ah, gentlemen, I am full tired this morn. No fox is in danger of me, I am sure.

Come, Dagonet! We will not hear nay! Put on Lancelot's helmet and hoist up his shield-it is no fox we hunt this day!

Ah, gentlemen, and I am no Lancelot. Surely you would rather have a jig? A pratfall?

Come, come! Nothing would amuse us more than to see our own Dagonet dressed up as a knight like a little girl in her mother's gown!

One hunt, then. A fool must earn his penny.

She mounted up beside me on the young knight's horse-a back broad enough to bear Atlas in his blue chair!-and I a-clang in the young knight's armor, a poor Patroclus, all elbows, in Achilles' bronze breastplate. A fool's lady shares in his acts, his pantomimes, his jokes and jibes. She is his straight-man, she is his stage-hand.

Who is to say where Lancelot was that he did not hunt with his men? Not I; not the crocuses; not the roses. Not the queen.

No fox. Not a fox. A breath of white in the linden trees, a breath of ivory and silver against the tall white birches, a breath of hair like spun glass behind a weave of glossy green leaves. Never a fox. And it was my lady who tempted the beast, whose cheeks bloomed with clover and hyacinth, though she laughed like irises opening-I am no maid, said she, and it was no jest. From the day the floor pushed her up like a stalk she thirsted for me and I thirsted for her and we were sunlight and water and dirt and air.

But you are a maid, for a fool is not a man, and thus.

Not a fox, not a maid, not a man.

The wood smelled of old campfires and stripped bark. Some flowers were there: mean and nameless things, little more than a smear of red or purple in the brush. Who was I to notice when the birches faded to redwoods and mist covered all things from nose to branch? I thought myself to smell the sea.

It was a unicorn they came to hunt. I tell this tale not to please.

The poor beast blundered into the sward when the apples were firm on the boughs, and was spotted-such a guileless thing cannot help but be spotted, caught, rendered into fat and bone and meat. These boys, these fine boys, a pack of young, bored lions, took themselves up after it, never expecting to find a maiden in any crook of that palace to lure a four-legged pearl from the fog. My lady was the best they could find, and I, as always, amuse them, pass the tedious stretches of a hunt which do not involve gouts of hot blood, but rather cramped muscles and waiting. How marvelous to dress me in a lion's skin. I am a bow-kneed Hercules, and how my Nemean suit clatters and clangs.

My lady lifted her skirt of roses and stepped between the grotesque red trees, calling, calling her thrush-cry voice (tan-dara-dara-dei) calling for the unicorn which surely would not come to her, how could it come to her, whose legs clap strong as weeds around my waist, whose lips crushed against mine, whose kisses were so terrible and thick and sweet that our teeth clashed like tiles-what pure beast would come to her? Yet the birches seemed to bleed their white from bark to bark until it emerged, stepping lightly towards her, copper hooves dancing lightly here, there, like an impossibly delicate crab, unsure, hesitant, but drawn to her as though she held him on a string of pale, braided hair.

My lady always had open arms for any lost creature-how else could she have loved me? Her black hair blew back from her face like a nun's veil as she held out her hands to it, smiling, laughing, coaxing, sitting as maidens will do, as they do in all the tapestries I have ever seen, cross-legged on a mossy patch of forest, with red leaves all around her, sticking in her dress and wind-plastered to her skin. In my memory, in my songs, I can never decide if the dress was red, too, or white.

It was a stallion. A fine white down covered his snowy testicles-I noticed that, of all things, thin pale fur like fishbones lying against his pink skin as he sank down into her lap, as if he were tired, an old man who cannot even bend far enough to take off his shoes when the day is done. His huge head nuzzled her laced breast, great black eyes shuddering closed. He quivered, his diamond hide twitched and his teeth ground together-he groaned in my lady's lap, the usurper. And the horn-that horn!-long and twisted like an ice-casked branch, knotted and thick and not at all graceful. It a living limb, no ornament, no pretty bauble stuck to a horse's head. Blood pale as champagne seemed to pulse faintly under the pocked and pitted pearl.

His legs folded onto the moss and my pride was stung-of course it was. They were right, she was a maiden still, and our nights together were as vapor, the seed I left in her no more than a blown dandelion. The head in her lap proved me nothing but a floor-tile, walking like a man, but no less terra-cotta. The silver of the unicorn's cheek rippled against her skin, and she chuckled, my lady chuckled, her laugh like marigolds opening, and stroked his glassy mane. They laughed, too, the men, uproarious, slapping each other's backs and pointing at me, at my lumpish shape which could not even take a maidenhead, swimming in armor too big for me.

It was when she touched him-he must have smelled me on her, must have smelled whatever nameless thing takes the place of virginity, buried deeper in her than other women, for my lady was a floor-flower, and who asks a lily if it has lain with another lily? He snorted; his breath was lilac and ice fogging her knees.

I do not want to sing of this. I do not want to tell you how her cheek flushed as though she had been slapped. I do not want to knit rhyme to rhyme just to tell you how the unicorn drew back, his crystalline nostrils flaring, betrayed and betraying, the scent of her a red smear in his perfect nose, how he drew back-I have no meter for it-how he drew back like an arrow and thrust the limb of his horn into her belly, through the skirt of roses and her belt of thyme, through her leaf-skin, her hyacinth-skin, and my lady opened her mouth as if to protest, and blood dribbled from it, black and ugly, falling onto the flaxen beast in long streams and wasn't it funny to dress up a fool in a lion's skin? Wasn't it funny to call his whore a virgin? Wasn't it funny, wasn't it funny?

The blood seemed to burn him like a brand; he drove deeper into her, the twisted horn working and grinding against her spine, and he was screaming-a unicorn's scream! A glass-scrape against gold against bone-screaming and hooves slipping in the moss and bucking against her broken hips as her belly fell into her hands, and she was not a flower, she was not a lily, she was wet and red and she was my wife and she is dead, dead, and I will never sing of anything anymore.

IV.

Stand ye yet, O lime trees Where we two made our bed?

In the open field in the open land where I lay my lover's head?

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

Stand we yet, we lime trees who watched you lay her head Here too are grasses broken grasses where she made her bed.

Tan-dara-dei Tan-dara-dara-dei.

But in the end, the floor cannot be unwalked upon. It is not asked if it would prefer a surcease of shoes. It is trodden; it is worn. It is owned, and paid for, and it will lie beneath all those feet, it will lie beneath a severed white head preserved above the mantle, a white head and a gnarled horn, it will lie beneath those black-glass eyes and never complain. It is not paid to complain. It will sing, because it was made for singing, and because the feet would have their song.

Tan-dara-dara-dei.

XII THE HANGED MAN.