It is not so incredible, I suppose, that our blood should mix in the dry grass, that we should be clasped, hand to hand as if in prayer, one body again, as we began. Your wound is not so great as mine. (Is it strange to think a wound is like a mouth, to wish it would speak, explain itself, ask forgiveness for its redness?) But your wound is lower, and the seep is darker. Our little pieta, so full of stigmata that there is nothing left but holes, and we fall out of ourselves. Who holds who? Who is the winner? After all this, I still want to beat you once, little brother-yes, little. Do you forget I was born first? Seven minutes, seven minutes before you. I had seven minutes alone with our mother before you came ripping your way free of her.

If I die first, will that even the score?

Balin It isn't supposed to be like this. Women are supposed to hold us, and give succor, and dry our tears with their veils. How can I give succor to you? How can a pieta stand, when both figures are shivering with blood loss and shock? This isn't the tableau I was meant for, trying to help you into death as if it were as simple as opening a door or throwing a coat over a puddle, trying not to embarrass myself by dying first. Pellam would turn up his nose at this wreck of a death scene-the old man always had a fetish for protocol, for the mos maiorum, for good manners in all things-and we are dying in a terribly rude fashion, are we not?

His palace was the height of fashion, Cinderella-spired and Alhambra-fountained, chandeliers from Waterford and spiral banisters carved from solid California oak. It bordered the land where the mist and hulking trees change a man to a beast, the Otherland where quests always seem to lead-the rear walls of the place dropped off with a sickening shear, falling into fog and forest. I was brought in-if you could have tasted the feast, Balan! Of course he had the best-the workers in his fields live on rinds and dimes, but he supped on roasted dove and deer, corn and plum-wine and peaches, carrot soup, strawberries, oranges, potatoes like russet fists, new cream and mint leaves and wild thyme, brandy and port and chocolate dark as the devil's throat. There is nothing that does not grow or breed in that perfect valley, the San Joaquin, heaven's heart. Pellam's table shuddered under the weight of it. And the apples! How can I have forgotten the apples? Pyramids of red and yellow, crowned, each, with a bright green fruit, simmering at the summit like the lamp of a lighthouse.

He began as ritual would have it-as though he would let a chance for ritual slip by! The impeccably dressed (powder blue accented with cobalt) monarch rose at the head of the cherrywood table and recited the litany of begats which charted the genetic drift between himself and the Christ child, tectonic plates buoying continents of paternity, a tree so complex and oft-grafted that Pellam himself seemed surprised had not come out half-dove.

Once the fighting broke out (I suppose you will say that was my fault, brother, that I need not take every challenge thrown up at me by flea-infested second and third sons, but I am what I am) Pellam cracked my sword against one of the perfectly appointed marble steps, and I ran to find another-I only meant to find another sword, you understand. How was I to know he had that ghastly spear hidden away? If it was very important, he would have displayed it in the hall and lectured about it for at least an hour before we were allowed to touch his precious brandy.

There was no crack of thunder when I took it from the altar, no blinding flash of folly or revelation-not even when I buried it in Pellam's femoral artery-I use the precise term in his honor-was there any clap of cielo furioso.

Until the house came down.

But by then I had left the spear in Pellam, jutting up awkwardly like an inopportune erection; I didn't connect the wobbling red lance with the sudden seizure of the architecture. Only after I was spirited out from under the Virgin Mary did I understand-the fields outside his house were a gray ruin, the migrants picking at shriveled berries that crumbled to ash at a touch. The orange trees had petrified, the corn-rows calcified, the apple orchards had dropped all their fruit in one gasp, and the wind was snatching up the stench of rot. The irrigation canals had iced over, though there was no cold. They sat sullen and blue-banked, glowering at the hapless workers with their bushels of clay and dust.

Was it his protocols and monotonous ritual that kept the land pushing plenty up through its crown? Or the spear in its proper place? You know I have never gotten a handle on propriety. If I had, I would have at least asked your name before charging-but I was tired, I wanted it over and done, I hoped there was a pretty maid in the tower to smile shyly and put a cool cloth on my head.

This island does not have the decency to blight at the touch of our blood. It keeps its swampy councils, and the cranes suck eels from the streams without taking notice of the tragedy nearby. You would think, would you not, my brother, that the noise of such irony as this would be deafening?

Balan Perhaps it is the fault of our names. Balin, Balan, it hardly makes a difference, does it? Did no one ask where I had gone all those years, while you were assisting suicides and claiming more swords than you deserved? Did no one wonder what had happened to the older twin, the one who didn't run at the other children like a rabid mountain goat, cracking horn against horn? While you were sidling up to Arthur and making battlefield eyes at his knights, did no lady with wild violets in her hair ask if you hadn't once had a brother, and what had become of him?

What was the Dolorous Stroke? When have you made a stroke which was not?

Is she watching us, can you see? My girl? Are there eyes in that tower, feline and yellow-yellow I once thought of as gold, as lion's pelt, as burnished bedposts. Does her red sleeve fall over the parapet-dare I hope that she is crying? I had my quest, finally, and it ended in her, her yellow eyes moving over me, appraising, as the blood of her last knight still steamed on my chest-and I can still smell the metallic tang of that blood as she pulled me down onto her, as it smeared onto her breasts, her lips, as it pooled in her navel-Balin, the smell of it, when I loved her that first day!

Can red have a smell? It must, it must-it must smell of her breath and her hungry mouth when she licked the blood from my fingers.

I cannot turn to look, you must do it for me-my legs have gone numb. If she is there, if her hair is falling over the tower stones, then she loved me and it was not that I was simply next. If she is there then she liked the taste of the beans I planted in the black soil-generations of duels will fertilize the land-she liked the sound of my children's hearts beating against hers, she liked my heavy shape sleeping against her. If she is not-I do not know. Perhaps she betrayed me, perhaps she is at her bath, perhaps she did not hear the sounds of us cracking horn against horn.

I begin to think there is a plexus of these fairy women, a chain, a net, knotted by hundreds of hands in hundreds of towers. They must spread out like veins, collecting each other's daughters, waiting for a chance to escape the pattern of knights and clamber onto that barge themselves.

I want her to have quit that sisterhood, to have hung up its wimple and stamped their prayer beads into glass dust. I want her to have kissed the blood from me and forgotten all her oaths to those witches, those siren-crones, those moon-addled alchemists. I want her to have never known what apples taste like, or stroked another fey-girl's hair with those delicate hands, smooth as candles. I want her to have looked at me and loved me, and turned away from the light of their pale sylph-bodies, away from the forest where masts are cut from strong trunks, and flax crushed between plump fingers, woven into sailcloth.

But I think, even now, she is stepping onto the birchwood and taking deep breaths of the sea wind.

Balin It was the lady of the house who gave me the shield. It was larger, she said, and more splendid. They would not send me to face the Red Knight with my own, which, she insisted, was little more than a buckler. I admit that it was fine, though the cormorant was unsettling, rising up as if to flee its station.

The old man had brought me all that way from Pellam's castle, and the blasted heath that I had made of the two-rivered valley-I could hardly speak for hunger and tremors of exhausted muscle. The lady put morsels of duck and goose into my mouth, wiped the juice form my chin. She held a cup of hot wine to my lips, and ushered old owl-hands from the castle. Then she told me of a terrible beast who held a maiden captive on an island just a little distant from there. The rushes grew high on that isle, and no road cut through the marshes.

I am what I am, Balan.

I was not even afraid when I saw you, no bigger than I, though your armor flashed scarlet and black in the dim sun, filtered through low fog. You were like a blood-golem, bearing down on me without even a horse, bellowing some name I could not understand. If you had seen my shield, my own, with the two swords-you remember, don't you, the girl with hair like a deer's flank who said no man but her champion could pull the sword? And I took it from her-even Arthur could not! I took it-I alone won two swords. If you had seen the crossed blades, crossed like spears, would you have stopped and clapped me on the shoulder, called me brother, and would we have gone in to feast with your woman? It could not have happened that way, I know that.

Thou shalt strike a stroke most dolorous that man ever struck.

Oh, my brother, my other self, I did not think he meant this. Put your fingers through mine, lock them knuckle to knuckle as we used to, and do not cough so. I will not die before you, I will not go down into the earth without you. I will be your mother, I will be your pieta, I will hold your prone body beloved as it goes blue and stiff. I will wait for you to start down the stair, and I will follow after. I am so sorry, I wish your ribs did not show through your skin, I wish I were not so cold, that I could not feel myself emptying from myself. I wish we were whole again, safe in the womb, warm heads pressed together, waiting for a rush of phosphor, for that burst of sound and air scalding its way through new lungs, waiting for seven minutes to separate us.

Balan I have put my beans and my lettuce to sleep in the earth, my wife to sleep in the tower, and my daughters to sleep on the barge. The cranes have put their heads beneath their wings. Everyone sleeps but us, this huddle of twins in the damp, skin flushed back to the blue of pre-breath infants, whose breath no longer even hangs in the air.

Quiet, now, little brother. I will go first, as I have always done, so that if you fall on the night-stair, I will catch you.

II.

There is not a stone here which has not borne up under a foot. The castle is warm with touching, with hands against walls and spines against floors. Behind the blessing hills, it nearly glows. Knees have worn cups into the floor of the cathedral, and the faithful find their favorite places, nestling into the warm indents that hold them up like palms.

Wells have been sunk. The water is sweet and clear, and tastes a little of new moss, a little of burnt wood. The river is swift and cold and neatly diverted into a hundred fields. There is talk of a new monastery-in thirty years it will be famous for barrels of thick black beer.

The market in the great courtyard passes old money around-each coin has been endlessly fondled, turned into cakes, cloth, shoe-soles, honeycombs, thick red meat strung with thyme and turning slowly on a spit. There are children who have grown up in the shade of the portcullis, and stalls which have been in the family. Seven successive queens have looked down from the topmost tower, each with black braids. Each grew old, each watched their braids turn silver, then white.

There is one up there now-look, you can see the sun on her scalp. Is she smiling? Is she crying? It is always hard to tell with queens.

The lands outside the walls bristle with vegetable, with animal. There are new breeds-someone has even grown a low trellis of grapes. In the winter, they freeze, and children suck on the hard purple fruits. Goats wander shaggy and fat, sheep bleat and roll in the long grass. The clatter of wool-carding is pleasant, and makes little girls sleepy. Taxes are high, but not too high.

Late in autumn, the taxes are not taken-some few guess why. That castle leaks men like a sieve, and they are always out searching for one thing or another. This time it's a cup. They hear. They shrug. Well, everyone needs cups. But the tax-man is busy questing, and the king's tithe is well-put to use in babies' mouths, in old aunts' jugs, in new cows and spinning wheels and a big plow-horse with a white patch on his forehead.

The valley is small and quiet, and the castle sits in its center: safe, familiar, eternal. When was there not a castle here? Curse me if I can remember.

V THE HEIROPHANT.

Pellinore Pellinore, at that time a king, followed the Questing Beast, and after his death Sir Palomides followed it.

-Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur Of the approximately three thousand species of lizards in existence, only a few are very large. The legs of some lizards are greatly shortened, or vestigial, making animals such as the glass lizard or slowworm snakelike in appearance; they are distinguished from true snakes by their movable eyelids and by differences in the structure of the skull bones, especially those of the lower jaw. The bones of the two halves of a lizard's lower jaw are firmly united; those of a snake are separable. Scales are evenly arrayed in lines down and around the body. Dorsal scales are keeled while the ventral scales are smooth; there is little overlapping. Colors are various shades of brown, green, yellow, even black-some species have lighter longitudinal stripes or variegated colors.

A fold of skin is generally noted running laterally along the length of the body-some scholars believe that this is evidence of vestigial wings, while others scoff at the idea that creatures of such size ever flew.

I will admit, I will whisper into the dust-plated corners, behind bookshelves and umbrella-racks, sheaves of woolen coats and heavy boots: it is possible that there is no such thing as a dragon.

It is not the Beast itself that matters, you understand. Leopard or lamia, there are many hides I could have taken home to Camelot by now, if it were only the Beast I wanted. I would not travel this way, if that were all, belts and sashes clanging with sextants and telescopes, magnifying glasses and monocles, nautical charts, compasses in brass and gold, graphometers, refractometers, hydrometers, cliometers, and galvanometers, azimuths and globes studded with malachite and onyx, zinc-carbon batteries, micro-manipulators and a genuine camera obscura-all of my own invention. There is a gramophone in the saddlebags. But all this apparati is not for finding-it is for looking.

That is what they do not understand, the boys who rush out wearing braggart swords on bonny hips, astride horses flashing flanks at the sun-only to hurry home as soon as the moon shows her calf. There is sanctity in simply placing one foot in front of the other, again and again, until the foot seems to remember no time when it sat still on a polished floor, and cannot recall what country birthed it-toe, heel, or arch. Devotion to the wood and the wild is a thing of beauty, devotion to the walking staff and the manzanita-bramble, devotion to the beast which may or may not breathe fire, which may or may not possess the ability to fly, which may or may not dream of its eggs, of the shell's slippery hues, ultramarine to indigo, splintering with the pressure of a tiny speckled beak.

In the Sierras, there are places men have never trampled a leaf underfoot. This is, after all, the othered space of fairyland, and if I am to take my chances anywhere, if I am to hope for a green leg, a variegated tail, a clutch of painted eggs, it can be nowhere else but here. I make my little fire in the shade of granite, on the moraine where a glacier once ground its ponderous, imperturbable way through, dropping boulders like shameful tears behind it. Kitchen smells urge their oily gleam through the oaky air-the tea sour and thin, bacon popping and slapping in its grease, leaving a tiny constellation of fat-burns on my forearm, a Pleiades of lard and scorched hair-the sound of it like a spill of salt onto a slick white floor. Coffee speaks its bean-tongue, and the mountains grumble a loamy rhythm of longevity.

The sextant gleams hopefully.

In the center of the head of many lizards is a small semi-transparent spot, which connects to an area of the brain, called the pineal body. A pineal body is a small, cone-shaped projection from the top of the midbrain of most vertebrate species. The pineal body does not appear in crocodiles or in mammals of the order Xenarthra, consisting of only a few cells even in whales and elephants. In lizards, this is a kind of "third eye," thought to detect day length via the angles of sunlight, triggering the breeding instinct in midsummer, and hibernation in winter. It may also allow certain species of green and red lizards to detect the presence of others of their kind, suitable mates or rivals. It has been suggested that the pineal body would account for the reports of dragons able to eerily pinpoint the weakest part of siege-towers and other man-made defenses.

Pellinore is a new name. Once, it was Beli Mawr, once Bile and Bel. When the Beast had not yet taught our family to disregard the year's hemlines we came when we were called, and on boulder-strewn fields we thrust our fists against the mud. We kept death in the grasses, and when we opened our mouths, our daughter roared into birth from our jaws. We were moss-bearded giants, beasts ourselves, and our knees were large as shields. Over time, we shrunk into the usual span of height, and began to hunt others, instead of fleeing from earnest young men with nets and tridents.

We became domesticated-it can happen to anyone.

The muscles in our hawthorne-thighs ached with the strain of holding the down the dark. Stone huts and beds of barley-hulls began to seem sweet as mountains to us, and we lay down into the sleepiness of country lordships.

But we still resemble boulders enfleshed-occasionally I will find a bit of lichen or milkweed growing in my beard-our skin is famously tough, elephant-coarse and the deep brown of men accustomed to carrying the sun on their shoulders. Roofs do not become us. But I took a roof onto my back, didn't I? Didn't I agree to put my shoulders to the beams of Camelot, didn't I let them settle the rafters onto my neck like the fasteners of a guillotine?

I suppose I did, and yet now it seems as though another man asked to be seated at that table, where no Beast would ever rest its beryl hindquarters. Someone young and blonde with knuckles like fat golden rings-yet I know my beard is red. What color could it be but red? My face sprouts fire as the Beast's does. We are brothers, sinewy and smoldering old goats trundling about on a mountain neither of us can name. Who was it that clapped Arthur on the back and ate roasted rooster's combs? I suppose it was me. I am a Pellinore, the only one living. So, logically, it must have been me.

Perhaps I only wish it were another man, so that I would not now be this old walnut-husk, so that I would not have walled myself away from the Beast and the storm-sky's clamor for all those years. Perhaps I once had yellow hair, and I have forgotten it.

I never told Arthur whether I am older or younger than he-at times I played the lad, at times I stood for the Merlin-that-was, the Merlin-before-Nimue, and put my hand on his shoulder-though it is not the owl-clutch he remembers, my hand is much too heavy for that. But it held the old man's place for awhile.

Do you remember, Arthur, the night you, too, dreamed of the Beast? How you said it had a pelt like a leopard-patently ridiculous, of course-and the feet of a deer-absurd!-the haunches of a lion to top it off-of all the preposterous theories! And you clutched me, sweating, clammy, and whispered that a brother had got a child on his sister, and that child was the Beast, and the brother was punished, punished, in your dream he was punished and the Beast ate him whole.

Oh, my boy. You come to your Pellinore and tell him to wear the band of a dream-interpreter, and I know you are sorry, I know you wish it had not happened, but you needn't tell stories about Beast to torture yourself. He is beyond such silliness. And I told you not to fear-I had hunted him for years and would take it up again for you, and I would ask him myself if all children of a brother and a sister were wicked. As if the Beast knows a thing about it, but it seemed to calm you, and that one night, you feel asleep in my arms, like a son.

I cannot go back now-too many graves, fanning out like sunflowers around its grounds, too many wraiths in the halls, spaces whose edges still burn like cigarette-scars, spaces where people we loved used to walk, and gossip, and trade their cinnamon for lumps of brown sugar. All the men of that place are professional pallbearers now. That great, gabled hall is a death-barrow. It is a mausoleum, tightly shut, scented with bergamot and myrrh. Nothing can live closed inside.

The Beast, oh, my Beast is life. The dragon, its skin hot as a baking stone, its tender snout nosing the air, the space where its skull-plates meet pulsing in an almost intimate rhythm, so that you almost feel ashamed to witness so private a flutter. Nothing about the creature admits the existence of cold-the pouched flaps which might be wings chuff a sirocco off of its aerie, a rush of brown and ochre nest-shreddings. And I, in my lowland hutch, speculating to an audience of three dim stars and a titmouse as to whether the Beast might have some kind of fur over its spine, as smaller lizards are reported to have, fat tufts of hoary tangles-and how would this affect any latent or actual flight abilities?

But the castle beyond the foothills spattered with blackthorn and honey-hearted oak, the castle where the lights have gone out in the tall windows? That is a dead place, and I would never have found the Beast if I had stayed to die with it.

. . . most lizards and many other species of reptile have the ability to rejuvenate their tails. The bright coloration of the tail, ranging from vermillion to emerald and into various shades of gold, in some species diverts the attention of predators to the expendable appendage, aiding in escape. (Image ) Fracture points on the tail bone allow the tail to easily break away. In some lizard varieties, (Image Y), the tail can regenerate itself many times over after detachment, often in entirely different patterns of color than the original tail.

Beast, Beast, when you leave me, I am alone.

When I forget its color-I am almost certain it is green-when I forget that the lining of its nasal passage is coated in opaque mucus which protects the tender tissues from any stray spires of baroque flame, I wake up in the night, shivering, sweating, groping for my notes.

I think, when I was at Arthur's candled hearth, I did not sleep at all. The mornings were all pale as the thronging winter and twice as polluted, scarred like a map, and beyond that line there were monsters, terra incognita, alien shores of bleached dinosaur bones, lizards like gods, and I sitting lotus-full in their center, thick as meat. And I was not off the map, I was choked with parchment, when I should have been where I belonged-with the monsters and the deep, outside the grip of longitude.

But Arthur was a beast himself in those days-the tawny bear-king slapping lazily at bees with a massive paw. I contented myself with measuring his stride and analyzing the musculature of his broad back-I told myself that was enough, to watch the lion lying on his stone slab, and his mate languid in the shadows. I told myself that there were no dragons, or if there had once been, they were long extinct, long extinguished, dead as diamonds.

But at night, I would wake and my lungs would seize, I would scramble for my cliometer and hold it to my heaving chest. I would calculate the Beast's probable heart rate, its respiration, its molting-day three years hence, until I was calm again. As time went by, more and more recitations were necessary to calm the panic burbling up in me like cauldron-brew. I was not Merlin, I could not be the old man of the law-bench and banquet-hall-I could only be the old man of the mountain, and that only by the grace of the Beast.

I longed for the mountains, the mountains which hunch and huddle like my own body, clutches of wild ponderosa and star thistle grinning in the knee-joints and elbow-sockets. I longed to sniff the baroque, three-pointed footprint of the Beast, to measure it precisely and note the length of the talons in my notebook. I longed to smell a fire gobbling up the green branches, I longed to sleep on hard ground and wake to the sound of a tail whisking by, just a little further on, always a little further on.

I didn't even have to creep, or muffle my footsteps. By the time I heard the great gate swing closed behind me, there was no one left to care that I had gone.

The scales of certain lizards are shaped like small beads. Only the beaded varieties are venomous; therefore, if one can get close enough to a specimen or obtain a corpse for study, this can be useful in taxonomy. Of course, dragons have no need of venom, being capable of generating streams of multicolored fire from glands corresponding approximately to lymph nodes in humans. My opponents maintain that there is a relationship between reports of fire and reports of venom-that the two have somehow become confused in folklore, and that the image of the great-winged, fire-breathing dragon so popular in the peasant psyche is, in fact, a small, bead-scaled creature no more than three feet in length capable of producing a venom which may or may not paralyze small vermin such as mice and voles.

It is always dangerous to leave the mountains.

If one leaves them for Camelot, one may at least be sure that one travels form linear space to linear space, that molecules and sky-motes will behave approximately as they do elsewhere.

Any other destination is suspect.

When I first went down from the granite cliffs, when I despaired of my Beast, when I had lost the trail of its scent (bayberry and sulfur with an underwaft of jimson weed) in the Butterfly Forest, I had meant to go to Camelot. After all, where could I find better maps, better records of past hunts, better genealogical archives which might have recorded sightings long since forgotten by the peasants-in short, I meant to go for the purposes of research. I say I meant, for Camelot did not rise to meet me, as the tales assure one that it does, cresting the hills with its golden turrets to the sound of trumpets and of flutes-I found darker places before I found Camelot, places of red smoke and hushed voices. The path which was supposed to lead up the fabled hill until Camelot itself took hold and laid itself out before the weary traveler-me-like a new bride lost itself, curled on itself like the tail of the Beast, and swallowed me up. I hardly knew the pebbles underfoot had changed before I could no longer guess at the geography of England, could no longer spin my compass to the capitol.

Around me, before I could draw breath, was a town of oak-shacks and dark seal-heads floating grim in the morning, a town full of trickling wells and streets that blew dust at themselves. I could see no one, only the murk of dun and gray creeping along empty, plantless ways. I rode into the Underworld on the singing angle of my golden sextant, eyes open, charts asplay, and yet, and yet. I suppose I ought to have known. The place wore all the vestments of hell: smoke closed around me, red as eyes-floats of yellow-gold flared and sputtered in the waft, and my feet crushed the moss, and my fingers groped for a gate. But there was no gate, no lock like a gape-mouth slavering for its key. There was no dog-I was quite hoping there would be a dog. I would have liked to scruff it behind the ear and call it a nice pup, a good chap. I would have liked to take dictation, to note down its long tale of service and meals of damned marrow thrice daily. But there was no asphodel, and no moon-eyed wolf. I lay down on a couch of flesh, and there was a discord of music, a silvern jangle that slid over scales as though cut by them. Smoke vomited itself from glass pipes, from ivory lips, from pools of paint like open veins. I fell, I fell so far, and the green fields of Dover frayed into emerald string, into the spines of serpents corkscrewing in the airless sky, slips of tongues like letters snapping through their phonemes. I seemed to see a woman's face above mine, her black hair drawing its curtains around my jaw, and she put a flute of whalebone into my throat. When she blew, I filled with her white exhalation, fat as bellows, and my navel burst in a spray of star-sputum.

I fell. I fell so far. And the Beast was there at the bottom, a belly as big as the world, banded in nacre, rolling on his back, a beached turtle on black sands.

He did not look at me-of course not. I was a mote in his perfect eye, flashing in the dim, yes, but no more than a flash. His forelegs clutched at the downbreath of Stygian air, mottled green and yellow as cholera-his bunched hindlegs flexed lazily, muscles bulbous-blue. As if in water, his jaws opened and shut, clacking together desultorily, without hunger or malice. At last I saw the pink of his cheeks, his gullet, his marvelous tail slapping heavily on some unguessable floor. A leathery plume sprouted braggart-red from his head, and oh, it was so like the plumes of those poor, ruined dolls winding down their clockwork way, fused to horses, prancing in a jerky sort of grace towards their fossil-frieze.

It was so like the plumes I wore.

Beast! Oh, Beast, when you leave me, I am so lost. I cannot paste the pages of my manuscripts together to make anything like your shape. If you were to look at me-I do not ask for more than a glance!-I would be young again for you, a boy hunting his favorite lizard across the hot stones, pricked over with bright burrs. I would be gray of eye and gold of hair for you, the height of scientific fashion. I would be hotheaded and rash, I would forget the cubic measure, I would forget, even, to note the circumference of your jeweled skull. I would be just your own lagging lord-but what is a Beast without his Huntsman?

Surely we are connected, the Beast and I, surely within that geologic musculature he knows he is mine, my Quarry. Surely his bones know that he is captive, that we are locked together in step and follow-it cannot be that he has ambled on his way and never heard a desperate pant not far-not far at all-behind.

I fell. I fell and he never glanced up, never heard the whistle of my descent, of the air through all my ticking instruments. I only fell, and fell into him, into the globe of his stomach, and the skin, the spotted, spackled, glowing skin, only gave a little before breaking under the needles of graphometers, refractometers, hydrometers, cliometers, galvanometers, and azimuths, all bristling from me like natural defenses, and they tore into him, they opened him up like an egg, and I went down into the swim of his viscous self, I went down through the banded gate, and my face was erased in the acid of him. He saw me then I am sure, I know it. His eye rolled downward to me, expressionless, yes, but he witnessed my rapture, I am certain, I am certain. In his entrails primordial I was helpless, and his black blood pooled around me like a sea lapping against a ship whose loss is forgone. But he saw the wisps of my hair and the earnest gleam of my study, even proud-he must have been proud!-to allow me to finish my work, intimate, close.

He extended that elegant snout to me and his nostrils flared sulfurous-sere. I touched it-I touched it with awe, and the warmth of his tympani-heart barreled up beneath me, slamming a sun back and forth between its sixteen ventricles, and I was a part of that violent sway.

And then my face was wet, and the woman with curtaining hair was emptying a copper flask over me, and thin-lipped she dragged me to a veiled door. The Beast was gone, the vision detonated in a splash of algae-ridden water. His belly was sewn up without me, and I could not even find his scent in the murky air. There was no gateless void, there was no endless fall, and on my instruments there remained not one drop of precious blood to tell me its secrets. I stumbled, no better than a drunk bereft of tavern, and the black-haired creature flung me from the door, into the wood and the wold again, with nothing but mewling magpies flitting stupidly ahead of me.

Beast, when you leave me, I am so lost.

Lizards utilize a combination of high heat, fermentation and stomach microbes to break down their food. Dentition is a secondary mechanism, as the fiery interior of their bodies is fully capable of both killing and in some sense cooking their prey. Teeth are used only to crop large pieces of meat for ingestion and subsequent incineration.

The structure of their gastrointestinal system is similar to that of herbivorous mammals including a greatly enlarged, elaborate colon, almost baroque in its labyrinthine design. Seared flesh passes through the small intestine into the large, cup-like anterior colon. The lizard colon contains many folds and partitions which act to slow the passage of flesh, giving increased time to fermentation and cremation while allowing time to work on the ingested foodstuff by the microbial inhabitants of the colon (protozoa, bacteria and nematodes).

The interior of a dragon is a cathedral constantly engulfed in holy flame, and the flesh of the devoured lies within, consumed in that incorruptible holocaust.

The wood is cool and pale; ashes from my night-fire still comb through the air, delicate as sheets of vellum escaped from some celestial library. There is gooseflesh. There are cracked lips. I crouch in the crevice between granite and juniper, and my knees creak-of course they creak. That is the office of an old man's bones.

It has been weeks since I found even a snapped branch that might tell of the Beast's passing. I sold all my instruments in that strange and dreaming town, to the perplexed palms of a blacksmith who will surely melt them into slag, and then into horseshoes. Somewhere a horse will clop its way from stable to hall on hooves of golden calipers and brass clockworks. I am all that is left-but I am pure, I am ready for him, I have nothing more to learn-I only ask to be in the presence of that skin-heat, that baleful eye, to in truth be in his orbit, just a small, unassuming moon, content to radiate his verdant light.

In the black-cake soil I illuminate, monk-intent, the text of my Beast, his lymph-canticle, the scripture of his taxonomy. The loam is my bestiary, and he is the only inhabitant of my dust-opus. The curve of his spine is there, the web of his toes. In the mire, his plume is enshrined, his terrible belly is recorded for the rain and the fog to witness. Tales of his ferocity, of his mercy, of his depthless hunger, insatiable, incomprehensible. The folklore of his birth is etched in pinecone and birchbark, the fire-birth of the cosmos, and he a crystalline sphere of ineffable green. I am his lonely scribe, who was once-but who can remember now?-the scribe of that other plumed beast, that other strutting sire at play in his menagerie, galloping among the tigers and serpents and great, graceful deer, the dancing bears and the hoopoe, the salamanders and the crows snapping at the tendons of winter.

I could not bear the noise. The contests of mating, the territorial screech. And in the end, I could not bear the meathouse slaughter, the shanks of wildcat piled red and dripping, the pearlescent feet pickled in so many glass jars.

The Beast is blessedly silent, he has no hooting language, no raucous claim. And if I have any fealty left in me, it is owed to the gilt-lined innards of the untouchable leviathan.

I will wait, and I will walk in the ash-strung wood.

And in the distance, there will be, before the end, a green flash in the mere.

IV THE HERMIT.

Galahad Then took he himself the Holy Vessel and came to Galahad; and he kneeled down, and there he received his Saviour.

-Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur Last night I was a lily, and very purple. I sat on the water with my toes in the silt, and my petals curled darkly up at the juniper forest. Thick violet lips reflecting the light of flickering fish deep in the lake, surfacing to nibble at my lily-flesh. But I do not taste like a dragonfly, and they never eat me entire.

A flower is very still, still in a way I can't imitate in the suntime. I grow legs and fingers and breasts, and lost my purpleness. I begin to notice imperfections-my coffee cup is chipped, I haven't made my bed in days, I stumble under the almost-raining sky like a doomed gazelle. And oh, the ocean here is not so wide or deep as I had hoped. It does not swallow me, or demand, or promise like the ocean I remember. When I am a lily I am not disappointed, the lake moves through me and I can let it.

You understand, of course. You know the nature of lakes. Water passes over you in sunlight and moonlight and grasslight and fishlight and you love it for its passage. I envy you your capacity for silence, and waiting. Do you know the Question already? Or does it wait in your mind like a hibernating bear, ready at the precise aural combination to stretch its furry legs and roar out its relief? Funny how "question" contains the word "quest" inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars. You want me to push towards you, to believe in you, to want you and strive to achieve you. To be bent upon your purpose and wear white robes, passing though trees like a fiery-eyed wraith, filled with your flame. To encircle the globe with desire for you.

But a lake is a deep-within place, within a forest, or mountains. And I am by the Sea, an edge-place, the end of the world. And somehow, because it is beautiful, and sparkling, and very expensive to stand on the seashelless sand, I feel I should not be so disappointed, that I am not allowed to be. But still, I will not come to you, will not succumb to the destiny you have written for me. This is not a quest, but a battle, and my will is as strong as yours.

Let me tell you a little story. You know it already, of course, but here in Southern California, it floats between the boardwalk shops like half a memory. You see, on the voyage home from windy Troy there was a place called the Island of the Lotus Eaters. It was on the coast of Africa (which in the Western Mind is somehow all Sahara, all sand and desert with an occasional cheetah or jackal). But the flower-eaters island wasn't like that. It was full of green, and lakes and rivers, and beautiful, bulbous blue flowers that grew everywhere like dandelions. They covered the rocks like foam, and rippled like laughter at the base of the swaying trees. Pale, child's eye blue floated over the island, and the petals tasted sweet, like spun sugar, their fuzzy texture melting on the tongue. And the men ate the flowers, and they were always happy, and serene, and they could let the water pass through them. Through the flowers shining and dancing, through the skein of cerulean and silver-white, they thought their land was the best and the most wonderful, and no one wanted to leave. Their tall ships against the bleeding sunset seemed ugly, monstrous skeletons, which had once seemed so graceful and sleek. Happiness forever seemed to hang like a jeweled necklace in the air, the promise of an eternity without intellectualized discontented winters.

And you know, the people here remind me of that a little. There is a thought that inhabits many of us, not quite generated of our own brains, that this is the best of all possible worlds. Sand and water alone somehow constitute paradise, and to be unhappy here is sacrilegious. To think this ocean different from the others and too warm. Everyone eats the flowers and never wants to leave. And I am a soldier-sailor, I want to go home, if my ship would steer that way, home from the Crusades through the musky domes of Los Angeles, the myrrh-scented incense of San Diego. The rain beads on cafe tabletops like tears, and gold-plated hooves stamp on sanctified alleyways, the smell of palm-wind and cinnamon weaving the air. I would walk these roads, if I could, where everything is gold, threads of light leading away from you, towards release and illumination. Beyond them lies destiny as I would craft it, in the mountains and rivers I have never seen. A hermitage of the crags and meadows, devouring time.

Here, in these strange lands that lie on the homeward route from broken Constantinople, through the Red Sea and Santa Monica, gold dust covers my toes in a fine mist, it is spun out clear and pure, translucent in the windowpanes, beaten into coronas around the heads of dark-eyed women-alive? Dead?-with their bundles of rushes and blue-flowered rosemary, cobbled onto the rooftops that spread out in an infinite line, like the sea. The sun turns cities into novae.

In a thick stream, gold is drunk in coffee-shops and eaten in musky theatres. I would pull this curtain of light over my body and hide from you forever. I can see its sheen billowing behind me like a sail, making me invisible, bearing me home in a wash of sun. This, that is Holy Land, drowns in its beauty and golden lights, until there is nothing but the light, covering everything, swallowing the body and smoothing the universe into a long, gold altar cloth.