But I don't want to eat the lily; I remember what happened to Eve. Never eat the fruit another offers you. Because then I will forget what fire and darkness are. I will forget my wounds, my blood, and without my scars and sacrifice, what am I? What am I without my pain? What if I did not storm and weep and rail at the sky, if I did not leap with madness or rapture, did not pound my fists against anything? What if I did not resist? Would I know myself? Would anyone? What if I were a simple man, kind and true, full of unadulterated light, walking the earth only outside my own door, not wandering like a nomad on a bedraggled camel? What if I were not driven to do these things? What if I were not filled with desire and expansiveness? Would I be anything? Am I anything without my drive to see, to experience, to devour?

What if I never despaired, never doubted, never considered the ravening advance of time, never thought of death? What if I merely yielded to you? I would not know myself, would not recognize my own sinews. The flame that keeps my flesh crackling with light, if for a moment it were calmed and turned civilized, I would cease to be. I, the thing that is I, would vanish. If I did not resist you, did not clamor against you, did not open my throat to swallow everything, as though to ingest some power to allow me to keep out the tympani of your call.

Can you see this? Or is the bear pacing within you, the creature that yearns only for the right question to be asked to release you? Is he deaf to all other questions save that One? But last night I was the lily, and I was content, and forgot.

Last night I was a silver trumpet, and I roared out the beauty of caves for you to hear. The goblet of my metal rim gleamed in dim, smoky light. My voice was crimson and it sparked like a blacksmith's forge. I thought of you, because of your silence, because of our oppositeness. It was good to be loud and colorful at last. I have felt so much gray and amorphous lately. But to dispel that ashen self, someone had to find me, and polish me, flick my keys with their fingers to test me out, and force air and sound out of my throat. Someone's lips wrapped around me, forcing me to sing, pushing a wash of color out of me. It leaves me pale and shaking, but scoured clean. I have made something beautiful, and it is enough. I wonder if I will always need someone else to make me useful? How used to lying in a cedar box in an attic have I become, someone's once-beloved instrument, a glimmer of metal with a corona, like a Byzantine Madonna? Someone once ran their fingers along me, almost faint with desire, the music in him rushing to bloom into the world. I once carried a universe of possibility. Before potentiality sharpened to a fine edge.

Attics are soft and warm, they do not require my loudness or my weeping notes, they require only my inactivity, so that they can settle dust over me like a lover's hand. How comforting that once was. But it is only like a lover's hand, it is not. Softness and gold half-light sing the mind to darkness. And this place, the woven gold of the California desert, is an attic that wraps you in warmth like a chain. It is good to be quiet and think, but it does not quite satisfy the belly. And to be this brazen thing, to make something red, something else must supply the air, or I am silent. You understand, of course. You, too, require another to complete you. Your purpose is unfulfilled by solitude. Alone you are an old man sitting on the pier, drinking bourbon and feeding seagulls. Alone, passing teenagers toss a thoughtless coin into your gray felt hat, half-smile in pity and leave you in the dust of their red leather high heels. But this is not you at all, you are a King and it is the quest that makes you the King-Who-Waits. It is at your feet the salamander sits, showing his glinting emerald loyalty. But sometimes I smell your cigarettes from far away.

I thought of that last night, as my trumpet-voice drank the smoke of cigarettes from quietly disintegrating club-goers, and moved through a woman's hair with such softness, such an ache, taking a black strand of it tenderly from her mouth. I wanted to show you this thing, this thing that you sacrificed. You desire only the one who finds without seeking, how can I tell you what her hair felt like? How can I give you the serpentlyric I cried out over her dark head?

You stand at the center of all human paths, but you know nothing of us, of me, who you call to yourself like a child, of the woman I touched, how beautiful she was. You don't know what it is to want, except the one who can find your temple in the forest that is not of trees.

I wish I were that one, that I were innocent enough, and patient enough, and that my hands did not bleed so.

I am not your one.

You play the harp, and your notes are silver and slinkingly soft, all glissando. You call me with this wind harp, call me to the dust of the pilgrimage path through California desert instead of Byzantium. You call me to the rim of crusader's footprints. But last night, at least, I was the trumpet, and not the kind that is mournful and low. The kind that deafens the harp.

I can't help that I am too loud. My voice would break the glass of your trees. I am all fortissimo, and I can't change the need for that thumping clamor beating at the ears. I can't always be the water and the silence that you inhabit in tortoiselight forever. I'm so sorry, because I want to know, I want to walk where you have passed, and I want to see the chalice shining through the tree-shadows. But you can't make me into a crusader. This is not my quest, not my question, not my life, not my desire. Not my fault.

Last night I was a hummingbird, and it was a thoughtless jewel of green and pink, existing in between dewmeals. I tasted the thick orange-red lips of bougainvillea like dusky honey, and the jacaranda flowers like pale cold wine. There is so much desert in California, I seize like one starved upon the beauty of a few bright things alive in the dark. It occurs to me that when I write to you of my night metamorphoses, I always tell you about drinking. Perhaps because I associate you with water, and rivers, and seas and rain. My father was afraid of the water, he ran from it, all the way to the desert. But to me, you are the king of waterpaths, and I think of that all the stories I tell you, you most like to hear about the liquids I encounter. It is why you found me in California, where the sea walks in my skin. It is how I commune with you, when I drink the lakewater, and feel the damp sky on my skin. When I am immersed in the water of your mind, I feel as though I have not disappointed you, and I am with you in the night.

Because I have disappointed you, haven't I? You wait and wait, silently watching the lake ripple in blackbirdlight, and you expect that any moment I will appear out of the shadows, cloaked in white light as you always knew I would be, and rest my head on your silver knee.

I prefer my little lives to your uninterrupted living. Last night I flittered down the street that leads west to the Pacific, I reveled in the syntheticness of the streetlights which in the movies always glimmer like tiny moons, pure and perfect. But in the world outside Casablanca, they are orange-yellow, and insects thrum around them in a corona. I could have eaten a few, when they are in the light like that, they act like opium-eaters, swaying on a wind sweet only to them. But I was not (could not be) wholly hummingbird, and mosquitoes taste like bad vodka. You live in a mythical Morocco, you wrap yourself in the sea and white streetlamps. I feel their radiant falseness on my wings.

Sometimes I hate you. Your silence claws my throat, your own private knife under my ribs. You know I will come to you, even when I run and fly with shutterblink wings to escape you. You know, and I hate that smugness, even though you are incapable of such a selfish thing as smugness.

Or is it only that I want to see you without human faults? Perhaps if you are not human it will be easier for me to submit to you in the end. Then I will have had no choice, it will not be from failure of will that I yielded.

They call you a King. The Fisher King. And if you are a King, a monarch with absolute power, not a gentle sort of steward, then it won't be my fault that I couldn't refuse to come, bearing the sun to you in my arms. It is who I am, what I was made for, for pain and the quest. If I deny it I will be driven below the waves by the weight of that denial of purpose. Is this how others will see me when all this struggle is over? Do I need you to be beautiful and sage, the father when he is still worshipped by his cherubic child? Will they need me to be perfect for them? Will they need my purity like I need yours? My inhumanity? Galahad the White, the Pure? Will a river of light be emblazoned on my shield, will that be my symbol?

But I know I am not capable of your silence, I don't want any part of this wide-gaping fate. I want to be a hummingbird, to be thoughtlessly dazzling, an aviary seraphim without the burden of paradise.

I want to be wordless.

Instead I overflow with words, offering them to you like sacrificial bulls, and if the blood runs red enough over the garlands of jacaranda, will you, Jupiter-like, release me from this?

Last night I was a salmon. Salmon go home. They have such a powerful drive towards the little stream of algaelight that threw them forth. It calls and calls them, a siren cry that promises life and death and sex all in one. You understand, of course.

You call like that, too.

Salmon are silver-rose scaled, and their eyes are pupilless and strange. This is what I was, but it was winter, and the spawning season waited on the turn of equinoxes. The sea slid through me like mercury. I swam thoughtless with thick ranks of silver-rose fish, and I was not separate from them, but they were my brothers and sisters and we were one liquid arrow of movement.

Let me tell you a longer story. You know it already, of course. A woman told me this story in a tarot-reader's shop in San Francisco, as she shuffled her cards with hands like a hawthorne tree. And I think that she knew from the lines on my palm that I would meet you when I grew up, because now I know this story is about you.

Once there was a boy, and he was very bright, the most promising child in his village. His hair and his eyes and his skin were all gold, so that he looked like a young lion. His father was very proud of him, and smiled when he saw how strong and clever his son had grown. But he worried that since everything came so easily to this boy, that he would never be the kind of man to lead the clan. So one day when the boy was fourteen years old, lean and strong and skilled with his fishing-spear, his father took him away from the village, to the edge of the forest, and told him: "My son, I am very proud of you. You have become the strongest and cleverest of your brothers. The women in our village look at you with willing eyes. But though you are as tall as I am, you are not yet a man, and I fear that you will always be clever, but never wise. So you will go into the forest for seven days, and you will not take your fishing-spear. You will not take your hunting-knife. You will not take your water-skin. You will go away from the clan and seek the manhood you have not discovered in your father's house."

The boy was afraid, for he had never been away from the village without his father or one of his red-haired brothers. But he knew that he should not show his father his fear, and turned silently to go into the forest. But his father called after him: "Wait, my child. Like all warriors who go into the wild, you must have a geas put upon you, a thing forbidden. Listen carefully, for if you break your geas, you will never lead the clan. Whatever you catch to eat, whether it be rabbit-flesh, or mouse-haunch, or fish from the river, you must roast it over a fire, and not touch it, or eat of it, until it has been scorched black. This is the way of your geas. Come back to me with your belly full of this scorched flesh, and you will be a man, and not merely a clever boy."

So the boy went into the forest, and he found it full of voices, the voices of trees, and streams, and the earth covered in dry leaves. For three days he could not catch a rabbit, or a mouse, or any fish, since he had not taken knife or spear. On the fourth day his belly ate at his spine, and he walked into the cold and racing river to catch fish the way he had seen the old men of his clan do to impress the boys, with their own hands and no spear. He walked into the river until it licked at his waist, and he shivered, peering into the swift water for a glimpse of silver fish.

Three times he saw a fat salmon, and three times he plunged his thin hands into the water and felt the slick animal escape. He began to cry in frustration, even though he knew it was not strong or clever to cry, and his father would be ashamed. Night was coming, and he was certain that he would never have to worry about eating foul-tasting scorched meat, because he would never be a man, because he could not catch anything.

As the shadows grew long over the water, he saw another fish, but this one was thin and small, hardly the length of his hand. Once again he pushed his hands into the icy river, and this time he felt the fish firm in his grip, and he drew it out with a whoop of triumph which the oak trees heard with satisfaction. The boy made a fire to roast his victory, and soon the salmon was blistering away in the red-gold flames. The boy thought how proud his father would be, and how his broad-chested brothers would clap him on the shoulder and tease him over the size of his catch. The smell of the fish was rich and sweet, and it was beginning to blacken.

But the boy was a boy, and very hungry. He looked at the fish, which was not at all scorched yet, and with the eyes of hunger thought it to be quite black enough for him to have a little bite. He put his fingers into the fire to tear off a piece of fish, but the flames burned his thumb and forefinger, and he put them to his mouth to ease the pain.

And then the boy saw why he had been forbidden to do this. For some of the oil of the fish was on him, and when he tasted it he knew in a torrent all the things in the universe, and he understood the voices of the trees, and the river, and the earth covered with dry leaves. He knew the thoughts of his father and his mother and his red-haired brothers. He knew all the things that were and would be, and he knew that he could not now lead the clan.

So the boy went deeper into the forest, further than any of his clan had been. And he was mad for a long time, with these things scorching his mind. But one day the madness passed over him, and he was a pool of standing water with the moon on his back, and he stayed in the forest, finding his fate in the deep-within places.

And your father wept, for you never came again to the village.

Perhaps that salmon was like me, not a salmon, not at home in the fish-skin, a wanderer whose journey to the sea ended in your campfire. I journey to the sea now, that's where all these forms take me, slowly, against my will which is not strong enough, to you who wait in the forest, on the long pier in seagullight, at the end of the gray and foggy streets of Southern California. Because all these places are the same place, and I know with the certainty of an earnest seeker that the locus of the Grailcastle is nowhere/ cannot be sought, unless one eats the salmon and his insides are lit up by it like a silver-rose lantern.

Last night I was a pen, and it was a sigh of movement. Motion, motion, linear and serene. My consciousness focused in the brass tip, fierce and sharp, devouring the parchment in swoops and whorls of black ink, diving like a seabird, in and out of the golden sea of paper, catching fat fish of verbs and participles in my metallic beak. And swept back, the rest of me flowed like a wave of light, into a long, creamy feather tipped in scarlet, I quivered and vibrated with the shivering motion of writing, illumination, conjugation, culmination of thought, spilled in a rush onto the expanse of page.

I danced with myself: tip, quill, ink, in waltzing time, Viennese in the extreme, the vanilla of silken feather as it crossed highways of finely wrought paper, crescendo, denouement, a box-step of being, tip yielding to the forward motion of statement. I yielded, yielded, to the waxy cold of the scholar's hand that deftly drove my length, his skin made phosphorescent by moonlight singing in through the iron-crossed window, shifted into cobalt by the stained glass. We swam in blue, were washed in it, purified as though floating in the hand of a river-nymph. The scholar's lashes fractured the light, casting long, sweeping shadows on the page, blue within black within blue, bars of darkness breaking the expanse of watery light, as though waves blowing forwards and back, whitecaps of my own quick steps through the lines.

It was relief. I did not have to create. The salve of his icy hands on my feather-spine, flowing over me in a blanket of snowy flesh, silencing my voice grown so hoarse with speaking, with screaming over the sea to be heard. He slid me through words, through the alpha and the theta, through the wide forest paths of chi, the violet shadows of omega. He made his letters carefully, small and delicate, dipping me into his little clay pot of ink which swirled around and into me in a rush of glistening darkness, like the Nile through the throat of a crocodile, glutted my mouth with black, with thick, with the absence of light.

It flowed in and out of me with equal ease, in inklight and moonlight, and I could let it because I did not initiate motion, because I was an instrument and not the voice, the ever-sounding voice that could not afford silence for a second, else the world would fail. I could release something nameless and accept the passage of liquid through me, and its pouring of self onto a valley of dry and rasping manuscript. The glyphs formed so beautifully, shimmering slightly before drying. The cuneiform magic of their arch and fall sang through me.

And yet how strange to be vertical, held upright like a heron poised on one leg, maintained in a tall line, the mast of a ship catching wind and expelling storm. How strange to feel inkblood draining out of me, all sensation focused downward as the vellum received my raven-throated exhalations. Horizontal is the direction of dreams, of the otherworld, of sharp-hoofed Time and the eventuality of death. Thus we lie on slabs and mounds of furs, on cots and grasses. We lie and gaze upwards into a sky-mirror, there to see ourselves become fantastic, become legend. Verticality denied me this, I could not cast upward to the sun. I was timeless in the hand of icicle-skin, without present, in motion so slidingly that pause by death or dream was inconceivable.

Is this what you feel, out beyond the breakers, beyond the desert and the stream? You do not move, but are in motion, shaking with it, sylphlike in the water-shadows and reeds? Your tentacles and umbilici snake out over the miles of earth and sand, coils of bodylight snatching at the air to find a remnant of me still gasping in the wind.

I want to shake you, as I have been shaken by you, to see the lake ripple behind your eyes and demand, demand, demand: "Why are you drawing me?"

My voice is pathetic to my own ears, a whimpering, sheeting tears, child's wet-nose: "Why me?"

Why is my figure so circumnavigated in your mind, so realized and defined, drawn as surely as a an angel out of Raphael, shaded and colored by your palette alone? Why am I bound to you?

It isn't worth anything, protestation. In these metamorphoses how rarely do I have pockets for a few dismal coins, but no lump of copper or silver would make a single cry of negation a thing of substance or meaning. I know it, I know it, I know why this road was built, why it goes forward and not back, what lies at its end.

I am peeled like a raw almond, bright green, down to the pure whiteness of fruit, so that you can take my skinless and shivering form into yourself and make me like you. Purity flows from your hand like a curling vine, and you will have me white or not at all. Purification, purification, scouring the sands of rivers dark and hushed from my arms, pulling the mosaic teeth of ritual crocodiles from my feet streaked with the black mud of the Delta. My body is restful and leaping and rippling like the lake that bore the sword, but it cannot yet birth such a thing.

I hate what you want to make me. You encourage my limbs, seduce them into rigidity, into dissolution, into the silver aurora of a blade, beguile the line of my lips into the twisted gold of a hilt. Or is it the stem of a Cup into which you would have my body form itself? My mouth open to the heavy sky in its silent howl to mold the agate and ivory bowl of the chalice? Are the very fingernails of my hands to comprise the milky jewels of its rim?

Yes, I am angry. I have floated like a barge of lashed birchwood on the fantasy of my Will, and you steal it from me. Every time you smile beneath the curtain of your briar-beard, every time your face goes benevolent and sorrowful my hatred rumbles like a sheet of tin. If I shrink into the corner of a cinnamon-scented cafe, if I bury my face in a chipped green cup so that the steam will encircle and hide me from you, you appear before me to ask in infinite gentleness if I want another.

If I recede behind a bookcase in the Library, examining the bindings, you materialize to tell me that silence is mandatory in such places. I cannot escape you and I will never forgive you that. Only in the nights, as I flee into shapes and lines not my own do I find respite from your compulsion and sympathy. You see in me some core of purity beneath all that which does not exist. You will allow me no humanity.

Last night I was a a glass of beer. I was foamy and golden, and slender and bitter-earthy. I think I was a microbrew of some kind. I sat on a coaster with a picture of a mallard flying low over a marsh on it. The marsh was wet with spilled bourbon. I sat for a while the woman who bought me talked to her suitor, laughing synthetically and stroking her swan-cheek with grape-colored fingernails.

I wondered if I could taste myself while she regaled him with tales of her corporate dragon-slaying. If I could taste my own liquidlight, then I would know myself, whether the foreigners I feel was by the brewer's design. But while I mused on the taste of myself, the woman stopped trying to be seduced and sipped me in silence. I felt the warmth of her throat, the slickness. I sighed into the heat of her body, letting desire pass over me in sunlight and moonlight and grasslight and fishlight, and I did not try to hold it with both hands. Soon I had passed of necessity from the beerself to the glasself, and I rested in my own emptiness, foam clinging to my cupbody. I was transparent, the clarity of my bones was sweet, and I reflected a myriad of eyes, like a crystalline Argus. And for a moment, in this glass in an antediluvian bar, in the hands of a sad and lovely woman whose belly cried inside her I was the grail, open and clear. For a moment which slid away as quickly as a strand of beerfoam, I was no longer my own ever-striving self, but a chalice of blown glass, yawning to encompass the sky and the sea, floating in dolphinlight, I was not a questing knight with tobacco-stained hands, I was you, the king in the forest, and I wept into my own lake, watching the ripples expand into fractal infinity.

And then I was not a glass, or beer, or a lily, or a fish, and the grailight was gone. I was alone in the dark, and even the alcoholic fishermen who dread their children had dragged themselves home. I crumpled in the shade of a brick building, my belly betrayed my grief and I vomited the Pacific into the street, my throat flaming-I was the Chinese boy who drank the sea, and I gave it back and back until no more would come and still my body convulsed in anguish for the moment I could not keep. In fear for my sanity, in fear that I was a hallucinatory Fool with the black dog at my back, who dances in beerlight alone on the cliff edge to the tune of a man who may not/I want not to exist.

And I was ashamed of this so-human act.

Last night I was my father. I looked at my mother from above her body, and I saw, not her face, but the face of another woman, with hair like the spaces between stairs. I did not understand, and when her mouth shifted, red to pink, it became my mother's mouth, the mouth I knew, and in my father's skin I cowered, I crawled away from the slick of her belly, and the moon rolled out of my mouth.

Last night I was my father, and I went into the desert. I yearned for the cup, the cup, always the cup, the thing you offer me so easily, that he could never hope to touch. His hands were hung with women-my hands are empty.

You cannot bear any hands which remember other grails. They must be pure, they must have been waiting for you since they first turned brown in the sun. My father died in the desert like a man who stuffed his mouth with peyote, and when he returned, his eyes were full of dead lakes. He patted my head and draped himself over a cross until the chapel stank of his sour sweat and shit. He never spoke to me, not a scrap of scripture or drunken curse for my mother-in both his hands he gave me silence like a black ball of opium.

But last night I squatted in his skin as though it were a sacred hut, I breathed the sage-smoke rolling off of his bones, I drew patterns in the sand which had settled on the roof of his stomach. I put my toes into the water that filled him, and writhed with him under the rain-bringing moon. I was sick with the thickness of him, I asked for nothing but escape, I longed for my salmon-skin-yet I had swum to the stream of my birth, as a salmon must, and the water choked me. I spluttered and flailed in the wake of it, trying to touch the rim of my mother, somewhere in his desert geography-but she was not there. I was not there. We did not exist for him; we were not the saguaro and the yucca. This is what I understood in his marrow-I was encased in a vial of water, and he wanted only sand.

And now I seek the waters of you, because no black-eyed queen ever looked at me with fire cutting her fingers.

In the cell of him, floating over my mother and the painted desert, I tasted the apple-bile of his sorrow, and forgave that cairn of murdered words. Perhaps I would not have survived that gaze.

He should have known better than to seek you in the wild-a cup is a thing of the city, it is civilized, it sits at a hundred thousand tables and travels from wood to mouth. A cup is only needed when joined hands at the river have failed, when an adobe hut is raised up, and a stone oven shaped into the wall, and dried flowers thrown into a pot. He sought the Lady, I seek the King.

Perhaps there is no difference, perhaps the King wears a gown of river-white, and the Lady binds her breasts under an ermine robe.

Last night I was Lancelot, and I fathered myself on a woman I hated, and I begged forgiveness from a lake of night.

So this is the end.

I walked with heavy feet to the end of the pier last night, and looked into the sea which is the rim of the western world, and wondered when I accepted that this was inescapable. I still hate that you did not think me strong or clever enough to turn from this road. (And of course I was not.) But there on the pier was a little fisherman's hut, white paint curled back by sea wind, and it glowed softly in porcelainlight.

I stood outside for a long time, and the door seemed to grow to enormity, to much for me to dare. I felt and still feel that this is all too big for me, that I am a salamander before the throne of the King of Spears. The threshold mocked me, and whispered that I was a very clever child, the strongest and cleverest of my brothers, but I would never, never be wise, there is no forest deep enough to purify me, my madness will last and last. So in the end it was pride that drove me through the door, that I would show myself to be pure enough, just barely, to finally see you.

And there you were, not so powerful-looking, an aging man, but not infirm, the gold of your hair not quite conquered by snow. You sat in a deep leather chair, your left hand held an ancient fishing-spear, your right held a cup of living glass. Yet in the lines of your body there was a darker shape, a liquid self moving behind the lines of your skin, holding black-tipped breasts out to me with both hands, like a sacrifice.

You looked at me with laughing eyes, and I saw that sleek shape moving behind them. I wondered then if I saw you with a beard because I could only give myself over to a father, to a King, and the rest was beyond my touch-pure enough for you, but not for her. I suppose it doesn't matter, in the end-if you are doubled, if you are twinned, I will know in a moment, when the chair is mine, and I vanish into the glass.

You could not speak, that was not the ritual, it was mine to ask the question you have desired. But you laughed because you understood, of course. You know the nature of quests. You know that this has been the question, all these words to you on the road to this temple/hut. You know that my fighting has burned this body hollow, and made it ready for this. You know that the end of the quest is silence, only the quest is the sound and dancing and galloping toward.

And so I reached out, able to do nothing else but dare this thing, and touched the rim of the cup/lake.

And the burning filled my vision.

And the sea swallowed my voice.

XVI THE TOWER.

Mordred For King Arthur lay by King Lot's wife, the which was Arthur's sister, and gat on her Mordred.

-Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one's deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions in the field: I. Moral Law Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.

The morning before the war begins, there is not much to do but sit on a sand-choked embankment and tell yourself lies about how you got here.

I am a good liar. I have always shown a talent for it. When other children were discovering that they could paint or sing as though their little throats were coated in gold, I reached within my own skin and drew out a body of falsehood, a chalice-eyed homunculus with beautiful fingers, clasped together in saintly gesture. This other boy was more pleasing than I, he stood straighter and rode with thighs more steady. When he spoke, glittering ladies patted his scarlet cheek and called him clever; when I spoke, they yawned and asked if perhaps the room had not become uncomfortably cool. It was not long before I had given myself over entirely to him, his baroque, mincing speeches, his fantastic tales of his own marvels, his great strategies-oh, the strategies, the ambitions! Laid out like a litter of manticore at his bedside, how they grew and grew, and how their tails bulged with venom. The lies lay over my tongue like a melt of stained glass, and I was praised, I was praised for them.

I came to the desert and lied a war into the golden air. The other boy rode very high on a brown horse and hoisted a banner into the sun-hung sky. He made it look beautiful; he made it look like a war-everything glittered as it ought, everything spangled and shone the way it will before blood and lymph come slithering out onto the thirsty dust. I walked the walls-ah, those light-swallowing walls!-I walked the ditches and the drainage pits, I watched the city chuff out its jeweled effluvia and starve for more than it could eat. I came to the fat city of skinny angels and tasted the salt of its sweat, and my tongue was as crystalline with lies as ever it was. The city shivered in delight; lies are her peculiar fetish.

Besides, men would hardly know how to fight a war if it did not look like a war, if the lies did not line up in formation, if lies did not sit about with rifles and knives leaning against trees, chewing black bread, cracking jokes and knuckles and hiding the shaking of their hands. If there were no lies floating through the morning fog-that strangling, choleric fog, even in the desert, even so, when the sea is not so far off, when behind the bolt of mountains sailboats in turquoise marinas dip their prows like women's needles through the surf, that filthy, shit-sludge fog, nicotine-wet, sops up all imaginable sound-if lies did not prick through it they would not even know to blow their trumpets twice, three times. Lies stick to everything, even the sun, forcing that warm, balding brow below the horizon like the victim of a drowning.

My little fire is a recalcitrant smear of red in the brown and the gray, the unfathomable gray, and the scrub crackles on the coals, manzanita and pine, sending up a fragrant, clutching smoke which is, in the end, indistinguishable from the fog.

The other boy, with his crow-tongue a-grin, says that we are here, in the mountains where the river Cam flashes green and gold and the aqueducts glare straight and narrow through the land like cutting knives, because our father is wicked, and it is the duty of all those who carry light in their bellies to thrust something very sharp into the wicked. He says that it is the natural way, for the wild and toothed to tear apart the house of order before it freezes the world into statuary, before it spasms in a glut of compulsion, and all men walk gray and dull, in lockstep, abased before the altar of chivalry. He says our father is a goat dressed up in a tin tuxedo, and the sun ought shine on a finer beast than that, a jungle-beast, a desert-beast, a thing with red teeth and hindquarters rampant. We are here, he says, because we are the apostles of a savage virtue, and we must teach it to the old debauch.

That is what he says.

I crouch here with the small of my back against the stone wall, the concrete stinking and steaming, peering into the ripples of gold, the otherworld-veils hanging from the sky. I am afraid to walk in the fog-it gnaws at my vision, and I cannot see. I am afraid to go down to the sea, into the other city, which shows against the daub and wattle of Camelot like a metallic negative: many-knived and spiraling.

It is not long before we are all-soldiers, cooks, squires, smiths-weeping like pieta in the brume, salting the earth with secret tears, pissing ourselves fearful. It comes blooming up from the city and fills our gullets like old beer, brown and sickening. The sere of it, the cough and lag and blear of it, blinds and burns, bubbling over our knuckles like bile from some wasting creature.

The roof-tiles of the city are musky and mired in the brown, as we are musky and mired on the desert rims of those ghost-streets, as the streets are musky and mired in their wheeling and spoking, out from some center I cannot guess at. The mute, silent squalor pricks at my eyes, and the horizon wavers like a lie, and there is no father in this, the throat-saw and the sour-eyed bleed. There is no order or pride, no frieze of dead lords marching, nothing but spittle and the scrub, the unending sun-I can see nothing, nothing at all.

Hinc illae lacrimae, hinc illae lacrimae.

There has never been any father, only a burning plain skirted in stone, and a boy vomiting his breakfast into the weeds.

I do not know why I am here at all.

II. Heaven Heaven signifies night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons.

My mother has no name. Or she has dozens-but when you have so many, like jewel-boxes lined up around a great, high bed, it is just as well to say you have none. Her nameless womb crushed my body into something like a boy's shape, something like limbs and skull and digits, something like primogeniture, something like alive. Did she have dark hair? Did she keep her milk? Did she watch the umbilicus that once connected us shrivel and blacken like a spent candlewick? Each of these things she kept in a box by her bed, boxes of silver and chalcedony and iron slugs. Each of these she kept locked away from me like a name, and I never knew them scattered clear on my hands like drops of water.

But isn't that always the way? How we rotten, errant sons do love to drape our worm-eaten souls around our mother's shoulders. My mother didn't love me: the chanson of the tyrant.

My mother loved me. I believe it; that must make it so. Out of all those names I pull a woman-aggregate: she had dark hair. She played with my toes. When I took my first step, she was there to tell me I had pleased her. When I crawled under light-diffuse linens next to her, and her black hair branched all around like an old tree, there was always milk, secret and sweet, and her voice was a consonant-less hum, like bees or gray wings.

I do not remember these things, but I would like to. The other boy remembers them-he says that we looked so like her that it was whispered we had no father at all. But then, lies involving parentage are the most common of all, and he mastered that species early on. I watched them with each other: dark mother sopping at the skirts with lakewater and my double, my twin, whose tongue was all bound up in deceitful sapphires. There was always milk for him, yes, but I was always thirsty.

What was the first lie?

Do you love your mother?

Yes.

No, no, that came later, later, when there was no more milk for either of us, only empty, hardened breasts, and linens rough and unbeaten, and hair like snakes snapping. The first lie, which seeded me with my brother as though I were a woman, and she a father: Isn't he lovely? I am his aunt.

And the other boy formed inside me, like water freezing to the shape of its bottle. This other boy who was her nephew, who was charming, precocious, and doesn't he look marvelous in his uniform, marching along just like a little soldier! But I was her son, inside the golden clockwork boy, pawing at her under the bedclothes, with only her sorrow-bent stare to feed me: they cannot know. If they knew they would take you from me.

But still, I was born a lie, I was made a secret, and that sort of thing can't help but leave a mark, like a slap. How could I be anything other than this, hunkered down in the dunes with the scorpions lashing their tails at the moon? A man told his sister he loved her-what of that? Tawdry tragedy, except that a child was all hung with shadows, a child that no one could ever know about, lest it get its fool head knocked out on some unfortunate granite stairs.

I am no one.

I was not supposed to be.

I have no name, either. No one would give me one, for to name a thing means it is real, it exists, it displaces air.