Please, father, look at how I move the air around me. I am right here. Look at me.

III. Earth Earth comprises distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passes; the chances of life and death.

This is La Cienega. This is Camlann. There is a river; there is a sea; there is sand and the wend of snakes rattling through the throat-scoured soil. There is stone and a road and light like albumen floating yellow and white. I walk down to the city because I have to, because the light is also a lie, but it lies only about itself, and is holy. I have always been told that light is holy. Even I cannot quite imagine a world where the dark is sacrosanct-I am a mushroom fulminating in shit and decay, but still I acknowledge the sun, though it too lies. It lies and says it is the center of everything, the source of all possible light.

I go into the city because my mother lives there still, and my father will smell her like a deer, and go after her, hoping to find her gracefully bent in the snow, her nose snuffling out acorns under the ice. I know she would never do such a thing; I look for her as she is. This is her place, all full of glamors and illusions and images spinning.

A son told his mother he loved her. What of that? I have heard of a man in Thebes who fucked his mother-he made four children in her, two kings, two beauties, and one of those beauties was an anti-establishment revolution in a twelve-year-old's body. Certainly this bested the previous score of one shriveled, club-footed boy, marked on that tired womb with a Greek fingernail. I confess I had hoped, too, to best my father, to people the vineyards and humble little rivers with laughing, dark-eyed revolutions. But somewhere in the city's dark crease she found a lesson learned: no more children hung with shadow, no more lies hung upside down from a weeping woman, umbilicus black and blaming on their little throats.

No more nephews, she said to an apothecary with eyes like spinning wheels, whose counter was greasy with aqua vitae and typical tonics-what otherworld physic does not vend hemlock, belladonna, mandrake? The wheels clicked round-thirty times left, twenty times right, ten times left again, and out of a dry drawer popped her panacea, and though her legs were open to me her body was shut, and she put her hand on my face when I came to her and whispered that a ruin called to a ruin, and what were we both but stones already crumbling, and what did it matter after all, what was any of it but solace, and solace she had, solace thick as clouds.

The other boy breathed heavy and gold. The other boy told her to lie to him.

I love you, she said.

We never spoke of my father when I was young. The universal pronoun. The only possible him. He hung in our house like Cicero's head, but we never looked, we never spoke of it, how its blood dripped on the tablecloth, spattering the spoons. Instead of a father I had two crows, pets caught out on the moor by young girls with leather cages and horsewhips at their hips. I did not call them Thought and Memory. I called them Gaheris and Agravaine for the brothers who were not brothers, and therefore would not look at me, would not speak to me, but chased the girls with the leather cages and caught them round the throat like thrushes. I called my birds brothers and they cawed in my ears, perched on my bed while I slept, shook their feathers and clacked talons against wood when my mother lay beside me.

Gaheris and Agravaine pick through the trash which blows along the central thoroughfare of Camlann, which is Los Angeles, which is not a road but a river, which is not a river but a road-Gaheris picks up the refrain, disappearing down alleys glutted with old paper, crying: a river is a road, a river is a road-gray and flat, ripple-less, proceeding on and empty, and if she is there, if my mother is there and my father, I can catch no sight of them from here, where lights flicker behind monoliths-light of the moon? Of stars? Of sickness and electric haze? Agravaine tosses a beetle into the air and severs it with a snap of his black beak.

The sun is coming up, banging over the black hills like an old, dirty shop-sign.

IV. The Commander The Commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerely, benevolence, courage and strictness.

There is a crown lying on an iron grating. It is studded with opals and cat's eyes. A crown always watches you, you know. Watches for the smallest weakness, the smallest excuse to roll off, grinding over the ground to another bone-battered skull. It sees me, but it won't move towards me, not the smallest inch.

The other boy would grab for it. Gaheris and Agravaine, my crows, my true brothers, snap at the blinking jewels. I hunch under a little bridge and stare at the circle of metal. The troll under the bridge-when have I been anything else? I am crypt-hidden; I am secreted, and the secreted thing wants nothing more than to come into the light-no, to be beckoned into it, to be called, to be invited. The other boy put on a coat of red and black; the other boy stood at attention and drilled the mission into me.

We are here because the old man has bound himself up in virtue, and would bind the rest of us so, would tell us how to be, how to think, would tell us what was right, what creature virtue, and no inch of space would be left for us to see behind him, beyond him, to see anything but him. He would take up our vision like a sun, a lying sun who screeches that he is the source of all possible light, and would burn our eyes under we saw nothing but holes in the sky, purple and green. Of course, those he loves, those he cannot live without will be pardoned, with a kneel and a dry kiss, for any breach.

Except us. We are unforgivable. His whoring wife has grace and we have a broken staircase and an old beehive, exile that tastes like desert weeds.

The old man worships order, and those who worship order cannot abide anything which is not-order. We are not-order. We are a cut in the immaculate flesh. We are not allowed to be; he will not let us be. He is not Hammurabi, not Moses-what right has he to hand us laws in stone?

I put my head on my knees. I want to be called into the light. I am here to be asked into the gold, to be beckoned, I am here to stand on the stone and wait for my father to tell me it was all a mistake-had he only known, had he only known.

A river is a road, caws Gaheris, down a gutter, past a courtyard which still seems to hold the refuse of pilgrims, old relics sucked dry of divinity, shoes more hole than leather, crosses dented and softened at their joint by rust and rain, swords and sackcloth and old paper, blowing in whip-wound dervishes, tentpoles and helmets and bibles empty of pages. They were here, in Camlann, on La Cienega, in Holy-Land. I am here-I should not have come down into the city. Cities connect to each other, some dark, glittering network, they know each others' secrets, they pass each other's fluids down sluices of concrete and thatch and creaking, swinging iron.

Once, I saw my mother as he must have seen her. She was down at the riverside, fishing with her hands. We lived alone by then, the other sons gone, the young girls she collected like butterflies alighting on her lips grown and wandering, wild as she. We were alone, she and I and that old crumbling manor with its stairs breaking off into nothing, an arm dashed at the wrist. We ate honey from her bees and wore cloth spun from her spiders and chewed the bones of her frogs and my mother was always the queen of small and creeping things-which is why she drew me from the deck for a son, I suppose.

I saw her waist-sunk in the river, her long black hair floating around her like water-snakes, her strong brown face searching the sun-flattened ripples-and now and again she would pull a squirming, gasping fish up to look it in the eye before smashing its bony head against a flat stone. She always did that, looked her fish, and her bees and her spiders and her frogs, in the eye before spilling their brains out on a stone. The light was so bright on her hair that it shone blue, and I saw, for a moment, how a brother could not care, could see nothing but the blue in her, nothing but that dancing cyan, and move staircases and rivers and worlds to touch it with one finger of his hand.

We crouched by the stump of a rotten elm, the other boy and I, unified for once in our admiration for the long lines of blue that shot back from her clear brow. We felt like our father, primeval and golden and never secret, as though we could stride towards her just then, just then, and she would welcome us as she had welcomed him. We felt as though she was constant, her blue was constant, and we had a right to the blue, inherited, just like this blasted land, from that tattered old lion we would spend every day after chasing.

That was the first night we spent in her.

In the mere, in the mire and the rubble and the slow blinking light of a street in the other-city, the fairy city I touch only now, after they have both passed before me into it, along the slow, creeping aqueducts which steal water from richer lands, I see-yes?-a flash of blue dancing forward, a long line like fishing-silk, and I will not, I will not call her name, not any of them, as I run after it, as my feet catch on old bottles and broken windows, as my breath comes hoarse with the poisoned air. I will not. The other boy makes me a fool.

He calls joyously into the shadows.

Morgan. Morgause. Morgana. Mother.

V. Method and Discipline By method and discipline are to be understood the marshaling of the army in its proper subdivisions, the graduations of rank among the officers, the maintenance of roads by which supplies may reach the army, and the control of military expenditure.

A father hangs in the dark like a noose, his feet already reliquaried, his brainpan already opened to silver needles, dissection-angelic, searching for the kernel of light that must make a king a king.

But he is not dead yet and all I can see is the shape of him against the night. The smell of the desert is coming over the hills: not sweet sage and agave, but dead mice, old bones, and the droppings of buzzards. The shape of his back. Of his lie. But I am the shape of his lie and I cannot be expected to do anything in this place but stand my ground and tell him that order is inherently oppressive, as though that means anything at all when our eyes are the same shade of green, and our forefingers crook identically to the left.

The other boy's forefinger is straight as an accusation.

There are men back there, beyond the hills, who are playing ridiculous games with rattlesnakes, baiting the poor green creatures, laughing when they snap. They came because I told them to, and I am very beautiful when I command, and they didn't want to pay a pair of oxen to the old king when a little sweat-work might save the cow and make the new king look kindly on them.

I will not be king. I know that. Secrets aren't kings. Genealogies are meant to be worn on one's chest, not held under the tongue like a communion wafer. I wait for it to melt and it stays hard and sharp against my mouth. The other boy still thinks there is a destiny here. I have heard his wife never had a child; I would have given her one, if I had survived this place. If she had had blue in her hair. And that boy would have been king and no one's nephew-but you cannot be king when you cannot, even for a moment, stand in the light. I knew it when I came here, I knew it when I walked off of the desert like sea-fog pooling in a valley, I knew it when I followed my mother to him like a hyena following the water to a wounded gazelle. The crown wouldn't look at me. He wouldn't look at me.

She is standing in the Pacific, waist-sunk. The sun is on her hair. Her dress billows like a sail. She is the ship of dreams.

Did you grow up strong?

Yes, the other boy lies.

I'm glad.

She reaches into the salt foam and pulls me in beside her, her cold, wet hand on the nape of my neck. She looks me in the eye.

It's surprising how much a body weighs. I can't remember which corpse I dragged along the beach, though it seemed like my own black insides pouring out on the sand, over the little holes the sand-mites make with their leaping. It seemed like his gut opening clam-thick. We are both so black inside, and maybe he was a secret, too. Secrets beget.

The other boy leaps and slaps his thigh in triumph, struts like a yellow-headed parrot, teaches lessons so that our father will know how wise we have become in his absence.

When seeking to determine the military conditions, let them be made the basis of a comparison, in this way: Which of the two sovereigns is imbued with the Moral Law?

This is what happens: the son replaces the father. It's the heart of every story. But I am not in a story. I never existed, he was my uncle, wasn't he? Silly boy, thinking you had a father, that you started in someone's body. I stuck in my father as he stuck in my mother and there was so much black, so much red, and his eyes were so tired. I walked from his ruin, ruin from ruin, and the flags went up in the distance, the flags, and the trumpets' long, clear calls.

Which of the two generals has most ability?

This is what happens: the king is sacrificed; the new king ascends. I didn't want to hang him on the oak tree, I didn't want my crows to peck at his intestines. I didn't want to watch him remember that he had a son once before the moon ate his skull in one swallow. The other boy was so sure, so sure he was right, that this one thing was no lie: the old king was rotten, corrupt, cuckolded, senile. It was our duty. This is how histories of the kings of frozen islands are written. I stepped up, behind his body, and there was only the same oak tree, wide as the world, and waiting.

With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth?

This is what happens: a boy sees his father in the dark, and calls out to him. The father turns, not, in the end, particularly surprised. He sees blue in his son's hair, and almost manages a smile. The other boy leaps first, and he can taste the metal of the cat's-eye crown, and the family cuts into itself like meat. They lay together on the beach, and there are sandpipers all around, and the sun is over the horizon, whitened to a tumor by fog.

It was an accident. I meant only to show him I was strong. He was always too old for this; his bones like an string-necked chicken's. A lung shot through with blue like a woman's hair spat blood into his mouth. I cradled his head as if he were my son. When he died, the grief was like a child in me, though my stomach lay open and bleeding, a gift of his antler-hilted knife. I gave birth and the strangled child was death, our death, and I whispered songs to him while the gulls snapped mussels from the gray-spackled rocks.

I never touched her, you know. Did you really believe all that Oedipal nonsense? The other boy told you that-he is convincing, an orator wrapped in white. He was always the best of us. I was no Sphinx-solver, I could not fill her up with kings. I slept against her; she was so cool and soft, as if her strands of blue retreated in the night and ran all through her body. I slept against her as a son will. And once, oh, once, my breath so thick in my throat, like throttling wool, I cupped her breast in my hand and she turned that great black stare on me-father, you know that stare-it rippled with such pity. She took my chin in her hand. She looked me in the eye.

You look like your father.

Who is my father?

The man you look like.

I came to the city. I looked into a mirror of flesh and it broke, a long silver crack.

This is what happened: I killed my father. He got his knife into me when I leapt-stupid, not to keep my guard up.

The streets shine with flotsam.

XXI THE WORLD.

Bedivere Then Sir Bedivere departed, and went to the sword, and lightly took it up, and went to the water side; and there he bound the girdle about the hilts, and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might; and there came an arm and an hand above the water and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.

So Sir Bedivere came again to the king, and told him what he saw.

-Sir Thomas Malory Le Morte d'Arthur Therefore, said Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, take thou Excalibur, my good sword, and go with it to the waterside, and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in that water, and come again and tell me what thou there seest.

It's amazing how heavy a sword really is. You never think about it-spend your life heaving them into wood and silk and leather, into earth and mire and stone, into bone and meat. It becomes part of you-you do not have a hand of flesh, but an arm which ends in metal, a long, curving finger which accuses, always accuses. You stop thinking about how thick and still it sits in your fist, the heft of it, the swing and the slog of it. It's a hammer, and a club, it's your own bone and gristle, and if the light is beautiful on the blade, if it is even like water, like a lake-edge, that does not mean that it was built for less than cutting, less than bludgeoning, less than pulling flesh from flesh.

You told me to come here, and the sea is on the shore like a tablecloth, more blue than I have seen together in all my days. I am tired, tired in my perfect sinews-recall how they used to call me that, how the women used to cheer for Bedevere, the Knight of the Perfect Sinews, and I never knew if it was mockery or not, if they snickered at my stump-wrist while praising the one hand left to me. But we were young, we were so young, and names of that sort seemed so important.

I am tired-there is no water here which is not full of salt, no wind that is not a hot clutch at the throat, a flaming sash, a flaming favor. I cannot see what color I might have been before the blood, before your son's blood-how heavy was he, too, when I pulled him from you like a skin from an apple!-my blood, your own clotted last. The books always say that a dying man's face is gray-I always thought that a poet's silk-calved dream of what death might be, but your face, your face with its evening stubble stippling the skin like grass, it is gray after all, gray as the moon, and I am still so warm and red.

It is not a one-handed sword, your old blade, and I had to drag it from your body to the sea, two limping footsteps and a deep, worrying furrow in the sand. Bees buzz around my gore-stuck hair and lizards snap at fleas in my shoes. Kelp collects at the sword-tip; wet sand pulls and sucks at it, as though the earth would have it before the brine. My good arm aches as though I spent the day heaving a silver axe into cedar-you used to tease me when I filled my own wood-grate, told me you had men to do that for us.

Of course you do, Arthur, I said, you have me.

There are islands out there, beyond the sunline, but I cannot see them except as lashes of whipped light against a too-bright horizon. Dawn slants down like a glass window dropped into the whitecaps, and the whole world is waterside, how am I to know where to throw it? How am I to know where it ought to fall? How can I choose the place, who was never one of you, one of the boys who heads beamed with so much light that to look in on your suppers was to look into a painting, choked with coronae. I never wore anything on my head but my hair, and you were all too beautiful for me to feel like much more than an altarboy at some terrible, radiant Mass. I was thick at the ankle, at the waist, at the shoulder, no part of me was slender or elegant. They called me perfect and I winced at the lie, at the joke, the hulking man who could hardly cut his own meat for the mottled stump at his wrist where his hand used to be.

But I know you did not mean to be cruel. Such a thing was not in you.

Of all the places I went at your side, I never imagined this would be the last, this long strand, like a thick rope laid below the dark city, the strange half-place where the Cam whorled and looped into the not-Cam, into a road I could hardly fathom as a road-yet who could think that the dead air could empty itself in a sea so clear, so bright, that I cannot look at it, cannot look out on that perfect shore, that perfect sea.

The breeze smells of clean grass-the dunes prickle with it, curving back over the headlands. The blue batters at my skull, and out of the surf comes the strange, foreign cry of dolphins, their chirping litany, their barking lament. Their blue heads stud the water like sapphires set in steel-like the stones on the hilt of this cleaver, this hack-saw you loved so well.

I know a secret: it is your own arm I carry to the waterside, severed from you-you are like me, now, at the end, limb-hewn-embarrassed by its own jewelry, but no less your own, hung at your wrist all those years as though by joint and sinew. I have dragged it through the barnacled sand, this arm, this pommel, this elbow, this cross-guard, this shoulder with its sparse golden hair. I know it for your arm and no blade, and I cannot fling it away as though it were a scrap of palimpsest blowing through the streets of that city by the sea.

I cannot cast off this thing which has been your body, cast it into the water like a fishing line. I cannot do it. I will keep it for myself, and fold it beneath my floorboards, wrapped in rags and furs and covered in pine which does not quite match the surrounding ash, so that in the smallest of all night-hours, I may pull up the planks like exhuming a grave, prying up the coffin-splinters, so that I may uncover it like an old bone, and look into it as a mirror, lay beside it as beside dust, and know my friend is near.

I will not do it.

What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but waves and winds. That is untruly said of thee, said the king, therefore go thou lightly again, and do my commandment; as thou art to me as life and dear, spare not, but throw it in.

The sun is so high and hot that it will allow nothing green beneath it-everything here is hard and gold, hard and blue, hard and white. The hilt is warm in my hand; the blade is incandescent, star-shot. I am almost used to it, stranger to my palm before you turned gray and coagulate.

Lumps of city scatter off to the west, houses like red ant-cairns, roof-tiles shining back the endless light, light that must have weight, weight like shoulder-plates, like liquid, pooling silver. The sand has dried in the noon so that the furrow I leave this time is neat and sighing. Its sides trickle in behind me.

There has been a beach like this before, though never a sea like this, never a sun like this. But there was a strand-oh, does he remember it, in the long line of things he has killed which must string together in his breast like old ornaments? St. Michael, St. Michael, the castle and the tide, and the fires burning like infidels stuck on the ramparts. We went into that place, and I never came out, that place so like this one, as though all places which are not Camelot must run together into one country, long and strange and serrated, along the coast of another sea.

Arthur did not want to go. I understood immediately, because I did not want to go either. I saw in the ogre-keeper of that place my own hulking, muscle-bound form, horrible in its meat-pounding arms, its swollen legs. I did not want to go down across the green fields when the strawberries had just come through, still small and hard and pale on the stalk, I did not want to go trampling over their little beads in order to kill something so like myself. I have always pitied ungainly things, things born too big for the world. I never forgot my own inelegance, my own boar-belly.

There were a line of girls at the gate in those days, crying dirt-tears, eyes spinning in their heads like weathervanes. They held their fists between their legs and the blood had dried to black there. Mouths hung open, missing teeth, and they just stood still, all in a row, so quiet, like nuns, their breasts beaten flat. Arthur did not want to look at them: he knew their faces. He remembered that his mother looked like that every time his father came home from campaign, sweat-stung and hard, that it had never gotten better or easier for her, not the littlest bit, and he knew from the time he was hay-haired and jam-stained that she probably looked like that the morning after he was made.

Every morning there was another woman in the line, beads on an abacus, and someone, somewhere, tallying, tallying. Finally I went out to them, and found the first in that blood-wan sisterhood.

Who did this to you, Lady? You must know that this is the house of justice-we manufacture it here, like wooden toys.

Her eyes rolled back and I could see the tiny scarlet veins in the white, like the strokes of a brush.

The Beast of St. Michael pushed us open until we could not but crack. I cannot feel my spine, but I can feel him, still, inside me.

Still, he did not want to know. He did not want to remember that he could not sit on his mother's lap for days after his father had left again, door a-slam and finally soft. He did not want to think that his own blood was full of numb spines and cracked hips. But I could not watch them add to their number, day by day, like a faucet dripping.

She is dead, and beyond him now.

He, too, is dead, sighed Arthur, and gone after her. What if still he breaks her beneath him on a rack of clouds?

I pulled on his shirt and strapped this very sword to his waist, though his limbs were frozen and heavy. I dressed him like a baby. He could not raise his head to them as we rode out, though they beat their bellies until the blood began to run red and wet again, and we were heralded in crimson all the way to the sea.

The castle stood on a strand like this one, though the sea was gray, not blue, and the sun was a white disc, not flaming as if to purify a sinning sphere. Far out into the slate waves it frowned, piled on itself like a fallen cake, sullen, gouged windows and doors bolted like torsos. Here and there, it was burning, tall, thin flames hissing as they met the damp sky, steaming in rain that slanted into the brine-pitted walls, and surely to him it must have looked like home, must have looked like his mother's bed, must have looked like his father's grinning face.

Of course, he would not remember the girl. Only I saw her, only I touched her. If I were a better man I would confess my sins to my king before he dies, but I cannot unstring my lips after all this time, and see his pupils widen, then shrink. I was once a good man. I was once his man.

We slayed a giant together, my friend and I, a giant with no beanstalk or harp of gold, only a wretched castle hollowed out for him by whale-speckled tides, only rough, mucus-yellow eyes and an expression like a lamp that once shone and has long gone out. The usual business of slaying occurred-we have done this before. There were bellows like shades blowing open in a storm, and once the skin of a thing is broken, I am always reminded of heifers calving on my own father's land-my father, who never knew, as I do, how much blood you could let out of a woman and yet keep her living-arms deep in hot, swampy flesh, pulling at bone, at kicking hoof. We reached into him as into a breach-birth and pulled at his kicking spleen, pulled at his huge heart until the chambers tore one from the other in our hands.

The blood coated us, made of us red knights. We laughed, pulled greasy strips of giant-flesh from each others' hair like apes picking lice, and set out searching for harps or geese or whatever a giant holds dear enough to build a castle to keep. My eyes were still blurred with exertion and triumph, gore still thickening and drying on each of my perfect sinews-my whole skin thrilled and pricked like a plucked guitar, as it will when you have killed a thing much bigger than yourself, and much stronger. Even my eyelashes seemed to vibrate, to sing some dark and untaught tune.

It was in this state that I found her. If I had been un-frenzied, if the giant's blood in my mouth had not been so like boiling wine- She was not young. Her skin was deeply lined and sunburned; her hair was matted and gray and hung like long iron bars all around her, hung in her face so that her dark eyes peered through them. She was naked, and her arms clasped above her head with chains of bone bolted in bronze, her ankles nailed through, like a crucifixion, the skin long healed and grown around the nail-shaft. She sat on a low wall, perched as well as she could with her arms pinioned so-and all through the grass-stuck mud wall march a line of small graves.

She shrieked when she saw me, so like the giant, and painted in his corpse. She shrieked, tired of shrieking, but knowing that the giant would always expect her cry. Her howl was dry and breaking, like pine needles crushed underfoot. The fires of the castle still burned in its higher terraces-the rain scissored down through dark clouds and the sound of the giant dying, of the sear of it, was still in me, battering back and forth between my bones, so loudly I could hardly hear her weep with sweat-sour relief, knowing her salvation had ridden to her bearing a silver cross.

The giant pulled up my daughter and I from our country like crickets from a hay roof.

Ah, the chains of bone! My blood sang high and taut.

He tried to have her, but she was always so pretty, and so frail, and his love broke her hips open like two halves of an apple.

Ah, how black her eyes! My blood hummed low and loose.

He fell on me then, and it has been years. I was always stronger than my girl. That is her, buried there, buried first.

The blood in me and the blood on my back seemed to stretch towards each other, and the rain and flames were so hard and bright, and I could not see anything but her splayed legs, without the smallest modesty-what blush should she have left for me?-though the stain of the giant's last visit still streaked her skin like a tiger's hide, black against brown. After the giant, I thought, she will hardly feel me. I have done so much for her today.

I thought that. I.

With the titan's ruined heart still in my hand I pushed her knees open, and I did not even notice the caked blood, but I saw her clamp shut her mouth, and her eyes roll up to heaven, and you know, she never even made a sound, though I heard her old bones creak-I was so full of slanting flame, so full of blade-swings and axe-wield, so full of fur and bone and bile, all thumping and throbbing within me, and I was the giant, his innards draped me like sacramental robes. I was the giant, and my boulder-knees scraped the stone wall. I was the giant, and I wanted her to cry out beneath me.

Another knight would have knelt and hoisted her to his horse, given her over to convent, washed her wounded womb in a clear river. It is what we were trained to do. How many of us failed to do it? Or was it only I who fell so far?

I rolled off of her and there were no stars behind a skirt of clouds. She stared at me, expressionless, and the blood ran from me then, and I was not the giant, I was a gristle-clung ape and I had done what apes will do. I turned and vomited into the gravestones, spattering their rough granite with sickness.

Those headstones-how bitter and terrible her growl!-are for the children I bore the giant, all the babes he threw from the ramparts to watch their skulls crack on the surf-sharpened rocks. Don't you worry, chevalier, I'll make sure your little one is not parted from his brothers and sisters. I am not so old yet that I can yet leave the funeral trade.