Avalon, Part I

To the west of Camlann, off the deep teal shores of Cornwall, there resided a little island called Avalon, or the Isle of Apples. But as he looked about him, he saw no sign of the reddening buds, only the silent tread of autumn leaves scattered across the wind.

For years had passed, and there were only the leaves now, and the cold, bright white sun.

Soon, he knew, soon the bodies of men would fill up those groves of empty apple trees. They would be stretched out underneath that bright autumn sky like depressed leaves, torn from the stems and laid down before some eternal eye, unblinking, as does all tragic art, within its own brand of cosmic detachment.

Arthur looked up, snapping shut the visor over his eyes. The chain mail beneath his heavy armor seemed to rattle and dance, chattering irritatedly upon his weathered skin. His bones seemed to hold well, yet were brittle: cold and brittle with the crevices of time.

He looked up. His blood grew chilled with the passing of the wind.

Excalibur sat in his hand. The blade was sacred—born of enchantment—and it shook in its scabbard, perhaps unnerved. Arthur placed a hand over the pommel, his palm lingering there, and the sword obeyed him.

Camlann was the last reminder of all that was lost, and that which was yet to be gained. Its sun seemed a maddening disk shining in his metal eyes, spinning so that the light fractured and shot out in a spectrum of rays. For as long as the light of that sun shone hotly on his sins, he would never forgive himself.

“Treason—treason—and I've not a drop of innocence?” Mordred had cried before the Court. He scanned each face, searching. No eyes dared meet him. “Father—“

He started for the King's hand, grasping it before being seized and promptly spat upon. Arthur looked down at his bastard son, his face bathed in flames from a hearth. The light of the fire rendered him simple and defenseless; he smelled of ash and salt.

“I am His Majesty,” he said, his eyes glimmering, “thou shalt address me a title no baser.”

He refused to look as they took Mordred away.

The flames crackled as, one by one, his subjects exited the room. He regarded each one with hard eyes. And when each had given his last consolation of obedient silence, he knelt before the blazing, bathing hearth, wrapping a veil around his shoulders.

With one great sinking motion, he tenderly cradled the place where his son had touched his hand, brushing pearl-white hairs against the leaking pit of his sparkling eyes, his brokenness captured only by the warmth of flames much too close to befriend.

“Prithee,” he said, clutching his veins, “place thine faith as yet in me.”

***

Now Mordred stood defiantly in the distance, wedged between two swirling sentries on the banks of the River Camel—a fat blue snake that inched along the eastern spine of Cornwall. Men surrounded him but did not touch him, spinning about him as if he were instead a magnet.

There he awaited Arthur.

The halo of the sun illuminated the ash-wood forest, and as soon as Arthur's order was given, the magnet dissolved; basalt ringed the trees as electricity flowed freely through the air. Speckled sticklebacks overflowed on the blue banks, writhing atop pits of granite sand.

The world descended.

War.

Arrows flared. Bits of sword, fire, and steel clashed and crumpled; homes blazed as Knights and villeins burned, as stone holdings collapsed, as mortar fell.

Fire to ash, and ash to soil; blood to soil, and fire to blood, Arthur thought, his mind turning in circles as he unhorsed another red-faced cavalryman. Before the war began, the epiphany of his death resided somewhere within a dream, or, perhaps, within many dreams: buried beneath chalk-silver grass, where in a box of snow-blossoms, his memory twinkled with the last early morning shades of sunlight.

Driven mad with fire, the two masses crashed into one another, and collapsed into void with a great unending bellow.

To claim, even implicitly, that Arthur and Mordred stared at one another would be to cross the line of animalistic treason, for across the vast expanse of emptied land, a great understanding passed between them. It was as if no armies of men had ever separated them: wavelengths blazed from one electrode to the other. Both men in that moment had ceased to be mere men. Now a dualism was to meet; now god and devil were to clash.

Mordred was a commander; but his name bore the indelible crest of traitor. He was wreathed of green iron; he was fire. The boy could burn towers with but one wayward glance. When he approached, Arthur could feel metal rising in his blood and iron pounding against the valves of his heart.

Filing and magnet.

Mordred removed his helmet first, glancing up at the dying sun. White-gold specks of hair draped a young, hardy, resolute face. His eyes, now stripped of their blue virtue, contracted and burned like the flames of Arthur's hearth, gleaming a familiar light.

Bearer and fruit.

“Father,” said Mordred, spitting out the word with a bright smile. “Pray: how does treason fare you now? How spills love now, but from the brim of a full and embittered heart?” His smile grew wider, his teeth glittering white venom as he indicated the masses of dead. “So have you said. They are slain—so will I fulfill it.”

Then he said: “I am come to slay thee.”

Arthur said nothing, filled at once with grace and love; for, despite the unassailable shell of black metal encasing him, he was old. He knew he had little else in his spirit to begrudge his blood.

“Do you understand me?”

Arthur nodded. Waves of electricity passed between them again.

“Hate me, then, Father,” Mordred spat, drawing up his sword with a bloodied, twisted, buckling arm. “Hold me in your bitterness. Look at me.” The tip of the sword drew Arthur up by his chin. “Look at me. This is the face of your enemy. This is the wellspring of your misery. Let this Mordred know your true sin; know this bastard-creature before you as your truest bane.”

Arthur remained still.

“Hate me!” Mordred screamed, his voice ringing in the red valleys of Cornwall before sinking into the wind.

A long moment waited for them.

“If love is my true sin,” said Arthur, finally, “then deal me my punishment accordingly.”

A desperate cry rang from the boy's throat.

They lunged into the other's sword.

Excalibur drew in, pierced, drew out, and sheathed in all of one motion. Thus proceeded Mordred’s demise, quick and painless, as if he had been stung by a pinprick.

However, Mordred knew not of such graceful execution, bless the poor boy, and his sword slammed its blunt edge into the cage of Arthur’s helmet. Arthur sat atop Mordred's body, crumpling like a doll.

Mordred's head tumbled in the sand that crept along Camel's riverbed.

All about him, faces of men and foes were mangled together, meshed in horrific masses of metal and limbs. Bodies were twisted and eyes were vacant. Men were strewn there, tossed about the field like children's toys. They seemed wooden now, now that each had been deprived of the light of life; now family and enemy laid together as if lovers, neither truly aware of the other's folly. Spears and rapiers and daggers and chain mail were ripped apart and spread out, as the King had predicted, before the benediction of heaven. Now, sitting in the valley of silver steam and silence and stillness, all of them were ready to be received.

It was too beautiful. Arthur choked on his silence, feeling as though his head was getting crushed by the sunlight burning in his eyes. Hoisting himself up higher amid the mass, the iron penetration in his skull blazed in blood. He let out a cry of exasperated relief—relieved that he indeed did feel pain—and he sank deeper into the pit of dead, pulling himself down with his back on the ground, down to the brotherhood to which he truly belonged.

Arthur could not see his visor. As he tried to reach it, he saw a cloud bouncing around in the sky. He blinked at it, glancing up. He noticed that his armor had ceased quaking, and he was grateful for the temporary peace.

He closed his eyes and waited.

Minutes later, after his prayers had dissolved on his tongue, one came to him, reaching for him through the ether, steadily but painfully climbing the mountaintop where he lay. This one, his name was Sir Lucan the Butler.

Sweet Sir Lucan, Arthur thought.

So together they sat, side by side: very quietly, very still, watching the other die quite peacefully.

“You are doing it wrong,” said Lucan, after a while had passed.

Arthur sighed. “What am I doing that is wrong?”

“You are sitting on top of Mordred, my King,” replied Lucan without a hint of humor in his voice. “You seem to have mistaken him for a chair.”

Arthur looked wearily at him.

“Well?”

“Well, I want a chair too.”

Arthur laughed at this the best he could. He chuckled at the folly of war, at the idiocy of men...and in the same breath, the mirth swelled, and over the corners of his upturned mouth, twin silver streaks ran down from the ashes of his eyes.

“Arthur,” Lucan said quietly.

Gone. Gone. All of them were gone. Everything he had ever known, or thought, or cherished, or hated...was gone. The entire world, built upon a fragile infrastructure of hope, had collapsed into nothingness. Even his enemy son, the self-proclaimed “bane” of his existence, was erased...no longer Mordred the enemy. No longer Mordred the son. No longer Mordred.

In the entirety of his hope, he thought, the earth had finally fallen. Arthur dared not look into the blue endlessness of Mordred's eyes, depthless like the haze of cat's-eye, for he knew the want of his own death had once resided there. But beneath the bitter heart of it all, he knew, Mordred was only a proud boy. He was a boy, a boy given too much ambition and cunning, a poor boy with no home, the heir of a blood he could not control, a poor, proud boy destined to be another pawn of some indefinite, unrelenting game.

The boy had only been proud. The boy had only been proud. He was too proud to submit to his mother, too ashamed to reciprocate Arthur's love. Now, within the mist of Camel, the father sat on top of his proud son's metal chest—cold and heavy as rock, where, jutting out of an adjacent patch of sand, an unblinking hardy face stared almost triumphantly into oblivion—as the gross stupidity of this thing called the Universe hit him hard, realizing that he was, simply, no one. Arthur was no longer a King, a man, nor a significance; he was just another broken human being.

“Luc—Lucan—“ he choked.

Sitting up, Arthur wrapped the other man in his arms, absorbing the warmth of human presence. His eyes filled as he held on, pressing his arms around the man's neck with all of his heart's might, holding his dear Sir Lucan together in this simple embrace.

Someone lived; someone lived. It caused him much joy, this simple, natural procession, the continuation of life...

A thin trail of red ran down Lucan's nose.

“Uh,” said Lucan, and died.

Left to the mercy of his sins, Arthur buried his head and wept in dear Sir Lucan's dead lap, watching the innards of his faithful butler's stomach unravel on the ground and glitter crimson-black in the indifferent white light.

***