"I See My Face on the Surface..."
Apr. 3rd, 2007 12:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psalm_onethirtyone"What do we do now?"
Gaheris is curled up in the bed they're sharing at the hotel, the covers drawn closely over him. Mordred stands by the window, looking out. His hands are at his sides, and very still, unnaturally, as if he's taking great care to hold them that way; his black hair is tousled and rumpled. He's been running his fingers through it.
"What?" he says, not turning back.
"What now? Do we go home?"
"Stop looking to me for answers," very steadily. "You keep doing that. I don't know everything. Where do we go? I don't know."
Gaheris is silent.
"You tell me. You make a choice."
Outside it's begun to rain, spring rain, beating against the window gently. There's the dark fragrance of wind and water at night, which somehow blows into the room and fills it, and the air between them is cool. Everything seems quiet, waiting for an answer to some great question, and Gaheris wonders why he always thinks of everything as question and answer (and then, of course, he knows why; there's so much unanswered with him that he longs to know). Finally he says,--
"Let's go home."
Mordred at last turns to look at him. "You hate it," he says, voice tinged with bitter humour. "What's the point in going?"
"I want to know it's still there." Not just some dream or delusion--how could it be if they all remember? he thinks, but that doesn't still the questions.
Mordred laughs a hard laugh. "Fine," he says.
~~~
In the morning they take the rental car as far as they can, out of Wales and up, up through England and Scotland, over two days, until they come to the place where a car's no good any more, and it takes a boat to get to Orkney. The sea's cold and blowing, seems as though it blows right through Gaheris as he stands on the ferry that goes twice a day, bringing people to the Mainland and then taking them away again.
For all the wind on the sea, there's sunlight. Mordred sits away from the sides of the ferry and looks at his hands; he seems far away and lost to Gaheris, thinking of something else or someone else, looking somewhere else at things Gaheris can't ever hope to see.
And though it feels as though the ocean will never end, as though the islands are too far ever to reach, as though this in-between place will capture them and hold them for-ever, the ferry comes to ground and lets them go. For a few moments he looks around with a forced calm, noting the shape of the harbour and the clusters of brush and letting it into his mind. Then the memory comes. It's like nothing else, it's like being bathed in stars, too beautiful to be believed but as sharp as glass splinters, and without waiting to see where Mordred is or taking note of anything around him he begins to run inland. He runs with the wind behind him. He runs towards the heart of his birthplace. He runs until his breath is ragged and aching, until the wind that pushed him begins to catch in his throat and blind his eyes, and then he goes on running.
That morning he'd put a scarf 'round his neck, and it blows behind him along with his jacket, which isn't zipped shut, rising in the air. He remembers sixteen and leaving for England to be Arthur's, his cloak fastened at his throat with a cloakpin King Lot gave him--perhaps the only gift he ever received from his father--and he remembers that his cloak blew behind him like his jacket does now. But it was long, he thinks, whispered around his ankles when the wind was still.
He opens his arms to it, to all the memories. It stops mattering that they hurt.
This is the place he comes from. Here it is that he was born and brought up, from a small stumbling child to a young man who handled everything badly and didn't know how to find himself. He escaped from it and returned to it and died far away from it, ached for it and hated it and lived with its heritage in his blood.
This is home.
He stops running after a while and stands in a field by a single tree that's grown up in the centre. His breath is a long time to catch, and when he opens his eyes again, when his throat has finally stopped hurting, he finds Mordred just coming across to him.
He expects a reprimand for running off, at very least a goddamned idiot, but Mordred just says,--
"It's a few miles along yet."
By the time they reach the ruins of the castle it's late afternoon, and the sun streaks down on them when they enter, slanting through the tall and cracked stone towers, shining through old windows and lighting up the dust that floats slowly down. At first they're silent and unsure, treading softly, as though afraid they'll disturb something. Then Gaheris starts laughing.
He doesn't know why; it comes from nowhere, filling his chest with lightness. For a moment Mordred looks at him strangely, and then he laughs too, shakes his head and laughs. They run through the castle like children, calling out to one another, up and down stairs and in and out of rooms. Gaheris finds the one where they all used to sleep, or at least the walls; the hall ends abruptly and the floor breaks off into emptiness. Down below he can see scattered stones. Mordred catches his arm and pulls him over to Clar's room, where dead heather and herbs are still somehow preserved. The dust there smells of magic.
The throne room is spare and empty. They only know what it is because of the wideness of it, and Mordred's memories. There are sloped arches in the ceiling where banners used to hang, and a dais for the throne. In the banquet hall are more daises, and crumbling fireplaces, so many remnants, so much that's been almost-destroyed and yet they make it whole in their eyes.
When night falls they continue in the moonlight. Gaheris thinks once that they should be tired of it by now, that he can't see how anyone could ever stand looking at a castle this long--but it's theirs, that's the difference. Everywhere there's some little detail that belongs to them and no one else. Once Mordred pries a brick out of a wall and the space behind it is filled with perfect white stones.
"I picked them up the first spring Gawain was gone," he says, "I wanted to hide them somewhere you wouldn't get hold of them. You and Agravain were always nosing through my things."
"Not together?"
"God, no. I was beset by two wholly separate armies. I kept having to convince Agravain that you were out to try and trip him up, so he'd go after you and leave me alone. It was the only way I ever got a moment's peace."
"What a revelation."
"I tried to be a model brother."
For once his laughter is free and easy, unguarded.
Why is it so? Gaheris thinks, when he finally stops too think. For all it's familiar, was it ever a good place? He remembers how afraid he used to be of it, how he never fit in here. He's been in every room but Morgause's; he doesn't need to go there. He knows what it looks like, and he knows that the blood has never faded out of the stone floor. Here there's a sense of stillness, as though time's never moved, despite the broken walls and roofless halls.
Every memory is preserved in this place. The easy ones and the hurting ones are mingled together into a single haze of his childhood. He remembers Gareth taking Latin lessons in this room, in this one Clar presented in her first court dress, blue velvet that fell to her feet and a belt set with crystals. She hated it passionately that Morgause encouraged looks with magic and insisted that they should go together. Clar was made for magic alone and not for conscious beauty. In this room Agravain skinned rabbits, hands red with their blood, his eyes proud: he had carved and strung the bow himself.
Gaheris always hid outside when he wanted to escape from the castle, and he finds that place, too, though the trees have grown up tall and thick as marble columns, tangled with vines and creepers. His name is no longer carved into a trunk, or if it still is it's grown out of his reach.
Things are so different now, and his questions still aren't answered.
He walks down to the shore, and as he does the wind seems to blow through him again, clearing out a smoke inside. The castle had soothed him, but now that ease is going. It's like a spell that wears off and leaves him with an ache in his head and the same sorrows as before. He kneels in the sand.
Time passes. Mordred comes down and stands behind him, a hand on his shoulder.
Silence.
Somewhere he can hear sheep bleating, and he stirs himself. Mordred steps back to let him get to his feet.
"I thought it would be all right," Gaheris begins, his voice catching.
"It is all right."
"It doesn't help."
"Come on, now, don't lose yourself on me." Mordred's hand grips his shoulder again, and Gaheris realises that his face is wet. He's a fool. He's an idiot, and why is he always crying? Like a woman or a child, or-- "We're leaving now. We're putting it behind."
"Can't put this behind you," he says brokenly.
"Why the hell not?"
"It's home. It's us. It's all through us."
"Damn you, I left it before. I can do it again. It's not a disease."
"It's in our blood."
"Gareth told me you said we're not blood any more. It's been hundreds of years. I think we've managed to breed it out by now, don't you?"
"Stop it."
"You're telling me?" he says.
"You feel it as much as I do."
"All right, I do. I still know we can leave."
Gaheris opens his mouth to argue, but it isn't worth arguing over. It's Orkney. There's nothing that can be said, no way to leave it, and no means of keeping it from their blood, no matter how many years. They both know that. There's no point in arguing. Mordred sighs and turns back to the sea.
"Why does everything always end with me telling you to have breakfast?"
"Are we going to have breakfast?"
"With any luck. Are you coming?"
"--Yes."
"Tearing yourself away from the irresistible pull of our family ruin?"
"Shut up."
"Innocent question."
They walk back much slower than they came, and at the first sign of a village stop in at a tea house. Mordred flirts with the girl who brings their breakfast, and Gaheris looks at the table, trying to ease the terrible emptiness that's come into him. Will he ever--it seems like a fair question--stop hurting? Will he ever answer something in a way that makes the question go away? Why can't he just forget?
And then he realises he is forgetting. Everything that came back when he went towards the castle is gone now. The intricate details, the clear memory of his childhood is gone. Something about a cloakpin trembles on the edge of his mind, and he doesn't know whether it's important or insignificant, and suddenly he doesn't care. If only it would all do that.
"Christ."
"What?" He looks up.
Mordred smiles with an edge of wry amusement. "The castle apparently doesn't exist."
"What?"
"Our waitress has no idea what I'm talking about. There's no castle there, she says."
"But we--"
"I know." He laughs. "I know."
"It's not Mother."
"I know."
"I don't know who--do you think it's Clar?"
Mordred licks his spoon. "Could be."
"When are we going back?"
"To the hotel? As soon as you finish up."
"I need to go back first."
"All right." He looks at Gaheris with dark eyes, but doesn't argue or ask. "If you hurry up about it."
So Gaheris runs again.
~~
The castle is waiting for him. He climbs the fallen staircase slowly, up into the dusty height of the second storey, his hands out on either side of him to touch the stone. At the top he turns and finds their room, the floorless room. He reaches along the walls, edging along on a small broken rim that extends halfway around, until he reaches a place where the hole in the wall indicates a fireplace; there he puts his hand in, feeling the ash on his bare arm.
It's easy to find what he's looking for. It's funny how they have so much hidden here, so many secrets within the stonework. Mordred had, and he too, and he's sure the others have their own things, things they never wanted each other to find. He slips it into his pocket and edges back to the hall.
Before he leaves the castle he goes to Clar's room again, where the perfectly preserved herbs, that should have turned to dust long ago, hang up upon the walls, and for a moment considers taking them down and bringing them back to her. Maybe she has something here that she wishes she had there. Maybe her own secret wants to return to her, or she wants to know that it's safe--and then he shakes his head and turns away. Clar's secrets aren't like anybody else's.
He leans against the cool walls, eyes closed, breathing in the smell of the old things, of the old world, of the old time. Then, for the hundredth time, he leaves home.
Gaheris is curled up in the bed they're sharing at the hotel, the covers drawn closely over him. Mordred stands by the window, looking out. His hands are at his sides, and very still, unnaturally, as if he's taking great care to hold them that way; his black hair is tousled and rumpled. He's been running his fingers through it.
"What?" he says, not turning back.
"What now? Do we go home?"
"Stop looking to me for answers," very steadily. "You keep doing that. I don't know everything. Where do we go? I don't know."
Gaheris is silent.
"You tell me. You make a choice."
Outside it's begun to rain, spring rain, beating against the window gently. There's the dark fragrance of wind and water at night, which somehow blows into the room and fills it, and the air between them is cool. Everything seems quiet, waiting for an answer to some great question, and Gaheris wonders why he always thinks of everything as question and answer (and then, of course, he knows why; there's so much unanswered with him that he longs to know). Finally he says,--
"Let's go home."
Mordred at last turns to look at him. "You hate it," he says, voice tinged with bitter humour. "What's the point in going?"
"I want to know it's still there." Not just some dream or delusion--how could it be if they all remember? he thinks, but that doesn't still the questions.
Mordred laughs a hard laugh. "Fine," he says.
In the morning they take the rental car as far as they can, out of Wales and up, up through England and Scotland, over two days, until they come to the place where a car's no good any more, and it takes a boat to get to Orkney. The sea's cold and blowing, seems as though it blows right through Gaheris as he stands on the ferry that goes twice a day, bringing people to the Mainland and then taking them away again.
For all the wind on the sea, there's sunlight. Mordred sits away from the sides of the ferry and looks at his hands; he seems far away and lost to Gaheris, thinking of something else or someone else, looking somewhere else at things Gaheris can't ever hope to see.
And though it feels as though the ocean will never end, as though the islands are too far ever to reach, as though this in-between place will capture them and hold them for-ever, the ferry comes to ground and lets them go. For a few moments he looks around with a forced calm, noting the shape of the harbour and the clusters of brush and letting it into his mind. Then the memory comes. It's like nothing else, it's like being bathed in stars, too beautiful to be believed but as sharp as glass splinters, and without waiting to see where Mordred is or taking note of anything around him he begins to run inland. He runs with the wind behind him. He runs towards the heart of his birthplace. He runs until his breath is ragged and aching, until the wind that pushed him begins to catch in his throat and blind his eyes, and then he goes on running.
That morning he'd put a scarf 'round his neck, and it blows behind him along with his jacket, which isn't zipped shut, rising in the air. He remembers sixteen and leaving for England to be Arthur's, his cloak fastened at his throat with a cloakpin King Lot gave him--perhaps the only gift he ever received from his father--and he remembers that his cloak blew behind him like his jacket does now. But it was long, he thinks, whispered around his ankles when the wind was still.
He opens his arms to it, to all the memories. It stops mattering that they hurt.
This is the place he comes from. Here it is that he was born and brought up, from a small stumbling child to a young man who handled everything badly and didn't know how to find himself. He escaped from it and returned to it and died far away from it, ached for it and hated it and lived with its heritage in his blood.
This is home.
He stops running after a while and stands in a field by a single tree that's grown up in the centre. His breath is a long time to catch, and when he opens his eyes again, when his throat has finally stopped hurting, he finds Mordred just coming across to him.
He expects a reprimand for running off, at very least a goddamned idiot, but Mordred just says,--
"It's a few miles along yet."
By the time they reach the ruins of the castle it's late afternoon, and the sun streaks down on them when they enter, slanting through the tall and cracked stone towers, shining through old windows and lighting up the dust that floats slowly down. At first they're silent and unsure, treading softly, as though afraid they'll disturb something. Then Gaheris starts laughing.
He doesn't know why; it comes from nowhere, filling his chest with lightness. For a moment Mordred looks at him strangely, and then he laughs too, shakes his head and laughs. They run through the castle like children, calling out to one another, up and down stairs and in and out of rooms. Gaheris finds the one where they all used to sleep, or at least the walls; the hall ends abruptly and the floor breaks off into emptiness. Down below he can see scattered stones. Mordred catches his arm and pulls him over to Clar's room, where dead heather and herbs are still somehow preserved. The dust there smells of magic.
The throne room is spare and empty. They only know what it is because of the wideness of it, and Mordred's memories. There are sloped arches in the ceiling where banners used to hang, and a dais for the throne. In the banquet hall are more daises, and crumbling fireplaces, so many remnants, so much that's been almost-destroyed and yet they make it whole in their eyes.
When night falls they continue in the moonlight. Gaheris thinks once that they should be tired of it by now, that he can't see how anyone could ever stand looking at a castle this long--but it's theirs, that's the difference. Everywhere there's some little detail that belongs to them and no one else. Once Mordred pries a brick out of a wall and the space behind it is filled with perfect white stones.
"I picked them up the first spring Gawain was gone," he says, "I wanted to hide them somewhere you wouldn't get hold of them. You and Agravain were always nosing through my things."
"Not together?"
"God, no. I was beset by two wholly separate armies. I kept having to convince Agravain that you were out to try and trip him up, so he'd go after you and leave me alone. It was the only way I ever got a moment's peace."
"What a revelation."
"I tried to be a model brother."
For once his laughter is free and easy, unguarded.
Why is it so? Gaheris thinks, when he finally stops too think. For all it's familiar, was it ever a good place? He remembers how afraid he used to be of it, how he never fit in here. He's been in every room but Morgause's; he doesn't need to go there. He knows what it looks like, and he knows that the blood has never faded out of the stone floor. Here there's a sense of stillness, as though time's never moved, despite the broken walls and roofless halls.
Every memory is preserved in this place. The easy ones and the hurting ones are mingled together into a single haze of his childhood. He remembers Gareth taking Latin lessons in this room, in this one Clar presented in her first court dress, blue velvet that fell to her feet and a belt set with crystals. She hated it passionately that Morgause encouraged looks with magic and insisted that they should go together. Clar was made for magic alone and not for conscious beauty. In this room Agravain skinned rabbits, hands red with their blood, his eyes proud: he had carved and strung the bow himself.
Gaheris always hid outside when he wanted to escape from the castle, and he finds that place, too, though the trees have grown up tall and thick as marble columns, tangled with vines and creepers. His name is no longer carved into a trunk, or if it still is it's grown out of his reach.
Things are so different now, and his questions still aren't answered.
He walks down to the shore, and as he does the wind seems to blow through him again, clearing out a smoke inside. The castle had soothed him, but now that ease is going. It's like a spell that wears off and leaves him with an ache in his head and the same sorrows as before. He kneels in the sand.
Time passes. Mordred comes down and stands behind him, a hand on his shoulder.
Silence.
Somewhere he can hear sheep bleating, and he stirs himself. Mordred steps back to let him get to his feet.
"I thought it would be all right," Gaheris begins, his voice catching.
"It is all right."
"It doesn't help."
"Come on, now, don't lose yourself on me." Mordred's hand grips his shoulder again, and Gaheris realises that his face is wet. He's a fool. He's an idiot, and why is he always crying? Like a woman or a child, or-- "We're leaving now. We're putting it behind."
"Can't put this behind you," he says brokenly.
"Why the hell not?"
"It's home. It's us. It's all through us."
"Damn you, I left it before. I can do it again. It's not a disease."
"It's in our blood."
"Gareth told me you said we're not blood any more. It's been hundreds of years. I think we've managed to breed it out by now, don't you?"
"Stop it."
"You're telling me?" he says.
"You feel it as much as I do."
"All right, I do. I still know we can leave."
Gaheris opens his mouth to argue, but it isn't worth arguing over. It's Orkney. There's nothing that can be said, no way to leave it, and no means of keeping it from their blood, no matter how many years. They both know that. There's no point in arguing. Mordred sighs and turns back to the sea.
"Why does everything always end with me telling you to have breakfast?"
"Are we going to have breakfast?"
"With any luck. Are you coming?"
"--Yes."
"Tearing yourself away from the irresistible pull of our family ruin?"
"Shut up."
"Innocent question."
They walk back much slower than they came, and at the first sign of a village stop in at a tea house. Mordred flirts with the girl who brings their breakfast, and Gaheris looks at the table, trying to ease the terrible emptiness that's come into him. Will he ever--it seems like a fair question--stop hurting? Will he ever answer something in a way that makes the question go away? Why can't he just forget?
And then he realises he is forgetting. Everything that came back when he went towards the castle is gone now. The intricate details, the clear memory of his childhood is gone. Something about a cloakpin trembles on the edge of his mind, and he doesn't know whether it's important or insignificant, and suddenly he doesn't care. If only it would all do that.
"Christ."
"What?" He looks up.
Mordred smiles with an edge of wry amusement. "The castle apparently doesn't exist."
"What?"
"Our waitress has no idea what I'm talking about. There's no castle there, she says."
"But we--"
"I know." He laughs. "I know."
"It's not Mother."
"I know."
"I don't know who--do you think it's Clar?"
Mordred licks his spoon. "Could be."
"When are we going back?"
"To the hotel? As soon as you finish up."
"I need to go back first."
"All right." He looks at Gaheris with dark eyes, but doesn't argue or ask. "If you hurry up about it."
So Gaheris runs again.
The castle is waiting for him. He climbs the fallen staircase slowly, up into the dusty height of the second storey, his hands out on either side of him to touch the stone. At the top he turns and finds their room, the floorless room. He reaches along the walls, edging along on a small broken rim that extends halfway around, until he reaches a place where the hole in the wall indicates a fireplace; there he puts his hand in, feeling the ash on his bare arm.
It's easy to find what he's looking for. It's funny how they have so much hidden here, so many secrets within the stonework. Mordred had, and he too, and he's sure the others have their own things, things they never wanted each other to find. He slips it into his pocket and edges back to the hall.
Before he leaves the castle he goes to Clar's room again, where the perfectly preserved herbs, that should have turned to dust long ago, hang up upon the walls, and for a moment considers taking them down and bringing them back to her. Maybe she has something here that she wishes she had there. Maybe her own secret wants to return to her, or she wants to know that it's safe--and then he shakes his head and turns away. Clar's secrets aren't like anybody else's.
He leans against the cool walls, eyes closed, breathing in the smell of the old things, of the old world, of the old time. Then, for the hundredth time, he leaves home.
