Catechism!
Title: Catechism (chapter twenty-two)
Rating: PG-13 for Mordred expressing his displeasure in no uncertain terms.
Archive: Yes
Notes: Previous twenty-one chapters are here.
Summary: Reincarnated Arthurians! In this chapter Clarissant's freakouts are explained, and Gareth admits his shocking secret.
He stood on the front steps and knocked. It was a Saturday, it was summer, he was ten, he had a roomful of library books and Jessie was at camp for the week and she wasn't going to annoy them, so he and Jennifer could spend the whole week sitting on his bed reading and talking. The sun was making his black hair hot when he touched it, and he rocked a little on his feet, listening to the screaming inside the house and waiting for someone to answer the door.
Finally it opened.
Jennifer's mother, tall, fat, with curly brown hair, looked down at him. "Hello?" She sounded half-impatient and half-frightened. He stood perfectly still and watched the pattern on her t-shirt, little leaves and green curlicues, with his dark eyes.
"Mrs. Mayfield?"
"Hi, Mike. This isn't a good time."
"Jennifer can't talk--?"
"She can't. Definitely. I'm sorry, please come back later. 'Bye." She shut the door.
So he went back to his house. They were next-door-neighbours; it wasn't a long walk, just out under the big sycamores in the Mayfields' front yard, four concrete sidewalk squares, and then his own yard, full of his mother's flowers, reds and pinks and oranges. Zinnias. He shut the door as softly as possible and slipped into the living room, where Jessie would usually be, watching television or playing with her stuffed animals if she wasn't outside. In the kitchen, his mother said, "Did you get her?" He was never quiet enough to get by her.
"No. Her mom was being weird."
"Try going back in an hour."
"Okay."
For the rest of the day he read, and practised his speech for Kids' Debate Club in front of his mirror, measuring his words, measuring his tone. He had a good voice. He breathed on his mirror and wrote his name in the cloud and watched it fade.
Later, when it was dark, he went over again, under the stars showing through the sycamore branches, and instead of knocking at the door went around behind the house and tapped on her ground-floor window. The curtains were pulled shut, green curtains. He kept tapping until Jennifer yanked them wide and opened the window for him.
"Shut up!" she said.
He grinned. "Hi."
"She's mad. Shout, shout, shout."
"What did you do?"
"I got sick."
"Really?"
"I couldn't remember where we put the coloured pencils." She sat back on the bed and rocked, running her hands along her hair slowly, looking at the bedspread as if she were sad. Her room was blue--blue wallpaper, blue carpet, blue glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceiling. Her bookshelf was painted blue, and her comforter and pillowcases were soft blue quilting. "It was important. So I screamed."
"Christ."
Jennifer looked at him sharply. "Your dad says that."
"Yeah."
"They're going to take me to a psy-chi-a-trist," she said, and hummed a little.
"You're really weird."
"You're stupid."
"I got books for you."
"Good."
~~~
When Gaheris wakes the next morning, he finds that he's curled up against Mordred, his head by Mordred's chest. It's comfortable, and Mordred is warm--someone opened a window last night and the December air is inviting itself in--and he moves a little closer, looking at the wrinkles on Mordred's white shirt. It's hard to remember what morning it is.
He remembers stumbling in the night before, though. When he's tired it's like he's drunk; he loses things in the haze of it. But he remembers Clar, and Clar screaming, screaming, and Gareth holding her. Vividly, suddenly, he remembers them as children, when he was already ten and solemn, and they, five and four, were sitting by the fire in the hall of the castle, and Gareth, though Gareth was older, was crying while Clar poked him gently and hummed to him. She was fey from the moment she was born, talked strange and tangled as yarn skeins, but with Gareth she almost seemed sane. He always calmed her, and she comforted him.
Gaheris has charcoals of both of them, Clar with her enchantments, Gareth learning to tilt in the fields, both of them among the standing stones, wading in the ocean, building caches of seashells to give the selkies, building fires at the Midsummer, when it never grew dark and there was no need for light. They get older in his drawings and Clar gets taller and thinner, and walks in the graveyard; Gareth squires for Gawain in Camelot. They meet on Midsummer again when Gawain comes home, and Clar, disdainful of everyone else, never leaves Gareth's side. She teaches him a magic to guard him. He brings her white horsehairs and dried flowers from Guenever's gardens.
Gareth learns the rest of knighthood from Lancelot, because now Gaheris needs Gawain; he gets his device, his marked shield, and then puts it away because Lancelot is shamed, and he says he'll give up his title until Lancelot has his again. He turns kitchen boy, and Kay sends him questing. Clar stays in Orkney, doing for the people there what her mother never did, giving them spells to guard their sheep, to protect their children from the bites of serpents, to keep the milk left out for the barn spirits from being drunk by the cats.
Gareth comes back from his quest with honour and two wives, one his own and one soon to be his brother's. Clar touches his shoulder briefly and sends him to take care of her hedgehogs.
Gareth dies. Clar lives alone. She gives the spells, for an easy labour or to keep the sheep well while they wander, but she speaks to no one. She turns shadowed, she has nothing to hold and no one to calm her and she dies by herself in a thatched house on a hill, among druid stones and her own enchantments. The Orkney people, because she is Theirs, their witch, bury her and build her a cairn, cover it with island flowers, remember it. She is the last of Queen Morgause's children, the only one who lived through the war.
(Queen Morgause was not born in Orkney: she married its King, and yet no one thinks of her as anything but of Orkney. Her husband died some years after they married and everyone forgot him. Queen Morgause, they say, Queen Morgause's children, never King Lot's.)
Gaheris doesn't show these, and never put them in the gallery. He doesn't even know whether they're true. What he imagines for Clar might never have happened, no matter how much she loves Gareth, and tragedy sells well. He should sell the pictures, he used to tell himself. But they died, and he didn't know whether they would ever come again.
Now the figures in his unpriced charcoals are grown up again; they're both grown up strange. Now they're all strange, same and different.
"You awake?" Mordred touches his hair, just light enough it's not a tousle.
"Yes,"
"Just checking."
He puts an arm around Gaheris, and Gaheris stops remembering, and they go back to sleep.
~~~
Jennifer, at fourteen, was still a skinny little brat. He was getting taller and fit his clothes better, but she stayed small and dark and ran around and folded herself up into tiny spaces. Her long hair swung loose, and half the girls in their class were jealous of her--straight, shiny hair was in. Jennifer's wasn't shiny, but it was so straight everybody said it couldn't be natural.
She was taking gifted intelligence classes and doing better than anybody else as long as she wasn't paired with anybody, or in a group. If she did things alone she was almost perfect. When she was with other people she started to talk in halting, angry sentences and gave the other kids looks that scared them. When people asked her things she didn't know, she tightened up all over and her eyes darkened--if she couldn't figure them out, she screamed. She always screamed when she didn't know the answer to something.
"Because I need to know," she told him.
He waited for her after History, when she got out of the GI class, and she walked along beside him, dragging her blue bookbag.
"Hey."
"Everybody was stupid to-day," she said, frowning. "She made us do things. With frogs. We looked inside, and it was smelly. Everybody was stupid. Biochemistry."
He was silent, because she'd go on if he let her.
"And," she said.
"Yeah?"
"You're getting old. Watch out! I'm going to scream again when we get home."
Her fits--her mother called them fits--were happening more and more; they'd doubled from the year before. It was always over something nobody else could understand, because nobody could understand why it mattered so much that she didn't know whatever it was she didn't know. More and more often it wasn't even over a question she got asked or something she couldn't find. When she picked herself up again, when she finally got calm, she'd just say it was because of something she couldn't remember. She wouldn't say what.
And it was weird, he thought, because Jennifer acted like she decided to do them when she talked, but he'd been with her a couple of times when it happened, and she didn't act like she knew what she was doing then. She screamed and cried and held on to him, and fell on the floor and rocked, and sometimes she talked another language that he knew, but he pretended not to know it. He'd known who she was for years. The Orkney Norse only proved it.
He didn't know what to do with knowing who she was, or knowing who he was. There had to be some way it made sense, had to be, but when he was trying to do his homework and just kept remembering his father knighting him, cold sword blade on his shoulder, kind eyes on his bowed head, saying, 'Now thou art Sir Mordred', he sure couldn't figure out what that way was.
And then his dad would yell "Christ!" to the TV in the other room and he'd shake the memory out of his head and get his math done.
He thought the way Jennifer kept getting upset, and the way the time between times got shorter and shorter, meant something, as if there was something that was going to happen--it was like the way when an earthquake was coming all the animals went crazy--but he couldn't figure it out. He couldn't figure anything out, and it made him mad. There had to be some way it made sense. If Jennifer remembered--he was sure if Jennifer remembered she'd know what it was.
~~~
When he wakes again Mordred is up, standing in front of the mirror and trying to flatten his tousled black hair. Gaheris yawns a little, rubs at his eyes, looks over. Mordred turns to him with a slightly cynical smile, just as he always does, and Gaheris thinks something important happened last night that passed out of his memory as easily as his daughter's name.
"Good morning."
"'Morning," he says.
"How long, exactly, are you planning on sleeping?"
"What time is it?"
"Noon."
"That's not bad."
"Not for you, maybe. Goddamn work-from-home types."
"You don't have work to-day."
"I have the sleep pattern." Mordred comes back to the bed and sits.
"How's Clar?"
"I haven't checked yet. I didn't hear any more frantic screams during the night, so that's promising."
"I'm sorry I fell asleep last night."
He raises an eyebrow. "What were you supposed to do? Go out for a drive?"
"You were talking to me. I don't remember much--jetlagged as hell."
"I was trying to get you to take off your shoes."
"It didn't work," he says, looking at his feet. Mordred laughs and tousles his hair in earnest this time, ruffling it up thoroughly.
"Ah, well. It was worth a shot."
"Look, if it was something important--"
"It wasn't."
~~~
They were taking the same Chemistry class together when Jennifer remembered. They were even partnered. They were standing right across from each other in the lab with the desk and their project between them and she had a test tube full of acid in her hands. Suddenly she broke off in whatever she'd been saying to him--he forgot. It wasn't important.
Her eyes. He was looking at her eyes, and they turned sharp as fire and steel and she drew in her breath quickly, and then smashed the test tube on the desktop. It was a slipping little movement of her hand, nobody else saw. The acid leaked onto her arm.
He waited for her to scream, but she only looked at him, she kept looking at him, as if she were looking across a universe and seeing him, her eyes burning. Then she turned to the teacher, who was standing over her shoulder and asking her what on earth had happened, what had she done, and said,--
"Doesn't matter."
The teacher sent her to the nurse's office.
After class he waited for her, waited outside the door in the long hall painted sea-green and covered with flyers for the band, the sports team, cheerleading, school play, any number of things he had no interest in and had never read before them, and while he was reading them heard her snapping at the nurse but not screaming. After a while the door opened and she came out. She had a cloth bandage on her arm.
"Jennifer--"
"You're dead," she said.
"No, I'm not," he said quietly.
"I tried."
"I'm sorry--"
"She's stupid." She looked over her shoulder at the door.
"I bet you could go home early."
"I am. You too."
"Really?"
She gave him a scathing look and grabbed his hand. "Now."
~~~
"Well. You ready to go down?"
Gaheris nods and gets out of bed, pulling at his shirt as if that's going to make the slept-in feeling go away, and rubbing his face and pushing his hair down. Mordred is already changed into clean clothes and looks wide awake, and he even laughs, looking at Gaheris, and pushes him into the bathroom before they reach the top of the stairs.
"Brush your teeth, first. You always look like such hell in the morning."
As they go downstairs, Gaheris trails his fingers along the wall side of the staircase quietly. The vast patchwork quilt across the living room doorway, even if it weren't spelled for it, keeps them out because it's Clar's; it's hanging still like vines off a castle. For a moment they stand in front of it awkwardly, and then Mordred shrugs and goes into the kitchen and starts making eggs. Gaheris follows him.
Ten minutes later, Gareth comes in. He's as rumpled as Gaheris, but considerably more cheerful, even with the red from Clar's dress all over him and a little magic tucked in his hair that even Gaheris can feel.
"Hi! --Oooh, eggs."
"Well?" Mordred says.
"You made eggs!" He beams. "I love eggs."
"Don't try that shit with me, kid. How's your sister?"
"--She's fine. She's hungry. She said I should get some breakfast for her."
"Tell her to come get it herself."
"Tell Mordred shut up!" Clar yells from the living room, only slightly muffled by the quilt.
"She, um, she says--"
"I hate all of you." Mordred shoves a plate of eggs and toast at him. "Go feed the dragon."
"Hungry!" she shouts.
"Jesus Christ."
~~~
"You didn't tell me." Jennifer sat with him on the grass and the twisted above-ground roots under one of the sycamores and rubbed the shiny smooth metal part of the zipper on her bookbag. She was frowning. He put his hands in his jean pockets and leaned back against the tree, smooth except for the places where irregular ovals in the bark showed much paler bark beneath.
"I didn't know what to tell you. I thought you'd freak out or something, or laugh at me, or tell me I'm stupid."
"You are. Didn't tell me."
"I'm sorry."
"It was stupid not to. I know things. I know. Everything."
"Like what?"
"Mother's spells."
He shivered and looked away. He was trying to think about it ironically, like his dad, like himself, but nothing came. Nobody had called Morgause Mother in years, not even him in his head. When he turned back Jennifer was watching him calmly.
"Everybody else is here too."
"Where?"
"Now. With now-mothers and now-fathers. Everybody."
"Gawain?" he asked, even though he knew she'd say yes, because she'd already said so.
"I said so. Stupid."
He grinned. "Great."
"But he's not the first. You have to wait." Suddenly she smiled at him, a smile like he'd never seen on her before, not in years more than he could count. It was a Clarissant smile. It was an Orkney smile.
"What?" he said to her in the old language.
"One just got born," she answered. Same tongue. Same words nobody else would understand, words that had died out years ago and belonged only to them in the whole world, never studied, always known, out of everyone's reach: part Norse, touched with Icelandic, accented like Scottish voices and scattered with Celtic words. Theirs.
"Who? Dost thou know who?"
"No," she said scornfully.
"Where?"
"No. It's nobody important. I felt."
"What do we do now?"
"Wait. Thou canst wait, canst thou not? Thou hast a long time of waiting to do."
~~~
Clar comes out by lunchtime. In the meantime, Mordred's been for and come back with the paper and has it spread all over the kitchen table to read, and Gaheris went on a run for her cigarettes and to stop by the gallery and look in through the windows for an empty spot on the wall where a charcoal had been sold. There were two. He went around by Amy's house and left her a folded note in his illegible handwriting to let her know he was home, and then he came back and settled in the kitchen as well, drawing with a pen on the Sunday comics.
Even Gareth is in with them, making microwave vegetable soup and toast--"Do you ever eat anything without toast?" Mordred asks irritably, and Gareth grins and dips it in his soup--when Clar comes and sits down between the wall and Gaheris and says,--
"You bought the right kind."
Gaheris pauses in drawing moustaches on the Rex Morgan, M.D., panels and slides the cigarettes over to her.
Gareth takes another bite of soupy toast. "I don't want to go back to work to-morrow."
"Too bad," Mordred says, looking up from the editorials. "We've got to keep her in cigarettes somehow. So does the banal conversation mean we're all finished now with the hysterics?"
"There's going to be another," Clar says.
"Christ, not again."
"Not that. Stupid. It's a thing. Person. She's going to say something."
"Do we have any idea what, pray tell?"
"No."
"Wonderful."
"His name is Will."
"I thought we were talking about a 'she'. Who the hell is Will?"
Gareth blushes. "Um. Me."
"What?"
"It's my--it's my name. Will Adams. You know."
"You know your name."
"Yeah," he says shyly, and finishes his toast. "I didn't think it was important or anything any more. And it's not--really my name. You know."
"No, but it would have made my life a hell of a lot easier, I can tell you that. I've been putting you down on the goddamn tax returns as a poverty-stricken Mexican youth we adopted because I couldn't get around your having no social security number--"
"I have a social security number!"
Mordred gives him a murderous look. "Thank you for telling me that two and a half years too late."
"What's my name?"
"Will. I thought we all knew that now."
"No, no, what you've been putting down on the tax stuff. My Mexican name."
"José. José fucking Wilkinson, since you're one of the family now. White American mother, hence the fact that you look like a New Yorker." He turns to Gaheris, holding the newspaper. "Don't tell me you know yours, too, or I'll kill you with Andy Rooney, so help me God."
Gaheris shakes his head.
"Good."
The telephone rings.
There's a scatter as everyone except Clar tries to answer it: Clar just steals Mordred's water glass, inspects it, and then empties it out in the sink, washes it twice, and refills it with iced tea out of the refrigerator while Gaheris, who got the phone first, says,--
"Hi," breathlessly.
"Hey! You're not Mike!"
"No," he says.
The girl's voice on the end of the line is young, sounds only a few years older than Amy's. He frowns a little, trying to place it or explain it. "Well, I was just calling for Mike. I have the right number, right?"
"Michael Wilkinson?"
"Yeah! Okay, just checking." She laughs. "I wasn't sure. So who are you?"
"His--his brother. Younger brother." He looks over at Mordred unsurely. Mordred covers his face with his palm, a God help me gesture.
"Are you sure I have the right number? 'Cause the Mike Wilkinson I know just has a little sister, and that's me."
"Oh. Um. Sorry. That's just what we--um--I mean--can I give you to Mike?"
"Oh, my God. Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't realise! Sure, just let Mike have the phone. Oh, by the way, I'm Jessie. What's your name?"
"Gaheris. My parents had a--sense of humour."
"I like that. It sounds cool. Okay, let me talk to Mike."
"Sure." He hands the telephone over with an sinking feeling, half-relief and half-fear. "It's for you. It's Jessie."
"How in hell do you always get your hands on my important calls?" Mordred says, taking it from him. "Hi, Jess? Hey, babe. How's it going? How's school? Yeah? Great. Oh, sure. Hey, I always am. No way. Nope. Really? Is he cute? Tell him if he's not nice I'll drive over and beat him up. Huh? With the brass knuckles I keep in my underwear drawer. Yeah. Yeah. You'd better. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to, sorry. I'm behind in everything. I've been in California for a week. Yeah, just visiting a friend. Yeah. No, it's fine. No. No snow. Shitty weather. Don't tell Mom. Okay. Oh, guess what? I'm going to be a godfather. I know. No, that friend I was seeing. His wife's having a baby in June. I know. I know, I'm going to corrupt the kid. You're telling me."
Gareth eyes him and then starts making Clar a sandwich. She hangs over his shoulder, telling him what to put on it. No tomatoes, they taste funny and they're not real. They're plastic, she says. Gaheris adds another moustache to the comics and then steals bread and shredded turkey from Gareth.
"Okay, I want to hear everything about school. And the boy. All the details. You've heard my news."
"Why does Mordred know so many girls?" Gareth whispers, handing him the mustard.
"This one's his sister."
"Oh. That's okay, then."
Clar snorts.
"Well, I'm glad to hear that. How's Mom? Great. I'm glad. Oh, yeah, Gaheris. Sorry about him. Huh? ...No. Jess. No."
All three of them look up and over at him. Clar laughs, takes her sandwich out of Gareth's hands, and slips the real estate listings out of the paper, tucks them under her arm. Then she goes into the living room. Gareth doesn't even notice; he and Gaheris are too busy watching Mordred.
"No, look, I swear to you, he's just--he's not American, okay, he's still getting hold of the vocabulary. I'm hosting him for the college, okay? He's from Wales, if you must know. What? The part where they still speak Welsh. Oh, come on. I am not covering up. Don't even, kiddo. No. Christ! You and Mom! No. He's not my--look, don't you think I'd have better taste than that? Trust me, if I go out with anyone, it's going to be someone with some class, better taste in shoes, and sixty-thousand million in the bank. Right. And someone who doesn't snore."
"Hey!"
"--Okay, slow for you, because I love you. I am not gay. But if I were, I would not be sleeping with Gaheris. Capisce? Good girl. There's a sweetheart. No, of course I'm not mad at you. I'm never mad at you. Okay, I was mad at you that day. Not now. Okay. Kiss your boy from me. I'm just kidding. Give me a kiss. You, too. Talk to you later, babe." He presses the 'end call' button.
Gaheris and Gareth look at him. Mordred looks back.
Fifteen minutes later Clar comes out from the behind the hanging quilt and starts shouting for quiet, just as Mordred finally sits on Gaheris with a laugh of triumph, just before Gareth jumps him and sends the three of them toppling again.
Rating: PG-13 for Mordred expressing his displeasure in no uncertain terms.
Archive: Yes
Notes: Previous twenty-one chapters are here.
Summary: Reincarnated Arthurians! In this chapter Clarissant's freakouts are explained, and Gareth admits his shocking secret.
He stood on the front steps and knocked. It was a Saturday, it was summer, he was ten, he had a roomful of library books and Jessie was at camp for the week and she wasn't going to annoy them, so he and Jennifer could spend the whole week sitting on his bed reading and talking. The sun was making his black hair hot when he touched it, and he rocked a little on his feet, listening to the screaming inside the house and waiting for someone to answer the door.
Finally it opened.
Jennifer's mother, tall, fat, with curly brown hair, looked down at him. "Hello?" She sounded half-impatient and half-frightened. He stood perfectly still and watched the pattern on her t-shirt, little leaves and green curlicues, with his dark eyes.
"Mrs. Mayfield?"
"Hi, Mike. This isn't a good time."
"Jennifer can't talk--?"
"She can't. Definitely. I'm sorry, please come back later. 'Bye." She shut the door.
So he went back to his house. They were next-door-neighbours; it wasn't a long walk, just out under the big sycamores in the Mayfields' front yard, four concrete sidewalk squares, and then his own yard, full of his mother's flowers, reds and pinks and oranges. Zinnias. He shut the door as softly as possible and slipped into the living room, where Jessie would usually be, watching television or playing with her stuffed animals if she wasn't outside. In the kitchen, his mother said, "Did you get her?" He was never quiet enough to get by her.
"No. Her mom was being weird."
"Try going back in an hour."
"Okay."
For the rest of the day he read, and practised his speech for Kids' Debate Club in front of his mirror, measuring his words, measuring his tone. He had a good voice. He breathed on his mirror and wrote his name in the cloud and watched it fade.
Later, when it was dark, he went over again, under the stars showing through the sycamore branches, and instead of knocking at the door went around behind the house and tapped on her ground-floor window. The curtains were pulled shut, green curtains. He kept tapping until Jennifer yanked them wide and opened the window for him.
"Shut up!" she said.
He grinned. "Hi."
"She's mad. Shout, shout, shout."
"What did you do?"
"I got sick."
"Really?"
"I couldn't remember where we put the coloured pencils." She sat back on the bed and rocked, running her hands along her hair slowly, looking at the bedspread as if she were sad. Her room was blue--blue wallpaper, blue carpet, blue glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceiling. Her bookshelf was painted blue, and her comforter and pillowcases were soft blue quilting. "It was important. So I screamed."
"Christ."
Jennifer looked at him sharply. "Your dad says that."
"Yeah."
"They're going to take me to a psy-chi-a-trist," she said, and hummed a little.
"You're really weird."
"You're stupid."
"I got books for you."
"Good."
~~~
When Gaheris wakes the next morning, he finds that he's curled up against Mordred, his head by Mordred's chest. It's comfortable, and Mordred is warm--someone opened a window last night and the December air is inviting itself in--and he moves a little closer, looking at the wrinkles on Mordred's white shirt. It's hard to remember what morning it is.
He remembers stumbling in the night before, though. When he's tired it's like he's drunk; he loses things in the haze of it. But he remembers Clar, and Clar screaming, screaming, and Gareth holding her. Vividly, suddenly, he remembers them as children, when he was already ten and solemn, and they, five and four, were sitting by the fire in the hall of the castle, and Gareth, though Gareth was older, was crying while Clar poked him gently and hummed to him. She was fey from the moment she was born, talked strange and tangled as yarn skeins, but with Gareth she almost seemed sane. He always calmed her, and she comforted him.
Gaheris has charcoals of both of them, Clar with her enchantments, Gareth learning to tilt in the fields, both of them among the standing stones, wading in the ocean, building caches of seashells to give the selkies, building fires at the Midsummer, when it never grew dark and there was no need for light. They get older in his drawings and Clar gets taller and thinner, and walks in the graveyard; Gareth squires for Gawain in Camelot. They meet on Midsummer again when Gawain comes home, and Clar, disdainful of everyone else, never leaves Gareth's side. She teaches him a magic to guard him. He brings her white horsehairs and dried flowers from Guenever's gardens.
Gareth learns the rest of knighthood from Lancelot, because now Gaheris needs Gawain; he gets his device, his marked shield, and then puts it away because Lancelot is shamed, and he says he'll give up his title until Lancelot has his again. He turns kitchen boy, and Kay sends him questing. Clar stays in Orkney, doing for the people there what her mother never did, giving them spells to guard their sheep, to protect their children from the bites of serpents, to keep the milk left out for the barn spirits from being drunk by the cats.
Gareth comes back from his quest with honour and two wives, one his own and one soon to be his brother's. Clar touches his shoulder briefly and sends him to take care of her hedgehogs.
Gareth dies. Clar lives alone. She gives the spells, for an easy labour or to keep the sheep well while they wander, but she speaks to no one. She turns shadowed, she has nothing to hold and no one to calm her and she dies by herself in a thatched house on a hill, among druid stones and her own enchantments. The Orkney people, because she is Theirs, their witch, bury her and build her a cairn, cover it with island flowers, remember it. She is the last of Queen Morgause's children, the only one who lived through the war.
(Queen Morgause was not born in Orkney: she married its King, and yet no one thinks of her as anything but of Orkney. Her husband died some years after they married and everyone forgot him. Queen Morgause, they say, Queen Morgause's children, never King Lot's.)
Gaheris doesn't show these, and never put them in the gallery. He doesn't even know whether they're true. What he imagines for Clar might never have happened, no matter how much she loves Gareth, and tragedy sells well. He should sell the pictures, he used to tell himself. But they died, and he didn't know whether they would ever come again.
Now the figures in his unpriced charcoals are grown up again; they're both grown up strange. Now they're all strange, same and different.
"You awake?" Mordred touches his hair, just light enough it's not a tousle.
"Yes,"
"Just checking."
He puts an arm around Gaheris, and Gaheris stops remembering, and they go back to sleep.
~~~
Jennifer, at fourteen, was still a skinny little brat. He was getting taller and fit his clothes better, but she stayed small and dark and ran around and folded herself up into tiny spaces. Her long hair swung loose, and half the girls in their class were jealous of her--straight, shiny hair was in. Jennifer's wasn't shiny, but it was so straight everybody said it couldn't be natural.
She was taking gifted intelligence classes and doing better than anybody else as long as she wasn't paired with anybody, or in a group. If she did things alone she was almost perfect. When she was with other people she started to talk in halting, angry sentences and gave the other kids looks that scared them. When people asked her things she didn't know, she tightened up all over and her eyes darkened--if she couldn't figure them out, she screamed. She always screamed when she didn't know the answer to something.
"Because I need to know," she told him.
He waited for her after History, when she got out of the GI class, and she walked along beside him, dragging her blue bookbag.
"Hey."
"Everybody was stupid to-day," she said, frowning. "She made us do things. With frogs. We looked inside, and it was smelly. Everybody was stupid. Biochemistry."
He was silent, because she'd go on if he let her.
"And," she said.
"Yeah?"
"You're getting old. Watch out! I'm going to scream again when we get home."
Her fits--her mother called them fits--were happening more and more; they'd doubled from the year before. It was always over something nobody else could understand, because nobody could understand why it mattered so much that she didn't know whatever it was she didn't know. More and more often it wasn't even over a question she got asked or something she couldn't find. When she picked herself up again, when she finally got calm, she'd just say it was because of something she couldn't remember. She wouldn't say what.
And it was weird, he thought, because Jennifer acted like she decided to do them when she talked, but he'd been with her a couple of times when it happened, and she didn't act like she knew what she was doing then. She screamed and cried and held on to him, and fell on the floor and rocked, and sometimes she talked another language that he knew, but he pretended not to know it. He'd known who she was for years. The Orkney Norse only proved it.
He didn't know what to do with knowing who she was, or knowing who he was. There had to be some way it made sense, had to be, but when he was trying to do his homework and just kept remembering his father knighting him, cold sword blade on his shoulder, kind eyes on his bowed head, saying, 'Now thou art Sir Mordred', he sure couldn't figure out what that way was.
And then his dad would yell "Christ!" to the TV in the other room and he'd shake the memory out of his head and get his math done.
He thought the way Jennifer kept getting upset, and the way the time between times got shorter and shorter, meant something, as if there was something that was going to happen--it was like the way when an earthquake was coming all the animals went crazy--but he couldn't figure it out. He couldn't figure anything out, and it made him mad. There had to be some way it made sense. If Jennifer remembered--he was sure if Jennifer remembered she'd know what it was.
~~~
When he wakes again Mordred is up, standing in front of the mirror and trying to flatten his tousled black hair. Gaheris yawns a little, rubs at his eyes, looks over. Mordred turns to him with a slightly cynical smile, just as he always does, and Gaheris thinks something important happened last night that passed out of his memory as easily as his daughter's name.
"Good morning."
"'Morning," he says.
"How long, exactly, are you planning on sleeping?"
"What time is it?"
"Noon."
"That's not bad."
"Not for you, maybe. Goddamn work-from-home types."
"You don't have work to-day."
"I have the sleep pattern." Mordred comes back to the bed and sits.
"How's Clar?"
"I haven't checked yet. I didn't hear any more frantic screams during the night, so that's promising."
"I'm sorry I fell asleep last night."
He raises an eyebrow. "What were you supposed to do? Go out for a drive?"
"You were talking to me. I don't remember much--jetlagged as hell."
"I was trying to get you to take off your shoes."
"It didn't work," he says, looking at his feet. Mordred laughs and tousles his hair in earnest this time, ruffling it up thoroughly.
"Ah, well. It was worth a shot."
"Look, if it was something important--"
"It wasn't."
~~~
They were taking the same Chemistry class together when Jennifer remembered. They were even partnered. They were standing right across from each other in the lab with the desk and their project between them and she had a test tube full of acid in her hands. Suddenly she broke off in whatever she'd been saying to him--he forgot. It wasn't important.
Her eyes. He was looking at her eyes, and they turned sharp as fire and steel and she drew in her breath quickly, and then smashed the test tube on the desktop. It was a slipping little movement of her hand, nobody else saw. The acid leaked onto her arm.
He waited for her to scream, but she only looked at him, she kept looking at him, as if she were looking across a universe and seeing him, her eyes burning. Then she turned to the teacher, who was standing over her shoulder and asking her what on earth had happened, what had she done, and said,--
"Doesn't matter."
The teacher sent her to the nurse's office.
After class he waited for her, waited outside the door in the long hall painted sea-green and covered with flyers for the band, the sports team, cheerleading, school play, any number of things he had no interest in and had never read before them, and while he was reading them heard her snapping at the nurse but not screaming. After a while the door opened and she came out. She had a cloth bandage on her arm.
"Jennifer--"
"You're dead," she said.
"No, I'm not," he said quietly.
"I tried."
"I'm sorry--"
"She's stupid." She looked over her shoulder at the door.
"I bet you could go home early."
"I am. You too."
"Really?"
She gave him a scathing look and grabbed his hand. "Now."
~~~
"Well. You ready to go down?"
Gaheris nods and gets out of bed, pulling at his shirt as if that's going to make the slept-in feeling go away, and rubbing his face and pushing his hair down. Mordred is already changed into clean clothes and looks wide awake, and he even laughs, looking at Gaheris, and pushes him into the bathroom before they reach the top of the stairs.
"Brush your teeth, first. You always look like such hell in the morning."
As they go downstairs, Gaheris trails his fingers along the wall side of the staircase quietly. The vast patchwork quilt across the living room doorway, even if it weren't spelled for it, keeps them out because it's Clar's; it's hanging still like vines off a castle. For a moment they stand in front of it awkwardly, and then Mordred shrugs and goes into the kitchen and starts making eggs. Gaheris follows him.
Ten minutes later, Gareth comes in. He's as rumpled as Gaheris, but considerably more cheerful, even with the red from Clar's dress all over him and a little magic tucked in his hair that even Gaheris can feel.
"Hi! --Oooh, eggs."
"Well?" Mordred says.
"You made eggs!" He beams. "I love eggs."
"Don't try that shit with me, kid. How's your sister?"
"--She's fine. She's hungry. She said I should get some breakfast for her."
"Tell her to come get it herself."
"Tell Mordred shut up!" Clar yells from the living room, only slightly muffled by the quilt.
"She, um, she says--"
"I hate all of you." Mordred shoves a plate of eggs and toast at him. "Go feed the dragon."
"Hungry!" she shouts.
"Jesus Christ."
~~~
"You didn't tell me." Jennifer sat with him on the grass and the twisted above-ground roots under one of the sycamores and rubbed the shiny smooth metal part of the zipper on her bookbag. She was frowning. He put his hands in his jean pockets and leaned back against the tree, smooth except for the places where irregular ovals in the bark showed much paler bark beneath.
"I didn't know what to tell you. I thought you'd freak out or something, or laugh at me, or tell me I'm stupid."
"You are. Didn't tell me."
"I'm sorry."
"It was stupid not to. I know things. I know. Everything."
"Like what?"
"Mother's spells."
He shivered and looked away. He was trying to think about it ironically, like his dad, like himself, but nothing came. Nobody had called Morgause Mother in years, not even him in his head. When he turned back Jennifer was watching him calmly.
"Everybody else is here too."
"Where?"
"Now. With now-mothers and now-fathers. Everybody."
"Gawain?" he asked, even though he knew she'd say yes, because she'd already said so.
"I said so. Stupid."
He grinned. "Great."
"But he's not the first. You have to wait." Suddenly she smiled at him, a smile like he'd never seen on her before, not in years more than he could count. It was a Clarissant smile. It was an Orkney smile.
"What?" he said to her in the old language.
"One just got born," she answered. Same tongue. Same words nobody else would understand, words that had died out years ago and belonged only to them in the whole world, never studied, always known, out of everyone's reach: part Norse, touched with Icelandic, accented like Scottish voices and scattered with Celtic words. Theirs.
"Who? Dost thou know who?"
"No," she said scornfully.
"Where?"
"No. It's nobody important. I felt."
"What do we do now?"
"Wait. Thou canst wait, canst thou not? Thou hast a long time of waiting to do."
~~~
Clar comes out by lunchtime. In the meantime, Mordred's been for and come back with the paper and has it spread all over the kitchen table to read, and Gaheris went on a run for her cigarettes and to stop by the gallery and look in through the windows for an empty spot on the wall where a charcoal had been sold. There were two. He went around by Amy's house and left her a folded note in his illegible handwriting to let her know he was home, and then he came back and settled in the kitchen as well, drawing with a pen on the Sunday comics.
Even Gareth is in with them, making microwave vegetable soup and toast--"Do you ever eat anything without toast?" Mordred asks irritably, and Gareth grins and dips it in his soup--when Clar comes and sits down between the wall and Gaheris and says,--
"You bought the right kind."
Gaheris pauses in drawing moustaches on the Rex Morgan, M.D., panels and slides the cigarettes over to her.
Gareth takes another bite of soupy toast. "I don't want to go back to work to-morrow."
"Too bad," Mordred says, looking up from the editorials. "We've got to keep her in cigarettes somehow. So does the banal conversation mean we're all finished now with the hysterics?"
"There's going to be another," Clar says.
"Christ, not again."
"Not that. Stupid. It's a thing. Person. She's going to say something."
"Do we have any idea what, pray tell?"
"No."
"Wonderful."
"His name is Will."
"I thought we were talking about a 'she'. Who the hell is Will?"
Gareth blushes. "Um. Me."
"What?"
"It's my--it's my name. Will Adams. You know."
"You know your name."
"Yeah," he says shyly, and finishes his toast. "I didn't think it was important or anything any more. And it's not--really my name. You know."
"No, but it would have made my life a hell of a lot easier, I can tell you that. I've been putting you down on the goddamn tax returns as a poverty-stricken Mexican youth we adopted because I couldn't get around your having no social security number--"
"I have a social security number!"
Mordred gives him a murderous look. "Thank you for telling me that two and a half years too late."
"What's my name?"
"Will. I thought we all knew that now."
"No, no, what you've been putting down on the tax stuff. My Mexican name."
"José. José fucking Wilkinson, since you're one of the family now. White American mother, hence the fact that you look like a New Yorker." He turns to Gaheris, holding the newspaper. "Don't tell me you know yours, too, or I'll kill you with Andy Rooney, so help me God."
Gaheris shakes his head.
"Good."
The telephone rings.
There's a scatter as everyone except Clar tries to answer it: Clar just steals Mordred's water glass, inspects it, and then empties it out in the sink, washes it twice, and refills it with iced tea out of the refrigerator while Gaheris, who got the phone first, says,--
"Hi," breathlessly.
"Hey! You're not Mike!"
"No," he says.
The girl's voice on the end of the line is young, sounds only a few years older than Amy's. He frowns a little, trying to place it or explain it. "Well, I was just calling for Mike. I have the right number, right?"
"Michael Wilkinson?"
"Yeah! Okay, just checking." She laughs. "I wasn't sure. So who are you?"
"His--his brother. Younger brother." He looks over at Mordred unsurely. Mordred covers his face with his palm, a God help me gesture.
"Are you sure I have the right number? 'Cause the Mike Wilkinson I know just has a little sister, and that's me."
"Oh. Um. Sorry. That's just what we--um--I mean--can I give you to Mike?"
"Oh, my God. Oh. I'm sorry, I didn't realise! Sure, just let Mike have the phone. Oh, by the way, I'm Jessie. What's your name?"
"Gaheris. My parents had a--sense of humour."
"I like that. It sounds cool. Okay, let me talk to Mike."
"Sure." He hands the telephone over with an sinking feeling, half-relief and half-fear. "It's for you. It's Jessie."
"How in hell do you always get your hands on my important calls?" Mordred says, taking it from him. "Hi, Jess? Hey, babe. How's it going? How's school? Yeah? Great. Oh, sure. Hey, I always am. No way. Nope. Really? Is he cute? Tell him if he's not nice I'll drive over and beat him up. Huh? With the brass knuckles I keep in my underwear drawer. Yeah. Yeah. You'd better. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to, sorry. I'm behind in everything. I've been in California for a week. Yeah, just visiting a friend. Yeah. No, it's fine. No. No snow. Shitty weather. Don't tell Mom. Okay. Oh, guess what? I'm going to be a godfather. I know. No, that friend I was seeing. His wife's having a baby in June. I know. I know, I'm going to corrupt the kid. You're telling me."
Gareth eyes him and then starts making Clar a sandwich. She hangs over his shoulder, telling him what to put on it. No tomatoes, they taste funny and they're not real. They're plastic, she says. Gaheris adds another moustache to the comics and then steals bread and shredded turkey from Gareth.
"Okay, I want to hear everything about school. And the boy. All the details. You've heard my news."
"Why does Mordred know so many girls?" Gareth whispers, handing him the mustard.
"This one's his sister."
"Oh. That's okay, then."
Clar snorts.
"Well, I'm glad to hear that. How's Mom? Great. I'm glad. Oh, yeah, Gaheris. Sorry about him. Huh? ...No. Jess. No."
All three of them look up and over at him. Clar laughs, takes her sandwich out of Gareth's hands, and slips the real estate listings out of the paper, tucks them under her arm. Then she goes into the living room. Gareth doesn't even notice; he and Gaheris are too busy watching Mordred.
"No, look, I swear to you, he's just--he's not American, okay, he's still getting hold of the vocabulary. I'm hosting him for the college, okay? He's from Wales, if you must know. What? The part where they still speak Welsh. Oh, come on. I am not covering up. Don't even, kiddo. No. Christ! You and Mom! No. He's not my--look, don't you think I'd have better taste than that? Trust me, if I go out with anyone, it's going to be someone with some class, better taste in shoes, and sixty-thousand million in the bank. Right. And someone who doesn't snore."
"Hey!"
"--Okay, slow for you, because I love you. I am not gay. But if I were, I would not be sleeping with Gaheris. Capisce? Good girl. There's a sweetheart. No, of course I'm not mad at you. I'm never mad at you. Okay, I was mad at you that day. Not now. Okay. Kiss your boy from me. I'm just kidding. Give me a kiss. You, too. Talk to you later, babe." He presses the 'end call' button.
Gaheris and Gareth look at him. Mordred looks back.
Fifteen minutes later Clar comes out from the behind the hanging quilt and starts shouting for quiet, just as Mordred finally sits on Gaheris with a laugh of triumph, just before Gareth jumps him and sends the three of them toppling again.