“Mary, you’d never know he was living,” the woman murmurs. Anna lifts her head to look at him. The child’s eyes are black as stones. “What will he be baptised, Lady?”

“I’ll decide later,” Anna says quietly.

The midwife nods. All of Anna’s servants are loyal–afraid of her, perhaps, but loyal, and sometimes even sympathetic, although she doesn’t care for their sympathy. What she really cares for is the wordless obedience, and the knowledge that they are hers, and will say and do as she directs them.

As for the child, it’ll probably die. Most women’s do. It’s a miracle the first three were all healthy, especially Mordred, born when she was so young; she had a better chance with Gawain and Agravain, but they at least came out fat and screaming. This one is thin and wrinkled like an old man, and he never makes a sound.

–

A week later she brings him to the baptismal font and the priest ducks his head in the holy water. Her first three children screamed at this, too, but though Gaheris’ face twists with misery he remains silent. Lot watches impassively.

He suspects her, Anna thinks, of cuckolding him. She hasn’t yet; she may.

Gaheris reminds her, suddenly of her sister Elaine, though God knows she hasn’t seen Elaine in years. Her sister was silent too, the last child born before beautiful, half-blooded Arthur. Anna sighs. Perhaps Gaheris will disappear the way Elaine has. His black eyes irritate her, in a way she can’t put into words, and she knows that he’s watching her, despite his eyes can’t focus on an object yet.

–

After a while she forgets about him. She sends for a wet nurse right away; Mordred is the only child she nursed, and the only one she will unless she gets her daughter.

She supposes, when she supposes, that he plays in the nursery with the other three, that he’s growing up somewhere out of sight. Lot avoids hers for a while, then brings her into his bed again; she endures it, knowing that he isn’t Arthur. Sometimes she considers casting a glamour on herself to forget whose hands are touching her body, but the thought disgusts her and she lets it pass.

–

“Lady.”

“What is it, Rosmund?”

“The nurse sent me word, the littlest prince has taken ill. The surgeon came round and bled him, but they can’t tell what’s gotten into him. She begged you to come, Lady.”

“Tell her I will come in a little while.”

“She says he’s like to die.”

“I will come apace.”

–

Anna finds him lying in his bed, his face to the wall. He’s two years old, if she were to venture a guess–his hair is dark and sleek like the coat of a seal. His black eyes fasten on her.

She doesn’t love him. Knowing it doesn’t stir anything within her, no regret, no guilt: she feels nothing, but she makes a potion for him anyway, full of bitter herbs and bitterer magic, because he belongs to her. The nurse sits him in her lap and helps him drink it, stroking his hair and murmuring sweet things as if he were her own child.

Anna wonders whether it should offend her, but finds it doesn’t.

Gaheris mends quickly with the drink. She doesn’t have to see him again.

–

Her next child is another boy, and then, finally, her girl. The rest of the children don’t matter. Clarissant is what she’s always wanted.

–

He knows consciously, by the time he’s five years old, that his mother doesn’t love him.

It isn’t difficult to know. She doesn’t go out of her way to see him, or any of them, really–he was mothered more by Gareth’s wet-nurse than ever by Morgause. The older ones don’t seem to mind much. Mordred, who is almost as quiet as Gaheris himself, has Gawain, and sticks close to him. They laugh and talk and run together, and Gaheris watches. Agravain doesn’t like anyone else, so he just doesn’t bother.

For Gaheris it feels like a blow to the heart, like the time he fell down the castle stairs and had the wind knocked out of him, and lay there on the stone floor unable to breathe or speak.

–

As he gets older, he takes refuge with their tutors. The monks are glad to have one enthusiastic student, so he learns to read Latin and Greek, and Father Culoc teaches him to write in illumination.

He spoils his manuscripts, but it’s easy to be whipped for ruining the expensive vellum, then forgiven, then given the chance to begin over again–far easier than to watch Morgause sweeping down the hallway in her long rich dress without ever looking his way.

–

Gawain teaches him to box, fence, and joust, but he does all of those things badly. He knows Gawain doesn’t mean to use him as an example every time; it’s just that he illustrates so well what mistakes can be made.

For the first year he attends every practise faithfully. For the first year he endures being beaten by Agravain and Mordred, and even little Gareth, at nearly everything, and the year after that he starts running away to the sea.

The sea at the Orkney shore is cold and dark and edged by craggy cliffs of stone that sometimes turn white with seabirds, nestling and squawking and wheeling out against the sky like distant glimpses of angels. The beach is long and Gaheris finds a quiet place to sit where he digs up shells and practises illuminated script in the sand.

After a while the sea always washes it away.

One afternoon he realises that the seals that lie along the rocks on the shore sometimes slip out of their skins and sun, or fight with each other, honking and barking despite their human throats. For the first few months he just watches them.

–

He sits in his usual place, chasing after a sand crab idly, when the selkie woman catches him off-guard. Her eyes are as black as his own, flat and smooth like sea-washed stones. She reaches out and cups his thin face in her hands.

“Hello,” he says shyly, and feels a fool for saying it. But she answers.

“Man. Come into the sea, Man,” and he lets her draw him, crawls onto his knees and follows her into the cold, salty water, and swims with her in the shallows.

She tries to take him further, but he hesitates, so she goes on without him.

–

The next day she pulls him into the deep water. The day after that she holds him under for as long as he can hold his breath, until he surfaces gasping and she watches him, laughing. She picks the seaweed out of his hair and kisses him.

Gaheris realises that he’s never been kissed before. He’s had no romance with any castle girl, and his mother never kissed him. He supposes one of the nurses might have, back before he can remember. But he doesn’t remember.

He’s sixteen years old.

–

He spends every day with her after that, and for a while it’s just more swimming, and kisses, and the selkie catches oysters for him and sometimes brings him fish, and he feels too guilty not to share them.

Once he brings her a ring, and she laughs at him again.

“That was stupid,” he says, shamefaced.

“It was stupid,” she agrees. “How would I wear it?”

“I don’t know. I guess I thought–I wasn’t thinking.”

“Men never think.”

Her voice is light, but in the fading sun, when it’s almost warm in the sparse grass at the edge of the beach, they make love quietly, and he runs his thin pale hands through her wet black hair. He’s heard a hundred stories from the nurses and the servants of men who married selkies and got children on them, and hid their skins to keep them faithful.

He knows where she leaves her skin when she comes out of the water, but he thinks of himself, caught like a trapped rabbit in the castle, and how he can’t be happy and he can’t sleep easy, and the torturous practises with Gawain.

When she leaves in the evening he lets her go.

–

“Gaheris, all your brothers have gone to Camelot. Gareth will go next year. Why haven’t you left yet?”

“Forgive me, Lady.” His voice is soft; he can’t see her face. His head is bent as he kneels before her.

“It’s past time.”

“I’ll go within the week if you will it.”

“I will it.”

It’s the first time she’s spoken to him in two years. His father is long dead. They tell about how King Pellinore brought him down treacherously in battle; Gaheris doesn’t care. He doesn’t care about any of it. His selkie has a mate from her own kind. He’s no better than he ever was. King Arthur won’t knight him. Gaheris hasn’t got the skill to do any brave deeds.

He thinks, fleetingly, that he should have asked her to send him to a monastery. He can write and read, at least, as well as any man, perhaps as well as a brother. The monastery’s fee would be less than the allowance he’ll need to keep a horse and page and quarters in the court.

But he doesn’t believe in God. Father Culoc’s teaching didn’t extend so far. Besides, he’d have to manage the company of at least twenty or thirty other brothers every day, and the thought makes him sick.

It isn’t any good. The next day he gathers his things together, takes a horse from the stables, and rides for Camelot.

–

Nothing changes here. His brothers are glad to see him–at least Gawain is. Mordred is quiet, as Mordred is wont, but there’s some spark of welcoming in his eyes, and Gaheris is comforted by it for a little while. Agravain just grunts.

He stays in his room, and spends the allowance for his page on books instead.

–

Gawain’s voice is calm and steadying, warm like goat’s milk. “You should try to earn your knighthood.”

“I can’t.”

“All of my squires say that. And all of them have been knighted.”

“Your squires can hold a damn sword.”

“Not all of them.” His mouth turns up at the corner. “Look, you’re only seventeen. That’s the right age. Just come along on our next patrol of the border. Uncle Arthur’s fond of giving knighthoods for valour on the front.”

“I’ll fall off my horse.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Gaheris leans against the wall, his arms folded across his chest. “–Gawain–”

“What is it?”

“Did Mother love you?”

Gawain pauses for a long while before he says, “In her own way.”

–

He goes on the next patrol, but at the second night when they camp he slips away to go hunting with his knife. He doesn’t have Agravain’s skill–Agravain, so blunt and caged indoors, so angry, is wild and free in the forest, and hunts as if he were born for it above any other purpose–but he can cut a snare and skin a rabbit, and it’s something to do. It gets him away from the rest of them.

He first hears the cries from far off, and mistakes them for some kind of bird. Then they grow louder, and he can hear the wounded note underneath, bright with pain.

When he finally finds the cluster of willows, the cries are loud enough to have frightened the woods silent. Gaheris catches a glimpse of pale brown linen, and winds his way through the brambles into the copse.

It’s a child.

–

“Hey, lass.”

She looks up, shutting her mouth, her cheeks tear-stained.

“Art thou lost?”

She nods, wordlessly.

“Hurt?”

Another nod.

“Come, show me what’s hurt thee.”

She gets to her feet and limps to him, standing at the edge of the trees. The knees of her skirt are streaked with the dirty brown of blood, and Gaheris sits her down before him, kneeling.

“Didst fall?”

She nods.

“On the stones?”

Nods.

He lifts up her skirt to find her knees scraped and bloodied, and strips off his tunic. He bites through the thread on the seams with his teeth, and ties half the cloth around both her legs.

“Shall I take thee home?”

She nods.

“Show me which way’s home?”

The child shakes her head. Her hair is drawn back into a plait the colour of musty straw–she’s Saxon. He sighs. The skirmish he’s followed his brothers on is with the Saxons, who won’t be ruled by Arthur. His own reddish-dark hair will give him away at once for a Celt.

“Dost mind what village?”

She shakes her head.

“Nor how far?”

Of course not.

“Didst thou come by walking?”

She nods.

“Then it can’t be far. Wast walking with the sun in thine eyen?”

Nods.

“Then I’ll find it. Canst ride on my shoulders.” He offers his arms, and she lets him lift her onto his back, where she wraps her legs around his neck and clings to his head with her arms. Gaheris sighs again.

“What’s thy father do, lass?” he asks, as he starts walking westward.

“Farrier.” It’s the first time she’s spoken, and her voice is thick from her crying.

“That’s a good trade. Hast any brothers or sisters?”

“Brother. All th’others died.”

“What’s thy brother’s name?”

“Richard.”

He keeps her talking all the way back to the village. At the outskirts, some man in a blacksmith’s leather apron raises a cry before Gaheris ever sets foot on the path. Before he has time to think, the child’s been pulled from his back by a blonde, thin-boned woman, and he’s been backhanded across the mouth and kicked to the ground with a boot in his stomach.

–

When he comes round, he’s lying on a straw mattress in a house lit by a smoky fire. The thin-boned woman is washing blood out of his mouth.

“Boy’s waked, Davey.”

A man comes into view, a man with a giant bushy beard and fierce eyebrows. Gaheris closes his eyes.

“Hey, boy. Anna says thee saved her from the woods.”

Gaheris nods, his eyes still shut. He hurts just looking at the man, letting alone the pain in his back and stomach.

“Came from the knights, did thee?”

He nods again; he can’t talk around the cloth in his mouth.

“We’ll be sending thee back soon as thee’s got thy feet again. Wager thee couldn’t walk now if I put money on thee.” The man laughs, a broad laugh that makes Gaheris’ head ache. He lies still while the woman finishes cleaning his face.

–

The Saxons are true to their word. By the next morning he’s not so sore he can’t walk, and they tell him the way back to his camp from the village.

Agravain swears.

“We should rout the blond bastards off the face of the earth.”

“Shut up,” Mordred says automatically.

“Are you all right?” Gawain asks.

“I’m fine,” Gaheris says. “I’m fine. They wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t thought I was trying to steal their child. They let me go, didn’t they?”

“Aye, they did.”

When Gawain and Agravain are busy elsewhere, Mordred catches Gaheris lying down by the fire and puts a blanket around him, smoothing back his hair with one hand.

“It’s well you’re well, brother.”

Gaheris sighs. It feels like something painful and old drains out with his breath, like a splinter in his blood that’s finally coming out. For the first time in his life he thinks that perhaps his brothers love him.

In the end, he’s still enough hurt that Gawain won’t let him go to the fight, but when they return to Camelot Arthur knights him anyway.

–

In the end, he goes back to Orkney for nothing so much as for the sake of his selkie woman. It’s been years–nine, ten, he doesn’t remember accurately. His own wife waits for him back in Camelot, and it would be a lie to say he doesn’t love her; he loves her more than his own life.

It’s just that he can’t sleep at night, and when he does he dreams of the Orkney shore and the cold sand, and the selkie watching him from her place on the sun-warm stones, waiting for him to return.

It’s either that dream or the one where he dies, in a burst of scattered blood and shattered bone, and as to which one he’d like to have come true, he doesn’t have any trouble deciding.

So he leaves Lynette and goes back to his mother’s castle.

–

The selkie opens her arms to him as if he’d never gone away. The first day, the first hour he goes down to the beach, before he ever tells Morgause that he’s arrived. And there she is, waiting for him, stretched out on the sand.

He’s not a boy any more, no youthful lover, but he’s ready to leap into the sea for her in a moment. She makes him feel whole again, she makes his blood stop pounding and thickening and aching in his body. It’s like returning home after a journey abroad. It’s like sleeping after having been awake too long.

Afterwards he lies on the warm rock with her while she plays with his hair. She’s forgotten his name, true, but she knows him.

He doesn’t talk to her of going or staying or how long he’s been gone. He’s not even sure she’d understand that. He’s not sure she would care, or whether it would matter. It’s just the presence of her, and he knows as surely as he knows anything that it’ll end as it did before, she’ll go back to her own kind, but in the wintry season when the seals aren’t mating she can cast off her skin and stay with him a while.

It was the right choice to come, he decides. It was the right choice.

–

Anna is grateful for the boy.

Lamorak is no skilled lover, and not particularly wise. He’s just a soldier with a few ideas. But his body is young and his eyes are bright and he loves her, or he thinks he loves her, and she’s been lonely since Lot died.

No man will ever be Arthur; she will never have that. But Lamorak eases the longing when she’s with him, and she’s always been willing to take advantage.

He’s overstayed his time in her home. She knows that. He was sent to her to make peace on behalf of his family, since his father committed the unpardonable sin of being the one to slay Lot in battle. Of all the ways to show diplomacy, finding his way into her bed is not the worst. Still, if any of her sons find out, she supposes they’ll hold her responsible, as though she should be loyal to the memory of a dead man.

–

In the morning she takes breakfast with him, and afterwards he shows off his skill with the sword against one of her servants–it is his fancy, to show her how strong he is, and she tolerates it because it brings him much pleasure.

When he has done with that she sets aside her book and convinces him to come upstairs with her. Something in her is troubled to-day, worse than usual, and she wants the company.

In her warm bed, he spreads her dark hair across the pillow, down from its plaits; he kisses her shoulders and vows undying love that she knows won’t last. Anna knows. She has time for her teacher.

He whispers her real name and not her title: Anna, Anna, a groan wrested from his lips each time she presses near to him and draws away again, teasing him brainless.

–

She doesn’t know how long Gaheris has been watching–she only knows that she lifts her head and there he is in the doorway, her black-eyed son, his face drawn.

“Mother of God,” he says, in a strangled voice, when he sees that her eyes are on him.

“Gaheris.” She says it sharply, bitingly, to call him back. “Get out.” She sits up, drawing her sheets around her. “Get out.”

And then she feels it, like lightning down her spine, the burning shock of realisation. Like Elaine, who was silent, but felt things as strongly as she or Morgan ever did–like Elaine, her son is more than she credited him. She almost laughs: it is so unfair, and it is also just.

His eyes are flat, are blind, like stone instead of eyes. She doesn’t love him. She feels no stirring of love for him, poor creature, but she understands that she has done this, as surely as she did anything in the lives of her children.

“Do you love me, Gaheris?”

Lamorak is silent beside her, senseless. Of course he has no idea what to do.

Gaheris’ thin body shakes. “Yes.”

“That was your choice. It was always your choice, little fool. You should have learned better, like Mordred.”

“But surely–”

“I am done, Gaheris.”

Instead of turning away, he gropes blindly at his side for his sword, and she knows, she knows, but she sits very still and waits. She will give him this gift, let him be brave, let him make his own vengeance for his life.

She has no other gift for him at all.

–

His sword pierces her like a hawk sweeping down and killing, always killing: in this, at long last, he has a steady hand.

And there’s silence, not even Lamorak’s shuddered breath to break the stillness, not even the pounding retreat of his footsteps as he runs, panicked, down the stairs. In an instant, she remembers Gaheris’ birth, as silent as this, as cold, as bloody.

It’s over, Anna thinks, and then her body falls to the floor.

Nothing but silence now.

—

David first came to us in Gibeah after my father’s army defeated the Amalekites. At that time I knew in my heart that the Lord God had ended His covenant with my father, and the grace of the Lord had left my father, for he was tormented, and his spirit suffered all day and all night.

The prophet Samuel who served the Lord in my father’s presence left us too. In the old days Samuel would pass his time in the temple, and when my father brought me by to be anointed, as he did before every battle, Samuel would get up at once and come to us. He smiled when he saw me, and anointed my forehead with oil, saying that the Lord God would protect me from our enemies. My father, who was pleased that I was skilled enough to fight even when I was a boy, would smile also and thank Samuel for my blessing.

Before we battled the Amalekites at Havilah and even as distantly as Shur, and my father slew them entirely, Samuel blessed me, but he did not smile, at me or my father. When I came home, he led me aside and took me by my shoulders, saying, “Jonathan, your father has sinned.”

Truly I did not know how to answer. I knew that my father had disobeyed the Lord God and spared the king of the Amalekites, and he had spared the finest of their cattle and sheep to make sacrifices to the Lord; but I had not argued with him, for I thought it was good to make sacrifices after the Lord had so blessed our fight. Though I knew the Amalekites to be sinners I thought it gracious to have spared their king. But Samuel was angry, and that night I heard him crying out in the temple to the Lord. He cried out all night, and in the morning he went to my father.

I was not permitted in my father’s chambers for that meeting, but I know that Samuel slew Agag king of the Amalekites himself, by his own hand, and then he went to Ramah, without speaking to me again. My father went to his estate in Gibeah, and bade me come with him.

All day in Gibeah I paced in my room, trying to accustom myself to the weight of my body without my armour.

When I was a child in Israel I thought I was my father’s only son. He wished to make a better soldier of me by giving me no reason to hesitate in war, to feel no fear that I might never again meet with some person I loved. Thus I was kept separate from my brothers and my sisters. My father trained me in the use of my sword and my spear and my bow, and I fought in all his battles as soon as I was skilled enough.

But when Samuel left him, my father refused to see me, saying that I was nothing to him for my part in the battle at Havilah. I thought then that I should die, for what purpose had I, if his great battle shamed him? What was I, save my father’s general? I had no friend to turn to, for he had permitted none. He had his advisors, but I was alone.

Then my father called David to Gibeah.

What should I say of David? He came from Bethlehem where he tended sheep for his father, and played his harp for mine. When he played, the sore and restless part of my father’s spirit was finally soothed; for the first time since Samuel left us my father was able to be at peace as he was when the Lord loved him.

David is younger than me by only two or three years, and he is the handsomest man I ever saw; truly I have known few men my own age, for in my father’s armies most of the men are ordinary soldiers, my elders by at least five years, and often as many as ten. In a way David, like these men, falls under my command, for he as well as they have fought for my father, but I do not know how to command him.

He defeated Goliath, the Philistine champion from Gath, with a small stone. I, I have trained my whole life, but swear I could not do such a thing. When my father’s army returned from the Shaaraim road where we routed the Philistines (having returned to war, for my father was heartened by the music David played for him, and took up arms once more), my father presented him to me.

“Jonathan,” he said. “This is the root of Jesse who slew Goliath; the son of Jesse of Bethlehem. You know him; he plays the harp for me.”

I did not know him then; or only from watching from afar. I had not spoken to him. I have never had a tongue that could form fine words, as the priests do in the temples; I cannot speak any way but plainly. Still, I thought at least I would do him the honour I knew how for his part in routing the Philistines–I meant to greet him as it would befit him.

Before our Lord God of the Israelites, who wrestled with Israel our father in the guise of an angel, it was as though something entered into me in his presence. I am not a holy man, and I have never truly felt the spirit of God within me, not as some men do, not as my father once did. Truly I tell you that I will never know that grace that priests speak of, which to hear tell of must be as wonderful as a spear which flies up to the sun, then falls like a gold-backed eagle to its mark. Yet when I stood before David and opened my mouth to greet him, I, who am nothing but a man, I felt as though I were honoured among men.

I swear to you now that I knelt down before him.

I bowed my head so I could not see him, but he set his hands upon my shoulders and drew me to my feet. I still could not speak, so I unbuckled my armour and lay it down before him.

My father made a noise of displeasure behind me, but I could not heed him. David took my armour, though he was too lithe to wear it, and when we had returned to my father’s house he came to my room with me, though my father said he would not be satisfied until David had played for him. In my room I took off my sword and my bow and gave them to David.

He looked at me quietly, with eyes as dark as the burnish of bronze. Still I could not speak, and I took off my robe and my tunic and lay them down, and then David son of Jesse of Bethlehem kissed me.

How should I speak of this kiss? In the commandments our ancestor Moses brought down from Mount Sinai, after the Lord God ransomed us from Egypt, he admonished us against such things, calling upon the displeasure of the Lord. Nevertheless I knew these things were done in my father’s army, often before a battle when the soldiers would take comfort with one another, or when they had been long away from their homes and could not be satisfied alone. But I had never myself– I had never felt any stirring of passion for man or woman until David kissed me.

He is as strong and lithe as a lioness, and he went to my bed with me in my father’s house. I was dirty from the dust and sweat of the day of fighting, but he washed my skin with fresh water and took my mouth with his. He took me into his hands and between his lips. I had never known these things before.

As long as I had then lived alone, it was as if I had met my brother as well as my lover. At night he would lie beside me, and I felt like a young woman, for truly I confess that I lay awake watching him sleep and thinking on how dear he was to me.

My father had not failed in this: that I do not fear for my own life when I go into battle. Instead I fear for David of Bethlehem. Every fight I expected him to be hurt, though I knew the Lord God to be with him. I fought in a fever by his side and it is as I said before, that I hardly dared to command him. When we had won–as often as not from the strength of his arm above any other reason–it was painful to me to wait to return to my room before I fell on him, kissing his limbs and his face and assuring myself he was unhurt.

When I did this he laughed, gently.

“Jonathan, am I not well? And you are filthy.”

“In the name of the Lord God our God–”

“Shhh.” He kissed me, unbuckling my armour. “The Lord God is with me. I am never afraid.”

This I knew to be a lie, for when David is afraid, or sad, or troubled in his spirit, he writes songs on his harp, and for the last few days he remained in the corner of my room playing and singing. Still, I did not contradict him. I helped us both out of our clothes and he came to my bed, and we knew each other there.

It was soon after this that my father grew to hate David, and he began to devise errands in the hope that David would be slain in the fulfilling of them. At the same time, while David played for him in his chambers, he would strike at him with a spear. David told me all these things, and I begged him to go into hiding, but he swore that the Lord God would protect him.

He swore this to me even on the day he told me that my father intended to marry him to my sister Michal, but had set a marriage-price of one hundred Philistine foreskins.

“One-hundred?” I asked him. “How will you kill one hundred men and take their foreskins? And will you marry my sister?”

“Jonathan, how am I to refuse her? I have already refused your sister Merab–” He held up his hand to silence me, for I had begun to speak. “I didn’t tell you because he changed his mind.”

“He will do it again. He is going mad.”

“If he does not, how am I to refuse? I cannot tell him that I will not take his daughter because I love his son. I will pay the marriage-price twofold, and marry your sister. But do not think it means I will leave you.” David set his hands at my hips and drew me to him.

“Then let me go with you to help you.”

“Let me go alone. Stay here and pray for me.”

We argued more, but it is not worth the telling; in the end he won, and we lay together, and he left. God was with him, as always, and he brought back the marriage-price twofold and was married to my sister.

This did nothing to make my father hate him less, and he began again to look for ways to take David’s life. I argued with him, told him David was one of my best soldiers, his best soldiers. I told him that I needed his help to keep Israel safe. I reminded my father of how he had killed the Philistine champion, and that he was an innocent man.

My father took an oath to spare him, and I thought certainly he was persuaded; too I thought that he had no knowledge of us. David lived quietly with my sister, and I oversaw the training of our new soldiers. I believed all was well until Michal sent word to me that David had fled to Ramah where the prophet Samuel was living, and that I was to meet him there.

By the time I was on the road to Ramah David was on his way back to Gibeah. I met him in a field just outside the city. He had lost all his composure, and was clutching his harp and weeping bitterly, and when I caught him by his shoulders he buried his face in my neck.

“What have I done?” he cried. “What is my crime? How have I wronged your father, that he is trying to take my life?”

“Never,” I said. “You are not going to die. Look, my father doesn’t do anything, great or small, without confiding in me. Why would he hide this from me? It isn’t so, I swear by the Lord God.”

But David swore and said, “Your father knows very well that I have found favour in your eyes, and he has said to himself, ‘Jonathan must not know this or he will be grieved’. Yet as surely as the Lord lives and as you live, there is only a step between me and death.”

“Whatever you want me to do I will do for you.”

“Jonathan, to-morrow is the New Moon festival, and I am supposed to dine with the king; but let me go and hide in the filed until the evening of the day after to-morrow. If your father misses me at all, tell him, ‘David earnestly asked my permission to hurry to Bethlehem, his home, because an annual sacrifice is being made there fore his whole clan’. If he says, ‘Very well’, then your servant is safe. But if he loses his temper, you can be sure that he is determined to harm me. As for you, show kindness to your servant, for you have brought him into a covenant with you before the Lord. If I am guilty, then kill me yourself! Why hand me over to your father?”

Truly I tell you I was frightened, for David had never called himself my servant before, and I would never have thought of harming him. My breath ached in my throat and I held him close to me, my fingers curled in his hair so hard I must have been hurting him. “Never! If I had the least knowledge that my father was determined to harm you, wouldn’t I tell you?”

“Who will tell me if your father answers you harshly?”

“Come,” I said, “let’s go into the field,” and I drew him from the road, into the tall fields. He was shaking against my body, and I was sick in my heart and my bowels at the thought that he no longer trusted me to help him against my father. In the field I said to him, “By the Lord God of Israel, I will surely sound out my father by this time the day after to-morrow. If he is favourably disposed toward you, will I not send you word and let you know? But if my father is inclined to harm you, may the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if I do not let you know and send you away safely. May the Lord be with you as he has been with my father. But show me unfailing kindness like that of the Lord as long as I live, so that I may not be killed, and do not ever cut off your kindness from my family–not even when the Lord has cut off every one of David’s enemies from the face of the earth. And may the Lord call David’s enemies to account.” I spoke so for I hoped to show him that I was as much in need of him as he of me, to reassure him.

But David would not speak to me. Instead he kissed me, as feverishly as I used to kiss him after a battle. He pulled me down amongst the heads of wheat in the field and divided the folds of my clothes with his hands, forgetting his harp beside him. He stroked my face, and I kissed his hands and his body, and we knew each other there. For a while I thought he was consoled, for he stopped shaking and he lay quietly beside me afterward, but then he got up and urged me again to protect him from my father.

“To-morrow is the New Moon festival,” I said to him. “You will be missed, because your seat will be empty. The day after to-morrow, toward evening, go to the place where you hid when this trouble began, and wait by the stone Ezel. I will shoot three arrows to the side of it as though I were shooting at a target. Then I will send a boy and say, ‘Go, find the arrows’. If I say to him, ‘Look, the arrows are on this side of you; bring them here’, then come, because, as surely as the Lord lives, you are safe; there is no danger. But if I say to the boy, ‘Look, the arrows are beyond you’, then you must go, because the Lord has sent you away. And about the matter you and I discussed–remember, the Lord is witness between you and me for-ever.”

Then I left him, silent, his face still streaked from weeping.

For the first day of the festival my father said nothing, but the second day he approached me, took me by my shoulder very hard. “Jonathan, why hasn’t the son of Jesse come to the feast, either yesterday or to-day?”

“David earnestly asked me for permission to go to Bethlehem,” I said. “He said, ‘Let me go, because our family is observing a sacrifice in the town and my brother has ordered me to be there. If I have found favour in your eyes, let me get away to see my brothers’. That is why he has not come to the king’s table.”

Then my father struck me in my face. “Son of a perverse and rebellious woman! Don’t I know that you have sided with the son of Jesse to your own shame and to the shame of the mother who bore you? As long as the son of Jesse lives upon this earth, neither you nor your kingdom shall be established. Now send and bring him to me, for he must die!”

“Why should he be put to death? What has he done?” I said, but my father took his spear in his hand and threw it at me. I believe that if he had not trained me so well I would not have been able to avoid it, but certainly I knew that he would not keep the oath he had made to me, to spare David’s life.

I left the festival and fasted until the next morning. Then I went out with a boy and my bow, and told him to run and find my arrows after I shot them. As he was running, I shot beyond him, and cried, “Isn’t the arrow beyond you? Hurry! Go quickly! Don’t stop!” Then he brought my arrows back to me.

I sent him back to town ahead of me, for I intended to walk back quietly by myself, my soul wearied. But David got up from behind the stone Ezel and ran to me. He knelt before me, and then he rose and kissed me, and I began to weep, and he wept too. Truly I believe he wept more than I did, but I cannot say, for we both grieved bitterly and kissed each other all the while.

Then I strengthened my resolve and told him, “Go in peace, for we have sworn friendship with each other in the name of the Lord, saying, ‘The Lord is witness between you and me, and between my descendants and your descendants for-ever’.”

Then David left, and I went back to town.

I only saw him once more after that day. My father went to war against him, but I would not take part in it, and he took my birthright and gave it to my brother Abinadab. I remained in Gibeah while David raised his army in Judah. He joined with Abiathar son of Ahimelech, who was slain by my father, and they saved Keilah from the Philistines; men from Keilah joined his forces there. Then they went into the Desert of Ziph where my father searched for them.

While he was in the desert the Lord God sent His spirit to me for the only time. I was alone in Gibeah in my room, and suddenly I knelt down on the bed where David used to lie by me and began to pray, which I had never done so honestly before, not since I was a small child. At that moment, the Lord instructed me to go to Horesh and meet David, for he had need of me.

It was over as quickly as it came upon me, like a storm that passes, but I felt as though something beautiful, which had entered me, was gone, and I had touched something wondrous that I would never touch again. I lay on the floor and wept because I knew I will never feel it again. I believe it is what my father used to feel when God was with him, and what David feels every day, and for a moment I understood why my father is so angry that David possesses it and not he himself.

When I had wept I roused myself and journeyed to Horesh. There I met David. He had over six-hundred men with him, and he was well-prepared, but I found him silent and frightened as he had been when I left him in the fields outside of Gibeah.

I took him into a room apart and kissed his hands. Then I called for a basin of water and one of oil, and when there were brought I made him sit and I washed his feet. Afterwards I anointed his feet and his forehead with oil, as Samuel always did for me.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said. “My father Saul will not lay a hand on you. You will be king over Israel, and I will be second to you. Even my father knows this.”

I did not lie with him then. Truly I tell you that I regret it now, for my last memory of his body is the brief time we passed in the wheat field before he left. He was inconsolable then, but when I left him in Horesh he was ready to do battle. We sat through the day in his room, and he composed music on his harp to rough songs I tried to write for him. I cannot speak well, but I tried. I sang of the spirit of God, and how it felt when it entered into me. David laughed at my poor singing. I swore my oath to him again, and he made a covenant with me, and then I left, for I could not fight against my own father, not even for David’s sake.

But we are at war with the Philistines again, my father and I. Our army spent too long seeking David, and the Philistines came back down to Israel. We will fight on Mount Gilboa to-morrow.

There is nothing to hold me back now. I have known the spirit of God, which I would never have known without David of Bethlehem. I have known the love a man feels for his brother, and a fiercer love still, and perhaps the Lord God will punish me for it; but I have felt it, and I truly tell you the punishment of having never borne it would be greater. I would never have felt these things if David had not come to Gibeah.

And someday David will be king over Israel, as the spirit of God said to me. When that day comes, I will be his armour-bearer and his servant, his general, his chief officer and his brother. I will never fear for my purpose again.

…

1 Samuel 31:11-13, 2 Samuel 1:4-10, 17-18, 25-26

How the mighty have fallen in battle!
Jonathan lies slain on your heights.
I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
you were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
more wonderful than that of women.

I had a friend whose dreams came true
so he was afraid to sleep.
He looked to God for answers
and God said I do not know.

The sheep barn on the hill was empty, but
when we put out the hay they came running.
A ram, six ewes; four white lambs, one black lamb, limping
because of the dog that bit him.

If I admit I love you,
does it reflect on me?
Heaven knows I’m not fragile.
Lithe son of sinews, bones, and restless atoms
I wish I knew whether we understood each other.

Is our kinship just the reflection of my hope?
Are we one people with our wounds and secrets,
or am I your anthropologist,
trying to emulate and learn your language
earn your trust and study your patterns
so that one day you’ll maybe
take me in?

My father unbound the bales of hay, and I
carried buckets of sweet grain from the barn.
Our sky was the colour of goose feather down
and this is my country, my homeland and mother
and if I love you then I’m one among others.

The wind huffed in our ears all the way down the hill
while the black lamb watched us like a lighthouse-keeper.
I had to make some kind of choice
so I decided not to choose yet.

I’ll see you in your country to-morrow
I’ll take harbour in my sleep to-night.
Lithe son of sinews bones and restless cells
we are the children
of a God without answers.
Whatever reflects is just full of light.

It was true that once he had thumbed the part in her hair where the red paint disappeared subtly against her skin, and said, “How warlike you are,” on their wedding night. It was true that their children had loved her for the stories she told them of battles and justice and the heroes of India. But she watches now across the water for the dark bow of the ship to come within range, and her hand is perfectly steady on the wheel of the Nautilus.

“Captain,” Akal said at her elbow. “He wants to speak with you again.”

She scoffed. “Again?”

“He knows what you are doing, and he directed me to tell you that his heart is breaking.”

“I will not permit him to speak with me when I am working,” she said, smooth and final, like the closing of the sea above a sinking ship. Arronax was good company when he wanted to talk of science or mathematics or his work in Paris, but when he began to speak of morality and right and wrong and the purposelessness of revenge, she hardened her heart like Pharaoh and kept him away.

“Are you ready?” Harker says at her elbow. Harker is straight-backed and tall, her neck still wrapped in a scarlet scarf.

“I have always been prepared,” she says.

“I suppose we had better give it to them, then.”

She had chosen the name because it took everything from her–country, sex, language, occupation. With that name she was no one. Even Akal, who was a clever man and certainly aware that his captain was not everything that he should be, by rights, would not have guessed exactly what the missing pieces were. She found that the Latin buried her dead children, her distant home. It was as easy to wipe them away as the bindi on her forehead.

Arronax knew she had secrets. She had been straightforward at least in that. Sometimes she thought that he was fair and honest enough, and enough kin to her in spirit, that she would permit him to know a little of her present (but never her past). He recognised that the pale spiral of narwhal tusk was built into the design of the ship, that she had taken everything from the sea because she had no other broker of goods, no habitat or environment, no homeland other than these coral fields and depthless canyons. She considered that, weighed it and balanced it against the fact that he was a civilised man, and she would have, eventually, to let him go. Then she kept her secrets.

Her hand is perfectly steady.

The impact rocks the Nautilus, making it quiver down to the storerooms, thorough enough to feel beneath her feet. The spiral-cut spear at the helm is tearing through the soft steel of the ship above them. She knows it in her heart. She knows the size and shape of the ripped metal cavern, knows how it sounds when the sailors scream and shout and try to get their boats free in time to leave a few survivors.

She’ll bring the Nautilus up first, and Sawyer will pick them off with his rifle.

“Nemo–!” Harker’s voice is like a small bell in an empty chamber, clear but followed by an echo. “Bring her around! For heaven’s sake, stop, we’ve got to pick up the men in the water.”

“Leave them. They’re only Englishmen.”

“They’re people!”

She can hear Arronax’s voice in Harker’s, the echo of the bell. She can hear Arronax’s French consonants, his swallowed r’s, and the strain on the word people that betokened his outrage. The only thing missing is the way Arronax made her question herself, for the only time in this life. He was the only one who gave her doubts.

He watched the fish through her window, the octopodes winding quick-footed across the glass, the sleek sharks that circled back curiously to stare at them inside. He read her notes and went over her careful sketches. He ate from her table and agreed to learn whatever she offered to teach him, and he repaid her by telling her, over and over, “They’re people.”

She knows they’re people. She has always known they were people.

That’s why she does it.

“Nemo! Bring the ship around!”

She looks at Harker with hard eyes, then turns the wheel. Arronax would be happy if he knew; but he won’t know. Perhaps Sawyer will shoot them anyway, and make the question moot. Perhaps she’ll have a revelation and put on this new guise of mercy as easily as her husband’s clothes.

At night she goes back to her room and unwinds the turban from her dark head. The cloth comes loose with a whisper, and suddenly she’s thinking of Arronax and Dakkar and her heart almost slips, her heart almost tumbles, loose like the cloth of a turban. But she catches it and puts it back.

She made herself no one. She doesn’t intend to change that now.

I wore my sisters’ hand-me-downs
patched dresses meant for longer legs and smaller plans.
I was the last of eleven
except the baby who died.
I was the fairy princess in the dust
sweating out my damn big dreams in the Carolina sun.

We were movers back in the day
whether or not you believe me
or hear what I’m telling you
out of these dry lips that never make the words I’m
telling them to.

I was the most beautiful girl on the beach
in the prettiest swimsuit
when the sea itself would rock backwards in waves
overcome by me. Back then
I could have walked on water
and all the boys sang Stella under my windows.

Ten years later I was teaching history
bone-tired from my three kids at home
and twenty-seven more Monday to Friday.
But winter evenings when I headed home
the skies were full of frosty stars wailing my name
and Tennessee felt like home after a while.

We were movers back in the day.
Now Bill sits on the couch opposite my chair
watching the news too loud, thinking I’ve forgotten.
I still speak the language.
I just can’t say the words.

I used to remember every book I read
and the names of my daughters.
But those things aren’t as important
when the ghosts of my sisters come to visit
sitting their ectoplasmic selves down on my furniture.
Sometimes they lead me off to parties I used to go to
the ones where nobody could talk as smart as fast;
my hot dusty Carolina dream picked up and realised.

Some days they dress me up
like my fairy princess self.

Sometimes I go back to school myself
working towards my paperthin pair of proud letters
even when it leaves me so weary I can hardly bear
to drive myself home to my little girls.
They’re trouble, but they’re good.
Those choirs of stars know their names too.

We were movers back in the day,
state to state, year after year, following the jobs
praying for the money.

Me, I’m still moving.
You think I’m a quiet woman
living in this chair in silence, stillness–
but you can’t see me walking down the beach
while the boys and the waves think about how to flirt.
I can hear the clamour.
Stella, Stella, Stella, Stella.

At first he thinks he’s back in the castle, on his straw mattress in his old room, with Agravain and Gareth sleeping near him, Agravain whining and grunting in his sleep like a dog, Gareth with one arm thrown over his stomach, because Gareth would go after the closest person to stay warm. His heart sinks a little because it never made him happy; but then he realises that he isn’t really here.

He’s sleeping in a pile of brush. Sleeping? He turns over and sits up, rubbing at his eyes, and when he does that he feels a cold wet smear.

God. No.

That’s a lie. Lie? It can’t be true; so it’s a lie.

Maybe he’s in the castle. From his window he could look out across the long heather meadow, down the steep sloping cliff that fell into the sea. He could stand there shivering in his woollen trousers watching the silver shapes on the dark sand.

But that wouldn’t explain the blood.

He gets up (trousers aren’t woollen. Leather, maybe. Or linen. Either way it’s dirty) and looks around for the meadow. At least if he finds that he can follow it. His arms and chest feel stiff and tight, but he realises that it’s from the blood, the blood is drying, and his clothes are stiffening in it. God, he thinks, what could have that much blood? Maybe a boar.

Suddenly he realises that he can’t remember whether there are boars in Orkney.

He’s best off finding the sea.

The sea used to be the only thing that could cure the cold, anyway. That cold, he remembers. It would get into his body, under the skin and inside the bones, and the only thing that could get it out was to go down to the sea and watch the silver. They would come to find him there. If anyone looks for him now they’ll know.

As it turns out, he remembers where the cliff is. He even remembers where the golden curve of the path is, follows it down through the stones until he comes out on the shore.

Something in his heart twitches. (Maybe he shouldn’t be here.) (Maybe, but he has to get the cold out somehow, and he has to wash away some of the blood before it drowns him, and they’ll know where to find him here, they always knew how.)

He kneels down in the surf where it meets the sand, white with a froth like Orkney beer. The blood comes off easily, leaving a red stain in the sand, and he’s so pleased with way it washes out that he takes off his tunic and scrubs it with a rough rock, takes off his trousers, ducks his head under the bitter, salty water and shakes away the blood that’s dried in his hair. It’s all coming off, it’s coming away, it’s leaving him.

The cold, though, the cold is still there.

He waits. He remembers the waiting, although they’re not bound by moonlight, have none of the fay rules of light and dark. They’ll come when they want to, and when they want to they’ll be here.

He falls asleep.

“Man.”

Oh, God, his heart is as tired as his body. He lifts his head anyway, and she looks down at him, her eyes like flat black stones.

“You’re back.”

“It’s cold out there,” he says, steadily. “Damned cold. I missed you.”

She sits down beside him, her long body the brown and grey colour of sand. Her hair is black like her eyes. “Why didn’t you take my skin?”

“Don’t have any use for a damned sealskin,” he tells her. “You wear it better.”

She almost smiles. Almost. “Did you come back for me?”

He nods.

“Why do you smell like blood?”

“I don’t know. Suppose I killed something.”

She rests her hand on his knee, holding her fingers strangely, as if there were too many. He’s naked, but the cold is ebbing out now, out with the tide.

“There are other Men coming from the big island. Boats and Men. They smell like your kin.”

“That’s all right. They know to find me here.”

The selkie leans forward, her black hair brushing his cheek. “Man, the blood smells like your kin. Don’t stay here.”

“What?”

“We don’t want your Man blood in our water. You didn’t take my skin. Go back up and hide from your kin, but don’t come back here.”

He finds the way back to the heather meadow, but he doesn’t remember how. He doesn’t even think of his clothes until he’s back from the cliffs, deep into the meadow. Nothing means anything. (Maybe it never will again.)

He doesn’t remember, either, whether he sleeps. All he can think of is the blood, and the black-eyed selkie with her hand on his knee. He kissed her once. Not now, but a long time ago, back when he was a child still and shared his room with Gareth and Agravain. She was down on the sand with her skin folded behind a rock, and he found it and let it be. She was so beautiful, basking in what sun there was. He sat still and watched her, and when she came to him he apologised, and she took him into the water.

(Don’t come back here.)

“Gaheris!”

When he hears them calling his name, the cold sinks back into his body, and this time he knows it won’t wash away in the sea.

“Gaheris! God, where is he?”

He burrows further into the thick heather and pretends to be deaf and blind and senseless, God, anything, because his kin have come and it might have been their blood, and he can’t put a name to anything any more but he knows he’ll dream about it anyway. Everything is silver. The world is full of blood and silver and the scent of heather, too sweet to be true. Oh, God, he’s so cold.

“There he is! Oh, Christ, Gaheris.”

The land of Egypt is full of cities and buildings, not like the huge wide plains where my brothers and I tend my father’s flocks of sheep and goats and cattle. In Canaan I guard the sheep and lambs; usually they are fat and sleek, but now they are thin and ugly like the homeless dogs in Egypt that snap at our donkeys, their lips drawn back so I can see their teeth. The same famine that is upon us in Canaan is in the land of Egypt.

My brothers bring me to the lord of the Egyptians, the lord who distributes the grain. He is a tall and very handsome man, and my brothers bow to him with their foreheads touching the floor, so I bow also. Judah has his hand on my shoulder to hold me down, as if he thinks I am a locust or a toad and will go springing up unwisely. Reuben, who is the eldest of my brothers, tells the lord, “Here we are. We have brought our brother, Benjamin, whom our father loves.” Me, he means–me.

The lord does not answer Reuben; he leaves and his steward returns to us, saying, “Do not be afraid. My lord asks that you dine with him at his house. I will bring you there.”

For a moment I think Reuben will answer him. Reuben is headstrong and opinionated and most likely to cuff me, and I have never seen him without an answer to anyone. He has complained about this journey, about the stubbornness of my father to make us wait so long and the contrariness of the lord to make them bring me with them, and I think that he will complain to the steward too, but he keeps his mouth closed and nods quietly.

I have not been frightened before now, not truly, but I am now that Reuben has been silenced. If this man is so strange that Reuben, of all my brothers, is afraid, then I think there is reason to be afraid. For the first time I wish I were at home with my beautiful mother, who is always waiting for me when I bring in the sheep.

When we arrive at the entrance to the lord’s house Judah and Levi go to the steward and say, “Please, we have brought silver for the grain, and silver because of the money that was given back to us when we came before, and we didn’t know that the money was given back to us before.” My gut quivers within my body; Levi is the fiercest of my brothers, who does not say ‘please’ to any man.

But the steward tells my brothers, “Do not be afraid. The God of your fathers has rewarded you. I received your money the first time you came.”

Then he brings Simeon out to us.

Simeon is the twin of Levi, my fiercest brother, and they are most often my father’s hunters. They disappear into the plains and return with lions and wind-footed deer. When Simeon comes out to us, Levi drops to his knees and holds out his arms, saying, “Truly the God of our father Israel is merciful to me, for he has given my brother back to me; truly I am fortunate among men, for my brother who was lost is found again.” O God! Proud, fierce-hearted Levi is weeping, and Simeon is weeping too, their arms around each other.

Did my father weep so for me? I do not know, and I hide behind Naphtali, my hand clenched in his robes. He is young like me, and has the sweetest tongue. Naphtali puts his hand on top of my head.

“Don’t be afraid. Surely the God of our father Israel will be as merciful with Judah as he has been with Levi, and you will return safely with us.”

Meanwhile the steward leads us inside the lord’s house, and brings us water to wash our feet, and grain for our donkeys. Judah and Reuben prepare the gifts our father sent with us, and Simeon and Levi mind the donkeys, slipping off together. Naphtali assures me they should be left alone; “They have been long apart,” he tells me, “and they must grow back together where their roots were split.”

Then the lord comes in, brusque and handsome in his white Egyptian clothes. Instead of long robes, like my brothers and I, he wears a short skirt and much gold, in his ears and on his arms and legs and around his neck; he carries a golden staff set with blue stones. My brothers bow to him, and once again Judah pushes down my head, as if I were not old enough to know that we must respect the lord.

“How is your father you told me about? Is he still living?” His voice is cool and compelling, like the voice of the rabbi, and I wonder how people pray in Egypt. I know he is not a Hebrew, but do the Egyptians have men like rabbis who lead them and teach them about God our God?

“Your servant our father is alive and well,” Reuben says, speaking for all my brothers.

The lord looks over us, all bowing before him, and his eyes halt on me, studying me. My bowels and my heart both jump.

“Is this your youngest brother, of whom you told me?” He comes to me and goes down on one knee, saying, “God be gracious to you, my son.” Then his eyes cloud and he springs to his feet, rushing from the room.

At once my brothers are in an uproar, standing and saying, “Why has he left? What has offended him?” and Simeon and Levi return from the stable, saying, “What has happened? Has the lord refused us?” There is so much commotion that no one sees me go after the lord, and he himself does not see me follow him down the hall. He ducks into a room, and I stop at the door, watching him from around the frame.

He is a stern and imposing man, and has frightened my brothers, but I am not so frightened of him any more; I stand in his door and watch him weeping on his bed, his brown shoulders shaking like the sides of a frightened lamb. It may be that he is the most powerful man in the land of Egypt, but when he weeps he sounds like my mother. The sigh of his tears in his throat are exactly like hers.

Then he rises, and I can see that he will turn towards the door, so I run back to the room where my brothers are. Reuben cuffs me for having gone missing, but there is more anger in it than usual, and his brown face is pale. In a moment the lord reappears and instructs his steward to serve us.

We cannot sit with the Egyptians, but he sits with us anyway. He seats my brothers in the order of their age, from eldest to youngest, which frightens Judah; Judah’s face is also pale, and he speaks briefly, his voice as brittle as ashes. When we are served, I have more to eat and more to drink than any other man.

My brothers want to remark on it, but they don’t. They are quiet and reserved, but the steward keeps bringing wine, and soon they are all laughing and talking like they do at home when we bring the flocks in. Although I have the biggest portion of wine, I do not drink, because I want to know why the lord is treating me the way he is. I have heard from other Canaanites that Egyptians are freer with their affections, and that some Egyptians keep boys to make love to. If this is what he desires, for my brothers to bring me here so he can keep me, he is mistaken (I think this to myself with very foolish pride), for I shall return to my father in Canaan.

He watches me all through dinner, his smooth face intent and his dark eyes curious. I try not to imagine what would happen if he made me his slave, what it would feel like to have his smooth official’s hands trace over my body, to be laid back upon the linen sheets of his bed. I give thanks to God when dinner is finally over and we are sent to our rooms. My brothers are drunk, but at least it is safe to sleep with Naphtali, who puts his arm around my waist and holds me to him like a child or a wife, snoring very softly in my ear. Still, I am frightened, and it is a long time before I fall asleep.

I give another prayer to God when we are allowed to leave the next morning. The lord gives us back our donkeys, laden with grain, and my brothers, complaining about their heads, lead us out of the city. We travel I think three hours–I cannot tell, the time passes like moments–before we hear the sound of a horse’s feet, and the lord’s steward overtakes us. He jumps down from his horse, reining her in hard. My brothers begin to whisper among themselves. Even before he speaks, Dan takes hold of Judah’s sleeve and whispers, “Brother, he is going to accuse us of some thing. Has he not already accused us of being spies and demanded our brother Benjamin as proof that we are not? Be alert, Judah.”

I feel the blood in my heart run thinner as the steward approaches us.

“Why have you repaid good with evil?” he cries to my brothers. “Isn’t this the cup my master drinks from, and also the one he uses for divination? Why have you done this wicked thing?”

My brothers Simeon and Levi growl like lions, like lions with their fur rising from anger, but Judah silences them with his hand. “How can you say such things?” he asks the steward. “Far be it from your servants ever to do such a thing. We even brought back from the land of Canaan the silver we found in our sacks. So why should we take silver or gold from your master’s house? If it is found among our possessions, let the one who has it die, and the rest of us will become your master’s slaves.”

“Very well, let it be so. But whoever is found to have the cup, let him become my master’s servant; the rest of you will be free from blame.”

We each search through our donkey’s sacks and bundles, heavier with grain but lighter of the presents we brought for the lord. My brothers, one after another, find their sacks empty, but when I open mine I see a glint of silver. At first I think of pushing it further down into the grain and hoping no one has seen, or perhaps taking it out and hiding it in my robes. But the steward sees the shining of the sun on the lord’s cup and cries out.

My brothers tear their clothes and beards, and Simeon and Levi whisper loudly to Judah of slaying the steward; Naphtali tries to talk reasonably to him, and Dan says that it is not my fault, I am a child. As for me, what can I think? My bowels and my heart are as unsteady as water from a spring. The lord is determined to have me for his slave, and he has secured me through treachery. Who else would have done such a thing? And for what purpose?

O God my God, I pray. O God of my father Israel. Deliver me from this man who wishes for my body and would take me away from my flocks in Canaan. O God, deliver me.

But my brothers load their sacks back onto their donkeys, and follow the steward back to the city in Egypt. When we arrive at the lord’s house, they fall to the floor before him, begging for mercy, but I cannot do so. I feel as though I am the only real man in the world, as though everyone else were made of stone tablets without thoughts or hearts written onto their stone bodies. The lord barters with my brothers for me, but all I can think of are my sweet flocks in Canaan. I shall never tend my sheep again.

O God, God of my father Israel. I will never see my mother again, or have any memento of her, unless this lord weeps; the sound of his weeping is the only thing I will ever have to remind me of my mother. O God, I will make him weep.

I suppose I cannot take much longer than the flight of a spear to think these things, but I feel as though I have been standing in this lord’s hall for years, and I feel as though I am steady and still as a deer standing without movement, trying to fool a hunter. But when the lord raises his eyes from Reuben to look at me, I bolt like one of my own sheep, fleeing through the corridors.

Our houses in Canaan are all tents. We move around, carrying our homes with our tabernacle, following our herds and flocks. The Egyptians’ homes are solid, made of sand and stone, with many halls and many rooms with strange paintings on the walls and statues of strange gods whose names I do not know. I cannot think enough to look at any of them clearly; I see wings and horns and crowns, idols with the heads of animals and the hands of men. I cannot even hear the sound of anyone pursuing me, only the pounding of my sandals on the stone floor of the corridors. I cannot think; that is why I fall down the stairs, although for a moment I think my robes will hold me up and I will fly like a woven-winged bird. Instead I fall hard against the wall at the bottom of the stairs, and feel a crack through my whole body that I think begins in my shoulder, and there I lie weeping like the child I am.

The lord does not take very long to find me. He kneels down beside me, cradling my head in his lap. “O God, Benjamin,” he says, stroking my hair. “God of my father Israel.” His steward arrives a moment later, breathless, and he shouts, “Find my physician, find the Pharaoh’s physician! My brother is hurt and I am wounded by it, I am wounded in my innermost heart.”

I cannot think, I do not understand what he is saying. He lifts me, letting me lean my head against his shoulder, and kisses my cheeks, and I can feel from this that he is weeping again. “O God,” he says. “I have found my brother again and now he lies bleeding. O God my God forgive me, for I put him in danger for my pride’s sake and I have hurt him.” He brushes blood from my lips with his hand and says, “O God, Benjamin.”

Then the physician comes, and what happens then I do not know, and for a long time I do not know anything at all. When I wake again, the lord is by my bedside, his elbows propped on his knees and his hands folded, watching me.

“Where are Reuben and Judah?” I ask him. “Where are Simeon and Levi?”

“Your brothers have lived in my house. I have given my house to your brothers until you became well again.”

“How was I hurt?”

“Your shoulder was broken, but my physician set it. As for the rest, it will leave no mark.” His hand falls to my unhurt shoulder. “Your father will not know that harm has come to you on that account.”

“Why have you done this?” I ask. My shoulder aches, and my head aches too, for I remember what he said when I had fallen, and he held me at the bottom of the stairs. I cannot imagine why this Egyptian, who is as brown as any Egyptian man, calls my father Israel his father also.

“You are like my brother who was lost to me.” His eyes are already clouded again, and I think he is going to weep–I have never met a grown man who wept so much. At least this time I hope he will not run out of the room again. I am too tired to think about following him. “When he was a boy, he went to meet his brothers while they tended their flocks and herds, but he was set upon and killed, and I do not know where his body lies, though I think it is in Egypt. You have eyes like my brother’s, and your face is like his.”

“Will you let me go? My father swears to my brothers that if I die it will bring his grey head down to the grave in sorrow.”

“I cannot let you go,” the lord says. “My steward found my silver in your sack.”

“I was not the one who put it there!”

I try to sit up, but his hand pushes me down, and he says, “Softly, my brother, softly.”

“I was not the one! I swear on the God of my father Israel, you put that cup in my sack to keep me here with you. I know that Egyptians are deceitful and lustful like lions, but I will not be your slave to satisfy you!”

I close my mouth tightly, because instead of weeping, he is suddenly laughing.

“Lustful? Do you think I wish to keep you here to make you one of my wives?”

“I know that is how it is done in Egypt,” I say, and my voice is sullen like a child’s.

“No. You are my brother who was lost.”

“I am my brothers’ brother! You are a stranger to us.”

His face becomes solemn again, and he stands. When he is outside of the room, I can hear the sound of my mother’s weeping behind the door, except that it is not my mother, it is him, and he will not let me go.

The next time he comes he tells me, “Your brothers have left. They did not take their grain, only their donkeys, and they gave me no word that they were leaving. Do you think they have run away?”

My head is sick and I feel hot all the time, but I say, “They will return. My brothers will return for me.”

“Truly I tell you I think they have left you here.” He dips a linen cloth in a bowl of cool water and bathes my face and my chest with it. It feels so good, like food after a day of work, like night coming on after the long days in summer. It feels so good that tears fall from me, and I grit my teeth so he won’t know.

He comes every day to me, more than once a day sometimes, to care for me. Sometimes I know, and sometimes he has to tell me because I don’t remember. The physician says I have an ague that crept into my body through my shoulder; he puts idols in my room as well as giving me foul medicine, and they watch me when I try to sleep. Once I forget myself and sob on the Egyptian lord, begging him to take them away.

He tells the physician that because I am Hebrew Egyptian gods will not protect me, and the next hour they disappear. After that it is just the medicines, and the lord by my bedside, combing back my sweaty hair with his fingers and washing my body with clean water. Thus it is day after day until I am well again.

I can tell when that day comes because I wake up and can think again, and because I am so hungry I feel I could eat all the grain in Egypt. The lord laughs and has food brought for me, roasted meat and a little wine, which he is afraid will upset my guts, but does not. He watches me while I eat.

“Truly I tell you I am glad to see you well. I was frightened.”

“God watches me.”

“I think He does,” he says softly.

Now that I am well I am allowed to walk all over his house, in all of the rooms. He has a pretty young wife whose name is Asenath, and two sons who are babies, Manasseh and Ephraim. They are barely nine and seven, and Manasseh has nothing to talk about except his new hunting dog. He is so full of pride I cannot stand him.

I follow the lord. During the day he does work for the Egyptian king, called Pharaoh, taking charge of hearing many of his petitions, and measuring out the grain that is to be distributed. Many of Egypt’s animals have died, and he meets with tradesmen to buy new cattle and sheep and to arrange for their keeping. When he is not working, we speak often; he asks all about how I grew up, and my father Israel, and my mother. I ask him whether Egyptians have men like rabbis, and he says yes.

One night he teaches me astrology. He tells me that his great honours from the Pharaoh are due to his wisdom in reading the stars and the dreams of other men. He shows me how to use an astrolabe and tells me what the stars mean.

“They do not write in Hebrew, nor in Egyptian,” he tells me. “It is a new language, and I will teach it to you.”

At first I think he is a fool; I think that it is only the kind of thing magicians have to show, tricks and lies. But when he asks me questions, I find the answers in the sky. The stars are clustered like little sheep; they scatter like sheep frightened by a lion. Just as I can tell what the sheep need, I can understand what the stars signify.

“Will you look for something for me?” he asks one night, while we stand outside the house, looking up at the sky.

“What should I seek?”

“My brother who is lost–will you look for him?”

My heart aches. We stand outside his fine stone house, in the prosperity of his house, where he keeps two sons and a wife, but he is looking at me and his dark clouded eyes are solemn. I wonder what it is like to hold so to the past.

“Why can you not seek him yourself?”

The lord clasps his hands behind his back and lifts his head to gaze at the stars. “I cannot read dreams or stars any longer. God gave me that power, but he has taken it away.”

“Why did you teach me? How did you know I would understand?”

“Because God watches you. Benjamin, look for my brother.”

So I do. I look for hours, but all that I am told is that his brother is in Egypt–that his brother is in the city in Egypt, and that is all. When I apologise to him, he rests his hand on my shoulder.

“God has given you a gift.”

“But I can’t find him for you.”

“You are a true diviner.”

“I found nothing.”

“I say unto you, you are a diviner and you read the language of the stars. Some day I will have no secrets from you, but this is not that day. Keep studying.”

“I will.”

I do. The lord goes about his work for Pharaoh, and I watch the sky. Asenath treats me as though I am the lord’s brother, and even Manassah seems more tolerable.

Then one day my brothers come back again, and they bring my father with them.

Asenath wakes me early in the morning, before the sun comes up. Her cool brown hands shake my shoulders.

“Benjamin. Wake up.”

“What is it?” I ask, sitting up in my bed and wiping my eyes.

“Your brothers have brought your father to plead with Zaphenath-Paneah,” she says (this is the titled name of the lord, given to him by the Pharaoh. Asenath knows his real name, but she will not tell me; she says it is not hers to tell me, and I will not know until the lord chooses). My bowels and my heart start to tremble as they have not since my brothers left me in Egypt.

“Wait, wait, I must bring you to him,” Asenath says, but I have already sprung to my feet, and I run down the corridor towards the great hall where the lord receives petitioners. This is the hall where my brothers and I were led when I first came to Egypt.

The lord is already there, and all of my brothers are bowing on the floor, and O God, my God, my father Israel is on his knees. He is so old and gaunt I cannot understand at first how he can be my father; I know him, but he looks like a man who has withstood the worst of all things. The lord does not stop me from falling to the floor beside him and taking him into my arms. O God of my father! he is so thin.

“Benjamin?” he whispers in my ear. His arms encircle me like another robe.

I remember how Levi fell to the ground and opened his arms to Simeon. I remember how they wept, and how Levi cried out, “Truly the God of our father Israel is merciful to me!” God has not been merciful to my father.

“Forgive me,” I say to him, holding him as close as I dare. I am afraid I will crush him like a dry husk of grain. What if he crumbles in my arms and there is nothing left of him but a few scattered pieces of grass? “Forgive me. I have been here all along. I am not lost.”

“You are not lost.” He repeats it like a child, but I am the one who only turned sixteen a week ago. He touches my face with one hand, feels the curve of my nose and the sockets of my eyes, and runs his thumb across my lips. “Benjamin, my son. Truly my God is merciful to me.” Then his voice cracks, like a badly-fired pot on a stone floor. “O Benjamin, your mother Rachel weeps every day while she goes about her work. When she sleeps in the night she weeps.”

It feels like the worst thing in the world to turn away from him to the lord, but I do, I take a great breath and turn away. The lord is watching us, but I know from the way his calves are taut that he wants to run into the corridor, he wants to weep openly as we are.

“No!” I cry, as he starts to turn. “Zaphenath-Paneah! Lord of Egypt! You have as much power as the Pharaoh; surely you are as powerful as the king. Send me home with my brothers. You have been kind to me; truly I do not understand who you are or what you ever wanted with me, but you have been kind, and for my sake–” I catch my breath, as he stands staring at me. “For the sake of your brother who was lost, let me not be lost to mine. Give my brothers their grain without tricks or hostages, and send me home with my father, send me back to my mother and my sheep. For the sake of your brother.”

Then the lord begins to weep in front of us all. He is as free in his tears as any child, and it shocks me to be reminded of how he sounds like my mother Rachel. His tears come forth with the voice of my mother.

My father’s arm tightens around me. “Joseph?”

“O God, God of my father Israel,” the lord says, wiping his eyes with one brown arm. “I am Joseph.”

“My son Joseph?”

He kneels with us, bowing his head to the ground, until it touches the stone floor. My father puts his hand on the lord’s head. “My son Joseph who was lost to me?”

“I am not lost, father.”

Behind us I hear Judah saying, “O God, is it Joseph?” and Levi, “is it Joseph?” and then Asher and Naphtali ask, “is it Joseph? God of our father, it is Joseph who was sold into Egypt.” Even shy Issacar is saying, “He weeps like Joseph. It is Joseph.”

The lord takes my father’s hand and kisses it, and then my father begins to weep anew, and we are all weeping now, not just my father and Joseph but me too, and my brothers too, even Reuben. I think Reuben is perhaps the worst.

“I came to Egypt to find one son, and I found both who were lost,” my father says. “I came seeking one lamb, and found two. O my children, all my children. Let me gather you to me; I was a shepherd with a dwindling flock, but now all my sheep are with me.”

My father gathers us both into his arms, holding us close to his breast. Joseph’s black hair is pressed against my cheek, and I can smell the kohl from his eyes and the oils on his skin, and I think–although perhaps it is only my imagination–that I can smell Canaan on him also. It has been so long since I was in Canaan. When I left I was a child, and now I think I may be a man, though I do not know what it means to say so. I only know that my heart is weary but my shoulders feel very light, and my brother’s body is near mine, and I wish for my home.

I was fifteen years old when my brothers brought me into the land of Egypt, and I am nearly seventeen when my family settles there. It is not a great time to have passed. I do not think I will ever see Canaan again, although I am not bound to live here. Egypt does not have the same wide plains as Canaan, and I have no sheep to tend, no flocks to herd through the brief grass. Sometimes it makes me laugh; for Joseph was the brother thought to have been lost, and he was found, and truly I was thought to be lost, and I was found. Even when I feel lost in the midst of Egypt, my brothers and their families surround me.

Even I have a quiet wife, a sister of Asenath who is older than me. The Pharaoh makes me an astronomer, and Joseph gives me the silver cup that was the cause of my father coming to Egypt–with this and my astrolabe I divine what is in the stars.

I see that one day we will no longer be welcome in Egypt, and the time will come when we must flee back to Canaan. I see that it will change us for-ever, with rules and rituals, and for a few days I wondered whether I should tell Joseph or my father Israel, and lead us out of Egypt before that day comes.

But I do not, for that is not what the stars say, and it is not what God says. Besides, there is no need for astronomers in Canaan. Joseph was right: God is watching me. When I stand outside the house with my hands clasped behind my back, alone as a shepherd in the midst of the plains, kept company only by my wandering herds of stars, I know that I also am watching God.

Thereupon I am never lost.

(He would whisper to her, “Do you want to come to France, ma dame?” and she would say, “Yes, of course. I want to see your home,” lying in his bed with his hands at her waist and it wasn’t that he was kinder or better or more honourable than Arthur, just that he was different.)

Her golden hair is, like Arthur’s, filled with long streaks of grey, pulled into a braid down her back or coiled on her head (a woman her age doesn’t wear her hair down). Lancelot could still make her feel beautiful, and Arthur made her feel like an old woman, wrinkling and wintering like Gawain’s lost fairy wife. But hadn’t Arthur always come when she was lost, and hadn’t Lancelot run away?

Lancelot had run away, leaving blood all around him, and she, God, she– they were all so concerned with Lancelot that no one had stopped to watch her walking through the slain in her night-gown, crying over Gawain’s fine young children and Agravain’s eager followers. God, what had he done? She remembers that she held Agravain, because he was so rough and so angry and far, far back in the beginning she had used to think he was warming to her a little, but when Lancelot came he was cold to her.

Agravain was old like she’s becoming, his reddish Orkney hair as streaked as hers or Arthur’s, his bitter mouth weathered, and she had wanted to bring him back to life, but she knew better on that count. She knew better, and she still knelt there cradling his body, with his head against her breast, until Mordred threw her away from him in anger.

What would his wife think? What would any of their wives think? And it isn’t her business to wonder about those things any more. She looks to the door, but it’s still barred, and she knows they’re going to burn her, because Arthur has no choice, and why would he choose otherwise? He always came when she was lost, and she chose Lancelot over that, she chose Lancelot over Camelot, over the lives of all those men–God–Gawain’s children. Those boys whose swords she’d given them on the day Arthur knighted them.

And Lancelot is gone. He’s run away, to leave her alone with all those bodies and her own responsibility.

She sits quietly in her barred room, still wearing her night-gown, still with her braid hung down her back, still with Agravain’s blood a reddish stain like his hair on her breast. Perhaps she had always loved Agravain the most, because he had almost loved her. Agravain had held her to a higher standard than Arthur, who turned his face away to pretend he didn’t know his wife and his dearest friend would betray him. Lancelot had wanted–what, of her? Had he loved her? Surely he loved her, or else he wouldn’t have stayed so long, or fought so hard so many times. Every man should have one chance to be a coward without being condemned.

But if she were betrayed, wouldn’t she deserve it?

Agravain had never dissembled. He had only hated. In its honesty it seems more noble now than any deed Lancelot has ever done in her name. In its straightforwardness it seems the thing Arthur should always have done. If he were here now Guinever wonders what she would say to him, whether she would apologise, and realises that here now is something Agravain will never be anywhere ever again in any place or time. The world is empty of Agravain. Soon the world will be empty of her.

Weeks later, when the world is only empty of Mordred’s poor brothers, she thinks that Lancelot betrayed her worse to come back than he ever did to leave. The castle is worse than a barred room, and to walk in it in her mourning dress is sadder and darker than her scorched night-gown with the smear of blood down the front.

When she walks she feels as though the earth is going to cut out from under her like an unexpected precipice. Mordred’s brother Gareth still had the face of a child, and Gaheris had probably been too mad to understand what was happening. All she can think of is Lynet, strong, fierce Lynet, who managed her husband’s madness as if it were commonplace, who stood by him unchanging after his mother’s murder, who bore through the exile with him, who endured it all, sobbing, “I could not find him all, O, God, I could not find him all.”

Guinever’s burned feet have healed, but she thinks that’s all that has.

Arthur is a country away, and she doesn’t expect Mordred to forgive her, not now, not for this. Mordred never had any reason to love her much before, but now she doesn’t expect anything less than hate. She feels more barren than she’s ever felt, worse than the year after year after year of giving Arthur no children–she feels like all the fields in Britain in winter, like all the empty seed husks, like all the dry rivers. She never bore anyone anything.

In the end, all she gave Britain, and Arthur, and Agravain, is this, is war, and wives whose husbands were cut into so many pieces they couldn’t all be gathered from the field.

For her vanity? For what? She doesn’t know. For an accent from a country she’d never see and a chance to feel like a girl again? Because she didn’t know better then?

She knows better now.

I woke as if I had been sleeping for years.

Her hospice nurse called from the care centre
where her soft laboured breathing had ended.
Six long months with the oxygen tank,
an albatross that quivered behind her
on its little set of wheels.

On the other end of the phone the nurse understood me
and made no judgement when I said, “Thank God.”

My grandfather died soon after
as if he had made a suicide pact with his soul.
The pain in his back spread through his body
with the flow of his blood.

By his birthday we knew he was dying
and when I said good-bye at Christmas I meant it
and he did not. But he held me as tight
as a man should hold his granddaughter.

My aunt called long-distance to tell us.
The day my grandfather died
he sat in his favourite chair watching the glass door
and the full winter sun was washing him
splashing itself on his still, still heart.

That night I slept as if I had been awake for years.

At eleven o’clock p.m. the train went by, hollowly shouting
into the very black nighttime
about the truth of the earth, particles of text
burning to make its engine run, spinning into the chimney
along with coals and sparks and smoke.

Nothing is ever lost, even when it is never found.
Even the shreds of memories that make you a person
which drift away into star-sugared space
as you get older
still exist somewhere, in the causal butterfly of all futures
even when you are just a little old person
sleeping and dying
in a flower-print-wallpapered nursing home
bounded by tired nurses and sixty others of your kind.

I used to be afraid that we were taking over,
that people would erase the old blueprints
earth used to use to make herself–
but I was wrong.
Her memory is too good for that;
it holds everything,
from the first year when we were only bubbles of bacteria and plasma
to the bird-lizards that flew with feathered wings and jewelled scales
through dinosaur skies
to the spilled bags of scrabble tiles
that make up our cities.
The train was as clear as the fiery cold
of mountainside streams.
We are not the custodians of the earth.
We are just the pocketwatch with which she keeps the time.