Pitter-patter remnants of rain finally stopped and Simon stood up. Slowly, I did too—Simon helping me, hands grasped, pulling me up. His hand didn’t feel like a handshake, it didn’t feel like it had been typing out emails all day, like a claw, like a vise.
Blue-blushing clouds tightened back up and sunlight appeared, filtering through leaves that were once again their splendid greens. The rustle of the forest reprised its tune that hinted of abundance—of gamey birds, goats, wild boar? I had no idea. There could be dragons out there for all I knew, and Simon didn’t look like he knew either. He knew where the river was, he knew which direction was west, and he had been to London proper plenty of times before, but it felt like we were on equal footing now, our certainties only based on what was behind us and all the things we could not go back to. Simon looked back toward Greenwich, then looked at me, watched me rubbing my sores and aches.
“You good?” he asked, hesitantly certain. Ready to go but only within this one shaky minute.
I nodded. I walked a bit, testing my legs, which were fine, and I said, “Yes.” Then I waited for something—a phone call or an airplane above us or the hum of an idling car, anything to stop and give me pause, but there was nothing, only a silence walled up by trees that would all one day be chopped down.
I said yes again, let’s go, and it was decided, clear and resounding within myself, that I didn’t want to go back. Not just back to Greenwich, to the manor, but back tomyGreenwich, to my time, my flat, my life, my days of toil and ruin. I would not go.
I simply did not want to return.
4
We left the woods and the woods left us, the greenery becoming sparser, replaced with a muddy brown, muddy bricks, muddy people. We sold the pieces of phone to different merchants along the road to London, under little outposts, thatched roofs, some terra-cotta. Blacksmiths inspected the metal bits, tiny screws, and strange circuitry, estimated ounces and purity once melted down. A jeweler held the glass orb of the phone camera up to the sun and asked us how much for this... opal? jade? and we just smiled and nodded at every best price. Here the lines of economy were physical—money trading hands, spreading urbanization, becoming London with a sudden ferocity until all you could see was the mighty fortress itself.
We made it to Southwark by midday and to London Bridge, where the river below was a highway filled with more boats than water and the Tower on the other side loomed much more a tower than I had ever thought of it before. Everything was dirty but dirty in a way that was cleaner than anything in modernLondon. The air was sweet with sound, manure, herbs, rot, fruity fragrance, animal hair. There was no car exhaust, no petrol fumes, no plastic waste lining the river.
Yes, there were decapitated, mutilated human heads on spikes hung across the entrance to the City—that was a shocking thing to see: their eyes gone, teeth bleached by the sun—but people passing the display all shared the same wincing, perplexed reaction as me. It was all still a shared humanity. Most people looked away with disgust, pulled their gawking children away. Others scoffed, frustrated and tired of the barbarity. Others pointed with almost casual awe as if to say “Oh, that’s the thief they caught last week.” But most importantly, people simply carried on. This cloud of brutality existed simultaneously alongside the regular shoppers, beggars, construction workers, day traders, city officials, and the mix was astonishing. I suppose that isn’t any different from the modern world, the only difference being how easy it is to disconnect yourself from it all. In the modern world, you don’t have to worry about running into severed heads, you just have to make sure not to google them.
We crossed the bridge and the metropolis bloomed. This London was smaller, but more overwhelming. There were fewer people, but also less space, corralled by imposing walls that echoed with noises denser and prickly with squish, slice, scream, bark, crash, spray, laugh. Things slammed and broke. There were coy little jingles. Roosters, dogs, cattle, kids. There were no phones, no noise-canceling headphones; everyone was enmeshed and implicated and it wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t ugly either.
The people simply were the same. I just couldn’t get over it. The mask of “history” peeled off and every type of human in every type of predicament was in the street just like they werein the London I knew. Rich, poor, regular, diseased, clerics, beggars, swindlers, lovers, tourists, nobility, knights, and while some of the forms these varieties took were intense and new to me, mostly everyone was staid, plain, and simply going about this pleasant, overcast day. For every strange law, custom, or sign of brutality I witnessed, there was alongside it the ultimate leveler of humanity: boredom. We waited in a queue to pay our toll to enter the city. We waited in a queue to buy bread and cheese at a market stall. We shuffled through crowds. Any exoticism or thrill of seeing “history” in real life was dulled by the blunt politics of the meal deal, the endless search for an open table, and the people watching that only ever reveals their sameness, their shifting of mass from one place to another, waiting out the day.
There was a festival in town, which explained the long queues. There were more people than usual. And if things felt extra-medieval and cliché to me, then that was the point—there was a Round Table tournament being put on. Demonstrations, carnival games, and jousting were on at the Guildhall and stretched to Smithfield with all the cringe of a comic book expo.
“Don’t you want to see the jousting?” Simon asked with a cloying, sarcastic tone. I was surprised by his knack for sarcasm. Wasn’t he someone who lived by holy oaths and duty? His unreadability was constantly surprising.
“Not particularly,” I replied, still unsure if he was serious or not. “Are they actual knights? Like, knight-knights? Like, they work for the king?” I knew nothing.
“Yeah, these guys are the real deal,” said Simon. “They put on these King Arthur tournaments to drum up money and support for the war. The contests and stuff are all fake though, just a dick-swinging contest at the end of the day.”
I nearly choked on my food. I couldn’t tell if it was my improved English inviting me into friendlier layers of communication or Simon’s escape from bondage making him looser and uninhibited, but I welcomed it. We laughed and watched the crowd gathering at the entrance to one of the arenas. He told me about the one jousting tournament he had gone to as a child, how it had had the opposite effect on him and made him afraid of horses when one had gotten spooked and jumped into the crowd. An old man was kicked in the head and died. He remembered how disorganized and drunk the knights were, the crush of the crowd.
“The goal is to hit the other guy coming at you right here.” He balled his hand into a fist and pressed it lightly against the side of my chest and held it there, then he unballed the hand and slipped it under my armpit. “If it slips right in there it’ll lift the knight up without really hurting him, and the force puts their body into a spin so they can fall sideways and not get trampled. It kind of ruins everything once you notice it. You can actually see the knights lean into the motion like they’ve choreographed it before. I’m pretty sure they plan out who wins and who loses just for the drama. There’s always a tie, then a sudden death. A good guy, a bad guy.”
“This is coming from the guy who thinks dragons are real,” I said, sipping mead from a metal flask. The liquid was grainy and had a slightly charred-sugar taste. It was delicious.
“That’s a totally different thing. There’s no comparison there.”
“Yeah, but if you can see through this whole Round Table, King Arthur charade for what it is, why wouldn’t dragons just be an extension of that? It’s all just stories and fables.”
Simon shook his head. “No, you’ve got it mixed up. I’m sayingthe jousting and these silly tournaments are just for show—but the knights are really knights. Chivalry is a real thing, just not very strong in these showboaters. Dragons are real. The Round Table and King Arthur are real things.”
“King Arthur’s not real,” I said. That was the one useful thing I could remember from school. A snide history teacher telling our class how King Arthur had been completely made up, how he was the Superman of his day, just a propaganda myth.
Simon raised his eyebrows. “Well, he’s not alive anymore, but he definitely was a real king a long time ago. I’m sure some of the stories about him and the magic and all that are embellished a little, but no more than these knights here with their fake jousting. If he were alive today he’d be ashamed of these guys.”
Before I could say anything else, a woman sitting farther down the table shouted over to us. “Hey, how about you show some respect for our troops. These men risk their lives fighting for our freedom every day. The least you can do is show some respect at a time like this.”
Embarrassed, Simon began to apologize immediately, but another man sitting on the other side of us chimed in. “Don’t apologize,” he said to Simon, but loud enough, clearly directed for the woman to hear. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for, son.”
“Excuse me?” said the woman.
The man kept his attention only on me and Simon. “Deluded are the people that come to these things,” he said. He was elderly and his clothes were in tatters. Bristly white whiskers were all over his cheeks, his ears, his eyebrows. It was clear he wasn’t here for the festival so much as he was here because it was a place to be. “Deluded! Cheering on a war machine. Makes me sick to see.”
“I wasn’t talking to you, sir,” said the woman.
“Wasn’t talking to you either but here we are.” He leaned across the table and trained his wild eyes on her. “Only thing you’re cheering for is more dead children in the streets.”
