Written by the hand of EDWARD by the grace of God King of England, Lord of Ireland, Duke of Aquitaine, Conqueror of Wales, Hammer of Scots
“Eighty-six percent recycled polyester. Fourteen percent spandex. Made in India. Machine wash cold. Tumble dry low. Keep away from fire. Wash dark colors separately. Do not soak. Do not iron printed part. Color may rub off.”
That was what the writing on the small white square sewn into the lining of the garment said. This was among the evidence sent to me by the Lord of Greenwich, leading to my tracking and summoning of George and all the madness that ensued. It took four days for a translator to decipher the characters and make the translation, making no reasonable interpretation beyond what I could easily surmise on my own. I knew of greater India and had seen garments of similar brilliance among traders during my pilgrimage to the Holy Land in my youth. The multi-deity beliefs of those in the Hindustan regions would account for the word “polyester,” withpolymeaning multiple andestera derivative of ether, the unknowable substance of God. “Spandex” could be the joining ofspanmeaning the span of time anddexterity, giving credence toGeorge’s assertion of time travel. I know George did not hail from Hindustan, but religious inference seems a legitimate line of inquiry, given the circumstances—but why such markers would be plainly written and sewn into a garment makes no sense other than an aim to intentionally dissuade. And I don’t believe there’s a single man on this Earth who hasn’t the predilection to deceive me.
When the Prince of Wales returned, he ambushed a meeting of my war council in a grotesque display of emotion, barging into the room, clothing soiled, his frame like that of a rattling waif, more insult than son of mine, demanding his crusted rag of a lover before all else:
“Where is Piers? Where is Piers? It’s real. It’s real, Father—Your Majesty. Apologies.” He twaddled into a bow. I stared. “It killed two soldiers. Its tail stretches through fields and fields. Its eyes are like meaty discs. Its face, a small planet, the weight of its body, heavier than our own, it crushes through the earth, and the fire. God almighty, Father, like heat, like sweltering, like I don’t even know. And Piers? Where is my Piers?”
I banished the prince and ordered silence. I ordered the rug where he had stood cleaned. I ordered a censuring of the council and a full testimony to be taken from the soldier who had accompanied the prince and also borne witness to the beast. He was more coherent and of a sound mind and recounted the creature’s appearance, its destruction, all with admirable articulation beyond his rank. He was a natural believer, unlike the prince, his steadfastness keeping him on the faithful side of hysterics, and I applauded him. I noticed a scar stretching from his ear to his temple and remarked upon it.I said that if he had managed to survive whatever Welsh demon had given him that injury, surely this English one could be brought under similar submission.
The soldier replied, “Aye, this? No, Your Majesty, it’s not from beast or man, Welsh or English. It’s from an unfortunate incident when I was small, back in Lancashire. My sister had hoisted me up to tie a bale of hay and when I jumped down upon her in jest, we both failed to see the scythe resting there on the ground, improperly stored. Just the unlucky business of children, I’m afraid, nothing remarkable—still something we’re both lucky to be alive by. And even still, I’d have been just a wee lad during the Welsh campaigns, barely fit enough to strip arrows let alone accompany Your Majesty in a vanguard.”
I asked the soldier his age and he confirmed he was only twenty-five, saying the number in such a way as all youth do—no one more obsessed with being young than the young themselves—and I felt every single one of my sixty-two years. A reflexive fury pulsed through me and the soldier took note of this, apologizing for his forthrightness and excusing it by saying it was only because we had spoken before, actually, at Falkirk. He had been a spearman behind my archers.
“It was after Falkirk that I was awarded the patronage of your son,” he said, “for my bravery and the great success we had there. And whilst the Prince of Wales is no Scottish horde, some nights when he calls on me to his chambers I can attest to a fear not unlike what I felt as a spearman.” Again he apologized for his forthrightness before my anger could boil over, but I was more stunned at the gall that possessed him to speak in such a way. Before I could react properly with anger, my sensibilities turned neutral and staid—a first. I triedto summon the memory of this soldier at Falkirk but saw only wanton rivers of blood, the leaves and grass they mixed with, how the eyelids of boys wouldn’t close.
I dismissed the soldier and returned to my battlements, thinking not on the Prince of Wales’s hysterics, nor the soldier’s report, but on the image of the soldier as a child, climbing and falling from a bale of hay, thinking on my own children’s travails of youth, the majority of which go unreported to me, my long separations from them, how this must have warped them for the better and the worse, again feeling the solidity of all sixty-two of my years.
All abated rage reignited days later at Lindisfarne of all places, on that holy island, where I discovered the Prince of Wales once again in the arms of the Gaveston sodomite as if the pair were on a bridal tour. I flew into a deserved fury against the both of them. Gaveston fell in line immediately, of course, shielding his modesty, groveling. Of the prince I tore clumps of hair from the scalp, pulled his neck and throttled it, feeling my own line of succession falter beneath my grip—and let it be so: I have Thomas now, and Queen Margaret again with child, and plenty more heirs to come. I forced him to look at the way his lover had so quickly filed behind me, how his filthy allegiances swayed and teetered by mere proximity to rank. I shook the boy like all of the boy he was and he wept and wept.
My intention has always been to temper the boy, to cease the hysteria that only pushes him further into those duplicitous arms that know nothing of sacrifice, nothing of valor, nothingof brotherly love, only the romantic. I told him love was the last thing that would save us. And love drawn like blood from a stone, well that’s just humiliating. I spat.
My Eleanor, the boy’s mother, died when he was but a child and it’s as if a child he has stayed. I mourn for the nation the lasting indentation this must have made on his psyche. My new dear Margaret, though a worthy wife and mother, is more closer in age to be the prince’s sister than mother, and is no guide for his lack of wit, his inability to think linearly, his mind too amorphous and dyeable by the mores of others. “Color may rub off.” That’s what Gaveston has done, the legal thief, the heart stealer. He has tainted my son not with the spoiling pleasures of sodomy, but with the constant taking, the ruinous humanizing, the desecration of our calling, making this all but an adornment to masturbate. He has taken my heir’s heart before he has had the opportunity to consecrate it for another, let alone a nation. “Keep away from fire.” When I mourn at the cross for Eleanor, I mourn for that loss. The loss of a goodness the boy will never know, and the sharp pain, that intake of stilted breath I feel, of knowing I am not blameless. For if my son will one day become me, then what have I been that hasn’t been enough? What have I not been that he will also one day become?
13
I became an archaeologist of the future. I began taking trips out to the lava field alone, scavenging, and for what, I was afraid to really say. I broke our shovel breaking ground. I went to the nearest village and bought a new one and spent whole days out there with it. Not that there was much to dig up. But if I dug deep enough, clunked hard enough into the burs of magma, they would crack in half and reveal an etching inside, some petrified barbaric logo or a screw, wires or the remains of wires, coat hangers, melted engines. If there was copper or any sort of refined metal, I’d take it home so we could sell it. If there was plastic or something strange, something I couldn’t put my finger on but was sure it was a shape, a semblance of something, I took it home as if just to saylook. My people.
“How about you take the donkey with you next time and bring back some of the rocks,” said Simon, sounding like the apotheosis of everything I never thought he would be. “It’s volcanic. It’d be good for the soil here.”
“I think I’ve found an entire car,” I said. I was lying on the ground in the middle of the wide-open yard.
“I don’t know what that is,” said Simon.
“It’s like a donkey but made of metal. Up to five people can sit inside it. You can fill it with your groceries.”
Simon was performing operatic busyness behind me, sweeping dust out of the house through the open front door, moving misplaced cups, stools, cushions, making a racket while the rest of the summer pulsed around our little snow globe of a life. He chewed on a skinny birch twig while he worked. He moved it from one side of his mouth to the other, annoying me. He asked, “How would five people get inside a donkey?”
I didn’t respond, just stared at the sky, at the sun still up there. It was July? August? It was late in the evening but the sun was still smack in the middle up there. I had once loved these long days of summer back in London—Pimm’s and lost Frisbees, men running around half naked in parks while their girlfriends watched and wore, inexplicably, prairie dresses—but out here these days were sixteen hours of haunting stasis, filled with labor, endless labor, pointless labor, digging and digging. I picked at new blisters that had formed on my hands and wondered when we would see a dragon come soaring across the sky.
There was a whole-ass dragon out there. Wow.
I worried about how much I cared. My reaction to the dragon had initially been that of shock, but as these empty days of recuperation continued with no news from prince, king, or dragon, a cognitive dissonance took hold of me where I knew I wasn’t feeling the right kind of terror. Part of me wondered if whatever the dragon was doing—did it matter? Even if the dragon was some kind of time-traveling monster, I knew it hadno bearing on my life because I knew that in the future there were no dragons. There had been no world-ending invasion by a dragon in 1301 because there simply hadn’t been. There was a dangerous freeness in the inconsequentiality of time travel and it made me feel too loose with everything else. If dragons were a problem, then I would already know dragons were a problem just like I knew Oliver Cromwell would one day be a problem, like Henry VIII and Brexit and cars, nuclear weapons, pandemics, the internet, and confusing internet bills would all be problems—these would be things of more consequence than a giant dragon appearing for a few hours in the remote English countryside once a month. I felt a sense of security in knowing nothing mattered. I didn’t know how to convey this to Simon without it sounding like a horrific, nihilistic gasp.
“Don’t pick,” Simon said now, watching me inspect my blisters. “You didn’t want gloves, well now your hands are growing a pair on their own.”
“Will you bring me my cough syrup?” I asked. Again, we spoke at each other like buses on mismatched routes, flashing broad black and yellow words, no answers, just questions and demands. He brought me the jar of nettle and yarrow, but took a pointedly long time, exhaling loudly. He tossed it to me on the ground and then finally sat down, only not next to me, in a pile of hay instead. He rubbed his face and looked straight ahead at the treeline beyond the meadow. I wouldn’t say things were icy or irreparable between us but there was this distance, and boy did it look like a chasm when the never-setting sun hit it like this. On my side of the rift there was my place in this world—and consequently my place in Simon’s life—and whether I truly belongedin either of them. On Simon’s side—well, I don’t know. He was too far away.
I coated my finger with the green slime and shoved it down my throat. I tried not to trigger a wave of coughing, which had gotten worse since the dragon attack. There was a permanently wheezy, ashy taste in the back of my throat, and I struggled to catch my breath if I exerted myself too much. Simon still helped with it, keeping me well supplied with herbal concoctions, but the romance of his care was gone, replaced with rote tenderness, tossed jars. We still made love and shared a bed, but Prince Edward’s warnings reverberated in my mind with every act of reconciliation.
You need to break his heart. You need to shatter his reality and hope he’s able to put something of it back together on his own.
I continued my trips back to the lava field to dig, spending whole days out there, where lay all the reverberations of everything that had fallen between me and Simon, all of the things I thought I had left behind, entombed in rock and ash, and what choice did I have but to excavate them, to make use of them.
The land didn’t look like England anymore. The ashen plane had taken on a pale gray, almost lavender hue, and the hardened ribbons of lava looked completely alien, which helped me accept my own foreignness here, my helpless self-pollution.
The “entire car” I thought I had found was more of a hunch. It was the outline of a windshield, then the frame of some kind of sedan, a place for a door, another door, a few podlike rocks in the shape of what could have been wheels before they had beeneviscerated in flame. I cracked one of them open to reveal what looked like, if I held it at the right angle, the outline of a hubcap. After three days of digging I had exhumed the whole perimeter of what I thought was the car. Sweat coated my face, bringing relief from the ash. No birds or insects accompanied me and there was hardly any wind. Even the thwacks of the shovel sounded hollow and muted, not echoing out across the crater. By the time the sun was a notch lower than the great height it maintained all day, I knew I had worked too long and would be late getting back home.
