There was only one moment when that calm turned slightly on its heel and the grief of reality slipped in. It was early in my dog walking endeavor, before the overstuffed wolf pack, back when I only took one or two dogs at a time. I was at Greenwich Park watching the sunset over the skyline. It was early summer. Frisbees and green clouds of parakeets swam through the air. I was sitting in the grass with a black Lab and a terrier sufficiently exhausted on either side of me, my body telling me this was the most satisfying day of work I’d ever had despite my mind feelingotherwise. Suddenly the Lab’s tail began to wag and he perked up. He stood, whimpered, and nervously skipped over to another dog walking across the field. I did the usual smile and nod to the owner and we let the dogs sniff each other and play for a few minutes. Something in them had clicked in that unspoken way of animals and they were instantly giddy together, no hesitancy or fear, only quick yips of excitement, a whine and a wiggle of the hips, a game of chase performed like a well-rehearsed ballet, like they knew each other from long ago. And I remember a distinct, painful longing opened up in my heart as I watched them, an ache that swelled throughout my whole body, that almost made me cry aloud: I wish I could have that.
The thought was as simple as that, and it caused me so much pain.
1301. In the end, it was only me who remained, no other living thing—and I doubted that even of myself. I stayed with the dragon long after the shores of lava had hardened and my clothes had burned away and blisters had risen in welts across my skin. I smelled burning hair and burning men but found nothing organic, only phones and tablets, plastic bottles, forever chemicals, car parts, and metal beams, chains, buckets, nails—all this undigested dragon kibble etched into bricks of charcoal—not a hand in sight to grab, not a face, no one crying “George!” and no one to whom I could cry “Simon!” This, now, was real silence, punctuated only by weeping and a hacking cough, my calls to no one eking out of me as whispers and strains, the throat in my mouth a cave inside a cave.
Fire lapped up the dragon’s skin and chewed through muscleright down to white bone. His coiled head remained mostly whole, coated in ash. His mouth was left open, as if it were permanently aghast at me peering inside—in fact I walked back inside it, standing and sitting and curling up and waiting with a feeble hope Simon would crawl out from some hidden bowel, walk magically through the forest of teeth. Under the dragon’s tongue there’d be a portal I could step through into whatever world Simon had disappeared into and I’d come out the other end and see him there in jeans and a T-shirt, nice trainers, phone charged, ironic and mawkish about how easily he had embraced the twenty-first century, or twenty-second, thirty-seventh, eighty-fifth, who knows, and it would look good on him, better than it had ever looked on me, and he’d smile, pick me up, clean me up—we’d shower together like we used to share a tub together but there’d be limitless water, limitless soap and towels and perfumes and red cheeks—and I wouldn’t even have to say I’m sorry—because I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Simon, I really am. I don’t know what came over me back there. I had thought to say that in the moment—words of denial had crossed my mind almost as if in parody. “It’s not what it looks like!” as if he had caught me and the dragon in an unseemly tryst. I was an embarrassment and a cliché right up to the moment of vanishment, right to the very end. I looked out from the jaws of the dragon, saw the gray, decimated world, and cried. Tremors drove through me and all I could do was collapse and weep, unable to breathe.
I stayed in the mouth of the dragon for a long time. It was comforting in a strange way to be in hell, to be at the verybottom and know that there was nothing farther below me. Ashes coated my body and all my surroundings, creating a new silence I had never experienced before. The silence from when I first time traveled had been surreal and almost a body-horror, but this new silence was exactly what it was: it was silent. I heard nothing. I felt nothing. There was no ringing sensation in my ears, no alien croaks from deep within my body. There was only absence, complete void. The empty, secluded glade of a zero.
Then One.
“Sir?”
A child’s hand touched my shoulder. A child’s, I guessed, only because it felt small and weak. In all other ways it was older than would be considered humane, dead almost and brittle, coated in cuts, blisters, and ash, dirty fingernails, actually, missing fingernails.
“Sir George?”
I rolled over and my dry eyes stung, blinked, coated themselves in acid tears, blinked again, saw a form, saw a visage of gray, the form of a child—thechild, the kid from dinner. My god. The kid, my excuse. I yelped like a lunatic. I grabbed the kid and clutched him to me.
“You killed the dragon,” he said.
Words failed. I could only cry. I stood up and stepped away, coughed and spit, tried to compose myself but that only made my vision clearer, so I could better see the shell-shocked kid and how one of his ears was blown off, foot pointing the wrong way, his new tremor and dried blood, the rocks embedded under skin.
As clear as when I had first arrived in this world, I called for God. I watched the six-year-old pick at his wounds, pick at mine,wince with every movement and I waited for God to step in and say something. Here, God, look—here’s another casualty of this thing that’s slipped through the netting of time and threatened to ruin it all, nullify this whole grand experiment in earthing, do you mind? Do you care? Don’t you want to step in and say something? If I leave this kid here, will you mind? If I take him with me only for him to run off and die in some other battle, will you be fine?
I sat with the child in the mouth of the dragon while we sutured our bleeding, wrapped sprains and breaks in what cloth was still salvageable. No angel appeared. No voice from heaven. No eyeball of God, blinking once for yes, twice for no. Again just that silence.
I sighed—no, I smiled, actually. It was the physical reaction to the buoying of my cheeks against a sudden lightness, nay, a sudden emptiness, but it was a smile nonetheless and this was enough of a hydraulic to keep me upright, to stand and move and climb. We left the dragon and clambered over rocks, scampered up cliffs. Half the well had landslided itself into more of a modest slope, so this wasn’t pure mountaineering, but it was arduous. I carried the child on my back—the child whose name I never bothered to learn, who I’m sure is dead by now from sepsis or tetanus or maybe he never even had a name, just a cattle-prodded serf, purpose-built for rote tasks dressed up in the temptation of bravery. I was going to put him on a horse and send him off to the king with news of the dragon’s demise, which reminded me—“Fuck!” I said it like forgetting my keys, the last gasp of my own modernity. We were still in the crater, but out of the well. A bright gray sky was above us. “Stay here,” I said to the kid. He stared straight ahead, only bones and gristle. I ran back down intothe crater. I tripped and fell three times but what did it matter at this point. I grabbed my sword and went to the dragon’s head one last time. With the sword as a saw, I extracted the smallest tooth from its mouth, rubbery gums still succulent, great big nerve endings floppy and alien. It took even longer to climb out of the well with the tooth strapped to my back, but I made it. I found a horse. I loaded it with the child and the tooth—its knick-knock legs buckled slightly. Then I said goodbye.
I did not accompany them to Scarborough. The mammoth tusk of a tooth would speak louder than anything I’d be able to say. I didn’t even bother going back to the smallholding. I left Yorkshire. In a way it was like I left England completely, left the entire United Kingdom, which wasn’t a kingdom yet and had far from any semblance of unity. A year ago, time had removed me from itself, and so now, this time, I took the clear, decisive action to remove it from myself. I went away and embraced my end.
Interstitial
THIRD EPISTLE, concerning the insistence of peace despite borders
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, Uniter of kingdoms, grandfather, father
Smoke drained out of the valleys and moors and was never seen again in such a lacquer, the countryside reverting to its familiar controlled burns, its celebratory bonfires, its cozy hearths, each of these appearing on the horizon like gentle trails of seafoam across sand. News of this change in weather pattern reached us while lodging at Peebles, our pocket of peace, where the sky was already a beaming Scottish blue, yet still I turned my head southward, waiting for something, watching and listening, greeted by only the sweetest noise—the punctuation of children laughing. Grandchildren.
A sword stuck me clear through the back. The wooden nub of it slipped around my side and I mimed a gallant death, collapsed and beaten with tickles by soft little hands. Gilbert and Mary and Elizabeth piled on top of me and for once, without the cushioning of armor, I felt the exposure of my age in my joints, in my shoulders as the children clung to me and by admission of defeat my daughter Joan had to call themoff. I yielded to their terms of surrender, granting each child candied oranges and a rose bestowed by Queen Margaret, and these were my goings-on when a battered mare flanked by soldiers approached from across the garden. A starved child rode the mare. The mare towed an enormous white effigy, sharpened like a spear, dragging across the grass.
Queen Margaret called the tooth an elephant tusk. She showed me her ivory comb. “Feel the texture,” she said. “It’s the same.” She sent a servant all the way to her palace at Marlborough to retrieve an ivory platter for further comparison but by the time he was on his return we had moved on to Berwick and the servant wrote to me saying he was stopped at the border and that was what sent me into a rage, Margaret’s first of mine to witness. “Stopped at the border.” Be it tusk or tooth I broke it in half. A crystalline pulp at the core crumbled across the ground. I dug Margaret’s comb out from her hair and snapped that in half as well. How am I meant to unlight a fire like that? How can I not raise my voice and bark and scream at this encroachment, this casual treason in my own home?
THERE IS NO BORDER. I could barely scrawl the words myself. I screamed them into the ear of my scribe, stabbed the pen right through the bloody parchment while everyone—Margaret, the Prince of Wales, Thomas, Mary, the kids, the urchins, the usurpers—looked on, dead-eyed and too young. I don’t know how to be unseething and unscreaming when they look at me like that, when I see their ingratitude for the land they live in, their assumption that everything there issimply there, because it’s there. Thousands of countrymen have not died with spears through their heads and swords through their bellies for your parcels to be “stopped at the border.” A border does not exist. A border is a consignment of the devil, and how dare you freely give it to him? A border should only be an ocean, nothing smaller, like that which lies between us and France, and yet even that I can step over. I step north, I step south, people pop underfoot like berries and bleed red, their skins like that of thin tadpoles. There is absolutely no border. How dare he say he’s stuck at the border like some misbegotten cow. If the servant dares show his face with that plate, both will be split in half.
I digress.
I take strange comfort in the thought of George and theXXXXXX. I don’t believe what Margaret said about the tooth being feigned. It wasn’t ivory. She is young and unbelieving in many things, as young as everyone is in this world—a world that feels too fragile, constantly newly born. She is pregnant again. How can humanity refresh itself at such a maniacal pace? As old as I am I feel myself alone in this battle against a slate that is continuously wiped clean, “borders” repainted like black iron mullions, when in reality they are movable, I have moved them, I have shattered them; still I bang against these windows, still I walk to all these places. I’ve outlived every horse I’ve ever owned. I’ve spent every last coin in the treasury. And so the comfort of George, as I was saying, is the unspent youth I saw in his eyes. They were not deadened. They were fey. I remain haunted not by their depth but by their wide absorption.
With theXXXXXXslain, George’s role is fulfilled, but if atroublesome time befalls this disunited kingdom, I can think of no greater guidance than his to seek. If he really was from a world still to come, then there is comfort in knowing that there will be children of our children, there will be a continuing branch despite what I only see as a constant culling. And what I say here about George, I suppose, I mean to say to you. You who will one day be in possession of these records by the sheer happenstance of our sacred calling. You who will one day be me and for that I’ve spent your life in so much loathing of you, from fear, from agony, and yes, from love. You, my son. My heart.
18
I was hauling a bundle of dried flax on my back when a town crier announced the death of King Edward in September, in 1307. The king had died two months earlier, in July, six years after the last reported dragon attack, when the love of my life had disappeared into thin air.
I dropped the bundle of flax and stretched my back while the crier went through all his pageantry. This was in a market town on the outskirts of Cambridge. This was during one of the musty last days of summer when I’d mistake weariness for wariness, rub melancholic muscles in my arms and shoulders, and feel the length of all the different paths my life could have once taken.
The king’s body was going to be marched down the main road here on its way to Waltham Abbey, where it would lie in state for a time before burial in London. A conflicting series of shrugs passed through the crowd of villagers gathered around the crier—some relieved that all the needless drama with Scotland might finally end, others wary of his son’s more dangerouspredilections. Hah, I thought, how’s that for time travel?—we’re back to year one. Year one of King Edward the Second’s reign. Long live the new faggot king, his child bride Queen Isabella, and his soothsayer-lover Piers Gaveston. I toyed with the idea of writing to them or doing something to climb into those circles of privilege before the opportunity completely dried up. I still had my summons letter from Edward I and a letter of thanksgiving for all that business with the dragon, a royal seal. I could hire a scribe. I could go view the body as it lay in state, rub shoulders with a knight or earl and remind them of who I was, what I did. I kept these ideas as the toys they were. I had more timely matters now.
