Pelles Gwertherion sits at the bar tonight. His cap is dirty, tip pointing back, as though to a conversation he can’t let go of. His hair is tucked behind his ears, pierced with blackthorn and briar. He seems drunk but isn’t. Drugged, but is he? He introduces himself as nobody you’d know. He has badgers nesting in the caves of his eyelids. Mackerel and seals, basking sharks, from the far North Sea, thrashing silver and deep wild water muscle, black within each iris. Albatross, and two Vs of returning snow geese are forging through storm-crazy dark and ominous cloud, thick with ice — sky wracked licorice custard — effortless, from his mind to his mouth. He speaks of magic and druid lore and slaughter, and of all the unborn baby birds that, he whispers finally, might not live beyond the shell.
He has the smoke of peat hearths on his breath like squalid, dangerous perfume. And kelp. And loam. Eagles pipe his name, and hares descend to the valleys of his hands, to rest between the lines that tell of elder days and fathomless drownings.
I want to disbelieve him. That he should even be. I want to think him mad. Mortal. No guardian of any legendary grail should look so derelict and distant. So busted, but who am I to place him?
Dusk, seeping through the sigh escaping from his memories, is some place none of us should ever go. Somewhere between. I know that superstition. Like Oisín, returning on a moonlight horse, with hope that had rules he could not follow. Dust, that was. The loneliness of the forgotten. Its violatory emptiness.
My lake has run dry, he whispers.
Soil, like dried blood, or old loam, is under his fingernails, more lightless than the rooms where he hides the indignity of thrashings. Wild violets crack their arctic sod. Spring snow is still thick. It seeks sunlight that can’t come yet. He holds out his arms, soundless with forgiving.
Do you see me? he asks, disbelieving. Longing.
I hear you, I see you.
Then you belong, he whispers, and coaxes twinned swans from his deep pocket. Willing them their freedom. Some unrecognisable ensorcelment. They don’t go. Some willpowers belong to no one but ourselves, I suppose. They shelter around his neck and touch each other, beak to brow. Lovers from the long ago. Not leaving. Not agreeing to the wasteland. All he knows.
The Fisher King sips his beer. His lips attempt to open with a storytelling of queens and glittering mirrored halls, but they are glued, like swallows to an alley wall, and nothing but a kestrel, from the top of the mountain, sighs its wingspan along the swamp that is the bar, hunting nourishment that used to be in copse, in thicket, in covey. The woman behind it pours a shot of oblivion in amber, watching him, afraid because she doesn’t understand how she knows not who he is, but what. She turns her back. She doesn’t dare any other way. He leaves forgetting on the counter. A tip, sort of.
When he steps out into the terrifying night I follow, wanted or not. Ignored. Old roses and bloated lilies, flaccid, hectic, catastrophic with lost beauty and entertainment, are dashed to decay along gutters of earlier rain before dropping through the destiny of an iron grate. They remind him, and he does not want that. Fur rushes past, grey with old snow, mother wolf searching for cubs amongst the detritus of the city, him knowing she won’t find them.
I am broken, he says, rolling a cigarette but forgetting what it’s for. Acknowledging that I am his company for a while.
I have seen your palace, I say.
He stops.
It’s a tent, he explains. You didn’t see anything. Besides, it blew away.
Like hate, I say.
Like belief, he answers, unsmiling.
And the rooftops are lined with indigo shadows. Pigeons. Noticers of crime and couriers of war, because he is what he says he is, but he is drowning in air. They are here to witness. Crows, the druids of another violated island, rattle down to balance, ballerinas in mourning, on the power lines. I’m fleetingly reminded of a childhood that was someone else’s. Wishing it was what really happened and not what did.
I know, he says.
And paired Orcas ride the roiling surf that foam-flecks through his compassion. He has stars for footsteps, each soft with a long-ago burning.
I am dead I think, he whispers.
But I hear you. I see you.
As he shrugs, ivy twines a thousand unchainsawed forest giants. It has a right to be here because it always has been. It garments his shoulders with a mantle, a remembered warmth upon which the swans settle, a birdly dark green nest, unmade by effort. Dreams, like icicles in the heart of a midwinter’s eve, weep down his cheeks and holly, oak and graveyard yew, form a procession along the desolation of street tarmac, drinking from him, growing infant mountains from decay. He does this.
I know you, I say.
He touches the muscles of his chest, beneath the thickness of the coat that frays at the slightest frightening, with a hand corded with the gnarled roots of a Brú na Bóinne rowan tree that crowns this king, like early spring, with vivid verdigris, with the courting songs of foxes across the valley, with the sorcery of those thin slivered tattoos, like a lifeline of ten thousand years.
If I hold him will I kill him? Like a coward, I look down, instead. If I know him will they lock me away too? If I tell him that I will remember, and I forget?
Gotta go, he says.
It takes discipline for me to say nothing else. What if I forget?
There is one — he says, over his shoulder, as he begins his disappearance. I know he means a grail. He knows I know.
I am the Fisher King.
Did he just say that and I thought it was the mist soughing through iron bars? Me? Forget him? I beg the night, don’t let it be the other way around.
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