Son of the Lake

I taught him to be greedy, when I took him. I found him in a cold, stone room in a decaying castle, curled up on a broken bed. He was such a small boy, and pale, too, red veins stark against his thin white cheeks.

He looked like a thing you could break. Delicate as glass. And when he saw me, his eyes lifted, so innocent. So soft: soft enough to shape.

I knew, then, that I would teach him about greed.

That sounds malicious, perhaps, or at least misguided. It is not. I knew what I was doing. I knew from the moment I saw him what that boy was going to be, if only he knew what I knew. If only he could be taught.

His kingly father was half-dead anyway. He was not in a position to oppose.

I called the boy Lancelot, for his grandfather, and du Lac, for me. Lady, he whispered, as I lifted him onto my horse, and I told him there were many ladies but only one of the lake.

When we reached the lake, it was a long, blue-green mirror in the twilight. I sat the boy on the water’s edge and told him to breathe. He did, his child’s chest expanding and contracting, his long-lashed eyelids fluttering closed.

Then, tenderly, I pushed him in.

He screamed. He flailed. I waited.

Lancelot clambered up onto the shore.

“Do you want it, now?” I asked. “Do you want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything?”

His voice was a needlepoint, tiny yet preternaturally sharp. “Breath?”

I corrected, “Life.”

The boy nodded, quick and certain.

“Good,” I told him. “You have to need it. You have to hoard it. Steal it. That is how we keep it.”

He nodded again.

I told him, “Come with me.”

This time, when I took him to the water, I brought him in slow, by my side. He was frightened, I knew he was frightened, but he did not let himself tremble. Good, I thought.

The lake is not another version of the land. It’s murkier, stranger, heavy and indistinct. But it’s beautiful, and I watched him as he opened his eyes to it, as I took him to live in it, as he learned what it could make him.

Lancelot du Lac. He became a man in those waters. The ill-made knight, they would later call him, but I would say he was made well, just for a different kind of place.

When he was yet small and tender-skinned, I taught him the way you stand with your feet in the silt, swaying with the current, light yet rooted. I taught him the way you watch the little darting fish and the deep-diving birds, eyes open in the deep. I taught him the way you weave a life out of cattails, the way you spell runes in the pebbles, the way a ripple is another kind of magic, another kind of truth.

What did he know of swords and round tables, when he left me? Well, some. But mostly he knew what I’d taught him. He was what I’d made him: a still eye in a swirling pool. A reed that bent but did not break. Hungry for air and hungry to live.

He was delicate, always, but few would notice.

It was years before I heard from him. My child, my son. And I heard, first, not from him, but from the king, by his emissary: my Lancelot had gone mad.

When he came to me, I knew he’d forgotten. I could hear it in his breath: the long, slow inhales of an earth dweller. He took the air for granted. He’d forgotten to be greedy.

“What has become of you?” I whispered.

He gestured carelessly at the shore. “On land, Lady, we have a thing called grief.”

I shook my head and stepped closer. I could smell it on him, see it underneath the dirt-marked hands and the crushed-berry stains. I said, “You have a thing called shame.”

I took one of those hands in mine. Scratches, calluses, the memory of scars. As he looked at me, wonder and madness warring in his eyes, I led him into the water again.

It is different underwater. You do not speak the same. You speak, but as an implication, an incantation, almost. I knew what he said, but he may not have, not quite.

There, in the deep, I reminded him what I’d taught him. I explained that he’d forgotten. Hunger. Greed.

His face was still and cool in the watery dark.

“No,” he told me, eyes closed, smiling. “I coveted my neighbor’s wife, Lady. Is that not greedy?”

“That is the wrong kind of greed.”

The effort it took for him to keep smiling. I could see it so clearly. “I love her.”

“You betrayed her.”

“Yes. But not on purpose.”

“We are getting distracted.”

He shook his head, tiny bubbles flying from his nostrils. “She is the only thing,” he said, with effort, “worth talking about.”

Ah, love. A terrible curse for a breakable thing.

I said, “Open your eyes.”

Slowly, slowly, he complied.

We were sitting on the sands of the bottom. I pressed his palm into that softness. I put my other hand to his chin and tilted it toward the surface. Light, a golden thread diffracted through the dimness. Miniature creatures guided by the current in its wake.

“Love is not life,” I told him. “Greed is not love. Nor is it the battlefield. Nor the castles. Remember our greed. The greed of the lake.”

“The greed of the lake,” he mumbled, mocking, but he kept looking where I led him.

“This is your duty. This is your call. Light and shadow. Pool and current. Watching without moving, swaying while holding your ground. Do you understand?”

He shrugged, childish. “I thought I did.”

“This is your last lesson,” I pressed. “You’d better listen.”

He did.

“You are to be greedy for exactly what you are. A knight. A man. Alive. You are to want what you have earned so badly that you never, ever take it for granted, and you are to earn what you want so surely that no one can take it, and you are to remember that you are Lancelot du Lac, son of a king and son of the lake.” I paused. “Will you remember this?”

He closed his eyes. I could hear the tears in his voice as he begged, “Heal me, Lady. Enough with the lessons. Just heal me.”

And I knew exactly how.

“Lancelot du Lac,” I told him. “Come with me to the surface.”

“And what shall I do there?”

He was stone and glass, strong yet stooped, wise with sorrow and sick with joy. The man we’d made, me and the lake.

I said, “You’re going to breathe.”