Chapter 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 modern London.
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 were in 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 saying the 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.”
The woman eyed him the way anyone would eye the brusque unknown—her wariness felt modern and familiar. There was a nervousness
in her voice, but a determination to snap back, her eyes were calculating for a moment, then decisive. “I’m just here with
my four boys”—she gestured to four children sat around her—“showing support for their father who’s in Wales as we speak, making
sure you’ve got bread to eat and a roof over your head.” The oldest of the boys glared at us and the old man, who continued
barking his rant.
“You know King Arthur was Welsh, right?” he said. “You lot love to ride into London for the day and have fun at the games
and all this blasphemy, but he was a Welshman through and through and you and your boys can rest assured that when he comes
again he’ll rip up all the castles your daddy and king—”
“Oh, so he’s still on his way then?” The woman broke into sharp laughter. “Anytime now, right? We’re all waiting! Typical
for a Welshman to be snoozing while his country’s being conquered. The lazy bastard couldn’t even show up for Caerphilly.”
“No lazier than an army-pension-sucking pig—that’s what you are, aren’t you? Showing up to the trough?”
And with that the oldest of the children sprang up from his seat. He couldn’t be any older than ten, but his hand was on his