They were in full harness except for gauntlets and helmets. Bare steel, no surcoats. Bedivere’s breastplate had a sun etched in the center from which gilded rays emanated in all directions, so that his entire body was striped steel and gold. He bore a sun on his shield, too, half-eclipsed, on a silver field; the sun’s face appeared distressed, as if at the pain of being partially obscured. At first glance Dinadan’s armor seemed almost ostentatiously plain, but when you looked closer you saw it was subtly engraved with birds and beasts and portraits of various saints with their attributes. On his shield was a sheaf of arrows gripped in a disembodied fist.

  The Green Knight was there, too, on his horse of twisted branches, looking even weirder in full morning sunlight, the polecat presumably curled up safely back inside his chest. A handful of squires and servants dressed in Camelot’s azure and gold were fussing around a cartload of food and wine and bedding and bundled lances and what Collum took to be a folded-up pavilion.

  “Coming?” Bedivere asked.

  Collum did his best not to grin like an idiot.

  “I’m coming.”

  “Collum, how do you feel about defending ladies?” Dinadan asked.

  “Good.”

  “And the helpless?”

  “Good.”

  “Loyal to your king? I mean if there was one?”

  “Yes.”

  “Speak the truth? No treason or murder?”

  “I—yes. And no. And no.” In fact he might possibly have been a murderer, but it didn’t seem like the moment to split hairs.

  “You forgot the church,” Bedivere said. “And bravery.”

  “Right,” Dinadan said. “Are you going to serve the Lord? And be brave?”

  “Yes and—”

  Collum’s right ear flashed with pain. It was the same ear the Green Knight had smashed the day before, and the pain was so intense he clutched at it and lost his balance and fell heavily off his horse onto the muddy grass in his freshly polished armor.

  Someone had hit him. He lay there on his side, breathing and rubbing at his ear, waiting for the pain to go away. He seemed to find himself in this position a lot around the knights of Camelot. The monumentally heavy hooves of a destrier clumped past him.

  “Arise, Sir Collum of the Out Isles!” Sir Palomides called back over his shoulder. “Adventure awaits!”

  Eleven

  The Tale of Sir Palomides

  The first time Palomides heard the word Britain it was in the suq al-warraqin, the paper-seller’s market. Vast tides of words, both familiar and strange, written and spoken, ebbed and flowed and sloshed around the marketplace as if it were a great verbal ocean. But he’d never heard this one before.

  “It’s a Christian city,” Hassan said with authority. Hassan sold copies of mathematical tracts from India that were so abstruse as to be indistinguishable from poetry. “Situated on the shore of the Western Ocean, the seventh clime, very cold and quite barbarous. Britain is ruled by seven kings, and if a stranger tries to enter it a magic idol puts them to sleep. When they wake up the Britons interrogate them as to their business there.”

  “And you know this how?”

  Tahir passed a hand through his rich, lustrous hair. It was his shop they stood outside of, down a stubby little alley littered with fallen palm fronds and crammed with long uneven tables piled with books. Tahir trafficked in medical textbooks, mostly from China, and he was also the handsomest man Palomides had ever seen, a fact of which he seemed completely oblivious.

  “A book,” Hassan said. “The writer was a prisoner of war in Constantinople.”

  “Constantinople is a long way from the Western Ocean. Which I think is more correctly named the Encircling Ocean.” Ziyad had to squint up at them when he talked from under his wickedly hunched back. His shop dealt exclusively in lavishly inlaid pen boxes.

  The three men liked to try to outdo one another in pedantry. It was a game they played.

  “I’ve never heard of either of them,” Palomides remarked. They ignored him.

  “There is no such thing as the Encircling Ocean,” Tahir said, “unless you mean the Green Sea, or as it’s also known, the Sea of Darkness. Apparently its water appears black, but when you scoop it up with your hands, it runs clear.”

  “The text specifies the Western Ocean,” Hassan said. “They can’t all be the same one.”

  “How many oceans can there be?” Tahir asked.

  “And seven kings sounds like quite a lot of kings for one city,” Palomides said. “A highly unstable arrangement.” Here in the paper-seller’s quarter Palomides was a nobody, a dilettante, a slumming aristocrat from the royal precinct. Men like Ziyad and Tahir and Hassan were the princes here.

  And they were right, he was a dilettante. He had no idea what any of them were talking about. But it all sounded very thrilling and romantic.

  As far as the knights of the Round Table were concerned, Sir Palomides was a Saracen. In actual fact, when he arrived in Britain he’d never heard the word Saracen before, and it took him a while to figure out that they were using it to refer to him. But the British were so deeply convinced that “Saracen” was the correct name for people like Palomides—that is, for Muslims—that they further concluded, reasoning backward in their stolid British way, that he must come from a place called Sarras.

  They had a lot of feverish fantasies about Sarras, which was supposed to be located somewhere near Egypt. In fact there was no such place. It didn’t exist.

  Palomides had long since given up explaining this. The British could wear you down that way. And the truth would’ve been harder to explain, because Palomides was from Baghdad, a city that in magnificence and sophistication far outshone even the fever dream of Sarras.

  When Palomides was first ushered into the presence of the Round Table he did his best to look impressed, but while the Table was indeed large and undeniably Round, Palomides came from an entire city that was ruled out in a perfect Euclidean circle four miles in circumference. The city’s founder, Caliph Abu Ja’far Abdallah ibn Muhammad al-Mansur, had paced it out himself on the empty sand and had it marked with cotton balls soaked in naphtha, so that at night they could be set alight and you could see the shape of the city-to-come burning in the cold darkness of the desert.

  Ring-walled, four-gated Baghdad was a city of markets and squares, mosques and schools, baths and markets, bridges and canals, mansions and slums. Everything was built in stucco and brick, stone being a relative rarity in the fertile floodplains of the Tigris, which rubbed affectionately up against the city walls like a cat. Everybody came to Baghdad: Sunni and Shia, Arabs and Persians, Africans and Bedouins, Greeks and Christians, Jews and Indians and Slavs, scientists and scholars and slaves and singers and shoemakers and swordsmen and silk weavers. In the precise center of the city was a second perfect circle, a much smaller one, and within it stood the Great Mosque and the homes of the caliph and his extended family, which included Palomides. Baghdad was a prince among cities, and Palomides was a prince of Baghdad.

  The royal precinct was a lush enclave of fragrant wood and lavish tiles, scented with rose water and shadowed from the desert heat. The young Palomides grew up among its numberless villas and colonnades and belvederes. Its courtyards were planted with orange trees, their branches artfully interwoven and heavy with fruit and the doves and parrots that gathered there. At the very center of this circle-within-a-circle was the caliph’s home, the Palace of the Golden Gate, surmounted by a great green dome, 150 feet high, that was itself topped by a golden horseman who carried a golden lance in his golden hand. The horseman had been magicked in such a way that it turned and pointed its lance in whatever direction the caliph’s enemies would come from next.

  Palomides used to stare up at the golden lancer, hoping to catch it at the moment when it spun to point at a new foe. Every once in a very great while, he did.

  A large, well-made boy, bright and curious, Palomides was fed on lamb and fish tongues and sweet melons that arrived from far northern lands packed in snow to keep them fresh. His mind was fed by a brace of tutors versed in mathematics, music, poetry, law, economics, medicine, astronomy, and above all the Hadith and the Quran. He was an avid polo player—polo was one of the pillars of furusiyya, the martial art of mounted combat. He trained with a sword as well, practicing a thousand strokes a day until he could slice through twenty reams of paper with a single blow without cutting through the soft cotton cloth they rested on. Though it seemed like a waste of good paper to Palomides.

  He was a prince, but he would never be a king. He was well insulated from the throne by three hearty older brothers, and as a result nobody paid him much attention. His brothers absorbed all the love and honors his parents had to bestow. Years later he would discover that in Britain it was customary for a fourth son to carry the image of a swift on his shield, because a swift was a bird that was believed to have no feet and spent its entire life on the wing, never landing, from birth to death.

  Palomides knew perfectly well that swifts have feet, but he understood the symbolism. That was the rootless, landless life of a fourth son, heir to nothing, fated to wander the world in search of a place, even as places were handed free to his siblings.

  Palomides enjoyed every possible luxury, but as he grew older he looked at the life of leisured irrelevance that stretched out ahead of him and found himself troubled. There was a nagging hollowness to it all, the endless round of dinners and hunting and polo, backgammon at the club and flirting in the gardens. Wasn’t there something more—some way to make his mark on the world? He wanted to be a hero. But of what story?

  Another ornament of Baghdad’s royal precinct was its great library, the House of Wisdom. The caliph was obsessed with books, and his agents scoured the world for them, buying them at great expense, exhuming them from ancient sand-flooded tombs and temples, claiming them as spoils of war, extorting them from foreign potentates as gifts and favors. The caliph didn’t let these books lie fallow, he brought in scribes to copy them, and scholars to study and translate them and debate the merits of their contents, and cooks and cleaners and servants to serve the scribes and scholars, who sometimes slept in the House of Wisdom when their labors were so all-consuming that they couldn’t even leave them to go home to their families.

  But Palomides didn’t much care for the House of Wisdom. He found its hushed halls oppressive and its denizens insufferably pretentious. When he wanted intellectual talk he betook himself outside the great circular walls of Baghdad, to the saltier, less salubrious alleys of the suq al-warraqin. Three or four times a week Palomides balanced his way across the Tigris, over a bridge of colorful skiffs that were permanently moored together in a chain, which the current tugged into a gentle crescent, to visit them.

  “The Sea of Darkness is a mystery, my friends,” Ziyad was saying. “Nobody knows how big it is. Sailors hug the shore for fear of getting lost forever. Waves sweep across it big as castles. Massive sea creatures live in it, with black skin and white flesh, so big the British build houses from their bones.”

  “Who or what exactly are the British?” Palomides asked.

  “That’s what Hassan has been busily misinforming us about. In point of fact Britain isn’t a city at all, it’s an archipelago, twelve islands, all shrouded in the mist and rain that blow in from the Encircling Ocean.” He held up a finger to hold off both Tahir and Hassan from correcting him. “The British are a primitive people. The seventh clime is excessively cold, and the cold corrupts their humors. Also birds grow on trees there, like fruit, and the British roast and eat them.”

  “That raises so many questions,” Tahir said. “For example, are these bird-fruits plants or animals?”

  “They possess characteristics of both,” Ziyad said, not very illuminatingly.

  “And the British eat their bird-fruit in their bone-houses?” Hassan asked. “The ones they make out of the giant fish?”

  “Correct.”

  As the men talked, Palomides began to hear a strange roaring in his ears, louder and louder. It was as if a great wind had come rushing in off the desert—because this was it. It was so obvious. This was the story, this was how he would make his mark. This was how the swift would take wing. He felt his life turning like the golden lancer spinning on top of the caliph’s great green dome. Where would it stop?

  “Gentlemen,” he announced, “I will settle this argument for you.”

  The three other men looked at him without much interest.

  “You will?” Tahir said. “Really?”

  “How do you intend do that?” Hassan said.

  “Very simply. I will go to Britain myself and find out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It took him two years.

  It was perverse, and impulsive, and foolish, as not one single member of his family failed to point out to him. But that was the beauty of it! It was a magnificent gesture, a pure act of will, spitting straight in the eye of fate! Every time he thought of it the same wild thrill went through him. No one would ever forget Palomides, prince of Baghdad, who one day on a whim turned on his heel and lit out for the edge of the world.

  As exits went, it would never be beaten. And anyway he couldn’t very well go back to the paper sellers now. The die was cast. He would not be a caliph in a golden cage, he would be a citizen of the world. Maybe he would bring back seeds from those bird-fruit-trees and plant them in the royal courtyards alongside the orange trees. He would throw a feast of roast tree-bird-fruits and invite all the paper sellers.

  He went by camel at first, following the Silk Road west to Mosul, bobbing easily on the current of jade, paper, cardamom, frankincense, myrrh, cinnamon, slaves, and, of course, silk. From there he passed to Sivas and Ankara and finally, after ten months, to Constantinople.

  Palomides loved Constantinople. It was a true rival to his beloved Baghdad, full of life and color and confusion, a babel of voices, dirt and smells and beautiful women and strange birds. But nobody there knew much more than he did about his ultimate destination. Europeans were fascinated with the east, they obsessed and raged and fantasized about it, but their fascination was not requited by the east except on a strictly commercial basis. Some Europeans were good, some were bad. All were tall, drunk, promiscuous, and incredibly smelly. What else did you need to know?

  Also they were fiercely devoted to Christianity, an outmoded faith that had long since been superseded by Islam. The only new fact Palomides gleaned about Britain was that it was currently ruled by a king named Arthur.

  He at least was intriguing, this Arthur. Apparently one reason the Britons were so obscure and mysterious was that they had long been too busy fighting one another to have much to do with the wider world beyond their misty archipelago. But under Arthur that had changed. The Britons had made peace and were becoming prosperous and mighty. This Arthur must cut quite a figure.

  Sailing to Venice, Palomides was racked with both sea- and homesickness. But for those rumors of Arthur and the tales of his glorious court, he might have given up. Instead he let them pull him forward, westward, ever westward, into the setting sun. It was in Venice that he acquired his new name. He was tired of listening to people stumble through his Arabic name so he adopted a new one, easier for a European to pronounce: Palomides. It had belonged to a minor figure in the Trojan War, legendarily clever, credited by some with inventing dice, or numbers, or certain letters of the alphabet. The original Palomides met a bad end in the war, but never mind. This Palomides would write a better ending for himself.

  Now there was a thought—he would write a book! Of course he would! It would be copied out in numberless editions and shelved in the House of Wisdom. Handsome Hassan would sell it at his shop, telling his customers, I was there the day Prince Palomides departed for Britain. We all thought he was mad! But then…

  Palomides joined a convoy of merchants headed first for Milan, from there to Cologne, and from there north to the Frankish city of Bruges. There, by dint of a lot of royal charm, memorized phrases, hand gestures, and gold, he booked passage on a ship that would brave the Western Sea, or the Encircling Sea, or the Green Sea, or the Sea of Darkness, beyond which lay at last the land of Arthur.

  * * *

  • • •

  No magic idol put Palomides to sleep. There would be times when he wondered if it had, and if what followed was one long tortuous idol-induced nightmare.

  In the cold stone hall of Camelot he presented gifts to King Arthur, a tall, rangy man, handsome in a long-nosed kind of way, who thanked him graciously but not overly effusively. He might have been a magic idol for the way his pale eyes seemed to bore into Palomides’s own, warmly but insistently, as if to divine intentions that even he, Palomides, might not be aware of.

  Palomides was then drawn aside by a berobed individual with long, lank hair and a brusque manner who startled him by speaking rapid, fluent street Arabic with no trace of an accent. This Merlin, as he called himself, accepted Palomides’s homage—which was not a word that Palomides would have used, but he let it pass—on Arthur’s behalf and in return offered him the hospitality due a visiting diplomat from the great city of Sarras. An officious undersecretary was assigned to show Palomides to his room and acquaint him with the wonders of Camelot.

  The wonders. Of course Palomides knew he was an emissary from a more advanced civilization, and it was important to be charitable to those less fortunately situated. But even so it was hard not to feel like, after all that, it was a bit of an anticlimax.

  In Baghdad there was a palace with an artificial pond at its center, and in the center of the pond was a tree made of silver. The tree had eighteen branches, and each branch sprouted innumerable twigs and leaves, and on each twig sat a mechanical bird that could, by means of a concealed mechanism, be made to sing and flutter its wings.