Wordsworth – Chapter 24

The glass with a black frame shows a beautiful woman reading inside of it.

“The PRT still hasn’t disclosed an official statement regarding the earlier incident, though anonymous sources indicate a Master’s power to be the cause of Gallant’s—”

It’s always a beautiful woman or a handsome man, as if beauty and truth were cousins, as if the bearers of news had to portray both.

Except when they aren’t.

It’s always beauty, except when it’s ugliness.

“Bullshit,” the ugly man sitting beside me says, his sneer pulling at the scar running over his cheek.

“It’s all a conspiracy,” the man by his side agrees, nodding in a way that has his beer slide from beneath white foam and drip a single trickle down marred glass and over his fattened fingers.

“Still, while we wait for an official report, the facts are as clear as can be seen: the young ward Iridescent who rose to fame after her repeated victories over the Undersiders and Wordsworth herself has very publicly stated that her old nemesis is a hero. Was she alluding to a redemption story? To a mistaken identity? Maybe to an undercover job?” Beauty says, steering close to Truth for merely a moment before veering away.

“Yeah, right. More like a false flag,” the scarred man says as he rolls his eyes, and more beer is spilled in agreement.

“All of this coming to light after Lung’s defeat and capture seems to make the question ever more pressing. The question of who is Wordsworth,” the woman says with solemnity that strays into farce.

“Who is Wordsworth? Ha! Good question, isn’t it? A freak cape who—”

Who is Wordsworth?

I answered that question before I asked it on that night I first walked in beauty like the night, when I came for my lost father. When I reflected on the tale of the Red and Black sisters.

Wordsworth.

Me.

“If you ask me, she’s just another bullshit move to make that new ward look good. Takes the fall a few times, then gets publicly redeemed? What’s next, they are long lost sisters? Hell, a pair of dykes—”

The tinkle of broken glass echoes around me as the beauty of the night fades away.

And I stand.

In the middle of an Empire 88 hangout, surrounded by ugly men with ugly scars looking at me as I appear from within my veil of Moon and Stars.

I stand.

Furious.

“There once was—” the words come swiftly to my lips, the ink rushing down my gloves, eager to leap out, to find the nearest of them as they move, some to flee, others to draw their weapons out.

I stop them.

For the first time, I silence my stories.

They don’t deserve them.

I twirl around, my fist lashing out and catching the fat man’s forearm with my knuckles.

It snaps.

There’s a thing about paper: it comes from wood.

It is heavy.

Far heavier than a human arm.

He drops to his knees, cradling the shattered thing with his left hand as his switchblade slips out of nerveless fingers, and he howls in pain, agony, and rage.

I can sympathize.

I am hit from behind, the kick catching me on my lower back and making me stumble forward into a fist waiting for me, striking my jaw, turning my face aside.

The ugly man with the ugly scar shakes his hand and grimaces.

I…

Words rush through my mind, some of Lisa’s first attempts to get me out of my fugues helpfully hinting at knowledge that I keep inside myself even if I’m usually not aware of it.

My fist once again shoots forward, and the man bends over it, his eyes wide, his breathing exploding out of a gaping, stunned mouth as I bury two bent fingers right below his sternum.

I could have… It would have been easier to shatter his ribs.

Easier.

It never was about things being easy.

I twist out of the way, the man falling to join his drinking partner on the scuffed, wooden floor stained with spilled drinks and darker liquids.

Someone shatters a bottle over my head, the cheap whisky running over my ink, and I suppress a grimace at the memories of a father absent in all but body and at my words trying to recede from the attack as it seeps into my pages.

I force them still, to endure, to not reveal weakness in front of the enemy as I lash out with a low kick that catches the ankle of my attacker with the edge of my high-heeled shoe.

He stumbles away, catching himself on the dark countertop, framed by two red flags with a vile symbol on them.

And they dare talk about false flags…

The whole bar is decorated fittingly. Blood red hanging from the ceiling, framing iron eagles in walls laden with posters of soldiers from a long-gone war. From the war after Tolkien’s, the one that was called the Writers’ War.

Because war fascinates. It captures the human soul promising both the highest and the lowest that we can reach. War lures us in with promises of heroic deeds. Of the spirit enduring in the face of horror, rising up to things we never knew we were capable of.

Resistance. Defiance. Courage. Bravery.

Honor.

War promises.

And, sometimes, it delivers.

I lean on more words borrowed from things I haven’t learned, and I wrap my hand around a lunging wrist with yet another knife aimed at my eye, twisting my whole body, turning around, and dragging the screaming man with me so that he violently stumbles face first against the nearest wall, right over a poster of a man wearing a tanned uniform, his hand raised in a salute I shall never return.

I’m backed into a corner, surrounded by them all, by all those that haven’t fled.

By worshippers of War.

Of a War that brought the world to its lowest.

“Tay, why aren’t you using your power?” Lisa’s voice asks from the headset hidden in my curls, and, for a guilty moment, I regret that the device didn’t break with the bottle.

I rush forward and low, my pointed elbow in front of me, buried into a man’s belly, launching him away before I get more than a hint of the acrid stench coming from a white shirt that has too many splotches of other colors.

A knife sinks into my back before I can straighten up.

‘Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?’

No. Not before me. There were never daggers before me.

There was only red hair and giggles from behind.

I leap forward, the knife pulled out of me like a fake sword out of an unfit stone, and I’m surrounded. I see dark guns waved around, but they refrain from shooting among them, relieving me of the duty to stop them from doing so when I may not want to.

So they have that much awareness. That much intelligence.

Yet they still revel in this.

I yearn to speak words that will change their minds, mend their hearts, but what words could they be?

What truth could I say, what beautiful truth, to those who willingly turn to such ugly lies?

A crack of wood sounds over me, the stool striking my back forcing me ahead into waiting arms that grab at me, that try to hold me still for more giggling knives to find me.

I’m surrounded.

By men.

By grown men who love ugly lies.

They all could have red hair, beautiful smiles.

‘Her name is Wordsworth,’ they would all say while looking straight ahead into a camera that would show me their colors as they were stained and drained away until they fell, empty of everything except for a smile that I knew for years.

A smile that had only ever been mine.

My ugly smile.

I roar, without words, without meaning, and I kick back into a now shattered shin. Flailing arms let go of me as the knives lunge forward, glimmering like stars in the beauty of the night.

I could handle all of this so easily.

I could slip away clad with beauty like the night before weaving a tale just for them, as merciful or as terrible as I intended to be. I could follow a deliberate plan laid out by a clever fox. I could do a thousand things other than stumble forward on high heels, turning aside at the last moment so that stabs can only glance me, only cut shallowly at pages that may be weak by themselves but that are denser than flesh when together and knit by black words.

I still know what pain is, but I no longer feel it the same way. There’s no more rushed urgency, no more flashing panic.

Not when it comes to my body.

But I see them. The ugly men and the ugly scars, rushing around me, striking at me, reaching at me.

They don’t smile.

And then the doors to the bar blow open, the mismatched twins torn off their hinges, and in comes Stormtiger.

The one I’d been waiting for.

The one that Lisa’s plan was meant to lure.

Another worshipper of War. Another peddler of ugly lies.

So I meet him with a sad, brilliant, beautiful truth.

“Storm’d at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well, Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of Hell Rode the six hundred.”

My words finally spring free from me, rushing out of my dress, my gloves, my hat my hair. They cover the whole bar turning it into a true battlefield, one with cannons to the left and to the right as the six hundred ride.

And they were noble.

Not because their cause was just. Not because they fought for the right side.

But because, after their charge, after the thundering hooves of six hundred horses rushed forward and toward the enemy’s guns, after they took upon themselves to fight despite the blunder, black sabers of ink flashing forward under a brief sun…

After they are torn apart in front of my eyes by Stormtiger’s razor winds as the chained man whirrs into frantic, panicked motion…

“They that had fought so well Came thro’ the jaws of Death, Back from the mouth of Hell, All that was left of them,

“Left of six hundred.”

I whisper the penultimate verses, the ones before the triumphant, rallying note.

The ones that tell me about those who survived despite it all and those that fell in their attempt.

And I end the poem there.

And so they return, my words, my soldiers, rushing back to me after their first strike. After their first defeat.

My enemy still stands, clutching at a bleeding arm, one of my six hundred having managed to weather the storm.

The rest of the Nazis have fled or are moaning on a floor that is once again wooden, that doesn’t bear the scars of battle.

Words are once again ready in my mouth, eager to leap forward. To bring more truth here.

He raises his left hand, the uninjured one, and winds once more whirr around it, screeching in ugly fury and rage.

It would’ve been so fitting on her.

It would’ve been far more fitting than a beautiful smile turned cruel. Or an ugly smile turned into yearning like a skull’s.

‘Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?’

I never kissed Emma’s lips. Just her cheeks, her hair, her hands. Just the girl she was before the flesh fell away from my dead Red Sister, and all that remained of her were blazing, beautiful colors that hid ugly lies.

A Red Sister that still struck with flashes of merriment.

A Red Sister that it took me too long to realize had been replaced.

Stormtiger’s strike briefly meets Humpty Dumpty’s wall, and both are scattered over a stained floor. He readies another assault, the winds gathered around him growing faster and wilder.

But I have an audience.

I have my words.

I have far more than six hundred.

***

Stormtiger lies broken and weeping.

His ugly lies rent asunder by my beautiful truths.

By Arthur’s death. By Camelot’s fall. By yet another war that took too much to give so little.

My enemy’s been battered by every Knight of the Round that lived to see the fall of their kingdom. Struck with blows pulled at the last moment as those who nursed my love of noble sacrifice fell again and again like they had always been destined to.

I stand in the destroyed bar, surrounded by wounded men and torn flags, and I imagine Arthur right there, beneath my feet, returning Excalibur, scolding Bedivere for not throwing it away to its rightful owner, to the Lady of the Lake.

I imagine a tired man who had lived long enough to see his dream crumble. To see his heroes fall. To be betrayed by lover and friend.

Yet, somehow, in my eyes, Arthur is always smiling.

Because he lost. He was defeated in all the ways that mattered. Defeated by Lancelot and Guinevere’s love. By Mordred and Morgana’s treachery. By Merlin’s absence.

He lost all that he had fought for. The kingdom he had raised. The knights he had loved.

He had lost everything.

Everything but himself.

“Come back, Tay,” Lisa whispers.

“The plan…” I half answer.

“No. This was a mistake. You’re not ready to go out yet.”

I look at my feet.

At where I imagine Arthur lying, smiling as the life drains out of him when one of his last knights finally leaves him behind to, this time, throw Excalibur into the still waters of a nearby lake.

Bedivere did it, in the end, a white hand rising from the depths to take the promised sword.

And, when he came back…

Arthur was no longer there.