The Inheritance
In this new work of short fiction, author Lindsay Lennox offers a modern take on the Arthurian legend
By Lindsay Lennox,
“Absolutely not.”
The rock sat, dumbly.
“Look, I am definitely not doing that,” Ira clarified.
The rock maintained a dignified silence from its home on Ira’s desk, where it spent its days shoved behind his laptop, just visible among the tangle of cables. It didn’t need to be very visible; Ira wasn’t sure if it actually needed to be seen at all but he was nervous about what might happen if he hid it in a desk drawer instead.
“Goddamnit.” Ira flung himself backward into his desk chair, which skidded sideways so he couldn’t see the rock anymore, not that it mattered.
He had found the rock in his late twenties, on a hike in western Colorado. It was a dark and irregularly rounded lump of schist, a bit smaller than a bowling ball with veins of dull gold running through it, and Ira hated it.
He’d hated it since he’d first seen it, looking entirely unlike the dominant local geology, which ran more to sedimentary layers. Stopping for water, he’d immediately spotted it sitting pertly (if a rock as heavy and pendulous as this one could be pert) on top of a slab of shale that was doing its best to mind its own business. After stowing his water bottle, and without thinking much about the impulse, he’d picked up the rock (god, it was heavy) and added it to his pack. It was going to make the hike back down very, very irritating, but there’d been nothing else to do about it.
At 34, Ira had gotten used to the rock, and the rock had gotten used to Ira. It sat on Ira’s desk, and it mostly did nothing at all. Very, very occasionally, it stopped doing nothing, and what it did instead was suggest that Ira do something (whereupon it returned at once to doing nothing).
Ira could not have described how the rock suggested anything to him. It didn’t move, or glow, or look any different as far as he could tell. It just… it loomed at him from its spot behind his laptop, temporarily becoming the center of the entire universe, brighter and darker and more densely packed with meaning than any other object Ira had ever encountered.
Luckily, this only lasted for an infinitesimal moment – Ira was pretty sure it would burn out his whole brain if it lasted any longer – and it left behind, like an afterimage, a quest.
The quests were… well, they were stupid, Ira felt. Go to the Starbucks on 80th and chat with the barista, for example. Park on the north side of Washington Park at 10 pm. Sometimes Ira could make a guess about these quests: parked on the street at 10:12 pm he’d seen a tall, red-haired women run out onto the sidewalk pursued by an angry man, presumably her boyfriend.
After a glance at Ira’s idling engine and rolled-down window, the man had gotten into a pickup truck and departed with a screech of tires and a billow of blue smoke. The woman had simply looked neutrally at Ira for a moment, then gone back inside. (Ira did see her in dreams after that, just occasionally, giving him that same expressionless, appraising look.)
Most of the time he had no idea what he was doing, but since there was no possibility of resisting these imperatives, he was just thankful they didn’t come up very often and were almost trivially easy to fulfill.
Today’s suggestion, though, was something else again.
Ira let out a guttural, complaining sound. This was not a good time for complicated international quests; it really, really was not. It was going to take some serious reorganization of his work schedule for at least the rest of the week. Ira opened his calendar; he sent apologetic emails; he declined meetings. He turned on an auto-reply indicating he was away on unexpected family business and expected to be back in the office by Monday.
“There,” said Ira, slamming his laptop closed, and raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Happy?”
The rock sat, looking neither happy nor unhappy. Ira rolled his eyes.
***
Ira stood on a cliff in Wales.
His hair whipped into his face as he tried not to look down to where cold waves beat against the chalky precipice at whose edge he stood. He had to admit, the Welsh coast knew a thing or two about drama, even for someone who’d grown up amid the casual grandeur of the Rocky Mountains.
To reach the cliff, he had parked his rented Peugeot in a large, well-maintained parking lot, double checked to make sure an entry fee wasn’t required, and hiked an easy few hundred yards down the coast. It had turned out to be an unexpectedly simple last leg of this extremely inconvenient errand. Idly, Ira wondered what his total mileage was, were he to submit it for reimbursement, if he knew where to submit it, or to whom.
From Heathrow (4600 miles via the red-eye), he’d taken a National Express train to Southhampton (about 90 kilometres), where he’d eaten breakfast, rented the Peugeot and driven it to Salisbury (39 km). In Salisbury he’d spent quite a bit of time, not to mention a significant amount of the limited international data plan he’d purchased shortly before leaving the US, trying to find out what in the world a “water meadow” was. Then, he’d circled around the southwestern quadrant of the city looking for a way to access it (kilometrage unknown but infuriatingly recursive in their path).
Eventually, in the wake of an increasingly complex series of lies – lies which had also required the creation of a website for a fictitious research lab at a real American university to validate his identity as a research assistant – he’d driven another half kilometre up a private access road, then back down once he had the item he’d been looking for (which he’d stowed in the trunk of the rental with considerable embarrassment.)
Another few hundred kilometres by car, another few hundred meters by foot and here he was: standing on a cliff, holding what was, it had to be said, an absolutely enormous and cumbersome sword.
Ira didn’t know anything about holding swords, so it hung limply by his side where he stood, its tip resting in the chalky dust at his feet. It was long enough that he’d had to continually maneuver it during the hike to the top of the cliff; long enough that he kept worrying about how to effectively conceal it from the people he encountered on the path every so often. Apparently he needn’t have worried: the other hikers smoothly circumnavigated the sword’s awkward length without seeming to actually see it.
Although he had only a lazy acquaintance with the relevant legends, Ira had known what it was as soon as he picked it up from the boggy, flooded ground in Salisbury, not far from the place where three rivers had once converged.
The sword, having been thrown into the confluence soon after the death of its owner during a battle so bloody that it had briefly turned the waters of the northern river red, had lain quietly under the riverbed for quite a long time, and Ira didn’t see why it couldn’t have simply stayed there, causing no trouble, igniting no political furors.
This particular sword – it had many names, and the reader will already have guessed the most famous one – had a definite knack for causing trouble, though. Trouble from the very first Christmas Eve when it had appeared in a church courtyard well to the north, lodged firmly in a rock, a different rock from Ira’s, but another rock that had absolutely no business being where it was found.
Ira hefted the sword, awkwardly.
It had a certain presence to it, he had to admit. Even in his inexpert grip, even with fifteen or so centuries separating him from the bastard nephew-son whose inheritance was still, improbably, encoded in his Y chromosome, Ira could feel its warm magnetism, suggesting that he might, if he wished, wield it. He wavered, for a moment; the sword, long as it was, would probably fit handily inside his hall closet, next to the skis.
But, in the end, no. The last thing he needed, Ira felt, was another confusing and possibly imperious object hanging around his house, issuing orders and looming at him. He adjusted his grip, trying to find a position that would give him some leverage. He planted his feet; he drew his arm back; he swung it forward and released the sword with as much force as he could manage.
For a moment it seemed clear that it wasn’t enough; the sword plunged heavily downward, and Ira thought it would bounce gracelessly off the side of the cliff. But the ever-present coastal wind caught the blade, twisting it out towards the sea in a long westward arc. As he blinked in the setting sun, it vanished into the water, where, Ira hoped, it would stay for a very, very long time.
Lindsay Lennox is a queer, non-binary writer living in Colorado. Their work includes poetry, short fiction and essays published in The New Territory (forthcoming), The Fem, Flashquake, thickjam, Thought Catalog, Underground Voices and other places. Their work often explores how fantasy and narrative shape identity.