Dmitri & Elias Go To Medieval Times

The castle looked grand. It stood between I-90 and Roselle Road in Schaumburg, Illinois. Its turrets were the color of dull steel under a wet March sky.

"You wanted this," Elias said.

"I saw the billboard and thought it looked like fun." Dmitri studied the battlements with the expression of a man appraising livestock. "It said knights and feast. Since we have nowhere to be until nine tomorrow morning, I thought we should take in some American culture."

It had been three months since the two men in their summer coats arrived back in a December just hours before the first leap took place. For three months, they had been working in the casino. And for Dmitri, he had spent the last three months learning to use a phone – something that hadn't existed in his time. And tomorrow at 9:00am, after three months of waiting, a man from the Bulgarian consulate would slide two folders across a desk, changing their lives again. But for tonight, and for the next two hours, there would be knights fighting for the honor of their patrons who filled the theater in their paper hats and "VIP passes."

Blue crowns were placed on their heads at the door by a teenager in a velveteen tabard as she addressed each man as "my lord." The blue crowns, the teenager explained, meant they would cheer for the blue knight, who fought for the honor of the House of Navarre.

"Navarre?" Elias begged.

"You will love your knight," the teenager said, with the fatigue of a girl who had said it four hundred times. "He's the crowd favorite."

The hall inside had been built as a sand-floored arena, ringed with tiers of long tables that faced inward like the benches of an anatomy theater. Colored light washed the sand turning it blue. The sound of trumpets brayed from speakers that were made to look like torches. The air smelled of chicken fat and dry-ice fog. Somewhere behind them a child was crying.

They found their seats in the blue section between a bachelorette party and a family in matching t-shirts. Dmitri settled in with genuine contentment. Elias read the program description from the medievaltimes.com website.

"Dmitri…"

"Mm hmm?"

"Listen to this. 'Journey back to a time of chivalry and splendor, as the noble houses of León, Castile, Navarre, and Aragon ride to Cordoba in contest of the great tournament of the Caliph.'" Elias lowered the program. "Castile was just a county in our Caliphate… a line of border forts – nothing more."

"You are angry about the program."

"I am not angry about the program. I'm just noting that it is wrong."

"The wall over there is plastic and the torches are lightbulbs," Dmitri said. "But the program. That is where they lost you?"

The lights fell. A spotlight found a man on a balcony in robes of polyester brocade, who raised both arms and addressed the room through a headset microphone as the Grand Hajib of Cordoba. He welcomed the assembled lords and ladies to the court of the Caliphate, jewel of the world, on this night of nights, when the four houses of the Christian north, once proud and now humbled, would ride in tribute before the throne their grandfathers had failed to take. He attempted a phrase of Arabic that had once meant Commander of the Faithful and produced instead a sound like a man reciting the ingredients of a cough syrup.

Elias closed his eyes in frustration.

"Breathe," Dmitri said.

With the tribute to history concluded, the Hajib announced the feast. Serfs and wenches – the staff used the words themselves as job titles, "ah yes, me lord, I be a wench" – moved down the tiers with steel bowls, and a girl of perhaps nineteen leaned over their table and asked if either of them had allergies before setting down the first course of tomato bisque.

Elias paused and looked at it for a long moment. The soup bore a slick of cream in a spiral, applied by machine made to look like a dragon.

"Go on," Dmitri said. "Say it."

"Tomatoes are American." Elias kept his voice level. "It grows on a continent that no one in the Middle Ages would have known existed. So does the corn. So does the potato. This kitchen has assembled a feast from a hemisphere the Middle Ages had not yet discovered."

"And what about the bread?"

"It's garlic bread. Italian-American. It's from New Jersey."

Dmitri drank his soup directly from the bowl, as instructed by the Hajib, who was at that moment explaining with delight that guests would eat in the authentic medieval manner – with their hands, for utensils had not yet been invented.

Elias set the bowl down. "We had utensils," he said, to no one, to the arena at large. "Spoons are older than the wheel. There were spoons in the ash at Pompeii. We even drank from glasses so fine you could read through them. We washed our hands in rosewater between courses. There were napkins, Dmitri. Embroidered napkins."

"I remember the napkins." Dmitri said, looking directly at Elias as he deliberately wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "I remember you talked about the napkins a lot."

The girl returned with the main course and set before each of them half a roast chicken, one rib of corn, one herbed potato, and a damp towelette sealed in plastic. On the sand below, the four Christian houses rode out to trumpets and colored smoke, and the crowd roared for its color-coded loyalties, and the blue knight of Navarre raised his sword to their section with the theatrical slowness of a man who has been told the back rows need time to see it.

"Here is what offends me," Elias said, tearing the chicken with his fingers because there was no other way. "They have the right winner. Somewhere a script department decided the House of Cordoba prevails, the north bends the knee, history ends where it ended. And having gotten the one large thing right, they dress the victors as the vanquished. This is how the Frankish camps ate. Half a chicken to a man. Men who ate like this lost. Cordoba had streetlights. Cordoba had running water and seventy libraries, and its cooks ranked the freshness of fish by the hour it left the sea. And the fantasy these people have paid a hundred dollars to witness belongs to the loser."

"The chicken is good, though," Dmitri said, as he held it between his hands and took a bite, the juices running down his fingers and dripping onto his plate.

"That is not the point."

"It is the point. I once ate barley that a horse had refused. Barbarism agrees with me." He raised the chicken in salute to the arena. "Also, look. Your knight is about to perform."

The tournament began in earnest. It was, Elias had to concede, a horse show of real discipline wrapped in a swordfight of astonishing dishonesty. The knight declaimed his feud lines into a hidden microphone – "You shall rue this day, Navarre!" – with the emotional register of a man reading an eye chart. Then the knights fell upon each other with a choreography that made Dmitri laugh deep from within his belly.

"He holds his sword like a torch," Dmitri said. "Look at his hand. Look where his thumb is."

"They strike edge to edge."

"They strike edge to edge on purpose. For the sparks. They have made the blades soft so the blades will spark." Dmitri's voice held a kind of wonder. "A thousand years, and men have engineered the sword backwards. Every strike announced from the shoulder. Every parry waiting in place before the blow arrives. And the footwork…" he exhaled through his nose in disgust.

The green knight of León, villain of the evening's plot, took the blue knight's sword beneath his arm at the climax of their duel. He clutched his chest. He remembered his cape, gathered it clear of his boots, and then "died," sinking to the sand with his face angled to the expensive seats. Some moments later, with the duel concluded and the spotlight elsewhere, the corpse shifted his hips to a better position and settled his helmet against his arm, and in doing so died again, more comfortably the second time around.

Dmitri wept. He did it silently, shaking, one hand flat on the table, and the bachelorette party assumed he was moved and one of them patted his shoulder.

"Men I killed died better than that," he managed. "They died once."

Elias elbowed Dmitri in the rib. "You are crying at Medieval Times."

"I am crying at the resurrection of the green knight. It is a religious experience. Where is the wench, I need another Pepsi."

Then the lights fell again, and the drums came up. The Hajib's voice dropped into the register that announcers reserve for the sacred.

“Tonight's champion,” he said, “will ride for the honor of the throne itself, and for the First Caliph, the Lawgiver, the Moon of the West, who raised Cordoba above every city of the earth and struck the chains from those who dwelt in her shadow.”

A banner unrolled from the ceiling. It was green, and it carried a white moon, and beneath the moon an actor rode out on a black horse wearing a bathrobe of gold lamé and a beard of acrylic fiber, raising one hand in a gesture of benediction that someone had clearly copied from a painting, and four hundred people cheered with their mouths full.

Elias did not move.

The actor circled the arena. The children waved and cheered. The Hajib recited the law given in his name, the tax he had lifted from the unbelievers so that no man paid for his prayers. The recitation was garbled and wrong in its particulars.

Dmitri leaned in closer. His shoulder came to rest against Elias' shoulder, a pressure the room would read as nothing.

"They gave you a beard," he said quietly, suppressing a laugh.

"I see that."

"You could never grow one," Dmitri wrapped an arm around Elias affectionately. "The whole court pretended not to notice."

"I remember what the court pretended." Elias said. "Don't think I didn't notice."

The actor took his throne of painted plywood above the sand. Below him the champion of Cordoba saluted, and the last melee began. Elias watched a stranger in a bathrobe preside over a fiction of his life while a serving wench cleared away plates of chicken bones and corn cobs. He felt nearer to what a man feels at his own memorial, hearing the eulogy of someone kind who had not known him.

The champion of Cordoba won, as scripted. The four houses bent the knee, as history had bent it. The green knight, twice dead, rose for his bows.

"The horses were the only ones telling the truth," Elias said in the parking lot as they were leaving.

Dmitri nodded before the sentence finished. He had been thinking it since the first horse entered the arena. Andalusians, real ones, the breed unmistakable at any distance with their gray coats gone silver under the lights. They were perhaps forty generations past the horses whose names Dmitri still knew. All night, they had done their work honestly among a cast of pretenders, performing the old airs above sand that had never seen Iberia.

"The men on the horses were luggage to be carted around," Dmitri said as they got up to leave.

The moon hung over I-90, granting its borrowed light to a near-empty parking lot made wet by a recent rain shower. Elias still wore the paper crown. He discovered this by touch, and reached to remove it. Dmitri caught his wrist.

Dmitri took the crown, straightened its small dent, and set it back on Elias' head with both hands, adjusting it by some standard of his own.

"Nine o'clock tomorrow," Dmitri said. "Consulate. Try to look ordinary."

"I am ordinary."

"Your Majesty," Dmitri said, "you have never once managed to be ordinary." He placed his arm around Elias and pulled him in closer. "But you're my Caliph, and I love you."

Elias stopped and looked up into Dmitri's eyes, standing on his tip-toes to deliver a kiss. "And you're the only knight I need."