Fantastic Metropolis

Based on examining this passage and several others detailing freshwater ponds, lakes, rivers, streams, and brooks, it is my belief that part of the reason William the Conqueror undertook to create the Domesday Book, besides the benefit to his Norman knights, was to document every possible body of freshwater in the land, thus ensuring that wherever in his realm he might travel he would have access to his natural element while transformed into a giant eel. Thus, the notations, which, to my way of thinking, probably dealt with follow-up questions regarding the course of such bodies of water, their depth, their length, etc.

There are the persistent rumors about William and his ilk before they became known as Sun Kings (or, Kings of the Sun, due to their Kingdom of the Sun in Sicily later in the same century). These rumors hinted of a secret society that the Norman knights and kings belonged to known as “Le Serpent.” However, the depiction of “Le Serpent” on the broken blade from the Battle of Hastings, and even in the stylized banners in parts of the Domesday Book do not look like snakes so much as pale eels. (See also French and English folktales about the “eel folk” and the “eel life,” most of which date from William’s time and after.)

Then there is the water component of Le Serpent’s rituals. According to an untitled document I happened upon in the British Library, found among the belongings of one of William’s spies before the battle of Hastings and brought to Edward the Confessor along with other intelligence, “Shall we immerse in waters like unto baptism. Ours is the moonlight, wherefore we writhe and receive the benefit of the waters, to rejuvenate and lengthen us; let us swim twice upon a moon and all our cares and wounds shall be gone.” (Translation mine.)

This strange passage hints at an unusual scene indeed: of William and his knights in the water, dissolving from human flesh into the thick length of eels and cavorting like teenage boys at summer camp. I have this very humanizing image in my head of William shedding his armor or courtly attire at dusk and jumping energetically into a pond filled with his fellow knight-eels while yelling out the Medieval equivalent of “cannon ball!” (which just might have been “cannon ball”). It almost becomes science fictional to me, the more I think about it, as if from a bad science fiction movie: What if not eels at all, but extraterrestrials on vacation, inhabiting the bodies of Norman knights? But this is, of course, ridiculous and unsupportable. As a kind of surreal Jodorowsky image, however, it retains a certain amount of power for me. (Of course, I am not so invested in the legitimacy of my theory that I don’t recognize that William may have merely thought he was a giant eel.)

I could continue to document the various circumstantial evidences uncovered by my research, but I must retain some of it for the forthcoming book. Not to mention that of late I’ve found the pull of investigating P.T. Barnum’s secret life further has been distracting me from William the Conqueror’s secret life. Barnum’s secret life does not seem possible given what we know about the limits of the flexibility of the human body, but I am heartened by my work on William. If William’s hidden identity as a giant eel can be corroborated by so many independent sources, then surely Barnum’s midnight walks out to the old barn, the strange lights that emanated from the place while he was inside it, and what eventually resulted from it will be much, much easier to substantiate. Or, perhaps, in this case, I should say “trans-substantiate.”

In any event, I plan to finish the book by 2007, depending, of course, on research grants, time for travel, and the vagaries of circumstance created by the details of my own secret life, which is often a health-hazard and includes periods of almost unimaginable danger to my person and to my sanity.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Secret Lives will be published in a limited edition hardcover by Prime Books in October 2005. The mass market edition of City of Saints & Madmen has just been released by Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom. Bantam Books will release his Veniss Underground in 2005, with his new novel, Shriek: An Afterword forthcoming from Pan Macmillan (UK) and Tor (US) in 2006.