"Well, as you say, there is no door of the more usual sort," said Arthur reasonably. "We have seen how Marguessan comes and goes, how she put us here in the first place. We must try to leave by the same road she uses."
Magic, then; why was I not surprised? I left off questioning, and joined Arthur where he sat cross-legged on the floor in the center of the cell. He had placed a quaich of freshly drawn water to his left, had poured a small quantity of salt into my pottery food-dish and put it on his right; above these and in the center, between us, he set now the crystal sphere. He motioned me to follow his lead, whatever he might do; my Druid training having come back to me with the rest of my memories, I felt an inward pride and confidence to know that I could help, and prepared myself to do so.
The one worry I had not dared voice, neither inwardly to me nor aloud to Arthur, nevertheless naggled at my new-found faith and sureness: What of Marguessan? She had been clever enough and skilled enough to get us here and keep us here; surely she would sense any attempt to escape, particularly if it were done by means of magic—and crossics to cribbins she would not be sitting back with her feet up while it went on without her… I set my fears firmly aside. Uncertainty is a great killer of spells, and this enterprise had already enough elements of chanciness that my faintheart doubts might cause it to perish before ever it had been fairly begun. No more.
And, as I thought so, I felt almost as if a dammed passage had been made clear again, as if a river choked by ice had all at once been unblocked, so that the torrent might once more run free. As I watched Arthur begin the working in earnest, and myself began to feed power and support to him, I heard Morgan’s voice come clear to me, and I was glad. She it was who was doing the real work here; Arthur and I were merely vehicles, conduits of her power to where it was needed, supporters of her effort with the mere fact of our being and the raw strength we could lend her. Our success, and hers, would depend largely on how skilled Arthur and I were at being so used, how well we could subdue our own selves and wills and skills and let hers, so boundlessly greater, move through us.
Now that I knew more or less what was toward, I was happier, and I settled myself to Arthur’s acts and Morgan’s might. And, I have to say, it very nearly worked: The spell Morgan had sent in the stone, the clach, the course that Arthur and I had prepared for her to send in upon, it was all very nearly enough. As we sat there, the walls around us began to shimmer and tremble and dissolve away, and I felt Morgan’s presence in the chamber. Looking over Arthur’s shoulder, I could see hallways beyond, and dimly glimpse spaces that seemed to be rooms and chambers in Oeth-Anoeth’s further reaches. It would take only a little more time, a few more touches upon Marguessan’s evil web, and we would be free…
But this was Marguessan on her home ground, in her master’s stronghold, and it was not to be so simple after all: All at once there came a shudder beneath us, as if an earthshake had broken loose under the castle. The walls that had been fading became solid again, and across the chamber the water of the stone fountain sloshed wildly in its basin.
I threw a glance of pure terror at Arthur, all the time trying even in my panic not to break the link, not to lose touch with Morgan’s presence and power.
"It is Marguessan," murmured Arthur, though he surely did not have to tell me, and he never for one instant withdrew his attention from the focus of the stone and its blazing blue light. "She has twigged what we are attempting—
I hardly dared breathe. "And can she prevent it?"
"Maybe, though I think not entirely. Any road, we have other help as, for all her boasts of Edeyrn, she does not."
With an effort almost physical, as if the very air resisted him, Arthur straightened his shoulders and lowered his hands, resting his wrists upon his knees. I followed suit; and, closing my eyes the better to order my own attention, I suddenly saw with a warm incredulous shock of emotion and recognition a vision before my inner sight. Merlynn…? Then a flare of doubt: Was it rather Edeyrn? Nay, surely it was my Merlynn, my Ailithir, our beloved teacher and friend and guide! His aspect was not as we had known in life, but as I had last seen him: a beautiful white-haired, white-bearded man of years, asleep, peaceful, yet also somehow awake and strong, and aware of us and our need, sending of that strength to us as we struggled here against Marguessan, whom he had ever coldly loathed. One thing only differed from my last sight of him, under the hill in Dun Aengus of the Sidhe: He lay now upon a bed of gold, not within the crystal tree in which Edeyrn had entrapped and entombed him at the fight of Nandruidion; and yet the crystal tree was also somehow there…
I blinked and shook my head to clear it. Was it Merlynn, after all? Now the sleeping countenance bore a look of Uthyr Ard-righ, or rather Uthyr as he might have looked, had he been given to live out his span, Uthyr in the hale old age he had never reached. Or was it in truth some other—Amris, Leowyn, Gorlas, Gwyddno—all these together, or some king or lord I knew not yet?
Without warning the vision faded, and the same instant that it fled I felt Marguessan’s angry force thrown back for good and all. The walls thinned to vanishment yet again, and this time they stayed vanished; the floor had ceased to rock, was steady and firm beneath our feet. I looked at Arthur, and he nodded answer.
"Get your harp and cloak, go and do not look back for me. I promise I will be close upon your heels."
I heard the confidence in his voice and trusted unquestioningly. Of course he had to follow me out, he had to close down the magic: to break the link, scatter the salt, spill the water, dim the light of the stone… I dived across the couch and seized Frame of Harmony in its travelling bag. Coming onto my feet again, I stooped to catch up Arthur’s cloak and my own, his leather backsack, a few oddments that might come in handy after—
And as my hand closed on a small pouch of my own that had lain unnoted in a corner of the chamber, I startled to feel through the soft green leather the unmistakable outline and weight of a blade. Had I been weaponed all the time I had been here and known it not? It would seem so; but now was not the time for further investigation, and with all my strength and hope, a prayer to the Goddess on my lips and trust in Morgan in my heart, I flung myself through the wall of the cell as if it had been mere air.
And so in fact it was: Without even the shock of contact I found myself in a broad dim corridor that ended in a door a long way off. Moments later, Arthur was beside me, unruffled if perhaps a touch grim; behind us, the cell seemed to contract into darkness, folding in upon itself in a way my waking mind could not understand. But some other, deeper sense understood very well indeed, and I was away at once, following Arthur as he raced down the hallway to the door at the distant end.
Though that door, when we reached it, proved to be a stout thick one of ancient findruinna-strapped oak, it had neither lock nor bolt to it; Arthur, raising his brows at the apparent ease of it, raised the latch also, and we stepped through—into what?
At once the source and origin of that strange blue light that had seeped in through my window were apparent: No sun, no sky, no faha or court, no distant skyline or bordering forest were visible to us as we stood there. Oh, the castle was real enough behind us—I laid a hand on its rough mossy stones just to be certain—but before us and above us was naught but mist. A wall of sorcerous vapor, a fence of fog, a mist-hedge enveloped all that should have been seen, and I drew a steadying breath of even such freedom as this, and glanced at Arthur. For there is at life’s first end a border we all must pass—in some faiths a river, in others a wall of stones or gates of pearl or gold; in ours a hedge of mist—before the great journey may begin. Was this where our escape had brought us? If so, well enough; I only wished to know.
Arthur saw my question and doubt. "Nay, not yet," he said with a smile, half to himself, half to me—or perhaps to someone else I could not see. Then he lifted his arm, and blue fire shot from the crystal sphere he held in his right hand.
The flash of light must have been a prearranged signal of sorts, for
no sooner had its lancing rays pierced the fog than came to my straining ears the sound of a horn. Not Gwyn’s horn, that horn of the Sidhe I knew so well, fearing and loving it together; but an earthly horn, its sound no less lovely or welcome for all that.
And with the horn’s cry the mist began to break. It shivered and tattered, it fell away in rags, revealing what it had heretofore cloaked: a faha, then an orchard full of flowering apple trees, stretching away before us, and far in the distance a range of blue hills. A wall ran randomly in front of the trees, enclosing the green grassy space of the faha; it was built of the same gray stone as the castle—
I looked over my shoulder and leaped back in astonishment, for the castle that had been at our backs was as vanished as the mist. We stood now on a grass-covered knoll, unmarked by stone or ditch, nothing to show that a castle had ever been there. Oeth-Anoeth had simply—ceased to be; perhaps it had gone back to whatever place it inhabited when its mistress did not wish it discovered, and perhaps that too was why I had not been found for so long a time. My whereabouts had not been discovered because none could discover the place where I was… But then, where had it, and I, been? What ‘there’ had we both dwelled in?
I discovered I did not really wish to know the answer to that, and turned again to Arthur, who had never moved. He did not meet my glance, but pointed, directing my gaze to one side of the green-grassed faha, before the walls and the trees began.
I looked and gasped: Marguessan was seated in a chair of solid gold, her arms along its arms, upon her head a golden fillet. She was not looking at us, but at a gate in the faha wall, broad and high enough to admit a mounted rider. And beyond the gate—
I drew back a little, appalled and yet not at all surprised. Arthur, it seemed, had seen already, or perhaps he had been made to see earlier still, on his arrival at Oeth-Anoeth…
In amongst the trees of the orchard, half-veiled by the foam-white apple-blossoms along the boughs, were set smooth stakes of peeled gray wood, each of the thickness of a woman’s arm and of the height of a tall man; and on each of those stakes was impaled a human head. I could not look to see detail, not more than a quick brief glance through lowered lids, but it seemed that there were men and women both in that savage orchard. Some heads were helmed, some bare under the sun, some with hair streaming, some with Fian war-braids; some all but skulls, some freshly mounted…
When I had finished being as sick as I felt I could reasonably be at this particular moment, I stepped forward again to stand at Arthur’s side. Again the horn sounded from beyond the faha wall, and this time Marguessan raised her hand. When she lowered it, the gate in the wall was open to admit a rider on a blood-bay warhorse. Both rider and mount were full armed and caparisoned for combat; their armor gleamed dull gold in the newly revealed sunlight. But I did not recognize the horse, and the rider’s helm was closed; I could not see the face.
The rider paid no heed to either Marguessan or ourselves, but rode at a slow parade trot to one end of the faha and turned, drawing to a halt in combat stance. I looked round for the opponent he obviously expected, but saw no one. Then Marguessan raised her hand again, and another rider appeared in the gate.
He wore silver armor, and was mounted on a tall, powerfully built black horse whose tail swept the ground; I saw a small gold horn fastened to the saddle roll just by his left knee. He paused as if to survey the scene—unlike the first knight, this one seemed to look long on Arthur and on me, but the silver beaver was down, and I could not say for sure—then rode in, turning to the opposite end of the faha from the warrior on the bay.
I opened my mouth as if to speak, for somehow it seemed that I knew this second knight, this one who rode the black horse; there was something familiar about him, the set of his shoulders, his seat on the horse, his bearing—But Arthur closed iron fingers upon my arm, and I closed my mouth.
But an unspoken signal had apparently passed between the two knights, and also between Arthur and Marguessan, for he nodded, and she lifted her hand a third time; when she let it fall, the two horses, the blood-colored and the black, surged toward each other with a sound of thunder.
It was not a joust, as I understand the single combat is often practiced on other worlds, and as I later came to read in my mother’s books and journals was once the custom on Earth her homeworld. Rather it was a swordfight ahorse, and the chargers used in such contests are trained as long and as carefully as their masters, for they are equal partners with their riders in the fight.
They met with a clash of blades, the horses going up on their hind legs with a scream like to that of sword against sword. Marguessan’s champion—for so he was, the rider on the blood-bay horse—won the first exchange, and as they drew off to make another run I saw that the knight in the silver armor, our champion, had taken a wound in the arm.
"He is hurt," I said to Arthur, all unnecessarily, and Arthur nodded.
"The horse will make up for it," was all he said, for just then the fighters spurred forward to engage again. Our eyes went at once to the black charger, who seemed to know just what weakness his rider now labored under, for he backed and danced and reared so that it seemed the knight on his back was wielded by him like a blade, the rider merely a means to hold the sword so that the horse itself could fight the opponent charger.
And indeed the horse made up his rider’s lack, and more beside, for at the end of this exchange it was the gold-armored knight who drooped and sagged in his saddle. Even from where Arthur and I stood, we could see blood running down the gleaming breastplate, and another stream of bright red issuing from the cuissed leg above the boot-top.
The black’s rider seemed to know he now held the mastery, and the horse knew too, for barely had they wheeled this time before they were charging again. This time the gold knight was theirs; even the bay’s skill could not save him, and as the other struck, he went top-for-toe over his horse’s shoulder, to lie very still upon the ground.
Marguessan had watched the combat with her face impassive, only her hands clenching and unclenching upon the dragon’s-head armrests giving evidence of her state of mind. When the gold knight fell to the earth of the faha, and lay unmoving, Marguessan slowly rose up out of her chair, and turned her face to Arthur.
Astoundingly, she was laughing. But it was not mirth that moved her.
"Brother, to you!" she cried in a hawk’s voice. "This time, to you! Glyndour, farewell! I enjoyed your guesting with me, if you did not—greet my sister from me, and tell her she fought well today. But her teacher has yet to stand against mine; tell her that too." She lifted her arm in salute to the rider on the black horse.
"Kinsman, to you! So it can be, when dragon fights dragon—but you will yet follow wandering fires!"
She raised both arms above her head, palms flat and facing, fingertips just barely joined. Arthur made one uncontrollable move forward, the black horse half-reared, from the saddle the silver knight winded his horn yet a third time—and Marguessan was gone. Gone too the fallen knight, the bright bay stallion, the gold chair, the gray wall, even the terrible orchard and its trees that bore the ghastly fruit of Marguessan’s champion’s other, more successful combats. All had vanished even as the castle Oeth-Anoeth, leaving only the clean grass underfoot and the distant skylined mountains.
And ourselves, of course… I felt myself all over, gave Arthur a long hard scan—I felt I could not be too careful, the way things changed and shifted around here—and then turned with him to face the oncoming rider on the black horse.
I knew him before he had unlaced the silver helm; said his name with love and pride.
"Gerrans. My son."
Geraint Pendreic ac Glyndour ap Taliesin looked down at me out of Morguenna Pendreic’s eyes. I had not seen my son for two years, true enough, and before that not for another year more: He had been from home, training with the Fianna that was his first love and for which he had the greatest talent. He was not yet of age, being some years short of his full majority;
but I saw with pride and pleasure that he had grown into a tall, lithe, well-made young man, who this day had surely done full credit to his training and his bloodline.
And speaking of blood… "Are you badly hurt?" I asked with swift paternal concern. "Shall I help you down? Shall we do a healing rann? Can you—"
Gerrans laughed and leaped down from the saddle. "I am well enough, athra, now that you are back with us!" He leaned into my embrace, a fervent bear-hug of love and relief, and, on my part, gratitude for both my deliverance and his own safety; then he broke off and looked at his uncle the High King, who stood indulgently by.
He bowed formally to Arthur, who bent his head in equally formal acknowledgment.
"I have been fighting against myself, Lord," said Gerrans then.
"Then thou hast conquered thyself," came Arthur’s calm reply, in the stately High Gaeloch, and I wondered at the sudden formality that chilled the moment.
But just as swiftly the frost was gone, and Gerrans leading his splendid black horse went down the grassy slope with me on one side and Arthur on the other, to where the wall had been that bounded the faha, and beyond to where the evil trees had stood—and perhaps still did, in some other realm of the real.
To my surprise, four horses waited there for us, two patient pack beasts and two riding horses fully tacked, a little nervous and lonely, and glad to see us. Gerrans gave each of us a leg up—my bones and sinews, two years out of the saddle, would be howling their protest long before nightfall—then stripped off all but the minimum of armor and vaulted up again upon the black.
As we rode away, I carefully refrained from backward glances, and said no word to either of my companions. There would be time enough for talking, to catch up on the events that had been in Keltia in my absence; for the moment it was enough to know that I was free, and that Morgan my lady and Geraint my son and Arthur my brother had been the means of my deliverance. And Marguessan and the gold knight were gone; that, also, was enough for my satisfaction as I rode.
The Hedge of Mist Page 4