For sharp and true as a spear, as the Spear that she bore within her, Prydwen took aim at the great firemounts I had earlier noted, that faced each other across the lava plain. And as the distance grew shorter between falling ship and rising ground, I saw that Prydwen was headed for the greater of the two, the one which the Salamandri we had bespoken had named the Firehorn. Arthur had chosen the Tantad for his last road… and belike it was no bad choosing.
It is graven upon my mind’s eye, forever, the way Prydwen blazed out of the sky, so that ‘falling’ was not the word. There is but one time in all times, of the ships that carry souls, when the ship is free of a master’s hand and may herself be master. And that is when the last aboard falls and the ship is free to choose. And so Prydwen went now, with purpose and celerity, free to go as she pleased, and this the course it pleased her to take. She went as by will of her own, and was never a handspan out in all her going, as if she too had chosen the same end as those who sailed in her.
Like an arrow to the gold she went, a dark arrow to the gold heart of fire, a lance between the horns of light. And whether it was by one last magic of Arthur’s making or one final grace of some pitying goddess or god, we in the little sloop were suddenly permitted to see, or See, all; as if we were beside them, with them, right to the last…
All throughout Prydwen they had bestowed themselves like warriors in an ancient barrow, had laid themselves down upon the couches in their cabins, or upon cloak-covered pallets on the floor if there was no couch to take. Their hands were folded upon the hilts of their swords, they were clad in the arms and colors of their Houses, tores gleamed bright about their necks. Those who were kin or friend or beloved lay together side by side and hand in hand; there was no look but peace on any face I beheld.
And I saw them all, my dearest ones, they were all there: Tarian with her glass-blond hair smooth as ever; Alannagh, the green-blue eyes closed now; Betwyr with the ship’s log lying by him, as if he had just now finished entering the account of Prydwen’s last sail; my sister Tegau Goldbreast, who had guarded Uthyr, now as guard for Arthur; my teacher Elphin Carannoc, chief of my order, with his harp cradled in his arms…
They were gone or ever the ship pierced the mountain’s heart; they had taken Jaun-Zuria’s way, or Arthur had chosen it for them as a last mercy, casting all into sleep before they fell together into a deeper slumber.
And though tears blinded my sight I Saw with other vision, Saw how it would be for them, how I myself could wish it. That deeper slumber would lead but to a bright awakening: They would open their eyes to find themselves lying on the floor of a fair pavilion by the shore of a highland tarn, with wild hills golden with morning autumn light across the sparkling water, white clouds running on a northwest wind across skies of impossible blue depth; and bending down to awaken each sleeper would be the one he or she loved best in all the worlds. Perhaps for Arthur it would be Amris, at last; or Gorlas, or even Athyn his hero and his guide—and for the others the one they would wish it to be. Or perhaps Fionn the Young would come for them, or Malen Ruadh Rhen, as they deserved, for they had gone out as warriors all—
And Arthur lay alone, King in the Light. The Hallows, the Treasures of Keltia, slept in their chest at the foot of his couch, waiting for the day when they themselves would waken. Two guards—one was Tegau—with bared swords in fisted hands sat outside his cabin door; the device of the Red Dragon blazed upon his breast. And it seemed to me in my Seeing that I drewn ear to him as he lay; I looked down upon him, as I had done so often when he slept and I waked watchful, and I marvelled at what I now saw upon that face I loved so well.
Strength was there, as ever, and resolution, and all the merry brightness of his youth and the wisdom of his years; and something else, something I could not at first put name to. Then it came to me that it was the look a maker will have as a made thing becomes itself, when the efforts of his hand have brought into being the vision of his mind and the desire of his heart. And it goes both ways, you know, the thing makes him as he makes it; the work does work of its own… It is a look I have seen often, on Morgan’s face or Ygrawn’s, a look that no doubt comes upon my own countenance when I have made correctly, when the words within become the song or poem without. And the look I saw now upon Arthur’s face was that very look of completion, and achievement, and rightness; and it was a most fair thing to see.
And then Prydwen came to the Firehorn and stinted not but went straight within, cleanly, like a sword striking home into the scabbard, or the Blade into the Cup in the High Mysteries. Prydwen vanished into the mountain that would be her long home and the lastplace of those who sailed her, and it seemed that I vanished with them from myself…
When I came to my senses again I found myself in the little alcove aft that housed my blastcouch, with no recollection of how I had come there. Craning, I could see in the dim light that the others were all similarly disposed; indeed, they slept, or else feigned well thereof. And perhaps that was best for them, and I was suddenly exhausted, and thought to do the same.
But as I lay down I felt something round and hard between my pillow and my coverlet, and reaching my hand under I pulled it out to see. And stared, looking upon the thing that had lain there for me to find: the Seal of Keltia, the great emerald carved inghearrad with the knot of the Six Nations, the stone Morric had given Athyn at their handfasting, the flaw deep within it dancing like a far flame.
And I cast my mind back to the Seeing I had had, Saw again Arthur as he lay there upon his couch, and his hand was bare. Then that other Seeing came to me, that I had had just as we had come to Kholco: Arthur asleep, or dead, and on his hand a ring I did not know. And I was comforted obscurely: This would be. This was meant. This was going to happen; and again I felt, far and faint now but very true, that lovely water-clear certainty like a swift-flowing stream, and I smiled.
As I turned over in my own couch and prepared for sleep, I chanced to glance down at the foot of the bed. And was startled anew, aye, and much moved besides: There, through a wrapping of cloaks and curtaghs and other such, Frame of Harmony’s unmistakable outlines jutted through, like a ship through fog.
I remember very little of the sail that followed, at least up until the Aojunese destroyer met us halfway home. I do recall conducting a ritual of sending for Arthur and the others on Prydwen—as the only Druid for many star-miles it was my obligation, and my joy also—but not much after. The others told me later—a long while later—that I had gone to my couch and remained there as one dead himself; indeed, for a time they had thought me so. Perhaps I was: I do know that I followed them out as far as I might, though by no means as far as I would. I was turned back at my strength’s limit, though I would have gone on even then; turned back gently but most firmly, and in that turning I sensed Rhian’s hand, the Young Goddess, and I obeyed.
But the voyage itself, nay, that I do not recall; nor even the others, not so much. I had no wish to speak with them, though they needed comforting as much as did I, and what this was doing to Sgilti and Anghaud, even, I had no care. If I were not dead, then at the least I must have been for the moment out of my head with grief and loss and anger and longing. But to me it seemed like neither death nor madness: My mind was filling with images and words and the beginning strains of music. And though all my being was one long denying shout, ‘Croesawr i mi!’, something else was stirring and waking and walking here, drawing nearer to the birth. But not yet was it come to term.
We were escorted by the Yamazai ship straight to Aojun, and Majanah herself was there to meet us when we landed. No formal ceremonial: She had eyes for none but me, and I for her, and she knew as soon as our glances met what was toward. But she said no word to any other, just put her arm through mine, said my name—"Talvosghen"—and drew me away from the rest.
We went away from the city, she and I, to a small oakwood on the side of a mountain, where we could look down upon the fantastical roofs and towers of Mistissyn rising through the April dusk.
We did not speak for long and long; then out of the speaking silence came a sudden sense of peace, and dan also, a kind of inevitability—what the Aojunni themselves call khazei’khar—and I knew then that it mattered not a whit what was said or thought or felt about any of this. The thing was sufficient to itself; the truth was the truth, and in the end would prevail.
So I told Majanah all that had passed. She harkened most intently to all my telling, and in the end asked one question only: "Did he have pain in the going?" And I was able to assure her that he had not, that there had been in death no hurt for him or for any of the others. She nodded, accepting this as a queen and warrior, and also as a woman who had greatly loved this man.
We stayed in Mistissyn some days while a proper ship was made ready for us—the journey back to Keltia would have taken months in the little sloop—and Majanah did not surprise us when she announced that she would accompany us. Donah, of course, was still on Tara, and as yet unaware of her father’s death (though I myself was not so sure of that); and Gweniver would need all the friends she had to help her through not only the losing of her mate and King but the coming of her child.
Just now I was more concerned with Janjan. Of course she and Artos had long since ceased to be lovers—he had come to Gweniver, and she to her own consort Brone—but they had remained close and loving friends, and of course they had Donah to link them forever. But even in my own half-dead stupor of shock and grief, I saw that Majanah, though she tried to hide it and for the most part succeeded, was very near as lost as I. Yet her Yamazai soul, the findruinna core that lay at the heart of her, would not allow her to acknowledge it.
Part of this was because it had been decided en route from Kholco, among the seven of us who lived on, not to announce to the world that Arthur was dead. After all, we reasoned, none save ourselves had seen him die; and, strictly speaking, we had not seen even that. It was possible that Prydwen and her crew had survived the volcano; it might be, it could have happened so… And to keep his death secret was in chiming with his own lastwords to Keltia, that he should come again when there was need. Had we known, then, what this decision would mean, in full, perhaps we had not so decided; but we did not, and did.
Majanah, for her part, fell in with the fiction, though she ordered Court mourning as sign of respect, and the whole planet complied. For Aojun had not forgotten Artho Kendrion; the Young Lion would live forever on this world.
But her own grief could not be masked so featly; and so when one sunset she came to me in my chambers—the same I had had when I dwelled here so long ago—and said no word, but only looked at me out of haunted eyes and a face which though set as steel seemed about to crumple like a sorrowful child’s, I knew what I must do. So I took out Frame of Harmony, and I began to harp for the Queen of Aojun; not the marunad I had made earlier in hall but an older song, and one not of my own making: the song she wished, and needed, to hear.
"‘My love in green came down the meadow
Let it follow, let it follow
My love in green came down the meadow
Longtime ago…’"
* * *
Chapter Thirty
We left Aojun for Keltia a day or two later. Majanah had us sail on a warship in a martial convoy of six, for she had earlier told us two things we had assumed but did not know for fact: that the Fomori were still hotter than hornets over our raid to rescue the Clero captives and the damage we had done to Fomor in the rescuing; and that the remnant Coranian fleet was still skulking about, the Cabiri Emperor Hasparren Lacho as cross as two sticks that his great venture had been so spectacularly and finally crushed—not to mention the loss of the Marro. The little sloop we took in tow, as the last of Prydwen; it would be kept in Keltia in honor and remembrance, and perhaps, some time to come, one might find a further and equally high purpose for it. Until then let it rest.
We came home to Keltia this time on a befittingly leaden afternoon of cold rain and bitter wind. Word of what had befallen at Kholco had been kept utterly secret among the seven of us who had returned therefrom; on Aojun, only Majanah and Brone had been told, and the matriarch of Roric’s kindred, and they had all vowed by their own gods to keep silence on the matter. The rest of the Aojunni had been fed the line we intended to feed not only the Kelts but all the galaxy as well, the line we had sworn mighty oaths to our lost ones and to each other that we should hold past death. Else all had been in vain, and that was not even to be imagined…
At Mardale, Gweniver was on the field to meet us despite the storm, and if she knew or guessed or sensed aught more than our bare and guarded transcom exchanges had told her, she gave no sign; nor would she have let anyone see it in any case. True, arriving home without Arthur, Prydwen or our crewmates might have given the clue; but there could have been any number of explanations for that—and we only prayed the folk would accept the one we were going to give them.
But Gweniver was a different case, and, like Majanah, she twigged instantly from our faces—from my face.
"Tell me not anything now," she whispered as we embraced in greeting. "I felt him go… felt all of them. I will hear. But not yet."
And not later either, not until she was alone with me in the chamber where she had chosen to hear the tidings she already knew in her heart. Not even Morgan or Ygrawn was with us; we were alone, the Ard-rian and the Pen-bardd, Gwennach and Talyn. About us, the great double cube of Gwahanlen was dim with rainlight filtering through the leaded glass of the ceiling, and the tapestries on the wall had lost all color in the gray gleam.
We sat anyhow at the table Rhodaur, a few places apart, our chairs angled to face each other across the empty seats between. As clearly and calmly and concisely as I might, a supreme bardic effort, I gave her the outlines of what had happened at Camlann and in the Morimaruse and at Fomor and on Kholco, all the details she did not know, telling the tale as a bard would tell any hero-tale of old—only so could I hope to get through the telling.
And perhaps only so could Gweniver have received it: It may be easier—though never easy—to hear of the death of one’s King than the death of one’s husband. That the two were in this instance one and the same mattered not; it was all in the telling and the hearing. So Gweniver Ard-rian heard of Arthur Ard-righ’s passing, and the passing of her Companions, as she had heard of so many passings before; and at the end of my account, when I fell exhausted against the high back of my chair, she asked the same question Majanah had asked. One question only, as there had been but one question asked on Aojun, and the answer I gave now to this queen was the same answer I had given the other. Both had loved him, and still loved him, and that fear had haunted them. But I thanked all gods that I knew from my othersensing that it was the truth I gave them both.
At Gweniver’s request, or maybe command, I left her there in Gwahanlen, and what she said then to Arthur I do not know. That she spoke to her departed mate I have no doubt, and that he was there with her I have also no doubt: I felt his presence, as I had so often since his going, and as I knew I was destined to do for the rest of my own span this-side. But I closed the doors behind me, and went on to my next ordeal—telling Ygrawn—and the details of that meeting I will keep between her and me forevermore. She was Ygrawn; that is enough.
And lastly I told Morgan, who had of course known before anyone and needed no telling at all. But she attended gravely to what I said, even as her cousin and her mother had done; and when I had finished this third recounting—the most terrible triad that ever I had known—she said no word but took my face between her slim cool hands and kissed me gently, and naught more needed to be said. Keltia could wait; we had our own loss to bear first.
But after, when we all came together in Ygrawn’s solar and wept and laughed and raged as was fit and needed, the four of us agreed on one thing paramount: that the truth of Arthur’s death be kept secret still. It would be given out to the folk and to history that Arthur Ard-righ had vanished in battle, had gone away in Prydwen with his Compan
ions around him and sent seven alone home to tell of it. After all, all Keltia had heard his message from the Roads of Camlann, when he had locked Prydwen’s jaws on the Marro’s flanks and taken them both into the ard-na-speire and into legend. He had told the folk plain that he would come again; therefore let them continue to think so. And if the days and months of their thinking and hoping stretched into years and centuries and even millennia, what of it? The secret of his death and the departure from Keltia of the Hallows must be maintained; so that when that one who was to find them again came at last to do so, naught would be known save what I myself would leave for clue in song.
Not even all the surviving Companions would know the truth of it, decreed Gweniver, and we concurred. Oh, the old guard, the Coldgates leaven, to be sure: Grehan, Tryffin, Ysild, the few others who had been commanded to stay behind—and who were as shaken and comfortless and heartsick and, aye, furious as we who had also stayed behind, or been forced to do so.
But for the rest of it, we had done well: We had been utterly victorious at Camlann, Grehan told us—hence the pique of Alphor. When Arthur had removed the Marro from the field, the other invading ships had lost heart as well as direction, and our own fleet had picked them off like fish in a keeve. True, these particular fish had shot back, and aye, a few of the fishers had ended up in the enemy creel; but it had availed them little in the end, and Ganaster had already been contacted to begin the drawing up of truce documents, all of the terms thereof being most favorable to Keltia’s interests. That, and the memory of the mailed fist, should keep them away from our door for long time to come; or so at least we hoped.
Morgan, listening to Grehan tell us seven all this, stirred in her chair at the Council board.
"I should feel easier to know we had a greater safeguard even than the assurances of the High Justiciary and the weight of our own arm," she said darkly. "A year or two, well enough. A decade, or two or three, and they will forget—the Coranians, the Fomori, the Fir Bolg. They always do, as we have always seen, and they will try us on again. And though we lie our faces black and direly swear to them other wise, truth remains we have no Arthur left us to hold them off again. It is on me that we must find another shield as proof against our enemies as the power of Arthur’s name."
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