I was silent, and he did not press me. Then, to my utter amazement, I heard myself asking a question I had not known I needed answered.
"Why did not the Shining Folk honor Artos’s rite of sending at Ni-maen?" I asked sullenly, and to my horror and annoyance I found myself fighting to hold back stinging tears. "Was he not so good a friend to you then? Did he not deserve such presence?"
The faerie lord’s voice was veiled, and his eyes hooded. "It may be you left Ni-maen too soon that night you speak of," he said presently. "But I tell you we were there." His glance came up to mine and his voice rang and shifted. "Still, that is not why I have come here to bespeak you—"
Suddenly, all unwilled by me, my black mood, that high king of all dubhachas under which I had labored so long, as under a thick choking cloud, lifted and was gone; and I found myself expectant, full fain of hearing what was Allyn mhic Midna’s errand to the Pen-bardd of Keltia.
"You and Morguenna both," he said. "Both of you have work to do ere the end. Morgan already knows what her task shall be, and how it shall be accomplished; now I tell you of yours." He smiled as he saw me lean forward the better to hear him, eager now as a hound for the chase. "Much of what has passed in Keltia of late—and I mean long before Arthur’s going—has come about because of what I shall, for lack of truer word, call politics, though it is far more than that. Now my folk do not ordinarily concern themselves with such matters, believing them best left to mortal Kelts and tiresome in any case. But Nudd the King has bidden me come to you with a thought, which you may take or no as you shall please, and it is this: Keltia stands or falls by magic; but the magic that now prevails in Keltia stands or falls itself by political dominion and cause and the ascendancy of worldly claims. And this, we hold, should not be."
"It is pure truth," I said, interested in spite of myself. "Though we love to think it other wise, both magical orders in Keltia, Druids and Ban-draoi alike, have long time on certain levels worked more as a shadow Council—or Councils, since they hardly ever run in pace with each other—than as holy conventicles whose sole and high purpose is to do worship and teach that same to all."
"And many Ban-draoi and Druids do just that," agreed Allyn. "But some not so much, not of late; and therefore am I sent. Talyn, these are Nudd’s words: A new Order is needed in Keltia, one that shall have for its heart and center the purity of pure magic, to whom shall be named and accepted only those men and women who are supreme in that one Gift. And if such a thing is ever to be at all, it must be now, and you are the one who must engender it."
Again my breath went out of me in one convulse: Whatever I had been thinking to hear him say, surely it had not been this! And though my heart yearned and leaped to it at once, my head said other…
"Why me?" I heard myself asking coolly. "Surely there are many others in Keltia far better suited to such a task than I. I am Pen-bardd, right enough, but only an indifferent Druid. Nudd might better have suggested one like Loherin, say, who now is Graalkeeper; someone of that same high exalted condition—a mystic and a sage, whether man or woman. A magician, not a musician."
"Nudd names you," said Allyn, smiling but dismissive of my modesty; not that he thought it false, for it was not and he knew it, but that he held it irrelevant. "And none asks Nudd whyfor. His reasons are his own, and if he himself is advised, we know not from what quarter such advice might come. Any road, this is no command nor prophecy, but suggestion only. Think on it. Speak of it to those you love and trust. And if in the end you elect against it, at the least it shall have been ventured in this age, and we shall know it was not to be."
"But what shall come to be if I decline?" I asked, suddenly, deeply fearing; I did not even know what this task might prove or demand, nor yet if I would take it up, yet already I despaired to lose it.
"That not even Nudd himself has been given to know," said Allyn, and even as the silver bells sounded again, crystal rain, the music of the Bell-branch, he was gone as silently and strangely as he had come.
I shook myself all over and glanced wildly around. Nay, surely this had not happened! I had been half-dreaming while nodding on the bed, that was it; the close warm air and sunlight streaming through the lancets had induced some doze-dream or fancy, an ashling at best… Then my eye caught something upon the table by the window, which had most definitely not been there before Allyn’s visit, and I fell upon it and bore it back to bed.
Cross-legged upon the pillows, I examined it gingerly and avidly together. It was a small disk or medallion: a flattened ring of dull silver, very ancient, that enclosed the figure of a most elegant dragon. Silhouetted against open space, the creature struck a heraldic posture between passant and rampant, its wings elevated, its tail arranged in a graceful curve, one clawed foreleg reaching out, or holding off. At the top of the ring was a little bail integral to the piece, through which a cord of black leather had been strung and knotted.
Without thinking I looped the cord about my neck, and the silver dragon disk lay there upon my chest where once my gold hawk’s feather had lain, that now graced my mother’s grave beneath the Hill of Fare. My mind was full of Allyn’s words and Nudd’s alike, and it seemed that the medallion spoke to me also, or else it somehow enhanced natural gifts of mindspeech and perhaps Sight also, were one to be trained to it…
For as I touched the medallion to my lips, I Saw indeed: a vast company of folk, reaching down the years like a river, all of them robed in black and purple; and at each throat the silver dragon gleamed. They seemed to me as a sword for Keltia to wield where all other weapons broke and failed; and now that the Sword was gone—for a time, for a time only—they would stand forward to fill its place at need.
The vision faded, and I looked again at the little silver disk. It minded me of that device Arthur had adopted for himself and his House in the early years of his reign—the Red Dragon, the which was already his byname on Fomor, for his exploits there and otherwhere—though that dragon was a fiercer far than this. And yet this winged silver beast had strength and power of its own… All at once I leaped from the bed where I had so long lain slothful and indulgent and despondent, and went by the inner corridors to a wing of Turusachan I had not visited for too long.
When I entered Gwahanlen Morgan was there before me. She turned to me with a smile; it seemed she knew all. And yet as I began haltingly to tell her of Allyn’s visit, and the first delicate stirrings of a brand-new Order, it seemed she knew nothing about it; for when I was done and she, shining-eyed, had added her voice to Nudd’s and Allyn’s urgings—that this surely was a task with the name ‘Taliesin Glyndour’ graven upon it—she began to tell me in her turn of the task that bore her own.
"You will remember from Coldgates, Talyn," she said, with an eagerness in her face that, though she did not know it, made her look a maid again, as young as she had looked at that same Coldgates. "How the pale cast round Sulven protected us all from discovery and destruction and even from the worst of the weather? Well then, I have mentioned to you on a time, or two or three, how if such a pale could be constructed to protect more than one mountain or one small ship? To protect all Keltia…"
"I remember," I said, surprised that I did. "Before Cadarachta, I think. We were talking of how such a thing might be done, and of what it might do, and of how it might work on Keltia once it was done. Oh aye, I remember very well."
Morgan smiled. "And liked it not so much, as I remember."
"Only for that I fear that to seal Keltia off from outworld contact, though it keep us safe, will also keep us same. To stand away so from the rest of the worlds—But I have argued so before."
"Indeed; and now it is on me that perhaps that may not be so bad a bargain: stagnation for safety. But I will not debate it with you, cariad."
"That is well," I said with a not-so-hidden air of relief. "For that you have always said you did not know how such a thing could be done?"
Morgan shook her head, and all my relieved air vanished like dew off the
grass.
"Nay; because I know now how I might achieve it, and I intend to try."
Of the debate that raged through Turusachan over the next months, I shall spare you the grossest particulars; chiefly because I did not myself comprehend a tenth of the technical considerations that Morgan tossed off like the merest nurse-tales or counting-rhymes. Suffice it to say that she rolled right over all who stood in her path with a dispatch and celerity and inevitability that her brother would have cheered to the rafters. Sorcerer or scientist, it made no differ: All went down before her logic and magic as before a boulder coming down a mountainside; soon or late, they were hers.
She tried to explain it to me any number of times, though I always screamed and fled; she would talk about leys, electromagnetic tides and channels, and how the Morimaruse could be used to our advantage, as a line of defense—the idea was that the leys would shunt any invading or unauthorized ships away from our space and deposit them far on the other side of the Morimaruse—but I truly did not want to hear.
For, all comic reasons of my hatred for mathematicals aside, I knew that this pale Morgan was set to raise round Keltia—they were calling it the Curtain Wall, after an old and basic feature of defensive castle architecture—would be, literally, the death of her. And that not being something I was eager to rush to meet—well, you can imagine. But she knew what it held for her, too, of course; and though she would not have denied it if taxed with it, she did not speak of it to any, not even to me. Especially not to me.
But it was the task she had been set, perhaps even the one true task for which she had been born. She was afire with the idea, it consumed all her hours and thought and energy, waking or sleeping: endless huddled talks with Ban-draoi Dominas or Druid masters or Fian astrogators and planetophysicists. The arguments continued unabated, in the Senate and Assembly, and in the House of Peers; among the folk also—and good strong ground and warrant did they have for it, either side. None of it seemed to matter a scrappet to Morgan: She would do what she would do, and that was the end of it. That it would also be, very like, the end of her made no bones.
Yet, even knowing that, incredibly, there were those who thwarted and denied her at every turn; and these were just the folk on whom she counted most heavily, who, one might be forgiven for thinking, would and should be her staunchest supporters.
They were the Pheryllt, the Druid supercollege of master sorcerers, from whose ranks in days past had come such as Merlynn Llwyd and Edeyrn Marbh-draoi himself. In the ranks of the Ban-draoi Morgan was the equal of any among them; but that was not why they now denied her the support she needed, nay. They denied it her because they were yet cross as two sticks that Arthur had gone above their heads and named an Archdruid in their despite, even the estimable Alein Lysaght.
The reason that he had done this was most good: Their last time on the field, they had chosen Ultagh Casnar, and just recall how he had turned out. No fault to Arthur for thinking that did they again have choice of naming their chief, they would do little better and very like worse; and he did not wish to leave behind him in Keltia another such success as Ultagh heading up the Druid Order. But they did not see it quite so, and now they were taking their vengeance for that choosing of Arthur’s, and taking it out upon his sister.
But everyone in Turusachan these days seemed full of angry passion and spite. Gweniver and Ygrawn—Morgan was by now too taken up by her plans for the Wall to spare much time for her Regent’s duties—were as one that the Wall should be raised; and of course to any right-thinking prudent person that should have ended the thing right there, for no one got the better of those two, particularly when they were allied with the third. But the debate burned on for months, oil on water, among the Councillors and officers of state, and would probably do so until the Wall was square in place.
The people seemed divided and uncertain as well. All Keltia, of course, was wishful of safety—over the past centuries the folk had had of alien invaders sufficient for several lifetimes—but still, few of those folk agreed on how this safety should be achieved. And the thought of a great magical barrier hanging in the dark of space, invisible yet impenetrable, hiding seven star systems from the galaxy without, was too much for them to grasp, and they felt stupid and afraid when they thought of it.
Well, I blamed them not at all; I felt stupid and afraid every time I thought of it too. But one night when I was feeling a little less feared and stupid than usual, I asked Morgan to explain it to me yet again.
She looked up from her work—the table in our bedchamber was chin-deep in paper and computer-crystals and arcane charts and plottings—and then gently set it all aside to come and sit by me.
"You make more of it than it is, cariad," she said smiling. "It is but a construct, you know, not a cosmology. A wall to be built like any other—like one in the rose garden below. Only bigger."
"Aye, well, it is not like any other! To begin with, it is staggeringly tremendous—
"And so it has to be, to shut off seven stars and all their planets."
I blinked. "‘Seven’? But there are in our declared space—"
"Twelve stars altogether; aye, I know. But why do you think we have never in almost two millennia settled any of those other systems?"
"I had not given it much thought."
"Nor does it need much… Well, we have never done so because those other five suns are variable and unstable, unable to support life; and their planets could never be made habitable by humans in any case, for many reasons. Too small, too big, too much gravity or not enough, one is a gas-giant, not enough breathable air, eccentric orbit, too swift a rotation… It makes a long list of why-nots. But they can still serve our need and purpose."
I was beginning to get a first faint glimmering of her plan, and already I could see why some folk liked it so little. But she was deep in her explanation.
"The Wall will of course need to be powered, and the power will need to last, if not forever, then at least a very long time indeed. It cannot be redone or renewed; we must get it right and running the first time or never at all. And to power something so vast, on such a scale, we need a like source."
"You would need a star," I observed unthinking, then stiffened.
"Aye. We would need a star. Five stars, to be precise; and every one of those hitherto useless planets. All of them must be exploded to give power to the Wall. This, then, is what I have been planning all these months. And, Talyn, it shall work."
I was silent; well, speechless, was more like. Oh, I had known Morgan was plotting out with the scientists and sorcerers something fairly, well, huge; but this… I could not even find a place for it in my mind, the thing was too enormous for me to grasp. Five stellar explosions—the stars Morgan spoke of were all sorts, red giants, yellow dwarrows, blue hobs—and gods knew how many smaller planetary ones, and they would not be small, nay, not by any measure. The scale of it was beyond me, and the thought that my wife, the mate of my heart, seemed to think it only slightly more complicated than masoning a wall in the rose garden was daunting in itself.
"What will it look like?" I surprised myself by asking. "Does it just hang there like an arras and cut off the stars we see?"
Morgan laughed. "Nay, nay! We shall not even see it, not even know by sight that it is there. Even from outside none will be able to see it; light will be bent through and around it—" She launched into another of her technical lectures—all the more daunting, for there was no proper Gaeloch for any of this, only techtalk—until she saw my eyes glazing over (it did not take long, I promise you!) and took pity.
"Well, then, think of a huge blue curtain of light, but you cannot see it, all round Keltia, in three dimensions—a great glowing sphere with us inside. We can see out, but no one can see in. We shall still be able to see the stars, but our stars will nevermore be seen beyond the Pale, beyond this Curtain Wall that we shall build. Our ships can cross it at will, but no outfrenne craft may pass within to the Bawn."
"The
Bawn? But ‘bawn’ means the space within a castle-wall’s defenses—ah."
"Strange how these ancient terms lend themselves so well to this new application," said Morgan blandly. "I would think that as a bard you would find that—intriguing."
I laughed dutifully. "Perhaps it is that I am rather more concerned about the workings of this thing. What happens, for instance, if a ship, Kelt or gall, not keyed to cross the Pale tries to do so?"
"That is where those leys I spoke of once to you come into play. The short explanation is that any ship to try such would not be destroyed, but would simply find itself many star-miles away, across the Morimaruse; and I think you yourself can say how effective a deterrent that would be."
"Truly." Any ship suddenly bounced, without explanation, from one corner of space to the far side of the Morimaruse would hardly wish to sail back again for more of the same… It was a brilliant plan, and it was being brilliantly executed. Save for that troublesome matter of the Pheryllt.
"They will not help," said Morgan simply when I inquired. "They say most fine and large that each Druid is free to choose for himself after his own conscience, whether he will help or no. But in practice—Just so. In practice very few Druids, save only the boldest and mightiest (and those she had already), were prepared to go against the stated wishes of their ruling body. I knew that I would not, were I an ordinary Druid; but I was not, and yet I still had not decided.
"Will folk know Keltia is still here? I should hate the outworlds to forget us."
"Some might think that a thing to be wished for—but aye, they will know. That is, they will know something is there, and they will know from their charts and rutairs that the something is Keltia; but they will not be able to see it and they will not be able to get into it. We shall be safe forever behind our Wall."
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