The Hedge of Mist

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  We touched down upon the hither shore of the Dragonsea—we would walk to Beckery this time as pilgrims, not ride as questers—and gazed across at the mystic island. Today it lay plain upon the waters like a bossed shield; but there was wonder in our stares, and fear also, for just as plain there was no castle to be seen upon its hill.

  "Where is it?" I asked at last. "Caervanogue—where Loherin keeps the Gates of the Graal—has it gone?"

  Morgan shook her head. "Nay; but it has been taken away just for now, as what we must do there is not a thing it should behold."

  "We do an honest work," said Ygrawn to no one in especial, though the edge-bite of reproof flicked us all.

  Her youngest smiled. "Aye indeed, mamaith; but great works leave their echo behind them, and my cousin Loherin only takes prudent care that such an echo of such a working does not cling forevermore to the stones of Caervanogue. Nothing more."

  She stepped then to the edge of the water—so clear and green it was, I can still see, a hue like peridots or spring grass—where it lapped against the white stony sand of the shingle, and shed her boots.

  "The tide cannot be waited for," she said, as if in apology. "We must go now, as we can—"

  And as if she set her foot upon that grass of spring, she set it now upon that emerald ocean, and did not sink. Stride after unhurried stride she took across the waves, stirring up no more water than if she walked along the edge of the tidewash. Without turning she called to us to follow; and after a silent hesitation, we unshod ourselves, and did so.

  Strange it was, walking upon the water as though it were the solid stone of the causeway that led to Beckery; the which, most disconcertingly, I could see, through the water on top of which I now so blithely strolled, gleaming whitely fathoms below my bare feet. I set my teeth and fixed my glance to the island shore, and walked on; what the others did I know not, but I am sure it was done for like reason.

  We all arrived dry-foot upon the sands of Beckery, and I looked around in wonder. There was no sign that ever a castle had stood here, or foot had stepped here along the cobbled way that once I and the rest, or some of them, had walked. Beyond the narrow beach the sand gave way to low machair-grass and then to beautiful springy green turf that rolled unbroken up the island’s single hill. On the hill’s other side, I knew, was the strand Garanwynion, where the Graal had come back to us all those years ago; and I thought, as I know the others did, that that same strand was where Morgan would now lead us to begin the work.

  But again she surprised us. We climbed the hill—Tribruit, it was called, no more than three hundred feet above the water at its highest—and when we had all gained the top she bade us halt.

  "But—this is where Caervanogue should be, or was," said Gwain quietly, only his eyes moving as he cast covertly—and more than a little fearfully—all about him.

  "And it is where Caervanogue is," said Morgan smiling. "And shall be again… No mistake, Gwalchmai. All is to our purposes."

  She moved to the center of the hill-top, hands outstretched, fingers spread wide, as if she sensed her way before her in a dark room, and at irregular moments blue fire seemed to flicker from her spread fingers to the ground, and back again. It was as if she dowsed the ground of the magic, or the ground dowsed her… She had brought with her no gear of any kind, no magical implements or tools or trappings; no technological ones either. Yet as Morgan stood there barefoot upon the crown of Tribruit, she was also with Gweniver in Gwahanlen, and with the Fian scientists, led by our old Companion Elenna, on Arvor, and with the sorcerers on the four wards of the Wall that was to be, and with their fellows on every world of Keltia.

  It was, as she had explained many times, not a complicated working, if a complex one; we were not trying for subtle here but massive—as the proverb puts it, not the laighen but the mataun. Our job was plain, if not simple: to raise as much power as we could; hers was to consecrate it to its purpose and to send it where it must go to act. As for the physical manifestations of the thing: We should not see the explosions of the five stars—they were too distant for that, and by the time their final light would have reached us, it would have been channeled instead into the Wall, and so never would have come to us in any case—but we should unquestionably sense them. The death of a star, or five stars, and planets also—all to raise something I was not sure even yet should be raised at all.

  But I knew all the same, somewhere far within, that it must be; and knew too that I must exert greatest care not to let my uncertainty, and my fears for Morgan, color my work. But those fears were all but certainties now—and so they were no longer fears at all: Went the Wall as it might, the raising of it was going to part me from my mate for a long, long time to come. Not forever. Never that. But long.

  She knew it too, of course; you do not grow to be so great a sorceress without being keenly ‘ware of all such possibilities, nor to know when they leave off being possible and become what is. We had made our farewells, such as we could make them, last night; but in truth, we had been making those farewells all our lives together, and all our separate lives before that also. You do not meet before you are parting; and you are parting before you have ever met, and meeting after you have parted: It is all one. This now—well, it was much like the many battles we had gone into over the years, setting all thought of past and future aside, knowing that this very one might be the fight you would not come home from, or your mate or your child or your friend would not… I was prepared. But that is by no means the same thing as being ready.

  To still all this, I looked out eastward, remembering. The Graal had come from that Airt, last time I was here on this isle, and its herald also… As I looked now there was only the open dark rough water of true ocean outside the huge calm bay, and strewn like landstars across the sea reaches were the tiny scraps of rock and earth that were the Easter Isles.

  And standing there, my feet sinking deep in the warm green turf of the Graal island, I dared to let myself hope that what I feared, had feared from the first, might not come to pass even so. Morgan had brought us here last time to witness the triumph of life; it seemed unthinkable, if strangely fitting, that this time round and again in life’s service, death should be the visitant instead. And yet I knew in my heart that it could be, and would be: whether for Morgan alone, or for us with her, or for other sorcerers on other worlds. That might well be the price Keltia paid for the Wall’s raising.

  Suddenly a memory lanced to the front of my mind: a paragraph in one of my mother’s journals, where she described and commented on an ancient custom of our Keltic forebears on her Terran homeworld—how when they raised a defending wall, of a castle or some such, they would entomb in it a living thing, or more than one; immure it alive beneath the wall’s footings, so that in death it might give its life-strength to the bulwark erected above it, and thus keep safe the folk.

  And, my sorrow to report, all too often that living thing, in those times, had been no beast or bird (bad enough) but a human being… I could not keep the terrible picture and even more terrible comparison from my thought: Was that ancient and most barbarous custom about to be revived here? Would this Wall, too, require for its footings the strength—and the lives—of those it was intended to protect?

  Morgan did not give us time and luxury to wait round and grow distracted or distressed by just such sleeveless queries as this. Working swiftly now, smoothly and serenely, she set us out into three circles atop the hill, each with a leader of its own to direct and link the working; and she herself took up her own position in the center of us all.

  I had located myself carefully, so that from my own stance in the deosil circle I could watch Morgan where she now stood—Ygrawn, I saw, had done likewise, though Cristant and Gwain were so placed that they must keep their backs to their kinswoman—and as she lifted her arms to begin, I forced my attention to the work I had before me.

  I felt it at once, the link, the chain Morgan had been quietly fashioning all during the journey here
, and doubtless for a long while before that: the thread, finer than any silk, stronger than any findruinna, that connected each of us here to each and to all those on all worlds, and to those out among the stars. The timing was the same for all of us, the hour was long known; and we were eager for it, a hound pack held hard in before the hunt began, waiting on the Master’s signal to course.

  And—though as I have said no implement had been brought to the holy isle—it seemed to every soul in Keltia, in the magic or not, that a great horn sounded, a hunting-music, three long far cries that rode upon the wind and rang through every heart, a call to summon them all to the hunt. Even those who thought they had no magic in them, even children and the very old, even the beasts who shared our homes and hearths: All had their part in this. As never it had been before, and never would be again, Keltia was one: And that one was Morguenna Pendreic.

  How she took it upon her I shall never know; even the spillover, the sparkling edge-currents and eddies of the power that the rest of us on Tribruit perceived, even those were staggering enough, and even to seasoned sorcerers. But Morgan drew it in, in calmness and in visible joy, knowing exactly what she did; held it, blessed it; and then sent it out again, to do her will.

  And we felt it begin to build, felt the Wall begin to rise; and at the same time I felt the wall that was here on Beckery, the wall that was between us and Caervanogue where Loherin was master and Servant, begin to thin. And then, Morgan’s will also being that we should see as she herself did, we began to see what our labors were creating.

  It was very strange: Behind me I kept getting flashes of stone ashlar and long echoing corridors and rooms like pools of peace—Caervanogue, beginning to come through—but those were mingled with stunning glimpses of the space far distant, where mighty things were in train. The first star I saw die was a small and powerfully unstable blue hob, tight and incandescent.

  It glowed fiercely, rippling the colors of the sunbow; and then in a silent white dissilience, some starflower pod of vast dimension bursting its hull, the sun gave up its light. A thousand years, a million, who knows how long its life should have gone on; but it would have died in any case, and this way its end was no vain thing. And yet I could not feel that it had died; indeed, I felt it was glad so to sacrifice itself, glad as we ourselves would be.

  Four times more this scene played out before our othersight; only the colors changed as the stars differed. Planets added a different, earthier tone to the mix of colors, the giant palette of energies unimaginable that Morgan was about to put on her immensities of canvas.

  And then, as the Gates behind us to Caervanogue opened in the presence of the Power here resident and the powers Morgan had called in, two things happened: Loherin the Graalkeeper came forward. And Marguessan Pendreic came forward too.

  My first thoughts in that astounding moment were: How fair Loherin is, how his beauty reflects his soul and his task. And: How at last her inside is revealed upon her outer self-—how the evil that found footing from the start, and bloomed and blossomed under Edeyrn, is made plain in Marguessan at last…

  No one, seeing her now, could ever have been blamed for thinking her no relation in any degree to Morgan and Ygrawn. Nor yet to Gwain, whose white face shone like the moon Argialla out of the corner of my eye. Oh, her beauty was still there, in a way; but now it looked as some fair tree clutted with a noxious black devouring growth, its last strength and goodness sucked out of it by the clinging parasitical leech.

  And incredibly, I felt sorrow touch me for Marguessan and her dan and her choices; for an instant only, faint and far, but I felt it, and I knew I would remember it after, when the coil had run out and things were as they would be.

  But, as I say, it was a matter of an instant only; and then I felt all those other things buzzing round me in an angry cloud, the things that had always walked with me when Marguessan was at hand. Chiefly, though, I felt fear: for Morgan, for Loherin, for the work, for us all; since it was very plain that Marguessan had not dropped by in a leisure moment to help us with the raising of the Pale. And all the while I felt the raised power checked in its rising, hanging over us, still under the iron grip of Morgan’s mastery but an earthshake on a leash all the same—an earth-shake that could topple the stars.

  There was naught any of us could do about it: We were bound in our circles, unable even to cut ourselves a gateway in the usual fashion and step out to aid Morgan. She had designed the magic so a-purpose, so that if anything went wrong with the shifting of power from her to the Wall we would be protected from the worst backlash of it, and the brunt of it come down upon her alone. Even Loherin, master though he was in this place, was barred from acting; and any road he had his own concerns to look to and protect—Caervanogue, and, overarchingly important, the Gates that his predecessor Avallac’h had given into his care to guard, the Gates that led from our reality into another, and which could not be allowed to be breached.

  That was it: As soon as I got to the breaching of the Gates I knew. Marguessan was still up to her old and desperate tricks: She had come here to try yet again to bring through her damned and damnable Black Graal, and she thought to use the vast amounts of power raised here for the building of the Wall, and Morgan’s own power (vulnerable at such a moment), to achieve her desire at last. Glancing at my Morgan, in desperation of my own, I screamed out with all the strength and clarity of my thought to warn her. But I saw as I did so that she knew already, had come here expecting it, even. Whether she was prepared for it: That I did not know, nor was I eager to see proved.

  Marguessan seemed eerily confident for one who was also so plainly down to her last throw. Just for a moment I allowed myself to wonder about all those years she had spent in exile and self-chosen banishment, after her theft of the Cup: the dreariness of it all, the futility of it, mumbling over her balked intent, alone in her dark little corner with her rags and bones of malice. But those rags and bones were many: the Cup, her killing of her own son and daughter, the first attempt on the Gates, the calling in of the outfrenne looters and the attempt on me at Saltcoats, her rising against her own brother and her self-coronation as Ard-rian… The slate ran heavy against her.

  And I could see that she did not care, not in the slightest. She knew this was her ultimate effort, and for once she was ready to accept the consequences. But it inflamed me, the angry impotency of it, that I could not help my wife; until it came to me that this was her moment as much as Marguessan’s, that high taut time when the buttons were off the foils and meaning came clear and roads that had been decades in the making drew together all at once like a sheaf of arrows, their points all aimed alike.

  The two sisters approached each other; or rather, Marguessan came slowly over the turf while Morgan remained statue-still. Their likeness of countenance, never pronounced for all that they were twins, was suddenly more apparent than ever before: Each’s features in the other’s face had somehow sharpened and denned and focused, and they bore a greater resemblance to one another, now in this hour when their true resemblance and kinship and likeness could scarcely have been any the lesser, than at any time in all their lives before.

  The moment seemed time-stopped, like something that had happened long ago, a scene from one of the great tapestries that hung in Gwahanlen. Even the sea below the hill had hushed its waves, and the wind that in those parts blew constant and fresh out of the east died away to a tense and bodeful calm.

  Marguessan halted perhaps ten feet from her sister, her back to the sea. Their faces betrayed nothing but their stamped kinship; but they looked at one another then, with the click and jump of two magnets coming together, opposite poles aligned now. And as I beheld this I recalled a thing Arthur had said once to me, oh, years since… We had been atop Brendan’s Keep at Turusachan, I cannot recall why or even when; and of a sudden he had cried out from his heart, wondering aloud and bleakly how one birthing could produce two such opposite souls.

  And I recalled too that I had reluctantly op
ined, on his order to me as my Ard-righ, that to me it seemed Morgan and Marguessan shared one dan and soul between them, had halved it, so that Morgan’s portion was the Light and Marguessan’s the Darkness. But now as I looked on them together I saw that it was by no means so simple an equation as that. Inheritance, then, was not merely a matter of worldly things only; but why it had sorted itself out so for these two, I could not say. They had been raised alike in all particulars, had had the love unstinted of their parents and their kin; yet Marguessan had for reasons that seemed good to her renounced the Light by which the rest of us lived, and Morguenna had not. (I realize that to the sorcerers among you reading this, such distinction of good and evil, bane and blessing, into Dark and Light, may be simplistic and even wrong-headed; but not all of you are sorcerers, and it is easier so, trust me.)

  The thought went by in an eyeblinking instant; and in that instant many things happened. Morgan let the magic fly, releasing it as a hawk from her wrist; it roared out from Tribruit, a shout upon the hill to be heard among the stars. Marguessan reached out with both hands, as if she would catch it by the jesses and draw it to herself. Loherin stood before the opening Gates, and I knew that he would sooner destroy them than let Marguessan touch or taint them. And far off a black unclean unformed thing was howling—a loathsome echo of the shout that had set the magic free—and I sensed with horror shared by the others present that we were hearing the ravening cry of the Dark Graal as it clamored to be let through into our creation.

  As the one magic went—and the tremendous burden thereof was lifted from Morgan, though the rest of us continued to carry our own share in it—it was replaced by another, as Morgan faced down Marguessan before the Gates of the Graal. And again there came into my mind an echo of the past, Morgan speaking to me in our bed one night, speaking from her Sight. "Have you news from the Gate?"… Well; and if we wished not that news to be of the blackest, we must break our hearts to keep the work in motion, so that those our fellows on the four star stations themselves be not struck down by the very work of protection they performed.