The Hedge of Mist

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  The Dragon Kinship took up most of my time apart from bardery. Arawn the King was building us a fine new brugh of our own, Gwahanlen having grown too small for our burgeoning numbers. The elegant edifice was being raised just a little way away from Seren Beirdd, on the eastern edge of Turusachan’s plateau, hard by the entrance to the Way of Souls.

  I am proud to say that the Kin to the Dragon now numbered some twenty-seven hundred. As I had planned from the start, they were drawn from all levels of Keltic society—all ranks, trades, crafts and callings—and already we were beginning to make our influence felt. Not to command nor yet to pressure, but to suggest and incline, to prevail by example: We had come into being to stand apart from partisan politics or slanted protocols, however noble or worthy. The oath we had taken, the commitment we had pledged, was to the magic that lay at the heart of Keltia, the magic that had founded and fueled and fostered Keltia since the day Brendan had led the Danaans out from Earth. And because our prime loyalty was to that eternality rather than to a thing more transitory, we would not fail of the oath’s keeping, and the well-being, the spirit and soul of Keltdom, would be served thereby.

  But after years more than a few—though I will not say how many—I felt myself begin to turn away from even my bards and my Dragons and my much-loved kin, and I knew that the time had come to attend to some last remaining tasks, both here in Keltia and otherwhere. For me, it was time to go.

  I made few farewells; few indeed were left to bid goodbye in any case. Only Arawn, the High King, Gerrans my son and Cristant his wife, Sgilti, Anghaud and Cathelin—only these knew my true intent. The rest of Keltia was given a story; and who better than the Pen-bardd to spin it?

  My writings were all in order, willed to Cathelin and to the Bardic Library. I had thought I would feel a certain pang at separating from these, but it was not so; more a feeling of freedom. I had done all I could, what I could; the rest was no longer mine to rule, or even to hope. Whatever came next out of those words of mine, it was nothing to do with me.

  I took little with me: the portrait of Morgan that had travelled with me wherever I went; the two medallions, the suncross and the sigil, that had belonged first to my mother, and the silver Dragon disk that had been Morgan’s alone; the ruby-eyed serpent marriage ring upon my hand; two of the hand-copied little volumes of Treithi Annuvin,’ bound in Gwynedd blue. I would need little else.

  No one had been told the night of my departure from Turusachan, for secrecy’s sake; but when I stood on a certain corner of the field at Mardale, where a certain ship had been made ready for me by Gerrans and Arawn himself, a slight, cloaked figure stepped from the shadows.

  "I had a feeling it would be tonight," said Cathelin, and embraced me with a whispered blessing.

  "You are too like your grandmother sometimes," I said, but I was smiling, and I was glad that she had come. "All is in order?"

  She nodded, eyes wide in the depths of her hood. "No fear! By this time tomorrownight all Keltia will be grieving the going of Taliesin Pen-bardd, who died suddenly and was disembodied in secrecy by the scadarc at Caer-na-gael, as was his wish and his kindred’s. That is how it shall be. As you have commanded it."

  "That is it, right enough," I agreed. "Only you, alanna, and the others of our immediate kin shall know the truth of it. It is best so."

  She laughed, but I could see the tears glittering in her eyes that were so like Morgan’s.

  "Best for you, selfish pig—but we will be left here not knowing…"

  I gathered her into my arms again. "Oh, lassie, you will know. And you must confess, it has a certain grandeur and rightness about it, not so?"

  "Aye, even enough to satisfy bards who must make songs about it after…" Cathelin stepped back, and brushed her cheeks, openly but defiantly also.

  "This will be hardest on you, I think," I said gently. "Only remember that it is all part of the making; the final dwned has meaning and heart only by grace of what has gone before. Yet that before counts for little if resolution is not made in the last lines."

  "Forever bard!" But she knew well I did not speak of bardery alone…

  "I have somewhat here for you," I said, and lifting a large and well-wrapped bundle from the ground I placed it in her arms.

  Cathelin was shaking her head in denial and refusal even as Frame of Harmony settled into her hands, as if it knew its new partner.

  "Ah, nay, syra-wyn, not this—I cannot let you go musicless from Keltia—

  "The songs are here, and here," I said, touching my temple and my breast. "The rest is gilding on gold… We had a long and wondrous chaunt of it, Frame of Harmony and I; now the reel-figure changes. No more."

  I kissed her brow, gave a final touch to my harp—my oldest friend, it had been with me before even Arthur had—and heard from within the satchel, though truly this could not have been, a faint whispering chime of the strings as if Frame of Harmony had bidden me farewell. Could not have been; but nice to think it.

  And then I turned and entered the ship that stood ready behind me, and closed the door. Its dark-green hull glinting in the moon, the sloop that was the last of Prydwen, that had carried the Seven home from Caer Sidi among the stars, rose up from Tara, and took me with it.

  We were not going very far, at least not at first. And as Tara fell behind me—as Arthur before Camlann, I had not been able to forbear a final flight over Caerdroia—and Gwynedd came mistily at me through the ard-na-speire, I felt the upwelling of a mighty emotion, a tremendous sense of love and joy and tasks accomplished. Not quite all tasks, some yet remained for me to finish; but the task Arthur and I had set ourselves so long ago, down there, in drowned Gwaelod and burned Daars and frozen Coldgates, that was well achieved. We had built to last there, we two and the others who had joined us in our building. Arawn and those who would follow had inherited a firm foundation and a strong keep set thereon; the rest of the castle was theirs to raise and hold.

  You may be wondering why I did not make one last visit to Morgan’s grave, or my mother’s, before leaving Keltia as I was now about to do; and indeed, I considered both long and hard before resolving not to visit. Not for lack of love or respect; but I had made my farewells to my mother long since. And as for Morgan, all that I had to say to her, all the work—if I may call it so—I needed to do between us, had been done when we buried her, Gwyn and Birogue and I. Anything more was between her and me alone, and was being done even now. To go back to her grave would be somehow to diminish that farewell and physical parting; I would not do that, and any road she was with me as I went…

  I came into Gwynedd carefully cloaked by the tirr—that inconvenient quirk of which Artos had so often lamented, that the thing could not be used on a moving ship, had been overcome at last, by the Fianna scientists—and, resisting the temptation of touching down briefly at Tair Rhandir or Caer Dathyl or any of a dozen other places that called out to me now in past voices, I held the little ship on course, straight for Glora and the North.

  I set down on the shores of the great inland sea itself. It was just before sunset local time, the mountains that ringed Glora tipped with fire; the sky glowed and throbbed. Across the still water that flamed now like a road to the sun, the island Collimare sailed dark and deserted, the Forest in the Sea. The tall trees rising from its low shores made it seem a galleon of old times, or one of the warships we of the Counterinsurgency had once sailed down these straits, bound for Raven’s Rift.

  I stepped to the water’s edge, my boots crunching loud in the silence on the white pebbled shingle. Even the little wavelets seemed to hush at my coming, as if all around me waited, breathless and expectant, for what was about to happen.

  I had a fair idea, myself, as to what that might be, but it remained to be seen… I threw back my curtagh and unhooked from my baldric a sword in a leather scabbard worn shiny with age and use, its inlaid tracery of gold and enamel all but flaked away. I held it across my palms, looking at it, remembering.

  This was
Llacharn, the Sword from the Air and the Sword from the Fire, the Sword from the Water and the Sword from the Stone. Arthur and Morgan and I, working together, had ourselves taken it from the place of its long keeping, deep in the earth beneath Collimare. And now it was going home: The last of the Companions had brought Llacharn with him, or maybe Llacharn had brought him. And it was right and fitting that that last should have also been the first.

  The feeling of expectancy deepened around me, and I knew I was waited for. I lifted the sword above my head; then, as once a king had done before me with another, greater Sword, with my left hand I stripped away the scabbard. A shard of blade came with it—Llacharn had never been reforged after Nandruidion where it had broken, in Arthur’s hand in defense of Uthyr Ard-righ—and I caught it before it could fall to the ground.

  Hilt-shard, blade-shard… I took one in either hand, and with the hand that held the hilt I cast the scabbard from me into the loch. Before it touched the surface it vanished in a flash of flame, and I smiled as a voice cried out from the air itself.

  "The hour is here, but not the man!" Three times it cried so, and left behind it a silence even more enormous than before.

  I strode forward so that my boots were set in the water’s edge. "The hour is come, and the man also!" I shouted into that silence, once only. Then lifting the sword-shards once more, I crossed them above my head in salute, so that catching the fire of the setting Beli, they blazed the suncross symbol that is both a beginning and an end. And I flung the halves of Llacharn mightily out above the waters.

  The sparkling shards turned top for tip, revolving with a strange stateliness, spinning like triskells as they reflected the light. They seemed to slow then in the air, and hang there over the center of the waters between Collimare and the shore-Loch Bel Draccon, this arm of Glora was called, the Lake of the Dragon’s Mouth, and I wondered suddenly just why it had such a name… But then a wind came up, a windfist, a small waterspout, that ruffled Glora’s surface and came dancing down the track of the sun. It caught the sword—the sword reforged—into itself, bright water spinning everywhere like drops of gold.

  And some might say they saw a white hand come up to grasp the hilt, an arm come up out of the dark waters, lifting Llacharn made whole again, an arm clothed in oreadach that held the sword in salute a moment still, then pulled it down without a sound or splash beneath the waters of Loch Bel Draccon, and the sun was gone.

  Some might say that. But I myself…well, I am a bard. Too many folk already have accused me of embroidering upon the truth. I leave this truth unadorned. Ornament it as you please.

  And that was the last of my labors in Keltia, as Gwyn and Birogue and Merlynn—who were ever in my thoughts as I set my ship’s nose for the Curtain Wall—had been telling me for so long. I must confess, I had half-hoped to see one or all of them there at Glora for Llacharn’s homecoming—and I had no doubt but that it was even now resting once again in its dolmen, where an unknown hand had first set it, in the little cave whence Arthur had brought it up into the light—but, as I had known the grave-visits would be, such farewell was pure superfluity. Our partings had been made, our words had all been said. Anything more would be, well, too much.

  As the Wall’s pale blue glow began to grow in my ship’s viewscreens—you may remember that Morgan had designed it so, to be invisible to direct sight—I began to chaunt, softly at first then in full bardic voice and strength, to sing my way out as a bard will do upon his deathbed; though that for me was yet to come. But I was leaving Keltia for the last time, and if that was not death as I knew it, then naught was; and so I sang.

  And also I remembered, and considered: All things had been left in order, all geisa filled, all tasks accomplished. I had named Alannagh Ruthven’s daughter, Fidais, to be Pendragon of the Kinship after me. I had passed along Frame of Harmony to hands full fit to hold it. I had set such a shield of myth and mystery between Arthur and the truth of his end that none should ever come at it save that one who would be born to do so. I had wedded out of love a lady out of legend, and had loved none other, not even after she was gone: For, as the great bard Lassarina Aoibhell had said of her lost mate, the even greater bard Seomaighas Douglas, and said so well too, ‘When the wine is gone, only a fool would drink seawater; better far to go thirsty, and remember the wine, however long the drought.’

  All this I had done; there was no more in Keltia I must do.

  The Curtain Wall was all but upon me, or I upon it: I was going beyond the Pale, for the first time and the last. And it came to me as I looked upon this my wife’s monument and lasting triumph that the Pale was a boundary between one life and another, a hedge of mist like that one that is at the end of each span of our days, and before the beginning of the next. The thought struck me with a sense of joy and fulfillment renewed, and I knew I should never be able to set it into song; for I was done with that too, and well done.

  There came around me a light through the ports of the sloop; the ship shuddered once, twice; then the stars of the Bawn went dark, and ahead of me the whole sweep of outfrenne space lay open.

  Keltia was behind me; but I did not look back.

  After an uneventful sail I came to Aojun, where Donah was now Jamadarin. Majanah had died a few years since: I had gone to her funeral, accompanied by Gerrans and Arawn himself, who had wished to pay respects to his lasmathra whom he had loved, and to see again his halfsister—as monarchs both, they would have much to share and speak of. Donah had wedded—Daronwy and Roric’s son, of all people, Harodin—and had now three children, including her heir, Sarinah.

  I was met in Mistissyn by the Queen, looking remarkably like herself. She received me as a revered and beloved uncle, with joy only slightly tempered with sorrow, and I spent a month on that world where I had dwelled so long ago.

  But Aojun was not my final destination, far from it; and before I left, my sloop refurbished and provisioned for my next world of call, I gave Donah one of the blue leather books in which were written the words I had made on her father’s death. She received it gravely and gratefully; though she understood why I must go, all the same she and Harodin and Sarinah—who looked so like her grandmother Daronwy at that age as to unsettle me quite—pressed me both subtly and bluntly to stay on and end my days with them in peace and comfort and love.

  Though I was tempted, I refused; those days of mine were running short now, and I had still a thing or two to do before they ran out entirely. So after taking tearful and tender farewell of my niece and her family, and their world that I had grown to love—no chance here that Arthur would be forgotten! Artho Kendrion, not entirely to my liking and easiness, had been raised almost to the stature of a minor god—I took ship again, and this time my intended planetfall held no such assurance of felicity.

  Kholco looked as dull and dust-veiled as it had the last time I had beheld it—the only time. I spoke briefly with the guardians who had authority over landings, and presently obtained the clearances I sought.

  The firemounts across the great lava plain were quiescent this time, though in the greater, the one that had taken Prydwen, a low glow burned, and every now and again a sullen rumble shivered the ground. I put the ship down on a basalt flat as level as a piece of panbread, and waited to see what would happen next.

  They came after a reasonable interval, from the cliffs to the west that housed the settlement I knew was called the Ras of Salhi. There were perhaps eight or ten of them all told, mounted on small strong-boned horses with long streaming manes and tails. I had stayed in the sloop to protect myself from the heat that pounded like a fist on the hull, wanting to be let in. I was not going to oblige: Kelts do not deal well with heat; seven or eight thousand years of misty cool climes will breed it out of you every time. But the Salamandri had arrived, and I went outside to meet them.

  They were a handsome people, saurinoids, with strong blunt features and lightly scaled leathery skin of varying hues. They bowed in answer to my opening courtesies, and the on
e who stood foremost of them spoke, in a fluent if strangely accented version of the Common Speech.

  After an exchange of greetings and words of welcome, I steeled myself to speak of my errand. But I was anticipated.

  "We know your reason for coming," said Adamar, who had spoken first. "And we would hear."

  I stared, then recovered myself. "How can that be, lord?"

  He gave a snort of laughter, immediately stilled. "No—it is not a laughing matter. We knew you would come one day. We saw the ship of your people sink itself in the holy mountain, ori-vech—years ago."

  "‘Holy mountain’?" I repeated dumbly, first nonplussed and then aghast. "Have we offended?"

  One of the other Firefolk jerked up his chin, which I guessed was their signal for Nay. "You do not understand. It is their presence that has made the mountain holy. They were brave folk, and died nobly."

  "We could not get home," I murmured. "I was here—I remember."

  Adamar saw my thought. "Comfort yourself. There was no way they could have saved themselves. They saved whom they could, and made an end. They did correctly. Even we could not have helped them repair the ship."

  "Have you come to take them home, lord?" asked one of the others, of build more slight, though whether this was a sign of youth or gender I did not know. "We understand that you would wish to, and surely would allow it, but it would be best for all if they were left here in peace. No harm will come to them. They are honored."

  I hesitated, not sure if I wished to hear an answer; then asked. "Did you see them—in the ship? Did you look within?"

  Adamar nodded slowly. "Once only, when we pulled the craft from the fire, to see if any yet lived or could be saved. The ship had been scanned as it fell—though we have no weapons, we have enough technology for that—and we knew all were dead long before they reached the fire. But still we had hope. Then the mountain began to wake, and we thought it best to move them thence."