The Harrowing of Gwynedd

by Katherine Kurtz

  “I take it that we’re all agreed, this is Jodotha,” he said quietly. “Do any of the legends say how she’s supposed to have died?”

  Evaine shook her head. “Not precisely. Some traditions have her involved in trying to save King Llarik’s two sons—both of whom were executed by their own father in 699. Orin was already dead by then, of course—he was considerably older than Jodotha. Whatever happened, I—guess she decided to come back here and die beside him.”

  “But, she’s supposed to have been a Healer, isn’t she?” Joram said. “If she had the strength to get back here from wherever it happened, wouldn’t she have had the strength to Heal herself?”

  Queron cocked his head wistfully. “Maybe she didn’t want to Heal herself, Joram. If she was the princes’ protectoress and failed to save them, maybe she didn’t want to live anymore. After all, Orin was long dead, the princes’ cause lost, the Airsid scattered—”

  “Aye, I think the Airsid died with her,” Evaine murmured, clutching the locket to her breast as she slowly shook her head. “How could things have gone so far awry? And all that knowledge, lost …”

  Queron nodded. “Those were dark times, especially that hundred years or so during and after Llarik’s reign—up until Bearand had just about earned his title of saint. With all the barbarian incursions, the failure of the Pax Romanum, the cost of the Moorish repulsion, it’s a wonder we have as much as we do. Imagine, if the great libraries had burned, for example.”

  “They may, yet,” Joram muttered darkly, “if Edward MacInnis has anything to say about it. All the best parts, anyway.”

  “No, some of the best parts may be here,” Evaine said, “maybe even inside this bier. Finding the burial place of both Orin and Jodotha has to rank with the major historical discoveries of the past two or three decades.”

  “Ah, but dare we use what they left?” Queron asked, glancing uneasily at Jodotha’s body. “If Orin and Jodotha were half as powerful as legend suggests—

  “Why, Queron, I’m surprised,” Evaine said, reaching out to touch a lock of the still-bright hair. “Joram is supposed to be the cautious—oh!”

  As her finger brushed the hair, the whole body began to shimmer, setting up a resonance that could be sensed but not seen. Evaine jerked back her hand in alarm, and all of them edged back from it.

  But then, quietly, with no fuss at all, the body simply collapsed in on itself and went to dust. Within seconds, all that remained was a dust-coated garment of stained violet silk, an ivory wand, similarly stained, and a twisted golden torque, partially contained in a crumbling mass of faded scarlet that once had been a woolen mantle. Not even teeth or fragments of bone remained.

  “Well,” Queron said softly, after a moment in which all of them resumed breathing, “it would appear that at least a part of the matter has been taken out of our hands.” He inched forward on his hunkers and ran steady fingers above the ivory wand, the torque of gold, then turned to smile wanly at Evaine.

  “I think that these should go to you, dear lady. Oh, they’re clean—but not for us men. Take them.”

  Solemnly, Evaine handed Jodotha’s locket to Joram, then reached out and plucked the torque from the ruin of wool, blew dust from its surface, wiped it on the hem of her gown. Cleaned, the torque showed bold patterns of interlace and brilliant color, elegantly traced insets of scarlet and purple and blue and green enamel done in details so fine, she could barely make out all the lines. The solar crosses of the Gabrilites were there, but also more ancient symbols.

  She polished it again against her skirt, then touched it to her lips before slipping it around her neck. The ornament gleamed like the collar of a princess, and the wand she picked up resembled a scepter. Joram offered her his hand as she made to stand, and his slight bow, begun as a gesture of lightness, changed to one profound as she took his hand and rose. None of them dared to speak until she let out a great breath and glanced at both of them.

  “Well, what of Orin now?” she said. Avoiding Jodotha’s dust, she moved to the head of the bier, but still on Jodotha’s side. “I was serious when I suggested that some of his missing scrolls might be hidden in the bier, but I’m not anxious to start dismantling it.”

  “That may not be necessary,” Queron said, moving with Joram to the left side again, where they would not further disturb Jodotha’s remains. “The scrolls may be much closer than that. Look there, at that bulge under his left arm. He’s got something buried with him—and it’s about the right shape.”

  “You may be right,” Evaine said, leaning down to get another angle. “We’d have to move the net to get at them, though. How safe do you suppose that would be?”

  Joram, moving closer to the foot of the bier, folded his arms uneasily. “Maybe we should think about it and come back later.”

  “No, if the scrolls are here, we need them now,” Evaine said. Coming around to the left side, she laid her wand on the floor close in the angle of the bier, then ran her hands the length of the body just above the surface of the net. Gingerly she touched one of the shiral crystals fastened in a portion of the net not covering the body. She could feel the energy harnessed in the crystal and its balance with the others, but that balance was very delicate. With a sigh, she raised her head and glanced at the others.

  “I would say that if we disturb the net, his body is going to go to dust just the way Jodotha’s did. However, I think that’s all that will happen.”

  “I agree,” Queron said promptly.

  “Which means,” Joram said slowly, “that it’s a question of disturbing the dead and maybe getting what we came looking for, or leaving him in peace and losing whatever that is under his cloak—which we don’t even know for certain is the information we need.”

  “That’s true.” Evaine sighed and began again. “Joram, I’m no more fond of disturbing the dead than you are, but if we don’t do this, then we might just as well not have found him. Of course, it goes without saying that when time and circumstances permit, we’ll gather the dust and reinter it properly in consecrated ground. In fact, we could mingle their dust.” She reached out to touch her brother’s arm. “I think she would have liked that. And somehow, I think it’s fitting.”

  Joram, staring hard at the locket he held, closed it in his fist and nodded. “You’re right. Forgive my squeamishness. I went through something like this once before, though, when I had to move Alister Cullen’s body. And it didn’t help that it looked like Father at the time.”

  No one could gainsay that. After a dozen heartbeats, Queron sighed and moved back to the head of the bier. Joram was already at the foot, tucking the Jodotha locket into the front of his cassock. Evaine remained on the left and gingerly picked up the very edge of the net where it trailed off the bier.

  “If you two will lift evenly, I’ll try to gather up the slack in the middle,” Evaine said, as they all took hold.

  As one, they lifted the fragile net, pausing several times for Evaine to free the cords net from where they had hung up on a cloak clasp, a slippered toe, one curved finger. As the net cleared the body, the last contact broken, it was as if the dust began to crawl on the body, alive in a rainbow shimmer of strangely shifting light on light.

  Quickly they lifted the net clear and laid it on the floor on Evaine’s side; but by the time they could straighten up, all that remained of the great Orin was a collapsing mound of moldering clothing laid out in human shape, the fabric upthrust by several lumps and bulges. Queron, boldest of them all at that point, gently moved aside the fold of feathered cloak that still covered the most suspicious bulge, then grinned widely.

  “We were looking for scrolls, I believe?”

  The two loosely rolled scrolls lay with a wand that was the mate to Evaine’s. One was tied with a cord of royal blue, the other with violet. Evaine drew a quick breath at that, for she had read long ago of a rumored fifth, blue-bound protocol known only as the Scroll of Daring and she saw, by Joram’s expression, that he also recognized the p
ossible significance.

  But, the violet-corded one?

  “Could that be a sixth protocol,” Joram whispered, glancing up at Evaine’s awed face.

  “I’ve never heard of one. But that could be his working notes—”

  “I take it that the blue-bound one is the fifth protocol,” Queron murmured. “Are you saying that the other one is the Codex Orini?”

  “Ah, you’ve heard of it, too,” Evaine answered, somewhat distractedly. “Yes, the blue one will be the missing fifth protocol.” She picked it up carefully from its bed of dust and ruined wool and tapped it lightly before slipping off its cord, to open it and scan the first few lines.

  “Ah, yes. On Staring Patterns, Moon-Saying, and the Blocking of Power in Those of Magical Birthright,” she read, with a growing grin. She handed the scroll to Queron with a slight bow. “Yours, I believe, for the next time you see Tavis and Sylvan.”

  “And the other one?” Queron urged.

  “The other one—ah, yes.” Almost reverently she lifted it and shook off the worst of the dust, carefully blowing more dust from the violet cord. “This one I think I’ll save until later.”

  “A wise decision, saving it,” Joram muttered. “In fact, I think I’d open it in a warded circle, if I were you.”

  Queron glanced at him sharply. “You sense something?”

  “Not exactly. Just a feeling that—whatever is in there is very powerful. I’m not sure I even want to be around, when she opens it.”

  “Intuition or just natural caution?” Queron pressed.

  “Perhaps a little of both. It probably doesn’t mean anything.” Joram glanced at the dust again, then extracted the second ivory wand. “Here’s the mate to yours, Evaine. Do you think it was a magical implement, or just some kind of symbol of office?”

  “Could be either—or both—or neither, though I’d guess they’re symbols of office. We can certainly use them as such.” She handled Joram’s wand thoughtfully, then retrieved her own and compared the two, side by side, her scroll tucked under her arm. “Yes, Coadjutor wands, I think. They’ll add a little of Orin and Jodotha’s presence to our deliberations—which seems fitting, since we have them to thank for so much of our esoteric tradition.”

  “I’ll concur with that,” Queron agreed. “And Joram,” he continued, picking Orin’s ring out of the dust, “suppose you take this and keep it in trust for us. Probe it, when you have the time, and see what you can learn.”

  “I couldn’t wear it,” Joram protested, wiping his hands nervously on his cassock.

  “Then, put it away,” Queron said, placing the ring in Joram’s hand and closing his fingers over it. “When you’re ready, it will be there. Your sister isn’t the only one in your family with talent, you know.”

  “Very well.”

  As Queron scanned the dust again, Joram slipped the ring into his belt pouch and looked much relieved. Queron, when he had finished, glanced at the others.

  “Let’s come back tomorrow or the next day to finish here,” he said quietly. “We’ll need a few things to do the job right. For now, it’s been a very busy night, and I think we all need time to rest and to digest what we’ve learned.”

  He got no argument from either of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  But you shall not mock at me thus, neither will I break the sacred oaths of my ancestors to keep the Law, not even though you tear out mine eyes and burn out mine entrails.

  —IV Maccabees 2:53

  What remained of the night brought but fitful sleep for any of the three Deryni. Nor might they lie abed, for Holy Saturday made early morning demands of everyone in the sanctuary. Emotionally wrung out from their experience and already primed with the stark, solemn symbolism of Holy Week, all three reported bizarre dreams when they conferred after Joram’s first Mass the next morning. In addition, Evaine found herself possessed of an inexplicable desire to see the remains of Orin and Jodotha blessed and laid to rest as quickly as possible.

  “I don’t know why it’s so important; it just is,” she said, when pressed for a reason. Indeed, though sheer logic could support absolutely no urgency for reinterring a pair dead these nearly three centuries, some unignorable sense beyond logic did insist that this was a task best resolved, and quickly. Even Joram came to agree, to his own surprise.

  Sheer practicality presented its own problems, however. Logistically speaking, a worse day for the task than Holy Saturday could scarcely be imagined, even if the symbolism of descending into the tomb was inescapable. If the Lenten season was more than usually demanding upon the services of God’s priests, then the transition into Eastertide was doubly so; and in the small community dwelling in the Michaeline sanctuary, any untoward absence, especially by all three of them, would be all too obvious.

  Nonetheless, they decided that a very few free hours might be squeezed out if they were careful, between the stark recitation of Prime and the more demanding rites of the night’s Easter Vigil, with its blessing of the newly kindled fire and baptismal water and the lighting of the Paschal candle. Under guise of retiring for an afternoon’s rest and meditation for the long night ahead, while the rest of the community did likewise, the three returned to the tomb beneath the altar under Grecotha, bearing with them a small hearth broom, an ivory coffer bound with iron, and two capacious leather satchels. The two priests prayed quietly over the dust-filled clothing for a few minutes. Then they and Evaine bent to the delicate task of sifting the remains of the two Deryni adepts from the clothing left behind.

  They started with Jodotha. The wool of her mantle came to pieces in their hands, and had to be gathered into one of the satchels for later burning, but the silk gown held, so that its contents could be carefully poured and shaken into the ivory coffer. Shifting Jodotha’s mantle revealed another ring where her right hand had lain, an apparent twin to the one Orin had worn. Inside, the Latin inscription confirmed her identity: Jodotha, serva Deum.

  “Servant of the gods,” Evaine translated, showing it briefly to the others before tucking the ring into an inner pocket to compare with Orin’s, later on.

  “Yes, but which gods?” Joram said archly.

  But they had no time to speculate further just now, as the afternoon wore on toward Vespers and the demands of the night. After sweeping the rest of Jodotha’s remains into the coffer, they had to start on Orin. The feathers of the cloak had been stitched to silk with silken thread, so it fared very well, but Orin’s robe, being wool, had disintegrated to dusty, cobwebby-looking shreds of faded purple. These joined the remnants of Jodotha’s mantle in the first satchel. They scooped the rest of the cloak’s contents into the ivory coffer. His silken hose and leather slippers went into the bag with Jodotha’s gown, along with the net of shiral crystals, carefully folded.

  When all was done, Evaine set the coffer in the center of the bier, squarely on the intersection where the four center cubes met, and stood back to look at it again. Queron carried the satchels and broom, and Joram held the feathered cope across one arm. Relieved of its recent occupant, the bier’s construction as a configuration of ward cubes was at last clearly apparent, the left half formed by four black cubes and the right by four white. Queron flicked a last speck of dust from one white corner, near where Orin’s head had lain, then glanced quietly at the others.

  “I’m struck by the fitness of a funeral bier symbolizing the Pillars of the Temple,” he said after a pause. “It’s such a logical extension of the cube altar configuration, I wonder that no one ever seems to have made the connection before. In fact, something comes back to me now from my days at Saint Neot’s, that made no sense at the time—but then, neither did the cleansing ritual that brought us to this place.”

  The eyes of both his listeners turned silently upon him as he went on.

  “My Order did know of this,” he said wonderingly. “They must have known. They veiled it from profane eyes—and indeed, even we brethren didn’t know the full significance—but the Elders o
f the Order surely must have known. I can see that now.”

  Joram was looking at him oddly. “They—knew about this?”

  Nodding, Queron laid down his satchels and broom, moving closer again to set his hands on the corners near where Orin’s head had been. “They may not have known consciously, but they knew something. We had a special catafalque at Saint Neot’s that only was brought out when one of the Elders died. It was made of eight hollow, wooden cubes that bolted together to make a shape like this—and came apart for ease of storage and assembly, I’d always assumed. The top surfaces were plain, stained wood—yew, I think—and the sides were carved with the symbols of our Order and our Faith, as one might expect. The surfaces that butted together were blank.” He ran a fingertip along the join of black and white cubes.

  “But the insides of the cubes were painted, some black and some white—something I only found out when I was a very senior brother in the Gabrilites, when I was poking around in the storeroom where the cubes were kept, looking for something else. It never occurred to me to ask about it, but when they were bolted together, the cubes with the black insides would have been lined up along the left side and the white ones along the right. The significance didn’t register until just now.”

  “You mean no one ever noticed, before that, when they were setting up the bier?” Evaine asked.

  “If they did, I never heard anyone comment on it,” Queron replied. “Brother Sacristan always supervised the preparations for an Elder’s funeral. Not only that, I don’t recall ever being asked to help assemble the bier, though the cubes must have been very heavy, and someone would have had to bring them into the church from storage. Novices and junior brethren handled most of the other preparations, but the bier was always in place when we began.”

  “And I’ll bet that Brother Sacristan was always an Elder, correct?” Joram asked.