"It was left here for you, what time you should come to take it up." Morgan's voice echoed in the cave's confines; but though I could not see her face, and dared not turn to look for her, I knew she had not spoken to me, nor had she spoken aloud. "Arthur. Take the hilt."
At that Arthur's head came up, and I felt him reach out to the sword with his senses as he must reach out with his hand. If indeed the weapon was such as could be taken up with hand alone… But it was a carving still; or was it?
Stepping forward, without hesitation Arthur set his right hand to the gray granite, where the sword-hilt was wrought in curving interlace. What happened next I could not see, for his back was to me, but I did see him flinch a little, drawing back his hand rather more swiftly than he had extended it, and when I saw his hand clear I gasped aloud. Blood dripped from his fingers, as if something had slashed across them; and when he turned his palm outward to us, the blood flying out in an arc, like a spray of red rain, we could plainly see the cuts across the skin, thin and fine, as if he had grasped a fistful of whipping wires.
My face reflected my pain at his pain, but Morgan's expression did not alter. "Again."
Arthur had never lacked for courage, and he was already reaching out again as his sister spoke, this time with his left hand. And this time he did not flinch, but went stiff as his palm seemed to freeze to the stone. After an instant he set his mouth and ripped his fingers free: Some of the skin had been torn from the palm, so fast had it frozen and so swiftly had he pulled his hand away; and the remaining skin was seared blue and mottled white, as if it had been touched to freezing iron. He did not need to be bidden try yet a third time. With the look of someone who has suddenly out of blackest bafflement seen the answer to a riddle, Arthur stepped forward again, and this time—it is hard to explain, for though I Saw what happened next, I do not think I truly saw it—using both hands, he reached into the stone, and closed his fingers upon the carved hilt of the carved sword.
It seems impossible now as I recount it—indeed, it did then, when I was but observing it—but the dolmen had become almost transparent, and even as the stone was losing its density and very physicality, the sword could be seen taking it on, growing real, growing solid, so that now it blazed silver and gold in the cavelight, and the great square stone in its pommel flamed red. But the greatest wonder was yet to come: As Arthur took the hilt in both hands, the bleeding hand and the burned hand alike, the stone was gone in a flash of light, and only the sword remained; and his hands that had been slashed and skin-torn were full healed.
"Llacharn," said Morgan, and I heard in her voice an echo of Merlynn's. "'The Flamebright'… not the Sword that will do the true task in the end, but it will serve for the work to come."
"It will serve," said Arthur in a drowned, wondering voice. He lifted the sword, and the blade flashed like silk in sunlight.
"Bring me the sword, Arthur Pendreic," said his sister, and such was the depth of the magic that he did not jib at the name she used in that moment—the royal surname they shared through different fathers—but came and knelt before her, as a man before a mighty queen, and gave the sword Llacharn into her hands.
Morgan held up the blade balanced on her palms, and blessed it, then kissed the hilt and gave the weapon back to Arthur, and kissed him. As he rose from his knee, and turned to look at me, I let out a deep breath that I did not realize I had been holding, and met his eyes. Though we said no word, we saluted the moment, for the dan of Keltia and the doom of Edeyrn had been born here this night in this cave. Born of Arthur, born of Morgan, born of me, born of Birogue, born of whoever had wrought Llacharn for Arthur to bear—this night had been long in the making, and though it must soon pass if that making were to have meaning beyond this night, these walls, we three stood a moment motionless, honoring the moment, glimpsing what would be.
"Now," said Morgan then, relief and delight in her voice, and it an everyday voice at last, "now let us go from here. Time it is this place must rest, and so must we."
We did not leave directly, of course: Working for the first time together as sorcerers, the three of us sealed the cave until such a day as it might again be needed, with thanks and with blessing. Morgan directed the magic herself, and when we had finished, not I nor Arthur and perhaps not even she could see where the entrance or the cave itself had been. It was as if the hill had closed up behind us, as water will close after a swimmer's arm has passed. Though the rock still held the memory of the cavern, and the cavern would exist again at the proper time or in the lawful need, the place where the cave had been was solid now as if no cave had ever yawned there, as filled with stone as it had been an hour since with darkness and with light.
After that, we were tired and hungry indeed, and dizzily elated with the winning of the weapon. So Morgan fed us; and though she was no more skilled a cook than any other great sorcerer I have known, we contrived all the same to be full and warm and happy, and slept dreamlessly that night on beds of furs and rushes. Yet all that night was not for sleeping…
I woke suddenly, my heart hammering as with some uncaused terror—an awakening such as I had not had for many years. Had there been a noise, had someone cried out, was there some intruder on the island, or in the room? I held myself to stillness until I had taken inventory of my chamber; once satisfied that no one was lurking in the shadows or behind a chair, I cast out in thought to Arthur's room and to Morgan's. But I could detect there only peaceful sleep—though Arthur slept with one hand on Llacharn's hilt—and two steady hearts; and farther too all was safe and calm.
Well, it seemed to be my trouble alone, then. But I had ridden ghostmares before now: I lay awake for a while, watching the moonlight on the floor, breathing in a mode to induce sleep, then sighed deeply and cast off the coverlets and began to dress. In my years as Owein's man I had known many such awakenings, and knew too from those experiences that my chances of attaining sleep again any time soon were few to none. So I did what I had used to do at Caer Dathyl: went out to breathe the night air and be at one for a while beneath the stars, hoping to trick myself into sleepiness thereby. If it worked at Caer Dathyl, I told myself, moving silently past Arthur's door—Morgan's chamber was on the Han's far side—it should work here; if not, a little clean night air never harmed anyone.
Once outside, and the others not awakened behind me, I stood for a while in the Han's sheltering angle, letting my eyes grow 'customed to the moonsplashed world before me, all my senses slapped to wakefulness by the light and cool air. Though Glora was called a sea, her waters were fresh rather than salt, and so the tang that breathed from the waves was not of the ocean but of high snows and glaciers and rivers and tarns and streams—all the waters that had flowed down to Glora, and there remained.
During the evening's long lazy converse, after the nightmeal and before retiring, Morgan had spoken of a small pinegrove on the edge of the rocks above the sea, where she liked to sit—in meditation or in idleness, it made little differ which, in that place they were much the same—and after a pause to get my bearings in the glamourie the moonlight cast upon Collimare, I turned my steps that way.
As I approached the grove—more a dell than a grove, sheltered and shadowed—I thought that someone else stood there, tall and straight and motionless, and stopped dead in my tracks. Stupid, I chided myself; for if it had been an enemy not only would I have betrayed my knowledge of his presence by my abrupt halt, but I would have provided a perfect target for his weapons. Yet I think I knew even in that surprised blinking instant that it was neither enemy nor stranger, and so when she spoke I was not surprised at all.
"You took long enough in the coming," said Morgan. I could see her face now, white as the statue she had seemed at first to be; but as I came up to her I could only marvel at how she had come there before me when I had sensed her deep asleep as I left the llan.
Her eyes danced under the moon, for she knew well how puzzled I was, and after a moment she relented.
"And you
call yourself Druid! Ah Talynno, what kind of sorceress would I be could I not make you think I slept though I waked and walked?"
"But you were asleep, you were there! I kenned you and Arthur both, so that I should not wake you as I went. I take oath you were both well under, for I even felt you breathing." The smile widened. "Nay, I have been here this hour past—an hour spent, I might add, in calling to you. You take a deal of waking—or perhaps you were still wearied from your journey." That was a deliberate taunt, though a loving one: I to be wearied, who had spent much of the past twenty years on Gwynedd's roads!
I forced the words out past a sudden shyness, though I needed no answer from her. "And why is it, lady, that you did call me?"
Morgan did not trouble to answer, only took my face between her cool hands and kissed me gravely, lightly upon the lips. And that was the last of our past and the beginning of our world, as the stars spun above us and the deep grass was soft below.
What we did was no more nor less than all others do, or than each of us had done before—Morgan too had known her Teltown, and other nights after, as had I—doubtless it was little different for you, or for any.
What we did was simple; what we did was fathomlessly complex. Sharing minds as well as bodies; all consciousness receding to that ancient place in the back of our brains that remembers things our forebrains never dreamed on: lights dimming in the regions of thought, all sensation exploding out from one white silent blazing center.
I have been caught up before and since in something bigger than my own small finite being, and it was both like and unlike to this—though there can be the same urgency and ecstasy in one's art as in one's body. Oh, it was a wonder, and no mistake; joy there was, even rapture, though not the soaring communion that was to come later—both of us were, I think, too frightened by the overwhelming inevitability of the thing. It is hard to get what one has long wanted.
And what we did set the seal on what had been done in the cave; for the first time the long battle waged and the distance yet to go seemed capable of achievement. That Morgan and I should come together then, at Collimare, was Sight long Seen, another corner of the pattern tying itself off, another square completed; in years to come it would be deeper and higher and wider, but never could it be more certain than it was that night.
And when Arthur and I left Collimare next morning—only one of us ever to return there—Morgan rode between us.
* * *
Chapter Twenty-nine
Thus began the beginning of the end of the beginning: the last days of the secret war that Arthur had been waging and all those before him for all the years of the Marbh-draoi's rule. It ran quick enough now, but for all that, it was near five years more before it ended.
Five years we were in hard campaigning, such campaigning as we had not yet seen, as perhaps Gwynedd herself had not seen, not even in the earliest days of Keltia. We fought now for the planet, fought openly; the actions that had gone before were mere pinprick reivings, by compare to what Arthur now commanded.
No more now were we just a few loyal comrades, a handful of Fians hidden away in shielings, endlessly training for fights that never came. Now they were upon us, those fights, and we were a true army that met them gladly. For with purpose and method both deadly alike, Arthur had begun to claim Gwynedd back from Owein, lai by lai, foot by foot, inch by bloody inch. Some of those claimings are wreathed now in legend; many are lost, or remembered only by those who helped to make them, or who were themselves caught up in them—soldiers, townsfolk, Companions, landholders whose lands became the battleground whether they will or nill. There could be no bystanders anymore: The day had dawned at last when Gwyneddans, and their fellow Kelts on the other worlds soon to come to it as well, must declare for Edeyrn or for Arthur, for the Marbh-draoi or for the Bear; and from either choosing there could be no appeal, and no return.
I myself do not recall every skirmish we fought in those earliest days, every stronghold we toppled, every town we took. But some shall live in my memory until the day I no longer can recall them or indeed anything else, and they are not all of them the grand fights of glory that Keltia will never forget.
Those epic battles are well enshrined otherwhere: Here I am free to raise shrines of my own, to erect cairns of memory that perhaps none other may think to build, and I have five years and more of building-stones to choose from…
The high tops were whitening now with winter coming on, the streams running down from the slopes braided brown with leaves and twigs and laced with foam. All sensible creatures were making ready for, if not actual sleep, then at least protracted inactivity for the duration of the approaching cold times, obedient to the inborn ancient commands: Beasts that had been fattening were going now to lair, the gray geese had long since flown south, the red deer were down on the flats from their upland haunts, townfolk and hilldwellers alike had prepared themselves to face the frosts.
All creatures indeed; all, that is, save Arthur, and those who went with him in his madnesses…
It must be said that campaigning in Keltia in those days was not as it had been formerly, or is now. It used to be that a winter campaign was the mark of an inexperienced captain, or a lunatic one, or one with no alternative; and now, of course, we have such technologies as make winter battle not even an inconvenience. There was that, if naught else, to be said for Edeyrn's rule: By depriving us of enginery and other tools of science he had given us a life of winter quiet and rest, like to that of our long-ago kin on Earth.
Arthur changed all that, as he was changing most things these days: Never one to waste the snow-months in sleepiness like the bear whose name he bore, he roused the rest of us as well. Some of us liked it not at all, while others thrived: We went never hungry, though sometimes the board at Llwynarth was sparser set than we might have liked it; nor were we ever idle, though after bouts of prolonged inaction—due more often to fierce weather than to Arthur's strategies—the more restive souls among us began to suffer from what we called 'cavern fever.' But for the most part Arthur had us out and doing in all weathers until we dropped—he himself seemed never to tire, which can be most tiresome for those who do—and sometimes we cursed him as passionately as Owein's Ravens cursed us all.
Now we were often together, he and I, as we had not been since our shieling days; Morgan of course was with us—with me—and Ygrawn too, sometimes, though it was still judged too unsafe for Uthyr to venture from Coldgates. Keils Rathen, warlord paramount, joined Arthur that winter I speak of; and though Tarian and Grehan, who had long been counted chief commanders, were a little daunted by him at first, and fearful that Keils should usurp their place by virtue of greater experience or age or mastery, they soon learned that their fears were groundless. Keils was a professional warrior, to him victory was all; he cared no whit how it was gotten. Though his help was matchless, he confined himself to advising only, and he was the first to give the praise, where merited, to his two young counterparts.
As for the rest of us Companions, we were much the same as ever; Tarian and Grehan, of whom I spoke just now, and Betwyr, and Kei, and Daronwy, and Ferdia and the rest, that inner ring of Companions within the Company, and the outer circle as well. Indeed, so confident and forward had Arthur grown with his successes that we began about now to seek irregular levies: troops committed to Arthur and to our cause who were not permanent members of our kinship, who came and went with the seasons, recruited for specific objectives—the taking of a certain town, or the raiding of a particular stronghold—and then disbanded, never to come to Llwynarth. The strategy worked surpassingly well for these short-term goals, and left in place a framework of warriors all across Gwynedd, when Arthur should in time to come need every fighter he could call to him.
But that winter began the sword-dance across the Arvon hills for which he was so famed in after years. From the Rough Bounds in the east to the slopes of the Grain Valley Range far to the west, Arthur led Owein's forces thrice round and three times thrice m
ore, in a teasing, slaughterous progress—feinting, drawing them on deep into the trackless hills he knew so well and they feared so greatly, then turning round to strike. There was blood on the snow that winter from Agned clear to the sad ruins of Daars, and we were pleased indeed that so little of it was our own.
All the same, there were times when even Arthur cut things a little too fine for anyone's liking—
Deep midwinter, past Sunstanding and the feast-time that followed. Snow had been falling for three or four days straight; then a thaw had set in, and then a freeze again. The ground was hard now and bare, the sky a brilliant blue.
We had been caught by the snows too far from Llwynarth to replenish our supplies, and now we had not enough food among us to make even a forced march there without perishing like fawns on the howling hills. We had new levies with us as well, to whom Llwynarth was no option; and worst of all, we had not enough power to recharge the new weapons sent us from the scientists at Coldgates—laser flains and balisters, glaives and even a few small field pieces—and should an attack come we would be hard pressed to stand it off. Our only comfort was that few Ravens would be willing to brave the harsh weather; but that was by no means a thing assured.
I came to Arthur's tent that afternoon to find him deep in converse with Tarian and Kei. To judge by the grave faces, we were in worse straits than even I in my usual pessimism had thought; but to judge by Arthur's face alone, we might have been in the midst of a summer revel.
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