The Eagle and the Sword (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 2)

by A. A. Attanasio

  With a stab of shock, Arthor recognizes the green-blackened fig shapes as dried ears and noses threaded upon a twine of scalp hair.

  "Take them!" Aelle shouts with laughter, and the Thunderers echo his mirth and clack their swords together. "We will find plenty more."

  Arthor backs away from the Saxon trophy. "You have your son. I need no proof."

  Aelle gusts with laughter, shaking so hard tears spark from his shut eyes. Behind him, the flap opens, and a bald, sinuous tattooed man appears, green and black as a snakeskin. He hisses with outrage, and Aelle casts an angry stare over his shoulder at him. They exchange irate words in their own brute language, and then the mansnake snatches the necklace.

  Inside the tent, Arthor glimpses a woman. She has dark hair massed in Mediterranean curls and a long-nosed, full-lipped face from a Roman statue. Her large, Byzantine eyes seize urgently on him. She makes the sign of the Cross, then lifts her arms, gesturing in dire supplication.

  "Who is that woman?" Arthor asks.

  Aelle shoves Cissa back into the tent and throws the flap into place. "She belongs to my son Cissa."

  "She is a Christian woman," Arthor states.

  "She is Cissa's woman." Aelle rests his spear against his thick shoulder and motions helplessly. "He does not want you to have the necklace of relics. I am sorry. Perhaps there is another emblem you will accept. My men can offer you a scalp shirt. It is not the hair of priests but good Christians, I am sure."

  Arthor's mind races, and he looks about, purchasing time. "What has become of Fen?"

  Aelle's humor withers. "He is there." He jerks his bearded face toward slender trees nearby, where several of the warriors are smearing Fen's nakedness with rotted apples. "He will be whipped for surviving when the other warriors with him died. If he lives through that, he will have other chances to prove himself worthy of the Thunderers."

  Fen shouts something in his native tongue, which Arthor does not understand, a warning to his father: "Beware the boy! He is the wild flame that jumps from the fire!"

  "Take your pain in silence!" Aelle yells back. "You are no judge of men, you who live on their leash like a dog!"

  "The Christian woman in the tent," Arthor says. "What will become of her?"

  "Put her out of your mind," Aelle warns sternly, turning to him with a harsh light in his cold eyes. "Take the scalps we offer and go. My blood oath will not protect you if you challenge me."

  But Arthor finds he cannot go—not without her. He knows in that instant that if he leaves her behind, she will stay with him forever in a charred place of his soul. Her pathetic plea to him makes the air collapse in his lungs. He cannot simply walk away from her, even if to stay means death. Then, surely, she is the lovely face of his death.

  "I want the woman," Arthor insists, heart pounding, mouth dry, words like ashes in his throat. "She is Christian."

  "So?" Aelle gnashes his teeth with a sound like wood snapping in fire. "She is Cissa's. Go—now. When we meet next, I will kill you."

  Arthor backs away, his eyes very thin. A luminous intensity shines from out of the depths of things. Softly, the wind stirs. His chest burns as if wounded by the impact of his wild heart, and a strict sanity puts everything precisely in its place.

  He sees the stations of all the alert warriors arrayed around him, edging closer, eager to be the first to put their steel in him. Two indigo buntings flit out of the apple tree in a wide arc and come back. In the soaring summer clouds, rays of sunlight are wound infinite and tight.

  Aelle peers into him. The chief knows Kyner's son will strike and waits with staunch patience for the tension coiling in the boy's muscles to release.

  With a bold cry, Arthor draws Short-Life, feints toward Aelle to push him back one step, and spins off sideways toward the tent. A wide pendulum strike severs two of the tent's guy ropes. Another blow and two more taut ropes shrivel. Grabbing the loose canvas, Arthor runs toward the Saxons, sweeps it over their heads, and leaps into the exposed interior.

  Melania squints into the gushing sunlight and tries to push to her feet at the sight of the Christian soldier but falls immediately to her knees in a swirl of dizzy fatigue. Cissa, who has been trying to coax her to end her fast and drink the broth he has prepared, drops the bowl and reaches for the lode-knife in his belt. Arthor swipes him across the jaw with the butt of his sword, and the snake-priest collapses.

  Swiftly, Melania yanks the guardian band from his throat and grabs the lode-knife. Arthor takes her arm. "Come with me!" he cries, hoping to get her away from the tent before the others come at them. But she wrenches free, defying her weakness to scramble across the tent and reclaim the sphinx-handled urn.

  Aelle and the Thunderers shred and trample the tent, and Arthor spins Short-Life from hand to hand, ready for mortal combat. He gazes into the pale eyes fixed on him, cold and fierce as the malign north that bred them, and he knows that he is going to die in this place.

  Melania opens the urn.

  The lamia sizzles into the air. The sun's milk goes sour. Aelle screams, shrill as a woman, and scurries away. Arthor has to squint in the morning glare to see what frightens him. Transparent fumes wrinkle the air to a hideously implausible shape, a taloned wraith with hooked arms and clustered ribs like a spider's husk, a disembodied skeletal shape drained of all its tissue reds, extending a bodiless bone face of fanged jaws ravening for blood.

  "Stay close to me!" Melania yells and clutches at him.

  He slides toward her, not taking his startled eyes off the monstrous apparition, and they bump violently. She drops the urn and the guardian band. Her shaking hand inadvertently shoves the throat band farther from her as she takes possession of the urn, waving the lode-knife with her other hand.

  One of the Saxons dives for the band, and the shrieking lamia strikes him even as he clutches at it. The impact flings the metal band from his spasmed clutch, and his body rises feet-first into the air and splits like a cocoon divulging its startling red-ribbed interior.

  Arthor pulls Melania after him, toward the palfrey that skitters and neighs nervously where it is tethered to the apple tree.

  "The guardian band!" she cries. "We need the throat band!"

  The lamia has finished with the Saxon who last touched the torque, and it swivels like a cobra, searching for the amulet. The band has spun to the verge of the slender trees, into the grass before naked Fen. He has seen the whole sequence, from Arthor's rending of the tent to the Thunderer's desperate lunge for this black metal crescent. The screaming woman and his instincts assure him the throat band offers survival before the glare of this ghostly monster that rears above him, filling out with shrill colors stolen from the man it has split open.

  Fen throws himself at the guardian band, and the lamia plucks him upright. The metal band wobbles in his grip, but he does not let it go. The lamia's talons reach into him, ripping a choking howl from his lungs, yet he holds on to the talisman.

  Arthor leaps upon his horse and pulls Melania after him. The Thunderers have fled across the clearing, and they offer no threat as he pulls his steed hard about and charges for the opposite tree line.

  The hoarse roar of Fen paints the morning with agony.

  Once, Arthor looks back. He sees the Saxon twisting in the air in the livid flames of the unearthly creature.

  Melania, clasping him from behind with all her might, whispers with husky despair, "Don't look back!" And he turns away sharply and gallops toward the dark alleys of the forest.

  BOOK TWO

  Keeping the White Bird

  Chapter 16: The Evil

  The lamia squats inside Fen. It wants to burst him apart and swell stronger on his blood-heat. But...

  The guardian band about Fen's throat thwarts the creature by drawing all the sky's vast strength into the woven cells of the Saxon's body.

  The lamia, dressed now in arteries and bones, fills its host with unspeakable seductive power. Nimbly, he flows to the ground and spills naked across the clearing,
bounding toward the terrified Thunderers.

  Fen feels powerful as a frost giant, cold with might and hunger. Boldly, he charges at the men who stripped and kicked him, who pelted him with rotted apples, who would have whipped him to a shameful death.

  They see him coming, furred in tiny lightnings, a man-beast of wolfish fire, muscles gorged with internal force swelling veins to blue snakes and twisting his face like a thundercloud. Fleeing, they fall over each other. The man-beast pounces upon the two that tormented him the most and smashes their heads together so forcefully their skulls explode like glass and splash brains in the grass.

  Reluctantly, Aelle waves his spear at the fiery beast but cannot find the strength to throw it. His hulking son billows larger, inhaling the blood-smoke of the dead men. He turns an evil face toward his father, and Aelle's knees stutter.

  "Fen!" a rageful voice booms from across the glade.

  The blazing man-beast swirls about and confronts Cissa stalking across the clearing, beating his chest like a drum. Cloud shadows swarm rapidly over the grassy field, darkening around him. The lamia knows that the viper priest is summoning the furious god, the one-eyed giant powerful enough to strip it free of this human animal.

  Fen feels the lamia's urgency to escape, and he flies so swiftly across the wild field that he leaves feathers of flame floating in the air behind him. He is confused, yet this much he knows: he does not want to lose this stupendous new power, nor does he want to stay with the Thunderers any longer. He knows that Aelle will surely kill him for spilling the lives of his men.

  Smooth as liquid, he streams into the forest, ball lightning, bouncing through the dark cellars, fleeing the Furor and the Thunderers, stalking Arthor. For it was that Christian boy, with his arrogant pride, who orphaned Fen from his tribe. He refused to let Fen return to his people alone and without shame. Now Fen will find him, and the lamia will yank Arthor's cruel heart from his ribs.

  Strong with the blood-heat of three men, the lamia thumps among the trees with anxious impatience. He will kill Arthor and that damnable woman that carried the living terror inside him to this island, that delivered it to the Furor and separated it from its twin. And after it kills them, it will wander the forests hunting for ways to spend its rage.

  Agile as the wind, Fen runs—yet seems to go nowhere. Like Roman sundials, the trees throw shadows that swing weightlessly into the future. Clouds rush swift and blind through the treecrowns, sweeping the glitter of morning into golden midday sheens and then soft pastels of sunset. He takes three steps into darkness.

  Magic! Fen wails, and the confused lamia does not recognize where it is in the dense forest under the fleece of stars. Expecting the Furor to loom out of the night, Fen crouches in the leaf mulch. Faeries swarm like hornets against the day's last streaks of cinnabar.

  They blow closer on a fragrant, aimless sigh of the wind and carry the splendor of sleep. The last image Fen sees before succumbing to the fleeting waters of a dream is the bright commotion of the faeries spiraling upward through the trees toward the invisible pivot where the North Star kindles.

  Only after Fen is sound asleep does Merlin emerge from among the cloistered trees. Master Sphenks sniffs at the naked Saxon and retreats, whimpering and tail-tucked. "You smell it, too," the wizard whispers to his cur. "The evil."

  Master Sphenks snarls.

  "No, we dare not kill it," Merlin answers and backs away into the darkness. "Already I have spent too much magic to stop it. The Furor will recognize me—and we dare not call him down upon us. We have done all we can to help Arthor this night."

  The wizard and his dog hurry to where the moon stands among the trees. He knows that Morgeu the Fey will also have felt his magic, and once she perceives that he has left Camelot will certainly surmise that her half brother is in these woods. He must go to Arthor's side and protect him—but not immediately.

  Anxiously, he peers over his shoulder for the Furor. Tripping the lamia-possessed Fen into a time-ditch a day deep may alert the god to Merlin's presence, though not necessarily to the significance of Arthor.

  Hurriedly, the wizard travels away from where the young man and the Christian woman he rescued have fled. Who is she? he wonders. A sorceress?

  Watching Arthor from afar, the wizard could sense the evil of the lamia but nothing about the woman. He will have to scrutinize her up close to know for sure. Perhaps at this moment, young Arthor is bewitched by a demon's minion.

  No hope in worry, he reminds himself, scanning for the Furor as he and his wise dog slip through the narrow lanes where the forest drinks moonlight.

  Earlier in the day, Arthor had ridden past these same gnarled trees with the strange, beautiful woman sitting behind him, her arms locked over his chest, her cheek pressed to his back. She was exhausted, and when Arthor felt that he had traveled deep enough into the woods to elude pursuit he stopped, and she slept.

  He climbed to a high bough of a tree that summer had woven in ivy and searched for the Thunderers—and the terrible thing that had laid hold of Fen. Far off, where the forest goes white with dogwood, he spied the Saxons moving away. Only after he was convinced that they were not circling back his way and that Fen was nowhere in sight did he descend and sit beside the woman. He studied her smudged loveliness.

  The sight of her only imprisoned him deeper in his loneliness. Unlike the milkmaids and farmers' daughters he had grown up knowing, this woman, even in her disarray and smirch, is different: she has an aristocratic presence, a lady forever inaccessible to a misbreed such as himself.

  He may flee Kyner, he realized soberly, and escape Cei's scalding insults, and he may even extend the wings of his soul as far as his fingertips and travel to the limits of the Christian world, still he would never merit a consort as noble as she.

  Pained, he averted his gaze and sought comfort from the image on his shield of Mother Mary. She alone soothed the venom of his self-loathing with the truth that he will someday outlive his life and change to spirit, a ray from the star of God's love, immutable and heedless of life's ludicrous inequities. Until then, he must endure. Even in this beautiful woman's presence, he must somehow endure.

  He examined the empty urn, tracing his square fingertips over the twin-coiled vipers and the winged and bearded sphinxes. He held it to his nose and recoiled at its stink. The thought occurred to him that she is not what she seems, this beautiful lady.

  Kyner used to tell him skin-rippling stories of vampyres and ravenous werebeasts that the Romans and Phoenicians brought to this island and that Kyner himself stalked in their dark dwellings among ruins and caverns.

  How primitive and unlikely a weapon is this lodestone dagger, he observed with curiosity. He hefted it, ran its dull edge across the back of his arm, and returned it to the sleeping woman's waistband. The warm feel of her breathing body stirred him, and he quickly tried to return his attention to the Virgin.

  Now, under clouds like haystacks and sunlight blinking through leaves, Arthor wanders about, gathering berries, setting snares, and talking to himself, hoping to defeat his hopeless attraction: "You're free now," he tells himself. "Free of the Celts, by God. Free of servitude. Don't let desire make an unholy slave of you. Deliver this lady to Hammer's Throw and be on your way."

  A tattered shawl of butterflies covers a blackberry bush, like an old woman bent in the kitchen of a cypress grove. There, he collects mint, elecampane, ginger root, veneria tuber, and galingale. In two of his snares, rabbits wait with desultory timidity. He breaks their necks with deft twists, eviscerates and skins them, and braises them with the herbs.

  When Melania wakes, she finds the sky truffled with sunset. The evening wind carries a spicy whisper of leaves and cooking aromas. Stepping through a curtain of ivy hung among sighing spruce, she finds the fair young man turning a spit of mint-glazed rabbit. He rises and, in curious lilting Latin, asks, "Are you hungry?"

  "Yes, thank you." She joins him in the fire circle, where he uncovers birch-bark trenchers of roo
t and berry salad. She barely finds the breath to say, "I am Melania—of Aquitania."

  Arthor passes her a flagon of water and introduces himself. She listens, eating hungrily yet delicately of his food, and after he explains his presence in the camp of the Thunderers, she tells her story.

  "There are two lamia?" Arthor finally asks, awed. "Yet, who was the dwarf that took the other away?"

  "I don't know," she answers frankly. Facing this young Christian with his yellow eyes and sun-streaked hair sleek as a badger's in the firelight, she feels she can confide everything in him. "I must tell you, Arthor, when the lamia's strength was still within me—I saw the Furor, the chieftain of the north gods. He stood taller than a cedar, and his mantle billowed blue as the sky. I think the evil dwarf is his creature."

  Arthor accepts this with a nervous glance into the darkness. "If, as you say, he uses the lamia to shapeshift, he can be anywhere around us."

  "I think not," she says, pausing thoughtfully before helping herself to more berries. "I don't know what Cissa said to him, but he left with purpose in his stride. I do not believe he lingers in these woods."

  "And Fen? What will become of him?"

  "What became of me." She shakes her head grimly. "He will have supernatural strength—so long as he feeds the lamia."

  "You say they eat only human lives."

  "That is their craving."

  "Then we are in danger," he says tersely. "He will surely come after me for returning him to Aelle."

  Melania puts her hand to the weapon in her waistband. "I have the lodestone dagger. That may well keep him away, for it will kill the lamia. There is so much easier prey in the villages."

  Arthor's youthful face closes around that thought. "If he attacks the villages, I will have to track him down. I cannot have the blood of innocents on my hands. Mother Mary would never permit that."