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

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Master, I still don't understand."

  Merlin looks up abruptly and seems surprised to see Hannes before him. "Oh—Hannes—yes, of course. I'm mumbling, aren't I? Never mind. This does not concern you. You have done enough for me, good fellow." He takes the carpenter's shoulder in his grip and squeezes it affectionately. "I now release you from your charge. You are free to go."

  "You don't seem sound, yet," Hannes observes with concern. "You are still weak. I will stay until you recover."

  "I'm well enough. The Furor took the wind out of me, but I am whole. I shall be fine." He sits on the edge of the star stone and draws a deep breath to clear his head. The trees billow with the giant pulse of the wind, and he experiences again a rush of relief at surviving in the hollow hills under the Furor's spear. "I owe you my life, Hannes. I would like to reward you."

  "That is not necessary, Master." Hannes shakes his head. His avid blue eyes do not budge from watching the wizard. "The wonders I have experienced these past days are reward enough for this old man."

  "Even so—" Merlin gestures expansively. "The world of magic is wide. Horizons forever! I have opened the first four gates of power in your body. Now, let me open the fifth. That will empower you with the heart's brails for feeling deeper into the world."

  "Master, please—" Hannes looks pleadful. "I don't want to feel any deeper. Actually, I have been thinking to ask you—when you are well enough, that is—to take away the magic you have given me."

  Merlin leans back. "Take it away? But you've become so adept."

  "You warned me that magic does with us as it pleases." Hannes sits down beside the wizard, leans his elbows on his knees, and shrugs his helpless hands. "I see now the truth of what you say. I had dreamed that magic would make of my old days a youthful adventure. And it surely did that. But I am not a youth. My heart is a horde of ghosts. They wonder why I am cavorting with elves and faeries when I've grandchildren who have yet to learn my trade." He flexes his hands and proudly holds them up. "These, I realize now, are all the magic I wanted. My own life back in my hands. I am a master builder, Merlin, not a wizard. When I lost my hands, I lost my work—and then I lost my mind and started dreaming of a new life. After all I've seen and done these past days, I would be glad indeed for my old life. Just leave me the use of my hands."

  Merlin smiles, wisely. He recognizes here the human spirit that belongs to its work, that finds itself in what it creates, only thinking it wants more clarity, power, life, while knowing deeper it exists not to want or even to have but to be. "You don't want to be a wizard?"

  "No, Merlin," Hannes admits and stands up. "I want to be what I am."

  Merlin rises and looks the carpenter squarely in the eyes. "Well said, Hannes. Well said. You shall have your hands. You shall be again the master builder you always were." The wizard speaks forgetfulness to the man.

  Hannes's eyes flutter, and Merlin steadies the carpenter until he snaps alert. "It is done," the wizard tells him. "I have fulfilled your wish."

  Holding his strong, flexible hands before his face, Hannes grins. "My hands—you have restored my hands!"

  "As you wished," Merlin says. "Now, I believe, our agreement is satisfied. You have built me the round table—and I have granted you one wish."

  With tears in his eyes, the master builder hugs the wizard. He rants for a while about what joy this is for him, what creations wait to be released from his nimble fingers. Then he bids fond farewell and merrily strides away, eager to return to Hartland, where his family and his work await.

  Merlin watches him amble off and finally disappear in the far warp of the land among cedar giants that the Romans planted centuries earlier.

  He turns, walks to the sheer hem of rock atop the mount, and balances, gazing down at the snakewise river with its mottled skin of morning fire and forest shadows. And he waits patiently for the fragrant wind to send him messages of the young king and to stop whispering about the river's adventures in the lost valleys and its slow journey to the blue embrace of the sea.

  Chapter 29: Love Is First

  Clouds heave over the forest hills and budge against the dawn, promising rain. Fen and Melania sit upright, embraced, joined below the waist, legs about each other's hips, foreheads touching, in deepest communion. The fast beat of their hearts outpaces their rocking bodies. And when the mounting pleasure becomes unbearable for her, she lifts her face, shy and desirous, and her eyes open and see him watching her from far away, deep in the dream life of his animal ecstasy.

  She puts a hand on the muscled pad above his nipple and covers the thunderbolt scar that marks him as a Saxon clansman and chieftain's son. Then his hands release her and brace the earth behind him as he levers his hips, reaching with his bright tine for the core of her. She's startled by the sound she makes, bites her lip, and lashes his corded neck and straining shoulders with her long hair.

  They ride their shared climax equally amazed and collapse together into shapeless exhaustion. For a long time afterward, they lean into each other, not wanting to interrupt the union that has delivered them to the first true joy of their lives.

  Neither of them can account for this passion that has fused not just their bodies but seemingly their fates. Beyond the sheer truth of desire, they find they both reach for something more, an initial hope that each echoes for the other. In Fen, Melania has found her champion, who can help her reclaim her estate. And for him, she is the home he can win for himself by displaying the best traits of his heritage—by daring, martial skill, and strong spirit.

  Throughout the night, while Fen plaited for himself a grass kilt under a sky choking with stars, this is all they spoke of. Their faith in each other requires no god, no clan, no magic but their own sole desire to take back what the world has taken from them. They recognize themselves as counterparts of one destiny. And now that they have physically sealed that union and tethered themselves by bonds of love, they unclasp and face each other with equal measures of expectancy, dread, and amazement.

  Relieved and released from passion, they look at each other for something more naked than their bodies. Fen speaks first. "I want to go with you, to Aquitania—just exactly as we discussed when we lay together in the dark, when we could not see each other, only our dreams."

  "It is day now," Melania says, and glances at the blush of dawn. "Dreams must prove themselves in this clear light—or fade away."

  Fen takes her hands in his. "I will not fade away."

  "You are a very different treasure than what Great-grandmother sent me to find."

  "I will prove as valuable," he promises, relaxing all force in his voice and lifting his silver-bearded face to reveal his sincerity.

  "Oh, I think more so." She smiles and kisses him.

  Arthor shoulders through the hedges, still straightening his tunic from his passionate encounter in the night, and he stops short. "Melania!"

  Melania snatches her gown and covers her nakedness.

  "Arthor—" Fen speaks with surprise, then shrugs with good humor, and entreats, "Please—we need to be alone."

  "Alone?" Arthor shoots bewildered ire at the couple. "Melania—what of our passion?"

  "Our passion?" Melania asks over her shoulder as she crawls into her gown. "What are you talking about?"

  "Our passion together—last night."

  She pulls the gown into place and turns a befuddled look upon him. "I was not with you last night."

  "Of course you were," the flustered boy insists. "You came for me. We lay together in the field."

  She passes her frown to Fen, then back to Arthor. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Melania and I have been with each other all night, Arthor," Fen says as he secures about his waist the hemp cord of his grass kilt.

  Arthor locks his jaw, eyes narrowing, trying to see through to the motive of their lies. "I don't understand." He steps a pace closer to Melania, accusatory finger pointing. "I saw you—I touched you, held you. We were together unti
l just now."

  Melania shakes her head solemnly and stands up, dropping her gown fully into place. "That was not me."

  Arthor, hands on his hips, turns his head and regards them out of the tail of his eye. "You are tricking me—the two of you."

  "Arthor—look at me." Fen steps up to him, his face grave beyond all jest. "Melania and I are in love. We have given ourselves to each other."

  "This is true," Melania eagerly confirms, standing behind Fen and taking his arm. "We have spent all night preparing for our lives together."

  Arthor's arms drop limply to his side. "Then—who was I with?"

  Melania lifts her eyebrows inquisitively. "An elf-woman from the hollow hills?"

  "Or the witch," Fen murmurs darkly.

  Arthor makes a face. "What witch?"

  "The witch with the dwarf," the Saxon replies, nearly shivering to remember the lamia's possession, full of hunger and power. "She called herself Morgeu the Fey."

  "I've heard of her," Arthor mumbles, recognizing the name from overheard conversations at hearthside in White Thorn. He knows she is King Lot's wife, a sorceress much loathed by Kyner and his Christian court. "But the woman I was with looked exactly like ... Melania."

  "I was not with you, Arthor," Melania says sadly, pitying him for the strangeness that has found him in the night. "You were under the spell of an enchantress."

  Arthor nods, stunned. He backs away, too numb for words, then turns and retreats into the hedges. A heavy rainlike mist settles through the trees. Morgeu the Fey? he says to himself. Why would she come to me?

  He returns to the field where he lay with the enchantress. The rising sun smears through misty clouds—green, ocher, purple—hues runny as a disease. From the matted grass where he and his lover thrashed, he tries to spot her footprints. They are obvious in the wild grass, and he traces her steps among bent shafts of wild ginger, Solomon's seal, deer's-tongue, and trout lily. Soon he finds himself beneath husky spruce, where the trail of footprints ends.

  What did she do—fly? he wonders, searching vainly for further signs of her.

  Eventually, he relents and sits on a root-ledge, chin in his hands. Mist flares to a drizzle and soaks him in its chill aura. Hard as he ponders, he cannot think why a sorceress would seduce him. All he can surmise is that the strange gleeman who led them into the hollow hills and saved them from the Furor and his warriors is not yet done with them. They are all under a terrible spell. Why else would a Christian woman and a Saxon fall in love? he reasons. We are charmed by eldritch powers—elves and witches.

  He berates himself for not having heeded Melania when she first warned him about the gleeman. Because the odd man had professed Christian faith, Arthor had ignored his grotesque appearance. But now, recalling those weird metallic eyes and long bones, he knows that this warlock cast his magic upon them.

  But to what end? he asks himself, aware that twice the magician saved his life—first with his wise dog snatching Fen's thrown ax out of midair and then sparing them the viper-priest's deathblow. Did the warlock save me for the sorceress? Why?

  "It will all come clear in time, lad." A dark, gleaming voice speaks from the leaning evergreens.

  Short-Life flies to Arthor's hand. "Who speaks?"

  "Over here, boy."

  In the tenebrous rain shadows among crisscrossed spruce, a vague figure appears. Arthor wipes dripping rain from his brow and shifts sideways, raising his sword defensively when he sees that the tall man in blue tunic and yellow boots who steps from the forest alcove looks transparent as water.

  The apparition shows the misty woods behind him. As he approaches, the wounded details of his battered body reveal themselves: His scalp gleams fire-bald on one side, hackled with singed red hair on the other, and his long, green eyes gaze out from a scalded face lacy with blisters and hot sores.

  "Who are you?" Arthor asks in a fright.

  "Bright Night," the ghost replies with a shining, shadowy voice. "A prince of the Daoine Sid."

  Arthor steps back, waving his saber. "Stand away from me. I am a Christian man. My soul belongs with Jesus—not your Dragon."

  A luminous smile winks from his burned lips. "I'm not here for your soul, lad."

  "What do you want of me?"

  "I've come to return something you left behind in my realm." Bright Night's image wavers in the trembling rain as he turns and gestures toward a bank of empurpled clover. "We don't want the likes of it in the hollow hills. It belongs to you. Take it."

  Arthor's shield lies on the ground, beaded with raindrops, the doleful image of the Virgin full of beautiful silence.

  "Mother Mary!" Arthor sheathes his sword, steps through the clover, and takes the shield in both hands to be sure it is not an illusion. The solidity of it floats a smile on his face. He marks all the familiar dents and scratches and touches his brow to the Virgin. "I did not think I'd see this again."

  Even with his protective icon in his hands, he feels the edge of fear within him and knows its source. He stares across his shoulder at the wounded entity, notes the ester fumes seeping from his burned flesh, and the velvet stink of pond decay. "You look more a devil than an elf, Bright Night."

  "Aye, that I do," the prince admits, eyeing his tattered hands. "I've been wounded—struck by the Furor's spear. I would be gone from this life now had not my warriors used their own brave bodies to shield me. That's my pity, for I'd as soon be dead."

  Arthor hears depths of grief in the elf. "Why?"

  "Need you, of all people, ask? You, a Christian?" Tensions of sorrow and anger draw tight lines across Bright Night's scalded forehead. "Your faith is what is killing the elves. The love your gentle Jesus preaches holds much appeal for the Sid—elves and faeries alike. But when we take on your faith, we leave the hollow hills, we leave the underground of the Storm Tree, where we have found refuge these many years, and we return to the great cycle of being—of birth and rebirth. Our numbers are growing less when we should be multiplying, increasing our multitudes, the better to fight our way back into the Great Tree. We will never walk in the upper boughs again now that we are losing ourselves to your god. We are doomed—and I'd rather be dead than see the Daoine Sid fade away."

  "Jesus promises eternal salvation—"

  A laugh harsh as a shout cuts through the elf. "The wish is a keyhole to the soul, lad. Don't we all wish to be eternally saved? But, I'll tell you a truth, unless you practice emptiness and disadherence and silence, you will not be saved. You will return, form after form, to experience life in all its flamboyant complexity, until you are whole enough to be one with our Creator. Ah, that wholeness is lifetimes away for the likes of us."

  Arthor recoils from the elf's bitterness. "That is not what my faith tells me."

  "Then listen to your faith, lad," Bright Night says, and steps back into the feathers of rain dropping through the branches. "Who am I to gainsay your Jesus? Perhaps love is enough. I am an elf, and for me love is a fiery call. I love the flame of life. I love the warmth of the sun. I love the brightness of the moon and stars. Until I win my way out of the hollow hills and back into the luminous boughs of the World Tree, I am not ready for the eternal salvation you preach." He fades into silica shadows of mist.

  "Bright Night," Arthor calls after him, holding his shield high. "Thank you."

  "May it help your sword teach the strong to tremble," the prince's dark voice shines out of nowhere. "Our faiths may differ, young warrior, but our enemies do not."

  The last words wobble into echoes, as if falling down a well, and by that Arthor knows Bright Night is gone. Only then does it occur to him to ask what the elf meant when he said that the meaning of Arthor's encounters with the warlock and the sorceress would come clear in time.

  "Arthor!" Melania's cry trips through the hollows of the forest. Fen's shout follows, "Arthor!"

  The young warrior walks toward the sound of their voices. When he emerges from the woods into the field where he lay with Morgeu the Fey, Melania and
Fen share a look of surprise to see him bearing his shield. He lifts it proudly, and relates his encounter with Bright Night.

  Rainsmoke wanders off while he speaks, and the morning sun drops a hard-edged rainbow into the far fields.

  "You are blessed by the faeries," Melania says. Even with her torn gown a soaked rag and her wet hair heavy as eels, her resolute beauty congests Arthor's chest with yearning. "Share your blessing with us. Come to Aquitania."

  "Your sword will ensure that we win back Melania's estate," Fen says, then looks down at his grass skirt. "But first, we must get me some clothes."

  "We all need new clothes," Arthor agrees, plucking at his shredded tunic. "The village of Telltale is not far from here, and I've enough coin in my saddle pouch to buy us fine garments and a good meal. Let's away."

  "Then you will come with us?" Melania asks enthusiastically.

  "As far as Telltale," he answers, and refrains from putting a hand to her cheek and touching its shades of spice. "I am destined to stay here on this island of my birth. I believe that's why the elves returned my shield. They want me to fight our enemies."

  "There are enemies of Jesus enough in Aquitania," Fen asserts.

  Arthor kicks at the grass. "It's not only Jesus I'm to defend. It's Britain."

  "Britain?" Melania wears a mask of open disdain as she looks around at the ragged walls of aboriginal forest adrift in a slurry of fog. "Britain is a remote and desolate island, Arthor. The world is far grander than this primitive place. True civilization awaits you in the south. Rome, Ravenna, Byzantium all touch Aquitania with their trade ships and their missions for Jesus. There you will meet wise men of deep learning and beautiful women of true refinement. You are but a boy. Think of the wonders you will experience in the big cities—Arles, Toulouse, Bordeaux. Come away from this bleak and haunted island, Arthor. Come away from elves and faeries and seek your fortune with us, with people who are building the Christian kingdoms of Europe."