The Celtic Mirror

by Louis Phillippi

  The bleeding from the gash had slowed to a mere seeping but the robe Morgan had removed was soaked with the blood she had already lost. He eased an arm under the small of her back and cautiously lifted her, freeing the remainder of the garment. He tossed it away, and it fell, unseen into a dark corner.

  He pulled off his shorts and tore strips of linen from them. He then cleaned the wound with one of the strips, soaked in whiskey. Brigid did not cry out when he applied the burning liquid to the wound, but she opened her eyes and watched him stoically as he probed for the stone splinter, which must have made the cut. Finding no shard, Morgan lifted her shoulders once again and fastened a pressure bandage with the strips from the remainder of his shorts.

  She kept her eyes on his face for a time, and then lifted both hands to her breasts. “Praise be to Belenus,” she whispered so softly that Morgan had to strain to hear. “We live.”

  “Thanks be to the whole mob,” he said, nodding in agreement, close to tears with the reality of her survival. He pulled the tapestry back over her body guiltily even though he was well aware that nudity was not embarrassing to the New World Celts. A hot blush suffused his cheeks, nonetheless, and he wished that he had not tossed his own tunic so far away. Maintaining an illusory semblance of composure, he splashed two fingers of whiskey into a cup and placed it to her lips. She swallowed, choking, and sank back, watching him with an upward turn to the corner of her mouth. Her gaze did not linger on his face that time.

  “How did you light the globe?” she asked, slowly raising her eyes.

  “You taught me, my lady,” he replied, still feeling warm.

  “That is good.” Her voice held no trace of humor or of sarcasm. “I was not sure the gods would heed the prayers of pagans like you.”

  “Me, a pagan?” He was incredulous at having the word applied to him. His father, if he could have known, might have agreed, however.

  “Peace, Morgan,” Brigid said, touching the pendant that had fallen to one side of her neck. “There is one other prayer you should know.” Despite her obvious pain, her smile held a fierce quality, and her words were demanding, insistent.

  “Aiofe of the White Wings,

  Hear my prayer.

  Grant me, thy daughter, that which I most desire:

  This warrior of the Shadow World.”

  The suspended sphere flared and dimmed in eldritch cadence with her chant, and, as she spoke the last, the naked Morgan felt the unmistakable pressure of her hands upon him though it was the pendant she held tightly and not his rigid flesh.

  She languidly pushed the tapestry to the floor and waited without speaking for him to approach her. He moved as if in one of his dreams. As he reached her side she released the pendant and took him, instead in both hands.

  “I have watched you long, Kerry Morgan. And with the aid of the Winged One, I have made you mine!” Thus speaking to the stunned Morgan, she pulled him down upon herself.

  It was lovemaking such as Morgan had never before experienced. Each time a sweet crescendo was reached, they would begin anew, unsated, hungry, and inexhaustible. When sleep finally came to Morgan it was to dream of making love.

  When he awoke, a feeble ray of light from above illuminated the small bedchamber. Of course! The room had been built with ventilation openings above ground level with internally controlled louvers to shut out rain and wind. He slid from the couch, careful not to disturb Brigid, and examined the room’s two vents. They were too narrow for either of them to crawl through, and rubble blocked them from the outside so that Morgan could not operate the simple controls. He reached up and flexed one of the vent louvers. It was a thin strip of softwood, which would break easily. If he snapped all the slats on the street-facing ventilator, he could attract attention by shouting. Someone was certain to hear. He looked at the sleeping Brigid. She lay on her side like a child, face resting in the crook of her arm, appealing. Morgan was sorry that rescue would be so easy.

  She stirred when he returned to the couch and gazed at him, sleepily.

  “I reached for you, my love, and you were gone,” she said huskily, reaching up for him.

  “I found a way for us to get out of here,” he answered, bending to her.

  “There is much time to think of rescue,” she whispered, and moved her hands.

  Morgan opened his eyes, hearing grating sounds through the fog of sleep that followed their lovemaking. It sounded as if more rubble was falling from the ruined school building, and he hoped that he would be able to summon help when he got up again. Then there was a crash and an angry shout – from inside the underground chambers.

  “Morgan!”

  Connach! Morgan was jolted completely awake and turned his head toward the shouter. Grime-covered, the prince stood at the doorway, staring at the two of them. He crossed the tiny room in three strides and clutched Morgan’s shoulder with a white-knuckled claw. “Sit up, you son-of-a-bitch!”

  “Oh, shit!” Morgan said as he tried to roll over. Connach had him pinned; yet Brigid was able to slip free from beneath him, dropped to the floor and stood staring back at her brother as if he were a stranger gone berserk.

  Connach, however, was not similarly rooted. He swung from his heels before Morgan could disengage himself. Ian’s fist collided like a swung sledgehammer against Morgan’s unguarded face, launching him fully across the couch. He landed heavily on the floor, still caught in folds of the tapestry, which clutched at his legs like a living thing. Morgan fought free soundlessly and shakily gained his feet, moving his head dumbly, not clearly seeing his attacker. He was sluggish, dull, and his mouth and jaw hurt fiercely. Connach, still blurry in Morgan’s vision, vaulted the bed and advanced, his face dangerous.

  Then Brigid moved with a shout of her own. She leaped into the gap that separated the two men and slapped her brother hard across the face, her ring of office cutting Ian’s cheekbone. Connach stopped in mid-stride and glared at his sister who glared back at him with narrowed eyes. Morgan watched her with admiration. Kendra would have cut and run from such a confrontation. Her commitment had been a shallow one, he realized for the first time. Brigid would not run. Her eyes burned with an anger that matched Connach’s and tight cords stood out like warning signs on her neck. She placed the palms of both hands on Connach’s chest, holding him immobile more by the power of her unexpected counterattack than by the strength of her body, which Morgan knew, was not inconsiderable.

  She yelled a word at Connach that had not been one of Morgan’s vocabulary assignments. Connach’s face reddened. “Stop acting like a fool and listen to me,” she hissed. “You style yourself a warrior and then strike an unprepared man like one of Maelgwyn’s Dark Ones. You dare call yourself a nobleman, yet you condemn without asking the ‘victim’ if a crime has been committed! There has been no crime against me! None against the House of Connach! None!” She sprayed Connach with spittle as she carried the verbal slashing forward. As her saliva ran down his face, mingling with the blood from his cut cheek, Connach stood, anchored, and Morgan watched the nobleman’s rage simmer into a less-heated anger and a milder hurt. He seemed to be listening, but barely.

  Morgan’s head felt like a bag of broken glass; the swelling had already begun, and his mouth was full of blood. He probed with his tongue and discovered all his teeth intact.

  Brigid lowered her hands and moved to him. She placed her arms around his shoulders, flattening her breasts against him.

  “This is my man!” She shouted vehemently at Connach, who had not yet gone deaf as far as Morgan could tell. “I have chosen him as is my right as the daughter and granddaughter of a virs nobilis!”

  “You have no right to make that decision,” her brother retorted, lamely. “That is a clan matter.”

  “I have already saved them the trouble.” She covered Morgan’s bloody mouth with her own, hurting him more than she knew. It was his turn to be stoic.

  She turned slowly to face Connach, with Morgan’s blood on her lips. “I love this m
an. You have made him worthy by making him a member of our clan. He is an officer in the force you have fought so hard to create. Therefore, he is a fit mate for a High Chief’s kinswoman. Deny this!”

  “And you, Morgan?” Connach asked, with an incredulous lift to his brows.

  Morgan did not hesitate. “I love her, Ian.”

  Connach’s lips writhed in a parody of humor. “What you mistake for love, older brother, probably has little to do with you, after all.” He reached for the heavy chain that hung between Brigid’s breasts, and catching the pendant in his hand, pulled it closer to him. He took Morgan’s left hand and brought ring and pendant together. The stones stared upward like two blue eyes at Morgan, transfixing him.

  “Has Aiofe been granting your prayers lately, Brigid?” Connach asked, in a voice heavily loaded with sarcasm. Brigid did not answer but her eyes shot angry fire at her brother.

  “I think, Kerry, that if you removed the gift my dear sister has urged upon you, you might discover your undying love waning just a little. Isn’t that right, Brigid?”

  “You have no right to interfere in my affairs! Aiofe has given him to me!”

  Morgan lifted his eyes from the compelling stones and looked first at Connach, then at Brigid. Aiofe has given me to her! Aiofe, not human chemistry. Magic, but of the wrong kind?

  “You hear the lady?” Connach battered at Morgan’s unprotected soul like a relentless machine. “Aiofe has awarded you to Brigid. Probably for good behavior. Is that what you want?”

  Morgan removed his hand from Connach’s grasp and slid the ring from his finger before Brigid could protest. He placed the exquisite charm on the rumpled couch and looked long at her, tall, bare-breasted, and supple, trying to see with eyes unclouded by trickery and magic. Has she really bewitched me with the aid of the ring? His practical mind fought with the idea, but he understood full well that Connach’s world had proved to be far removed from Morgan’s concept of a rational or practical place. A corner of his own Celtic being accepted the idea of magic despite the veneer of his American education. With prayer to a pagan deity, he had lit a glowlight.

  He looked at her appraisingly. Her skin appeared even browner in contrast to the white, linen strips that bound her wound. She was unbelievably beautiful, and he found it incredible that such a fabulous being would want him enough to defy her clan and culture and to enlist the assistance of the spirit she served to enhance her chances of winning him.

  He took the ring from the couch and very deliberately placed it back on his finger. He reached out that hand and took hers.

  “Yes. That is exactly what I want,” he said.

  Connach shook his head slowly, stepping back a pace from the lovers. For an instant, Morgan thought compassion flashed across the war chief’s face before it hardened.

  “May both your Christian God and Brigid’s Aiofe protect you. You are going to need all the help you can get from this moment on. Not only are you a target of Maelgwyn’s assassins, according to my informants, but you have now defied the House of Connach.”

  He wheeled. “Guards! Arrest this traitor!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  For three frustrating days, Morgan stewed in his quarters under house arrest and incommunicado. A detail of polite, indistinguishable and unsmiling guards waited patiently outside his door, admitting no one but a solitary steward who brought meals twice each day. Unused to enforced inactivity, Morgan made a deck of cards out of scraps of parchment, cheated at every game he remembered, invented a few, then quit—bored and depressed.

  On the fourth eventless morning, he sat on the sleeping couch and stared listlessly at the heavy, leather-bound chest that rested on the main room’s single table. It was just possible, he hoped, that the contents of the chest might break the pattern of the three previous days. Identical scroll chests lay on identical tables in each officer’s quarters, courtesy of the Free State Scroll Society, he supposed. He rubbed his days-old stubble and was startled by that tangible evidence of his enervated state.

  “Sorry-for-me time’s over as of now!” He slid off the couch and threw open the carved lid of the chest. Somewhere inside lay the answer to the Druids’ puzzling veneration of Rome’s most depraved Emperor and the key to their vacillating response to enemy aggression. “What are you hiding?” He called into the chest.

  He rummaged through half of the scrolls before he found the one he wanted: Nero’s story, “The Book of Changes,” the chronicle of the bizarre events that had mutated the history of Brigid’s world, forcing it along a vastly different path of development than Morgan’s Earth. Morgan placed the turned handles into the grooved holder built into the tabletop and bent over the opened scroll. He began to read, following the Latin script with one forefinger, referring often to a slim hand-written dictionary he had set about compiling with Brigid’s assistance.

  “And it came to pass in the eleventh year of the reign of Nero Germanicus that the Emperor waxed angry with certain elders of the cult of the Risen God, for they honored Nero in all things but one: they were steadfast in refusing to hail him as a descendant of the false Roman gods as he would have it.

  “Nero, drunken with wine and poppy as was his wont, sent his soldiers into the city and caused the elders to be brought before him.”

  Checking far too often with his makeshift lexicon, Morgan pieced the story together from the time when the elders were brought, shaking in their sandals, to face the clearly insane ruler, to the day they were to be pitted against wild beasts in the arena in the jolly Imperial fashion. There they would, in Nero’s words, “prove to be good sport for the beasts, a spectacle of great pleasure for us, and a fitting sacrifice to my fellow gods.”

  The fifty leaders were dragged to the arena on the appointed day. At the moment before the hunger-maddened lions were to be released, the men were given a last opportunity to win their lives by acknowledging Nero to be a god. The elders demonstrated their readiness to die. Forty-nine of them declined to speak at all, kneeling and praying silently instead. The remaining man, Timothy of Emona, faced the ruler. Morgan read:

  “In a voice that was mightier than the roar of the caged lions, Heaven’s servant, Timothy, called unto Nero, saying, ‘Murderer of Agrippina who bore you, mortal flesh, though ye deny it, ye shall be smitten by the Lord God of Hosts even as ye are about to smite us!’”

  No sooner had the defiant holy man spoken, Nero abruptly fell to the ground “…with a great gnashing of teeth and a foaming of his champing mouth.” Despite the enlightened efforts of the physicians reluctantly persuaded into attendance, Nero remained in that unhappy condition until Timothy of Emona was brought into the Imperial sickroom. Timothy and the other condemned elders had been spared from death until Nero had recovered enough to enjoy the show. It was lucky for Nero. He calmed, it appeared, when the holy man was ushered into the purple-hung chamber. However, when Timothy boldly called upon Nero to accept the new God as the only true God, Nero, as could be expected, refused, and immediately fell again to the floor, “…gnashing and foaming, like unto a mad dog.”

  Timothy was roughly summoned the following day and repeated his demands to the again miraculously recovered ruler. Rereading the previous day’s script, Nero arrogantly refused to consider the captive’s requests and was stricken even more severely than before. On the third day, the mad Emperor capitulated to the gentle Timothy.

  Dieu Ex Machina! Hollywood, eat your heart out! Morgan found he was chuckling out loud.

  “As Nero Germanicus bowed his head in prayer to the Risen God, the chamber filled with a great light, and the spirit of the Immortals sat upon him as a fire that did not burn.”

  Nero then knelt and offered his prayer in a tongue not known by any assembled in his chambers.

  What followed in the narrative explained many of the philosophical inconsistencies Morgan had encountered in Reged. Nero continued to rule the Roman Empire for two more years following his dramatic conversion. During that period, he gave up all luxury—
turning his “Golden House” that extended from the Palatine Hill to the Esquiline into a hospital for the poor, building temples, declaring the God of Timothy to be the only God while extending religious freedom to all. At the end of those two years, he abdicated in favor of Vespasian who, following Nero’s example, abandoned his traditional Roman gods for the single one worshipped by his predecessor. The forty-one years left to the once depraved Emperor were spent trying to weld the fermenting Empire together with love instead of lances. The subsequent history of Earth’s twin sister proved that Nero was eminently successful in accomplishing what Rome’s enemies could not achieve with force—collapse!

  Nero, killer of his stepbrother, Britannicus; murderer of his own mother, Agrippina; executioner of his young wife, Octavia; persecutor of Jews and Christians; Nero, the last of the Claudians; Nero, madman. In Morgan’s world, a disgraced suicide by the age of thirty-two; in Ian’s, an honored man of God, dead after a lifetime of humility and good deeds at seventy-one. Morgan re-rolled the scroll thoughtfully and replaced it in the chest.

  “My God!” The half-whispered exclamation was no oath. The Resurrected God was most certainly the Christ he had worshipped as a child in his father’s church. Nero had become a Christian. But there’s no evidence of Christianity in Verulamium. On the contrary, Ian’s hometown is obviously polytheistic. Belenus this. Cernunos that. What happened to the Christians? They obviously once existed. How had Nero evolved from an early Christian evangelist into a Celtic god?

  The only one who had enough knowledge to unravel the tangle was Ian Connach himself, and he had not favored his prisoner with a visit since Morgan’s arrest had been ordered.