The Perilous Order of Camelot
Volume Four:
The Serpent and the Grail
The Serpent and the Grail
published by Firelords Press
second edition copyright © 2011 by A. A. Attanasio
ISBN: 978-0-9836084-5-5
http://aaattanasio.com/
Originally published by HarperCollins 1999
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
LC control no.: 99012611
CALL NUMBER: PS3551.T74 S47 1999
The Serpent and the Grail / A.A. Attanasio.
Cover art by Jeff Bigman
http://www.bigmanart.com/
A gentle sound, an awful light!
Three angels bear the holy Grail:
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,
And star-like mingles with the stars.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Sir Galahad
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: An Angel Crosses Europe in A.D. 491
Chapter 2: Return to Magic
Chapter 3: The Blood Pact
Chapter 4: Crown of Snakes
Chapter 5: Cinderland
Chapter 6: The Future Grows from Small Things
Chapter 7: Dragon Psalm
Chapter 8: Weird Traveler
Chapter 9: Beautiful beyond Beauty
Chapter 10: The Seven Eyes of God
Chapter 11: A World of Dreams
Chapter 12: Love like Wrath
Chapter 13: The Valor of the Worm
Chapter 14: Crown of Fire
Chapter 15: Road of Solitudes
Chapter 16: Lo! The Dragon!
Chapter 17: Unwrinkle the Stars
Chapter 18: Powers of Angels
Chapter 19: Beauty Shines Invisible
Chapter 20: Lucifer by Moonlight
Chapter 21: Imaginary Numbers Are the Flight of God's Spirit
Chapter 22: Fate-Sayer
Chapter 23: Kingdom in a Chalice
Chapter 24: Return from the Dead
Chapter 25: The Finding of the Dead
Chapter 26: An Angel Crosses Europe in A.D. 492
Chapter 1:
An Angel Crosses Europe in A.D. 491
Shortly after dawn sometime late in spring, an angel appeared over Jerusalem. His eyes shone like night's last stars. His hair streaked the sky with prismatic threads, stitching daybreak into crimson banners above the ancient city's ramparts.
In one stride, he stepped over the steep skyline and across the shattered rocks of prophets' tombs and dunes crouching like lions beside toppled columns of Greek shrines. Somewhere above the Mediterranean, he gazed down through palpitant air at goose-winged sails carrying cargoes of carob wood and Lebanese cedar to Carthage. There, the Vandals busily rebuilt the wharves and harbors they had torched in their conquest of Africa forty years earlier.
The angel quickly moved north onto the Italic peninsula. He glanced briefly at the green baize of croplands and orchards charred by the ravages of the Ostrogoths. But not one look did he give the crumbled arches of Rome and its slum-yards. Instead, he peered beyond the snow peaks of the Alps and the expansive tracts of boreal forests to the remote isle kingdom of Britain.
Four strides later, he passed above the war camps of Clovis and the battlefields of the fierce Alamanni. The hordes of pagan Saxons, Angles, and Jutes who had assembled on the shores of Jutland for their invasion of Britain sensed him not at all. When he finally lighted on the rocky summit before Camelot, his eyes brightened to gaze at the proud and unlikely structure that reared above the aboriginal forests. Paraboloid jacket walls, chevron-shaped battlements, polished-brass solar scoops, and dodecahedral spires formed an edifice strange to its time.
The angel stood still before this geometric wonder of blue stone. His effluvial body disappeared, camouflaged by sunlight slanting through big trees. And the shining trees listened as he began to sing in a voice only they could hear.
-)(-
We heard the trees of Camelot laughing, we Nine Queens of Avalon. We did not recognize what we heard at first, for sequence is not known here. Avalon is somewhere else. In our honeycomb of time, where every moment is a temple, centuries rise and fall as days, and each day climbs through centuries.
Ah, but we are far ahead of ourselves. You do not understand. Be patient with us. We have a story to tell, of angels and demons, of fire-breathing dragons and a dangerous unicorn—and a story of you and King Arthur.
Like the moon that swallows itself each month, we come and we go; yet, we are always here. Come. Sit with us at the heart's fountain, which in your presence has become this printed page. Sit and listen to how we Nine Queens of Avalon heard the trees of Camelot laughing.
Only an angel could evoke such rapture from trees. What kind of angel was this? We could not see or hear him.
Was it one of the radiant angels who had gathered us to Avalon and our fateful purpose—or was it an angel fallen from the light, a wicked messenger of darkness? We could not tell. Trees are easily charmed. They eat light, and even the clotted light of demons is enough to fill them with astonished joy.
By the time we gathered our wits sufficiently to look more closely for the angel, he had moved on. Some personage of light or dark had visited. A being once hugged tight to the stars had come to Camelot.
Why?
We feared the answer.
Chapter 2:
Return to Magic
Ygrane stood on the ramparts of Tintagel with her face lifted to the salt wind rushing off the turbulent sea below. White robes of her nun's habit fluttered and flapped, and she squinted to peer across the lilac morning at thundersmoke climbing the horizon.
Small and vague as a wisp of mist, a sail ran hard before the mounting storm—a distant vessel caught in the Belgic Strait by the season's peril. A prayer for the crew's safety slipped silently from her lips, though she could plainly see that the ship stood no chance of outpacing the tempest.
Her prayer for mercy unfolded with familiar grace, and she stopped before she finished her petition. The time for prayers was over for her. Seventeen years she had served as abbess here at Tintagel, a fortification she had transformed into a religious sanctuary dedicated to the glory of Christ's chalice—the Holy Graal.
Eighteen years earlier, when she had lived in this stronghold as the wife of Uther Pendragon, the mysterious Sisters of Arimathea had entrusted her with the care of the sacred cup. And then, not two months ago, she had sent the Graal to Camelot, to serve her seventeen-year-old son Aquila Regalis Thor—King Arthor—and his Warriors of the Round Table. During a terrible battle they had waged and won to unite their island kingdom, the holy chalice had vanished.
Ygrane blamed herself. She knew now she should have waited for strife to end before delivering the Graal to her son's fortress city. She had acted impulsively and prematurely—not unlike those mariners she spied in the distance riding on the purple horizon who believed they could outrun the sky's wrath. They flew east on the dark sea, already caught in the gale's wide grasp.
-)(-
Piled in corners of the central hall of Tintagel and mounded in the open spaces of the great chambers, the freight of Duke Marcus waited, shrouded in canvas. During the recent war that had united Britain under King Arthor, Marcus Dumnoni's ancestral estate in Isca had been razed, and the abbess Ygrane, the king's mother, had awarded Tintagel to the duke for his battle-proven l
oyalty to her son. She retained only a small gallery, a chapel, and a garden. These she reserved for the nuns of her order, so that they might continue to tend the infirm and indigent of the region.
Those nuns, a score and three, waited with tears in their eyes outside the manor house before the concourse that opened to the courtyard and the outer ward. Ygrane proceeded past them slowly, stopping before each to clasp hands and speak words of faith and encouragement.
When she reached the great folding doors of the yard, she paused to regard their burnished-bronze panels embossed with scenes from the life of Christ and remembered the first time she had stood before this giant portal. That had been thirty-two years prior, when the Druids had brought her here as a fourteen-year-old girl to marry the dux Britanniarum, Marius Sidonius Gorlois.
The bas-relief images of Christ's torments that had frightened her at that time filled her now with soft warmth and compassion for this divine man who had taken so much suffering upon himself. She wondered if she would ever see these panels again, or the limestone white turrets that towered above. Her slant green eyes played over the courtyard's granaries, storehouses, and stables.
Finally, she turned to exit into the outer ward. Activity there stopped, and the numerous functionaries of Tintagel saluted her: The Nubian gatekeeper, the grooms, factors, and stewards—each in his turn came forward to bow before the departing mistress of the four-hundred-year-old Roman citadel.
Outside Tintagel, Ygrane met on the campestral with the palace gardeners and thanked each personally for cultivating the grounds to her specifications over the years. She then proceeded alone past the lily pond and through a colonnade of poplars to a budding rose garden enclosed by beech and sycamore.
Through perimeter trees, the cliff's edge came into view and, far below, the tide-washed shingles and sand dunes. She wondered about the ship in the storm that she had glimpsed from the battlements yesterday and what had become of it.
A swallowtail butterfly fluttered past and settled among larkspur beside the sundial, and when she turned to watch it, she noticed a tall figure in luminous raiment of rainbow streaks and sun-fire. She went down on her knees and bowed her head.
"Angel—always before, you have preceded the Lady." Ygrane spoke in a hush. "I am not worthy to see her, for I am leaving Tintagel to find the Holy Graal that I have lost. Please, I beg you—tell the Lady I cannot speak with her this day. I am putting aside my habit and our faith in the Savior. Faith is not sufficient for what now I must do."
Shadows bent away from her, and the mossy cobbles her lowered eyes gazed upon shone like dark emeralds. Squinting into the brightness, she looked up and faced the angel standing close. Flame-woven and only vaguely human in appearance, he presented a visage of Greek pride that seemed to stare forth from heatless radiance. He smiled at her, then faded away.
In his place stood an olive-skinned Semitic woman with Levantine eyes and black hair gathered under a blue veil.
"Miriam—" Ygrane rose from where she knelt and took the Lady's hands. They felt warm. "You should not have come. I told your messenger—"
"Hush, Ygrane." Miriam spoke in the lilting Brythonic of Ygrane's childhood. "I know your heart. You feel responsible for the loss of the chalice."
"Yes. I must find it. For my son."
"Of course." Miriam led Ygrane gently to a stone bench graven with dryads, and they sat together, legs touching, hands clasped. "We have had many pleasant talks, you and I. Always about the same concerns—the sick, the poor, and why they suffer. And always, I have told you the same thing."
"That we know nothing of our souls. That we must trust God."
"Yes." Miriam smiled. "This time I have come to tell you that once again—but with a warning. If you doff your nun's habit and take up once more the way of magic, we cannot meet again. I am of the new order. The old ways are not my ways."
Ygrane nodded, eyes lowered. "I understand, Miriam. I have prayed for the Graal's return—as I have prayed fervently all these years for the sick and the impoverished. God listens. And yet people still suffer. Children, too. By this I know, if the Graal is to be found, if my son, the rightful ruler of this land, is to have its blessing, I who lost it must find it."
Ygrane removed the white veil of her nun's frock and ran a hand through her cropped hair. She placed the veil in Miriam's lap, and the swarthy woman lifted it sadly in her hands.
"I know what it is to love a son. And I know that love cannot protect him." Miriam's large, dark eyes gazed dolefully at the fair woman's determined face. "Please, do not do this thing. You are not as youthful as once you were, Ygrane. The quest you intend to undertake is fraught with danger."
"I am twoscore and six years old, Miriam." Ygrane stood and removed her robes. Beneath them, she wore a brown leather bodice, fawnskin trousers, and riding boots. "I am not yet too old to ride. If the Graal can be found in this world, I will find it. I need to know one thing only." She peered earnestly at the blessed visitor. "Is the chalice yet in this world—or have the angels taken it away?"
"The angels have not taken it."
"Who has?"
"It is not our work to know that, Ygrane." Miriam rose and held forth the nun's veil. "Temporal powers contend in a world of things that cannot last, a world of darkness where objects are hidden and lost. Come back to the world of things that can never be lost. For I tell you, everything hidden shall be revealed. In the world of light and love that we share, there is nothing for us to do, except open our hearts and relieve the suffering of those around us. Stay with me."
Ygrane's shoulders slumped under the weight of truth she heard in Miriam's words. "What you say moves me deeply, Miriam. Yet, I cannot stay with you. I am a woman of this world, and I must be responsible for my place in this world. How can I continue to live as a nun when the very faith of light and love that we share is threatened by invaders who respect only might and cruelty? God sheds his sunlight and rain upon both the good and the wicked. I cannot hope that God will help us in this fight. What strength I have I will use to find the Graal so that my son will have its power to aid him in his defense of our land."
"Then, I must say farewell to you now." Miriam placed Ygrane's veil on the stone bench where they had sat. "You have done much good among the least of your people in my son's name. For that, you are blessed. The way of magic, the old way, is a grave peril to your soul, Ygrane. I will pray for you."
"Miriam—" Ygrane reached out and took the smaller woman's arm. "The heaven where you go—what is it like? Before you leave, tell me of that blessed place. And tell me something of God."
A sorrowful laugh slipped from Miriam. "Every time we meet, you ask me these same questions. And always I turn your attention back to this world and the hope of the suffering. Do you know this world so well that you are ready to understand the next?" She leaned forward, smiling, and kissed Ygrane's cheek. As she stepped back, she bleared away, her voice lingering to say, "In time, all that is hidden will be revealed."
Chapter 3:
The Blood Pact
Ygrane had been born to a peasant family in the west of Britain, among the remote hills of Cymru, and she had spent her earliest years footloose in wild places around her hamlet's osier shacks. Faeries had danced for her then in the moonlight, and the pale people—the Daoine Sid—had spoken to her at twilight of their home in the hollow hills. No one else in the area could see or hear them, and she had been too young then to think this strange. The faerie had been her pets and the Sid her playmates.
Early on, they had explained to her that once they had lived in the sky as gods, happy in the great Storm Tree, whose branches fill the cope of heaven. The Fauni, the gods of the Romans, had driven the Sid out of the sky and had forced them to live underground among the tangled roots of the World Tree. There, they survived by feeding the Dragon who lived in the earth. They fed it the souls of anyone they could lure into the hollow hills—but she was not to be afraid, for she was their friend and such a fate would never bef
all her or her family. The Sid preferred the souls of the Roman invaders and local scoffers.
When she had told her kin these tales, word spread, and eventually the Druids came for her. They ritually confirmed her rapport with the Daoine Sid and made her their queen. In the sacred groves of Cymru, they taught her magic. And then, they gave her to Gorlois.
Ygrane turned her back on where Miriam had appeared to her in the garden and spoke for the first time in seventeen years to the pale people who had once been her allies: "Daoine Sid—I summon you! Remember me, the queen among the people of your land. Come forth from your hollow hills! Come forth, pale people, and remember me, Ygrane. Come and give me grace and strength for my return to magic."
"I am here, sister," a voice gleamed darkly from outside the budding rose garden.
Ygrane hurried through the lane poplars to the lily pond. Leaning over the black water, she saw reflected in its rimpled surface a tall, young man with auburn hair and tapered eyes that shone green as the unicorn's. He wore opulent garments of a mortal nobleman: blue linen tunic embroidered with flowerets of gold, a silver-studded, red leather belt, and yellow boots. She recognized him at once as Bright Night, prince of the Daoine Sid.
He smiled impishly. "I believed I would never hear you call for me again, Ygrane. I am glad to be wrong. Why have you summoned the servants of the twilight?"
Ygrane said nothing at first. She had expected an inner vision or at most a whisper from the shadows. Surprised to see one of the pale people by daylight, even in reflection, she uttered almost under her breath, "Arthor... My son, Arthor—he must have the Graal..."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 1