The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot)

by Attanasio, A. A.

  "The vessel of the nailed god." The slender elf prince shrugged. "What are the Daoine Sid to do? Call on your friend Miriam and ask for her help."

  "Bright Night, you know that Miriam and her son the Christ lead us away from this life." Fear for her son strengthened her voice. "I need your help here and now, in this world—the world in which you are fighting to regain your place. Help me find the Graal, and I will serve you."

  Insects dimpled the surface of the lily pond as frenzied as rain, and Prince Bright Night appeared as young and mirthful as when she had first met him, over forty years ago. "You say that you will serve the Daoine Sid again if we give you the magic to find the chalice of your nailed god. Yes?"

  Ygrane nodded. The reflection of her short hair and angular face swam among the ether of marsh mists. "The chalice is a vessel that receives power from the angels—from the Fire Lords of the Annwn, the Otherworld. My son needs that power to save his kingdom from the magic of the pagans' one-eyed god, the Furor."

  The elf-prince smiled at her precision with him, amused by her care after so many years of devotion to an alien faith to show that she remembered the local gods. "The Daoine Sid will make certain that you have enough power to terrify the Furor—power directly from the Dragon."

  "The Dragon sleeps—"

  "Yes, the Dragon sleeps. And dreams." The prince's oblique eyes brightened. "The Daoine Sid know all the secret ways through the underworld, and we can gather those dragondreams to empower you with magic that will shake the Storm Tree! But you must make us a solemn promise, Ygrane."

  The green-eyed woman narrowed her stare, reluctant to commit herself to any bargain with the notorious deceivers of the hollow hills. "What must I promise?"

  "When you return the Graal to your son, you will give yourself to us." A shadow like a bruise darkened the space between Bright Night’s eyes. "You must know that you are no common mortal. Your body knows how to hold the cold fire of heaven—and so, since your earliest days, you have seen us. The Daoine Sid will impart all the cold fire that your mortal frame can bear. You shall have as much magical power as you can carry. And when your task is done, we will take you body and soul into the hollow hills, into the most obscure depths of the earth, and there you will be sacrificed to the Dragon." The elf prince paused and cocked his head inquisitively. "Does that frighten you? Do you fear so mortal a pact?"

  "Yes, Bright Night, I am frightened. But not for my life. We are all of us mortal beings. I am frightened for my soul."

  "Your soul will be devoured by the Dragon," Bright Night answered frankly. "And you will become one with its dreamsongs. You will journey on the long traveling light through the void and among the worlds—forever."

  "You ask much of me," Ygrane replied quietly. "I had hoped to give my soul to the Christ. If I must surrender it to the Dragon, then tell me why you want this."

  "I want it for the Daoine Sid, for the glory that was once ours." The elvish apparition pressed closer against the pane of the pond's watery surface. "When we sacrifice you, the abrupt release of your power will awaken the beast—and the Daoine Sid will ride that might into the Storm Tree and take back from the Furor the celestial heights that once were ours."

  Ygrane crossed arms over her chest and bowed in submission. "When the Holy Graal is returned to my son, you may take my soul. Now grant me the power, the magic that I need to fulfill this quest."

  The elf prince smiled from behind the ammonia clouds of silt in the lily pond. "Prick the middle finger of your left hand," he instructed. "Three drops of blood in the water and our pact is sealed. You will have all the magic of the Daoine Sid at your disposal. All the might of the hollow hills will be yours to command in your search for the nailed god's chalice. And when you have the chalice—we will have you."

  Ygrane lifted the twig of a rosebud tossed into the grass by the previous night's storm and used its thorn to draw blood from her finger. Three crimson drops fell into the pond, unfurling smoky blossoms.

  From behind her, a horse whinnied like music from underwater.

  And when she turned, she looked upon a stallion blue as midnight, with fire yellow eyes and silver fetlocks. A devil steed!

  She felt cold all over, remembering the fright tales of babies snatched away in his teeth and fallen warriors carried off on his glistening back into the hollow hills.

  She cast a backward glance to the lily pond. The elf prince had gone, and a toad peeked at her from under a green coverlet of pond froth.

  "Devil, come here," she summoned the stallion.

  Hot eyes, slant and malevolent, watched her. Then, like a drift of dark wind, he stood beside her. She mounted his naked back.

  Though early summer, resinous smells from an autumn mountain filled the hollows of her body. The chill promise of winter brightened her lungs, and they were off. She leaned forward, holding on with her knees, her face bleared by the wind in the black flames of his mane.

  -)(-

  Atop the torched hills that peered down toward Tintagel and the rocky coast, Marcus Dumnoni sat his formidable warhorse. Each charred tree of the seared forest around him stood erect, like a scaly stylus, against a sky swept raw and blue by the previous day's storm. The ground, still faintly breathing vapors, hissed as his men drew up behind, and a smoldering stink of blackened scrog tainted the air.

  All the creatures of the forest had departed except for the crows perched on the flame-frayed boughs like living pieces of the dead landscape. They silently surveyed the infernal waste with him, watching the world veer away to its rocky margins and to the shining surmise of the sea.

  Those white towers on the massive and somber headlands would be his new home—an archaic heap of limestone that had reigned over Land's End since the Romans first built roads across these swales, roads reduced now to demonic tracks through windblown scurf.

  Tintagel, Marcus spoke silently to himself, will you be my sanctuary or my prison?

  As he gazed beyond the white parapets to the sea, wondering when the next wave of invaders would arrive and if he would prove strong and able enough to withstand them, his men watched him. His strong, beardless face, blue-eyed and blond as any Saxon's, inspired their trust. To his men, he appeared a statue of strength meant to endure every hardship, sculpted by God's hand itself to outstare all enemies, unblinking even to death.

  In his heart he feared all he could not see. By nature, a fatalist who regarded outcomes as inevitable, he had trained himself to follow the flow of events, and from this courage he had gained much renown. Yet, he could not accept what he could not see, and so in his heart, secretly, he feared the future, the invisible powers of chance, and battle luck. Most of all, he feared God.

  Marcus Dumnoni led his mounted men along an ashen trace that wended past torched spinneys and charred hedges toward Tintagel. Behind them rumbled wagonloads belonging to the families and household attendants of his soldiers, following their duke to his new abode at Land's End. Children squealed at the sight of the fortress' white towers upon the sea-thrashed cliffs.

  The dalmatian guard dogs that ran ahead had turned. They bolted back across the ashen heath, tails tucked.

  Out of the shadow of Tintagel a rider shot into view, moving faster than any mortal steed could gallop.

  Marcus drew his sword and spurred his horse forward to intercept that unnatural rider as far from the wagons as possible.

  He and his guard trotted past the torched trees, and sooner than they had anticipated, the charging horse rushed upon them, blurring so fast none could identify the rider.

  The horses of the duke and his men reared and nearly tossed them. When they finally wrested their mounts steady, a terrible black stallion stamped and snorted before them, breathing darkness. Upon its naked back sat a woman with tawny shorn hair and a feral face hollow-cheeked and green-eyed as a lynx.

  "Abbess!" Marcus hissed with surprise, all the while fighting to restrain his panicked steed. The chemical music of autumn filled the summer air, and spa
rks like faeries spun through the slant afternoon light.

  Ygrane nodded slightly. "Tintagel is yours," she breathed. "I am away." And she was gone, a shadow cognate with the burned terrain, leaving behind an august presence of leafsmoke and frosty emptiness.

  PART ONE

  BOOK OF THE SERPENT

  Nothing exists except atoms and the void. Everything else is conjecture.

  — Democritus

  Chapter 4:

  Crown of Snakes

  Deep within the Earth, the Dragon slumbered.

  In the entire universe, only one Dragon existed: a beast whose body spanned all of spacetime. Its scales glimmered as galaxies. Its exhalations filled black space with starsmoke. Within its immense mind, songs pulsed to the rhythms of its cosmic life—dreamsongs circulating at the speed of light among the billions of worlds that constituted the cells of the Dragon's body.

  Our blue world, one of those small cells, received the dreamsongs—and they touched silence. The dragonlife in this cell lay dormant, lulled to sleep.

  Coiled drowsily about the hot magnetic core of the planet, the terrestrial power of the Dragon began to dream. It dreamed memories. Images played through its slumbering consciousness of the childhood of time, the first moments of the universe.

  This dreaming cell remembered back to the Dragon's fetal growth, before planets, before stars, when atoms themselves had not yet formed and all was energy. For three hundred and eighty thousand years, the Dragon had turned in the womb of creation, afloat in the amniotic light of quarks and photons.

  God was there. She was in the light itself. She dwelled in the light as a pattern of information with an uncanny power to pattern information. She touched every point of spacetime with Her uterine presence, her capacity to create events and structures, including the birth of the Dragon.

  Out of a vacuum smaller than a quark, She had emerged. From compact dimensions of infinite temperature and infinite density, She had carried the astronomic energy that would eventually cool to atoms and dark matter and congeal the Dragon's physical body.

  She had come forth from infinity to play. All of creation was Her dance. And She was dancing many dances at once, many universes, an infinite number of universes, some radiant, others profoundly dark.

  In many of the luminous universes, a Dragon partnered Her dance. The Dragons' dreamsongs accompanied Her music, the boisterous polyphony of energy chilling to matter, atoms compressing to stars and fusing in stellar explosions to heavy elements, building larger, more complex harmonies of molecules, densities, starfields, and galaxies—all accelerating into the emptiness, eventually to dissipate to nothing when the dance is over. Stillness touches infinity, and in the spark that jumps between nothing and infinity, the dance begins anew.

  The one cell of the Dragon asleep inside the Earth never dreamed about the infinite emptiness to come. It dreamed backward to its fiery origin and the heat of its self-discovery. It remembered the secret of light: Time is an illusion. In each photon, in each tiny piece of light, there is no time. There is only motion—the ceaseless movement of the eternal dance—for light is the timeless power of God Herself moving energetically through the dark, cold ballroom of space.

  With the Dragon's birth, when the amniotic sac of quarks and photons burst into hydrogen clouds and the first stars, the dreamsongs began. The Dragon first heard them from other Dragons, where God danced with them in separate universes.

  Whispers of their dreamsongs leaked out of the massive, black stars that had collapsed upon themselves. Their rotating darkness opened like doorways, and echoes unfolded Dragon songs in other rooms of time.

  Are you there? they called. We are here. And we are dancing.We are dancing with Her! She is the Mother. of Everything. Are you there? Are you dancing with Her, too?

  -)(-

  Fleeing a tempest in the Belgic Strait, a double-masted ship ran east twenty leagues before the powerful winds fell upon it. With landfall in sight, the tillerman's heart swelled with hope. The captain and the pilot both had already been swept overboard, lost in the fierce squalls that battered the merchant ship. The remaining crew cowered against the gunwales, too frightened to climb the masts and reef the sails.

  As sea foamed along the deck and timbers squealed, the tillerman clung desperately to the whipstaff. Boots fixed to deck cleats, face uplifted to the spume, he stared hard at great black talons of rocks looming ahead. The ship's bow soared out of the water, and a huge wave smashed aboard. A halliard burst loose, and the block and tackle swung wildly and clipped the tillerman hard between the shoulder blades. The force of the blow heaved him across the deck and into the churning water.

  A wave lifted him above the ship. From his reeling vantage, he beheld enormous rocks surging out of the sea. Oak timbers splintered against those boulders. The keel foundered, and the vessel lurched about broadside and split asunder with a tormented wail like a soul cast into hell.

  Before the turbulent waters closed over him, he witnessed the frantic shapes of horses spilling forth into the black and frothing waters and, among them, the hold's tonnage of crates, bales, bins, and barrels, a cornucopia of cargo discharged into chaos. Then, the seething waters received him into their depths, and he and all on board drowned in the stormy tumult, all save one—a lanky scribe of fifty years with dark curly hair and a terrified face of bold eyebrows and matted beard.

  Hopelessly nearsighted, the scribe floundered blindly in the violent sea. The chop tossed him among broken timbers and the bodies of the drowned, and he grasped desperately. His arms encompassed the thick buoyant body of a fellow passenger. The churning water heaved them hard together so that the scribe pressed close to the bruised and dented face of a corpse—the gray-bearded visage of his own master, the papal legate Victricius of Troyes.

  But for the swirling brine, the scribe would have cried out, not in fright, rather despair for this man of God whom he had known many years and had loved for his devotion to the blessed Church, to the Rock of Christ.

  The stormwind screamed, and a wave hoisted the clasped bodies of scribe and legate above the froth, then muted to cold silence as thrashing waters closed over them again.

  -)(-

  The scribe awoke in a driftwood hut. Sunlight slanted among dangling gourds and weathered skeins of netting. Naked, llying on a floor of sand, he listened to the rumble of surf. He squinted nearsighted eyes and feebly focused on a ceiling of withes and red kelp. Several large fish dangled, still glistening with the sea's chrism.

  Beside him, a crudely carved crucifix leaned askew in an alcove of oyster and periwinkle shells.

  The rustic retreat of an eremite, he thought, amazed to find himself alive and marked for grace by this immediate presence of the Savior. He rolled to his side. Aching in every muscle, too weak to kneel, he began to pray for the souls of the drowned.

  A narrow door tilted open on rope hinges, admitting a shadowy figure.

  The scribe squinted again and made out a sun-scorched man dressed in tattered fish skins. Twigs in his wild beard, dried husks of small fish in his tangled hair, and a crown of starfish on his head, the sunburned man fell to his knees before the crucifix and cried in Latin, "Praise be to the loaves and fishes! Praise to Galilee's footprints! For a man wakes on land who pillowed in the sea!"

  A madman! the scribe thought. Yet—a fellow Christian. And my rescuerer.

  He rolled to his back, dizzy yet from the untoward stillness of the ground. "Are there others," he mumbled, and tried to collect himself. "Are there others? Others who survived?"

  The disheveled man shook his shaggy head. "You alone are come to me out of the sea—to me, the Fisher King."

  Even with his weak eyes, the scribe noticed the broad, livid scar that creased the man's blistered brow beneath the crown of starfish. "Fisher King?" Painfully bruised, the scribe propped himself to his elbows and spied his brown cassock hanging to dry on a wall peg. Through the open doorway a sea breeze carried aromas of braised fish and woodsmoke. "Are
you a fisherman?"

  "He who leaped from virgin thighs is the fisher of man," the Fisher King replied with crinkled smile. "He fishes souls. I fish the sea. And there last night I fished out you."

  "Then I owe you my life, good king." The scribe gratefully accepted a slat of wood with a fillet of steaming fish. "I am a papal scribe—a notarius from Ravenna. Our Holy Father has dispatched me as amanuensis for the good bishop Victricius of Troyes ... "

  The scribe fell silent, remembering Victricius' corpse flung into his arms by the storm.

  The Fisher King read grief in the scribe's narrow face and, for a fascinated moment, gazed unrelentingly at this man with the large Roman nose and small chin of gray-streaked whiskers. "So—you are the pope's man, and your superior, the bishop Victricius, now resides in the sea's unentered house. Where is the moment of miracle? Is that what you want to know, scribe? How dare God drown the holy bishop and wash ashore this man with inky fingers?"

  The scribe stared at the savory fillet of fish, astonished to feel hunger in the grip of such grief. "Victricius was a saintly man," he said in a voice raspy from the brine that had nearly drowned him. He forced himself to speak, to voice a memorium for his beloved master. "Twice he endured torture among the pagans. First as a young monk at the hands of marauding Goths. Then—decades later—as bishop of Troyes, when the cruel Franks interred all the Christians of that city—locked in the tin mines as forced laborers. I cannot hold in mind such terror, I whose greatest hardship has been Lenten fast. I cannot hold in mind how he endured. God delivered him into the merciless hands of the pagans, and both times Victricius' unflinching faith and compassion converted his tormentors to the grace of our Savior.

  "And now Victricius sabbaths with the fishes." The Fisher King shook his head. "Why does God defeat the holy and the innocent? Not even a navy of doves can freight the weight of that question." He motioned to the braised fish. "Eat. There is no crueler truth than God. Eat. You will need strength to find your way in His keyless house."