King Wesc served as chief of the alliance of Saxons, Jutes, Angles, Picts, and Scoti. United under him to conquer Britain, they had adopted Roman war tactics and weapons and even a Roman name, the Foederatus. As their chief, Wesc exerted ruthless cunning in coordinating their invasion of Britain. He spent most of his time preparing battle plans from the province of Cantii, his Saxon foothold at the southeast corner of the Christian island.
In the Roman villa of Dubrae above the limestone cliffs overpeering the Belgic Strait, he listened to his generals. Chieftains all, each one counseled him wisely in the terrible ways of war. And he wrote poetry.
A short man with close-cropped dark hair, a long ginger beard, and a limp from a childhood boating accident, King Wesc presented an unremarkable figure. He heightened his ordinariness by his preference for simple dress: long-sleeved red woolens and trousers of black canvas. He carried no weapons whatsoever, and only his tall boots and the twin-coiled serpents embossed on his kid-leather jerkin signified the noble status he had attained. Never had he fought in a battle. No life had ever been taken by his hands. Yet the Foederatus revered him above all men and entitled him to wear a golden crown of entwined snakes as lord of many tribes. Scoti, Jutes, Picts, and Angles adored him as passionately as his own Saxons, for he was beloved of Lady Unique, the wife of their chief deity, the Furor.
Accompanied everywhere by a black cat, the goddess' familiar, Wesc availed himself of Lady Unique's blessings of wisdom and luck to rule the Foederatus—and he thanked her frequently with sacred poetry: Lady, only my memory of you preserves my hands from ignorance—only my hope of you makes from the noise of death a music ...
"Aquila Regalis Thor," King Wesc spoke to his scribe in the atrium at Dubrae. Evening settled like blue dust upon marble statuary and potted trees under the open sky. Ornate oil lamps upheld by tripods cast saffron radiance on Roman architecture, which the Saxon king had kept intact for his elucidation, that he might better know his enemy's mind and soul. "Royal Eagle of Thor!" In his tall boots and red woolen shirt, he paced slowly about the central fountain, tugging at his ginger beard. "Thor—that is their botched name for our god Thunder Red Hair. This king mocks us with his very name. So, mark me well now, scribe—you will spell his name with a 'u'—Arthur. It will sound the same yet will no longer carry the name of our god, and we will break his evil spell with this significant change."
The scribe, an elderly, gray-bearded man in brown robes and pointed scholar's cap, nodded from where he sat on a stool beside a mirror-lantern, recording with a stylus onto a wax tablet the king's dictation.
"This poem is to be sent to him at Camelot, his fortress in the west," the stout king instructed. "And be certain that our terms for reconciliation are attached—and the consequences if they are refused. He must know that I am serious. Now, begin—
Arthur, from here I have watched you walking the flat of the blade, seeking the edge where the light is sliced from the dark. The tide of that wound is the blood in which we are drowning. Only my memory of the gods preserves my hands from the ignorance of our war. The gods show me how to find peace without shame. It is almost impossible, even for you, battle-lord of Britain, to imagine my terror when our warriors wake each morning to discover, asleep in their hands, the old weapons. Arthur, make peace with me—or our war will unmake you.
— Wesc, high lord of the Foederatus
Chapter 5:
Cinderland
Arthor Rex lay facedown upon the naked back of his horse, cheek pressed against her neck, listening to pumping blood and muscular breaths filling her body with joy. Just returned from a fast jaunt across the champaign surrounding Camelot, she smelled of the happy season after the noise of battle has passed over.
How many battles had she carried him through in the four years they had fought together? He had lost count. She had been his since a foal. Her name was Straif, Gaelic for blackthorn, not only for her sloe eyes that resembled that tree's black fruit but also the strife of fate, as the tree itself was so named by the bards. She carried him on the unavoidable path, the harsh choice that had to be obeyed. When he rode her, he rode upon life's cruel joy.
The horse warriors had laughed when he took Straif for his battle mount. A palfrey, she was a slender riding steed more suited for carrying a woman than an armored man. He wore his armor light. And he did not want her to charge and trample but to dance and elude. With her under him, he rode like smoke among his enemies, he rode as an ally of the wind, come and gone, with death in his shadow.
From his initial foray into combat, he had depended on her like a voice and its echo. They had smelled men's blood for the first time together. Battle cries and death shrieks did not startle her on the narrow footbridge of life. Like the floating cloud whose color she bore, she moved with airy grace, and the din of warscapes never troubled her.
Arthor loved Straif. She had won Britain with him against those who had fomented war rather than accept a boy monarch. Now, the war had ended. He reigned undisputed as high king of Britain. And all that had been a torment to him before, he loved.
His parentless childhood extended the very hand of his guide, the surety of a hard-won self-reliance. The many indignities of thralldom he had endured before he knew his royal birthright had become the music of humility. He would always hear that music as king and dance most inwardly to it whenever sycophants sang to him.
Years of brutal training from earliest childhood provided the majestic arms that had made him his own bodyguard. And the loneliness, the smiting isolation he had endured believing himself the spawn of a foreign rapist, that terrible loneliness that had hurt him from his first memories had opened into irreproachable solitude. In that sacred place of waking dreams, what had been a steely pin in his heart fixed now the axis of the universe.
-)(-
Merlin stood in the shadows of the inner-bailey. Midnight blue robes and bent, conical hat annealed to the darkness so that his long, pallid face and forked beard hovered there like a vaporous apparition. Chrome eyes gazed half-lidded in dragon sockets. With a dreamer's languid and unwavering intensity, he watched Arthor Rex lying atop his palfrey in full embrace like some aboriginal worshiper.
The wizard gauged the boy's happiness. Arthor spoke to his horse and laughed softly, and the beast listened and laughed, too, as horses laugh, tossing her narrow head, squinting her dark eyes.
What is the mettle of this shared joy? the demon wondered. What is the worth of this giddy confidence?
The disaster that had almost overwhelmed Camelot only six weeks prior had not left the king unscathed. A livid wound gaped from his right thigh where his riding tunic had uplifted, exposing a maroon puncture inflicted by a rebel arrow.
Even seen from this distance, the injury appeared to throb with pustulant heat. A refractory trauma, defiant of all Merlin's plasters and healing spells, the injury required the boy to use a crutch.
And yet—the boy laughed! What thoughts must be his to defy such pain and so hideous an omen?
Clearly, Arthor knew by his victory that he reigned as God's own child, his authority validated in blood by the annihilation of those who had opposed him. Rosy cheeks flushed as much with euphoria as exertion, he hugged his whole body to his animal with guileless love.
Who would not seek the companionship of such a one?
Grooms waited in the stable gates, all eyes on him, eager for his merest gesture. And there on a stool beside the sunny hayrick sat Bedevere, one-armed swordmaster and personal guard to the king. He held his balding head proudly poised as if this were his own son returned triumphant from war.
In the ward beyond the gingerstone wall and the iron gate wrought with the flying eagle of the royal crest, the best young men of the kingdom waited. They massed for their chance to impress the boy-king with their skills: archers, poets, musicians, all yearning for his notice, all knowing that the events of the world drifted as did they, like so much blown sand. But here, with this lordly youth, at this frontier, the wor
ld itself prospered, defiant of chaos. The court of King Arthor thrived as a living thing in whose sacred memory history, with all its inscrutable purpose, flowed.
Merlin did not want to forestall this well-earned adulation or intrude on the king's joy. Arthor had won his war to unite Britain. The youngster deserved a respite from struggle and a spate of time to envision and build. But if Britain was to survive, Arthor would have to leave the peace of Camelot and confront again the enemies of his people with ferocity.
When the boy turned the horse in his direction, the wizard took the opportunity to step from the shadows.
Arthor's laughter stalled and his smile went brittle. For an instant, the squint of his eyes broadcast a hope that he could turn away and ignore the tall, silver-eyed figure. Then his jaw tightened with acceptance of the inevitable, and he slid from his gray palfrey. He took the horse's long head in his arms, whispered briefly a farewell, and turned away.
"A word, my lord," Merlin said, as the boy limped toward him, favoring his good leg. "These six weeks in celebration and conviviality, you have relished your victory. Now you see me before you again and must know the time is nigh to discuss the state of your kingdom."
Arthor put an arm across the wizard's shoulders and leaned heavily on him, waiting for the groom who came running across the stable yard with a sturdy gnarl of cypress wood fashioned to a stave. The king received it gratefully. "I have not been entirely indolent, you know. My brother and I have reviewed all the road maps and bridge plans that most direly need repair in the kingdom..."
"Sire—" Merlin cut him off. "That is worthy work for your stepbrother Cei. But Britain needs a great deal more from you than worthy roads and bridges."
"Now that our island kingdom is united, we are stronger than ever, and surely ..."
"Nothing is sure for our land with the Graal missing."
"The Graal?" The king lowered himself onto a bench in the shadow of a vaulted archway, where floral scents breezed from the singing brightness of a garden. "In all truth, Merlin, what could I possible know of such a mysterious thing? You are my wizard. If this goblet is so precious to our kingdom, you must find it.".He handed Merlin his cypress stave, dismissed the groom with a smile, and began unlacing his riding boots. "You must use your magic."
Merlin noticed that the king never spoke of magic unless they were alone. The boy's sister Morgeu had deceived Arthor so shamelessly with her unholy power that he completely spurned the old ways—at least in public.
"My lord, whoever removed the Graal from us has magical powers equal to or greater than my own. For all my scrying, I have been unable to find the sacred chalice."
"And what am I to do, Merlin?" Arthor tugged at a boot.
"It is time you left Camelot and toured the realm. Then you will see for yourself the widespread blight upon the countryside. You will see something far worse than the scars of war. A curse, a black curse befouls Britain. Something evil lurks in your kingdom, my lord. And you must take it upon yourself to uncover it."
Arthor waved a boot at him. "That is the work of sorcerers and wizards. If there is a curse upon our island, you will discover it, Merlin, not I. My work is here, reviewing the damage done by human hands and planning what human hands can do to restore our kingdom."
"Your engineers can fulfill that task. Only you have authority to wage war against the deviltry that plagues our land."
"Deviltry?" Arthor wrinkled his nose and shook his head. "No, Merlin. I'm a Christian king, and I will trust in my faith to protect us from deviltry. God has placed me to make a fortress of our island and to keep at bay the pagan tribes that would overrun us. That is fight enough for me. I have no power to challenge devils."
"My lord, come forth into your domain. See for yourself. There is evil abroad as destructive as the raiders that harry our shores. It is an evil that has brought drought and famine to Britain and threatens to break our defenses from within."
"I have petitioned the Holy Father in Ravenna to send aid." Arthor spoke as he painfully struggled to remove the boot from his wounded leg. "The pope will not refuse a Christian king in need. Soon, there will be barges of grain and livestock arriving in our ports. They will sustain us until our farmers and drovers have restored our land by their own husbandry. Within a few seasons, we will again be exporting goods, and our debt to the Holy Father shall be repaid in full."
"Is that how our future appears from within these walls?" Merlin knelt before the king and gently removed the troublesome boot. "I tell you, Arthor, the reality beyond Camelot is far worse than you can guess."
"My scouts have visited every district, and they inform me that when the roads are repaired, the bridges erected once more, and the walls of the cities bolstered, prosperity follows. We have only the raiders to concern us."
Merlin sat beside him on the settle. "None of the scouts you send forth will report anything else to you. They do not see as a king would see."
"A king is a man."
"Is that what you think?" Merlin took the boy's wrist in his big, bony hand and squeezed it for emphasis. "A king is an emblem. And all emblems hold magic. You are the emblem of the land, sire. And you carry the magic of the land in your person. Regard your wound. Why does it not heal?"
"I want no more truck with magic, Merlin." Arthor twisted his arm free, grabbed his stave, and pushed to his feet. "I am here to serve God and my people."
"God's grace sent me to counsel and protect you."
The young man trepidatiously regarded the entity before him. His chest hollowed with cold to look at this old man not truly a man. The wizard wore a face like geology, like the shale and schists that sometimes wear human faces in seacliffs, staring without compassion or fear of God.
The king turned away and tried to warm this chill by staring into the brightness of the garden. "Your counsel is unnatural. Deviltry, magic, curses. I'll have no more of that. The war is won. Now is the time of rebuilding and defense, not only of the kingdom but of my own soul. No more magic. No more sorcery. Or deviltry. My mind is preoccupied with far more mundane concerns."
Merlin scowled. "Your mind is bound by trivialities. You give yourself to logistics, to routes of conveyance and economic pacts with the new nations of Europe. These are merely the trappings of governance. Your jurisdiction is far wider. Look at me, sire. Please."
"It is not easy to look at you, wizard," Arthor said without facing him.
"Look at me, Arthor." He waited until the boy reluctantly turned. "I have a devil's countenance. In truth, I am a demon—the demon Lailoken. Yet, God has installed me in this human form and given me a destiny greater than the malign purpose that drove me to this world across the aeons. Neither your mother Ygrane nor your father Uther Pendragon spurned my counsel. They knew my power and trusted me."
"I would rather trust in our Savior and my own sound reason."
"Did reason save you from your sister Morgeu's beguilement?"
Arthor veered back as if avoiding a blow. "I will not speak of her."
"For all your sound reason, she deceived you into lying with her." The wizard stood. He did not want to hurt this king nor offer false comfort against dire truth. "Was our Savior present when you, Arthor, got your sister with child?"
"Merlin, be silent." The boy limped toward the garden.
With two large steps, the old man strode to his side, voice hissing close to his face. "Incest, Arthor. That word scalds your ears and offends your very soul, because you gave your seed to your sister! And neither faith nor reason saved you—because magic is stronger."
"Enough, Merlin!"
"Morgeu tricked you with magic so that you thought you lay with a beautiful and noble woman. An illusion! And now, your incest child suckles at your sister's breast. Mordred lives! And all that you will accomplish, the sum of all your noble deeds, the histories of every battle triumph must evermore bear the dishonor of his existence—your very love of God called into question—and your faith a mock ritual deferring to a moment's
lust."
Arthor spun about with his fist raised. "I will hear no more, wizard!"
"You would strike me?" Merlin's silver eyes widened in mock apprehension. Part of him, the human part of him, would have stopped there, said no more to hurt this young lion. Let him brood on this pain, the human voice in him resounded, and he will come to the truth of his fate in time. Magic has its place with reason and faith.
The demon mind of the wizard knew: there was no time. He had seen the future's dark tide rising—and reason and faith, for all their ultimate virtue, would not forestall that reckoning. Magic alone is our best hope.
The demonic part of him glowed with the malice necessary to shock the king from his complacence. He sneered at the angry boy who had raised his fists. "Where then is the famous compassion of your faith, sire? Where is your Savior now that incest has made a wreckage of your great plans? How will Jesus judge the intended glory of your reign? Glory canceled by carnality."
Tears shone in Arthor's eyes. He cried out in anguish. The stave clattered to the flagstones, and he brought both fists down hard on Merlin's shoulders.
With a wet, ugly sound, the wizard collapsed into a tumble of black toads. The fervid swarm skittered and hopped over each other across the paving slates.
"Nothing is really as it appears," Merlin said from behind. "That is the secret of magic, Arthor. Everything is false."
Arthor twisted about with a sob and stood weeping before the tall, gaunt figure. "Not everything," he mumbled. "Not everything is false."
"Oh, everything we can know." Merlin draped an arm over the youth's shoulders and guided him back toward the settle. "Each of us and all of us together, lad, are only a fraction among so many other fractions in an aggregate beyond conception. If you could have posted witness to reality from its inception, as have I, you would know the world for what it actually is—so much tenuous smoke thinning away in the void. We are a momentary dream."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 4