Arthor sat down heavily. "How can you go on living if you believe this—this blasphemy?"
"We go on." Merlin sat beside him, comforting arm across his shoulders. "Living or dead, awake or asleep, we go on. Here in the void, nothing is lost, Arthor—only rearranged. The angels strive to arrange things ever more complexly, building from atoms all the chains of being. And the demons tear them apart, wanting the simplicity of emptiness and darkness—the ultimate reckoning of the universe."
Arthor slumped under the oppressive weight of that thought. "If emptiness is our ultimate reckoning, Merlin, why then should we struggle at all?"
"Is it a simple solution that you seek, King Arthor? Then surrender to the invaders at your shores. Let the pagans have Britain. If you love your God, if you serve God as the angels do, then you must endure complexity in yourself and in the world around you."
"You mock and confuse me, wizard. Incest is my sin. You hold that atrocity up to my face even as you assure me that everything I worship and hold dear is false. Now, you say that if I love God I must—what? Endure complexity? What under heaven does that mean?"
"Be the man you are."
"But I am!"
"Are you?" Merlin removed his arm and shifted to face the youth. "You hide behind these walls. You seclude yourself here and draft plans for new roads and bridges. As if a kingdom were so many pathways and cities."
Arthor ran both hands through his badger brown hair. "A kingdom is commerce. Surely."
"You are seventeen and surrounded by people bedazzled with your achievement. Your right to rule proven in blood upon the field of battle, you understand the authentic value of triumph after a childhood of hardship. With such favor secured outside and within your royal personage, come with me. And see what magic is doing to Britain. Your scouts will not speak of the devilitry they find, for they fear your Christian righteousness. Come, then. See for yourself what supernatural evil harrows the land."
Arthor expelled a heavy sigh. He felt afraid and angry at himself for being afraid. "I despise magic, Merlin. Morgeu uses magic—and you are right to shame me with the horror of what she has done. I cannot abide the unnatural strength of magic. I do not understand it or its place in God's creation. My own mother, a powerful sorceress for the Celts, forsook such sorcery to worship the very God that you ridicule."
"I do not ridicule the Christian God, Arthor. I only insist that you not rely upon God to fulfill your labors. As for your mother Ygrane—" From a blue sleeve stitched with crimson seams of esoteric glyphs, Merlin extracted a narrow strip of parchment. "I have here a dispatch from Duke Marcus. He claims Ygrane has defrocked herself. He asserts that with his own eyes he beheld her riding a demon steed out of Tintagel. He is among the most sober of your warlords, Arthor. I do not doubt his word. Ygrane has given herself again to magic."
-)(-
Her body breathed energy. As she lay in the gray grass and watched a spring storm gathering above her, Ygrane felt the wind of light within her body. She had never held so much galmour before.
In the ambitious sunshine let down between the darkening clouds, she summoned the faeries. They spun around her and landed upon her outstretched hands. Their tiny bodies of honeyshine, though radiant with sentience, pulsed without shape.
Each fairie carried an orphaned event from a distant corner of the island. By turns, they hovered before her eyes, and she saw scenes of Britain.
The ancient walled cities drifted past in all their dilapidated sorrow—daub edifices cracked and patched with straw, doorways covered in rawhide, lanes littered and weedy: Glevum, Deva, Calcaria seemed called forth out of dust and rubble prophetically bound toward eternal obscurity. Only Londinium appeared a true city, retaining some of the glory of Rome in its historic governor's palace of marble friezes and fluted columns of ornate plinth and cornice.
Between the cities ranged ash flats, a cinderland spoored with charred farmhouses and crisped hedges and spinneys. Only those faeries that had toured the most remote hills of Cymru and Caledonia revealed the presences of spring: branches buoyant with blossoms and new leaves.
"How does it feel?" a gleaming dark voice asked. The elf prince Bright Night stood over her, yellow boots to either side of her shoulders, green eyes smiling down. His red hair spun flames fantastic against the storm sky.
Ygrane sat up, and the faeries scattered. "I'm hungry."
"No need ever to feel hunger again." He squatted so that he practically sat on her thighs, his small nose an inch from her face. "Use your glamour."
She pushed him away, and he dissolved into a comet's luminous veils. "If I live on glamour, I will become as you are."
"You will not live long enough to become as we are," his voice replied from the glittering vapors slowly reshaping his form. "We will find the Graal long before then."
Ygrane accepted this silently. There was no sense in half measures now that she had abandoned Miriam and their shared faith in divine love. Not love but courage would fulfill her resolution. She needed strength for the task she had set herself, and hunger had become a distraction.
Glamour glimmered in the air like starwork. She breathed it in, and the pangs of hunger relaxed to lucid strength.
"It is good, is it not?" the dark voice asked out of the shining air.
An uncleaved feeling of merger pulled her to her feet, and she smiled to sense her wholeness, the union of her inner life with the world around her. "I had forgotten this deep joy."
"Seventeen years a nun." Bright Night's body congealed from the auroras of glamour, and he shook his head ruefully. "You have denied yourself much—and for what? For silence. For a god who does not speak and who has no name."
"For my husband." Ygrane turned her face blindly toward the chill wind that brought the first frecklings of rain. "I became a Christian to honor my husband."
"Uther Pendragon dances to the Piper's tunes in the Happy Woods. Your gesture was empty. Uther achieved honor enough when he exchanged his Christian soul for our greatest warrior's soul."
Ygrane opened her eyes. "Does Cuchulain's soul truly reside in my son's body?"
"You know it is so. That is the true reason why you gave yourself to the nailed god—to share your son's faith with him. You are the king's mother, and for that distinction you abandoned us who in former times you adored. Tell me, Ygrane, now that glamour courses through your flesh once again—" Distant thunder rang like broken bells. "Are you happy with your religion of denial?"
"For me, it is enough."
"Because it makes Arthor king, yes? It feeds your pride to know your son has united Celts and Britons. Yet, would you embrace such a grim religion otherwise?" Bright Night moved toward her in fumes of smoky topaz. "The Cross-worshipers spurn this world. They believe they will be reborn in a glorious afterworld they call heaven. You are too knowledgeable to embrace such nonsense. Pride alone dropped you to your knees before the gruesome, tortured Son of God with his crown of thorns and his woeful and bloody face. Pride alone."
"You make much of my pride. What of yours, Bright Night?" Ygrane crossed her arms over her chest. "You rankle at life in the hollow hills and will sacrifice me to wake the Dragon for the power to assault the north gods. Why? Why else but that you may strut once more through the Storm Tree."
"Is that what you think—that my ambition to take back the mighty World Tree is vanity?" The spiritous mistings of glamour hardened to the contours of a physical body replete again with blue linen tunic embroidered in flowerets of gold and cinched by a silver-studded belt of red leather. "I am not vain. I am sick—sick of the sulfurous dragonfumes in the hollow hills—sick of eternal twilight. I want to feel the rain and the wind and the glory of daylight." He opened his arms to the sunshine hanging like brilliant banners from the gray turrets of the storm front. "Your death will earn this happiness for all the Daoine Sid for all time to come. When you descend into the dragonpit, we will ascend into Yggdrasil and throw the north gods after you. And the great beast will devour
them in the ore-infested earth. Then we will take our place above the blue planet, and the pale people will become radiant once more. We will shine with solar fire. We will taste the day's blue eternity. And our laughter will ride the clouds below us."
"This is not vanity?"
"No. It is not vanity." The prince smiled ferociously, his red hair bristling madness. "It is our rapture."
The rain came in twisting sheets or like a giantess' silver, winding hair let down from the cloudscapes. Ygrane turned her back on the elf prince of glamour and ran with the wet wind toward a knoll of yew and cedar and the greater likelihood of lightning. She fled Bright Night, and when she reached the creaking and groaning trees was glad to see that their fear of thunderbolts had driven underground the faeries and their lord.
Unhappy with his obsession with their pact, she questioned the wisdom of her quest. Even if I find the Graal, will it help Arthor? Am I casting myself to the Dragon for naught?
Ygrane did not believe that the Daoine Sid could take the Storm Tree from the north gods. As a young woman, she had climbed into Yggdrasil, had gazed into the Furor's one gray eye. She had glimpsed there in the black of the pupil the aisles of light, the long fluorescent corridors of the future.
She had seen many things in that prophetic moment. Cities with towers like quartz. Hornblende roadways crisscrossing all of Britain and Europe and the mysterious landforms beyond the Western Sea. Boats of metal. Airships of metal. And nowhere the Daoine Sid.
The Furor was there. Ditched into darkness at the far end of time, the Furor had stared back at her. His silver mane and wind-wrung beard had shone like a fogged sun across the centuries. And nowhere had she seen the pale people.
The storm sky above the giant trees gazed down upon her like that mad gray eye, and she wanted to flee back to Tintagel and her nun's habit. She wondered if there were any act of holy contrition that could shrive her of her feverish hopes for her son. King Arthor—the hope of Britain ...
Bright Night had touched the truth of her. Pride for her son had stolen her faith from the gentle love of the Savior. Glamour had replaced hope. Instead of a Prince of Peace, she wanted to give herself to a king of might—Uther's son, her son.
She felt gratitude for the wet wind—as if the cloudburst had run to meet her at just this juncture of will and destiny so that she could lift her face to the sky and let the rain wash away her tears. Life had become an unspeakable effort.
Even so, she determined to play her role. The unfinished legend of Uther Pendragon, the one man she had loved, would find fulfillment in their son even if it cost her the miserable eternity of life in this world, this rock of fallen heaven.
Fear battled with hope in her, resignation with longing, and this tension hummed like a taut dulcimer string just behind her tearful eyes. The wild thought of that string snapping sprang through her, and she imagined throwing herself over a cliff, smashing her brains against rocks, and entrusting her soul to God's mercy. She shook that mad urge from her mind. Arthor needed her. There was no time for self-pity with all she had to do and do quickly.
A familiar pang of soft pain deep in her pelvis interrupted her musings. "Oh, not now—" she complained, recognizing the warm, stuttering cramp that signaled the onset of her menses. Under the stress of giving herself to so many changes, she had lost track of her own body's rhythms and had not prepared for this monthly ritual. She heaved an exasperated sigh, and as she began looking about for anything to stanch the flow, she realized that it was the glamour that had provoked this sudden release.
With both hands on her abdomen, she felt the soft slippery dark movement within and nearly used glamour to stop it. Immediately, she understood that such intervention would be unwise. It was one thing to eat of glamour so she could complete her quest and entirely another to use this power to withhold the offering of her sacred blood. That would only deepen her dependence on magic, and she had determined that her glamour would serve her son and their people, not herself.
Or was that simply a fanciful evasion, she wondered, rummaging through last season's mulchy leaves for a wad of moss. If she employed her glamour on this deepest most organic part of herself, it would be far more difficult later to relinquish her magic and live again as an ordinary woman.
Bright Night believed she had promised herself to the dragonpit after the Graal was found. She cherished the prayerful hope that she might be spared, that when she completed her mission she would find herself back at Tintagel, once more a nun serving the sick, the dying, the impoverished of Dumnoni. She did not want to rely on glamour.
Fashioning a menstrual dressing in the drought-ridden land vexed her. Leaves crumpled to powder, and moss could not be found. Finally, she resorted to tearing the linen sleeves from her chemise and folding them to wads, one for now, the other a reserve.
By the time she finished, the rain had abated. The storm was just passing through. Fragmentary sunlight drifted across gray fields, and Ygrane wished that the torrent had lasted longer. There had not been enough rain this season to nourish the summer flowers to come: The white shepherd's purse, yellow snapdragons, and carpets of daisies would not arrive this year.
An ill wind blew weather too quickly to sea. Perhaps when she found the Graal, its magic could be used to inspire sufficient rain to overwhelm this warscape of burned plains with dog roses and rambling bryony. For now, the land remained colorless, with its smoke-blackened trees and encrustations of dry ivy.
She stepped out from among the dolorous yews with their boughs of sere needles and looked about for her demon horse. He drifted out of the rock-strewn knoll where he had hidden during the downpour. He came toward her with the cloud shadows, a deeper shadow itself, his ember eyes twin perforations into a sunset world.
Dewlights of rain sparkled in Ygrane's short hair and prismed the light on her lashes as the sun came out. Before mounting the black devil stallion, she watched storm clouds hurrying away, and she used her glamour to lade her emotions upon those thunderheads. She needed to be calm though she bled and ached, and she could not carry fear and doubt as well as pain where she was going.
Glamour lifted her uncertainties into the clouds. Then all the irresolute thoughts that had grievously troubled her about the loss of her gentle Savior and the necessity of this quest drifted away with those gray barges, those ghost ships whose cargo was her soul.
Chapter 6:
The Future Grows from Small Things
The Furor hung upside down from Raven's Branch, the topmost limit of Yggdrasil. He breathed in day and exhaled night. The powerful stratospheric winds buffeted him, twisting him on the axis of the leather thong binding him by his ankles to the silver bough that was also the uppermost limb of the planet's atmosphere. Gusts tossed him recklessly, and random blusters pummeled his bruised body, shaking him to the verge of unconsciousness.
He forced himself to stay alert. He had to stay awake or vision would not come. Destiny's strange and familiar whereabouts loomed just beyond the brink of utmost suffering. If he could hold on long enough, endure the random jets and blows of the thrashing wind ... long enough ...
At the limit of his anguish, music sifted into his brain from the far future: remote strains of Beethoven's Eroica entwined with the lieder of Schumann and Schubert and enclosing it all, at the audible frontier, Bach trembling with vital power, bringing the god a pristine glimpse of what might be for his people if only he could embrace the agony a little longer ...
The trammels of suffering peeled away day and night and grafted him onto emptiness. The void held him in its augury, and ripples of music from the future stilled to silence as the wind stopped and left him suspended unmoving above the immense, spinning world.
Dark oceans and umber continents drifted below. They slid with planetary slowness from the azure daystruck crescent into blackness. Slowly, the black orb of Earth turned under the evaporations of stars.
Vision came as always with images of the iron cities. Factory towers spilled smoke
into hazy brown skies. Highways entangled the land in knots of concrete. Steel-and-glass buildings mazed every estuary and clotted the shores of every lake. Wherever he turned his one eye upon the future of the world, cities of towers and tracts of box-houses loomed.
A white-hot glare silhouetted skylines to skeletal etchings. Within this star-furnace, the Fire Lords moved. The Furor perceived them as motes of intense brilliance swirling through columning clouds of fiery ash. They danced. They danced as the iron cities burned!
Every sinew in the Furor's body strained to see past the fiery horror to a new beginning. His one eye found only ranges of lifeless talc where the cities had been.
A child's voice piped, "All-Father, why are you hanging upside down?"
The Furor twisted about to face a smudge-cheeked girl with stringy blond hair and tattered smock. She stood barefoot on the frosty gravel under the Raven's Branch. The chieftain of the Aesir gods knew her at once: Skuld, youngest of the Norns, the Wyrd Sisters who witnessed all of time. "Do not mock me, little one. Leave me be."
The Furor feared the Norns. None knew their origin. They simply existed. From before the time of the elder gods, they came and went as they pleased.
Skuld peered upward with ingenuous awe at the wrathful god dangling by his ankles from the silver limb of heaven. His thick and twisted beard had fallen across his anguished face. "Verthandi says you would speak with me, All-Father. I have left my home on the Branch of Hours, and here I am."
The Furor peered at the child to see if she did jeer him. She seemed sincere. As Norn of the future, she had no immediate knowledge of his ritual hanging and how it drew the electrical might of the sun and the stars themselves through his legs and into his head to open a prophetic vista.
Her Wyrd Sister, Verthandi, Norn of the present, had obviously beheld his distress and sent Skuld to counsel him. Distraught by what he had witnessed on the horizon of time, he defied his better judgment and said to the Wyrd Sister, "I am in dire trouble, Skuld."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 5