"Heaven knows—then again, my lord, perhaps not even heaven."
-)(-
Merlin made his way along the ruins of an old wall and down a steep path to where silt from the river Nene had buried some ancient city. The donkey he had ridden from Venonae gazed about with its eyes of devilish merriment, as if amused that nowhere among the austere rocks sprouted any tuft upon which to graze.
Except for a few scurrilous shrubs crowning the great masonry blocks atop the skewed wall, no flora had survived the purging fires. The landscape all about appeared primal and anonymous as the absolute shale delivered from Earth's volcanic creation.
The wizard knew this was unnatural. Something more terrible than the scorched-earth tactics of the king's enemies had charred the land. Dressed in worn farmer's clothes, tattered as a scarecrow, he moved nimbly over silt-stained paving plates, seeking the deepest gradient among the rubble.
He appeared an old scavenger, his bearded visage obscured by the black, floppy-brimmed hat he wore low and secured with twine. When he leaped from the stone abutment of a collapsed bridge to a cistern filled with gravel, he lighted with feline grace and, fluid as a shadow, slid down among the tilted slabs of a littoral causeway.
In truth, he felt stronger than ever in this life, for he grew younger each year. A demon in human guise, he had once flourished as a sexual fiend, an incubus. The angels had lured him into the womb of a saint, Optima, daughter of the King of Cos. And in that sacred darkness, he had lain with God Herself. For love of Her, he had been born into this brutal world a man growing younger.
He squeezed himself against the stone pylon of a sunken quay where ripples of the river tickled small, smooth stones, and he listened. His demon senses reached downward through the columnar rock into the alluvial soil that quaked with the singing burden of the river.
Deeper, he listened, past the sonorous bed of the Nene. He guided his attention through strata of tile rock and tectonic densities into the magnetic flux of the planet's mantle.
There, he heard the Dragon's dreamsongs. The universe cried in those songs. The low, deep moan of the explosion that had flung all light into the void hummed through the Dragon's dreams with heat-noise—the cosmic thermal haze of a fire set by Whom. The flames had slaked long ago to starry embers, cold and drifting deeper into cold.
Merlin shifted his attention. What he heard in the sibilant darkness around the Dragon jolted him. He recognized demon voices, incantatory singing—the mesmeric chants of his old cohorts. They gathered the sleeping Dragon's energy, shaping its bright magnetic fire so like the Dragon itself—making evil miniatures within the Dragon's aura ...
His listening was heard. All at once, from out of the rock against which he pressed, a shadow shone. Through stony granulations, the shadow thickened, bubbling to a tarry shape of ichorous outline.
Too late, Merlin pushed away.
The living darkness stepped forth as a black reflection of himself and blocked his escape.
"Lailoken." The whisper of his name spurted like a flame and ignited the featureless thing of pitch and his own flesh as well. Together they burst into light and faced each other as they had in the beginning, in white space, without intentions, pure energy of infinite frequencies, original light, without wanting, inside and out all at once, the plain truth before time, before fate.
This is an illusion! Merlin shouted in his mind. The light of heaven was long gone—except for the heat-noise in the Dragon's dreamsongs and what flames the Fire Lords themselves carried. An illusion!
"Lailoken, you cannot stop us," a voice deep as a drum spoke. "Britain will burn."
"The Dragon sleeps!" Merlin shouted, and his voice seemed to bound down an endless corridor, "How? How are you using the beast?"
"Britain burns, Lailoken," the drumbeat voice went on, "and your gutsack flesh will burn with her."
The wizard seized the dimensional shadow-thing, intent on pinning it to the rock and squeezing answers from it. His hands closed on emptiness. As abruptly as it had appeared, the sticky blackness seeped away, draining backward through the rock crust. For one instant, a face with a smeared mouth and eyes hollow as bubbles hung like froth upon the stone. "You will die," it rasped, and vanished.
Merlin placed both hands upon the naked rock, feeling for the demonic presence and feeling only hard, insensate stone. He did not move. "I am as cruel as you are," he muttered to the rock. "I have not forgotten evil. Do you hear me? I will fight you!
He waited for a reply. And though none came, he waited for long minutes in the mystery procession of time.
-)(-
Morgeu the Fey, daughter of Ygrane and half sister to the king, breast-fed her infant Mordred. She reclined among satin squabs on the piazza that her husband, the Celtic chieftain Lot, had built for her. An arcade in the Roman style, with a colonnade of cedar pillars, the piazza stood apart from Lot's black slate fastness. It occupied the highest hilltop on the northernmost isle of their realm and commanded a lyric view of the island chain.
Wrapped in a mantle of crimson silk, Morgeu nursed and gazed at the gray boreal sea. Embrasures in a wall of mossy agate scented the sea air with nepenthe, which kept the usually colicky baby quiet. Water ouzels skimmed the bays, curlews rode rings of wind above forested cliffs, and fishing vessels trawled the numerous firths and bays.
She could have been happy here. The people loved her. Her enchantments diverted the big storms, encouraged the crops, and lured thick schools of fish. The North Isles had never flourished so well.
Yet, she could never know true joy, not so long as her half brother, Arthor, sat on the throne. His father, Uther Pendragon, had taken her mother for his wife after the demon-wizard Merlin had killed Morgeu's father, Gorlois. And with that death, happiness had become murder for Morgeu the Fey.
As a youth, distraught at the death of her father, Morgeu had retreated beyond the remnants of the Antonine Wall to the Roman ruins at Inchtuthil. In that windy hinterland, she had practiced demonolatry so intimately that she became the sum and meaning of those riotous ruins. The Picts, the ferocious tattooed warriors of Caledonia, feared her and called her the Fey—the Doomed.
With the infant Mordred in her arms, she felt the justice of that sobriquet. No ordinary child, he had begun life by incest magic with Arthor. She had deceived her brother with a lustful illusion so that her womb would attract and hold the soul of her deceased father. But in death, Gorlois had been changed. The enemy of his former life, the Furor, had cut prophecy into her father's soul.
With the baby suckling at her breast, she could feel the strong eye that the Furor had carved within the reborn Gorlois. Vision expanded beyond the horizon of time. She glimpsed futures of unknown rank and order a dozen and more centuries ahead.
Sitting on the fragrant piazza with the infant in her arms and eyes closed, she beheld what the Furor feared—and she indeed felt doomed: Monolithic cities of glass and steel glared to shadowy stencils in abrupt bursts of light, then dimmed to roiling fireclouds, giant trees of flame, each with its crown of ash. When these blinding flares dimmed away, horizons of imponderable ruin appeared, burned-out lake beds of hell—black ranges of barren cinderland.
Lot, under a white bearskin cloak, glowered at his wife from where he sat in his oak chair set in the sun. He was old. His long gray hair and full beard enclosed a seamed face fixed to a permanent scowl.
Since the birth of Mordred, he had begun to lose his mind. His two sons by Morgeu the Fey—Gawain and Gareth—pleaded with their mother to use her enchantments for his recovery. Morgeu claimed that the cure of his dementia lay beyond her powers.
In truth, she felt relieved that Lot's age had stolen his mind. If he had possessed the clarity to suspect that Mordred was not his own child, the infant's life would be at risk. As it was, he had sunk into himself, believing he had sired three sons by Morgeu.
His gray eyes gazed through an eagling frown at his wife nursing her baby, and he fixed on her moon-round face and small
jet eyes that gazed kindly at him. Sometimes he recalled that she was his wife. This afternoon, she appeared a stranger. He played his stare over her smiling but pugnacious features, her thick neck, and the gleam of her white shoulder between fallen tresses of crinkly, flame-colored hair.
He remembered his two earlier wives—long-limbed Elen, who had birthed him the warriors Delbaeth, Loinnbheimionach, and Cohar—and the lovely Pryderi of the Golden Hair, by whom he had sired the warrior twins Gwair and Galobrun. He nodded to himself'with satisfaction and sifted back through those proud memories.
Morgeu watched him drift toward sleep, then rose from her cushioned divan and signaled with a nod for the nurse to emerge from the portico and take the sated infant from her. A young woman in saffron robes hurried to her side and bundled away Mordred.
Stepping lightly over white flagstones to her husband's side, Morgeu bent to tuck the bearskin cloak more securely about his shoulders, and paused. A shadow of something invisible flitted across the limed wall beyond the stooped apple trees, and the air seemed to pulse louder with the sea's noise: The systole and diastole of waves among the rocks roared with tempest fury though the bay shone calm.
The smell of night surrounded her in the dazzling sun. And a chill frosted her bones. Magnificent and dreadful sorcery moved toward her from many leagues away, a glamour so huge that it already cast its shadow upon her though her strong eye revealed no unusual presences to the very terminals of sea and land.
Fear lit her from within, a luminous terror that blanched all thoughts.
She sat down on a rose marble bench and waited for what was coming—something ancient, missing for centuries from daylight, already darkening the sun shafts in the tree vaults. Not since she first gave herself to demonolatry had she experienced such fear.
This was no demon coming for her. Demons embodied compact intelligences of destructive power. Each had a personality of evil love. What loomed toward her was something far vaster, full of blue rain and the sex of trees.
Swiftly, the presence descended upon her. Candlelights burned in the wall of sunlight beyond the apple trees.
Faeries! she realized in a frightful whirl of wonder. They came forward under the azure sky and towering clouds. Faeries in daylight!
Not since their exile from the Storm Tree five hundred years before had the pale people shown themselves by day. And not a mere handful but an empire of them came forward over the sea's curve and the low hills. Diamond glints burning among a mesh of sun rays, they came with the dense, overwhelming aroma of miles of grass.
Morgeu knew this was not possible. Even so—
A moneying gush of gold sparks poured over the motherless ocean and swirled toward her as wind-rushing atoms of noon.
Without the sustaining energy of the Storm Tree, the Daoine Sid lacked the strength to withstand the heat of the sun. They survived only because they took refuge by day underground, in the hollow hills. Yet, here they were, so brilliant that daylight bent around them in rainbow arcs.
They held no form but radiance. Solar particulates afloat in the air and in the choirs of sky beyond, they enclosed not only her but the arcade of cedar pillars and the entire black slate fortress! Like glyphs of a burning alphabet, they arrayed themselves in passages, shimmering yet still.
"Who are you?" she asked, feeling foolish and frightened, for she knew very well who they were. "What do you want of me?"
"A witness to truth," said a faint voice that she recognized immediately.
"Mother!"
Ygrane came striding forth from among the crooked apple trees.
Morgeu knew that it was she, even with her hair shorn and the air around her viscous and dazzling. The young mother staggered upright, squinting to discern the familiar broad jaw, long, straight nose, and slant green eyes of her mother.
A softly hallucinated blur of light erased the space between them, and Ygrane stood before her, within arm's reach. Morgeu sat back down on the rose marble bench, startled.
The faeries vanished. The gelid blue sky with its cottony clouds retained no remnant of the Daoine Sid's trespass into day. And the woman before her, in white kid riding boots with red laces, fawnskin trousers, and brown leather bodice, smiled kindly.
"Mother—" Morgeu reached out and touched the woman's pale, naked arm, assuring herself of the solidity and actuality of this manifestation. With this one touch, she felt the same tranquil truth she had first experienced as a child and knew then that this was no illusion. "How?"
"The Daoine Sid have given me all the glamour I can carry—to find the Graal."
"The Sid? But you are a Christian—" Morgeu paused, and her mouth trembled for a moment before curling to a smile of comprehension. "You've forsaken the nailed god for power—the power of the Sid!"
Ygrane stared without flinching into her daughter's cold smile. "I must find the Graal, and you are going to help me, Morgeu."
Morgeu had been at Camelot, birthing Mordred, when the Graal had disappeared. She had believed the angels had taken it back, and said, "The Fire Lords did not remove the Graal, or you would still be wearing your nun's habit, on your knees before your god's tortured son. The angels can't help you—or won't. And so here you are, Mother, a witch-queen once more." Her small black eyes glinted with smug pride. "Look at you! You are more powerful than you ever were. Why is that? What did you promise Old Elk-Head in return for so much magic?"
"You saw the faerie hosts under the sun's blade." Ygrane bowed forward at the waist so that her face leveled with her daughter's. "I am the power that anchors them in the day world. Do you understand, Morgeu?"
The smile slipped from Morgeu's lips. Though she hated her mother for abandoning her father and marrying Uther, she loved her for her strength and her glamour. The enchantress' small black eyes glittered with pride and expectation. "Yes, Mother. You are the kingdom of yourself—the goddess in flesh rags—the one who makes shapes of pain—Morrigan herself."
"I have given myself to her. And she will have my soul."
Morgeu took her mother's arm and sat her down on the bench. Wonder pulsed in Morgeu, and fear. This was her flesh and blood, this creature of magic. Ygrane had belonged to the pale people from childhood, and with that thought Morgeu grasped her mother's fate. "You are the sacrifice. When you find the Graal, you will be fed to the Dragon." She searched her mother's sun-stained face for understanding. "But the Dragon is asleep. It was your unicorn that gave the Dragon sleep."
Ygrane said nothing, waiting for Morgeu to complete the pattern of her thought.
"And it will be your death that will rouse the Dragon again," Morgeu continued, "so that the Daoine Sid can carry their fight to the Storm Tree and the Aesir gods. That's it, is it not?"
"Yes."
"Mother!" The younger woman shook her head with disbelief. "You will never return to this world. Your soul will become one with the Dragon's dreamsongs, and you will never wear flesh in this world again. A wraith among the stars is what you will be. You know that."
"I know that."
"And you do this for Arthor?"
"He is my son."
Morgeu stood and stepped a pace aside. "I am your daughter and your firstborn. That was not enough to keep you from giving yourself to Uther Pendragon."
"I loved Uther. I did not love your father."
"Gorlois was a good Roman." Morgeu's voice quavered, though the black bores of her eyes gazed steadily. Hurt twisted in her at the memory of her father dead in battle, killed defending this fickle woman, this faithless witch. "He was worthy of your love."
"Morgeu, I am not here to apologize for my past." Ygrane held her daughter's outraged stare—with difficulty. Queasiness blurred through her from her cramped uterus. The glamour coursing through her body provoked her menstrual flow, and she wanted to lie down. She dared not show Morgeu her qualm, and she kept her voice strong. "I have made this sacrifice—and I have the power of Morrigan."
"The Sid will obey you, and you can lead them into the
daylight. What has that to do with me?"
Ygrane rose to her feet, ignoring the pulpy discomfort in her pelvis. "You are going to help me find the Graal."
"Have your faeries find it."
"They have searched all the Celtic lands and the hollow hills and found nothing. Now I must see if the north gods have seized it."
"And what has that to do with me?"
Ygrane stepped closer. "Mordred carries the soul of Gorlois—a soul that once dared ascend the Storm Tree. The Furor caught him there and cut him into a shape that can see the timeshadows of the future."
"You will not touch my son, witch-queen." A frightened rage whirled up in the red-haired woman at the thought of losing her child to this sorceress.
"Ah, Morgeu." Sadness creased Ygrane's brow. "Why have you always been so difficult? Keep your silence, daughter. I know that the lack of love between your father and me hurt you. You would never accept that I was given to him against my will. I was but fourteen ... "
"You will not touch my son."
"Yes, I will, Morgeu." Ygrane moved close enough for her daughter to see the stars of determination in her eyes. "And you will help me, because all that you cherish for your son is at hazard. If the north gods indeed possess the Graal, they are using it against Britain. And if they succeed in destroying your brother, Arthor, there will be no future at all for Mordred. You do not need the strong eye to see clearly this mortal truth." Pressing closer yet, she revealed the stars in her eyes for what they really were: white birds, herons winging through darkness. "Take me to the child."
Chapter 8:
Weird Traveler
Mother Mary, my people suffer! Do you hear my prayers? Why do you send no relief? No rain. No aid from the Holy Father in Ravenna. Not even a cool breeze! Why? I tell you, Mother Mary, we despair. Merlin was just and sound in his demand that I tour my kingdom. Now I know the agony of Britain. War with the rebels has reduced the land to ash. Fishing villages have had all their boats burned. Farmers have lost their crops for the entire season. Drovers squat among the bones of their cattle.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 8