Orchards and vineyards cultivated over generations are gone! Even once-splendid inns and spas are destitute. Wherever I turn, there is mortal loss and suffering. What am I to do, Mother Mary? What am I to do? I am a wounded king. A sinful king.
Grief has me by the hair with both iron hands and pushes my face into the dirt, into the burned dirt of Britain, so that my cries and my prayers clog in the ash and dog shit and are not heard in heaven.
The Furor sat stitching outside the cave of the tranced gods among the whinstones and shale of the Raven's Branch. "Oh, heaven hears you, boy-king. The chieftain of heaven hears you, lad—and he is well pleased!"
The one-eyed god restrained a laugh, not wanting to disturb his stitching. These were rune sutures, binding the seam with spells to empower a pouch no bigger than his thumbnail. It was an earlobe, severed from an elf hunted down in the grasslands and divvied among the Rovers. He had taken the earlobe to fashion a listening amulet. Stuffed with sand from the cave of sleeping gods, it partook of his magic with the demon lord Lucifer. Now, wherever he traveled in the Storm Tree, this amulet would let him listen to the prayers of his enemy.
"Mother Mary!" He choked back his laughter at the anguish of Arthor's petitions. "Do you truly expect a desert tribeswoman dead over four hundred years to listen to your plaints, boy? You are so much more the fool than I ever thought. I cannot believe you have survived this long."
With a giddy heart, the Furor looked up from his stitching, into the cavern of the gods in their shrouds of sand. "Brave and trusting Aesir gods, I tell you now with certainty, your sacrifice is not in vain. I have heard the peevish obloquy of the West Isles' king for his nailed god—I have heard him weeping with frustration—and I tell you, when you wake, Britain will be ours."
-)(-
Avalon, an island deep within its own dream, could be reached only from the coast of the mind. And when one finally arrived there, one walked with the tread of the heart.
Each of us can listen to our heart inside our chest and hear the footfalls of selfhood. So also was it with the Nine Queens of Avalon.
Under immense clouds, luminously white and stacked miles high, the queens lived in immortal trance, because the magic of the Fire Lords enclosed them. Together, they experienced the invisible, disembodied ether that belongs to the long dream of life on this planet.
Each of them could feel the enigmatic perfection of this ether that the moderns call mind. It enclosed the aching beauty of the dream in a secret purpose, which only now, fifteen centuries later, science has begun to disclose in its explorations of the cosmos and the atom.
None of the Nine Queens knew anything of the quantum mysteries that we wonder upon, yet they understood the true purpose of our faint, implausible dream within their own hearts.
So also may it be with us.
-)(-
Fra Athanasius rode a sumpter mule on the merchant road to Camelot. He kept as close to Chief Urien as he could among the pagan warlord's entourage of archers, lancers, and bare-chested Celtic cavalrymen. Urien had warned him that Saxon and Jutish raiders ranged freely through these badlands. With his weak eyes, the papal legate could see little of the surroundings, and what he did see disheartened him indeed.
The highway—what these primitive Britons called a highway—memorialized an antiquated Roman road whose metal surfacing had eroded away and whose paving stones had buckled, revealing gravel beds worn to potholes. Every field they passed lay scorched, every hillside slashed with wrathful blackness.
Late in the afternoon of the second day, a weird traveler hailed them from the roadside. Urien called a full halt at the sight of him.
Of no remarkable stature, he stood alone in the bleak terrain without so much as a walking staff or water flagon. Dressed entirely in black close-fitting garments, he seemed at first a shadow of a man. The company's sturdy dogs that ran ahead leaped about him with gleeful yips as if recognizing an old friend.
When the stranger removed his large, flat hat, he exposed a bald head and beardless visage tattooed blue and green with runes. Futhorc sigils in sinuous viper shapes framed a strikingly handsome face of merry, obsidian eyes, an exquisite nose, and strong chin, all stippled with tiny stylized symbols that together resembled the mottlings of snakeskin.
He smiled, and his teeth showed perfect and white as a shaft of moonlight.
An infection of excitement spread through the war party at the sight of him. He waved his big hat in greeting and advanced smiling—the dogs hopping joyfully around him.
Fra Athanasius, who could see none of this, asked worriedly, "Whatsoe'er do you see? Who stops our train?"
A Celtic lancer, who knew some Latin, whispered, "There is a supernatural being come to us. God or spirit of the hills, I know not."
"God or hill spirit!" Athanasius muttered to himself and clutched at the crude cross he had fashioned from whittled wood and twine. "What malevolence finds us in this broken land?"
The weird traveler in black held his floppy hat in both gloved hands and bowed his colorful and handsome head. When he looked up, he nodded at the gawking travelers and smiled again as if much pleased with the world.
In flawless Brythonic, he said, "I am come from the uttermost edge of the earth and am bound for Camelot to seek counsel with the king's wizard Merlin. May I ride with you?"
"What is your name?" Urien asked.
"Call me whatever you wish." The strangers smile narrowed, and he cocked a delicate, stenciled eyebrow. "Men are not happy when they know my name."
"Stand aside," Urien commanded. "We will have no company with travelers we cannot name."
The bald head nodded sagely. "Then call me the Guide, for I am come to offer you guidance on these treacherous byways—in return for the favor of traveling in anonymity with your war party."
"Guidance?" Urien frowned. "We need no guidance in our own land. We know our way. Stand aside."
The stranger kicked at an ashen bank beside the road and out spilled an ossiferous cache of small bones and crepe skulls no bigger than fists. "Children in their place of murder." He shook his head sadly and gestured at the charred terrain. "You are among the dead. My presence in your company guarantees you safe passage. I am well-known to the murderers—and they will broker you no harm so long as I am with you."
Urien dismounted and took counsel with his warriors.
"What dost the chieftain say?" Athanasius queried the lancer who spoke archaic Latin.
"The traveler before us has no dust upon his boots," the Celt replied in a hush. "Look for yourself. Not a flake of ash, not a mote of dirt upon his sable person. He is not natural. Our chieftain is loath to pass him by and offend such a divinity.
"Divinity?" Fra Athanasius squinted at the black shadow upon the road. He would have abided this dark stranger quiety if not for the memory of his beloved teacher, bishop Victricius, who had given his life to place the monk here.
With an earnest sigh, Athanasius hopped from his sumpter mule and stepped to Urien's side. "My lord chieftain, this creature before us is obviously unholy. He displays every sign of a minion to Satan. I beseech you, set him behind us."
Urien regarded the lanky emissary thoughtfully. "I thank thee for thy counsel, No-Death. I was undecided, and thou hast made clear my mind."
Fra Athanasius returned to his mule alleviated of his duty to Victricius' legacy. He grasped his cross and mumbled a prayer of intercession for the bishop's soul and protection against the Devil for his own.
"You wear the runes of our enemy, stranger," Urien declared from atop his powerful battlehorse. "What surety can you give us that you are not some scout of the raiders who savage our lands?"
"Indeed, I hail from the land of your foes, who know me well. My surety is my word. Your enemies have knowledge of me—and I of them." He fitted his large black hat upon his head, and his dark eyes glistened within its shadow. "Trust me once, and if I fail you, be done with me."
"You say you are the Guide," Urien challenged
from his high mount. "Then tell us, what direction from here favors our journey?
The stranger pointed across the cinderous waste. "Leave the road at once and make your way to the high ground west of here. You will recognize my purpose when we arrive."
Urien nodded once and waved the Guide into his company. The mysterious man bowed with exaggerated grace and strode through their midst.
The horses whinnied happily and bowed their heads to nuzzle him as he passed. He returned their salutes by cosseting several with his gloved hands.
When he reached the sumpter mule that Fra Athanasius rode, he hopped on behind the rider. His arms tightened around the papal legate's midriff, and the wide brim of his hat folded against the back of the cassock's hood as he pressed his comely face to the cowl, and whispered in fluent and contemporary Latin, "You think I'm the Devil, don't you?"
Fra Athanasius, shocked at his abrupt seizure by this stranger, made no reply. The Devil, a dissembler eager for discourse, spoke with foul breath—but this devil smelled sweet as a meadow. As they rode, his grassy scent thickened pleasantly against the acrid stench of the slaglands.
Dusted with ash, Urien's war party moved through drifts of smoke and cinders and met no other travelers in the barren land. They passed what had been a thorp, its wattle houses reduced to seared outlines in the chalken earth.
At the central well, the travelers managed to draw water by lowering a boot strapped to a belt. Farther on, they found the skeletal remains of a shepherd, his herd reduced to clots of wool among bones smashed to the neuter simplicity of gravel.
Sunlight itself grew filthy with cinderous scurf as the day wore on. Shambling with exhaustion, the horses climbed a long slope where war fires had staggered and left clumps of green shrubs. Ahead stood a massive forest singed by the purging flames but largely spared. In the west, filaments of lightning stood like fiery witch signs over the woodlands.
From this high vantage, Urien and his warriors gazed through blistered trees almost straight down upon a bend in the old Roman highway. If not for the preternatural stranger, they would be traversing that road now. The Celts peered into crisped hedges far below and discerned a band of Wolf Warriors waiting in ambush. At Urien's signal, the archers fired through the treetops and handily slew all of the Furor's fierce raiders.
Fra Athanasius averted his eyes from the slaughter and subsequent coup-taking and desecration of the enemy corpses. He dismounted and, coated in gypsum dust pale as a ghost, sidled away from the triumphant yells echoing off the highway. At a stooped and leafless tree, he knelt to pray.
"Pagans," a suave voice spoke from close behind. "Were Urien and his men Christians, there would be no atrocity among the war dead. This is what you're thinking."
Athanasius cast an unhappy look over his shoulder. The Guide knelt there, his black hat and tight ebony garments, gloves, and boots pristine, untainted by the ash and dust that coated the other travelers. "Keep away from me, devil."
The striking man nodded politely. "Yes, I am a devil to you. These others you call pagans—" His gloved hand motioned toward the jubilant cries of the Celts. "For them, I am a holy one. And now that I have thwarted the wrath of the Wolf Warriors, they are assured of my worthiness among them."
Athanasius clutched his wood cross and cast his gaze to the stony ground. "You are the Devil himself."
The Guide smiled gently, mysteriously patient. "You would be dead on that road below were it not for this devil."
The legate ignored him, concentrating on making his prayers as focused and tight as his attention on the stony grit he studied.
The stranger's soft voice, for all its gentleness, chilled the monk. "A man of the cloth, Athanasius. you believe in your heart, good wars with evil. And what is at risk is the soul. How strange that you put at venture what you so little understand." He laid a light hand upon the legate's shoulder, and the curly-haired man jolted at the touch. "What if evil is itself a dispensation of good? And that good has no authority without evil?"
"Heresy!" Fra Athanasius hissed and began to pray more fervently under his breath, brown, bovine eyes downcast.
"Oh, yes, heresy, from the Greek hairesis, the act of choosing. You choose to believe that evil is the privation of good. Any other understanding is heresy." The Guide removed his hand from the legate's shoulder and stood. "I will tell you a truth then, man of the cloth. Evil is not the loss of good." He walked away, paused, then over his shoulder added with a smile of conviction, "That is not lost which never knew a path."
Athanasius pushed to his feet and strode back to his mule. The war party returned with blond scalps in their fists, and the legate mingled among them, preferring their blood-freckled faces and incomprehensible utterances to the tattooed visage and taunting voice of the supernatural stranger.
Urien arrived burdened with several enemy swords and went to one knee before the Guide. The others of the company followed suit. Only Athanasius remained standing, and he turned his back and remounted the mule so that he would not have to see the gloating smile of the weird traveler.
The Celts offered the divine traveler their horses in gratitude for his protection. He declined and chose to ride again behind the cowering legate. To the surprise and relief of Athanasius, the Guide kept his silence. Though his meadowland fragrance displayed another aspect of his demonic nature, the Christian was glad for it. The rancid stink of blood from the scalps curing in the windless heat mingled poorly with the acrid odors of the scorched land.
Later that day, they passed ruinous walls whose battlements had fallen and lay strewn among bones and skulls. Urien's riders, indigo with dust, ash-powdered steeds festooned with scalps, seemed barbaric rovers of a phantom world. What had been a city only a season past appeared to the dusty wanderers an ancient home for the wind. The day waned, yet none of the company would bivouac among those blackened stones.
They continued across the parched land through widening fans of crimson rays. To the Guide they looked for direction. He sent them north into a chill blue evening among low hills of whitethorn and bramble trampled by the hosts of armies that had laid waste to the terrain two months earlier.
Twilight, blue and oily, found them approaching an ancient forest. The Celts dismounted and made camp in a cove that took shape from the light of their campfire breathing upon the arched boughs above. Warriors fawned on the Guide, offering him their best provisions and serenading him with harp music and song.
Fra Athanasius kept himself well apart from that happy band. Under a holm oak, he knelt in fervent prayer to the Almighty. "Holy of holies, protect me! This creature's unnaturalness is writ large, and I do fear him. Protect my soul if not my very life, oh Lord!"
"Who do you believe hears your petition?" The svelte voice of the Guide emerged from the darkness alongside the praying man.
Athanasius stared in fright at the unexpected appearance of the tattooed man. The stranger leaned against the holm oak, stenciled face afloat, framed by his jet hat and the blackness of night. The legate swung his wild stare toward the campfire and, with a myopic squint, discerned the bald, shining pate of the Guide sitting among the adoring pagans.
"My God—my God!"
"Yours is a silent god, Athanasius." The Guide spoke gently, as to a child. "If he hears you, how will you know?"
"What wickedness is this?" Athanasius staggered upright. "Is this a trickery of twins?"
"I am unique, I assure you." He smiled gleefully at the legate's wide-eyed distress. "It is no great wonder to find me in two places at once, for I am not corporeal in the manner of people."
"Not corporeal ... "
"No, not corporeal. Not physical at all in any way familiar to you."
Athanasius pressed the crude cross to his chest as if to keep his slamming heart from bursting through its cage of ribs. "I have touched you."
"And amused me as well, Athanasius." The entity proudly lifted the chin of his sternly beautiful face. "I am quite alive. Yet I am not a material being
. Oh, in the Great Tree I am solid enough. Here in Middle Earth I find it easy to work in multiples."
"Who are you?"
"I'll tell you if you promise on your god that you will not divulge my name to the others until we arrive in Camelot."
Athanasius winced at the thought of a secret covenant with the infernal creature and backed away. "Leave me be. In the name of God, leave me be."
"Come now, you are scribe and a man of five decades' experience. Surely, you understand that the world is ultimately not a knowable thing. It is a mystery that most deeply defeats us."
The legate's heels struck an upraised root as he retreated. He toppled backward and, with a yelp, sprawled into the leafy litter. Frightened cries squeaked from his constricted throat.
"They can't hear you. They are far too boisterous in my good company." The Guide stepped to where Athanasius lay and knelt over him. "Do you want to know who I am?"
Athanasius's stricken face shivered. "Do not impart such perilous knowledge."
"I am going to tell you anyway." The Guide gave an impish grin and patted the frightened man's cheek. "First you must promise. I have enemies. It is best for all that my presence here not be bandied about."
In a crab-scuttle, Athanasius crawled away from the grinning apparition. "Why are you inflicting yourself on me?"
"Because you alone in our company do not adore me. You think I am your god's enemy. I am not." The Guide's double sat cross-legged on the forest floor and removed his large hat. In the darkness, the runes that stained his scalp seemed to squirm, and the round cope of his head shone as if greased. "Do you know who I am?"
Athanasius, propped on his elbows, peered over the quivering knees he had drawn up almost to his chest and shook his head.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 9