"Promise you will keep my secret," the glowing head insisted.
Fearful of the consequences of refusing, the legate replied weakly, "I promise."
"Then I will tell you. I am not the Devil." His black eyes glinted like nails. "The Devil is older than the world itself, isn't he? I am not that old. No. I am a mortal being, such as you—only not as mortal. I was born higher in the World Tree, under the Rainbow Bridge and behind the great World-Mill that grinds the mold and fungus that makes earth. My mother was a white snake—a supernally beautiful being with eyes of gold flakes and milk blue as starlight. And my father—oh my father was a giant, a towering, muscular mute who turned the millstones of the World-Mill, grinding out boulders and rocks to build the mighty mountain ranges of this world. His sweat, his blood, his semen greased those millstones. And that was how I was born, when my mother came swimming under the Rainbow Bridge and received my father's seed in the foaming waters."
Athanasius's Latin face curdled with disgust. "You are a devil!"
"No." He scowled and smiled simultaneously, his jubilant face eloquently insane with anger and delight, and insisted, "I am the sworn blood brother of the Furor himself. In the Storm Tree, I am called Loki, the Liar, because I am responsible for restraining my brother's wild enthusiasm for the truth. He is absolutely drunk with his need for it, you see—as if anything can be true in a universe whose most basic principle is uncertainty! Ah, but what would you know of that, you who have given yourself to dogma."
Athanasius blinked, hopelessly trying to bring his large eyes to focus. "You are a—god?"
"That is such a human word." Loki crawled forward on all fours, reciting in a voice of pure joy, '"Is it not written in your law, I have said, You are gods?'"
"Those are words from the Gospel of John, chapter ten, verse thirty-four." Athanasius gusted with surprise. "You know the words of our Savior?"
Loki crawled over him. "Are you amazed to meet a pagan who is not ignorant of your faith?"
"I am bewildered," he said, averting his face. "You know of our Savior—you a ... a pagan divinity. You know, but do you have faith in our Lord Jesus Christ?"
Loki rose and pulled Athanasius to his feet by the front of his cassock. "I have faith in everything, Brother! Everything! The bare stones themselves!"
"The bare stones?" The legate reeled, and Loki steadied him.
"Stone is the coma of light."
"The deep sleep of light?" Athanasius blinked with confusion at the amused, sly face of scrawled runes. With the god's face pressed this close, the nearsighted man observed with fright that the futhorc markings were moving! Sinuously, they writhed, intercoiling to the proud shape of a crown—a crown of snakes. From far within, he heard himself plaintively whining, "I don't understand."
"Light, Brother, light!" Loki shook the scribe by his shoulders. "Everything is light, either asleep like the stones or awake like the cool fire shimmering off the living mud of your brain—the crackling brain-blaze you call mind."
Athanasius twisted free with a terrified cry and turned away. "You speak nonsense. Leave me be, Loki—the Liar. I am Christian! I care not for your devilish talk. Leave me be. In the name of God!"
No reply came. Athanasius knew that the trickster was snickering at him. When he glanced back, Loki sat at the campfire, inspiring laughter among the Celts. Several of the warriors leaped up and began to dance for their divine guide.
The lanky, weak-eyed scribe shivered. Enclosed by a breeze-less chill, he hugged himself. He feared to approach the campfire, where the evil god presided. Equally he feared to remain where he was, with the darkness breathing all around and the leaves of the trees moving like tongues, murmuring in a language he could almost understand.
-)(-
The infant that Ygrane held in her arms had been her husband Gorlois and the father of his own mother, Morgeu. Her will to love him forever had lifted Gorlois' soul out of the netherworld of being and perishing. She had retrieved him before the spirit wind could shake the memories out of him and blow him into a different womb.
His small skull fit perfectly in Ygrane's palm. She could feel the blood-pulse of his fontanel where his reborn soul throbbed at the top of his brain, not wholly fitting into his new body.
"How beautiful he is." Morgeu's doting smile brightened in her round, moon-pale face.
The enchantress and Ygrane stood alone in the nursery of Lot's stone fastness. Tapestries covered the gray slate walls with battle scenes depicting the fall of Troy, the Greek victory against Xerxes at Salamis, and the sacking of Rome by Alaric eighty years before.
Gorlois' armor, with its gorgon vizzard, embossed eagle cuirass, and ducal plumed helmet, hung opposite the tall windows so that sunshine drenched its polished brass. The short blade of his Roman sword pointed unsheathed down upon the cradle.
"He is a beautiful baby," Ygrane admitted, admiring the placid features of the child asleep in her embrace. The glistening fur of his head matched in blackness Morgeu's small intent eyes, and he smelled of ferns. "Will he be a good man? Will you rear him to be righteous? Or is vengeance the only destiny you cherish for him?"
"You should have stayed with Father," Morgeu replied. The hurt in her voice attested to her irreversible sorrow. That pain cored her incest magic, the evil intelligence that plotted ways to use her children as weapons.
"Your father was a cruel man." Ygrane met her daughter's pained look with the quiet suffering in her own green eyes. "I know you don't want to hear this truth, yet you must. You have returned Gorlois among us, and the Furor has marked him with a visionary power he never possessed before. As his mother, you must strive to redeem his failings."
Disgust twisted Morgeu's lips. "Gorlois' only failing was that he married a woman who did not love him."
"How could I love a man who brutalized me and my people?"
"Then you should have defied the Druids and not married him at all. You should never have lain with him, never have brought me into this world." She placed her silver-ringed right hand upon the child's chest. "I live and Mordred lives and we defy your spawn Arthor, a spawn who exists only because of you and your faithlessness."
"I know that is what you believe, Morgeu. That is why I am here." Ygrane wanted to say more. An air about Morgeu defied reconciliation. She tolerated her mother only because of Ygrane's power. And now, despite her menstrual cramps and her heartache for her daughter and her fear of what the Sid's glamour was making of her, Ygrane had to use that power. "We will find the Holy Graal, Morgeu, and I will leave you to rear this unnatural child as you see fit."
"So I shall," she said with vehement certainty. "And in good time, he will rule all Britain, and the child you conceived with the usurper Uther Pendragon will be toppled and forgotten."
"Enough prattle, child," Ygrane responded with force in her voice. She pointed to a nursemaid's stool. "Sit. And be silent."
Morgeu could not disobey. The nerves of her body had received the command before her brain could contravene, and she plopped onto the nursemaid's stool. Her mouth jarred open as she forced herself to protest, then stopped.
The air around her mother had jeweled. The nursery shimmered as with sunlight broken on water, and a slippery music began, a sighing rustle as of a willow breeze but coherent and subtle. The enchantress sat mesmerized by it, hearing single threads of voices, whispering cries, unweighted howls floating like wind-singing.
Faeries rode these unfolded wings of music through the open transoms, gliding on sunslants and windowgleams into the nursery. They gathered over the infant, clustering like ball lightning.
Morgeu began to rise to go to her child, then paused. The baby had become a cloud. The nimbus floated before Ygrane, lit from within and aswarm with hot points of fire.
The very moment screamed—and the cloud became the phantom of Gorlois. He did not look like her father, for his face had been carved by the knife of the Furor so that he could see the timeshadows of what might be.
Gorlois gazed at her with
surprise in the eyeball aslant upon his forehead and an unvoiced cry unlocked and skewed to one side of his lipless jaw like a laughing mule. An inward-rushing wind sucked the smoke of him through a starhole into another world.
The rawhide thongs dangling from Ygrane's vest lifted and waved like feelers in the draft, and the tapestries and cradle veils behind her billowed and snapped, eager to follow Gorlois' ectoplasm straight into the fiery perforation.
Morgeu clutched the stool under her, her crimson robes and frizzled red hair tugged fiercely by the robust rip current. In that violent moment, she knew her mother had deceived her and had used the faerie to snatch away her baby's soul.
Rage flared in her. With all her might, she dug her crimson velvet slippers into the bunched carpet to keep her own lifeshine from whisking free of her body and following her father-child's soul into the netherworld.
Then, the wind stopped. Between herself and Ygrane hovered a chrome chalice laced in gold—the Graal. Through its translucence she could see her mother's face, hollow-cheeked as a lynx and underlit by the ethereal glow of the beautiful cup. The baby was nowhere to be seen.
Morgeu lunged to her feet. "Mordred!"
For an instant, Ygrane noted a belled reflection in the Graal's chrome surface: A startling figure loomed there—squat, immense, and fierce: a dwarf dressed in studded leather straps that crisscrossed an iridescent tunic of firesnake skin.
The outrage in Morgeu's throat tightened to silence as she, too, glimpsed the creature half as high as a man but twice as wide, with huge, muscular limbs. He had a cubed head of tufty gold hair and red whiskers that swirled over pugnacious jowls. "The Furor's dwarf," she moaned. "Brokk!"
At the sound of her voice, the image wobbled and began to break up. Ygrane swiped at the vision, and it smeared to radiance, white and frosty.
"My baby!" Morgeu cried. She collided with her mother, and Ygrane pressed the infant into her arms. "Mordred!" She spun away with the child, and he began to wail. "Hush—hush!"
Quickly, she examined the baby, jubilant to find him whole and unmarked. And when she turned again in the next moment to face Ygrane, no one was there.
Chapter 9:
Beautiful beyond Beauty
Marcus Dumnoni stood at the balustrade on the east terrace of Tintagel castle. He peered into a golden broth of dawnlight pouring across wide swards and ponds. The long reach of his vision grabbed at distant farmhouses on the moors and streaks of woodsmoke from their chimneys. He searched for some sign of the faeries he knew had to be there—for that land had been home for eighteen years to the witch-queen Ygrane.
Since she rode past him on the black devil stallion, he believed her life as a nun a lie. The Sisters of the Holy Graal continued to tend their plots of speedwell, yellow clover, skullcap, and bitterroot in the herb garden at the back of the castle, and each day they rode their dray carts to the hamlets of the countryside, delivering medicines to the ill and food for the indigent. Marcus had spoken to every one of the sisters, and none had a single recollection of their abbess practicing the old ways.
Before moving his entourage into Tintagel, he had carefully inspected each chamber, every alcove, searching for pagan symbols or implements. He had found none.
Yet, he knew what he had seen: Ygrane sovereign in her elfen power. She had barely looked human. Her face, dusted golden in faerie powder, shone beautiful beyond the beauty of mortal women—and terrifying, with the faeries themselves wafting about her like thistle tufts. He could still conjure the tang of autumn just by remembering the rapt expression of her angular eyes, those eyes the color of trees.
He had feared then that Tintagel would prove a hauntful place, a portal to the netherworld, and a peril to himself and his household. And every day since arriving, he had been vigilant for eldritch signs. Nothing, however, justified his sumptuous fear.
By night, he took comfort in his sanctuary. With the breaking of day, weary of having to face again the burden of administrative chores and the mundane terrors of Wolf Warriors and woodland gangs, he almost wished for a ghost to shuffle through the salt pines.
This morning, sunbeams quivered in the clear deeps of the indigo sky. A shadow stirred upon the lawn. Gardeners with their reaping hooks and mulch pails, he was sure. He turned to change his nightdress of soft saffron silk for tunic and sandals, and paused. By the sharper sight at the periphery of vision, he observed it distinctly—a black horse about a furlong from the castle.
The devil stallion!
No—not a stallion, not a horse at all. Standing perfectly still, he fixed his gaze and discerned a tusk upon the equine creature's brow: a unicorn, sable as the night.
Fetched up by the windless light of dawn, it pranced across the strath to the broken rocky ground where the heath began. There, it stepped into the sky, climbing among gray cobs of cloud, a black hunter, a thimbleful of another world.
Without moving, Marcus watched it run, flying across the sky's kingdom until it disappeared in the remnants of night.
-)(-
At noon, Bedevere leaned forward atop his massive horse and pointed down the hot and shimmering road to where a lone figure approached over shattered stone plates and dislodged cobbles. The mounted rider trembled and bleared in the sun and finally coalesced into a farmer with a floppy-brimmed hat atop a donkey. "Merlin approaches, sire."
Arthor cantered Straif past several potholes to the wizard. "Where have you been, Merlin?"
The lanky traveler did not answer. He surveyed the leafless and jagged trees and the ocher fields cooking in the heat. Wobbly horizons augmented into gray hills under dusty haze.
Bedevere offered the old man a flagon of water.
Merlin waved it aside. "Have you seen aught of evil in the land, my lord?"
"Five brigands, my own soldiers, attempted to loot an inn, an impoverished inn at that." Arthor accepted Bedevere's flagon and drank. "And you? Aught of evil?"
"Yes, evil. Not brigands, my lord." He scanned the burned countryside with his strong eye, and green spectra flashed from where the roadway disappeared among distant planes of heat. "Demons. My old cohorts are in the land, and thus we find this devastation."
"Demons?" Bedevere cast a skeptical glance to the king. "This land was torched by rebel armies."
"Come." Merlin pulled his donkey around. "If the heat has not addled your bare heads, you will see more of true evil this day than the ravages of armies."
They rode on. Bedevere peered down uneasily at the wizard in his farmer's hat. "Why must we be here at all? Three days we have traveled in disguise among the devastations of war. What more is there for the king to see? Let us hie back to Camelot where we belong. There, we can coordinate the rebuilding of this ravaged land."
Merlin regarded Bedevere balefully. "What I want the king to witness has eluded us these three days, because we travel in disguise. Were the demons to know of our presence outside the protective bulwarks of Camelot, their monstrosities would have overwhelmed us."
Arthor shifted uncomfortably atop Straif. He did not want to hear about demons. He felt happier thinking about anything else—about Julia, for instance. In his mind, wrenched about by the havoc of war and the cruel wiles of his enchantress sister Morgeu, the austere efficiency of Julia's inn seemed a paradise. He wished he could return there. He did not want to go where Merlin led.
As they rode, the sky darkened. Sulfur smoke hung over the land in yellow shrouds, and the king sat tall in his saddle, searching the way ahead. "The balefires of war were damped weeks ago," he commented. "What is the origin of this evil pall?"
"Looters and brigands," Bedevere responded from atop his mighty warhorse. "Malefactors the likes of whom we routed at The Blanket of Stars. They abound in the wake of war, my lord, and set blazes to cover their wicked progress."
"Not brigands or Foederatus raiders inspired these fumes," Merlin contradicted, and leaned forward across the neck of his mule to point with his whole body through the haze. "I warned you there was dire
magic afoot in the land, sire. Now, behold—there, in the saddle of those hills ahead. What do you see?"
Arthor spied a scattering herd of sheep and several red cows galloping, and behind them a score of villagers in full flight. Wolf Warriors! he thought, and hoped that the sulfur mist had not dimmed the sun beyond hope of sending a flash-signal to Bors Bona in the tableland to the north.
Though Merlin had lured him beyond the walls of Camelot with news of a magical threat to his kingdom, Arthor had seen only the dreadful aftermath of war. He wished he had stayed at the drafting tables in the council rooms, supervising the rebuilding of this heartbreaking devastation. "A whole village is fleeing raiders."
"Not raiders," Merlin insisted. "Look again!"
"God in heaven!" Bedevere shouted, and his large horse reared and nearly threw him. "What unholy thing do we see?"
'"Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons!'" Merlin gusted Psalm 148 in giddy fright, and clutched excitedly at Arthor's arm. "Do you see now? Do you see how the kingdom is given to the dragon, my lord?"
Arthor made no reply. Through the brume, he sighted what had stampeded an entire village, terrified Bedevere and driven the wizard to biblical outcry. A veritable behemoth walked the earth: a cancerous thing, spraddle-legged, imperfect, and malformed.
A huge, tuberous shape hung with flesh like leper-rags staggered across the land. Swinging and slobbering its misshapen head on a delirious neck of parasitical lace, the lumbering thing emerged from behind the hills big and warty-shouldered as the hills themselves.
"What abomination is this?" Bedevere yelled, his big horse sidestepping and rolling eyes like a parade dancer.
"A dragon!" Merlin called above the enormous roar of the beast. "A dream of the sleeping Dragon—a dream-dragon!"
"The ground itself shakes beneath the might of this dream!" Bedevere protested, struggling to control his sidling mount.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 10