The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot)

by Attanasio, A. A.

"It is a dream made of cold fire!" the wizard declared. "The demons themselves have provoked it!"

  Arthor sat enthralled with fright. The dragon's breath wheezed smoke from a face like an earth-fetus. Eyes colorless as phlegm glared from the torn and grotesquely swollen head in a rage of agony as the beast shambled moaning through the scalding sunlight.

  "Daylight burns its hide!" Bedevere called out. "The dragon suffers under the sun!"

  Merlin's teeth clacked on a startled oath when the mule under him bucked once. He lay forward again and placed a hand atop its head, gentling the frightened animal. "The demons who culled this dream from the Dragon's sleep have set sunfire upon the dragons. The demons torment them into rageful acts."

  "There are more?" Bedevere gawked in horror at the leviathan's warped stride, its bedrock claws plowing the ruined fields with each step. "Are they the blight upon the land?"

  With a bone-jerking blast, the answer came: The dragon's gruesome face unflanged a jaw that opened deep as a cliff into a gorge of teeth, and blue-hot fire jetted from its maw. The blaze consumed half a dozen sheep and left oozing twists of black bone in a pool of melted earth that bubbled like tar.

  "Stop this monster, Merlin!" Arthor commanded.

  "I cannot, my lord. It is a demon's conjuration. If I break the Dragon's dream, the demons will rise out of the earth and swarm over us."

  "You say this is an apparition of cold fire." Bedevere pulled his steed around with tight reins, thwarting his animal's urgency to flee. "Stir up a tempest and blow it away."

  "No gale could stop this dragon," said Merlin with furious awe. "Cold fire it is but woven solid as rock. Behold its might!"

  The dragon's hunched shoulders unfurled to spiked wings. Tattered membranes between pinions of varnished bone snapped like whips in the updraft of its broad span. The vortex it spun toppled the running villagers.

  Arthor reached for a burlap sack upon Bedevere's jittery horse and unwrapped Excalibur. Its star blue blade mirrored the cindered world around them cold and clear as a vigilant mind.

  "What are you doing?" Bedevere gnashed, pulling with his one arm to hold his massive horse steady.

  "I have met gods before—in the hollow hills." Arthor brought his palfrey closer to Bedevere and yanked the burlap from the shield that rested atop the haunches of the warhorse. The image of the Blessed Virgin regarded him serenely. "The gods are beings of cold fire, and they fear Excalibur. Merlin drove off the Furor with this very sword."

  "Metal will disrupt the Dragon's fiery dreambodies," Merlin admitted, glowering with consternation. "But the risk is too great. Sheathe your weapon. Let us flee from here."

  "This is the evil that infests our kingdom," Arthor said, taking the shield in his left hand. "This is what you brought me here to confront, Merlin. Now I will fight it."

  "Not now, Arthor!" The wizard flung a terrified look to where the colossus bellowed, peering through the steam of its own smoldering flesh for its prey. "You must gather your warriors."

  Arthor swung his palfrey around and aimed her to charge. "That thing is going to destroy those people."

  "They are but peasants, my lord." Bedevere's stallion blocked the palfrey. "I cannot permit you to throw your life away."

  Arthor glared angrily at him and danced Straif around the frightened warhorse. "They are my people!" he shouted across his shoulder and rode off.

  "Stop him, Merlin!" Bedevere struggled to turn his big steed and charge, but the animal fought him. "By our Savior's wounds!" He leaped from the terrified stallion, drew his saber, and ran after Arthor, yelling at the wizard, "Merlin! Save the king!"

  Merlin shouted, "Halt!" and Bedevere's legs buckled under him.

  Walking his mule forward, the wizard leaned down from the animal, floppy hat falling from his head, and caught the paralyzed man by the back of his jerkin. "The king has given himself to his fate." The wizard shook the limp man. "You cannot save him."

  "You can," Bedevere moaned.

  Merlin shook his wild head of hair. "If I stop him as I stopped you, he would not be king."

  "Then stop that monstrous thing!" Bedevere struggled against the numbness saturating him, tried to run, and fell to his knees with a frustrated groan. "Surely, it will kill him!"

  "Well it may!" Merlin raised both blue-knuckled fists in despair. "If I use magic, the demons who shaped this dragon will know it is I. They will savage us, and no one will survive."

  The wizard nudged the mule out of the open into a field of gray winter grass and dragged Bedevere after him. From that partial cover, they stared transfixed at Arthor, who rode full tilt over the ashen terrain, kicking up clouds behind him. In his right hand, Excalibur spun, flashing stars of sunlight through the sulfur smoke.

  Bedevere stabbed his saber into the ground and leaned on its hilt, heart thick in his throat, mouth agape. The dragon had spotted the charging horse and swung its obscene head toward the shouting rider and his bright sword.

  Arthor pulled Straif up short and stood the palfrey on her hind legs, sword swinging over his head.

  With a bellow, the dragon veered toward him, yellow steam wafting off its saurian hulk. The villagers fallen in its shadow scrambled to their feet and ran wildly.

  The gills of the dragon's rib cage pulsed in rhythm to its roaring stride as it descended on Arthor. The king lay flat over his steed, and Merlin, who had lifted himself to his knees atop his mule, stood straight up, and said in a voice barely audible in the shuddering air, "He's talking to her! What the devil is he saying to her?"

  "What?" Bedevere croaked. "What do you say?"

  "He's talking to his horse!" Merlin wanted to turn away. The heart pumping in its darkness, drumming in his head, held him fast.

  Blue fire from the dragon's maw blasted the air like a stroke of lightning. Bedevere shouted with alarm. Merlin's unblinking stare winced, and in that blind moment, he lost sight of his humanity and became again a stranger to flesh and the dark beating of blood.

  Death was no revelation to him. He had ripped apart lives on worlds when Earth was still just nuclear ash in the star furnaces. Life was never any part of what mattered. Only void mattered to the demons. And the dancing atoms belonged to the angels who used those motes to create their illusions. Arthor had merely been the brevity of another dream ...

  "The king!" Bedevere cried when he spotted Arthor atop Straif lunging through the dragonsmoke.

  Merlin blinked. The palfrey had listened to the boy! She had not panicked under the blows of heat and bone-shaking thunder, nor under the stink, the lung-sore stink of the monster.

  With dazzling speed, Straif carried Arthor beneath the flame swath and between the dragon's massive claws. Excalibur winked like a star as the king swung it upward into the torn leather breast of the creature.

  A scream ripped to the horizons. The gigantic beast staggered upright, its cable-thick tendons stretched to their twisted limits. With one heaving throe, the dragon tore into gusty auroras and vanished.

  -)(-

  Arriving in Avalon at the end of the fifth century immersed one in a sourly sweet fragrance of sun-melted apples. Wild orchids flared colorfully among gnarly apple trees, afoot in the syrupy brown mulch of their dropped fruit.

  On every knoll stood rough-hewn menhirs—single upright stones—that pierced the flowery ground in crude circles. Swift, soft clouds hurried from the south, swirling in sunny tatters as they flew through a blue sky darker than the enclosing sea with its tusks of foam.

  Emerald butterflies jostled among the season's leavings—ruffled cabbage flowers poking through windfall apples with orange and violet intoxicants. White deer grazed upon the tall bracken between bare frames of renegade elms. And beside a turquoise lake squatted a fat, lopsided mushroom dome, brown as gingerbread.

  Mossy rock shelves led to a crooked wooden door beside which glistened red shrubs—gooseberry, wild rose, and barberry. Within the odd round hut on the shore of the green lake we dwelled—the Nine Queens of Avalon. The hut
's broad interior consisted of an earthen floor and round walls decorated in spirals and wavy lines of warm yellow, blue, and red ocher.

  Illuminated by slant rays of azure light from small, round windows high in the dome, we stately nine sat on nine block-cut thrones of rowan wood arranged in an outward-facing circle. In our presence, the reek of the dying season lingered as though we lived in the brown hallways of the forest itself.

  Who are we? And to whom are we speaking?

  The eldest of us was Rna, queen of the Flint Knives. When she lifted her veil, she showed skin white as buffed bone, a crinkled flesh that gleamed like minnow scales. Blue dusk had somehow been pressed into her temples, and though young of feature, with luxuriant hair the color of a thrush's breast, she appeared also very, very old.

  She was, in truth, nearly a hundred thousand years old. She had come to Europe with the first people. No other people had ever camped or hunted among the fog-pines of that land until Rna arrived with the Flint Knives. The angels with their faces of fire had kept watch. Through the blue doors of the glacier, they had watched, and one spring evening under the black pines they carried her off and brought her to this round hut.

  And here she sat alone for ten thousand years. The angels gave her long life, and she remained beautiful in her exile. Long sight, too, the angels gave her, and she witnessed mammoth hunts, the taking of ivory for carving, and the leather chews of the women among the caves and along the streambeds.

  Generations revolved. And after the last of the Flint Knives was dead, she observed the other tribes that followed. With the zenith sight that the angels had given her, she followed the flowing glaciers and then the ebbing ice sheets.

  And all the while, she sat invisibly beside the hunters reckoning with their stone knives, and she walked invisibly with the women listening for the bees' path to honey, and she hovered invisibly in the air around the lame ones and the blind ones coaxing music from the hollow bones ...

  One hundred centuries later, the angels brought a second queen from a nomad tribe to preside in mute witness with Rna. What does her name matter? Together they sat listening to the same birth screams and sun dances and mournful burial songs. They beheld the endless hunt. Fire stolen from a lightning-struck tree, the clans held within sacred fire pits, burning omens lost and found again and lost again. The seasons delivered their idiot packages of snow and rain. Glaciers crawled forward across the land ...

  Ten thousand years passed, and the angels brought a third queen from yet another tribe of wanderers.

  Over and over, every hundred centuries the angels installed a new queen. In our attentive trance, we nine heeded all the particular instants of human life, tirelessly watching people thrive, struggle, and die.

  With our hearts as well as our strong eyes, we gave ourselves, mourning endless murders more plausible than love, lauding countless unsung heroes and their treason to evil. And slowly, as the stubborn ground of our own hard souls did relent and accept the nascent seeds of peace, charity, and mercy, a greening time began, falteringly, in the one joined soul of all women and men.

  The furrow of our chastened ways cradled new lives. Our remorse and praise and our prayers gave significance to a hundred, a thousand generations, and gradually a spirit of reconciliation and fellowship took root in the human heart. The plow of love dug deeper. Moral understanding—-justice—common equality became important to the people.

  And then—suddenly—the time of the queens ended ...

  Who are we—we nine?

  The angels summoned no more queens to Avalon. Instead, a king would come as answer to the ten thousand years of kings before him. And Rna's soul would at last be free to return to the round of living souls that pass from form to breathing form.

  Soon, the angels would bring to this place the first male gage, the first pledge of man's rule, who would sit beside the last of the queens, Nynyve. And together with the eight queens, he would witness the indignities of man to his own kind and—worse—terrible crimes never committed during the long epoch of the queens—the indignities of man to the Earth herself.

  Indignities of a monstrous estrangement. But who are we to say? And to whom are we speaking who will listen?

  -)(-

  When the peasants who had fled the dragon returned triumphantly with Arthor to their hamlet, the devastation broke the heart of the boy-king. Not one wattle house remained standing. The fields reduced to scorched furrows, byre and stable blackened skeletons, farm animals cauterized to stinking scrog, the community no longer existed.

  The king sent a sunflash signal that brought Bors Bona and his men down from the hills, and the remainder of the day they spent rebuilding the settlement.

  At day's end, when amber sunlight fell the length of the world, Arthor lay numb with wretchedness atop Straif. The palfrey had carried him into a yard of crisped beanpoles, where the crusty ground hissed with each hoofstep.

  His thigh wound pulsed madly, enraged at the strenuous effort he had made baling thatch for the roofs with the other men, and the prayer in his mind sounded barely audible above the trumpeting din of pain: Mother Mary, why do you not hear me?

  Bors Bona, stripped of the brass armor he usually wore, stood at the yard edge, stout and burly in a dirty tunic, hands grimed from digging postholes, gray brush-cut hair strewn with hay stems. He thought it a foolish use of his men to rebuild a peasants' hamlet. Nevertheless, he had worked strenuously among them, because the king had commanded. Scores more villages, as savagely ravaged, lay between them and Camelot. Did the boy intend to bind wattle and weave thatch for all of them?

  If it came to that, Bors knew that he would obey without complaint. This king had won more than his fealty. The fierce general who had torched pagan camps and had put to the sword the women and children of the invaders had given his heart to this boy.

  The lad was brave, his principles broad, and love dwelled in his soul for all his people. Bors had known no other warlord so selflessly devoted to the idea of a united Britain save Arthor's own father, Uther Pendragon.

  Unwilling to approach his king unbidden, Bors Bona waited patiently beside a charred trellis of bean vines. Bedevere, watching discreetly from among fire-chewed hedges, advanced between the beanpoles so that Straif saw him and turned in his direction, facing Arthor toward his general.

  Spotting his warrior, the king sat up on his barebacked palfrey and nudged her across the yard. "How fares the hamlet, Bors?"

  The general did not respond at once. The sight of the king with his hair singed and eyebrows erased by dragonfire startled him. Bors had not seen Arthor's marred countenance clearly until now. Throughout the day, he had taken his orders from Merlin while the king had labored at a distance, in the one untrodden field, binding thatch.

  All the talk among the villagers had been of Arthor's triumph against the dragon, but until this moment Bors had not realized how close the boy had come to losing his life. For a hamlet! he marveled, and felt his heart swelling in his throat.

  He had observed dragons on his patrol through the hills to the north and had been appalled at their grotesque might. For a certainty, he knew he himself would not have had the courage to charge such a beast.

  He cleared his throat, and reported, "The grange hall is up and roofed, and the peasants may sleep there this night. All our provisions are at their disposal, as you have commanded, sire."

  "Thank you." Arthor wiped the cold sweat of pain from his smudged brow. "You are good to give your men to this humble task."

  "We are your men to command, sire."

  "Yet, this is not a task worthy of warriors." He nodded wearily. "I know. But I needed to know for myself that these infernal monsters can be slain and their damage undone."

  "You took a grave risk to destroy the dragon, my lord."

  Arthor looked up in dismay at the high, flame-woven clouds of dusk. "So I've heard all day from Merlin and Bedevere. Spare me further rebuke, Bors."

  "I applaud what you did, sire." Bors
nodded sincerely. "I applaud it, though I would not have had the courage to do the same."

  "Were you king, you would."

  "No, my lord." Bors waved flies from his beardless face. "I am a warrior trained to fight men. I have no strength to confront dragons."

  "Aye. I feel much the same." Arthor bit his lip, distress in his yellow eyes. "Magic frightens me."

  "Yet, you abide Merlin. He is an unnatural being, my lord." Bors read discomfort in his king's young face. "Forgive my outspokenness."

  Arthor dismissed his general's concern with a curt shake of his head. "I want my warriors to speak openly with me. And I will be open with you. I fear Merlin. I fear magic. My own sister, Morgeu ... " His voice faltered, and he covered his eyes with one hand.

  "Say no more, sire. We all know how Morgeu the Fey used her enchantments to beguile you into sin."

  "I am so ashamed, Bors." Arthor lowered the hand shielding his eyes and spoke aloud his anguish. "I am unworthy to be king with this black sin upon my soul."

  "Then send me to the North Isles," Bors insisted. "I will purge you of your wicked sister and her evil child."

  "No!" Arthor sat up straighter, and the pain in his thigh flashed so hotly he gnashed his teeth. "That will only compound my sin. You must promise me, Bors, that neither you nor anyone by your charge will do harm to my sister or our child."

  "But why, sire?" Bors glowered with bewilderment. "They are an abomination, the two of them. They should be purged at once!"

  Arthor heaved a sigh, throwing off his physical pain. "We are Christian warriors, Bors. We are not murderers."

  "This would not be murder. Morgeu has committed treason against the crown by lying with you deceptively and bringing an unholy child into the world. The law demands her execution and the destruction of her abominable offspring."

  "She deceived me, yes. But I was not king when I lay with her. She committed no crime against the crown. And I will not have her murdered." The king leaned forward. "Is that understood, Bors?"