"Yes, my lord." Bors Bona faced away, squinting into the bright declivities of twilight, jaw pulsing.
"Speak your mind, man."
"You are too good to be king."
"Too good?" The boy scratched his itchy scalp. "What does that mean?"
"Only God is good, says the Bible." Bors faced Arthor with a devout look in his bulldog visage. "You are king. You must do whatever is necessary to preserve your kingdom. Your aims and purposes are invested with an authority greater than all other men. For the good of all sometimes you must extend your claims to what others consider fraughtful or even evil."
Arthor shook his head. "Bors, you sound like Merlin now."
"I am no wizard." The general advanced a pace, frowning. "I am a warlord. I know the darker nature of our enemy, and we will not stand unless we stand by the sword."
"Have you forgotten?" Arthor squeezed his thigh muscle above the wound, wanting to throttle the nagging hurt. "I was not born a king. I was not reared in noble luxury. I've lived most of my life as a thrall, and I know the darker nature of men and the brutal intent of our enemy." With steady, pain-bright eyes, he peered deep into Bors' gray stare. "That is why I insist that my rule be something greater—something that uplifts us beyond the reach of our darker nature—something truly noble that our people and those who follow us can emulate—a reign of mercy and Christian love whose radiance will shine forth no matter what darkness follows."
Bors Bona rolled his eyes to the darkening heavens. "That is a child's dream, unsuitable to this cruel world, my lord. You will not endure long embracing that simple and charitable vision, I assure you."
"That is my vision," Arthor insisted. "And I am king. And so long as I am king, I will abide by mercy and love. That is what our Savior preached even to his last breath upon the Cross."
"And what of magic and Merlin?" Bors locked his jaw. "Does your mercy extend to wizards and demons alike?"
"Merlin serves what is holy and good. And though I like not his reliance on magic, I trust in his goodness and his fair judgment." Arthor extended a hand and clasped his general's shoulder. "You have beheld dragons in the land. You know that we contend against unspeakable forces. We need Merlin."
"As you say, my lord." Bors felt a pang of sorrow for this idealistic youth. "I pray Merlin's magic is ample enough in the weeks to come. Clearly, his magic has done your leg wound no good. And if he cannot heal so small an insult, what hope against the invaders?"
"This is an unnatural wound." Arthor's hand rested heavily on Bors Bona's shoulder. "It pierces to my soul ... and its pain pulses like a second heart, like the very heart of my shame."
"Morgeu—" The warrior's face tightened, indicating that something of the same had passed through his mind. "If you will not cast her into hell where she belongs, then what hope of breaking her curse upon you—and upon our land? What hope against King Wesc, who gathers a fearsome host in Jutland? His Foederatus legions will invade before the storm season is upon us. He will invade, my lord, and we have not the defenses to stop him on our shores. That battle will rage across Britain. And when it is done, our Saxon overlords will have little to say about mercy and Christian love."
Arthor made a fist. "Then, when it is done, we must be the victors."
"I have small hope of that, my lord. We are too few, and they are many."
"You have spoken openly with me, Bors. I thank you for that from my heart, troubled as I am." The king grasped again his throbbing leg. "Now, go and rest. Tomorrow, we will leave some men behind to finish the work here. And we will return to Camelot—and slay dragons on our way."
He pulled Straif around into the gloaming, horse and rider amalgamated to one shadow in the indigo darkness. Over his shoulder, he declared, "I have seen enough to know that Merlin spoke the truth. There is greater evil in the land than Wolf Warriors and brigands. Much as I despise magic, we must find a way to use it against our enemies."
Chapter 10:
The Seven Eyes of God
Ygrane had the faeries lead her to Merlin and found the wizard at sunset on a hilltop of orange weeds. He came alone as her faeries had instructed. The powdery ash of the burned land had colored gray his blue robes and conical hat.
When she stepped forth from the scarlet glow of the low and watery sun, his deep eyes widened slightly. "It is you." With his common sight, he noticed faeries crawling through her stubbly hair like flame moths—and the disembodied intelligences of the pale people moved through the twilit dust in ghost blurs only half-seen as though his brain had erred.
Within his demon vision, the lunatic shadows tightened outside human time to real forms, shapes fragrant with soul: in the very shine of the air itself, leafsmoke wore chameleon faces and red monkey grins. The sour incense of bog mud began moaning. And veils of dusk mist parted to reveal the Daoine Sid in their thousands and tens of thousands.
"By my holy mother!" Merlin gasped, and stepped a pace backward. He paused. Surrounded by bodies thin as dreams yet stitched with flamethreads of desire so hot they could have burned him to the roots of his six senses, he stood perfectly still. "What have you done, woman?"
"Steady yourself, Merlin." Ygrane came forward garbed in rawhide and a chemise of torn linen. She smelled of mountain mint and the deep quiet of the color blue. "I am queen of the Sid, daughter of Morrigan the Drinker of Lives. You are in my care, and no harm will come to you."
"Ygrane—Ygrane ... " Merlin removed his hat and held it limply in one hand while grasping the astonishment upon his pale brow with the other. "You have forsaken your Christian soul!"
"That is no concern of yours." Her eyes in kohl shadows shone green as streaks of sunset. "I have summoned you here for the hope of Britain's soul."
Merlin shook his head in befuddlement. His sliding eyes stared uneasily at the many frosted eyes gazing back at him from faces slick as fruits—faces floating full before him, then slipping away behind other faces of seaweed hair, smoke hair, flametip teeth, starglint teeth, a pantheon of the angry red night.
"You've given your soul to them—to the pale people. When Marcus sent word that he had seen you riding the night horse in broad daylight, I could not believe that was you. I searched for you in my crystals. I couldn't find you, not even in trance."
"I did not want you to see me." Feather-faces drifted between them and disappeared in the furnace air of sunset. "Arthor should not know."
"He knows. He saw the message from Marcus." Merlin pointed behind him to the lanternlights of the thorp in the dale below. "He is among his people, helping rethatch their roofs. This day he saved them from a dragon."
Ygrane's regal posture stammered. "You let him face the dragondream?"
"Then you know what the demons are doing in the earth to the sleeping Dragon?"
"Of course I know. The Sid have told me everything. The demons are bound by the Furor's magic and ravage Britain with nightmares culled from the dragondream." An ache of maternal fear for her son choked her silent for a moment, and she lifted her chin remonstratively. "You were foolish to let Arthor face such terror. If he dies, everything we struggled and sacrificed for all these years is lost. Britain will be shredded among the warlords again—and the Furor's tribes will sweep over us."
"This is so." Merlin fitted his hat back on his long, bald skull. "Arthor is my king. I cannot command him."
"You are sworn to protect him."
"With my very life. Kyner reared him a good Christian, and he is averse to magic. I needed to convince him that we must use magic as well as valor to protect Britain."
Ygrane nodded, and the faeries blew around her like bright spores. "He is averse to magic because of his strong faith."
"And his sister's betrayal." Merlin did not hide the bitter unhappiness in his voice. "Her incest magic has damaged his very soul."
"Again, Merlin, you failed to protect the king. How could you let Morgeu get so close to him?"
"My lady, you are mistaken if you believe I am infallible."
The witch-queen sighed and turned so that the setting rays sliced across the notches of her profile. "Yes, you're right, Merlin. We are shaped by our flaws." The wizard could almost see her thoughts moving the way fire thinks, blazing with clarity and attached to forms yet reaching for the formless—knowing she ultimately bore responsibility for Arthor's life and with it all the attendant paradox of suffering. "I fear for my son."
"That is why you have summoned me here—and why you have abandoned our faith in the love and salvation of our Savior.”
She faced him full again, and her eyes were all pupil. "I am determined to recover the Holy Graal for my son."
"You know where it is?"
"I will find it."
Merlin stepped closer, his stare avid. "Where is it?"
"I don't know," she lied. She dared not tell him what she knew, for Merlin was only his human name. His demon cohorts might easily hear his thoughts and warn the dwarf Brokk and his master the Furor that she was coming. "I will return the Graal to Camelot."
"If you can, you must." Merlin wanted to reach into her mind, to discover more about what she knew. He restrained himself, fearful of her power of soul-snatching madness, a power good to dread. "The Graal is an antenna, an implement for receiving and focusing cosmic energies ... "
"I did not call you here to tell me what I already know." Her hand took his arm and gently, as if drawing the lonely near, pulled him close. "I am again queen of the Sid, and I am privy to knowledge that can protect my son and all Britain for his lifetime. Know this, Merlin: High upon a remote branch of the World Tree, there grows a singular blossom cultivated by the old gods in the age before the Fauni or even the Sid dwelled in Yggdrasil. It is known among the pale people as the Vanir Lotus."
"I have never heard of this blossom."
Ygrane's slim smile floated palely in the darkening air. "Nor has the Furor or any of the Aesir gods. The Sid stumbled upon it only after having dwelled in the Storm Tree for many years. And it meant nothing to them then. Now that they have endured life in the hollow hills all these centuries and have become servants of the Dragon, they have realized the magical purport of the Vanir Lotus."
Her lips approached his ear, and a dense smell of summer rusting to autumn dizzied him. "If a single teardrop from the Dragon is immixed with the nectar of the Vanir Lotus, the elixir that results fuses the most high and the most low of this planet. Whosoever partakes of it will embody the strength of Yggdrasil's root and branch. No one—not even the Furor and all his Rovers of the Wild Hunt—can do him harm. And if the one who collects the Dragon's teardrop and blends it with the nectar of the Vanir Lotus is king, then by the magic of emblem and correspondence, his entire kingdom receives infallible protection for the life span of that king after he drinks of the elixir."
"Can this be?" Merlin surged with hope. No reply came. Only a dark wind pressed against him where Ygrane had been.
-)(-
Gawain of fourteen years and Gareth of thirteen climbed through the branches of the apple trees at the edge of the piazza better to view their father, Lot, wrapped in his white bearskin cloak asleep in his large oak chair. "Did Mother put a spell upon him?" the youngest asked.
"Yes, she has blessed him with sleep." Gawain propped himself against a knobby trunk. A large lad, muscular and broad of shoulder, he spoke in a mature voice, "He has earned his rest."
"No, Gawain." Gareth, slighter yet as freckled and russet blond as Gawain, perched on a smaller bough above his brother. "Did Mother put a spell upon him to forget us?"
Gawain shook his head, though he was not sure. "Mother would not do that. Our father is old, Gareth. Nigh on fourscore years."
"He remembered us before the snows melted. How could he forget us so quickly?"
"The war. He fought hard for Uncle Arthor. His strenuous effort exhausted what remained of him." Gawain eyed his mother Morgeu emerging from the doorway to the nursery, holding their baby brother Mordred to her breast, and he stiffened.
She stared directly at them. Though their covert of apple bramble would have rendered them invisible from her vantage, they both knew she saw them. "Come on, Gareth. We'd best return to our studies. No dinner if we can't complete our ciphers and write our verses."
Morgeu met her sons as they climbed down from the apple trees. Both boys startled, surprised that she had crossed the piazza that quickly with the babe in her arms. Before either of them could say a word, she waved one hand before their faces and passed them into a waking dream.
For a moment, she hesitated to fulfill her intent. Beguiling her boys did not please her. Looking at Gawain's freckled youth already relenting to the ferocious hawk's face of his adulthood filled her simply and naturally with pride. Gareth—still more boy than adolescent—presented features clear and light as the weight of a flame.
Unhappily, she had to act. She had to use both Gawain and Gareth and at once. The incest magic she had provoked two springs past had its own horrific energy that would not be denied now that she had seen the powerful Graal vessel in the crafty hands of Brokk the smith and weaponsmaster of the Aesir gods.
Her incest magic wanted the Graal, for Mordred, for madness itself, and she would try to take it from Brokk. She would risk her life and Mordred's for this unspeakable need. The evil she had wrought against her brother now bound her as well.
To fulfill her ambition, she had to distract Arthor and his warriors from the true Graal. She would use her own children to do this, for they were her own flesh and easiest to manipulate. They would carry to Camelot the illusion that God had hidden the true Holy Grail and only the most noble of men could reclaim it.
The quest would scatter Arthor's warriors across Britain and offer opportunities for her to destroy them while she sought the actual Graal that Brokk held. With Arthor's best generals driven to distraction by this deceitful quest and perhaps even killed, she would weaken the king and do him crucial harm.
"Boys, you have seen the true Grail, the Holy Grail," she told them in a voice with a texture of moonlight. "Not the Graal that you saw in Camelot. That Graal, with its chrome jacket and gold filigree, is the false Graal. The genuine Grail is made of wood. It is the true cup from which Jesus drank wine at his last meal with his disciples before the Romans crucified him."
Gawain and Gareth stared at her softly in the cloudshift of late afternoon. They loved her with a grief hard as gravel, and her voice smoothed all their sharp hurts.
"Behind the apple garth, you beheld the true Grail floating above the six-foot grass, floating in a sunfiash as off a lake. But there was no lake. Only the sunflash and the floating cup of wood and a voice of blue hugeness, the voice of the sky, that spoke, 'Behold the sacred vessel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This is the true Grail, sequestered in Britain, where only the pure of heart and most sincere of faith may find it. Return the Holy Grail to Camelot and the blight of the land shall be healed.'"
"We are Celts! Not Christians," young Gareth declared proudly.
Morgeu smiled with shameless guile, and no tenderness broke in her heart when she said, "The sky has said to you, 'The true Grail is revealed to you both for you are pagans. How else are the other Warriors of the Round Table to know this vision is authentic? The messengers of a Christian vision are pagans. What you see is not of your faith and therefore all the more valid. Go now and inform Arthor and his warriors of your mystic encounter.'"
Gawain and Gareth swallowed hard, accepting this tranced moment with dread, grimacing as if drinking dark medicine.
-)(-
Merlin said nothing to Arthor of his meeting with Ygrane. He wanted the king safely returned to Camelot before discussing the dangerous hope that the witch-queen had revealed. Arthor instead intended to rally his warriors and track down the other fire-breathing dragons devastating his kingdom.
"Swordplay is not sufficient to end this plague of dragons," Merlin argued hotly to the king in the hamlet they had helped rebuild. They stood beside a well where Bors Bon
a's men had created a makeshift derrick to dredge the ash-clogged water table. "For every dragon you slay, the demons within the earth will cull two more from the sleeping Dragon's dreams."
"I refuse to believe that magic is the only way to break this evil assault on our land," Arthor insisted stubbornly. His previous day's attack against the dragon had singed his hair to his scalp. "Exorcism and the ministrations of the Church will not avail against these demons?"
"Easier to pray the sun backward on its heavenly course, my lord," said the wizard. "These demons are not theological creatures subject to priestly command. They are older than time and subject to cosmic laws so wide of our faith we must call them magic. Camelot itself is designed on those cosmic principles. Let me show you how we can use your fortress city to thwart these demons and restore Britain."
Arthor, though still sorely troubled, resigned himself to Merlin's argument and did not hesitate any longer. During the day's ride, his thoughts returned to the dragonfight, to the sulfur stink and the beast's radiant flesh, iridescent behind those scabrous peelings. It must have been a beautiful creature before the sun's blast drove it mad.
At night, asleep in the watchful forest at the foothills of Cymru, the air around him throbbing with owl calls, the king dreamed that Straif hesitated. Dragonfire struck, and blue flames erased him in searing pain.
Arthor woke in a sweat, and the hauntful feeling of the nightmare polluted him with his fear of magic. What if Straif had not heeded him? What if the magic of the dragon had been more persuasive to the animal than his soothing words?
The low, throbbing pain of his wounded leg, the vacuity of his prayers, and this fear of magic, of Morgeu and Merlin, too, and his own mother Ygrane—all this troubled him until Camelot finally hove into view.
The strange beauty of the fortress revealed something new to him each time he let the parabolic walls and twelve-sided spires touch his mind. His pain dimmed. He wanted Merlin to reveal more of the citadel's secrets.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 12