"The magic I needed to bind those demons was so much more than any talisman could harness. But did she care?" He dropped his boots and meshed his thick knuckles like gears. "My ingenuity lies in uniting the strengths of many gods and melding a power that not even the demons can defy. Did she praise me for my daring? No. She berated me for endangering Thunder Red Hair and Beauty."
"Trouble your mind no more with this." Keeper of the Dusk Apples sat beside him on the large rock among the pale trees like wands. She rested her head on his shoulder, and her gold-streaked hair smelled sweet as a meadow. "Take a moment's refuge in my arms. You will be stronger for it. Come." She drew him down to the red moss floor of the forest in a dell of dense grasses seventy leagues above the turning world.
-)(-
Mother Mary, I fear for my soul. Grasshoppers crackle in the weeds. It's nigh on autumn and no rains. I have prayed to you time and again to protect the few grain boats we bought so dearly in Gaul. And each time, the Saxons have caught them at sea as if the devil were receiving my prayers instead of your grace. Forgive me. I am cantankerous these days. My leg blazes like a Yule log.
Mother, help me.
-)(-
"Democritus was right, you know," Loki whispered from behind Fra Athanasius on the sumpter mule. "Atoms and the void—that's all there is. The precious light itself is made of little bits, restless little bits that never stop moving. And even space, so-called empty space, is composed of tiny parts, threads and knots so minuscule that familiar space around us appears smooth and empty. Space and time is one thing, you must understand, and it is not continuous, I assure you. It is granular, an effervescence of unbelievably small geometries."
Fra Athanasius shrunk inside his cassock, hood drawn up over his curly head, trying to ignore the devilish god at his back. Under his breath, he recited prayers and Bible passages and paid no heed to what the demonic voice said.
When Urien announced the appearance of Camelot through the trees, the legate gave thanks to the Almighty that his mind had not been seduced to confusion by the pagan dissembler. He squinted to see their destination, and his weak eyes offered him a blurry image of a large, lustrous stone edifice among the blunt mountains of Cymru.
Once through the massive pylons, Loki leaped from the mule and was gone. Fra Athanasius felt his lungs expand with relief. And then a fanfare of horns announced his arrival in the outer bailey. A small crowd had gathered to greet the papal legate. Urien and his pagan warriors immediately dispersed among the market stalls while grooms led the weary, dusty mounts to the stables.
The myopic scribe stood awkwardly before the assembly of faithful. He gaped until greeted by a deep, resonant voice that he heard as much with his chest as his ears, "Emissary of our Holy Father, welcome to Camelot. I am the king's counselor—Merlin. This is our bishop Riochatus, who will assist you in your ecclesiastical offices while you are among us."
Athanasius peered blearily at the indistinct figures and knelt before the crozier-shape. "Bishop Riochatus! You honor me more than I deserve! The misfortune of my own beloved bishop—" The monk swallowed hard. "The terrible loss of my master has untimely bestowed this charge upon me. Blessed Riochatus—you have won renown from Arles to Ravenna for your staunch efforts to carry the good news of our Savior among the pagans of Britain. My lord Victricius, whose soul now resides with God in heaven, oft spoke of you as an equal to Patrick of the Gaels and Non of Cymru—a saint of the Church."
Riochatus, stooped and doddering under his mitre and leaning heavily on his crozier, dismissed this flattery with a sputter and bid the priests on either side lift the legate to his feet. When the papal emissary stood erect, the bishop spoke in an enfeebled tone so small and bodiless that Athanasius almost toppled forward bending to hear.
"Blessed Victricius remains a true prince of our Church in his heavenly station," Riochatus wheezed. "We are deeply saddened that the Most High has called him from us so soon. Please, do not kneel or bow to me. Lift your head, dear Athanasius. I am your servant. You carry the mandate of the Holy Father and the love of our Mother Church for our island kingdom."
The cavernous voice of the counselor resounded again, this time from behind, startling the legate and jolting him upright. "In anticipation of your arrival, I have prepared for you a small gift. If you would humor me for a moment, please—" Merlin placed a wafer of glass to Athanasius' left eye, and inquired, "What, sir, do you see through this ocular crystal?"
The legate's mouth jarred loose. With stunning clarity, he faced haggard, grizzle-bearded Riochatus in his gold-and-ecru ecclesiastic robes and mitre. Every blue knuckle glowed in the aged hand gripping the shepherd's crook. Around him, seven priests attended in the gray, brown, and black cassocks of their individual orders.
"Urien's messages mentioned your weak eyes," Merlin continued, removing the glass disk. "I took a reasonable guess about the curvature of the prism necessary to correct for your blurred vision. We can make minor adjustments later. For now, I believe these will serve you well."
Reaching around from Athanasius' back, Merlin fitted two lenses framed in gold wire over the legate's eyes and hooked the armatures behind the emissary's ears. Vision sharpened with miraculous immediacy and force, and Athanasius gasped aloud.
Before him, the devout crowd stood in crisp and colorful detail: Riochatus with every gray whisker aglint in the bright sun's rays; the seven priests revealing yellow, snaggled teeth with broad smiles at his astonishment; and four lancers in the king's black leather cuirasses embossed with eagles, sunshine glazing their bronze helmets.
He could have stared a long time into each of their exquisite faces and gazed into the very mirrors of their souls so clear in their watchful eyes. But his newly sharpened vision pulled beyond them to the citadel that loomed above.
Initially, he was not sure what he saw. The geometries baffled him. The rampart walls curved, devoid of masonry seams. Atop them, stone shells—chevron parapets—each twice as tall as a man, fretted the battlements. Trying to discern their function filled his head with a meaty ache.
The spires that lofted into the blue afternoon carried pieces of sun. Among the towers' many facets, daystars burned, as though angels stood in the turret windows.
When he turned to the counselor Merlin, all thoughts fled. His heart a frantic movement, he stepped back two quick paces, repelled by a face of Death with diamond eyes.
One finger raised, the wizard stopped Athanasius' scream in his throat before it reached his mouth. The scribe did not see the glorious light of that finger but felt its warmth just behind his face.
On the walk across the bailey to the king's court, the wizard put his arm across the legate's shoulders and told the astonishing and improbable story of his origins as the demon Lailoken and his birth as a human in the womb of Saint Optima.
Athanasius listened attentively. His soul smoothed like a linen sheet by the wizard's strong voice, he wholly accepted the veracity of this miraclous account. At the central ward, before a tall fountain of green tourmaline, where waterspouts emptied onto interlayered basins all carven with images of dolphins, salmon, squid, conger eels, and mermaids, Merlin took his leave.
"Anon we shall speak further on matters of spirit and soul and their opposites whirling to one center." With a fateful smile in his grisly countenance, Merlin hurried away before Athanasius could reply. Riochatus and his entourage approached, ushering the emissary into the main hall.
The king received the legate in a monumental chamber vaulted by a dome more glass than stone and ablaze with solar fire. Though the sun had already passed below the colossal battlements, yet sunshine dazzled windows and skylights.
Between high-manteled open hearths, tall casements exposed a panoramic of the fortress city's luxurious and enigmatic architecture: Buttress terraces of Irish yews banked an inner ward of roof ridges, cottage gables, turrets, and airy spires. Arched footways joined bastion upon wider bastion between which fell artful and artificial waterfalls. These cas
cades fed tiered households with running water and powered fountains in diverse yards, courts and gardens.
The Round Table—ashen silver as a storm cloud backlit by sunlight—occupied the center of the hall. Its high-backed ebony chairs, carved with dragons and unicorns, sat empty. Aromatic sandalwood pillars inlaid with gold encircled the great studio, separating the perimeter into individual alcoves decorated with statuary and hangings of figured silk.
Spectators filled these enclaves—churchmen, merchants and their families, warriors and their attendants—all gathered to witness the arrival of the pope's legate. A sennet of brass horns from the musicians announced his entry.
With his restored vision, Athanasius skittered his attention among the alcoves, wanting to focus on everything at once. Never had he beheld such sumptuous appointments: settles upholstered in leather of peacock blue, silver lanterns of topaz lights with chains twined in a verdure of creeping plants, red-lacquered doorways jambed by jasper columns—and the people attired in a magnificence of divers-colored textiles cut to Roman and Celtic fashions.
The music ceased. The emissary's bespectacled eyes alighted upon a throne of dark wood cut with the image of a dragon and a unicorn fused to one fabulous creature. The king who sat on that strange seat was, as foretold, a boy. He wore the gold chaplet of monarchy and regal garb of deep indigo blue with figurings of crimson. But his hackled hair, rosy cheeks, and thick jaw devoid of beard could more plausibly have belonged to a yeoman.
Athanasius went down on one knee. The boy-king admonished him to rise, and as he stood, his sharpened eyes fell upon the one-armed warrior standing behind the dais vigilantly watching the assemblage in the alcoves. Blood shrank from the legate's face, then rushed back in a flush of shame. At once, he dropped to his knee again, hiding his consternation.
"Legate, rise," the king repeated, and leaned forward, almost standing to help the stricken emissary to his feet. "What troubles you in my presence?"
"Sire—the soldier attendant upon you at your dais... I do recognize him." Athanasius spoke in a voice thick with disgust. He dared look again and squinted his gaze, ascertaining that the wizard's lenses did not deceive him. "There is Bedevere of the Odovacar."
Hearing his name, Bedevere stepped forward. "I am Bedevere of the fallen kingdom of the Odovacar, former servant of our Holy Father, Pope Gelasius and also of his servants Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, and his brother-in-law, Clovis, the Merovingian king."
"You recognize me not, Bedevere?" Athanasius' upper lip curled with revulsion. "A score and ten years ago, I served as notarius—civil notary—for the emperor Julius Nepos in Dalmatia when the holy bishop and now blessed saint Severinus excommunicated you. I am the very scribe who recorded the minutes of your hearing before the ecclesiastic judges."
Bedevere shrank where he stood. His face drained of color as hot murmurs ran through the assembly.
"Excommunicated?" Arthur gave a bewildered look to his personal guard. "What was the offense?"
Bedevere remained silent, his head hung low.
"Sire, his offense is unspeakable." Athanasius leveled an expression of horror upon the king. "I am shocked to find him in your presence—for you are at an age still prime to be corrupted by his evil."
"Never!" Bedevere shouted. "My offense was thirty years ago! I have redeemed myself since in numerous righteous battles for our Savior. Gelasius himself accepted my sword in his defense full aware of the ban upon me."
"And the Christian monarch you now serve? Has this young monarch any cognizance of your heinous offense." Athanasius shook his head grimly and faced the perplexed king. "My lord, my first responsibility as legate of our Holy Father is to warn you that this—this swordsman who serves at your right hand serves Satan as well. The Church has condemned him for a sodomite."
-)(-
Merlin descended slick and uneven stalagmite steps into his grotto beneath Camelot. The cavern, illuminated by an array of small glass spheres that burned butyl blue, gleamed. Hung from among the stone teeth of the high ceiling, these spheres focused white light to a dozen rays that crisscrossed the haze.
Their spotlights revealed stone niches where tar-oil burners blazed under galley pots and alembics. Large jointed pipes and coiling copper tubes connected hissing brass kettles to numerous carboys and stained-glass jars that percolated with incandescent distillates.
"I know you are in here!" the wizard shouted, and his angry voice echoed across the uvular dome and along the ribbed walls of the cavern. "I smelled your electric stink leagues distant. Come forth, trickster!"
From inside a tall, primeval stone carving of the Original Mother, Her features rubbed smooth an epoch ago on the glacial moraines, Loki emerged. He removed his floppy black hat. His bald, rune-marked head nodded congenially, and he gestured at a mural of archaic starcharts hung between gleaming stalactites. "Ah, Lailoken, the maps of mortal destiny writ large upon the sky—do these celestial signatures apply to demons and angels, as well?"
The wizard strode angrily to the god, seized him by his shoulders, and shook him to a blur of voltage. Swiping an amber wand from a table-rock cluttered with pliers and tongs, he pierced the fox fire. Quickly he carried it to a maroon stump, a lode of hematite iron. Then, robes flapping and hat flying from his head, he rushed to a stone shelf, grabbed a bell jar, and hurriedly placed it over the pulsing flame.
"Done!" Merlin huffed, and stepped back with a proud laugh. "A small aeon shall pass before you slip these shackles, Aesir god."
Loki's face formed within the bell jar, fetal and bloated. "Lailoken, I have not come to you in strife."
"So you say, Liar."
"If I had meant you harm, demon, would I have presented myself to you so directly?" He opened his tiny arms guilelessly. "Do you not think I knew you would smell my body of lightning from leagues distant? I relied upon it. That is why I sought refuge with Urien and his war party. I have come not in secrecy from you, remarkable Lailoken, but as emissary from the Aesir gods." His bulbous head rolled forward and pressed his scrawled scalp against the glass jar. "Read the futhorc upon my pate. Read it. These are inscriptions to ward off detection by my brother and all the Rovers of the Wild Hunt. I am here with you unbeknownst to them."
Merlin glanced at the runes and confirmed that they spelled shapeshifter incantations meant to hide Loki from the earthward gaze of anyone in the Storm Tree. "Why? Why have you put yourself so easily in my hands, Loki? You are brother to the Furor, the sworn enemy of my king."
"That is precisely why I am here with you. For years I have disagreed with my blood brother's arrogant nostalgia for the past. And now I require your help, Lailoken."
"You will not call me by that name." The lanky old man picked up his hat and dusted it off. "I am Merlin, the king's counselor."
"But it is Lailoken who can help me, for I am come to ally myself with the Fire Lords—the angels of your king's lore."
"The Fire Lords are not mine to command."
"Surely not." Loki's disembodied head stared passionately from under a halo of silver electricity. "You are, however, a demon they have favored. Was it not the Fire Lords who lured you into the womb of Saint Optima and wove you a human body? With your help, I would ally myself with them."
Merlin donned his hat and sat on a stob green with malachite. "Why would an Aesir god want anything at all to do with the Fire Lords, whom they despise?"
"I do not despise them, because I know they will have ultimate victory in this world." Loki's dark eyes expanded plaintively. "The Fire Lords are the future. The Furor's ambition to hold them at bay is futile. The knowledge of numbers and alphabets that they have brought to our world has forever changed us—gods and mortals alike. The primeval age that the Furor loves is long gone, never to return."
"To what end would you betray the Aesir, your own clan?" Merlin crossed one leg atop the other and rested his chin on the prop of his palm, curious. "To what end, Loki?"
"Not all the Aesir share my brother's
fanaticism for the days of yore. Many of us know that change is inevitable. The Christian faith will soon enough supplant us. Science—that is the knowing that the Fire Lords gave to the Sumerians and Egyptians, to the Chaldeans and Babylonians. Each of these peoples used it to know greatness for their moment of history. Science is what made the Fauni of the Greeks and the Romans strong enough to conquer the world for their moment. Now the Angles and Saxons want that power. We want the future and our moment of glory."
"You will serve the Fire Lords?" Merlin threw up both hands. "Say no more. Whatever you say, I will not believe you."
"I do not ask you to believe. I have come for your help, not your faith."
"What help do you want of me?"
Loki lifted his rune-marked face and closed his marked eyelids. "I want the sword that Brokk forged when the Furor was exiled to walk the earth. I want the sword Lightning. The Fire Lords stole this celebrated blade from Brokk for your king. I want the sword that you call Excalibur."
Merlin uncrossed his legs and stiffened. "That is the king's sword."
"It is the Furor's weapon stolen to serve your king." Loki's eyes flashed open and held the wizard's adamant stare with determination. "I want it back. With the sword Lightning in my hand, I will lead a revolt against the Furor and take Yggdrasil for those who serve the future instead of the past."
"Excalibur is not mine to give. And even if I could, why would I?"
"To save your king from the wrath of the Furor." Loki's visage expanded to one dark staring eye. "The sword Lightning is the first weapon that Brokk fashioned for my blood brother in his war against the Old Ones. The dwarf proportioned it for a human hand, because in those early fugitive days our chieftain could safely assume no greater stature. Now he is a giant among gods—and the sword still fits a human hand, this dangerous sword forged of diamond-edged steel, this lethal sword Lightning designed to rip the waveform flesh of gods as savagely as it tears human bodies. Put that sword in my hand, and Yggdrasil becomes a home to gods friendly to your king and to Britain."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 14