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

by Attanasio, A. A.

  Merlin's mind reeled at the possibility that this god fabled for his deceits and betrayals spoke sincerely. "How can I trust you, Loki, whose name means Liar?"

  "Trust begins here—with me putting myself in your hands." The god's face shrank to dewdrop size. "That is why I came to Camelot with the king's warlord Urien, to place myself in your hands and trust that we can make an alliance."

  Merlin stood up from the brassy green rock and stroked his forked beard. Loki had arrived at a destinal moment for the kingdom. With his crucial help the king might actually have a chance at claiming the Vanir Lotus—or ... not. This was the Liar, infamous even among demons.

  For a long while, the wizard gazed languidly into the calm light of the nearest oil lamp, one of a dozen glass orbs dangling by fine chains from the carinated ceiling. Its flame like an autumn leaf floated on fuel clear as water.

  No hope in fear, he heard his mother, Saint Optima, advise from far back in his soul, and he stepped to the trapped god and removed the bell jar.

  When he took away the amber wand, a thousand fiery snowflakes swirled up from the hematite stump and solidified to Loki in his black garb sitting cross-legged on the maroon rock.

  His fine-looking, stenciled face smiled without rancor. "I knew I could trust you, Merlin. You were a demon once. You know the uses of fear. But trust, that's something new for you, isn't it? And we all want what's new."

  "I cannot give you Excalibur," Merlin said flatly, and sat down again on the malachite stump. "Not unless the king gives it to me first. And he won't. Unless I trick him. And I won't trick him. Unless you help him take from the World Tree something more valuable than the sword."

  Loki's scrawled eyebrows lifted inquisitively. "Are you going to scare me?"

  Merlin told the god about his encounter with the witch-queen and what she had revealed to him of the Vanir Lotus.

  "Are you mad?" Loki's bald head shook with disbelief. "You will never get your boy into Yggdrasil without the Rovers of the Wild Hunt knowing. Put out of your mind climbing with him to some distant bough. The Aesir are hunters. They will track you down like animals. And when they catch you, they will nail you to the Tree and feed you alive to the ravens."

  "You will distract them."

  Loki hid his face in his hands. "Just put the bell jar over me again and forget I'm here."

  "The sword Lightning is not easily won, Loki." The wizard stood. "If you want the king's sword, you will have ample share of his risk."

  Loki peeked through his gloved fingers. "When do we begin?"

  -)(-

  For ninety thousand years and more, people wandered the earth and their dreams fitted the contours of the earth perfectly. Whirlwinds of light, the people moved upon the open hand of the earth. When they died, they disappeared completely, vanishing like dreams into the very depths of emptiness.

  Then the Fire Lords taught the people numbers and alphabets. The people learned spelling—and with these spells, the world changed forever. Dreams became bigger than the contours of the earth. People still died, but they did not disappear completely anymore. Their dreams remained behind.

  The Fire Lords placed we Nine Queens here on Avalon to witness this change that came upon the earth with the first kings. History is their enduring spell, etched in fired clay, chiseled in basalt, inked onto parchment, printed across bond paper, carried in binary patterns of electrons. We have seen these spells change the earth we once knew into a world of dreams we do not recognize.

  Why are we here?

  Why else but to be with you? We are in your spell, this most intimate spell: the spell of reading the written line that carries us deeper into your light.

  Chapter 12:

  Love like Wrath

  "Are you a sodomite, Bedevere?" King Arthur had dismissed the valets and now stood alone with his bodyguard in the blue tiled studio behind the central hall.

  Bedevere faced the king with his back to the spired windows. Along the armless side of his body, rose trellises framed the bishop Riochatus and his clerics, marching with Fra Athanasius to chapel.

  "My lord, you dismissed the papal emissary too hastily." Bedevere cast an apprehensive look out the windows at the colorfully attired crowd filing through the garden maze. "Without the approval of Athanasius, our requests for grain and livestock will be denied. Famine will devastate hundreds of communities across Britain."

  The husky boy stepped forward angrily, winced, and leaned against an oaken chair. His right leg ached into the bone. "Are you a sodomite or not?"

  Bedevere straightened. "I am."

  The king sagged into the chair, his pallid face expressionless. When he spoke, his voice anguished, "For over a year—you lied ... "

  "I never lied to you, my lord."

  "By omission—you lied!" The hurt in his stare twisted to anger. "We are humiliated—shamed before the entire court—learning this intimate truth in a public denouncement!"

  Bedevere dropped his chin to his chest.

  "You hid your passion well, and well you should have," Arthur said grimly. "I am a Christian king."

  "You are my king, and I revere that truth with my very life." He addressed Arthur's boots with a stricken look. "No hint of my feelings would ever have been known to you had not the legate made the issue public."

  "By God's wounds, man, how can you speak so to me?" The king pounded both fists on the arms of the chair. "What of shame? Have you not given yourself to Christ?"

  Bedevere's throat tightened. "You cannot imagine the intensity of my love for our Savior. I love him with a fiery ardor that wracks my bones."

  Arthur sat back in his chair as if shoved. "You are shameless!"

  "No, sire." Bedevere looked up sharply, gaze firm. "I know shame. But not for what God made of me."

  "God?" The king's mouth hung open, voiceless. He measured the man before him, astonished at his apparent sincerity. "It is Satan who has corrupted your soul, Bedevere."

  Bedevere lifted his eyebrows sadly. "When I was your age, so I believed. I tormented myself with fasts and endless prayer vigils, striving with all my might to drive the evil one from my soul. It took years for me to realize—there is no more evil in my soul than in any of us created of mortal clay. I am simply a man, a man who loves men."

  Arthur could not believe his ears. "That is abhorrent."

  "Is it, my lord? Our Savior never spoke against it. He taught us to love one another."

  "Not in the way you love. In the eyes of God, that is a love like wrath."

  "I love with my heart, as did our Savior—as do you. Never have I inflicted my desire on anyone, neither by force of will nor cunning."

  "I cannot believe that God has put such desire in your soul, Bedevere." The king sagged in his chair, shaking his head. "It is unnatural."

  Bedevere nodded softly at this brutal censure and its inevitable consequence. "I will leave Britain at once."

  Arthur gnashed his teeth. "No."

  "The other warlords—the people of the land—now everyone knows my heart." The warrior shielded his eyes with his one hand, twisting inside to have met ire and disappointment immixed in the young king's face. "I must leave your kingdom."

  "Exile?" Hues of blood patched the king's cheeks, yet his brow gleamed white as stone. "After you've slandered my reign and implicated me in your sin, do you think I will release you?"

  "My lord—" Bedevere looked up, baffled. "Of course, you must release me. Never have you executed or imprisoned a subject. You are the true Christian king that the Holy Father seeks. To win his blessing—and his grain—you must denounce and banish me."

  Arthur sank deeper in the chair, pulled by the weight of a decision.

  Bedevere unclasped his sword belt and offered the weapon.

  The boy-king stared past this gesture with a peculiar sad outrage.

  The sword belt slipped through Bedevere's fingers, and he said, "Do I detect behind your hot dismay, cool pity?" His bewildered look pressed to a frown. "You think—
you think I am humid in my heart? You think to redeem me through charity and mortification. Sire!" His mouth worked soundlessly a moment, then said, "I will not be changed. I am not infirm of soul."

  "Be silent." The king curtly waved him aside. "I can't think on this now. Pick up your weapon and get out."

  Kneeling on one knee, his hand atop his sword belt, Bedevere did not move or speak for a tense moment. Finally, he dared announce, "Perhaps you should execute me, my lord. Athanasius will surely deny you the pope's grain—thousands of families will suffer in the months ahead. Many will die. I am to blame."

  "Your sins have caught up with you at a crucial time for Britain," Arthur said quietly, and pressed a knuckle into the ache at the center of his brow. "I know about sin. Fair breeds foul. Morgeu—Mordred—and now you, Bedevere? I can't think on all this at once." He brusquely pointed to the door. "Leave me alone. Stand watch outside. Keep my prayers undisturbed."

  Head bowed, lashed by the king's silence, Bedevere exited.

  -)(-

  Mother Mary! Arthur cried out from his soul. Carnal sins pollute my life and my kingdom! Evil propels us on an infinite course. You must pray for us, Mother—or we are damned.

  -)(-

  The Furor heard Arthur's cry. The dim, mortal voice echoed like a prophetic haunting, a summons from his blind side, tattered with echoes.

  ... pray for us ...

  The chief of the Wild Rovers was surprised to hear this voice from the earlobe amulet he had stitched to his vest. He had climbed to Fallen Wing, the highest twig on Raven's Branch, the tallest bough of Yggdrasil. Amulets rarely held their power so close to the abyss. For as far as he could see around him, silver sands rippled under stellar winds and nothing living stirred. Overhead, constellations hung their lamps in the void.

  ... we are damned.

  Was that truly King Arthur's voice—or Lucifer's?

  The Furor had felt a jolt in his soul while lying with his mistress, an abrupt torque of mood that could only have come from disturbing the power he had borrowed from the sleeping gods. He had climbed to Fallen Wing alone to find out if his demons remained bound to his magic.

  He expected treachery from demons. But he had not asked for help from the Rovers of the Wild Hunt. This was a chieftain's risk, and belonged to him alone.

  Crags of black clouds towered against the star mist. Their thunderhead darkness stretched for distances so unreckonable that light itself took centuries and millennia to cross them. Infinitesimal, an atom smaller than sight, the Furor stood before the House of Fog.

  He called for the demons he had bound, and cold rushed out of that immeasurable pit of smoldering darkness, brushing back his beard and flipping the brim of his wide leather hat. The black wind poured into his head with knowledge from the demons, who had been driven out of the hollow hills by the Daoine Sid.

  "With the Dragon asleep, the Sid are feeble ghosts," the Furor said to the pit. "They could not have driven you out. There must have been a Fire Lord among them."

  The one-eyed god did not wait for a reply from the gulf. He turned and hurried away across the whispering sands. He leaped from Fallen Wing like a rainbow.

  If there was a Fire Lord below, he would find that radiant being, and the angel would tell him why they had come with their spells of numbers and alphabets. For the sake of all time to come, the angel would tell him.

  -)(-

  Under a cloven moon with the northern sun smoldering like an ember, Morgeu the Fey wandered a desolate field. Torchlights of the black slate fastness that she shared with her husband Lot glinted on the ruddy horizon.

  When she had hiked into the remote interior far enough from the watchful eyes of Lot's warriors and the ever-curious witnesses of the fishing hamlets, she called for the Furor: "All-Father, One-Eye-All-Seeing, Furor and Rune-Master, Frenzied God of the Wild Hunt, Sacrifice of the Storm Tree, come to me! I who birthed her father call to you. Come, First of All Magicians. Come to me that I may offer you alliance!"

  Morgeu felt forced to this desperate summons. Her spies in Camelot reported that her brother had received Selwa of the wealthy house of Syrax, a seductress who had proposed marriage to the king. That news inflamed Morgeu, and her breath jetted forcefully in the cold.

  An agony of frustration cramped her. Everything she had done to destroy Uther's son had come to nothing. All the good in her life that she had sacrificed to defeat Arthur had been twisted and damaged by her incest magic: her husband, her children ...

  A visceral shriek flung spittle against the stars. She had given away too much of her life to let Arthur live—let alone flourish. The king's alliance with the aggressive Syrax family would deny Mordred his claim to the throne. She had to give herself in bond to an even greater power. "Chieftain of Yggdrasil, hear my cry!" she called into the night with all the strength she had won from her demonolatry.

  A star moved free of its tethers of darkness to the north and tracked across the black horizon. In moments, it expanded to radiance sleek as a comet and swift as a meteor. Among the enormous mansions of night in the northern constellations, it swerved, journeying brightly toward her.

  "Skidblade!" she cried in awe. The self-propelled launch designed and built by Brokk, the master smithy for the Furor, approached. A ship without sails, without oars, floated in the sky upon the shadow of the earth. Its seamless hull shone softly, fashioned from chrome of moonlight.

  When it settled down through the glycerin layers of the atmosphere like a silver pearl, she noticed that it did indeed possess sails—tenuous and ruffling scarves of auroral iridescence that whispered around it with the transparency of star fumes.

  The luminous vessel hovered soundlessly an inch above the rocky ground. Rotating slowly, it displayed the smooth contours of a porpoise as it rocked gently to a complete stop. An oval doorway irised open to a glittering interior, and Morgeu lifted her scarlet robes so that her sandals could carry her in a full run to the ship the god had sent for her.

  Cold, gelid air poured from inside with the purple smell of a squall, but she did not hesitate to enter. Immediately, the door winced shut behind her, and she gawked about at blue-yellow centers of flame all around and then, abruptly, clouds of steam drifting through each other with a hum that widened gradually to a whistling wind.

  Skidblade flies, she realized in the swathing steam that embraced her with a touch like the sun. Skidblade flew, and she felt no motion, only the kiss of the dry steam. And then, the calm flamecores flared around her again, the door gaped, and an icy breeze hurried her out.

  She stepped onto a moraine of flaking shale before an ice-sludged sea. On the horizon, a small, frosty sun nested in green clouds. She flung a look backward, and Skidblade was gone.

  "You would speak with me, woman?" the voice of a hammer spoke.

  Morgeu whirled about and faced a one-eyed man with the visage of a storm cloud: his beard gray as the North Sea, wild as a war song of kettledrums and trumpets. No—not a man, she realized instantly. Though he stood upon the gravel banks in big wolfskin boots and bear-hide vest, his turbulent mane blurred like an aura of blizzard, his empty socket punched a skullhole into night, and his one boreal gray eye focused a crystal of the future. One glance into it and her life was a shadow as time roared down inside her.

  She fell to her knees and gazed hard at the frost-veined stones. "All-Father, you see into my heart. You know why I have called to you."

  "Ygrane knows that I have the Fire Lords' Graal," the voice of thunder said. "And you are here to help me—and to help your son Mordred, who is your father Gorlois."

  "My brother Arthur cannot stop you from taking Britain for yourself," Morgeu said to the ground. "I know this. So I give myself to you that you will have mercy upon my son who is my father. Use me—and find a worthy place for Mordred when our islands fall into your hands."

  "Such a vengeful heart beats in your breast, Morgeu." The Furor's shadow fell upon her deep as a night without stars. "You rage at the demon Lailoken fo
r your father's death, though death is certain for all. And you rage at your mother Ygrane for marrying Uther Pendragon and birthing Arthur, though birth is what love sows in answer to death. Is it not existence itself that you spite?"

  Morgeu's mind reeled among bitter memories and fierce thoughts of smashing those who had stolen her father from her, stolen his life at its prime and mocked his death by filling his absence so quickly with another.

  "Look deeper," the voice of avalanche said from above, reading her thoughts. "Look for the crow in your heart. Look."

  It was there. The Furor's voice of command brought it out to where she could see it: the living shadow of bitterness—the rageful darkness that had always dwelled within her. That black intelligence was never a child. Always it had taught her another way to think: Life is useless. It begins in spasm. It ends in spasm. A brief fever in a cold world.

  "Yes—that is your truth, Morgeu the Fey." The voice of the tempest covered her. "You have always disdained life. The death of your father is only an excuse for your hatred of your brief dream, your brief brightness."

  Morgeu lifted her face angrily. Above her, the one eye stared coldly like light held in wet ice and beside it the empty socket with darkness pouring out, the aftermath of all light.

  Her face tightened to a fist. "Why must any of us live at all?"

  The Furor nodded, satisfied. "I will tell you. You are a Roman woman, and you will not understand me. I will tell you anyway. We live so the stars can caress us. We live so that when we do perish the earth can receive us into her sweet home. Yes, the earth that you call dirt is holy, and she is sweet. Certainly, the world is cold, and we are its warmth. Who kindled this fire in us? Know that and you will understand why the animals share their wisdom with us: They curry our spirits during the hunt so that we may wear their skins proudly and eat their flesh with joy. Joy! Do you hear me, Morgeu? Joy. That is the location of life. Whatever happens, the one, simple truth of life remains always unchanged. All our troubles and all our pain are always pathways back to joy."