Morgeu turned her face spitefully to one side and peered at the blue mountains of icebergs on the dark sea. Despite her fear of the Furor's wrath, she heard the crow in her heart squawking: Clown—clown—clown!
"I am a clown to the Roman mind—the modern mind," said the Furor like a grinding of glaciers. "Only a clown can find joy in a world of suffering. Yes? That is why the Fire Lords have taught you numbers and alphabets to make science, to protect yourself from suffering. And now, the modern people kennel whole tribes in walled cities, cage people in boxes with numbers, imprison entire races in grids of roads, while slicing the open country with fences. Keep out the suffering. Protect yourself with boundaries from disorder and what is other. But all you do is isolate yourself, for joy cannot be contained."
Morgeu stood up and canted her head defiantly. "Strike me dead if you will, god of the one-eye—for I have two eyes, and I see clearly that there is no joy that does not rot to pain sooner or later. Strike me dead, just stop dunning me with your righteous noise about the glories of nature. Nature eats babies. So, strike me dead, All-Father. I find no joy in this miserable world."
The Furor sighed, a pine breeze full of creaking sorrow. "I will not strike you dead, Morgeu, because I need you. You are a powerful enchantress, trained by the demons themselves. You will use your craft for me."
"Will you provide a worthy place for my son Mordred when you take Britain?"
"First you must do a difficult thing for me." The Furor's storm silver eyebrows tightened to a frown. "When the Fire Lords wanted to steal my sword Lightning to arm your brother, they sent Rna, the eldest of the Nine Queens of Avalon. She came here and strode past Garm, my wolf-ogre, entered my dwarf Brokk's underground workshop unfazed by the smelting pots of boiling metal he poured upon her—and took my sword. I fear that the Fire Lords will send her or her ilk again, this time to retrieve the Graal—a device of their own fashioning. I want you to stop them."
Morgeu scowled with disbelief. "How? The Nine Queens are as gods."
"Skidblade will take you to Avalon." The god spoke with his eye raised to the slow revelation of clouds in the twilit sky as if reading there the future. "You will hex-dance around their abode and weave an enchantment that will contain them. In that way, the Graal will remain here, where Brokk can continue studying it and interpreting its secrets."
"What if the Fire Lords themselves come for their Graal?"
A smile opened in his beard as he scrutinized the first stammering stars. "I am hoping for exactly that. I have longed for such a confrontation since I first heard gossip of them. They are older than the gods, you know. And unlike the demons, who are as old as they but so much more cowardly, they still carry the light of creation. Though it burns them with indescribable suffering, they carry creation’s fire. Think on the revelations my prophetic eye will discern in that glorious fire!"
"And if I fail?" Morgeu continued to stare contemptuously at the god, who shone with a rainbow aura in the gathering darkness. "If my enchantments will not contain the Nine Queens within their abode?"
"You will not fail, Morgeu." The Furor held her with a baleful expression. "You who mock the joy of life will be hurt by what you mock." His naked, muscular arm pointed to where long rays of scarlet from day's end illuminated a startling figure half as high as a man but twice as wide, with huge limbs and a cubed head of tufty gold hair and red whiskers that swirled over pugnacious jowls. The dwarf Brokk approached, and in his arms he held an infant.
"Mordred!" Morgeu's cry elicited a frightened wail from the baby. She moved to rush to him—but the ferocious strength of the Furor's stare held her in place.
"Nature eats babies." The Furor's face was a cliff in the red darkness. "My wolf-ogre Garm will devour your beloved Mordred in one bite if you fail me, Morgeu."
-)(-
Merlin found the king in the rose maze on his way to the chapel. The choir's threnodies unraveled among the trellises like invisible veils, and the hardy spiciness from censers and thuribles overlay the summer scent of the dusky roses. The wizard removed his hat and glanced around while the wounded king painfully lowered himself onto a stone bench. No others saw them among the rose arbors—save Bedevere, several paces back on the grass walk.
"I heard the valets chattering about the uproar that the pope's ninny inspired during his audience with you." The wizard turned his hoary head and nodded to the one-armed guard. "I am sorry, Bedevere, that you were made the foil of such a fool." He sat on the bench beside the king. "Sire, how have you decided to resolve this controversy?"
Arthur cast a weary, troubled glance at his bodyguard. "I am too angry to resolve anything. I don't want to talk about it."
Merlin clucked and pulled on the tines of his forked beard. "You are king. You make a decision even when you do not decide."
"Look at this leg." His extended a limb swollen and green as a toad's. "This is going to kill me."
"Nonsense." Merlin touched the glossed flesh and felt no pestiferous forces. "There is no poison here, my lord. Only a septic soul. You suffer a malady of the mind." He hung his long face close to the boy's ear. "Conscience."
Arthur nodded and moaned, "Morgeu."
"Deeper."
The king squinted as he tried to understand.
"You do not trust God's election. You crave the freedom of failure, because your hour is upon you and you must prove that you are not the slave Kyner reared. Your conscience questions you: Are you yet a slave? To magic? Or Morgeu? Or to me?"
The king hung his head and confessed, "My prayers turn against me, Merlin. Mother Mary spurns me. I am an abomination in God's eyes."
The old wizard clapped his hands loudly. "And what then am I, an incubus squeezed into the skullcase of a man? We are all abominations, Arthur. Now stop sulking and make a decision about your personal guard."
"What do you recommend, counselor?"
"I recommend you make a decision immediately." Merlin stood up. "Accept God's election. You are king, no matter how you feel. Decide."
"As you say." Arthur beckoned Bedevere. When the guard knelt before him, the king stated resolutely, "I have decided not to decide. You will continue for now to guard and defend my person. We will ignore whatever calumny that inspires. And when I am less pressed, I will deliberate on your fate." He motioned Bedevere aside, then turned to his aged advisor. "Satisfied?"
"Superlative decision, my lord." Merlin wrung his bony hands together. "Men are to be judged by their deeds, never their desires." He bent closer to the king. "Now then, we have a far more ticklish situation to settle. I have just come from a meeting with Loki."
"The Aesir god?" Arthur stiffened with incredulity. "Here in Camelot?"
"In the grotto," the wizard replied. "He seeks an alliance with us, my lord."
The king looked into his counselor's silver eyes and saw he did not jest. "Merlin, he is known among the Saxons as the Liar."
"True." The old man nodded, and his hair looked like a moult of feathers in the warm breeze. "Yet, his rivalry with his blood brother the Furor is famous. He believes that the Fire Lords will ultimately dominate our world, and he positions himself for inclusion among the victors."
"Dare we believe him? He's a trickster—and a god."
"Ah, but I possess a demon's soul." His face, resembling nothing more than cold gray wax, smiled both grave and complaisant. "I gazed into the flamecore of this god's mind, and I believe him sincere. As much as one such as he can be. Should our defeat ever present greater dividends than what injury he can inflict on his brother, I have no doubt that he will turn on us. For now, he means to serve our cause."
"How?"
"Sire, you are convinced that only magic can now save our kingdom?"
Arthur removed the chaplet of gold laurel leaves and rubbed his burned hair. He felt immersed in a nightmare. Could it be that God and the Holy Mother had given him over to magic and pagan gods? It could not be. And yet it was, and that left him feeling scared and adrift in a reali
ty as absurdly wild as battle itself.
He gritted his teeth before the inevitable, determined to save his kingdom. "My encounter with the dragon has overridden all my previous reservations. If magic is what we need to save Britain, then I will certainly use magic—even if we must go to the Devil for it."
Merlin winked with satisfaction at the king's hard-won mettle. "Loki may well be that devil. His magic is strong. And we will need that magic and his knowledge of Yggdrasil to defeat our enemies."
He again sat beside the king and there, with his mummied hand upon Arthur's arm, informed him of his encounter with Ygrane and her hope of winning protection for him and Britain with a Dragon's teardrop and nectar from the Vanir Lotus.
Worry stamped the king's brow—worry that Ygrane had voluntarily damned herself for him—and he took a deep sighing breath. "This is knowledge my mother won with her soul, Merlin. I must speak with her."
The wizard turned his hands palm up. "Even I cannot find her, my lord. She has given herself again to the Daoine Sid. The pale people have been her intimates since childhood. Be assured, Ygrane and the Sid strive for Britain as valiantly as we. As soon as she can, I know she will find you."
Arthur shook his head and cocked a cynical eyebrow. "Can we ever succeed at this improbable quest, Merlin?"
"No venture is certain, my lord—least of all one as dangerous as this. Victory means the salvation of Britain for your lifetime and a golden moment for your people." The wizard suppressed a hideous chill at forethought of the dark age to come, and added quickly, "With Ygrane preparing the way, and with Loki to guide us and distract our enemies, victory is foreseeably within our grasp. Now we must take the risk."
"There is little time." Arthur straightened his right leg painfully and shifted his weight. "I have met with Selwa of the Family Syrax. She has arranged an audience for me with King Wesc. I have won us an uneasy respite, at least for these next few weeks. However, if by Mabon we have neither a magical victory nor a willingness to capitulate to the Foederatus, pagan hordes will sweep over Britain."
"And what of the papal interlocutor Athanasius?" Bedevere spoke up, tentatively. When he saw that the king regarded him, he continued more strongly, "Once you deliver the Dragon's teardrop to the Vanir Lotus and drink of the protective elixir, there is still the famine of Britain to defeat. My lord, without aid from the pope, you will reign over a nation that will endure suffering for generations to come."
"That will not be," Arthur replied softly and with determination. "Athanasius must be won to our love of Britain. He must no longer regard us as a nation of lost souls cursed by God."
"Athanasius is a simple matter, sire." Merlin stood and fitted his tall hat upon his head. "I will entrance him."
"No. You will not." Arthur spoke brusquely, holding the wizard's unearthly stare with unblinking resolve. "Magic shall not be the solution to all our problems, Merlin. Athanasius is not a simple matter. He is the emissary of the pope, and so he is the very emissary of my Christian soul. He will not be entranced. He will be won—convinced of our fidelity to the teachings of our Savior and that our purpose is just and good in the eyes of God."
Merlin lifted his owlish eyebrows and tugged at his wispy beard. "That may be more difficult than bringing the Dragon's teardrop to the Vanir Lotus."
"Then we will take the legate with us on our quest," the king decided, and shoved himself to his feet. "We will show that sanctimonious Athanasius that we are not devils but God's own champions."
-)(-
"Hu Gadarn Hyscion—Hu the Mighty, who led the Celtic people to Britain—Mighty Hu descended from Abraham the father of the Semites," Gawain declared in his clear, vibrant voice. He had arrived at the court of King Arthur, his brother Gareth at his side, and now both stood before the Round Table, their russet hair mashed with sweat. They had marched directly into the central hall in their riding leathers and interrupted a security conference, where all the warlords attended save Lot.
The boys had ridden well ahead of their father, arriving in time to occupy his position at the Table and speak in his place. Eyes shiny with zeal, they shared their vision of the Holy Grail. Only Urien, affronted that senile Lot had lost his two boys to the nailed god, demanded to know why Celts should have anything at all to do with the drinking cup of a Hebrew prophet.
"The Celts are a tribe of the Hebrews," young Gareth explained with conviction, and all laughed but the king and his eldritch counselor.
"Our altars remember," Gawain pressed when he noticed that his uncle Arthur listened intently. "The dolmen shrines. The menhir boundaries. The great slabstone circles. We Celts build altars from unhewn stone, and that has been recorded in the Hebrew's second book of Moses. Uncle, look at chapter twenty, verse twenty-five in Exodus: 'And if you make Me an altar of stone, you shall not build it of hewn stone; for if you use your tool on it, you have profaned it.'"
"Our vision is important," Gareth insisted. "We must find the Holy Grail to heal Britain."
"Who will search with us?" Gawain looked directly at the king. "Who will fulfill the angel's command?"
Arthur smiled warmly. "All in time, nephews. For now, it is enough that we prepare to stand against the Foederatus."
"And what does your father say to all this passion for the nailed god?" Urien demanded of the youths, and stood up angrily. "Does he countenance you to speak of Celts as lost Hebrews?"
The king motioned him to sit. "I've heard all that before, Urien. And from the scholars. So it may well be true. The desert prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zechariah all named their coming messiah 'the Branch.' The Druids, too, teach that the Celtic deliverer is the Branch—the All Heal symbolized by the mistletoe."
"And on the rare oak where the mistletoe grows, do not our people mark a cross?" Gareth challenged Urien. "And do we not name that branch All Heal, in our oldest dialect—Yesu?"
"Yes, yes, all that is true," the king acknowledged, and directed a mollifying look at Urien. "I've spoken to Druids, rabbis, Persian magi, and yogis. The ancient history of the Celts is wide and touches much of the world. Even so, lads, Urien is right to return us to this Table. The fate of Britain holds us all to the tasks at hand. We have no time for anything else just now—not even the Sacred Grail."
"No time for God?" Gareth asked in shrill disbelief.
Arthur laughed at the dismayed expression on the thirteen-year-old's face. "I've used up what time God has given me," the king confided, and motioned for the boys to sit. "Of course He's always making more, isn't he? And if He gives some to us after we drive the Wolf Warriors from our shores, we will quest together for the Grail. This I promise."
-)(-
Ygrane determined to visit her dead husband, Uther Pendragon. The way through the hollow hills to the sleeping Dragon had been cleared of demons for her son. There was nothing more she could do for him in these scarlet-shadowed depths of the planet.
She turned her devil steed about and galloped through the featureless terrain following red and green threads of eternal twilight.
Eventually, the shadow plains brightened under a sky like an ocean of blood. Out of the abstract shadows emerged the skeletal shafts of fire-ravaged trees—echoes of scorched Britain. Ygrane rode faster, and soon bluesmoke forests appeared in the crepuscular dark, followed by sprawling meadowlands that were at once curiously cultivated and wild.
She slowed down and walked the devil horse into the netherworld forest so that the pines' tufted boughs floated above her like islands in the sky. The lurid light had paled to opal hues streaked with raspberry smudges and lemon rinds of clouds.
She drew her steed to a full stop and listened to the faint piping of the oldest music, the rhythms of wind and water. Dismounting, she felt soggy and heavy. She leaned against a pine and took the time to change the pad she had fashioned from the torn linen sleeve of her chemise.
Thoughts of Homer's and Virgil's heroes presenting blood offerings in the underworld crossed her mind as she buried the soaked clot
h in the soft mulch of the hollow hills. This was the presentation of her lifeblood to the dead, and when she stood she whispered the name of her dead husband, "Uther Pendragon."
Foaming laughter and song sifted through the slanted apertures of the woods. She discerned human shapes of luminous mist frolicking and cavorting in the distance like an assemblage of fauns.
"Uther," she called quietly. "Come forth."
The misty figures in the bosky woods continued their roisterous dancing like passing smoke on a wintry river.
Ygrane called again, this time summoning her husband by his original name, "Theodosius Aurelianus—come to your wife. Come to Ygrane of the Celts. Come forth, Theo."
A spry figure separated from the troupe and stepped closer through the forest's purple shadows—a man of floss and cobwebs, chimerically lovely in his tatterdemalion silks.
"Theo!"
Her beloved came full into view, his raven hair darkly shining as in life and his yellow eyes bright with surprise and ardor. "Ygrane! It is you!" His stare winced. "Are you dead?"
"No—not yet, my love."
He shifted his gaze to the devil horse with its glossy black sinews and slant red eyes. "What is this beast? It smells of magic—you smell of magic." His Roman face showed concern, and his voice betrayed his disappointment. "Why, Ygrane?"
"Only magic could bring me here to see you."
He stepped back from her. "You must go—and quickly. There is no magic here. The Lady of the Wild Things dwells in these woods, and her glory is eternal spring." The mists subsumed him, yet his words continued, frantic and crazed with echoes, "Can't you smell it? The flares of pollen? The rain mists? Ygrane—this is a place of life! You cannot stay here. You belong in the world of the dying."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 16