John Halt interrupted her. "Please, no magic." His ruddy, boyish cheeks paled, and she was not sure if fear or anger tightened through him until he added, "I'm a Christian—and magic offends me."
"Oh, but we're all Christians here." She squeezed his arm reassuringly. "Let's find comfort for you in prayer, then, if the surgeons and the crones can't help."
Cheerful golden rays slanted into the villa through the restored windows and illuminated cedar rafters hung with dark red roses. Thick vines climbed the walls out of great clay vases painted with images of Persephone in spring. Julia explained how these urns had arrived among wagonloads of stores that included amphorae of Spanish claret, casks of Rhenish brandy, white wine in barrels from the Gironde, and tubs of British beer.
"The king has truly been most generous," Elder John noted coolly. He nodded to the tables carved round and flat in the likeness of tortoises, stubby legs supported by carved dragons standing on hind feet. Puce-colored goatskin covered the benches, and upon the window ledges stood onyx pots planted with yellow roses. "Are you now more inclined to find favor with our majesty than when last we visited?"
Julia's flaxen eyebrows bent woefully. "All this I accept for my family. Forsooth, I'd as soon have sent every stick and nail back to Camelot. I'm yet sore at heart with the king. Was it not he who took my Eril away? None of this bounty is worth even one hour in my husband’s arms."
John Halt met the older man's placid, reproving stare with a frown. "I know my master would be pleased if your young sister—Leoba is her name, yes? Might Leoba show my master to a chamber where he could bathe and remove the dust of the road?"
"I myself would happily oblige. But all our rooms are filled!" Julia led them through the empty dining hall to a staircase with a yet-unvarnished newel post and raw wood steps. Laughter and overlapping voices floated from above. "A caravan from Uxacona is carrying wares to Londinium. Tin goods, bolts of cloth, and such. They're the only ones in the land with coin. A week ago, they'd have passed us by, and now they've filled the inn and we're all busy as starlings. Our family's suite is yours during your stay. We'd not even be alive but for you. Come along. Father and Leoba are in the galley. We'll get you some victuals and then a bath."
"Well! I am glad that fortune's wheel has turned for you." Elder John pushed open a swinging door whose panels displayed a cornucopia spilling fruits and sheaves of grain. Oven fumes laved them with redolences of braised meats and boiling broths. "Since we are imposing on you, Julia, I'd like for us to be of some real use to your household. With his bad leg, my apprentice will be no good with the guests. I have some experience working with people. If it pleases you, I will take over some of your responsibilities with the guests. And perhaps young John can help with your sit-down chores. He's a good conversationalist—and a marvel with a scrub brush."
-)(-
With excessive brightness, we see you. From inside our round hut on the solemn island of Avalon, we see the wonder and pain and beauty of who you are.
You are this: the serpent and the grail—blue bunched bowels coiled hungrily in an upright pelvis, the overflowing cup of the sacrum, sacred vessel of bone that is our humanity.
Together with you, we wander the wooded slopes of destiny, losing our way as in a forest. Your thoughts are sunbeams gleaming in the somber darkness of the forest that is your body, that is the bodies of all the physical things about you. Your thoughts are sunbeams, and by their light we find our way through the physical world in which we are lost. Your thoughts are sunbeams, bright pillars of nothingness in a universe of atoms and the void.
Life-enchanted animal, who are you?
The stars sing in their fiery kingdoms. Cosmic rays. Gamma rays. X rays. Ultraviolet rays. Rays, like burning angels with blazing wings lifting over us forever. They stand fiercely atop the sky. One angel falls to Earth. The angel of visible light falls into our world under the clouds:
The rainbow is our own rapturous angel. The spectrum of visible light walks ahead of us upon the gathered roads, and this angel with seven faces is our guardian fallen to Earth. Our guardian’s blue face fills the sky.
Shells of darkness beyond resound with the singing stars and the fierce songs of invisible and dark angels—but down here, beneath the uncaring heavens, there shall be light. And within this radiance, we shall dwell in wonder among spelled words and these thoughts we share, these bright pillars of nothingness.
-)(-
The shade of Uther Pendragon vanished in the mists of the netherworld, and Ygrane stood alone where ocher light sifted through crazed pine boughs. The ground quaked underfoot like a bog. She looked for her demon stallion and saw him nowhere.
Starwebs dazzled in the gloaming, and the shadows around her looked darker and butchered. She thought the sparkling air her faerie escort. As the energy began to take form, she knew this majestic magical power arrived not from the pale people but their antler-crowned god, Someone Knows the Truth.
"Why do you torment Uther?" a rumbling voice asked out of an elk head atop a shaggy human form twice as large as a man. "His soul belongs to me."
Ygrane dropped to one knee before the primeval deity. "Lord of the Wild, forgive me. I trespass in the Happy Woods to see again my husband."
"Uther Pendragon is no one's husband." The black lips of the animal head did not move: The god's voice poured directly into her brain. "You took from me Cuchulain's soul and fleshed a body for him in your womb. Uther is given in exchange. He is no one's husband."
"Yes, lord. Forgive me." The elk-god's shadow stretched over her, and cold shook her bones. "I acted foolishly."
"Most foolishly, Ygrane. For you have come into my suzerainty—and so, you are mine."
"No." She dared raise her face and confronted flakes of light drizzling through a human shape crowned with antlers. "Lord of the Wild, I am not dead. I came to drive off the Furor's demons from the Dragon who sleeps deep below the hollow hills. I have done that, and now I must depart."
"How will you depart, Ygrane?" The sparkling form scattered to emptiness, and only the giant antlers hovered before her. Their points merged with the pine boughs like a tangled misperception, an error of her brain. "No mortal walks free of the hollow hills."
She lifted her arms toward the invisible voice. "I have covenant with the Daoine Sid ... "
"I am god of the Sid." The voice throbbed angrily. "I know all about your covenant. Bright Night will throw you into the dragonpit to wake the planetary beast and ride it into the World Tree. Ha! He is an arrogant minstrel of madness. Does my name mean nothing to you? Someone Knows the Truth—a name I have carried for longer than you can know. I have seen the ice sheets come and go. Repeatedly. Of all the elder gods, I have survived, because I do not wage wars I cannot win. I will not sacrifice my subjects to the wrath of the Furor."
"Prince Bright Night has given his word," Ygrane pleaded. "I have spilled my blood in pact."
"So long as you are here, mortal flesh, there is no pact. And here you will stay, for I will not release you."
The pines stood empty, and the wind stirred among them a babble of shadows. "Wait! Do not forsake me here! The Sid have given their word!"
Someone Knows the Truth had wholly vanished. She stood alone in pinefog. Black iron woods imprisoned her, and the Daoine Sid could not rescue her. They would not defy their god, not within the hollow hills.
Ygrane approached a tree and pressed her forehead to its black, twisted middle. She knew better than to wander. In the netherworld, all directions are the same and lead deeper into dusk, into the resinous light of the primordial fire that forged the Earth.
Not long ago, when the Dragon was awake, the pale people led the living there and fed them to the beast. Now the planet had become for Ygrane a tremendous stone room. In the hearth at its center burned the dreams of the Dragon.
She listened for those dreams in the pine that was not a pine but an illusion of the underworld. It was an illusion full of voices in the uptwisting branches, a
nd she used all her training from the Druids, all her experience among the pale people to listen past the fury of noise.
She heard the yammering of souls in rapture and terror. The elk-god's gristled power sizzled like lightning, and behind that ranged the scraping, grinding thunder of the planet's smoldering interior. Deeper yet, she found the silence in which floated the dreamsongs of the Dragon.
If she had not heard it before as a younger woman, she would not have recognized this waft of repose. The soft phosphorescence of the one cosmic Dragon communed with its many parts scattered among the floating worlds of the stellar islands, the galaxies adrift in the universe.
Touching the dragon's serene power with her mind, she reached beyond the netherworld, higher than the sky. And there, she found the wild creature that could save her.
Even before she had called for it, it had known she would call. It dwelled at the perimeter of time, where the future echoes back into the present. It appeared as a black unicorn, a shadow-creature projected into darkness by the sun stallions that ran in herds upon the solar wind.
She would have preferred to summon a white unicorn, for her magic had bonded her with one of those argent animals in years past, and she knew their ways. But they would not come for her in the hollow hills. They were creatures of radiance.
The silk of its nearness touched the back of her neck, and she pushed away from the tree. The black unicorn swayed before her, a wild bulk of darkness, rearing and wheeling away, then sliding close, bending low, its tusk an inch from her amazed face, its eyes slants of animal clarity, opal blue. In their mirroring nearness, she met the emerald light of her own eyes, twin sparks of a hollow-cheeked mask covering the astonishment within her.
She had not expected it to come so swiftly. Nor had she anticipated the psychic exposure she felt before its sentient gaze. The beat of her heart deepened. She could hear the unicorn as she had heard the elk-god, only softer and more intimately. Hold on to me, it breathed within her. He is coming. And he is angry.
The ocher light between the black trees jellied to an antlered shape. "What is this?" a big voice rumbled. "What witchery have you brought into my domain?"
Swiftly, Ygrane flung herself onto the back of the unicorn. As soon as she touched it, a vibration of bliss coursed through her. She experienced the masterful elation of escape even before the unicorn took a step. She felt the certainty of it echoing across the gusty distance of the future.
In an instant, the black animal under her would charge directly at the shaggy giant, exploding him to fiery shards. And his roar of pain would rush into the wing-space above the trees and stretch to helpless silence behind them.
-)(-
Merlin took Fra Athanasius and Loki through the upland fields to the high woods behind Camelot. "To win your confidence in what lies ahead for us, it is important that I show you how I designed this fortress," he told them proudly.
On one side of them, the land plummeted to a gorge of immense boulders and clinging trees where a cataract poured its blur of mist and rainbows into the River Amnis. On the other, scorched terrain mottled meadows and forests, marking the sites of battling armies from earlier in the season. Between the verdant river canyon and the seared countryside, Camelot appeared like a flight of thought captured in pure geometry.
From this vantage, the luminous fortress city looked almost pyramidal, with terraced edifices and ziggurat-style stepbacks. Morning light reflected in star-spurs from various skydomes and curving windows. Sculpted friezes and projecting entablatures adorned the facades, familiar contours that offered refuge to the eye in the midst of strange polyhedral turrets and paraboloid jacket walls shining brilliantly in the sun.
"The stone is dressed with crushed coral and powdered seashells immixed with alabaster concrete," Merlin explained with satisfaction. "That is why the towers and walls shine like poured light. It is a technique I first observed in Egypt thirty-five centuries ago."
Athanasius hugged his dalmatic tighter about himself. He nervously edged away from the wizard, in the process tripping over an upraised root.
Loki grabbed the legate's arm and kept him from falling. "Steady, man. You represent the Rock of Christ. Stand fast."
"Mock not my faith, unnatural creature!" The scribe tugged his arm free and glared at the stenciled god who smirked at him from the shadow of his large black hat. "I say unto you, if you had tasted the truth of our Savior, you would not address me so insolently nor regard me with looks that smack of ridicule."
Loki stepped back, fleering. "Next time, then, holy man, I'll leave you to fall on your rump."
"Will you two pay heed?" Merlin scowled at them. He pointed a gnarled hand at the luminous towers of Camelot. "See here now. That citadel is no mere edifice. It is a portal into the Storm Tree itself. So, Loki, if you are sincere about taking that Tree from the Furor, you'd do well to respect what I have to say about how we will get there."
Loki stiffened, then nodded once, curtly.
"As for you, Athanasius—" Merlin leveled a stern look at the legate yet spoke in a softer, more conciliatory tone. "How can you judge my king fairly if all you see is magic where, in fact, there is science? Loki is no unnatural creature. I thought I had demonstrated that to you in the grotto."
The scribe stood silent a moment, feeling the uncomfortable weight of his responsibility—as had been charged to him by his holy office. With his forefinger, he pushed his spectacles higher on his nose, then sifted a sigh between clenched teeth and turned to the god. "I apologize, Loki. You, too, are a creature of God by Whose omniscience you have been shaped of stuff different of substance yet similar of kind. I was wrong to declare you unnatural."
Loki accepted the apology with a lopsided grin. "It must be difficult for you, a man of the Church, to stand here with a demon and an Aesir god. So what say you? Do you believe Jesus loves us as he loves you?"
"Enough!" From under his midnight blue robes, Merlin extracted an amber rod coiled with silver wire. "Your insolence is a dangerous distraction."
"I mean no disrespect." Loki opened his small eyes wide with mock innocence and placed both black-gloved hands upon his chest to stay a startled breath. "I have asked the man a simple question. I would but know if Jesus is our Savior, too. Is that insolence?"
The wizard rolled his wrist and twirled the amber baton around his hand so fast it blurred. "Enough of you, I say! We will talk later." With one pass of the wand, the god spun on his heels, a black vortex with a pale smear of startled eyes and woeful mouth.
"Go to the grotto and wait for me there," Merlin commanded. "And make no mischief, or I will expel you from Camelot altogether!" With a mighty twist of his body that sent his robes and conical hat flying, Merlin whipped full around and pointed the rod toward the radiant battlements of the fortress.
A wild moan trailed behind as the man-sized whirlwind that was Loki rushed off, tilting downslope through the sizzling grass.
"Upon my soul!" Athanasius blinked into the gust of frosty magnetic wind that smelled of thunder and straightened the curly hairs of his head. "I took in earnest his question, Merlin, and would have offered him tender bond of our Savior's love."
"It was a mistake to bring him along." With his nimbus of white hair fluffed about his ferocious face, the wizard resembled a wroth prophet of the Bible. "You must understand, I thought to take advantage of Loki's restrained situation. He is here secretly among us. Those runes he wears upon his flesh are designed to keep him invisible to the other Aesir gods, in particular his irascible brother the Furor. He dare not use his powers too overtly, or he will expose himself and face his brother's fury. Believe me, Athanasius, gods oft use their strength cruelly upon people. If Loki were not restricted by his need to remain discreet, he would be too dangerous to tolerate anywhere near us."
"Might and a high heart are Loki's divine philosophy, it seems." The scribe picked up the wizard's fallen hat and handed it to him. "How would you reply to the god's question? Does our Savior love
the gods as he loves humankind, or is Loki's hope for salvation a vain purpose?"
Merlin lifted a pointy eyebrow. "Is this another theological test from the legate?"
Athanasius looked askance at the path of parted grass that Loki's vortex had left behind. "On my word, Merlin, the need to know this kingdom's Christian merit is all that keeps me here."
"And your judgment thus far, legate?"
"My judgment remains in suspension." The scribe nervously twisted the whiskers on his small chin. "Yet, I would know your understanding concerning pagan gods and the salvation proffered by our Lord Jesus."
'"No understanding avails against the Lord.'" Merlin wiped broken leaves from the brim and fitted his hat upon his hoary head. "So we are told in Proverbs twenty-one. Hence, my thoughts on this issue matter not at all. It is by our deeds that we shall be judged, Athanasius. By our deeds. And that is why I have brought you here, that you may comprehend the scientific means by which the deeds before us shall be accomplished and not mistake them for magic. We are a Christian kingdom, and all that we achieve here is done by the grace of God and the natural powers He puts at our disposal."
Athanasius removed his spectacles, filled his head with blurry light, then fitted the lenses back upon his face. It gave him unspeakable gratification to see again with such sharp acuity the tiny grassheads swaying in the morning breeze and pollen motes afloat in their millions. "Throughout my tenure here, you have answered me with reasons supported by logic," he began slowly, weighing his thoughts carefully. "The unpeace that first assailed me is for the most part at rest. Despite the strangeness of much before us on this remote island, you have freed me from the thralldom of fear. No longer do I believe that the mysteries I have witnessed will necessarily lead your kingdom to bane. But I reserve my judgment until I more fully comprehend this alleged science." Arms akimbo, he turned decisively to regard the chevron-hooded battlements of Camelot. "Reveal to me what you will of this—this teeming edifice."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 19