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

by Attanasio, A. A.

  "John—we're away!" John Elder called from alongside the sawyer's wagon under the scaffolds at the north side of the villa. "Be quick about it. Our horses are already saddled."

  "So soon?" John Halt called.

  His master had turned away, and the query got lost among the loud hammering of the carpenters. He shrugged to Julia and gingerly slid from the table onto his good leg. "I must go. I hope your faith is fulfilled and your Eril returns. Short of that—" He dared a gentle smile. "I hope you learn to love again."

  She took his ruddied hand and squeezed it affectionately. She felt ashamed for the feelings of desire he stirred in her. He was a boy—and yet not. Unlike her Eril, swarthy and rugged to look upon but gentle within, John Halt's rosy cheeks and gentle features belied the fury she had seen in him when first they met.

  He was not a common man as was her beloved. By his own admission, he had lived in a chieftain's fastness, even if as a thrall. Hearing the strength in his voice and the caring, she could give herself to him—if she were not yet in love with Eril, and she told him as much, "Were I to find a man as kind and able as you, perhaps I would learn to love again."

  Arthur limped away light-footed under the scaffolds and the fresh-painted trellis of a future vineyard to the apple yard. Bedevere already sat upon his big chestnut stallion. Though the older man said not a word, his urgency showed in the way he tossed the reins of the palfrey to the youth. "Don't dawdle, boy. We've a long ride ahead of us. Put some life into that gimpy leg or find yourself another master."

  Once their horses had clopped over the new-laid flagstones and gained the highway, the king said, "You'd best have good cause to remove me, Bedevere. Julia is like family to me."

  "You've another family, sire, who needs you now." Bedevere hurried his horse to a canter. "The sun signals I've received tell me that your brother Cei is burned—scorched by a dragon. He lingers at death's threshold."

  Arthur spurred Straif to a gallop and rode her until she was spent. By then, Bedevere's signals had brought fresh steeds from the garrison at Venonae, and the king and his personal guard continued without stopping.

  Under the breathing stars of the Milky Way, they charged along the Roman Midlands highway, taking new mounts at Letocetum, Pennocrucium, and Uxacona. By dawn, they swept into Cymru and ascended the steep trails at a full run. Their swift shapes paced their reflections in the mirror world of the high lakes. And they reached Cold Kitchen before midday to arrive at Camelot with their coursers half-dead under them.

  On an airy terrace enclosed by potted mint ferns, Cei lay abed, mummied with wet windings soaked in cooling unguents. His swollen face looked unfamiliar and tinted green, and through the thin slits of his eyes stared a blackness in which starlight whispered.

  "The hallowed Grail," Kyner said, rising from a folding chair beside the bed and bowing to the king. "Cei found the Grail in the Black Chapel and would have restored it to you, my lord, but for the dragon."

  Arthur embraced his stepfather, then bent close over Cei, and whispered, "I am here for you, brother."

  "Save the king," Cei's blistered lips mumbled from deep in his suffering, from far away on pain's road of solitudes. "Save the king from fire—fire of world's end ... Apocalypse ... "

  Merlin gently led Arthur aside. "He raves, my lord, about the Christ's return and stern judgment. He sees hellfire."

  "Restore him, Merlin," Arthur beseeched.

  "You know I would if that were in my power, sire." The wizard placed both big-knuckled hands on the king's shoulders. "Cei suffers from flames of the Dragon's dream. If he is to live, you must drink the very elixir your mother has foretold. Only by imbibing a teardrop of the Dragon combined with nectar of the Vanir Lotus will you heal these wounds—Cei's, yours, and Britain's."

  Arthur's jaw seized up as he absorbed this fact, and his golden stare did not flinch. "Lead the way, wizard. Lead the way into the underworld."

  -)(-

  Skidblade crossed time as well as distance. Morgeu the Fey concluded this when she commanded the wondrous flying ship to deliver her to Londinium: The ark of moonfire descended upon the roof of the governor's palace, and when Morgeu stepped through the dilated portal into night, she noticed that the disposition of the wandering stars had shifted. Jupiter and Mars had transited slightly among the constellations, signifying the passage of days, though she felt as though she had stood before the Furor in the arctic twilight of Brokk's island only hours ago.

  Fear widened in her like the frayed end of a rope. With the lapsing of so much time, surely the Furor would know that she had not gone directly to Avalon as he had commanded. A groan twisted in her as she thought of Mordred. When next she entered Skidblade, she might well return to the Furor to find her baby maimed or dead.

  I must be swift, she realized, and marched across the rooftop past ornamental cornice urns to a bronze utility door under a wooden canopy. Locked, the door received the enchantress' urgent whispers. Moments later, the latch clacked, lamplight sliced the darkness, and a matronly servant woman peered out.

  Morgeu spoke sleep to the servant and took the tin lamp from her as she slid unconscious onto the steps. Her crimson robes jumping, she pranced quickly down the stairs and through an open door of sturdy oak strapped with iron into a narrow and dark corridor of the upper floor. She spoke to the yellow tooth of flame at the mouth of the handlamp: "Take me to the mistress of the palace."

  Following the directional sway of the flame, Morgeu strode swiftly among hallways lit with ceiling lanterns and scented with braziers of fragrant wood. She intended to finish her business there as expeditiously as possible, as she did not want to leave Skidblade unattended too long. When she encountered servants or guards, she curtly informed them, "You do not see me." And they did not.

  The lampflame led her to an opulent chamber of potted palms and pink marble pillars. A dark-skinned sylph of a woman sat perched upon a teak chair before a mahogany table laden with silver platters of figs, dates, blood oranges, nut pastries, and honey confections. Her glossy black hair fell in tight ringlets to small shoulders covered by translucent pastel fabrics trimmed with gold tinsel. The dark, heavy-lidded beauty of her Persian face betrayed no fear or even surprise at the arrival of the large moonfaced woman with bright frizzy red hair.

  "Good evening, Selwa from the house of Syrax." The enchantress placed the tin lamp on an ivory stand. "Am I disturbing you?"

  "Not at all. Come. Sit with me." Selwa motioned to a sofa of silk cushions embroidered with trumpeting elephants. "You must be the king's sister, Morgeu the Doomed. You are famous even in lands as distant as Araby and the Levant."

  Morgeu stepped past copper kettles overflowing with ferns and helped herself to a glazed date. "I have heard from Camelot that you have visited my brother—with an offer of matrimony."

  "A prudent offer, which he foolishly declined." Her suspiring eyes did not flinch before the cold stare of her guest. No look could intimidate her. She had peered too often into the dark bores of men's widening pupils as they had died, poisoned as much by her beauty as by the toxins she had slipped into their drinks. Inured to death and thus immune to life's threats and blandishments, she viewed all the world's ugliness and beauty through a viper's eye. "The king would do well with me at his side. An alliance with the Syrax family assures prosperity to Britain."

  "It is not Britain's prosperity that interests you." Morgeu nibbled at the date with her small white teeth. "You would control the king with your wiles. You are a seductress. And you are out of your depth."

  "Am I?" From around her long neck, she lifted an onyx amulet whose crystal planes radiated a demonic visage—a pike's thrust jaw and a grin of fangs that reached to its shelved brow shading malevolent eyes: a Chaldean devil. "My efreet is older than the pyramids!"

  The devil-face lifted out of its onyx matrix slow as a cobra's sway, then rushed forward in an ectoplasmic blur of needle teeth.

  Morgeu continued nibbling the glazed date in her right hand w
hile her left twirled and wrapped the green smoke of the efreet about her wrist. "Your magic is old, my dear. And tired. In the eight thousand years since the magi trapped this devil in its crystal cage, the planetary powers have moved north. The south now belongs to the Fire Lords and their world-conquering science. You would do better if you allied yourself with them instead of these worn-out relics from the Euphrates."

  Selwa pushed to her feet, astonished.

  "Sit down," Morgeu commanded, and the small woman's legs gave out and plopped her inelegantly into her seat. "I want to speak with you."

  "I will not see your brother again," Selwa insisted with a lilt of fright in her voice. "I will never return to Camelot."

  "Of course you won't exert your wiles upon my brother again." Morgeu snapped her wrist, and the efreet's eelish body thwacked against the table edge and blurred to an effluvial vapor that seeped back with a squeak into the onyx amulet. "But you will return to Camelot. And you will use that seductive body of yours to entice the man closest to the king."

  Selwa closed her open mouth and winced. "Bedevere will have none of me or any woman."

  "Not Bedevere, you foolish girl." Morgeu put her hands upon the ebony table and leaned toward the frightened woman. "Merlin."

  "The wizard?" Selwa scowled with disgust. "He's ... old."

  "You speak more truth than you know." The enchantress took a honey confection from a silver dish and admired its amber inclusions of almonds and yellow raisins. "Merlin is very old. Yet, his flesh is growing younger. And with flesh comes desire. You will give yourself to him and baffle and distract him with desire. But—" She popped the confection into her mouth and turned to depart. Without looking back, she said around a mouthful, "You will not conceive a child by him." The potted palms clacked as she swept through the doorway, and only the musical enchantment of her voice remained behind. "If you do, I will have to kill you."

  -)(-

  Birth. Love. Death. Those are the icons we worship, the oldest devotion. What was true for the great earth mother and the most ancient female spirit—what was true for Rna when she danced as a priestess, primitive and wild upon the open hand of the earth—what was true a thousand centuries ago remains true today, for you. Though you live in a labyrinth of steel, though the invisible angels have fallen from atop the sky to dwell among you as your servants—X rays for your teeth and bones, radio waves for your entertainment, microwaves for your food—you still obey the oldest devotion, you still worship the icons we worship. Birth. Love. Death.

  And so?

  The heart's secret self makes a covenant with the darkness from which we are born and with the darkness into which we die. Ardent and voluptuous, passionate and tender, that covenant is our common bond. The whole population of humanity from time immemorial to your time in the steel labyrinth wonders what it is for, this covenant of love that stands between birth and death and that holds them apart with such ardent and passionate tenderness.

  We are the Nine Queens who have watched the lonely and enchanted children of the forest become the proud warlords of the planet—and yet we ourselves do not know what love is for. Though we sit upon the highest mountain of time, we ourselves do not know.

  -)(-

  The portal to Merlin's grotto appeared as crude as a cave hole. An ouroboric carving of a snake swallowing its tail encircled the entryway, and mephitic odors sifted from within.

  The wizard, the king, and the papal legate stood on the threshold garbed like desert nomads, black sendal head scarves drawn tightly to protect their faces from the Dragon's breath. Bedevere, bareheaded yet dressed for combat in his leather cuirass and sword belt, protested, "You must reconsider, my lord, and keep me at your side."

  "No, Bedevere," the king replied, leaning heavily on his cypress-wood crutch. "It is Merlin who commands us in the underworld. And he says the fewer the travelers the better our chances of returning."

  "You cannot protect the king where we are going," Merlin confirmed. "I would have to watch after you in the netherworld. Loki, himself a god, refuses to accompany us. Without his help, I will not have the wherewithal to assure your safety."

  "My lord, it will not gall my heart to stay behind," Athanasius spoke. The jittery eyes behind his spectacles looked first to the king and then the wizard for reprieve. "This demonstration of telluric science that you offer me, Merlin, I must say is more than I desire."

  Merlin's chrome eyes narrowed above his mask of black silk. "Then, on your word as legate, as the pope's own emissary, you will commend our king a true Christian and immediately request provisions be shipped to Britain from the Continent?"

  "On my word?" Athanasius lowered his eyelids resignedly. "I have tasted the truth of what you claim is science but not yet digested it. In good faith, I cannot swear that this kingdom is other than a false jewel of righteousness in a rich casing of deviltry justified by sophistry and specious reasoning."

  "There you have it." Merlin put his arm about the legate's shoulders and led him down the grotto's steps. "Your papal commission requires you to accompany us. You must ascertain that it is not magic and supernatural powers with which our king cavorts but the natural forces of God's creation."

  The king met the concern in Bedevere's gray eyes. "I need you here in Camelot. Attend to all matters of state while I am away."

  Bedevere returned to the court with a heavy heart. He knew he could not fulfill the king's charge. A sinner useful only to the king, he found no allies at court. Kyner and the other Christian warriors acted as though he did not exist and responded to him only when in the presence of Arthur.

  Worst of all, Bishop Riochatus insisted on preaching to him at every encounter and sprinkling him with holy water, striving to drive away the carnal devils that possessed him.

  Bedevere determined to prove himself as righteous as any man, and on the day the king entered the hollow hills to claim a teardrop from the eye of the Dragon, the one-armed warrior left on his own quest for the Holy Grail. When he returned with that sacred vessel, he knew that no one would ever again question his faith or his worthiness to serve the king.

  Following Kyner's directions to the Black Chapel, Bedevere soon arrived in Crowland, atop the pine bluff that looked down on the willow isle in its shallow stream. Egrets waded through their silver reflections in midstream. And the dragon that had mortally wounded Cei gave no sign.

  Bedevere loosened the girth straps of his horse, fitted his plumed bronze helmet upon his head, and led his steed down the slope of reed brakes. With the day scattered like crushed topaz in the water, he mounted and drew his sword loudly from its sheath so that its echoes rang across the glade.

  A deep growl replied from behind the willow isle, leaving a trail of darker echoes.

  Fear boiled up in Bedevere. He used all his strength to hold the reins and the hilt of his sword firmly in his one hand as his mount danced beneath him, desperate to run.

  But there was no place to run to. In Camelot and across all Britain, he was an abomination. His salvation awaited him in the Black Chapel. In that moment, the dragon became the hatred of the people who had forced him to this cruel contest. All the prejudice that had tramped upon his honor, all the hopeless love and the murdered joy of his life had assumed form in this vile and vehement creature.

  His fright hardened to ivory anger, and he shouted, "Come out, you filthy beast! Come out and end my suffering once and for all! Make me a man among men—or kill me!"

  From behind the vale of willows, the dragon rose. Its tonnage of torn flesh and encrusted bone reared against the sky on ruined wings. It lunged over the isle with one stride. Fumes poured from its skull-grin like the smoke of a squall, darkening the day. And the flags of its ripped tissue flapped with the force of its bounding charge.

  Bedevere's horse would not be restrained. It twisted about and bolted away hopelessly, fleeing under the steaming shadow of the monster. A roar pounded the air to deafness. Bedevere took that as a signal to jolt his loosened saddle rig
htward, toward his armless side. He slid under the galloping steed as blue fire blasted over him and the world blurred and disappeared in a blind glare. Heat scorched him, and the stink of roasted flesh filled his lungs.

  The burned horse crumpled, sliding into the water and collapsing into mud and gravel. Bedevere rolled, with his sword pressed flat against his chest, his cuirass and helmet taking blows from the river rocks. Fast as he could, he shoved to his feet and ran for the shrieking behemoth, remembering how Arthur had slain his dragon.

  The hissing bellows of the beast deepened, and he knew another blast of burning death impended. Screaming inaudibly against the oceanic roar of the dragon, Bedevere swung his sword hard over his head.

  Above him towered legs big as pylons, with iridescent hide ripped raw to shining, pink-fleshed wounds. And above the mighty legs, a torso of tattered crimson banners. And above all that, the gaping maw with its slithering tongue of black oils and smoking red teeth. Eyes like yolk jellies in horned sockets fixed him where he stood, and jetting blue flames exploded with lightning force as he threw his sword.

  -)(-

  "Earth is a globe in the void," Merlin explained to Fra Athanasius when they entered the hollow hills. Layers of ether light glowed in the long sky beyond a horizon of narrow trees.

  Moments earlier, the wizard had led the monk and the king down natural steps of flowstone to the grotto where the scribe had first learned of electricity. Vapors continued to leak phosphorescently from distilling vats, galley pots, and carboys that cluttered the limestone crannies.

  In passing, Athanasius had glanced into lamplit side chambers of vermiculate rock formations crowded with drafting tables, brass instruments, and more glassware. He had been nervously looking for Loki and had found only a few bats flurrying around the hanging spires of the cave vaults.