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

by Attanasio, A. A.

  And then the wizard had taken a sharp turn, past ruffled columns of green rock mired where the ceiling dripped puddles of mineral liquor, and suddenly they were in a sparse woods lit with minty colors of twilight.

  "The flat earth is an illusion," Merlin went on, striving to calm himself as well as his companions. Well he knew the risks of wandering in the hollow hills. On prior visits, the wrath of the elk-headed god had nearly killed him and once had even made him a spirit fugitive to his own body. "What the eye perceives is only apparent. In truth, the Earth ... "

  "Has a spherical shape," Athanasius concluded the wizard's thought. "For centuries reason has been in mutiny to perception. Aristotle observed the curved shadow that Earth casts upon the Moon in eclipse. Oh yes, Merlin, I am a scribe, and I have read scrolls in the libraries of Rome and Alexandria full of wonders past expectation. Such as Aristarchus of Samos, whose mind rose to high enterprises and noble attempts three centuries before our Savior's birth. Aristarchus proposed that the ponderous notion of celestial spheres upon which are fixed the stars and planets is a luxuriant illusion. He claimed that Earth is simply one of the wandering planets, all revolving about the Sun. The nocturnal parade of stars across the heavens appears thus because Earth rotates on an axis."

  "Your erudition is a happy surprise," Arthur said, braced by his cypress crutch and gawking about uneasily at the crepuscular forest. He, too, had known horror in the hollow hills and fervently regretted that this magic required him personally to collect the Dragon's teardrop. "Can you perhaps arrange for those scrolls to be copied for our library in Camelot?"

  "I will see to it upon my return to Ravenna, my lord," the legate replied, avidly praying in silence that God would allow him to fulfill his promise and deliver him whole and sound from this unsavory venture.

  Apprehensively, he looked about at a sky like watery blood and trees thin and knobbed as charred spines. He shuddered and strode closer to the wizard. "How then, Merlin, if we journey subterranean, do our senses perceive ourselves at cockshut time in a wood of eerie quiet where one might well expect to behold steaming out of the loam the departed dead?"

  "The Earth is electrical as is the brain," Merlin answered. "What we see in the hollow hills are the thoughts of the Earth, or I should say the thoughts of those beings who live in the Earth, the Daoine Sid. They have imagined the world above. For them, twilight is perpetual, for in their exile from the World Tree, they are the light fallen into the Earth. We wander in their dream."

  The wizard stopped abruptly. From among the red shadows of impending night came a rider. Dead leaves swirled under hoof, and the air shimmered about the steed.

  Athanasius tilted his lenses, and breathed in awe, "A unicorn!”

  "Fear not," Merlin said, and grasped Arthur's forearm. "It is the king's mother, Ygrane."

  Lit by a faint pale aura, the witch-queen came to a stop upon her black unicorn several strides away. "Do not approach," she warned. The space around her appeared fragmented or feathered, brushed with streaks of northern lights. "I have broken free from the god of the hollow hills. His glamour is upon me, and if we touch, you will be enthralled."

  "Mother!" Arthur limped forward and pulled the mask of black sendal from his face. He had never before seen her without her habit. Bareheaded, her pale hair cropped close to the facets of her skull, her eyes a green rhyme to the sunset, combustive stars in the dark hollows under her high forehead, she seemed malfeasant, an apostate to all that was holy. "It is true then? You have forsaken your immortal soul and given yourself to the pagan gods?"

  Ygrane made no reply. Aqueous reflections wobbled around her and smeared her features with a radiance propagated out of emptiness. Upon the brow-tusk of the black unicorn palest fire spiraled, and within the bestial curves of its opal blue eyes Ygrane sat again upon the black unicorn, both drenched in sunlight, already arrived in the dayheld world beyond the hollow hills.

  "Mother—why?" Tears tracked Arthur's cheeks. "You were a holy woman, and now you are—a witch!"

  "Do not tarry," she counseled him, unfazed by sorrow or a mother's sentiment. Contact with the unicorn flared a serene and voiceless joy through her, a prophetic joy that washed over her and passed on through the beast's horn to the three before her.

  Arthur would endure. He would endure beyond his flesh. The slippery body that had somersaulted in her womb and that had squeezed forth from her would find a way back to daylight and the deeds that would defy silence and death and give themselves in a fusion of memory and dream to become legend.

  "Do not tarry," she said again, and smiled, her heart broken and its pain arrogated by the might of a greater love.

  Chapter 16:

  Lo! The Dragon!

  Inside the nacreous foglight of Skidblade, Morgeu the Fey writhed with remorse. She had endangered her baby Mordred to use the Aesir god's magic ship for her purposes. No matter that those purposes ultimately served the child. If by her delay in going to Avalon she had enraged the Furor, he would flay the infant for a skin-patch on his breeches.

  When Skidblade's hull circled open and revealed a sun-basked vista of knolls and dells crowded with apple trees and the standing stones called menhirs, Morgeu leaped out and skidded on a slick mound of rotted fruit. She fell to her haunches and sat there in the apple muck, staring at high thin serifs of cloud printed against the blue like some undeciphered legend.

  On the verdant promontory below the cloud-runes, a cascade fell in a single silver thread into a gorge of lichen-covered rocks splotched yellow, red, brown, and green as tapestries or carpets flung into the chasm.

  She laughed, realizing she had arrived in Avalon and had, for now, eluded the Furor's ire. Muttering Mordred's name fervently as a prayer, she scrambled to her feet. Crimson robes lifted almost to her knees, she ran nimbly, a happy servant of the Aesir chieftain. From among gnarled apple trees, she glanced back and saw Skidblade floating blue and white as a cloud in a glade of clover.

  The death of her baby would extinguish all her foolish pride, she realized, acknowledging to herself that her pride in the child born of her incest magic was foolish. She and her baby Mordred occupied a momentary dream. The warmth of the sun stretching itself on the meadows of Avalon and the perfume of those meadows, enigmatic and pianissimo, assured her of that. And she slowed her run.

  We could have stopped her then. We Nine Queens possessed magic of our own, and this was our island. But millennia of watching and not interfering, of witnessing birth, love, and death with divine patience had left us empty beyond illusion.

  Let the enchantress work her spell, we thought to ourselves. Eight thousand five hundred years of spelling had not unraveled the knot of the human heart and its tangled bloodways of mammalian hungers. Ninety thousand years of our attentiveness and attunement had only just begun to loosen that knot.

  Compassion, mercy, and love still could not match strength with the heart's avarice and vengefulness. Murder, rape, and the venom of lust that molested children and made of them monsters filled our unblinking sight day after day across horizons of time. Only the rare soul knows what love is for.

  So—Let the enchantress work her spell, we thought. None had dared before, and we were unobstructed by expectations, fearful or otherwise.

  Morgeu came slowly through the trees, already sensing the pointlessness of her rage and the truth of what the Furor himself had told her: You have always disdained life and hated our brief dream, our brief brightness.

  We cooled the heat of her disdain by our mere presence, but that only slowed her. She came on through the apple trees and down the slope of cloud shadows and swaying grass like a sleepwalker.

  The chanting had already begun inside her in the woods, before she saw the large round hut of packed earth, with its circular windows and small red door. When our hovel finally came into view she gave loud voice to her spell, her gaze illumined with purpose.

  Barbarous words they were—full of harsh sounds and discordant rhythms—abrasive cri
es that weakened the strength of our watchful trance. Dancing her circles lighter than leaves about our hut, her crimson robe aflutter, her arms jangling over her luminous head of frizzy red hair, she stalled our soulful visions.

  We slumped in our block-cut thrones, and our pulses clicked like ice in our wrists.

  For that moment, we were just women again. The magic had stopped, and we were simply nine women lowering our gauzy veils, blinking away sleep, and staring at one another anxiously. Were we wrong to let the enchantress dance her spell? What would we do now? Would we live or die?

  The youngest of us, Nynyve, who had been out in the world recently to help the high king of Britain whom the Fire Lords had marked to take Rna's place, said, "Wait. The Fire Lords who chose each of us for this beautiful work want us to finish. They will not let Morgeu or the Furor stop us. But the radiant ones are few and scattered widely across the cosmos. Wait, and one of them will come."

  We agreed to keep to our places, and so we sat and chatted about how eerie and lovely the world was, and ruminated why each of us had been selected for this task. "We are victims," one of us said, recalling the Germanic kin word wih from the Sanskrit vinakti—"he sets apart."

  "We have been set apart to carry the dream of the universal family," chimed another. And a third added, "Because that dream is a dream, no one believes it, and so we must bear its weight across the generations until love becomes more plausible than hate." And a fourth suggested, "We are lucky the universal family is a dream, for dreams are light and our road is long."

  Before anyone else could speak, the spacious chamber with its earthen floor flooded with dazzling light. A Fire Lord arrived, as Nynyve had known he would.

  We drew our veils once more across our faces, and the magic of the radiant one lifted us taller in our seats. The trance seeing began again, every unique human life in Europe floating before us like foliage upon the branches of a sturdy bough.

  Outside, Morgeu the Fey stopped her frenzied dance, and the barbarous spell went silent in her throat. The Fire Lord stood before her so bright that even the vivid red of her hair and the crimson of her robes drained to white outlines of themselves.

  In the sugared radiance, the enchantress stared silently, aghast that her blasphemy had summoned a fiery angel out of heaven's closed eternity.

  -)(-

  Loki sat on the ground, upon red jasper flagstones in a narrow and remote terrace under Camelot's north wall. He plucked sulkily at livid toadstools growing through the joints and pondered summoning the Fire Lords directly. Why did he have to wait on Merlin? Why truckle to a demon who had lost the stature of a demon and become a man? For the promise of a sword?

  His blood brother the Furor had employed high magic to draw demons from the House of Fog for his conquest of Britain. Why not summon the Fire Lords themselves and conquer Yggdrasil?

  "But would they come?" he wondered aloud and looked about him at evergreen arbors and a flight of black marble stairs that descended to a water garden in the inner ward. Lifting his tattooed face to the ranks of beech trees against the espaliered bulwark, he felt a moment of pride. Of all the gods, he alone had dared to enter the citadel of the Furor's enemies. Merlin could have trapped him in a jug and thrown him into the sea to languish for aeons. His courage and his wits had prevailed.

  Bolstered by this evidence, he decided to call out to the Fire Lords and appeal for their direct support in overthrowing the Furor, who despised them. Merlin had claimed that this citadel was designed to resonate with the Storm Tree and thus presumably with the universe beyond. If the angels could be reached at all, they would surely sense him from here.

  He stood and sent forth a single shout, not daring more for fear of alerting the Aesir to his presence in Camelot. Even this cry risked exposure, and he directed his summons high above the Storm Tree and far into outer space. "Fire Lords!" he called. "Come forth!"

  No radiant beings appeared. Instead, the air darkened, though the sun remained unobscured by clouds. A frigid wind broomed dead leaves across the terrace, gathering them into a scuttling whirlwind.

  Out of the tossing wind emerged a naked man big as two men, a giant with pomegranate skin, and where his face should have been, rusted twists of jagged wire stitched every orifice—eye sockets, nostrils, mouth, and ears. A living face thrived on his belly with goat eyes of clouded quartz for nipples, a hog's nose at his sternum, and an impossibly wide grin of fangs like a serpent's jaw dislocated to devour prey.

  Succoth, one of the demons driven off the Dragon by the witch-queen Ygrane, came forward. The Furor's magic bound him to the will of the Aesir, and Loki’s summons retrieved him from the interplanetary abyss. An immediate telepathic understanding passed between him and the Liar: The demon would devour the god, would rip him to plasmic shreds and scatter the ions of his dead flesh into the solar wind, where they would blow into space and drift forever through profound and absolute darkness.

  Terror sliced through Loki, and he anchored his wits on the espaliered bulwark beyond the beech trees. When Succoth came for him, scythe claws slashing, the god sprinted across the terrace, through the trees, and up the curving bulwark with monkey agility.

  Succoth followed, abdominal jaws rending wet and grinding cries.

  True to his word, Merlin had designed Camelot for connection with the Storm Tree, and when Loki reached the parapet above the inner ward, he slapped the tattoos from his scalp and face and ascended toward Yggdrasil in a geyser of auroral fire.

  Succoth's claws swiped the empty space where the god had stood, and the demon soared after him. His sticky red flames yawed to a shark's mouth, and he shot with flowing voracity through the tangled layers of the Tree.

  Loki intended to lose the demon in the dense forests of Yggdrasil. He ducked under hanging moss and air plants and entered a wanton world of pallid tree boles, strangler vines, and thick walls of blossoms. A crested eagle, surprised by the fleeing god, screamed, "Lokee! Kee! Kee!" And its laughter at the Liar's plight directed Succoth faster along ivy lanes and high galleries.

  When Loki realized he could not hide in the forests of Yggdrasil, he fled to the marshes. There, mist strayed in whorls among cypress stumps and skeletons of fallen trees. He banged on the lichenous doors of trolls, hoping they would hide him. The wet, gnashing cries of the demon frightened them. They heard the toads of the mere responding to the dark angel, shouting, "Suk—ut! Suk! Suk! Suk—ut!"

  In despair, Loki ran full out across the open fields of the upper world, bounding away uphill with furious vigor. The other gods, alerted by Loki's loud shrieks, watched in astonishment from their bowers and the forest trails of the endless Wild Hunt. None stirred to help him, because all sensed the Furor's magic upon Succoth. Like a howling wind, the demon passed among them, intent only on Loki.

  The sky's broad blue glare darkened toward indigo and wisps of eternal night as the terrified god climbed higher in the Storm Tree. Stars tight as silver seeds gleamed where the cold hardened and the silence roared.

  If Loki ran any higher, he would plunge into space and the solar wind would sweep him away. Desperately, he searched about for his blood brother, and called to him by his childhood name: "Wo-tan! Wo!"

  The cry flapped across gypsum dunes to the Raven's Branch, where the sleeping gods lay. These gods loved the Furor so dearly that they had given to him their wakefulness to strengthen his magic and his tether upon the demons from the House of Fog.

  Loki's bitter cry fell into their dreamless ears, and they heard him not. Sister Mint, whose husband, the Brewer, had concocted the sleeping potion; Blue, sea-dweller and oldest friend of the Furor; Ravager, storm-rider and sorceress; Silver Heart, huntress; and the two children the Furor begot on his wife Lady Unique—Beauty and Thunder Red Hair—stirred not at all. The Liar's screams reached them, and they heard him not.

  Elsewhere in the World Tree, in the oak-wood palace called Home, Lady Unique did hear the despairing cries of the Liar. And she smiled, for she detested his dece
its and trickery. Yet, she knew her husband would not tolerate his blood brother's death by a rabid Dark Dweller from the House of Fog. Too humiliating a death for any Aesir god, she thought, knowing the Furor to be as proud as he was bold. That he had not quickly responded gave her pause for thought.

  Lady Unique, robust and big-boned, white-blond hair strained back from a serene brow and gathered in deep folds at the back of her head by bands of moonstone, wore only the simplest gowns of brown hunter's cloth embroidered by her own hand. She did not value opulence, nor did she favor weakness of any kind. For many years, she had believed her husband admired these sturdy qualities in her.

  Of late, since he had convinced their children, Beauty and Thunder Red Hair, to give him their life strength for his magic, he had seemed more remote, and she sometimes wondered if perhaps he savored her less than before. Such thoughts, themselves a betrayal of weakness, she always drove quickly from mind.

  Queen of the Aesir gods, she conducted herself as a worthy consort. Upon the blond rafters of their Home gleamed the shields of battles won against Fauni and Sid. The skulls and bones of enemy champions had been crafted into flambeaux to light the tall windows of Home, and they reminded her of her pride and her purpose as the Furor's wife.

  While the Furor gave all his strength to his magic, binding demons to serve him and conniving against the invading Fire Lords, she worked daily to gather the mortal troops necessary for the conquest of the West Isles. Their king, Wesc, wrote devotional poetry to her. His poetry pleased her with its profundity and beauty.

  She had embroidered his lines of verse in gold thread upon black baize, framed it in gazelle horn, and placed it among the skull trophies, battle flutes, and skin drums of the hearth den to inspire humility in her husband:

  What has not become of you