continues.
How it has helped you you
will never know.
Daily she inspired King Wesc's Wolf Warriors and his snake priests. Daily the invasion force grew, pulsing with the energy that she gathered for them through her talismans: She wove them from bryony twine and set them with polished beryls so that they focused the magical power of the upper world and directed it to her chieftains and wizards as battle luck, courage, and orphic visions. This work lately occupied most of her time, and she had no strength left for suspicions and the weakness of jealousy.
With the Furor's blood brother shrieking for his life, a spectacle before all the gods, she could not help but wonder why her husband was so slow to reply. She resolved to question him about this the next time he came Home to inquire about his mortal troops.
She would ask him where he was, though already her pride insisted that he lived in trance, using their children's strength and the strength of the other gods who loved him to protect Yggdrasil from the Fire Lords—and the cataclysm of Ragnarok.
In truth, the Furor lay in tall ambrosial grass beside his mistress, Keeper of the Dusk Apples. Tall and slender, Keeper dressed in laces, tiffanies, and veils set with gems like dewdrops and scented with angelica. Her love for the Furor flourished with fierce passion, and little talk of invasions, talismans, demons, or Fire Lords passed between them. Staring into her adoring eyes, he heard the Liar's screams as in a dream.
Loki dared not wait another instant for his brother's aid. The demon Succoth flew across the gypsum dunes like a red razor. The god leaped from the Raven's Branch and fell through the World Tree, through the azure sky and clouds like white hills. He landed upon the Branch of Hours—the bough of the Storm Tree that belonged to the Norns.
This bough, a mere of ice and mists, ranged mutely to a cold jade sky. Noon stood like a golden column, warming a small girl with strawberry hair and a tattered frock: the Wyrd sister Skuld. Her face smudged, her thin limbs gray with grime, she played with prismatic pebbles, blue diamonds marked by runes, a gift from the Furor.
When Loki fell into a nearby drift, splashing snowdust, Skuld did not look up from her game. "The red blade comes for you, Liar." She tossed her pebbles onto the slate ground with one dirty hand and gathered them with the other. "You cannot live here. Not now."
"Where can I live, Skuld?" Loki asked, tumbling out of the drift and skidding and slipping toward her. "Be quick, girl! Where is the way to where I live?"
"Under the lamp of the moon," she answered simply. The tossed pebbles clacked. "But you have to run, Liar. The red blade comes."
Loki spun about and found the Moon under the scales of night in the far distance. He ran, veering and sliding on ice, forcibly quieting his breath to listen for the wet, grinding chops of the red demon. He heard a glittering growl and then Succoth's claws clattering onto the ice panes, and the Liar did not look back.
The sky grew darker as Loki fled across the winter bough into the future. Night reared before him, a black flame of star vapors. Half a millennium later, he slowed his mad dash across the glacier of time and threw a fearful look over his shoulder. No one was there. Far back from where he had come, he beheld the claw of the sun and winter light, pale, silent, diaphanous as smoke—the smoke of the past, fumes rising from a grave.
-)(-
The Dragon slept. In its sleep, it dreamed. And in its dream, the universe opened into an enormous instant. The beginning burst like a star upon silence, throwing spears of light into darkness. From a point smaller than an atom, smaller than an electron, tinier yet than a quark, the explosion threw out prophecies. Time began.
Stars emerged within densities of hydrogen gas. Gravity and exploding stars forged beryllium-8, carbon-12, and oxygen-16. And the fusion of these nuclei in other generations of stars built calcium, magnesium, and iron. From the zero of nothing, the light. Wombs inside wombs: the womb of nothing becoming light delivering matter into the envenomed cold, into bitter darkness and the thermodynamic flow of spacetime.
The enormous instant plunged outward into itself. Billions of years, tens of billions, and the swarming galaxies thinned away like so much smoke. Outward, faster and faster—forever.
In the Dragon's dream, the enormous instant of the universe expanded to absolute darkness. The dreaming Dragon of Earth gazed back at itself across that precipice of nothing, back through vacuous aeons to the fiery delirium of spinning galaxies, then down to one yellow star and Earth falling through its orbital years, down to Earth spinning its wobbly circle of days, down to the Dragon's own slumbering self coiled deep in the cooling core of the planet.
Three diminutive creatures approached—animalcules made of Stardust—tiny entities of calcium and carbon and effervescing water, mere fantasies, fleeting blurs so close to nothingness that the Dragon in its sleep almost did not see them there at the tiniest boundaries of time.
"Where are we?" Athanasius shouted into the roaring air. His spectacles glared red against his black mask, and he raised his hand to shield his eyes from the blinding refulgence of the sun. No, not Sol! He had to remind himself that the king, the wizard, and he wandered miles below the surface of the earth.
The illusion of trees had vanished long ago, and the pilgrims had been scrabbling through rocky terrain for hours, relentlessly pursuing the flaring sunset. The stench of sulfur and the heat disoriented him. "Merlin! For what in this world has God wrought this subterranean luminosity?"
"The fire of Vesuvius!" Merlin yelled above the din. He waved the legate closer, to the jagged brink of a titanic ravine where he and the king stood. "Lo! The Dragon!"
Across an abyss of fiery cliffs and gulfs, magma flowed in arteries of incandescent blood and cataracts of dazzling white-hot radiance. Waves of lava splashed against black rock islands and columnar walls of carbon and corundum, while overhead the shadowy glare reflected off crystal vaults frosted with diamonds. By the chromatic light that breathed in those gems, the vascular arches and cupolas appeared organic, like effloresced tissue and mottled skin.
"Who would have dreamed?" Athanasius bellowed in awe. "A great life inhabits the interior! Self-effulgent and fiery!"
"Relax your gaze!" Merlin passed a hand before Athanasius's face. "See deeper!"
As the wizard's hand fell away, the legate recognized the desolate patterns of bare rock as camouflage. The colossal gorge became skin folds and wrinkles under an eye gigantic as a mountain. Glowing currents of lava branched as capillaries among the scleral immensity of the eye. Its crystalline cell structure pulsed with radiant life-force on an orb so immense that even craning his head all the way back, he could not see beyond the lower curve of the diamond eye white to where the dragon's iris began. He staggered backward and sat down on the warm stone floor, stunned.
King Arthur, too, limped back a pace when he recognized the stupendous eye. By swinging his head side to side, he observed that the pupil had rolled up into the socket. The Dragon slumbered.
"Use Excalibur to retrieve a teardrop!" Merlin instructed the king, and pointed to the rock face in the lower eyelid of the dragon. Mineral outgrowths knobbed its surface and gleamed with chimeric light.
Arthur did not hear the wizard. Nor did he feel the throbbing pain in his leg that had escorted him from Camelot. He stood entranced by the behemoth. Before him slumbered the worship of gods and ancestors. There is that Leviathan which You have made ... Psalm 104 rang from his stammering heart and in its echo the portentous words of Job 40:19—He is the first of the ways of God.
Within its heat, he felt all the veins of his body shooting blood, hammering arterial walls and his brain with awe. An ecstasy of wonder transfixed him. He did not feel his wound or hear the jarring cacophony.
Merlin grasped his shoulder, pointed at the wall, and shouted, "Use Excalibur!"
The king drew his sword, and it shone slick as blood in the fiery air.
Merlin walked alongside, fearful for the king. Arthur alone had to retrieve the teardr
op to assure the fulfillment of the magical operation. The wizard was not certain that this was necessary, yet he thought it wise to take no chances, even though this required the king to climb with his wounded leg above the pit of flames.
Arthur set aside his crutch and favored his good leg as he pulled himself onto the ponderous shelf of rock at the fluorescent brink of the gorge. Merlin placed himself at the edge of the plummet to catch the king if he fell.
Fortunately, no demons lurked anywhere near. The wizard searched for them and felt only the Dragon's sense of being, a repose at the point of transparency, opening upon star depths and the vertigo of galactic distances. Ygrane had kept her word and had cleared the dragonpit for her son.
To steady himself, Merlin focused upon the king's precarious ascent. By the ultraviolet glow of the superheated rock in the chasm, lachrymal drippings shone above Arthur as purple stalactites, nacreous oozings from the cliff. The boy perched on an overhang above seething magma and balanced himself on the toes of his good leg to reach a bubbled spill of crystals.
Wedging the blade of his sword beneath a globular excrescence and using his strong leg for purchase, he twisted from the waist and pried loose a pearl big as a skull. It fell into his arms. With a whooping shout silent under the roar of the heat, he jumped down.
"My lord!" Merlin yelled triumphantly and ran a knobby hand over the iridescent sphere. "We must hurry from here! Already the sleeper senses our presence! Should the Dragon dream of us, we will never find our way out!"
-)(-
"Falon!" Ygrane called, and the black unicorn carried her north over Britain toward the Celtic warrior who had protected her since her days as a child-queen chosen by the Druids. The scorched land flew below like black-and-brown mottlings of a serpent's skin. Then the lake country reflected the sun in wild flashes, and clouds fell to mists among the highlands and dark ravines of Caledonia—
And they arrived.
A canopy of chestnut trees framed a mound of mossy rocks—a gravesite. Rhododendron and barberry flourished around the cairn, and a path of pebbles and rivershells led from the burial tumulus into a pine forest so that the warrior's soul could walk away from the fallen animal in the grave and return to the spirit world.
Atop the unicorn, Ygrane peered through time and a corpuscular haze of matter so that the grave became a window into the magnificent disorder of the corpse. Millipedes, beetles, ants, and a ferment of minuscules thrived in the loam that had been her guardian.
Naked bones moldered with a brown decay of new life. New desires flourished inside the amber cage where his heart had been parsed out to countless tiny creatures. And in the domed cave, in the sludge that had been his brain, worms writhed, singing about paradise.
She dismounted and slumped. Separation from the unicorn drained her of prescience. She stood dull with grief before the burial site. The disposition of the stones, well joined along the sides and aligned awkwardly at the crest, told her that Falon had prepared his own cairn and had lain down in it and covered himself with prepared stones when he was ready to die. She found braids of ivy net and twined creepers that he had used to lower the last cache of rocks upon himself from where he had hoisted them in the bough of the overhanging chestnut, and she wept.
That he had died alone did not grieve her. He had lived as fiana, one of the fabled horsemen of no home who had served the Celtic queen by defending her highways and countryside from marauders. No fiana knew loneliness, because they had married the wind. When she had put on the habit of a nun and married herself to the Cross, Falon, who had no love for any outlander religion, had left her. He had wandered with the wind to this wild place.
She wept for the grace lost between them, seventeen years of absence.
Troubled that Falon would not accompany her into the Storm Tree, she sat on the mossy rock mound. She needed a companion she could trust on her dangerous mission, and some of her tears carried her solitude.
After Uther's death, her devotion to his faith had led her to Miriam, the Savior's mother. Miriam had been sweet company throughout those years of service among the sick and impoverished. Who would help Ygrane now with the best of her fiana dead?
She pressed her hands against her abdomen, massaging her cramped insides. Menstrual pain and grief mixed poorly, and she felt battered in body and soul.
"Creature!" A muffled shout echoed from under the needle floor of the forest. A moment later, sunthreads let down by the forest canopy parted like draperies, and Prince Bright Night of the Daoine Sid emerged, red hair in radiant disarray, tapered green eyes wrathful—"You faithless creature! You pierced our god! Someone Knows the Truth lies on the floor of the hollow hills bewildered with pain."
Ygrane glared with outrage. "You abandoned me in the hollow hills!"
"Our god commanded us."
"Your god!" The witch-queen stood up, surprised. "And our blood pact?"
Bright Night nodded impatiently. "Yes, you spilled blood for our pact, Ygrane, and I am bound by our agreement—to retrieve the Graal." He wagged a finger slowly before his angular face. "But I am not bound to defy Someone Knows the Truth. He is my god. You were a foolish woman to seek out your dead husband in the first place. What did you expect? That you would take him back with you, out of the hollow hills?"
"Of course not." She picked up a spiky chestnut and held its urchin pins against her palm, feeling the glint of pain as a temporal reminder of what she had sacrificed to see her Theo again and to help their son hold his kingdom. "I am a mortal woman, prince. If I am to be cast into the dragonpit, never again to be reborn upon this world but to journey in the great beast's dreamsong as exiled as starlight, then I am entitled to see my husband a last time."
"Entitled?" Incredulity stiffened his stare. "You risked the entire enterprise for your dead husband. You are a living woman, Ygrane. You have no entitlement to see Uther at all." He kicked the chestnut tree as if it were a door he could force open. "Don't you realize what we've mobilized here?"
She nodded angrily. "All the Daoine Sid are at my command."
"Faeries. Sylphs. Hobs. Elves. We are your servants—after our devotion to Old Elk-Head."
"Was that part of our blood vow?" Ygrane stepped slowly toward him. "You said that the Sid will make certain I have the power to terrify the Furor. You said you would empower me with magic that would shake the Storm Tree. You promised with blood that I would have at my disposal all the magic of the Daoine Sid—not what magic remains after your devotion to this Old One."
"This Old One, as you slanderously tar him, is the last in Europe." Bright Night stood touching boot tips with the witch-queen and did not turn away though her face looked slant as night. In the green-rimmed dark of her eyes, his shining form appeared as an ashen smudge, and he knew that with a shout she could dissolve him to rainsmoke and send him spinning through clouds for the next hundred years.
Yet, even so, he bitterly spoke the outrage of all the Sid: "Wotan—Zeus—Vishnu murdered all the Old Ones, to take power for themselves. And look at what those vehement gods have done to our Mother: the land torn into empires, ripped by war, and scarred by the avarice of human ambition. You of all mortals must feel the numbness, the deadness the Romans have made of her body with their cities and roads. The ancient lines of power in the terrain are broken. Our rivers run filthy with city waste. The forests shrink. All this in a mere thirty centuries. For three hundred centuries, the Old Ones have led us through the tides of ice, and we have moved like waterbirds in and out of the valleys since long before there were mortals in the north forests and on the snow plains. We were lords among the beasts. Where did you come from?"
"We have a blood pact, Prince Bright Night." She pressed closer, of a height with him, her vexed expression tight as a stone. "For the price of my soul—a soul in love with Jesus—you said I would command all the might of the hollow hills."
"It was understood, the Daoine Sid obey Someone Knows the Truth above all others." He did not budge before her ire.
"This is ancient knowledge. You cannot plead ignorance."
"Then you are mistaken." Her voice gleamed cool as ivory. "I took you on your word—and you broke your word."
"What are you saying?" The elf prince raised his beardless chin proudly. "We agreed to return the Graal to your son, not overthrow our eternal devotion to ... "
"Don't chivvy me with your eternal devotion!" Ygrane gnashed her teeth so tightly her jaw locked, and for a moment she glared speechless. When her words came, they sounded viscous with wrath. "I lost my eternal salvation in those three drops of blood. I want all the magic of the Sid. All of it. You will not abandon me in the hollow hills again. Look what I had to resort to! Look!" She gestured to the celestial beast silently watching them.
The black unicorn floated in the tremolo shadows of the forest. Its eyes hot slashes of sunlight, its tusk the sharpest needle of night, it paced. And the floor of dead leaves did not rustle under its weight.
"They are not uncommon." The prince lidded his eyes indifferently and did not waver before the witch-queen's close, irate stare. "They come down from the void and wander the wild spaces—what wildness is left after empire."
"And when they come," Ygrane said, and tilted her shorn head impatiently, "the branches of the World Tree reach through time and blossom into the future."
"It is no concern to us." The elf touched noses with the witch and winced playfully. "No invaders have yet swarmed us from times yet to come. And who can help those few of us who wander through the Tree and disappear? They return more rarely than the unicorns themselves."
"That is my fear, Bright Night." Her callused hands seized him by his blue tunic, and a crow cried in his heart. When she laid hands on him, she took him into her brightness. Her light stripped him naked of form, reduced him to moon mist trembling in the breeze. "To get Arthur to the Vanir Lotus, he will have to cross among the branches—and risk losing himself across time."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 23