"Have no concern for that, my lady." Bright Night's smoke seethed through Ygrane's fingers and re-formed to his human shape a pace away. "The Sid will not permit your son to wander aimlessly the ranges of time like some homeless wayfarer. He will return, he will win the Lotus and the Graal—and you will be ours. That is our pact."
The witch edged closer. "What will you do when Someone Knows the Truth summons you from my side again?"
Bright Night crossed his arms. "We cannot defy our god."
"Why not defy him?" Ygrane put her hands on his arms and made him feel her interior space and the tragic dimension of her sacrifice. She had given herself to a decision that made time and the emptiness of the world shimmer. She wanted him to feel the same power. "Why not boldly overthrow him? You are the more able leader, Bright Night. You have vision and daring. With you as god, the Sid can return to the World Tree."
The prince laughed and pushed away from the witch. "I am not a god! I am but a prince of elves who can win this great victory for my god. I will return Someone Knows the Truth to heaven."
"Unless we fail." Her voice deepened somberly. "And if we fail, if you let the Old One thwart me again, you will not have my soul to waken the Dragon and win your fight. Yggdrasil will never again be home to you or your god. To win my soul, the Sid must devote their power to me above Someone Knows the Truth. You must cut through him if he blocks my way again. Let the pain bewilder him. He will restore himself. What you take from me, I lose forever."
Bright Night mulled this over, shining eyes lidded—and an acid tang of hate poisoned his thinking. He did not want to balance odds against stakes to decide faithlessness to his god. That assailed his integrity.
With a jolt, he understood that this was also what enraged the witch-queen—the resented blood pact that had turned her from her nameless god. He unlocked his arms and straightened with surprise. "We are thrown together as one!"
"As one," she confirmed with a grim nod. "I am glad you finally understand."
"It is a dark pact we have forged between us, my lady." Bright Night pulled his fleecy hair back with both hands. "We are a pair of infidelities."
"To one purpose." Her eyes suggested pits above the hollows of her cheeks, a shadow of the Crone. "My leadership. My sacrifice. Simple and certain."
Bright Night nodded once, committed to the ruthless symmetry of their pact. "Our god will not block your way again. Until your soul is in our hands, we set him aside." He looked at the slinky darkness of the unicorn. "And you will control your beast. It is not the same creature as the white unicorn you rode when you were a young queen. This breed is treacherous."
"I am not afraid." She smiled at him, bright-eyed with unconcern for the future. "After all, you are guarding me."
Chapter 17:
Unwrlnkle the Stars
Morgeu the Fey cringed before the Fire Lord, hands upheld to shield her from the angel's heatless brilliance. In his glare, shadows appeared more darkly real than physical objects, and colors detached and floated away. The round abode of the Nine Queens, the apple groves, and the languid hills of Avalon shone white and featureless.
Darkness intervened. A human figure massive as three men eclipsed the Fire Lord, and in the giant's shadow Morgeu sat down, stunned colors and vaporous hues rippling across her brain. The dark soul in her dark blood crawled away somewhere, and for a long moment, she remained just a shape of herself, like the chalk patterns of the trees and hills she had glimpsed in the angel's radiance.
Voices locked in ice hissed and cracked. The sense of the words floated away unreachably distant, yet Morgeu the Fey knew that the giant and the angel were conversing in great seriousness. When her senses thickened enough for her to open her hands in the brown sunlight and touch the grass stalks she had trampled with her barbarous dance, she remembered herself.
The giant stood in flame-edged silhouette, and she recognized his wolfskin boots and his wild hair shining like tangled lightning. Startled, she scuttled backward from the Furor. His heavy shadow crawled with ribbonworms of light. The rays of the Fire Lord moved inside the god, fanning through his astral form.
Morgeu rolled to her feet and dashed away. The god did not see her. He was in the angel's grip. That was what he had wanted all along—for her to evoke the Fire Lord with her noisy, delirious enchantment of the Nine Queens so that he could confront the fiery being, his fateful enemy.
She ran from the Furor and did not glance back. Every shadow pointed the way, stretching from the white dazzle of the angel into the honeycomb dark of the forest. She did not care what transpired between the two titans. Her promise fulfilled, she wanted to get back to Skidblade and use the shining ship to find Mordred.
The Furor paid her no heed. All his attention fixed upon the luminous entity, because he stood before this adversary without a weapon. He cherished no hope of winning a fight with such a formidable and otherworldly being and determined instead to confront the invader with himself, leader, and—if need be—sacrificial offering of the Aesir. "Who are you?" asked the chieftain.
No reply came. The being's light fitted his thoughts as water in a skull cup. Wherever the prophetic power of his one eye searched, he saw only himself in the diamond rays, in the blinding white, in the endless vacuum white of the Fire Lord.
"Why do you come to my world with your magic?" The Furor still smelled the crushed-grass musk from Keeper of the Dusk Apples. He had rushed to Avalon as soon as he had heard Morgeu's raving chant, and the mint scent of his mistress breathed from his furs. Along its perfume trails, deep into the Furor's psyche, the Fire Lord shone his radiation from the first pulsebeat of time.
The Furor fluoresced. The atomic haze of his ionic plasma resonated with the energy of the Fire Lord. The angel expanded to fill the full mosaic of the Furor's physical body.
Shining with the refulgence of the Fire Lord, the god witnessed his thoughts and feelings as cut crystal, inexorable, definitive projections of his corporeal form.
"You say there is no choice! Is that what you are telling me, Fire Lord?" He realized that to this entity he merely filled a form, a shape, barely sensate.
The Fire Lord illuminated one facet of the Furor's crystal soul, and the angelica perfume of his lover brightened in his nostrils.
The Furor listened to the silence, not a bird or a leaf rustling. The white intensity of the angel had blinded him, and the passionate smell of his lover returned him to the ambrosial grass in the dell where he lay with Keeper of the Dusk Apples.
"Why did you rush away?" she asked him, her hazel eyes surprised, caught picking feathers of grass from her gauzy veils. "What is going on?"
"I am with a Fire Lord ... " he began to say, and the dream scrap of his mistress slipped away. He squinted into the fathomless glow of the Fire Lord until his one eye hurt, then he turned his lost eye to the light—and he saw with it once more!
He observed his wife Lady Unique at Home, in their palace of blond wood. She sat under a quince tree beside the lily pool braiding more of her beryl-and-bryony talismans for King Wesc. Her faithfulness to their cause stung his empty eye with a teardrop of lye.
The Fire Lord touched again the first facet of the god's soul, and the rhapsody of longings the Furor felt for Keeper of the Dusk Apples swelled with voluptuous insistence. His whole body reeled like a cliff, rigid yet threatening to topple at any moment into the depths of his passion.
"Stop!—touching me!" The Furor bowed his head and squeezed his eye shut. Golden light hazed to the silver shadows of her hair and that fragrance again, fathoms of desire full of unremembered dreams. "Yes. She is my lover. The great secret of my life. Should my proud wife ever discover us, I will lose my strongest ally. Is that what you want me to admit? That I have put my whole noble purpose at risk for faithless lust?"
The Furor sank to his knees, hands over his face, his voice a sob of muffled thunder in his big beard. "I admit it then! Thick desire stands in me! And you are perfection come to Earth? Then why do you
break the land with roads and walls and fences? Why do you kennel people in cities? And why, tell me, why do I see you always in our future?" He uncovered his face and saw no one.
"Come back!" the Furor bellowed, lurching half-blind to his feet. Colors burned to their opposites and staggered back into place—red hills, green apples ...
"Come back and answer my questions!" He stamped his feet angrily and shook his fists at the black clouds. "Why do the cities burn in winds of fire? I have seen it. The cities of glass and metal burn! Why? And why do you dance in their flames?"
-)(-
Bedevere's flung sword exploded the dragon, and the blast ripped through him like a bolt from the blue vault of heaven. All the tips of his body burst into silver flames. Shrieking, he threw off his sparking helmet and collapsed into the water. The shallows crawled momentarily with green firesnakes.
When he stood up, his blackened nose and the charred tips of his ears wisped fumes, and ashen hair drizzled from his bald head. A red star etched in soot upon his pate marked where the helmet had arced to his scalp.
With the tattered fingers of his one hand, he reached for the willow isle and its veiled chapel. He shambled through the canes and willow withes, moaning through roasted lips. His swollen eyes rolled with each tortured step, as if inspired by the tragedy put upon him, as if pain also had a muse.
He entered the blackstone chapel on his knees. The serene flames on the tall candles cast a uterine glow in the dark interior and seemed to pulse with his heart as he reached for the basalt altar and the holy chalice.
The wood cup did not diminish his agony. It fit his grasp with wood that had filled the hand of the Savior, and it gave him focus: He fixed his mind upon the terrible beauty of the Lord's suffering. And his mind, already tried beyond endurance, found strength.
With the Holy Grail grasped in his black, frayed fingers, he shoved himself out of the chapel, lumbered through the willows, and slogged downstream. He would carry this glory to Camelot, never suspecting its unreality and Morgeu's trickery.
The glory was all that the burning pain would allow him to hold in his mind. He would carry to Camelot this holy emblem of his Christian fidelity. The warlords would kneel in awe before him.
Kneel in awe ...
He marched through the night, the stars burning coldly in their deep cavities. By dawn, he shuffled across sand on a windy gray beach. Dunes scalloped the coast as far as he could see. A fisherman's shed occupied a cove of black boulders—driftwood thatching and walls of wind-slotted planks. Pale seaweed draped its doorway and parted before a lank man with a salt-stained beard and hollow eyes. He wore fish-skin raiment and a crown of starfish. A wide, vermilion scar glossed his brow.
"Hail from the Fisher King!" The unshorn man strode through the gloaming toward the one-armed wanderer and presented himself. "Let your journey's ache end here, stranger. You are come upon the Kingdom of the Sea, and without a boat it is shut to your coming as rock. Stop and climb prayers with me, prayers for the quick and the dead, and I will share the high room of the soul with you where we are all kings above our made graves. Stop and give prayers to these answering skies and praise with me the love who dies for our grave truth."
Bedevere stalled before the seeming madman. He wanted to shove past him, to keep walking, on to Camelot and his redemption at the Round Table. The jabbering hermit blocked his way.
"Speak, man!" the Fisher King commanded and lifted both fists in the gray, predawn air. "Have you knelt at the empty grave? Do you know who rolled aside the stone? Speak, man!"
"The Holy Grail!" Bedevere shouted, and held forth the chalice, but only a moan emerged from his crisped lungs.
The Fisher King recognized the embossed eagle upon the wayfarer's leather cuirass. "Even a king's officer must reply to the whirlwind silence! To God! Know you His son? Are you deathless? Is the Word in you? Or are you yet trapped in the mire of love, in the guilty flesh appointed to dust, caught at the endless beginning of suffering? Speak, I say!"
Bedevere grunted once more, a guttural, incomprehensible utterance, "The Holy Grail!"
The Fisher King seized Bedevere's scorched face in his greasy hands and pried open his jaws to see what wound impaired his speech. "Heaven's host confound evil!" he shouted, and danced away with fright. From the wanderer's mouth stuck a black tongue split at the tip into a pink five-pointed star.
"Are you the Devil that will unwrinkle the stars? Are you come to set aboil the waters of my heart and plunge me into darkness like some pitch moon? Begone! I do have the Word in me. And winds of light surround me. And I am protected by the original love."
Bedevere sagged to his knees. He reverently stood the sacred chalice upon the wet sand and wrote in Latin under it, This is the Holy Grail, taken from the Black Chapel by Bedevere—Protector ... He sagged over, unconscious.
The Fisher King read the dark words in the silver sand over and over—until the sea turned the page with a white wave. He flung himself into the churning sand and grabbed the wood cup as it rolled away.
Caesar's man had found the Holy Grail and delivered it to him. Surely, this was the purpose of his birth—and this officer's as well. He could almost see the burning ciphers aflame in the round of space above him, the spirit fire that once touched the crosstree, the tomb, and the apostles' heads.
The Fisher King took the Holy Grail to his crude shrine at the back of the stony cove. He stood the chalice beside a crucifix of splinters, a savage outline in slivers of a man nailed to the boards. Then he fell to the sand and writhed with sobs. "Praise to the conjured spirit on my shrine of spindrift! Praise to you, Cup of our Savior—you who knew him before the prodigies of his suffering won us from Adam's sin! Praise!"
While Bedevere's body rocked back and forth in the lapping waves, the hermit wept and prayed. Inspiration followed, and he cobbled together a raft from the wood of his shed and vines of sea grape.
He sang the Lord's Prayer as he lashed to the thwarts the Caesar’s man. Then, he pushed the makeshift raft down the beach, into the sliding water.
Out on the seabound current, he sent the gray boat with the devil-marked body Bedevere. It rode the ebb surge of the tide and soon dwindled under a horizon that shone like dirty milk.
-)(-
Three nomads masked in black head scarves hobbled across a night landscape toward deep twilight flat as a blade. The infernal glow of the hollow hills dwindled behind them. Ahead a sky of opal marked a new day under the sun.
On all sides, swales of grass breathed with silver shadows, and the air smelled cool and algal. The path underfoot narrowed to a ridge of packed turf, one of many that crisscrossed above the marsh: trails of ancient drovers.
King Arthur, Merlin, and Fra Athanasius halted their laborious hike, momentarily bewildered by chattering birds and warbling frogs. They tugged the black scarves from their faces and drank sweet air.
"We are in the Fenlands, sire." Merlin smelled the ocean spices in the dawn wind. He reached with the brails of his heart into the twilight and summoned a raven. "The Wash of Metaris is a few leagues ahead. Banovallum, then, cannot be far north."
The black bird lit on his shoulder and waited under spread wings as he withdrew a strip of parchment from his pocket, stretched it across his palm, and began writing on it with a stub of lampblack. "The garrison will get this message before the sun rises, and horses and provisions shall arrive soon thereafter."
The king lowered himself to the turf and sat hugging his cypress crutch, searching the star pastures in the western darkness for any sign of the netherworld. He found only familiar constellations and curlews flapping through the gray air above the marsh grass. With a whispered prayer, he pressed his chin to his chest, grateful to be returned to Britain.
Behind him, Fra Athanasius sat cross-legged on the path, holding the Dragon's teardrop in his lap. They had taken turns hauling the ponderous orb of smooth stone and had each experienced the clarity of its boundless nature. In the pearl glow of first light
, the mineral mass gleamed, aswirl with oily rainbows.
Timelessness suffused from it, and Athanasius felt erased. He no longer existed as a special point in the universe, a soul. Consciousness extended beyond his solitude into the whole of God's creation. And he sat amazed under the skywide realization that his immortal soul dwelled not inside him: He lived inside the cosmic immensity of his soul.
Wingbeats thrashed, and the raven Merlin had conscripted as messenger flew north, tossing irate cries behind. The wizard took the teardrop from Athanasius' lap, and the legate continued to peer beatifically through spectacles powdered with rock dust of purest mauve.
"I don't believe our blessed emissary will have aught to say till past noon." Merlin showed his buckled teeth in a hideous grin and held the nacreous sphere before the king. "My lord, your trophy. Let the lachrymose strength in the Dragon's tear ease your burden of time. Soon enough, we shall be in Camelot."
Arthur waved the geode aside. "I'm not returning to Camelot. There is naught I can do for Cei anyway, not until we reach the Vanir Lotus in the Storm Tree. I must prepare myself for that."
Merlin made no reply. In his spidery hand, the glass stone dripped reflections of greasy light from the lowering dawn, and fear for the king expanded in him. After a moment of clamorous thinking, he bowed and backed away.
He had no faith that this boy could act wisely on his own behalf. Arthur lacked sufficient self-love and cared only for the tribal imperative, the greater good of those Providence had placed in his care. For that selflessness, Merlin felt respect. And for the personal disregard that enabled such nobility, he feared for the king.
Before the brightening coals in the east and the charcoal expanse of the nightbound marsh, the demon Lailoken hefted the Dragon's tear in one hand and then in the other, balancing his decision to say nothing against everything he could say about the unforeseen consequence and the inscrutable heart, everything he had learned over millennia as a destroyer of souls.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 24