Silence felt preferable in the mind of this counselor old as time. Let the king have his dalliance again with the common lot of men. That was how he had been reared by Kyner, as a thrall, and that was where the comfort of his identity remained.
Let him take rest among his people, the wizard intoned, using magic to assuage the disquiet in his heart: the foreknowledge of evil festered in the king's petite incautions. We have survived the Dragon. We have yet to face the Storm Tree. And before that, in the days ahead, there is the encounter with King Wesc in Londinium—the suit for peace without concession.
Merlin mouthed a silent unhappy laugh, knowing the brutal devastation that the Furor would visit upon Britain for defying him. War had become inevitable—and the outcome a terrible thing to dwell upon. All they could hope from their king was that he could buy them time, a respite from chaos.
How will our lad handle himself before a king twice his age and tenfold stronger in military might? Merlin tilted the globular rock so that it reflected the red fetal eye of dawn. Wesc is no fool to magic. He will be prepared to annul all my cunning efforts. Arthur must face this king on his own.
The wizard placed the teardrop before the secret center of himself, that unique space where right goes invisible before left takes hold. Positioning the stone that way, he felt inside the relic to the whirlwind of stars, the collision of suns that drove the metabolism of the Dragon.
Time is deep—and lives glitter-sparks ...
Merlin silenced himself. He sensed us, the nine watchers installed in Europe by the Fire Lords. He regarded us quietly, the way a demon would, rubbing our softness, our watchfulness against his face of emptiness.
An irreparable shiver chilled us. Wont to see into human hearts, we glimpsed the abyss. Three of us curled in our chairs and the other six dropped to the dirt floor. We quailed before this vision with no boundaries, and it damaged us.
Never had we contemplated such immeasurable emptiness, and—unprepared to save ourselves—we fell through absolute darkness into the sleep that stone dreams upon.
Formless void—beyond witness ...
-)(-
Arthur handed his chaplet of gold laurel leaves to Merlin in the presence of the camp commander from Banovallum and instructed the wizard to convene the Round Table in the king’s absence and make ready for the Londinium meeting. He would join his entourage on the Tamesis, at Corinium, after a fortnight. His sword Excalibur he entrusted to the papal legate, saying, "For our Savior came to bring a sword into this world. This is the sword of the Christ in my kingdom. Guard it with your soul."
He doffed his leather armor and silk tunic for a hempen robe and a boot dagger. Even his cypress stave he relinquished. With Straif stabled in Ratae, the camp commander gave him a sorrel stallion, and he rode that horse swiftly out of the Fens.
Divested of all power save himself, free of the wizard and the watchful grooms, the vigilant warriors, the attentive women and curious children, he charged over the peat trails.
Farther west, among bare rounded crests of scorched knolls, he wished he had brought Excalibur. Blessedly, no dragons stalked him across the wide vales, and he rode unmolested into the cedarwood town of Causennae.
Arthur recalled a market plaza crowded with pens of live game, vegetable bins, fish tubs, and meat stalls. Shops lifted upon wooden pillars above the boggy ground had offered cooking pots, farm equipment, and cosmetics from perfumes to eyebrow-black and false hair. Now, those shops stood empty. Two fruit barrels and a run of chickens occupied the plaza sward.
He spent the night outside the fortress city in a rowan stand above a creek and dreamed of a church bell tolling over shimmering grasslands—but no tower or edifice stood upon the bleak swales—only the sun in the quivering sky echoing like a well.
The next morning he galloped for a while with a flurry of birds skirling behind. Towers of white cloud rose with their implausible dreams above ink-and-pearl hills. Like an emerald blazon upon gray heraldic fields, the irrigated orchards, vegetable plots, lawns, and spinneys surrounding The Blanket of Stars shone visible from the highway for many leagues.
The king's engineers had learned their science serving the wizard Merlin during the long construction of Camelot, and restoring this ruined Roman villa had served as a model for the renovation of Britain. Rills and creeks diverted, wells unclogged and pumped by small windmills, water flowed in clay pipes across the estate. Upon grassy slopes and clover swards, shepherds stood among their flocks. They watched the beautiful sorrel move like visual music through chords of sunlight and shadow cast by the highway's colonnade of trees.
A score of local people displaced by the war had come to the villa to work on the grounds. Their thatched cottages covered the sunken floor in the gutted ruins of a Roman granary, and their children gamboled with a white dog under walnut trees. A young woman watching over the smaller children pointed to the beautiful horse and waved.
This pastoral community that had been cinderland only weeks before inspired optimism, and the king rode on jauntily. Ahead on the road, a caravan waited to be stabled. The wagon tents glared with swastikas painted in bold black lines—crossed hammer and tongs, emblem of the ironworkers' guild.
Wood shingles nailed to the side planks identified the caravan's sponsors from the Orders of Iron: swords, arrowheads, lances, helmets, shields.
Armorers and weaponmasters all, Arthur groaned to himself. They journeyed to Londinium for the Meeting of Arthur and Wesc and for the commerce of kings—war.
Chapter 18:
Powers of Angels
Blue heather clad a hill craggy with black rocks. Into a cleft of these giant scree boulders, Ygrane rode her black unicorn, and the Daoine Sid followed. They glittered around the witch-queen as luculent shadows of their eternal kind, lit with inner light. Halo moths cut fiery signs in the air above her. And smiles like thin scarlet threads streaked the darkness in her wake.
She rode across indigo sands with her bare head uplifted, surveying the nocturnal terrain. Imponderable horizons of darkness pulsed with mystic blood, the red auras of volcanic cones pouring lava streams. Their throbbing glare matched the pain of her menstrual cramps.
Grimly, she held herself upright with the thought that this anguish carried only the mask of herself. Behind the incandescent pain brooded the bloodtide of the moon. That was the knife turning inside her, peeling away another slice of her life for its calendar cult: the divine torture by whose spilled blood the irrevocable promise of endless life was assured. She held herself above her pain and nausea with this reckoning.
"Why have we returned to the hollow hills?" Prince Bright Night called through waves of heat. "My lady, where are you taking us?"
Ygrane rode silently, her attention focused on a plutonic eye of flames that had opened in the planetary depths. It watched her wrothful and unblinking, and she pointed at it with her right thumb as though she held a scepter. "I will speak with you, elk-god."
"What are you doing?" Bright Night whispered hotly from the swarm of chambered lights tumbling in the darkness behind her. "We must not involve Someone Knows the Truth."
"Be silent until I command you to speak." Ygrane lifted herself high upon the unicorn's velvet back and raised her voice. "You call yourself Someone Knows the Truth. Come before me that we may speak. I command you by the might of the Daoine Sid, by all the faeries, elves, hobs, and sylphs whose power sustains you."
The glowering eye expanded, and the black range under them dwindled away. The staring flames billowed larger, a huge, silent explosion of burning gas. It filled the darkness with ramparts, spires, and domes of dazzling energy—a palace made of fire.
Bright Night said nothing, and Ygrane could sense him tighten with anxiety. She rode the black unicorn beneath a portcullis of lacy flames. They entered a radiant court, where tiered galleries glowed red as cauldrons of magma and pillars woven of fire throbbed. Yet, no heat assailed them nor din of combusting rock. The magic of the Daoine Sid protected Ygrane
—from all but her feverish cramps.
The witch-queen rode directly toward a luminous throne of burning topaz, where sat a naked giant of a man, bearing the head of an elk.
"I am queen of the Daoine Sid," Ygrane announced dourly. "And you are one of my subjects."
The centroids of darkness in the eyes of the elk-god visibly brightened. "I am no one's subject."
Ygrane's jaw tensed, all her patience eroded by her lavish menstrual pain. She lifted both arms above her head, made fists of her hands, and pulled them quickly to her sides. "Bring down the palace!" she ordered the Sid—and in that instant, the fiery walls, resplendent balustrades, bright columns, and archways collapsed to darkness. Dimly, a rimland of mesas and serrated horizons appeared, backlit by a scarlet glow.
Someone Knows the Truth fell from his vanished throne and landed on his haunches with a mighty groan. "Children of the hollow hills!" he shouted—then moaned when no reply came. "Why do you betray me?"
"You are not betrayed, Old One." Ygrane leaned forward upon the withers of her horned beast, teeth gnashed against the hurt cradled by her pelvis. "The Sid remain loyal to you as ever. But they are obedient first to their queen—and I am not happy with you."
"You are not happy?" Someone Knows the Truth bellowed and pushed to his feet, arms fisted at his sides. "Who are you to stand against me? Mortal woman, I am god of the Wild Things, god since the time of ice!"
"The time of ice is long past." Ygrane spoke from her ulcerous pain. "And I am no common woman." Words came angrily, and she voiced them without thinking, believing that what she said did not matter so long as she expressed what was ripped, what was torn. "Through lifetimes far older than the ice, I have bled. What do you know of time? I have paid in blood since time stood on two legs." She straightened upon her beast and pulled achingly against the twisted knots in her belly. "You are as a child to me, elk-god. And I am not happy with you."
The furry chest of the god swelled, drawing breath to speak strongly to the Daoine Sid. He stopped when he saw the witch-queen shake her pale head and gesture to the watchful dark.
The pale people materialized in a spectral host, ranks and tiers of them in the darkness, a broken motley of shapes and echoes of shapes—leaf people, winged gazelles, human skulls with scaly flesh and eyes like spinning water, fleeting faces of the wind with brush sparks of lashing hair, and those thin, unraveled smiles.
The more that the god looked, the deeper he felt himself intertwining with the misty throng of the Sid. His own bestial humanity began to dissolve, drawn away from him into the squalid haze of phantasmal shapes.
Dizziness seized him, and the astral crowd began screaming and jabbering excitedly to feel his glittering strength joining theirs. Their noise expanded to a welter of monkey howls and chittering trills, and above it all, a sustained and eerie lilt of human singing.
Someone Knows the Truth covered his hairy ears and sagged to his knees.
"You are queen of the Daoine Sid," he acknowledged, antlers almost touching the ground. "Do not be angry with me, my lady. Spare my life, and I will serve you."
She fisted her hands over her sore womb. "You have held your form longer than most, Old One. True power resides not in form. We are as shadows, all of us. The source of our being is the greater light that casts us into these lives, a light in whose radiance the sun is itself but a shadow."
"I will not forget, my lady." With the legions of luminous creatures crowding around him like seething fog, he pleaded, "How may I serve you?"
Ygrane wanted to ask that her husband be brought to her so that she might speak again with him and assure him that their son had become monarch of all Britain, that Uther’s sacrifice had been fulfilled. The vibrant power of the unicorn dulled in her at the thought, and she knew that the echoes from the future did not rebound from that hope. She would never see Theo again.
"You serve me by serving the Daoine Sid," she informed the elk-god, then turned the black unicorn and rode away with her cramps through the shining mists of the animal powers.
-)(-
Merlin placed the chaplet of gold laurel leaves at the center of the Round Table. In chairs engraved with dragons and unicorns sat the warriors Bors Bona, Urien, Kyner, Lot and his two sons, Gawain and Gareth. All apprehensively watched the bareheaded wizard pace before them, hands clasped at his back. None felt at ease in the presence of this demonic being, and they listened unhappily to his account of the journey to the dragonpit.
Bors Bona, a compact and powerfully built man with a face as stout and small-eyed as a boar's, lowered his gaze. He stared at his square hands pressed palm down upon the Table, so that only the flat top of his gray, brush-cut hair faced the wizard, and hid his dismay. "We are men, Merlin. We have gathered around our king to defend our island from invaders—Jutes, Picts, Angles, Scoti, and Saxons—men all. We are not sorcerers and necromancers suited to battle dragons." He lifted his pugnacious face and looked to Kyner. "Cei is a great warrior, yet he fell before a dragon. Is that to be the fate of us all?"
"We must slay the monsters!" Kyner shouted, and practically stood up. "We must answer Cei's suffering with death for all dragons!"
Bors conceded this with a reluctant nod and rubbed his square, beardless chin. "Can we not slay these creatures with our arrows? Must we hazard their breaths of flame?"
"Arrows have not sufficient concentration of metal to kill a dragon." Merlin placed his hands upon the back of an empty chair and slowly swung his craggy visage around the Table. "We leave soon for Londinium and the crucial conference of our king and the Foederatus. We have the word of King Wesc that no raiders will be set upon our shores during this meeting or immediately thereafter. Those are assurances given for Foederatus raiders. The dragons will swarm."
"We will be ready!" Kyner thumped the Table with his fist.
Lot parted the long white locks that had fallen over his face as he had dozed, and he blinked at the jowly, red-faced man pounding the Table beside him. "Who are you?" He glared at the stranger in the white tunic crossed in scarlet. The man appeared a Celt, with his long mustaches and all else shaven from above the ears, his gray-streaked red hair pulled to a horsetail topknot. But he wore the blood cross of the nailed god.
"Da." Gawain leaned close to his father's ear. "This is Chief Kyner of White Thorn."
"Kyner?" Lot's drooping white mustache puffed outward with a gust of surprise as he recognized the arctic-wolf eyes in the ruddy, sun-scarred face. "Nay, nay. You are too old. You are Kyner's father, Owain. You and I hunted the white bear in Cimmeria."
"Aye, you and Owain hunted the white bear in Cimmeria." The wolfish eyes in Kyner's russet face crinkled kindly. "Owain wore that giant snow fur the day he died in his lodge, three days after taking wounds defending Cymru against Scoti raiders. That was my nineteenth summer, and Owain was my father."
"Forty years ago," Gawain whispered in Lot's ear.
Lot nodded somberly, absorbing this.
Merlin came around behind the senile Celt and laid a long-fingered hand upon his shoulder. The wizard felt the vacuoles of forgetfulness in him, clustered chambers of a darker heart pumping emptiness through all the interstices, from the immense gaps between atoms to the spongiform darkness of intergalactic space. He suffered beyond the wizard's help.
Gawain and Gareth regarded Merlin hopefully until he shook his head and strolled away, hands clasped once again behind his back. The boys shared a knowing look. They had discussed this eventuality earlier. Merlin could not heal their ailing father, because his magic was demonic. They would have to find the Holy Grail themselves and use it to serve Lot holy water and thus clear his mind.
Dressed in tunics that displayed a gold-wire circle enclosing a silver-studded cross, the brothers revealed their conversion to Christianity without alerting and offending their father. To him the Celtic cross represented sun and earth, primeval emblem of wholeness. Its significance to his sons would only be disclosed to him, they decided, after the Grail had heale
d his mind.
Until then, the boys made no public announcement of their new faith, though they wore tunics of soft lambskin, Gawain's stained maroon for the blood of the Christ and Gareth's pure white as the Savior's soul. God and His servants knew their sincerity: The day that they had arrived in Camelot with the news of their Grail vision, they had been baptized at midnight by Kyner and Bishop Riochatus while Lot snored in his suite.
"Where is No-Death?" Urien inquired, breaking the awkward silence. Naked above his braided belt and buckskin trousers, save for a shouldercloth of plaid, the chieftain of the Durotriges appeared restless in the high-backed chair. "Why is the legate not among us to hear of our plight?"
"The king has entrusted Excalibur to the legate," said Merlin as he paced slowly about the Round Table. "The holy emissary is presently in the chapel praying for our deliverance from the Beast he viewed in the hollow hills. He knows not whether he beheld Satan Himself or the rarest of God's creatures seen by mortal eyes."
Urien's white-blond hair fell across his face when he pressed forward upon the dark, lacquered Table. "Are you saying, wizard, that this minion of the nailed god yet refuses to secure aid for us from his masters?" He stood up, ready to stride out of the council room. "I will speak with No-Death, and we will have the Church's tribute."
"No, Urien." Kyner rose, jowls dark. "I am a Christian, and I will speak with the legate. My son put his life in the dragon's fire for love of our faith. He can deny us no longer!"
"Sit—" Merlin hissed the word softly, and the two Celts sat. "Grain and livestock are little good to our people if the meeting with Wesc turns against us. Until that is decided, we must defend our land from dragons. Marcus Dumnoni guards the south. Lot will remain here with Kyner to oversee the west. Bors, you shall hunt in the north. And Urien, you will escort the king to Londinium." The wizard stopped behind Gawain and Gareth. "As for the two of you, who have seen the Holy Grail, I have an important task for you to fulfill."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 25