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

by Attanasio, A. A.

  "We shall hunt dragons with the chieftains!" Gareth declared boldly, and Lot rapped his knuckles proudly and gave a hoarse laugh.

  "Let us come with you that we may speak again to our uncle and discuss our vision with him once more," Gawain entreated Merlin, not flinching before the wizard's unearthly stare. "We have petitioned him since we arrived, and he has made no reply. We are his own kindred, nephews by his sole sister. Take us to see him, that he may understand our lives are changed utterly by an angel of God."

  Merlin nodded sagely. "Lads, the angel came to you, not to your uncle, by design. You are messengers. Arthur is your shield. Leave him to protect us so that you may reveal all of what God has disclosed to you."

  "We have revealed all." Gawain's young, kestrel face darkened. At fourteen, he had bulked big as a man, and he wore his strawberry hair shaved well above his ears and pleated across his crown in mystic knots like a warrior. "We would speak to the king about what must come of our vision. All the warriors of the Round Table should give themselves to the quest for the Savior's chalice. For Christian and Celt alike, this relic must be found."

  "Yes!" Merlin clapped his hand upon the boy's thick shoulder and touched his soul, feeling how crushed and flaccid it had become under Morgeu's spell. Like white ivy, like almost-death, the young soul's true brightness lay obscured, veiled by enchantment. "Your vision is valid and must be revealed not only to our king but to the pope himself."

  The wizard's head, bald, long, and speckled like an egg, intruded between the two boys, and his silver eyes slid side to side. The moment that he felt Morgeu's shadow in them, they had become prisoners of Camelot. "There are two drafting tables in the library behind the central hall. Go there and each of you write about your vision. Illustrate profusely. I will ask Fra Athanasius to assist you. Pay him heed. He is not only the papal legate, he is an experienced court scribe. With his help, you will create illuminated accounts that will convince our Holy Father that Britain is a true Christian isle. And when he sends the grain that saves us from famine, I will be there to see that the king and all the warlords praise you for saving Britain."

  -)(-

  We are in a place between dreaming and wakefulness, between absence and presence, that is violated by travel. When the Furor kicked down the red door to our hut and stamped in, six of us lay on the dirt floor and three sat twisted in our block-cut chairs. Contact with the demon soul of Lailoken had nearly cast us out of our own bodies. We peered unhappily at the fierce chieftain with the storm gray beard.

  The Furor advanced into our clay dome and saw the round windows like wells where he could drink deeply of sunlight. He saw the nine block-cut thrones of rowan wood arranged in an outward-facing circle. But he did not see us.

  He strode mightily around the hut. On the earthen floor and curved wall of pastel spirals and flowing lines, shadows whispered yes and no as clouds sped across the sun. The one-eyed god stepped backward out the door, muttering oaths at the empty chamber.

  We are in a place between dreaming and wakefulness, between absence and presence, that is violated by travel. Until you are here, there is no way to get here. Once you are here, there is nowhere else.

  -)(-

  "I want to learn all your secrets," Selwa told Merlin in the western gallery where he received her. A ribbon window curved the length and breadth of the slate wall, facing the west quarter of the outer ward with its winding cobbled streets and rooftops of green and purple tiles.

  The wizard stood with his back to the afternoon, an angular silhouette among potted mimosa trees. "For so long as you will teach me, Merlin, I will stay at your side and please you, attentively please you, in the manner for which I was trained in the seraglio of a Persian prince. He owed the house of Syrax a small fortune and repaid it by giving me a most excellent education."

  The wizard regarded the petite and lithesome woman silently for a moment. No guile showed in her large, obsidian eyes. Those windows opened on elemental feelings he recognized as sincere—avarice, yearning for mastery, hunger for power—and he inspected again her outer form. She wore a long silk robe of green moons and nightingales. She parted that raiment and revealed, behind a sheer gown of creamy white gauze, cinnamon shadows of her breasts, the antelope curve of her belly, and the dark tuft below.

  "You are beautiful," he said, removing his peaked hat. He stepped to the side so that window light fell full upon his strange visage: metallic eyes in skullpits, a swerved blade of a nose, and a forked beard drooping like catfish whiskers. "And I am grotesque."

  "Who you are is beautiful to me." Her fingers languorously touched the bone dents of his temple and the long ridge of his maxilla. "You are the greatest wizard who has ever lived."

  "I am a demon locked by angels in this lurid body." He ran his knobby hand over his distended, sallow pate, his scalp blotched brown and ocher, a map of mysterious countries. "I am growing younger each year—as a man. And as a man, I suffer the physical cravings of any man. For now, I am not young enough in the flesh to win affection by my appearance. And I am sworn on my good mother's soul never to use my demon powers for ill—and surely enchanting any woman to embrace this mutable and perverse body is grievous ill."

  Selwa stepped close enough for him to smell the sumptuous fragrance of her glistening curls and the spice of her breath. "Embrace me then, Merlin. The angels meant for you to be a man. And to live fully as a man, you must know a woman."

  Merlin reached into her mind once more with penetrating clarity and confirmed her greedy urgency for magic. No demons lurked within, and no enchantments lay upon her. Simply a mortal woman, she fostered the audacious notion of giving herself to him for his capitulated knowledge. "You are not appalled by my hideous form?"

  "Hideous?" She stroked the long white hair above his gristly ears. "You who have lived since creation first forged stars and firmament—you are not hideous in my eyes. You are unsurpassable! The angels themselves have shaped you, and you are a virile form, most august and terrible as the knowledge you bear. Share that knowledge with me, Merlin, and I am yours, in body and deed."

  -)(-

  Athanasius knelt in an alcove of the chapel lit by red glass oil lamps. Excalibur stood unsheathed in his hand, rays in every hue of fire fanning from its naked blade. Since the king had entrusted him with the royal sword, the legate had kept the sheathed weapon under his clerical robes.

  The journey into the underworld had left him shaken and determined to flee Britain and its demon-wizard, gods, and dragons. He would have departed from Banovallum in a bull-hide boat with one oar and no provisions, risking Belgic pirates and Saxon raiders to get back to any Christian realm—war-torn Trier, remote Bordeaux, or even the slums of Rome. The king had stopped him by giving him his sword. That was a trust he dared not betray before God, even on the frontiers of hell.

  Huddled in holy darkness, he gazed with endless astonishment into the blade's flawless mirror. He turned the airy sword in his hand, and reflections spun around him smart and quick as birdsongs. He observed a light within the light, where the reflected world of lampflames, statuary, window lights, his whiskery face, and star-thistle eyes hung like tattered muslin.

  Beyond this coarse scrim, light drenched itself. A voluptuous ocean of light, where all his thoughts drowned in transparencies of brightness and his whole life floated before him like a great lesson.

  Not until later did his thinking self return, in the indigo darkness of his canopy bed with Excalibur sheathed and lying lengthwise atop him, his hands crossed over it in funereal repose. Then he remembered who he was and who the Church had made him. He told himself that his vision of drowning in light came as a spirit visitation. His master, the drowned bishop Victricius, prayed for him in heaven, and his prayers had inundated him in grace. He was sure of it.

  I am not to flee, he believed, and reflected on the smallness of his soul adrift in God's light, his whole life a great lesson, an illuminating experience for his immortal self. This vision fixedly confi
rms me. I am to stay here 'mongst what I fear and do not understand—and I am to learn.

  Athanasius convinced himself that heaven sponsored his mission, his suffering, and perhaps even his death in this hinterland. And Victricius continued as his teacher, even before the face of God. To fulfill that good bishop's work in this world, he determined to remain in Britain and to exploit all his faculties to answer the problem originally posed to Victricius by the Holy Father: Is Britain blessed—or damned?

  The draperies of the canopy ripped away, torn off as by a gale wind, and Loki jumped onto the bed. Screaming with garish pain, he reared over the legate. His wild face, stenciled once more with futhorc sigils in a vain attempt to drive away the demon pursuing him, grimaced horribly. The bedchamber had filled with Succoth’s ichorous heat and the cries of a razorous wind. Above these shrieks, Loki bawled, "Give me the sword!"

  Athanasius squealed and rolled over the scabbard, cringing with fright.

  The god seized the back of the legate's sleeping gown and lifted him off the bed. "Give me the cursed sword!"

  "Merlin!" the scribe yelled.

  The chamber doors burst open with a radiant gush, and the wizard, bareheaded and draped in leather chemist's apron, stalked in, waving a torch. The flames flared larger in the fetid atmosphere and blazed green. Merlin shouted, "Loki, release him!"

  Loki dropped Athanasius onto the bed and, with his gloved hands clutching his bald head, threw himself at the wizard's sandals. "Help me, Merlin! Get it off me!"

  Merlin swung the torch over his head, his wispy beard and tangled white hair brushed back by the vortex force he released from the gates of his body. Using the brails of his heart, he snatched the demon out of the thick heat and with one blow from the torch dressed him in fire.

  "Succoth!" He recognized the warped limbs and chewed visage of his former accomplice from the void. "I break the Furor's hold on you! Go back to the abyss! Now!"

  A frigid pallor descended from the groined ceiling, and the cutting wind ceased abruptly. In the ensuing icy stillness, the flame-woven demon crackled, "Lailoken—traitor—we will chew your bones ... "

  With a backhanded swipe of the torch, Merlin smashed the fiery shape to dazzling dust. Sparkles billowed to emptiness, and the frigid pall dispersed.

  "Sweet blessed Jesus, pray for us in this furious moment of trial!" Athanasius implored ardently, clutching the sheathed sword to his chest with both hands.

  "I will take Excalibur now," the wizard declared, and removed the sword from the legate's grasp. "I leave soon for Londinium, where the king will require his sword. I do regret that this responsibility has cost you such a fright."

  "I am not stony-livered enough for life in Camelot," the legate admitted, glad to see Excalibur taken from him. "For my happy deliverance from the spoiler of souls, I will spend the night in prayer to our Savior."

  "Pray to Merlin." Loki spoke with awe, peering up from where he lay on the carpet and seeing no demonic sparks other than the silver pins in the skull sockets of the wizard. "It is Merlin who saved us." He pushed to his knees. "Succoth is gone?"

  The fluttering torchlight rippled over the pits and rills of Merlin's long face. "Succoth will fall for a while through the blind depths. Soon enough he will come to his senses and report to the others—and to the Furor. Loki, your presence in Camelot will not long be secret. Why did you draw Succoth here?"

  Loki looked hurt as he pushed to his feet. "I grew impatient waiting for you, Merlin. You abandoned me." He glanced into the shadowy corners of the chamber and shivered, still hearing the demon's echoing cries in his bones. "I called for the Fire Lords—and Succoth came instead."

  Merlin scowled irately and grabbed Loki's ear. "Come with me. You have jeopardized us all. Now I must find a place to keep you until we are ready to climb the Storm Tree."

  "Ouch!" Loki grabbed the wizard's wrist but did not dare pull the hand away or shapeshift, fearing he might be cast out among the demons. "Let me go. I will come with you freely. I have much to tell you of my flight through Yggdrasil—onto the Branch of Hours and into times yet to be. I thought to lose the demon, but he followed and chased me back here. Ouch! Release me, Merlin. I must tell you of the Tree ... the Branch of Hours ... and the phantom worlds. Ouch!"

  The wizard led the tattooed god out the door by his ear, and Athanasius sat in bed watching, appalled. Torchlight faded down the corridor, and darkness closed over the disheveled chamber.

  -)(-

  Cei lay in silk windings on a pallet under the ivy spills of a terrace wall at the north side of Camelot. There the sun did not touch his blistered face or the moon glare across his swollen eyes. By day, mountain breezes bodied forth clouds above the gorges and laved him with conifer fragrances. At nightfall, attendants drew veils about the pallet and lit braziers of scented woods to sift soothing fragrances through the starlight.

  A surgeon, a priest, and a harp player attended Cei at all times, yet he remained unresponsive. Three times a day, the surgeon inserted a tube down the seneschal's throat and fed him broth and herbal infusions. The bedding changed regularly, the scorched body anointed with plasters Merlin had devised of willow seepings, the warrior’s caretakers did all in their power to heal him. But these medicinal efforts had no more obvious effect than the prayers or music that graced the terrace.

  Cei hovered free of his burned body. He rose past slick cascades of ivy and looked back at yellow flagstones grouted with moss—and a pallet with bed linens folded like white petals around a bandaged figure with his face.

  The more he looked at himself, the more he felt the gummy pain, viscously stretched over the length of his body. Every movement touched dragonfire. He threw his attention outward, away from the terrace, away from his suffering, and he soared across the sky's blue gulf.

  A gilded barge with crimson gunwales and an ivory hull floated placidly in its moorings at a river wharf crowded with pavilion tents and awnings. Cei recognized the royal barge and the pebble shoals and birch groves at the headlands of the Tamesis River, the waterway that flowed to Londinium. Arthur's meeting with Wesc!

  With that loud thought, Cei found himself wandering in the memory forest under a bewitching moon of dreams. The shadowy runes on the face of the moon spelled raidho—mannaz, journey—step back. All around him, shades of his past closed in: Wolf Warriors in scalp cloaks, his mother at White Thorn, only much younger with her wheat gold hair twisted over one naked shoulder as she breast-fed him, and there was Arthor the boy, six summers old, cheeks smudged, huffing to keep up with the dogs as he lugged quivers, bows, and water flagons, a good servant on a quail hunt ...

  Cei began to pray, and despair came on like a star when he could not remember the words to any of his prayers. Phantoms circled closer. Berserkers hoisting battle-axes, Bishop Riochatus swinging the chain of a fuming censer, bent crones lopping grassheads with their short scythes, and the rasping coils of a dragon sliding in and out of sight among the memory trees.

  Each tree thrived as an interval of forgetfulness in his exiled mind. When he threw himself at one and pressed his face against its trunk to avoid looking at the wraiths lifting around him like sea mist, he entered not-knowing, the darkness of dreamless sleep. For a while, he rested. Upon waking, he floated out of his body again and slipped up the ivy wall onto a blue causeway cobbled with clouds.

  Descending over the pebble shoals of the Tamesis, he watched the royal barge sliding downriver. The gilt naiads at the prow with their unbound hair painted in gold flake gleamed in sunlight above the frothy wake. He wove among the red-and-white pennants streaming from the rail spars and glided above the blue caps of the bearded bargemen.

  Under a tasseled canopy emblazoned with the royal eagle, Merlin and Selwa sat together on a divan of velvet secured to the observation platform. She lay curled against the wizard. Her glossy black tresses spilled over his shoulder. Pastels of diaphanous veils hid little of her dusky beauty.

  Simultaneously inflamed with desire and cold
with astonishment to see horrid Merlin so embraced, Cei looked away. His attention shot beyond the billowy coppices at the riverside to fields and hedgerows where hearthsmoke wreathed farmsteads.

  These bosky obscurities calmed him, and he drifted. He drifted high over the river. He drifted through clouds like hanging gardens, like powers of angels.

  Chapter 19:

  Beauty Shines Invisible

  Bedevere woke on a terrace, ocean mist and valerian scenting the air. A cloud of pain filled him. Rolling his head to one side, he faced a prospect of seacliffs clothed with pine forests and primrose glades. "Tintagel," he mumbled, recognizing the majestic headlands.

  "He awakes," a woman's voice called forth softly. Distantly, chimes glittered and dogs barked. A nun in a white habit bent over him with a moist cloth fragrant with myrrh, and she smiled and daubed at his crusty eyes.

  The barking dogs grew louder. The nun whispered a blessing and stepped aside. Chalk pillars coiled with vines framed a maritime view. There stood the silhouette of a robust man with shaven cheeks and a stout chest cased in a jerkin of silver studs. A large dalmatian stood poised to either side of him, and when he stepped closer he revealed a chiseled face and blond hair ruffled as a hay nest.

  "Duke Marcus ... "

  "Be still, Bedevere." The warlord showed no dismay as he regarded the burned man, though his stomach winced at the sight of the blisters that nubbled the blackened face, blisters like seed pearls. "The nuns found you on the strand, washed ashore during the night. We've sent news of your arrival to Camelot."