Bedevere sat up, and pieces of light swarmed across his vision until he lay back down again. "The Grail," he husked, relieved that his swollen tongue could speak. "I found the Holy Grail!"
"I doubt you not." Marcus spoke soothingly and adjusted upon the scorched man's head the wreath of blue spikenard that the nuns had woven to help him sleep. "Tell me first of the king. Where is Arthur?"
"With Merlin." His eyes gleamed from under their eaves of charred darkness. "In the hollow hills."
"Why are you not at his side?"
Bedevere grimaced, remembering. "Merlin forbade me to go with the king. I left Camelot ... expelled by shame." He raised a glossy hand to his trembling lips and confessed in a tremulous whisper, "Lord Marcus, I ... my past is revealed to all by Athanasius ... "
"Say no more of that, Bedevere." Marcus laid a comforting hand upon the shoulder of the swordsman's missing arm. "I ask not of your past. Minstrels and gleemen delight in parading sordid news from Camelot. That has no import for us."
"You are not offended at my presence?"
"We fought together alongside the king, and I know you for your courage, wise in battle. All else is between you and God." Marcus bent closer. "Now, tell me—who burned you? Brigands? Wolf Warriors?"
"A dragon."
Marcus retracted his chin.
"It guarded the Black Chapel," Bedevere insisted, straining to lift his head and deliver his conviction directly into the duke's skeptical eyes. "I slew it and took the Grail."
"A dragon?" A crease of sadness deepened across Marcus' brow. "Bedevere, there are no dragons. Villagers and countryfolk in horror of this broad devastation see dragons and devils. Shock overwhelms their minds."
"The king slew a dragon outside Ratae. I killed one in Crowland, and it burned me."
Marcus fixed him with a stern look and spoke harshly, hoping to jolt him free of his delusion. "You are distraught. The anguish that drove you from Camelot has distorted your memory. Raiders or a woodland gang torched you. Remember."
"I found the Holy Grail, I tell you." The one-armed man sagged back onto the couch, defeated by his pain and exhaustion. His voice dimmed. "A dragon guarded it, and I slew the beast."
"Rest now, Bedevere." Marcus straightened and motioned for the attending nun to approach. "Rest, and we will talk more later."
"No." Bedevere's hand clasped the duke's wrist. "Many have seen them. Surely, you have heard reports."
"These are dire times." Marcus pried away Bedevere's hand. "The gleemen sing of dragons. Traveling tinkers whisper of them. And countless battle-maddened rustics wail about them. But neither I nor anyone here at Tintagel has seen such a beast."
Bedevere fell as abruptly into sleep as a body into the dark earth. The airy part of him rose like a gravepit vapor, and he floated outside of his flesh.
He looked down at his blisters, pearled gems against his seared skin. Buoyant as a fragrance, he drifted away. The nun beside him, a white moth wing against the black bough of his body, dwindled as he slipped through the rafters of purpling valerian and hovered on the seawind.
Hours poured from the cup of the day moon before he understood this was no dream. Time had become something new. The sea washing its laundry among the black rocks under the cliffs enthralled him. Time opened to a kingdom of light, its riches hammered to gold upon the ocean and spun to opulent threads in the loom of the forest.
Under tall columns of white clouds, he could be anywhere at all. He flew with feathers of sea mist over the limestone turrets of Tintagel, eager to find his way back to his physical form.
The pain of his blistered flesh drove him away from his comatose body. He fluttered down into the great yew avenues and oak-houses of the forests north of Tintagel. Unwittingly, he followed the blood aura of his clothing.
The duke knew that Bedevere was no fool. If the one-armed master swordsman claimed a dragon had burned him, then Marcus determined to see what manner of beast roamed the land. With Bedevere's charred clothing to inspire his dogs, the duke and three lancers followed the dalmatians north.
By day's end, they arrived at a grove of evergreen magnolias. Bright citrus rays shone through the trees while the hunters searched about for a glade in which to bivouac for the night.
Bedevere's shade bobbed past them, following the excited dogs under the twilight jellies toward a knoll of black hemlock. He knew what lurked there. A dragon lay curled among the pines, waiting for the hateful sun to set. Bedevere tried to stop the dogs. He waved his arms and shouted. The animals did not sense his ghost as they bounded over the knoll.
With their broken yelps and shrill cries behind him, Bedevere flew back toward the duke and his men. The tide of night flowed with him. Moonlight like glue pasted the black cutouts of trees to silver darkness as he swept toward the horsemen. The duke’s men shouted and whistled for the dogs. He danced and pranced and tumbled before them, and they did not see him.
The ground quaked, and pine needles sizzled from the drought trees. Two of the lancers fell from their mounts, and the duke fought with both arms to steady his steed. A sump stench thickened in the darkness, and then an evil shape reared against the white fires of Spica and Arcturus in the western sky, an eclipsing behemoth among the steadfast stars.
"Jesus, Lord and Savior!" Marcus cried out.
A blue flame blazed above the treetops, illuminating a gaping maw wide as sunset. Clusters of fangs flashed, razorpoints of stars in an ulcerous visage of lizard jaws hung with wattles of torn flesh. Under a barbed brow, eyes of smoky blood glared, and the roar that followed sent clods of torn tree bark flying like startled birds.
The first stroke of dragonfire smote the treetops in a lightning blast that ignited the stand of dry evergreens. Through the wall of flame, the dragon crashed, and its second gust of blue fire combusted a thousand autumns of fallen leaves.
The thrown lancers abandoned their weapons and leaped upon their horses. Marcus drove them ahead and charged after, yelling for them to, "Run! Run to the sea!"
In tatters of inky blackness, the dragon spread its wings, blotting whole constellations. It swooped overhead, whipping flames, sparks, and dead leaves into vortices that ran alongside the galloping horses and their terrified riders.
Bellowing another cry, the dragon's talons seized the lead runner, plucking the lancer in one claw and the horse in the other. It hoisted them into the night's crystal darkness. Their screams disappeared in the concussion of the roar, and moments later gobbets of flesh, lopped limbs, and slashed viscera rained down upon the duke and his men.
"Into the trees!" Marcus shouted, and the riders plunged off the forest trail into the woods' dark byways.
Wings whistling like stormwind, the dragon dived. Blue flames sheeted the trees, and the crisp forest exploded. Tree trunks burst, scattering hot flechettes of burning wood in fiery arcs. With a horrified scream, one of the lancers' horses tripped and fell, and before it could rise, the blazing canopy collapsed over it, immolating steed and rider.
Marcus and the remaining lancer shot out of the woods onto the highway two lengths ahead of a surging firecloud. They rode full out, hugging their horses’ necks, not daring to twist a look toward the deadly sky. Moonsmoke flowed upon the sea as they came across the moors.
Overhead, the dragon circled. Occasionally, its roars swelled out of the night, and the riders cringed. The demon beast did not stoop to kill. It glided on the high wind mesmerized by a sensation akin to the power that had created it.
Bedevere's ghost lay upon its horned head, singing to the rageful creature. While neither dogs nor men could hear him, the dragon did. It heard him singing "Grandma and the Widower" and "I Have No Money for My Ale to Pay" and other ditties, and it circled higher, soothed.
Bedevere wished he had known sooner the power that his phantom songs exerted upon the dragon, so he could have saved the two lancers. The disembodied man kept his focus upon his singing until the horsemen reached the citadel of Tintagel. Then he dared quiet himse
lf and listen.
The dragon's congealed face of scabs and leprous sores appeared like a battle mask battered by a hundred years of enmity, and it moved Bedevere to pity. He heard a drowsy music within the beast, a melodious form of divination that carried this dragon's hideous will within a larger will—the dreamsong of the Dragon at the center of the planet.
Hearing a dim echo of that energy, the ghost experienced an implacable clarity expanding within, widening him toward the unity of existence. If he went with it, he knew he would enlarge beyond himself.
He broke away.
Night rushed across the enormous edge of time.
Bedevere jolted. He woke inside his body again, inside his pain. Nearby, nuns chanted vespers. And in the distance, from somewhere in the fastness, Duke Marcus shouted with distress.
-)(-
Flesh and shadow—for thousands of years, we knew both. Then, we peered into Merlin's demon depths, and our trance broke. We Nine Queens fell back into our lives on the edge of time. For an interval, we became again as you are, mortal, ephemeral, each of us a consciousness exiled in pain and unknowing.
How do you go on?
Knowing what we know, having witnessed for thousands of years the same pains, hungers, and ignorances of people, we gaped at each other and wanted to die. We did not want to live as human animals ever again. We wanted to die into emptiness, into absolute forgetfulness.
You go on, because you have not seen all that we have seen, over and over and over again—the same cruelties of murder, rape, and despair—over and over and over again. None of the living has witnessed these eternal hostilities with our clarity, and so you go on, perpetrators of evil and victims of ignorance, believing your crimes and your sufferings unique to you.
That is why love fails.
And that is why, deprived of the Fire Lords' power, we felt ruined. We knew everything. And so little of it good.
The sun blazed in the doorway to our round and earthen hut. Not the sun. A Fire Lord. His radiance penetrated our stunned bodies and burned away our despair. Once again, we were lifted above the mystic biology of pain to our vantage outside time.
And from there, we witnessed the living souls of Europe like grains of sand before us, each grain a tiny, magnifying lens revealing to our unblinking minds the redundant malice, suffering, and loss—
Yet, we also recognized what could comfort us: the dreams from where your strength comes—the compelling reason you go on—the dreams, hopes, ambitions of the pitiless love that is life.
-)(-
"John Halt is the king, I tell you," Leoba said to her sister as they drew water at the tile-canopied well in the kitchen yard outside The Blanket of Stars. The drum-windlass installed by the king's workers made easy work of lifting the heavy bucket that before had caused the simple pulley to whine and groan. Even the small, strawberry-haired girl had no difficulty raising the three-gallon container. She rested it on the stone lip of the well, opened its spigot, and began filling terra-cotta carafes for the guest rooms. "Think on it, Julia. He's of an age to the king and shows a leg wound."
"A thousand boys in the land are of an age to the king and a hundred of them got leg wounds," Julia countered, fitting the filled carafes into a push wagon festively painted with starlings and garlands. "And if he were king, where are his soldiers? The king goes nowhere without his men. Not with gangs on the highways and raiders in the woods."
"Ask him then, why don't you?" Leoba challenged. She topped off the last of the carafes, placed a wood lid atop the bucket, and left it on the well ledge for guests to help themselves. "He talks right proper, and Georgie says his horse got noble lines, a sorrel courser fit for the upper cut, not a merchant's boy."
Julia laughed and pushed the cart to the kitchen. So much to laugh about: every room of the inn filled and paid for in advance by ironwork guildsmen on their way to Londinium for the grand conference of King Arthur and the pagan lord, Wesc. These guests would carry glad reports of the handsomely renovated buildings and grounds at The Blanket of Stars, and there would be no lack of business ever again. Only the absence of her beloved Eril left a stain upon her heart. He had paid in blood for the king's craftsmen and their materials.
"Leoba thinks you're King Arthur," Julia informed John Halt when she came through the hanging leather strips that guarded the kitchen door from flies. "What say you to that serious charge, John?"
John Halt did not look up from the chopping block where he minced chives with a cleaver. "Leoba is right, of course. I was unhappy in Camelot and thought to ease my soul by chopping vegetables and washing dirty linens at your fine inn. She's an observant lass."
Julia laughed again and ladled dishwater into the window boxes of cooking herbs flourishing on the sunny sills of the long casements. "Why are you here with us, John?"
"I'm the king, even as Leoba says, and I'm hiding from my woes." He smiled at her, happy to tell her the truth. The upcoming confrontation with King Wesc and the ascent into the Storm Tree to end Cei's suffering burdened him less in her easy company. He enjoyed accomplishing small tasks, living much in the same manner he had known as Kyner's thrall in White Thorn, before magic had made him king—and an incestuous sinner. "I'm also here to court you, Julia. I want you to be my wife and to live with me in Camelot."
More laughter poured from her, and she set about stirring the stewpots and sauce pans simmering on the gridiron charcoal stove. "As if God and the king have not already got the man most precious to me." The laughter drained from her, and sadness imposed an inner watchfulness over her strong and freckled face. "Heaven has received my Eril. A hero for the king, he is. And I'm proud of him. So, if he is in heaven, and you are the king, how will you woo me?"
"With the best oysters from Rameslie," he answered at once. "And a dozen robust sunsets at Land's End. And our own houseboat on the Nith River."
"No gold?" Julia feigned surprise. "No fine perfumes from Persia? And a palace in the Eildon Hills with valets and footmen?"
John Halt laid down the cleaver, and answered earnestly, "When you are queen, you will see that those things offer far less than the simple pleasures. That's why I'm here."
"Ah, then you must be king to appreciate a simple woman like me." She gave a self-mocking laugh and tossed a pinch of salt into the soup. "If you add to the bargain the sharpest cheese from Droitwich, I will be your queen."
Julia's father entered the kitchen with a peck of elecampane roots to be pared and diced for the stew. He made no secret of his ambition that John Halt would take fifteen-year-old Leoba for his wife. The older man admired the youth for his courage, his eloquence, and his industry despite his war injury, and wanted him for his son-in-law.
At every opportunity, he paired them. With the inn full, the many necessary tasks quickly separated them. By night, after the galley was cleaned, the dining hall cleared, and all the guests had drunk their fill and sung themselves hoarse under the stars in the atrium and gone to sleep, John Halt and the innkeeper's family shuffled to bed, too exhausted to mingle.
Dreamless sleep soothed Arthur. He was happy at The Blanket of Stars and hopeful that, if he could convince Wesc to forestall the pagan invasion and if he succeeded in working the magic that his mother, the witch-queen, had devised to protect Britain, he would be free to make Julia his wife. Then there would be no more of magic in his life, he swore to himself. He would rule by charity and love with a woman at his side who knew from hard experience, as did he, the everyday needs of the people.
In the dark before dawn, John Halt rose from his straw pallet in the granary and, with the scythe pole he used as a crutch, limped to the woodshed to gather birch bark and straw. The earth oven outside the kitchen had to be fired early to bake the day's bread, and during his stay he had taken this task upon himself.
Leoba, roused earlier by her father and sent to intercept John Halt, awaited him by the domed oven, arranging hazelwood tinder in the fire hole. "You are the king, ain't you?" She squinted at him in the gr
ay light from where she squatted, loose hair straying across her face in the dawn breeze. "You're King Arthur."
John Halt threw the bark and straw into the fire hole and leaned full upon the scythe pole. "I don't think you much like me, Leoba."
"I like Eril," she said almost without moving her lips. "He were a kindly man. He took us in. He did that. He gave us this home. And the king killed him."
"He died in war, Leoba." Among the jointed shadows of the vineyard, morning mist drifted like wraiths. "A lot of people died in that war."
"So that you might be king." She withdrew a tinder pouch from the ample pocket of her frock. "You should be in Camelot. Why do you want to live with us common folks?"
"I'm happy here, Leoba." He gestured to his common tunic and rope sandals. "I grew up a thrall in Chief Kyner's clan at White Thorn, in the far hills, a rustic place, and I'm more at ease in a stable than a stateroom."
"There are lots of stables in Britain. Why are you here with us then?" she asked, striking a spark with flint and firesteel.
"I love your sister."
"I know that." Red light jerked in her eyes from the combusting torchwood. "I seen you looking at her, smiling at her, touching her. I told Da that. He says you ain't old enough to know what you want. He wants you for me."
"I'll wager you already have someone you love."
"And he loves me, too, Tom does." She stoked the kindling until the hazelwood took the flames. "Not that we see each other much since you fixed this place up and brought in the caravans."
"I didn't fix it up, Leoba." Standing crooked, spiked hair awry against the right and God-made stars, he looked every inch the peasant he claimed to be. "The king's men did this work. And there's so much more work to do for this inn to be successful. Why don't you ask your Tom to serve here at The Blanket of Stars? You could use the help."
"He works here already." Leoba pointed to a hillside beyond the orchards where a herd floated like fog. "They're his. Them sheep. Well, his da watches them for my da. But Tom tends them, he does."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 27