John Halt shifted his weight on the scythe pole and turned about in the plum light. "I'm leaving soon. Perhaps your father will ask Tom to work in the inn with you."
"Them sheep were bought for my da with the king's coin." She stood, hands on her hips, jaw irately thrust to one side. "Now Da thinks Tom ain't good enough for me no more. Da wants the likes of you."
Julia called from the kitchen for Leoba to bring charcoal, and the young woman shoved past John Halt to reach the coal bin.
The busy day left no time for further talk about personal ambitions for any of the workers. The caravan of guildsman packed to leave early that morning, and by midafternoon another caravan had arrived, textile merchants from the north cities on their way to the port city of Noviomagus to ship their wares during the lull of hostilities from the coming negotiations. The day's work went on until near midnight.
John Halt lay weary on his pallet when the granary door opened narrowly and admitted a shadow figure against the flare of stars.
"Leoba says you leave us soon." Julia spoke in the round darkness. "Is that so?"
"Aye." John Halt sat up in the dark and felt Julia settle beside him on the pallet. "I must finish the work my master has given me to do. I stopped here first to be with you, Julia—to see if you would have me for your husband."
She pressed her face close to his, and he smelled the kitchen smoke in her hair. She whispered tenderly, "You're yet a beardless boy, John."
"I'm eighteen years old this month." He dared put his arm around her waist, and she did not object. "You're but two years older."
"I'm a married woman," she said, and covered his hand on her hip with hers. "I gave myself to another man."
"Your vows are not wider than death."
"Is my Eril dead?" She turned in his embrace and put both hands on his shoulders. "I've seen not body or grave."
"I'm not asking you to marry me at once." Noses almost touching, they gazed at each other, eyes glimmering like vague stars. "If you will have me, we will wed in the spring. It will be a full year since the war. If Eril is not returned to you by then, he would not want you to wait."
Her nose did touch his, playfully. "How do you know that?"
"I love you, and if I were gone a year from your side, I would not want you to wait for me." His voice carried sad certitude. "From all you've said of him, I know he loved you as much and would feel the same."
"How can you say you love me, John?" She sighed and gently pushed him away. "You only just know me."
He would not let her go and urged her closer. "That's why I stayed, to know you better. And now I know for sure."
"And now you know for sure, my beardless boy?" Her laugh shimmered, then fell quiet. Her breathing sounded close to panting. "You know you want this woman who has given her heart to another man?"
"You're a woman who can give her heart, and that's what I love about you, Julia." He drew her close to him, his strong arms tight about her. "I want you to give your heart to me. I want that, and I will do whatever I have to do to win your heart."
"And Leoba?" she asked when he released her. "Da wants you for her, you know."
"Leoba wants nothing to do with me. She's for Tom."
"And what a happy family we'll be then—you and me, Tom and Leoba, and father and Georgie." She laughed again, and his heart swelled in his chest with the joy he heard in her voice. "We'll make The Blanket of Stars the best inn in Britain, won't we?" She gently brushed his hair back and kissed his forehead, slowly and with passion. Then she stood up to leave. "Let me think on your love, my beardless boy. Let me think on all this, and we'll talk again, won't we? When will you be back?"
"When I can." He rose, put his hands to the sides of her face, and spoke to the stars that were her eyes. "And if I'm gone more than a year—don't wait for me."
-)(-
Morgeu the Fey squatted in the dry, fragrant mists of Skidblade. The flying machine's control lights clicked their sharp colors in her soft stare. An ocean divided her life. On one shore, her baby Mordred cried for her from Brokk's island guarded by the wolf-ogre Garm. On the other, she trembled, a speck of dust, a shivering mote in the radiance of the Fire Lord who had crossed the universe to confront the Furor. The backs of her eyes still ached from her glimpse of that fiery angel.
Morgeu commanded Skidblade to take her to her mother. As if the world were a thought, the portal sighed open on a drowsy dazzle of daylight. She exited into an ivy grove enclosed by mossy trunks of rowans.
A black unicorn lay in the bracken under a broken rainbow. Its tusked head turned toward her, opal blue eyes watching, dream-free and attentive.
Ygrane sat on a cracked clay floor among drifts of leaves, white butterflies opening and closing themselves in her cupped hands. She smelled of the hollow hills, a pungency of cauterized stone. Her mind had been deep in contemplation, pondering the best way for her to climb into the Storm Tree unseen, when Skidblade stole the birdsongs from the forest and flashed between the trees like raucous sunshine.
No joy lit her long eyes at the sight of her daughter.
"Mother, I need your help." Morgeu threw herself onto the glade's hard floor, arms outstretched before her. "The Furor has taken my baby and holds him captive on Brokk's desolate island."
The butterflies scattered from Ygrane, world wanderers once again. "You saw the Graal with me. You know it was stolen away to that island—and you went there yourself, did you not?"
"Mother, I only thought to broker a bargain for the chalice," the enchantress whined. "That evil dwarf Brokk is using it to direct the Furor's demons. He creates dragons from the dreams of the One Dragon. Why should Britain suffer? Let us come to an agreement with the Furor, I thought ... "
"You thought to usurp Arthur." Ygrane spoke dryly. "But the Furor is not to be bargained with, is he?"
"Mother, do not do this to me." Morgeu beat her fists against the clay and pressed her face to the ground. "If you will help me in this, I will never again oppose you—or Arthur. Get back my baby, and Mordred and I will swear fealty to the king."
Ygrane thought: She deceives herself. But—how could she not? Her mind is twisted around her grief for her father, the very soul she has captured again in Mordred with her incest magic. She will say anything to get him back.
"Speak to me, Mother!" Morgeu lifted a smudged face tracked with tears. "Don't stare at me so coldly. Mordred is your grandson. And he is held on the same island as the chalice. Come with me now in Skidblade. With your authority over the Sid, we can free my baby and take the Graal from Brokk. That is what you want, isn't it?"
"Yes," spoke a darkly gleaming voice. "That is what our queen wants. And this is our opportunity to fulfill our blood pact with her." From shadow depths between the rowans stepped a tall man with florid red hair and green eyes. His torso and legs appeared transparent, weirdly empty and blue as the deep sky, and like the air's endless nowhere, a luminous being as much nothing as darkness for all his light.
This startling apparition rolled Morgeu onto her haunches. She had never seen him before, yet she knew who he was from legend. "You are the elf prince—" She studied him as his empty body, his slender figure with its suggestions of effeminacy, took on the figurations of a blue tunic, red leggings, and yellow boots.
"I am Prince Bright Night." Behind him, in the forest's dark recesses, lizard eyes glinted, candled skulls, and wide scarlet animal grins. "I speak for the host of the Daoine Sid."
The resonant voice touched Morgeu’s spine with a torpor that almost rolled her onto her back. Only her training as an enchantress kept her from slipping instantly into trance. "Mother—"
"Leave her be, Bright Night." Ygrane tossed a twig at the elf prince, and it passed cleanly through him. "She distracts us from our purpose."
"Distracts us?" Bright Night glared with incomprehension and gestured to the cold disc of palpitant light shining between the trees, like fire fallen from the planet heavens. "There is our passage to the sacred cup we s
eek. Let us seize this opportunity at once and complete our quest!"
"If we enter Skidblade," Ygrane warned, "we become prisoners to the Furor's will as she is."
Bright Night's shoulders sagged, and he cast an unhappy look at Morgeu. "Is this true? Are you bound to the Furor?"
"Don't play the fool, Bright Night." Ygrane nodded to Morgeu. "Tell him from where you have come."
"Avalon," she answered before she could help herself. Her mother's power reached into her like a cold wind and gripped her viscera. "The Furor made me chant a binding spell upon the Nine Queens. And a Fire Lord came—"
Bright Night stepped back into the rowan depths of the ivy glade, afraid of the Fire Lords, those luminous entities alive beyond beginning.
Ygrane placed her focus upon her uterine cramps, anchoring herself with her pain so that her excitement did not betray her intent to Morgeu. The Furor hunts the Fire Lords! she grasped. Now is the time to climb into Yggdrasil. Now is the time to find for Arthur the way to the Vanir Lotus.
"Mother, please—my baby Mordred ... " Morgeu entreated.
Ygrane was already on her feet. The frightful carnival of faeries, hobs, sprites, and elves in the woods began rushing through the forkings of the trees like windblown mist, like a storm front rising into the sky. In a black blur, the witch-queen vanished with her unicorn. Sunlight tinkled through the hanging ivy of the rowan glade, and the voice of the birds returned as though Ygrane and her wild troupe had never been there.
Morgeu leaped up, shrieking, "Come back!"
For a while, she stood staring angrily through the holes in the forest canopy at blue void and the nacre bowl of the moon. She hung her head and shuffled back to Skidblade.
Wrath seethed in her, and she decided to return to the mirage chapel and the Grail that she had created on the willow isle and recruit the demon dragon she had summoned there. With that beast, she would attack Brokk and retrieve her infant.
"Take me to the Grail I shaped by my own magic," she commanded, once Skidblade's door huffed shut behind her. The staccato lights began their colorful and silent music.
Moments later, the portal opened again and spilled its sweet smoke on a beach of grassy dunes and crying gulls. Morgeu wiped the tears from her eyes and stepped forth.
"I am counting my denials before you, angel of God!" an anguished voice shouted. A raving and bearded man in tattered fishskin wrap and wearing a crown of dried starfish knelt in the wet sand where petaling waves hissed. With upheld hands, he grasped the wood cup that Morgeu had fashioned by her magic. "I deny Satan! I deny the abyss! I deny Rome and Sodom! And I deny desire with its heydays and spellbound praise!"
"What manner of lunatic have we here?" Morgeu strode toward him, holding in one hand the hem of her crimson robe bunched to her knees. She noted the purple scar that creased his brow. "You've paid the wages of war, haven't you, fool? What's your name?"
"Why—I am the sheep in hood of wolf-—the prince of sea foam—gravest ghost of man—each soul's lost love—and God's own thief by the stolen grace of Adam's sin." He gasped for breath. "I am the Fisher King!" He waved the wood cup. "And behold, crimson charioteer of the Most High—behold the chalice that succored our Lord at his last commensal table before his holy blood bought our freedom."
"Rise, Fisher King." Morgeu backed away from the spray of waves exploding upon the barnacled rocks. Here is a companion better than a dragon, she told herself with a tight smile on her small lips. While the wolf-ogre Garm packs his gullet with this crackpate, I will snatch Mordred and flee.
"Behold this sacred cup," the Fisher King intoned, "from which beauty shines invisible. Humble as it appears, grace is its trick."
"Rise, I said!" Morgeu's irate command yanked the Fisher King to his feet. "Come now away from this noisy beach and into my celestial chariot. And be quick about it!"
The Fisher King jogged to her side. "Crimson angel from on high, I belong to the cadaver's country and am not worthy to rise whole as Elijah into the sky."
"Shut up and get in." Morgeu shoved him toward Skidblade. "And give me that thing." She snatched the wood cup from his hands and followed him into the gods' airship.
"My busy heart is drained," the Fisher King whispered in awe as he beheld the vessel's interior with its parabolic curves of chrome inset with ingots of lights. "No tower of words could describe ... "
"Silence, you fool." In the storm-scented smoke that filled the chamber, her voice sounded distant and cottony. "Take us directly to Brokk!"
"Brokk?" The Fisher King pivoted on his heels, startled by the flurrying colors and smears of radiance. "My faring heart would know: Is Brokk among the Thrones and Principalities?"
Morgeu gave no answer. When the exit opened upon a strand of gravel plaited with frost, she took the madman by the elbow and escorted him out of Skidblade. The quarter moon shone like a shard of tarnished silver swaged above an anvil of storm clouds.
"My prayers are eunuch!" the Fisher King cried out. "We are yet hooded by the moon! This is not heaven! You are no angel!"
Morgeu showed her tiny teeth in a grim smile. "Oh, you will see heaven and the angels soon enough, I assure you."
Chapter 20:
Lucifer by Moonlight
The king's ivory-hulled barge drifted down the Tamesis toward Londinium accompanied by lighters of lute players and trumpeters. Three ferries of archers sailed alongside, and a score of Urien's armored horsemen accompanied the river procession on the banks.
Merlin appreciated these vigilant escorts. Usually, the brails of his heart entangled with the surroundings for leagues on all sides and warned him of menace, but in the company of the seductive Selwa his attention barely strayed beyond the perfumed and garlanded canopy tent.
Selwa absorbed Merlin in a realm of pleasure with her flexible and fragrant mink's body. Unfazed by a ghoulish physiognomy as sunken and bony as an autumn salmon, she kissed his eyes and ears with erotic mischief and tongued his mouth with the astuteness of a hungry eel.
Undaunted by his ceramic torso bent and bony as a crippled heron, she smeared him in attar oil and twisted him around her in a python coil so that they embraced with lubricious happiness like coupling serpents. Unafraid of an empurpled phallus that lifted above the broken rock of his pelvis, she drew him into the deepest darkest limit of herself and gasped with laughter at his savage amazement.
Fiery lights flashed across Merlin's brain. The seminal powers in his spine unlocked, and he sated his prehistoric hunger in a delirium of mad passion. Selwa responded with ambitious and unguarded ardor. That surprised even her as the wizard's unconquerable energy carried them with careless abandon to unexplored possibilities of virtuosity and lustful excitement far beyond exhaustion.
Spent, they both felt oddly stronger than when they had begun. And they began again.
Desire bound them. Desire greater than fatigue, more carnivorous than famine bound them to self-centered, burning voracity. And the more they conjugated, the more demanding and lyrical their appetite for each other became. The universe emptied of everything else.
To save themselves from starvation and from damaging the happiest parts of their bodies, Selwa pleaded with Merlin to disengage, to shut down their machinery of heaven. Merlin reluctantly obliged.
Two nightfalls and a day had passed, and neither of them could walk. Servants, appalled and frightened by all they had heard, trembled as they answered the cries for water and food. Two had already cast themselves overboard in terror, and of the others all had stopped praying the day before and now wholly doubted the existence of God.
Selwa and Merlin slept through the next day. The following night, to spare their impenitent bodies further travails, they put on matching saffron kirtles of gauzy tiffany and gave their full attention to sharing magic. Merlin fulfilled his part of their bargain with the same intensity that Selwa had granted him. He not only told her about the seven gates of power in the human body, he began to open each of them for her.
Lik
e the seven colors of the rainbow, the seven eyes of God waited to stare forth from the seductress. The slow, red rhythms in her bones felt into pebbles and stones and the fingerings of gravity. Her sexual parts tingled as she levitated sand from the riverbed and sent it skipping across the sun-dimpled surface.
Orange whistles sounded from the fallopian flowers of her sacrum as her awareness extended outward to the riverbanks and the lanterns of water, the plants, with their mystifications of light and photosynthesis. Yellow radiation linked her solar plexus with the sun itself, and she sat astonished at the bow, unsinewed by light.
The crucial knot of herself opened like a blossom and her supernatural spirit aligned itself with the shining river. She sat mesmerized. With her hair streaming in the wind and day leaning against her soul, her mind reached to heaven's edge.
At nightfall, soothed by this daylong euphoria and still fatigued from her lewd lovemaking with Merlin, Selwa plummeted into profound sleep. Merlin carried her from the prow of the ship into the canopy tent and laid her comfortably among the silk pillows and satin cushions. Then he stepped onto the deck to pace through the mild moonlight, pondering his gratitude to Selwa, his abnegation of chastity, and the invincible frontier of desire onto which he had so dauntlessly embarked.
The servants and the crew, fearful of the wizard, had retreated to the pilothouse and the bilge quarters. Merlin stopped tramping, surprised to find a young man sitting at the aft. Moonlight, shining through a gap in the moss-hags where the barge had tied off for the night, lit the lapping peat water warm brown. That silver light cast the tremulous shadow of the stern—but no shadow of the youth.
Merlin reached out with the brails of his heart and felt nothing. He quaked with surprise and stared more intently at the young, astonishingly beautiful man sitting cross-legged on the stern. Smiling tenderly, the youth, naked but for a white waistcloth, stood and leaned against the taffrail with the sleek muscularity of an athlete. His long fleecy hair held the softest sunlight. But his eyes were strange—large and banded with agate colors like a goat's eyes.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 28