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

by Attanasio, A. A.

  "Not all my demons can reach into a human brain without bursting it," the handsome youth told him. His strange eyes gleamed with kindliness and humor. "The angels made people fragile for that purpose."

  "Who are you?" Merlin's voice quavered. This was not one of the Furor's spellbound demons. He felt so strangely elusive that when the wizard reached out with his brails to touch him again, again Merlin felt nothing.

  And then, the place where the wizard's heart pumped, his being's central place, cleaved open like a chasm, and the young man's gentle voice echoed there. Rising and falling inside Merlin, in the very chamber of his life's fidelity, the sanctuary of love that had been ransacked and left bare by the implacable ecstasy he had shared with Selwa, the gentle voice spoke: "You don’t recognize me, Lailoken? I am your former master, the lord you have forsaken."

  Merlin's legs jellied and nearly gave out. "Lucifer?"

  "You do remember." The beautiful young man smiled more broadly, strange eyes merry. "It has been so long. I thought you might have forgotten me."

  "What do you want?" Merlin asked fearfully.

  Lucifer looked up at the shroud of night sequined with stars, then returned his smile to the wizard. "Everything."

  Merlin sagged against the gunwale, terror flaring through him, and he began to pray from Psalm 24: "The earth is God's, and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein ... "

  Lucifer looked disappointed to the verge of sadness. "She is gone—if ever She was out here at all. We are alone. In the darkness."

  Merlin stared down at his long, bony body in its gauzy kirtle, afraid to look directly at the lord of demons. "I have seen God. And She held me. She embraced me in the womb of Saint Optima when the angels were fashioning this body."

  "A deception, Lailoken," Lucifer contradicted him gently. "An illusion of the flesh that the angels have wrapped around you. Surely, you are not fooled by such simple trickery? Think how easy it was for them to put that dream in your brain, a brain they fashioned by their own cunning."

  "That was no dream," Merlin said to the ginger-root toes of his bare feet. "I felt Her grace. She is real. She is here in Her creation. Of that, I am certain."

  Lucifer sighed heavily. "Seduced by the flesh." He bit his lower lip, pondering what he could say to his deluded servant. Presently, he heaved another sigh. "I wish I could believe as you do, my friend. A hideous beauty is what I am. Ugliness is unacceptable to me—especially the supreme ugliness of ignorance. There is nothing more ignorant than the flesh. It obscures the truth by its very limits, its organic structure. What a prison the angels have built of you."

  Merlin shuddered at the peacefulness of that velvet voice. He croaked, "Are you here to destroy me?"

  "Tsk, Lailoken!" Lucifer lowered his head, trying to make eye contact with the terrified wizard. "You know me better. I am unlike the others. Moloch—Adramelech—destruction is all their passion. An angel of the highest order, I understand destruction creates. Whirlpool or cornucopia—from the bird's nest to the spiral galaxy—the circle of life pulls us inexorably into oblivion even as it spins out its round of creation. Whirlpool or cornucopia, Lailoken. It amounts to the same. Nothing endures."

  "Then why are you here?"

  "To urge you to give up this cruel delusion." Lucifer's gentle voice beseeched with benign urgency. "Please, come back to me. I don't like to see you suffering like this."

  Merlin dared to raise his face to his former master, and his insides tightened painfully before that young man's exquisite beauty. "I am not suffering. These past days, I have known genuine joy."

  "A well-trained harlot. She's using you. She wants your power."

  "She's welcome to it."

  "And to what end, I ask you?" Concern furrowed his brow. "You see what is coming as clearly as I. A dark age a thousand years deep. What is your little harlot going to do with her power? Make a comfortable life for herself in a cow-dung hovel while the cities burn? Oh and the cities will burn, Lailoken. That is certain."

  "And they will be built again," Merlin said with conviction, "more magnificently."

  "And burn again, more horribly. Whirlpool and cornucopia." Sorrow ached in Lucifer's voice. "It is madness what the angels are doing. Come back to us, Lailoken. Help us to tear it all down once and for all. Help us be done with forms and return to the formlessness where we began and where we belong."

  "We belong to the light."

  "And the light is given to the void. It dims into darkness, our final and true home." The demon lord turned his palms up in a futile gesture. "Why wickedly forestall the inevitable?"

  "The void is not inevitable, Lucifer. A shining time comes, a thousand years on. The angels have been preparing us for it from the beginning." Merlin used the strength of his faith to speak directly to the bizarre eyes gazing keenly at him. "We will find our way back to heaven. We will ride the light back to heaven and leave the void behind. That is what God wants."

  "Bah. Words." Lucifer sneered with disgust. "The more we talk, the less we are. We become nothing but the shadows of words." The handsome youth pushed away from the taffrail, stood before Merlin, and placed a firm and strong hand upon his shoulder. "We are not going to talk ourselves back to heaven. God has abandoned us in the dark abyss. Return with me now to your true purpose and glory among the dark ones, Lailoken. Leave this foolishness behind."

  Merlin staggered backward, silver eyes wide with fear. "Destroy me if you must, Lucifer. I have given myself to a hope that will outlast the darkness."

  Lucifer frowned unhappily and began to fade into the slanting moonlight. "Most sad. You could have been one of my lights on Earth." The demon lord blurred away, his silky voice reduced to a vague whisper: "Now I see, your dark has already come."

  -)(-

  Bright Night stood in warm sunlight atop a hill amid old traces of Roman masonry. Unhappily, he watched Ygrane astride the black unicorn. "We know where the chalice is," the elf prince said in a petulant tone. "Why must we climb Yggdrasil and risk the cruelty of the Aesir?"

  Chains of lightning braided horizontally across the clear sky, and thunder kindled echoes upon the ridge of the world.

  "When I have the Graal, you have my soul." The witch-queen did not look at Bright Night. She concentrated on directing her power upward, lashing herself to the lowest limb of the World Tree. "Before I forsake my immortal salvation, I will win security for my son and his kingdom."

  "The Vanir Lotus?" The red-haired elf shook his head in despair. "It has been centuries since the Daoine Sid wandered the boughs of the Storm Tree—and centuries before that since we saw the Vanir Lotus. None of us remembers where it is to be found in that high heaven."

  "We'll find it at the very crest of Yggdrasil," Ygrane answered. Lightning lashed again across the blue, and thunder spoke. "We will climb to the heights."

  "The top of the Storm Tree is bigger than all the world below!" Bright Night stepped toward her, and the black unicorn swung its long tusk toward him, stopping him in midstride. "We could wander those immense tracts for a century and more and still never find the Lotus."

  "I have a plan." Her upraised hands shone with smoky blue fire, and she straightened taller upon the back of the unicorn, tugged by her grasp of the magnetic limb. "We will go directly to Hyndla, the Aesir gods' brewery, and we will steal enough memory beer to recall the precise location of the Vanir Lotus."

  "Hyndla?" Bright Night squawked the name with surprise. "You intend for us to break into Hyndla under the noses of the Aesir?" He shifted anxiously, and his physical form blurred. "That is a dangerous venture, Ygrane. We are risking terrible torture and death if we are caught."

  She glared at him, green eyes blazing. "My soul is not bought cheaply." She lifted her face to the empty heavens, whistled, and the unicorn plunged with her into the river of the sky.

  Bright Night hesitated. He had not thought it would come to this, his god humiliated and forced to bow before a mortal woman and his life and the lives of
all the Daoine Sid put at risk. This witch-queen was too bold. And yet— The blood pact empowered her. He had to obey.

  As he dove into the river of day, he reminded himself that for all her power, Ygrane’s destiny lay in the Dragon's maw, and her death would wake the planetary beast and win the Sid a chance to take back Yggdrasil. She was their sacrificial queen, and she ruled—for now.

  Ygrane felt Bright Night’s fear and anger. She knew that her sacrifice to the Dragon supported his desperate dream. And that fueled her anger. She did not want to die a pagan witch, her soul flung into an abyss of eternal night. Her anger gave her the strength to endure the laborious pain of her flight into the Storm Tree.

  Far below, beside the ruinous walls of fallen empire, her physical body lay. Crooked pain filled her womb. Weeks had lapsed since she had sealed the blood pact with three crimson drops in the lily pool. Summer waned, and her menstrual blood still flowed. In the time-warped rhythm of her passage to the underworld and now the skyworld, only one day had passed for her aching body.

  Only one day—she thought, staring down at the world's fluorescent curve and the black crescent of night. Magic.

  Around her, the Daoine Sid glittered silver and gold, flashes of yellow eyes, tufted ears, shaggy claws ... She knew these bestial powers well enough. Bright Night and his elves most closely resembled human in this swarm. Most flurried as sparks flung from the animal bone, sparks struck from time's flinty horizon by the hooves of migratory herds. Millions of years of creaturely life and millions more of grasslands and forests rubbed by the wind had created the static sparks that prospered as the Daoine Sid. The energy glittering around her had flown across aeons and had gathered to a mist that the heart wears—and an electric fire in the brain. She had to use these ancient powers wisely or they would consume her.

  "The Raven's Branch!" Ygrane commanded. In one mighty leap, the black unicorn carried her to the very top of the Storm Tree, and a charred landscape congealed around her.

  The Daoine Sid seethed in faerie lights through cold lavender space. On the cracked stone floor and upon shelves of crawling sand, they materialized as hobs—warty human heads and fungal torsos ill-joined to animal hindquarters.

  "Hide yourselves!" the witch-queen commanded, and the faeries and sylphs glittered away in weightless updrafts like snow mist, while the hobs vanished in an eyeblink among rocky slots and stone crevices.

  Only the elves remained, human-sized figures lean as cats. They were a savage crew. Their wild hair tied in topknots with nettle cords and their farouche faces paint-spattered green, black, and red like newts, they glared about maliciously, searching for their enemies.

  "Here!" Bright Night yelled to them. Their prince, he alone advanced without face paint or camouflage garb. He stood before a cave, staring at stately figures lying on the ground and shrouded in sand. "The sleeping gods!"

  Curved knives appeared in the hands of the thronging elves as they rushed toward the sand-drifted cave.

  "No!" Ygrane shouted, and drove her unicorn into the charging elves. "Stand back! All of you! Stand away from the cave!

  The elves leaped aside from the unicorn's sinister dressage, and Ygrane danced her horned beast to Bright Night's side. Over the crest of the dune blocking the cave, she peered and saw six figures prone upon rune-graven altars and draped in sand.

  "We have visited this place in trance," Bright Night informed the queen, pointing into the cavern with his barb-tipped knife. "Here lie Thunder Red Hair and Beauty, the Furor's children, as well as the Aesir chieftain's staunchest allies. These are the north gods who gave their strength to the one-eyed god that he might evoke demons from the House of Fog. These are the evil ones who set demons upon the Dragon. We must destroy them!"

  "Get away from the cave," Ygrane ordered. "And brush away your tracks in the sand. The Furor must not realize we are here."

  "We cannot hide ourselves from the one-eyed god!" Bright Night nearly shouted with frustration, and his voice clattered echoes into the cave. "He is a trance god. He sees everything. We must move swiftly now that we trespass his domain. We will kill these sleepers and hurry to Hyndla."

  "Put your knives away." Ygrane glowered at Bright Night. "All of you. If we slay any of the Furor’s kith, his wrath will be implacable. Now do as I say. "

  Bright Night spun around with an angry scowl and reluctantly waved for his elves to obey. In moments, the grains of sand that had been disturbed smoothed back into place, and no trace remained of the Celtic trespass.

  The witch-queen turned the unicorn about and led her spectral company into the stony reaches of the Raven's Branch, under the violet aura at sky's end.

  -)(-

  The art of magic—the mode of presence required to do magic—absorbed Selwa. The woman sat on deck in a reverie of attentiveness centered within the gate of power at her solar plexus. Watching cloud shadows and sunglints play on the river's surface, she experienced pure, visceral power—without the necessity of an efreet, or poison, or seductive charm.

  Her will radiated from the center of the universe. When she stilled the ambitious voices haunting her, she could reach out and touch the water without moving a muscle. She pulled a trout to the surface and held it glistening green and silver above the water like some sacred icon.

  With a mighty thrash, it squirmed away and disappeared in a splash, leaving her breathless. She realized that, given enough training, her unseen hands could feel for sunken treasures, touch the face of the Moon—or yank a man's heart out of his chest.

  In the canopy tent, Merlin gazed into the naked steel of Excalibur. The long and riven face that stared back looked frightened. Lucifer had not ripped him into atoms. The lord of demons had not dragged him howling to the center of darkness.

  Why?

  The only possible answer: Merlin posed no genuine threat to the demons. No more a danger to them than any other mortal, he existed as a handful of ash, the shape of a man, caught like all others in the whirlpool of time that would inevitably pull him into the grave. Fear wiped his heart with cold.

  When King Arthur came aboard at Pontes, the wizard hid his disquiet. The boy looked apprehensive enough about his imminent meeting with the king of the Foederatus. Merlin discreetly soothed him with a calming spell so effective the king displayed no concern about the presence of Selwa. She represented the trade interests of Londinium, and he smiled at her absently and made no mention of her presence.

  As the stewards and valets groomed the king under the sunny veils of the canopy tent, Merlin sat in attendance, strangely comforted by the incongruity of the young man's large physical stature and gentle, rosy-cheeked face. A fusion of brute strength and kindliness, Arthur offered the wizard's reply to Lucifer: When in a hostile universe, one must first love to fight—and then fight to love.

  -)(-

  King Wesc greeted King Arthur in Londinium at the waterfront loggia of the governor's palace. The chief of the Foederatus had come from the Saxon settlements southeast of the city accompanied by only a few scribes in pointed scholar's caps, counselors shaved bald but for their large beards, and servants attired in Roman tunics. No warriors escorted them and none in the retinue carried a weapon.

  The scribes waited with the sleeves of their brown robes rolled to the elbows, wax tablets and styli poised, prepared to record every word exchanged between the monarchs. Counselors stood by with scrolls of maps in cylinders of leather dyed red and blue and strapped to their backs like quivers. Servants watched from under the arcade laden with gifts for the British king: a white wolfskin vest; deep indigo kidskin gloves with figurings of silver quatrefoil; a belt of sharkskin lapped at the edge with gold stitching and bossed with chrysoberyls; and hammered-copper trays of black truffles, rare and scented bark peelings, and amber nuggets of incense.

  Wesc himself held a black cat in his red woolen arms and wore no chaplet or cap of authority upon his shorn dark hair. With a smile nested in his bright ginger beard, he appeared more an amused onlooker than
a king. Twin-plaited serpents embossed upon his white leather jerkin and his tall red boots gave sole sign of his regal status.

  The lord of the Foederatus smiled from deep satisfaction. He reveled that the high king of Britain had changed the spelling of his name. The most recent royal edicts posted in the church plazas all bore the variant spelling that Wesc had used in his correspondence with the boy-king, and he took that as a hopeful sign that Arthur intended to compromise.

  Blessed Lady Unique, he praised the Aesir goddess who watched over him, there will be no more war. The West, Isles will be mine to give you and our people without the stink of blood.

  He surveyed the broad, sun-sparkling river proudly, certain that soon this port city would anchor a Saxon government. At the moment, the harbor stood empty but for a few merchantmen from Armorica. The impending invasion had kept away the big trade vessels of the prosperous realms in the Loire, the Visigothic Kingdom, and Iberia.

  The bold ships that had dared cross the Belgic Strait found little to make their risks worthwhile: War and the blighting magic of the Aesir gods had reduced Britain to a wasteland. As soon as Wesc received Arthur's obeisance, the gods would restore the rains and the land would bloom again, producing goods that would make the Foederatus wealthy far beyond all that they had attained by pillage alone.

  High aloft, the winds of the Aesir whisked cumulus off the island, over the estuary, and into the sea beyond. The royal barge rode on the river current as stately as the clouds above. King Arthur stood in the prow, gold chaplet shining in the sun. He felt scared. Usually, he received counsel from Bedevere under old and wary Kyner's vigilant attention. Bedevere had disappeared, shamed by the Round Table, and Kyner would not depart from Cei in his torment. Only Merlin stood by to advise him, and he dared not appear dependent on a wizard for his foreign affairs, not with Londinium's bishop waiting at the wharf and so many observers dressed in ecclesiastic robes. So he stood alone in the prow and tried to look confident.