Wesc’s smile deepened to see that the beardless youth did not wear armor over his purple tunic, though the famous sword Excalibur hung from his waist by a black belt and scabbard. That was rightly the Furor's sword, Lightning, stolen, some said, by an angel—angelos, messenger of the nameless god. Retrieving it for his gods was one of King Wesc's most ardent ambitions.
As the barge drew nearer, the Saxon poet-king spied Merlin in the British entourage. He had never before seen the wizard, and the unearthly cast of the tall figure struck him. Even with his head covered by a conical cap similar to what his own scribes wore, Merlin's outlandish features caught sunlight on sharp cheekbones and curved nose. His counselors and the vitikis, the seers of his court, had warned him not to touch the wizard: He was a Dark Dweller from the House of Fog and full of magic.
Alongside the wizard leaned Selwa, the factor from the house of Syrax, who plied another kind of magic: the great wealth of her venerable and ubiquitous family. Trade agreements had been struck between her and the Foederatus, guaranteeing supplies for the massive invasion force in Jutland, and she had served as a messenger between Wesc and Arthur.
In exchange for her goodwill, she had won for her family's trappers and furriers safe passage into the mink-rich Saxon lands and forests of the Balts. She leaned seductively against Merlin, her soft, dress of green chambray clinging to her lissome figure in the river wind.
The barge bobbed on the foreshore current, and the boatswain shouted, "Oars ho!" The crew shipped the oars and threw mooring ropes to the wharf.
When the stevedores lashed the royal barge to the bollards and pulled the ship to the wharf, Wesc handed his black cat to a young servant boy with coifed hair and a Hellenic face and walked to the very edge of the dock. He extended an open hand to his rival, and Arthur took it as he stepped onto the landing.
"Today is Mabon, ancient festival of the autumn equinox," the Saxon king greeted cheerfully in guttural Saxon. "Eighteen summers from this day of your birth have brought you here to counsel with me the fate of Britain."
Arthur forced a smile and answered in the Saxon tongue he had learned as a child from the Saxon thralls of White Thorn, "The fate of Britain is in God's hands, King Wesc—as are our births and our deaths."
"Was it a year ago that you and I first met?" Wesc looked up at the large youth with a merry gleam in his blue eyes. "You came to me a prisoner then, and your life lay entirely in my hands. Not your nameless god but Wesc spared you, lad."
"I am indebted to you for my very life." Arthur removed his chaplet of gold laurel leaves and passed it to the young aide who had clambered onto the dock directly behind him. "If you wish to collect that debt, I will go with you now as your thrall. My kingdom belongs to God."
"As your nameless god does not much speak and negotiating with him will thus present unrealistic barriers, I will forgo taking you into thrall." Wesc gestured for the aide to return the chaplet to the king. "You will have to speak for your silent god, Arthur—because this day we will decide the fate of Britain between us."
Arthur placed the chaplet on his head, and they strolled across the dock to the loggia. King Wesc motioned for his servants, and they came forth with his gifts. He signaled them to converge on Merlin, who had waited for the ramp before escorting Selwa onto the dock. "Let your wizard inspect my gifts, while you and I walk alone." He brushed aside the scribes shuffling beside him. "What we discuss will stay between us. No magicians, no scribblers."
"Then I will accompany you without a weapon." Arthur moved to take off his scabbard. "We will meet as men, not kings."
Wesc stayed his hand. "Keep your sword. It is the emblem of what we have come to discuss. If you remove Excalibur, then give it to me, and I will return to you peace and prosperity for all this land."
Arthur squared his shoulders. "Neither this sword nor Britain is negotiable."
"Then why are you here, Arthur?" The Saxon king walked stiffly along the river arcade. He turned and lifted skeptical eyebrows. "Why talk with me at all?"
Stopping suddenly when Wesc swung about and blocked him, Arthur hobbled awkwardly. He regretted leaving his cypress walking stick in the barge, afraid it would make him appear weak. "I've come to convince you of my will to fight."
"You can barely walk straight, and you want to fight the Foederatus?" Wesc showed his hairy Adam's apple and laughed. His ginger beard pointed to the bronze lanterns suspended by iron chains in the arcade's ceiling vaults. "You are mad, boy. Think of the bloodshed."
Arthur leaned against a slender stone pillar and frowned at the smiling man. "You walk hardly better than I."
"Ah, a boating accident in my childhood." The laughter drained from him. "It made me a poet. Let us sit here." He trudged to the riverside wall and sat on a bench shaped with sea horses and finny wings carved from a single slab of blue rock.
Arthur sat beside him and gazed across the river at tree-roughs and wattle villages on the far shore. He spoke without looking at Wesc. "My grandfather wore the purple as colonial senator in this city. A fellow senator, Balbus Gaius Cocceius, poisoned him so that he could forge an alliance with the Saxons. They titled my grandfather's murderer Vortigern, Great Leader. Great Leader summoned the Saxons to Britain as mercenaries to fight the Picts, and the Saxons have squatted ever since on the fertile plains of the Cantii. Horsa and Hengist—your predecessors—they demanded tribute in gold, and they punished those cities that did not pay. My uncle Ambrosius and my father, Uther Pendragon, both died to overthrow Vortigern and to unite this island." He turned his golden eyes on the watchful poet-king. "You cannot expect me to defile the memory of my fathers by allying again with the Saxons."
"The Foederatus, Arthur." Wesc reared his head knowingly. "If the Saxons alone breached this offer, you would be correct to reject us. I represent legions of Angles, Jutes, Scoti, and Picts as well as Saxons. You will be overrun."
Arthur's yellow eyes did not blink. "Many will die."
"Many will die." Wesc nodded with grim certainty. "And the West Isles will be ours."
"If God so wills."
"Do not speak to me of your nameless god." Wesc waved at the mountains of cumulus sliding out to sea. "Do you see those clouds? My gods ride those clouds." He peered at the young king through one squinted eye. "When has it last rained upon your kingdom? Nor will it rain again until these islands belong to the Foederatus."
Arthur lifted his chin and shook his head. "My God may be nameless, yet He will not be denied. By the will of God Himself, I will overcome the Aesir, for they are created beings, little different than you and I. My God is uncreated. What He wills no demiurges or gods can thwart. And He has willed that I rule Britain."
"How can you be so sure, boy?" Wesc scoffed him with a sharp laugh. "Your god has no voice."
"My God speaks through deeds." Arthur leaned toward the small king. "And He has given me Merlin. You know about Merlin. I saw how you looked at him—how you used your gifts to separate him from us. You fear him, and you should. He is a fallen angel—a Dark Dweller. With him, I will overcome the Aesir."
Wesc refused to be intimidated. He seized Arthur's thick wrists. "Show me your hands, lad. Look, they are tough with calluses. And behold my soft, weak hands. That sword you carry—how many men have you killed in battle with it? I have never held a sword in my life, let alone fought a battle or killed a man. How can you hope to stand against me even with Merlin?" He released Arthur's wrists and slapped his own white kid-leather vest with both palms. "The entire Foederatus fights for me. Why? Because I am not a man." He put a skinny finger to his freckled forehead. "I am a vision. The vision of Saxon Britain. There is no Rome anymore. Roman Britain is as dead as the Empire, and your defeat is so obvious it has become the stuff of song among my people. My poems have made the fall of Vortigern and the deaths of Horsa and Hengist into legend. What I have written, the bard sings, and now whole nations have joined with us to live the song and take the West Isles out of the dead hands of Rome. The future is Eu
rope."
"Do not mistake me for a Roman, Lord Wesc. I am a Briton."
"And I am a poet. Why else would I even be speaking with you? A warrior-king would have invaded weeks ago. A poet is a maker." He nodded sagely. "I want to make peace, not war."
"Then disperse your host of warriors, poet. Send them east onto the steppes."
"No one goes east. There are warrior tribes all the way to Cathay. Our destiny manifests in the west. You cannot stop us from taking Britain. Join us, Arthur—do not dare fight us."
King Arthur's eyes narrowed. "If I join you, what becomes of Britain's yeomen and free landholders?"
"They work the same land as their forefathers."
"But they will work it as thralls of Saxon overlords."
"It is the way of history." King Wesc lifted his dark eyebrows philosophically. "You are a well-read man. You know it has ever been thus, since the first river kingdoms."
"We will not be your vassals."
The Saxon unhappily swung his jaw to one side. "Then am I to believe that your people are greedy and will not share with us the bounty of these isles?"
"Four hundred years we have lived here unmolested—"
"Under Roman rule."
"Rome cultivated these lands, and they are ours now, and Christian."
"Ah, the nameless god again." Wesc wagged a finger. "Did not his own son admonish you to love your enemies? Did he not say that if anyone wants your tunic, let him have also your cloak?"
Arthur's lips whitened as he withheld an irate reply to this small, unassuming man whose soldiers wore trousers of human skin and drank toasts from their enemies' skulls. "We will trade with you. We will offer you aid so that you may cultivate your own farms and create your own abundance. But the Saxon has no heart for clearing land, does he? Nor will the Jute's pride permit him to follow behind a beast with a plow. And what Angle has ever dwelled long enough in one place to grow a vineyard?"
Arthur stood, his large frame tense with anger. "Do not ever try to use my Savior's words to deceive me. The Foederatus comes not to build Britain but to pillage her."
"Then you choose the knife over the pen?" He shook his bearded head. "Do not make this fatal error, Arthur." From a pocket of his white vest, he removed a small wax tablet and a reed stylus and offered them to the youth. "Create a treaty with me. Choose the pen."
"A pen that signs my people into slavery?" King Arthur shook his head once. "I choose the knife."
"Your own messiah has warned you, those who live by the knife die by it. I say, those who live by the pen never die." He placed the tablet of brown wax on the bench and began writing. "Your way is false, Arthur. It ends in death." Leaving the tablet and stylus on the bench, he rose. He held Arthur's golden stare with a grim look. Then, with a sad shake of his head, he shuffled away.
Arthur watched him disappear among his scribes, counselors, and servants in the archway of the arcade and gritted his teeth. There would be war now. Only magic could forestall it. When that inevitability had finished hanging its dark consequences upon his entrails, he picked up the wax tablet and read the rhymeless, weirdly broken rhythm of a berserker war chant—
I am a knife.
My hunger is all
I have. I move
like a criminal, silent,
ignoring surfaces, reaching
for the heart of things, unable
to hold anything. I have no
integrity—integrity
falls away from me
and no arriving, only
separation.
I am less each time.
Standing always at
the crossroads, all directions
are false.
Chapter 21:
Imaginary Numbers Are the Flight of God’s Spirit
Lady Unique arrived in Cantii, the Saxon territory at the southeast corner of Britain, as a fortune-telling cat. She had heard the worshipful summons of her poet-king, Wesc, and she went directly to his residence in the Roman villa of Dubrae above the limestone cliffs overlooking the stormy Belgic Strait.
She strolled among stately poplars that enclosed the four-century-old estate, inspecting decayed stone walkways with their once-regal rock gardens and shrubbery, now grown wild. A stele of fauns and satyrs stood in weeds, and she paused before it. Nearby, a toppled sundial lay obscured by ivy. The grandeur of Rome and its calamitous reckoning moved her to ponder the fate of all empires and the mock glory of mortals and gods alike.
Through the poplars, she glimpsed a vision of the age that had supplanted the proud imperialists: The old vineyards had been razed to make room for wattle-and-daub cottages, housing for the settlers from Saxony and Jutland. In their midst, the winery and the vintner's manse still stood, serving as administrative buildings for the Foederatus. On the grassy parade field between them, horned gleemen and wise dogs danced and cavorted in harlequin garb, amusing stocky Foederatus officers in rawhide gear.
The goddess proceeded toward the villa, passing timber-framed buildings with plaster walls painted with hortatory images of battles—a frantic mural of headlong horses impaled by lancers, ax-swinging cavalry under a clattering drove of arrows, ranks of naked warriors trampling unhorsed defenders—training panels for the invasion of Britain.
The black cat with a white star of augury above its blue eyes entered a courtyard garden flanked by colonnades of green marble. The gardener on his knees before the bedding trenches of hedges paid the animal no heed. The poet-king favored cats, and the worker assumed he glimpsed yet another household familiar. The maidservants responsible for cleaning the bath suite also ignored the cat as she walked along the terra-cotta pipes that carried water to the basins and fountains.
The goddess crossed a mosaic floor decorated with lunettes of sea panthers, Cupid riding a dolphin, and Triton blowing his conch horn. These images of the dead Fauni gods left her uneasy, because they reminded her of the Furor's warning that the Fire Lords meant to destroy all the gods. She moved quickly out of the bath suite and across an atrium of potted pomegranate and apricot trees, where caged songbirds silenced their melodies at her approach.
The gallery beyond made her more comfortable with its display of "raven's food"—war trophies: tapestries of woven scalps, harps of human bone, drums stretched with the flayed skin of enemies, and racks of skull cups. Here, the commanders of the Foederatus came to counsel with their high king.
This morning, the long chamber stood empty but for a vitiki, a seer, devoutly dusting the trophies. He recognized the goddess at once and fell to one knee, head bowed.
In a writing bay with a coved ceiling and columned fenestration that opened on a view of the white cliffs, King Wesc sat drafting battle orders. He did not sense Lady Unique until she bounded atop his writing table. An ardent smile opened in his ginger beard. "You've come!"
The goddess said nothing. She had deigned to lower herself to the planet's surface, the Dragon's hide, so that she might listen to her devotee. In truth, she knew fear. Until recently, the Dragon roamed about, awake and voracious. Rarely had Lady Unique left Yggdrasil and its high nectars for fear of the dangerous beast. But Wesc was dear to her, and to give him the strength he needed to wage her husband's war against the Britons, she defied her fright.
"My lady!" Tears glistened in the poet-king's eyes. "I am moved to my marrows to see you. Never had I needed your blessing more than now. Look—" He held a fistful of parchment before the oracle cat. "King Cruithni of the Picts defies my command. He insists on sweeping down from his highland camps and invading Britain at once. Instead of my authority, the coming winter spurs him. I am not ready yet. The Jutes quarrel with the Angles. The Angles bicker with the Scoti. And the Scoti rankle under Saxon command. My invasion force is falling apart. I need your strength."
The black cat rubbed against the king's outheld hand, and his life opened into a rain of brightness as though swiveling into a dream. All around him, energy drizzled—battle luck falling through the ceiling from heaven
. Arms outstretched, head tilted back, he received this gift of the goddess with a heart instantly calm and complete.
Many talismans had been fashioned in the Storm Tree from bryony twine and beryls polished by her hand and infused with her magical power. The effort had drained her. Yet, seeing the euphoria on the ruddy face of King Wesc, she knew contentment. Her husband would be pleased, he who had given so much of himself to take these West Isles, to defy the Fire Lords, to reshape the future on the anvil of his own ardor and courage.
She could not care less what happened to Britain, but she loved the Furor—and this poet-king who loved her made it easier to accept the sacrifices: the absence of her children, Thunder Red Hair and Beauty; the remoteness of her husband; and the strenuous effort to provide battle luck and inspiring orphic visions to the uneasy alliance of Foederatus tribes.
King Wesc rose to his feet buoyant as a white curtain in a wind of sunlight. "I must tell you of Arthur," he said to the divine cat as he stepped out of the writing alcove and into the trophy gallery. "He will not be easy to defeat. He is not like the other Britons and Celts. For the first fifteen years of his life, he believed his father a Saxon. He took his fire from the forge of our blood, my Lady. And I think that in that place inside him that no one sees, he is yet one of ours ... "
Walking through the gallery of war tokens and then into the pomegranate atrium, Wesc regaled the black cat with his fears and hopes for Britain. And the vitiki and the servants, who looked up from their chores, saw no cat beside their king but a tall and sturdy woman whose loose gray hair and simple gown of brown hunter's cloth embroidered with ferns and wood pigeons belied her dignity and noble stature.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 30