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For a brief interval, after we glimpsed the abyss in Merlin, we became mortal again. And though each of us was ten thousand years older than the next, we lived as sisters who had known the same winters and summers, the same fireside darkness after the stars soaked up twilight.
Ice sheets came and went. Flood times and drought, herds and flocks shared their wisdom and moved on, many into silence. And yet, our world did not change in the ninety thousand years of our reign. Each of us knew the moon's phase every day of our mortal lives. We shared an altar on the wind. Scents of water, thunder, death served as spirit guides. They whispered deeper than hearing, and to each one of us they shared the same secrets.
For us, for more than a hundred centuries, no difference between medicine and compassion, no distinction between law and justice.
But for you ...
These past ten thousand years have changed everything.
And yet ... and yet—even for you—death is a word like stone.
So much has been mistaken since our rule ended and the reign of the chieftains began. Closed is the heart that once held horizons. Boredom burns inside. We are forced to look deeper into your truth than we ever could see within ourselves. We look past the reckless pity and the boredom and the wheel that is love and the weight that is loss. We look deep enough to find your truth. And that truth is strange to us.
Strange. Once we slept in the open, under stars, atop the earth. Beneath you, the earth is not flat. You live on a sphere hung in the emptiness. Every child knows this—now.
From Avalon, we Nine Queens look deeper yet inside you, through your mind to the other side, to square roots, cubes, exponents, and the immeasurable depth of irrational numbers.
Infinity. This is where pi runs to forever. Here is where we find negative numbers and, deeper yet, the square root of negative numbers—imaginary numbers, which are the flight of God's spirit. There are no boundaries here. Rivers. Glaciers. Oceans. All limits fall away. Time is an illusion at this depth. And reality is instantaneous.
Where are we?
This is the underside of the soul.
At this level, you are here with us. We are the nine—and you are the rebound to zero. Together, we are one more than nine and the beginning of a new way to spell, a new magic, binary magic: one and zero: 10. Your whole world is shaped by this new binary magic of ones and zeroes.
You are the one. We are the nothing. Is it strange that you are one—just you and only you? It is strange for us—who have been here for thousands of years before you—strange that, without you, we are nothing.
You will understand what we are saying or you will not.
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On the ramparts of Tintagel, Duke Marcus erected artillery weapons—sturdy, wood-frame projectile armaments that fired iron-headed bolts. The dragon that had killed two of his lancers and chased him back to the citadel harried the outlying crofts by day and assailed the cliffside fastness by night. The white walls bore scorched streaks where dragonfire had lashed them, and two of the highest turrets looked like black claws, their roofs burned away.
Each night of the dragon assault, the duke fired his missile throwers, and the bolts arced harmlessly into the dark. Bedevere, face burned black and blistered red, tried to rise from his couch to stop Marcus. "The dragon is tormented by demons," he breathed, almost inaudibly, to the white-robed nun who tended him. "It is not itself an evil creature. I have felt its suffering."
Duke Marcus ignored Bedevere. Two of his lancers were dead, his land torched, and the fortress that the king had placed in his care damaged and under assault. He determined to slay the dragon and pressed his engineers to strengthen the firing cords of the projectile launchers.
On the third night, when the dragon glided out of silver moonclouds, a bolt struck its underside. The lacy-winged monster shrieked fiercely but did not evaporate as Bedevere had described. The wooden, brass-tipped bolt lacked the strength to kill it.
Blue flames lashed Tintagel, and turrets and rooftops roared in a red rush of fire. Cinderous smoke, underlit in scarlet by the holocaust, reeked up against the night and blotted the stars. Again and again, the missile throwers launched their bolts, but the dragon had sailed away into the vapor-hung darkness, its anguished screams ruffling behind like torn banners.
The next day, King Arthur and the squad of cavalry and lancers who had ridden with him from Londinium calmed their nervous steeds in a charred thicket overlooking Tintagel. The mounts smelled the dragon and skittered. Messages from both Marcus and Bedevere had reached him at the governor's palace, and—against Merlin's counsel—he had hurried to Land's End as fast as the worn Roman roads would allow.
Merlin had advised Arthur to return to Camelot immediately. Wesc, rebuffed by the British king, surely would launch his formidable invasion before winter. All the warlords of Britain stood on alert. Every city had set aside harvest work to fortify its defenses and post additional patrols. Already reports had arrived from the north with news that the Picts swarmed across Caledonia.
Arthur had sent his wizard directly to Camelot, with assurances that he would join him there as soon as Tintagel was secure. Eager to get back to Loki and prepare for the ascent into the Storm Tree, which was the king's last hope of protecting Britain from the bloody assault of the Foederatus, Merlin had not objected. He and his earnest apprentice Selwa had left at once.
Now, seeing the burned towers and the large charcoal stars on the walls of Tintagel where firebreath had struck, Arthur wished Merlin had stayed at his side. The king feared magic, and he did not trust his own strength against a beast wrought by demons. He wanted, first of all, to protect the men who had accompanied him from Londinium. They had been his guard against berserkers and roving gangs, and he would not lose them to dragonfire. He ordered them to Tintagel, but they would not leave his side.
"Stay behind me, then," the king insisted, and forced his mount to follow its fear. If Straif were under him, he would have felt more confident riding among the few unburned trees that had recently stepped from their leaves into autumn. Skittishly, the horse carried him to a hazel copse where sunlight stood like lamps among the thick boughs.
The dragon lay there, wounded. Its scaly hide, like a heap of tarnished coins, held more shadow than light. With its drilled-out eyes, it watched them from a face like a smashed boulder.
Swords hissed from their scabbards, and King Arthur raised his right hand to stay them. Bedevere's messages had described a peaceful union with the creature, and he recalled what Merlin had told him: This was a dreambound thing, provoked from the One Dragon, the planetary beast that slept at the Earth's fiery core.
With horrified mutterings tumbling behind him, Arthur stepped through sun-struck asphodel and amaranth and entered the hazel copse, his leather-gloved hands open before him. Daylight glinted off his bronze helmet and the hinges and buckles of his brass-plated armor and clicked in the dark, deep eyes of the dragon.
Sticky coils of tarsmoke seeped from the beast's ulcerous lips. It tried to lift its large, horned head. It was too weak. The metal-tipped bolt had drained its strength.
Arthur circled the dragon, breathing through his mouth against the sulfurous stink. His heart beat thickly as he surveyed the slitherous immensity and long, barbed wings of folded black crepe. Its malevolent serpent's grin gaped under stalks, antlers, knobs, and tusks that cluttered its horrid face. The bores of its eyes glittered far back with the enormity of its pain.
Crusted with scablike black quartz, the bolt that had brought this sky-behemoth to the ground looked ridiculously small where it stuck from the tigered yellow-and-black underbelly. He had to remind himself that this was not an animal of flesh but of ectoplasm hardened by demons.
To reach the impacted bolt, Arthur climbed atop a webbed talon and lay full against the dragon's broad flank with its cancerous nodules like red embers. That contact flushed him with untrappable thoughts and musical bewilderments: the Dragon's dreamsong.
He extracted the bolt with one hand, and a ray of blood-light shone forth briefly before closing over. The dragon hissed angrily. Black steam unraveled in the sunbeams, and the hulking beast lurched upright, throwing Arthur into the air. He dropped the bolt and clutched at the cobbled spine to keep from flying into the trees.
Prostrate upon the dragon's back, Arthur felt the thunder of the roar pouring from the dragon before he heard it. The sound disappeared inside him. Absorbed in the dreamsong of the true Dragon, the king's mind widened so that for a moment he became one with the white acetylene intensity of music from the Earth's core. He melded into dragon consciousness.
Aisles of stars opened before him. Galactic vistas. Light pierced him on its exile through the darkness of kingdom come. The luminous ruin of the universe as it expanded faster and faster into blackness filled him with its extravagant emptiness. And he would have blacked out—but for the music, the melodious voltage welding him back into his own mind, his own flesh. The Dragon's dreamsong, aimed at the stars, passed through Arthur on its way outward, shaking happiness into his bones and making his heart laugh.
Up from the hazel copse, the winged abomination rose, with Arthur clasped to its back like a human star. The soldiers, groveling atop their frightened horses, grimaced through the whirlwind of tossed leaves and shouted after the dragon as it vanished with their king into the blue zenith.
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In Camelot's library behind the central hall, Gawain and Gareth sat at separate drafting tables recording their shared vision of the Holy Grail while Fra Athanasius paced before them. '"Twere folly, Gareth, to rely so prodigiously upon the gerundive. Your account thus swells overmuch your own achievement. Your readers shall assume you are winding truth to your own purposes. You must begin anew if you want this written account to command respect in Ravenna." The scribe turned the parchment over before the young Celt and rapped it with his knuckle. "This time make better use of the ablative. And as for you, Gawain, open your ears." He removed the sheet from before the thick-shouldered lad, and read aloud: '"Such voice commande that wee shoulde thenceawaye fare upp ynto Camelot with haiste and do sumbmytt our vision to our Lorde the Kynge.' By the Graces themselves, boy, this is nigh unreadable! You write in a spider's thread of archaic Latin. We have much work to do."
"No, we don't!" The glowering Gawain pushed away from the drafting table and stood up so forcefully he knocked over his stool. "We've done enough work. For days, we've done nothing but writing and rewriting. I want no more of this."
Athanasius' face remained sturdily somber. "Sit down, boy. You will begin again—for this tuneless language will bring your account to bane. No one will believe you."
"I don't care." He snatched the parchment from the legate's hands and crumpled it. "Gareth and I know the truth of what the angel told us. The Holy Grail is out there somewhere in Britain—and we're not going to find it in this library."
Gareth poured his phial of ink over his writing table and shoved to his feet. "We have wasted enough time sitting here like scribes. We are warriors. Our Da needs us to find the Grail."
Athanasius glared with outrage. "You are boys. Your father will not endorse your starry-eyed ambition."
"Da is not well." Gawain's kestrel stare revealed a determination that had been hardening for days. "Merlin himself cannot heal him. Da needs to drink from the holy chalice to clear his mind."
"And we will find that chalice for him," Gareth asserted, stepping to his brother's side.
"Sit down. The two of you," Athanasius commanded, and his face flinched when the sturdy youths did not immediately obey. "I will not brook such shameful behavior. You will do as I say."
"I think not, scribe." The threat in Gawain's tone forced Athanasius back one step before the young warriors seized him. They easily subdued the gangly Roman, and they hog-tied him with the sash of his ecclesiastic robe and gagged him with his skullcap. Not until evening, when a servant entered the library to fill the oil lamps, was he found.
By then, Gawain and Gareth had ridden half a day from Camelot. They had taken strong horses and several days' provisions. Outfitted in full battle gear, they had not been questioned by the gate sentinels, who believed they departed on patrol.
Athanasius berated himself for misjudging the boys' dissatisfaction with their scrivenings, and he implored Kyner to send riders after them. News of the collapsed talks in Londinium between Arthur and Wesc, however, dissuaded the old Celt. War lurked on the horizon, and the chief would spare no men to discipline two unruly youths.
In despair for the safety of the youngsters and unhappy with the tongue-lashing he would receive from Merlin when the wizard returned to Camelot, Athanasius sought help from Loki. The legate spent a day searching storage chambers in the central hall and towers, warerooms in the bailey, depots along the lanes of terrace houses, and even toolsheds in the numerous gardens to no avail. At last, only Merlin's grotto remained uninspected.
With trepidation, the bespectacled emissary passed through the ouroboros portal and descended uneven rock stairs into the chemical fetor of the subterranean chamber. Glass-orb lamps suspended from stone teeth in the high, domed ceiling lit the way. Who has lit them?
Loki sat under a bell jar atop a rusty ledge surrounded by alchemic retorts and crucibles. Like a homunculus, the god's bald and swollen head loomed against the glass while his withered torso and tadpole limbs drifted in effluvial mist.
"Athanasius!" Loki's stunted hands slapped against the bell jar. "Let me out!"
The scribe peered nervously at the distorted figure and related to him the quest for the Grail undertaken by Gawain and Gareth.
"Lift the bell jar," Loki said, "and I will seek them at once."
Athanasius put both hands against the glass and felt his palms tingling with the energy within. "You must promise."
"I do promise."
The legate lifted the bell jar, and a dazzling flurry of sparks rushed over him so brusquely he dropped the glass. With an explosion of brittle brightness, it smashed to splinters. "Oh mercy of heaven!"
Loki laughed. He stood whole and garbed entirely in black, bald pate and face scrawled with futhorc. "Heaven has no mercy, poor fool, or children would never die."
Athanasius ignored the god's slander. "Loki, you must hurry. Gawain and Gareth have been at large among pillagers and invaders these two days."
"They will have to find their own way back." Loki stepped over the smashed bell jar toward the rock steps. "I have more pressing concerns."
"What are you saying?"
The god shrugged. "I am the Liar. And I am aptly named."
"Wait!" Athanasius grabbed the god's elbow, and it dissolved to evanescent bubbles in his grip. Shocked, he stared at his empty hand shining with cold and then at Loki's broken arm as it swiftly formed again. "I helped you. Take pity on me, Loki."
"Pity?" Loki stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked disdainfully at the mortal. "What pity did you show me when Succoth pursued me to your chamber? You have no idea where I had been or what horrors I had seen. You turned away from me."
"I was charged by the king himself to protect his sword," Athanasius protested. He groped in the deep pocket of his dalmatic and withdrew a rosary of ivory beads on a silver thread. "Behold the horror of God made man!" Waving the crucifix before him, he approached the Aesir god. "Whatever horrors you have witnessed are naught compared with this suffering. And in the name of God's wounds, I beg you to stop and help me."
Loki's marked face twisted angrily. "You don't know what you are talking about, fool. I have seen calamities of blood and cruelty that overwhelm the death of any one man, God or not." He stepped closer, a gleam of savage understanding in his inky eyes. "Succoth pursued me to the Branch of Hours, and I fled across time. I ran for my very life across the centuries. And do you know what I saw?"
Athanasius backed away, crucifix wavering in his outheld arm and rosary beads clacking.
"I saw with my own eyes that the nameles
s god you worship, the god of no shape who became a man, the god of your Holy Bible is nowhere to be found." Futhorc squirmed like black worms across Loki's face. '"Lord, how long will the wicked, how long will the wicked triumph?' I will answer that Psalm's question for you Athanasius. So long as humans thrive."
"Calm yourself, Loki." The legate pressed the crucifix to his breast and prayed inwardly for protection from the wrathful man-shape edging toward him. "Nor truth nor wisdom comes from your mouth this day."
"Pogrom." Loki's mirthless smile sprang open like a knife. "The word means nothing to you. The Crusades. Another empty name for you. Christians will massacre Jews and other Semites by the thousands for the glory of your blessed Jesus, your Prince of Peace. There is no peace in the future, Athanasius. There is Black Death and more pogroms. There is the Inquisition and the ghetto. There is Belsen—death camps and ovens."
"You speak in insensible thunders, Loki!"
The god grabbed Athanasius by the back of his white alb and walked him briskly across the grotto. "I tried to tell Merlin. He would not listen. He locked me away. Now I am going to make him listen. And you are not going to stop me." He shoved the frightened scribe into a caliginous hole in the wall and shouted after him, "The wicked will triumph for a thousand years and more, you fool! And your god will keep his silence!"
Athanasius stumbled into darkness, tripped over the cracked ground, and whirled about with a flapping of robes. A cloud of dust and ash blinded him, and when he wiped his lenses clear, his eyesight flitted over an amorphous shadowscape lit dimly by a squalid red glow, smoky and evil.
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"Where is my baby?" Morgeu the Fey asked Brokk, as the robust dwarf strode forth from mists whispering over flint banks and stony tracts of his arctic isle. "I did as the Furor commanded, and now I want my baby."
A smile of big square teeth illuminated the dwarf's pugnacious face. "Who is this—this guest you bring with you, Morgeu? He has a whimsical aspect. Is he a gleeman?"
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 31