"I am the conjured clay," the Fisher King answered, putting both hands to his crown of starfish. "I am the dust of vanity crowned by our Savior a king of fishers, and I search the Moon-turned tides for souls and in searching found the wooden miracle." He gestured to the cup in Morgeu's hand. "The Grail!"
The smile slipped from Brokk's face. "He's a madman'" He glared at Morgeu. "Why have you brought a madman to my island?"
"The mad are servants of the gods." Morgeu pulled her crimson robe tighter about herself against the damp chill and pressed the cup of illusion against her chest so that its concavity echoed her words and cast a shadow upon the dwarf’s mind. "Think what a god such as yourself could accomplish with this servant."
The dwarf's thick hands swiped his cranium of tufty gold hair and his jowls of red whiskers, absently trying to brush away the tickle in his brain that Morgeu's voice inspired. "I am no god. I am weaponsmaster to the gods."
"So I thought." Morgeu nodded sagely, and her voice dared reach deeper, far back into the dwarf's inner lives, the series of selves slippery with time and forgetfulness who wanted to remember their ambitions, their fixations and regrets. "But now I have ridden in Skidblade—your creation—and I know you are a god."
Brokk agreed in his depths, and his black eyes glinted.
Morgeu would have feared to attempt enchantment upon one of the gods' own creatures, but for her desperation to save her son, the reborn strength of Gorlois. She filled her voice with great quiet, and commanded, "Take us within your workshop, Brokk, and use this madman as a tool of your ingenuity. Use him to win your rightful place among the Aesir of Yggdrasil."
Brokk obeyed. He led them through a crevice in a frost-veined rock wall and conducted them along stone corridors lit by red shadows from grottoes of smelter pots and forges. The air stank of slag and brimstone, and several times the Fisher King made dire noises of protest. Morgeu silenced him each time with an angry hiss.
Her sacrifice, held so firmly in the grip of her enchantment, he said nothing when they entered the dwarf's workshop and stood before a metal manikin with a devil's countenance. Mutely, he looked about at the cavern of rime-crusted walls and stone worktables where gems glinted amidst calipers, clamps, and peelings of metal.
"My mind already encompasses a strategy for my ascension to the sacred boughs of the Storm Tree," Brokk announced as if emerging from a long sleep. "Behold my most ruthless armor: Cruel Striker." He shuffled around a scaffold in which hung a tall humanoid of black silver with a tusked mask and red mantis eyes.
The dwarf's blunt fingers delicately outlined the sharp fins at the elbows and shoulders. "I designed it for the gods to award any mortal warrior brave enough to invade the hollow hills. But now—now I see it can be used by this madman you have brought to me. The Fisher King will wear Cruel Striker into the World Tree and take from there the dusk apples. With those apples I will brew an elixir that will make me equal to the gods themselves."
"Yes!" Morgeu fixed her enchantment deep in the dwarf's soul with a shout. "Now that I have given you the tool to lift yourself to the divine status you have long deserved, return my son to me."
"As you say." Brokk waddled across the cavern and at a stalagmite slotted with levers gazed into a crystal sphere big as a skull. "Ah, Delling is done nursing. She will be here with the child momentarily."
"Delling?" Morgeu asked nervously. "The red elf of the dawn?"
"The same," Brokk acknowledged, rubbing his hands together and sizing up the Fisher King for inclusion in Cruel Striker. "The boy was hungry. What was there to feed him here?"
Morgeu steadied herself against the stone worktable. "You nursed Mordred on the milk of the red elf—the milk of a goddess?"
Brokk seemed not to hear. He had the Fisher King extend both arms to his sides and measured them with a knotted string. "Some small adjustments, your lordship, and you will be fitted for an assault of heaven!"
"No navy of doves can ascend a man to heaven, truant thumbling," the Fisher King asserted. "Far easier to shut the sun or cage the zodiac. You stride to holocaust I previse ... "
"Oh shut up." Brokk unhinged the tusked mask of Cruel Striker and clapped it over the Fisher King's face.
Morgeu the Fey gasped and clutched her heart. Over Brokk’s shoulder, she watched, in a slant portal garishly illuminated by kiln fires, Delling the red elf of dawn enter.
Ruddy as cinnamon with tawny, brindled tresses that fell loosely over milk-swollen breasts, she shone almost incandescently in her black raiment. She nodded to Morgeu and held back a laugh. At her side clung a pale and naked boy whose long, lank black hair veiled inky eyes bright with supernatural knowing.
"Ah, Mordred!" Brokk grinned with avuncular glee at the child. "You have grown strong on the milk of dawn!"
-)(-
A lavish sunset filled the boughs of Yggdrasil. The Brewer stepped outside of Hyndla, the distillery for the Rovers of the Wild Hunt, to relish the sky's supernal beauty. The balding, lump-nosed god untied a leather apron from his thick torso, hung it on a door peg of the stout tower of cedar and mossbrick, and strode forth to admire the shimmering dusk.
His assistants and their apprentices had already left, and he relished this private and charmed moment in the ivy-trellised patio under the star-kirtled heavens.
Rarely had he seen such an extravagant twilight, and he marveled at the radiant serifs of cloud that bridged the gates of day. Unbeknownst to him, those incandescent vapors and plumes of sunsmoke swelled with the sylphs of the Daoine Sid. Their wisps and streamers carried hot colors into the very folds of night. Above them, Arcturus blazed with savage brightness.
While the Brewer gazed dreamily upon glassy filaments of cloud braiding the wind in ultratones of color, faeries wafted floral fragrances from the forest depths. The keen taste of autumn intoxicated him, and he stepped to the edge of the patio and did not notice the malformed hobs scurrying from tree shadows behind him.
Leather-winged snakes flew to a round window of Hyndla's tower and opened it with their teeth, while owls with children's faces attached ropes of reeved vines and roots to the sill. Bright Night grasped the thick braid and walked up the mossbrick wall. Ygrane followed, and together they slipped through the large open window.
The yeasty redolence of the interior pinched their sinuses and watered their eyes, and they sat disoriented for a moment in the casement above percolating vats and softly steaming cauldrons. Then, Ygrane spied what she wanted: black oak kegs marked with the interlocking rune Jera—the harvest, the good season. "There's the memory beer." She pointed to a loft of stacked kegs.
Bright Night whistled like a night bird, and the bat-winged vipers and baby-faced owls soared through the window. By the time Ygrane and Bright Night, backs pressed against humid mossbricks, had edged along the fretwork molding and reached the loft, the hobs had pierced one of the kegs with their talons.
The witch-queen filled a flagon with frothy blue memory beer, and when she had finished, the elf prince rolled the keg over so that its punctured side did not show.
The Brewer inhaled another waft of the spectral night's extraordinary aroma and turned to go back inside Hyndla. He crossed the patio and reached for his leather apron upon the door peg. A clatter distracted him, and he thought he glimpsed figures moving over the rooty footings of the forest.
He walked to the patio edge and brushed aside dangling ivy. Gazing hard into the black chambers of the woods, he discerned only the wind with its footsteps in the boughs—and a zenith of stars strung with strands of cobweb fire.
Chapter 22:
Fate-Sayer
The dragon soared into a faultless blue sky with Arthur clinging to its back. Sunlight shone from the king's bronze helmet and brass plates of armor, and he appeared from the ground as a sparkle upon the black hide of something huge and reptilian and wrapped in steam.
Enveloped by that acrid dragonsmoke, the young man groaned. He embraced a spine knob with all his strength, his face bleared b
ack by the force of the dragon's ascent.
The air grew cold, and Arthur's breath smoked as he pulled himself along the scaly ridges of the dragon's back. To either side, spiked wings flared, catching the wind with giant torn sheets of crocodilian flesh. Then, above the clouds, the dragon leveled its flight.
Sunlight burned the iridescent flesh to charred crust, and a searing pain coursed through its long body. Fearlessly, it endured this fiery anguish, intent on absorbing from the sun enough energy to combust.
It's going to destroy itself! Arthur realized with alarm, and nearly lost his grip. Desperately, he clung tighter, feeling through the scaly hide the dragon's lethal will—and even the torment that drove it. It flew heavy with hurt. The demons had shaped it for agony and rampage, and now it just wanted to die.
Arthur crawled along the spine, squinting through acidic vapors streaming off the ripped hide. The closer he pulled himself to the beast's head, the more vividly he experienced its physical thoughts. The dreamdragon that had been conjured by demons had turned its wrath upon itself, wanting to change this evil dream.
Flames erupted from the sharp tips of the wing bones. In moments, the fissured skin would explode, and this ectoplasmic creature would vanish in a haze above the shining world. Arthur gaped at the tilted forests and fields below. And distantly, he heard singing.
Another roar flew past in a gasp of black smoke, and the melodious voice did not diminish. The melody floated not in the air but up from within him, far louder than any memory. He heard Bedevere's voice, singing a tavern ditty.
Believing that dragonfumes had bedeviled his mind, Arthur concentrated on pulling himself over the jagged hide, heedless of the burning pain and Bedevere's incongruously lyrical voice wafting above the rollicking plains far below.
He clasped a skull horn and lifted himself into the clear wind. He had never seen so much sky! Blue rushed through his chest and into his humming ears.
And still, he heard Bedevere singing. The soothing tune lilted from within, from an unsuspected magical bond with the dragon. The messages Bedevere had sent to Londinium had spoken of trance singing and the possibility of peaceful union with the dragon, and they had spoken truer than Arthur had dared believe: Can it be that this wondrous creature knows my thoughts?
Arthur called down into the ditch of agony: "North! Fly north, dragon! Fly to the cool north!"
The dragon's flight veered. It dipped into a cloud, and the sun became but a sigh. Instantly, the searing hurt diminished, and Bedevere's singing resounded louder. He crooned a Roman song about a lizard skittering along a churchyard's wall. The tune flowed like cool water in the creek bed of the dragon's mind.
The cloud turned feathery, then burst into open sky. And though sunlight smoldered across its hide, the dragon did not roar or even hiss with pain. Entranced by Bedevere's singing and by Arthur's presence, it glided toward the protective shade of another cloudbank.
The electric charge building on the king's armor gave his voice a compelling force in the dragon's mind. "North! Quickly as you can, dragon! Fly north!" His words echoed across the bright blue dream. And the Dragon, the planetary beast curled asleep at the magnetic heart of the Earth, heard him.
The distant voice promised misty lochs, steep valleys, and dense glens. In the absence of demons to influence its dreaming, the sleeping Dragon accepted the king's suggestion, and it flew north.
At that moment, all the dreamdragons across Britain rose as one amid thunderous bellowing and spills of smoke. From willow banks, fern holts, and caves under collapsed bridges, they scrambled forth and launched into the sky. All at once, a score and twelve dragons etched vapor paths in the azure zenith, converging northward.
Arthur beheld them cruising in clusters through the stacked clouds. Their shadows below flurried across the countryside. His heart swerved, astounded that the dragon armada obeyed him. Will they do whatever I command?
Bracing himself against the crown of horns on the brow of his dragon, the king called, "Bedevere!" He kept his eyes open, staring into the lashing wind and watching purple highlands step forth from the sweltering horizon. "Keep singing! We command dragons!"
The hammerbeat of his heart and the buffeting wind obscured the singing, yet the king sensed Bedevere near. Linked with the dreamsong of the Dragon, his voice had insinuated itself inside the sleeping Dragon's awareness.
He and Arthur floated in an alert zone colossal as the dreaming mind, insignificant smudges of atomic dust in the enormous instant of the universe. Across diamond distances of stars, the dreamsong clenched immensities swarming with galaxies—and Bedevere’s singing connected them to cosmic power.
Arthur shouted triumphantly into the strong wind. The Dragon lay slumbering and dreaming under mantles of space sewn with stars. Though too huge to notice them, the Dragon responded to Bedevere, who had found a way to tap its power.
Bedevere—
Remorse stumbled through the young king. He had been unkind to this man who had fought at his side, and he had judged him in his heart, judged him not by known deeds but by slander. That seemed obvious in the shining wind, flanked by dragons. And he briefly wondered if he would feel the same charity if he survived this flight, on the ground, away from the magical intensity of these beasts dreamed by a greater being.
His ruminations broke off at the sight of King Cruithni's massive army swarming upon the countryside, advancing like cloud shadows across the moors and over the hills. In the distance, Luguvalium burned, hurling black smoke into the sky.
The aerial view of that gutted city twisted rage in the king. He sagged before the rush of the wind, feeling the onrush of souls with their inaudible screams. In the depths where his mind touched dream, the Dragon experienced his fiery wrath, and before he could speak, a sky of flames fell upon the Picts.
Arthur pressed an arm over his face, warding the heat and gusting stink of roasted bodies. Incinerated howls crawled away under the furious noise of the dragons. When the king removed his protective arm, he surveyed drifts of ash. Tarry spines and blackened briskets alone remained of the warrior hordes.
On surrounding braes, dragons stalked the fleeing ranks. Rays of blue fire slashed through tumultuous smoke and cinders. The dragon carrying Arthur launched beyond a pall of greasy soot and arced into the clear sky. Nausea flew like a ghost through his body and left him flat, clinging with one arm to the dragon's horned brow.
Below, a delirium of dragons frenzied over the coombs and dales of the rumpled land. Horrible, hollow cries leaped upward when Pictish steel exploded dragons. Then the shrieking of beasts stopped.
Arthur pushed himself to his elbows. Dragons milled upon the scorched ground. They did not spread their leathery wings and rise from the earth. They had spent their power as the Dragon had dreamed, in a sky of falling fire. Cruithni's army had passed entirely into ash.
-)(-
Morgeu the Fey sat down on an obsidian-stone workbench in the underground foundry of the Aesir dwarf Brokk. Flameshadows cast by surrounding kilns illuminated a look of benign surprise on her round face. Her placid expression hid outrage and fright that her baby Mordred had drunk of elf's milk during her absence and had grown to the height of a ten-year-old.
And his mind? she wondered, smiling at the naked boy as he came out from under the protective arm and long, brindled tresses of the elf. What has the red elf's milk made of the mind that was my father?
"Mother, you are more beautiful than I remember," the child said in a clear, factual voice, and stepped toward her. "You have been gone so long, whenever I looked for you I found only a corpse."
Morgeu said nothing, stunned by what elf's milk and loveless time had made of her baby. She took the boy's hand and felt childhood nirvana. Joy, wonder, and energy glowed from him. Cut to speak prophecy by the Furor's own knife, nursed by a goddess, reborn of a slain Roman, Mordred was yet a child.
"You are not a corpse," he said, and touched her frizzy red hair. "Not yet."
"Whoever
looks far enough sees a corpse," Delling chirped from the slant portal in the rock wall. "Mordred has the strong eye, and sometimes he sees too far. I told him to look for you closer to us. But you occupied Skidblade, and the way time folded around you confused him, poor dear."
Morgeu wanted to scream—her baby was gone! She smiled instead and brushed the stringy black hair from her son's face. Yes, there was Arthur's wide brow, her mother's oblique cheekbones, her own small black eyes, like puncture holes in white flesh, and Gorlois' pugnacious jaw.
Mordred lost interest in staring at her, comparing her moony face and big-shouldered frame to the mummied skeleton of his visions. Only the bright red hair looked the same.
He stepped away and peered up at the tarnished silver armor with its barbed fins and tusked mask that the ingenious dwarf had built to raid Yggdrasil. "Who is inside Cruel Striker, Nuncle Brokk?"
The smith, with a big-toothed grin in his whiskery face, rapped a knuckle against the smoky metal, eliciting a desultory bong. "You are a fate-sayer, Mordred. Say the fate of the mortal caged herein."
Mordred gazed at the bruised limbs dangling from inside the tall armor and reached out to finger the fish-skin tunic and crude cordwood sandals. "He will not fish again."
Brokk bleated with laughter. "Say more!"
"He will hold the treasure of the gods," the boy whispered, small eyes smaller as he tried to understand what he witnessed. "They are—apples. Strange apples. Made of wind, and the wind is bright ... I do not know what this is. Is this sunlight swirling round in each apple? I see myself reflected in the shiny skins. I am in a hole in the ground, too deep for me to climb out. I am playing with white snakes and a skull."
Morgeu stood and gently pulled Mordred away from the Fisher King hanging in the scaffold of armor. "You must not look too closely at the dusk apples. They are a blind mirror."
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 32