Animals, elves, roaming hunters—there were so many possible passersby the stones could have heard. She would have dismissed the Fisher King's cries to listen better to her lover—because the Furor told of the Fire Lord who had shamed him for his infidelity to Lady Unique—but her lover insisted she look.
Leaning over the burled wood frame of the bed, she glanced at the mirror charm that watched the grange silo, and she gasped.
With that cry, the Furor felt his soul cleave open. His encounter with the Fire Lord had exposed the mistake of lust in his heart, the mistake that had blinded his one good eye. With the energy of the Fire Lord still shining in him, he envisioned clearly what he had ignored before. And he understood why the Wyrd Sister Skuld had revealed the conception of Arthur, why the smudge-faced waif had warned him to listen to Wesc’s mad poetry—to understand that his betrayal of Lady Unique would cost him his war with Arthur. With premonitory clarity, he heard Keeper of the Dusk Apples' gasp, and her soft cry was the wind of his soul leaving him.
Icy realization sank coldly into his marrows.
That upstart Arthur would live to forge a vision that would brighten over the centuries. Camelot would illuminate the dominance of mortals over gods. And the light of Excalibur would fuse earth and heaven with machinery, flaring ever hotter, until the planet itself sweltered and burst into nuclear flames!
Ash. The future was ash. And ash clogged the Furor's heart as he heard his mistress announce the theft of the dusk apples. Is it Merlin? Or Arthur himself who steals into Yggdrasil?
Half-naked, the warrior god stormed from the tree house, wolfskin boots in one hand, javelin in the other. Perhaps there was yet time to redeem himself. He would slay Arthur at once, with his own hands, and drink a salutation to his wife from the boy-king's skull.
-)(-
Loki caught the sword Lightning as it fell, and the moment his hand grasped the gold haft he turned to sunsteam. With the blade's magic, he ascended directly into the Storm Tree.
Arthur did not see the geyser of light that shot to the zenith. He teetered backward from the precipice with a wailing baby in his hands.
Merlin, swinging with the severed bridge, balefully watched the star of Excalibur dwindle into the sky. In the moment before the falling span slapped into the opposite cliff, the wizard shouted the god's name with outraged fury: "Lo—kee!"
Stupendous laughter seized Loki when the plank bridge threw Merlin into the cliff wall and his body tumbled down the rocky scarp like a bundle of loose sticks. Had the fool wizard truly expected Loki to serve him—a filthy demon—once the sword Lightning was his?
"I am the Liar!" he shouted back, hoping that Merlin broke his neck in the brutal fall but not lingering to see. Conquest awaited him.
The hazy dimness of Middle Earth brightened into the spectral colors and sunglint clarity of Yggdrasil. He breathed in the rainbow air that strobed past him during his entry to one of the lower boughs. Immediately, he began looking around boulders and stumps and old scree for a good place to hide the weapon.
Not far off, a tall warrior in armor of scalded silver and black enamel strode through the rainbow mists, appearing and disappearing among the trees. He carried a canvas sack, walking hard for the dusky blue field beyond the forest. He seemed determined to throw himself into the gulf and fall to Middle Earth.
The sword Lightning obeyed Loki's heart and flew from his hand. Bolts of electric fire tangled blindingly, and Cruel Striker collapsed, its skull plate hewn open. Hot knots of energy blazed where the sword had wedged between the red mantis eyes and curving tusks.
Loki ran up to the fallen warrior and pulled Lightning free. The bloody interior interested him less than the mysterious canvas sack, and he opened it with the blade. A moan, low and sexual, oozed from him at the sight of the dusk apples.
He knelt and, with trembling hands, returned the spilled apples to the sack, counting the loyalties he could buy among the Aesir with this harvest. A whistle of too-good-to-be-true curved just within hearing. And the first dark edge of doubt about this windfall bounty touched his mind an instant before the shadow of the Furor fell upon him.
Loki cringed a look over his shoulder and stared into the starpoint tip of the chieftain's javelin.
Chapter 23:
Kingdom in a Chalice
Stars burned like high altar flames.
How can there be stars in the hollow hills? Fra Athanasius pondered anxiously. He pulled his alb and priestly robe tighter about himself. For many hours, he wandered under the lee of a mountain, its dark immensity growing between him and the twilight. The subterranean crag entirely blotted the hell-glow of the fiery core of the planet, and stars glimmered overhead. How can that be?
He gazed around trepidatiously. The air blew cold here, so unlike the caustic paths to the Dragon, where he had wandered with the young king and Merlin. His lenses chilled in the gloom and misted with his body heat. Spiritous reflections made him jump.
Stifling a cry, he dropped to his knees in the darkness and began to pray yet again for divine help. As he groveled, his brow scratched against the gravel, and he noticed that the black grit sparkled.
Pausing in his prayers, he scooped up a handful of earth and brought it close to his eyes. The grains resembled tiny cubes, like those he had seen in the jet agate geodes from the chasm of Vesuvius that the Bishop of Neapolis displayed in his garden. The lights above are not stars after all, he realized, but mineral crystals reflecting chthonic fires.
Bolstered by this rational observation, Athanasius shook off his fear, stood up, and continued his trek. He reasoned that the direction away from the molten light would lead to the surface, and he pressed on through the cold and murky landscape, ant-small among arches of rock like immense stone ribs. Mists coagulated to phantoms. Even after he wiped his lenses, the phantoms hung like steam in the glittering dark.
He stopped in his tracks, and his astonished hands groped before him, not trusting his eyes. Bishop Victricius stood ahead on the carbonized sand, a phosphorescent specter so vivid that his robes, heavy and stiff with water, pulled from his bony shoulders. Bedraggled hair and beard matted his skull, and a brown ribbon of kelp furled over his blue forehead. He drew the sign of the cross in the air.
"Your Grace?" Athanasius gaped, blinked, and turned his head to be sure his smeared spectacles did not deceive him. "Bishop Victricius!"
"I have been watching you, notarius, from on high." The wraith lifted his arm, and through the radiant transparency of his soaked robe, the black mountain brightened.
A terraced landscape of cracked clay flared desolately into view. Above it, a precarious garden overhung the torched plateland. Broken stumps of cacti and spined trees cluttered the thin rills that trickled down from a higher terrace.
On those summit slopes, carpeted meadows of wildflowers, sprawling trees, and waterways of misty falls bedazzled the darkland. The bishop spoke, "I will not leave this limbo for paradise until our mission to Britain is concluded. So, dear notarius, will you please show some alacrity? I am cold."
Athanasius leaned toward the apparition, so amazed that he stammered on silence before he managed to say, "Eminence! All this time you have been watching over me?" The scribe bowed his head, ashamed. "Forgive me, sainted Victricius. I have served ill. Our mission is undone, because I am lost in the hollow hills."
The shade said nothing. With a heavy arm, he pointed into the dark, then kindled brighter and disappeared.
Athanasius hurried forward to embrace the bishop, and only emptiness received him. Gawking about, he observed mists crawling down the moraine from the mountain, flowing like milk among the boulders. Slowly, the woven tendrils of fog unraveled to release haggard shapes—deadwalkers, corpses that staggered toward him with their flesh hanging like blackened rags. These were the souls of the damned. Attracted initially by the holy glow of Victricius, they now fixed upon the blood heat of the scribe.
He ran. Soon he realized the futility of running. The ghosts
flew like spume. Their char bones danced ahead of him. Quickly, he sidestepped into a grove of obelisks. In his desperation to flee, he slammed into one of the stone spires and sagged to his knees. The iron studs that outlined the cross and the chi-rho on his vestments clamped onto the obelisk and pulled his garment tightly about his sagging frame. Though he tugged at his dalmatic with all his might, he could not free it from the greedy stone.
Athanasius grasped at once that this must be a lodestone and, after a moment's further struggle, realized that it was a lodestone of such extraordinary power he would have to rip or crawl out of his dalmatic to get free. Memories of Merlin's lectures rushed forward even as he cringed behind the magnetic column, watching the ghastly fumes unfold more shuffling dead. Their vaporous skullfaces uplifted, they sniffed for his blood warmth.
Scientia! he remembered Merlin's promise. And an idea fitted itself together in him with a rush of hope. Groping at the base of the obelisk, his hands closed on a splinter of lodestone long as his forearm and wide as a finger. He picked it up and ran with it, the diabolic fog rolling after him.
Crouched between two shattered spires, he removed the rosary from his pocket, mumbled a short prayer beseeching forgiveness, then snapped the clasp that bound the loop of prayer beads to the crucifix. The ivory beads spilled with a soft clatter. In his frightened fingers, the silver cord unwound swiftly into its individual filaments, and soon he had a handful of fine silver thread.
Through the standing rocks, the soot smoke of the dead drifted. Athanasius hurried away, his busy fingers wrapping the silver wire tightly about the finger of lodestone, as he had seen Merlin do. Twice he had to start over again when he stumbled in the dark and his hands fumbled. When at last he had successfully coiled the wire, he stopped his cowering retreat and turned again in the direction that Bishop Victricius had pointed, for surely that was the way back to Britain and the completion of his mission.
Grave smoke blocked his way, ranks of corpses watching him with glistening eyes in scooped sockets.
He was not afraid. He knew that the wire he had coiled around the lodestone conducted an electric current, because Merlin had shown him this phenomenon in his laboratory. Though mild, sufficient current ran through the silver wire to disrupt effluvial shapes.
"Scientia!" Emboldened by his cry, Athanasius advanced, waving his electric wand. Necrotic shapes dissolved before him with silent screams. Leprous, grasping hands wafted to mist, and he strode through the torn vapors.
-)(-
Yellow wings of dusk lowered over the tree house where the Furor and Keeper of the Dusk Apples lay curled together in their bower bed. The sword Lightning stood upon the headboard, stabbed into the knotted wood by the one-eyed god.
The portent of victory that the Furor found in his old weapon occluded all the shame he had suffered for betraying Lady Unique. The Fire Lord at Avalon had filled him with reproach as a defense, to avoid answering the chieftain's questions.
Dismiss all shame. So long as my wife knows nothing of Keeper, there is no harm, he said to himself. No one is hurt. All are happy.
The return of the sword Lightning weakened Arthur, and the boy-king's early death would staunch the flames of history so that they did not flare into apocalypse.
"And the Liar?" Keeper whispered, running her fingers through his large beard, her lips grazing his ear. "He stole our dusk apples to bribe the Rovers away from you. And he destroyed Brokk's Cruel Striker when it tried to protect the apples. Surely, love, you will not show mercy to your blood brother this time?"
"We will not see Loki again for a long time," the Furor answered, turning and pulling her against him. "Put him out of your mind and give yourself again to me. I want the sword Lightning to behold the ardor we share."
Excalibur's mirror blade reflected the lovers’ tangled embrace. In the twilight windows of the tree-house, sylphs of the Daoine Sid watched. Invisible against the fiery seams of the day, they watched intently.
Faeries brought the sylphs' intelligence to the witch-queen. On an obscure branch of Yggdrasil smoky with starlight, she sat with Bright Night, both staring quietly at the Vanir Lotus. The pale blue petals of the immense blossom glowed like ice, afloat on its reflection in a tarn of water black as molasses.
Peering into the giant flower, the travelers shared serenity with this elegant being. They sat unmoving before the ethereal plant until the faeries arrived. Gold-dust bodies dazzled in the whispering light. When Ygrane heard what they had to say, she stood up and turned away from the blossom of incredible loveliness.
"Send the hobs down to the lower branches," she ordered quietly. "When Arthur climbs into the Tree, they will lead him here."
Bright Night pulled his gaze away from the huge flower. "And where are you going?"
The witch-queen kept her own counsel as she hurried toward the massive pillars of ghost woods where the black unicorn grazed on the tenderest shafts of sunlight. She ran and leaped upon its back, and no pain jarred through her. Since arriving in Yggdrasil, her menstrual cramps had dimmed away, her womb renewed even as her destiny drew to a close.
The faeries' news offered her a chance to help her son and possibly even save herself from the dragonpit. She commanded the faeries to lead her toward Home, the timber palace of heaven's king and queen.
Bright Night and his elves, perplexed at the queen's abrupt departure, rushed after. Panic swarmed through them when they understood where she was headed, and they fell from the shining air, heavy with fright.
Atop an alpine ridge just under the mountaintop aerie of Home, they waved frantically, signaling Ygrane to stop. She ignored them and heard their shouted curses as she flew on. Her death would deprive the Sid of the power to wake the Dragon—and she was certainly a dead woman the moment she rode into sight of the Furor's Home.
The end of her bleeding had provoked her to take this stunning risk. The cycle of blood had completed itself in her body and in her life. All that awaited her now was the dragonpit and her soul flung into vacuous eternity.
Grimly she rode the unicorn to Home, a lodge of titanic cedars and oaks notched together and grouted with peat. Its roof of turf ranged broad as the sky, a sward dotted with red cows.
She dismounted on the lawn and drove the unicorn and the faeries away with a strict command. A moment later, Lady Unique emerged from the garden door of Home. She had glimpsed the black unicorn through the window while standing at her herb-cutting table and, with a curved pruning knife in hand, stepped through the red frame door, wondering who dared trespass the chieftain's sanctuary.
"Lady Unique!" the witch-queen cried, throwing urgency into her voice. "I am Ygrane Morrigan, the witch-queen who has led the Daoine Sid into the World Tree! I am here for my son, Arthur, king of Britain, enemy of Wesc. Slay me if you must, but first hear what I know of the truth."
Lady Unique motioned aside the bearskin trolls who had clambered onto the broad rooftop from the forest to intercept the intruder. Ygrane lay prostrate before the goddess, waiting for the knife or the word. Let it be the knife, she prayed. Save my soul from the dragonpit.
"Rise."
The white-haired goddess appeared so full of simplicity in her plain gown of brown hunter's cloth embroidered with ferns and wood pigeons that Ygrane hesitated to affront her with what she knew. She pushed herself to her knees and lifted above her head both her hands crossed at the wrist, signifying her abject submission. "Were I you, goddess, I would want this knowledge brought to me—no matter the pain."
Lady Unique cast aside the pruning knife and took the mortal's hands in her own. In an eyeblink, all that Ygrane knew, the goddess knew.
A gasp escaped Lady Unique. Revelation and rebuke pierced her, and she stood unmoving, unspeaking, wildly awake, and feeling toward what had never been felt before.
Betrayal ...
She did not release the witch-queen's hands but lifted the mortal to her feet. "You are brave to come before me." The Furor's wife smiled at the feral woman, gently
, sadly. The hard pulse at her throat betrayed her fury. "There is only one queen of heaven, and I am she. Though you have invaded Yggdrasil, stolen our memory beer, and blazed a path to the Vanir Lotus for your son, the foe of my husband, yet you have served me better than my own people, Ygrane Morrigan. You have shown me the truth of my husband's heart ... the truth of his betrayal. For that, you shall have the good of my rage. Let your son drink of the protective lotus. Let the West Isles be denied the Furor for the lifetime of Arthur. And take that damnable sword Lightning with you when you go. It has seen far more than I like."
-)(-
Merlin’s plummet into the gorge filled him with dark existence. The human body’s primal fear of falling stained his mind even as his demonic strength seized the craggy face of the cliff. He pounced onto a slant ledge and climbed the cliff crevices slowly, heavy with loss.
When he eventually crawled out of the ravine and found the king, the wizard told him everything. He confessed the theft of the Dragon's teardrop by Selwa and the deception that had put Excalibur in the hands of Loki.
The king said little in reply. The dragon flight had changed him. He had touched the One Dragon, the cosmic creature made of worlds, and he had glimpsed the endless instant that was the universe. Maelstroms of stars spun through the void, flying apart into measureless night. He had seen that. And he had felt the dreamsong. Harmonic energies connected fiery, magnetic worlds into a being so enormous that light crept for aeons over its cosmic body and never reached a boundary.
Beings huge and minuscule floated as one in black emptiness. The Dragon and the nameless child that Arthur had caught at the cliffside were the same living being.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 34