The youth upbraided the wizard for risking the baby's life, yet he carried no bitterness about the lost blade. The infant merited any number of Excaliburs and all his kingdom, for God had placed him where he could catch her. His sword provided only a weapon, his kingdom a place on earth. But she delivered the living body of the universe helpless before him.
And though Merlin had tricked him into losing the magical blade, he could hold no real grudge against the wizard who had made him king.
"Broken waters heal themselves." He told that to disconsolate Merlin and was glad to be divested of his magic and closer to the simple humanity he knew he could trust.
The heartbroken wizard would not be comforted. He moaned about the loss of the teardrop and a squandered opportunity to trump the Aesir gods.
Gods, dragons, magic swords ... Arthur could not give his love to these supernal things, not after Morgeu. "Let Selwa have the teardrop." Arthur thought her treasonous theft meet and just for a passion-addled wizard of an incestuous king. "We are not meant to have the teardrop. I will defend Britain with my life, not with magic!"
Merlin insisted they ascend into Yggdrasil and make every effort to track down Selwa. For Britain, for the people God had given him to serve, and for his own brother Cei, Arthur relented. By sunfall of their return to the citadel, the young king stood alone beside Merlin in the glass-domed gallery at the topmost turret of Camelot.
Though dressed for travel, he carried no flagon or provender satchel and neither hat nor cloak. Other than the gnarled cypress crutch that supported his silk-bound right thigh, he bore no weapon. Merlin had said that armor would not protect them in the Storm Tree and, without Excalibur, no useful weapon lay at hand.
Merlin, too, wore wayfarer’s garb: bog boots, brown trousers crisscrossed with green thongs the length of his heron legs, and, as always, his bent wizard's hat. He looked morose. The sullen wizard led his monarch past a marble pillar pale as moonlight and into its shadow, which cloaked a strait passage.
Three paces in, darkness opened into wincing brightness. Sunshine glared hot as silver off peaty pools and sedges lush as a jungle. Out of the worsted shadows, hobs scurried. Small demi-human figurines shorn up from a nightmare skittered silently through the rank pastures and marsh grass.
With the brails of his heart, Merlin received their message, and his heart soared. "Your mother has cleared a direct path to the Vanir Lotus!" He squatted and held his rooty hands over the squalid troupe of beasts with laughing faces. "They have seen Selwa! And they have misdirected her!"
Arthur's crutch sank in the loamy ground, and he could not keep up with frantic Merlin. He stopped and sat on the lip of a large rock. Hurt leg stretched out, he gazed upon Yggdrasil, a wild fen of holy beauty. Willow glades slouched like green lions. Out of canebrakes, pelicans lifted heavily into an auburn sky, where a pearl moon floated wrapped in its own luminous shadows.
Out of this sky, a black wind dropped. It fell from the ruffling auroras, from the Storm Tree's higher boughs. Arthur had no idea what he perceived. A turbulent shadow plummeted into the tree-clad hummocks. And cypress crests trembled along its path deeper into the marsh.
The wizard knew. He ran farther ahead, on a dwindling turf path, following the hobs into a tunnel of mangrove, and he spotted Loki fleeing the demons that the Furor had set upon him for stealing the dusk apples.
The terrified god rushed upon Merlin, crying, "Help me, good son of Optima! Help me, and I will atone!"
Merlin staggered to a stop when the black wind rolled over him. Loki swung in the dark air like flayed butcher meat, his arms and shoulder bones hooked in the talons of Succoth, Nergal, and Thartoc.
Shock at the sight of the lizard-grinning demons elicited a barbarous shout from the wizard. His lash of power cut sparks from the demons' flinty hides, and they flew off shrieking, their gaunted prey wailing in their grasp.
The demons barged through the canopy, and, in their frenzy, tore apart a flowery wall of hanging vines. On the pulpy trail that ripped into view, Selwa hobbled frantically, the Dragon's heavy teardrop in her arms.
"Selwa!" Merlin yelled. His mind reeled at the sight of her. "Stop! Stop at once!" His alarmed cry startled winged snakes in the clerestories of the swamp, and they flurried and squeaked overhead like eelish bats. "The hobs have led you astray! If you go any farther, you will leave the Storm Tree! Stop! You will fall down the sky!"
Selwa shuffled faster. She would not listen to the wizard and be deceived. He had taught her how to open the lower gates of her body and touch the world outside her, and she had done that with the hobs. They had truly seen the Vanir Lotus. She felt the verity of it in the magic Merlin had given her. Is he fool enough to think he can stop me now with mere words?
She pressed on, and Merlin watched helplessly as she shoved through tall feather grass and plunged into the blue abyss. Jet-stream winds snatched her away, and she flew in breathless terror across the curving horizon.
Before she disappeared into the big sky above the azure Mediterranean and the umber mass of North Africa, winged hobs lifted the Dragon's teardrop from her numb fingers. The stone orb rose toward the indigo zenith atop a spiral of feathered toads, wyverns, and goat-legged cherubs: Selwa’s last glimpse of magic before returning to earth.
To the bough tip of Yggdrasil, the Sid flew, cackling like flames at their daring rescue of the teardrop. Merlin yanked the stone from their small and furry hands and stalked away. He burned with rage that they had not saved Selwa. He said not a word to Arthur at the large rock or on the arduous climb that followed, letting his scowl speak for him.
Succumbing to base desire, he had drawn Selwa close enough for her to learn the magic that would destroy her. He felt sordid and mean. But there was no time or strength to punish himself. The lame king required all Merlin's help to struggle up the steep slopes. Arthur's wound had opened, and black blood seeped through the silk bindings.
Ascending moss stairs and bramble ladders, Merlin hoisted the Dragon's teardrop in both hands, with Arthur's arm over his shoulders and his weight leaning into him. The wizard exploited all his supernatural strength to lug the strapping man along the narrow root-ledges. Twice they slipped on slick cliff steps and dangled by one arm above the lavender arc of the Earth's atmosphere and the grinning mouth of the moon.
The hobs rescued the mortals each time their strength failed. They would have carried the king and his wizard to the crest if they could. Watching for Aesir hunters compelled them more urgently. Arthur and Merlin followed as best they could. By the time they reached the tarn of the Vanir Lotus, they both staggered to a halt, exhausted.
Merlin sat among ferns and serrate mushrooms, the Dragon's teardrop in his lap and his brow pressed against it. Inside the stone, Arthur had already caught his breath and gotten up from where he lay gasping on the soggy turf ... he had already splashed through the sepia waters of the tarn, the Dragon's teardrop lifted above his head ...
Arthur removed the iridescent sphere from under the sleeping wizard. Merlin had spent every spark of his power to carry the king to this height of Yggdrasil, and he did not rouse even as Arthur propped him more restfully against the bracken.
The young man cleared his throat, hoping that the wizard would wake. He had to restrain himself from calling out his name. He wanted Merlin's guidance—yet, he sensed that even if he woke his counselor, the wizard could only acknowledge that the king, the human emblem of the land, had to complete this sorcery alone.
Mother Mary! he began to pray, wanting divine help with what lay ahead. The small black heart of his pain could not pray. Not to Mother Mary. He had ridden dragons. He had raided the hollow hills and taken its prize. Now he coveted magic.
Arthur looked about at the wild garden of black ferns and the tarn paces away, its amber water still, broken by roots like loops of snakes. The Vanir Lotus drifted above the havoc of the swamp very like a cloud, its white petals blue with sky glow. He did not move toward it at once, because he feared it
.
What he was about to do had no precedent in his faith or the annals of the Church. Am I defying God? Am I damning myself?
He did not know. He would not stop now even if he did know, even if an angel intervened and showed him the face of his soul in hell. Too much blood had been spilled across the obscene altar of war. If his soul belonged in hell so that magic could bring peace or even respite to this tortured realm, he gave his soul.
Arthur pushed the stone and dragged his dead leg, limping and crawling over the soft ground and through entangled ferns. The water smelled vegetal and felt cold as it received him. He splashed onto his back, the Dragon's teardrop riding his buoyant chest, and he floated under root arches to the Vanir Lotus.
The gigantic water lily received the stone atop its green base without quivering, and the wounded king strenuously pulled himself from the water. The large blossom drifted luminously on the black pool with Arthur sprawled atop its pad, his throbbing leg straight. He unraveled silk bindings and exposed a wound like a tragic mouth.
Mother Mary! he called to heaven once more. I am black with sin and shadow. I crave magic. I do not trust the Almighty to spare us without it. I do not trust—and so I take my kingdom into my own hands. Mother Mary, forgive me. How different am I than Lucifer, who trusts not God, only himself?
Far down the Storm Tree, the Furor heard King Arthur's despair. The chieftain sat with his wife in the trophy hall of Home, on a bull-hide couch under the wares of the eternal hunt: skull cups, femur pipes, tapestries of scalps and skins.
"Ragnarok!" Lady Unique spoke through proud tears. "Ragnarok, you cried. And I believed you."
The Furor listened inward more deeply, trying to catch again the British king's prayer.
Am I wrong to be here at all, Mother Mary? Arthur pulled himself through the white petals, and they tore in his hands and under the rolling weight of the rock, releasing a rampant scent of dew. Is the magic of the Vanir Lotus slanderous to God?
"Vanir Lotus?" the Furor asked aloud. "What is the Vanir Lotus? What is the boy yammering about?"
"You will listen to me, husband!" Lady Unique seized the earlobe amulet on his vest, tore it loose, and cast it across the room. "You deceived me." Sorrow darkened her brow, though her gray eyes continued to stare icily. "I have always been honest with you, and I will honestly tell you now—you will forget the West Isles for the nonce and remember who we are together. Or we will be together no more."
"I trust our love is stronger than that," the Furor grumbled, and pushed away from the couch. "We will continue this when I return."
"Come back here!" she called vexedly. Under her glowering stare, he grabbed his lance and charged through the door. "Where are you going?"
"I don't know," he shouted back, which was true. Arthur's prayer had sounded full of echoes, his voice bouncing among the boughs, and that meant he had climbed into the World Tree.
The Furor called on his ravens to find the intruder, and black shadows rose through the Storm Tree like an enormous declivity of night.
Arthur noticed the sky darken and shivered with foreboding. He had crept to the center of the lotus, where a red stile taller than a man upheld a stigma blue as midnight. Nectar gleamed on the bright stamens, and a fur of white pollen covered the entire pistil. Glistening like a lovely, fragile snow garden, the core of the lotus seemed an unlikely maw into hell.
Mother Mary, pray for my forgiveness. I am afraid of magic and sin and burning forever in the pit. I am sore afraid! God have mercy on my soul.
Kneeling on his one good leg, he held the Dragon's teardrop above his head with both hands and tossed it into the center of the Vanir Lotus. It crashed among the delicate red stalks and filaments at the flower's core—and instantly dissolved like quicksilver.
Arthur ladled the elixir in his hands. Its shiny surface reflected his singed face and gullies of stars in the violet sky above.
He drank deeply. Bright trickles ran down his chin and splashed in beads and globules across his chest. The magical fluid coursed a cold path into his stomach, and chill energy spread swiftly through his torso.
When the frosty strength reached his heart, he gave himself over to that power he had experienced upon the dragon's back—the thread of a song weaving across diamond distances of stars, connecting the most intimate in him with the most distant and impersonal reaches of creation.
Magic soaked into every cell of his body, and serenity coursed through him, circling back on itself into a deep peacefulness. He slid off the lotus pad and reclined in the tannic water. Above him, the Furor appeared in cloudsurges and thunderheads. Lightning tangled. But no thunder followed. The sun, strenuous as an angelic guardian, turned the wind and shoved the Aesir god aside.
-)(-
King Wesc sat on a balcony terrace of the villa at Dubrae. He observed the day climb down the white cliffs and dance sparkling upon the salt sea, and the beauty of the day calmed his frustration. Across the Belgic Strait, the Foederatus tribes had begun disbanding.
Gory news from Caledonia of ten Pictish clans destroyed by dragons had stunned the troops. And the retreat of blithering King Cruithni to the remote and icy Orcades unsettled the other lords. King Antor of the Jutes decided to winter in the southern river valleys, while Ulfin of the Angles had already broken camp and disappeared into the eastern forests.
Lady Unique withdrew her battle luck.
Why? The short monarch pondered this question in silence all day. At nightfall, he clasped his hands over his head and propped his elbows on the balustrade, kneeling before the altar of the sky. Is Arthur's magic so powerful, Lady? Or have I offended you? Why do you not answer me? Why do you exile me to silence?
No answer came. He knelt staring across the marble rail at the eastern sea until Mars rose—the signal for the invasion of Britain. A signal no one observed but him.
He sighed, calmly stood, and walked to his writing desk. Quickly, he dashed a few short lines, a last poem. Then, returning to the balustrade and climbing onto the rail, he teetered a moment on the edge. He almost gave himself to the night, to avoid the humiliations to come. One breath of the sea-wind and that temptation passed. He stepped down and tossed the parchment over the rail.
The poem fluttered into the dark, disappearing on the scarp rocks, where rain and tide delivered it to the sea.
What is silence?
It has left everything behind.
Black's disciple.
From its voice, mirrors.
From its promise, music.
From its memory, death.
A forgetful prophet remembering now.
-)(-
Cruel Striker lay abandoned where it had fallen. Inside the metallic warrior, the Fisher King pulled himself awake, blood-slick, head ringing with invisible voices. The burning blade of Excalibur had cut through the visor, just missing his face, and the impact had pounded his head hard against the back of the helmet.
An irate woman's voice echoed in his skull: "Ragnarok, you cried. Ragnarok! Ragnarok!"
The Fisher King stared out through the gashed open mask at chromatic mists wafting by. He remembered that he had been striding out of a forest, following these spectral vapors to the Rainbow Bridge that would return him to earth. And then he remembered earth ...
"Ragnarok is coming!" The angry voice of the invisible woman chanted mockingly. "Ragnarok is coming! We must stop the Fire Lords, you said. You convinced me that the fate of all time to come depended on stopping these Fire Lords. As if the future and the whole universe are ours to command! And I am the fool, because I believed you!"
The Fisher King ignored the bitter, strident voice. His mind opened into memory upon a burning field. He served in Bors Bona’s army, a conscript for the king. Armed with a short sword and a sharp wooden pole, he charged terrified with his comrades into combat. He had never killed anyone.
"You said we had to take the West Isles," the voice started up again. "We had to drive the Romans out and make it our own. You ins
isted I help you, that I stay at Home and make talismans to strengthen your armies, which I did till my fingers bled! All along, you were merely distracting me while you had your dalliances with that—that child!"
The low rumble of a man's voice replied to the wrathful woman, and the Fisher King heard it as distant thunder. His full attention fixed upon the battle-ax that swung out of the battlesmoke of memory. His last vivid recollection flashed lucidly before he woke here in this torn armor.
He was alive. His hand, greased with blood, slid free of its leather restraint, reached up, and touched his aching and bloodied head. He felt the starfish crown, and an ether wisp of a voice very much like his own called to him, "Awake husked of sin, you prodigy of suffering, and know you are the Fisher King as surely as pity rules heaven."
He pulled off the crown of starfish and dropped it like some venomous thing. He had heard the whisper of madness in it, and he did not want to remember any more of what had happened after the battle-ax struck him. He was alive now—and he would not succumb to madness.
"I won't listen to your excuses, your lies." The agitated woman's voice almost shrilled. "Am I your wife or is she? You have behaved like the lascivious Fauni, cavorting with a woman young enough to be your granddaughter. Are you a chieftain of the Wild Hunt or no better than a faithless animal in rut? I will have nothing more to do with your mad obsession. I want my children woken from trance at once. You will release those hideous demons and wake my children, or I will not speak with you again."
Cruel Striker lumberously stood, torn metal shrieking. The human rider within vaguely knew that these rainbow mists led home. With laborious effort, he lurched inside the armor through the grassy field of colorful fumes and toppled forward into fiery dawn.
He hit the ground on his feet, landing in the middle of an empty roadway so forcefully that Cruel Striker burst apart around him, and its pieces clanged on the pavement rocks.
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 35