A smoky dusk received him with a fine drizzle of rain, and he staggered away from the broken armor. A phantasm of man, grimed in blood, wild-haired, stinking of the fish skins that draped his bruised nakedness, he wandered into the gentle showers.
He was home again.
Under gray slashes of dawn, he lifted his head to the cool, sweet rain and strode more strongly, refreshed by the wet wind. The invisible voices had dwindled away, leaving his mind clear and his heart homelorn.
-)(-
Ygrane rode the unicorn out of Yggdrasil with the sword Lightning in her right hand. Before her, the atmosphere blazed in a blue parabola against the black of space, and clouds swirled below like spider's milk.
She called out for her homeland, for Cymru. Sunlight caught on the mirror blade, and the witch-queen's trajectory blazed like a falling star across the night of Britain.
She approached Camelot, coming down from the black spaces above the sky to light unseen atop the highest turret. Hobs opened the circular pane at the top of the glass dome, and sylphs lowered her into the nightheld chamber. She stood Excalibur against the gallery's northwest pillar, where the rays of the rising sun would find it soon.
Bright Night's long green eyes gleamed forth from the night-shadows, and the prince of elves separated from the darkness. "It is time to take the Graal from Morgeu the Doomed."
Ygrane looked around at the weightless shadows and mammoth stones that a human mind had married to this sacred space. No tapestries hid the mighty columns, no rugs masked the travertine floor. This place was made simply of stone and the naked mind.
"You can delay us no longer," Bright Night insisted. "Come."
Ygrane nodded softly in agreement. She had accomplished all the deeds she had bartered for her soul: Christian Britain remained free of pillagers, protected from pagan invaders for a generation. That alone warrants my soul, she reasoned coolly. Excalibur belonged again to Arthur, and that redeemed her exile from Earth, for so long as her son wielded that weapon, he served the angels, the very Fire Lords who had first wrested it from the gods for her beloved Uther.
She did not resist when the sylphs wove over her like sea foam and lifted her up and out the circular window that the hobs then closed behind them.
"To the Graal," she said softly to the unicorn, and Camelot dropped away, a shining fruit into night's pocket.
Stars blurred. The dark earth flew below. An evil red eye blinked open, a volcanic vent on the desolate scree. The unicorn circled the glowing rock furnace, and Ygrane noticed two figures on the slag flats below. They wore satin head scarves pulled over their faces and capes of black canvas to protect them from the acid mist. The shorter one carried a gold chalice.
Out of the moonless sky, the Daoine Sid descended. Falling in golden flames shaped as winged claws, they alighted upon the rocky slopes. Malevolent flicker eyes, lunatic swipes of fire, giant shining paramecia and fluorescent red spirochetes whirling in rabid pandemonium surrounded the cloaked figures and yanked aside their scarves.
Morgeu's bright hair and pale round face reflected the magma glow from the vent, and she shone like a flame. Mordred glowered, his lank hair falling in eelish swerves over a sallow child's face.
The black unicorn stepped through the wall of whirling, elvish energies, and Ygrane rode atop it, her countenance aglint like gold flake. Faeries fluttered ablaze around her, their wing beats staining the dark with an oily shine. "Give the Graal to the Daoine Sid, Morgeu."
"So they may return it to the king?" Mordred asked in a peeved voice. He turned about and angrily struck the chalice against a boulder, making the alloyed vessel ring brilliant echoes off the back of Ygrane's skull. "That will not happen," the little boy said.
"Who are you, child?"
"You do not recognize me, Grandmother?" Mordred showed crooked milk teeth in a wry smile. "Or should I call you wife?"
In that voice, Ygrane heard Gorlois' malice. "Mordred?"
Bright Night advanced from where the Sid had settled to crawling embers and molten rivulets among the plutonic rocks. "We will take the Graal from you, boy!"
"Come, take it!" Mordred dashed over cracked tiles to the upwind rim of a fiery chute. He stood underlit in crimson, arms upraised, fingers dangling the radiant cup above the pit. "Must I say your fate, prince of elves?"
"Stand away, Bright Night!" Ygrane called to him. "Stand away from the dragonpit!"
"The Daoine Sid are done obeying you, witch." Bright Night aimed a finger at the Holy Graal paces away, its curved gold breathing in the rippled heat. "Now we have the Graal, and you will obey us!"
Mordred wagged the chalice over the fiery shaft and chuckled. "I suckled on elves' milk, and I can say your fate, elf prince. Shall I say it? You are this cup. Only this cup can buy you the soul that will wake the Dragon. This is your kingdom in a chalice."
"Back off, Bright Night!" Ygrane yelled. "Obey me!"
Bright Night recognized the mischievous glint in the boy's tiny black eyes, and he shot forward, a gust of green fire.
Mordred dropped the Graal into the dragonpit. It toppled flashing. And, mesmerized by its fateful power, Bright Night flew after it. If he grabbed it in time, Ygrane's soul was his, and the hobs would throw Mordred and his mother into the pit no matter what the witch-queen said.
The Dragon slumbered, but it was not dead. Its reflexive claws hooked the bold elf prince through his chest and hoicked him into the earth faster than he could scream.
The Daoine Sid stormed in pursuit, skirling a banshee wail, convinced they could snatch their destiny from the Dragon's jaws. They surged past Ygrane, a tempest wind of twilight flames, and they poured into the steam vent in a blinding, fire-spun vortex. Gourd-lantern faces swung past, forests of tree spirits burning in their rush to seize the fallen Graal.
Mordred danced aside laughing, his hair flung out from his head like black solar rays.
Ygrane shouted again and again for them to stop, already far too late. The blood pact for the Graal, the enchanting command of a fate-sayer, and the voracity of the planetary beast altogether doomed the Sid who had followed this far.
The spinning column of fire wicked out, and darkness closed around a mephitic stink of fuming sulfur. The Dragon's magnetic fires had devoured all the elves and hobs. A few sylphs slithered away over the cracked earth, and a loose cloud of faeries littered downwind.
Morgeu clasped Mordred in her arms, and mother and son glared at Ygrane on her black unicorn. The magic had gone out of her with the annihilation of the Sid. The horned beast had become even more dangerous, and they waited to see if it would throw her.
Ygrane sat astonished. The unicorn under her stepped slowly backward. No flames gushed forth from the hellhole. No shrieks. The banshee wind simply died away across the rock fields, and night darkened so deeply she gazed up at stardust and needle-streaks of light in the busy heights.
-)(-
Snow flurries dusted the brownstone battlements of Lindum on the December day that a raven delivered to Bors Bona a parchment strip in the king's code. Bors himself led a cadre of equestrian officers and a flight of archers into the wildwoods of Parisi, and they found under a hawthorn hedge the king and his wizard crouched beside a twigfire, sooty, cold, and starved as predacious ancestors.
The king smiled benignly at his men, his chin shadowed with the first whiskers of a beard. The wound of his leg had healed over whole and unblemished, and for the first time in many months he walked among his admiring warriors without a crutch, touching each of them on the hand and gazing into their eyes with the affection of a brother.
To his wonderment, the power of magic had transformed him, easing all his fears. And his joy widened with news that Excalibur had mysteriously returned to Camelot. That same night, Marcus Dumnoni had received the king's mother at Tintagel. Though she had looked like a beaten animal, she comported herself soundly and had taken sanctuary in the abbey, confiding to no one anything about where she had been.
"Now t
he time of doubt is past." Merlin winked at Arthur, then embraced him. Softly, in the king's ear, he said, "Magic has healed you, and the poison you loathed has proven your medicine."
The wizard mounted a fleet stallion and departed at once, a lone rider for Camelot under the evening's pink rags. Selwa had broken his heart and had blithely stolen every hope from him—and Loki, true to his cognomen, had taken Excalibur without keeping his word and leading the way through Yggdrasil. Still—still! Arthur had delivered the Dragon's teardrop to the Vanir Lotus and had sipped eternity!
While Merlin rode to Camelot to rally the engineers who would rebuild Britain, Arthur traveled south to Ratae, where his palfrey Straif had been stabled since the summer. She greeted him friskily, and he ordered her dressed for parade. Then he bathed in a steaming pool scented with gentians and outfitted himself in all his regal finery, from purple tunic and gold chaplet to an escort of lancer guards riding under full armor and unfurled banners.
Bors Bona cleared a path for the king through the city crowds and guided the royal company onto the highway. Black mantles streaming behind, Bona's swiftest riders raced ahead to move traffic off the road, and the king's lancers flew upon the boreal wind, steeds smoking, hoof falls bursting in the crisp air.
They arrived at The Blanket of Stars under a triumphant flourish of horns, and Arthur rode Straif into the courtyard flanked by flag officers and Bors Bona in his gorgon mask.
Georgie knelt with slack-faced surprise before John Halt bedecked in majestic apparel. Leoba came backward down the stone steps of the portico, pulling a shawl around her father and grinning exultantly over her shoulder, "You! You are King Arthur! I said it from the first, didn't I?"
Arthur smiled warmly at the old man and his children. "And I never contradicted you."
"Eril is come back," Georgie announced, and wiped his ruddy nose with the back of his hand. "He come back last month, naked and beaten bloody. But he's sound, he is that—and with a story to tell!"
Arthur's smile stiffened as his claim on Julia's heart collapsed. In one moment, his triumphant hope of happiness curdled to a sigh—a tuneless laugh of recognition at the justice of it. Angels could not have timed Eril's return more fittingly.
Flowers in her honey brown hair and her long shoulders squared proudly, Julia stepped smiling onto the portico and hugged Eril. Arthur nodded to the tall, clean-shaven man with the war scar on his brow. And he met kind eyes in a weathered visage handsome as a hawk.
Joy floated in the king. Though magic owned him now forever, there would always be this one household in his realm where simple happiness reigned.
The king lifted his sword and raised a cheer for the veteran come home. Banners and lances went up with a shout that startled crows out of the winter-bare orchard and made dogs howl.
Through the jubilant noise, John Halt and Julia looked at each other briefly with eyes shining like cold starlight, and they shared a smile at life's inscrutable makings.
-)(-
Why did we create this spell, our retelling of King Arthur's long-ago story and our news from Avalon, except to summon you? And why are you here except that you are a true magician, the one who unlocks this spell and hears our voice? You are the doorway of the eye's pupil and the gate of the ear into the infinite realm at the underside of the soul, where pi runs to forever.
We need your help.
If you can unlock spells, you can make spells. Make one for us. Make one for the first king among us, Arthur. He lived to provide a beacon of inspiration across a dark age. Yet, now that he is one of us, now that he sits upon a block-cut throne in our round hut on Avalon, he looks for you and cannot find you.
From where we are in Avalon, your age seems more a dream than a place. The electromagnetic haze from your time blinds us. Sometimes Arthur fears you might not even be there at all!
Will you take but a moment to convince him and us that you truly are there in the radiance of the manufactured world—that you are. We would feel more certain of our fate then, in this sudden and frightening domain of binary magic and untold secrets.
Are you there for us, now that the invisible and fierce angels have descended to Earth and live among you—the angels of X rays and microwaves and electric radiations in every frequency? Are you still there, as we insist you must be, or—as King Arthur fears—have those angels devoured your souls?
To Earth and other worlds among the haydust stars, the Fire Lords carried numbers and alphabets—the human dreamsong. Use these powers to create a spell that will touch the underside of the world, from where everything grows. Make it as simple as "I am." Or "I am hopeful." Or "I am a warrior of my own perilous order, fifteen hundred years after you, Arthur, and I am struggling in the kingdom of survival with love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." Or write him a joke. Record an observation of the invented spaces around you. That is magic. Use it to kick Lucifer himself in the butt with a few choice words. Comfort your king and the ancient queens. Let us know that we have not been entirely martyred to legend.
Afterworlds
Who can open the doors of his face?
-Job 41:14
Chapter 24:
Return from the Dead
Out of the predawn dark on a spring day in anno Domini 492, Fra Athanasius strode from the forests of Cymru and into the hamlet of Cold Kitchen. The steep main street climbed before him lit solely by the lanterns of the bakery.
At the crest of the street, beyond the hilltop chapel and the climbing highway immersed in night, Camelot's torchlit ramparts blazed from the northern uplands. He knelt to it as before an altar and offered to God his splendor of relief and pride at having escaped hell.
For hours he had hiked the hollow hills, yet months had passed in the world above. The Lyre gleamed directly overhead. Vega, the hand of an angel, plucked once again the music of springtime as birds began their pre-dawn singing. He rose from kneeling, light-boned with amazement. All of creation had been created anew!
Plastered with damp leaves and streaked with ash, the scribe strolled grinning past closed shops. He blessed with his makeshift electric wand the muscular baker and the farmers setting up their vegetable stalls.
When he stopped at the plaza fountain to wash the soot from his spectacles, several women filling amphorae recognized him from his visit to Cold Kitchen with Bishop Riochatus the previous summer. They edged away from him, repelled by his pungent aura of brimstone.
He moved along, dazed with wind and stars and the fragrance of baking bread. On the slate steps of the chapel, he sat and watched dawn open over the hills of Cymru in cinnabar bands of thunderclouds. The rains had returned to Britain. He could smell the tenderness of the dew and knew that the land bloomed, fecund.
The baker and a fruit vendor brought him breakfast and stood back from his stink while he ate with vivid delight. Munching an apple and hot biscuits, he excitedly shared with the small gathering of early risers news of his triumph against the tormented souls of the damned.
An escort of lancers from Camelot arrived while early-morning still glowed orange on the mountain peaks. They whisked the bedraggled legate away from the spellbound villagers, and he traveled to the fortress city in a carriage, his head out the window smiling into the brisk air.
He had been summoned for an immediate audience with the king—and was taken first to the baths. A Kurdish masseur scrubbed the stink of sulfur from the wanderer's bruised body, and tailors stood ready to fit him into any of the finest ecclesiastic garments at hand.
Athanasius waved aside the brocade robes and put on a scribe's brown cassock. He knew that he had survived perdition not by his saintliness but by what little Merlin had shown him of the natural laws of the world, and he accepted as a blessing the scribal skills that had helped him grasp those sphinxian truths. Henceforth, he determined, he would keep to his place in God's creation, content as a scribe.
King Arthur awaited the papal legate in the main council chamber. The boy-king no longe
r looked so youthful, the scribe noticed. Blond whiskers tufted his chin and the corners of his mouth, and his yellow eyes gazed at the world with careworn clarity.
He headed a long ebony table under the indoor rainbow called the Seven Eyes of God. To his right sat Cei, his burly form showing no visible signs of the dragonfire that had blistered him comatose. Bedevere leaned his one arm on the table to the king’s left and gazed impassively at the emissary, his gray, swordmaster's eyes steady and unreadable. And Merlin lurked well back in the alcove shadows.
Athanasius stood a long moment unmoving in the door, joy welling up to see these familiar people, these men he had mistaken for devils. Now that he had met true devils, he recognized this king and his subjects as civilized Christians.
No, they are not dogmatically correct. They have succumbed to fallacies, each of them. The king consorts with a wizard, works magic with his witch-queen mother, and barters with gods and demons. Yet, what does that matter to this scrivening fool of God, who has witnessed the tillage of souls in the earth's deeps?
Arthur Rex—a true Christian king.
Of this, the legate harbored no doubt. Who but an anointed king would put at risk his sanity, his very soul, to stand for Christ against pagan hordes, demons, and dragons?
Bishop Victricius' mission finally complete in his mind and heart, Athanasius bowed deeply to the king. Not for another moment did Victricius' soul have to suffer in cold limbo!
Athanasius walked directly to a tray of reed pens under the rainbow canopy. Without even taking a seat, he began drafting a missive to the Holy Father in Ravenna declaring Britain worthy of inclusion in the kingdoms of Christendom.
Done, he shoved the document into the center of the table and placed atop it his wand of magnetic stone coiled in silver wire. Standing back, he met Merlin's approving gaze and said through his grin, "Scientia!"
The Serpent and the Grail (The Perilous Order of Camelot) Page 36