Cai and Ena both looked mystified.
“Because,” Uther answered the question, “every Roman soldier had a better sword than most of our aristocrats could afford to buy. The Romans armed their legionnaires well and fed them well. Maybe some of those senatorial politicians were rotten soldiers, but they outlasted us. And in the end, we were driven back to our forests and swamps, into one futile revolt after another. Luckily, we had our forests and swamps here. In the south, in open country, stronghold after stronghold fell, and the people were enslaved. Enslaved by those chiefs clever enough to make common cause with the Romans and become traitors to their own people. In that part of Britannia, you served the Romans or you died.
“Here we managed to maintain some independence. The Romans are gone, but their Saxon troops remain. The archdruid is in the pay of the powerful ruling landowning nobles in the south, and, as always, he serves their ends.
“He wants control of my son,” Uther snarled. “There is only one, thanks to my own abstinence.… ”
Morgana directed an amused look at Uther.
“Well,” he continued stubbornly, “if not abstinence, at least intelligent planning. No other eligible candidate for the high kingship. Besides, he has had the summer crown placed on his head.”
“I know,” Cai said. “Gawain wove it from wheat, barley, rye, and oats. And the warrior assemblies feasted him as he wore it.”
“I blessed it myself,” Morgana said. She wore a look of exultation. “She possessed me … that day.”
“He is sacred—and cannot be set aside,” Uther said. “But can he resist Merlin and Igrane? It always comes back to that. What say you, Cai? Of all of us, you know him best. Can he withstand them?”
The fire roared. Bounding in one jump from gray ash to a roaring blaze.
All four of them cringed from the sudden heat and light. Ena spoke, but not in Ena’s voice. Vareen used her mouth and tongue! She answered for Cai. “He would not know how not to resist them.”
He woke at Tintigal, lying on the floor, looking up at Igrane.
“You stink!” she said.
“So do you, Mother,” he replied. “At least I don’t smell of corruption and treachery. I can’t say the same for you … or your lover.”
She turned and swept away from him. He was in her apartments. It was day; the sky outside was thick with dark, rolling clouds.
She strode past the divan with its invisible drape and toward her glowing mirror. She postured and preened herself in front of the glass.
“Young as ever, I see,” he said as he sat up.
“No thanks to you or that little bitch … of yours.”
“Mine, Mother? Mine in what way? You brought her here. Don’t blame me if you bit off more than you or even your inamorata could chew. You should have left well enough alone.”
He was dizzy with both hunger and the shock of transition. But all his memory was intact, which was more than he could say for himself since he had been bitten by her serpent.
Igrane was wearing an almost transparent coan silk gown. He could clearly see both her nipples and the dark triangle of her sex through it. He felt the heat in his face and looked away. She was his mother, after all. And then he remembered that the other function of sex is punishment—men use it to humiliate women. And since turnabout is fair play, women often use it to humiliate men.
When he glanced back at her, she smiled at him maliciously. Then stretched herself as luxuriously as a cat, making the best of all her attributes. He wondered what might have happened to him if Uther hadn’t violently removed him from her when he was seven years old. He didn’t much like to think about it.
His attraction faded, and he felt sick with self-disgust. But then, that was the point, wasn’t it? That was what she and her lover wanted—to control him.
She seemed to grasp that he had slipped through her fingers again, because she turned shrewish. “Will you never learn?”
All right. I’ll play, he thought. Better shrewish than seductive.
“Learn what, Mother?”
“Learn who is master here,” she snapped.
He managed a tolerant smile. “Who might that be, Mother? Odd. I thought I was the summer king.” He looked up again, his gaze challenging her.
She spat on him.
He was delighted. He wiped the saliva from his cheek and looked at it. “Nice to know your honest opinion of me.”
Smart enough to know her anger was playing into his hands, she dropped the beautiful mask of power down over her face. The angry eyes hooded themselves.
“Go bathe,” she commanded in an icy voice, “lest you disgust my women. They are preparing a meal for you.”
She pointed to the tub behind its alabaster screen. But before he did, he walked to the mirror on its stand, near the other end of the room. As a child he had heard many tales about mirrors and the things that could be seen in them. He had put such stories down to the fact that they were a foreign luxury and only the very wealthy could afford them. But then Morgana had told him that a people who lived near Rome used them to read the future.
He had laughed. “How?” he’d asked.
“I don’t know,” she’d said. “It was one of the secrets they never taught the Romans. The women did it. Scrying in a glass, they called it.”
“What happened to them?” he had asked.
“The Romans,” she said, as if that were explanation enough.
And when he thought about it, he agreed.
But this mirror showed him only his reflection. He was pale and had lost weight. His mother was right. He was dirty, filthy in fact. A week’s growth of stubble covered his face. But he found himself reminded of a fine sword in a battered sheath. His body was lean and hard; his fine-drawn features were a mask of resolution and courage. He was a different man already from the young king Merlin and Igrane had placed in their prison. And he wondered what sort of man would emerge if he were able ever to escape their malice.
He stretched out his left hand and touched the glass with his fingertips. A face looked over his shoulder into his eyes. He flinched and recoiled, then glanced quickly at Igrane to see if she had noticed his reaction.
She hadn’t and was in conversation with her women near the bath. Just as well. When he looked back at the mirror, the face was gone.
He kept secrets from her reflexively. He turned away from the mirror and went to the bath. Her women tried to accompany him, and he ordered them away in a tone of voice that brooked no disobedience. When they were gone, he stripped and immersed himself in the warm water, leaning back, his neck pressing against the edge of the marble tub.
He was a young man and hadn’t had time to trouble himself about sex during her imprisonment. When he sank into the warm water, desire shook him like a fever. He pressed his eyelids tightly together and whispered a curse. Desire was only another weapon, like hunger, loneliness, and cold arrayed against him by his tormentors. He spent the next few moments spending that sexual energy as quickly as he could.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the bird perched on top of the alabaster screen, looking down at him with what seemed to be prurient curiosity. It cocked its head, studied him with one eye, then the other, then both.
“Is that an entertaining sight, bird? One of the struggles of a desperate man?”
To his great surprise, the bird said, “No!”
No, a corner of his rational mind told him. Birds don’t talk. But this bird was a raven and might be an escaped pet.
With a flip of his wings, the raven flew down and began to circle the curious set of inlays around the pool. It strutted along with a rather pompous air, until it reached the yew, then pecked at it.
It looked at him, one eye, then the other eye, then both, and said, “Arthur.”
He started upright in the water. The bird took wing.
He remembered the yew—today? It seemed a thousand years ago. And the face in the mirror behind him.
He had decided his mind w
as playing tricks on him. Pressure, starvation, fear. Now he concluded that he might be wrong.
He despised magic and most of its practitioners, Morgana being the one exception, and he had never felt drawn to the art. His mind strayed back to his youth, when he had feared the things Igrane and Merlin could do to him, like death. His face grew hot with remembered rage, rage at his own abasement and shame at his powerlessness, and knew this situation was a repeat of the first.
He had thought then that they derived pleasure from his sufferings. Now he knew they did. And further, they despised as weak those who were not skilled in their deadly art.
But maybe, maybe they had overreached themselves this time.
He sat in the water and clenched his fists until his ragged nails made his palms bleed. Then he deliberately made himself relax and began to wash his hair, skin, beard, everything. A few moments later, one of Igrane’s women brought him fresh clothing. He didn’t don it, with the exception of the shirt. He put his riding pants and boots back on, tearing the hem from the shirt to restore the cross gartering on his leggings. Nor would he let them trim his hair and shave the stubble on his face.
“You’re hardly what I would call presentable,” Igrane said as he left the shelter of the walled bath. “And you still stink.” She turned away and, almost too late, he felt the presence behind him. The shaft of pain was simply blinding, the sort of pain a man feels when he bites down and feels a tooth break, then air hits an exposed nerve.
“Piss yourself, you little shit,” Merlin said.
And Arthur remembered when he was a child, he had done so on command.
“Piss yourself, and I’ll let you go.”
He never afterward knew how he did it. Never! He was on his knees, next to the wizard’s legs, but he was no longer a helpless seven-year-old. He spun around, still on his knees, and drove his left fist into the man’s groin as hard as he could.
Merlin screamed. Igrane screamed. He saw the merciless rage in her face and the savage gesture her right hand made as she flung the darkness at his face.
He was blind.
But even if he couldn’t make them kill him, maybe he could do it himself. Blindness would break him, but he would never let them win.
He scrambled to his feet and bolted for the spot where he remembered the rail to be. If he flung himself over, the drop to the next level of the fortress might be enough to kill him.
The rail caught him in the midsection. He used both hands to vault into a somersault over it.
Break my neck, was his last thought. Please! Please! Let me break my neck.
The worst of it was that I was running out of beach. I was very close to the cove where I spent my first night on land. Beyond it, the shore turned rocky. But that didn’t matter. I had to keep on running.
When I reached the rocky barrier that ended the beach, I plunged into the surf. I managed to glance back.
The thing was slowing or having trouble running in the sand. Slowing, I thought. The arrows and the fire had wounded it deeply. The belly was streaked with blood, and charred areas on its shoulders and long, clawed arms testified that the wall of flame left behind in the mass of driftwood had taken its toll. I began to think I stood a pretty good chance of surviving.
Then I was in the sea and what I saw ahead of me along the shore made my heart sink again. I had hoped to swim around the rock, dog-paddling in the surf. But within seconds, I found myself in water so deep I had to swim for my life. Then I was caught in a riptide and sucked down.
For a second I panicked and fought the suction. Then I knew from Kyra and Maeniel’s teachings that was the surest way to death in the water. Try to ride it, and the movement of the waves will bring you onshore again. You hope. Then again, maybe not. But fear will kill you more quickly than suffocation.
I held my breath and, sure enough, I bobbed up like a cork as the current weakened in deeper water. God, to breathe. Air. You don’t know what it means until you cannot take a breath.
I coughed, and the salt water stung my eyes. They teared, and my vision cleared.
I had lost ground, and the thing was closing the gap between us. Beyond the low headland I had just rounded, the beach was gone and only a rocky shelf stretched between land and water. It was hammered by the waves, overgrown with barnacles and sea moss, a hell of a dangerous thing to run on. I had no choice, for the currents were trying to sweep me back toward the cove and the sandy beach where the thing could intercept me as I tried to get ashore.
I threw all my strength into swimming for the rocks and found my fatigue had become a factor. Even as I struggled to get ashore amid the breaking seas, I could feel my strength ebbing. But I experienced one piece of good fortune in that the rocks extended out farther than the sand spits did, and I found myself able to run, not swim, a lot more quickly than I thought I would be able to. I also blessed Talorcan, because his gift of shoes kept my feet from being cut to ribbons by the barnacles on the rocks.
I looked back and saw that the monster had taken to the water, and it was coming around the headland toward me. It was a wonderful swimmer. It moved through the water with the undulating stroke of a snake crossing sand, in a series of broad S-curves. The tide was coming in, I knew, and unless I could find high ground, the water would sweep me away and the thing would get me.
There is a moment in every struggle when defeat looms. I was tired, and I had begun to feel pain. My body was covered with cuts and bruises. My shirt hung in shreds from my arms and shoulders, and the lower part of my pants were torn away. The salt water stung every raw spot on my body and every wave that broke over me felt like the cut of a whip.
But I had regained my footing on the rocky shore, and I was able to speed across the flat stone table at a run. It was a strange place, and I could feel its power as I made my way across the surface. The thousands of years the sea had lashed it had worn channels in the stone surface. The breaking waves filled and emptied them with a force that could knock the feet from under you as you crossed them and sometimes sent me rolling, battered by the sea and the projections of the granite that I was flung across.
The stone was gray, silver in the light, old silver, harsh, tarnished by time and abuse. The waves were a continuous thunder and sometimes a deafening roar as the surf filled pot-holes from above and below and sent water geysering up into towering plumes, which crashed into roaring waves that threatened to wash me back into the monster’s maw. Each immersion ended in pain, as my torn flesh was bathed by the sea.
I looked back again and saw the thing had landed, climbed up from the water, and now stood on the same broad stone I did, the gigantic ledge that projected out from the coast. I didn’t know how much longer I could last. But I was heartened by the fact that the monster was flagging, also. Washed by the waves, I could see how much I had hurt him. His wounds, both those areas of skin scorched by the fire and the arrow wounds in his midsection, were still running blood. At the one near his groin, the flow pulsed with each beat of his heart. His mouth was open, spade-shaped tongue visible, as he panted. We were not far apart, and had he been as strong as he was at first, one rush and he would have had me.
But he hesitated, I think to get his breath after his struggle with the sea. Then he lifted one powerful, three-clawed foot and came at me.
God, he was fast.
I spun around and bolted. I found I’d left the sea behind and was running across a broken, pitted but level surface toward the face of a cliff I could see ahead.
Fear is a wonderful thing; so is youth. I flew along, but I knew it could not last. I was exhausted; the stitch in my side was agony. My lungs were burning. I could hear the steady slap of the three-clawed foot on the wet stone behind me.
And then we both ran out of running room. I flew over the edge and into the sea again. I went under. The currents took me at once. The level stone I had been running on looked oddly like the top of a sea wall.
Yes, we build them, or at least the Romans did—though no doubt
my people did the heavy lifting. But this was a bigger sea wall than even the Romans could have created. Yet at last the sea breached it and cut a pass through the ruined stone bulwarks to the remnants of something almost unimaginable. At first I thought it a gigantic cave. And indeed it must once have been domed, much as those Roman buildings Maeniel and Dugald told me about. I would not have believed them either, had they not vouched for each other.
But this domed opening was larger than anything the Romans ever dreamed of. It stretched from sea level to the top of the cliffs, a vast, broken arch that ended where the fallen roof made a hole at the top.
Light swept it and seemed to propagate inside along the curving walls, flashing in a wave along them. This light was gray and blue, a mirrored shimmer that reflected the colors of the sea.
The current had me. I didn’t need to be told not to fight it. I no longer had the strength to do anything; and so it swept me into the broken bowl, because that’s what it looked like—a vast egg with a broken shell. The sun came out just then and shone between the clouds, and it was as though someone had struck the strings of a harp that sang in light and color, not sound.
The glow swept over the shattered walls like a moving rainbow. The dominant colors now were yellow-gold and glitter-white, glitter like the sparkle of uncounted stars or the winter sun on a frozen wood. Then as quickly as the brightness came, it faded. The sun went behind a cloud and a dreaming glow of a thousand blues, purples, amethysts, violets, and even dark reds flowed over the walls and vanished into uncounted shades of silver, and then a storm cloud’s mixture of gray and white.
I knew I had picked an uncommon place to die. Because die I would. The thing had outlasted me and entered the swirling water that formed a pool under that magical dome. True, I had the fairy armor my father had given me. Yes, and a tortoise has its shell. But when an eagle catches one up in his talons and lets it fall to the stony earth, the eagle dines. The tortoise takes longer to die than a rat or rabbit in the bird’s talons, but I doubt if the tortoise is glad of the fact. I would die hard, but in the end, the fangs would prevail and the monster’s raw strength would wrench me limb from limb.
The Dragon Queen Page 34