Arthur’s breath caught in his throat thinking of her. “I had not known,” he said.
“Had not known what?” the man’s voice asked.
“That anything could be so beautiful,” was his reply. “Is she really the eldest?”
“Yes. She came into being long ago in a colder, wetter time, when forests ruled the world. A forest such as man has never known. This place pens her, also. Defeat the monster, the thing that haunts this cage, and you may lie in her arms. It is her jailer.”
“He is yet some years from that,” the woman’s voice broke in, sounding ruthlessly practical. “And he will not learn the skills he needs here.”
“He may die,” the man warned.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “I may, but that is always a risk.” He was kicking away anything near the fire that might spread the flame. “I’ll leave it burning, though it goes against my instincts, woodsman that I am. Now, lead on.”
A short time later, they reached the edge of the plateau. He stood looking down into the valley. The moon was bright, and when he climbed out on the branches of the tree, he could look down and see the black void where the fissure in the rock formed the chimney leading down to the valley.
He lay on his stomach on the rough-barked branch and closed his eyes.
“He will fall,” the male voice complained.
“He will not.” The woman spoke with as much certainty as the man had.
“Let us not debate the issue,” Arthur said. “One way or another, I will get down, won’t I?”
“I’m pleased that you find your plight a source of amusement,” the man’s voice said.
“Take your chance. You will not get a better,” the woman said. “The moon is full, the sky is free of clouds. There is but little wind. The air is warm. Even here in the summer country, the winter brings chill and buckets of rain.”
“I thank you, my lady,” Arthur said. “I need no further encouragement.”
“But—” the man’s voice began.
“No!” Arthur cut him off. “Some things don’t repay too much thought.”
With that, he swung down and, clinging to the stubby branches near the tree trunk, he dropped toward the mass of twisted roots struggling into the fissure.
At first he found the going was easy. In some places the rock fissure sloped down without being too steep. It was also fairly deep, and he could work his way along, feet on one side, back against the other. Plant life had colonized the fractured stone, and the small trees, ferns, and clumps of moss offered convenient handholds as he climbed, moving from ledge to ledge inside the crack.
But about halfway down, the character of the stone changed. It became darker, harder, and more weathered; and therefore, more slippery than the jagged sedimentary rock above. The farther down he got, the worse it got. He began to feel blood on his fingers as the skin on them wore away against the silicates in the granite. Then, about two-thirds of the way down, the fissure, which had been becoming more and more shallow, played out. He lay, held by only two shallow handholds and the pressure of his knees against the stone on a bulge of bare rock—over the catastrophically shattered mass of stone on the valley floor.
He paused, hands bleeding, sobbing for breath, staring down at what he was sure would be his death.
“Shush.” He heard Vareen’s companion’s voice. “Shush. Rest. Rest. Then work your way to one side. The rock slide shattered the stone into a series of narrow ledges. They will support you as you climb the rest of the way down.
“I must tell you what Vareen did not.” The words were a whisper, soft as the breeze, the dawn wind just beginning to blow. “You are magic. No, you cannot do magic, as Igrane or Merlin or even your sky-eyed queen-to-be can. But you are magic.”
“I’ve always hated them,” he whispered. “Always hated them.”
“I know. But that’s why they tortured you and want to control you. Because of the magic in your being. It was your magic that drew the Flower Bride.”
He began to laugh. He could feel his stomach muscles quiver against the stone. “Women and directions,” he said. “To my right or to my left, these ledges?”
“Umm … the ones on the left are closer. The ones on the right might be better, because you’re stronger on that side.”
Arthur sighed and chose the right. A few minutes later, he was feeling for a ledge lower down. He found an extraordinarily flat and strong one. It took him a few minutes to turn his head carefully and check, but when he did, he realized it wasn’t a ledge. He was on the ground.
He had barely strength enough to stagger away from the cliff into the fan-shaped rock pile that led into the valley. It wasn’t as hard going as he thought it might be. The boulders of the rock slide were a lot bigger than they had looked from the top, and he could walk among them without difficulty.
He knew they must have fallen from the cliff, where the orange-red rocks formed the floor of the plateau. The blocks were square and almost regular enough to have been shaped by human hands. And he remembered the sense of seeing writing carved into the wall near the spring where he had seen the Flower Bride. Whatever their origin, their regular, smooth shapes made it comfortable to sit on one and rest his back against another. It was rather like sitting on a flight of giant steps—broad, spreading steps, like those in front of the basilica he had seen in London, now given over to Christian worship. Or the fallen part of a very big wall.
Various sensations warred in his body and mind. Fear—Igrane and Merlin were bound to pursue him. Exhaustion—he had had an arduous twenty-four hours, and the days before that had drained him of strength. Cold—the sweat on his body was drying in the cool air, and he was shivering with the chill. Somewhere deep in his mind, he knew that he should be hungry and thirsty, but he had passed beyond those sensations.
“I will rest,” he said to himself, “just for a few minutes, and then push on.”
She came in the dawn’s first hush. He awakened just long enough to know she was present, his Flower Bride. He saw the waters in her eyes, rivers rushing over floodplains. The forest was her voice. The ancient, immortal, complex forest, that lives as much in the disintegration of its components as in the lives of trees or in the sun-kissed canopy above.
She was the wind of a winter midnight or the coating of frost on an autumn morning, cleansing the trees of the summer’s last leaves.
The Flower Bride. For what is a flower but life’s expressed passion for itself. Sudden and brief, but certain and eternal at the same time.
She embraced him and brought him closer to the knowledge of what it must be like to be loved by one of them. His troubled, angry yet courageous spirit stumbled and cried out in pain and rebellion. But her soft lips were on his and her kiss … was the kiss of peace.
When he woke, the sun was at its zenith. He had slept away the morning, but he was at peace and felt certain of his destiny. He knew he was dreadfully weak, and if he didn’t find food and shelter soon, he would die. But his sense of freedom was so joyous that in spite of all his aches and weariness, he was filled with a dear, bright happiness.
Why? he wondered. Am I going mad? But no, it was simply so joyous to be free and alive.
He hurried down the stepped blocks until he reached the bottom. He wouldn’t let himself think about Merlin and Igrane. He didn’t want anything to disturb the peace he had achieved in his dreams.
At the foot of the tumbled stone blocks, he found a pool of rainwater in something that almost seemed a broken rock basin. The rock was basalt, and it looked as though it had been cooked in unimaginable fires. But the shape was such that he was sure it must have been worked by human hands.
The water was clear, but a little silt had settled and coated the bottom of the bowl. He drank deep. The water was clean and sweet, but his fingers stirred the silt and he saw the symbols worked in gold at its center.
He reached in and tried to explore it with his fingers. A second later, he stood in the presence of Merlin and Igrane. The
y were standing together in her apartments beside the pool where he had bathed the night before.
Igrane looked at him and screamed. Merlin’s eyes widened in shock and, surprisingly to Arthur, terror.
Arthur jerked his hand out of the water and fell back on the ground next to the basin and the rocks, his vision of the pair gone. But he scrambled to his feet and ran as fast as he could into the forest.
After about a hundred yards, he was forced to slow down by his own weakness and a painful stitch in his side. He dropped to a walk. After a time, he began to wonder if he had only imagined what he saw.
The woods around him were silent except for the normal sounds of wind, birdsong, and insects. Nothing pursued him. As before, the sense of peace he had found in his dream returned, filling him the way water does an empty cup.
The woodland was open pines, some of them giants, mixed with hardwoods—oak, ash, maple—and in the low places, poplar and willow. He kept to the trees because the clearings were thick with wildflowers—white and red daisies, blue ironweed, and goldenrod were rampant among blackberry vines covered with white flowers and thorns. Here and there crab apple, wild plum, medlar, and gooseberry formed almost impenetrable thickets.
A rich place, this, he thought. Then he came to an ancient linden. It had definitely been coppiced.
Someone lives around hereabouts, he thought. And sure enough, a few yards farther on, he came to a winding road.
It was little but a wagon trace, two ruts in the grass. He followed it to the edge of the forest. He smelled woodsmoke before he saw the house.
He paused at the last tree to take in his surroundings. He liked what he saw. The house stood on a small knoll in the center of the clearing. It wasn’t round, as his people’s were, but crescent-shaped. The building surrounded a courtyard that was open on one side. The shed, with a milk cow chewing her cud, was on one side of the house. Near the forest, a barn stood in the shadow of the trees.
A fenced garden a dozen yards beyond the house was on high ground overlooking the river and a water meadow where two draft horses grazed. Beyond the house was a field, thick with the mixture of wheat, barley, and oats his people commonly grew. It was hard to tell what cereal predominated here, but on casual inspection, it appeared to be wheat. That meant cool nights, warm-to-hot days, and probably, from the look of the burgeoning root crops in the kitchen garden—they were ready for harvest—rather mild winters.
If the winter included long stretches of freezing cold and a lot of snow, the abundance of the kitchen garden wouldn’t have been possible this early in the year. The wheat crop in the field was still very green and as yet no higher than his calves.
Chickens pecked in the courtyard. Beyond the water meadow, he saw plenty of ducks and geese feeding along the edge of the river.
Guinea hens near the back door of the house set up a prodigious cackling as he stepped out of the woods and began to walk toward the house.
She greeted him at the back door with a pike in her hand and no friendliness in her eyes. The pike looked home-forged, a savage, hooked blade sharpened on both sides, the metal dark with age and pitted with rust. But the edges had recently seen the attentions of a file, and they were bright and razor-sharp.
But he was more disturbed by the mastiff she held back with the other hand. A big-jawed, heavy-shouldered fighter of a dog that snarled and strained against her grip, trying to get to him.
“Go!” she spat. “Get off our land or I’ll set the dog on you.”
Arthur backed up. Then went to one knee. “Mistress,” he said. “Please. I’m starving.”
“No!” She was clearly very frightened and unsteady. She backed up, pulling dog and pike with her, and kicked the door shut.
He rose to his feet and staggered away. When he and Cai hunted, they often stopped with the people who lived on the land. They were always hospitable.
But then he considered that he must look like hell, like a brigand in fact. His clothing had suffered from his time in the forest, and the climb down the cliff left him battered, covered with bruises, scrapes, and cuts. His fingers were raw, nails worn to the quick. His face was covered with what must now be over a week’s growth of beard. And he had not lied. He was quite literally starving.
Near the house, a log lay under a tree and a stump near it was smoothed off to form a rude table. He collapsed on the log to consider what to do now.
He didn’t know he had fainted until he awakened in the grass with her looking down at him. When she saw he was conscious, she backed away very quickly.
“I didn’t know,” she said, “that … things had gone so hard for you. Forgive me. I would never refuse food to a starving man. I thought.… I was afraid.… I … please eat and go!
We have troubles of our own here.”
He saw a cloth-covered dish resting on the stump, and next to it, three loaves of the small, flat breads baked on a griddle by country people. When he sat up, she hurried away toward the door. The dog was chained near it, and the pike leaned against the wall beside the door frame. She took both dog and pike into the house with her, and he heard the bar fall inside.
He fell on the food. Until he was half finished, he didn’t realize what he was eating, and then he wasn’t sure. Chicken? Pork? But it didn’t matter; he was ready to eat anything he could get his hands on. He did notice that the stew was mostly vegetables—onions, leeks, cabbage, turnips, carrots—all things that could be collected quickly in her garden. The bread did have butter on it, and he was grateful for that.
He found he had to slow himself down to be sure he didn’t upset his stomach with the unaccustomed bounty of a full meal. When he finished, he leaned back against the log. He dozed for a time, and when he woke, he found he felt human again for the first time since the beginning of his ordeal.
He studied the farm. She was alone. He was almost sure of that. And it was possible she was running out of food. Also, the woodpile was almost empty.
He found an ax hanging on the wall of the house next to its file. He sharpened the ax and spent two hours replenishing the wood supply. The chores on such a place as this were no mystery to him. He and Cai had been sternly taught that the open-handed generosity of the poor was not to be trifled with. If they could not repay with the game they brought in, they must make some other offering, and most often this involved work of some kind.
Noble or not, at Morgana’s stronghold everyone worked, and he was never spared his share of the chores. Besides, there was in his nature a strong tendency toward the keeping of order. When he saw that something needed to be done, he felt gratified by being able to do it. Sometimes when that was the only reward he got, the satisfaction of a job well done was enough for him.
These chores were lined up before him, beckoning, and he attacked them with a will. After he felt the woodpile was sufficiently full, he went to the stable and cleared the stalls of the two draft horses and dumped the manure in the compost pit near the forest. He filled the stall floors with sweet, clean hay and the mangers with feed.
Not the best, he thought. Spelt, but better than ordinary hay or the grass from the water meadow.
He was worried about catching the horses, but they greeted him with cries of joy. It was plain they were used to human tending. When he got them on dry ground, he checked their hooves for damage from having been on the damp ground so long. They were not massive draft horses that he’d sometimes seen shown off by prosperous farmers but simply square, sturdy cobs. Their coats were a mass of tangles, manes and tails snaked and knotted with weeds and burrs.
He spent a rewarding two hours grooming them and trimming hooves. When he came out of the barn, there was another bowl of food and more bread on the stump, this time clearly a chicken stew. Again he ate ravenously.
He went to the house and stood by the wall. It was stone, he noticed with some surprise, worked cobbles held together with mortar. There were few windows, and they were high up, just under the eaves.
“I’m go
ing to the river to bathe,” he said, “and I will return and sleep in the barn. I am feeling better now, and I am very grateful for the food and shelter. But I will leave tomorrow, if you wish.”
There was no reply. The only sound he heard was the brief wailing of a child that stopped abruptly, as though it had been put to the breast.
When he returned, he found some bread and cheese on the stump. He sat and ate it quietly, watching the sunset, the river painted gold in the fading light.
He was a king on exile but still a king. Yet he knew he wouldn’t have minded if he had been born a humble man and had the privilege of settling in a place like this. To know this was his land and sit quietly, as he was now, overlooking the house, fields, and pastures. If they were his own, it would have given him abiding pleasure.
He watched as the light slowly changed from yellow to rose to gold, and at last into purple and blue. The stars flung their pathway across the sky.
He remembered walking into the barn but never remembered crawling into the hay. He was so weary that he slept this night without dreams, in absolute peace. Or at least in a peace as absolute as he had ever known.
He woke before first light. When he and Cai spent time with people on the land, most families were up and stirring at their chores before the sun crossed the horizon.
He dropped down easily from the loft. The horses were restless in their open stalls, tethered to the walls by ropes. He saw they had finished the hay he had put in their mangers yesterday. He checked their hooves and saw they were dry. So he released them and turned them out into the water meadow to graze.
He followed them more slowly. As he did, he passed the smokehouse.
He paused. Yes, there was a wisp coming from the chimney. But there was no firewood stacked beside it. He comprehended that she must have used what was there when the wood box at the house was empty.
He shrugged. Such an expedient was a desperate one for a farm wife. The fire in the smokehouse must be maintained to cure the ham and sausage necessary to overwinter the family. But then he remembered she’d looked none too steady on her legs when she’d hurried back into the house.
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