Shela-na-gig. The church hated her and feared her, yet they let the people carve her on the apse of their churches. She was too strong to deny or ignore.
The priestess’s hands lingered and caressed the young warrior as she prepared him for death. Then they stamped out the fire and finished their run toward the sea.
They were children, but Shela and they thought as one. The only advantage they had was surprise.
Arthur crouched on the shore with them. In the darkness, he could smell them around him. The reek of fear and rage, old ashes, piss, hot meat, raw meat, newly dead like a bloodless kill, ready to be butchered. He knew he must lead. The sacrifice must go first, the raw rage that precedes certain death, terror, boiling into rage as liquid into vapor, filling his mind and body with exultation and a readiness to inspire others with his directed self-destruction.
His sword was in his right hand. Shela’s instructions were, “Let your eyes accustom themselves to the darkness. Be sure they have accommodated well. Then pick your target and hesitate no more.”
Yes, he saw the ship. There was no moon; it was a dark shape against a sea of stars. Now his eyes picked out the gunwales. Stranded, she was canted a bit to the left, her sloping deck an easy leap from the sand. There was a light aboard, a shielded lantern or candle. Very faint. The sentry or sentries would be close to it.
He probed the shadows around the vessel, searching for an ambush, because that would occur to him, were he stranded in such a place. But no, it did not appear to have been part of the captain’s thinking.
He felt a surge of raw, physical desire. His left hand was resting on his thigh. He felt his male organ move across the tips of his fingers. His death would be ecstatic.
He heard the whispered word, “Now!” without really knowing who said it. Then he was flying, flashing along like spindrift carried by the wind. The stranded ship loomed over him, and he had time to reflect that they were barely in time. The tide was rising, and he was running through the shallows.
A second later, his leap—he seemed to be flying—carried him to the deck. The sentry stood before him.
He remembered the man’s face, large gray eyes, a scar on the forehead. The sentry must have heard them splash through the shallows, because his sword was in his hand. He drove it swiftly at Arthur’s unprotected left chest.
Arthur felt the blow.
I’m dead, he thought. But I have a second before my heart stops.
He felt a jolt of raw pleasure and his mind and body rode the wave he was sure would break and spill him into eternity. He had permission to swing his own weapon now, and his descending blade split his adversary’s skull to the teeth. A fountain of scarlet—warm, wet, and sticky—blinded him, and he went down.
He felt rather than saw Shela and the rest of the boys flood onto the ship. Most of the crew was still asleep and never woke up. They rescued the girl warrior of the Hawk society. They took no casualties at all.
No, not even him.
The warrior’s sword thrust didn’t penetrate. It skidded along his rib. He still had the scar—his first mark of valor. And he was felt to have met all the conditions of the offering, including allowing his enemy to strike the first blow.
The powers had spared him. He had other work to accomplish.
The sun was down. The stars changed places with the sea and stretched around him until he stood alone in the vast emptying of the universe. She came drifting across the star glow.
He found he knew her. Not long after he and Cai had their adventure of being trapped offshore, they returned to the gentle green valleys caught in the flanks of the mountains beside the sea. He couldn’t remember what spring it had been, because when he lived in Morgana’s realm time didn’t seem to exist any longer. She held it at bay with her magic.
Even the Romans had found the ground shifted beneath their feet at times, and they lost a legion in her mists. She laughed at the Roman commander when he tried to get it back, so he remitted the taxes he had wanted to collect and the legion returned from the soft, wet nowhere into the world of men again. Not long after, the Romans marched away from the white isle forever as they confronted the disintegration of their particular world.
She had been born in the valley, near the sea, and so she died there. Her family were Christians, and they would not give her to the sea eagles. She was buried.
He remembered her face when his father returned to put her to rest. For she walked. Or so the other families in the valley complained. And Uther said Christian or no, her body must be burned before there were more killings.
One woman and two men were already dead. All three had seen her walking in the mist near the sea before the tide caught them in the flat open sands near the ocean.
Uther came and overruled the local bishop. She was dug up.
Arthur remembered her face, the yellow skin cleaving to the fair, delicate bone structure of the skull. The empty, dark eye hollows, and lips still full but purple-black with decay over young, even white teeth. The corpse’s tallow body even more ripe, full, and curvaceous than the rather slender virgin girl buried a year ago. It radiated a cold eroticism, even discolored as it was but still draped in its silk and linen winding sheet. Like a snake, firm but cold to the touch.
She walked toward him out of the darkness along the road of stars. She held out her arms to him.
He had seen his father embrace, then kiss her and yield her to the flames. How am I less? he thought, and took her in his arms.
He remembered the snapping of twigs, the hiss of flesh melting in the fire, running like wax. The beautiful, dead but still beautiful, face crowned with dried flowers yielding, withering, vanishing into flame. The loathsome lady, the hag of winter’s darkness, that the winter king, to be a king, must kiss.
His nostrils were drenched with the scent of putrefaction as he pressed his lips to hers.
TWENTY-SIX
SAT, FOR THERE IS A SO-CALLED CHAIR where the queens sit before the dance. There are a lot of these things, so old no one is sure what they mean.
A footprint at Tintigal. And yes, Uther places his foot there always when he visits. And when he does, his oath men and many others hail him with a great shout.
That would be the people’s seal of approval, if my dance pleased them. A shout. A mighty shout. Then another, if my actions seemed proper in a queen. Then at last a third if I were acceptable as a ruler.
For rule I would. The young women Mondig had chosen were puppets, and Kyra was right. They would fall in behind me, provided I did not seriously inconvenience any of the factions they represented. Or, quite possibly, even if I did, since I could practice divide and rule among them, picking them off one by one at my pleasure. None were individually strong enough to defy me, if, if, if I could bring an end to these raids.
Kyra had given me a warm mantle, some wool-silk blend, another of the gifts I had received. It was colored with a rich blend of early spring greens, blues, and pale yellows—water, grass, and sunlight. And it was warm and almost feather-light.
That was good. I was almost naked under it. I wore the chains at my shoulders. They fell away on either side of my breasts, colored with the glowing greens of my father’s gift, my fairy armor. A similar fine metal band at my hips held a skirt of fine chain, which hung almost to my knees. Eros, it gives life.
I knew that in the hall the woman they choose is ready; she is fertile. Her body is the warm, spring earth before the plow. The red translucent salmon roe glowing like fire in the icy water, waiting for the pale swirls of milt. Warm flushed as coals covering the bread baking in a pot, thick as the wheat heads bending with fruitfulness, the blush of wild autumn apples on the bough.
Eros and the watching crowd gathered on the slopes surrounding the dance floor would see it as I danced. They had a right to know the Dragon Queen could choose a king or, if necessary, bear one. And either way there would be no reason for them to be disappointed in her.
So be it.
Then I t
hought about war, because above all, it was my business.
“It is a lottery,” Maeniel said. “The winners garner the prizes, power, wealth, women. Women are last, but they go with wealth and power or, at least, many do. To the loser, death, slavery, poverty, and ignominy. Mostly death.”
“Ha!” I asked, “What about the dead on the winning side?”
That was long ago, and Black Leg was still with us. “You make it sound terrible,” he accused his father.
“It is,” Maeniel said. “And there is only one side in a war—that of the survivors. The others don’t count, no matter what their stated affiliation might be. And, trust me, more on the winning side survive than on the losing. Slavery is often only a somewhat slower death sentence than that found on the battlefield.”
“God! Why do they do it, then?” he asked his father.
We had been out after a herd of wild horses and were walking along downslope through a pine forest. Maeniel stopped and looked at both of us.
“Think about the boys in the war band.”
“He’s right,” I said to Black Leg. For a second, he looked appalled, then, as comprehension dawned, he nodded and whispered, “Yes. I see.”
None of the boys who faced the pirates that day on the beach ever went back to the wandering companies who guard the coast. Bain made a marriage to Issa, the chief’s daughter. No way Dunnel would have given his only child but that Bain was able to bring the loot he stripped from the bodies of the pirates killed on the beach that day.
On the strength of his gains, Gray got Anna, the smith’s daughter. Next to Dunnel, the smith was the most important and prosperous individual in our community. All of the boys got places and most got women.
“That is how the game is played,” Maeniel said. “Never be misled by claims of valor, honor, or even justice or truth. Though you will find these things all deploy themselves as part of the mix from time to time and so must be dealt with. Remember this central truth. Your enemy is there because he, too, has weighed the consequences of failure and accepts them. Play always to win, because nothing else matters.”
He was right. And the raids had to stop. But whatever killing Maeniel and Gray did—in the final analysis it would only win us a temporary respite. There were simply too many young men, and, yes, women, hungry sometimes only for simple survival and without the means to ensure it. They would risk all on the off chance they would draw life, wealth, and happiness in the contest of war, violence, and theft. It had been so in the time of the Romans, and the Greeks before them. And even when the sea kings battled for supremacy over the blue Mediterranean and the first Greeks were hill tribes cutting one another’s throats with bronze swords and the Painted People carried iron from Etruria to Gaul and the first iron swords were smelted in the mountain fires. None even then thought any differently than they do now about war and its necessity.
Maeniel believed Christ tried to change men’s minds about one another, tried to persuade them that they were brothers and sisters and owed each other the love and protection any good family owes its members. That they might live together in compassion and peace.
“He failed,” I said.
“No!” Maeniel answered strongly. “He did not entirely fail. And since what he tried to do was so difficult, he may be satisfied with the work of one lifetime. I cannot say. The mind of God is a closed book to me. But he showed us which direction we must go in order to serve good. The good! And to seek it!”
I was … what? ten at the time he told me that, and walking through a forest in search of game to feed our family. Mother and Black Leg were beside me.
Mother snorted, a soft wolf sound only faintly audible to human ears. It said volumes.
What she replied said more volumes. All the books in the world could not be so succinct.
“We hunt whatever we need to eat, be it deer, hare, horse, or even fish or fowl. They—you, for you are one of them—hunt each other. We are avenged for their multiple cruelties and supreme madness. I can but hope we survive them.” Mother was, as he said, a sarcastic bitch.
Yes—Mother—she formed my mind, and in my heart I am a she-wolf.
The sun was sinking now into the sea, so low—so lost in haze—that I could look into its circle of light reflecting burnished gold like a mirror. The wind was growing cold, and below the chair, the ocean thundered and hissed against the rocks.
Mother! She is part of the answer to the abyss. The question: Why anything? Why not nothing?
She is life and guides it from generation to generation, even as both my mothers did.
Mother had no easy life, even for a wolf. The mantle of procreation fell on her young as the last surviving female in her pack. Her first get were born when she was little more than a yearling. Not long after, Maeniel became her mate, and she was after not too many years saddled with me. A strong creature, the she-wolf, strong and wedded to her duty.
But she was also free and no wise Maeniel’s property. Had he returned to Gaul the next spring, she would have danced in the moonlight with new suitors and gone on with her sacred task of ensuring the future.
“This is what we do,” she told me once.
“Why?” I asked.
She laid her ears back, a sign of great displeasure. “Why does water flow downhill, a river to the sea?” she asked. “I cannot think your kind has any sense at all. Even as I remember when long ago ice and snow covered the whole world, so I know this is God in me. God the mother.”
I was full of myself. “Maeniel says we must exercise discretion in the matter,” I told her.
“I can do that also. I know when the weather has been bad, humans have been particularly insane or for whatever reason game is scarce. I know not to summon my lovers in springtime but wait and protect what I have. It is you—your kind—who are feckless, lecherous, and stubbornly blind. A wolf too aggressive would meet my teeth. But your men will force a woman, especially a woman they see as theirs, without a second thought. As though one could own another.”
Then she left me to ponder her words.
Yes, everything they, Maeniel and Mother, said was true. And it had mattered little to me then. I was only a young girl with her way to make in the world. I could do little about such philosophical conundrums.
But now! Now! I was reaching for power. And I must give the lessons of war and love some thought. I must decide what course my life would take. As Maeniel pointed out—though as usual, Dugald did not agree with him—Christ pointed the way for the rest of us.
Could I change things?
The sun was down, but the sky was still suffused with light. Beyond the chair where I sat along the cliff, people were gathering on the slopes around the broken dance floor. Fires were leaping at the edge of the remnants of the dragon dance floor. The people arriving to watch my performance carried torches; neither candles nor lamps would stay lit in the omnipresent wind from the sea.
The sky was a bowl of bright blue above, still catching the light shining upward from the sun. But the stars were finding their way out against the glowing blackness. When the sky was fully dark and the crowd an island, a kingdom of light between the sky, the mountains, and the thundering sea, Kyra would summon me.
Could I change things? And if so—how? Need war be an eternal necessity among humans? Need lust and greed always determine the fate of men and women? Especially women?
I heard footsteps and knew Kyra was coming with the ladies of heaven, the rulers of the ancient houses set among the stars. They were here to escort me to the dance floor.
TWENTY-SEVEN
HE STARS VANISHED. INSTEAD, THEY WERE in a pit.
“Congratulations,” came the voice, dry and ancient. “You have won the right to face me in single combat. Few of your kind get so far. But none has ever survived this final test.”
Arthur tried to see into the murk surrounding him, the not-quite darkness.
“Trying to look at me?” came the ironic question.
“We are unc
omfortable when we cannot see,” he answered.
“Oh, discomfort, not terror. Not pissing, shrieking madness.”
“No!” Arthur replied. “Only discomfort.”
“I’ll see if I can remedy that.”
The flame seemed to shoot from the floor near his foot, a wash of fire rather like that of a smelter fueled by the air from a bellows. It was hot. He moved away, but then another, closer, roared into life. Then another.
Now he could see, but it wasn’t comforting. It seemed a vast metal dome covered them both. It was stitched together with iron bolts. But even though it seemed formed of something grayish, harder than the steel that was the hardest metal he was used to, the dome was beginning to deteriorate and shards of metal were peeling off the thick plates. Not rusting, but undergoing some much slower process, which rendered it brittle. His booted foot crunched a piece at his feet, and he watched it disintegrate.
Another flame leaped from a jet on the floor and illuminated the thrones around the walls.
The voice laughed. “See! We are all dead.”
They were; and in addition, none of them was human. She sat before him, a rack of bones clothed in silk, gold mesh, and shadows. He could clearly see her hands and face. The hand bones were long, four fingers—no, three fingers—and something that looked like a very flexible thumb. The skull was simply a nightmare, longer than a human’s but broad at the back with a lot of room for brain. The front was fanged with long teeth, which protruded at the jawline. It reminded him of a bird, a bird of prey, because the eyes faced the front.
The one next to her was covered by strips of something that had fallen into a pile from the seat of the chair, stretching to the floor. But between them, the rust-colored bone and some sort of almost unbreakable ligament clung together. The rest were heaps of tattered remnants, sometimes on the chairs, others scattered on the floor.
The torches roaring around him sent flickering shadows over a scene that would have done credit to the Prince of Darkness himself.
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