“You can’t give me that.” She sounded almost accusing.
“No,” I said. “I can’t.”
The simple admission seemed to quiet her. Her breathing grew more even.
“What was your world like?” I asked.
She spun me a marvelous fantasy of a green and white world of unending, open plains and magnificent forests where her people lived to follow the herds of elephant, wild cattle, horses, deer, and giant elk. In winter they subsisted on the gifts of the sea, hunting small game and gathering shellfish and finfish on the coast. Come summer, the herds moved north out of the forested lowlands and up high onto the steppes, rich plains teeming with burgeoning life.
Of necessity, the humans must follow them, and in the brief summer hunt, kill enough of them so that they could dry and store adequate meat to get them through the winter. Then when the herds turned south again, they had to follow. An arduous and often short life, but one she longed to live again, even in all its brevity and struggle.
I fell asleep listening to her tales of an elephant with long, shaggy hair and curled tusks so big he swallowed the sun. I didn’t listen as well as I should have, but in my own defense, I will say I was very tired still from my many battles and I was sodden with weariness. So I walked all fat, happy, and stupid into the jaws of the trap.
They were eating trilobites and something that might as well have been a shrimp, except that where legs can be found on a shrimp, these things had gills. They were very small, but then you could eat the whole critter, crunching the head and shell up with the meat. So far as the trilobites were concerned, the edible part was the long set of muscles that formed the mound along the length of the back running from the carapace to the tail.
They curled up when caught, but uncurled when they were steamed. The head shield was cracked and removed, then the shell on the back was lifted, exposing the musculature of the tail. The meat was extracted rather the way a lobster’s is pulled out, all in one piece, dipped in butter and then eaten. It was a bit better than lobster, because the stored roe near the carapace tended to drip down on the meat, giving it a light, mustard taste.
Lancelot was on his sixth. She was on her fifth, and Merlin had eaten three and could eat no more. The wine in his cup had undergone a subtle change to a white that tasted good with seafood. He was eyeing her speculatively. Being her prisoner wasn’t going to be so bad. In fact, after the youngster was gone for a while, possibly, just possibly, she would let him comfort her.
She turned to him, the last morsels of buttered trilobite in her hand, and said, “In your dreams, you louse. In your dreams.”
He turned scarlet at allowing himself to be so easily read. Lancelot looked baffled for a moment, then his expression changed to truculent. The boy would kill him in a second. In fact, sorcerer or not, probably could kill him if he succumbed to a fit of jealousy.
The birds that hung around him were always in evidence. When he had gone fishing, the youngster had stretched out his hand and received a helmet with a transparent face shield. Then he had pulled a jointed spear out of the air. The shield covered only his eyes, nose, and mouth, but it allowed him to walk on the bottom, breathe, and see whatever prey he wanted to take with the spear.
“It’s been a rough last few months,” she said.
“Got any advice for me about King Bade?” Lancelot said.
“Try not to let him kill you,” she said.
“Thank you,” Lancelot said. “Thank you oh so very much. Anything else helpful you can think of?”
“The sword is in the stone,” Merlin said. “She has to give him the sword in the stone.”
“Where did you get that?” she asked.
“We were talking about the ins and outs of divination. One of the diviners told me that—told it to me several times for that matter,” Merlin said. “She was most insistent. In fact, boring on the subject.”
“You don’t get swords out of stones,” she said.
“Shows how much you know,” Lancelot said. “Of course you do. Stones are where they start. Fire from heaven.”
Both Merlin and she stopped eating and glared at him. “What do you mean?” Merlin said.
“Simple,” Lancelot answered.
There was a fire on the beach. Next to it was the bowl of cold boiled shrimp things. A pit near the fire, a mass of sea grass and three red, steamed trilobites. Lancelot tried to pick up a trilobite, burned his fingers, and yelled, “Ow!” He licked the tips of his fingers.
“Leave off worrying about your stomach for a moment and explain that statement,” she said.
“Swords are made from wire. Wire is steel, and it is drawn from iron ore that looks like a pile of rocks. I ought to know. When Gray ran out of scrap, which is better since some of the work is already done, we had to render iron ore and get bloom iron. That’s something I never want to do again. It’s dirty, hot, hard work. And we would be at it for two or three days at a time. Gray said that’s why the smith was so keen to have him marry his daughter—so he had a son-in-law who would spend the rest of his life making bloom iron out of the ore he buys from Italy.”
“So,” Merlin said thoughtfully. “So.”
“I’ll tell Guinevere when I get there,” Lancelot said.
“That still doesn’t fully explain the statement,” Merlin said.
“No,” the Lady of the Lake agreed.
Lancelot was juggling the last trilobite.
“Hell,” she said. “You ate the other two already. You’re going to burst.”
“He’s a growing boy,” Merlin purred.
She gave him a long, slow look through her lashes.
“You do that again,” Lancelot said, “and I’m going to cut his head off before I go.”
“God!” she whispered. “Then hurry up and finish eating. We need to say good-bye. And I’ll bet when we get finished, you won’t have the energy to go slicing up anything.”
“If you’re in love with him, why are you sending him off to help a woman he idolizes?”
She didn’t answer, and Lancelot stood up. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips without touching her anywhere else.
“I’m salty, sticky, and greasy,” he said. “I want a bath.” Then he walked away down the long beach toward her . . . home?
“Why?” Merlin repeated.
This time she answered. “Something wonderful and terrible hangs about them. Some fate both dark and bright.”
Again the sorcerer said, “That doesn’t explain.”
“One,” she said, “I’m not a goddess and I’ve learned that successful intervention in the lives of others is rare. It is best when humans work out their own destiny. Two, the fate that shimmers around those three is as gigantic as the aurora borealis. To interfere with such a powerful convocation of forces might be to do evil. In fact, I think it would. And I will not lend my very considerable powers to an immoral course of action. I won’t knowingly do wrong. I don’t own him. Young and mortal he may be, but the choices he makes are his own. I cannot . . . will not make them for him.”
With that, she rose and followed her lover along the beach and into the darkness.
When the birds came, Arthur knew they were no natural beings. Those eyes and their coal-like glow disturbed him profoundly.
“Are you from the king? Are you his emissaries?” he asked the first, a bird who flew out of the cool gray mist that hovered between first light and dawn.
Arthur was munching on a handful of berries. They stained the skin of his left hand dark purple. His right was occupied with digging a shallow pit to cover the ashes from his fire and such scraps left from the fish he had eaten the night before. He tossed a berry at the bird’s feet. It looked at him with one eye, then the other, and last, in a most un-birdlike fashion, with both.
I wonder, he thought, if they think different thoughts with one eye on the object of their interest than they do when they look at it with the other?
“No! And Yes!”
He jumped slightly and drew in a quick breath at the sudden answer to both his queries.
“No and yes what?” This time he spoke aloud.
“No! I am not an emissary from King Bade. And yes, I am not sure how or why, but the use of one eye then the other does involve an awakening and an increase in comprehension. Which is why birds do it. As a man, I didn’t need to, but as a bird, I can make use of the faculty, so I do.”
“You were a man?”
“Sort of. Maybe once. A long time ago there.” The creature’s voice was frightened with a bleak, lonely sorrow. “Now, you are right. I am an emissary, but not from the king. My lord is the Warrior of Water and Light. Not a man, but not a god, either. He holds my fealty until I die. He begs that you accept his help.”
“I need all the help I can get,” Arthur said. “And anyone who in truth wishes to come to my assistance need not beg.”
“So be it,” the bird said and took wing.
“I have spoken with a bird,” Arthur said. “He has promised me the help of the Warrior of Water and Light. I probably need to go soak my head in the snowmelt river. It might freeze the cobwebs in my brain. I could not but think I am caught in dreams or delusion, had not so many strange things happened to me.” Then he moved off with Bax leading him toward the distant towers of light.
Lancelot sat in a perilous seat, one made from the ancient enchanted oaks in the dark, endless forest. She sent him there. The throne was hollowed from the trunk of one tree. It was ten feet across and crowned the last hill of the Forest of Forever and Nowhere. She called it that. When he said that was incomprehensible, she said fine, she sympathized with him. Then she pointed out to him the problem of it.
“This was well known to the ancients,” she said. “The forest was like that.” And good luck to him if he ever became entangled with it.
He asked how Arthur got out and she said he hadn’t. Bade had released him because Arthur had managed to defeat the forest in a trial of strength. Reluctantly, Bade had released him. She wasn’t sure why. Bade’s thinking was opaque to her. He was so much smarter and more powerful than anything that existed on earth now. But in the past, others had fought him to a standstill. He had never been defeated, only contained. It hadn’t happened often, but it could be done. Just possibly Arthur was another such champion, and it was inconceivable that he would not champion his own people. That’s what kings were created to do.
A king’s life belonged to his people. They were entitled to sacrifice him, and if the conditions for such a sacrifice should be met, he was obligated to go to his death without complaint. The torque is a garrote and used to strangle its wearer. Damocles made them, and at one time that was why only noblemen and women wore them. It was a Damoclean reminder of the obligation of rank. Arthur would meet and exceed his obligations.
Lancelot, his back to the dark enchantment, looked out into the pillared walls of the more normal wood. It was spring and nature had decked herself in red-gold and green splendor. Near his feet, safely away from the vast, shadowed trap behind him, a spring burst out of the rock and gurgled away downhill across a bed of shiny cobbles toward the river. Lancelot sat on the polished wood seat and didn’t know he looked impressive.
He wore leather pants and a woolen dalmatic tuniclike garment that was standard male dress of the time. It had long sleeves and he wore a linen shirt under it. It looked sewn on the hem, neck, and sleeves with rubies. But it wasn’t. The things that looked like rubies were eyes, Argus eyes that saw everything around him.
The helm raven returned, perched on the rock above the spring, sipped some cool water, threw his head back and swallowed. Then he sharpened his beak on the rough rocks, honing it.
“My lord, mission accomplished,” he said.
“Thank you,” Lancelot said.
“Do not thank me,” the bird said.
“Why not?”
“She is right about Arthur. Keep away unless you absolutely have to go in close.”
“Why?”
“He is a stone killer.”
Lancelot nodded. “So. But I don’t think she had my welfare in mind when she cautioned me to stay as far out as possible. I believe she intended to limit the Dread King’s knowledge of my presence. That was also why she told me never to mention his name.”
“To be sure,” the raven said. “But he is still a stone killer.”
“I’m not lacking in courage myself.” Lancelot spoke a bit stiffly.
“No,” the bird said. “You would go up against hopeless odds if you felt the situation demanded it. But he . . . he . . . Arthur would not even notice the odds.”
“Oh,” Lancelot said.
Arthur continued to move downhill toward the towers he remembered from his dream of manhood. He had been told he must fight supernatural beings and that’s what the dream meant. This King Bade must be the one, and the terrible hog-featured warriors must be another.
Fat, confident, and stupid. That’s what I still was when I awakened the next morning. The sun got up before I did, and its light was shining into the dry lake bed where the sun cape supposedly lay. Micka was gone, but I didn’t have much time to wonder where, because in a few moments she returned with several of the melons we had gotten water from yesterday.
We refreshed ourselves with the cool melons and chewed some jerky. Then I went searching for a pile of rocks high enough to let me see down into the dry lake. I found a place where the ravine’s sides looked climbable and went up. When I reached the top, I saw the sun cape lay spread in the very center of what had once been water.
Fine. Now all I had to do was figure out—
I heard a sound reminiscent of the distant Heiiiii of a hawk. It took at least a minute for my mind to consider the fact that there were no birds here, at least, none I had seen. The one exception was the lake that belonged to Ilona’s family and strictly speaking, it wasn’t here “here.”
That was the only warning I got. The beak snapped shut.
I don’t know if I screamed, didn’t scream, fainted, or just had quiet hysterics. All I knew was that I was swept like a flying arrow over the lost lake. I passed over what seemed acres of those murderous plants.
There in the center, the scraps of the sun cape lay tangled with a few yellow bones. Even at the speed I was traveling, it was clear that I could make no use of it because it was ruined beyond repair.
“What! The! Hell! Just! Happened?” my unseen companion screeched at the top of her lungs. Then she added unhelpfully, “It’s! Got! You!”
I could, I thought, start gibbering, but then my companion seemed to have captured that role. We were rising. The beak squeezing my midsection tightened as its owner reached the edge of the lake and caught the lifting air mass driven by the sun heating the rocks. We went up, flying in successively wider and wider circles as the thing used the thermal to propel itself into the sky.
The wings . . . I didn’t believe the wings. No bird ever had wings like that. They were three times as long as my body, but more like a bat’s than a bird’s, webbed, furred with short, very, very short, down. White, the down made them shimmer like mother-of-pearl, and ever so slightly translucent at the edges that they glowed a bit, pink in the new sun.
Up, up, they swept, turning slightly to present the edge and escape the resistance of the air. At the top of the stroke, they flared into white, iridescent sails and caught the wind on their down surfaces, a magnificent down, driving the two of us higher and higher toward the golden blue of the morning sky.
“Your sword!” the dress screamed. “You still have your sword! Kill! It!”
“I don’t think so.”
We were high, so high that even fear was gone. At a certain point, I discovered, the ground below simply is not real. The dry lake was no bigger than a large platter, and we were rising yet, those magnificent wings pushing us. The flying thing had a long, narrow beak. It was not hard like a bird’s beak is, but flexible and cartilaginous, or at least the edges were. I suspected th
at if I were not wearing that little mail shirt, the thing might have bitten me in half. As it was, the little ring mail was protecting me.
“Humph! I’m glad you know that. I am,” was the soft-voiced reply to my thought.
“Fine,” I said. “Have you got yourself under control?”
There was a long silence; a long, chagrined silence. Then it snapped, “Yes!”
“Fine!” I said. “I hope you don’t have any more bright ideas about me killing this thing, because if I do, or even if I swing and miss and upset it, it might drop me. And unless you can slow my fall . . .”
“I might. I’m not sure.”
“Not sure isn’t good enough,” I warbled back.
“True! Only too true. We are very high, and if what I feel is correct, this . . . whatever . . . is unhappy. It’s finding you a load to carry and if it weren’t so important to get you to . . . to . . . I don’t know the very high personage who commanded it to get you . . . it would set you down right now and forget the whole thing.”
I glanced to my right and saw the beak clasping my waist and beyond it, one troubled orange eye with a black pupil gazing at me. The head was covered with the same fine down as the wings were. It looked as soft as the fine fur on a newborn kitten. It was white on top and blue on the bottom. In fact, the whole belly of the creature was a pale blue. It extended out under the wings and even, I could see, to the downy legs that ended in long, smooth, narrow, folded claws. There was a slight crest on the head. The crest was striped with soft bands of blue, the same iridescent blue that covered the belly and underwings. All in all, a magnificent creature.
I was aware that I was clutching my sword.
“I can get that,” my companion said.
The thing vanished from my hand. I hung where I was, the creature’s beak holding me. I saw the city, toy-sized, pass below me. The wings pulled us up and up, partway riding the thermals, partially by main force. As we passed above the tallest towers, I saw men and women of the city clad in furs standing on balconies and platforms amidst the white towers, the final pinnacle of the city’s heights. They pointed up and watched the magnificent bird (was it a bird?) labor over them and clear the mountain peak.
The Raven Warrior Page 55