The Magick of Camelot

by Arthur H. Landis

  “No it is not,” Fel-Holdt said. He crossed the room to embrace me. “I would but ask, my lord, that you take good care.”

  Hooli, of course, had listened to it all and without so much as a blink of an eyelid, or the twitch of an ear. I’d mentioned the “outside force” deliberately; it was the first time I had done so, the first time ever that his presence had been hinted at beyond the hypnotic powers of his flute. Moreover, my little rodentius drusis’s lidded eyes seemed dull as dull could be—except that this time, I knew better.

  There is no stronghold of any kind on Camelot-Fregis without its secret passageways. Some have more than one. Indeed, depending upon the owner-lord’s degree of resulting guilt-paranoia from mistreating his peasants and such, he may have as many as six, ten or even a dozen. Most, however, are satisfied with two.

  I knew that Gortfin had one, at least. For I’d hardly retired after a hearty dinner and more table talk of new victories won in the south and west when that particular passage was put to use. In no way sleepy, I’d first opened the draped, stoneworked windows to the night breeze and wafted perfumes of flowers plus the smell of water from far below. In my bed again, I’d lain back against the propped-up pillows, the better to watch the ghostly moons of Capil and Ripple wending their liquid way across the star-filed skies. My mind was at ease with a sort of Zen contemplation when I sensed movement in the far corner next to a stairwell. The starlight, touching softly on the area, seemed suddenly then to withdraw; indeed, dissolved to a yawning blackness.

  My spine tingled. A doorway of sorts had been opened by someone. Seizing my sword, I drew it slowly and silently to me while unsheathing it in a way so as to make no sound.

  “Stay your hand, my lord.” The softly imperious though hardly audible words were those of Elioseen.

  “Well, now,” I murmured just as softly, “here’s a witchery I hadn’t counted on.”

  My body thrilled throughout to the exciting sensation of a quasi deja vu, a tingling feeling of repetition. For Murie, too, had come to me once in exactly this way, and with almost the same words.

  Wasting not a second, Elioseen came swiftly across the few paces to my bed. Her form, slender, silver in the starlight, gleamed with a phantom shining. I threw back the furred sleeping robes, though I was quite naked. She in turn shrugged her single garment, a gossamer thigh-length shift, from her body. She bent to kiss me, lips and breath warm against my own. She then moved to lay beside me, but I took her completely in my arms so that her head was against my chest beneath my chin. One slim leg sought immediately to encircle my body.

  I welcomed her as I would an expected, familiar lover. For some things are preordained, and this was one of them.

  She knew it, too. She said huskily, her mouth searching my flesh, “Last night I truly believed you’d never see the sun again, Collin. Tonight—well to me it’s as an extra few hours of life for which neither you nor myself need ever account to anyone.” She spoke matter-of-factly, but with a certain sadness.

  I laughed, squirmed into a more comfortable position above the heady warmth of her body. “You confuse me, my lady. If there’s an ambivalence to your pleasure, why so?”

  But she’d chosen the moment to run her lips over the muscles of my chest. The caress completed, she looked up. “Why, if you were dead,” she said, “I’d not then be betraying my niece like this—” Her wet mouth roamed still further.

  I told her hoarsely, “Elioseen, twixt you and me there’s no betrayal of anyone.”

  “Oh? Why not?”

  “Because as of this moment we are not of this world’s reality. I am again truly from somewhere else; and you, too, for what you’ve become. This night and hour has nothing, to do, therefore, with any part of the world of Fregis.”

  Her laughter came silver-sweet, mocking. “Hey, Collin? Tm bound to think from what you’ve said that things are not so advanced among the stars as you’d have me believe. Your rationale for illicit love is most interesting.”

  “It may sound so, on this world. Not out there. There, if I’ve chosen a mate, and she me, well, we may still enjoy the body of another if we so desire. There’s neither guilt nor blame. Tis but a pleasant exchange, no more.”

  “But you are now in the kingdom of Marack.”

  “Nay. I am in this room with you.”

  .”So what of my niece?”

  “Why, that I love her. Nothing will change.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “Certainly. But not in the same way; nor,” I grinned, “do you love me, my lady.”

  “How” do you know that?” She sat up to grasp my shoulders and to stare deep into my eyes. I winked immediately, phasing my contacts ever so slightly so as to avoid what I thought might be a quick attempt at hypnosis.

  “If you did,” I murmured, putting my hands upon the softness of her inner thighs to spread them, “I doubt you’d be here.”

  “By the gods!” she exclaimed at my movements, gasped as my hands touched further. “I’ll most certainly take that option, to visit the stars—when this is over.”

  I rolled her gently to her back, raised myself to look down upon that soft female body of melded golds and silvers; her arms reaching, her legs wide-spread, her eyes so wide in the starlight as to seem like a Terran painting of a child I’d seen in the long ago.

  “If Murie knew of us—” I said confidently. “If she knew that this was the way it truly was, this mutual but quite undemanding act of pleasure, I doubt that she’d be all that unhappy.”

  “Oh, ho. You but say now what you wish to hear. If my niece knew of this—” and she seized me in such an embrace of legs and arms as to make my eyes bulge—”why then, sir, I swear she’d have us both to the dungeons. And that’s a fact A last point, Collin, is that you talk too much….”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “But still—”

  And that is as far as I ever got.

  The hours of a night such as that are long remembered; indeed, are set aside by some selective natural mechanism of the human mind for the later, dreaming years of age. The whole of it was a collage of flesh and limbs, tossed bedclothes, and a sweating, writhing, gasping; to be repeated and repeated with each denouement, until the final exhaustion of two bodies holding hands and with limbs spread to the cooling night breeze… . Then after, the exploring and the sustained intimacies of the tastes of flesh that last interminably. ….

  There is usually, on such a night, and there was then, a last raging against one’s ultimate end; a final melding of flesh in glorious battle. And that was it And that, to those who achieve it—for those who can participate and still be free— well, let us say that it is truly they who have a right to the stars.

  In the early hours, as a simple act of understood comradeship, she laid a hand upon my cheek. I touched each finger with my lips. And so she left me.

  The attack went well the following morning, despite the fact that the Kelbian merchants and would-be priests were accompanied by two full companies of white-tabbed warriors and led by six knights. The order for battle was given with the use of the mirror and an accompanying audio effect The voice was Fel-Holdt’s own, to his men.

  We watched the fighting. The enemy, ambushed and thus surprised, and with our numbers being twice theirs, was literally destroyed. The battle was short, bloody and brutal. In the midst of it all, when I saw that we were surely winning, I called to my volunteers, including one of our sorcerers, reputedly a master of disguises, shook the hands of all those who knew we were leaving and went quickly to the meadow in back of Gortfin, and the scoutship.

  I’d kissed Elioseen’s hand, a simple act Gen-Rondin did too. For luck, he said. A small glance of friendship and love then passed between the three of us….

  Another glance from me to that miserable Hooli, who’d appeared unannounced in the same magick-room, elicited a wink and a head bobble, from where he leaned on a monstrous, bubbling retort. Why was it, I’d time to wonder, that though I truly loved Hooli, usually, when
I thought of him at all, my one desire was to boot his little ass over the nearest conifer?

  Even as I pondered this transient riddle, a small voice said, “Screw you, too, Henry.”

  How, indeed, could I not love him?

  Kriloy, taking the scoutship back to the protection of Gortfin’s invisibility, left us at the scene of the battle. Later, two warrior students, familiar with the environs of Glagmaron Castle, would accompany him to our trysting spot on the river road below the cliff. That he’d be within three short miles of the dreaded sphere had brought no pink to the pallor of his cheeks.

  “Don’t sweat it,” I told him. “No one ever takes the river road at night. We’ll be there. I promise you. Moreover, those who’ll be with you are fine swordsmen. A last thing: If we’re not there, well, wait ‘till the false dawn only—then get the hell out.”

  He said seriously, unhappily, “For Og’s sake, Kyrie, don’t be a fool. Use those goddamned blasters at the first sign of trouble, not the last. You know what I mean?”

  I laughed. “I’ll think about it”

  “You’ve got a new admirer.”

  “Who?”

  “Me. I confess that before, when I was aboard the Deneb and we’d get your reports, see you even, in this battle or that, well, it all seemed like a video—Captain Universe and all that crap, it’s not that way anymore. Actually, for me it’s too real. It scares the hell out of me.”

  “You’ll get used to it.” I slapped his shoulder;

  “Kyrie. I don’t want to get used to it. By the way, how come you no longer mention the drain on the CT tap, or that I’ve failed to contact the galactic grid? Change your mind?”

  “I think I know where the stuffs going. I’ll explain it later—on the river road.”

  “Hey, Kyrieeee,”

  “No time,” I said gruffly. “Really.”

  I stepped away, watched the ship phase out and then trotted off through the trees and the sun-dappled undergrowth to the ambush site. Our waiting Marackian swordsmen were led by a half-dozen knights, among them the brothers, Sir Chat and Sir Vos-Agin, both good friends to Rawl. They’d expected us, no more. We had to tell them of our purpose.

  “Well then,” Chat-Agin said. “You’re in luck. One Kelbian party was from the town of Hertz, just a few miles from the border. Take their robes and dottles with the heraldry blankets and saddles. You’re nine, right? You match up perfectly. There was a priest, a knight, four merchants and three ostlers.”

  “We’re eight. Our good sorcerer here will return with you. Hell aid us in looking like those we replace.”

  The swordsmen of the four knights and the Agin brothers then propped up the bodies of the Kelbian-Hertsian mendicants, with their accompanying knight and priest so that our sorcerer, Ter-abs, could match us up properly, and then sat down all around us to lunch.

  Amidst encouraging remarks, catcalls and much head-shaking from those around him, Ter-Abs sat each of us next to his appointed likeness and went to work with paste, colors, hah-and sticky putty-glue. When it was over and we were bidding each other good-bye, we were no longer recognizable. Gen-Rondin, the oldest and most portly, had become the merchant leader. Sir Rawl was the Kelbian knight, Rettish. I was the red-eyed, ascetic warlock priest and our students were the three ostlers, or dottle handlers. Other than riding dottles we also had a dozen loaded with bags of sea salt and dried fish. These were for the trade-mart in Glagmaron City which we would supposedly visit the next day—to buy and sell.

  It went so smoothly, we could hardly believe our luck. We’d arrived at the site of the ambush at noon. The battle itself had taken place at eleven a.m. At the sixteenth hour the third Kelbian caravan came wending its way toward Glagmaron—to be met by myself, a distraught priest who moaned and cried of ambush, slaughter and the fact that so few had survived. I then whistled the others out of the trees. With the exception of the unbending Dosh—:he was now a merchant, as was Lors Sernas—they did a right good job of crying and bemoaning their fate.

  I begged the leaders of the new caravan to allow us to ride with them as protection against more forays by the “Collin bandits.” They agreed, but sneeringly, noting the interesting fact that whereas all other trading dottles with heavy packs, bales and the like of merchandise had seemingly disappeared into the forests, ours were still with us. The cost of their protection, they told me, would be one half the value of our goods.

  Young Sernas—he was a born trader, or so we found out—became furious at this and actually dared to challenge the knight-captain of their troop of one hundred warriors so as to defend our goods, until I managed to calm both him and the captain down.

  Gen-Rondin, in an aside to me later, was for demanding that the irresponsible, money-grubbing Sernas lose, himself in the forest immediately. But Sernas, hearing, apologized profusely for his outburst and was given a second chance.

  “Collin,” Rawl said to me while we trotted along through the lazy afternoon—I’d known he felt queasily uncomfortable at the idea of parting with his weapons before entering the great hall—”to enter thusly, into the very heart of our enemy’s camp, does my heart no good. I’m bound to think, old comrade, that should we be discovered, we’ll be stuck like so many gog babies.”

  “There’s always your faldirk,” I told him grimly. “I’d concentrate on our purpose, sir. Caroween, I swear, will be most happy to see you.”

  “Not so,” he remonstrated sadly. “For I’m thinking, too, that the head she’ll see when it’s been parted from this pinto body, will be that of a stranger. Mind you, Collin, I’ve nothing against big noses and pendulum ears. But in no way can my dearest associate these attributes with the well-loved profile of her true love. I’d not thought to die a buffoon playactor, and that’s a fact.”

  He carried on this way until we were slowed by the ford of a river crossing. I said, as our dottles bounced their big fat paws and waited their turns impatiently, “I’ve a mind to agree with you, my old companion. But I do assure you that if we are found out, there’ll still be time for the weapons to appear; time, too, for you to rid yourself of that nose and those pancake ears to disclose your true self to your lady. I must confess, however, that I’m bound to think—and perhaps you should ponder this—that your new nose and ears are not all that unsightly. Given free choice, our Caroween might well choose the man she sees rather than the one that was.”

  “By the gods, Collin,” he hissed in reply, glancing about him the while, “you do most certainly choose the wrong place and time for such a joke, though in your case it could be true. Those quivering jowls and puffy cheeks, sir, do resemble a Flimpl’s ass after mating. Yet I’m bound to believe that for our Murie the change could indeed be welcome, if the truth be known.”

  Sir Dosh, an inadvertent party to our conversation, felt a need to enter the lists at this point. He said, as an act of serious mediation—and at that point we were waist-deep in the waters of the river—”My lords, as my lord of Fergis says, this is no time for differences. Still, if I must judge the two of you as you now are and have been, I’d have to say that both .have gained some points and lost others; this, with your new guises. I, on the other hand, have been most foully tampered with. I’ve been made to appear a clown, sirs; given a round, red nose akin to a deformed plum-wit, in place of the great and generous one passed on to me by my glorious father. His was a stately nose, sirs, before which all of Ortmund was wont to tremble. I do pray the gods that I’ll not be made to suffer long.”

  As we rode up the cleft of the far bank, drenched and mud-spattered, Sernas, our Hishian lover, could not help but seize the chance to enter the arena… . “For such obvious clowns to boast of points on either side,” he muttered loudly so that all could hear, “is an insult to the name of beauty. A man’s beauty lies in the workings of his brain, a well-kept lean and supple body, and a lance and ballocks in proportion to make a gerdess kick her heels with joy. Why I’ve allowed myself to be cozened into such an adventure for lovesick school
boys I’ll never know. If ever you doubt your manhood, sirs, I challenge you: Run not lo your mirrors, but rather, reach down, grasp your parts firmly and pray that our good and gracious Hoom-Tet will get the juices churning. That’s what the ladies want—a constant and deep, gut-level reassurance that they are forever desired, wanted; now. RIGHT NOW! They’d care not a fig if your heads were fern pots; for all the primping and tweezang in the world will never substitute for the visibly aroused male who’s coming at them, doodle in hand, to have his way with them. Enough! You tire me. The world of Hoom-Tet is admittedly small. Its rewards, however, for the use of simple common sense exceed those of all other gods.”