The Oak above the Kings

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  "The Cup, the Cauldron, the Graal—call it what name you will, it is the same, and it is itself. And from it every other healing thing in Keltia takes power: every crochan, every saining-pool, every healing-rann, every specific and restorative and palliative, even that wondrous tool by which you mend wounds with light. All come from the Cup in the end."

  "And Olwen's quaich—

  "—has power to know love's true touch, and derives that power from the Pair itself. It is one of the lesser graals, and all those are children of the greater."

  I was beginning to have a first faint inkling of what he was making ready to tell me, and I say to you, not even in the time of my dreaming before Cadarachta did I have such a feeling of dread at what I might be made to know…

  Gwyn drew himself up. "Taliesin. The Cup is gone, the Pair. It is not in its place with the other Treasures, and we have sought for it long and hard. It is not here. It vanished the night Olwen's cup disappeared from under your sight in Mi-cuarta, as have all such vessels throughout Keltia; indeed it appeared to you there in the hall, in token of its going. And soon now, even the healing tools and ranns and all the rest will no longer be able to perform their tasks,—as you will find."

  "Goddess, is there then no healing left in the land?" I cried out, aghast at the thought.

  "Only its echo," said Seli. "Illnesses may still be cured, so that they are not grave ones,—but no more. There is yet an overflow into your world from where the Pair now is, to make such small healings possible. But the greater ills—not so."

  "Nay, this cannot be!" I was as good a theologian as any of my calling. "When Uthyr gave up his life, when he took the unhealing wound—he did it so that Keltia might be healed, that the land made waste might be whole again. It was the royal sacrifice, the given-death—that paid for all! For you see yourself how the land was healed—at Nandruidion, you were there—"

  "Truly," said Birogue, and now she was as somber as the other two, and fear rose up to choke me. "That was a debt paid and purchased; this is another matter entirely."

  "What then are you telling me?" I asked in a very small voice; I could bear no more of this, I was beaten and afraid. "Just let you say it straight out, let it be told me."

  And it was Gwyn who did so. "It is the Princess Marguessan. She it is who has stolen the Cup, and you must seek to find it."

  I opened my mouth to speak, but no word came out; it seemed that no more could be said, ever, to shock or surprise me. I had already taken two hard hits this day, as Gwyn had said earlier, and in all honesty I did not know how much more I could bear, not and stay sane. First my mother, then Merlynn, now this… I think I made some little small sound, and then I am quite sure I fainted; for the next memory I have is of lying on a low couch where Gwyn must have carried me, and Birogue looking down upon me, dabbing my face with cool water on a silk cloth dipped in a silver bowl.

  At the memory the sight of the bowl put on me, I started violently upright, struggling against the sick dizziness. "The Cup—"

  But Gwyn pressed my shoulders gently down again upon the pillows. "Even the Cup can wait on your senses returning," he said. "But as you see, Talyn, it is a grave thing."

  I saw; oh gods, I Saw all! Marguessan's sleeveless antic in Mi-cuarta—merely a covering screen for this greater, more terrible thing: Pair Dadeni stolen, I could still hardly believe it…

  "How?" I asked after a while. "And if so, to what purpose?"

  "Naught good, you may be sure," said Seli. "As to how, we are not certain. But it is so beyond all doubt, that Marguessan has taken it. And yet there may be some hope here."

  "What hope?" I asked, for I was all but hopeless.

  "The Cup protects itself, Talyn," said Birogue. "As do all the other Treasures… It may be that it has betaken itself to a place of safety in face of Marguessan's attack; where if it cannot be used for good then at least it may not be used for harm. Marguessan may not be able to come at it just now any more than we ourselves."

  Well, that was some comfort—perhaps. "More pity Artos took it not what time Nudd offered," I muttered, and Gwyn laughed.

  "As to that," he said, "who knows but that Marguessan would only have gotten her hands on it all the sooner? Nay, Arthur did well, and will do better still. But this is Gweniver's task. And she shall not go alone: Women must seek the Cup, and men of art shall help in the seeking. It is not a task for a warrior alone, this one; be sure that Arthur knows and accepts that, else the quest will be all in vain."

  "I will tell him, lord," I said doubtfully, for I knew already that Arthur would claim this quest for his given the taish of a chance.

  "Nay, Talyn," said Birogue, softly but with iron-bite in her voice. "In this you must command him."

  "He is the High King! Or had you forgotten?"

  "He is our High King also," said Gwyn. "In all mortal things we are lieges of the Ard-tiarnas of Keltia even as you yourselves, bound to the Copper Crown in more ways than you can know. But this is one matter in which Arthur has no dominion. This is not for him to settle, and so you must tell him."

  "He will like it not."

  "Nay," he answered. "But he will do it even so. I know Arthur, he will recognize the necessity, and do what he must do. It is all part of the dan he began to work at Cadarachta, and it was not completed at Nandruidion, for there is one thing more you must be told—

  At that word my spirit all but failed and fled me,—I closed my eyes, then opened them again—I would take my very deathblow with open eyes, I ever like to know whence comes the stroke—and when I had heard that last they had to tell me, I knew that Arthur would indeed stand away from this quest; for it was geis, and geis was a thing he well comprehended.

  "Aye," was all I said; and all I had time to say, for I felt again that lurch and dislocation of reality—even such reality as this!—the spinning, the roaring in my ears,—and then as once before I was lying on the cold grassy ground without, on the edge of Sychan's gorge, my horses both grazing nearby.

  I lay there a while unmoving, wondering why with all their magic the Shining Folk could not contrive a gentler method of sending their guests back to the road when the visit was over. Then I sat carefully up, and glared in the direction of the great hidden hall behind the waters.

  "Gods but I hate that—" I sent a protest, aloud also, and bitterly, and heard a faint friendly echo of mirthful understanding. But I was not angry, nor even much annoyed, at the matter of my summary dismissal. There were greater and higher and deeper things to hand, and time it was I got back to Turusachan so that others besides myself could deal with them.

  I caught the horses easily, mounted and rode slowly up the track to where I had entered the valley of Glenshee, for all the urgency of my errand still reluctant to leave so lovely and powerful a place. Argialla was rising in the east, and I saw unsurprised that, judging by the curve of the waning crescent, I had been within Dun Aengus one full month, perhaps longer. But now there was no more time to tarry, if indeed there had ever been, and already it might be too late.

  I kneed my horse to a canter, and we dropped down over the edge of the ridge; Glenshee closed up behind us as if it had never been. And if it were ever to be again, for me or for Gwyn or for Keltia, if Keltia itself were to continue to be, all might ride on my returning timely to Arthur and to Gwen. Surely, it was ever somewhat; but this was a far more terrible somewhat than aught before it.

  For what Gwyn had said to me at the last was naught to do with my mother, or with Merlynn; naught even to do directly with the vanishing of the Cup. Nay; what he had given me at last was the answer to a thing we had beaten at in vain these many years; you may well remember.

  Long since, when Edeyrn had caused Morguenna and myself to be brought to him in Ratherne, on the eve of Nandruidion, he had told us one thing in especial among the many dreadful things with which he had taunted us. And this it was: "There is another; one who has sat at my feet to learn skills and secrets, one whom I have raised up so that all they
may be thrown down. And even should I myself be destroyed in the fight to come, or all of them perish likewise, this one I have taught may live to rule Keltia in their despite, and raise an heir to follow."

  The 'they' he spoke of was, of course, the kindred of Pendreic, the royal House of Don. And the 'one' he spoke of—well, all of us had ever thought that Edeyrn meant Gwenwynbar, whose son Malgan had been heir to Edeyrn's own heir Owein Rheged. Indeed, she had shown us a certain crude facility with things of power, as witnessed by the events at Tyntagel, and what went before. But now I knew for certain it was not so, and was racing to tell Arthur before another sun could set on the truth. We might not have many suns left to rise over Tara, and I would waste no more.

  For the truth Gwyn had told me was this: Arthur's great enemy, Edeyrn's last pupil, was not his onetime now-dead wife. Nay; it was his own sister. It was Marguessan Pendreic. Daughter of Uthyr and Ygrawn, sister to Morgan, cousin to Gweniver: She it was who had worked against us all this time. "Now shall boar be set against bear": I had heard it myself, and had not guessed it. And now she had stolen the Cup of our Treasures, and we must quest to take it back again.

  I rode east under the rising moons all that long, long night, back to Methven town, one thought only in my mind and soul and heart: Marguessan must be stopped. The Cup must be found and restored. And it was for Gweniver, and women of her choosing, and men of art, to do the seeking and the stopping and the finding—once the High Queen had given the word.

  But before it could be given, that word must first be brought. And so I rode; and, after a while, very softly, I began to chaunt.

  (Here ends The Oak Above the Kings, the second book in the Tales of Arthur sequence of THE KELTIAD. The third book is called The Hedge of Mist.)