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by A. A. Attanasio

  tree-crowns and into the smudged outline of his body, the weird dimensions narrow beyond memory, taking away all the lives in their billions that have blazed before him.

  Frantically, he strives to hold on to what he can,

  paying greatest heed to the combusting images nearest his own small life as a human being.

  Battles horrible rage all around—severed limbs,

  screaming men, wild, blood-frothed horses with bronze-breasted and leather-masked bowmen astride them.

  Arrows whistle, searing through space, disappearing to their fletch-feathers in the torsos of barbarians.

  And there stands the bloodstained Furor, his one

  good eye tight with malice, his heavy beard and coiled locks streaking back in a tempest wind, the veins on his enraged face tangled like chains of blue steel.

  Lailoken averts his gaze from the war god's ghastly

  wrath and notices the stump of a mammoth oak sliced to a great wheel taller than a man. The wheel falls to its side and becomes a large table and kings in all their finery sit around it. The round table disappears, replaced by stone battlements, the glare of smoking torches and bonfires, muddy trenches hackled with pikes and spears, and more horsemen in their raptor-helmets, wielding curved Persian bows. And he espies musicians and jugglers, camels, too, and an elephant. And a young, beardless king with raven

  hair and yellow eyes and a jade crucifix at the crook of his collarbones.

  The howling wrath of the Furor rises against the

  youthful Christian king with the golden eyes. Lailoken stands between them, and their two countenances stare at the wizard from opposite poles of his destiny—one furious, the other supplicative—and within that space he

  experiences the immense finality that separates violence and love and that has made him the living axis between them, fated to keep them apart.

  With a physical thump, Lailoken finds himself skull-

  bound once more, staring bulge-eyed at Raglaw's leering mask.

  "Did you see?" she wheezes. "Did you see?"

  "I saw war—"

  "Did you see the king?"

  Lailoken nods and nearly collapses, his muscles

  gummy with weariness.

  Her claws clasp his beard and pull his face into the

  wet heat of her rant, "That is the kingl You saw him!

  Solitary as a cliff this side of forever! That is the king who can stand upon horror for a love that quickens the

  centuries! That is the king! Remember him, Lailoken!

  Remember him, for you must find him for the queen—for Ygrane—before the Furor's unquenchable sword finds us!"

  "Find him?" the old man mumbles, confused. "Who is he? Where would I find him?"

  Contemptuous laughter ekes from her gaping mouth

  with a sparking sound. "Where? You fool! I have shown you something better than your wanton knowledge. I have filled your heart with vision and shown you how the

  seasons are built. I have shown you destiny! Go now—

  hurry, man. Go! The mortal event awaits you! And if you fail, not only you will be extinguished but all the future that you have seen."

  The haggard, simian presence of the crone flaps

  before him like black fire, and he defies his exhaustion and scrambles away on all fours, dragging his staff with him.

  He does not slow down until he arrives in camp and the night watch jolts alert from where he slumps under the moon's thumb.

  Lailoken lies still, curled upon himself, stunned by

  what he has experienced in the crone's trance. "The Christian king with yellow eyes," he natters softly to himself

  "The crone says I must find him. Long ago, mother spoke of a king—born of the love of two enemies ..."

  He notices the night watch peering at him curiously,

  thinking the old man blithers to the campfire. Lailoken turns his back to the guard and ponders the crone's riddle that

  will teach him what it is to be human, "What good have mortals found on earth that God can never find?"

  Only later as sleep narrows in does the answer rise

  out of his demonic memory, and he sighs, "Of course" and hugs himself, then whispers, barely audibly, "A worthy master."

  *

  Morgeu stirs in her sleep, rolls over on the straw-

  filled pallet under a canopy of pine boughs. She startles to see Raglaw, hood thrown back, standing over her. In the dark, the crone's charred face has the jet luster of a beetle's black armor.

  "Lie still, child."

  "Crone—" Morgeu swipes sleep from her eyes with the sleeve of her bed-shirt and darts a look for her guard.

  "Asleep, all." Needleglints move in the bleak sockets of the crone's eyes. "We are alone, you and I."

  "Why do you rouse me, crone?" Morgeu sits up, her round, pale face braving the steady stare from the black beetle carapace.

  "This is the last time we shall meet, you and I.

  Future time and past time intersect here in this one dark moment. Only our plight is alive, child—and it lives through us."

  Morgeu, frightened by the crone's raving, looks

  again for her guard. His shaggy head has bowed forward chin to chest, and indeed he snoozes before a fire whose dying embers glow dark as rubies.

  Dense magic mutes the flames, thickens the dark.

  The child has experienced this eerie atmosphere before, with her mother and the crone. She has crept out of bed to find the two witches talking to quick furious faces in the fire or prancing lockstep with balls of lightning in the woods.

  "What do you want of me, crone?"

  "I want to touch the future in you, child." A deformed hand like a knob on a branch, bearing only forefinger and thumb, emerges from under her robe and reaches for her face. "Be still. I would feel the timewind in you."

  True to her word, at the crone's touch, Morgeu's

  insides chill as though frosted. She opens her mouth to cry out, to alert the guard, yet not even a squeak emerges.

  The crone's touch hollows her out, leaves her empty and soundless. And within that void, images spin.

  She sees her father, his burly frame flying through

  the air, stern features clenched in something more than a battle grimace, a hectic look she has never beheld in his face before—fear. Barbarians in outlandish skull-armor

  rush among twists of smoke. Lailoken squats before behemoths of tar ooze afloat with monstrous visages—the chitin faces of insects and crabs, yet weirdly, evilly sapient.

  Out of this swirling vision struts a corpse pale

  woman with a lunar face, eyes like two black puncture wounds, and flame-wild hair. It is herself grown up—a faerie-tale enchantress in green satin robes.

  The bone white woman with blood-red lips gazes

  back at her down the years, a flash of menace in her small swart eyes. Morgeu shrinks before realizing that the

  enchantress is peering through her at the crone.

  Raglaw's ruined face gawks in surprise, and grains

  of her nose and cheeks trickle away in thin smoky streams.

  "You are strong—" she grunts with involuntary candor, straining all her twitching might to deflect an invisible vehemence.

  The enchantress's voice opens in young Morgeu,

  painfully bright, full of the jewel-dazzle of strong magic:

  "You would touch the future, Raglaw—you would abort me with your claw. But I have grown too strong. Now the future touches you. And by the hand of your prey, I kill you—I kill you with the very strength you would have used to kill me!"

  The crone, reduced to glaring stupefied, wags her

  extended hand, trying to free it from an invisible grip. The frayed fingertip and cracked thumb ball, poised before young Morgeu's face, sear to black ash and flake off. With a dire groan, Raglaw staggers backward, the club of her hand fingerless and smoldering.

  Instantly, the spell is broken, and the child Morgeu

/>   stands up searching for the faerie-tale enchantress that will be herself. She is gone, and the crone is gone, and the flawless night reels overhead. The eerie atmosphere has vanished before an excited glow, a thrilled aftermath of spectacle.

  She watches the firelight strengthen, sparks leap

  again to rags of flame. The guard jerks his head upright as though just rescuing himself from sleep. Joy feels velvety in her body, like the warmth of wine-water she has tasted at her father's table.

  The memory of her father flying fright-stricken

  through smoky air makes her knees spongy, and she sags back onto her pallet. She does not understand all that she has witnessed, though she knows for sure that there is grave jeopardy for the duke. Her fear for him fits

  dangerously into her ignorance of what she has seen.

  A child once more, she lies back and peeks through

  the chinks of the pine boughs, wide-awake in the mesh of fathomless feelings, her black eyes like two starless drops fallen out of the night.

  *

  The hag keeps to her wagon for the remainder of

  that journey, and Lailoken does not see her again until they arrive, on a gray, drizzly afternoon, at Maridunum, a stone-walled city on the bluffs above a quiet river. Once inside the city gates, the old woman leaps from her wagon, spry as a rat, and watches the wizard dismount.

  "Remember the king!" She flaps her black robes excitedly and stamps her feet on the damp flagstones.

  To avoid her fervid stare, Lailoken pulls up his cowl as if to ward off the misty rain. Throughout the rough journey, the crone's dire prophecy haunted him, If you fail, not only you will be extinguished...

  He watches Morgeu canter on ahead, then dismount

  in a graceful bound that flutters her mantle like blue wings.

  Red hair flaring behind, she hurries past the sentinel soldiers and the courtyard's leaping dolphin fountain toward a grand, old-fashioned house flanked by oaks

  upright as obelisks.

  "Such a pretty dish to serve murder in," Raglaw cackles from under her black cope. "To be sure, she'll be a fatal kind of trouble for your king—that is, if you can save him from the Furor first. To save, you must find. Have you thought on that? Look smart now, Lailoken!"

  The wizard heads straight for the mansio, the largest and oldest structure in the city. There, Morgeu has already bounded up the marble stairs and disappeared

  through the vestibule.

  The mansio, with its two stories, four wings, and vine-hung porticoes, dominates the smaller thatch-roofed houses of the city. They radiate from the hub of the

  splendid mansion in irregular spokes of tree-cloistered avenues, cobbled alleys, and rutted lanes.

  Children and their dogs flit across the busy

  courtyard, and soldiers shoo them away from the horses.

  Matrons who have filled their amphorae at the fountain do not linger to gossip in the sprinkling rain but hurry off with the veils of their tunicas held over their heads.

  Lailoken lingers, face upturned, refreshed by the

  chill points of rain as he takes it all in—his first real city as a human. No one in the small crowd that has turned out to greet the party pays him any particular heed. Stable hands take the horses, wine merchants with leather flasks offer refreshment to the road-weary guards, and a tangle of Roman officers in characteristic military cloaks and gilded leather cuirasses loiter by a tavern doorway and watch the Celts with idle interest.

  "Gorlois' men," a voice hisses beside Lailoken, and the witch Raglaw presses upon him again. "Gorlois—father of Morgeu—"

  The wizard backs away hurriedly from the shadowy

  hag.

  She is swift and easily catches his forearm. "We'll see the queen together," she hacks in her broken voice,

  "you and I—before you go—"

  "Go?"

  "You must leave at once—after you see the queen."

  Her scratchy laughter at his befuddlement hurts his ears.

  "Have you forgotten already? To find the king for Ygrane!"

  "But her husband—Gorlois—" he stammers,

  perplexed.

  A jet of hot, apple-sour breath slaps him as the hag

  expels a silent guffaw. "Ygrane is a Celtic queen. You should know, Lailoken, she may have all the husbands she wishes. Though, in truth, she wishes only one—and not proud Gorlois, either. But come—the queen is waiting—

  and the duke who has the cure for my aching bones. We must hurry."

  Raglaw's iron grasp drags the bearded old man after

  her, and his feet scramble to follow as she scampers up the stairs, across the portico, past the armed sentinels, and into the mansio's expansive foyer. Among fluted pillars, alternating Celtic and Roman guards stand at attention.

  Lailoken inspects their weapons and notes the dark

  sheen of use on the hilts and shafts. He directs his

  attention with a nod to the foyer's far end, where an ornate eagle standard leans against a polished staff heavily nicked with ogham symbols. Here, Roman tradition and

  Celtic might clearly have united in unpredictable ways.

  The high, red-lacquered double doors behind the

  joined standards jump open, and a stout, goat-eyed man with a bulldog's jowls and neckless breadth strides into the foyer. Ruddy, with brindled hair short and bristly as boar hackles, he looks more like a man who wrestles with

  boulders, an infantry trench digger, than a duke.

  Regardless, he wears the bronze breastplate

  embossed with intertwining serpents, with the knot of purple silk over his left shoulder that identifies him as nobility. Under his arm and over his hip, he hauls Morgeu, who kicks the air and shouts with glee.

  Ygrane watches silently from inside the threshold,

  tall and long-shouldered, her expression unhappy. When she spots Raglaw, that look widens to horror, and Lailoken knows then grief is upon them.

  "You've waited patiently enough while I broke the back of the sea rovers," the narrow-eyed bulldog says to

  Morgeu. "Now I can take you for a sail, girl. And afterward, a feast on the beach. How sits that?" He swings her off his hip and into the air, catches her under her arms, and lowers her gently to the floor.

  All levity drops from his heavy face when he spots

  the hag. "You! Witch!" His voice booms into echoes across the arched ceiling. "You dare? I said if ever. Ever I laid eyes on you again, I'd have your head—and, God help me, I will!"

  "Do it then, Gorlois," Raglaw goads him and lowers her hood. "Return me to the Greater World." Her leprous arms, spare as rods, reach for him in a queerly angular way, as in some ritual dance.

  Gorlois pauses, reading madness in the antic jerk of

  her limbs as she advances defiantly.

  "What stays your hand?" the crone sneers. "Is this my magic again—that I, already in death's jaws, should have less fear of dying than you, a mighty warrior?

  Coward!"

  Metal sings, the nobleman whisking sword from

  scabbard.

  "Gorlois!" Ygrane cries.

  With a razorish whistle, the sword blurs in a

  streaking arc and slices cleanly through the crone's skinny neck. The body slumps forward, arterial jets lashing

  Gorlois' hardened visage in two crimson strokes. The head topples backward and rolls to Lailoken's feet. Raglaw's scorched face gazes at the wizard from a widening puddle of blood.

  The fiana, who have lunged forward from their posts as Gorlois' sword smote the hag, draw their weapons in turn.

  Ygrane stays them with upraised arms. "No!" she calls out loudly, signing her guard to stand back. "Raglaw has chosen her own death. I heard her. She has returned to the Greater World of her own will." Her voice fractures a little, and she has to close her eyes—

  "Sent by my sword to her pagan hell!" Gorlois snarls, and wipes the blood from his blade on the crone's robe. From behind him, Morgeu watches wi
th glittering intensity.

  "Take your men, Gorlois, and go," Ygrane demands.

  Her eyes shine with tears and rage. "Your work here is done." Then, in a softer voice, she adds, "Morgeu, to your chambers."

  Gorlois levels a hard stare on his wife. "I'll take no orders from you, Ygrane. My daughter and I are off for a sail."

  "No, Gorlois," Ygrane speaks firmly. "Morgeu will

  honor the mourning rites for Raglaw with the rest of my people. If you stay, you and your men will do the same.

  This is not the Saxon Coast. We are in Cymru, where I am law—by agreement of our alliance, husband."

  Gorlois' jaw tightens. "I'll take no part in your pagan rites, woman. You know that."

  "Then gather your men and go—now." The queen says this without raising her voice, though it has the forcefulness of a shout.

  Gorlois' goat eyes tighten and, for several seconds,

  lock in a silent duel with his wife's. He breaks off abruptly and spits at the severed head; then, waves his sword for his soldiers to follow and barrels past the stunned wizard as though he is not there.

  Morgeu, following after her father with her eyes,

  casts a bitter look at her mother.

  "To your chambers," Ygrane tells the child coldly.

  Morgeu dashes into the house, and the queen

  stands unmoving until the last Roman soldier has departed and the eagle standard has disappeared down the stairs and out of sight.

  Only then, cheeks bright with tears, does she say in

  Brythonic to her fiana, "Brothers, you see how I have lost my spirit reckoner. We have lost her magic. It is ever the way of the wise ones—ever the way"—she wipes her tears and summons a proud smile—"that our Raglaw has found her own reckoner and delivered a new wise one to us. He stands before you now—the demon visitor, Lailoken."

  The old man sways, momentarily taken aback, while

  the fiana cheer. All of them know his story, well enough that within days harpists across the land will be singing

  "The Sorrows of Lailoken," conveying throughout Cymru news of the Dark Dweller from the House of Fog made

  human by the otherworldly Annwn, the Fire Lords.

  The queen motions the old man to her side, and he

  steps hesitantly around Raglaw's beheaded corpse.

  She puts a firm hand on Lailoken's shoulder and