"The dragon mark on my back, that's his mark."
Theo gazes abstractly into the slate sky, recalling the ghost stories of the Sarmatian dragon lord that their father used to tell Ambrosius. Family tradition claimed that these tales of vampyres, lamia, and were-beasts came from their
family's first legionnaire, an adventurer named Wray Vitki.
Reflecting on that now, Theo recalls learning from a
scholar, a fellow guest at one of the many mansios he visited in his Armorican youth, that the Slavic word vitki means magician.
"Your ancestor gathers the will to hold the moments together only when he is summoned by the need of his
family," Merlinus informs him. "When he rises out of the ground, the net of your blood catches him out of the air and you dream of him."
"He rises from the earth now because of Ambrosius'
war. Grandfather Vitki wants to help us avenge Father's
death. But he should not come to me. He should go to my brother." Self-pity blurs the young man's features for a moment. "When first we met, you told me that no one is saved. Yet this ancestor—this magus, Grandfather Vitki from the old stories, he comes to save us. What troubles my heart is that he comes to me when it is Ambrosius who needs him." His face fogs toward tears. "The Dragon has sent his magus to the wrong man. Merlinus—I am a
coward."
The impassioned inwardness of this confession
troubles Merlinus. "All wise men are cowards."
Theo nods heartlessly.
"Violence takes us out of ourselves," Merlinus tells him. "The killing frenzy of battle is a possession, a bestial overshadowing. It is wise to fear this. Those who do not are themselves possessed. Fear them, fear them all."
"I don't want to kill," Theo affirms in a fragile, freighted voice. "So, why does Wray Vitki come to me?"
"You need him. Perhaps not to kill but to protect."
That word seizes Theo's attention, and he looks up.
"Yes—to protect." The priest in him understands this impulse. "Merlinus, I am tired of the killing. I want the Gaels to go away and leave us in peace. We should be trading together, not fighting."
Merlinus squints with disbelief. "You must truly be exhausted to have forgotten where we are in history.
Recall the Huns. Remember Uncle Attila. The Gaels have lost their lands to the Huns. In turn, they are taking yours."
Theo rises, stands feet apart, arms crossed against
the northern blow, and scans the ragged forest, the raiders'
wide sanctuary. "We need Rome."
Merlinus stays seated on the plank, hands cupping
themselves in his lap, pleased that he has attained this rapport without magic. "We need the authority of the sword.
It is a grievous truth."
"How can this phantom magus help us? What can
Wray Vitki do?"
Merlinus does not know and makes no effort to hide
his uncertainty, his voice musing. "He is old now. He has served your family since before Jesus suffered. Soon, he will die, and all the power he has used to build his body of light will be devoured by the Dragon. I think he intends to give all he has left of himself to help your family in battle."
Theo turns and gives the wizard a careful look. "Tell me, strange being, whoever you are, will there ever be a time without war?"
"Is that a riddle?"
Theo looks disappointed, and the corrosive
shadows darken under his eyes. "Then you say that war is
inevitable?"
Merlinus stands and speaks in a tone of revelation.
"I say that war is like a strong river that sweeps men away.
Too wide for a bridge, far too furious for any boat. So, you tell me, will there ever be a time when one can walk across such a river?"
"You're not making sense."
"No truth in making sense."
Theo shakes his head. "I'm too tired for riddles."
"Then, I will tell you directly." The sorcerer speaks with generous candor. "There is a time when one can cross even the raging river by foot. In winter, when the water ices over. Fear not the dark time and the coldness of the heart, Theo, for they have their blessings—if you know how to receive them."
"I am tired, Merlinus."
"Then come back to your tent and sleep," the old soul says, draping his robed arm around the young
quaestor and guiding him toward the scaffold ladder.
"Tomorrow the river carries us to the next battle."
*
Spring finds the Dragon Lord's army, as Ambrosius
has foretold, marching in great numbers beside the foggy slither of the River Tamesis. The mercenary Saxons, on missions far to the north, are nowhere to be seen.
Vortigern, unable to prevent the advance of his enemy, has locked himself away in his fortress on the south bank with a handful of troops still loyal to him.
Crocuses lie scattered like bright rags around
Londinium. Deer pronk right across camp. Hare scuttle after each other through the tents. Life sings in the high halls of the forest. And Ambrosius brings death to
Vortigern.
From just outside the range of Balbus Gaius
Cocceius' archers, Ambrosius' Persian bow fires one
flame-tipped arrow after another into the timbers of the fortress. The Dragon Lord bellows for Cocceius to leave his poisons behind, come out, and fight Aurelianus hand to hand. Vortigern cowers in his fort, and the flames eat the dead wood.
Black smoke crawls across the belly of the sky, and
the pylon gates swing wide. Troops fleeing the flames fall before wind-screaming volleys of arrows. As the fortress ignites into a massive pyre, Ambrosius charges in and out of the smoke, shouting taunts and victory songs, shooting vengeful arrows into the wind-whipped holocaust.
Long after the walls have collapsed into a spark-
whirling vortex and then a smoldering unrecognizable heap, Ambrosius rides, chanting hoarsely through the ash fumes of his dead enemy. And his hate, and all the lands of pain he has crossed to fulfill it, climb blackly into the soaring landscapes of the spring sky.
*
Lailoken squats in the tall grass by the river. The
pyre smoke of Vortigern's citadel casts a twilight pall that gleams with the jubilant music and laughter of the victors.
He cannot bear to look into their faces. They are so happy, they look wicked.
So, he has fled to here, wanting the switching grass
and lapping river to soothe the pain he feels in the army's laughter. Their happy cries remind him too sharply of his former life as a demon.
At last, he kneels in the mud, crosses himself, and
begins to speak underbreath and rapidly. He talks to feel the source in himself, to address the force that pulls the atoms of him together and that has compelled all his
demonic powers and knowledge into a single human event.
He talks to hear himself.
*
My mortal story begins in the year of Our Lord 422
atop the highlands of Cos in the western kingdom of
Cymru. I and my demon cohorts were up to our usual
business, carrying panic and terror to the populace. Unable to entirely wipe out humanity in one fell swoop, as we would have liked and as we had achieved elsewhere on
other worlds, we had to content ourselves with inspiring mortals to destroy each other.
I had arrived on Earth three thousand years earlier
and enjoyed a great deal of success devastating the first large human settlements in Mesopotamia and Egypt. I had found it easy to use the avarice of mortals against them and remained confident that in short order the abomination called civilization would be undone.
I commuted from Rome to the frontiers, flush with
the victory I and my comrades had fulfilled through Alaric the Goth who, twelve years earlier, had sacked the so-called Eternal City. The Roma
n Empire satisfactorily
gutted, we demons reveled in the ensuing chaos of Attila and his Huns.
My mission during and after the fall of Rome
entailed traveling north and harrying the last garrison
outposts. I delighted in this. The Romans, Christian for the past hundred years, had abandoned their old priapic gods and nurturing goddesses and become fearful of lascivious spirits and bestial demons. Ha! Their fear made them all the more vulnerable to my powers.
I particularly enjoyed seeking out female eremites,
religious recluses and nuns whom I tortured with sexual fantasies and night terrors until they went mad and killed themselves or others. My confederates and I had perfected our technique so well in prior times that mortals even had a name for our torment: incubus.
The steep kingdom of Cos consists of ancient
mountains that folded onto themselves aeons before and eroded over the ages to a maze of jumbled hillocks and densely forested granite corridors. In a highland meadow overbrinking this primeval labyrinth, I came upon a
reclusive nun, a whilom princess of Cos, who fancied
herself a holy woman. Ha! And double-ha!
Homely as a stick, not quite ugly yet quite plain, she bore something of a weasel's mien. I forced myself upon her like a brusque wind howling down a dim road.
Let me help you see this more clearly, because
what follows is the key to this whole story. This nun, whose name was Optima, lived entirely alone in a round hut of wattle and daub. A hearth of rude stones occupied the center of the hovel, and wash pots hung on the wall above the firewood. The floor of stamped earth, warty with
embedded gravel, had no covering, not even reeds. And the bed, a pallet of straw ticking, lay swayback beside a splintered stool and rickety table. A crucifix watched from above a lopsided window as I kicked open the slat door and gushed into the cramped interior.
I found her at prayer, kneeling before a puny,
ridiculous altar of green river-stones. My windy presence snuffed the wan flame of hazelnut oil aflicker in the votive bowl and shoved her forward over the stones. Her hempen gown flew up about her hips with the force of my assault.
As a frosty wind, I jammed myself against her genitals, intent on eliciting shock and outrage. Ha!
I was the one shocked. An irresistible force gripped
me. A terrible, fervid magnetism pulled me hard and fast into the dark, liquid heat of her living body.
Nyah!
Always before, I had used my power to manipulate
small energy patterns - the brainwaves of my victims -
inspiring hallucinations. That had proven sufficient in the past to destroy my prey. Never before had I been inside a human body.
I thrashed and bucked. There was no loosening the
tight grip that fixed me, clutched me to my helplessness.
Emptied of strength, I woozed dumbly, entranced by the muffled tread of Optima's heart. Slowly, like a creaking oak giving up its leaves, I began to realize what had happened to me.
I lay a long time in the blaze of blood-darkness
stupid with disbelief. Only eventually did I face and accept the ineluctable truth. After billions of years of despair, after light-years, light-centuries, light-millennia of wandering, believing Divinity had fled from us forever, here She was!
The single point of my being, the monad of me, was one and the same with Her uterine presence.
This Optima, this homely weasel of a woman, only
appeared mortal, her mortality a camouflage for the house of God Herself. In the dark of a life-form I despised, in the undergroin heat, in the blood tangle and sodden tissues and jelly quivers of life - in that ugliness I had striven so ferociously to destroy - I found Her at last.
Or perhaps She found me. The bone-cave, the time-
coffin, the dark nightmare of that uterus provided again the wholeness I had known before the Big Bang. I was Her
favorite again. Though I had murdered the world, though I had fathered woe on many worlds, She loved me. She
loved me, because all the terror of my rampage I had
wrought for want of Her.
The triumph of our reunion redeemed every
suffering. And Her love broke tenderly through me, into all my darkness.
*
For nine months, for nine instants of the eternal
instant of creation, I turned in Her embrace. In the
omphalos-blood where everyone's darkness together holds the light that is the one body, the one body that becomes all bodies, I communed with God. Our sorrows fell in love.
She was as grieved as I that we had fallen apart.
Now we knew there was no greater happiness than to be together, all at one point with Her. But how could we have known without this futile and terrible separation? My fellow demons would readily agree if they had floated there with me.
The angels had been right all along to patch
together scraps of heaven, to build the elements out of the stars, to construct the worlds and in them the hopelessly fragile and wondrously complex forms of life. Only there, in life itself, could we meet with Her again out here in the cold and the dark.
The complexity is not complex enough, I realized
there in the womb. Organic form was still far too primitive to hold all of Her, and we could only meet with Her in bits and pieces, a few select and lucky ones at a time.
Indeed, luck alone had led me to Optima, a rare
mortal strong enough to withstand the horrors of me. Few had the faith that their personal nightmares were building something worthy.
God had room to dwell in Optima, and She had
waited there for a demon to come along—for me. She did this to share with me Her huge, desolate misery at being separated from us. Centuries might pass before another such human existed who could bear Her presence. She
required my help in furthering Her work—the work of the angels.
I despaired at the carnal truth of what She told me.
God meant for me, Lailoken the demon, to be born into the world, to be born of woman.
Not me! I cried. Naturally, it had to be me. What angel would assail a womb? And what did angels know of war and madness? I was the poison become medicine.
Stars have the permanence of smoke. Nine months
was less than the twinkling of an eye. Alone, without Her, I suffered in a muscled grip that tugged the squeezed parcel of my being slowly, hurtfully forward until, in a slither of hot oil and blood, I came unglued from the darkness. And I strangled free with a long, sudden skid into the cold radiance of the dying world.
*
I entered mortal life huge and ugly. Knobby boned,
my gray skin patched in livid pink like a radiation victim, I gazed about in horror from within a bristly beard white as frost. To any unprejudiced eye, I wasn't a baby at all. I was an old, old man, the most ancient of days, collapsed
around myself to a helpless, gristled, shrunken mass of whiskers and friable bones.
Any other mother would have shrieked at the sight
of me and mercifully dropped me in a well. Optima suckled me on her skinny teats, and though I felt weary enough to die, I survived. With each breath, my life threatened to slide out of me—and that would have been fine with me.
The most despairing loneliness I had ever known
glowed inside me. Worse than the desolation of losing heaven, for then I was with the others. I was truly and finally alone, locked inside my creaking bones and
crepitant flesh with only the boom of my terrified heart for company.
I, at least, had the memory of my time inside
Optima. The embrace of God's timeless love carried me.
The absence of Her absence inflicted a woe not nearly so bad as when we first lost Her—for now I knew She was out here in the vacuum with us, as miserable in Her grief as we.
All the memories of my existenc
e as a demon found
their places inside my human skull, and I remembered
everything of my former life. That mitigated my fright somewhat. But it subjected me to an insufferable
claustrophobia.
Skull-locked, I felt smothered. Colors looked
scrawny and fewer of them painted the world. Sounds
arrived muffled, filtered through layers of woolly distance.
All sensations appeared vitiated. And my telepathy did not appear at all.
I cried aloud from inside my thick horror. Nya-a-a-ah!
And I prayed.
God said nothing. She was gone. And for one
instant, I doubted my memory of Her. Sick at heart, I wondered if I had hallucinated the whole intrauterine experience.
Then, Optima began to sing. With a voice as
mellifluous as heaven's nostalgia, she sang of her love for me. She sang of the small birds, the tiniest of birds, which are strong enough to bear up spring and carry the warm days with them from the south. She rocked my shriveled body in her skinny arms, and she sang of the inner
mountains of the soul that each of us climbs to find our way to heaven.
My doubt passed wholly away, because I could hear
Her in Optima's voice. Despite the thrump of my suffering heart and the rasp of my reluctant lungs, I heard Her love breaking softly through Optima's voice, and I calmed down.
Before long, I found the strength to sit up on my
own. I was still too weak to speak. From inside this body, the world looked very different. Shadows seemed to have more substance and physical objects had smaller, denser aspects.
Gradually, I grew accustomed to my captivity, and I
took to watching Optima from under the oak where she
placed me when she went to the creek to wash our few
clothes. I stared at the world. It had a narrow beauty that I began to appreciate.
The high meadow where we lived thrived with tall
grasses glistening like fur in the wind. Reefs of mist obscured the lower ridges and hills. By noon, one could see the numerous valleys and hollows that undulate
among emerald crags. On distant hills, thatched roofs
serrated the horizon. Peasants climbed from there, visiting now and then to leave offerings to the holy woman of the high meadow.
We watched them coming from afar, and Optima
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