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by A. A. Attanasio

  The ever-growing crush of the crowd swells forward,

  and the front rank of cavalrymen has to bar the pressing advance with pikes while grooms lead out the restless horses.

  "Uther!" the evangelists begin chanting above the raucous cheers of the throng. "Uther! Christ for the Celts!"

  The bishop raises his crozier, and a huge cry surges

  from the masses, drowning out his shouted blessing. The cavalry mount, budging their steeds through the thick gathering to open a way for the procession.

  From the ship's taffrail at the rear of the entourage, Merlinus can see down to the dock where Uther, flanked by his vigilant men, hoists himself atop his horse. He appears dazed, stunned by the horde of faithful who have gathered to greet him.

  "Uther! Christ for the Celts! Uther!" the chant goes on, dimming somewhat as the flock begins to realize that the king is not showing himself.

  Riochatus, narrow face radiant with the glorious

  greeting of his mission, sends a wedge of clerics ahead bearing the cross-staff. He parts the multitude for the cavalry and the baggage train. Slowly, the procession makes its way from the docks to the road that travels north into pagan territory outside the city.

  Only when the Britons have left the bulk of the

  jubilant faithful behind does the bishop consent to enter his four-horse van and fly ahead to the walled city. He takes with him the majority of the cavalry, for he is to enter Maridunum first, like Christ into the underworld. There, he will prepare as best he can with the heathen Druids the ceremony to unite his king with the infidel queen and thus join intimately their disparate nations.

  The remaining cavalry follow with the wagons,

  moving slowly down old and rutted Roman roads. The king and wizard tramp along on horseback in the middle of the column, talking idly, as they have many times before, about old philosophers, astronomy, and the habits of migrating birds—anything but the fervid Christians they left at the docks or the Celtic queen awaiting them in Maridunum.

  Behind them, four sumpter horses and two mule-

  drawn bullock carts carry the king's offerings to Ygrane—a small forest of sapling fruit trees and green muscat grapes, because the wizard remembered the queen's passion for her garden.

  At a crumbling bend that looks down through a

  copse of silver fir to the crescent of a sandy cove and the green sea, a bullock cart breaks an axle. The cavalry guard dismounts to help the foot soldiers, grooms, and baggage handlers unload the vehicle and turn it on its side for a makeshift repair.

  Merlinus, perceived to be too old to help and the king, with his wound, disallowed, they wander off the road into the lucid autumn noon. Under the day's brash heat, Uther removes his dragon-embossed cuirass and strolls along the ridge, peering down at the sea.

  Sensing no danger in the vicinity, the wizard allows

  the king his privacy. Merlinus wanders uphill into a wood of wind-twisted apple trees and stalwart oak and fir, where the sea breeze breaks through the canopy with a rushing sound like the surf.

  He has not walked far—he can still see and hear the

  men grunting and swearing below him—when he enters a

  small, colorful clearing. A lightning-stabbed oak has collapsed the prior winter, and the air here shines bright and clear as good cider.

  Before the fungus bulk of the fallen tree, the unicorn stands. It glides forward, and the air softens with silvery peace. In that aromatic enclosure spangled with yellow cinquefoils and daisies in their thousands, sunlight spins.

  The unicorn places its tusk through the wizard's

  beard and deep into the crook of his throat, where his clavicles join. Stabbing pain jolts him backward, and he collapses to his back. Around the hurt in his throat, barbarous words clot and compact furiously to wild,

  irrepressible laughter.

  All pain gushes away in the first spasm of rabid

  laughing, and blue fire takes its place. He sees the cold radiance inside himself with inward-staring vision—blue flames swirling up his throat and into his head, gusting brighter with the convulsions of his laughter.

  And then silence.

  A windy silence, the sounds of bird-squabbling, leaf-

  rustling, and his crazed laughter coming and going

  between lapses of utter stillness.

  With stupendous effort, Merlinus tugs open his eyes.

  A mirage of the future floats in the circular sky, wobbly as a reflection in a pool. Street mazes of tar and concrete blur with distance to a jagged skyline, rootless in the sky above the forest.

  The fantastic vertical city looks erased, as in swamp haze. For a long time, he stands watching it drift away, tugged like a landscape of clouds by high, cobalt winds.

  Eventually, the city floats so far it thins to a wisp, a line of birds navigating the season's reckoning.

  The birds vanish into the faultless sky, and Lailoken hears his own voice grow hollow and speak—

  *

  When winter came in purple and pale, I was strong enough to stand, hobble about, and speak. Optima and I huddled before the glowing oven. I sucked porridge and she gnawed black bread and dried meat, offerings country folk left at our doorstep.

  'Do you know?' I gummed my first words.

  Her kindly, weasel face nodded. 'I know.'

  My weak voice labored to shape my full question,

  'Do you know—who I am?'

  Her fingers, knobby from years of hewing wood,

  gently stroked the wispy white hair from my rheumy eyes.

  'Of course, my dear. You are the demon Lailoken. The

  angels have told me much about you.'

  I blinked to be sure she was truly smiling and not

  grimacing. 'Why?' I croaked.

  'What, my dear?'

  'Why—do you care—for me?'

  She hushed me with a fingertip to my sunken lips.

  'You are God's creature, Lailoken. You are my child.'

  Her child! The concept ennobled and uplifted me.

  Motherless since the beginning of time, I had traded the forlornness of the void for a mortal body and a mother's love.

  Optima and I spent that harsh winter discussing my

  destiny.

  'You are not the Anointed One,' she warned me one

  blue, radiant morning as we chipped ice for drinking water at the creek where she had first washed away my placental blood and baptized me. 'Christ is the Son of God. Yes, you are virgin born as was He, but you are a minion of

  darkness—evil incarnate. I knew that when you lewdly

  entered me. I did not reject you, because our Lord suffered and died on the Cross to teach us love—especially love for our enemies. I knew that if I could love you, the enemy of life, I would honor our Savior's teachings.'

  I regretted that I had not been in Palestine when

  Jesus walked the earth. I would have liked to have seen for myself if he truly embodied Her love as my mother so

  fervently believed. Alas, at that time, my revelries had led me to Rome and the gladiators' blood games.

  'Perhaps, then, I am the anti-Christ,' I ventured,

  huffing hot jets of smoky breath, already exhausted by my feeble effort to crack the creek ice with a rock.

  Optima paused in her hammering and fixed me with

  a worried look that filled me with wretchedness. 'You would break my heart, Lailoken. You tore me in half when you crawled out of me. Even so, I bless that day, because the angels assure me you will use your demon power to serve the highest good in all you do. Tell me now if I am

  mistaken.'

  I sucked in a great breath and shook my hoary

  head. 'You are not mistaken, mother.'

  Grave concern deepened the creases in her

  careworn face. 'The angels have told me, a long night is coming to the world—a terrible night a thousand years long.'

  Apprehensive at her dismay, I sat back in the snow.


  'Can I stop this?'

  The alarm that warped her features lifted away, and

  she regarded me with a smile of such sincere gentleness and love that I thought for an instant I had misunderstood her oppressive sense of foreboding. 'No, Lailoken.' The level look in her gray eyes fixed me with vigorous clarity, a look not from a mother but from one spirit being to another.

  'In this world, at this time, we are doomed.'

  The dignity with which she faced this hopeless truth

  strangely inspired me. I glimpsed, in her raised chin and squared shoulders, traces from her former life as a

  princess in the regal house of Cos. 'You will have powers as your body grows younger, though they will not prove sufficient to stave off this monstrous millennial night.' She bent her eyebrows sadly and lifted me out of the snow, wiping the sleet from my backside with her frayed robe. 'If only you had come into this world at some other time, a more hopeful time, when your redemption could make

  changes that would endure." She bowed her head and what she said next she said in a slower, thicker voice, with a tight sorrow in her throat: 'A king will be born from the love of two enemies—and he will unite the people of our island for a time—and for that just and noble time you must serve him.'

  'Me? Why? Why ever? If we are doomed, let us

  away. We will find our private peace and joy.'

  The sadness on her brow silenced me. 'The angels

  did not birth you upon me for my peace and joy, Lailoken.'

  'But I'm not as I was before, mother. I am only

  memories inside an old man's body.'

  'That will change. You are growing younger. The

  angels have said that you are born old and will grow

  young, because you are a demon and so must enter

  creation backward and gradually prove yourself worthy to possess the divinity of childhood.'

  What nonsense! I didn't want to tell her that this was nonsense. Most surely, the angels had arranged my

  enfeebled geriatric state to better control me in the event I reverted to my former demonic ways.

  Optima assured me, 'Your powers will grow. By the

  time you meet the king, you will have the strength. What

  you must provide is the humility to serve.'

  'Who is this king?'

  She squeezed my shoulders, proudly it seemed.

  'You will know him, for you will prepare the way for him.'

  I tell you sincerely, the joy that woman's smile

  worked in me shone through my frail body brilliant as pain.

  And all the aeons of my dark craft collapsed in that single moment to the very truth of my life.

  *

  By the time the boreal winds had slackened and the

  snow drifts had slimmed enough for the peasants to find their way to us again, Optima did not bother hiding me. But she did lie about who I was. She told the reverent,

  smudge-faced people who came bearing gifts of bread,

  cheese, and candles that I was an aged and wandering

  monk.

  Surely, I looked the part. Since my birth in the early spring, I had already grown to my full height. Even though I was finally strong enough to carry firewood and haul ice for water, I had the wizened countenance and white beard of a patriarch's great-grandfather. The rustics left none the wiser.

  'Why must you lie, mother?' I asked, nibbling at the

  soft core of the bread with the budding crowns of my

  emerging teeth. 'That you could birth and convert a demon like myself is a tribute to your holiness.'

  She patted my cheek and threw a stick on the fire.

  'Dear Lailoken, for all your supernatural knowledge, you are so naive. I am a daughter of the king of Cos. And he is a worldly man. If he were to learn that I had given birth, naturally he would assume I had been raped. And since he has assigned guards to the lower valley to assure that no heathens find their way up here, he would draw the

  conclusion that one of them or a villager lay with me. And he would kill them one by one, seeking a confession and retribution. No, Lailoken. The truth is a dangerous thing.

  Sometimes it is good, sometimes evil. And often we must lie to do the greater good.'

  Optima lived as a truly wise woman, and I learned a

  great deal from her that winter about love and the devotion to God upon which all worldly good depends. The only

  good of which mortals are capable is love. To even begin to do good, one must be willing to go beyond oneself, she taught me. All things made by man perish. All words

  scatter into the emptiness that is the future. Only love endures. All else is sacrificed to that one and eternal truth.

  As if to punctuate that teaching, Optima herself died

  that spring. With the first faint green fuzz of recurring life, she simply passed away. By chance or design, it happened one year to the day after she birthed me.

  I had wandered off into the upland woods earlier

  that day to gather crocuses for the altar. An angel met me on my way back. The lightning of his staring eyes blazed hotly, and I had to turn away. When I looked again, he was gone, and in his place sunlight stood among the trees though the sun itself was far on the other side of the sky.

  I scurried through the woods to share with my

  mother the marvel I had witnessed, and I found her

  kneeling among the copper beeches. The unicorn stood

  with its long horn touching her shoulder. It backed away at the sight of me, its large, intelligent body fitting itself into the tree-shadows.

  When I touched her, she was cold and rigid, locked

  by death in her posture of worship. A giant cry of

  lamentation lifted me out of myself, beyond the blue of the sky, and into starmist. Eternal night opened before me.

  And the stars wounded me with their needles.

  *

  The grief of that memory untangles the laughter in

  Merlinus' chest and threads through his nostrils in a startled snort. The unicorn has vanished. The cypress grove glows empty, rayed in fans of sunlight clear as diamond facets.

  He sits up, puts a hand to his throat and feels the

  cool, electrical draft from the gateway in his body that the unicorn has opened. The flux of energy focuses his long sight to glimpse future events that loom closer, within the very span of his life.

  From across the field, he beholds a king striding

  through drifts of sunlight before a startling entourage of iron-masked warriors and elegant ladies in rainbow silks.

  This king's bearded blond face possesses the broad,

  frontal beauty of a lion—Ygrane's skull and coloring—and the yellow eyes and Roman nose of the Aurelianus

  patriarchs.

  The proud vision fevers away. Not before fanning

  the hope Optima set burning in his mortal heart. Lailoken has glimpsed the king of prophecy. And he is the son of Uther and Ygrane.

  *

  With an amazed smile at what he has witnessed,

  Merlinus jumps to his feet and turns full about, searching for the unicorn. The lambent creature is nowhere to be seen among cypress shadows and ferny undergrowth.

  He is alone, yet he finds himself saying, "Unicorn!

  You have opened my eyes! I have seen the king! The king Optima prophesied!"

  His happy words bloat to soft echoes in the forest's

  tall spaces. He picks up his staff and walks a small circle through the grove, head high, mind charged with demonic energy the unicorn has released in him.

  "You were right to withhold this power from me until now," Merlinus says. "I was not ready for this—to see so clearly. My travels changed me. You know that."

  He nods sagely at the empty forest. "Yes, you know that about me, unicorn. You know I am changed. I came to know the people, you see—my mother's people—the

  Christians." He thumps his staff against the loamy brown
duff and declares with certitude: "They are the people of my destiny, unicorn. I understand that now. They work their farms, their trades. They build their towns and their churches, and they believe God cares. They feel Her, as do I.'

  The wizard peers through the trees to where

  afternoon breaks into enchanted debris of sunmotes and splintered daylight. "I admire these people, I tell you. The Church tells them that the world will end any day now. And that is the same promise the Furor offers his people—that Apocalypse comes. The Christians build for tomorrow

  anyway. The Furor's people build nothing. They think it more courageous and cunning—more human—to take

  what others have built. They believe in nature's justice, where the strong kill and cull the weak. And so they

  destroy everything the Christians build. And the Christians build again, raising their shining towns where the meek can live and flourish—for a tomorrow that may never come."

  He addresses the feathers of sunlight in the canopy.

  "They believe in peace—they preach love. As did dear mother Optima. They build a future where every human

  being is responsible for every other human being. Think on that! Slowly, groping through their ignorance and fears, they are doing the work of the angels."

  With another triumphant thump of his staff, he sits

  down in the sylvan shadows. "They are my mother's people, unicorn. And, unwittingly, I have come to care for them. Try as I might to help them, even with the powers that you have shown me, I could not save any of them. Too much war. Everywhere. I witnessed it for five years, and I could do not a damned thing about it."

  Eyes closed before these dark memories, the wizard

  speaks strongly, "I am just one man. But a king of the Britons—someone strong enough to unite all the petty

  warlords—he could do as the Romans did—push back the

  savages, stop the marauding and the slaughter, and build the shining towns again. For a time. This bright memory for the future."

  Slowly, his fierce face rises, ardent with conviction.

  "This struggle and its goal is what I met in Raglaw's vision.

  What Ygrane believes, as well. And this is what mother expects of me. This is why the angels have worked so hard to bring me here. To fulfill the king's greatness. Only a great king can unify all the provinces. Britain is an island.