p1b6fn7sdh1ln0g4v1pkvkuqim54

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Go, demon-child!" Ygrane cries out.

  Morgeu shimmers closer. "I will not be gone—not

  until you give me your magic. I swear to you, I will use it

  only in ways that will make our people strong. The old ways, the ways that serve Morrigan."

  Ygrane shakes her head violently. "No. No more

  blood sacrifices. Morrigan's thrall of our people is over—

  long ago. You are a throwback, Morgeu. The Sid made me queen to overthrow the demon-goddess."

  "Foolish woman." Morgeu's voice fizzles as she steps into a ruddy shaft of dawnlight and half her body blurs away. "You do not see how weak our people have become since we forsook the Fang Mother, the true

  mother—the mother who births us in blood, who bleeds us each month, who devours our flesh. We have become a

  little people—while the barbarians, who still worship their blood gods, grow stronger."

  Ygrane's eyes scold. "Is this how you honor your father—the father you claim you loved? What would he

  think of you now—a demon worshiper?"

  Reduced to furious eye sparks and a bodiless voice

  in the slant of daylight, Morgeu replies slowly, "My father died a horrible death, betrayed by your wizard, the demon Lailoken. A violent death so that you could marry that pretty young man, who dares call himself Uther."

  Ygrane's eyes stare wide with disbelief. "Is that what you think?"

  "Think?" Morgeu's frazzled red hair and moony face materialize as she leans out of the sunbeam. "Mother—I know you sent Lailoken to find you a lover. I know he used his magic to make a stable hand into a king. And I know he used that same magic to kill Father. I saw him. I was there on the ramparts with him as he directed his power against Father. His demon power threw the duke into the enemy's hands to be hacked to pieces before my eyes. My father, a battle-hardened warrior, slain! While your lover, a would-be priest, a paltry horse groom, emerges with only the

  slightest scratch on his shoulder. Am I a fool? Am I to disbelieve my own eyes?"

  "You are wrong, Morgeu." Ygrane hugs her knees tighter. "Your father would be appalled to see you now."

  Morgeu's round face wrinkles with pain. "Father

  cannot see me now, Mother. He lies in a grave in

  Londinium, hacked into a dozen pieces."

  "Quit this treachery, Morgeu," Ygrane pleads. "Your father may be dead—but I did nothing to kill him. Nor did Myrddin. That I know, child. I have seen into that wizard in the trance light—I have watched him over the years on his journeys and seen the good he has done, no matter the grief set against him. He is not your father's murderer."

  "You lie to save your greedy life." Morgeu speaks bitterly. "You cannot change what I have seen with my own

  eyes!"

  Ygrane lifts a hand into the wraith-glow of her

  daughter's body. "Child, you are under a demon's sway. I would not lie to you—my own daughter. Listen to me. I am your mother."

  Morgeu glares and steps back into the dissolving

  brilliance of the sun. "You are my animal mother, Ygrane,"

  her voice sounds out of the bright air. "You are the beast that burdened me with this life. I discard you the way the midwife cuts the strangling birth cord and the suffocating caul. I will break you for the rabid creature you are—-mad with lust, lies, and hatred."

  Ygrane lowers her face onto her knees and can say

  no more against such vehemence.

  "Your people suffer," Morgeu continues, her words brittle, "while you make alliances with our enemies. Evil woman! When your magic is broken, I will take your power and give it to Morrigan. You will be our first blood

  sacrifice—and what magic I will take from you will only give Morrigan greater life in this new time. Together, we will restore our people to their rightful glory."

  Ygrane looks up with tear-burned eyes. Morgeu has

  gone, and only the Y Mamau remain. They rush her, their needle-teeth and glossed masks of human leather blotting the sun's rays.

  With a cry, the queen hurtles another painful surge

  of power at them, and they fall back against the far wall, huffing through their vizards.

  The sunlight in the room dims to a smutched pastel

  of itself. Out of the darkness, tiny, evil faces surface in the pocked skin of the rock walls, and a rancid stink drips from the thick silence.

  Merlinus crouches close to Ygrane, knowing what is

  about to happen next. He can feel her heart humming with alertness in the encroaching darkness.

  Will he see me? That is the wizard's dread as a blur of darkness blotches the chamber and Ethiops enters.

  Without his staff to unveil the unseen, Merlinus observes little, for the demon remains mostly invisible to him—and the wizard is apparently unseen by the demon, for Ethiops passes by him and comes to bear directly on the queen.

  Twin gleams of malice burn through the hazy air,

  and the Y Mamau stiffen with alarm and slink from the chamber. Ygrane does not quail, her magic strong. Though his frigid force grabs at her, trying to rip the magic out of her, she holds on.

  Merlinus knows how hard that must be, having

  broken many a mortal mind himself. If he so chooses,

  Ethiops could neatly pith her skull or strangle her from

  within. Clearly, he wants something more delicate from her than her life. He wants to tear her very soul out of her, as that is her real power. That is the magic that can call forth the unicorn and command the elf-folk. With that in his control, what perfect havoc Ethiops could wreak!

  Ygrane faces him. Her brow gleams with cold sweat.

  Shaking and shivering, sickly chilled as the venomous force of the demon saturates her, she puts all her mind, all her being, into vivifying the image of the unicorn. She fixes her concentration on the animal's sleek muscles sliding under its hide of moonlight. And Ethiops watches her trilling with pain in the bones of her teeth.

  Tears dew the lashes of her tight-shut eyes, and she

  forces herself to visualize the unicorn's cloven hooves, blue as mussel shells. The demon chars her lungs with his

  stink, trying to break her focus. She traces the limber lines from a curly fetlock, up the suave contour of the leg, across the broad withers and slender neck to the hollow cheek and the rounder world of its lucent green eye.

  Helpless, Merlinus witnesses their silent duel,

  witnesses Ethiops's frustration mount until, enraged, he lunges forward and pincers his victim's throat. Ygrane gags and wrenches backward, lifting her blue face for air.

  Reflexively, Merlinus flies at the malefic eyes

  floating in space—and zips through them, substanceless as a thought. When he spins about, the demon strangler has stopped, and Ygrane lies bent over the ground like a supplicant, eyes gaping at the infinite landscapes

  enshadowed in the granulations of stone.

  Her lids close, and she lies gasping. Somewhere in

  her mind, the unicorn bends its skinny legs and lies down on the flower field she has created in the silence of her prayers.

  Filthy sunlight parts, and a snaky shadow whips

  away. Merlinus realizes that Ethiops must leave or else he will kill her. She is that determined. He can sense in the decisive motion of his old ally's withdrawal that Ethiops is not wholly unhappy. This tortuous process appeals to him.

  Ygrane is weaker than the last time he tormented her, and he—or his minion Morgeu—will return. Ygrane's soul has become their malicious sport, their plaything, and they are determined not to break it just yet.

  With the demon's departure, the chamber brightens,

  the air freshens, and Merlinus places himself over her with the weight of sunlight. Within her, he observes her fright diminishing as she catches her breath. Waves of anger slosh over her, washing away her fear, and to calm herself she studies in her mind's eye the spiral of light that is the unicorn's horn.

 
Sorrow follows her anger, and she presses her cheek against the stone floor. Merlinus hears her wishing away her life, wishing she had run away from the Druids when they first came for her. Wishing she had fled Raglaw when she first saw that crone standing under the thatched eaves of her home. Regretting that she had ever left her childhood cottage among the high groves of birdsong, the cloud forests where the pale people danced for her, and the dark valleys with their restless mists and giggling faerie. She left them all behind, searching for something far greater than what she found, far greater than Gorlois and Morgeu and this evil place.

  Tears squeeze from her closed eyes and wet the

  granite floor in small dark stars. Her life seems a painful mistake. The weight of her sorrow and her unknowing drag her down into sleep.

  A margin of the sun's ray touches her cheek, and its

  warmth in her mind is the caress of her mother's good hand. When she awakes from her dream-gaze, it is not her mother's touch she imagines she has felt, or her mother's face she sees before her. Instead, an olive-skinned Semitic woman with black hair gathered under a blue veil watches over her. The stranger's large, Byzantine eyes search her benevolently, and a tender smile graces her serene face.

  "Don't weep, lovely queen," the swarthy woman speaks in the old-fashioned, lilting Brythonic of Ygrane's childhood. "We know nothing of our own souls. We must trust God."

  "Who ... are you?" Ygrane asks.

  "You don't know me. I am your husband's friend."

  "You know Uther?"

  "Since he was a child." A mild haze, like springtime tree mist, powders the space around her. "I have tried to give him the love that his own long-suffering mother could not."

  Ygrane's chest throbs. Her heart feels drunk with a

  peculiar elation. The haze around the stranger carries particulate brightness, a soft breeze of brilliant atoms, as though a glowing diamond has dissolved in the air. A

  relieved smile softens the queen's sad face.

  "That's better," the stranger says and begins to fade into her own brilliance. "You have such powerful love for God's creation, you need fear nothing—in this life or the next."

  "Wait—" Ygrane reaches into the shining emptiness.

  "Who are you? What is your name?"

  Through the star-color depths of sleep, a voice

  reaches back, barely audible. Merlinus strains for the fading syllables and thinks he can discern the name

  Miriam, before the kindly woman disappears entirely in the fog of Ygrane's sleep.

  *

  Under tangled chains of stars, Falon leads his

  haggard company across the barren, blackened pan of the netherworld. The riderless horse that has been guiding them trails behind now, as confused as they about which way to go. Falon arbitrarily sets the face of his steed toward a clot of stars on the horizon that writhes as brightly as a hacked-off tail of lightning.

  Parched and starving, the soldiers ride slumped

  over their mounts, heads bowed so as not to torment

  themselves any further with the relentless vista of

  wasteland. The palace shaped like fire appears now to their right, a flame mist that has occupied every compass point at some time in their circular wanderings. Its luster runs like wind between the pumice dunes.

  The horses slue with exhaustion, and Falon knows

  he should call a stop but dares not. At every rest, one of their number has not woken from sleep. The land has

  drunk the lives of two fiana and two cavalrymen. The horses carry their corpses far back, led by a long tether to hold off their stench in the windless dark.

  No one sings now or prays as they did in the

  beginning. Whirlwind flies have three times swirled up from the sootbeds, seemingly attracted by voices, and swept stinging through the line. Spider mites big as thumbnails leaped from the ink black dust and hooked flesh with their barbed mandibles. So the riders must keep to the broken plates of rock that injure the horses' hooves.

  Once, from out of the star-haze of the skyline, a

  ghost legion of antique Romans marched. Bedecked in

  tarnished scale armor and dented bronze helmets, they tramped past, studded sandal-boots noiseless, bearing rectangular shields before them as if to push back the bleary darkness.

  The marchers did not see the mounted men, though

  the legionnaires passed close enough to reveal eagles embossed in their red leather corselets and winged Cupid heads on the metal thongs of their sporrans. Wanderers in this changeling night for centuries, the legion wore away long ago. Only its martial spirit persists, bearing the empty image of the soldiers across the face of namelessness, invested with a bitter purpose defiant of time.

  Recently, cloven prints have appeared in the sable

  sand among the shattered, black plates. The cavalry are convinced it is the trace of devils that leads deeper into the

  demon kingdom, and they will not follow.

  "The unicorn," Falon's dry throat rasps, and he veers to follow the tracks. Whether the others go their own way or not, he cannot care. He does not have the strength to care.

  A horse screams, and those who can, look up.

  Falon valiantly lifts his hand to the hilt of the sword strapped to his back and stops, too weak to draw the

  weapon.

  From out of the mutant dark, lightning rolls like a

  rootless thornbush directly toward them. Searing noises and explosions accompany the creature of lightning as it crawls along the gravel fields. This radiance cuts kerfs in the larger rocks it crosses, splitting smaller ones into hot flechettes that skip over the ground, splashing sparks.

  Falon has not been this scared in fifteen years, not

  since he followed Ygrane into the World Tree and

  confronted the mad god of the roving tribes. He is

  surprised by his fear. So many times in this featureless twilight he has prepared to die that he believed all dread had been wrung from him. The wiry lightning walking

  toward him stark as a spider inspires new terror, and he finds the strength to draw his sword.

  A thunderbolt flares from the blazing bramble and

  strikes the sword. It cuts through Falon not with pain but with a glory that despoils all hurt and fatigue in him. He reels about jubilantly and sees the entire line of fiana and cavalry covered in soft shapes of electric fire.

  Everyone grins broadly with intensified happiness,

  the hollows of their faces filling with liquid flame. Even the corpses sit up, groggy. Their decay erases in brushstrokes of sheet lightning.

  Falon pulls around to face their salvation, expecting a Fire Lord. Instead, some bestial thing untangles from the sizzling lightning. The unicorn appears briefly to their human eyes, its white-hot apparition provoking blue

  shadows from the black rocks of the colorless land.

  Now it is gone, and the ensuing darkness bears a

  stain of its heraldic outline. A moment of confusion passes before the riders notice cloven hoofprints imprinting the ashen ground. The prints walk from where the unicorn has stood and disappear among the conjectural shadows cast by the alien stars. At last, even the Christians believe that the tracks show the way toward the known world.

  *

  While Ygrane slumbers, Merlinus lingers above her,

  marveling at what he has witnessed. Miriam! He speaks to

  himself the name of the apparition that comforted the queen and recalls that this is the name Optima had used in her fervid prayers to Jesus' mother. Can that be? he wonders. Why would such a woman trouble to show

  herself before a pagan queen? For Uther—of course. It is for his sake, for Theodosius, the "man whom God gives."

  Exhaustion leaves him vaporous and chilled. He has

  been too long away from his physical body. He must return to Avalon. Awe, alone, keeps him from relenting to the dizziness of sleep. He continues floating above the

  slumberin
g queen, reaching for some understanding of the holy vision she has experienced—

  A cold shadow dims the chamber again.

  Ethiops has returned. Panicky, Merlinus spins a

  hapless circle around the cell, until he realizes that the demon has not returned to continue his torture of Ygrane.

  Ethiops merely circulates, restless as a shark.

  The wizard knows this uneasiness well. It has

  flogged him between the stars, through the shoreless dark.

  Throwing caution aside, Merlinus reaches out with

  his heart's brails, and he hears Ethiops's familiar thoughts, the predictable ruminations of a demon. You will die, Ethiops thinks loudly, addressing the sleeping queen. Your child Morgeu will live and die, and this world will go on through its savage changes and pitiful developments. This time will pass, and owls will cry in the summer trees around a new Rome—and these rocks will have long fallen, yet still be rocks—and I, no matter the thick centuries, will go on, an enemy to rocks, Rome, summer trees, owls, and every child of every living thing.

  Desperate to help Ygrane somehow, Merlinus

  leaves Ethiops to his rant and flits down blind corridors and stairwells, through all the levels of stone, hoping to find some chink in the Y Mamau's defenses. In the depths, he comes upon a sunken ceremonial crypt—a circle of

  serpent-coiled jasper columns that sends a seen-before chill through him.

  The jasper serpents uphold a black stone dome

  nailed all over with human skulls. Whose? Slain Romans?

  Sacrificed Celts? Lantern flames blaze inside them.

  Suspended by iron chains, censers of hammered

  bronze leak twirling vapors that drool upon the floor and crawl like viperous ghosts to the onyx base of the hideous statue Ethiops possesses—a naked, fang-faced woman

  sporting a skull-necklace and brandishing a bloody sword and a severed head—Morrigan—the Demon Queen.

  Morgeu lies prostrate before the statue, tightly

  gripping its slender, dancing, bell-tasseled ankles. Naked, the young witch's tall and slim, just-womanly body shines

  dead white as wax. The rippling skull-light strokes her like shadowy, skeletal fingers.