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by A. A. Attanasio

  afterglow of the great being's dreamsong phosphors in the air. The echo of this music lulls the uneasiness and

  frustration in the unicorn.

  Soothed by the presence of the Dragon, by its

  resonance with other worlds, the unicorn has more

  patience. It feels along its tether into the witch-queen and finds something very different brimming in her.

  Unlike all their prior contacts, when the queen's

  magic sipped strength from the unicorn for healing potions

  and cumbersome rides across the Dragon's pelt, this time, energy slips into Ygrane. Inside her, another life stirs, and inside this tiny life a kingdom of lightning flashes, a thundering violence terrible and beautiful as spring.

  The unicorn returns its attention to the crevasse and the reds of winter's widening grin. Calmer now, it suffers less its urgency to return to the herd, and the animal strolls into drifting sunlight, content to graze patiently in this hot place that boils its hours into the slag of twilight, into the diamond-chip night.

  *

  Arguments flourish among the allies in Maridunum.

  Blood has already spilled various disputes over petty issues of protocol: the marching order of troops on parade, the seating arrangement in the war room, and the color of their alliance standard. Such nonsense infuriates Merlinus and urges him to fulfill his strong eye vision of the round table ... if only there were time.

  In the days that he has been away, Ygrane and

  Uther, in counsel with their advisers, have decided to establish a new city. Roman and Celtic hands will design and construct the capital. Of military necessity, it must be situated to the east of the Celtic lands, but for political reasons it must remain independent of territorial influence by the powerful Roman families. To that end, a wilderness site has been sought.

  Located among steep hills overhanging the Fosse

  Way, an ancient Roman highway, a broad plain is cleared in a high valley. Construction materials gather on a sharp bend in the River Amnis. The unicorn has dropped the star stone from Avalon onto a tributary brook of that river, and Merlinus believes now that this is a direction finder from the Annwn, the Fire Lords, who must have guided the animal.

  The location is ideal militarily and commercially.

  With promontories rising several hundred feet on all sides, the city will remain sequestered and guarded, while the river and the highway nearby will encourage brisk

  communications and trade.

  A name that weds both the queen's and the king's

  cultures has also been devised, something new to the

  language, representing the glad hope of a united people: from the Latin cameralis for royal treasure and the Celtic lodd for servant. The royal treasure's servant—Camelot.

  Architects sketched out designs for a modern city

  and drafted work plans for the construction to begin in the spring. In the interim, while the north wind and its snow storms hold the land—the very land that a year before the

  Dragon Lord Ambrosius had conquered by doughty cunning—the court will reside at Tintagel.

  From there, in close proximity to Armorica, the king's men can more readily watch and quickly report on the

  treacherous Roman families. Surely they plot the demise of Uther Pendragon in the same vicious manner that they

  have competed among themselves for power since the

  legions departed seventy years before.

  Tintagel, perched on the seacliffs, seems virtually

  impenetrable to rebel Celtic factions. The successful raid of the Y Mamau on Maridunum convinces the Druids to

  sanction their queen's move to the Christian province. Thus it is that barge-loads of Celtic families, whole villages, prepare to follow Ygrane.

  That only further alarms the Romans on the coast.

  In the days preceding the royal move there is much noise from the Druids about the protests of the Church and the concerns of Marcus Dumnoni, Gorlois' nephew and the

  new duke of the Saxon Coast.

  Marcus demands assurances that the arrival of

  Ygrane's military commanders and their troops will not erode his local authority. The Church requires that no pagan rituals be performed in the vicinity. Other territorial magistrates express anger that they will be taxed to

  support a pagan army.

  Assuaging these fears occupies what time remains

  to the king and queen in Maridunum. And then one

  morning, Ygrane stands in the colonnaded foyer of the mansio where the packaged freight of her court at Maridunum has been mounded—crates, cases, and trunks

  loaded with household items and the folios of her scribes.

  And that evening, she stands among the same objects at Tintagel in the sea's salt aura.

  Aware of Ygrane's title to the fortress, Marcus

  Dumnoni has removed all of his deceased uncle's

  furnishings and found appointments for the servants in other households. On the glittering autumn evening that the royal couple arrives, only orange sunlight stands in the capacious chambers.

  While the baggage crates at the harbor are

  conveyed to the palace and unpacked, the king and queen tour the rooms and decide where the furniture will go.

  Pieces have arrived as wedding gifts from Celtic chiefs, the major Roman families not only in the coloniae but from kingdoms as far away as Egypt, Thracia, and Oriens, the desert homeland of Jesus himself.

  Uther is impressed by Tintagel's modern

  architecture—its bartizan turrets slender as minarets and the main towers ledged with open, curved balconies that

  simultaneously face the western sea and the cliff forests.

  Running water skirls out of ceramic pipes and through stone basins in the tower suites, draining from rain

  catchments on the roofs, while a subterranean stream

  serves as a sewer for numerous baths and latrines.

  Where Uther finds novelty, Ygrane suffers haunting

  memories. Here is where the Druids brought her to marry Gorlois. Above brume and spindrift, spires of luminous limestone rise against sheer dark cliffs—a palace

  seemingly built from the salt of the sea. Salt bitterness is her memory. While her fiana paced with the sea-wisps in the stone corridors, she grappled with the duke's lecherous pawings that first night. Blessedly, she employed her magic cunningly enough to keep the lewd encounter short—yet she could not soften its violence: For the Roman, bedding the Celtic queen asserted his conquest, a brutal, physical triumph. She never lay with him again.

  The echo-loud apartments with their broad, seaward

  windows, fearless of attack, also remind the queen of her daughter, who was born and grew up here. On the wintry morning of her labor, Ygrane had the shutters removed against the orders of the Roman physicians and shivered in the maritime wind with faerie and ocean sprites at her side as she struggled to birth Morgeu. Three days later, she left the infant with the Roman wet nurses and fled Tintagel, never to return in Gorlois' lifetime.

  Several of the palace guards who had tried to stop

  her at the duke's orders died that day, slain by her fiana.

  The alliance nearly fell apart then. Tall Silver, the supreme Druid, assuaged Gorlois with more of what the duke really wanted. He committed Cymru's very best warriors to the Saxon Coast to clear the islets there of raiders and

  marauders. Ygrane, bearing responsibility for this blood-payment of her freedom, went along on those missions. To the loud consternation of the Druids and Raglaw both, she served with the army's surgeons and witnessed firsthand the gory dismay of war.

  She remembers returning north one night in a skiff

  crowded with moaning wounded, her garments stiff with drying blood, her heart clogged with suffering, and seeing Tintagel, its lean spires and tall battlements shining lavender in moonstruck darkness. The cries of the dying softened to behold it—this vision of civilizati
on for which they paid their blood.

  Now Gorlois has himself paid for this vision that

  came to Earth with the Fire Lords—and Ygrane worries

  that Morgeu may be right—that the queen, through her

  wizard Myrddin, is responsible for the duke's death. By championing Uther, she has merely displaced Gorlois. And

  though she knows that she is here in Tintagel with Uther to serve the good of Romans and Celts alike, she fears for their future. When Gorlois died, his blood splattered their union—and what begins in blood must end in blood.

  *

  Tintagel bustles with stevedores delivering

  wagonloads of goods and servants industriously setting up the household. Merlinus retreats from the hubbub to an empty, circular garden behind the shrine to scan with his long sight the terrain of time that lies ahead—and below.

  Among tattered trees and rubbish of dead leaves,

  Merlinus finds a secluded corner where he pulls his hood up against the spry wind and sits down. Immediately, he sinks into the Otherworld.

  He stands at the notch in the rimrock under sapphire

  lusters of stars big as crocuses—the very spot outside Wray Vitki's cave, where Ambrosius spoke his dark

  confession of fear. Below, in the grotto near the Christian afterworld with its fire-plumes and terraced sun-steps to heaven, a broad rainbow gleams.

  Merlinus recognizes this radiant diapason of colors

  from his demon travels: Bifrost, the rainbow bridge of the Aesir that links the rootlands with the gods' Home in the Great Tree. The giant rainbow's wet hues shoulder a

  glittering forest of silver firs—-and in that forest stand two figures, where the foot of the rainbow glows through the lace of branches like stained glass.

  One figure is huge, and Merlinus knows him at once

  for his raven-slouch, his windblown beard, and the black grot of his missing eye. The Furor, wearing the slick red pelage of a bear for a mantle and the arctic fur of timber wolves for trousers, bends forward in intimate conversation with a slender shape, someone wrapped in a black

  conjurer's robe stenciled with protective sigils.

  Merlinus thinks the figure may be an elf. The gold

  thread designs across the robe have an elfin intricacy.

  When he draws closer in his trance, he discerns the

  troubled red hair and pugnacious, moon white face of

  Morgeu.

  "They have lied to you from the beginning," the Furor states in his reverberant voice, staring fixedly at the mortal woman before him. "You are not noble. You are a mongrel—a child of the vanquished Fauni and the dying Celts. You are the humble dust of the earth itself."

  Morgeu returns his stare, her disheveled visage

  reflecting her madness in the black mirror of his huge pupil.

  "All blood is mixed," she states, standing defiantly tall

  before the furious one-eyed gaze of the north god.

  Ethiops's eelish coils roll like hills against the rainbow sky, and he hangs his giant face through the branches with a human countenance—the fang-grimacing scowl of

  Morrigan.

  The blatant deception stuns Merlinus, nearly rocking

  him loose from his trance. With panicky effort, he steadies himself, trying to quiet the muffled explosions of his heart so he can better hear what Morgeu tells the god.

  "All blood is mixed—and that is natural for the

  pigments of the earth, as well you know, you whose

  dominion ranges from the reindeer riders of the tundra to the river people of the Saxon forests. That is of no

  consequence. What matters, powerful All-Father, is the will of the gods. I call on you to accept the goddess Morrigan as your consort—and with her at your side, to receive the Celtic nation among the tribes of the Abiding North."

  The Furor and Ethiops behind his mask of Morrigan

  share a hideous satisfaction. "Morrigan and I are old consorts. But I knew her in the time before your people sullied themselves with the blood and magic of the Radiant South. You are a mongrel, Morgeu—and that is why my

  people call you the Doomed. Even with your goddess's

  help, you stand before me by luck alone. My dwarfs are sworn to destroy my enemies."

  "I am not the Furor's enemy—unless you force my

  hand, as you did my mother's. Then, you shall see why your people fear me.

  "Bold words!" The Furor scowls closer, and Morgeu sidles toward Ethiops for the protection of her goddess.

  "Your mother deceived me under the sanction of Ancestor Night. But you stand helpless before me, Morgeu the Fey."

  Inflamed by Ethiops's influence, Morgeu lifts her

  chin bravely. "I am not so helpless, All-Father. Morrigan favors me." She proudly twirls the hem of her conjurer's robe, the gold-threaded glyphs on the black fabric

  glimmering like will-o'-the-wisps in the starlight. "I made this robe that protects me from the attacks of your dwarfs.

  By my own magic, I called up the knowledge I needed and by my own exhausting effort, I shaped that knowledge to this object. Without it, would I be here now?"

  "Without it, the dwarfs would have trussed and

  gutted you by now." The Furor strokes his savage beard appreciatively. "You say you will help me against your own people. Why?"

  "I am a seer—as is my mother, who trained me."

  Morgeu raises her arms in supplication. "I have seen your victories in the trance-light. The Furor is destined to rule these islands and there is no power may stop you. I come

  here to offer myself as your warrior."

  "Morgeu—" the Furor speaks darkly, "I have but one eye, yet I see deeply. You are no ally to the Aesir. You are lying to me—and your pretty robe may stop the attacks of dwarfs, but it will not deflect my wrath."

  Morgeu does not even blink and no tremor sounds

  in her audacious voice. "Do I lie when I say you are the destined ruler of these islands? You have one eye, true, but it is a strong eye and you know what I foretell is so.

  You also know that I did not say I was to be your ally—-just your warrior. Give me the power to fight our common

  enemy—Lailoken the demon-wizard, who counsels my

  mother. He slew my father. I want his life for that death. He is your enemy as well as mine. Give me the power I need to kill him."

  The Furor looms over her in silence, reaching into

  her with his malevolent wisdom. Finally, a cold light glistens in his large, staring eye, and he says with a voice out of an abysmal gorge, "Then, you are mine, Morgeu the Fey. And you shall have your power."

  Merlinus jumps awake, the Furor's voice still shaking the blood in his teeth. He glances around at the autumn day to confirm that he is indeed awake. The collapsed garden, with trees like chattering skeletons in the chill wind, does not reassure him. He shivers, and the glum gray sky reaches deep into his soul, with its relentless promise of a more dire cold to come.

  Magic Passes—

  Like Blue in the Hour of One Star

  In moonlight, the birthmark between her husband's

  shoulder blades has a knife-tooth outline. By sunlight, the ruddy flesh tones reveal shadow wings: A pink splash of sunburn fans from a darker stain, with the wedge shape of a viper's taut face.

  When Uther is asleep beside her, Ygrane lays a

  magnetic hand atop this mark and feels inward, downward to where the dragon-magus stews in the crater-reek of the planet.

  From what part of Adam's body comest thou? Wray Vitki asks in antiquated Latin.

  "Whittled of Adam's rib, the woman who may carry your seed to the future," Ygrane speaks softly to Uther's back. "We need your help to fight our enemies."

  The ancient wont of flesh breaks my will. I die.

  Her hand comes away with a faint, weary scent of

  swamp smoke. The magus, indeed, bleeds into the

  Dragon. His centuries of proud freedom
roaming the

  rootlands of the Great Tree, adventuring with trolls, giants, and gods is over.

  Down deep, in the core of himself that has already

  become the Dragon, he feels satisfied about this. Only frivolously, with the pride of clan blood, does he desire to climb once more to the cold surface. Under the blue-blind stare of the void and in the icy blast of darkness that dissolves the stars themselves, he would spend the last of his magician's strength for the cause of Uther Pendragon.

  The thought itself blows downward in him, a wave's

  impact, shoving him away from her.

  Ygrane sits up in bed. Unless Wray Vitki receives

  tremendous portions of energy soon, he will fade into fumes. Her heart feels leaden, because there is nothing she can do.

  Like the kiss of a liar, that thought fills her with a jeering shame. In fact, she has the power to strengthen the magus. All the unicorn's magic and all her own personal glamour she invests in a love charm.

  "Troubled?" Uther croaks from the limb of sleep.

  Ygrane turns a smile toward him, intending to speak

  slumber to his bleary face. A look of caring that filters through the numb edges of his drowsy expression

  emboldens her, and she answers truthfully, "I am troubled, Theo."

  He rolls closer. "Tell me."

  "Since we've married, I've been hoarding magic."

  Uther's sleepy frown saddens to puzzlement.

  "You wouldn't know," she soothes him, running a cool hand across his brow. "Our love is true, and I've not touched you with the glamour, my own dearest self. You don't miss it. But our soldiers will miss the healing rinses I could have made. And your army will miss Wray Vitki—

  because I've used up the strength that could have revived him."

  Uther shudders fully awake at the name of the

  dragon-magus. "Wray Vitki?"

  "Theo, I have been selfish."

  She slips out of bed and opens a tortoise plate chest where she keeps her talismans. Something glows like a lit jewel, and he glimpses her elongate legs shadowed in

  sheer fabric. "It's a love charm," she announces, showing him the dazzle stone.

  A rough-cut nodule of mineral catches the sparse

  light of the dark chamber and emits fine rays, a sheen of silver needles. He touches it and feels nothing in the mica crust but the rasp of raw stone.