Then, on a windless night with the sky a steep commotion of stars, she arrives as herself and stands unmoving in the cinnabar shadows at the limit of his fire circle.
She is beautiful. Veins of iridescent ore glitter
throughout his heart at the sight of her, and her loveliness hurts his chest. His wound has healed badly, and its
poisons flare hotter as she steps wholly into the light. Her long body trembles, a white flame, and her eyes, tiny acetylene stars, pin him in place.
Sequins of chill sweat dazzle big as dewdrops
across his brow from his effort to raise his sword. With her fingertip, she tilts the weapon aside and slides down next to him. Her fluent touch heals his pain—and when daylight comes it burns like acid.
Now by day, he rides through dark glades and veers
from burning shafts of sunlight. He thinks he travels north, though most of the day his mind is somewhere far away.
The bleak terrain appears as nameless as the netherworld.
Only at night in the fire-glow, with her lying beside him, does his mind clear. She is eating him. He knows this, even as his fife-force fevers outward through his skin. He knows and cannot act to stop her. Because, as she eats him, she eats his pain—and all the pain of the world.
The entire winter, Falon shrivels in her embrace. In
soggy opal twilight, when the warrior has shrunk to a weasel of himself and his skin has the texture of
mushrooms, the vampyre gauges that he is finally too
weak to resist. She pulls the torque from his throat and grasps the crystal charm.
Mouth gaping about a silent scream, Falon's whole
body cramps with the exertion to draw his sword. He
stands bent over, holding the hilt with both hands, the
blade still wavering.
The vampyre's starry eyes peer through the smoke
of her hair, and her smile in the spring twilight is blue and slick. When he drives his blade through her heart, he is surprised. She is soft as moss.
Shapeshifters watching from the trees watch the
vampyre die. Her pale body collapses to pond scum.
Recognizing their chance to seize the charm from the
shrunken man, the predators swoop out of the forests
moon-steam.
Falon seizes the torque and the attached charm and
staggers back. He has emptied himself into the vampyre's beauty, and now he no longer possesses the strength to flee. He reels about to face his death and watches three hulks, each large as a bear. They lope downhill through the moonlight toward him. Their hideously large faces swim loosely on long skulls, features warped and unreal as a smashed aftermath.
This sight inspires horror in the exhausted soldier.
To his left, vapors smoke from a ravine, and he leaps in.
Clattering among rootcoils, he descends to a shale-ledged crevice large enough for him to crawl through. At the back of the dripping, pungent interior, he curls around and waits, sword ready.
When a massive shadow rumbles toward him from
above, he thrusts. The scream that follows burns outside on the cave ledge for an interminable time. All that night, Falon drifts between the bestial cries that threaten him from outside and the impossible emptiness inside him
where the vampyre has fed.
At dawn, he crawls into the sunlight and burns with
unpronounceable pain. He does not roll into the shade but bares himself to the searing fire. He wants to suffer for his betrayal of himself and his queen, and he scorches himself until he passes out.
Out of the fever daze of noon, the unicorn appears.
Ygrane has been looking for Falon all winter, since the solstice when she received the power of the Graal and could send her solar steed to help. The vampyre has kept him hidden in her darkness until this day.
One touch of its horn heals Falon, and he returns at
once to his quest. And though there is no need to visit Inchtuthil now, for the unicorn already knows that Morgeu has left, they stop there anyway on their return south.
At the sodden site, Falon views the dilapidated
shanties where the Y Mamau squatted among the Roman
ruins. Scattered throughout the slum are pock holes in the ground big as kettles, where blue flames dance atop fetid black ooze that percolates from underground.
The Dragon's presence makes the unicorn nervous, and they do not linger. On their way out through the
sagging shacks and stagnant ditches vivid with fecal
stench, they pass a mound of human skulls, black with baked blood, heaped about the grinning statue of dancing Morrigan.
*
The golden moment for the Pendragons ends with
the coming of the spring storms. Never before in history have there been such torrents. Lightning tangles its hot nets among the sharp towers of Tintagel day and night for a week, and the citadel gongs and moans with thundery echoes like a temple orchestra of giants.
The dragon returns to Uther's dreams. Its webbed
talons lift the earth under him, as they did when Uther went with the dragon-magus from the Otherworld to save
Ygrane. Claws carry him upward, toward a huge grin of fangs and the malevolent grandeur of cavernous, yellow eyes. Mist droplets detail rime-crusted nostrils, and every scale looks warped and heavy as metal.
Standing in the chill, mulchy breath of the ancestral dragon, before the jaws' hooked clamp, Uther sees frayed skin hanging from its chin like lepers' rags, kelpy growths and badges of cankers at the hinged corner of its mouth.
And he grasps that the beast is very old.
"Uther-r-r," its sea-depth voice growls like a drumming army.
Uther's heart beats thick, and he writhes awake in a
slather of fright. Sometimes, his wife's gentle cosseting returns him to sleep. Most nights he stands at the tower window and stares.
As fog crawls the moors like the ghosts of dead
millions, and fear sings out from his heart's darkest lanes of anonymity and hopelessness, he knows the time has come again for war.
*
The Furor sits in council with his demons, Azael and
Ethiops. They squat together in the silver darkness of the Otherworld. Nether stars breathe with the slow respiration of the Dragon.
"I will not meet you down here again," the Furor complains, his one eye glaring from within his knotted scowl. He loathes their ghastly skewed bodies, though he knows full well they are only appearances—one a bulbous
skull-face dangling among eel-ish slitherings, the other a nauseous whale hide full of nodules and laboring slug mouths fibrillose with fangs.
"Lord," the viperous Ethiops speaks in a voice pale with calm, "we are in no danger from the Dragon here among these root-coils of your planet's magnetic tree."
"Do not think to instruct me," the Furor warns, holding his voice flat, devoid of emotion. "Two of your kind are already dead—"
"Not dead, lord," Ethiops blandly corrects.
"Wounded."
"They are dead to this world," the Furor states more loudly. "You are no match for the Fire Lords. I should squeeze my magic out of you right now and fling you back into the House of Fog."
The demons sidle closer together. "We are your
servants, lord," Ethiops assures him, while thinking how best to control him. The interference of the angels has overwhelmed him and Azael, and they disagree about how to utilize their god to ruin their enemy's strategy.
Azael wants to advance the furious god and his
swarms of warriors across the island, destroying
everything. But Ethiops senses that somehow the angels expect and want that.
The angels seem to have invested their power in a
few humans, opportunistically creating an elite fighting force around their entranced companion Lailoken. "We have begged audience with you in this hidden place, to ask you to wait at Londinium
for the arrival of your enemies."
Azael remains silent, not willing to betray his discord with Ethiops for fear of further enraging this scowling god.
"Wait?" The Furor's frown screws tighter around his mad eye. "The last time you called me to this dismal place you had me talking to Morgeu—a child!—and you
disguised as a goddess! It was disgusting. And now, you tell me to wait." He tugs at his wild beard. "I will not wait. I will crush my enemies. And you will help me."
"We want to help you, lord," Ethiops protests with a tinge of impatience. "The Fire Lords are scattered across their flimsy creation. Few move about this planet. They cannot long hold together the monstrosity they call
civilization. We can defeat them. But—"
"I will not abide that word!" the Furor thunders. "We will defeat the Fire Lords! I have staked everything I am upon this."
"And we will prevail," Ethiops insists. "I tell you, the Fire Lords are spread too thin to interfere with our attacks.
We can destroy empires with impunity. The Fire Lords
cannot be everywhere at once."
"But!" the Furor growls. "But—what?"
"Merely this—the Fire Lords are taking advantage of our old ally Lailoken's laughable presence as a gutsack.
The angels are putting far more care than usual into
defending him and his circle—your human enemies."
"Why?"
"They have never had a demon to work for them
before," Ethiops reasons. "I believe they are going to use him to establish their new religion in these islands—in all the northlands, if they can.
"No! He must be destroyed!"
"Yes." Ethiops leans closer, eager to press his manipulation. "You can destroy him. You are powerful enough. But the Fire Lords will protect Lailoken, and even you dare not stand against them."
"That is why you led the child to me, the daughter of the Celtic queen." The Furor begins to understand. The Dark Dwellers are masters of destruction, adept at using the most mere beings to achieve violent results. "Morgeu is your disguise, isn't she? Your way to approach close
enough to the fugitive demon to separate him from the Fire Lords so that I can kill him."
Ethiops's smile opens in his skeletal face like a
bright blade. "Azael and I will distract the angels. Morgeu will kill the unicorn. That is the Fire Lords' anchor in this world. They are using its body to focus themselves on the planet's surface. With it gone, they will scatter again, and you will have the satisfaction of destroying the one who thwarts you."
"With Lailoken ripped free of his gutsack," Azael says, glad he kept his silence long enough to fix the hook of their influence deeper in this god, "you will triumphantly sweep away your enemies and seize these islands for your own. We will kill them all."
"And Londinium is where you will stage this
slaughter?" the Furor asks, the tightness of his voice relaxing.
"Londinium," Ethiops affirms, stepping back with his partner into the land of shadow. Their grisly bodies waft away, insubstantial as darkness.
*
When the steely storm clouds retreat north and
leave the sky dark blue, the Wheel-Table rolls out of Tintagel—and the king and queen carry the Graal and the Sword into the world. There is no doubt now of the two going together to war. They are the alliance, the living emblem of the kingdom, and must face together the full risk
of their worth.
The march to Londinium begins with enormous
fanfaronade, as if the Pendragons march in the company of Caesar himself, off to conquer the British Isles. Within a day, however, the truth of their plight sinks in.
The purple highlands of Exmoor climb before them
in horizons of gorse, and out of hidden folds in the land, barbarians attack. They are small, rogue squads of
berserkers who break the volunteers' line and send the farmers' sons and village recruits scampering. With deadly efficiency, the raiders smash a dozen heads from behind before the cavalry can push through the confusion and dispatch the attackers.
Pendragon's army, bloated as it is with well-wishers, dreamers, pilgrims, and traders, makes a sorry spectacle.
The ragtag volunteers continue to get in the way of the trained soldiers. So Uther creates a separate division for them—the king's auxiliaries—assigned to support the
infantry of Marcus Dumnoni and Uther's cavalry. It is with them that Merlinus travels, accompanying them on their daily food forages.
At irregular intervals, berserker squads howl up out
of ravines across the heath. They are the religious
devotees of their people, the most ardent worshipers of the Furor. At night, shallow-draft boats skim to shore from the black sea after days sailing from Frisia, Jutland, or the Isle of Gaels. The ax-wielding men they release on the moors are determined to go directly to the Hall of Heroes among the Aesir in the only way possible—by dying in battle.
The cavalry kills most of them from afar.
Occasionally, as in their first skirmish, they break through the line and dance death among the panicky ranks. By the time Pendragon reaches the City of the Legion, where the Celtic army awaits him, his troops are bloodied and
skittery.
Kyner, Urien, and Lot camp outside the black-walled
city in a wide, colorful sprawl of tents. This is the first return of the Celts to the lowlands that they lost centuries ago to the north tribes and the Romans. They study the landscape with awe-filled attention—the river plains of their ancestors.
The allied armies of Celts and Britons roll east like weather. The barbarians fly ahead of them, as the war council has envisioned.
Outside Aquae Sulis, where Bors Bona has come
down in full host from the north to greet them, a wedge of Jutes and Angles lies trapped. For two days, whole clans are caught running through the woods and hiding in the underbrush. The king has a score of army priests armed only with holy water stationed at his left, and Marcus
Dumnoni's lance corps for his right.
Any and all disarmed barbarians who bow before
the priests are baptized on the spot and whisked off in wagons to farms for Bible study and hard labor. Those who fight are killed; defiant women and children, too. And the lance corps does its killing with fast, precise fury. The cavalry hunts down the wild runners. Uther wants all
necessary killing done swiftly, with no torture or burnings.
The enemy slain are sprinkled with lime, packed with sod, and laid to rest under rock cairns.
Ygrane and her fiana follow a day behind the army and work magic on the cairns. In the green mists of spring twilight, she calls the pagan souls out of the Otherworld and back to their bones. As they waft out of the gloaming, the Sid snatch them away to the Wood of the Gods. There, the blood-wet souls of hunters dance with the Piper and the elk-king and all the animal gods they hunted. Many of these souls go mad and come to the hunter's end. Only lifetimes can heal them. Others revel. The animals inside them live again and share secrets, running off together under the twisting trees and unopened buds.
After her work with the dead, Ygrane sits in her tent with the Graal. Tiny people kneel—faerie burning bright as wicks while she swirls water in the Graal. Sky colors reflected from the open flue of the tent spin energy into the water. When she drinks, she grows stronger, the baby
within her stronger as well, and her sight becomes keen enough for a while to see her brother Falon.
Worn thin as a kestrel, Falon's sun-stained face
searches the southern tree line for the unicorn that leads him toward Londinium. About his neck, dangling from his torque by cords of his orange hair, Ygrane's love charm flashes bright as a spirit.
*
In the Cotswold Hills, smoke plumes mark Bors
Bona's vehement troops and the end of the cairn magic.
Among sugary blossoms, pagan families dangle, nailed to trees.
Growing from the boughs in grotesque contortions, a pale, bruised mushroom-people has emerged. It is
necessary, for an instant, to believe that these mottled, bloated gargoyles are a devil's fungus—men- and women-shapes in the tree forks, and under them the small black blossoms of children.
The king stares unblinking into the scalded faces of
these corpses. His skin burns in the stink, and his horse shimmies, stung by flies and spooked by the stench of death. He sends a herald ahead to Bors with the blunt
command to bury the enemy dead. That evening, the hills jump with flames. Bors laughs that he has buried the
enemy with fire—in pagan style.
The laughter stops later that night when the wind-
whipped holocaust shoves the army east to the thawed
bogs of the river plains. The Wheel-Table gets stuck. And far worse, the cavalry labors, nearly useless in this footless terrain. Out of the cane-brakes, Pictish berserkers lunge, singling out the unhorsed bowmen and hacking at them
with their massive axes.
Panic flares through the unseasoned village troops,
and they bolt for higher ground to the south. Veterans who have fought the Northmen before try in vain to stop the rout. Unable to ride free of the panicked mob and use their arrows, they remain trapped.
Screeching and yowling in their barbarous tongue,
the Picts rush down headlong from the bluffs. In the
starlight at a distance, they are a vaporous swarming of shadow hulks. The army dissolves in a panic, scattered and separated by tussocks and black fens. Shouts and
cries for order splinter against the screams of horses.
Then, the Picts come thrashing through the
canebrakes out of the south, bursting ferociously upon the army like demons sprung from another dimension. Heads shaved bald around topknots and side crests, the
gruesome warriors, some with dragon-skin tattooed on
their broad bodies, spear, club, and ax everyone in their path.
The horror of the Britons' death cries spurs survivors to charge back into the ranks, and they collide with the regulars.
Uther proves a poor general. Separated from
Marcus Dumnoni, his best military adviser, he does not know what commands to shout.
From atop his horse, Merlinus sees the king twisting
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