The Wolf and the Crown (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Not waiting for an answer, she reached out and lifted the diamond from his open palms. As soon as it left his touch, the apparitions vanished. The priest sat alone in the factory precincts at night, old purposes forgot, a new dialect of the heart suddenly comprehensible.

  By some fabulously strange hallucination from the age of King Arthur, he felt God's grace had returned to his life and cured him of his past, his sins. He tried once more, and this time he stood, steady, spry, strong, capable again of carrying the weight of the moment, of what is, of what momentarily is.

  Crows Talking

  Rex Mundi fell to Middle Earth. He appeared from below as a shooting star. He plummeted through space and plunged through time, tumbling head over heels out of the cosmic World Tree, Yggdrasil.

  The monkey in him squealed with fear. Dagonet screamed in unison with his familiar. Merlin and Azael wondered if their form would shatter and fling them free, one to wander again bodiless, the other to restore itself from dog's ashes across an eon before roaming once more.

  And the Fire Lord, the angel of God, he prayed, Your will be done, on earth as in heaven. If Your will allows, deliver us to Your guides that we may find our way to You.

  God heard his prayer, and the shooting star buffeted among the clouds and slowed as the heat of the industrial world below filled the magical robes. Gently, the lanky figure descended through the smoggy sky and alighted among weeds sprouted from cinder in a lot of nameless dross—shattered amber bottles, spokeless wheels of black gum, rusted hulks, cast-off papers and parchments, broken slabs of concrete.

  Where have we awived? Dagonet tried to make sense of what he saw—a smoldering skyline of tall chimneys surging flames—and closer, tar-streaked wooden poles stuck in the ground with groups of wires strung between them. On the wires, crows sat like black notes of a fragmented musical score. What ith thith gloomy plathe?

  "Skuld has dropped us near where my body must be," Merlin reasoned. "And clearly my body is not in our Britain anymore."

  Your hat—we mutht find your hat. But I don't thee it.

  "Find my hat!" Merlin commanded the crows and flapped his robe like wings. "Fly now and find my hat for Rex Mundi."

  The crows launched into the sky, scattering then reforming and scattering again.

  They go nowhere, Merlin. And why should they? They are cwowth!

  "We are Rex Mundi, King of the World—and the animals will serve us—demon and angel united, man and wizard and animal, all one." Rex Mundi danced among the junk and weeds, face lifted, reading the crows' patterns. "Look—they are writing ogham!"

  Cwowth talking? How can that be?

  "It is our magic, Dagonet. The magic of Rex Mundi."

  Land of Nightmares

  "I saw the end of this world, daughter." Gorlois hurried to keep up with Morgeu. She clutched Merlin's hat with one hand, Cei's arm with the other, and practically ran with him past the ponderous hulks of freight cars over gravel beds and rails shining yellow and red in dusty lantern light. "I witnessed the Apocalypse of John! Our world will end in fire!"

  "This world perhaps, father. This world but not all worlds."

  "You know that?" Gorlois sounded skeptical. "I beheld angels!"

  "The future has many worlds. In some, the warriors call forth fire to consume the cities. The angels dance in the heat—the hottest light ever in the history of Earth. It reminds them whence they came.

  "This is not a field of miracles," Cei grumbled. "This is a land of nightmares. Cities of apocalypse. Mills of fire and smoke. Ugliness everywhere. And you!" He glared at Gorlois. "You are not Merlin. Why does she call you father? Who are you?"

  "Be silent, Cei." Morgeu's grip tightened. "We have far—"

  Morgeu stopped abruptly, and Cei staggered backward in a fright and collided with Gorlois. Ahead of them on the tracks, under trestles and armatures, awash in shadows like watered ink, a beastman stood in Merlin's robes, taller than tall Cei, henna hackles fanning from a jungle countenance of bared fangs.

  "I've come for my body," the fierce creature spoke hoarsely.

  "Merlin?" Morgeu let Cei go and backed up against Gorlois.

  "I will take my hat, as well—and the diamond of the Dragon's pelf." Rex Mundi stepped forward with a panther's grace.

  Morgeu's mind raced—and she dropped the diamond to the gravel and poised her heel above it. "I cannot stop you, wizard. But I've magical strength enough to crush this Dragon's gem."

  "Stop!" Rex Mundi crouched, arms outstretched. "I need that to work the magic that will restore me. Break it and I will surely slay both you and Gorlois."

  "Gorlois?" Cei looked from Rex Mundi to Merlin's body. "What evil transpires here?"

  "You may have your gruesome body back, Merlin." Morgeu did not budge her heel. She threw the hat to the feet of Rex Mundi. "I want the threat from the messengers of death removed from my sons. And I want my father's soul returned to the root-blood of my womb."

  "Gawain and Gareth?" Rex Mundi straightened. "I pose no threat to your boys."

  "Not you." Morgeu pushed Cei so hard he nearly collapsed. "This oaf turned over to the messengers of death talismans made from locks of their hair. Now my sons are doomed lest you help."

  Rex Mundi's animal eyes flashed. "Cei—is this true?"

  "She cast me into the pit!" Cei shouted irately.

  "The messengers of death ... " Rex Mundi's savage face flinched. "We will have to enter the asylum of the wicked dead."

  The wicked dead? I don't think I like thith, Merlin!

  The King Is Lost

  Despite herself, Selwa found that she liked the young king. She had met numerous royal personages on her far-flung assignments for her wealthy family, and all had a sameness about them, some imperfection of the heart, either greed, cruelty, or fear. In talking with this boy on the terrace of the governor's palace and sharing a pastillus—a honey dumpling—with sweet veneria roots for confection and a hot brew of elecampane root, she learned of his unlikely childhood as a servant.

  He had acquired humility at a young age. And he had been trained to fight and offer himself in sacrifice for those greater than himself. Unlike those born to the purple, who would never think to sacrifice themselves for anyone, this youth sincerely believed he served his people—with his life.

  "I came here to kill you," she confessed to him at last, moved by his candor and guileless charm. "And as I have failed in my heart to carry through with this unhappy deed, my uncle will find other means. Assuredly, you will not leave the palace alive."

  Alarmed, Arthor growled, "The magister militum assured me safe passage!"

  Bedevere discreetly signed for him to quiet his voice.

  "You must depart at once," Selwa advised. "As soon as I leave here and uncle learns you yet live, escape will become impossible."

  Arthor's jaw throbbed with indignation.

  "What do you suggest, my lady?" Bedevere inquired quietly.

  "The river." Selwa took a last sip of the elecampane brew and rose. "Your party is small. You can easily make your way through the servants' quarters and storage chambers to the tidal wharf."

  "Selwa—" Arthor took the kind woman's hands. "How can I thank you—for myself, for Britain?"

  Selwa smiled wryly. "You will forgive me, sire, if I tell you that my reward will be departing this chilly, provincial island forever."

  With Selwa's guidance, Arthor and his men found their way unseen through the palace to the dank and cramped servants' lodgings. There, suspicious eyes obliged Selwa to turn away, and the king and his escort hurried brusquely among hung laundry and small hearths of steaming cookpots to the vaulted crypts that stored cheeses and grain.

  Mice scurried from the hurrying feet that scrambled faster when the alarm horn blared from somewhere in the palace. The archers pried open a grated window that exited upon a splintery pier for lading provisions to the palace.

  Several empty cargo gigs lay moored a short run along the pier. Arrows flew as the king and his
men scrambled into two of the boats and shoved off. Arthor stood astern, Excalibur raised defiantly at the bowmen on the ramparts. "Syrax is a mad traitor!"

  With his one arm, Bedevere grabbed for the king, and as he pulled him aside, an arrow struck Arthor a glancing blow across the brow. Into the water he plunged. Bedevere dove after him, and in the murk swam blind. With wild eyes and watery grimace, he burst to the surface and screamed, "The king is lost!"

  Stones of Fear

  Excalibur and the chaplet of gold laurel leaves had fallen into the gig when Arthor toppled overboard, as if death had divested the youth of his royal charge. In part by this symbolic justification and also because the bowmen on the palace ramparts continued their volleys, Bedevere ordered the gig quickly upstream, to hide in the rushes. Syrax's guards soon cluttered the banks, and the king's men had no choice but to retreat under cover.

  The river swallowed Arthor, and the deeper current swiftly carried him downstream. Air caught under his leather corselet conveyed him to the surface and bore him along with the city's rafted trash. Among rags of viscera, gray gouts of sewage, and stunned bits of nameless matter, he drifted. Eventually, he washed ashore under the afternoon's watchful sun.

  Voices woke him beneath wind-tilted willows. The iron taste of blood restored memory. Voices spoke a Saxon dialect he understood well enough, and the very rocks that pillowed his head seemed to vibrate with his fright. Hidden by river grass and dangling willow withes, he removed corselet and belt, weighted them with his stones of fear and shoved them beneath a bleached log. Then, he prayed for the voices to go away.

  "Yo-ho! Look here! A wounded lad!" Men in Saxon longshirts raised him from the willow bank and laid him on a sward full in the sun. By the cut of their breeches and crop of their hair, he knew they were karls—farmers—and he cherished hope yet of eluding them. "Can you speak, boy? You're bleeding. What's befallen you?"

  Arthor mumbled a few words in Saxon about a British raiding party and warned the men to hurry to their farms and protect their families. The karls fingered the youth's fine chemise and eyed his well-crafted boots and surmised his status: a jarl, an aristocrat worthy of their protection. Despite his protests, they lifted him in their strong arms and carried him up the bank to their wagon loaded with tinder.

  The clop of approaching hooves on the packed-dirt river road inspired Arthor to twist free of the helpful karls and lope into the ditch beside the road, intent on losing himself in the bramble.

  Soon the horses arrived, and shouting voices informed him that they were a warband sent from the king's camp to investigate the commotion reported from the British palace earlier that day. The karls pointed to where Arthor had hurried into the brush, and in short order armed men plucked him from under the bare hedges and hauled him back to the road.

  He protested that he had business elsewhere. His voice gave out when he looked up to see upon a sturdy battle-horse a scar-faced man with thick shoulders and black hair braided to a long rat's tail. "Ah, King Arthor!" A yellowed smile missing teeth stretched straight back like a shark's. "Surely you remember me, your fellow king—Gorthyn!"

  With grinning satisfaction, Gorthyn dismounted and tied Arthor's wrists with leather thongs. "I was so much your bane that you exiled me. Ah but one king's bane is another's ally. King Wesc has found worthy work for me—and will surely be pleased with the booty I bring him this day!"

  In the Land of Things Unspoken

  At the iron gate that marked the entry to the asylum of the wicked dead, Rex Mundi stood. Behind him, Morgeu, Cei, and Gorlois in Merlin's body watched apprehensively. Easily the assembled being could have overpowered Morgeu and wrested from her the diamond Merlin needed to reclaim his own flesh. The lives of two innocents lay in jeopardy, and all, save Azael, were united toward one goal.

  To protect Gawain and Gareth from untimely death, Rex Mundi seized the iron bars in his powerful hands and shoved the gate inward. Passively, Azael watched as the Fire Lord projected a cold brilliance through the pores of the leathery skin, and the misshapen shadows of the dead elongated and blew backward as if shoved by a fiery gale.

  Howls like arctic blasts scorched the air, and Lord Monkey and Dagonet quailed. Thith ith howible! We mutht not go here!

  "Stay close!" Merlin admonished the others as Rex Mundi strode into the cavernous asylum. "Stay close and look neither left nor right—or you will pay with your sanity."

  Look right! Look left! Azael chided inanely. Face the horror of the demon's life. Face the truth of horror! Look! Look!

  Morgeu would not be intimidated. Though Gorlois and Cei kept their eyes fastened upon the broad back of Rex Mundi, the enchantress dared to review the galleries of the asylum illumined by the brilliance of the Fire Lord.

  Upon thorn trees, flayed human skins hung, eyes within woeful with living torment. In a faintly smoking garden of coraline shapes, she discerned yet more mortal countenances, human bodies melted to bony scrag.

  She could witness no more and averted her face in time to see Rex Mundi come to a stop before a dimly hominoid figure. Bats came and went about this charred shape that seemed almost a hunched and naked tree in an attitude of suffering.

  Rex Mundi outheld his long and hirsute hand and said not a word, for no spoken word could match the import of silence in this land of things unspoken. Instead of words, the Fire Lord within Rex Mundi offered more light. His radiance increased slowly, inexorably, evoking color from the black environs.

  Slowly, the bent figure revealed outsized pink eyes that squinted painfully against the light. Bent fingers splayed over a bulbous skull, a swollen head thatched with white fur and papery scalp of wrinkled, burned skin.

  Swiftly, a clawed hand slapped Rex Mundi's open palm and deposited there two talismans of shorn locks. Then, ricketsprung legs carried the figure away into the barbed darkness.

  As the light dimmed, Rex Mundi quickly turned and walked out the way he had entered, his escort close at his heels. And this time, Morgeu glanced neither left nor right.

  Strange Beauty

  Rex Mundi did not stop walking until the dark relented to the familiar cerulean sky and speckled green landscape of March in Britain. Ochreous dust rose distantly from a hill path where a farmer's wagon trundled. Cranes flew overhead beneath clouds that poured down the cold sky like spilled milk.

  We are fwee! Fwee of hell! Fwee of the Devil! Fwee!

  Morgeu knelt in the crisp grass and hugged the talismans of her sons' hair to her breasts. Eyes filmed with tears, she handed up the large diamond to Rex Mundi.

  Cei marched over the soft earth, arms outflung, head cast back, a great silent laugh swelling through him.

  Gorlois watched Rex Mundi morosely. "What will you do ... "

  In mid-sentence, Rex Mundi tapped the diamond against Gorlois' brow, and his soul fled Merlin's body and lit the gem from within. The dispossessed body collapsed in a senseless heap.

  "Merlin!" Azael shouted with a fearfulness that startled small birds from the fields. "I will not be dog ashes! I will not release you!"

  A flash of light hot as a thunderbolt exploded through Rex Mundi, and instantly the gruesome figure disappeared in the glare.

  Cei and Morgeu covered their faces, and when they looked again, a tall man of strange beauty stood in the wizard's robes, Lord Monkey perched on his shoulder clinging to the man's curly red hair. With astonishment, he put his hands to his astonished face. "What has happened to me? Merlin?"

  Merlin sat up and groggily felt through the brittle grass until his long fingers came up with the diamond softly lit from within. He rocked to his haunches with a sleepy smile.

  "Gorlois!" Morgeu shrieked. "Where is my father? Merlin!"

  Cei stepped quickly to the wizard and helped him to his feet.

  "Gorlois is in the Dragon's gem." Merlin displayed it briefly between thumb and forefinger, then, with a roll of his wrist, it vanished. "I will retain him as assurance you offer no further grief to our king. For if you do, I shall dispa
tch Gorlois directly to the asylum for the wicked dead. You do understand?"

  Morgeu gaped mutely for a moment, then rasped, "You promised!"

  "I returned the talismans Cei forsook." Merlin waved Morgeu away. "That is all I promised. Now be off with you, enchantress."

  Lord Monkey chattered happily upon the stranger's shoulder.

  "Ah, you like the original form of your master." Merlin smiled. "You may thank the Fire Lord for that, Dagonet."

  Dagonet reached for Merlin and took his bony hand. "I was a dwarf! Stunted from childhood. From birth."

  "An accident of the cryptarch that shapes our fleshly forms, Dagonet." Merlin shook his hand amiably. "Now you are the handsome Armorican you always were before chance distorted you."

  "And the angel—and the demon Azael?" Dagonet inquired, wonderstruck.

  "Angels go where God wills. As for Azael—" The wizard booted the grass, and a small cloud of ashes luffed on the breeze.

  A Warrior's Death Song

  King Wesc received his royal prisoner in a birch grove on the high bluffs overhanging the River Tamesis. Gorthyn tied the leather leash of the prisoner's thongs to a leafless tree.

  "Release him, Gorthyn," King Wesc commanded. "And leave us."

  "Sire! This boy is most dangerous." Gorthyn glared at Arthor. "He is the Britons' iron hammer, trained as a warrior, not a king."

  The compact king looked beyond Gorthyn to his personal guard, and they stepped through the trees. Gorthyn quickly untied Arthor's wrists, bowed, and backed into the guards, who walked him briskly away.

  When they were alone, Wesc approached Arthor and stared up into his yellow eyes. "You speak my language."

  "Yes."

  "That was not a question." His eyes narrowed, and he crossed his red-sleeved arms over his wool shirt. "I know all my enemies. Kyner the Christian Celt reared you, trained you to live the life of death. You did not expect in this brutal world to serve as king. Nor did I. Nor did I."