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

by A. A. Attanasio

"You are a new man, Dagonet—with a new destiny." The wizard removed his long hat and exposed a hoary visage of baneful aspect. He glared at Lord Monkey, who was fingering one of the white arrows, and the beast cringed, dropped the arrow, and leaped with a squeal into Dagonet's lap. Though wholly transformed, Dagonet retained for the beast a cherished scent, and it clung fiercely to its protector and glared at Merlin. "Would you consider earning your place in our army by a mission for the king—a magical mission?"

  "Me?" Dagonet's freckles stood out in russet contrast to his suddenly pallid features. "I think not, my lord Merlin. I still have nightmares of our last magical mission that spanned the heights and depths of creation."

  "Of course, Dagonet. I understand." Merlin stroked his wispy, forked beard. "In time, your juggling skills will improve, and you will again hold a worthy place at court as a gleeman. I doubt, alas, that such position will much impress Chief Aidan or his fetching daughter Eufrasia, who finds your new pulchritude so alluring. What hope had you, once a dwarf, still a dwarf in heart, of winning such a lovely hand and the title to go with it?"

  "I am no dwarf in heart, Merlin!" Dagonet's offended tone inspired Lord Monkey to stand erect and scowl at the wizard. "I have been a dwarf all my life. I must yet recognize my new way." His voice softened. "Do you think Eufrasia finds me—attractive?"

  "Anyone can see that, lad." Merlin placed his hat back on his long skull and stood. "You are a handsome man now, Dagonet—a handsome man of no station. A chieftain's daughter, she requires station."

  Dagonet sighed resignedly and put a finger to Lord Monkey's silver-whiskered chin. "It seems, master, we are conscripted to the king's service—for hope of love and worthy station."

  The Bird in the Stone

  For hope of love and worthy station, Dagonet agreed to do hazardous work that none other of the king's company had either skill or fortitude to fulfill. The wizard gave him the reed sheaf of white arrows with instructions to ride north ahead of the army, followed by Lord Monkey in a dray cart.

  By the end of his day's travel, during the moment of the first star, he was to let loose one arrow at that earliest lamplight of heaven. Guided by magic, the arrow would land at the site of treasure. He would retrieve what wealth he found, load it upon the dray with the magical arrow, and send Lord Monkey and the dray back to the king.

  Having suffered the fabulous tour of heaven and hell with Rex Mundi, Dagonet had little doubt that what Merlin required of him could be accomplished. Yet he worried about leaving Lord Monkey to drive a one-horse dray cart across forest paths and uncertain roads.

  The wizard laughed a silent guffaw, an eerily mute mask of merriment. "I will affix the brailles of my heart to Lord Monkey and guide him swiftly back to me each night by faerie paths. He shall be returned to you each morning, refreshed and sound, I promise."

  Dagonet did as the wizard instructed. At the end of his first day's ride north, he tied off his steed to Lord Monkey's dray cart, fixed a white arrow to a recurved, composite bow—a bow with the curled shape of a temple demon's hostile smile—and aimed for the first star in the fading blue. Through woods strewn with long shadows and spokes of scarlet sunlight, he ran, green tunic slapping at his knees.

  The magical arrow had come down upon a boulder large as a man's torso. The silver tip had wedged itself in a narrow cleft. As he worked the arrow loose, the entire rock split asunder with a brittle snap. Each half revealed in the stone an impression of ribs, wing-bones, curled spine, grasping talons, and a wedged skull. Dagonet's fingers played lightly over the impression of feathers pressed into the rock with the finest filamentary detail.

  This was not the treasure he had expected, yet he dragged each of the heavy stone's two halves through the woods to where the dray cart waited. Laboriously, he loaded the split boulder and laid between its parts the scratched arrow that had found the bird in the stone.

  Darkness held the forest by the time Lord Monkey, grasping the reins and standing with commanding authority upon the bench of the dray cart, drove south through the woods.

  In the morning, as Dagonet bathed himself in a cold spring among budding withes of willow, he ached from the effort of dragging the split rock. Hearing the creak of the dray cart returning, he climbed from the water with a bent stoop and found a small parchment secured with a purple ribbon to Lord Monkey's back.

  The message read: Dagonet of the Quest, the first treasure you have found will serve the king well. The bishop of Auxerre, who collects antediluvian vestiges for the Antipope Laurentius, will pay handsomely for this bird that predates Noah. Do not mind the crook in your back. Ride hard two days north and fire the second white arrow at the second star that appears on the first clear night thereafter. God's speed for love of Britain and king — M.

  The Secret of Flying

  Lot insisted that Morgeu remain at his side during the king's march to Camelot. By the deepening of creases about his already wrinkled and aged face, she recognized the strain that her long absence had inflicted on him. She did not press for her independence even though she longed to return to the wild places of the north where she could work unhindered her magic to reclaim from Merlin the soul he had stolen from her womb. She knew Lot needed her with him.

  Without complaint, she accepted her uxorial chores, brewing tonics that kept him strong, working subtle enchantments that eased his worries, and spending time with their sons, who were quickly becoming men as they accompanied the warlords from the campaign tents to the viewing ranges of the king's military operations. To their father's delight, all that Gawain and Gareth spoke of lately was combat—how to defend from a low-lying position, how to rout brigands from a dell, how to best use cavalry in hilly terrain, how to kill with bare hands.

  To remind her sons of the world's other powers, she sat with them each night by their campfire and told tales that, though true, sounded fantastic to the boys: the white serpent of the rocky places on the mountaintop that, when biting its tail, encircled endless time and so could reveal all of past and future if one knew how to ask and listen; the pale people, renowned as the Daoine Sid, who dwelled in the hollow hills and who waited in ambush within rooty caves or misty groves to abduct victims to be fed to the Dragon that was the fire within the Earth; the unicorn that ran in herds over the hills and fields of the sun ...

  When her family slept, Morgeu lay beside them. But she did not sleep, for she knew the secret of flying. To outward eyes, she appeared unconscious. In fact, her mind had departed her physical body and flown with her dream-flesh into the sky of darkest light.

  The astral realm shone with luminous darkness. Within its gelid depths all physical and psychic space was available. As a young woman, first learning this secret from her mother the Celtic queen, who had herself learned it from the Druids, she had insisted on flying to the farthest reaches of the planet. She had visited Cathay, flitting through a busy, loud market cluttered with bright colors of kumquats, mangoes, amber-glazed ducklings, purple octopuses.

  These nights in King Arthor's camp, she traveled secretly to nearby tarns and muggy ponds, places of sinking things, where night vapors hung in the dank air like powdered jade or fine mold. Under the dark bower of swamp trees, the moon small in the sky and granular among the branches like spilled salt, she met with the undead.

  They appeared by astral light as they had when alive—Phoenician, Persian, Cretan and Roman figures—women and men in archaic raiment, hair oiled and coiffed in ringlets and elaborate tiers of foregone styles. For centuries, they had dwelled in these low, marshy hollows, coming to this hyperborean isle with the first Romans to escape the necromancers of their own lands. For centuries, they had survived on the blood of lost wanderers, occasional hunters, foolish treasure-seekers.

  In the coppery green haze that shimmered like dust, Morgeu gathered about her the undead, learned their names, their stories, and then led them to where their cold hungers could be sated.

  They Move among Us Unseen

  Merlin knew at on
ce what was happening when the king's soldiers began to fall sick, beset with chills and no fevers, waking from ferocious nightmares too weak to march and unable to stomach even the sight of food.

  "Vampyres," he informed Bedevere in the carmine light of day's end when the army sprawled like a giant among the scattered glades of the hillsides. "We've ten days' march ahead of us before we arrive at Camelot. At this rate, we'll be decimated when we get there."

  "I'll gather the priests, and we'll set up perimeters of holy candles and prayer vigils," Bedevere offered.

  "No." Merlin pulled the steward closer by his arm and walked with him away from the king's tent. "Arthor must not know. He will suspect Morgeu and rightly. That is what she wants, to alarm him and thus to bend me to her will and force me to return Gorlois' soul."

  "She has not yet miscarried that unholy child?" Bedevere's tall brow creased with concern. "I know a tincture that will purge her womb. Shall I see that it finds its way to her drink?"

  Merlin flashed a piqued look and spoke as if to a child, "She is an enchantress, Bedevere. Don't even think to challenge her." The wizard pulled the steward to where the grooms brushed and fed the cavalry's steeds, and he picked up a wooden bucket. On the iron hoop that bound the slats, he scrawled with red chalk a series of barbaric sigils.

  "Take this bucket, fill it with tarn water, the more black with leaf-rot the better. Then post yourself outside the tent of the stricken. Watch the water. When you see the vampyre reflected—" Merlin clapped the wooden top to the bucket. "Catch the devils this way. They move among us unseen, because they come in ethereal guise, too wary to expose their physical forms. We will catch their souls!"

  "What am I to do with the capped bucket?" asked Bedevere.

  Merlin merely smiled. That night, he equipped the steward with a dozen marked buckets, each filled with water dark with steeped leaves. By dawn, a sleepy Bedevere had capped all of them. The wizard lined them up in a clearing where red dawnlight climbed down the trees.

  With the sun at her back, Morgeu came striding through the haze of the cooking fires. She shoved past the horses being saddled for the day's march.

  "Do not destroy them, Lailoken." Morgeu placed a red-slippered foot on the first bucket that Merlin reached to uncover. "They came at my behest."

  "And what ire the survivors will harbor against you, Morgeu!" A crooked smile bent his lips. "They will come for you—and yours."

  Her round face squeezed a frown. "You want to destroy me."

  "I want you to oppose our king no more."

  Morgeu gripped Merlin's robe. "Give me back my child's soul."

  "Never, you incestuous harlot!"

  Morgeu raised her hand to strike the wizard, her small dark eyes flashing—and checked herself with a snarl.

  Merlin's smile widened to a grin of yellow, snaggled teeth. "If you hurry, you can carry each of these buckets to a dark place before we break camp. Do not dare thwart me again, Morgeu, or next time I will forget I am a Christian."

  The Beauty of Horses

  Spring rains sizzled through the trees when the king's army arrived at the River Amnis and Camelot hove into view. Much work had been achieved in the long months that the warriors had been away. The bartizans, spires, belvederes, and curtain-wall towers had all been completed. Even against the gray sky, with the black-and-green dragon pennants of the king's ancestors and the banners in Arthor's own colors of red and white hanging limply, the citadel offered a spectacular vista.

  While the army marched through Cold Kitchen, greeted by the trumpeting of elephants and joined by dancing bears and the antics of wise dogs, King Arthor rode swiftly ahead. The fortress-city stood triumphant under stormy cloudbanks and the deepening green of the mountains. Waterfowl flapped up out of the grass before his gallop: egrets, herons, and cranes that had returned to the River Amnis with the clement season.

  On the champaign around Camelot grazed a herd of slender-legged, sleekly muscled horses shining almost blue in the rain, silent and fluid as running ink. Arthor slowed to a stop and sat enraptured by the beauty of horses. He watched their ebony hooves dancing in the morning ground mist, their long, intelligent heads bowing and lifting, swinging to regard each other with smirking eyes of grace. Already they had become well aware of him studying them. The wells of their nostrils sampled the news of his arrival.

  The master masons and carpenters who greeted the king upon his entry into the slate-paved ward of the castle informed him that the sable horses had arrived at Cold Kitchen on a barge from Palaestina Salutaris as a gift of the dux Arabiae at Bostra.

  The Christian dux had heard of the boy-king's struggle against pagan invaders and the opposition of Severus Syrax. The redoubtable Syrax family had long been trade rivals to the dux Arabiae, and he was glad to do what he could to offer help against his foes.

  "When last we stood in this citadel, sire," Bedevere remarked to the king after they dismounted and strolled awestruck across the bailey, "your hair yet bristled like a hedgehog's and you'd rather have worn a common tunic than a royal chemise. And now—"

  Arthor did not hear his steward, so engrossed was he by the many towers and battlements of the outer ward—and then, the elegant spired archway to the central court, where a tall fountain of green tourmaline waterspouts emptied onto interlayered basins of carnelian all carven with images of dolphins, salmon, squid, conger eels, and mermaids.

  "Last we were here, sire, you told me you did not feel like a king in your heart." Bedevere admired how regal Arthor appeared with his hair grown out and his royal attire well worn to his form. "How does your heart feel now?"

  "Too much blood of our own people has spilled in the slaying of our enemies," Arthor answered quietly, almost absently, absorbed by the graven heights of the inner ward. "If I am not a king, Bedevere, then I am a heinous murderer."

  []

  Mother Mary, Camelot is beautiful. Evening falls on the central garden, where I kneel before you. Bats flutter about the cloister. Shadows climb the battlements. My sister still appears in my evil dreams, and she plays with my fate. I feel safe here among these towers of cold stone. She has a suite of chambers entirely to herself within Lot's wing of the castle, and this fortress-city is so large, I could live here years and never see her. A bell rings from the chapel. Three crows scatter, and a golden cloud dissolves. What compels me to remain kneeling among the rose shrubs as darkness encloses all and the lantern-lighter on the ramparts calls out the clock? Merlin speaks of a dark age to come. A thousand years of forgetfulness. We in this citadel are, by God's grace, a bright encounter before the unspeakable dark descends. The night that follows is not everlasting. A brighter age will ascend. And the call from within to serve that time yet to come scatters all my sad dreams.

  Dark Morning

  Black smoke rose from the horizon in a titanic wall that blotted the sun. "The pagans are burning the hamlets and their outlying fields!" Count Platorius reported to Severus Syrax.

  "Not pagans—Foederatus troops." The magister militum sat on his red stallion where the Belgae plains rose to gaunt rills above a river benchland. "Our allies are destroying the farms of our enemy, the tyrant Arthor. Why does this alarm you, Platorius?"

  The sullen count, wearing a beaverskin cap and white leather riding jacket collared in black sable seemed better attired for the sport of hunting than war. "I understand the tactic, Syrax. I question how Bors will respond. He is already displeased with our—allies."

  Severus Syrax grinned at the dark morning. "I have already taken precautions to safeguard Bors' fidelity to our cause." He adjusted his turbaned helmet and brushed ash from the furred shoulder-guards of his red leather cuirass. "I had the foresight to position him well east of us, in Calleva Atrebatum, where his large army will be handsomely provisioned and out of the way until we need it. Reports have already been forwarded to him indicating that the tyrant has set fire to his own farmlands to keep them from falling into our hands."

  "Surely this flagrant an
act of destruction will provoke a response from the tyrant." Count Platorius watched a squad of Wolf Warriors punting along the stream, the gunwales of their boat draped with the flayed scalps of farmers and their families.

  "I suspect he will send Marcus or Urien to counter us here." The magister militum turned in his saddle with a smug expression. "But we won't be here. By that time, Bors will be where we are now, and he will crush Urien, whom he hates for his pagan faith—and if it is Marcus, then the battle will not be as bloody but it will be as equally decisive. Bors cannot accept defeat."

  Count Platorius viewed uneasily the Wolf Warriors' booty in the thwarts of their boat—pink peeled skulls. "And where will we be when Bors is finishing the conflict that we have inspired this dark and grisly day?"

  "Ah, we are bound on a bold military venture, my brother-in-arms." Severus Syrax swept one silk-sleeved arm west. "We are destined to take Tintagel and capture the tyrant's mother, the converted pagan queen Ygrane!"

  The Guest in the Tree

  Dagonet's back ached unrelentingly on his two-day ride north. He cursed the heavy stone he had lugged through the forest and prayed that the next treasure he located for the king would not prove so ponderous.

  The second evening of his journey settled through the forest in a misty rain. No stars shone through the dense clouds, and he spent that night and the next three days hunkering in a hawthorn grove, trying to keep warm and dry.

  By day, he and Lord Monkey foraged early berries, dug edible cypress roots, and snared squirrels and rabbits. At night, they crouched under a hawthorn bower out of the rain and close to a twig-fire whose flames fled down the wind. And they discussed the life they would have for themselves when their mission was complete and the king rewarded them for replenishing his coffers.

  On the third day, the sky cleared. Among tufts of pink cloud, Dagonet watched for the second star to appear, a white arrow notched to his recurved bow. The moment he spied it, he aimed and fired. With a cold whistle, the pale arrow shot into the sky, flashed red at the top of its arc, and plummeted into the blue woods.