by Hiatt, Bill
And the girls? I tried not to be a chauvinist, but in the present situation we desperately needed muscle power, not brain power—and none of them were exactly amazons. Natalie was a female mathlete, Aabharana a contemplative writer, Mary an artist who spent hours sketching. And Eva? I couldn’t deny she was in good shape, in every sense of the word, and I think she used to do gymnastics, so she had good coordination and reflexes, but again, facing an enemy armed with sword or even claws, what could she do?
No sense being in denial. Any way you looked at it, we were screwed.
Nor did the reactions of the others improve the situation. To be fair, what would you do if you were standing in doors at night and suddenly found yourself in an apple orchard in broad daylight, with no rational explanation of how you got there? Nor was I in a great position to help them understand. “Uh, excuse me folks, but we’re in Annwn because I’m really the original Taliesin who served King Arthur, and one of my enemies has snatched us up for some foul purpose.” Yeah, right, that’ll work.
Stan was looking at me helplessly, but at least he appeared calm. Eva was not panicked about our sudden relocation, but only because she was totally panicked about Dan, a situation which didn’t improve when Dan fell to the ground like a sack of cement.
“We have to get him to a hospital!” she cried out with a heart-breaking urgency.
“He’s breathing normally, and his pulse seems okay,” replied Mary gently. She had moved over to help as soon as Dan fell. “I don’t think he’s in immediate danger.”
“But he passed out, or something! That can’t be normal.”
“Nothing is normal at the moment,” observed Carlos. “Before we can get Dan from here to a hospital, we have to figure out where exactly ‘here’ is.” Eva really looked around for the first time, and then burst into tears. At that moment I longed to take her into my arms and comfort her, but I didn’t trust myself to do that. Having her that close would certainly smash my concentration to atoms, and if I lost focus at this point, we would all be lost. Fortunately, Mary, Aabharana, and Natalie all tried to comfort her, so I could wrench my attention away from her and figure out what to do next.
Stan moved in my direction, but I raised a hand, and he stopped short. I needed a minute to actually concentrate, to see if I could open a portal from Annwn back into our world. I had accomplished such a feat as Taliesin 1, but again something blocked me. It was as if the tons of rock pressed against the door when I had tried to enter Annwn had now shifted to the other side of the door, blocking our return. I motioned Stan in my direction.
“Where are we?” he whispered shakily.
“Annwn for sure, but I’m not sure exactly which part. All the apple trees suggest Avalon, but by now one of the queens would surely have noticed us.”
“Avalon? Does that mean we will get to meet King Arthur?” Given everything Stan had seen in recent weeks, it was not an irrational question. His uneasiness gave way to excitement for just a moment.
“Arthur was brought to Avalon to heal after the battle of Camlann, but that was hundreds of years ago. There is no guarantee he’s still here.”
“Merlin? Morgan Le Fay?”
I shuddered at the last name. “I don’t know where Merlin is these days, and trust me, you don’t want to meet Morgan.”
“But I thought she was one of the queens that brought Arthur to Avalon.”
“That whole story about Arthur being taken to Avalon by Morgan Le Fay to be healed was actually just spin doctoring on Morgan’s part. Arthur was taken away by women with supernatural power, but Morgan was not among them. That’s one of the few parts of the story Geoffrey of Monmouth actually got right.”
“People did spin doctoring in the Middle Ages?” asked Stan incredulously.
“Yeah, they didn’t have the term, but they certainly had the concept. Morgan deliberately planted the stories about her helping Arthur in various ways; some even survived as interpolations in the work of Taliesin 1 and Taliesin 2. She hadn’t given up on her evil schemes, and having everyone know she was evil did not suit her purpose. Hasn’t it ever struck you as odd that Morgan is portrayed in many stories as stopping at nothing to destroy Arthur—then she takes him away to be healed? That change of heart makes no sense. But if that part of the story is understood as pro-Morgan propaganda, it makes perfect sense.”
“Anything you’d care to share with the class?” Jackson had walked up behind us. If you want to draw someone’s attention, just whisper, and they’ll come a’running to see what you are up to.
“Stan and I were just trying to figure out what could have happened to us. Neither of us have a clue, though, but…CARLOS, DON’T DO THAT!”
Carlos had picked one of the admittedly delicious looking apples and was just about to bite into it.
“What’s your problem, man?”
I couldn’t very well tell him that if he ate anything in a faerie realm, he would probably be trapped there for all eternity.
“This place looks too good to be true. I don’t trust it.”
Carlos glanced again at the apple, then reluctantly tossed it aside. “You’ve got a point, I guess. But what could all this be, a mass hallucination? In that case, the food isn’t going to be poisonous or something, just nonexistent.”
“I doubt all this is a hallucination,” replied Stan. “It’s too real for that, and we found ourselves here too suddenly and too completely. Hallucinations don’t work that way. Anyway, documented mass hallucinations are extremely rare.” I had to give Stan credit—he could think on his feet.
“Okay, Professor,” said Carlos with a hint of sarcasm. “What do you think this is?”
“A parallel universe. Hugh Everett proposed the idea way back in 1954, and the erratic behavior of quantum particles offers some support for it.”
“Nonsense,” replied Natalie with surprising vehemence. “The issues with quantum mechanics don’t mean the results are being thrown off by parallel universes. They just mean we haven’t discovered everything about quantum mechanics.” Wow, I could really see what Stan saw in her.
“I believe Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,’” interjected Aabharana, in an eerie coincidence picking the same Doyle quote Stan had used when he first tried to unearth my secret. Natalie started to object. “No, hear me out,” continued Aabharana. “I don’t know anything about quantum physics, but I know enough about science in general to know there is no scientific explanation for our suddenly moving from one place to another without passing through the space in between. That is what we have done, isn’t it?”
“Looks can be deceiving,” replied Natalie, but clearly because she had nothing better to say. After all, as much as she might disbelieve the idea of parallel universes, she could hardly deny that there was no other obvious explanation for our unusual situation.
If nothing else, the conversation had taken everyone’s mind off of our immediate dilemma.
Well, almost everyone.
“What are we going to do about Dan? We need to help him,” pleaded Eva.
Before anyone could respond, we heard the sound of a horse’s hooves in the distance, and everyone froze. Time itself seemed to stand still. Even the drowsy buzzing of the bees stopped abruptly.
Then almost all of us gasped in unison, though for somewhat different reasons. The rider we had heard earlier cantered into the clearing on a mare whose hair was generally as white as the inside of a fresh apple, but whose mane shined as red as the apple’s peal. The rider herself was even more striking: jet black hair, white flawless skin, flashing green eyes, model perfect features, voluptuous figure beneath an apple red samite gown interwoven with gold thread. She scanned us disdainfully, until her eyes met mine. Then hers widened in surprise.
“Taliesin? I hardly expected to see you here. Different body, but your soul is always unmistakable.”
“So is yours, Morgan.�
� Stan gasped again. I inclined my head just slightly in greeting. She probably expected a bow, but I could not make myself go quite that far. “Now perhaps you will be so kind as to tell us why you brought us here.”
“Tal, who is she?” whispered Jackson, but Morgan, whose years had always been very sharp, heard him.
“Taliesin, could your little playmates be so ignorant as to not recognize Morgan Le Fay, half-sister of Arthur Pendragon and rightful heiress to the throne of Camelot?” Her voice, though superficially sweet, was dark with contempt.
Well, I hadn’t been wrong. We were screwed. Royally screwed.
CHAPTER 9: DESPERATE TIMES
Just when you think things can’t get any worse, they often do—and that was certainly the case here. Morgan would be a tough opponent under any circumstances, but in a faerie realm, since she had some faerie blood, she would be next to unstoppable, except perhaps by a full-blooded faerie, and we were fresh out of those.
“Well, Morgan,” I said, trying to project a confidence I did not feel. “Why are we here?” My manner was so totally different from normal that Stan and some of the others looked at me strangely, but I doubted Morgan would know what to make of current me. Taliesin 1, on the hand, she could understand and potentially communicate with, so I did my very best to sound as he would have sounded.
“You tell me,” replied Morgan coolly, eying me appraisingly. “If I had known you were such a handsome boy now,” despite myself I blushed just a little at that, “I would certainly have invited you. But this time you seem to have come on your own.”
“On the contrary, we were brought here against our will, and very abruptly at that. Who besides you would be powerful enough to do that these days? There aren’t a great many sorceresses of the first rank around anymore.”
Morgan smiled a little at the compliment, but her face had never been more than a flesh mask. One could no more tell what she was feeling by looking at it then one could tell how a regular guy was feeling by looking at the mask he wore on Halloween. “I’m not one to disclaim such an act of power had I done it, but I swear it is as much a surprise to me as to you. That said, now that you are here…”
“What can we do for you?” I asked without a trace of the foreboding I felt.
“From them I want nothing…except perhaps to serve as hostages for your good behavior.” I suppressed a shudder. “From you, on the other hand, I want to know where Lancelot is.”
I thought Morgan’s commanding presence might have kept my friends quiet, but looking around, I could see that most of them were either preoccupied by Dan’s condition (Eva and Mary) or completely befuddled, trying frantically to process a situation completely alien to their experience (Jackson, Carlos, and Aabharana). The last three, perhaps without realizing it, had backed away from Morgan, an instinctive response to the magnitude of the threat she posed. They whispered just a little among themselves and seemed more afraid of drawing her attention than anything else. Only Stan, comparatively unflustered, remained close.
“My lady, surely Lancelot cannot still be alive?”
“You are,” she pointed out, the edge in her voice growing more obvious.
“Yes, but I am a rather rare exception. Lancelot could have been reincarnated, but if so, he is of no use to you, for he will remember nothing of his earlier lives.”
Morgan raised an eyebrow. “What was done to you could very well be done to him.” Could it be? Was my situation more than some cosmic fluke? Had someone deliberately awakened my earlier selves and changed my life forever?
“But,” she continued, either not noticing the impact her words had on me or choosing to ignore it, “given how things turned out last time, it might be just as well if he did not remember anything.” Quite an understatement, considering that Lancelot had rejected Morgan, precipitating Morgan’s vengeful pursuit of his destruction that eventually engulfed Arthur and all of Camelot as well. “I could arrange a seemingly random meeting, and we could fall in love as we should have the first time.” Yeah, that’ll happen. And then you can get elected as the first female pope.
“I have no art to find a soul once it has been reincarnated in another body—and neither, I suspect, do you, or you wouldn’t be asking me.” And even if I did, I was not about to hand over some poor guy who had been Lancelot ages ago, not to someone like Morgan, who could just as easily end up killing him as marrying him.
For a moment she looked so sad that even I felt a twinge of sympathy for her. Then the sorrow flickered away, and her face might as well have been stone.
“I am sure that you could figure something out…with the right motivation. Doubtless you will find that motivation during the time that you and your playmates are my guests.” The way she said “guests” could have made people shiver in the middle of the Sahara at high noon.
We would never have a better opportunity to make a run for it than now, but that wasn’t saying much. Dan was still incapacitated, and everyone else was distracted to one degree or another. Even Stan now looked as if the situation had overwhelmed him. I had to save them, and myself for that matter, but how?
At a signal from Morgan, several fully armored knights pushed their way into the clearing, their well-polished armor glinting in the sunlight, their wickedly sharp swords already out, ready for action. As if beating Morgan by herself would not have been difficult enough.
“Sir Accolon, take our guests back to the castle.” Morgan gave me a smile as warm and cozy as Antarctica. Everyone except me was backing toward the center of the clearing as the knights closed in.
“Tal, what’s happening?” shouted Carlos. “Who are these people?”
Then Dan sat up. I only had time to glance in his direction, but that was long enough for him to wink at me.
The Voice had reconnected with him.
Before I had time to think anything else, Dan shot in my direction as if he were about to make the winning touchdown. A silvery mist enshrouded his right hand, a mist that coalesced in the blink of an eye into a sword. White Hilt!
“Your patron’s good with sword swaps,” said Dan in Welsh as he handed me the sword. “Now use the damn thing!”
One thought from me, and the sword was engulfed in flames. I burst into song to strengthen the flame for what I needed to do. The knights hesitated.
“Take them! I can always heal you after,” shouted Morgan. Knights advanced, somewhat more cautiously.
“What good is one sword, even a flaming one, against a dozen knights?” Stan whispered to me. I’m sure that is what Morgan thought as well.
I spread the flames out into a circle around us at shield level, then gradually expanded the circle in both directions until I had a flame wall surrounding us completely. The knights, confused, stopped again and looked in Morgan’s direction.
Just as the pwca had not expected an improvised laser, Morgan had not expected what amounted to a force field. As she stared, I extended the flames over our heads, and the field was complete. Even a flying adversary, if Morgan had one up her sleeve, could not touch us without burning, and the flames burned so intensely now I could not imagine any knight jumping through them fast enough.
Unfortunately, the sword had not been forged with this kind of use in mind. I could feel the hilt starting to overheat in my hand, feel the sword start to draw magic faster than I could feed it. I could only keep this kind of barrier up a few minutes.
“Everyone, harmonize with him.” Everyone, even Stan, looked at Dan in surprise. They might have expected some defensive plan from him, but they could hardly have expected musical direction.
Stan joined in first. I don’t think he had much of a future as a cantor, but at least he reinforced my rhythm. I was singing in Welsh, but as there are no language barriers in faerie realms, someone like Stan could sing in English, yet somehow the lyrics meshed.
Then a high, clear voice joined the harmony. Eva, even on autopilot, as she was likely to be now after all she had been through, could still sing well,
having been the star of more than one musical. I could feel the strength of my magic grow, feel the flames burn even hotter.
Jackson joined then; though he was the drummer in my band, he was not a bad baritone. Dan himself joined next, contributing more volume than anything else, and then the others.
You would have thought that such a random combination of unrehearsed voices would have produced cacophony rather than music. Indeed, it might have, probably should have, but it didn’t. You see, when a bard uses music as a source of magic power, he uses more than just the sound; he uses the feeling behind it. All of us wanted to survive, and that intense feeling harmonized even if the literal sounds did not. Nor did the connection depend only on the survival instinct. The brotherhood Stan and I shared, the connection we had made with Dan, Eva and Dan’s love for each other, the long hours Jackson and I had spent in rehearsal, and other connections helped to bond us and to bond our sound. A recorded version probably still would have sounded horrible, despite all that, but to a listener standing right there, sharing our bond as well as hearing our sound, what we produced together would have had a rough but undeniable beauty.