“You like it? It was given me by one whom I loved much,” the captive said, fingering the torc, like a slave collar. “It cannot be removed, though I have tried. But you are after wounds, my friend. I offer them to you.”
Drawing back his cloak completely, the man reached up with his hands and tore the thin fabric of his shirt open to his waist.
Between the jagged tears of cloth, his flesh revealed curves of a lean physique, well-defined muscles, with a chest that was thick and broad despite his body’s over-all slender build.
Upon his smooth skin, small tattoos of the type that adorned the pagan priests—markings in the ancient tongue that could not be deciphered without risk of heresy. The small image of the sun itself lay just above the curve of his left nipple, and of the crescent moon at his right.
Three small markings had been etched just below his navel, with what looked like the welt of a healing wound that rose from the thin strip of leather at his thigh. He had no tufts of hair there, as it was the old ritual of the forest priests to remove the body hair of initiates into certain forbidden mysteries and damnations.
“Yes,” the man said, watching the young monk. He touched the outline of the crescent moon. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they? It’s hard to take your eyes from this art, for it is said that it holds a glamour for men to look upon it.”
The monk, transfixed by the body art, his fingers glided lightly along the captive’s ridged and taut stomach to his navel as he felt the slight welt of scar where the tattoos had been made just above his loins.
The stranger shivered slightly at his touch.
“You’re a most unusual monk,” the captive said. “Want to inspect the rest of me before some soldiers have their way? I could remove all clothing so you might see more of this magickal art of mine.”
His skin shone with oil and sweat, and when the man drew open the strip of leather bindings, parting straps and strips and folds, he grinned. “I have lain with monks before, so if there’s something else you need to see...” He brought his hand to the monk’s sleeve and tugged it. “Is this what you wish?”
The monk drew his arm back, returning his gaze to the captive’s face.
The stranger’s eyes seemed like shiny black stones now where they had seemed warm and bright beneath the sun just seconds before, and although the man remained smiling, his lips thick and curved, he radiated fury.
“I do not wish to…” the young monk said, his throat dry. “I want only to know.”
“To know? Is that why you keep me here? Or is it to sell my head to the highest bidder?”
“You’re hunted like the forest stag. It’s safer here than out in the cold fields where Bedevere’s men shout for your head. You’re the one who betrayed the king. And the knight Lancelot. And the fair Queen of the Britons, Guinevere.”
“All those people?” the man said. “You know this for a fact? You’ve spoken with them?”
“The news of you travels across the world and back again. And worst of all, you murdered our king.”
“My father.”
“You are truly Mordred, son of Morgan le Fay?”
“Yes. I am Mordred. I could lay claim to the family pen-Dragon, but I don’t wish to do so. I am a prince of the Wastelands and of the isles of Glass and of Avalon—and a priest of the Sacred Grove. I’m heir to those beliefs you and your brethren call dragon-worshippers and wish to stamp out. A pagan through and through, without remorse.”
“Why come here? We heard you’d escaped to the barbaric isles of the North. Some reports were of your death, of course.”
“And how did I die?”
“On the battlefield with your father.”
“When I thrust my spear into him, I suppose.” Mordred shook his head. “Or when I supposedly grabbed his sword and thrust it through his heart while some braggart of a knight hacked away at me from behind. The public loves such imaginative invention.”
“They said the battle was like none before fought, full of strange beasts and sorceries.”
Mordred sighed. “If only battles were that remarkable when you’re in the midst of them trying to keep your head on your shoulders. But…given all these terrible sorceries and such, well, I may be dead after all. Are you too young to recognize a ghost when it’s sitting next to you?”
“I don’t think ghosts care about any of us,” the monk said. “And I’m old enough.”
“Enough for what? Enough to sit here with the bloody murderer Mordred and his devilish ways? How old’s that?”
“I am nearly into my nineteenth year.”
“A dangerous age to bury yourself in a monastery, little brother monk,” Mordred said. “Your beauty is like a young stag in springtime. You should be out among the fields dancing with friends or riding some wild horse along the path by the river. Chasing nymphs. Or men. You’ve only just put the cup of life to your lips. The monastery is meant for old men, but the wilderness is meant for the likes of you. Your life has been shackled.”
“My life is pure,” the monk said. “I was born of sin and must atone.”
“All the world, according to you, born from sin,” Mordred laughed. “Tell me, pure one, why have you come to me so late? To cut off my head as I lay sleeping? To taunt me with your benevolence? To examine my wounds from nave to chops?”
The monk’s face reddened. “I would ask that you tell me of your life.”
“Why?”
“That I might understand all of this.” In his eyes, a glistening of tears, yet he did not wipe them. “I cannot tell you more, for if I did, I would have to leave you to your fate. I’ve been raised among the gardens and cells of this abbey. My mother died before I reached a full year, and I haven’t experienced this world you speak of. The monastery has been my whole life.”
“That’s criminal. Why, you’ve never been in love? Broken your heart? Sinned even a little bit?”
The monk almost grinned. “Perhaps in dreams.”
“So tales of my crimes will please you?” Mordred asked.
The monk nodded.
“So that when you are on that hard wood bed, in your itchy shirt, after your evening prayers, you may lie there and think of the great and evil Mordred to whom you are superior?”
“No, my lord. Not in any way. But they say the world has unraveled, and the great days have passed. You’re the only witness who has come here who knows the fine ladies and knights and the round table itself and all that happened. I wish for truth, sir. I wish…” But the monk’s voice faded, and a troubling look came into his eyes. “I wish to know.”
“I will tell you everything,” Mordred said. “If, with each tale, you allow me one freedom.”
“I cannot promise freedom.”
“I don’t mean the freedom from this cell. I mean, the freedom with you that I desire.”
“I have heard of your desires,” the monk said.
“And I know the desires of one kept among monks his whole life, one of such beauty and longing and purity,” Mordred said. “But I need one freedom to begin, and another when I have finished.”
“Tell me,” the young monk said.
“For a kiss.”
Mordred held his gaze steady upon the youth.
“I’ve heard of such things.”
“As kisses?”
“As men like you.”
“Only like me? Not like you? But then, what’s a kiss? It’s just a greeting. A way of showing care.”
The monk’s face turned pale.
“It’s a small price,” Mordred said.
After a quiet moment, the young man leaned forward, closing his eyes.
“Am I hideous?”
“No.”
“Then why close your eyes?”
The monk leaned in further and Mordred drew himself up to meet him, and their mouths touched lightly and the feeling the monk received was nearly like a burn along his spine as the dryness of his own lips met the moist heavy lips of the traitor of the world, and without me
aning to he reached out and put his hands on Mordred’s shoulders to steady himself and their mouths drew together as if from a terrible thirst.
The young monk withdrew after too long a moment, his face flush-red in the lamplight. He pulled his brown robe more tightly around himself as if for protection.
“Thank you,” Mordred sighed. “I haven’t felt so refreshed in days. And now, where to begin? Shall it be when I brought the queen into the light of day? Or when, as a boy, I learned the secrets of the earth that only serpents understand or passages from one world to another. Or my training with the Merlin in the eastern arts of necromancy and of war?”
“All of it,” the monk said, a slight rise in tone to his voice as if he were angry now for having given the kiss. “I want to know about Arthur and his knights. And meek and beautiful Guinevere, and that shining knight Lancelot, and the Lady of Astolat. I want to know of that terrible witch, Morgan le Fay and of her ogre-sister, Morgause, and of…”
“The lies that you’ve heard, second-hand, from your monastic cage,” Mordred said. “All gossip and falsehood. Morgan and Morgause were not ogresses, neither were they terrible. In fact, many men believed them to be the most beautiful and powerful women of their time. If I tell you the truth, the truth as I know it from my own memory, tonight, will you help me escape this place?”
Without hesitation, the monk nodded.
“I will. Tell me of your mother. I heard she was a great sorceress and spoke with the spirits of the dead.”
And so, Mordred began his tale.
“The king would one day call my mother the Witch-Queen, and she bore that title as if it were the greatest in all the world. And that is how I think of her, as the Queen of Witches, of the Faerie, of Broceliande and Tintagel and the Wastelands. But mostly, I think of her as Queen of the Britons. She was heavy with me in her belly when first she learned that Arthur, the King, but seventeen years of age, meant to murder her.”
Part I
The Witch Queen
Chapter Two
1
In those days, the world was different than it is now, and the forest, wilder, the rivers, deeper.
The waters between Cornwall and the shores of Armorica were not so rough to cross as now, nor so deep, and you might send a white raven as a messenger from Tintagel’s small windows at dawn and by midday it would reach the stone trees of the Dragon’s Mount.
To even think back on it is to remember the scent of sirus-blossom, like honey and thick incense in the air on a summer’s twilight, and to taste the white brana berries from the twisted brambles along shores of Lyonesse, the bittersweet flavor on the tongue, like a memory of the Otherworld; the gambol of the horses when they escaped the paddock at the villa, and the horse-herd boys who chased them across the marshy land and into the woodland path; and to remember the sound of laughter in the hills; and the way the deer ran along the edge of the field when dawn struck the earth with her holy light; before all this smoke and mist that obscured the living from the dead and the dead from the living; before even I came into this life.
But my mother had remembered it all for me, and through a forbidden art she had stolen from the Merlin, she raveled her life into mine.
2
She taught me the art of raveling. It is the backward glance within the soul, and the sharing of the visions from one to another. The raveling was a torment, and cannot be done lightly. It may burn the recipient from within if not performed in the exact ritual; it may cause bleeding from the one who offers to unravel into the other. It was meant to be done only at the moment before the soul passes to the next life. But my mother brought this into me that I might understand all that could not be understood by mere words. The raveling brought with it a deep sorrow, but also great understanding. It was like pulling at threads of a magnificent tapestry, and in the torn places, another tapestry forms, and in this, in the raveling, one could see into the past of another and the other could see into you.
Raveling could be shared between people if they lay close and held each other in such a way that the souls might merge, from the eyes into the eyes, breath into breath, skin into skin, and blood to blood. I was a boy when she raveled into me, and I became sick with fever for several nights afterward, while she took to her bed for a full moon, exhausted from the effort.
She brought the vision of her past memory into my soul that I might understand the world better and the echoes of one life to another.
What I saw within her memory, within that raveling, was her home of Tintagel, of the Merlin, and of my father, the King.
3
King Arthur had not yet fought in the wars, and he had only just grown his first beard. His advisors had played up the boy-king’s fears, and the prophecies of the Merlin were repeated again and again to him until, it was said, he could not sleep for remembering what was foretold by that great mage, Myrddin son of Morfryn, the Merlin, the Immortal.
You must know the way of the Merlin. He is born, like a phoenix from ashes, into a new sacred vessel of flesh with each death of the previous Merlin. He is the wisest of the wise, though sometimes he spoke in riddles and confusions. Whereas all other men, when reborn into life, forget our previous lives and lose much of the knowledge of our flesh, the Merlin’s wisdom and memory continue in each incarnation as if he had never died and been reborn. He possessed secrets and arts that no other man living held, and few women knew of; he taught me the ritual of the shifting, which is the way of becoming a creature of shadow in the dark of night. He taught me to see through the mist of the marshes and to watch out for the shimmering ones, “elementals” he called them, energies of deception within the rock and water.
The Merlin in my lifetime was a big man, stout and thick of arm and leg, as large as a Norseman, but with a gentle demeanor unless he was in a fury, and then he was like a thunderbolt. His head was shaved and half his body painted with images of the Grove and of the Druids. He had a penchant for torcs and rings, and a taste for mead and Roman wine as well as whores. He cursed like the worst Roman soldier, but his various verbal arrows stung less for the colorful way they’d been adorned. He wore the old robes of the Druid priests, though never the crown of the high priest. It was said that he brought the great stones to the kingdoms, and that in his thousands of years of incarnation, he had wandered the entire world from his earliest days in the land of Egypt and Troy.
Some thought him a terrible evil; others believed he brought blessings from the Otherworld.
To my knowledge, he was both a curse and a blessing, but I could not have loved life half so much—nor understood it—without his wisdom. His wood-spirit was the bear, and he was, as I remember him, a great bear of a man. He roared when he spoke, or he growled when he whispered; his eyes sparkled with mischief when the lusts of spring had him in their thrall, and he loved many women, though none so much, I think, as my mother, though she did only think of him as a kind of father and guardian to her. Still, he treated me as if I were his own son, and in the raveling time, I learned more of this remarkable being who was said to be the son of the stars and of the wind, who had been born within the dust of the earth on a night of fire and terror, long before our people had even come into being, long before the forests and rivers ran, before even the kingdoms of men had grown from the fertile valleys.
The Merlin existed to carry the wisdom through the generations, as a living scroll that the high priests and priestesses might read, and from whom kings would learn much. He was said to have been with the pharaohs in Egypt and had crossed the river beneath those deserts, into the Otherworld and had come back with knowledge that had cursed him from ever returning to the country of spirits. His soul had been vesseled by both male and female, and he had been both priest and priestess in his incarnations, always bringing the memories fresh into his new body. The raveling had been his way of keeping the memories of our folk alive when the great and small among us lay dying, when the priests and priestesses drew themselves back into the arms of the god
dess.
He was a terror and a wonder, but I cannot speak badly of him, for his understanding of the world was greater than any other woman or man, and his reasons for his actions are beyond my own wisdom.
The Merlin who came into my life, the one who raised my father, who is known to you as King Arthur pen-Dragon of the Britons, had four visions of what-will-be, and each carried the weight of the world upon them. These would affect all our lives, whether the visions were meant to be or not.
His first vision, which came to him from within burning incense and a drug known to the Druids called the Stag Thistle upon his tongue, was that Arthur should be the greatest King of the seven kingdoms of the Britons and would unite again the warlords and their lands.
The second vision, brought about when the Merlin slept against the standing stones of the ancients on the winter solstice in the forest of Broceliande, was that Arthur would bear the sword of power all his days, though it would heap disaster upon him as well as victory.
The third vision, which Merlin claimed the ravens of the towers had whispered to him during his time imprisoned, was that the king would marry a Roman, which would bring peace to the lands held to the east.
And the final vision that the Merlin had for King Arthur was that if he brought no bastards into the world, his kingdom would never be destroyed.
I am that the one of whom the Merlin foretold.
Born bastard, and heathen, and child of an incestuous mingling of the bloodline pen-Dragon and the bloodline of the Fay, who are called the Faerie Folk, for we still worship the Grove and our gods and goddesses who bless us and teach us the secret wisdom. I am a pagan prince of the Wastelands and of North-Galis and of the isles of Avalon, I am a priest of the Grove and of the mysteries of Namtareth, and I am the lover of men as some fear in this world who know not of love.
Mordred, Bastard Son Page 2