The Copper Crown

by Patricia Kennealy-Morrison

  Hastily he removed his own practice suit--Aeron had dived into the pool by now, and that made it considerably easier for him--and slipped into the water himself. Once submerged to the chin, he regained his self-possession enough to listen to what Rohan was saying.

  "--and detected what appears to be a tremendous buildup of Fomori forces."

  "They have a standing army even as do we." said Aeron, twisting onto her back and lazily propelling herself through the water. "Gwydion knows that; the explanation could well be a simple one."

  "True, but the activity came immediately after Bres and Elathan returned from a visit to Alphor. They were not Strephon's only guests," he said after a pause.

  "Indeed. Who else, then?"

  "Perhaps forty assorted heads of government and ministers--kings, queens, war-leaders--from the Phalanx as well as the Imperium, and from a fair number of unallied worlds as well; chiefly of note among those last being Panthissera of the Yamazai."

  There was a tremendous splash from Aeron's direction. "Could Gwydion's spies learn no more than that?"

  "What more than that do we need to know?" asked Slaine from where she lounged at the pool's edge, carefully out of range of errant splashes. "It comes so pat on the heels of Theo's arrival here--I think perhaps word should be sent to Earth also, lest they shortly receive a less pleasant surprise than merely the simple news of our existence."

  "Theo? What do you say?"

  Haruko, unprepared, snorted in hot water. "I think the Lady Slaine's idea is well taken," he said, when he was again able to speak. "May I send such a message, Ard-rian?"

  "You may." Aeron had hoisted herself, sleek and streaming, out of the pool and dried herself off. "But, Theo, do not make more of this than the facts might warrant. A simple alert should suffice." She had pulled on her everyday attire as she spoke, and now paused in the doorway. "My thanks for the match, and the lesson--I'd not cross swords with you in anything but friendship."

  She went out attended by Slaine, and Haruko collapsed gently back into the water. Through the wet black hair plastering his face, he saw Rohan watching him quizzically.

  He decided to be honest about it. "People here seem to be pretty casual about--well--"

  "Nakedness?" Rohan smiled. "Theo, in the very old days, we used to go naked into battle; in fact, some of the more old-fashioned Fians still do... But no one here bothers about skin."

  When Rohan too had gone, Haruko finally emerged from the pool, very pink still from more than just the heat of the water.

  "Well, it certainly bothers me," he said aloud, drying himself vigorously. It had bothered him profoundly, and obscurely, and not least because he couldn't verbalize exactly what it had been about the sight of Aeron unclothed--a very beautiful woman, after all--that had so bothered him. Just prudery, no doubt; the Kelts present had obviously thought it entirely usual, and Rohan was her own brother.

  With a final headshake he buttoned himself firmly into his clothes. glad that the steam of the pool-room had hid his blushes. Keltia was going to take more getting used to than he had thought.

  *

  The swordsmanship lesson had had more purpose to it than instruction or even simple exercise. Aeron had spoken of it to no one, not even Gwydion, but ever since the Terrans' arrival she had continued to have prescient dreams: not so vivid nor so immediately alarming as the one from which Gwydion had comforted her, but steady and unsettling and always on the same themes--war, the fall of the City, invasion, betrayal. Waking too, now, she was beginning to be haunted by dim feelings of impending disaster.

  To combat it, she had thrown herself into her work, both political and social, had ridden herself and her horse to exhaustion with furious gallops at all hours, had drugged herself to where dreams should not have been able to reach her--but all to no avail. The dreams continued. Therefore, the only course left to her was the one she was about to undertake.

  That night she went up the outside staircase to her chamber of magic and, closing the bronze doors behind her, leaned back against them and soberly surveyed the room.

  She was not unfamiliar with what awaited her. Trance was no new thing to so experienced a sorceress, and there were several trance techniques taught in the Druid and Ban-draoi schools, the marana being the lightest and the least of them. But to learn what Aeron now needed to know--the source of her dreams, the reason for her unease--she would have to go deeper and farther into trance than ever she had done before. She would have to dare the trance called taghairm.

  For all her powers, she was nevertheless a touch apprehensive, and mindful of the peril. Even Gwydion would have thought twice about such an undertaking, and after her first horrific dream he had in fact forbidden her to attempt a taghairm. He was naturally concerned for her, of course; as she would have been for him. But she was Ard-rian, and she was Ban-draoi, and she was Aeron; and above all else she needed to know. She had not resolved lightly upon such a course of action; it would be exhausting and it would be dangerous--sorcerers had died before now trying it--and only her great need and greater desperation had decided her in the end to take the risk.

  So she had spent the early evening in preparation: fasting, light meditation, a ritual purifying bath; and now she was as ready as was necessary, or possible.

  She lighted the four torches that marked the four compass points of the room, stripped off her black robe, and, veiled only in her unbound hair, stepped into the center of the inlaid circle. In her hands she carried a rolled-up white bullhide, which now she unfolded and spread out upon the slate floor.

  She took up the great ritual sword from where it lay upon the stone altar in the north of the circle, then stretched out upon the bullhide and rested the sword upon her body, its blade cold between her breasts and its point touching her throat. Extending her arms to either side, she cast the Circle in her mind and fell at once into trance.

  She was sinking, sinking like a stone into a dark pool, her consciousness a hard bright pebble turning over and over as it fell down through the black cold water. The marana trance was inwards, then out upon the astral; but the taghairm lay only inward, deeper and deeper. Then suddenly her dreams were there, just as she had dreamed them, clear and complete in all details: war and fire and blood, swift vivid pictures that blinked in her mind and were as swiftly gone--Gwydion in his scarlet cloak, with rain upon his face; herself with her sword in her hand in a strange battle-choked courtyard; Morwen floundering through a snowdrift; Theo looking up at her, then falling forward...

  And then she was past the dreams and the pictures, and here there was only a cold slick blankness, smooth and featureless as a glacier. She came up against it with such speed and force that the impact was physical; her head jerked backward as if she had been struck a blow. Again she flung her mind against the wall, and yet again, and each time she was thrown back, until at last she lay there with her mind bruised and battered, without the strength to go on. Either there was truly nothing to learn behind the dreams, or else--she began to come back up out of the pool, rising gradually back to everyday consciousness--or else someone very powerful indeed--more than one person, almost certainly--was blocking certain knowledge from her by sorcerous means; and even she could not break their power.

  Aeron emerged from the trance and sat up slowly and carefully, setting the sword to one side and grimacing at the headache that splintered her temples. With surprise, she saw that the sky outside the tower's windows was gray with dawn. And she was cold, and her muscles were stiff and cramped, and her head hurt abominably, and she was no closer to knowledge than she had been before.

  Well, that was not entirely true. She did know, now, that she was being blocked--maybe. And that was as alarming an indication as the dreams, perhaps more so; and she could do as little about it...

  In all modesty, she thought, wrapping herself in her robe, it would take a stupendous amount of power to keep me out, and with a taghairm too... Few there were in Keltia who could manage it, and surely she would be
aware of anyone possessing that measure of magical strength? Sudden misgiving seized her, and she shivered, not entirely with the chill.

  "Next time I shall listen to Gwydion," she said aloud, and began to extinguish the torches. But in truth there was no more she could do. She had tried, and she had failed; and now she must bide the issue, will she or nill she. Still, she rather thought she would not tell Gwydion, or anyone else for that matter, what she feared and what she had attempted. There was little to be gained save a scolding. Better it was to keep her failure and her fears--and her unrelenting dreams--to herself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Terrans had been in Keltia nearly two months now. According to their orders, they were required to remain until the arrival of a duly constituted formal embassy, if their hosts permitted it, and neither Kelts nor Terrans seemed to think it any hardship at all that the Terrans stayed. Quite the contrary: The visitors from Earth had become social lions--a fact to which each of them had reacted in his own particular way.

  Of them all, only Mikhailova could be said to remain truly aloof, and the others did not understand it. She was shy by nature, of course, but she had always tried to compensate for it, and she had started off as eager as the rest of them. Then for no reason they could see she had withdrawn into a shell that no amount of friendly overtures or coaxing or teasing seemed able to pierce. Tindal continued to devote all his attentions to the Princess Arianeira; and though his colleagues thought it extremely uncharacteristic, to say the least, they also had a tacit understanding to make nothing of it, among themselves as well as to outsiders. Hathaway saw no reason whatsoever not to have a very good time, and he was enjoying himself immensely; while O'Reilly had simply capitulated with a sigh of wonder, merging into Keltia like a young stream into a deep and mighty river: She had come home and she was happy. Yet oddly enough it was Haruko who had come closest of them all to the Keltic Queen The others often saw them walking together absorbed in talk, Aeron tall and vivid, Theo serious, chunky, strangely exotic on a world that had seen since the days of its founding few indeed of any race other than its own.

  That afternoon was gray with the threat of cold rain; Aeron, who had recovered entirely from the effects of the taghairm some nights before, though not from the reason for it, had spent the day in an unending succession of audiences, councils and meetings. At last she had rebelled and fled to the gardens, taking Haruko with her. Once there, she did not speak for some time, and Haruko knew her well enough by now to know that such shared silence was a sign that she felt truly at ease with someone, that the usual Court backchat was not necessary between them; and the compliment thrilled him.

  "If you were back on Earth, Theo?" she asked after a while. She plucked a handful of wild fraughans from a bush and offered him some. "What would you choose to be doing?"

  Haruko nibbled on the luscious dark-red berries and recounted his fantasy of luxury starliners. "And you? If you were not Queen in Keltia?"

  "I think I should like to be a nun," said Aeron dreamily. "To go into a Ban-draoi convent--there's a beautiful old one on Vannin, on a little island in a sea-loch--and spend the rest of my life in prayer and contemplation."

  He laughed, not unsympathetically. "The oldest dream of all the rulers of all the earths, Lady: to put off the crown and take the vows."

  "Not very original, I admit. But few better."

  They walked a while longer in the same companionable silence, through the gardens along the edge of the cliffs overlooking the sea.

  "What is the teaching of your folk, Theo, about life and death and the life again after?"

  So Haruko explained about karma, and the way of the Tao, and she listened, nodding in agreement.

  "That is a good and worthy Path."

  He glanced curiously at her. "What do your people believe, Lady, about such matters?"

  She was silent again, and he respected her silence. "The Great Wheel," she said then. "And the Three Circles that all mortal life must traverse and may aspire to: Annwn, the Abyss of the Unformed; Abred, the Path of Changes; and Gwynfyd, the Circle of Perfection."

  "And God?"

  "Inhabits alone the circle of Keugant... You know that all Druids are priests, and all Ban-draoi priestesses? Well, then, in the Mystery Schools we are instructed in matters not commonly taught to the rest of the folk. Of how we may choose our next lives; of how the future is and is not fated, and how it may be lawfully altered; of the things of power. This is where my authority originates; the heart of all true sovereignty and right order."

  Haruko was seized by a sudden inexplicable resentment and distaste. "You rule by divine right, then."

  "Nay, I rule by the will of the people," said Aeron, mildly surprised by his abrupt coldness. "Keltia elects its monarchs, though I admit the choice is a limited one."

  "What limits are these?"

  "What we call the righ-domhna, all eligible kin of the previous sovereign. For instance, the election that made me Ard-rian could have fallen upon any of my brothers or sisters; my father's brother or sister and their children; or my grandfather's brothers, their children and grandchildren. It is a sort of royal pool of possible monarchs."

  "Yet you were chosen."

  "In actual practice, it has been well over a thousand years since any other than the firstborn heir of the sovereign has been elected to the Crown. Yet, lest that should make us firstborn complacent, or the accident of birth order be regarded as a right to the Copper Crown, we have the righ-domhna and the election. It has been so here for three thousand years, and longer than that on Earth."

  "That is impressive," said Haruko, whose ill disposition seemed to have vanished as quickly as it had arisen. "But suppose tradition held, and the firstborn, though chosen, was not the best choice for the job?"

  She shrugged. "Doubtless that has happened many times. Perhaps even this time," she added with a smile. "How are we to know? In theory, and even in law, the Sovereign in Keltia is all-powerful, yet how much can one lord make or mar in one reign? We have fenced ourselves such a scaffolding--the brehon laws, the Senate and Assembly and House of Peers, the Fainne, custom itself--that even a monarch deliberately bent to evil can accomplish little of such an intent."

  "Evil? Have you ever had a truly evil leader?"

  "We have had our full share," she said quietly. "And the worst of them was Edeyrn; for when a sorcerer turns his might to evil he is the worst of all men... Yet I think even your own Way would say that evil in this world is as necessary as good. Any road, so do we believe. The Dark, as it now is, is the greatest evil that we know; and our teaching is that our true work here in this circle of Abred--yours, mine, everyone's--is not to fight to resist the Dark, for that is a vain struggle doomed from the start, but rather to take the evil from it, to absorb it as a right and natural part of ourselves, our Shadow, and in so doing, to restore it to its natural balance. Without the Light, the Darkness within us becomes malevolence; without the Darkness, the Light within us becomes forceless virtue, weak and ineffectual. Without the one, no other; for the Dark was not evil in the beginning, and it will not be evil in the end. On Earth, one of the myths in which this great truth was clothed was that of the fallen archangel, that Prince of Darkness who was called Lucifer."

  "Yet, in the Latin tongue, 'Lucifer' means 'Light-bearer.'"

  Aeron smiled, her whole face bright with the paradox. "Even so. That is a Mystery only the wisest among us can hope to attain knowledge of on this plane, and I am not one of them. To us, that lord was no angel but a god; his seat was among the Mighty Ones. He was a Prince of the Air, and his fall shook all the worlds. We--the Druids and the Ban-draoi--are taught that mankind's great work is to restore that Prince to his former place, to the bright throne in Gwynfyd that once was his. And it shall be done," she said, in a voice half prayer, half promise. "For in restoring him we do restore ourselves..."

  "But you say 'gods,' and you spoke before of one God?"

  "We worship above all others the One--K
elu, the Crown, that Highest God who is above all gods forever. It is our teaching that the One, whom we call as those of Atland did, Artzan Janco, the Shepherd of Heaven, cannot be truly known to us while we remain upon this plane of enlightenment. Such knowing would destroy us; we are not prepared to know, and our minds have no place to hold his reality. We say 'he,' but he is neither male nor female, or both male and female together, or beyond male and female alike. As for our other gods, they are closer to us, they can be spoken to as friends or kin, and they answer us in the same degree: the Goddess, the Mother, of whom I and all Ban-draoi are servants; the Lord-father, to whom the Druids owe their service; various Powers who rule certain spheres--gods and goddesses of peace and war, lore and literature, farming and smithcraft and bardery and the like." Her smile held a touch of irony, and more than a touch of self-mockery. "There are even stories that my House, the House of Dana, and several other of the old houses, are descended from certain of those gods. But I for one would not care to count upon it."

  *

  The next morning Haruko went early to Tindal's rooms in the Rose Tower. He had delayed sending that message to the Admiralty for nearly a week now, but today he would do it, before he forgot about it altogether, or, God forbid, it became academic. Important as it was, somehow he never seemed able to remember, or something came up, or he was otherwise prevented. But now he would do it.

  He knocked twice on the heavy oak door. Receiving no answer, he knocked again, louder, then cautiously lifted the latch and pushed the door ajar.

  "Lieutenant Tindal? Hugh?"

  Still no answer; Haruko stepped round the door into the sun-laced grianan. Not since their arrival at Turusachan had he had occasion to seek out Tindal in his quarters; and for that matter he had seen very little of him elsewhere, unlike his other crewmen, with whom he spent a great deal of time. O'Reilly, he remembered now, had made some snide observations about Tindal spending all his own time with Gwydion's sister Arianeira... distinctly odd, if true, but all the rest of them had Keltic friends by now, and why shouldn't Hugh.