“The ancient Egyptians seem to have had a far more benign view of history than our own kind.”
“For humanity, it must have seemed like a golden age, the true Garden of Eden. When the Nephilim enhanced human DNA, they were benefactors, divine beings who had elevated the species from the animal state. In the aftermath of a terrible Ice Age, they raised them to enlightenment. They gave them knowledge, intellect, and the capacity to write, reason, invent, and construct. Humanity has no real cause to curse the Nephilim. For them, Marduk Ra, the Nephilim overlord, was deserving of deification. We, of course, take a very different perspective. No sooner had we been created than we were all but destroyed.”
“But this cocoon thing is neither human nor nosferatu?”
“It’s Urshu.”
Marieko frowned. “Urshu?”
“Humanity and the nosferatu were by no means the sum total of Nephilim creative efforts. Until his domain proved unmanageable, Marduk Ra had big plans for this planet.”
Renquist approached the thing on the slab. Destry couldn’t help herself and blurted a warning. “Don’t touch it, Victor, anything could happen.”
“I think it’s safe.”
“We only just recovered from your opening the damned door to this place. Let’s not rely too much on guesswork. I don’t think I could go through something like that again.”
Renquist stopped, hand poised above the huge chrysalis. “Perhaps you’re right.”
Marieko brought his attention back on track. “You were explaining the Urshu.”
Renquist nodded. He wanted to further investigate the thing on the slab, but he knew Marieko and Destry wouldn’t be content until he had offered them as much of an explanation as he could. “You might know the Urshu better as the Watchers.”
Marieko put the pieces quickly together. “The Watchers that occur all through human folklore?”
“In many respects the Urshu—the ‘Watchers’—were the most successful product of the entire Nephilim colonization. They were as effectively immortal as we are. They had no problems with sunlight, and as far as I can tell, they were of superior intelligence. The Original Beings thoroughly detested them and called them
courtiers
, but that was perfectly understandable. Taking the Original Beings’ bellicose mind-set into account, they and the Urshu could only have been arch rivals. Our ancestors were designed for combat. The Urshu were administrators and negotiators specifically, in the context of Earth, designed to act as mediators between humanity and the Nephilim, whom the humans presumed to be gods.”
Destry interjected. “You sound like you’re giving a damned lecture.”
Renquist blinked. Already he’d been accused of pedantry. “I’m sorry.”
Destry waved away the apology. “No, no, go on. It’s good to have the details filled in for a change. I don’t have DNA dreams and all that stuff. I’m one of the ignorant undead, and I don’t mind admitting it.”
Yet again, Renquist wondered where Destry might have come from and how she had made the Change to nosferatu. So much of her defied easy explanation. In some areas, as in the case of the horse Dormandu, she seemed close to an expert, and yet great gaps seemed to exist in her knowledge of the origins and history of their kind. History, however, was the topic at hand, so Renquist
continued. “Like all the Nephilim creations, the Urshu were unfortunately less than perfect. From the very start, they were few in number, compared to the regiments of Original Being, or the vast tribes of humans who were selectively bred for release into the wild. They also had a reproductive problem.”
Destry chuckled. “They had trouble with sex?”
Renquist even permitted himself a dry smile. “According to everything I read, they were all created hermaphrodite, but with external characteristics that were predominately male.”
“That caused them a problem?”
“Although they were capable of sexual gratification, and some appeared to relish it, they were unable to reproduce, either in the distasteful mode of the humans or in our own more ritualized fashion.”
“So how did the Nephilim react to having created a race of mules?”
“Seemingly they tolerated it. The Urshu performed their function and found favor with the Nephilim on a practical level. We really know so little about them because by far the majority left with Marduk Ra when colonial Earth was abandoned, and the ones who stayed were skilled in disguise and illusion.”
“How many of them remained?”
Renquist shook his head. “There’s no record I’ve ever seen, but it would seem to be no more than a handful, because most of them are known to either history or legend.”
“We know them?”
Renquist shrugged. “Humanity has either known their names or given them their names. They may not have know what they were, but they knew them. They were the bringers of light, and of fire, the teachers of astronomy and agriculture. They attempted to maintain what remnants of Nephilim colonial civilization they could.” He arched an eyebrow and regarded Destry and Marieko. “They also, according to some accounts, attempted to
eradicate cannibalism, human sacrifice, and the drinking of blood.”
Getting no immediate response to this tidbit, he went on. “Quetzalcoatl would seem to have been an Urshu who intervened in South and Central America, in other areas there was Osiris, Ahura Mazda, the Sumerian Uan, Loki, Gilgamesh, Viracocha in the high Andes; the Greeks had Deucalion and Prometheus. Some even say Confucius was a Watcher, others Pericles, some Jesus Christ—”
At the final name, Destry hissed. Nosferatu prejudice could be deep and intractable. Renquist spread his hands. “I’m not making a case for the Urshu. I’m just giving you the standard list of semi-divine teachers that may have been Nephilim hybrids.”
“What other weaknesses did they have, aside from not being able to reproduce?”
“The greatest peculiarity would emerge only after the colony was abandoned and most of the Urshu had gone with the Nephilim.”
“And what was that?”
“They developed a need to hibernate.”
All three pairs of undead eyes turned to the great red-brown cocoon on the slab.
“They would enjoy a lifespan of three, four, maybe even five hundred years, and then suddenly they’d vanish, only to reemerge hundreds of years later. It would seem, just as humans must sleep by night, and we by day, the Urshu had to retreat into a kind of suspended animation for long periods of time. I wasn’t aware though, that they actually cocooned themselves like this.”
For a few moments, the three nosferatu were silent. Renquist’s revelations required a measure of digestion. Marieko moved nearer to the cocoon and peered closely at it, still careful not to touch the thing. “It seems to be covered in these hairline cracks, as though it was starting to fragment.”
“I believe it’s preparing to wake.”
“All that energy that escaped when the door was opened?”
“Overspill from an ongoing process of energization.”
Destry took a deep breath, as though the deluge of new concepts was taking its toll. “Victor, how sure are you of any of this?”
“Much of it is only historical speculation, but it’s speculation that would seem to fit with what we’ve found. I’m certain he’s going to wake.”
“He?”
Renquist realized that, in his chill, undead excitement, he may have said more than he had intended. “They were all ostensibly male.”
Destry and Marieko both stared hard at Renquist. “Don’t bullshit us, Victor.”
“You said
he
.”
“You have an actual idea of the identity of what’s in that cocoon, don’t you?”
They had him. He might as well go ahead and tell them the rest of what had been passing through his mind as he’d answered their questions, but he attempted to present it as casually as possible, even though the ramifications might prove incalculable. “I would have thought it was obvious from the location.”
“What’s the location got to do with it?”
“There’s a great deal of evidence pointing to the conclusion Taliesin may very well have been an Urshu. He would appear to have come here during the Roman occupation, but remained here after the Imperial withdrawal, attempting to unite the local tribes under the Pendragon banner in the face of Saxon invasion and, at the same time, doing all he could to slow the inroads of Christianity and its miserable priests.”
Marieko was shaking her head. “I fear you have the better of me. I may sound lamentably ignorant, but I have never heard of Taliesin.”
“Taliesin? Taliesin the Great Merlin?”
“Merlin? You mean Merlin? As in King Arthur?”
Renquist had metaphorically turned over his entire hand. “The very same. Do you see now why I came all this way?”
“You knew all along.”
Renquist shook his head. “At first it was only a working hypothesis, but it seems to have paid off.”
In the same metaphor, Destry had seen the cards but didn’t quite believe them. “But Merlin’s just storybook stuff, myth, movies, Malory and Tennyson.”
Renquist smiled. “And to many, my dear Destry, so are we. Myth, magic, and Christopher Lee.”
Marieko had been thinking. “Arthur Pendragon was reputed to have died between A.D. 539 and 541. Around the same time, Merlin is supposed to have disappeared.”
“Is that significant?”
“Columbine claimed the first phases of her dreams came from the sixth century.”
“Someone is going to have to tell me about Columbine’s dreams.”
“They might be a print-through? Caused by this thing’s memory starting to surface?”
Destry suddenly interjected. “Damn!”
Both Renquist and Marieko turned and stared at her. “What?”
“The damned locals call this place Merlin’s Rest. I only just remembered.”
Marieko looked blank. “I never heard that.”
Destry scored a point. “You don’t have as much contact with the yokels as I do.”
Marieko’s lip acquired the slightest curl. “I suppose not. I don’t ride horses.”
Renquist cloaked himself in the mantle of superiority. Sooner or later Marieko might prove a challenge. “Sometimes it pays to take the natives seriously.”
The Highlanders formed up around Columbine, to conduct her from the stables to another part of the house,
where they would presumably wait for the return of Renquist, Destry, and Marieko. She felt as though under close military escort, like royalty perhaps, although possibly a condemned queen going to her own execution. She was a little unkempt, however, for such a stately occasion and, with her skirt torn, showing rather more of her thighs than she deemed appropriate in present company. Gallowglass took the out-of-doors route, and she found herself crunching across the gravel of the driveway, next to the small ferretlike male with the blue spiral tattoos on his face, the gold earrings, and the headsman’s axe. The weapon in itself contributed considerably to the execution motif. She glanced at him as they walked. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing here?”
The male looked at her with a benign resignation. “None wha’ever, miss.”
“And that doesn’t bother you.”
“No.”
“You just come here and invade my home and don’t even wonder why?”
“M’ lord commands, an’ I obey.’ Like i’ says i’ th’ song, ‘over th’ hills an’ far away.’”
“You have a name?”
“Aye.”
“You want to tell me what it is?”
“They call me Prestwick, miss.”
“So, Prestwick, should I recommend you to your lord, appraise him of what an unquestioning vassal he has in you?”
Prestwick’s expression or aura didn’t so much as flicker. “M’ lord kens well wha’ he ha’ i’ me, miss. Din’a he raise me fra’ the dyin’ on th’ field after Culloden?”
Clearly no wiles could be practiced on these coarse barbarians, and Columbine was wasting her time if she thought she could smile and seduce her way out of the current problem. Renquist would probably have been intrigued
by the fact that Fenrior had once raised his retainers by bringing the wounded on the battlefield through the Change, and all but back from the dead, but such insights were not Columbine’s way, and even if they had been, she was left with no time to mull or consider. They had reached the front door of the house, and Gallowglass wanted something. “Miss Dashwood, do we ha’ y’ permission t’ cross th’ threshold o’ y’ Residence?”
So, despite the absurdity of the situation, Gallowglass still wished to observe the time-honored niceties. “It would be pointless to refuse, I suspect.”
“Aye, mistress, quite pointless, but why ignore th’ formalities? They cost us nothin’.”
Columbine’s expression was as blankly venomous as a reptile. “Welcome to Ravenkeep, Cousin Gallowglass. You and your companions may enter now by your own free will.”
Blue fire briefly encircled each Highlander as he stepped through the door. Columbine was surprised. She and her companions were never so highly charged. Did these brutes enjoy a surfeit of power in their primitive isolation? Was that one of the fringe benefits of cold nights and the simple life? As the Highlanders filed into the drawing room, Columbine realized perhaps it was her wits rather than her allure that might extricate her from this dangerous intrusion. Her first realization was that they were not too comfortable in the house. Even the troika’s clutter of furniture and bric-a-brac was too much civilization for these tribal yahoos. They could only really be at home in stone halls with straw and wolfhounds on the floor, with the social finesse of the barn and the stench of a sty. Once inside, they stood uncomfortably. A few awkwardly removed their plaid bonnets, unsure of how to act away from the bonhomie of fighting and farting. Even the small Prestwick seemed too large, too stained and battle-scarred, too heavily armed for the room.