Cai and Gawain had vowed themselves to Arthur in a similar way when he was crowned summer king. Why weren’t they here? Cai was with Ena. His father had dismissed him, but Gawain or even one of his father’s oath men should have accompanied him to his rooms.
Turn tail and run, something warned!
Run!
No. He refused to be stricken with panic in his own bedroom.
But he would hurry. He would leave everything here but take the swords, one at his waist and the other, longer one, strapped to his back. He seized the belt of the shorter one to put it on.
Something stung him painfully, viciously. He jerked his hand back and looked down. The snake was injured, dying, but it still had enough life in it to strike. The fangs were embedded in the back of his hand to the gums. Arthur drew his knife. There was a chance, if the venom was not in him, he might strike upward through the roof of the serpent’s mouth and rip it free, before he received a mortal dose. But even as the blade cleared the sheath, he realized this was no normal living being. A serpent is a frightening creature, but it, after all, was one of God’s creatures. But not this one. It was part of her hair and pure evil, a messenger of darkness. He saw the bloody stump where it had been severed from her head.
Its venom had begun paralyzing him, but he would try to the last. He struck upward with the knife, but his arm was blocked, and he found himself looking into Merlin’s eyes. There was a strange smile on the wizard’s face.
Then, as he watched, Merlin, with a finger, pressed down on the serpent’s head, driving the rest of the dark poison into Arthur’s body.
And that was the last thing the summer king saw or knew for a very long time.
Uther and his oath men waited only long enough for Arthur and his companions to join them. Cai arrived first, escorting a still protesting Ena.
The king left as soon as he saw them at the causeway that led to shore. A half dozen of his men always surrounded him closely. The rest followed, strung out along the road through the forest with Arthur, Gawain, and Cai bringing up the rear.
The king set a terrific pace, almost too fast for the narrow, muddy track they followed. The sky was overcast, and from time to time sprinkles of rain fell on the party.
Arthur was silent. Gawain was silent and smiling.
She must have been a particularly nice one, Cai thought.
Gawain was twenty three and had already acknowledged four bastards. Married or not, he had the beginnings of a huge family. His father, being of the Outer Isles, was glowingly proud of his son, as was his mother. His people were given to unusual marital arrangements. But then, they were seafarers. Marriage was a nuisance to those bold people. You couldn’t expect men and women who were separated for long periods of time to be as devoted as spouses that spent their entire lives together. King Lot had been married to one of his other aunts for seventeen years, but in that length of time, he doubted that the two had spent as much as a half year together.
Gawain had been conceived after his mother visited for six months on the Isle of Women, a thoroughly strange place. The high priestess, the Scathatch, had told Morguse she would conceive by the Queen of Light. She, like Dis Pater, Lord of the Dead, sometimes used other creatures to pursue her amours. And in this case, a giant sea eagle lifted Morguse to the top of a crag, and the mating took place in the air among the clouds over the open ocean.
Cai didn’t know what he thought about that. When he asked his grandmother Morgana about it, she replied with a beautiful poem of a maiden brought up to the sky by such an eagle and the culmination of their desire as they soared between heaven and earth, sky and sea.
When one is high enough, one is not falling but flying, and desire dissolves every emotion but the infinitely sweet preoccupation of flesh with flesh. In the poem, the bird carried a lance of glowing rainbow light at his loins, and the woman’s mad fear as they joined was transformed into ravishing ecstasy that pulsed on and on so long that the queen nigh died of the divine bird’s fire consuming her flesh. She was left sated and weak on the green velvet grass near the heart spring on the Isle of Women.
Her husband was sent for at once, and he added the vigor of mortal clay to the citadel of her fire drenched womb, and the child was drawn out of nothingness into existence. Nine months later, Gawain was born.
Women were on him like cats to catnip. They wallowed before him like lions in heat, absorbing his vitality, vigor, and virility the way the starved earth sucked up rain. Adoring him from near and far, upright and prone, day and night. He accommodated all comers with profound courtesy and deep good humor.
And there were often times when a wildly jealous Cai hated the air he breathed and the ground he walked on. But he was so amiable, kind, and good at everything he did that no one, certainly not any of his numerous amours, could stay out of temper with him long.
So he was forgiven trespasses that might have gotten other men killed on the spot. And he walked in the golden beauty of the goddess’s protection.
Ena was afraid, and so broke constantly in on Cai’s thoughts with querulous inquiries. “Where are we going/”
“Why are we riding so fast?”
“I’m not sure I can keep up.”
“When do we stop?”
“Will we slow down?”
“Why don’t you answer me?”
Cai began to laugh. “Too many,” he said. “Pick one.”
“Oh, God, you Britons are terrible. I can never get a straight answer from you. My mother told me… she warned me—”
“My sweet,” Cai broke in, “I can keep company with your mother, two aunts, and a cousin. They all have opinions about everything—at least to hear you tell it, they do. But aren’t you afraid your own dear self will get lost in the crowd?”
This silenced Ena for a few moments, while she sorted it out. Then she began to snivel. “Now I can’t talk about my family to you at all. Aren’t you ashamed to be such a tyrant?”
“And yet another question,” Cai said. “Let me see if I can sum it up. To Morgana. He wants to get as far from Tintigal as he can today. You can keep up. Plainly, you are doing it. We will stop soon, and we will slow down because he can’t push the horses so fast for so long. I have answered you, and no, I am not ashamed.”
Ena had to sort this out, also. And she was silenced for a time.
They did slow down, because as they distanced themselves from Tintigal, the road grew worse. As they pushed deeper into the forest, mist hung heavy in the trees, blocking out the light and impairing visibility.
Cai pulled his horse in and rode knee to knee with Ena. Gawain moved up from the rear and eased beside him.
“I don’t like it,” he said, frowning. “This stinks of magic.”
Ena was pale; she pulled her horse’s reins and began to slow.
“No, Ena,” Cai said. “Keep up.”
“We can’t go on running like this,” she replied. “It’s getting so I can’t see anything.”
And indeed, Uther’s oath men ahead were slowing also. The fog grew thicker and thicker.
“What do you mean about magic?” she asked Gawain.
“We started our ride in the morning sunshine, and then murk closes in around us. It’s unnatural.”
“That’s what magic is,” Ena said. “A betrayal of our expectations— the things we depend on for our very lives. When the magic rules, fire is cold, water burns, age is youth, and youth…”
She had almost stopped moving. The fog was blinding, and she ceased speaking because the three heard the sound of hooves thudding behind them.
“That will be Arthur,” Cai said.
“Will it?” Gawain said.
“Who else?” Ena said. Her face was pale. Her long blond hair, darkened by moisture, hung in damp rat tails on each side of her face and down her back.
“I can no longer see anything ahead of me,” Cai said.
Their horses were walking now.
“I can’t hear them either,” Ena whispered. “We’ve gotten separated from the rest somehow.”
The fog was a white wall around them. Trees, bushes, even the wet, oozing, muddy track they were riding along were almost hidden by the vapor.
Arthur’s horse rose into view behind them, with a figure in the saddle. He was wearing the robes of the summer king, the dragon embroidered on the heavy dalmatic.
Why now, for travel? Cai thought. The royal robes might be appropriate for a banquet or an affair of state, but for riding through a dripping wood? No.
Gawain, Cai, and Ena pulled their horses onto the grassy verge. Arthur’s stallion, still moving at a trot, drew level with them and began to pass.
Cai gave a sigh of relief at the two pale hands on the reins. That was all he could see. The hood of the dalmatic was up.
“My lord…” he said.
The figure on the stallion ignored him.
Ena was a bit ahead of Cai.
“My lord,” she echoed his cry, and reached out. Her fingers brushed the sleeve of Arthur’s court garb.
That was all it took.
The stallion slowed. The figure in the saddle turned toward the watching trio.
Cai felt a shock of absolute terror as he saw his friend’s face with the naked, empty eye sockets of a skull.
“Arthur,” he whispered.
But then it began to dissolve. Sand poured from every opening in the clothing, until at last a yellowed skull toppled from the top of a neck made of sticks to roll through the muddy puddles at their horses’ feet.
Gawain leaped from his saddle. He kicked at the remains—sticks, bones, sand, dried leaves, and the ancient skull.
Cai followed, lifting Ena down from her horse.
“He’s dead,” she whispered, staring at the skull.
“No!” Gawain said. “No!”
When Gawain felt the world, his senses were extended beyond those of his companions. This is a gift we all share to some extent, the knowledge of where we are with respect to time, space, inanimate objects, and animate others. But his gift was heightened by his supernatural ancestry. When he approached anyone, man or woman, he could tell what they were feeling and, often as not, what they were thinking. He need only brush a woman’s face with the tips of his fingers and he knew instantly how to bring her to a state of quivering ecstasy. He was similarly effective at defusing the anger and envy of men, persuading them to like him and to obey his requests and commands.
He knelt, lifted a handful of sand that had composed the limbs of the semblance and let it trickle through his fingers. The sense of wrongness was palpable. The fog surrounding them grew thicker by the moment. He felt a tendril brush his sleeve.
Real fog is moist and cool. Neither coolness nor moisture was resident in this cloud. Instead, he felt the deadly chill that is the first warning that the dead are present.
The miasmic vapor sucked the life from everything it touched. The trees were burdened with it, not refreshed as they might have been by real fog. It silvered the bark and leaves with the icy touch of midwinter hoarfrost. And he knew it would kill first the vegetation around them, then the denizens of the forest, locking them in its icy embrace until all warmth was sucked from their flesh into a frigid silence. It was already striking at the humans gathered here around the evil travesty of life, made vulnerable by grief.
Birds were his mother’s creatures. Not his human mother—the other one. And he remembered how he had first seen her through the wings of a bird as it spread them to take flight between his eyes and the sun. Each feather clearly delineated, each a wondrous construction that gave the bird flight. A translucent beauty, an ordered pattern glowing with the fire of the sun shining through them.
Mother! Mother! Answer me! Help me! And she did.
“No,” Gawain said. “He—it—never was alive. It was only a semblance… intended to fool us for a short time.”
Cai turned to Ena. The expression of fixed terror on her face was in itself frightening.
“What did I do?” she whispered.
“Nothing,” Gawain assured her. “Nothing. The thing would have dissolved in a short time in any event. Your touch broke the spell that held it together.”
“What did I do?” Ena asked again, as though she hadn’t heard him.
“Cai! Kiss her!” Gawain said.
“What?” Cai asked almost stupidly.
“Kiss her. She is in danger. The spell leaped from the semblance to her mind. The thing was… was… man trapped. It was supposed to get one of us. Instead, it got her. Kiss her, for God’s sake. If you love her, kiss her.”
Cai pulled Ena’s body against his and pressed his lips to hers.
He released her, feeling as though a thousand tiny insects covered his body.
“No! It’s just a game with you men!” Ena screamed.
“No game, this,” Cai said, lifting her into his arms and carrying her into the fog drowned woods.
The wind was beginning to blow. He threw her onto a bank of thick bracken, just out of sight of the road.
“I want you,” he snarled.
“Yes! Yes!” Ena panted. “Oh, yes! I smell the sea. Ah, God, how it pounds the rocks at midnight.”
Salt water was in her mouth, blood from his lips. He’d bitten them in the ferocity of his need. The wind was blowing more and more strongly, tearing the fog around them to tatters.
Gawain, standing in the road, looking at the debris of Merlin’s spell and clinging to the terrified horses’ reins, listened to the cries. Both human and those of the forest; giant trees sobbing now and moaning in the blast.
He smiled, a grim smile. Cai and Ena were throwing Merlin’s sorcery back in his face.
They were fiercely joined now, the forest around them crying out with passion, both its and theirs. Cai thrust his tongue almost into Ena’s throat. Her loins opened as he had never felt them open before—moist, hot, flowing with need.
“In! In!” She pulled her mouth away from his to speak. “In! I want all of you. All of you.”
Cai threw back his head as the overpowering spasms of his completion shook his body. He felt her nails digging into his buttocks, the slight pain driving him to even more ecstatic heights. It wrung an outcry from him more animal than human.
Then she screamed, seemingly almost scalded by her own desire. And it ended with the sun on his bare back and in her eyes as it shone through the high canopy of the forest above.