“No,” she said. “You need not fear that rite, but only one man is your true destiny. You are horribly dangerous to all others—avoid them.”
“I think I know who…” I began.
“Yes. He is already known to you,” she said. Then she touched my forehead with all five fingers.
I felt her arm around me as I went limp. Even now, I cannot say what happened. A wave went through me.
“What was that?” I said as I regained my senses.
“The reward of your labors,” she said. “When you need it, you will know it.”
“What is this place?” I asked.
Beyond the rocky shelf, the sun was sinking close to the water. The haze around us had faded once I was clothed, but the colors danced and sang in the walls.
The dragon drifted in the pool under the dome of light. He was fishing. His black and white was reflected in the walls, an unending dialogue between the permanent and the ephemeral, being and potential met as one.
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
“No. No, you don’t. But you come as close to grasping the concept that ruled its makers as any I have ever known,” she said.
“What was the faun?” I asked.
The dragon lifted his head from the water. He answered me. “The world you live in is cruel. Once it was—” he glanced at her “—less cruel. We tied the sea creatures together. He and his kind ruled the forests. They could speak the language of… bees tumbling among the flowers. The flowers themselves as their poignant solitude was fulfilled told him of their enrichment. Ferns spoke of their explorations among damp leaf mold. Even the spreading fungi constructing their webs through soil and damp, dissolving wood, spoke to him of the world’s endless cycles of renewal. He could follow the butterfly’s anxious search for the proper plant host for her young and understand the ecstasy of the crawling leaf eater’s epiphany as she wore her wings in the sun. He had all of those things and bartered them for…”
The dragon paused. “I cannot think what,” he said sadly.
“He is still my son,” she said. “Be kind to him,” she cautioned me. “And one day, set him free.”
The dragon paddled close to shore. A beautiful golden haze began to rise from the water. I climbed to the dragon’s back.
“Treise,” I said.
“Treise will be fine. In fact, had you shown fear and let the creature eat her, you would have vanished immediately. She is an important ancestress of yours.”
The haze was thick as fog now, hiding the domed room, the sea, and even the water.
“Take her home!” she commanded.
And the dragon obeyed.
He woke looking at the fire. his eyes burned and he knew he was not blind. His face was wet. He ran his tongue over his lips and tasted wine. That’s where the illusion of blindness came from. Igrane had thrown wine in his face when he savaged her lover’s groin.
He blinked and sat up, still shaking with reaction and some fear. The fire was warm and bright. All he could think, though, was,
How can I keep from letting them get me again?
But then, there had been that face looking at him from the mirror. And the fire—someone must have tended it while he was absent. Left to itself, it would have gone out.
He sat with his head bowed, simply letting the warmth soak into his body. Then at length, he asked the silence, “Am I alone here/ If I should happen not to be, who are you?”
He didn’t really expect an answer, but he got one in the form of a sigh. A little like the wind, he thought, but there was no wind. Only the tall, black outlines of the trees against a sky pearled with moonlight.
She rode high above the horizon, the full moon, on a sea of low clouds hovering over the distant mountains, a luminous vessel, adrift on phantom waves. The air was still. A voice followed the sigh; it was faint and every word articulated carefully, as though the speaker had limits set on his ability to communicate.
“At last. I was beginning to think I would never be able to persuade you to take the hints we kept dropping.”
“The bird,” Arthur said, “and your face in the mirror.”
A woman’s laugh trilled from the shadows. “1 sent the bird.”
Her voice was as faint and cool as the whisper of a breeze over a water meadow on a hot day. “You are in the yew.”
“Yes,” she whispered, “and he is in the birch.”
“This is?” he asked.
“The summer country,” was the answer. The man’s voice spoke.
“The land belongs to King Bademagus,” Arthur finished the sentence for him. “Morgana taught me well. But what took you so long?”
“We take our energy from you,” was the answer in the woman’s voice. “We feared to drain your strength.”
“I must escape this place,” Arthur said.
“And do so quickly, before Merlin can lay hands on you again,” the woman’s voice said.
“I would rather die than let that happen,” Arthur said.
“That may be the choice,” the man’s voice supplied.
“Then I will take it,” Arthur said, rising to his feet.
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” the woman said. “You have a little time.” She laughed, a strange sound in the shadows around the fire. “Your adversary is still in a lot of pain.”
“I certainly hope so,” Arthur said.
“Yes, you have gotten a little revenge. Below the yew, the deepest roots claw their way into a fissure in the rocks. It forms a chimney. It doesn’t run all the way to the ground, but it terminates at the top of a rock slide that will provide you with a slope of sorts until you reach the floor of the valley.”
“I don’t like it,” the man’s voice said. “It is a terrible risk.”
“What? Will you wait? Until they drive him mad?”
“I don’t know about him, but I won’t,” Arthur said. “A few weeks of their sport and I’ll be a drooling, whimpering wreck.”
“I think not,” the man’s voice said. “They have not got as much power over you as even they believe they have. You bore their torments as a child.”
“Yes, and they have poisoned my life.”
“See?” the woman’s voice whispered. “I told you. We must get him out of this cage.”
“Is this then a cage?”
“The cage of bones,” the man said, “and escape from this part of it won’t set you free. Not completely. But he will not find it as easy to seize hold of you when he wants you.”
“Good enough,” Arthur said. He slung the bow over his shoulder. “I want to keep it. Show me the way.”
“Leave the fire burning,” she whispered. “He will search near it first. You have nearly mastered this prison. You came here with nothing, and now have fire, food, and a vision of the eldest Flower Bride.”
Arthur’s breath caught in his throat thinking of her. “I had not known,” he said.
“Had not known what?” the man’s voice asked.
“That anything could be so beautiful,” was his reply. “Is she really the eldest?”
“Yes. She came into being long ago in a colder, wetter time, when forests ruled the world. A forest such as man has never known. This place pens her, also. Defeat the monster, the thing that haunts this cage, and you may lie in her arms. It is her jailer.”
“He is yet some years from that,” the woman’s voice broke in, sounding ruthlessly practical. “And he will not learn the skills he needs here.”
“He may die,” the man warned.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “I may, but that is always a risk.” He was kicking away anything near the fire that might spread the flame. “I’ll leave it burning, though it goes against my instincts, woodsman that I am. Now, lead on.”
A short time later, they reached the edge of the plateau. He stood looking down into the valley. The moon was bright, and when he climbed out on the branches of the tree, he could look down and see the black void where the fissure in the rock formed the chimney leading down to the valley.
He lay on his stomach on the rough barked branch and closed his eyes.
“He will fall,” the male voice complained.
“He will not.” The woman spoke with as much certainty as the man had.
“Let us not debate the issue,” Arthur said. “One way or another, I will get down, won’t I?”
“I’m pleased that you find your plight a source of amusement,” the man’s voice said.
“Take your chance. You will not get a better,” the woman said. “The moon is full, the sky is free of clouds. There is but little wind. The air is warm. Even here in the summer country, the winter brings chill and buckets of rain.”
“I thank you, my lady,” Arthur said. “I need no further encouragement.”
“But—” the man’s voice began.
“No!” Arthur cut him off. “Some things don’t repay too much thought.”
With that, he swung down and, clinging to the stubby branches near the tree trunk, he dropped toward the mass of twisted roots struggling into the fissure.
At first he found the going was easy. In some places the rock fissure sloped down without being too steep. It was also fairly deep, and he could work his way along, feet on one side, back against the other. Plant life had colonized the fractured stone, and the small trees, ferns, and clumps of moss offered convenient handholds as he climbed, moving from ledge to ledge inside the crack.
But about halfway down, the character of the stone changed. It became darker, harder, and more weathered; and therefore, more slippery than the jagged sedimentary rock above. The farther down he got, the worse it got. He began to feel blood on his fingers as the skin on them wore away against the silicates in the granite. Then, about two thirds of the way down, the fissure, which had been becoming more and more shallow, played out. He lay, held by only two shallow handholds and the pressure of his knees against the stone on a bulge of bare rock—over the catastrophically shattered mass of stone on the valley floor.
He paused, hands bleeding, sobbing for breath, staring down at what he was sure would be his death.
“Shush.” He heard Vareen’s companion’s voice. “Shush. Rest. Rest. Then work your way to one side. The rock slide shattered the stone into a series of narrow ledges. They will support you as you climb the rest of the way down.
“I must tell you what Vareen did not.” The words were a whisper, soft as the breeze, the dawn wind just beginning to blow. “You are magic. No, you cannot do magic, as Igrane or Merlin or even your sky eyed queen to be can. But you
are
magic.”
“I’ve always hated them,” he whispered. “Always hated them.”
“I know. But that’s why they tortured you and want to control you. Because of the magic in your being. It was your magic that drew the Flower Bride.”
He began to laugh. He could feel his stomach muscles quiver against the stone. “Women and directions,” he said. “To my right or to my left, these ledges?”
“Umm… the ones on the left are closer. The ones on the right might be better, because you’re stronger on that side.”
Arthur sighed and chose the right. A few minutes later, he was feeling for a ledge lower down. He found an extraordinarily flat and strong one. It took him a few minutes to turn his head carefully and check, but when he did, he realized it wasn’t a ledge. He was on the ground.
He had barely strength enough to stagger away from the cliff into the fan shaped rock pile that led into the valley. It wasn’t as hard going as he thought it might be. The boulders of the rock slide were a lot bigger than they had looked from the top, and he could walk among them without difficulty.
He knew they must have fallen from the cliff, where the orange red rocks formed the floor of the plateau. The blocks were square and almost regular enough to have been shaped by human hands. And he remembered sense of seeing writing carved into the wall near the spring where he had seen the Flower Bride. Whatever their origin, their regular, smooth shapes made it comfortable to sit on one and rest his back against another It was rather like sitting on a flight of giant steps—broad, spreading steps, like those in front of the basilica he had seen in London, now given over to Christian worship. Or the fallen part of a very big wall.
Various sensations warred in his body and mind. Fear—Igrane and Merlin were bound to pursue him. Exhaustion—he had had an arduous twenty four hours, and the days before that had drained him of strength. Cold—the sweat on his body was drying in the cool air, and he was shivering with the chill. Somewhere deep in his mind, he knew that he should be hungry and thirsty, but he had passed beyond those sensations.
“I will rest,” he said to himself, “just for a few minutes, and then push on.”
She came in the dawn’s first hush. He awakened just long enough to know she was present, his Flower Bride. He saw the waters in her eyes, rivers rushing over flood plains. The forest was her voice. The ancient, immortal, complex forest, that lives as much in the disintegration of its components as in the lives of trees or in the sun kissed canopy above.
She was the wind of a winter midnight or the coating of frost on an autumn morning, cleansing the trees of the summer’s last leaves.
The Flower Bride. For what is a flower but life’s expressed passion for itself. Sudden and brief, but certain and eternal at the same time.
She embraced him and brought him closer to the knowledge of what it must be like to be loved by one of them. His troubled, angry yet courageous spirit stumbled and cried out in pain and rebellion. But her soft lips were on his and her kiss… was the kiss of peace.
When he woke, the sun was at its zenith. He had slept away the morning, but he was at peace and felt certain of his destiny. He knew he was dreadfully weak, and if he didn’t find food and shelter soon, he would die. But his sense of freedom was so joyous that in spite of all his aches and weariness, he was filled with a dear, bright happiness.
Why?
he wondered.
Am I going mad?
But no, it was simply so joyous to be free and alive.
He hurried down the stepped blocks until he reached the bottom. He wouldn’t let himself think about Merlin and Igrane. He didn’t want anything to disturb the peace he had achieved in his dreams.
At the foot of the tumbled stone blocks, he found a pool of rainwater in something that almost seemed a broken rock basin. The rock was basalt and it looked as though it had been cooked in unimaginable fires. But the shape was such that he was sure it must have been worked by human hands.