“Because you are magic, it matters very much what both of you do now. You must choose your lives. It is time. I thrust the torch between you to give you that choice before you were both swept up too far into the currents of desire.”
“First,” I said, “I want to know why you believe your own mistakes caused your family’s deaths.”
Kyra’s eyes turned inward. “Fair enough,” she answered. “The first sorceress who saw the land flood and the perishing of the good order of the world was one of a large family. Her line did not fail. I know; I am one of them, and so are you—as was your mother and even Merlin and Igrane. Power is, of course, not devoted to good or, for that matter, to evil. Earth, air, fire, and water are the components of everything. Both of you understand that.”
“Yes. But what does that mean in practical terms?” I asked.
“In practical terms, it means we of the Painted People have a tradition of training our leaders and choosing them from among those we think would be best suited to the task. I was one so chosen and so trained by the high priestess, known as Scathatch, on the Isle of Women. We are needed in times of crisis to deal with any problems that might arise.”
“And what happened?” Black Leg asked.
Kyra was silent for a space, and I could hear the fire burn and the wind sigh in the trees.
“A great catastrophe happened among the Seal people. The queen’s line failed. There was a sickness and the women died—all of them—a terrible omen. A delegation was sent to Scathatch’s isle to find out what to do.
“I was proud of my skill in divination. I almost always could point out a productive course of action. Indeed, when summoned by the Scathatch, I knew without being told what was wrong. You see, there were five women; that was why no one thought the line could fail. When the ship drew up to the quay, I turned to go up to her seat in the fortress. I saw the first woman. I thought she was simply a child. I didn’t know. She passed me coming down. Then I saw her small feet left no footprints in the wet sand.
“The second met me at a bend in the path. She was gazing out over the sea, but I could see the rock she sat on through her body. The third was only a shadow. I could see the fourth, but she cast two shadows. They died together. The fifth stood at the head of the path and glared at me with eyes of flame. She alone of them all spoke. ‘Choose well,’ she said.
“I stopped because I didn’t want to pass through her, but as she spoke, she vanished.”
“Did you?” I asked. “Choose well?”
“No!” Kyra said very sharply. “I didn’t. That’s why I’m warning you now. Black Leg cannot be a king.”
For the first time, Black Leg and I looked at each other.
“No,” Black Leg said slowly. “No, I can’t.”
“Is that what they wanted you for—to choose a king?” I asked.
Kyra nodded. “This is the business of the royal line among the Painted People—to choose a king. And this is why your mother lay with the lords of the Sidhe and took on herself the curse of an early death—so that you might carry within your body sovereignty not just of the land but of the spirit of a whole people. On your body you carry the tokens of sovereignty. To you, it is but a gift of your father and an acknowledgment of paternity. But it speaks to the legitimacy of your claim to be known by right of blood as the king’s Flower Bride. Tell me, have you pledged your faith with the young king?”
I was silent for a space. Then I turned and met Black Leg’s eyes. “I have!” I answered proudly.
Kyra rose and walked away, out of the circle of firelight, leaving us alone.
“Why?” Black Leg asked.
“He is my other half,” I answered. I don’t know even now where the words came from, only that as I spoke them, I understood in some profound way their truth.
“What would you have me do?” I asked.
Black Leg’s eyes were fierce as a hawk’s or a wolf’s on the hunt. “Come with me,” he said. “We can live and love with humans, wolves, or both. I will be a hunter of great renown among the packs and a magnificent warrior among men. I know.” He struck his chest with his fist. “I know. I feel it here.”
“This is what you want?”
“Yes!” he answered. “Everything I want except… you.”
“It cannot be,” I answered. “And you know why.”
We both knew why.
“Vortigen,” I said, “is dead these hundred years. Yet your father, Maeniel, spoke to him, came to ask his help for the Bagaudae in France. I think you will take after your father.”
“No,” he said, scrambling to his feet. “I won’t just be a watcher.”
“Then seek the Isle of Women,” I said. “They will teach you to become the most dangerous warrior of all.”
“Where is the Isle of Women?” he asked.
“East of the sun, west of the moon. Follow the coast and they will call you.”
Again, I didn’t know where the words came from. But again I knew they were important and that it was important that I speak them. I wondered if this was part of the gift she had given me, the power to sometimes see into the souls of my companions and advise them well.
I doubt, you see, that the first queen of the people wanted to leave her pleasant, well watered valley, where she and her people hunted in the winter and in the summer allowed the sea’s bounty to smile upon them and journey to the cold crags, where they now made their home. But she knew the pleasant choice was not the wisest one, and so she accepted her fate.
A second later, my friend, my playmate, my foster brother was gone, and a big, gray wolf stood beside me. I turned toward him, tears swimming in my eyes. His nose touched mine. Then he was gone.
I can’t find him,“ Merlin said to Igrane. She chuckled. ”Don’t you dare,“ he said.
She tried, a bit unsuccessfully, to suppress a smile. His eyes lingered on her. The hag’s magic had worked well. She was beautiful again. It was a lean sort of beauty; her breasts were hardly bigger than ripe apples, cherry topped. Her stomach was so flat it was concave, and her ribs were visible. Her skin was gardenia white, protected from the sun by unguents, oils, and a little of her own magic. Her legs were so long as to make other women’s seem stubby by comparison, her sex a mound of soft curls.
As he watched, she spread her legs slightly, showing a bit, just a bit, of warm, scarlet flesh between them.
“Cover yourself!” he commanded and averted his eyes. His nostrils distended, but he knew he couldn’t afford this right now. He needed all his energies, his power. She distracted him. She always had. His had been a downhill course since he had met her.
Before that he had been able to concentrate all his energies on matters of state. He had dominated the politics of several successive kings and protected his power base among the great landowners of Britain. Protected them and their possessions.
Now this boy looked to slip through his ringers. He’d aided and abetted her in torturing her child, Arthur, but he sensed she’d gone too far. Her own tendencies toward cruelty and domination had betrayed her. A somewhat lighter touch and he would have wound up her slave, but she enjoyed tormenting the child too much. She hadn’t had the discretion to refrain from or limit her pleasures when the king was present, and he had caught her.
When Merlin arrived, she had a broken jaw and arm, and the boy was gone. He’d punished her; he liked punishing her. In fact, before the night was out, he would probably punish her again. But he wouldn’t kill her. He ought to, but he wouldn’t. And she knew it.
Hearing the genuine anger in his voice, she sighed and pulled on a long silk robe. “I thought you told me he couldn’t get out of that cage.” She sounded snappish.
“I didn’t think he could,” Merlin admitted. “But somehow he found the courage to climb down the cliff.”
“He never lacked courage,” she said, belting the robe. “I told you not to underestimate him. I can remember his eyes on me as a child. It was as though even while he was screaming, reduced to tears and fouling his clothing, some part of him stood aside, reckoning up the injuries and waiting for his chance to repay them in kind. I wish you had killed him.”
“He’s your son.” Even Merlin was a little horrified.
“What is that to me?” She spoke over her shoulder. Some distance away, near the terrace, her women were waiting like a bouquet of brightly colored flowers to do her hair and dress her for dinner. Watching her body undulate across the floor, part of Merlin’s mind considered his pleasures for the night, while the other part mulled over the problem of the young king. The politics of this country had been a problem since before the Romans. In a sense, they had only compounded the difficulties.
The Romans had been interested in the low, fertile lands centered around London. This wealthy agricultural land was what had drawn Caesar. The loot he extracted from the coastal tribes, the human merchandise collected by the slave dealers who followed him, and the tribute extorted from the rest of the country went far to pay his debts in Rome and make him its first full time emperor. When Claudius followed and began a conquest of the country, a permanent conquest this time, it was primarily these warm, southern lowlands he was interested in, also.
But to the Romans’ dismay, they found the deeper they ventured into the countryside, the harder the going got. Most of this never made it into the historical chronicles the Romans kept. But the mountains of Cornwall and Wales were higher; the forests denser; the tribes wilder, more dangerous, and less submissive than groups from the richer, coastal basin. Still there was gold and silver to be mined and much rich farmland to be exploited, easily worked by slaves or
coloni
—semi free serfs—for their new masters. From the less settled or exploitable parts of the country, furs, amber, and slaves generated by the endemic state of warfare between the tribes were valuable commodities.
All in all the Roman nobility were well satisfied with the situation. Bodiccia’s revolt was the first indication that things wouldn’t go entirely their way.
The Roman garrisons were lucky to crush it before the Roman presence was completely stamped out. But after that it was all downhill. Slowly downhill perhaps, but nevertheless a constant erosion took place. Six legions had to be stationed here to ensure the safety of the by now Romano British landowners. Wales could never be completely subdued. In the end, after many violent campaigns, the Roman garrisons were content to extract tribute.
Hadrian’s wall was at last a magnificent achievement and a confession of failure. The Romans were nothing if not ruthless bottom liners, and the bottom line was that Roman conquests had to pay for themselves. And there was no way that the legions could extract enough good land, silver, gold, or sellable slaves to repay them for the blood and treasure they had to pour out to finally and forever break the resistance of the native peoples.
What they did succeed in doing was dividing the country into two groups: the free tribes—people who ran their affairs according to customs that had been practices quite literally time out of mind—and the civilized Romano British landowners and their downtrodden slaves.
The slaves always had before their eyes the example of the freemen holding firm in the mountains of Wales and the ancient peoples of the highlands, whose claim to sovereignty was not just over the land of Britain but also over its religious life. Their claim to have been the first originators of law and governance for the entire island was hallowed not by centuries but by millennia. He didn’t know whether or not he believed the tales that they went to the mountains when the sea began to fill the valley between England and France. The story seemed like foolishness to him. But he knew he always came out second best when he crossed swords with their witch queens and sorcerers.
Like the little bitch who humbled Igrane and himself.
When the Romans left, he had cast his lot with the Romano British. God, they were civilized. They lived in houses, read books, had table manners. These wild men and women on the fen, moor, mountain, and deepest forests, who wore out short lives in loving, fighting, feasting, sailing, fishing on the deep seas, singing, and storytelling—what had any truly civilized man to do with them?
He loved his comforts, was a connoisseur of women, food, wine, and he had the best of everything. They went to bed on the floor, on skins, scratching their lice. And sometimes endured two seasons of famine a year, one in spring before the sheep dropped lambs and another near autumn before the crops came in. If he could have what he wished at the expense of others, why so much the worse for them. In any case, most of them were second rate material, better winnowed out the way a barren cow is by a harsh winter or an old hen fit only for the pot.
He admired the Romans. They brought civilization and law and order to the island. And the conquest of the drunk, disorderly rabble they crushed beneath their heel could only be a good thing. Twice the civilized south had made a bid to conquer the barbarian north. The second time, he had “arranged” the death of Vortigen and his powerful druid, Vareen. But he had failed. The Veneti had betrayed him by refusing to re supply the Saxon levies left behind by the legions, and he had found he had to back a new high king to halt the ever widening chaos that threatened to bring down the powerful southern landowners, his civilized allies.
Uther Pendragon was that king. Now he, the chief druid of Britain, was faced with another rebel in his son, Arthur. Igrane
would
torture the boy! It hadn’t been wise. Though Merlin agreed he could be broken and brought to heel by that means. He should have had her poisoned and taken over the child’s education himself. He understood the use of subtler means to control others. But he had fallen into his own trap. She was like a drug.
Luxuria,
the Romans called it. A descent into forbidden pleasures. He could feel the tightening in his loins at the mere thought.
Her women were setting a table for two among the flowers on the terrace. Wine, Roman wine in glass goblets. Dishes of crystal, gold, and silver would hold the fruits the glassed in chambers of his dwelling produced in such abundance summer and winter alike. There would be venison, wild boar, squab stuffed with strawberries taken from the open hilltops of Cornwall. And to top off the meal, pastries redolent of saffron and myrrh.