Truly
? I asked.
I believe so
, she answered.
I tried to close my mind to the abyss by calling up Arthur’s face. Very easily, it seemed, I found myself beside him.
He had just finished speaking. I knew that. The crowd around him seemed stunned by his words. Many wept. Others stood silent yet with a light in their eyes that suggested a great burden had been lifted from their souls. But he seemed uninterested in what they thought or felt, as if he wanted to evade their gratitude at all costs.
He spoke to a man at arms near him. “It is growing late. We must cross the river. If, as you say, this place grows more dangerous after dark, we haven’t much time.”
Then he strode toward the bridge. The women moved back to the shallows to fish. The men fell in behind Arthur, who took point and led them away.
“Law, Balin,” he said as the group marched, “is all well and good. But cattle are how we live.”
“Don’t try to make what you just did less,” a black bearded man said. “That we are not free men haunts us all. Much of what we think of ourselves is defined by what others tell us. And all our lives we have been told we were slaves and the property of this King Bade.”
I could sense Arthur was surprised at this man’s acuity. His brows rose. “May I know your name?” he asked.
“Caradog Freichfras,” the black beard answered. “I was one of the chief’s sons caught in the sweep. Will you now become our king and lead us?”
Arthur looked uncomfortable. “I have…” he began, but then broke off because they were well beyond the bridge and into the trees. And they had reached a point where they could see the cattle and far out into the valley beyond.
I heard Arthur gasp and I understood why. Long have I lived, but not before or since have I seen such beauty. Near the river, a mountain torrent flowed over a cliff, watering the first meadow where the cattle—pale buff beasts with red ears, hooves, and tails—grazed. Beyond the first meadow, the river flowed over a slope of giant boulders, into a second meadow a bit below it. And from there, into a third. Like giant steps, the meadows fell away toward a valley, sunstruck and hazy with distance.
“Ah, God,” Arthur whispered. “Never have I seen so fair a place as this. The realm of King Bade.”
The meadows were surrounded by mountains, but they were not unapproachable snow covered peaks in the distance rising sharp as pale knives against the sky. These were low hummocks of dark stone slopes covered by forests of ancient hardwoods stretching down into the open meadowed valleys. The long, rich green grass brushed Arthur’s kneecaps, and the cattle were fat with it.
“Eden!” Arthur said, “before Eve took the serpent’s apple and gave it to her lover.”
“Well and good,” Balin said, “but there was a serpent in Eden after all. And there is one here.” He pointed to the dark tower.
Arthur’s first thought was that the thing was a ruin. But it wasn’t. It simply flowed out of the earth the way the supports for the bridge had. Trees grew out of it, and some of them seemed to be part of it. An incredibly old oak was set close to the ground, and the roots, rather than tearing up the stones—boulders, really—at the base of the tower, seemed to be holding them together. A willow farther on had a hollow trunk that formed a catchment basin for water that fed vines, flowering vines that grew in and out between smaller stones like mortar.
The mixture of trees and other plants covered a round tower that rose beside the waterfall, up and up, until it looked out over the falls, the river, and all the valleys beyond.
“They say she rules here as much as Bade does,” Balin said.
“Who?” Arthur asked.
“The Queen of the Dead,” Balin answered.
“The Queen of the Dead,” Arthur repeated.
“She rules
them,”
Balin said, and pointed to three horsemen herding the cattle. They were the three Arthur had killed in the barn.
“She heard the flies, smelled the stink, and called them,” Balin whispered.
“Ah!” Arthur said. “I see.”
He didn’t, I was sure, but you must appear confident when you lead men. An army is as liable to panic as a flock of children. Or so Maeniel tells me. I expressed doubt about this when he said it. But even Dugald agreed with him, and they did not have their usual acrimonious debate.
This is one of the reasons the Romans were so successful—military discipline. It keeps them headed in the right direction and obeying their officers’ orders.
The herdsmen were a grisly crew, pale, the washed out gray that corpses show when the blood is gone. One’s throat had been cut and sewn back together with sinew; another had no eyes—only reddish paste in the sockets. The third looked well enough but for the dreadful wound in his back. They had been gutted, and their bellies had been sewn together to keep them from rotting quickly.
“They can do simple tasks,” Balin said, “until they decay and fall to pieces. There will be men nearby to supervise them.”
“Let us go and find the—” Arthur said.
The water hit me square in the face. I screamed, and the connection between me and Arthur was broken. I found myself standing on the deck of the ship, the sun burning my neck, blinded by what seemed like the deluge that poured over me.
“You were in too deep,” Dugald complained. “In a short time, you might have been drawn into—” he made the sign of the cross, and I remembered he was a Christian priest, also “—into God knows where,” he finished.
Morgana was sitting on a cushion, looking exhausted. One of her attendants handed me a towel, and I dried my face and body. Morgana was panting as if she had run a long race, and I felt drained and exhausted also.
“He has escaped Bade and Merlin both,” I said, “and is free, though I think in peril. But I believe Bade will find him a troublesome guest. A very troublesome guest.”
Morgana couldn’t speak yet, but she grinned wolfishly. I saw she agreed with me.
We returned to our encampment without telling Morgana what our plans were. She said she didn’t want to know. And Maeniel and Dugald agreed that was probably for the best.
I said a kind farewell to Farry at the dock. He did kiss my cheek then, and told me to keep him informed of our movements. To this end, he gave me a cage with four birds in it.
“You know how to use them,” he said.
I did. They are an old trick of the Veneti, one way a dispersed people can communicate quickly. Carrier pigeons.
Then we returned to camp.
That night, I lay in my blankets near Kyra, looking up at the stars. I was surprised that I couldn’t sleep. The half cup of wine I had with dinner had nearly knocked me out, and I turned in almost at sunset, not the usual custom with me. Normally, even when we were at home, we sat up late.
Sometimes Kyra told us a story or Maeniel and Dugald argued and debated whatever of the world’s events they had disagreed on during the day. And they seldom agreed to disagree. Instead, after nightfall, the dispute usually became louder and more heated, until the Gray Watcher went wolf and Dugald stalked away to his bed, muttering to himself loudly.
Kyra, Black Leg, and I took sides, sometimes supporting the wolf, at others Dugald. Now Black Leg was gone and I didn’t know when I would see him again, if ever.
Thinking of him, a dark finger of grief touched my heart. If I could have, I would have wanted to have him nearby always as a friend and brother. But that wasn’t possible, and it would not have been fair to him to try to keep him.
I rolled on my back and lay looking up at the stars. The bear was overhead, and I remembered that some called Arthur the Bear.
Dea Arto
. The mountain goddess.
Kyra told me she was very ancient. Long ago, when her people fled the rising seas and came to the highlands, they made offerings to her of honey and oil. And also, in spring, salmon, because these were all things she loved. Among the Silures, men only offered the salmon.
The Bear society was the fiercest and best. When they fought, they drew lots, and the winner went naked into battle as an offering. The Romans thought us mad to fight naked, and, indeed, most often we don’t. But those on whom the battle goddess’s exultation falls do march out in the vanguard as offerings, blood offerings to the wrathful, blood drinking daughters of Dis that they may quench their thirst and spare the rest.
Maeniel says it doesn’t work, and for once Dugald agrees with him. But the Bears still follow the old custom, and it is said no Bear has ever been known to die of a wound in his back. However great the odds, they have always fallen with their faces toward the enemy. If Arthur was a Bear, he was a mighty man, a deadly man, and King Bade would have his hands full with him.
I closed my eyes and must have slept a bit, because the dragon’s voice awakened me. He was singing a song of the stars. One of the songs about the houses of heaven that Kyra’s people learn, that they may track the hours of the night, the days of the year, and the march of the centuries.
All people know the houses of heaven, or so Kyra tells me, but only the Veneti and the Painted People know the parts of the songs that allow them to traverse the whale road, far out of the sight of land, yet look up into the sky by night and know where they are. The queens of Kyra’s people sit in their great halls, and each rules one house of the universe and one month of the year. The dragon sang of the house of the dragon.
I rose from my bed, pulled on my tunic, and walked down to the shore. The whole world was silent but for the low roar of the surf and the sea wind playing against the shore. The dragon glided back and forth in the shallows; his paddlelike fins stirred phosphorescence in the sea and the splash they made left a wake of cold fire.
He glided like a swan, neck arched, head bent down—a darker shape against a star filled sky. Back and forth in a small bay between two rocky headlands.
I knew he felt me watching, yet he continued to swim, and as he swam, he sang. And I understood he was doing magic. He was asking the almighty powers for something.
And the something was me!
I didn’t dare interrupt his singing, because I knew that whatever rules the universe was listening to him. Listening and answering.
The dragon song is a long one. Humans and dragons haven’t always gotten along. They compete with humans for the basking shark, seal, and walrus; but above all, for the salmon and eel coming upriver to spawn. More than once a dragon rookery along the coast has been wiped out by angry and greedy humans who smashed their eggs and killed their young and, often as not, such females who remained to defend their children. The song spoke of all these things, and I found myself shivering, though the sea breeze wasn’t unduly cold.
At length the dragon finished, turned, and glided toward shore. I felt rather than saw Kyra come up behind me.
“You go north,” he said to her rather than to me. “And you, most royal lady, will sponsor her in and among the dwellings of your people.”
“Yes,” Kyra said.
“Half the seats in the hall of heaven are empty. Only the songs are remembered,” the dragon said. “Of some, the line of the ancient seer queens have failed. In others, the dance floors are gone, swallowed by the sea. Others have nothing to do with us. We have no more truck with the archer, the wolf, or the fox. It has been how many centuries since all twelve queens were seated at once? It takes only one to bring a king to the people.
“Seven centuries, Kyra. Seven,” the dragon said, “since you and your people fared forth no more, and you were content to tend your sheep, harvest the salmon, run and sit in your dark raftered halls, telling each other tales of lost glories. Seven hundred years since you last sailed to the wine dark seas of Greece or into the frozen north, where the seas glitter with islands of ice, in search of the ivory tusked walrus or dark seal pelts. And buried your dead in the giant boulder tombs that dot the shores of Britain, Ireland, and Gaul.
“We mattered to you then, Kyra. We sailed the sea lanes with you, warned of storms, drove fish into your nets. The Dragon Queen was the greatest one of all. Then you didn’t grudge us our tribute. Salmon, eel, ling, kelp, samphire, and sometimes even seal and whale we took to feed our young. It was only at the end, when you began to go in mortal fear of the Romans, that she, the last queen, betrayed us and thereby wrought her doom.”
“No!” Kyra said. “None who ever occupied the Dragon Throne died in her bed. No, you may not have this one. No! And no again! Leave us! Go! Relations between your kind and ours are sundered. They were broken when Onbrawst danced, and the rock she danced upon was stricken by the trembling earth, and she and it fell into the sea.”
“Don’t I get a say in this?” I asked.
Kyra cried out, “What? Will you kill me with grief? Have I not had enough of sorrow in my life without this evil coming upon me?”
“Kyra,” I said, “tonight there is a place I must go and a thing I must do.”
A roar of wind came from behind me, parting my hair and blowing it out on either side of my face. The wind changed, and when I turned into the blast, I saw lightning dance over the mountains inland. The wind blew out to sea, and I knew I was being summoned.
I knew something, certainly not enough, of Kyra’s grief. But I, or perhaps it, was something left by
her
to reassure Kyra, my mother in love.
“Kyra,” I said, “whatever my fate, you will not live to mourn me. That grief will be mine. The sorrow at our parting.”
Then I ran into the surf where the dragon waited. “Do you know… ?” I asked him.
“I know. The silver manes told me. They are old, and the centuries they have waited and watched are more than the stars in the sky on a clear night or the grains of sand on all the beaches throughout all the world. They do not speak to just anyone, but they will talk to you. The one called Lais promised, and they keep their word.”
In moments, the only sight of the beach was the thin, pale line of the boiling surf. Then the dragon and I entered the darkness, and he began again to call down on me and his people the blessings of the star songs. And I knew that whatever might happen, I loved not just him but all his people. And they would make me a great queen and never, never, no matter what the cost to myself, would I ever betray them.