“So you’re thinking the same thing I am,” I said.
“Yes!” Maeniel said. “He’s relying on Kyra and Dugald to make you behave as he wishes.”
“But it doesn’t matter, because sooner or later he will kill me anyway, no matter what I do,” I said.
“Probably,” Maeniel said. “Once you and your people were not so wise, and the wolf taught you how to hunt. The ravens, like the wolf, led you to prey. The bear led others to colder lands, where the snow covered the ground and ice locked the mountain peaks. They watched the bear, and from him they learned how to fish, to wait until fruits and berries ripen, how to steal honey from hives, hunt among rotten logs for grubs, and kill deer.
“The boar showed them how to forage for winter food among hazelnuts and acorns, and the ducks and geese taught them to gather the seeds of wild grasses. And among the best of all were the dragons. They gave humankind the infinite resources of the sea. Led them to shellfish, dulse, and kelp. This is why they placed the friendly beasts among the stars and offered them the homage they deserved.
“But now all this is forgotten, and men believe the whole earth and all the good things thereof belong to them. They gobble and grab, kill and steal, and lay waste with both hands. Then murder anything that dares compete with them for the first place at the table of life. Do justice! This is the duty of a ruler.”
“I made a promise to myself about the dragons,” I said.
“Keep it,” he told me. “And watch the food.”
“You can tell, can’t you?” I asked.
He nodded. “Usually.”
But I never had to worry about the food. We entered the hall. It was alight with banners; the fire was blazing in the center. Everyone had dressed in their gaudy best. The light gleamed on a thousand pieces of jewelry on both men and women.
Each tribe,
tuath,
we call them, dyed their own cloth with their own subtle colors, a rainbow of reds, blues, greens, yellows, oranges, and even gray and black. Silk, linen, and wool flared on the people. In the center, the music had begun around the fire pit before the star seats. They were all painted and ready for their new occupants.
All but the dragon. The old oak that formed it was almost black with age, and it gleamed with the unadorned beauty that old dense grained, fine wood has.
I saw Dunnel. Issa and Bain, Dugald and Kyra had already joined them in seats of honor at Mondig’s table, along with two other young girls. Those must be the tame God’s children, who would be made queens.
But I walked past the table and toward the open space around the fire pit. Then I turned, walked past the musicians as the harp, pipe, and tabor fell silent.
I didn’t have to think about it. I went to the dragon chair and turned and sat down.
The closer he got to the tower, the less forbidding it got. Arthur knew he was looking at something nothing in his earlier experience had prepared him for. Nothing about the tower had the look of impressive arrogance most human constructions had. Instead, it seemed a part of the earth, the way the bridge did.
The vines twining the base looked almost as though they, and not human hands, had laid the foundations. In places where the stone was worn away by wind and rain, they closed the gaps with their thick, woody stems. Trees held the bigger boulders above, their roots stretched down to the ground to collect water and nutrients incidentally holding the larger stones in place like mortar.
Espaliered?
His people, like others, grew fruit trees against walls to save space. No, say rather the building was espaliered against the webwork of leaves, roots, and branches.
Yes, the stones, dark stone like the bridge abutments, were smoothed by eons of wind and rain. No, the trees rising up and up held the tower together, not the tower the trees. There was no door, only a perforated wall, because the tower was part of the world, built to embrace it, not shut it out. But the opening formed by the vines’ fuzzy small, aromatic flowers was a door to darkness. And in that darkness, something laughed.
Arthur felt a chill at the nape of his neck.
No!
he thought. I
may die for it, but I must find out what this strangest of places contains.
So he pushed the vines aside and went in.
A big tree root, part of the willow, made an inviting bench near the door. He sat down and let his eyes get used to the light. A thick, very soft moss lay like a carpet on the stone floor. The light was diffuse, greenish blue, and strangely the chamber seemed to lead down to the sea, for he saw the waves breaking on the other side of the room.
His mind told him this was impossible, but his eyes refused to cooperate. So he rose and waded into the sea.
The waves broke around his legs and ankles, but they didn’t wet him. So he walked deeper into the water, until it was up to his chin. His body continued dry, so he went a little farther, until the water was over his head.
Something armored like a crab ran into his arm. It had many legs, and it began to crawl down his arm. It was blue on the back, as some crabs are, but its many legs were a rather light yellow, paling to white at the tips. He tried to reach over and catch it, to see if it was really present. It must have been there in some sense, because he felt the hard carapace. Alarmed, it curled itself into a ball, fell to the bottom, and was pulled away by the current.
A school of fish flashed into view like flying needles, fleeing something. They turned left, then right, gleaming like tiny mirrors as they did so, then came straight ahead, breaking at the last moment to either side of him, and were gone.
The predator that followed them stunned him. It was fish or fishlike, but it was as armored as the crablike creature. But the plates were an iridescent red above, shading to gold green at the belly.
Then Arthur drew back out of the surf and watched it foam on the nonexistent beach. Real or not, the water was as changeable and beautiful as the summer sea he remembered as a boy. Again, he felt the strange peace that had invaded his mind when he reached the bottom of the cliff below his prison. The sun glow poured in through openings in the rock, flaming red between the green branches.
Arthur saw the stair, formed from the twisting roots of the trees. Someone, only a vague shape, passed him and began to climb the stair, vanishing around the first bend.
Yes,
this is a place of the dead,
he thought. And found himself in the midst of a great multitude moving toward the stair and up into light so bright that his eyes wouldn’t accept it. He turned away in self defense to look back at the ocean, but it was gone.
Fingers caressed his face, neck, shoulders, and back; and something kissed him on the lips. Then, to his horror, he found the lips on his were teeth, the fingers abrasive bone, and the stink of death overpowering. He tore away from whatever it was, retching.
Beyond the flowered arch of the door, sunset glowed bloody on a meadow. “Run, little man! Run!” a voice whispered. “Spit the taste of death out of your mouth, spit away the fear that haunts you. Haunts us all. And know you are only a man.”
Gagging, Arthur swallowed and staggered forward to climb the stair.
I didn’t get a chance to enjoy sitting on the Dragon Throne, though it was a comfortable chair.
An absolute dead silence fell in the assembly hall of the Painted People. Every eye in the room was fixed on me, and I could feel each one of them.
The emotions were a mixture of horror that any outsider would dare to commit such a massive transgression, anger that an ancient custom had been breached, rage and delight that some present had been given a truly wonderful excuse to kill me. And those were the ones I became concerned with first. Mondig must have packed the front benches of the assembly hall with his supporters.
As soon as he vaulted the table into the central court, I saw he was one of Merlin’s men. He wore the black and silver that are the powerful chief priest’s colors. His sword was drawn and ready. He tried to take my head off in one swipe.
I leaped clear of the Dragon Throne. I heard Kyra scream into the sudden silence, “Don’t! She is without weapons! For shame!”
Not for long,
I thought. And saw the Gray Watcher, sword in hand. It flew, hilt first, toward me.
My antagonist was no mean opponent. It took him only a second to see what was happening, pivot to face me, and attack. But he didn’t try to kill me. He did worse, he tried to humiliate me before those who must judge my fitness to rule. With two quick slashes, he cut the shoulder straps that held the dress on my body.
You must understand, nakedness with us is not shameful; it is ceremonial. The sacrifice is naked when he goes into battle. The king is naked when he lies with the Flower Bride. The queen is naked when she leads the Beltane procession into the forest to ensure the fruitfulness of the land. To be naked is to call the powers. And that’s what my nakedness did.
The armor leaped out all over my skin, green, shimmering in the firelight, clothing my skin in the ancient symbols of my people. The twining, ever changing, changeless forms of all creation from the stone to the star, the earth we trod, the air we breathe, the water that changes all things, the fire that transforms them. The patterns belonging to the dance of life wound intricately and forever into one.
The look on his face when he saw the armor blaze in the firelight and cover the nakedness he courted was one of dismay and sorrow, a little doom, too, because he knew he’d loosed a force he didn’t understand and that he couldn’t contain. And it would kill him.
And it did, too. Because he tried for my eye, but his blade skidded on my cheek and I had to turn my face away. He thought that would stop me; he thought he found a way out. But he hadn’t, because I pulled a trick Maeniel taught me. My sword flew from my right hand to my left, and I skewered him in the throat. Maeniel’s blade was a fine one; it severed his spine.
He fell bonelessly, like an empty sack. I spun around, my back to the fire, and saw there were fifteen more after me. But the gray wolf was with me. He hamstrung the first, and I cut his throat going down. He landed between the shoulders of the next.
The sword of the third slammed into my side. The armor held, but I felt two ribs crack. He was a giant of a man.
I told you earlier my armor doesn’t prevent me from being hurt or killed. It will turn a blade, that’s all.
I turned to protect my left side, but he swung at my right. I didn’t parry. I counted on the armor to block the sword’s edge. The pain went through my body like a flung spear as the big man’s sword hit. But my sword was already up, and I was wielding it two handed. I brought it down as hard as I could on the top of his head. My sword sheared through helmet, skull, and brain. I split his skull to the teeth.
Another tried to stab me in the back, sending a thin bladed knife through a chink in my fairy armor. He almost succeeded, but I twisted and the blade snapped away, a problem with a blade that thin. I spun around completely now. I got him by the throat and jerked him toward me. He had no sword, but he tried to send the broken stump of his knife (part of it was still lodged in the armor) under my left breast.
But my sword went through armor and man too quickly. He died before he could get any pressure behind the blade.
I jumped free of his falling corpse, but there were more coming at me. Maeniel had accounted for three—the first whose throat I slashed, a second whose neck he’d snapped, and on a third, the wolf’s jaws shattered a thigh bone. He bled out when the bone leaped through the skin.
But as I said, there were more.
Talorcan erupted from the fire pit in a fountain of embers. None of those coming to try to finish us off reached me, because the Death Pig disemboweled the first, and the others fled back among the benches while the one the pig killed died, twisting and screaming beside the fire.
I stood there, bloody blade in one hand, the wolf snarling beside me, and the pig dancing with fury on the other. But we were faced with an even worse threat.
At least two dozen bowmen stood around Mondig, arrows nocked and pointed at us. And the hall was not a stage but an amphitheater. I was sure there were slingers behind us.
I spared a glance over my shoulder and saw I was right.
“Kill them,” Mondig said. The entire hall was silent; his tone was almost conversational.
“Kill them,” he repeated.
“Mondig!” Kyra shouted. “Give over! Suppose—just suppose—you can’t!”
And I saw what had saved our lives so far. I saw it in the faces of the bowmen and the slingers.
They had seen our powers, and they weren’t sure they could kill us.
But I looked at the rest of the fire lit hall, and I knew they could. This was not a gathering of sheep but of wolves. Every man and most of the women had weapons in their hands.
“Dis!” Mondig hissed like a serpent. “Dis awaits you.”
The giant boar stirred restlessly beside me, and I understood why he had appeared unsummoned, because I had not called him. We were going to die. We might overcome the slingers and the bowmen, but we would in the end be cut to pieces by the men and women of the Painted People. They would not let us loose to wreak ruin on their land.
I AM A KING
, HE THOUGHT, AND BEGAN HIS CLIMB.
Odd, he didn’t remember the feast when he had been crowned, but then, he had been full of the spring mead that night. But Morgana told him the next day he hadn’t spoken prophetically or otherwise the night of the feast. He had been amiable toward his companions.
Sometimes the newly crowned king could become quite violent. Spring mead was a strange mix, and its recipe was a secret of the druid masters. In the spring, bees drink from flowers dangerous even to handle— aconite, henbane, foxglove, the small dense secret flowers of mistletoe, and perhaps other, even more toxic plants. The distilled essence of honey at this time filled the king’s cup with a beverage so intoxicating that some were, at times, lost to permanent madness.
It was said the new king could look into
her
soul and see
her
thoughts. And if he chose to kill a man among his companions, why it must be considered an offering to the powers who rule all things. That night he was sacred and could do no wrong.
Arthur remembered no anger that night, only a vast distance between himself and the rest of the world—a glass wall against which he pressed his face and fingers set between him and the other revelers at the feast. And a profound sorrow at the abyss of separation between him and others. A separation that he could not escape, around, under, over, or through. That’s why he was in this tower now. He would never be one of them.
The trunks of the trees in the tower to one side of the stair formed a wall, so he could not look down. The branches above stretched out over his head and held up the walls. He passed a spot where one tree had died, and only dead limbs held up the wall’s boulder size stones. But vines had covered the dead tree and were nurturing saplings at its base. Beyond the wall of tree trunks on his left there was a whisper, and at times a rush. He knew the falls he had seen next to the tower must in some way flow through it, and the living vegetation that formed the tower’s structure could drink from that flow.
Light still poured into the tower from beyond the thick growth of leaves on the branches clutching the stone, but in most places the sunlit leaves were so thick he couldn’t see out to the world beyond. Instead, he climbed in a perpetual emerald and golden glow.
Surely, he thought,
it must be sunset by now in the world outside.
But then, he didn’t know if the world outside was the one he had left behind. The things he did see between the interstices in the branches weren’t such as to reassure him.
Once it seemed he looked down at a jungle of thick trunked trees growing so close together that it didn’t seem even a mouse could force its way between them. Another time he saw desert with spare plants tipped with flame, all around them barren rock and scorching sun. A beautiful wasteland—the rocks red, purple, brown, and sometimes black—seeming almost to drink in the light and reflect it in glowing pastels more suited to a butterfly’s wings than the frightening barren place he looked upon. The glow of stone was textured like cloth, blue silk, velvet mountains, linen orange rocks, woolen green ravines in those few places where water collected. And the lean, long branched plants dipped in blood.
He could appreciate the thought of the builders who created this tower. They had understood what his people knew: that life itself comes closest to immortality. He remembered at Aquae Sulis the forest creeping in, the poplars and willows tearing up the heavy flags the Romans laid. A
frigidarium
taken over by moss, a fallen wall only a mound under some sweet flowering vine.