The Iron Tempest (47 page)

DÉNOUEMENT

The Bulgars, who had at first been disappointed at not finding their king at Charlemagne’s court, were delighted to discover him at last and begged Rashid to return with them to Adrianople where a crown and scepter waited. Constantine was preparing another invasion, they told him, with an even larger army, but with their hero’s aid they’d have no fear of being absorbed into the Greek empire.

Rashid accepted the throne, telling his new subjects that he’d be in Bulgaria—barring accident—within three months. His job was done before it started, however, for when Leon heard of this he told Rashid that as soon as he returned to Greece he’d have his father abandon his plans for further aggression against the Bulgars. Indeed, he’d beg Constantine to return every Bulgarian city he’d conquered.

Now that Rashid was a king he had the uninhibited approval of Bradamant’s mother; who had been impervious to his virtue was conquered by his title.

Charlemagne himself took charge of the wedding arrangements, making them as splendid and regal as though he were giving away his own daughter—which, in truth, he felt he were doing. Such was his love for Bradamant and for her accomplishments and merit that he would not have thought it overgenerous to have spent half his kingdom on her.

A proclamation of amnesty made it safe for anyone—friend or enemy—to attend the event and the lists were open for nine days to anyone who had a quarrel to settle.

The emperor erected the wedding pavilion on the same field outside the city where Bradamant had unsuccessfully fought Rashid and had it decorated with banners, bunting, wreaths and flowers and with so much gold and silk that it rivaled his own palace.

Within days the city swelled beyond its capacity with the crowds that poured in from even the remotest corners of the empire—and even from beyond: friends, strangers, family and foes; peasants and aristocrats; rich and poor of every rank; Greeks, Romans, Goths and Vandals; there seemed no end to the ambassadors sent from every region of the globe, even transarctic Iceland, who were eventually crammed uncomplainingly into every available inn, hut and tent.

Bradamant, who ought to have been as happy as any woman might have any right to be, was depressed. She was not so unintelligent that she didn’t realize how ridiculous this was, but at the same time she was apparently not so intelligent that she didn’t understand the causes of her black mood, or at least appreciate the complexity of her problem. She knew she was hurting Rashid by her not very subtle avoidance of him—she being unfortunately unblessed by any talent whatsoever for guile.

In the days preceding the wedding, she managed to escape as often as possible—and more often than was truly courteous—into the surrounding forest. She would leave her horse to graze at the verge while she wandered aimlessly among the trees. It was virgin forest, the trees unmolested since the beginning of time, and their vast boles soared overheard in Gothic perpendicularity. Bradamant sometimes felt as though she were lost in the abandoned streets of some cyclopean city: one of tall, fluted, terra cotta buildings, umber and sienna—both burnt and raw—their highest stones and most distant streets lost in an encompassing gloom. Scores of yards separate the giant trees; an army could advance through the forest with rank and file scarcely impeded. The ground between the trees is a soft cushion, fathoms deep, of a humus black, rich, fragrant and peaty. Feeble virgas of sunlight struggle through a hundred feet of thick foliage, so heavily filtered that the light becomes more like a fine luminous dust sifting down to coat the forest floor in a shadowless half-light; the air itself appears to be softly phosphorescent. No underbrush grows in the light-starved interstices so that the forest floor is curiously barren and tidy. The deep forest interior is like a subterranean world: a vast, cool, silent cavern whose dark vaults are supported by immense, patient columns. Scant hundreds of feet above, on the far side of the dense canopy, impenetrable as the crust of the earth, is an alien world of light, sound and color.

More often than not Bradamant found herself at a mirror-like pool she’d discovered snuggled into a hollow at the head of a small gorge. Its deep waters were perpetually shaded by the steep, semicircular, moss-covered cliff, from the overhanging lip of which sprung a little waterfall that arched gracefully fifty feet before falling into the pool with a musical splash. The cove was cool and damp and fragrant and entirely self-contained.

Sometimes she shed her clothing and sat on one of the spherical boulders that overhung the water, leaning back onto its cool mossy surface while her toes dangled in the water. Sometimes she would slip into the fragrant black waters, which even in the midst of summer were so cold she would gasp with the shock. She would allow herself to be carried in a gentle orbit by the swirling water; she would hold her body vertically, allowing it to sink like a plumb bob. The water was as clear as glass—though its limits vanished into shady blackness in every direction. She knew the pool was no more than a hundred feet across and probably no more than twenty deep—yet beneath its ruffled surface it seemed to expand infinitely, as though there were an entire universe beneath that silvery mirror, as though the pool were merely a porthole through a great wall separating her world from another, a primordial one, one still without form and void. She would hang motionless, suspended, weightless, in a transparent hemisphere, itself surrounded by an impenetrable gloom, like a butterfly imbedded in a decorative paperweight. She felt like the center of a new universe, as though she were the gravitational nucleus around which a whole new world might accrete. She hung like a pendant from a mirrored ceiling, her wan, green-tinted body looking like a new planet, the shifting, reticulated patterns of light swirling over her softly luminous landscape like the storms, cyclones, squalls and gales of a primeval world. She would wonder what creatures might evolve there, what empires and wars, kings and lovers.

Afterwards, Bradamant would climb onto a high rock and let the sun wash over her like warm butter, as amber embeds the hapless insect, as the mineral-laden waters replace the flesh of the future fossil with jasper and onyx.

On the afternoon preceding the matrimonial ceremony, as she lay half-dozing in the sun, imbedded in the warm sunlight like an insect in amber, Bradamant passed into what she thought was only a curious dream. She had been wondering just what it was that had happened during these past two or three years, what strange sea-change had occurred in her. Once, life had been simple, it had had the razor-sharp clarity of a woodcut. Black had been black, white white; good was as distinct from evil as night from day . . . there were no greys, no twilight, no equivocation, no doubts.
I’d known my place in the world as precisely as a navigator knows his position at sea, and I knew for whom I fought and why. Charlemagne and the cause of Christian Europe were Right, the forces of Moorish Afric were Wrong—no, worse, they were evil, possibly even satanic, certainly ungodly. And I still fight that enemy, I’ve destroyed whole armies single-handedly, I’ve brought great Saracen warriors to the True Faith. But for whose benefit have I done these things? For God and my emperor? Or for myself? Was it for the greater glory of the Empire, or for my own small, self-interested gain? But do my motives matter if the end is the same? Do my personal gains really matter if the greater gain would have been the same regardless? But . . . could the difference lie in that I once did what I did because it was my duty and for no other reason? I was as unconsciously thoughtless of what I did as a machine created for the purpose. What I’ve now done I’ve done because I cared, with passion and, and . . . love. Have I sinned because I’ve thought for and of myself?

A flame seemed to rise from the center of the pool, as though it were a lens concentrating the sunlight into an intolerably brilliant focus. Bradamant shaded her eyes against the glare and when she dared to again look she saw—as she had half expected—the sorceress Melissa hovering an inch or two above the dark water, as though it were a pool of oil and she the flame that burnt at its center.

“I have a wedding gift for you,” the sorceress said.

“I haven’t seen
you
in a while,” Bradamant said a little cooly.

“It’s not because I haven’t been around, or that I’ve forgotten you.”

“I had wondered.”

“You sound bitter.”

“No—I suppose I’m just tired. I don’t know. I sometimes wish I’d never met Rashid or—don’t take this the wrong way—you.”

“No offense taken.”

“It just seems as though I’ve been through too much—more than anyone ought to have been expected to endure just for the sake of love.”

“But it was for more than love, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what I mean. Was it? You attached this historical imperative to it; I felt the weight of the entire future of Italia and Frankland on my shoulders, as though the lives of thousands of people depended upon whether or not I loved Rashid.”

“It was nothing but the truth.”

“But what about these people? They’re only abstractions; I’ll never know any of them. In fact, I have only your word that they’ll ever even exist. Is the future so immutable that there couldn’t be impediments to its birth? Aren’t there alternative paths it could take? Even the greatest river can be deflected from its course. Can the future depend so utterly on the actions of single man or woman?”

“Would you like to see my wedding gift to you?”

“I suppose so.”

The sorceress drifted toward the girl and passed her hand over her eyes. When Bradamant’s vision cleared, she saw she was no longer sitting beside the pool but was inside an enormous, brightly-lit tent (and much more modestly dressed as well, thanks to Melissa’s thoughtfulness). Its walls and roof glowed with the sunlight that penetrated the canvas; its floor was covered by thick layers of beautiful carpets. The supporting poles were polished brass braced by velvet ropes. In the center of the tent, reminding Bradamant uncomfortably of the center ring of a circus, was a vast bed. Its cushions were piled as high as her head, its canopy supported by elaborately carved ivory columns. The jeweled head and footboards were engraved with scenes of Bradamant’s and Rashid’s adventures. She looked at them briefly and turned away in embarassment and annoyance. Was nothing of her life her own? She turned instead to the translucent walls and ceiling and was startled to see that they were covered with hundreds of figures, all stitched with such astonishing lifelikeness and color that they might have put Apelles to shame.

“This tent was embroidered two thousand years ago,” Melissa said, “by Cassandra, a maiden of Ilium. In a kind of prophetic fury, she created this entirely by her own hand in I don’t know how many long days and sleepless nights. She made it for her brother, Hector.

“Look closely and you’ll see that she has woven into the fabric the history of the chivalrous knight who was to descend from Hector, even though she knew he was as distant from her as the roots of a tree are from its branches. For his part, Hector never fully understood the significance of the design and only loved it because of its beauty and because his sister had made it.

“But Hector, as you know, was murdered treacherously, after which crime the Trojan people suffered terribly under the rule of the Greeks. Eventually, Menelaus inherited the canopy. He took it with him to Egypt where he left it for King Proteus in exchange for his wife, Helen, whom the king had kidnaped.

“Through Proteus, Ptolemy came into possession of the tent and through him, Cleopatra. It was eventually stolen from her by Agrippa’s soldiers. From him it passed into the hands of Augustus, then Tiberius, who kept it in Rome until the time of Constantine.

“When Constantine abandoned Italia, he carried the cloth to Byzantium. I obtained it from the present Constantine, Leon Augustus’ father.

“Look closely at the story it tells, Bradamant.”

Bradamant strained her eyes, but there were too many figures and too much action. It all seemed to swarm before her eyes like bees in a hive.

“See,” continued Melissa, “where the Graces themselves are acting as midwives to a queen—the divine Leonora, wife of Ercole. So wonderful a child is born that the world will not see another like it from the first age to the fourth. Look! Jove himself and Mars, Mercury and Venus are all scattering flowers and garlands to celebrate the birth!”

“Who is it, Melissa?”

“Hippolytus D’Este is the name embroided there,” the faerie answered. “See? There he is later in life, with Fortune holding one hand and Virtue the other. And there, even later, strangers are asking for the child in the name of his uncle, Corvinus, King of Hungary. He’s taken to the Ister capital, where thousands of Hungarians gather to cheer his arrival, adoring him as though he were a god. The king appreciates the child’s wisdom, wonderful even at that tender age, and raises him in status above even his own barons.

“Still little more than an infant, Hippolytus takes the scepter of Strigonia. See, he’s protrayed as never straying far from his uncle’s side, whether he be in the palace or in a military camp. Even while the king wages a campaign against the Turks or Germans, the child is beside him, performing even at that tender age noble feats and learning from his uncle the arts of chivalry and valor.

“Over there you can see him receiving his education from Fusco, who deciphers the ancient books of wisdom for Hippolytus. ‘This course you must take’ he tells him one time and ‘This you must avoid’ he tells him another, ‘if you wish for immortality and fame.’ Listen, you can almost hear them talking, can’t you?”

“I . . . suppose so.”

“Now you can see Hippolytus—only fourteen years old!—sitting as a cardinal in a consistory at the Vatican, where his eloquency is making even the Pope gape in astonishment. ‘Whatever will he be like when he reaches maturity?’ the pontiff wonders. ‘If Peter’s mantle should ever fall on those shoulders, oh! what a blessed age that will be!’

“But Hippolytus is still a boy: there he is playing and there he engages in sports. He’s fighting bears on craggy mountain cliffs or boars in deep swamps, he’s riding a jennet faster than the wind as he chases a roebuck or deer—which he fells with a single blow when he catches up with it, splitting the animal in two.