Authors: Ron Miller
In the glare of the woman’s pure light, Bradamant saw that the orgy she had imagined was in reality only a collection of tattered, stained tapestries, sooty old paintings and cold, crude carvings. The chamber now seemed dark, dull, tawdry and chill and the great fire that had raged within her was banked so that the heat of not even a single coal was left to warm her. She remembered that brief touch of passion no more than one might awaken from a long illness and remember the fever dreams.
“Please rise, Bradamant of the Great Heart,” the faerie woman said pleasantly, in a voice not at all unlike an articulate cello. “Have no fear: you have been led here by the will of God. When I spoke last with the spirit of Merlin, the great magician prophesied that you’d be taking an unusual path in order to visit his holy relics. He wishes to reveal to you something of your future.”
“Pardon?” said Bradamant, not making any sense of what the woman was saying. “I beg your pardon. What is this place? Who are you?”
“Welcome to the Valley of Joyousness, sometimes known to others as the Valley of Delight.”
“It seems somewhat misnamed to me, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.”
“Of course I do. Admittedly it was not always the dreary place you see now. There was in all the world no rival for its beauty when Merlin and Vivian first saw it. They didn’t know whether it was lovelier in the daytime, or at night when the moon shimmered full into its shadowy depths, like milk splashing into a deep pewter vessel.
“This place is the work of Merlin. Surely you have heard of him? This is his holy tomb.”
“Of course I know who Merlin was.”
Everyone knew the story of King Arthur’s fabulous magician, advisor and seer—of how he had been cozened and entombed by the treacherous Vivian—what Bradamant didn’t understand was what his tomb was doing in Frankland, and said so.
“There was once a palace on this spot,” explained the luminous woman, patiently, “of unprecedented grandeur, erected by Merlin magically in a single day for the woman he thought he loved. This is all that remains.”
“Are you Vivian?”
“Good heavens, no!” she laughed, unoffended. “My name is Melissa, and I came from a country very far from here in order to consult the legendary wizard. I am myself a sorceress of no small ability, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, and I wanted Merlin’s opinion on a small but important detail of my craft. In any event, I discovered, through him, that you were soon to arrive, so I waited here a month longer than I originally intended, just in the hope that I would meet you.”
“
Me?
Why?” said Bradamant, thinking that perhaps she was in fact still lying, unconscious, at the foot of the cliff and that this impossible conversation was entirely the product of a fractured skull, a bruise on her brain. “Why am I so important that there’d be prophecies about me or that you’d hang around this lonely place waiting to see me? It’s nice enough, I suppose, in its way, but in all honesty I can’t imagine that Merlin could be very good company, all things considered.”
“You’re much too modest, Bradamant,” replied the sorceress, stepping down from the altar though it was much too high for the single step she appeared to take, “and you underestimate Merlin.”
Bradamant was only half-listening. There were two things she had just realized about the woman who now stood not three paces from her: the first was that she was taller than Bradamant and she disliked women who were taller than she, and the second was that the woman was completely nude. Bradamant had never before seen another human being unclothed, let alone another woman—indeed, she had never even seen
herself
unclothed—and she was speechless and distracted with mingled consternation, embarrassment and fascination.
“Will you come this way, please?” Melissa said, “I’ll try to answer your question, though the answer will not be a simple one.”
Bradamant, thought that, dream or not, this was an interesting adventure and since adventure was adventure after all, followed more or less eagerly. If she had been meant to come to harm in this place, the harm would surely have befallen her by now. She trailed the shimmering woman into the dark recesses of the chapel. The sorceress had need for neither lantern nor torch: her phosphorescence was sufficient. Bradamant looked with some jealousy at the sinuous figure that glided ahead of her, as graceful as a meridian of longitude, her lustrous buttocks like twin pearls, undulating as rhythmically as the reflection of the moon in a trembling pond, the impossibly long legs, like ivory spindles, like dagger blades white-hot from the forge, swinging like lazy pendulums—it made her feel gross and clumsy and carnal in her armor. She wished she could tell whether or not Melissa’s feet were touching the tiles; she feared that they did not.
They crossed what seemed to be the apse of the subterranean cathedral, though its soaring walls and vaulted ceiling were all but lost in the gloomy, silent darkness. Soon Bradamant became aware of another light, a lambency against which even the sorceress’ aura seemed like a painter’s feeble attempt to duplicate sunlight with coarse, opaque pigments. The source was a great block of marble, as large as a cottage, glowing like an ingot in an ironworker’s furnace. It illuminated the surrounding chamber and the towering statues that circled the block. These cyclopean figures supported the looming roof on their bent shoulders, leaning over the mausoleum like the curious, gloomy spectators surrounding an accident victim. They were the images of the great knights who had formed Arthur’s round table.
“This is the tomb,” said Melissa, “created by Vivian after she had placed Merlin into a sleep that was deeper than death itself. His uncorrupted body still lies within, as cold and stiff as that day the wicked Vivian ensorceled him, but she could not murder his spirit—that was beyond her powers—and it still lives on.”
The tomb was featureless save for a single iron door. It swung open noiselessly at their approach. The sorceress, without hesitation, passed through it. Bradamant, after a moment’s hesitation, a shudder of superstitious foreboding, followed. As soon as she crossed the threshold, she was surrounded by an impenetrable mist of light, a luminous, opaque fog, and heard a voice that she knew must be Merlin’s. It seemed to come from the air itself, from every direction indiscriminately.
Welcome, most noble Lady, and may your God favor your every desire.
“Thank you, my lord,” Bradamant replied, not knowing what else to say, but rightly believing that common courtesy was never inappropriate. She did not know where to look while speaking; the misty illumination was disorienting. She held her hand near her face; it was invisible. Nor was there was there any sign of Melissa. “It’s, ah, nice to be here.”
I’m glad you like it. I look forward to seeing it from your vantage some day. I understand Vivian did a fine job. How is the weather?
“Rather dreary, my lord. It was beginning to drizzle when I arrived.”
I can tell you that sounds wonderful to someone who has to be dusted every few decades. However, I’m wasting your valuable time with this idle chitchat. There’s something far more important that I must tell you.
“Tell me, my lord?”
You, indeed, my dear Bradamant, and here it is, ready or not: From your womb shall spring children destined to bring honor not only to Italia but to all mankind. Two perfect bloodlines, yours and Rashid’s, each having originated in ancient Troy, are to be blended within you to produce the greatest of all the dynasties that have ever existed between the Indus, the Tagus, the Ister and the Nile, between the Antarctic and the Great Bear. Your posterity will include marquises, dukes, popes and emperors. From you shall spring the hundreds of generals and thousands of dauntless knights who by sword and wit will reclaim for Italia all her vanquished honor. The Golden Age will again live, under the august, just and holy rulers who shall be your descendants. In order to bring about this edict, which has been proclaimed by Heaven itself, which from the beginning of time has decreed that you be Rashid’s wife, continue your way with courage, remembering always that nothing will prevent God’s will from being done.
“But Rashid is a paynim paladin, Lord Merlin, an unbeliever, and I am Christian. Even God must know that there will be certain difficulties.”
Turning such a great knight to your faith will be one of the keystones of Agramant’s downfall and the foundation of the Pax Charlemagne.
“I didn’t know that you were such an avid supporter of the Christian cause, Lord Merlin.”
Heaven forfend! It’s only my affection for Arthur that compels me to take the Christian side over the Moors, at least in this case. Were it not for the sake of his memory, I’d probably back the Druids, wherever they are now. But I can see that I have a reason even greater than posterity: your love for Rashid and his love for you.
“He loves me?” she whispered, her heart thrumming within her armored breast like a captive hummingbird.
Oh dear. You didn’t know? Well, I’m probably giving away too much, but . . .
“I hardly know what to say, my lord!”
I don’t suppose there is much that I expect you to say. Trust in your God, no matter how bad things may seem, and everything will turn out for the best. And, Bradamant, my dear . . .
“Yes, my lord?”
Well, I was just going to say, if you happen to be in the neighborhood again some time, stop by and say hello, will you?
“Of course, my lord!”
There was no reply; the light dimmed and Bradamant found that she was alone with Melissa, who was just closing a huge leather-bound volume. They were outside the tomb although Bradamant had no recollection of passing through the door. She was disappointed; she had looked forward to seeing what Merlin’s preserved body looked like. Was he like the mummies of the Egyptians or was he pickled, like an egg or a sausage?
“Did you have a nice visit?” the sorceress asked pleasantly.
“I suppose so. He gave me a prophecy.”
“I thought he would. You’re very fortunate, you know. I don’t think that Merlin has spoken to an outsider in a hundred years.”
“I know that I should feel more grateful than I do.”
“He must have spoken of your future.”
“He did,” Bradamant said. “But I don’t know who these people are he spoke of, these people I and my descendants are to bear. Who are these kings and queens and emperors and knights? Are they all to be so perfect, are there to be no villains, no traitors? What of my own fate and what of Rashid’s? What will become of him and me?”
“I can’t tell you any more than Merlin did,” the sorceress replied, “whatever that was. I’m more human than he is. Perhaps I wouldn’t even if I could. Besides, what would their names mean to you? They haven’t been born yet, nor their children nor their children’s children.”
“But what then of Rashid and me?”
“No. No, you should leave here with a sweetness in your memory and not complain if we refuse to make it bitter.”
Bradamant didn’t like that answer one little bit, but she saw that the woman was adamant and deferred the question to a more appropriate time.
“But why
Rashid
? I’ve only met him once and that was in the midst of a battle, and not a single time since, though I’ve tried hard enough. He was a heathen warrior, but he had lost his helmet and was being sorely pummeled by an unchivalrous knight who was taking cowardly advantage of Rashid’s handicap. I couldn’t allow that, of course, no matter that he was my enemy. I threw him my own helmet, to make the fight fair, with the result that I sustained a wound that almost killed me.”
“Yes,” replied Melissa, “Merlin told me you were ill for quite some time.”
“I nearly died, but it wasn’t from the wound itself but from an infection that didn’t set in until well after the battle. Although the blow had nearly knocked me senseless, I recovered my wits and what with one thing or another I had other business during that fracas and lost sight of Rashid. Afterward, I searched every inch of the battlefield for him, but I didn’t find him. I’ve never seen him since. I feared he was dead and it was almost more than I could bear.”
“No, he is very much alive, as you have so cleverly discovered. If you’d care to know, he also searched that same battlefield for you, also in vain.”
“Did he really?”
“Of course. What did you think?”
“I feel so foolish, speaking of these things. I’ve told no one else—no one; I couldn’t bear to. And I don’t know if it wasn’t wrong to do that, or if it’s wrong to feel as I do for a pagan. I don’t seem to know anything. Nothing in my experience or education seems to give me the right answers, to fit this situation, and I daren’t ask a priest. I know what he’d say and I believe that my father and brothers would say the same thing.”
“Nothing could be wrong,” said Melissa, “that will have so much good resulting from it.”
“I know that, but it doesn’t really matter. I love Rashid and I
will
have him; whether it be for the world’s good or ill is of little account to me.”
“And does such self-interest bother you so much?”
“I feel that it
should
.”
“That’s only your training and your religion speaking,” the sorceress replied. “You’ll come to your senses. At dawn we shall take the most direct road to the steel castle where Rashid is being kept prisoner. I’ll guide you through the forest and as far as the sea. I will point the way from there, but I can go no further.”
CHAPTER THREE
In which Bradamant rescues her True Love—
only, to her Consternation and Astonishment,
to see him take Flight once again
The next morning, Bradamant followed the spirituelle sorceress through a dark and winding tunnel, the way illuminated only by Melissa’s firefly light. Abandoning the startling nudity of the previous day, much to Bradamant’s relief, the woman was now dressed in a gown of simple fabric that might have been gossamer on Bradamant’s body but on Melissa seemed as coarse and heavy as sackcloth. Though Bradamant had no reason to distrust Melissa, she did not much care for the narrow, twisting tube that forced her to make her way in a painfully hunched, stooped posture—the ceiling neither so low as to force her to her hands and knees nor quite high enough to allow her to walk upright. Peculiarly, the woman ahead of her, though taller than Bradamant, seemed able to walk erect. It was a trick that Bradamant wished that Melissa would be thoughtful enough to share—but, typically, it did not occur to her to voice a complaint or to beg for the favor, or if it did occur to her she repressed the weakness. A painful cramp in her neck and lower back made Bradamant feel cranky and impatient, to say nothing of an uncomfortably increasing awareness of a previously unsuspected inclination toward claustrophobia. For some reason she found this discovery embarrassing, as might a jeweler discovering a flaw in an otherwise perfect gem.
She had spent the night in the palace’s single bedroom. Evidently Merlin had considered the vast, labyrinthine excavation a kind of honeymoon hideaway and made no provisions for overnight guests. There were, so far as Bradamant could tell, not even accommodations for servants—but then, she thought, why would two powerful magicians require servants? The room was the size of the tilting field at Montauban and proportionally high. The only furniture of significance—save for a few inconsequential chairs, chests and small tables—was an enormous bed, raised so high above the floor that its billowing surface was just on a level with Bradamant’s eyes. Small stepladders on either side allowed its passengers to mount onto it, as though they were boarding an ornate pleasure barge for a pareunial cruise down the Nile.
The dark, looming walls were hung with vast tapestries that, unsurprisingly, considering the obsessively monothematic decorating scheme of the palace, illustrated amorous adventures with disturbing candor, inventiveness and an almost clinical realism. Bothered by an elusive, disturbing half-memory, Bradamant hoped that by extinguishing all but the lone candle by the bed she could relegate those erotogenic images to the shadows. That single light also shrank the intimidatingly cavernous room to a sphere of warm yellow light as intimate and encompassing as the yolk of an egg.
For the first time in days, she began to remove her armor. She let the scaled brunia fall to the floor with a sonorous clank, removed her boots, unwrapped her leggings and pulled the odious woolen tunic over her head and tossed it aside. The dank air of the chamber felt pleasant on her bare skin.
She caught something moving in the darkness, out of the corner of one eye, and she gave a frisk of surprise, instinctively if ineffectively—perhaps only symbolically—covering herself with one hand as she simultaneously groped for her sword. She sighed with mixed relief and embarrassment when she realized that she had only glimpsed her own reflection in a tall, previously unnoticed pier glass. Why was she so nervous? What had she to fear in this place? She had every reason to believe that it was uninhabited except for Melissa, herself and, if one chose to count him, Merlin. And after what she had just been told, what conceivable reason would they have for harming her?
Bradamant turned to look again at her reflection. In all her life she had never had more than two or three opportunities to see herself naked and she had successfully avoided most of them. This was not as difficult a task as it might at first seem. For one thing, she never undressed other than to sleep or to bathe, and the latter no more often than the average person of her day and age. And then looking glasses were exceedingly rare and prohibitively expensive luxuries in her word. Her family was well-to-do, but the only large mirrors in her father’s castle had been made of polished bronze. She herself had never owned a mirror and the only ones her mother had possessed had been small glasses meant to be held in the hand, their tarnished and uneven surfaces throwing back a disinterested approximation that she could not wholly associate with herself—as though she were looking at an ill-painted portrait of a vaguely familiar stranger. After a period of curious experimentation, she ignored them. She had no interest whatsoever in what her own face looked like; besides, she did not like the increasingly annoying sense of dissatisfaction she felt about her appearance, an annoyance that smacked of vanity.
The mirror she’d discovered was larger than anything she’d ever imagined; it was fully as tall as she was. Made of an almost supernaturally perfect glass, as flat and smooth as the surface of a pond, its reverse side was coated with the purest silver.
In the gloomridden room, surrounded and imbedded in the dark, the pale figure standing before her might have been that vaguely familiar stranger from her mother’s mirrors, grown older and taller. The deeply suntanned face merged into the shadows, as though it were hidden behind a dark mask, leaving the long pale body curiously detached and impersonal. Bradamant dropped her shift and felt it collapse around her feet with a soft rustle, a whispered murmur of approval.
She could not associate the stranger in the darkness with herself. She felt as though she were a spirit, invisible to the faceless woman, a disembodied viewpoint, a phantom voyeur. It was the anonymous figure in the mirror who was the creature of reality while she was the fiction. She appraised with dispassionate approval the long, hydrodynamic body, as supple as the thread of smoke from an extinguished candle or a stream of oil or honey pouring over the lip of a pitcher; the even longer legs; the small lunar breasts; the stomach like a sun-warmed flagstone. The ivory skin had a bloom, like a peach or plum or a pane of glass in a greenhouse, fogged by the slow, hot breath of the sultry plants within. She watched with cold objectivity as the woman’s hands with the slender fingers glided over the ivory surfaces, like the hands of a blind potter assessing the moist, earthy heat exuding from a vase fresh from the kiln. They eclipsed the twin moons of the breasts, which glowed between the parted fingers like coals through a grate. They glided like the shadows of gulls over the smooth, hard beach of the stomach. The transition from curve to curve was as elusive as the heavy undulations of a tropic sea. The hands were companies of ferrets—ten slender, voracious, serpentine hunters, so frightened perhaps, or so hungry, or so curious, that they slipped sinuously and silently into the shadowed, welcoming thicket, into the clefts and burrows of subterranean moss gardens. They were like eels dreaming in their lightless, submarine lairs. Like dark moray eels guarding their sluggish, perfumed fountains; sounding that immeasurable pelagic zone like the great whales, like plummeting dolphins, the secretive kraken. Like the contemplative oyster folded around its pearl of great price—a pearl like a coy, pink nymph curled on its sea-washed rock. Like the nymph in the protective gleaming arms of the somnolent octopus, the octopus silent, pensive, idle, restless, slow—
What is this stranger to me?
Bradamant wondered.
Whose is that beautiful, passionate body that has never possessed a heart to ache? What is she to me that my mouth should be like wool or that my tongue should cleave so to my palate? What is she to me that I feel a fist clenching in my groin? Why do my calves tighten and my fingers dig into moist palms and my back arch like the ecstatic cat’s? Who is she to me that my own body should coil and uncoil in rhythmic sympathy, like a courting seahorse? Or that it should vibrate like the rocks beneath a cataract? Why do my eyes fail to see, or stinging tears well up from them? Why do I taste blood on my lips? What is this galvanic current that runs through me, as though I’ve been threaded onto a white-hot wire? Why do my ears ring and buzz and whisper as they listen to the cry of my flesh as it becomes proud, as it passes beyond this world where some immense desire that my intellect cannot understand mixes with the desire for another body’s warmth and softness?
Lost, compassless, storm-ravaged, guided by the guttering pole star of a lonely candle, she drifted into the oceanic bed like a ship abandoned to the hurricane, sinking into its vast billows, relinquished to the welcoming arms of Neptune and the weightless, lightless, dreamless oblivion of the vasty abyss.
* * * * *
Bradamant and her guide eventually emerged into a woody ravine, passing through a vine-masked cleft in the rock. When she turned to look, she could find no sign of an opening.
All that day the women climbed through a wild landscape, rugged and broken, crossing hills and streams without stopping for rest. The conversation, such as it was, was for the most part one-sided, consisting of Melissa’s detailed lectures on the techniques that Bradamant would need to release the imprisoned hero. Bradamant had a thousand questions for the sorceress, but Melissa would not allow herself to be distracted. None of the questions, however, were about the strange dreams of the previous night, of which Bradamant had no memory.
“It wouldn’t matter if you were Athena or Pentesilea or Dido,” Melissa said, “or had all the armies of Karl the Great behind you, you still would have no hope of besting Atalante, the magician who has kidnapped Rashid—to say nothing of a great many others. Not only is his steel castle impregnable, not only does he possess his flying horse, but he also has a shield that shines with a brilliance that stuns—whoever gazes on it, however briefly, falls to the ground as though dead.”
“So I heard. I could shut my eyes or blindfold myself,” suggested Bradamant.
“Really? And how could you tell where Atalante was? How could you tell whether or not he was about to lop off your head? How could you parry his strokes or strike him? No. I’ll show you something that’ll get around Atalante and his magic.”
“And what’s that?”
“Agramant, the king of the Saracens, has given a ring to one of his barons, a horrible brute named Brunello. This ring was a prize brought from heathen India and has the property, among others no less remarkable, of rendering its wearer immune to any magic or spells.”
“Sounds useful.”
“It is.”
“So I only need to get this ring from Brunello, wherever he is?”
“Yes; he’s at an inn not very far from here.”
“No problem, then.”
“We’ll see about that. Brunello, you must know, is a most unchivalrous knight. He’s as expert in cunning, thievery and duplicity as Atalante is in sorcery. He is, like you, on a mission to retrieve Rashid from captivity and return him to Agramant and, typically, his methods are guile and treachery against which, all too often, honesty and openness are helpless. As you surely know, Agramant loves Rashid above all his other paladins and would do anything to get him back safely. Unlike you, Brunello has the advantage of the magic ring. With it, he will succeed. Without it, you will fail.”
“And Rashid’s gratitude would go to this Brunello and not to me.”
“You grasp the problem perfectly. In addition, Rashid would be lost forever to Karl and without him on the Christian side, the emperor will have no hope of defeating the Moors.”
“So all I need do is relieve Brunello of the ring.”
“Exactly. When we come to the sea where I must leave you, you’ll continue to follow the shoreline for three days. On that day you’ll reach the inn at which your quarry is stopping.”
“How’ll I recognize him?”
“All too easily. He’s a dreadful-looking man of medium build, pot-bellied, with black, greasy, curly hair, dark skin, very pockmarked, a shaggy beard and shaggier eyebrows. His nose is as flat as a mushroom and his eyes are shifty and protrude like a pekinese’s.”
“A what?”
“Pardon? Oh. It’s a peculiar dog favored in Cathay. It has popeyes like a frog and a face like a squashed tomato. A dreadful-looking creature.
“Brunello,” the sorceress continued, “will be disguised as a messenger. All you need do is turn the conversation onto the subject of magical spells. Let him know that you want to confront the sorcerer, but don’t let on that you know anything about the ring. He’s a braggart and self-styled lady’s man, so he’ll offer to show you the way to the steel castle—in his gentle company, of course. Accept his offer and the moment you see the castle, kill him. Let neither pity nor gratitude make you hesitate. You
must
do as I tell you, without fail. Don’t do or say anything that might give you away. If you do, he’ll either hide the ring or, worse, make use of its second remarkable power.”
“Which is?”
“He’ll put it in his mouth and instantly become invisible.”
“Just one more question, my lady.”
“What is that?”
“I understand why Agramant wishes to have Rashid back and, well, I think I understand why
I
want him,” (“I wonder,” murmured Melissa) “but what is Atalante’s interest in him? What does he gain by this kidnapping?”
“Ah. That, I am afraid, is one of the things that I cannot explain to you.”
This answer did not satisfy Bradamant at all, who, for all of her appreciation for and attraction to the sorceress, was becoming increasingly annoyed with her lack of forthrightness. The explicit secrecy and the implicit condescension did little to bolster the sense of trust that Bradamant
wanted
to feel but whose pride and caution kept in reserve.
The two women soon came to where the Garonne enters the sea near Bordeaux. Bradamant had been certain that she’d be able to persuade the sorceress to continue on with her, or that Melissa would not be as adamant as she had sounded about her decision to part company so soon. But all of her entreaties, all of her arguments and all of her tears failed to keep the sorceress from saying goodbye. Seeing that there was no other way to see the knight on her way, Melissa had simply disappeared.