Authors: Alice Borchardt
Then she was spreading—that’s the only way I can describe it—spreading the way light fills a room when a lamp is lit. At first there is only darkness, then a tiny spark when flint strikes steel, then light is everywhere. She seemed to fill the night and I could not follow. It was death and I was jerked back into my tormented flesh again, struggling in Ure’s grip.
He jerked me upright just as my mouth opened to breathe in water. We stood knee-deep in the shallows while I retched and coughed violently, at the same time trying to empty both my stomach and my lungs of water. He shook me again because I had managed to reach back and claw at his face with my left hand.
The pain was terrible. Never let anyone tell you being shaken by a strong man doesn’t hurt as muscles and tendons are torn free of bone. We were facing the land, and I could see the fortress clearly. It was a pyre, then there were no more screams and I knew nothing could live in the heart of that furnace. Our men and the Saxons were only black, struggling silhouettes against the raw brilliance of the flames.
By that light, I saw Maeniel at the water’s edge, face set in the wolf’s killing snarl, teeth bared, lips drawn back over fangs already seeming to drip blood in the glow from the burning fortress. He came lunging up for my throat.
Frantic with fear, I managed to twist away from Ure and heard Maeniel’s jaws snap shut inches from my neck. But I was dead and knew it as I watched the wolf land and the water sheet up from his plunging body. Maeniel might miss once—twice, never!
He turned, water swirling from his fur as his body turned even while he was in the air. His haunches dropped to catch a purchase in the mud, to brace him for his next jump at my throat.
I felt the serpent. It writhed in my body. My hips and breasts twisted, undulating like the long, legless, armless body. It was so mad with fear it had lost control and forgotten I was human and couldn’t move the way it did.
I lost my footing and went down just as Maeniel completed his turn and went for my throat again. I felt it wrench at my flesh, tearing the way a fingernail rips free when it’s caught in the bark of a piece of kindling when you split it with a knife. I have done that while collecting firewood, torn out one or two while wrenching the bark away from dry wood.
My body, my insides, seemed to tear as the serpent gathered my substance to form its own. I felt the smooth, scaled body first in my throat. It stopped my breath and slid over my tongue. My mouth must have gaped as wide as it would go, because it passed my lips and teeth like a smooth, hard breath and struck as hard as it could at Maeniel’s rushing body.
I heard Ure give a yell of triumph. He was so fast, his hand snapped shut on its neck and he jerked it clear of my body just as Maeniel’s front paws hit my chest and shoved me back toward the muddy bank. Ure was holding the horribly writhing, twisting thing at the neck and I saw it was trying to flip a coil around his arm and seize him. But he wouldn’t let it. He turned and hurled it far out over the black water. I saw it twist, drawn between the lake and the stars, then it vanished away.
He dragged me out of the water, cursing my stupidity for allowing the evil things power over me. “Don’t you know better?” he roared.
“You’re a sorcerer,” I managed to gasp out.
“Yes,” he said with another menacing grin, and a very evil one. “Not at all like that timorous fool Dugald you set such store by. Fear not. I’ll teach you better. I’ll teach you how to control them—make them your slaves and get them to do your bidding at will.”
I understood. He had persuaded my evil companions to leave by convincing them he was going to kill me. And he nearly had. Maeniel helped him. And I was free.
The pirates were almost all dead, and we watched from the water’s edge as our men—and they were men now—cut the throats of the few living wounded and began to strip the corpses of their kills.
There was not time, only everlasting repeating cycles: spring, summer, autumn, winter. Then spring again.
Nothing changed, not really. Babies were born, the elders died. The dead weren’t gone but an absent part of the community, temporarily absent because their spirits, freed by the bone fire, would wander for some little time and then return, seeking a womb. And when they found a couple in the throes of desire, they entered her body and breathed life into the couple’s mixed blood, and so came to live again.
Our memory of paradise,
Uther thought when he rode into the grove behind Morgana. He was decided and his plans were made. Or so he thought. He would leave tonight and ride with Cai and Gwain toward London.
The more Uther saw of the little forest, the happier he was with it as a place to camp. The trees were centered in open country. The priestess leaders of the warrior societies had set sentries, and any attacking force would be visible for miles. The food spitted over the open fires was beginning to cook and good smells brushed the king’s awareness. Nearby his oath men had set up what was almost a pavilion for him, a hide-and-cloth tent painted with his house’s ancient symbol of the dragon, white, blue, and gold. His standard, the same dragon, billowed on a pole in front of the tent. It, like the tent, was made of hide and cloth. Hollow, the head faced into the wind, and with every strong gust the wind flowed through it and the dragon cried out, the dark, sad music of war ringing in its voice.
How long, he wondered, had it been summoning men and women both. Commanding them to emerge from lives of happiness and peace to step forward, stand, and die, its noise and the trumpeting belling of the war horns speaking the challenge of stag, bull, boar, and wolf. The dark male statement of desire. I am strongest, I am best. She-beast, with valor and slaughter will I win your love, the immortality burning between your thighs? When, oh when did we begin this folly?
Morgana jerked him out of his reverie.
“My lord, we have duties here.”
“Yes,” Uther answered, brushing his hand before his eyes as if to banish some dreadful vision.
“If,” she continued, “this was a holy place as Shela, who first looked at it, suggests, it is our duty to sacrifice to its inhabitants. Not to show respect for them is to invite terrible ill luck. A king is the high priest of this people. It is your duty to placate them, lest they take it into their minds to do us some injury.”
Uther nodded. He wanted his supper badly, and he had a long ride ahead of him this night. So he was in a hurry to be done with what, after all, was only a social gesture, albeit a supernatural one.
“Collect something for the offerings,” he told her, “and follow me.”
“Honey, wine, oil, mead,” she suggested.
He shrugged. “Any or all of them, but not too much. It doesn’t do for a king to appear stingy, but we will need all our supplies before this . . .” He hesitated over the word, then finished strongly, “. . . before this war ends.”
He strode into the forest, leaving her to follow. Once past the screen of brush at the edge, the woodlot opened up. The trees were almost exclusively oaks, small, dense, and dark stands of holm oak scattered among ancient giants. In fact, Uther couldn’t remember ever seeing so many old trees in one place. None of the trunks could be spanned by the arms of one man, and many were so wide it would take at least a half dozen to make a chain around them. In some places there had been faces set into the wood in low relief, but the bark had grown back over the dedicated tree and even his practiced eye could no longer discern the spirits that once must have inhabited them.
As he strode deeper and deeper into the woods, he left the noise of the campground behind and silence walked with him. Because the trees were so old, the forest canopy was open and the westering sun shone down into it. He walked through a sort of parkland of dappled sunlight, soft shade with none of the deep darkness that hovered under the smaller groves of holm oaks.
His neck prickled when he realized the small, dense groves were thick with mistletoe, and he found himself avoiding them. The grass was short and almost, it seemed, as if some large animals must have been recently pastured here. Water collected in stumps at low places and he saw the tracks not of cattle but cloven hooves. But what sheep or goat could leave tracks so large?
He found what he sought at the edge of the wood, the entrance gazing out over the open plain. He wondered that the priestess hadn’t realized what it was, then decided she must not have been intended to see. But he was king and priest—he knew.
But for fire, all the world was dark then. The lamps they had were trembling, tiny flames that did little to dispel the encroaching night. They sat and watched the stars rise. Moon and sun came and went, but the stars remained everlasting and eternal, circling the pole forever.
This was what they wanted, the end of time. Life is good, but how could a life be so fair that one would want it to continue the same forever?
The barrow was wedge shaped, like others of its kind he had seen. The tomb chamber was at the high end and had a direct line of sight across the plain. The newly dead were placed just inside the entrance, where they could watch the stars rise. They yielded their flesh to the earth, melting down to become one with it. But the stars came lifting from the horizon to carry away their souls.
Time stops for the stars. They achieved in their barrows its end. How bitterly he envied them. He and his people were carried along in time’s rush as a fallen branch is by a wild river, to be battered, remolded, and changed forever by its flow.
Just then he heard movement in the woods behind him. He was alone! He had left Morgana and his oath men at the edge of the woods.
A second later he had his hand on his sword hilt and was turning to face his pursuer.
Morgana stepped out of the trees. She was carrying a string bag filled with leather containers holding the offerings to be made at the tomb. Uther let go a deep sigh of relief and noticed that his whole body was covered with perspiration.
Morgana paused, studying him. “Did you think me an assassin?”
“Yes!” Uther answered. “It is difficult to know how many among us the Saxon lords might have corrupted. Or perhaps it wouldn’t even take a bribe. A king makes so many enemies that it could simply be some grudge-bearing underling cherishing cold malice in his heart who would choose his time to stick a knife in me. You have the Cat Sith, Cai the seal, but I would die at once.”
“To be shape-strong is an advantage,” Morgana said. “But till now, I hadn’t thought it to be so much of an advantage. I am not like that Maeniel you know. I can’t do it whenever I wish simply by wishing. Neither can Cai—certain conditions have to be met. And I am not sure what all of them are.”
“I think they are about to be,” he said, and pointed at the barrow.
“Christ!” she whispered. “They! Still here!”
“Christ,” he said, “has nothing to do with it.”
“No?” she asked. “The cross is a symbol of the four directions that bind the universe!”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
She gestured at the bag in her hand. “I brought a lot. You are right, it doesn’t do to be stingy.”
She led the way to the front of the barrow and it did look to the west across the open country.
“They watch for the stars,” Morgana said.
The door at the high end of the barrow was a triangle, formed by two tall stones resting against each other at the top. Beyond it were the two stone platforms where the watchers lay, one on either side, and beyond them, darkness. Morgana knelt in the long, soft grass that flowed away out across the plain like some vast green sea. Even though the barrow faced roughly west, it had been angled in such a way that the dying sun didn’t break through the night clasped within it.
“I can feel their eyes,” Morgana said.
Uther looked out at the wind-stirred grass stretching out toward the horizon. It shimmered with the slanted rays of the setting sun.
“I wonder what life was like when kings trusted their people?” he asked.
“Like this,” Morgana answered. “Serene, silent, without fear or woe. As we are here now. Brother and sister together under an afternoon sky. Have you eaten today, brother mine?”
He shook his head. “I had no appetite. No stomach to break my fast on so evil a day of decision.”
“Then sit down. I cannot think the sleepers here would deny us a share in their feast.”
Uther pulled off his mantle and spread it on the grass. They both sat down and shared out of the provisions from the string bag: bread with sausage and onions, honey, butter, and wine.
“They were ever hospitable,” Morgana said, “and taught that tradition to us. No meat, but for the sausage cooked into the bread,” she told him as she passed him a small, flat loaf.
He spread butter and honey on it and ate. “How long were they here before . . . before we came?”
Morgana shrugged. “When I studied with those who knew about them, I found there was no agreement. Except the belief that the barrows were built after the mounded tombs but by the same people. But all said they seemed to be the first ones here, even before the sea rose and this became an island. How long they ruled alone is unknown. Perhaps at least a thousand years, but more likely three or four.”
Uther made the sign of the cross. “So long, so long. I cannot imagine it.”
Morgana filled a leather cup with wine and handed it to him. The sausage in the bread was salty. He drank deeply, feeling a strange peace entering his mind and body.
“Is the wine so strong?” he asked, looking out over the shimmering grass toward the sun approaching the haze at the horizon’s rim.
“I cannot think it,” Morgana answered. “Most likely it is the peace here. Whatever the builders of the tomb sought for their dead, they found it. This feast, the one we two share, is part of it. But we must wait until dark and make the offering to the first stars.”
He was finished eating.
“Stretch out and rest for a while,” Morgana said. “I will keep watch. Have no fear, we can find the rest in the dark. I brought a torch so that if we were caught out at sunset we could find our way back.”