Authors: Alice Borchardt
“No!” the bird answered. “You read the garden. They—the ones who planted it—never returned to hear our case, so we are lost. What is the price of peace? You can read the garden. Tell us.”
Lancelot bowed his head and realized the ravens were like children. Nasty, vicious children to be sure, but children with a simplistic outlook on the massive evil involved in their actions. They had bargained with monstrous cruelty for victory and sold their souls.
He studied the sky. The sun was gone; only an opalescent band of greenish blue decorated the horizon where it had been.
I read the garden.
And he had, but thinking about it was like trying to fly a dozen kites at one time and trying to keep them from tangling their cords together. He understood now what she meant when she told him the logic of the universe was beyond his powers. It was a maze that he could contemplate from time’s beginning until its end and still not wholly understand.
He stood between two evil things: the birds and the trophy fence—the dead. On either side. But nothing is ever completely evil, and that was the most difficult paradox that the shapes of the garden taught him—and the one that most challenged his understanding. Compared with a discussion of good and evil, most other concepts were child’s play.
He stretched out his hand and the sword flew into it. Then, as he had when he cheated death and raised a storm, he drew the logical path of love. The birds were frozen in their tracks, all but the one on the fence with the Hun.
“Tell me about him?” Lancelot asked.
“He . . . he was not a bad man,” the bird began, and the image of the Hun soldier appeared before the fence, eyes living, face grave.
“Very stoic, I suppose you would describe him,” the bird continued. “He had an unhappy life. I think most men, most beings, do not have very happy lives. But he loved the vast plains where his family roamed. He lived in a hide-covered tent, and they wintered in narrow valleys where they planted a crop. But when summer came, they returned to the plain to pasture their sheep and goats.
“His people were very poor and the only way any family does any better than scratch a bare living is when they raid the villages that cluster in the river valleys near the water. His father went on such a raid and did not return. His mother went back to her family and when he was big enough to ride and fight, they pushed him to sell his services to the great Attila. They said he would get rich . . . but . . . now he dreams only of the endless grass and his little mare. She is long dead now, and so is he. Newly dead. And he wishes he had been a chieftain, so he could have been buried with her and ride out forever across his people’s endless, rolling plains.
“There is such a sorrow in me, I can say no more.”
Lancelot said the incantation that was also a convenant. “Each and both ride with me. A short term of service, and you are free to roam the stars. Each and both remember you were men.”
The raven that had been his sword said, “Remember we were men. Is that the key? We sold our souls to escape mortality. Must we embrace it again?”
It was dark by then. There was no more light in the sky. But Lancelot had wolf’s eyes and the dried, twisted body of the next was near him.
“It is inescapable,” he said. “Speak!”
“You would not have liked this one, O sorcerer of battle.”
Then Lancelot saw a soldier, one who stood and gazed into his eyes with hatred.
“Long ago did I forget that I was ever human,” the bird said. “But his memories sicken even me.”
Then Lancelot went on to the next. The birds followed.
The third raven said, “We accept you, geis.” He flew to the fence.
The shape of the third warrior filled out in the gloom. He was very small; the face appeared beardless.
“Young,” the raven said. “A Frank. There was sickness in his village. All his kin died. He was too young to work his father’s land, too proud to go into another household and be treated like a servant. He joined the first party to cross the Rhine. He didn’t think of death in battle. He didn’t know that he could die.”
“It comes as a surprise to us all, I think,” Lancelot said.
“He is fleshless bones. Even the few rags of skin or cloth are gone. But there is a beautiful newness about his spirit,” the bird said. “And a great peace.”
“A warrior’s heart,” Lancelot said. “A little time with me and you are free, bird. The boy is free now.”
It was dark and they were in the dead forest. The fourth raven flew and landed on the fence near something that consisted of only a few long bones and some scraps of leather and cloth.
“This geis is a thing of terror and pain,” the bird said, “but it is mighty magic.”
“Speak!” Lancelot said.
“He was old,” the bird said, “and felt his life a failure. His village was attacked and his people slaughtered, among them, his wife and child. He rode to avenge them, following his king, Clovis. He never could bear to return and try to take up his life where it left off. He followed his king, but rank and riches eluded him, though he was a fierce warrior.
“He took another woman, but his bitterness drove her away. Killing became a way of life. He is not certain when he died. His life was so like death already. She wasn’t a bad woman, but he could never tell her how much she meant to him. This alone he regrets.”
Lancelot nodded. “Will he come?”
“No,” the bird answered. “He would sleep now.”
“Ride with me, bird,” Lancelot said.
“And I will spread my wings on the star road, O Warrior of Water and Light. It wrenches my heart that I remember now that I, too, would kiss one whose lips are dust. He never learned to feel or love. There is no hope where he is, but there is no pain. To live is to suffer. He denies you.”
“That’s his choice, bird. Only once ride with me, then I yield you to the star road. Remember, you were a man.”
So the night passed. Sometimes there was anger, at others, spite. But most of the dead stepped forth and spoke through the birds, and all of the birds went consenting to their meeting with the dead. Lancelot began to know them, because they had come to him for final disposition and in hope of rest. Few spoke about battle, few about death. They knew, he thought, all they wished to know about that particular thing.
They spoke of women as mothers, wives, and lovers. They remembered meals and celebrations, friendships and always all sorts of love. Loyalties, sorrows, and many losses, cruelty, anger, and betrayal. They spoke with longing of the beauty of the world; how fair life had been and how they didn’t appreciate it while they had it. And also, they longed, almost each and every one, to say “I love you” to someone, somewhere, sometime—and suffered bitter regret for having left those words unspoken.
“I never was able to kiss her or him, father, mother, or child, good-bye.”
Lancelot felt as he walked on following the fence down the mountainside that the things he was hearing should blight his life forever. But somehow they did not, for only a few of the dead—the birds—questioned, turned away, and refused to speak about themselves and their lives. Most, almost all, had, however it ended, loved their time in the sun and were one with him in teaching the birds the value of humanity; the humanity the birds had forgotten. In all generosity he offered them back their souls.
“We accept your geis,” each bird said as it took its place beside one of the dead.
The only thing that bowed Lancelot down was the age and seeming endlessness of the struggle. They passed Franks to Romans. Men born under the warm Italian sun came here to die in what to them was a bleak wilderness. They were representatives of Caesar’s legions, then men who enlisted under Marius. And yet other nameless Germanic warriors who rode into these mountains to raid and steal horses and sheep. Hannibal’s men, Iberian Celts with fierce horses and elaborate jewelry. Greek mercenaries, Ionian cavalry, persons in trousers, tribesmen from across the Rhine, raiders from villages high in the mountains, villages set on piling driven into the water of mountain lakes. And last of all, Etruscan pirates to whom Rome was only a squalid village on the Tiber where pigs wallowed in the Valleys of the Seven Hills.
In the end the trophy fence was but a shadow among the trees, and it could be tracked only by calling the dead who moldered deep in the soil and were utterly forgotten. It ended at last when they reached the river. Lancelot stood on the high bank surrounded by his men. They were his men. Forty oath men, forty ghosts, forty ravens. He wore the raven helmet and sword, but the birds had added a breastplate over a chain-mail shirt, arm and shin guards.
The armor was heavy and he was very tired. He stood alone on the high riverbank watching the rest. A warrior with a bronze spear and wearing very worn clothing was walking along the river bottom, looking for deep spots where he might find fish. Others were scattered along the gravel beds on each side of the narrow stream. The light was gray and patches of thick mist lay in places along the river. His men wandered in and out of them like ghosts—the ghosts they were.
A few lit fires and sat around them to warm themselves. One of them, a lean man in Roman dress, paused next to him. Lancelot remembered him, a surgeon with the Legions. But then he picked up extra work questioning prisoners under torture and that was why he’d ended nailed up as a trophy, his head swinging by the hair from a chieftain’s saddle. He’d said after he was captured, they’d squared accounts before they killed him.
“There is no sun yet,” the Roman said. “When it rises, we will be gone. We melt in its rays like the ground mist. We are dead and not dead, gone and yet not gone. You may summon us with a word. Simply say you need us. We will come. But I cannot think you will find us comfortable company. Yet I am not sorry I began this adventure.”
“What’s it like?” Lancelot asked. “To be . . . gone?”
“Like light everywhere and nowhere. We don’t lose anything. We just aren’t and then we are. And none of us know why any more than we knew why in the first place. I think that barbarian farmer has got a fish.” He pointed to the man with the bronze spear.
He pulled the limp fish off the spear and tossed it to a pair bringing along a small fire in a circle of rocks. One of them caught it, chopped off the head, and began to clean and scale it.
Just then Lancelot caught a flash of molten light as the first sun began to shine through the trees. When he looked around, they were all gone but the fire was still burning and the cleaned fish lay on the rocks nearby. He walked down into the riverbed, spitted the fish, and began to cook it.
A few minutes later, She rose from the deep pool downstream where the “farmer,” so called by the Roman, speared the fish. It was like a glowing bowl filled by the new sun. One moment she wasn’t there, the next moment she was. She was wearing a green and yellow dress that seemed made of autumn willow leaves. Like all her clothing, it left her breasts bare.
She walked toward him, her feet leaving no tracks in the sand and gravel riverbed. When she reached him, she touched her throat and glanced all around at the shining water, the fading mist, and the new day.
“What have you done? I have never felt so many in one place before.”
“The dead?” he asked.
“Yes.” There was dismay in her eyes.
“I don’t know, and I’m not sure. The ravens came to me for redemption, and I tried to give it to them. I don’t know if I succeeded or failed. But I’m afraid I might spend the rest of my life finding out.”
“I hope you found out about being a warrior, because I think that you have some problems that don’t lend themselves to negotiated solutions.”
“That’s a fancy way to say what?” He was eating the fish now and his mouth was full. He mumbled.
“You know that sorcerer that tried to get you to come with him the same day we met at my lake?”
“Yeah. I felt bad about leaving him there all alone.” He finished the fish, got up and walked to the slow trickle that represented the river and washed his hands.
“Don’t feel lonely. I can’t say I was all that interested in him either. Both our minds were on other things.”
He grinned nostalgically. “We weren’t thinking about much else. I wanted to lose my virginity and you were more than ready to help me get rid of it.”
“Brace yourself,” she said. “You have some shocks coming and they are not good ones.”
He dried his hands on his leather trousers.
“Your little blond girlfriend is in a lot of trouble. She doesn’t know it yet, but she is. She and her royal consort are both the targets of a hunt by the King of the Summer Country, Bade.”
“King Bade is folklore,” Lancelot said in a lofty fashion.
She studied her fingernails. They changed to an orange color. It didn’t go well with her white, rose petal skin. She sighed and her nails turned pink.
“You like that better on me?” she asked.
“Stop your distracting me,” he said. “King Bade. He doesn’t really exist, does he?”
“I wish,” she said. “Next to ‘Her,’ he’s the most powerful mortal being in the universe. Merlin found that out.”
“Merlin!” Lancelot said. “What’s he got to do with anything?”
“A lot. I just spent a very unpleasant ten hours with him. First, I had to capture him, then drug him to blow the cobwebs out of his brain and get him to thinking rationally. Then I had to pry the story out of him bit by bit. He’s still pretty incoherent at times. Bade’s curses are no joke, and when I did hear all he had to say, it scared the bejesus out of me. So I hope you learned what Cregan had to teach you, because unless I miss my guess, as Arthur’s subject and the little blonde’s foster brother . . .”
“Her name is Guinevere,” Lancelot snapped.
“I stand corrected. Guinevere’s foster brother. I’d say you were involved in this whole nasty business up to your cute neck.”
“The old sorcerer is . . . ?”
“Right, bright boy,” she answered. “He’s Merlin.”
Neither Maeniel nor Mother were sympathetic about fear. I ducked my head underwater and let the current beat on my face for a moment. The water was icy cold here. When I came to the surface, my skin seemed to glow. The fear ebbed and I found I could think clearly again. The dress the Fand wore was still clutched in my right hand.