Authors: Alice Borchardt
Then I stood on the platform, reeling.
“Two down,” I whispered. “Five more to go. I don’t know if I have the strength.”
The chain mail on my torso shifted and I felt strength flow back into me. My vision cleared; the perspiration dried on my body. My respiration slowed. Where I had been heated, I felt a cool breeze on my skin.
The audience in the Hall of the Tree was going wild. The cheers were causing the lights stretched out across the water to vibrate.
“How often can you do that?” I asked my friend.
“Not forever,” was the dark reply. “Only two or three more times, and then it will kill you.”
“Why?”
“Limited concepts! Difficult!”
“Try!”
“I draw on you . . . your unused capacity. You are a smaller sentient than I am used to.”
“Sentient?”
“Intelligent being. The Fand wasn’t—not intelligent. You are, but small. Your capacities are finite.”
“How soon is dawn?”
“Good! Soon! That might save you!”
“I hope.”
The cheers were dying down, but I saw something that boded ill for me. The heads of all the great houses were gathered together on one platform. I looked down at my right arm and saw the wound I had taken was crusted over and partially healed. I gripped the sword hilt near the guard and tried to relax my grip on it, but my fingers were a claw.
“Just as well you don’t,” my companion told me. “Flex your fingers a little. Try to relax, but don’t let go.”
The hall was silent now. Every eye was on me or the platform where the family heads gathered. They were arguing violently among themselves. Five seemed agreed on something, but there were two holdouts.
At length the two—the gold and bronze—gave in and they formed a circle, arms over one another’s shoulders, red, black, white, gold, silver, bronze, glass. I felt a wave of cold fly through my body. The sensation was rather like the one I felt when I jumped through the first warrior’s body.
The lamps above dimmed, the light turned to shadow, and I saw light was beginning to brighten the white towers that were the pinnacle of the city. Then the lights came up again and the circle broke open. There was a warrior standing in a spot that had been empty before.
He wore motley; that is, the colors of all the seven families. One leg was black, the other red. One side of his torso gold, the other silver. One arm white, the other bronze. His helm was glass.
I heard a sort of sigh sweep over the crowd. The face covered by the glass helm was that of a skull. The voice was so loud I think everyone in the hall could hear every word clearly.
“Maiden! Prepare yourself! I am the one, the only, the never defeated bridegroom. Death!”
Lancelot and the Lady of the Lake found the sorcerer gone.
“Oh, fine!” he said. “Now you’ve lost him.”
“I haven’t lost anything, you twit,” she said.
He was biting into a ripe peach he’d just taken from the table on the porch of her dwelling and admiring the glass bowl he’d summoned to convince her of his new powers. As usual the beach was white, the sun was shining, and a cooling breeze was blowing off the water.
“Paradise,” he said. “Maybe Cregan was right.”
“No,” she said. “There’s too much human in you. First you’d get bored, then you’d get crazy.”
“I didn’t tell you what Cregan said,” he pointed out mildly.
“You didn’t have to. I know what Cregan
would
say,” she snapped back as she was looking carefully up and down the beach in both directions. “Shut up and help me look for him. He can’t have gotten far.”
Lancelot sighed and was disturbed by a vague sense of something missing as he finished the peach. He took off his helmet and threw it up in the air. It became a raven and landed on the table with the food. It gazed at him with glowing red eyes.
“There’s another human around here.” He turned to her. “There aren’t a lot of humans here. Am I right in that supposition?”
“Yes,” she answered, folding her arms. “Far as I know, you, me, and Merlin are the only ones.”
“So one of us has gone missing. See if you can find him. And don’t take all day about it.” He was annoyed at being called a twit.
“Haughty, high and mighty, aren’t we?” the bird said.
“Please!” Lancelot added.
“That’s better,” the bird said. It took wing. It circled wider and wider, higher and higher, then vanished into the blue.
Lancelot helped himself to some bread, butter, and curd cheese, saying, “It probably won’t take him long. And while we’re waiting, why don’t you put on some clothes. I mean, we’re going to meet this sorcerer and surely you don’t want him to see you the way you are now.”
She glanced down at the gold and green willow dress, then looked him directly in the eye.
“You keep a civil tongue in your head when you talk to me. Listen up! Whatever I may look like to you, I am not—I repeat—
not
a human woman. And what I wear or don’t wear is none of your damn business. Is that clear?”
“I’m sorry, Your Majesty. Has your humble servant offended Your Ladyship? But I damn well don’t see why you’d want to parade around half-naked in front of that corrupt, dirty old man. What? Does it give you a thrill when he gets all excited looking at your . . . amplitude?”
“My what?” She was laughing.
“Amplitude!” he repeated stiffly.
“Hell, I’ve heard them called lots of things, some of them very vulgar. But nobody ever referred to my ‘amplitude’ before. No! Look, trust me. He doesn’t think of me as a woman. At least, not since I burned all his clothes off, then his beard and most of his hair.”
“You can do things like that?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. You saw a lot of what I can do when I want to extend myself. And he was dirty. He was lousy. He had things crawling in his hair, another set in his beard, and an even more exclusive group around his groin. His clothes were trying to crawl away by themselves when I caught up with them and perpetrated another massacre.
“By then,” she added thoughtfully, “he was kicking and screaming like a two-year-old with a tantrum. I dunked him in the ocean four times. That quieted him down some. Then I held his nose and poured a potion down his throat. A potion that brought him back to his right senses. And when he sobered up, he was even more frightened than when he was out of his mind. I put some pressure on him to talk, and he sang like a happy bird. And speaking of birds . . .” Her voice trailed off as the raven circled and landed.
“About two miles down the beach, that way.” The bird jabbed its beak to the right, then became a bird-shaped helmet. The red eyes did as they usually did, glowed, gazed on the world for a long moment, then closed.
“He sounds disgusting,” Lancelot said.
“Humph! Speaking of disgusting, how long has it been since . . .”
Lancelot scratched his head. His short curly hair was stiff with dried perspiration, wood smoke, and grit.
“Too long,” he admitted, and entered her dwelling to use the pool.
After he’d scrubbed off most of the accumulated sludge, she joined him. They were washing each other when he said, “If you’re not a woman, I sure can’t tell it. Everything seems to be here and arranged for maximum enjoyment.”
She kissed him. His hands wandered delightfully and expertly as she did so. Her breathing quickened.
“You’re getting better,” she gasped.
“I should be. I’m getting a lot of practice.”
“Oh, hush!” she said, and made a gesture. A big, soft, fluffy cloth appeared at the side of the pool. He lifted her and carried her to it.
They both made quite a few sounds after that, but neither said anything more. Not for a long time. Not until the afternoon sun found his face and shone in his eyes.
“I suppose we had better go talk to him,” he said.
They both got up. He was surprised when she donned a rose silk tunic deeply embroidered at the neck and hem with gold and pearls. It covered her from neck to ankles. She found a steel-gray silk one for him. It was fastened at shoulders by wolf-head pins and belted with gold-braid rope, thick with fine granulation.
“Where . . . ?” He pointed to her dress.
“Poppia. Nero’s wife,” she said. “She was cremated in it. The bastard gave her a magnificent funeral. He ought to have. He kicked her to death while she was pregnant. Kept kicking and punching at her belly until she miscarried and lost the child. The Greek physicians and midwives couldn’t stop the bleeding. She died that night. He was wild with grief.”
Lancelot looked down at his tunic in horror. “This . . . ?”
“Was an offering on someone’s funeral pyre. But the corpse wasn’t wearing it. The pins and belt came from a central Italian tomb.”
“You go places like that?” he gasped.
“I had business there, and don’t be a busybody. Besides, it would take hours to explain the circumstances of my visit. And yes, I go all sorts of places and don’t owe you any explanation for my activities. Shit!” she muttered. “You let them cop a feel, tumble around in the hay a few times, and they start acting like—”
“All right! All right! I get the picture,” he growled.
“No, you probably don’t,” she said grimly. “And you can feel free to disapprove all you want, but give it a rest. At least for right now.” She started down the beach in the direction the bird had indicated.
He followed. No matter how much she annoyed him sometimes, the afterglow of passionate lovemaking remained with him, and he found himself unable to stay angry with her. But the frequent reminders that she wasn’t truly human and that their relationship depended on her making allowances for him inspired a deep fire of jealous rage in his soul.
He took her hand as they walked along together. They interlaced their fingers.
“I’m just jealous. I hate to think about losing you. But I’ve heard all the stories about mortals and beings like you. They never come to a very good end.”
“That’s why you hear about them,” she said. “Nobody tells stories about the ones that work.”
“Some of them work?”
“Most of them work. We’re very stable individuals. We know what we like, what we don’t, and none of us are shy about speaking our minds. I think ours is a very promising one.”
“That makes me feel better,” he said. “I just hope when we find Merlin the sun won’t have fried his brain.”
“No. There are structures all along the coast. One of them probably materialized for him.”
“What? There are other buildings around here?”
“Yes, but you can’t see them easily.”
“Dead people’s clothes. Invisible buildings. What else are you . . . ?”
“Settle down. They are not dead people’s clothing. When they were devoured on the funeral pyre, they belong to me. And as for the structures, I’m not sure you would call them buildings. They aren’t invisible. They just are a little bit somewhere else.”
“How did they do that?” he asked.
“It’s like the tunnel between worlds. No one knows,” she said.
“Why?”
“We don’t know. What we do know is that their ability to dematerialize preserves them. And when we studied the matter long ago, that was the best and only explanation we could come up with. When you want something to last a long time, you build it of sturdy materials. But if you want something to last forever, you arrange it so that it can widen the spaces between the little thingamajiggies that make up matter and avoid the deterioration caused by heat, cold, wind, rain that batters structures.”
“You sure that’s the explanation?” he asked.
“No, but have you got a better one?” She pointed ahead. “Look!”
He saw what appeared to be a small forest of white columns on a promontory overlooking the ocean.
“He will be there,” she said confidently.
“How do you make them come into being?” he asked.
“Sometimes you can’t,” was her rueful answer. “Once my house went away. I hadn’t visited it in a long time, maybe a few hundred years, and I guess it got tired of waiting. I had to camp out in the spring that supplies the bathing pool and drinking water. Nothing wrong with that. There’s a beautiful cave down there that is filled with sunlight from holes in the rock above. The walls and floors are lined with tiny quartz crystals. They shine like new snow on a bright day when the light filters in. But it does get cold there at night. You’d need your fur.”
“The house?” he prompted.
“Oh. After a while, it came back. I’ve been careful to check on it periodically every twenty-five years or so since.”
The ground was broken here. The beach changed to shingle and the dark rocks that looked like the remnants of an ancient lava flow formed a small peninsula that stretched out into the ocean. A broad, shallow stair led to the top of the promontory.
He was sitting in a stone chair in the middle of a slightly sunken garden, staring out to sea. He was, as she had said, clean-shaven with thick, salt-and-pepper gray hair. He was wearing a clean cotton robe the butternut color of homespun. When they reached the top of the stair, he turned to look at them. The expression of controlled horror in his eyes struck Lancelot like a blow.
“I thought I’d be seeing you again,” he said. “And the bird. There are no birds here. I knew it had to be a messenger.”
The pavilion was to Lancelot like a scattering of mushrooms. Slender white, or were they white? Somehow they seemed to pick up the blue in the sky. Columns rose from fissures in the polished rock at his feet. Each column opened into a delicate stone parasol. They overlapped one another in a random pattern that created areas of both light and heavy shade. And like mushrooms, they were arranged in a ring around a sunlit garden.
The outer ring was small fig trees laden with fruit. The second ring held gooseberry bushes, again burdened with abundant red, translucent fruit. The innermost ring around a small pool held roses. They reminded Lancelot of dog roses, white with a pink blush at the edges and multiple golden stamens.
But no dog roses he’d ever seen were so large, each blossom wider across than the palm of his hand. Or so fragrant. Whenever the sea breeze dropped, the air was suddenly and seductively saturated with their fragrance.
The sorcerer shivered as with a chill. “How long,” he asked in a tormented voice, “will I stay sane?”