Authors: Alice Borchardt
The water in the stream seemed clean. He drank and went to find a yew. He found one on an outcropping, a jagged gray rock, and the ancient tree looked as though it had endured many cruelties. At some time in the past it had been split by lightning. The bolt charred and blackened most of the tree. But the part that survived had regrown and now the tree was almost as large as it had been before the lightning strike.
“At last.” He recognized the voice, Vareen’s.
“You’re here, too,” Arthur said.
“Yes. And no, the dog didn’t betray you. Bax led you well. The forest is not in a place, and as you probably surmised, it indeed can go on forever. Had you tried to flee the king, it would have. But you didn’t, and your magic was too strong for it. The tree before you endured Bade’s wrath, not any fire from heaven. It survived and so will you.”
“Is the other one with you?” Arthur asked.
“Yes, I’m here,” She answered. “Thank you for asking after me.”
He remembered them from when he had first come to the Summer Country. They told him how to escape the plateau where he had been imprisoned and got word to Morgana about where he was.
“Don’t you find such a life . . .” Then he paused, because both of them were long dead. Their skulls were nailed to trees on the plateau.
She laughed and he remembered her graceful skull. She was young when she perished, and he thought She must have laughed frequently.
“Such a death, you mean?” She said.
“I suppose,” he said, spreading his hands.
“No, Lord Arthur. Death is not like life. This is why the dead say so little. The existence they have is impossible to explain to the living. But no, Lord Arthur, we are neither uncomfortable nor are we bored.”
“Come! Come!” Vareen said. “We are using up his energy as we communicate with him.”
“Right now he has plenty. It’s not like last time, when he had endured so much suffering,” She rebuked Vareen.
“Yes,” Arthur said. “And it’s pleasant to pass the time of day with you both.”
“Humph,”
Vareen said. “That’s not why we came, though. And I think we should get down to business.”
“If you wish,” Arthur said, seating himself at the foot of the tree.
“As I said,” Vareen continued, “when you chose to face the Dread King, your magic became too strong for him. He is very powerful, but not infinitely so.”
“Must I try to find a way to kill him?” Arthur asked.
“No!” She sounded alarmed.
“I agree,” Vareen said. “And . . . I’m . . . not sure it’s possible. And if possible, I’m not sure it’s desirable. No! To do so would loose energies . . . that might . . . but, no. You probably couldn’t in any event, but . . .”
“Stop dithering,” She said. “He can’t. You can’t, Lord Arthur. But he loves to consider every contingency, even the impossible ones.”
“Did I kill her? The Queen of the Dead? The woman in the tower?” he asked.
“No,” She said. “You didn’t. And I don’t know how to tell you what you did, except that she departed of her own free will.”
“It seemed so to me,” Arthur said.
“Yes. but what we came to warn you about is that now you must face Bade, and this tree is very important,” She said.
“How?” Arthur asked.
“That’s just it. I don’t know.” Vareen sounded frustrated. “All I can tell you is that it is charged with magic.”
“I was going to make a longbow and a spear,” Arthur said.
“Yes. It will do for that. But I would be very careful what you do with them. In fact, perhaps it might be just as well if you picked another tree. The more I think about it, the more—”
“Vareen!” She said. “I believe we have given him the agreed-upon message. Lord Arthur, on what you must do, you are your own best counselor. We can but warn. And remember, had you listened to Vareen, you might never have escaped your prison.”
Arthur grinned. “True.”
“So,” She continued. “Fare you well. The lady in the tower left you better armed than you know. May God go with you.”
Then they were gone. He knew and didn’t know how he knew. The place was empty and silent.
There were flints around the boulder that the tree roots embraced. Arthur found some likely looking ones and set about making himself a knife. By dark he had the bow made. He found a hollow near the river and kindled a fire. He was careful to collect only perfectly dry wood, so that the fire generated little smoke.
Bax returned. It seemed he’d been foraging on his own. His belly was full and he was carrying a trout.
Having finished the bow, Arthur cleaned and spitted the fish, meaning to place it high over the fire and let it cook slowly in the smoke. By now it was dark, and he didn’t think the small amount of smoke he needed to flavor the fish would be noticed by anyone. So he threw the scraps he had cut from the bow into the coals.
There was a strange silence. It was as though all normal night noises paused and he stood in a bubble away from the world. His eyes stung for a moment as the smoke from the green wood billowed up. He blinked to clear away the tears and she stood there.
His first thought was the shock of her beauty. Her hair was short and clustered in a riot of red-gold curls. She was wearing a simple covering of golden mail, a sort of sparkling dress that clung to her gently curved body almost lovingly. Her armor was not in evidence. Her fair skin glowed soft and dense as that of a newborn child. Her beautiful eyes looked into his, wide and shocked, and he knew she saw him. A dripping sword was in her hand. He knew she had been in a fight and must have just made a kill.
Then as quickly as she had come, she was gone. Desire flashed through his body with the force of a lightning bolt. He had seen her only three times when, as she said, the dragons brought her to Tintigal. In the torchlight on the quay, he’d thought his eyes were deceiving him. In a pair of leather pants and a tunic very much the worse for wear, she shone like a diamond. Her speech was musical, her every move graceful as that of a young lioness.
The next day when they met in the afternoon, he had known he had not been deceived. But he had been tentative. He was young yet and knew his marriage was an important matter and that all three, his father, mother, and Merlin, would put pressure on him to seek the most politically advantageous match. This girl, however famous her name, was essentially a nobody.
Now . . .
He stared into the fire, sunk again to red coals with a few blue flames flickering over them.
Now . . . I am not the man I was, . . . and she is not what Merlin and Igrane judged her to be.
She had fought them to a standstill in the hall at Tintigal and summoned the servant of Dis to arrange her escape. Moreover, the man who acknowledged her as his daughter was manifestly not of this world. Her very strength would give his counselors pause and again they would advise against the match.
But then,
he thought,
none of that matters. There are some things that simply are not decided by the rational part of the mind but by much darker and more powerful forces.
He had known what his choice would be when he first saw her on the quay at Tintigal.
I want her,
he had thought.
And I will not rest until she is mine. One way or another, she will belong to me.
Sometimes the maiden’s bridegroom is death. No people like to think of it, but the sacrifice is very powerful. Because she is the future of humanity? Because for a parent to bury his or her child is the very height of sadness? But it has happened, and I remembered Dugald telling me how the ancient heroes killed a maiden to wring from the gods a fair wind to Troy.
There was a vast silence around me and all I could hear was the rush and roar of the river and the falls.
Magic! Magic!
I remembered Ure’s hall and the Faun’s head hanging in the net bag from a pine branch. The sad, brown eyes looking into mine: “You have danced the measure on the earthly labyrinth. Now look for the ballroom of the stars. She gave you power, for you took my head there.”
In a blinding flash it all came together, the odd script that marked the boundaries of the river, the swirling colors of the eternal dome. And I sensed it was eternal in some way present in the beginning and then never-yielding even when the sun dies. In fact, I knew that it survived the death of a dozen suns. Might have done so, in fact.
I had forgotten. Forgotten the Faun’s words. I saw Ure’s plans. He had wanted to destroy me, but hadn’t the strength. Or perhaps not the will. To take me out, he would have had to loose forces perhaps even he couldn’t control. And this was probably true of Bade and Arthur.
Time is a maze; time is a weaving. Ure could play tricks with cups, but a human life is another matter. Both Arthur and I were now deeply set in the pattern of events, and day by day, it became more dangerous to try to be rid of us. Or perhaps a better analogy would be a house might stand if you destroyed one wall, but not two. The longer we were present, the more we changed things. That’s why we had both been in danger since the day we were born. The longer we lived and fought, the more our enemies would draw back from the catastrophic consequences of our destruction.
Maeniel, the Gray Watcher, had known me since the day I was tested at the wolf den. He had given me the sword, his sword. Sheer time can make a thing magical. The blade had been forged in the high Alps when steel and the new world it brought were young.
I became aware that the vast chamber, the Hall of the Tree, was strangely silent; and I saw the crowd, my opponent, the whole world waited for my reply to the challenge. I gripped the sword hilt with two hands. Not difficult. It had been made for bigger, stronger hands than mine. I raised the blade toward the only dimly seen arch of stars beyond the lights.
And then I called the chamber. That’s the only way I can describe it. I asked, not commanded, the mirror of infinity for help.
I was answered.
All light died around me. The Hall of the Tree became utterly dark, but the star road seemed to leap to brightness above. The Hall of the Tree went from silence to a deafening surge of sound as panic struck the spectators. I was inundated with the sound of their terror in much the same way a storm-driven wave covers the shore, sweeping away everything in its path. A howling darkness.
Then the sword blade went red. Scarlet light illuminated the whole chamber. In it, I could see clearly.
Albe and Ilona among the women of the Diviners Guild. The frozen expressions of terror on the faces of the crowds gathered along the shore as they turned and tried to run and realized that to do so would send them into the arms of the night-hunting gangs gathered between the buildings. Music drowned out the anguished cries of human despair as a deep chord rang out.
“I see!” I didn’t know I was whispering until I was answered as the red grew brighter and brighter.
“Not all of it!” was the answer.
“No, but the music means something. The color . . . the emotion . . .” I did feel emotion: dull fury, rage, flaming anger, murderous intent were mine and not mine at the same time, and they seemed to sweep my soul along with them.
Then the blade was orange fire, warmth, reassurance, the skin of a fruit, velvet under my fingers. Taste, touch, and scent, not real but then unbearably real. Yellow. Time seemed to slow. Morning. Sunrise. Autumn sunflowers waving against a brown mowed hayfield and a dull gray sky. Sorrow, pain, loss, and, at last, a drenching of anguished despair.
To be capable of absolute commitment is to be vulnerable to absolute destruction. I understood that then as I had never understood it before. But nothing in me would consider turning back.
My arms quivered, my body was saturated with pain. Swept toward unnameable knowledge. I think the experience was then pushing me onward into those parts of the mind beyond rational consciousness, toward the experience of what we poor creatures of the dust might one day become.
A vision of how the wildflower blowing at roadside is connected to the drama of the sun’s journey through time and space. The colors, the sound, the emotions came and went. They and much, much more. Think of a crystal sundial; each hour as the sun changes it, a new splendor is revealed. But all pass and it—as my mind did—remains the same.
Then it was over. The cheers were deafening. Fear had given way to wild enthusiasm. I think people like to be frightened, shocked, confounded, and I had done all three. They loved me!
“You are immeasurably stronger,” my companion said.
“Yes,” I said, gritting my teeth. “But here comes death.”
And he was coming, the motley figure with the skull’s visage hopping from stone to stone toward the arena. I was all the more frightened, because he seemed unarmed. He carried a strange, shining object in his right hand. It glowed with rainbows just as my sword did now, the colors moving, changing as they danced up and down the blade.
He attacked just before he reached the arena. He let fly from the last stepping-stone. It came spinning toward me, whistling a high, thin cry of fury. I didn’t get my sword up in time. I parried, but I couldn’t completely deflect it. The winged disc slashed past my right leg and my armor didn’t come up in time to protect me. It opened a narrow gash on the side of my right calf muscle. I felt the sting then, a wave of burning pain.
“You’re hit!” my companion said.
“Stating the obvious,” I answered, watching the winged disc glide above the water and return to the hand of my adversary.
He laughed, and I saw the skull face behind the helm was a mask covering the visage of a living warrior. The pain in my leg subsided to a dull throb, but frighteningly, the leg felt weakened.
“Bad! Bad! Bad!” my companion said. “The thing is poisoned. I think I can defeat it and . . .”
I had no more time to listen because the disc left the hand of my attacker in a twinkling and was slicing through the air toward my face. The sword came up—it seemed almost of its own volition—and sparks flew as the disc was deflected toward the shore.
The mob composed of the night robber gangs and the ordinary citizens who were above the slaves but below the guildsmen took the brunt of the winged disc’s fury. They had no swords to protect themselves. I saw a woman go down without a face, brains and blood spilling down her gown. A man’s arm severed at the shoulder; his body spun wildly as he drenched the spectators with his blood. All this I glimpsed with my peripheral vision. Not to focus my attention on the warrior was death.