Authors: Alice Borchardt
I wonder,
he thought,
if they think different thoughts with one eye on the object of their interest than they do when they look at it with the other?
“No! And Yes!”
He jumped slightly and drew in a quick breath at the sudden answer to both his queries.
“No and yes what?” This time he spoke aloud.
“No! I am not an emissary from King Bade. And yes, I am not sure how or why, but the use of one eye then the other does involve an awakening and an increase in comprehension. Which is why birds do it. As a man, I didn’t need to, but as a bird, I can make use of the faculty, so I do.”
“You were a man?”
“Sort of. Maybe once. A long time ago there.” The creature’s voice was frightened with a bleak, lonely sorrow. “Now, you are right. I am an emissary, but not from the king. My lord is the Warrior of Water and Light. Not a man, but not a god, either. He holds my fealty until I die. He begs that you accept his help.”
“I need all the help I can get,” Arthur said. “And anyone who in truth wishes to come to my assistance need not beg.”
“So be it,” the bird said and took wing.
“I have spoken with a bird,” Arthur said. “He has promised me the help of the Warrior of Water and Light. I probably need to go soak my head in the snowmelt river. It might freeze the cobwebs in my brain. I could not but think I am caught in dreams or delusion, had not so many strange things happened to me.” Then he moved off with Bax leading him toward the distant towers of light.
Lancelot sat in a perilous seat, one made from the ancient enchanted oaks in the dark, endless forest. She sent him there. The throne was hollowed from the trunk of one tree. It was ten feet across and crowned the last hill of the Forest of Forever and Nowhere. She called it that. When he said that was incomprehensible, she said fine, she sympathized with him. Then she pointed out to him the problem of it.
“This was well known to the ancients,” she said. “The forest was like that.” And good luck to him if he ever became entangled with it.
He asked how Arthur got out and she said he hadn’t. Bade had released him because Arthur had managed to defeat the forest in a trial of strength. Reluctantly, Bade had released him. She wasn’t sure why. Bade’s thinking was opaque to her. He was so much smarter and more powerful than anything that existed on earth now. But in the past, others had fought him to a standstill. He had never been defeated, only contained. It hadn’t happened often, but it could be done. Just possibly Arthur was another such champion, and it was inconceivable that he would not champion his own people. That’s what kings were created to do.
A king’s life belonged to his people. They were entitled to sacrifice him, and if the conditions for such a sacrifice should be met, he was obligated to go to his death without complaint. The torque is a garrote and used to strangle its wearer. Damocles made them, and at one time that was why only noblemen and women wore them. It was a Damoclean reminder of the obligation of rank. Arthur would meet and exceed his obligations.
Lancelot, his back to the dark enchantment, looked out into the pillared walls of the more normal wood. It was spring and nature had decked herself in red-gold and green splendor. Near his feet, safely away from the vast, shadowed trap behind him, a spring burst out of the rock and gurgled away downhill across a bed of shiny cobbles toward the river. Lancelot sat on the polished wood seat and didn’t know he looked impressive.
He wore leather pants and a woolen dalmatic tuniclike garment that was standard male dress of the time. It had long sleeves and he wore a linen shirt under it. It looked sewn on the hem, neck, and sleeves with rubies. But it wasn’t. The things that looked like rubies were eyes, Argus eyes that saw everything around him.
The helm raven returned, perched on the rock above the spring, sipped some cool water, threw his head back and swallowed. Then he sharpened his beak on the rough rocks, honing it.
“My lord, mission accomplished,” he said.
“Thank you,” Lancelot said.
“Do not thank me,” the bird said.
“Why not?”
“She is right about Arthur. Keep away unless you absolutely have to go in close.”
“Why?”
“He is a stone killer.”
Lancelot nodded. “So. But I don’t think she had my welfare in mind when she cautioned me to stay as far out as possible. I believe she intended to limit the Dread King’s knowledge of my presence. That was also why she told me never to mention his name.”
“To be sure,” the raven said. “But he is still a stone killer.”
“I’m not lacking in courage myself.” Lancelot spoke a bit stiffly.
“No,” the bird said. “You would go up against hopeless odds if you felt the situation demanded it. But he . . . he . . . Arthur would not even notice the odds.”
“Oh,” Lancelot said.
Arthur continued to move downhill toward the towers he remembered from his dream of manhood. He had been told he must fight supernatural beings and that’s what the dream meant. This King Bade must be the one, and the terrible hog-featured warriors must be another.
Fat, confident, and stupid. That’s what I still was when I awakened the next morning. The sun got up before I did, and its light was shining into the dry lake bed where the sun cape supposedly lay. Micka was gone, but I didn’t have much time to wonder where, because in a few moments she returned with several of the melons we had gotten water from yesterday.
We refreshed ourselves with the cool melons and chewed some jerky. Then I went searching for a pile of rocks high enough to let me see down into the dry lake. I found a place where the ravine’s sides looked climbable and went up. When I reached the top, I saw the sun cape lay spread in the very center of what had once been water.
Fine. Now all I had to do was figure out—
I heard a sound reminiscent of the distant
Heiiiii
of a hawk. It took at least a minute for my mind to consider the fact that there were no birds here, at least, none I had seen. The one exception was the lake that belonged to Ilona’s family and strictly speaking, it wasn’t here “here.”
That was the only warning I got. The beak snapped shut.
I don’t know if I screamed, didn’t scream, fainted, or just had quiet hysterics. All I knew was that I was swept like a flying arrow over the lost lake. I passed over what seemed acres of those murderous plants.
There in the center, the scraps of the sun cape lay tangled with a few yellow bones. Even at the speed I was traveling, it was clear that I could make no use of it because it was ruined beyond repair.
“What! The! Hell! Just! Happened?” my unseen companion screeched at the top of her lungs. Then she added unhelpfully, “It’s! Got! You!”
I could, I thought, start gibbering, but then my companion seemed to have captured that role. We were rising. The beak squeezing my midsection tightened as its owner reached the edge of the lake and caught the lifting air mass driven by the sun heating the rocks. We went up, flying in successively wider and wider circles as the thing used the thermal to propel itself into the sky.
The wings . . . I didn’t believe the wings. No bird ever had wings like that. They were three times as long as my body, but more like a bat’s than a bird’s, webbed, furred with short, very, very short, down. White, the down made them shimmer like mother-of-pearl, and ever so slightly translucent at the edges that they glowed a bit, pink in the new sun.
Up, up, they swept, turning slightly to present the edge and escape the resistance of the air. At the top of the stroke, they flared into white, iridescent sails and caught the wind on their down surfaces, a magnificent down, driving the two of us higher and higher toward the golden blue of the morning sky.
“Your sword!” the dress screamed. “You still have your sword! Kill! It!”
“I don’t think so.”
We were high, so high that even fear was gone. At a certain point, I discovered, the ground below simply is not real. The dry lake was no bigger than a large platter, and we were rising yet, those magnificent wings pushing us. The flying thing had a long, narrow beak. It was not hard like a bird’s beak is, but flexible and cartilaginous, or at least the edges were. I suspected that if I were not wearing that little mail shirt, the thing might have bitten me in half. As it was, the little ring mail was protecting me.
“Humph! I’m glad you know that. I am,” was the soft-voiced reply to my thought.
“Fine,” I said. “Have you got yourself under control?”
There was a long silence; a long, chagrined silence. Then it snapped, “Yes!”
“Fine!” I said. “I hope you don’t have any more bright ideas about me killing this thing, because if I do, or even if I swing and miss and upset it, it might drop me. And unless you can slow my fall . . .”
“I might. I’m not sure.”
“Not sure isn’t good enough,” I warbled back.
“True! Only too true. We are very high, and if what I feel is correct, this . . . whatever . . . is unhappy. It’s finding you a load to carry and if it weren’t so important to get you to . . . to . . . I don’t know the very high personage who commanded it to get you . . . it would set you down right now and forget the whole thing.”
I glanced to my right and saw the beak clasping my waist and beyond it, one troubled orange eye with a black pupil gazing at me. The head was covered with the same fine down as the wings were. It looked as soft as the fine fur on a newborn kitten. It was white on top and blue on the bottom. In fact, the whole belly of the creature was a pale blue. It extended out under the wings and even, I could see, to the downy legs that ended in long, smooth, narrow, folded claws. There was a slight crest on the head. The crest was striped with soft bands of blue, the same iridescent blue that covered the belly and underwings. All in all, a magnificent creature.
I was aware that I was clutching my sword.
“I can get that,” my companion said.
The thing vanished from my hand. I hung where I was, the creature’s beak holding me. I saw the city, toy-sized, pass below me. The wings pulled us up and up, partway riding the thermals, partially by main force. As we passed above the tallest towers, I saw men and women of the city clad in furs standing on balconies and platforms amidst the white towers, the final pinnacle of the city’s heights. They pointed up and watched the magnificent bird (was it a bird?) labor over them and clear the mountain peak.
The mountain that clasped the city was only one of a long chain of sparkling, snow-clad pinnacles beyond. I found myself sick with fear. It was cold already. I didn’t know how high this thing could fly. Dugald hadn’t been slow to tell me that there were reasons why mountains had snowcapped peaks. Maeniel had crossed the Alps many times, and also warned me about the weather high up. These pinnacles were taller than any I had ever seen, and I thought I might easily die of the cold.
But I didn’t have long to worry. When we cleared the last towers of the city, I saw where the bird was going. It was like riding a falcon’s stoop when the creature folds its wings in midflight and drops toward the earth to surprise its prey. This creature also folded its wings slightly and rode down the slope, sometimes only a dozen or so feet off the ground, into the largest canyon I have ever seen. The slope unrolled before me like one end of a dropped scroll, snow and ice, bitterly cold wind, then shattered marble, flint scree, black basalt.
Then the thing’s beak tightened, squeezing me painfully. My companion acted to protect me.
“I don’t think it means you harm. It said it just doesn’t want to drop—
eeeyaaaa!
”
The wings snapped open and we soared over a massive gorge draped in a jungle at the lower elevations while at the bottom, a wild white-water river frothed and foamed. The bird floated lower, and even as frightened as I was, I gasped with delight. The jungle that clothed the lower slopes had, I think, no single flat spot. It existed on itself, feeding on itself, water and light. Massive trees with long, ropelike roots grew from pockets in the steep slopes. The thick, squat trunks were black with moisture. They supported an absolute riot of ferns that looked like cut lace: white, yellow, green, and red were mixed with moss on their branches. Vines that seemed to have no real rooting spot draped themselves over every place too steep for trees, and in between vines, trees, and ferns were flowers, single, glowing masterpieces of pink, purple, violet, gold, and soft combinations of pastels. Flowers in masses, black and yellow, orange, black and yellow, red, blooming along thick, succulent stems and protecting themselves with long, golden spines.
Even on the steepest slopes, sheer cliffs, the greenery colonized everything. On the more gentle grades (at best, most of them were very precipitous), there were scatters of what looked like eggshells, and they held quantities of food plants.
And oh, yes, I have forgotten about the birds. This gorge was a veritable paradise for birds. I saw iridescent ducks, geese with dark heads and gray bodies, deep blue with long, yellow beaks. Higher, the flocks flashed up out of the luxuriant greenery. Red and black, with loud voices and shining wings. Blue and gold, yellow and scarlet, burgundy and fire opal, they appeared for a second to delight the eye, then vanished again into the omnipresent green-velvet slopes.
I saw also that these magnificent lowlands were a gift of the knife-edged pinnacles above. They were crowned with glaciers, and the snow and ice that melted in the sun by day sent water cascading down into the river that roared and thundered below. You see, even in the bird’s beak with the wind roaring in my ears, I could hear it tearing along in its rocky bed below. Waterfalls by the hundreds were scattered along the canyon walls. Some ran in shallow streams, dropping from rock basin to rock basin, water spewing out, sending a fine mist of droplets to drench the jungle slopes. Others dropped from above, hundreds of feet straight down, carving out whirlpool basins.
As we passed one of these towering falls, I fancied I saw a white city behind it glowing in green and gold trim from a seemingly endless spill of eggshell-white terraces decked with roses. I remember the beauty of it flashed before my eyes. The sun was shining through the flowers and leaves. They were translucent in scarlet, green, and golden light against the pure, white terraces.