Authors: Alice Borchardt
“Greetings and homage, Golden King,” the bird said as it finished its salutation and stood upright once more.
“Golden King,” Arthur said. “Well, the Golden King is standing here in the rain freezing his butt off.”
“Unnecessarily,” the warrior said. “Spread your hands like this. The vessel in the tower belongs to you. It will come.”
“I want the vessel in the tower to protect the tower,” Arthur said.
The warrior nodded. “Yes. She said you’d worry about that. But she said, Don’t! Don’t worry. It can be in two places at once.”
Arthur spread his hands and the beautiful bowl appeared between his palms. The birds shied away from its light. They scattered into the green, rain-drenched countryside.
The cauldron proffered luxury. Arthur refused, citing his need for the useful and indeed his preference for it. And immediately he found himself clothed in leather trousers, leggings, and boots with dry stockings, a light wool and linen-blend dalmatic. A heavy woolen mantle was wrapped around his body.
He then asked the cauldron for weapons. He was met with simple incomprehension. He devoted his thanks to the silent beauty he saw suspended between his palms and basked for a moment in its warm light. Then, with a sigh of regret, he returned it to its everlasting vigil in the tower from whence it had come.
A few moments later, the two warriors were crouched over a small fire in the lee side of a massive boulder and out of the rain. More or less out of the rain; it depended on which way the wind was blowing. Lancelot had some provisions with him, and Arthur was dining on bread and some very strong curd cheese while the birds investigated the lines Arthur had set in the stream.
“I was sent here—I came of my own free will—because of my sister. I believe you may know her, she said.”
“She? Your sister?” Arthur asked.
“No. The Lady of the Lake. I haven’t seen my sister in some time.”
“The Lady of the Lake have a name?”
“Well, certainly she has a name, but I can’t tell you what it is, because I’m forbidden to reveal—”
“Do you have a name?” Arthur’s mouth was full; the question was a bit muffled.
Lancelot found a small jug of wine and proffered it to Arthur. “Of course I have a name.” He sounded offended.
“You are far from clear,” Arthur said.
“I can’t see how I could be any more informative,” Lancelot said.
“I can,” Arthur told him. “Try telling me who the hell you are. Who the hell your sister is. We can skip over the Lady of the Lake for now. Then you could explain just what the hell you’re doing here and why, not to mention how the hell you came so far to find me.”
Bax arrived just then with a fish.
“I hope it’s a trout,” Arthur said. “I can’t eat salmon.”
“Why?” Lancelot asked.
“Because I once was one.”
Lancelot digested this thoughtfully. “I think,” he said slowly, “we both have a lot of explaining to do.”
The Paradoxisus, that’s what they called them; and the palace where they were located, the Paradox Garden. The two women told me to run, so I ran.
My unseen companion was not happy. “You don’t have the least idea what their intentions are,” she scolded.
I ignored her. I wasn’t about to start talking to myself and convince . . . whatever they were . . . captors? Rescuers? They could well be either one. Convince them that I was insane.
“Hurry!” The one behind me urged me on when we reached the staircase. “We don’t dare tarry. He might reverse the steps and then we would never get out.”
“Reverse the steps?”
“Yes,” the one behind me said. “Reverse the steps so we would have to run up to get down.”
I decided to let that one lie right there. I concentrated on going down the narrow spiral staircase as fast as I could. It was corkscrew, that stair, and almost entirely enclosed in a complex lattice overgrown with those blazing roses. But for the translucent green leaves, red flowers, and brown, thorny canes, everything else was white, the selfsame, alabaster white that composed the outside of the tower. But somehow between the sunlight, the sky colors rioted on in the alabaster jewel until it looked like the heart of a rainbow.
But I didn’t regret it when the five of us, three women and two dogs, fled out through a high arched entryway and along a broad causeway over a beautiful, shallow blue lake. Flowers, water lilies of every imaginable color, clustered along with hyacinths, iris, pickerelweed, and lotus, scattered among the sprays of many diverse fountains.
On reaching the end of the causeway, the two women darted into a garden. Here I lost my way because this was not a very correct and well-laid-out Roman garden but a magnificent wilderness of groves containing ornamental trees; forest groves with oak, elder, beech, and even pine. Interspersed among the trees was greensward surrounded by flower beds, ponds, streams, and even waterfalls.
I was flagging now, but I think so were my companions.
“How large is this?”
“No one knows,” the woman said. “It may continue forever. Some of the things pertaining to the king do go on forever. Or at least, so far that we poor humans cannot reach the end of them.”
Her hood had fallen back and I saw her face was lined and scarred as though she had once been beaten very badly. Her hair, once quite dark, had streaks of gray. As I watched, she unhooked the dog’s lead and let him run ahead of us into a glade of young pines filled with dappled sunlight. The girl behind me followed suit. Her hood had also fallen back, and I saw she was much younger than the one ahead. She was a lightly built redhead with green eyes and fair skin.
“They won’t go far,” the one ahead of me said.
“She hurt him. She really hurt him,” the young redhead exclaimed. “I felt it. You know I can feel him.”
“Fine!” the dark one said. “But let’s get her under wraps before he recovers. And don’t count any chickens, not only not before they hatch but not until they’re ready to lay eggs or crow. I’ve been part of too many failed attempts at undermining his power that I begin by being pessimistic.”
“But, Annin, there is a king, another king, who is said to have been favored by the Queen of the Dead. I keep hoping . . .”
“That’s it,” the older one, Annin, said. “Keep hoping . . . and be careful.”
“You will be Annin,” I said. “And may I ask your name?” I said to the redhead.
“Erika,” she said.
Then the clouds came down to earth. That’s the only way I can describe it. We walked through mist so thick that we could see nothing for a few moments, and when we emerged, we gazed down into a tree-filled valley. Beyond the valley, a fortress of gray stone seemed to spring from a crag. It was overgrown with creeping vines from which hung drooping clusters of violet flowers.
Almost instinctively I turned toward it.
“No,” Erika said, tugging at my arm. “That’s why we say this garden may go on forever. We keep to a few well-beaten paths. No one who ever descended into that valley and tried to reach that fortress has ever returned.”
“The worst of it,” Annin said, “is that we don’t know if that’s good or bad. But on balance, we think bad.”
I studied the fortress as well as I could from this distance and saw the windows were only black holes, half-covered by the crawling vines, and the towers were ruined, jagged, and roofless. I shivered a little, and we turned and entered an aisle of flowering shrubs that ended in a building that seemed to keep changing its shape as I tried to look at it.
“We live there,” Annin said, pointing.
I stopped. “That doesn’t look much better.”
“Wheeeeee. . . .”
My unseen companion sounded delighted. “You can control this. It’s all in
how
you look at it.”
Annin paused. She picked up a stick and drew a diagram in a dusty spot under one of the bushes: two faces looking at each other on a chalice. I had seen such things before. Dugald’s people were interested in them and he had acquainted me with them.
“Either or neither,” I said. “The perception of the person looking at them makes the call. But they aren’t real. Those are lines on the ground. An optical illusion, if you like.”
“Not here they aren’t,” Annin said. “That’s what I meant when I said Bade might reverse the staircase. Among the towers, he controls perception. Here, we can. From time to time he fights us, trying to take control of our . . . dwellings, but so far, we have beaten him off. When you killed the lust-driven Tailogue, I knew you must be a sorceress of great power.”
I looked back at the door to their . . . dwelling and concentrated. From one point of view, it looked open; from another, closed.
“I see,” I said. I didn’t completely, but enough of the idea behind the . . . dwelling went home for me to function. In my mind, I closed the door.
“When we get there,” I said.
“Yes, that’s safest,” Annin said.
“Has this thing a name?” I asked Annin.
“Paradoxisus,” she said.
Sometime, somewhere, during our wild flight I found I was wearing a dress again. This was a long, white dalmatic with golden embroidery at the neck and hem. It felt like silk. Heavy, raw silk.
“She wasn’t wearing anything but her armor when we fled,” Erika said.
“Yes.” Annin spoke slowly. “And where is your sword?”
“I have a sort of friend,” I explained lamely. “Though I don’t see why she chose”—I looked down at the silk dress—“this particular style.”
“I’m not a
she
,” my companion said. “Properly speaking, I’m an it. But I kind of like she. You could use that.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Annin and Erika gave me the same sort of odd look I was beginning to get used to.
“You talk to it?” Annin asked.
“From time to time,” I said.
Annin lifted her head suddenly, her eyes closed. A second later, they opened and she looked afraid.
“The Tailogue are out. Bade has recovered from the blow she dealt him. Run!”
Luckily, we didn’t have far to go. I let Annin open the door. The dogs were waiting beside it and they plunged through it along with us. I never solved the internal geometry of the Paradoxisus, . . . the dwelling, as Annin put it. But then, I do not think its builders ever intended it to be solved. They generated the geometry to allow the inhabitants, or perhaps users of the Paradox, to go places they could not easily reach otherwise.
Inside, broad, shallow stairs converged on a stone circle with a star at the center; a star with many rays, each so constructed as to look three-dimensional. The rays moved as you looked at them, now seemingly constructed in high relief, but then they changed and appeared instead to be cut out of the rock and then somehow inlaid with silver.
“Whoosa,” my companion commented.
Staircase, staircases. Everywhere I looked I seemed to see another one. At first it seemed impossible to isolate one, but I got the trick of it. I counted ten, but then I found an eleventh.
“How many do you see?” Annin asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I count eleven, but I think I’ve spotted a twelfth.”
“You are indeed powerful,” Erika said. “I’ve never seen more than seven, and Annin can isolate only about ten. Sister mine, there is no telling what she could do with practice!”
“I think the star is a compass,” I said. “How many rays has it?”
“Good luck with that. If you look at it another way, you will find it has dark and bright rays. No one has ever been able to correctly count them,” Annin told me.
“However did you master this place?” I asked.
“We haven’t,” Erika said. “Only some of it. But enough to use it as a refuge against the king.”
“We believe,” Annin said, “that some of the places the stairs go may not exist any longer and that’s why we can’t reach them. Others, many others, are simply empty and dead, sort of like blind tunnels with a little something at the end. But they lead nowhere. Or rather, they touch places isolated even in their own worlds: the bottom of lakes, the tops of mountains, or deep caves in the earth. One goes to a river that never, as far as we know, sees the sun. The cave goes on and on, and it is very beautiful, but no exploration party has ever been able to find a way out.”
The shadows at the top of one of the stairs moved. I saw birds with black and silver wings, and then a woman, and the birds were a pattern on a black and silver dress. The woman appeared to be crowned with the white roses of faery, but as she drew closer, the roses vanished and her hair was gray. Her eyes were silvered by blindness and she felt her way down the steps with a blackthorn staff.
“Annin! Erika! She defeated the Tailogue. I felt it. Has she come? I can feel that someone is with you.”
“Yes,” Annin said.
“Very well. Bring her. She must attend her deliberations.”
Annin and Erika ran up the stair toward the blind woman and I followed.
Lancelot and Arthur reached the swamp the next day. They were still talking.
“Doesn’t surprise me that Merlin lost control of the situation. He was always one to overreach himself,” Arthur said. “My father hated him for . . .” He found himself not willing to explain his childhood to Lancelot. “For various reasons. But Uther always said that he was the most astute political advisor he ever had. I don’t think Father ever completely followed his advice, because Merlin was too much a partisan of the southern landowners. They want to rule the roost, and he’s happy to aid and abet them in every way.”
“If you think he’s smart, you should hang around her for a while.”
“Your Lady of the Lake?”
“Yes. And she thinks my sister, Guinevere, is the key to the whole thing . . . your gaining the High Kingship.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t try too hard to get back. These people here need me,” Arthur said.
“So do your father and the people of Alba. Do you love my sister?”
Arthur paused. The ground was getting soggy, and looking ahead, he saw that soon the two of them would be wading in water up to their knees.
“I hate to say love,” Arthur said. “I hate the word. My mother used to say she loved me.”
“You don’t like your mother?” Lancelot asked.
“I would cheerfully consign my mother to the devil. But judging by what Merlin told you about her probable fate, it is to be hoped she is there already. No, I won’t use the word
love
about Guinevere. But I will say that I want her. I wanted her from the first moment I saw her on the quay at Tintigal. She was wearing dirty leather pants, a grimy shirt, and that magnificent red-gold hair was wild, blown by the sea wind. And yet somehow she managed without any of the artifice other women employ to be the loveliest creature I had ever seen. I wanted her then, I want her now. And I think I will always want her. In my bed, in my arms, seated next to me at the table and across from me at my councils of war. Riding beside me at the hunt and holding my hand when I die. I think that if I ever stop wanting her, I will be beyond wanting anything.”