The Paradise War

by Stephen R. Lawhead

  Wear it proudly. Most of these men have trained for battle since they were infants, so you’re getting off lightly. You should be grateful.”

  I cast my eyes upon Simon’s blue-stained body. “But look at you, Simon. I would never have recognized you.”

  “This is just war paint,” he explained, then extended his arms. “But these are the real thing.” I saw that each inner arm had a bold blue tattoo in the distinctive Celtic design of intricate interwoven braided whorls. “This one is a salmon,” he said proudly, indicating his left arm. “And this one is a stag.” He lifted his right arm for my inspection. “I got them for killing enemy warriors—five each.”

  “You’ve killed ten men?” I gasped.

  “I might have received a torc for my kill today,” he said, somewhat peevishly. “A champion—that was my best one yet.”

  “Simon, what has happened to you?” I was still shaken by the battle, the scene still fresh in my mind.

  “Happened to me?” He snarled and jerked his thumb at the nearby spear. “If I hadn’t done what I did, it would be your head on the pole right now. Don’t you forget it. I saved your life.”

  “And I’m grateful, believe me,” I insisted. “It’s just that—”

  “Wandering out on a battlefield like that,” he continued angrily. “If the Cruin hadn’t killed you, the Llwyddi would have.” Simon stooped to a cloth bundle at his feet, unwrapped it, and shook out a long shirt of fine yellow cloth.

  “Who?”

  “Clan Cruin,” he said, putting his arms into the sleeves of the shirt. “They are the enemy we fought today. We are the Llwyddi.” He unrolled a pair of yellow and black checked trousers and drew them on.

  “What was the fight about?”

  “King Meldryn and one of the Cruin kings had a falling out over some hunting hounds.” He sat down cross-legged on the ground and began pulling on soft leather boots.

  “Dogs? Did you say dogs?” I plopped down beside him.

  “The Cruin king said that Meldryn’s hunting dogs stank.”

  “What? You mean to tell me that all that—that slaughter was over an insult to some dogs?”

  “Don’t be an ass. Of course it is more than that. There is honor at stake here.”

  “Oh, good. Glad to hear it. Dozens of men lost their lives today because somebody said King Meldryn has smelly dogs! I don’t believe it!”

  “Keep your voice down! You don’t understand.” He laced and tied one boot.

  “Sorry, Simon, but I came this close to getting murdered out there, and I—”

  “You did not,” he said flatly, his lips drawing back from his teeth. He glared at me, then softened. “You should have seen your face,” he said with a laugh. “I never saw anyone so scared! It was priceless.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Actually,” he continued, more the Simon I knew, “you were lucky to find us at all. We are going home tomorrow.” He laced and tied the remaining boot.

  “Why? You mean this isn’t the king’s fortress?”

  “This?” Simon dismissed it with an impatient flick of his hand. “This is just an overnight stopping place. Meldryn Mawr has hundreds of these scattered from one end of the realm to the other. This is just a small force made up of some of the younger warriors. We are only out here to avenge the affront to the king’s honor; then we go back to Sycharth.”

  “We?” I heard the unmistakable note of pride in Simon’s voice. I asked him again: “Simon, what has happened to you? What is going on here?”

  “Nothing has happened to me. As you see, I am fit and happy. I have never felt better in my life.” He turned the question back on me. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know. I came to find you,” I said and decided to skip a lengthy explanation of all I’d been through since his disappearance. “There’s some trouble, Simon. We don’t belong here. We’ve got to find a way to go back—you know, back to the real world.”

  Simon frowned. I could tell he did not like the idea. “That is not going to be easy, chum.”

  “Maybe not,” I allowed, “but we’ve got to try. And the sooner, the better.” I began telling him about the nexus and plexus and Professor Nettleton’s notions about interdependent reality and all the rest. I finished with a much-abbreviated version of Nettleton’s Unraveling Plexus Theory and the danger we were all in because of it.

  Simon listened, staring at the ground the whole time, his eyes distant and cold. He did not say anything; he just nodded and pulled up a few blades of grass, which he twirled between his palms. I could not tell whether what I had said made any impression on him at all.

  “Did you hear me, Simon?” I asked when I had finished.

  “I heard.” He glanced up at me and flung the grass away impatiently. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he replied. “I told you, I’m fine. Never better.”

  “Then why the long face? I thought you would be glad to see me. Really, it’s a miracle that I found you at all. I still can’t believe I’m here.”

  “Do they miss me?” he wondered idly.

  “Of course they do! Your parents are worried. They probably even have the police looking for you by now. You’ll be an official missing person next. I’m telling you, the sooner we get back, the better for everyone.”

  Simon glanced away. I thought he would make some reply. Instead, he began to tell me about what he had been doing since crossing over. “It was rough at first,” he said, and again I noticed that odd, distant look. “But it was late summer when I came here, so I could find fruit and berries to eat. When the Llwyddi found me, I had been wandering around the hills for—I don’t know how long, weeks at least.

  “A hunting party came upon me camped by the river. From my clothes and all that, they realized I was a stranger, so they hustled me off to the king. The Chief Bard took one look at me and declared me a visitor from the Otherworld. You can imagine the stir that caused . . .”

  I nodded but could not actually imagine any such thing. I could hardly credit what had happened to me in the few short hours I had been in this strange world.

  Simon continued. “I was given a place in the tribe—an honorary member. But I had no status, no name.”

  “No name? Why didn’t you tell them your name?”

  He shook his head slightly. “It doesn’t work that way. You have to earn your name here. I’m well on my way to earning a great name.”

  I remembered the old Celtic practice of withholding a person’s name until they achieved some great feat or special deed by which a name would be revealed and conferred. Also, a person’s name was not common currency to be bandied about lightly. Many heroes of legend held their true name in secret, never revealing it to anyone lest an enemy get hold of it and cause them harm.

  “So what do they call you?” I asked, fascinated.

  “They call me Sylfenu. It must mean ‘found,’ because they found me by the river. Killing the Cruin champion today would have done the trick.” He shrugged and added, “But never mind. I’ll have another chance soon enough.”

  “They made you a warrior?”

  “That was my choice,” he said. “I reckoned the best way to get to the top was to become a warrior. A warrior has more status, more freedom to come and go and do as he pleases. Warriors are not expected to do anything but hunt and fight, and they get all the gold and glory.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “But they also get killed in pretty short order.”

  “Sometimes, if they are unlucky,” he allowed. “But I have never been unlucky.” He grinned maliciously. “You are a warrior, too, now, don’t forget.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.” I thrust the thought aside. I did not plan on staying long enough to see, let alone participate in, another battle like the one I had witnessed that day. I changed the subject. “Why did you throw my watch away?”

  Simon simply laughed. “It would have been trouble if they had seen you with it. Time means nothing he
re.”

  “Where is here, Simon? Where are we? What is this place?”

  “This is Caer Modornn,” he said, climbing to his feet. He took up a wide woven cloth belt of green and black stripes and wrapped it around his waist, using it to close the front of his shirt. “Follow me; I’ll show you around.”

  We walked across the compound, and I identified the missing element I had noticed earlier: there were no women at the caer. I mentioned this to Simon. “Of course not,” he told me. “We are just a small raiding party. Women don’t tag along on this sort of outing.”

  “Oh. Do they tag along other times?”

  He arched his eyebrows. “You’ll see.”

  We reached the entrance to the caer and proceeded along the narrow path which topped the steep-sided ditch outside the timbered wall. We walked around the perimeter of the hill a short way and stopped. Below us stretched the broad, shining length of the river we had crossed earlier.

  “That is the Modornn River,” he told me. “It forms the eastern boundary of Llwyddi lands. On the other side—where we fought today—is Cruin land.”

  He turned and continued on a bit further. When we stopped, I turned in the direction Simon pointed and saw, in the misty, hill-rimmed distance, the silver glint of a wide expanse of river. “Beyond those hills to the northwest is Myr Llydan, a gulf of considerable size.”

  We tramped a bit further around the circumference of the caer. I observed that the land changed, rising into ragged foothills and plateaus. Beyond these, sharp mountains towered—range after range, marching into the distance in ragged ranks until they were lost in cloud and blue mist. “That is Cethness,” Simon explained simply. “In the heart of Cethness the Llwyddi maintain a fortress of stone which has no rival anywhere. It is called Findargad, and it is the ancient seat of the clan.”

  I peered at the solid ranks of mountains, blue and hazy on the horizon, and then we moved on. When we stopped again, I saw once more the gentle hills and the broad river basin and, behind these, the dark margins of woodland and forest. “To the south,” he said, pointing along the curving waterway, “lies Sycharth, Meldryn Mawr’s palace and stronghold. With Findargad in the north, and Sycharth in the south, he rules most of the West.”

  “The west of what?” I asked.

  “Prydain,” he replied. “One of the three realms. The others are Caledon, in the north, and Llogres in the south.”

  I knew these names from the old, old legends. “What is it called— the whole thing, all three realms together—what is it called?”

  Simon scanned the vast landscape shimmering before us. “This,” he said, lifting a hand to the grand panorama, “this is Albion.”

  “Albion,” I repeated, thinking it extremely odd that Otherworld names were known in the manifest world as well. “But that is historical,” I said. “Why should the Otherworld have a historical connection?”

  “Who says it has?” Simon countered.

  “Well, don’t you think it’s a little strange that a classical name should be known here?”

  “You’re the Celtic scholar,” he informed me. “You work it out. I am merely telling you what the people here call this place.”

  The Britons of old called their island Alba—and to many it was Alba still. Old Nettles was right, and I was wrong—or, rather, backwards: the Otherworld did not have a historical foundation; the historical world had an Otherworldly foundation.

  I grasped this truth, was made weak by the staggering weight of it; and then it slipped from me, elusive again and out of reach. But I knew that I had, for the briefest of instants, encompassed this revelation: Albion, the primal archetype of the Celtic world.

  The web between the worlds was wide and many-stranded. If Nettles was to be believed—and he had not led me astray so far— then this place, this Albion, was the Form of forms, the original pattern for all that flowed into creation of the unique and magnificent wonder known as the Celtic spirit. I should not be overly surprised to discover other remarkable similarities.

  Our circuit completed, Simon and I returned to the caer. Some of the warriors—not having had their fill of excitement for the day— had begun a wrestling match. A large circle had formed around the combatants, who stood inside the ring: seven pairs of wrestlers, each grappling with the other. The main idea seemed to be to lift one’s opponent into the air by any means possible and body slam him to the ground. By some method I could not perceive, the losers were gradually eliminated and the winners brought to face each other. When the last two contenders were left standing, the wagering began.

  The exchange was quick and lively, and everyone from the prince down placed a bet with one or another of his comrades. There was so much shouting and jostling, I thought the betting would come to blows. But, just as quickly as it had begun, the wagering ceased, and the wrestling began again.

  The two in the ring squared off. They circled one another warily, walking on the balls of their feet, naked limbs glistening. I think they had oiled themselves to make gripping more difficult; it made them look as if they were carved of polished marble. Certainly, the finest Greek statues were never as graceful as the wrestlers in the ring. Flawless, I thought; perfection in motion. One dark-haired, the other fair—but each as impeccably formed as the other.

  They revolved slowly, moving in tighter circles, nearer and nearer. All at once, the fair-haired man lunged at his opponent’s knees, wrapping his arms around them and lifting them in the same swift motion. The dark wrestler clasped his hands and swung them down between his attacker’s shoulder blades with a blow I thought would have stunned an ox.

  Indeed, the fair-haired man went down on one knee, but did not release his hold. His dark rival raised his hands above his shoulders into his antagonist’s stomach; the man let out a tremendous groan and doubled over. The lighter warrior stood, lifting his dark opponent off the ground—just a little, but enough to throw him off balance. They both fell, then. However, the blond wrestler landed squarely on the dark-haired warrior without touching the ground. The match was over just that quick, and the fair-haired warrior was accorded the victory.

  Catcalls and jeers filled the air, and I gathered from the general demeanor of the wagering crowd that the blond man had been the underdog. The bets were settled: rings and armbands changed hands, brooches and knives and spears were relinquished to new owners. The winners were jovial, the losers gracious. Everyone seemed blissfully happy with the proceedings.

  There was another match then—pitting seven more pairs against each other and narrowing the group to the two best—and then another. I feared it might go on all night but, as the third match finished, the crowd broke up and I saw the reason: the cooking fires had been lit and there was meat roasting on spits all across the camp. But before the food came drink: great draughts of a pale amber liquid I took to be ale, served in huge cups and bowls and horns and beakers—any sort of vessel, in fact, that could hold a quantity of liquid.

  At several strategic places around the caer, large vats had been set up. The warriors clustered around these vats with their jars, which they filled by plunging them into the frothy brew. Simon led me to the nearest vat, where a copper beaker was thrust into my hand by a big burly fellow with long brown locks and a yellow leather apron wrapped around his waist. The man watched me keenly and made drinking motions with his hand.

  “He is the brewer. He wants you to taste it,” Simon explained. “Drink up!”

  “Cheers!” I lifted the beaker to my lips. The liquid smelled pleasantly beery, and the taste was nicely sharp, if a bit sour. I swallowed a mouthful demurely—only to have it get up my nose. I sneezed and choked at the same time, spewing most of my mouthful at the brewmaster.

  The brewer apparently considered this high affirmation of his subtle art. He laughed out loud and clapped me on the back with a heavy hand, jarring me so that I sloshed half the contents of my beaker over myself. The beer baptism combined with the dried blood spattered over my torso and ran down
my belly in ruddy streaks. This made the jolly brewmaster laugh all the more. He threw back his head and guffawed loudly.

  “Oh, well done,” Simon crabbed. “I can’t take you anywhere.”

  “You might have warned me,” I muttered, shaking the liquid from my hands and arms. “What is it, ginger?”

  “Spruce, I think,” answered Simon. “It’s an acquired taste.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “I suggest you acquire it as soon as possible. They drink it by the vat around here. You don’t want to be seen stinting.”

  “God forbid,” I murmured, gazing into my cup. The brewer took this to be a sign that I needed a top-up. He snatched away my cup and filled it to the brim, gave it to me, and made his “bottoms up” sign again. I lifted the cup and quaffed the cool ale, wiping my mouth on my bare forearm.

  The brewmaster refilled my cup yet again, and Simon and I withdrew from the vat to sit down and nurse our drinks and wait for the food. “Is it like this all the time?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “Like this—you know, this crazy.” I indicated the whooping, hollering clusters of revelers all around us.

  Simon pursed his lips at my prudishness. “If you think this is crazy, just wait till you see a real victory celebration.”

  We tended our drinks in silence; I sipped mine slowly, as I was already beginning to feel a buzz from the ale—due to a combination of shock, exhaustion, spent adrenaline, and an empty stomach. We drank and watched the rosy dusk fade to a stunning twilight. I had never known such a brilliant evening; it seemed to me that my soul expanded to embrace the shimmering stars as they appeared in the radiant blue firmament. I saluted each in turn: “Hail, brother! And welcome. I recognize you.”

  By the time the food arrived, I was in my cups. My head all but flopped on my chest as I forced my jaws to chew the meat from a nicely roasted haunch cradled in my lap. The meat was savory and good, but I was too tired to eat much of it. I fell asleep clutching my empty beaker in one hand and my unfinished supper in the other. The last thing I remember was the bright fire leaping high into a night grown loud with singing and laughing.