I gasped with the others; but, truth to tell, I was more shocked than surprised, and even that not very. And Morgan, I saw at once, was not even that… She had known all along, as her sister had known, how this must end (though I wondered greatly just how she had known, and resolved to speak at length with her as soon as this coil was run out), and now she stepped forward to face her twin.
"Sleights cannot prevail in the place of the Cup," she said, and though her voice was unemphatic and carried no overt threat, Marguessan quivered as if she had been struck in the face. "No false Keeper"—Morgan cut her glance to Mordryth, who still sprawled upon the sands, breathing hard, as if he too had taken a great buffet—"shall bring the Graal home. Your workings will not avail you, Uthyr’s daughter."
Marguessan moved uncontrollably at that, and she seemed to my othersight a snarling, surging darkness, her words confirming.
"Say you so—Uthyr’s daughter? Of all here you best know my work and my strength—ask your mate if memory lacks—do you think I will be so easily stayed?"
Morgan drew breath to answer, but before she could speak, the true Avallac’h lifted both his hands to the heavens, and it seemed that not only all the isle of Beckery but all Keltia fell silent. Even Marguessan held her peace, and on her face was a look of fear that even Morgan could not have put there.
"Your work is known, Inion Durracha, Merch Dhu. It is known also into what tides of iniquity you have cast your own children—" He gestured with both his upraised hands, a beckoning gesture, and above us the castle doors were thrown wide, and a procession paced slowly through. A funeral procession of eight bearers, the points of whose upright spears transfixed a red cloak that served as bier; and upon that taut crimson mantle lay the body of Gwain Pendreic.
I choked back a cry of despairing guilt as they came slowly past me, dared not raise my eyes to Avallac’h out of purest agony of shame. But he made no sign of blame or accusation, and the bearers set their burden down upon the strand a few yards off. No one, not even Marguessan, said a word.
I forced myself to look upon the face of the young man I had been cozened into slaying. Gwain looked but deep asleep, not dead at all: His long brown hair fell clean and curling upon his shoulders; his face, though pale, was calm and unmarked. He was clad in black, and the small gold medallion of his House lay in the hollow of his collarbone.
I dared a glance aside. Gwain’s sister and brother were, for once, plainly, visibly fearful. Mordryth had picked himself up off the ground and was standing now beside Galeron, both of them wearing an expression compounded of equal parts terror and furtive cunning. Not only were they feared of their dead sib, I saw at once, but of their own mother, who stood now a little way away from them. Even more so were they feared of Marguessan, in plain fact; yet even in their fear of her they could not be free of her…
Marguessan, without turning her head, hissed a command at her daughter, and Galeron came forward obediently as a hound at the touch of the huntsman’s lash. She gave Gwain a swift guilty glance out of slitted eyes, then turned to face the rest of us. After a tense silent moment, Morgan too whispered somewhat, though in no wise so peremptory a fashion, and Donah—to my instant protesting astonishment—moved to face Galeron down near the edge of the surf.
Feared as I was for my godsdaughter, I was still wondering about her cousin Mordryth. We had seen, on the whole, almost nothing of him since that night at Turusachan, when he struck Gweniver and the Cup came among us all; though of course Arthur and Gerrans and I had seen rather more of him, later, at Oeth-Anoeth. I studied him closely now, noting that he had grown to favor Irian, his cipher father, in physical appearance; ah, but his soul was his mother’s, right enough, to do with as she would. She had tried here to pass him off as Graalkeeper, using him as her pawn to secure for her what her own magic could apparently not do—as Keeper in Avallac’h’s place, Mordryth could of course call in the Cup as its rightful servant would have done, and could then turn it over to his mother, since she had not been able to come by it through her black workings.
But she had been foiled here at Garanwynion—and again I wondered at how the thing was being played out. I glanced down at the rose I still held between my fingers: She had been balked not by grace of mine, but by a high purpose and a vast Design; and that was well. Yet it seemed, for so great a sorceress as she vaunted herself, she had made but a poor effort; surely she could have managed something less easily thwarted. Which meant she had not yet made her great move, had something else in mind for her true effort, something greater and darker, to which this coil with Mordryth-Avallac’h had been but a testing-spell…
Galeron and Donah faced off against each other now, darkness and dawn; against the Graal Princess was set the Maiden of the Cup of Darkness. A wind was rising, and out to sea over the Easter Isles great racks of cloud were building and massing slowly in slate-blue ranks. And now Avallac’h had turned his back on us to face east, over the wild waters, his arms flung out to either side; and I knew that the Cup was preparing itself to return home, to come back from where it had withdrawn itself in safety against Marguessan’s blasphemous theft; knew also that Galeron at her mother’s bidding would try to steal it away again, to divert it to a destination—Oeth-Anoeth?—of her own choosing, so that Marguessan’s nightmare vision of a black Graal could be made real at last.
Though the foreshore of Garanwynion was thick with sorcerers, there was naught any of us could do now; the thing was well out of our hands, after all our questing. Little enough even to see, save perhaps for Morgan and Marguessan, whose younger aspects the two maidens had now become. Avallac’h’s entire being was concentrated on the approaching Graal, on the pathway he must open for it; he had no scrap of strength to spare even to defend it from its enemies, those who sought only to plunder it. I sensed too, as all the others surely did, that we would not be permitted to interfere; Those who ordered this struggle were implacable on that. It must play itself out: This was a battle between Queens and Princesses, Morgan and Donah on the one side, Marguessan and Galeron on the other…
I met Gweniver’s eyes, and she looked as drowned in despair as I had ever seen her look; or had ever imagined she could look, it was not a mood that the Ard-rian of Keltia often entertained in herself. Yet I myself could not feel so; I seemed possessed of some joyous upwelling certainty that we would prevail here. Oh, this feeling had no root in anything I could name, I assure you, there were no grounds whatsoever for anything of the kind. Yet sometimes we know better than our selves what is real and true; and I have learned down the years to go with that feeling when it chooses to grace me with its presence… But things were happening now, and I could not look away.
Avallac’h still stood, tall and motionless against the clouds and sea. Then from the east came a sudden bloom of pale golden light, a soundless explosion of incandescence that dazzled us yet did not pain our sight, and I knew that the Portal had been opened by the true Keeper, so that the Cup might come through to the world again.
But if this were our joyful moment it was our moment of most peril also. For as one with the light came a—not a darkness, just so, but an anti-light, if you can conceive such abomination, such an offense against the laws of men and gods. A nullity, an inexistence, that yet had substance of a sort… It was frightful beyond all imaginings; it sickened us, it maddened the horses, it seemed to turn the waves backward from the shore—and it was Galeron, as Marguessan’s instrument, who was calling it down upon us, chanting this nonbeing into being. This was Marguessan’s great work of which she had boasted, and I of all folk knew how long her heart had been set upon it, for I had seen its pattern in her eyes when she had been a child of ten. All this was her doing, in which she rejoiced, this dark halo that heralded the coming of the Black Graal.
For that was what Galeron was calling, in place of the true Cup that Avallac’h besought and we had fought to bring home again. Mother and daughter, they worked as one, to capture the true Graal and to bring their own
dark Cup into reality. And we could do nothing to stop it, we had done all we could by coming here; our quest had served to summon the Cup home again, and that was its dan and ours. But evil too has dan, and its dan is not always to lose to good.
Yet even as the dark Graal trembled on the verge of accomplishment, it was forced back, by cleanness and true Light, by the only one who could do so. I saw Donah, rooted in the power of the world, gleaming like sunlight shooting out of the storm-clouds. Saw Morgan’s might behind her, and our own force behind that, and the strength of the folk behind that again—back and back and back, in a seemingly endless chain, boundlessly strong, linked together to bring back to us one of the Elements of the Keltic soul, without which we could not live. And overshadowing even Donah—if light can be said to shadow—was the bright image of One I knew, as a veil over Donah’s humanity, a phasma, an indwelling presentment; and I bowed my head to Rhian, the Young Goddess, who had set Her hand above my brother’s child…
Though contested, the outcome could scarcely be in doubt; yet it came to the balance of a hair, and surely Marguessan had confidently expected it to be other wise. Perfectly matched, light and dark strove together, while Avallac’h all the while stood above the fray; then the balance shifted. With a cry of bitter pain, Galeron fell to the sands as her brother earlier had done; but, unlike Mordryth, she lay still and small and did not move again. Donah, who also had gone to her knees with the strain and its sudden releasing, rose triumphant as an arrow in the gold, breathing hard but otherwise composed; and she stared down, her face unreadable, at the crumpled form of her cousin.
"Is Galeron slain?" I whispered to Morgan, forgetting in my distress to use mindvoice, and she nodded once. "Did Donah—"
Morgan shook her head, but her eyes were on Marguessan, not on either of her nieces, and she chose to speak with voice rather than with mind, so that others than I might hear the explanation she chose to give us, and not fear.
"Nay; Galeron was her own executioner. The power of the dark Graal overcame her as she tried to bring it through. True it is her mother had commanded her to do so, set her to it; but in the end she chose for herself the dark road, and so fell, for it is easy to stumble in the dark… The black Cup was her killer, not Donayah. Slaying is not permitted upon the Island of the Graal—at least not of the sort we are sadly ‘customed to—and any road the Keeper would never have allowed it. But to freely choose self-slaughter—that does not fall under the ban. And all this Galeron has now learned for herself, and she will be better instructed elsewhere for a time. As to her mother—who can say?"
I followed her glance—colder and brighter than I had ever seen it, it was the gray of sword-metal, of battle armor—to Marguessan, who still stood unmoving with Mordryth crouched now at her feet. Galeron’s body lay as she had fallen, and Gwain’s robed reposeful form was only yards beyond. Two dead children, Marguessan, I thought, not entirely without pity, aye, even for her, Is your vengeance against your brother worth so much? And what of the one chick you have left to you?
Marguessan stirred then, as if she had caught the wind of my thought brushing by her, but it was not at me she turned to stare but Morgan beside me. And I was staggered at the expression my matesister bore upon her countenance: Not the look of a woman with two of her three children lying dead on the ground beside her, but the flickering banefires of Uffern itself clung to Marguessan’s features. If I had thought her the living exponent of evil before, I had no words now for what she had become, right before our eyes. And if ever there had been a moment when Marguessan could have been turned, when her first self could have been reclaimed from the wrecked edifice that was her present soul, that moment was gone for good; had died with Gwain, with Galeron, perhaps even with Uthyr. She looked as the Gwrach y Rhibyn, wasted with the fires of hate, all her beauty gone, her features corded and fissured, her doom upon her.
So that is how it looks when dan is turned rightfully back upon one… I had known that tenet of our faith from my childhood; but never before had I seen it drawn so plainly upon a human face. My eyes went to Morgan, who stood as unmoving as her sister, and I quailed within, seeing what was in her face. What was it like, to watch your wombmate destroy herself, and not be able to halt or help her? They were not identically twinned, and therefore no closer, in theory, than any other sibs; but yet it was different for them, for they had been born of the one birth, had spent those months of forming in a closeness unparalleled even by that of husband and wife—how must my Guenna feel? Then I looked again at my mate’s face, and I knew.
"Sister," she said in a voice of command and compassion both, and Marguessan looked dumbly back at her across the width of all the seven hells. "Go now. Take your eldest, and be gone from here. It will be better for you both if you do go now."
Marguessan seemed to come back into herself at that—perhaps the command compelled her, or the compassion stung—and with a gesture at once protective and impatient she dragged Mordryth up beside her by a clawed hand on his collar.
"Go?" she said softly. "Aye, we shall go. I have no wish to see what comes here, and it surely does not wish to see me… But the work is not yet done, sister; not yours, not mine. Tell our brother and mother so, from us both."
She raked blazing eyes over me, Gweniver, Donah, Gerrans, Loherin; spun on her heel to blast Avallac’h (who lifted a hand slightly from his side, in warning or in farewell I could not decide); and then she was gone, and Mordryth with her. Galeron’s body too; Gwain’s lay unheeded behind her on the sand. I drew a long shuddering breath, let it out carefully, in soft measured puffs; but she was still gone. As each of us began to turn to one another, whether in joy or triumph or relief or fear we did not know just yet, Avallac’h called us back to business.
He clapped his hands twice, struck his bare right heel hard upon the shingle of Garanwynion that bore us all upon its breast, and spoke to be heard not by us merely.
"Let that which is lost find a way," he said. "Let that which has been gone come again home."
And we all of us knew he did not speak of the Cup alone.
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
From that moment I have no right judgment of time passing, as regards what happened next. Though I remember it all, to be sure—not hard, for the events of that day are graven with a pen of diamond into the palimpsest of my soul—sometimes it seems in memory’s eye that all those things happened in one merest instant, one brief snap of time’s fingers; while other times it seems that centuries were passed there on the strand Garanwynion. For the time in which the Cup, or the other Hallows, operates and has being is by no means the same time in which we mortals move and live and have existence; and when the two structures impinge so near upon each other, as now, a certain temporal dishevelment is bound to arise. Whichever it was, a span or a spasm, the great thing is that it truly was…
So Marguessan was gone, and in wrath too (though, as Gweniver remarked to me later, she had brought it on herself, and Gwen was right to say so; and too, as Gerrans said, there was no pleasing everyone, and he also was correct). But her departure, though surely it promised only worse to come from her hand what time we would be least expecting it, meant now that we were free to devote ourselves to our quest’s rightful conclusion—though to my way of thinking, it was more the Graal that had found us than we who had found the Graal. Still, we were here, and it was about to be here, and that was what it and we both alike had come for.
Exalted by the moment (though perhaps ‘giddy’ would be a truer word), I looked around me at the faces of my fellow seekers, and were alight even as my own. And mostly unknown to me as well: For all the whingeing complaints when the quest began, of how the companies of seekers were so heavily weighted to the righ-domhna and the high nobility (a complaint not entirely without merit, mind), the twenty-six seekers who had won through, who had earned the right to be here this day, were as level a mix as you were like to find in all Keltia. True, the pendreics were perhaps over-represent
ed; but, quite apart from merely being royal, each of us here present was here for a reason in which our royalty played no part—and even the most fervent antimonarchist could not long argue that.
But the others, as I say, were strangers: folk of all ranks and trades and crafts and callings, from each of our Six Nations; men and women, youths and maidens, all equal here in the Place of the Graal.
I roused suddenly from my musings, and hoped I had looked rapt rather than merely daft, to find Avallac’h standing patiently before me. A smile touched the corners of his mouth, and he raised silver brows and made the smallest of interrogatory expressions. I had not a clue, of course; and must have shown it plain, for at that he laughed aloud.
"He charged with bringing the ale to the feast must broach the keeve ere any can drink—I think you have somewhat to our need, Pen-bardd?"
And then of course I remembered, and blushing ruefully I drew out the magical rose again from beneath my leinna, and laid it gently in his hand; for so, of course, had I been bidden. Avallac’h smiled again, and bowed to me, and turning once again to the sea he crumpled the flower in his right hand at arm’s length, until the bloom was but petals and scraps.
"Not the Laughing Flower, but the flower that restores laughter," he said. "I give you the Rose that brings back Joy." He flung the petals from him into the sea, where the foam caught them, and the swift unseen tiderips spun the red shredlets out past the breaker line in a long bright string, and we all stared after them, and him.
For a path was forming in the sea along the line of the red petals, a path coming in the waters along the bright broad track the sun laid down: a road in the sea for the Cup to come in on, to follow home from the regions it had of late inhabited, protecting itself against the sacrilege Marguessan would have wrought upon it.
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