The Eagle and the Sword (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 2)

by A. A. Attanasio

  By daylight in the courtyard before the tower, the urn looked far less awe-inspiring than it had in the cryptic underground. It seemed no more than an antique and outlandishly ornate jewel box, not large enough to contain anything of threat. But when the crone opened it, spiritous fumes hissed outward so violently the air quaked with heat.

  Two fiery figures untangled and slithered translucently against the sky—bright muscles of flame in sinuous viper-shapes, with outspreading hair like dust of sundown and features like firelight on faces of bone.

  Great-grandmother danced around them, laughing, jabbing at them with the lode-knife, making their giant shapes skitter and twitch before her, making them slide away like haze in shimmering layers of sunbeams, then withdrawing the blade and pulling their radiant and vibrant plumes closer to her. "They fear the knife!" she shouted. "One stab of it, and they die!"

  Melania backed away from their rasping, loud as the drone of mad hornets—and their sticky reek of dead things—and their cold aura, thick and weighty as the ocean's winter breath.

  "Be not afraid, child," the crone assured her. "You wear the guardian band about your throat. They cannot harm you so long as you wear it. Come! Dance with us!"

  Melania did not dance with them. She watched outraged as these fireshapes with skull faces swirled around her great-grandmother. Phantom snakes, they coiled about her, and she spun with the lode-knife grasped in both hands until they retreated. Then, they condensed in the brash sunlight to a pool of green fog, an eerie phosphor that gathered upright, and hardened to a figure of a sable-haired man in a blue tunic—and beside him, another figure in a white gown, a lean woman with masses of chestnut hair and a lusty mole on her upper lip.

  Melania recognized her grandparents even as the crone eked a hurt cry to see again her lost son and his dead wife.

  The chimerical figures blurred and transformed themselves once more, assuming the angular posture of Melania's father and the slender, hollow-cheeked mirage of her fragile mother.

  "Make them stop, Great-grandmother!" Melania shouted.

  The old woman jabbed at them, and the lamia hazed into the raw boy of the grown man who had been her grandson and Melania's father. The other curled into the cherished infant of the crone's firstborn, birth chrism glistening, eyes not yet unstuck, arms clenching at emptiness, naked and crying.

  Weary of these apparitions, the old woman danced the lamia back into their urn and snapped shut the fang-meshed lid. Melania dropped to her knees and crossed herself. "It is as you say, old mother—an unchristian thing."

  The crone sucked air, winded by her perfidious dance, and smiled knowingly. "Unchristian they may be, but they are ours to use as we will—if we are cautious."

  "How will we hold them?" Melania asked. "Will they not escape us and haunt the countryside?"

  "Don't you remember the stories?" the old woman snickered. "They are bound to the urn. They cannot escape so long as the urn remains intact. And they will destroy any who enter their presence unprotected. Be aware of these simple truths, and they can do you no harm. Even I, a withered woman, can make them dance. Think how easy it will be for a spry young woman."

  Yet weeks would pass before Melania mustered the courage to open the urn herself and more weeks again before her legs found the strength to dance with the lamia and control them with the lode-knife. By then, Great-grandmother had identified the underground passageway that led to the archaic map vaults.

  Somewhere in that extensive catacomb, an ancestor from the reign of Emperor Nerva had stored a chart identifying the location of a rich trove of gold coins. They had been buried somewhere in the hinterlands of Britannia against such a dire time as this, when only gold could buy salvation. With that huge treasure in hand, Melania might purchase a treaty with the Salian Franks or, if necessary, hire mercenaries from rival tribes to drive them out of Aquitania and assure the restoration of her ancestral estate.

  For a year, the two women searched the map vaults under the tower before they found what they sought. During that time, they lived off stores of grain, cheese, olives, and wine and kept a small garden and a few animals. When marauders encroached, they secured the barn, released the lamia, and hid in the tower, where the old woman giggled and the young woman shuddered to hear the terrible cries that followed.

  Packs of wild dogs and crows came regularly to feast on the torn bodies of the slaughtered. On the spring day when, with map in hand, Melania bid tearful adieu to her great-grandmother, the estate gleamed with the scattered bones of the lamia's victims.

  Melania rode north. The urn secured tightly before her on the saddle of her draft horse, she kept to forest trails and avoided Roman roads. At night, she slept with the guardian band about her throat. Sometimes in the morning when she woke, she found her great-grandmother squatting beside her or her parents. A few times, her eyes opened on a mirror copy of herself.

  The lamia could do nothing more than startle her. They never spoke. They never touched her. She had become adept at using the lode-knife to return them to the urn, and before long she worried less about controlling them and more about how she would use her treasure to redeem her ancestral home.

  She imagined the noble men from Arles and Toulouse that she would consider for marriage, and in the mornings she began to wake to apparitions of handsome, virile swains.

  The first few times that brigands accosted her in the forests, she never even bothered to dismount, simply tilted the urn away and opened it. While the lamia completed their gruesome work, she rode on a short way and awaited their return.

  That tactic worked less well after the landscape began to change. Oak forests, olive groves and the draperies of vine on Aquitania's plains thinned out and gave way to birch, pine, and dwarf cedar as the land rose and folded into rugged terrain. Now she walks ahead of her horse, leading it by the reins along narrow trails above rock slides. Mists swirl and the whistle of a falcon startles green finches among shining pines.

  From an overhanging ledge, a net falls without warning. Its rock-weighted hem knocks her off her feet and nearly topples her over the ledge onto the treacherous gray scree. Her horse whinnies with fright. Above her loom several brutish men with crow black hair. From behind a boulder splashed with golden moss, several more emerge. They crouch over her, laughing, bearded men in red-and-green rags—brigands—and she sees beyond them to where the trail rises toward heather fields, blue peaks and clouds.

  They remove the net, and she tries to rise but is shoved back by a gruff hand that rips the guardian band from her throat. "No!" is all she can shout after the men seize her horse and find the urn. They snap open the fang-meshed lid.

  A tempest roar reverberates across the rocky slopes, and the brigands gawk about, startled. Melania lunges to her feet and grasps for the guardian band—but too late. The face of the haughty man holding the band shrivels to a scream. Silver flames engulf him, and he collapses, flesh boiling off his skeleton.

  Melania's hand clasps the throat band in the same instant that the spectral bone face of a lamia veers toward her, its spidery fingers already finding agonizing entrances into the smallest parts of her life.

  Chapter 4: Aelle, Chieftain of the Thunderers

  Aelle, chieftain in the Saxon clan of Thunderers, in his youth won fabled renown as a destroyer of cities. A true Northman, he lives as a son of the eternal green-mountain forests, his eyes cut from blue lamps of glacial ice and his soul shaped out of winter's polar lights. Fervently, he condemns cities for an abomination. They trap the human spirit.

  In nature, there are no walls. There are heights and depths, yet always with crevices and pathways of rivers and streams, always offering options. Not so in cities, where walls meet each other at tyrannical right angles, offering no choice, only submission.

  Streets, too, are walls, except laid flat, denying freedom, enslaving the very direction people may walk. And the houses that the Christian city-dwellers occupy are not collapsible and transportable like the tents of t
he nomadic Saxons but permanent abodes made of walls trapping the very land under them and the people inside them—traps, truly, with right-angle walls built atop right-angle streets inside right-angle ramparts, everything in a grid, snared in the Christian net, like their god, who is caught, trapped, nailed to his right-angle cross.

  No wonder they call him the Man of Sorrows. Who but the mad could worship such a one? Even the Christian dead are trapped: Instead of offering their dead the freedom of the pyre, Christians bury them in boxes. From birth through death, the evil ones live in cages.

  Dedicated to the destruction of such evil, Aelle burns cities and frees the land under them. He slaughters Christians and spares the tribes the contagion of their sick religion, a truly mad religion that fanatically seeks to convert all others to the insane faith that people are born evil! All are marked by the divine for eternal damnation unless they embrace the Man of Sorrows and share his terrible grief.

  No joy in this life, they claim, only suffering.

  Yet, what of the joy of the wild hunt that even the gods revere? And what of the splendor of spring after the fiery dark of winter? And what of woman, the joy of man? And the sun, so noble even crossing the immense snow plains? And the moon and the stars, the jewelry of night? And the privilege of silence when walking through snowy woods after the wind dies among slender trees with small animals asleep in their homes?

  Is not life itself joy? When one hears the laughter of children, is not the woman glad for childbirth? And is not the warrior happy for his wounds no matter their nagging aches?

  Aelle is a proud destroyer of cities. Unlike other clans—Death's Angels, Ravagers, the Sons of Freeze—Thunderers do not sneak upon their enemies under the cowl of night and storm. They attack with the rising sun at their backs, and the thunder of their war drums shakes the blue sky.

  The clan of Aelle is dedicated to the north god Thunder Red Hair and attacks as he would, boldly. When the fortress town of Regnum fell to such an assault, the Thunderers came away with over three hundred scalps and enough flayed flesh to make a hundred thunder drums.

  Aelle himself shucked the scalps of the priests while the holy men yet lived, honoring those worshipers of suffering by not sparing them the pain their god so adores. Later, when his men pulled down the city walls, he stood on the backs of the dying priests, their peeled skulls pink as melons at his feet.

  Other Saxon clans fear the Thunderers, for they know that Aelle is faithful only to Thunder Red Hair. He despises Death's Angels and the Sons of Freeze for joining the Foederatus, the alliance of north tribes, because they must obey foreign commanders such as Cruithni, the Pictish king, and the Jutish king, Wesc.

  Aelle will obey no king but himself, and his clan goes their own way. He fears no one and is bound by no obligations to any of the other Saxon clans.

  Such independence he attributes to the special favor of his god Thunder Red Hair. The thunder god took him for his own thirty-five summers ago during the battle at Aegelsthrep, when a British arrow pierced Aelle between the eyes.

  The blow, with all its possible grief, opened the eye of infinity in him. And he saw the gods themselves in the blue zenith—the great warrior Bright Shining Blood with arms massive as the turned wood of ships' masts, and beautiful Lady Unique in a sleek gown dazzling as the coins on a carp's back, and the one-eyed chieftain of the gods, the Furor, with his storm-beard and flowing mane of summer clouds standing beside his beloved son Thunder Red Hair.

  Thunder Red Hair's face, clear-cut as a garnet, smiled down at Aelle. That smile suffused the young warrior with such strength that pain fell from him like petals from a flower. He rose with the arrow still fixed in his brow and surged back into battle. That glorious day, his sword Skidblade sent many Britons into the earth to await mournful judgment by their Man of Sorrows.

  A year later, this time as chief of the Thunderers, he fought alongside the Destroyers and the Green Blades, slaughtering many Britons at Crecganford and dancing in a bishop's robes like a red-winged bird. Each summer after that, he has led his clan through the season's towering rains, calling on Thunder Red Hair to help him purge the land of the cities—the Roman vici— that would smother the earth under them and poison the rivers beside them.

  And though he has never again seen through the infinite sunlight to the very forms of the gods, he feels them always near him when steel strikes steel, and he hears their satisfied sighs when he squats on his fallen foes and lifts their heads by hanks of their hair for the ritual cut above the eyes and feels the night weight of death in them.

  Aelle does not see the gods anymore, though occasionally the scar between his eyes where the arrow pierced will throb with cold hurt. And by that he knows that one of the Great Ones of the Wild Hunt approaches—Thunder Red Hair or that god's father, the Furor.

  Usually they come at propitious times, to lead him into an important battle or away from a place where his enemies lurk, or they come to make him aware of the greatness of an event, as when his son Cissa entered this world.

  Aelle has had many children without the gods in attendance. When Cissa was born, twenty-six winters ago, the arrow scar throbbed with ruby-cut pain. That night, polar lights flowed free as living water. A white elk appeared from out of the forest's ice caverns, his great horns sparkling with bits of broken fire.

  A sweetly exotic perfume of summer settled over the frozen camp that night, full of the promise of legend. And the clan's Lawspeaker announced that Keeper of the Golden Apples, the Furor's mistress, had arrived to bless the birth of a seer.

  The Lawspeaker had declared the truth, for Cissa grew to manhood full of trance strength and prophecy. Lithe and muscular as his father, he excelled in the hunt and in the arts of war. But, unlike Aelle, Cissa's eyes of glacial ice see the invisibles.

  From early adolescence, he has shaved his body and worn only tattoo runes, snakeskin thongs, and leggings sewn from the hide and hair of the clan's enemies, because this pleases the Furor, his spirit father.

  With Cissa at his side, Aelle has led his war band deep into the British countryside, where even Foederatus armies have dreaded to venture, and he has burned numerous vici—Banavem, Venta, and Anderida—slaughtering all the inhabitants, compounding his respect among the north tribes and winning an audience with the chieftain of the gods, the Furor himself.

  "Leave me behind," Aelle demurs when his son announces the heavenly summons. They stand together in a field not far from Anderida. A farmer's barley had grown here the previous summer and now pale lavender asters glow in the wild grass. "Who am I to stand before a god? I do not have your deep sight."

  "You will not need deep sight, brave Aelle—not when you are in the god's presence." Cissa gestures to the green-and-purple sky lowering over the ragged tops of the forest. "You have been invited into the Storm Tree, and we will ascend as spirits and see with spirit eyes. To refuse to go would be an unhappiness for all who love your courage."

  "Have I refused?" Aelle glares at his son. "I question my worthiness. I am a warrior chief, not a seer."

  "Mighty yet humble Aelle, we are each of us no more than a drop of the ocean that made us—yet in each drop turn vast oceans. Question your worthiness no more." Cissa points across the field to where thunder moves like a ghost through the big woods and the clan sits hunched under barberry canopies waiting for the rain. "The Thunderers do not know why I asked to walk with you through this field. Let us return among them and say we came to taste the lightning and found it good."

  Aelle gently shakes his head. "No. The strength in your words has already opened the way for me. We have walked the paths of Middle Earth fearlessly though many have set their swords against us. Always, we prevailed. So, if the gods summon, why should we not walk the paths of the Storm Tree as well?"

  Cissa smiles proudly and places his large, tattooed hands on his father's scarred shoulders. "Sit, strong Aelle, and we will rise together into the World Tree. The gods await us."

  Their knees bend,
the tall grass rises above their heads, and a bolt of lightning explodes atop them in a glare of white fire. The blast shivers the marrows in their bones and blinds them.

  When they can see again, they blink at a rainbow land of which the summer of their earthly memory is but a dim echo. Zany green meadows tilt in all directions, crested with prismatic groves of immense trees above onyx boulders that spill tassels of waterfalls into iridescent pools. Breezes full of ripe apricot waft dragonflies and emerald birds through a sky-ocean of indolent clouds.

  Startled, breaths quickening, they stand, the light between them velvet with soft energies. Before they can speak, they see him striding toward them across the fiery green meadow. An opalescent wind in his stormy beard, his one eye fierce as a diamond, he stares at them from under a falcon's hat cocked over his empty socket.

  "All-Father!" Aelle cries, and he and his son throw themselves to the ground.

  "Stand, children." His vibrant voice shivers the small bones in their ears. "I have called you to me to give you honor. And there is no honor with your faces in the dirt."

  Yet, what dirt! The land of the Storm Tree smells like the bosom of a young woman. Lifted by the good-hearted laughter of the All-Father, they rise. He stands before them, no larger than a very large man but with unknowable wisdom pleating the air around him.

  "Come, walk with me, my children." He embraces them in his cavernous voice. "Let me show you this lovely branch of the World Tree." He motions toward a horizon slippery as gold, and they are pacing with the towering god above the sunset curtains of the earth.

  Below, among oceans like fish pools, the continents' brown faces gaze serenely. The Furor points to where the night winds blow back in auroral veils from the solar tide of dawn. He sweeps his thick arm upward, exposing celestial darkness strewn with clouds of stars and pinwheel fires.

  He motions back toward the Storm Tree, and they are once more among trees like fountains of colors and water birds trailing thin lines of music through an immense azure sky.