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

by A. A. Attanasio

The elk face mutates with anger to a predatory snarl. "A Christian kingdom, Lailoken, which brands me a devil and keeps the Daoine Sid underground."

  "This is true, my lord." The wizard lowers his face and stares up from under his hoary brow. "History defeats you. This has been so for centuries now. The Christians are not your enemies."

  The king of the Celtic gods stands, and the seams of his buckskin vest and leggings burst with swollen rage. "They say I am a devil!" Fury distorts his deer visage to a wolf's snarl. "Look at me! Once I was supreme god of all the tribes. My image adorned cavern walls in the sacred places. Now I am a devil. And you want my help with your Christian kingdom?" His voice sneers: "What is the curse the Christians use? 'Go to hell!'"

  Merlin rises and leans on his staff, hat in hand. "It was the Fauni drove you underground, my lord, not the Christians. The Furor has destroyed the Fauni. Now he will destroy the Christians—both Britons and Celts. And he won't stop there. You know, he will slay you if he can. Once he fully realizes that the Dragon is asleep, what will keep him and his Rovers of the Wild Hunt from swarming underground and slaughtering all the Daoine Sid? The Christians alone can protect you. They will drive the Furor from these islands. But you must help them. You must help Arthor."

  The king's features recompose themselves as he contemplates what the demon-wizard has said. "Arthor bears the soul of the Celts' most fierce warrior," he says. "I will not have him squandered to some jealous sorceress. By my word, he will live to fight the Furor. Return to the dayheld world, Lailoken. I will send the elf-prince Bright Night to meet you. With him to watch over Arthor, you may work unhindered on your city-fortress for the future king."

  Merlin bows gratefully and backs away, eager to remove his fragile mortal form from this illusory domain of shifting energies.

  "Mind you, Lailoken," the god calls after him, his orotund voice echoing from all sides, "I want respect for the Daoine Sid in Camelot. Among your Christian icons, be certain that there are included Celtic emblems that honor us who have enabled you."

  "You have my word—" Merlin begins to promise. Before the wizard can finish, he finds himself flying backward among windblown soot. The palace shaped like fire diminishes to a gaseous, swirly glare and then to a mere splinter of twilight before darkness swarms in.

  Quickly, the wizard chants a vigorous spell to liberate himself from the subterranean god's grasp, and he sprawls downhill, robes flapping, through a tumult of leaves to the floor of the forest.

  Sunset colors—scarlets, maroons, luminescent greens—fill the atmosphere between the dense trunks and boughs, while overhead, the first throw of stars glints in the purple zenith. Animal sounds sift back after the crash of Merlin's expulsion from the hollow hills fades. He rubs a knot on the back of his head where a rock has kissed his skull, and he staggers upright.

  "You're a bold one, Lailoken," a gleaming voice speaks from the smoke of twilight.

  "Bright Night?" the wizard recognizes. "Show yourself."

  "I am right before you, man." A laugh glitters nearby.

  Merlin retrieves his staff and waves it around. Its revealing power discloses directly in front of him a bareheaded figure with long hair so red it glows. Flamboyant green eyes aslant as a donkey's peer merrily at the wizard's confusion.

  The prince of the Daoine Sid wears a suede vest, blue tunic, fawnskin trousers, and yellow boots, and his beardless face grins cockily. "Well, I must say, I feel as happy as a dog's tail to see you again, Lailoken."

  "My name is Merlin now, Bright Night." The wizard casts about for his hat.

  Bright Night offers the wide-brimmed hat with the conical, bent peak. "A fancy piece of work, this—and your robe as well. From the looks of you, I'd say the business of wizardry agrees with you—Merlin."

  Ignoring the remark, the wizard brushes back his disheveled hair and fits the hat to his head. "I need your help, Bright Night. Arthor is in trouble."

  "It's been fifteen busy years," the prince complains, transparent among the dark trees and luminous sky. "Fifteen years, and you've not come to the hollow hills once or even sent a raven with news of your grand project. Tsk. I cherished the faith that we were friends."

  Merlin huffs with surprise. "Enemies stay close, Bright Night. Only true friends can keep their distance."

  "I thought perhaps you were unhappy with me," the elf says, "because it was I who came to take Uther Pendragon to the Happy Woods."

  Merlin scowls. "No, no—not at all. I haven't held that against you for a moment. Uther made that pact with your king: his soul for the warrior Cuchulain's. Now the Celtic warrior is reborn as Arthor, and Uther dances to the Piper in the Happy Woods. That was Uther's intent, and it is fulfilled. How could I spite you for that?"

  "Good. Silence is a text easy to misread."

  "I've been hard at work these many years, Bright Night. With Uther dead, the British warlords have been squabbling among themselves for the title of high king. You don't know—it has taken all my powers to prevent chaos, total war. I admit, I wanted to summon you earlier, to serve my cause. But in truth, I did not think that an elf-prince should be pressed into the service of my hopes."

  "And now?" Bright Night's eyes betray a look of resentment. "Why have you gone to my king to command my service?

  "Because Arthor is in danger. Quite simply, I cannot help him without abandoning Camelot—and if I do, there will be hell itself to pay without me there to mediate between the Celts and Britons." Merlin intently fixes his frost eyes on Bright Night, wanting to bring to bear all the magical charm he can muster. But darkness leans through the elf, blurring his image. "Anyway, I thought you were happy as a dog's tail to see me."

  "Oh I am," Bright Night agrees, his voice softening. "It's just the lowliness of the task that irks me. I'd rather fight the Furor and his storm raiders than stand guard, which is menial work that can be done just as well by faeries."

  "Aye, but you will be guarding Cuchulain's soul," Merlin reminds him. "The future king of Britain."

  Bright Night nods reluctantly.

  "Then you will help me?" Merlin presses.

  "No," the elf says, then breaks into a playful grin. "But if you let me wear your hat, I'll consider it more closely."

  "My hat? Whatever for?"

  "I want to feel what you've been thinking all these years."

  Merlin shrugs, removes his hat, and affixes it atop the elf-prince's head. "Now take me to Arthor."

  Bright Night sweeps his arm through the hyacinth-colored air, and a flurry of faerie lights swarms against the grain of the wind.

  As Merlin and the elf hurry after the gust of sparks, the prince chuckles, tickled by all he feels within the demon-man's cap: a full heart's frenzy, dazzling with ambitious expectations and tremors of anxiety.

  "You dream big dreams, wizard," he says hurrying among the trees. "When your mother birthed you, do you think she ever had anything as grandiose as Camelot in mind?"

  "Fragile hopes require strong vessels," Merlin says, breathing hard to keep up with the cold motes of light spinning through the gathering darkness.

  "You must admit," the elf-prince challenges, "if you fail, Camelot will persist only as a monument to our stillborn dreams and our broken lives."

  "Then," Merlin gasps, "we must—not fail."

  Through the arched boughs of dark trees, the faerie lead the wizard and the elf-prince past peaty ponds, where herons stand like phantoms in the frail light. Wild ducks burst loudly into the gloaming, and a crow flies on furtive wings toward night.

  Sedges fall away into the rank grass of a lush pasture where a bridleway climbs toward a Roman road. Before them, a company of riders stands silhouetted among rambling sycamores, erecting tents for a camp.

  Merlin stops, and says in a hush, "That is Kyner's company. Arthor will be among them. I dare not show myself. I have already drawn too close."

  "My king tells me you fear Ygrane's daughter, Morgeu," the elf-prince says, returning the wizard's hat. "I have not see
n her these past fifteen years. At that time, she had no fearsome powers of her own. The demons were her strength."

  "She has since found her own wicked powers, good prince. Beware of her. If she approaches Arthor, you must summon me at once. Do not reveal yourself. I believe she has the magic to destroy even radiant beings such as yourself."

  "I need no warning of Morgeu the Fey," the prince states, "for I shall not be staying here—or anywhere near your beloved Arthor."

  "But you told me—"

  "That I would consider your request more closely," the elf reminds him. "And I have. Though my king, Someone Knows the Truth, is old and oft makes weak decisions these days, he is yet my king and I dare not wholly disobey him. So—" From a small pocket in his suede vest, he produces a mirror tiny as a thumbnail, with a miniature blue rose pressed between its clear and silvered lenses. "I shall give you this summoning glass. When you burst it and the blue rose that comes from the Happy Woods is touched by the harsh light of this world it shrivels with a shriek I could hear in Cathay. I shall come to that call and exert my powers to help you—or any of your minions—to accomplish one worthy task." He grins close-lipped and merry-eyed, like a gypsy "Does that satisfy you, Merlin?"

  "No," the wizard answers flatly. "What of Morgeu's threat? Who shall watch over Arthor?"

  "Leave that to the faeries," the elf suggests. "They'll fly to you swifter than wind if he is in jeopardy. Trust them."

  Bright Night hands him the summoning glass, and Merlin accepts with an unhappy frown. "I am disappointed in you, prince."

  "And I in you, wizard. I had fostered such lofty hopes of your devotion to the Daoine Sid. After all, you are a demon in human flesh. I thought you would fight more strongly against the Furor."

  "The Furor has come to fulfill the old prophecies," Merlin says grimly. "Not even the Fire Lords—the Celts' famed Annwn— can stop him. Do not cherish false hopes, bold friend."

  The prince receives this warning with a dour jut of his lower lip. "So then, you are back to Camelot?"

  "Yes. The roof of the great hall is to be raised, and it is a task that may require my magic." Merlin claps a gnarly hand on the elf's shoulder and feels his chill heat vibrant and insubstantial as a prayer. "Thank you for the summoning glass. I shall not burst it until dire need is upon me."

  "Go, then," the prince says in the dark with a star-glint of smile. "Our friendship will hold the distance."

  Merlin slips into the night, his beard and long hair glowing briefly as wisps of fog before he vanishes entirely. Prince Bright Night stares morosely into the dark after he has gone and bemoans his fate, reciting the same internal incantation of his past that he has been repeating to himself for the thousand years of Sid exile:

  He alone of the Daoine Sid nourishes the rageful hope of storming heaven and reclaiming a place in the upper world. The others—Old Elk-Head, the faerie, and the other elves—have succumbed to their earthly fates inside the hollow hills.

  Before the Dragon began its most recent slumber, Bright Night earned his fame among the Sid by his skill at bringing oblations to the cosmic beast. Reckless of his own life, he faced down trolls, shapeshifters, giants, even gods, tricking each of these electrical beings into the Dragon's snares. The gods Tonans, Pluvius, Orcus, Ull, and Vali all have surged from the Great Tree, provoked by his taunts, and plunged howling into the subterranean maw of the Dragon. Brutal satyrs and gnomes, too, have dared stalk him, barbed by his insults, and come within inches of breaking his life before the claws of the Dragon broke theirs.

  Death holds no terror for Bright Night. Life is his suffering, for he too well remembers the glories of the Sid's lost home atop the Sky Tree. In the night pastures of the Tree, with the stars big as snowdrops, he sat enraptured, blank with bliss, shining inside the aura of the earth. By day, the sun's wind, full of horizons, polished his soul so shiny he seemed to reflect all the world in himself. He lived happy as grass. Love and destiny for him in those days were the same word.

  Now, and for the last thousand years since heaven was lost, Bright Night and the other Sid live in the long sunset, in cavernous burrows and immense subterranes of stalactite dells lit by the moody hues of fulgurant lava. He hates it. The confinement, the grinding noises and drippings, the hot stinks—all this offends him. He would rather die in an ogre's slobbering jaws, wounds open to the sun, than dwell safely another day among the red shadows in the hollow hills.

  Yet, much as it pleases him to strive for freedom in the day-held world, he does not want to watch over young Arthor. He has seen the coming darkness, and he knows that Arthor, for all the strength of Cuchulain and all the love of the angels, cannot hold back such a dark tide.

  For the sake of Someone Knows the Truth, Old Elk-Head, who has ruled these lands since even before the ice mountains came and went, he approaches Kyner's camp. Woven into the night, he is invisible. Through the golden haze of firelight, he strolls, looking for Arthor among the low-lying field tents.

  "He should have been back with the victuals by now," Kyner grouses, returning from the vesper prayers he has conducted under the sycamores with most of the company. "Stirpot flummery is well enough for us, but the wounded deserve eggs and fresh milk. Go on, Cei, and find what's keeping him."

  "Why me, Father?" Cei grumbles from where he sits roasting an apple in the campfire. "Arthor hates me. Send one of the men."

  "He is your foster brother, Cei. Now go."

  Kyner's stern look sends Cei lumbering into the dark. He follows a footpath through the tasseled pasture grass toward the yellow lights spilling from farm huts on a nearby knoll.

  Bright Night hurries ahead of Cei and finds Arthor at the curve of the hill entangled with a young peasant woman. Her giggling reaches Cei, who comes running, shouting, "Arthor! You pizzle-brain! Father will flay your hide!"

  The maiden shoves Arthor away, tweaks his nose, and rushes off laughing, her yellow dog bounding behind her like a bright smudge in the night field.

  Cei rushes up and cuffs his younger brother behind the head. "You're disgusting, boy! You behave like an animal!"

  Arthor whirls about, eyes flashing in the dark.

  "Go ahead, cur, hit me," Cei challenges. "Show me again I'm right. You're just an animal—a Saxon animal pretending to be a Celt."

  Arthor shoves him away. "At least I like women," he mutters, and swoops up the basket of foods he has just purchased from the farmers.

  "All right, insult me, then," Cei calls angrily, following Arthor's big strides back toward the camp. "Mock my faith and my abstinence. But my faith will not have me ravish any woman in the night."

  "I did not ravish her," Arthor protests. "She was ravishing me!”

  "Hah! Tell that to Father!"

  Kyner already stands at the field's edge, glowering at the two young men as they march into camp shouting at each other. Prince Bright Night lingers in the moonless pasture, wanting no part of the endless bickering of men.

  The elf prince watches the white fires in the sky until the campfire is dampened and the Celts sleep. Then he slips out of the night and hovers over Arthor's slumbering form. Faeries prance upon his bristly hair, sit on his nose, and crawl over his inert face.

  The elf prince lies down beside Arthor, so that their heads touch, and he feels into the young man's memories, feels everything that he has experienced in his fifteen angry years.

  Despite Kyner's heartfelt love, the boy has grown up a thrall, ever aware he did not belong. Indeed, though he traveled with the chieftain on his diplomatic tours among all the Christian strongholds in Britain and Gaul, he journeyed as his stepbrother Cei's lackey, a humbly dressed servant for the chieftain's brightly garbed son. By token of Kyner's Christian charity, the boys shared the same tutors in Latin, history, and mathematics and learned at Kyner's knee the books of the Bible, though none pressed Arthor for his understanding.

  Arthor resented his role as servant, and his bitterness curdled early in life to aggression. He scuffed with everyone,
from the chieftain to the stable hands. And though he adored horses and handled his steeds with clairvoyant understanding, he met other animals with cruelty. He kicked dogs out of his way. On the hunt, he purposefully wounded stately elk to track their blood spoor through the forest. The big bruins he netted, he baited with Kyner's dogs for the amusement of villagers.

  The servants, appalled, reported him regularly to Kyner, who eventually put him to work with the butchers. There, he perfected his killing skills with knives and hammers, slaughtering beasts with a fervor that frightened the meatmen.

  Wherever they traveled, Kyner obliged the boy they called the Royal Eagle of Thor to entertain their hosts with acrobatic skills and pony tricks. Juggling on horseback, leaping between saddles, winning every obstacle horse race he entered no matter the steed, Arthor garnered accolades from kings and dignitaries in every land they visited. And thus he earned the respect of the warlord who had reared him.

  That respect expanded to Kyner's outright admiration when Arthor's entertaining abilities proved useful on the battlefield. As a twelve-year-old, he rode and fought in his first military campaign, accompanying Kyner on a policing tour of the chieftain's domain. Expected to tend and groom the horses and to make the arduous journey more comfortable for Cei, who came along to observe and learn, Arthor rushed into the fray on foot during the first engagement against a band of maniacal Pictish raiders. Swinging a fallen battle-ax and wearing no armor, he slew four tattooed warriors before Kyner could pull him out of the battle.

  After that, Arthor asked for and received permission to wear chain mail and ride on horseback at Kyner's side. To save face, Cei forced himself to join them, overriding his fears and unreadiness. For the last three years, Arthor has continued to amaze Kyner—and not just as a warrior. From the first, the boy requested that his shield bear the likeness of the Savior's mother.

  "Why?" Kyner demanded, astonished at this request from a cold-hearted killer of animals and men.

  "I have the blood-thirst of my Saxon forebears," he answered in his surly way, "I shall need her at my side to remind me of mercy."