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

by A. A. Attanasio

  The reply pleased Kyner, and he inquired no further. The elf-prince lying beside Arthor in the night field senses the young man's soul and knows the true reason for his devotion. The cruel boy has turned his rage outward to slay beasts and warriors, because otherwise that fury would kill him.

  Arthor hates himself. He is not like others—not a Celt, not a mother and father's son, no, nor even a soul with a Christian birthright. He loathes what he is—a creature born from a carnal spasm of violence and abandoned for what he is, horrid and unlovable even to his own mother. And so he has turned to the one mother who can love him, the mother of pity who understands all sorrows, even his: mater dolorosa, the Mother of God.

  Prince Bright Night sits up with this revelation. Merlin has served you poorly, the elf thinks, gazing with desperate concern at the blond young man and the mighty soul within him trapped in ignorance. You have been poorly served in this bid for glory, young king. Then, the elf rises, faeries swirling around him in cold sparks, and strides angrily into the night, wondering what destiny could be worthy of this mortal misery.

  Chapter 6: Ygrane

  The sea rocks in its cage, its white fingers grasping the black boulders of the jagged cliffs, sliding away and then grasping again as if mounting the strength to climb out of this pit. Above the sea loom the majestic white stone towers and tiered turrets of castle Tintagel, stronghold of the Celtic queen, Ygrane. Once, this citadel served the queen's first husband, Gorlois, duke of the Saxon Coast, and housed his soldiers. Now it acts as cloister for the Christian queen and white-robed nuns who minister to the surrounding countryside as Holy Sisters of the Graal.

  Each day Ygrane, as abbess, conducts the synagogal service of scripture reading, psalm singing, and homiletic sermonizing that comprises the Mass. She shares with the other nuns the opportunity to serve as Christ's surrogate, so that eventually all may have the chance to administer the Eucharist.

  Afterward, she leads the Holy Sisters into the outlying communities to do the work Jesus himself would have done if he were in their place. By late afternoon, concluding a long day tending the sick and indigent of the outlying hamlets, they return to Tintagel, eat a humble meal prepared by the castle's acolytes, and retire to their individual chambers for solitary prayer and meditation.

  From a parapet balcony on the western face of Tintagel, Ygrane leans upon a marble balustrade of coiled serpents and watches the colors of the sea change. With the ocean as her altar, she prays to Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, the Mother of God. As she does every evening, she prays for the salvation of her people and the preservation of her child, Arthor, whom she has not seen since the wizard Merlin took him from her breast.

  Behind her a spacious portico holds blue seashine, salt breezes, and the round table. She and Uther Pendragon rolled the large wheel of Merlin's creation among the cities of Britain when they toured their kingdom soon after they married. At each city, they lay the wheel down as a table, a gathering place of political equity for chieftains and warlords. Even now, in disuse, the nuns each day polish its gray laminar surface to a mirror clarity that reflects the world in dusky inversion.

  At its center, the abbey has placed the Graal, a slender goblet of gold-laced chrome.

  This chalice is Ygrane's most prized treasure. No ordinary goblet, the shape serves as an antenna, a receiver that redirects the energies of the Fire Lords, radiant beings the Celts call Annwn, the Otherworldly, and Christians revere as angels.

  On occasion, these supernal beings visit the Graal. In the years since the Good Sisters of Arimathea delivered the holy vessel to her castle on the snowbound Christmas morning of 474 A.D., whenever the Annwn come, they appear in sacred vestments of iridescent gold—beardless men with tresses of silver sunlight. They speak soundlessly to her, lustrous eyes reading her words before she voices them.

  Once, she thought to ask about the Good Sisters, the nine mysterious women who had brought the Graal to her all those years ago.

  They are the Nine Queens of times past, the Annwn answered, one selected from each span of ten thousand years that the human race has dwelled on earth. Nine women for the ninety thousand years that humanity followed queens. They dwell as spirit beings now—on Avalon.

  The Annwn anticipated the queen's next thought and replied, Know this, Ygrane—your son Arthor shall take his place among the Nine when the eldest of the Queens is released, her spirit returned to the rhythmic duration of death and rebirth. Arthor will take her place, the lone man among the Nine, emblem for ten thousand years of rule by kings.

  "My son—" Ygrane's hands groped forward, to touch the vaporous angels, and felt the benediction of their lustrous, ungraspable energy. "My son will serve angels," she said aloud, her joy a fence from despair and bitter fear.

  Now, once again, Ygrane prays for her son. She has asked no further questions of the Annwn. She does not want to know what will happen on Avalon over the aeon that her son must serve the radiant beings. She is afraid for him.

  The angels, during their visits, stand before the Graal, their bodies fiery blue, cyanic and hugely empty as pieces of the sky. In their presence, she prays for a world without war and is glad when the luminous beings, with their wings of muscular lightning, do not speak.

  Most days, Ygrane keeps her solitude after long hours of mission work. When she can pray no more at the altar of the sea, she turns and sits at the round table in one of the high-backed ebony chairs delicately carved with dragons and unicorns.

  Resting her arms on the table, she extends her hands toward the Graal. She does not need to touch the holy vessel to feel its power. Invisible energies spill out their color and fragrance in her mind—a blue dazzle of amaryllis scent that fills her with longing for times past.

  She thinks of her second husband, the only man she truly loved, Uther Pendragon, and she wishes she had the magic she once possessed so that she could see him now in the joyful netherworld, to see if he is happy dancing to the Piper's passionate music.

  "I assure you, my lady, he is happy as any soul could be."

  Startled, Ygrane sits up taller and sees no one in the chamber or on the balcony behind her. "Bright Night?"

  Leaning forward to reach the bright goblet, she notices in the table's gray mirror the reflection of a lynx-eyed man grinning mischievously. When she looks up, she cannot see him, and when she peers again into the tabletop he is gone.

  Only after she stands and takes the Graal in her hands does his apparition waver into view, a svelte figure of pollen dust.

  "Once you could see me clearly by daylight." The elf prince shakes his head sadly. "You spent all your magic taming a unicorn—and where is that beast now? Flown to heaven. Don't you feel the fool?"

  "God's fool, perhaps." Ygrane, her complexion ruddied by years of devotional service in the countryside, gazes levelly into the elf's transparent face. "You have not come here after so many years to taunt me, have you, good prince? You cannot impede my Christian conviction."

  "I am not here to taunt but to warn." The prince sits casually on the edge of the table. "You must know how much the elves and the faeries still trust you. Once you were their queen. You abuse their devotion when you convert them to your faith. Do not deny it."

  Ygrane smiles, a slim, knowing smile. She sits and places the Graal on the table between them. "So, the old elk-king has sent you to warn me to stop my holy work with the elves—or else?"

  Bright Night thumbs his chin reflectively. "Do you know what happens to an elf or a faerie who is converted?"

  Ygrane nods. She knows very well that when such beings relent their alliance to the netherworld among the intricate coils of the World Tree that sustain them, they lose their form and resonance with the Daoine Sid and flow into the wider cascade of energy that pours into all organic life-forms—human, animal, and vegetative alike. "Their souls become living things."

  "They lose immortality," Bright Night says sternly. "They are reborn as physical creatures that must endure all the limitat
ions and indignities of life in the dayheld world—including disease and death. Why do you inflict this on us?"

  "I inflict nothing," the queen asserts calmly. "I trust in the teachings of my Savior. The kingdom of heaven is spread all around us, for those with eyes to see. Why not offer faeries and elves alike the chance to partake of God's creation?"

  "Our lives in the hollow hills are part of creation already," Bright Night insists with a brittle edge to his voice.

  "No, Bright Night," Ygrane responds softly. "I myself thought so, too, once. Not anymore. Look how you live, underground, where time has stopped. You have lost touch with your own faith. The ancient Celts speak of the two worlds: the Godhead of the Annwn in the life of the sun—and Cythrawl, destruction and blackness. I offer you the chance to return to the life of the sun through the Son."

  "You're a true Celt in your love of riddles, Ygrane." Bright Night proffers a sly smile. "Will you be converting me with your devious words?"

  "In fact, shrewd prince, I do not convert anyone." Ygrane speaks earnestly. "The faith of the Celts and the Christians are the same. Jesus is the Celtic Yesu of the mistletoe, the All-Heal our prophets have long predicted. He and they agree that the soul, being immortal, does not die, but travels through the kingdom of heaven, through the Godhead of the Annwn, which is spread all around us, as Jesus himself teaches. I simply call the faerie and the elves out of the darkness of the underworld to live their lives in the radiant world of the sun."

  "Call it what you will, Ygrane, but King Someone Knows the Truth is unhappy that you have taken from him many of his followers. He has sent me to warn you to stop."

  Ygrane lowers her gaze, glimpsing her worried scowl in the tabletop. "Or else—"

  "King Someone Knows the Truth has ordered me to watch over Arthor," the elf says. "I will say no more."

  Ygrane looks up with a flash of ire. "You would not harm him!"

  "Of course not, my lady." Bright Night pushes to his feet and begins to move away, fading to points of light, like snow crystals melting. "Yet if my king so commands, I must withdraw. And, Merlin assures me, your daughter intends to murder her half brother..."

  "Bright Night!" the queen calls after him. She seizes the Graal and stands, searching for the elf-prince. He is gone. Looking behind, she sees only the ocean reflecting orange-and-red coins of water and the green air above, empty of elves and faeries.

  In the following days, when the pale people do show themselves, she ignores them. Her ambition is not to convert the dwellers in the hollow hills, like some saint sent to redeem the Celtic underworld. Instead, she wants to live as Jesus himself would have lived here on the Saxon Coast, attentive to the suffering of the poorest people, mindful to the needs of the neediest.

  One drizzly day, with fog running along the shore and the sky a gray audacious velvet, the faerie rise up in alarming numbers and flurry like sparks in the rain. Even some of the Holy Sisters notice them sparkling in the ditchwater and think them perhaps the hem of some wandering angel's garment.

  Ygrane knows better. They have come to warn her that King Lot of the North Isles and his small entourage have arrived at the great hall. With him are his thirteen- and twelve-year-old sons, Gawain and Gareth—and his wife, Morgeu, Ygrane's daughter.

  At the sight of them, Ygrane stalls in the doorway, wordless. She has not seen Morgeu since her daughter wed Lot. Though he had been the staunchest of allies during her reign as queen, little affection remains. He is an old-fashioned Celt and passionately antagonistic to Christians.

  Morgeu looks so much harder and stronger than Ygrane remembers. Still, she wears the traditional tribal gwn, a green garment that falls to her ankles from a high-waisted brocade of gold beneath breasts covered by plaited tresses of her crinkly red hair.

  Morgeu's round, pale face stares out impassively at her mother, and her small, dark eyes shine with haunted darkness.

  King Lot comes forward, gray-haired yet unstooped by age. He wears Celtic battle attire, buckskin leggings and boots, his chest bare but for the sword strap that secures his weapon to his muscular back. His pale eyes watch coldly from their dark caves.

  The fair, long-haired boys wear warrior's attire as well: soft leather trousers and cross-laced suede boots with daggers in the cuffs, their lithe bodies naked from the waist up.

  "Lot—Morgeu—" Ygrane falters and opens her arms to them. "You sent no word, or I would have prepared a formal reception."

  "Tintagel stands now as a Christian hostel, I am told," King Lot says in his gruff voice. "What point for us to announce our coming when all are welcome here?"

  "Yes, of course," Ygrane agrees, and when she sees that neither Lot nor Morgeu will accept her embrace, she lowers her arms. Even her grandchildren, whom she has never seen before, gawk at her, appalled to meet a relative of theirs—a grandmother, no less—with cropped hair and heavy ecclesiastic robes, her white bodice stitched with the scarlet cross of the Christian cult. "You are welcome to Tintagel as are all travelers on the path of righteousness."

  "We have come to show our sons where their mother was born and reared," Morgeu says, looking around at the high colonnades and vaulted ceiling of the main hall. "We shall not stay long. Tomorrow we continue on our way to Camelot for the fifth-year festival."

  "Is that this summer?" Ygrane asks, approaching her grandsons. "I've lost track of time. But I should know from looking at the two of you—young men already. Will you be entering the contests, then?"

  They look to their father, who gives a barely perceptible nod before the eldest answers brightly, "Yes, Grandmother. Gareth will ride in the races, and I'm to enter both lance run and ax throw."

  Ygrane smiles proudly at her strong grandsons. "Before you leave tomorrow I'll see if we can find some of your grandfather's armor. Would you like that? A Roman shield, or perhaps a spear?"

  "Very much, Grandmother!" the youngest blurts before his brother nudges him to silence.

  "My sons will not have Roman gear," King Lot interrupts brusquely. "Celtic weapons serve them well enough."

  "Of course." She smiles at them. "You are young Celts and should know well the weapons of the clan. If there is time, I will tell you war tales of my travels with the fiana, the roving warriors who served me when I was queen—before I came to serve Yesu, the All-Heal of our salvation."

  "Boys," Morgeu summons. "Go with your father. He will show you the castle. I would like a word with your grandmother, alone."

  The boys bow courteously to their grandmother, less disturbed by her strange appearance now that she has referred, even in passing, to her royal Celtic past.

  As they follow King Lot and his entourage through the main hall toward the eastern portico, where the acolytes busily prepare a long table set with a summer's feast, Ygrane takes Morgeu up a winding staircase to her chambers in the western tower. They sit together at the round table, in the presence of the Graal, while the gray sky darkens and the sound of rain brightens.

  "We have been apart as many years as we were together," Ygrane observes. Her green eyes brighten with curiosity as they play over the familiar yet new features of her daughter.

  "The North Isles are far, Mother," Morgeu answers, running her fingers over the lustrous rim of the table—this emblem made by Merlin. She removes her hand and folds it with the other in her lap.

  "But distance is not why you have stayed away," Ygrane states sadly.

  "My husband keeps the old ways for his family and his clan." Morgeu shrugs. "Your Christian faith threatens him."

  "You were Christian in your time here in Tintagel," the queen remembers, an impish glint to her searching stare. "Your father insisted on it."

  "And when I visited with you in Cymru, you insisted I learn the ancient Celtic faith," Morgeu counters. "How ironic that having tasted both I chose your religion even as you abandoned it."

  "Had your father Gorlois loved Jesus as much as Uther did, perhaps I would have become Christian sooner."

  Morgeu curls
her lip with disgust. "My father was a good Christian soldier."

  "More soldier than Christian, you must admit, Morgeu. That was his demise."

  Morgeu's small, dark eyes spark with rage. "The demon Lailoken killed my father. I was there. I saw him."

  "Might you not have misread what you saw?"

  "No," she answers with sharp certainty.

  Ygrane shakes her head. In the dim rain-light, her features appear as serene as an icon. "Child, you cannot bear this terrible hatred your whole life long."

  "I shall bear it until Duke Gorlois is avenged."

  "And how will you avenge your father's death? With more death? Evil cannot make merit of evil. You know that, Morgeu."

  Morgeu's voice tightens with threat: "What I know is that Merlin intends to make your son by Uther the high king of Britain. I cannot allow that."

  "You hate me that much, Morgeu?"

  The crinkled red tresses tremble as she shakes her head. "Not you, mother—Merlin."

  "Don't lie to me, Morgeu." Ygrane bends forward, her calm face emerging from the dimness concrete and still. "I am the one you hate." She speaks with quiet clarity. "I am the one who took Lailoken into my service all those years ago. I am the very one who gave him his name. Myrddin, Merlinus, Merlin—the man from Maridunum. In service to me, he used his magic to transform Theodosius Aurelianus into Uther Pendragon. And in doing my work with Uther to ally Celts and Romans against the invaders, your father was killed. Accidentally." Her green eyes look down. "Dead, nonetheless. I am the one you hate, Morgeu."

  Morgeu draws away as from a dizzying precipice. "You are a witch."

  "I was such a one," Ygrane admits, and sits back in her chair. "We spoke with the pale people, you and I together. And we rode the unicorn."

  "You are yet a witch," Morgeu says in a small voice. "You fill me with such hate."

  Ygrane lifts her long-fingered hands. "I do not give you this hate, Morgeu. That comes from your own stubborn heart, which has much to learn of mercy and love. If you must hate, direct your hatred at its true target, which is myself—not Merlin. And not your brother." She places her hands on her breasts. "Hate me if you must. I could have been a better mother."