His heart sinks. Sad and long dreaming of love goes away with her, and he lets her go. That such a beautiful woman could have heard the good news and then deny Jesus troubles him.
Walking toward his shield, he plays upon the notion that she is right and he wrong: What if there is no God at all? No Jesus. No Mother Mary. All this no more real than Kyner's stories of faeries, elves, and monsters.
But he has seen a monster—and now he wonders about what he has not seen that could be lurking in these fog-tinged woods. He lifts his shield nervously and, after peeking into the jade distances of the forest and noticing nothing unusual, lowers a contemplative gaze on the sacred image of the Virgin.
It is inconceivable to him that Creation could exist without its Maker. Far back as he can remember, the Mother of God has given him comfort—and he has heard her voice, today more clearly than ever. "Love is first," he repeats, and looks up through the branches at the speeding turbid clouds.
"Love is first. So you have taught me, Mother. Yet what of Melania? What love for her has God given?"
A moment's thought reveals that, unlike himself, she once had her own family, had known their love, and at least tasted life as a noblewoman. She questions God for taking away what I never had. More pain in having and losing than never having at all. His hand settles on the hilt of Short-Life, and for the first time, his rage at the inequity he knew in Kyner's household dims.
Beyond Crowland, in the forested heights above the River Amnis, Kyner and the clan wait for him. They will accept him back, if he will take his proper place among them and serve. But Melania has no place—no family but an aged crone, her estate pillaged and occupied by pagans, even her faith despoiled.
He wants to save her. Earning the sword Short-Life has led him to her, and by that sword and by his faith, he will find a way to redeem all she has lost. And he will serve—but not as a lowly ward in Kyner's household.
He will serve love.
"Ar-thor!" Merlin's hoarse voice calls.
Bolstered by his determination to win Melania and uplifted by his vision of the Holy Spirit, Arthor carries his shield through the beeches back to camp. The gleeman and Melania have already packed the canvas and mounted their horses. Master Sphenks sits atop the saddle on the palfrey, wagging its sharp tail.
The old man explains that he stepped into the bushes last night and lost himself in the storm. Melania speculates that the lamia must have used sorcery to call him away, as it had with her.
Merlin does not dispute that. Secretly, he quivers with alarm that Fen could have approached so close while he sat entranced in the rain watching the Furor. He resolves to stay nearer to the young king until they reach Camelot.
Ingots of dawnlight shine in the forest of Crowland as they travel east on a trace hung with spiderwebs of fog. Melania rides close to the gleeman, as far from Arthor as she can get.
The young man lingers behind, watching the shifting shadows for clues of danger. Blue distilled from indigo rises toward the flyways of geese and herons, and his searching gaze lingers there until he notices a dove on an overarching branch. His heart leaps, and he cranes to see if Melania has spotted the bird.
She rides on oblivious to it and apparently to all else, for she stares rigidly straight ahead.
The gleeman, too, appears to be unaware of their surroundings, riding with his eyes half-closed. Arthor marvels that any man could have survived so long in this treacherous world with such indifference. He returns his attention to the dark woods and vaguely wonders why the Holy Spirit shows itself to him now. Love first, he remembers. Never abandon.
Up ahead, Merlin feels the approach of Morgeu and restrains himself from sitting up taller, not wanting to alarm the vigilant Arthor. The wizard has been chanting under his breath a spell of simple magic to drive off brigands.
The one small band of cutthroats in the area wake in their weed beds with slow, dim-witted dread. Not knowing why, they drift away from the trace they usually stalk and are far away on a hill of alder thickets when the riders pass through the early-morning mist.
The lamia guiding Fen, who leads Morgeu, is distracted by Merlin's simple magic. It mistakes Merlin's chanting for the ghost-scent of the Furor, and it directs Fen up out of the black grottoes of poisonous air toward the wizard's call. They emerge into an aromatic summer day through a sandy cleft of a salty, alkaline hillside overgrown with tamarisk and white velvet moonflowers.
The dank, genital odor of the wet forest nearly overcomes Morgeu with joy. She kneels in the sand, bends to embrace the nacre earth, and stops abruptly. Through the entwined, serpentine branches of the tamarisk, she sees Merlin dressed in ragged clothes and a hat woven of ivy leaves, beside him a young maiden of surly beauty—and behind them, riding bareheaded yet alert, bristle-cut hair shorn close as a Roman's, her half brother.
"Arthor," Merlin calls to him, sensing Morgeu and wanting the youth to ride closer. "Bring me Master Sphenks so I may consult with him where we shall stop for our rest."
Arthor! Morgeu thrills to discover his name. She rises too quickly, and dizziness swarms through her and plops her to her haunches. Hearing only her own ears drumming, she feels the physical strain of her circuit through the hollow hills. By the time she finds the strength to stand, the riders are gone.
So is Fen.
The lamia has carried him off through the woods in the opposite direction, toward the Thunderers. He will alert the Furor.
Morgeu sits back in the tussocky sand, her muscles languid, a thin fever running under her skin now that she is breathing pure air again. She has not the strength to confront Merlin just yet. She will find it, and soon. While the sun eats at the shadows, she lies back, and her eyes roll up as though she has been brained by the soft breeze and blue sky.
The sulfur reek of the underworld fades. Her fear that she was dead passes. And briefly the stinking dread of lost hope and the sweet possibilities of life intersect, and she lives in two worlds at once.
Merlin still senses her presence yet more distantly. Time touches his face like a breeze, and he smells her farther ahead—her usual musk scent choked with sulfur.
She has been in the hollow hills, he realizes, and ponders what this must mean.
He is still wondering hours later when the horses drink at a creek pebbly with toads. He sits under a willow and watches Arthor cross a gravel bar to harvest apples and chicory, Master Sphenks at his heels.
Upstream, Melania gathers creekwater in leather flagons. Pine martens slink stealthily through the blowing grass, stalking ptarmigans under the willows.
Down in his heart, he feels a giant love for this world, though the parts of the world do not love each other.
He recalls his former existence as a demon when he hated all life. Then he thought that living forms were treasonous to the void, a betrayal of the emptiness that holds all atoms and planets in its grasp of absolute cold. Life seemed a stupid turning away from the reality of the vacuum that stole light from heaven in the explosive origin of the cosmos.
Demons believe that there is no way back to heaven. Life denies that truth. It builds more and more complex forms within the formlessness of the void. It mocks the vacuum that holds it with the forms it creates.
The Fire Lords build life, thinking they are building their way back to heaven, and the demons tear it down, convinced there is no way back and accepting no substitutes for the cold and the dark and the emptiness.
Love changed his demonic cynicism. The love he learned from his mother Optima when he tried to possess her as an incubus altered him forever. Now he sees that though the void ripped the light out of heaven, and the absolute cold chilled that radiance to the darkness of matter, life is the memory of heaven as it writhes in the cold of space.
And because love is the force that holds life together, the Fire Lords are right to embrace it. He regrets the aeons he vehemently attacked life trying to break it back down to the void, to the emptiness he mistakenly believed was closer to heaven
.
Unspeakable sadness swells in him at the remembrance of the violence that possessed him for so long. A dark string twangs in his heart. Like an empty house, his body echoes with the noise of his grief. He tries to rise, to walk off this sudden melancholy—but like a house he cannot budge.
From a helpless distance, he sees her approaching—Morgeu the Doomed, her hair like a rag of blood, her face a moon disc, her small, black, sharp eyes piercing him. She is an apparition stepping down the sky among the doughy clouds. Caught daydreaming, he did not sense her enchantment locking him down with his own ponderous sadness from a past he cannot disown.
She sits up in the tall grass beside him, not an apparition at all but muscularly and muskily real. If he had been in possession of his magical stave, which senses invisible presences, this would have been impossible. She exults with an opulent grin.
Tainted with sulfur, her green gown torn and streaked, bright hair twisted with sweat, Morgeu kneels over him, her ardent face farouche as an animal's. Of his greatness, she never doubted, and so she has succeeded by extreme caution and psychic discipline in drawing close enough to cast a paralyzing spell on him.
Tears well in the wizard's gray metallic eyes. Try as he might, he cannot uproot Morgeu's spell, because she has been cunning enough to plant it deep inside him, in his oldest self, his demon mind. It tangles him with memories of his life in the vacuum, of his immutable sorrow at losing heaven and gaining the cold, lightless void. That is a sorrow he cannot quickly budge.
Glancing over her shoulder to be certain that she has not been seen by Melania or Arthor, Morgeu grips Merlin's frayed collar and drags him backward through the curtain of willows. He is light as ash, which surprises her.
For an instant, she wonders if she herself has been duped and he is a simulacrum. But no: When she focuses softly, she can see his bodylight, blue as heaven, the color of a supernal being rather than the blood-glow of a human being.
She drags his inert body through a spite of thistles to a hillock dominated by a massive yew. The dense branches of the tree have grown down into the ground, creating a circular wall of stems, many thick as trunks. Within this enclosure, the spongy mass of the original trunk stands haggard and mucronate with fungus. There, she props the wizard and squats before him. What a simple matter now to take his frilled throat in her hands and crush the life in him.
But she knows better. A demon-wizard is not so easily killed. His death flash could well possess her, drive her mad. Just as dangerously, a dagger to the heart could release a noxious spirit that would rip her life from her flesh and whisk her beyond the sky into eternal night.
He is a truly dangerous entity and must be respected. Here he will stay, entranced in his lithic sorrow, while she works a far more poignant vengeance with her half brother. When the wizard finally struggles free, the destiny he has devoted his life to create will be gone—stolen from him and reshaped in her womb.
She peers into his prophetic eyes, with their muted anguish of tears. And though she wishes to speak, to taunt him, she says nothing, for even one word could weaken her spell. Instead, she waves a silky laugh over him and slips away through the tendrils of the yew.
Merlin watches her disappear in the cavalcade of sunlight on the thistle field, and he strains to move, expending himself to the point of blackout before he relents. She has caught him. Speaking to himself has become self-devouring. That is her spell. He must return to nascent silence and slowly, slowly expand back into himself before he can move again. She has caught him very well indeed.
To save Arthor, only one hope remains. The Sid. Yet, when he calls to them from within the locked vault of his skull, no one answers.
A firefly twinkles in the yew gloom. It jounces closer, and he sees that it is a faerie. Lead Arthor to the hollow hills! he shouts in his mind. Does the little thing hear? Tears stream down his harrowed face with the sincerity of his plea: To the hollow hills lead Arthor!
Drifting like milkweed on the summer air, the faerie exits the loamy enclosure and vanishes in the hot light.
"Hannes!" Arthor calls for the gleeman.
"He has run off again," Melania says. "He has a doddering soul. He could be anywhere."
Master Sphenks runs in circles on the banks of the shimmering creek. No longer a wise dog without the wizard, it weaves aimlessly among willow roots and withy reeds.
Morgeu's magic hides the giant yew from everyone's sight, expanding in their minds the clustered willows to cover that ground.
Melania secures the flagons of water to her saddle and mounts. "Let us be on our way."
"No," Arthor says firmly, returning through the creekside grass from his search upstream. "We must stay and look for him."
"Look where?" she asks with exasperation. "We have searched both sides of the creek and all the nearby willow coves. He has wandered off, I tell you."
"Then, we shall camp here till tomorrow." He gathers the reins of the horses. "He will show up again as he did this morning."
"Or Fen will come back," Melania warns. "And the barbarians. Arthor, come. Ride with me to Camelot."
"These are the gleeman's horses." He leads the gleeman's gray mare and his own palfrey along the gravel beach toward the willows where they had last seen the old man.
"He knows where we are going," Melania pleads, walking the blond mare after him. "He will find us in Camelot."
"No, Melania." He strolls the horses through the green tresses of the river trees, Master Sphenks appearing and disappearing in the feathery grass. "We cannot go without him."
"More of your Christian justice?" she asks, sitting rigid in the saddle. "Does justice require that we risk our lives to wait on a senile old man? Even his wise dog cannot find him."
"We have not looked in the willow coves at the creek bend," he answers, and pulls himself into the saddle of his horse. "That's in the direction we want to go. Let's search there next."
Morgeu watches from under an ivy-draped overhang of rock at the creek bend as the riders approach. She coils her magic, preparing to strike with a cobra's precision. The blow is designed to startle the blond mare and throw the woman to the ground. The shadow of her death has already been imprinted among the washed rocks of the stream. For Arthor, a Gorgon's stare will hold him while she weaves the intricate spells of her tantric stratagem.
The enchantress floats on a tide of voices: These are the pre-vocalized spells already in her soul that are ready to shape events. She leans eagerly forward and watches first Arthor leading the gray and then the woman on the blond mare pass through a willow's hanging branches. Waiting for them to exit, she watches the trees catch the wind.
But the riders do not exit.
The willow hangs from a spill of boulders on a hillside, and there is no back way out. What are they doing in there? she wonders at first, until the sliding sun finally outlasts her patience and budges her from her covert.
She stalks angrily over the cobbled creek bank and whips aside the willow branches. With an explosive flap of wings, a dove bursts from the green interior and soars away.
The tree stands alone. Among its thin wicker shadows, hoofprints in the sand walk serenely into the stone wall of the hill.
Chapter 23: Child of the Sphinx
Arthor and Melania ride through a night scrawled with pinwheel stars and spidery wisps of luminous green vapors. A pan of dried, cracked slurry and caked ash stretches away toward a horizon staggered with cinder-cones.
"Where are we?" she asks in a narrow voice. Beyond the black volcanic hills, scarlet flames rush from the earth's depths and shake the darkness. "Is this hell?"
Arthor casts an angry look. "I thought you had no faith in God?"
The wind blows a sulfurous stench from the craters, and the horses toss their heads nervously. Curled up on the saddle before Arthor, Master Sphenks whimpers. Melania looks back the way they have come. The willow they passed through is gone, replaced by jagged lava fields and crawling smoke. She moans, "Where a
re we?"
"I don't know," Arthor mumbles. Fear worms in his flesh, eating the strength in his muscles, riddling his spine so that he can barely sit up and face the stinking black heat of this night. Under his breath, he prays, "Mother Mary, save us."
From out of the star-whorled sky, sparks flurry and spin ahead. Several blow close enough to see that they are tiny almost-people with kelpy hair and large eyes darker than shadows. Cinnamon streaks of wings blur from their nakedness: bodies milk blue and without genitals.
Powdery light smudges the air around them and streaks the paths of their spiraling flights. Master Sphenks yelps at the glimmering shapes and will leap from the saddle to snap at them if Arthor does not hold him down.
"Be still, mutt," Arthor coaxes. Though he has never seen their likes before, he knows who they are from the fireside chatter of Kyner and the storytellers. "The faerie."
"Yes, they must be," Melania agrees, awestruck. "Look—they are flying into a cave. They are showing us the way out!"
The flock of faeries whirls into a lightless socket beneath a stark promontory of scorched rock, and Melania rides after them.
"Wait," Arthor calls. "The faerie lead people into the hollow hills, never to be seen again. The old people say a dragon eats them."
Melania pauses before the cave entrance. Cool, vegetal musk luffs from verdant distances within. "The air is fresh in there. If there is a dragon, it's out here. I'm going in."
Arthor follows, and as soon as he reaches the threshold of the cave, Master Sphenks leaps from the palfrey and runs ahead, fleeing the sweltering stink.
Inside, night relents. Rime-bearded cavern walls yaw wide to daylight. They clop to a ledge overlooking an emerald chaparral of stunted willows and gold grass. Across the distance, ice green sky lakes flash beneath a violet haze of mountains.
The wise dog has already run down the mossy slope to the foreland fields of grass swaying green after green under a sunny gauze of golden pollen.
The Eagle and the Sword (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 2) Page 22
