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

by A. A. Attanasio

  The horses whinny with relief, and Arthor and Melania ride down into faerieland. Obeying the terrain's happy gravity, they bound into the grassland at a gallop.

  "Thank you, Mother Mary," the young warrior prays aloud, surveying the wide terrain. "Thank you for sparing us the darkness and for watching over us in the light."

  Melania laughs at him. "Mother Mary hasn't helped us, you simpleton. It's the faerie. Look at them!"

  Like a single glittering soul, the cloud of faeries moves as one, sifting into the grass, vanishing from sight, then rising farther on in silvery particles, sparkling school fish, only to fall back and rise again until they ultimately disappear in the distant green depths.

  "If we were in hell, Arthor, we've found our way to heaven."

  The barking of Master Sphenks flags him in the tall grass as he runs toward a lone tree. A peach moon floats huge as a cloud in the netherworld's mauve sky, and star-smoke slants over the horizon. Arthor marvels that everything here seems to move in stillness. Is this a dream?

  Huge, big as a cedar, with glossy ebony bark and no leaves but clusters of silver flowers that twinkle in the breeze, this tree looks as though it has been built in darkness by stars. They dismount in its velvet shade and sip creek-water from the flagons. Master Sphenks drinks from Arthor's hands, then stretches beside a root-ledge and naps.

  "What has happened to us?" Melania asks, touching the tree and feeling its dry, glassy surface. Fear and wonder flicker in her. "Is this Cissa's magic?"

  "The Thunderer's pagan priest?" Arthor wrinkles his nose and sits wearily in the cool grass. "The faerie of this island serve the Celts. We are inside the hollow hills. I'm sure of it."

  "That is bad, isn't it?" she inquires, leaning against the tree, legs stretched out before her. "In Aquitania, the nature spirits are called Fauni, and the priests teach us that they are the Devil's minions."

  "They may be," Arthor concurs, and shuts his eyes. His closed lids glow pink as petals, and in this bright darkness he again thanks his spiritual patron for saving them. "We rode the border of hell to get here. I don't know how we'll get out."

  Melania rests a hand on his. "We'll stay together."

  Arthor peeks through the slit of one eye. "I have not lost the white bird," he says softly. "Not even in this place."

  "I know," she concedes with a contrite nod. "I heard you praying. I would pray, too, if I thought God would listen." A pallor taints her cumin complexion, and her large eyes gel coldly as her beauty converges with the world's pain. "I cannot pray. I am condemned, Arthor. God has cursed me and killed my whole family—everyone but the crone who sent me into the world—" A slack laugh leaves her. "Sent me out to find a treasure already looted."

  "You condemn yourself." Arthor feels her hand tighten atop his, and he goes on, "God loves you. That is why he sent us Jesus."

  She removes her hand. "Let's not talk about Jesus again."

  "He died for you."

  She offers another soulless laugh. "Then why are we are?"

  "God will show us a way out," Arthor insists. He grips her hand and tries to take hold of her sadness, of which he knows nothing except the loneliness he has felt. And by that common deficit, by that mutual need, he promises, "We will find our way back to the world we know. Pray with me."

  His childish awe before the divine annoyed her in the dayworld—but here in the netherworld anything seems possible. She nods, and they kneel together under the faerie tree. With quiet simplicity, they pray from the centers of their edgeless hearts.

  Of all their desperate needs, for what they most cry is a return to the ordinary. Melania asks the divine to spare her hell for her mortal doubts. She wants to return to the familiar world to make her own way among the common people. That would be enough for Arthor as well. He wants to contend once more in the realm of men, not at the horizon of sanity, with reason itself a child of the sphinx.

  Their prayerful energies, focused and outward-directed, stir the currents of the faeries' chaparral, so that the bright ones rise once more from the sleep of seeds and bloom into the shapes of the conscious-type that aroused them.

  As tiny winged humanoids, they blur to the sere verges of the savanna, and there a fraction carries the heart-strong energy past the sky lakes and the dirgeful echoes of the mermaids' songs.

  Hannes sees them streak like meteors through the purple sky. The elf-prince Bright Night ignores them. There is no time for faeries, with their endless prattle about the small doings of their world. He and the carpenter have vital work to do. They are in the Happy Woods, the domain of the Daoine Sid, and have come to recruit a warband to attack the Furor's weapons master.

  Souls flute like birds in the tufted, vigorous pines, calling to others in distant groves. Religious chants sift from towering oaks and victory cries loft out of dense alders. Each type of tree has its own timbre of spirits swollen with particular longings. There are birch groves of kindness and sorrow, white poplar woodlets of laughter, willow bosks of desire, rowan holts of serenity, spindle thickets of prophecy, beech coppices of wisdom, apple orchards of magic, and reed brakes of solitude. In all of them, the Piper's music lilts a different tune. And in all, twilight leaves its golden dust on everything.

  Hannes and the elf prince are in a conifer spinney of tantrum, where angry souls sing war songs and thrash battle dances. The shadowshapes of the dead thrive to the storm-moan and wind-whistle of the Piper and descend from the boughs, sensing the presence of visitors.

  Hannes cringes at the eerie sight of their smoky, lunatic shapes. The vehemence of the stamping shadow-warriors with their blurred black wings and bituminous eyes stuns him, and all through his underbeing run warnings of instinctive alarm. He crouches and tries to hide beside the knees of a battered cypress, whose frantic, knobbed limbs clasp violet emptiness under the kiss of stars.

  "Fear them not, Hannes," the elf comforts. "They are but shades. The ones we seek are elves, who visit here to celebrate their own rage with the dead."

  Out of the dreamthreads of sunset, solid figures appear. Tall beings with long manes shining like blood, they slouch closer, strapped in swarthy leather and rawhide cords, sword belts and soft boots clasped with fangs. Thirty centuries of rage burn cold in their long green eyes, intent on outstaring fate.

  The prince nods to them and, without a spoken word, turns and leads them unswerving through the stormsmoke of the dead.

  Hannes leaps up and hurries to Bright Night's side. None of the elfen gang pays him any more heed than they do the convulsing shades. To walk among them—to stride, really—makes him feel as sleek and certain as pure silver.

  They will take back Excalibur. No dwarf, no sorceress can stand against them.

  Soon, they depart the spinney of gnarled conifers. The spirit stallions that will carry them into battle have already gathered in the fields of dusk. They are big animals nosing around in the high, sweet grass. Through the crepuscular light of the netherworld, they shamble like blue smoke, eyes bright as flames.

  Above them, Cissa senses their gathering might. To him, they sound like the song of the hive, droning with endless, tranceful chant that turns the world to honey.

  He knows that they will be harder to defeat the longer they wait, for they are collecting their powers. Quickly, he reaches into his heartbeat for news from the pit, and he touches Brokk's irascible cries.

  Brokk calls furiously from the underworld. Too clever for his own good, he has declined to follow Fen and has sent back the lamia. He wants the Furor to come to him. The Dragon sleeps, Cissa hears in the flutter of his heart. The Dragon sleeps. Send my god to me, for I have his sword and cannot find my way out of darkness.

  When Cissa explains this to Aelle, the chief swells with anger to cover his fear: "I am not going into the Dragon's lair. We sent Fen to get the sword. Has he failed us yet again?"

  Cissa cants his bald, viper-stenciled head as if listening to the sky. "Brokk will hand the sword only to the Furor."

  "I a
m a warrior." Aelle thumps the tree nearest him. "I fight my battles here in Middle Earth, not in Hel's underworld."

  "Would you have preferred to attack Camelot and perish as a distraction for a thieving dwarf?" Cissa asks rhetorically. He hunkers in the spiky grass, lifting his face with its designs of pain, the better to feel the wind. He listens through an aureole of sounds—bird chatter and leaf rustle—for Fen and hears him nearby. "Brokk has sent Fen back to us, to lead us through Hel's realm to the sword."

  The Thunderers, scattered among the trees, some in the branches, all posted to watch for prey and danger, give no sign of seeing anyone. "Fen is not here," Aelle gruffs. "He has fled."

  "No, wise Aelle. Fen is nearby. He will not show himself. He fears we will take the lamia off him and kill him."

  Aelle's wiry eyebrows bend angrily. "He should fear us. He set out to raid and allowed himself to be captured—taken by worshipers of a prince of peace! He gave up a glorious afterlife in the Hall of Light for slavery to weaklings who worship love and peace! When I find him, I tell you, he will hang from the branch of the bright wind until the ravens eat his sad stamina and carry his sickness away from our tribe."

  "Well and good, righteous Aelle—but for now, he alone can lead us to the Furor's sword." Cissa probes through the palimpsestuous layers of forest noise and scent—chittering squirrels, jackdaw squawks, thrush warbles, rosin scents, and pollen flux—feeling for the blood-hum of his brother's presence. When he locates it, pulsing all the louder for the audacious passion of the lamia, he turns to where his father nervously thuds the edge of his sandal against a root. "Fen is ready to lead us."

  Aelle signals his approval by waving for the Thunderers to gather. He smothers his anxiety in the rigors of command, arranging the men around him in a fighting wedge. "This day, for the glory of the Furor, we visit Hel's dark kingdom, where cowards and traitors are imprisoned. Be brave and obey our god, and you will only visit this terrible place—for you are Thunderers, destined for the corridors of light high in the World Tree.

  Cissa thuds his chest, drumming the storm god closer. From the sky, a cloud lowers, sifting through forest branches and enclosing the war party in luminous fog. Silence swells. Bird noise and the wind's hymnal cease.

  As shadow-figures, the warriors advance, following their snake-priest, who feels Fen among the witchgrass, backing away, retreating from this world.

  Acid sunlight blisters and foams at the shadow limit of the hollow hills. Fen lingers there until he is sure the Thunderers follow him. He knows he is dead in their eyes already. Without the lamia, he would be a corpse. The lamia is his strength and his damnation. For now, he must endure it.

  Its lunar fire lights the way for him over the black snaky surface of lava rock. Its death chill cools him in the volcanic swelter. Its strength keeps him running ahead of the war party, easy as a breeze.

  Ahead, among heat-shattered boulders of amber glass, the dwarf's witch waits. "My brother has escaped me, Fen," she whines, and darkness stains her with the colors of silence. "I must go with you into the hollow hills to find him. Take me with you."

  Fen does not even try to stop the lamia from leaping forth to devour this frightful woman. The monster's fanged thrust sweeps through Morgeu's phantom and crashes into the rocks. Shards fly like small birds.

  Weaker for the effort, the lamia slinks back into Fen, who must keep moving. The Thunderers are coming. The ghost-lit darkness and the baked stink of the underworld do not deter them. They run with the Furor, and soon they will be upon him.

  At his side, the witch's specter appears again—or is this Morgeu herself, night in her eyes, blood-shadows in her wild hair? "Do not try to devour me," she threatens, "or your lamia will grow too weak to protect you in this place."

  "What do you want?" Fen gasps, dragging himself among waist-high mounds of ash.

  "Only your guidance into the hollow hills, back toward Brokk." She keeps a respectful distance, this witch in torn green satin, with the bones of a man in her shoulders and jaw, and a woman's coy, helpless smile. "I cannot find my own way down here. I will follow you."

  Fen ignores her. He wants only to complete his mission and slip away. If he can find again the dark-haired woman with the urn of sphinxes, perhaps he can free himself from the lamia and win a new life.

  The lamia churns in him, indecisive about striking at Morgeu again. Wary about losing more power, it decides to put all its strength into crossing this balesome terrain. Flames run through the unreckonable darkness far ahead, bright as blood, and the lamia puts its focus there.

  Then, at its back, a startling wind arrives. Morgeu knows at once what this is and falls to her knees in the scorched furrows of fused sand. The wavering heat blows away in an arctic mayhem of glacial thunder, blizzard-smoke, and frost rays.

  "Morgeu the Doomed," a wide voice opens in her head, and the red life in her shivers blue. "Is it true the Dragon slumbers?"

  "Yes, All-Seeing Father!" the enchantress cries. Without the protection of her old demon allies, she is but a fragile snowflake in the blustery presence of the Furor. "The Dragon sleeps deeply."

  The Furor releases her, satisfied. Always before, he has entered these dark regions surreptitiously to avoid the ravenous attention of the Drinker of Lives. Now at last he can storm through these mephitic caverns without fear. Nothing here can challenge his power.

  Shrouded in his blue mantle of boreal wind, he steps over the animal lives of Morgeu, Fen, and the Thunderers, and strides boldly into the hissing darkness of stinking fumes.

  A tunnel of snow trails behind the god, and the Thunderers charge through it. Morgeu and Fen run ahead, afraid to fall back and be trampled or hacked by the rovers' naked swords. The lamia pours forth its liquid strength and sweeps them onward.

  Fen does not object to the witch clamping onto him, using the lamia's power to fly with him through the fire-breathing shadows and bright vortices of snow sizzling to hot rain and steam. She is another shield against the Thunderers, who want to break his bones to retrieve their pride.

  The Furor halts, and lightning staggers around him, shattering boulders and scattering ash in a hot scurf of sparks and spinning embers. Silver rivers of melted ice run away from him, sibilant as snakes among the hot rocks. He shrinks. All godliness seems to melt from him, and he stands among the rubble stone in darkness, a robust old man.

  Reflections of fugitive flames from distant calderas flimmer in his one blue eye, and he seems to perceive as if for the first time the enormous depth of this somber, black waste.

  Cissa is the first to realize that the Furor is not reduced. The god sees with an eye ignited by prophecy. He only appears to shrink as his vision goes ahead of him.

  "He sees our enemy," Cissa whispers to the others.

  The Thunderers stand gawking among melted shapes of smoldering scrog and fulgurite. They peer through shredded steam with raw amazement at their deity, standing ahead of them in the cratered terrain, leaning on his spear like one of their own.

  Dark light, like steel dust, shines around him. Only that divine sign distinguishes him from a man—albeit a huge man with massive brow scored by age and dented with war scars. His riven cheeks rise in creases from an abundant gray beard toward an empty socket and one mad, staring eye blue as a sky a thousand years deep.

  When they can muster enough heart to remove their adoring gazes from him, they see what he sees. Far ahead, through a black cleft in a lava lakebed, a war gang of Sid elves rides forth on spirit horses.

  It is Prince Bright Night and Hannes, leading their warriors to attack Brokk. At the sight of the Furor standing in the underworld surrounded by starry energy, the horses balk and nearly throw their riders.

  Bright Night signs for them to retreat, to fly back through the cleft to the emerald chaparral of faerieland and the mermaids' sky lakes. Too late.

  An ominous chill runs through the hot chambers, and blue licks of electric fire trace the tormented outlines of magma channels, sockets
of dried pools, and slag spires. Celestial brilliance casts grotesque shadows across the enormous grotto. The captured night of the underworld pulses, ever faster, until it strobes sharp, quick flashes of terror among the Sid.

  Bright Night howls for his warriors to fall back. Hannes clings frantically to the prince's back as the wild horses collide and throw riders into the quick shadows. Then the nimble blue flames vanish, and the night ranges return to wrathful blackness. The screaming of the horses and the cries of the elves clash for a blind and terrible moment.

  From across the dark, the Furor's spear reaches out. A lance of white sunlight. When it lands among the scrambling elves, several horses and their riders vaporize instantly in startling bursts of shadowshapes. Smeared by radiance, a whirlwind shock wave flings the others in every direction, so much world dust blowing into the void.

  Chapter 24: Warrior's Vow

  The faerieland's chaparral grass and dwarf willows sway in balmy wind. Arthor and Melania gaze up with naked awe at the stardust heavens of the underworld, wondering how the blotched moon and these misty star-wheels can be visible down here inside the hollow hills. They clamber through the boughs of the giant black tree and perch high among its silver, clustered blossoms, hoping to see the secrets of this inner sky.

  Craters sleep in the ashes of the moon. Whirlpools of stars fling feathers through lavender void, and the amplified images of pure night open new mysteries.

  Melania lifts the lovely shadow of her face toward the wind, inspiring desire in Arthor hard as cold. All at once, wonder drains from her placid features, and fear startles her. "Arthor, look!"

  The dark arrow of her face points beyond this wide plain of grass ripples to a niter cliff not visible from below. It is the desolate ash-lands they rode down from. At this height, they can peer into the volcanic terrain of burned brimstone and melted rocks and see the Furor.

  To them, he appears an enraged giant, his one mad eye bulging with pain and ire and the empty socket sunken to the skull-rim. Bone shines through his dented brow and twisted nose bridge, and his great beard and tangled mane haze into the darkness like battlesmoke.