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

by A. A. Attanasio

  The smoky coils swirl onto the savanna, and Hannes reaches into himself for the magical might to grasp a spur of boulders. He shoves at the rocks gathered beneath the ridge where Morgeu crouches.

  The earth slides, and Morgeu scrambles for higher ground. Thunder unrolls over the chaparral and bounds into the savanna. On its steeply pitched roar, faeries swirl upward, carrying their fog with them and artfully outlining the hulking mass of the Dragon.

  The Furor straightens rigidly at the first glimpse of the threatening shadow. Not for an instant does he hesitate to challenge the apparition, knowing with horrible certitude the fate of gods seized by the Drinker of Lives.

  He bounds away, convinced that the Sid have tricked him into the hollow hills for this gruesome sacrifice. As sop to the Dragon, he leaves the demon behind, too weak to escape, and masters the ache of his shoulder to climb hurriedly into the purple mountains.

  Brokk rushes after him, neighing like a frightened horse. The lamia clings to him, startled to see the night above explode to sun-cut brightness. Radiant rays of daylight pierce the rootweave of the domed sky where the Furor gouges a way out of the hollow hills with his spear. Sunshine slants from the mountaintop and rides on the sky lakes like myriad lotus cups.

  The lamia screams at the sight of the moon washed away and the stars dulled to quartz nodules in peaty banks of the earthy sky. Brokk stabs with the lodestone knife, and the clinging, panicky lamia flares up like ignited gas. The dwarf heaves away the knife and its sticky, blazing effluvium and hurriedly climbs the stairs of sunlight into the upper world.

  The Thunderers, too, with Cissa and Aelle in the lead, rush after the fleeing dwarf and their god. Up from the depths they clamber, moving in huge flying leaps and enormous bounding steps in the gold sunshine, swept along by the Furor's updraft into the blue hole of day.

  Morgeu screams after them, "It is a trick! A trick!" Her cries dim through the distances, and she plops down on the inter-fingerings of moss and gravel, and shrieks.

  Only Master Sphenks hears her, and it stops its barking and mad circling and perks its ears. Then, it smells the day world, the familiar scents of sun-baked dirt, territories of trees, and the damp wind of clouds curling with rain. It bolts after those well-known aromas, running into the moted sunlight on the mountain's flank. Tongue streaming back with its effort, it is determined to return to the world of birds, mice, rabbits, and a dog's life.

  Merlin sees it dash by and makes no effort to stop it. He pushes to his elbows and gawks about at the wingspread of sunlight shining across the underworld.

  Hannes, in wizard's cap and robe, approaches, dragging Excalibur. Faeries swirl about him like bright dust.

  "Master, are you sound?" the carpenter asks, kneeling beside Merlin.

  "I don't know," the wizard answers candidly. The naked flesh of his chest, where the Furor's spear touched him, shines like a miracle, and his bones feel hollow. "The Dragon—"

  "There is no Dragon," Hannes announces proudly. “Only me and the faeries making smoke and thunder. 'Twas their idea."

  "Their idea?" Merlin asks groggily "You can hear them?"

  "Oh, yes, Master. Listen."

  The faeries swim around them, blearing in and out of human shape. In their nebulous forms, as indigos of brilliance, they chime faintly, and the wizard hears their happiness.

  "Well-done, Hannes. Well-done, indeed." A weak smile graces his pallid face, and he lies back to listen more deeply to the murmuring faeries—and to dream himself awake.

  Chapter 26: Escape from the Hollow Hills

  Fen watches from the mountainside above the mermaids' lakes, where sunlight streaming through the Furor's exit shrivels the faerie grass to powdery gray mold. As the north god rushes toward him, he stands perfectly still at the edge of terror. The lamia squats over him in the gnarled shape of a fungus-ridden tree.

  The massive god, with his broken face and winged falcon's cap, shambles past without noticing him.

  Then the dwarf Brokk bounces by, and the feculent stink of the lamia he killed swirls after him. The despair of the shapeshifter for its dead twin nearly collapses its disguise. Fen must apply all the force of his dread to hold the grief-mad lamia in place. Even Cissa does not see him. The Thunderers dash past, mad to escape the Dragon.

  Fen quakes seeing the Dragon's charred shadow in the roiling fog rising from below. He dares not move until he is certain that the Furor and the others have gone well away. Better to be devoured by the Drinker of Lives than fall again into the cruel hands of the Thunderers.

  He watches searing daylight from the upper world bruise and sour the delicate flora of the Storm Tree's roots, reducing the shrubs around him to coral shapes of ash. Slowly but perceptibly, the exit hole clogs with soot and shrinks. He will have to move soon if he is to escape at all.

  The Dragon has retreated. The fog thins, and light soaks through. Fen spots the gleeman's dog charging up the mountainside. It senses him and alters its course to climb a slope well out of his reach. The withered grass under it puffs to dust with its passing, and it disappears into the narrowing blue avenue of daylight.

  Morgeu the Fey laboriously climbs toward him, emerging from a fuming sinkhole that vents the cinderlands. Her green gown hangs in filthy tatters from her large-boned frame, her pendulous breasts swinging heavily as she mounts the rocky shelves. If she knows he watches, she gives no indication but lumbers past, huffing for breath, her face hidden behind grimed veils of orange hair.

  The lamia's hunger supplants its mourning for its twin, and it shivers to attack the enchantress yet does not strike. It fears this woman. She has been a shadow before, and the lamia is loath to waste its vitality attacking a shade. It lets her pass into the smoky daylight and scans for other prey.

  Among the last coils of dragonfog that flow up the slopes, two horses gallop. Arthor and Melania ride hard to exit the hollow hills. Fen wraps the lamia about him in the form of Kyner and stands squarely on the path of their ascent.

  Arthor reins hard at the sight of the old chieftain, and Melania flies past and must pull around to face him. She meets the startled hopefulness in Arthor's face, more boylike than she has ever seen him before.

  Then she glances at the stranger on the ashen slope above, an old, hulking Celtic warrior in Roman cuirass and sandals, his long hair and thick mustache adorning a weathered and careworn face.

  "He is my father," Arthor breathes, blinking with astonishment.

  "You have no father," Melania reminds him, and reins in closer.

  "My foster father—Kyner." Arthor walks his palfrey closer.

  "Arthor, no." Melania pulls around to block him. "That cannot be him. Not here, not at this fateful moment. That must be an apparition. Fen! It is Fen and the lamia!"

  Its ruse disclosed, the lamia surges forward, and Fen cannot stop it. The flanged jaws of a vaporous skull strike. Melania smacks the rump of Arthor's horse as it rears back in fright and sends it bolting forward under the slashing jaws. A storm wind of horror blows through her as the lamia's viperous face swings closer.

  Fen will not let it have her. She is his only hope of salvation, and he tugs at the shrieking seraph. Its spider pincers writhe inches from her heaving chest, its jagged visage chittering with pain fills her vision.

  She pulls hard away and drives her terrified steed up the slope after Arthor. Briefly, she glances behind, at Fen on his knees, the cords of his body pulled to their taut limit. His stretched muscles twang loose from their impossible effort, and he comes hurtling uphill inside the scorpion-cloud of the lamia, its wide, lurid mouth shining with razorous tusks.

  The exit blazes above the riders, in the cornice ledge of the mountain—a root-hanging hole ripped into the very sky over the rock spire. Around its edges, sunfire illuminates broken sod fallen inward from above: black-eyed Susans and daylilies gleam in the root mats and clods of black earth.

  A mauve glow of sidereal energies still shines on the dome of the nether sky in the distance, but
near the hole, the heavens appear as a terrestrial fabric of loam and roots.

  The ragged gap has narrowed to streaks of daylight barely wide enough for Arthor and Melania to jump through together. Their horses leap from the mountain ledge into the blue day with its green woods and ruffled clouds. And the howling lamia comes rushing after like a burst of fire.

  They must charge through the woods at full gallop to keep away from its grasping talons. Trunks shuttle past, branches sing overhead, and the horses heave for breath, wild-beating hearts close to bursting.

  They dwindle among the trees, their rapid hoof falls muffled in leaf mold, and Hannes the carpenter emerges from the sunken hole in the earth. He sniffs the air, smelling for thunder, feeling for the presence of the Furor. The surrounding woods glimmer benevolently with birdsong and green sunlight. He eyes the trampled grass and shrubs where the Thunderers crashed through the forest, hurrying for higher ground beyond the reach of the Dragon's claw.

  After turning a slow circle and satisfying himself that the empty woods hold no hidden threats, he ducks back into the fuming chute. He returns carrying Merlin over his shoulders. He places the dazed wizard on a leafbed in a surge of shadows beneath wind-stirred beeches and goes back for Excalibur. When he returns with the sword, Merlin is sitting up.

  "I must find the young king," the wizard says thinly.

  Hannes shakes his head and lifts Excalibur. "No, Master. We must return the sword to the stone. If it is found missing, there will be war."

  Merlin hangs his head in weary agreement. He does not have the strength to protect Arthor now. It will be enough if he can return to Camelot and keep that hope alive for him. "You are right, Hannes. Help me up. We must not tarry."

  After hoisting the wizard to his feet, Hannes peers a last time into the hollow hills. Through the rent in the dark green earth, he surveys tottering distances of mountain slopes, shawls of mist, and sparkles of faerie in the margins of darkness, cringing from the sun rays.

  He shouts a singsong of thanks, then props Excalibur on his shoulder and escorts Merlin through the broken lights of the forest.

  The wizard does not have the strength to search ahead for danger. Darkness fits like muscles on his bones, and he barely holds onto consciousness. The Furor has drained him almost to absence, leaving him anonymous and separate from all his powers. He must rely on Hannes.

  The carpenter, himself weary, hollowed out by fear and awe, extends his magical strength beyond himself to feel for dim movements of threat. Out of the wind comes the rancid odor of wild men—brigands, no doubt. He does not care to know who they are but uses his magic to project a sense of threat into the woods ahead. He imagines spitting serpents and rampant lions.

  The Furor feels the threat even as he climbs the Storm Tree. The sun shakes like a fist in the infinite blue. His eyes have not yet adjusted to the light. His heart, too, still carries darkness from the underworld, and fright wedges itself in his chest.

  Not out of fear for himself does he dread a mindless death under the talons of the Dragon. He is old. The coming collapse can only bring him release from his long life of wounds. But the others—the Rovers of the Wild Hunt, and even the dwellers of Middle Earth, the small people like Cissa and his heroic father—what will become of them without him?

  From a low branch, he gazes back at earth—the dark rind of approaching night, pastel fumes of sunset and the honey plasma that is afternoon. This beauty maligns his fear, as if nothing evil or sorrowing could exist down there among such glorious brilliance.

  And yet, unlike most other gods, he has walked the hide of the Dragon and seen the luckless strivings of the tribes for himself.

  The mute moon's face knows. It sees into the darkness. Once the north people had only the night predators to fear and fire to stave them. Then the Romans came with machines of destruction and dreams of conquest instilled by the Fire Lords.

  Now the night holds new terrors. The familiar earth has grown strange with the blight of cities, roads, fences. In the night, alien dreams swarm over the people, inspiring them with strange ambitions to tame the wilderness and cage the free and unreckonable spirits of the earth.

  And by day, the forests topple, rivers clog with debris, the earth bears the burdens of the Fire Lords' victory.

  What will the gods and the people do without him to defy the tamers of the wild? For the people, he must live, he must go on. And so, he turns away from the marbled clouds, the blue swervings of rivers, and forests wide as summer. He will climb to the Raven's Branch, to the crest of the World Tree, and there hang by his feet until wisdom pours into him.

  He will hang until that wisdom shows him a future beyond his loss of the sword Lightning. Then he will know how to save the earth from his nightmare vision of dead forests and cities with their mills of smoke that poison the wind and the seas. Then he will at last understand how to stop the Fire Lords from their frantic haste to build the Apocalypse.

  Far below the Furor, among the stammering shadows of a birch grove, the Thunderers feel his retreat and the menace of Hannes's magic as an eagerness to get away from Cymru. "We have done all that was asked of us," Aelle says, standing atop a boulder and addressing the blue rondure of the sky, thinking it the wide cape of the Furor.

  "He has gone," Brokk gripes, kicking his boot against a tree trunk and shaking his large head. "And he is angry at me. He thinks I have failed him. But how could I have known the Dragon is not asleep? It has never lain so silent before."

  "The beauty of denial," Cissa chides from where he sits at the base of the boulder, "is the sweetness of the wish."

  Brokk turns on him with an expression furiously ugly as a bat's. "You are the Furor's priest. You should have seen the truth of the Dragon before you let our lord walk the roots of the Storm Tree."

  Cissa ignores him and stands. "Noble Aelle, the All-Seeing Father has indeed departed. He walks now in the lofty boughs of the Great Ash, grateful yet to be alive. We linger not in his thoughts, which move on to other strategies. And so we are freed of all charge to remain in Cymru. As are you, loyal Brokk." The viper-priest casts him a sidelong glance. "The Furor cannot spare you to the Dragon. You are commanded to return to your workshop. The sword Lightning belongs now to the Daoine Sid."

  With both hands, Brokk rubs his gold-tufted scalp, his frustration as irritating as lice. "I took the sword back from Lailoken—that thief! It was mine again! My own beautiful creation in my hands again."

  "Take with you the satisfaction that the demon-wizard Lailoken paid for his thievery with his life," Aelle consoles, stepping down the creased side of the boulder. "The Dragon has devoured him along with the Roman witch, her champion the Eagle of Thor, and our craven Fen. All orts in the Dragon's maw now."

  Brokk smiles, but darkly. "You do not truly believe you have seen the last of Lailoken? Simply because he calls himself Merlin, do not mistake him for a common and vulnerable man. He is a demon, older than the gods, and he knows all of wisdom and cunning that pain can teach. Mark what I say, Thunderers. Merlin will walk Middle Earth again."

  The dwarf touches each of the Thunderers with an aspect of cold portent. Then, feeling uneasy himself from the near-lethal encounter with the Dragon, he barges into the underbrush and vanishes among trembling branches.

  "Merlin may yet live," Aelle concedes, "yet the Thunderer we came here to take back from our enemy is gone to the Dragon—a just fate for one of our own who chose captivity over death in battle. Let us leave his unhappy memory here in these dismal hills and return now to our clan in the lowlands."

  Their flesh still stinking with the fetid taint of the underworld and their souls darkened by the shadow of the Dragon, the Thunderers readily agree. Aelle leads them west into the high bush. Out of sight, they will slink like wolves through their enemy's woods to the headland where their boats lie hidden under dunes.

  Fen does not see them depart. Wracked by the lamia's hunger, he lurches through briars, exploding thorns and branches with his m
onster's strength to leap ahead of the horses he pursues and to snatch Arthor.

  The young rider handles his horse with prescient agility. He vaults a hollow log practically standing in the saddle, then at the jump's peak collapses on its withers and directs the palfrey to twist in midair and dash off askew so that the lamia pounces on empty humus.

  The boy rides as though fused to the animal's heart, as though they share a soul. Melania cannot match him. Time and again, Fen finds himself close enough to strike her while Arthor vanishes through a sudden arch of boughs.

  Each time that Fen holds back the lamia's claws, dire pain tears him. Then, when Arthor spins around to dash back for her, the palfrey leaps and squirms like a hare, and the lamia cannot fix on him long enough to strike.

  Melania realizes that she only endangers Arthor by holding him back, and she peels away. Immediately, the lamia squats to a shagbark stump, hoping to trap Arthor when he turns back to follow her. Fen kneels within the illusion, panting for breath, glad for the respite, while Arthor reins his palfrey to a tight circle, looking for the lamia.

  Bounding as fast as she can through the torn rickrack of briars where the lamia cut through, Melania returns to the narrowing hole that pierces the hollow hills. It has shrunk to a vaporous gap just large enough for her to leap through without dismounting.

  Through rags of mist, she gallops down wide mountain slopes, intent on returning to the sky lakes where she stood before the Furor. She has come back to find the lodestone dagger.

  The small hole broken in the sod of the nether sky burns red as a rose behind her, its petals tightening. Open space spreads wide before her, mossy slopes, grassy plains, and the green lakes of the mermaids. Their singing falters on the wind, full of sadness. The gleeman's gray mare that Brokk rode grazes in tall hay on the savanna.