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

by A. A. Attanasio

  "Faeries!" she calls out as she tramples ferns on the speckled shore of an ice green lake. "The stone dagger! Where is it?"

  She cranes about and spots mica flashes higher up the slope, where she had run past. Rushing back there, she dismounts with her horse still moving and leaps three big steps before she stops. Faeries bob their luminous bodies in the strong green grass. When Melania kneels, she finds among the tall stalks the lode-stone knife, its quartz haft and speckled blade intact.

  She croons thanks to the faeries, tucks the knife in her waistband, and clambers onto her mare. Riding hard uphill goes slower. She kicks and shouts for speed, watching the ruddy shaft of daylight dwindle. Fields of hay heads and feather grass brush past like racing clouds, and with a sweep of shade the hole dims like sunfall.

  Melania stops atop the mountain summit, at the crest of the massive stalagmite that touches the turf sky of the hollow hills. Already, ethereal underlights among the rootweave breathe again, quickening to mistings of stars. Where the hole had been, a cool wind yet sweeps from above. She draws the lode-knife and strikes at the scuts of overlaid moss, opening a fissure in the tightening braids of roots.

  Standing atop the saddle, she succeeds in cutting a seam wide enough to filter sunlight. Her hands reach up and grasp clumps of sunburned grass. Utilizing all her strength, she pulls herself into the bright cleft and feels the snaky squirmings of the earth.

  The healing magic that seals the hollow hills penetrates her, cutting off her breathing. For a struggling moment, she gasps blue, then gains enough purchase with her elbows out of the hole to extrude the rest of herself. Her sandals slip through just as the ground stitches together beneath her—and from inside the earth, as if from far away, she hears the frightened cry of the gray mare.

  Lodestone knife in her fist, she runs back through the ripped briars, calling for Arthor. He hears her from the distance where he has roamed, looking for her, hoping she has circled around but fearing she has gotten lost. He thinks her call is a cry hurled from within the lamia's grasp, and he rushes toward her.

  At the shagbark stump where the lamia waits, the palfrey shies. Arthor sits up taller, looking for the monster.

  Fen unfurls before him half-breathless with blood-need. The lamia strikes over the head of the palfrey.

  Arthor slides from the horse's back and hangs from its side—and the lamia's clawed arm uncoils like a tentacle across the terrified animal's back and seizes his tunic. Screaming, the horse twists, bucks, and throws Arthor free before crashing through the shrubs.

  Fen stands horribly transfigured before the fallen boy. Inhuman with the desperate need of the lamia, the Saxon's flesh looks burned with hunger, black as toadskin. Eyes of squid swivel in his torso, from a skullmask on his ribs, where the ravenous heart of the monster hangs like the dark, flickering lantern of a hellgate. A cage of fangs opens in its bone face.

  Arthor unsheathes Short-Life in a blur that slashes through the abomination. Ichor flies—wobbles in the air in tremulous lobes, then spins back and sheets together like gobs of black mercury reassembling.

  The lamia's claws slice at Arthor, and he chops again, splattering them to bursts of mucilage. They implode and reattach to the skeletal lamia. Deft as vipers, the talons strike, and Arthor whacks them again and does not stop hacking. He shatters the atrocity to a writhing mess of worms and newts.

  Before the defilement can gather itself, Arthor flees. Even as he runs among crowded trees, he hears the wet, slitherous noises of the thing rebounding. Bulgar saber swinging, he spins about and cuts the lamia in two—and it falls together whole. He hews once more, driving downward, splitting the staring skull to the breastbone and twisting the saber to split it apart. And again it fuses whole with an acid sound.

  Arthor backs off, waving Short-Life, his shoulders burning with exertion. The shape of fire passes over the horror, and it assumes the appearance of Melania, arms outstretched beseechingly. "Arthor, help me!"

  He gashes her low, across the knees, and she tumbles forward and sprawls into a squamous writhing of tentacles that coil up his boots. Thwacking furiously, he bangs away the grasping tendrils and dances free.

  "Arthor, I'm here!"

  Heaving for breath and chattering with wild fear, Arthor jumps around and sees Melania rushing toward him. Short-Life sweeps upward, and she falls back with outraged fright.

  "Arthor!" She holds up the lodestone dagger.

  A glance over his shoulder reveals to him the true lamia, flailing toward him with hooked arms and a widening gullet of fangs, incisors, and razor teeth. He curls, reaching behind, and Melania presses the lodestone knife into his hand.

  With the scream of a pierced hawk, the lamia falls back. Its shape wavers watery pale over the quaking filament of Fen's body.

  "Take off the throat band," Arthor cries, lunging to his feet. "Take it off, Fen—or you will die with the lamia!"

  Fen turns and runs.

  "Take off the band!" Arthor calls again, and throws Short-Life.

  The blade strikes the lamia behind the knees and topples it to the ground in a snaky thrash. Arthor closes in, lodestone knife poised.

  Rolling to its back, the lamia lashes at Arthor with barbed arms. A gouge of the magnetic knife shrivels it to an aqueous sheen around Fen's naked and shivering body.

  Arthor seizes the guardian band and yanks it free from Fen's throat. The lamia comes with it. Its harrowing face of boneplates and fiery sockets whirls about to attack Fen, and Arthor pierces its skull with the lodestone dagger.

  A vibrant shriek and a blast of hot effluvium heave Arthor to his back. Above him, the lamia blazes invisibly, wrinkling to shadows of heat, its woeful, hideous face a black clot shriveling and then gone into nowhere.

  All that remains is a sticky, smoldering gel that drools from the lodestone knife. Arthor throws it into the grass and sits up.

  Fen stands over him, holding the Bulgar saber. Panting for breath, his meat shuddering on his bones, he looks crazed. He raises the sword, blue eyes wide, startled. "Now your life is in my hands, Royal Eagle of Thor."

  "Fen!" Melania shouts. "He saved you."

  The Saxon churns with rage, pride, exhaustion, and disgust. The lamia has violated him. And the Celts and this half-breed boy have violated him. His own clan has done the same and whipped and hanged him in shame. He has been reduced to a husk. And now he must strike before he loses all strength and honor.

  This boy below him, with the remote eyes of a killer, understands. He is, after all, the seed of Saxons. There has been a lethal pact between them from the beginning. He knows there is no alternative to death.

  Melania screams, and with a war whoop that empties his lungs, Fen swings Short-Life and impales it in Arthor's shadow.

  The Saxon totters, drops to his knees, and shrinks over his bones. "Now you are dead," he gasps at the startled boy. "You are dead—and must learn to live all over again."

  Chapter 27: In the Realm of Desire

  Morgeu the Fey sits up from the bed of mushrooms where she lay down to rest. Her hip aches against the knob of a root, and her brain feels as fragile as the delicate heads of toadstools around her. The scent of the hollow hills lingers on her—a balsam of sunset and woodsmoke that muzzies her with sleepiness. She has to shake her head to stay awake.

  In a creek running through deep rows of elm, she bathes, scrubbing herself with ground pine and mint. Working a magical spell that restores her clarity, dressing her chilled body in familiar chants and the scents and sounds of the ordinary woods, she grows stronger.

  By her blood-bond, she feels Arthor. He has escaped the hollow hills and wanders this forest, and she senses his fright amidst wickedness. Somewhere nearby, he trembles.

  Fen, she thinks. When she reaches out with the brails of her heart to touch the lamia, she cannot find it. Cold reaches back, and by that she knows that the monster is dead.

  She looks up through treecrowns, at sunlight wavering in the branches like the shaky light of ca
ndles, and she uses that hypnotic radiance to deepen her trance. Soon, her eyes close.

  She lies back, and a small sun rises in her brain. A body of light, she surfaces through the lake of her face and turns in midair to confront her nakedness floating below her, a pale wisp of fog hugging the hillside.

  Sunlight burns in the numerous windows of the forest. Butterflies plummet through her as she skims over the dark grass, feeling her way toward Arthor by the hum of his blood. She finds him in awe, sitting naked with Melania and Fen in a rain pond. They bathe under a canopy of elders and climbing vines so thick sunlight drizzles into the clearing. They are laughing, the beautiful Roman woman, the thin Saxon, and Arthor.

  "The Furor jumped out of the hollow hills faster than a rabbit." Melania smiles at the forest awning, lying back in the water, her sable tresses spreading like ink.

  Arthor lofts a laugh, then adds, "If he hadn't, we'd all have been eaten by the Dragon."

  "And Brokk!" Melania giggles. "He flew so fast even the lamia couldn't keep up with him."

  "You are brave to have gone back into the hollow hills for the stone dagger," Fen speaks with the amber water lapping at his whiskered chin. "The Furor himself had not the courage to stay—yet you returned."

  "How else to have saved us from the lamia?" Melania says with her eyes closed.

  "You could have outrun me," Fen replies. "I couldn't keep up with your horses."

  "Yet you did." She sits up, spilling water over her brow and cheeks. "More than once, you drew close enough to strike me—and you didn't. You held the lamia back."

  "I knew only you could save me." Fen stares calmly at her with his tired eyes. The lamia's possession has shrunken him closer to his bones, to the white cords of his body. "I couldn't let it kill you."

  "So I became your prey." Arthor groans.

  "I am truly sorry for that, Eagle of Thor." The salt white of Fen's long hair floats weblike. "You are a warrior. You have made a death pact with your sword and have taken many lives. Of the two, I chose you for the lamia. You could have escaped me. Your horsemanship is uncanny."

  Arthor accepts this praise with a barely perceptible nod. "I would not abandon Melania."

  "We saved each other," Melania adds. "Fen spared me, I went back for the blade that saved Arthor, and Arthor risked himself to free Fen from the lamia."

  "We are beholden to each other," Fen agrees, and props himself taller, feet gripped by fingers of sand. "We should go from here together."

  "You will not return to your clan?" Melania asks, keen with interest.

  "I cannot. And I would not." He regards them frankly and without self-pity. "I am not worthy of them. I did not die in battle with the others in my war party."

  "Why did you let Kyner take you captive?" Arthor asks.

  "I was not ready to die." Fen pauses, ashamed. Wasps prowl across the water with their bright colors and seem to hold his interest. At last, he admits, "I did not even want to lead that raid into Cymru. My father commanded me—to test my courage. I failed him."

  "In failing him, you won yourself," Melania heartens him.

  "For what that may be worth," the Saxon mutters.

  "It is worth what you make it, isn't it?" Arthor says. "That is why you did not kill me when you had Short-Life in your hands. That is why you said I am dead and now must learn to live all over again. You were speaking of yourself as well, weren't you?"

  "I suppose."

  Melania drifts closer to where the two men lean against the mossy bank. "We have all died on this journey. When I saw that the treasure I had come to this island to claim was already gone, I died, too. All three of us must be born again."

  "But to what?" Fen wonders.

  "Come to Camelot with Arthor and me." She speaks excitedly. "I am going to recruit among the warlords and chiefs. I want their help in reclaiming my estate in Aquitania. Come with us."

  "You are going to Camelot?" Fen asks Arthor. "I remember you saying that you would never go back to Kyner and his clan, that you were striking out on your own."

  "So I thought," Arthor admits, contritely, "before I died. Now that I must learn to live all over again, I cannot do so alone. I need my family."

  "Kyner will want subservience from you," Fen reminds him.

  "I am ready now to serve."

  "Ha!" The Saxon stands up, astonished, displaying a lean body mottled with lacerations and bruises. "The Royal Eagle of Thor serve? You are the best warrior and horseman in your clan—in any clan, I can truthfully say. How can you tell us that you will serve those less than you?"

  Arthor glances silently at both of them and weighs his words before he says, "I have been in the hollow hills and seen the verges of hell. I have stood before the Furor and met his wrathful judgment. And I have been prey to a lamia—and been killed."

  "And that has humbled you." Melania nods sympathetically.

  "Yes—and more." Arthor, encouraged by the open faces of his listeners, dares speak earnestly, "Not only am I humbled to experience the smallness of my life—I have seen the greatness of God's will. When I prayed for mercy to the Holy Mother, she appealed to God for me, and I was saved—we were all saved. For what? That I should go into the world and find more trouble for myself? I am not so arrogant as to believe that God exists to serve me. I have been saved this one time that I should find myself."

  Fen sits again in the pool and tilts his head curiously. "And what have you found, Royal Eagle of Thor?"

  "I know now that I belong where God has placed me," Arthor answers, head bowed, addressing his reflection in the dark water. "God in His greatness has made me just what I am—a warrior in the household of Chief Kyner and his rightful son Cei. They are my clan's leaders. I am but a foundling. If I love God truly, if I am a true Christian, I will take my place, humbly and with wholehearted devotion."

  Fen shakes his head. "Your god of love is a demanding one. What god would squander a man of your talents on servitude to an oaf like Cei?"

  Arthor responds without hesitation: "A God of justice."

  "Justice?" Fen turns a silent laugh to Melania, then back at Arthor. "Is it just, then, that Melania lose her estate to pagan warriors? That you, a man with Saxon blood, who has battle skills that would make you a chief in a Saxon clan, must serve Celts? What justice is this?"

  "It is divine justice, Fen. It is God's will."

  "I do not understand. Do you, Melania?"

  "No." She shakes her head sadly. "I have no faith anymore—not since my Christian family was destroyed by the barbarian sword. Our tour of hell and our encounter with the Furor has convinced me that this world is ruled not by God or justice or love but by might alone. Arthor, the Furor fled not from your desperate prayer to the Virgin—but from the terrible might of the Dragon."

  "No god cares about our small lives," Fen says. "We survive by our skills alone—or we do not survive at all."

  Arthor faces them with adamant sincerity. "You are both wrong. The God I worship is not a created being like the Furor or the Dragon. Such beings are the powers of this world, yes. But there is a Creator—a God who lives in each part of Creation and yet stands apart, watching and guiding. 'Not one sparrow is forgotten in God's sight. Even the hairs of your head are all counted. So do not be afraid, for you are of more value than many sparrows.'"

  "Is that what your religion teaches?" Fen asks, incredulous.

  "Those are the words of Jesus," Melania replies, looking at Arthor with an unhappy expression. "Then, was God watching when the pagans slew my brothers and my father?"

  Arthor lifts helpless hands, water streaming through his fingers. "Are we to question God for those chosen to die? Each of us has our time."

  "If you are so ready with the words of your Jesus," Fen speaks, "why did you not take succor with him in Kyner's clan? Why did you burn with the desire to flee? Where was Jesus for you then?"

  "Not in my heart," Arthor answers sincerely. "I am ashamed to say, I loved His mother more than Himself."

>   "His mother?" Fen frowns, not comprehending.

  "She is the Lady of Sorrows—she understands my suffering. She has always given me comfort, since I was a child. But I did not listen to her. I did not understand when she told me that love is first. Never abandon."

  "And now you understand?" Fen asks, trying to grasp.

  "I understand that I am, finally, glad to be but a foundling. I would not want to be Cei, to have to fill Kyner's shadow. I thought I wanted that. I used to pretend I was a king. It made me feel important. Now, I see the price of that importance. As a king in this land, one must stand against the likes of the Furor. I certainly do not want that. I never want to face that ferocious god again. I am happy to leave that to the true kings of this land. Let them carry such a frightful burden. I am glad that is not my fate. It will be easy now to serve those who must lead."

  Fen smiles wryly. "So you have found your place as a little man."

  "And happy for it, Fen," Arthor answers easily. "I am going back to Camelot to take my rightful place—as a little man. I will never complain again."

  Melania brushes her fingers against Arthor's cheek. "How sad that you must return without your shield—without the image of the Virgin."

  Arthor squeezes her hand affectionately. "It is only that, an image. She is with me, yet." He faces Fen with a bright countenance. "Will you come with us then—to Camelot?"

  "To a gathering of Celt and Christian warlords?" Fen tucks his chin and shakes his head. "I think not."

  Melania glimpses a pale motion blur in the canopy and glances up to see a dove perch on an overarching bough. "Arthor—look!"

  Fen smiles at their childlike surprise. "It is a bird."

  "Yes," Arthor agrees, and stands up in naked wonder. "A bird—small comfort for the peace I have made with myself."

  Morgeu the Fey has seen enough, and she withdraws through the vaulted spaces of the forest. A fleshy moon hangs among the branches of the day sky, orienting her in the loamy stillness. She finds her way back to the damp sweetness of the creek under the hillside where her body lies naked in the sun.