And there were often times when a wildly jealous Cai hated the air he breathed and the ground he walked on. But he was so amiable, kind, and good at everything he did that no one, certainly not any of his numerous amours, could stay out of temper with him long.
So he was forgiven trespasses that might have gotten other men killed on the spot. And he walked in the golden beauty of the goddess’s protection.
Ena was afraid, and so broke constantly in on Cai’s thoughts with querulous inquiries. “Where are we going?”
“Why are we riding so fast?” “I’m not sure I can keep up.”
“When do we stop?” “Will we slow down?” “Why don’t you answer me?”
Cai began to laugh. “Too many,” he said. “Pick one.”
“Oh, God, you Britons are terrible. I can never get a straight answer from you. My mother told me … she warned me—”
“My sweet,” Cai broke in, “I can keep company with your mother, two aunts, and a cousin. They all have opinions about everything—at least to hear you tell it, they do. But aren’t you afraid your own dear self will get lost in the crowd?”
This silenced Ena for a few moments, while she sorted it out. Then she began to snivel. “Now I can’t talk about my family to you at all. Aren’t you ashamed to be such a tyrant?”
“And yet another question,” Cai said. “Let me see if I can sum it up. To Morgana. He wants to get as far from Tintigal as he can today. You can keep up. Plainly, you are doing it. We will stop soon, and we will slow down because he can’t push the horses so fast for so long. I have answered you, and no, I am not ashamed.”
Ena had to sort this out, also. And she was silenced for a time.
They did slow down, because as they distanced themselves from Tintigal, the road grew worse. As they pushed deeper into the forest, mist hung heavy in the trees, blocking out the light and impairing visibility.
Cai pulled his horse in and rode knee to knee with Ena. Gawain moved up from the rear and eased beside him.
“I don’t like it,” he said, frowning. “This stinks of magic.”
Ena was pale; she pulled her horse’s reins and began to slow.
“No, Ena,” Cai said. “Keep up.”
“We can’t go on running like this,” she replied. “It’s getting so I can’t see anything.”
And indeed, Uther’s oath men ahead were slowing also. The fog grew thicker and thicker.
“What do you mean about magic?” she asked Gawain.
“We started our ride in the morning sunshine, and then murk closes in around us. It’s unnatural.”
“That’s what magic is,” Ena said. “A betrayal of our expectations—the things we depend on for our very lives. When the magic rules, fire is cold, water burns, age is youth, and youth …”
She had almost stopped moving. The fog was blinding, and she ceased speaking because the three heard the sound of hooves thudding behind them.
“That will be Arthur,” Cai said.
“Will it?” Gawain said.
“Who else?” Ena said. Her face was pale. Her long blond hair, darkened by moisture, hung in damp rat tails on each side of her face and down her back.
“I can no longer see anything ahead of me,” Cai said.
Their horses were walking now.
“I can’t hear them either,” Ena whispered. “We’ve gotten separated from the rest somehow.”
The fog was a white wall around them. Trees, bushes, even the wet, oozing, muddy track they were riding along were almost hidden by the vapor.
Arthur’s horse rose into view behind them, with a figure in the saddle. He was wearing the robes of the summer king, the dragon embroidered on the heavy dalmatic.
Why now, for travel? Cai thought. The royal robes might be appropriate for a banquet or an affair of state, but for riding through a dripping wood? No.
Gawain, Cai, and Ena pulled their horses onto the grassy verge. Arthur’s stallion, still moving at a trot, drew level with them and began to pass.
Cai gave a sigh of relief at the two pale hands on the reins. That was all he could see. The hood of the dalmatic was up.
“My lord …” he said.
The figure on the stallion ignored him.
Ena was a bit ahead of Cai.
“My lord,” she echoed his cry, and reached out. Her fingers brushed the sleeve of Arthur’s court garb.
That was all it took.
The stallion slowed. The figure in the saddle turned toward the watching trio.
Cai felt a shock of absolute terror as he saw his friend’s face with the naked, empty eye sockets of a skull.
“Arthur,” he whispered.
But then it began to dissolve. Sand poured from every opening in the clothing, until at last a yellowed skull toppled from the top of a neck made of sticks to roll through the muddy puddles at their horses’ feet.
Gawain leaped from his saddle. He kicked at the remains—sticks, bones, sand, dried leaves, and the ancient skull.
Cai followed, lifting Ena down from her horse.
“He’s dead,” she whispered, staring at the skull.
“No!” Gawain said. “No!”
When Gawain felt the world, his senses were extended beyond those of his companions. This is a gift we all share to some extent, the knowledge of where we are with respect to time, space, inanimate objects, and animate others. But his gift was heightened by his supernatural ancestry. When he approached anyone, man or woman, he could tell what they were feeling and, often as not, what they were thinking. He need only brush a woman’s face with the tips of his fingers and he knew instantly how to bring her to a state of quivering ecstasy. He was similarly effective at defusing the anger and envy of men, persuading them to like him and to obey his requests and commands.
He knelt, lifted a handful of sand that had composed the limbs of the semblance and let it trickle through his fingers. The sense of wrongness was palpable. The fog surrounding them grew thicker by the moment. He felt a tendril brush his sleeve.
Real fog is moist and cool. Neither coolness nor moisture was resident in this cloud. Instead, he felt the deadly chill that is the first warning that the dead are present.
The miasmic vapor sucked the life from everything it touched. The trees were burdened with it, not refreshed as they might have been by real fog. It silvered the bark and leaves with the icy touch of midwinter hoarfrost. And he knew it would kill first the vegetation around them, then the denizens of the forest, locking them in its icy embrace until all warmth was sucked from their flesh into a frigid silence. It was already striking at the humans gathered here around the evil travesty of life, made vulnerable by grief.
Birds were his mother’s creatures. Not his human mother—the other one. And he remembered how he had first seen her through the wings of a bird as it spread them to take flight between his eyes and the sun. Each feather clearly delineated, each a wondrous construction that gave the bird flight. A translucent beauty, an ordered pattern glowing with the fire of the sun shining through them.
Mother! Mother! Answer me! Help me! And she did.
“No,” Gawain said. “He—it—never was alive. It was only a semblance … intended to fool us for a short time.”
Cai turned to Ena. The expression of fixed terror on her face was in itself frightening.
“What did I do?” she whispered.
“Nothing,” Gawain assured her. “Nothing. The thing would have dissolved in a short time in any event. Your touch broke the spell that held it together.”
“What did I do?” Ena asked again, as though she hadn’t heard him.
“Cai! Kiss her!” Gawain said.
“What?” Cai asked almost stupidly.
“Kiss her. She is in danger. The spell leaped from the semblance to her mind. The thing was … was … man-trapped. It was supposed to get one of us. Instead, it got her. Kiss her, for God’s sake. If you love her, kiss her.”
Cai pulled Ena’s body against his and pressed hi
s lips to hers.
He released her, feeling as though a thousand tiny insects covered his body.
“No! It’s just a game with you men!” Ena screamed.
“No game, this,” Cai said, lifting her into his arms and carrying her into the fog-drowned woods.
The wind was beginning to blow. He threw her onto a bank of thick bracken, just out of sight of the road.
“I want you,” he snarled.
“Yes! Yes!” Ena panted. “Oh, yes! I smell the sea. Ah, God, how it pounds the rocks at midnight.”
Salt water was in her mouth, blood from his lips. He’d bitten them in the ferocity of his need. The wind was blowing more and more strongly, tearing the fog around them to tatters.
Gawain, standing in the road, looking at the debris of Merlin’s spell and clinging to the terrified horses’ reins, listened to the cries. Both human and those of the forest; giant trees sobbing now and moaning in the blast.
He smiled, a grim smile. Cai and Ena were throwing Merlin’s sorcery back in his face.
They were fiercely joined now, the forest around them crying out with passion, both its and theirs. Cai thrust his tongue almost into Ena’s throat. Her loins opened as he had never felt them open before—moist, hot, flowing with need.
“In! In!” She pulled her mouth away from his to speak. “In! I want all of you. All of you.”
Cai threw back his head as the overpowering spasms of his completion shook his body. He felt her nails digging into his buttocks, the slight pain driving him to even more ecstatic heights. It wrung an outcry from him more animal than human.
Then she screamed, seemingly almost scalded by her own desire. And it ended with the sun on his bare back and in her eyes as it shone through the high canopy of the forest above.
And around them, the thickets were stirred to beauty by birdsong and the summer breeze.
“He is taken,” Gawain told Uther.
Uther kicked at the sand, clothes, and skull piled in the road. The three, Cai, Gawain, and Ena. With the exception of Gawain none of them would look him in the eye.
Uther’s face was hard as a mountain crag.
“When?” he asked.
“Probably before we left Tintigal,” was Gawain’s reply.
“This thing—” he gestured toward the remnants “—was likely only intended to fool us for a short time.”
Ena closed her eyes. She placed her hand over the child in her belly, thinking, I can plead pregnancy. She glanced up at Cai’s set face. Not that it will do much good. He will likely hang the father beside both mother and child. There is a chance the two men will escape. Uther won’t want to irritate his own family or break off an alliance with the king of the Outer Isles, Gawain’s father, Lot.
“I left him to go with Ena,” Cai said.
Gawain’s eyes closed. “I left him to dally with a woman.”
“Yes,” Uther said. “And I with seventy brave men at my beck and call. I let him go to his room alone. Let us not try to assign guilt.”
Uther sensed relaxation in the three confronting him. They had been afraid they would face the irrational, unleashed fury of a king.
And there was fury enough in him. But he hadn’t become high king of the Britons by being unable to control his emotions, and he hadn’t held power so long by engaging in self-destructive savagery.
These three loved the boy as much as he did. Yes, he thought, turning away. He would love to hang, or better yet, burn or crucify someone, or even several someones. But certainly not his sister’s grandson or a prince of the blood like Gawain.
As for the girl … God! Might as well hang his son’s horse. It was standing in the road beside the remains of the semblance, looking as bewildered as the humans gathered there.
“I don’t know if it’s any comfort to you, my lord, but I believe we were all hoodwinked. I cannot think we were all remiss, not all at once—by accident.”
Uther glanced back at Gawain.
“Sometimes,” Gawain continued, “magic is most powerful when it is least seen.”
Uther remembered Gerlos long ago being driven to despair by Igrane’s desertion. He had used Merlin then to destroy the king of Dumnonia. Somehow Gerlos knew within the hour that Igrane lay with the Pendragon. And later, Uther had felt responsible for Gerlos’s despair and suicide. Now he was certain that Merlin had sent the news of Igrane’s betrayal to Gerlos.
“The last thing I should be guilty of right now is rashness or folly,” Uther said. “Speak.” He turned to Gawain. “You know more of magic, Hawk of May, than any of us. What is your thought?”
Gawain said, “Likely he—Arthur I mean—is not at Tintigal any longer but has been taken somewhere else. The Saxon pirates who harry our shores are in Merlin’s debt—deeply in his debt. And Arthur would have been given to them to transport God knows where. If you return to Tintigal, I think you will find the causeway to the mainland held against you; and your brave oath men will die in large numbers to win admittance for you. If, indeed, they can. Merlin’s personal guard will die to a man to keep you out. And likely, when they are dead, the queen and her lover will be gone also.”
Uther nodded. His mind turned inward. I should, he thought, do nothing, at least nothing right now. Sometimes that was the most difficult thing to do—nothing. I must speak with Morgana in the ancient land of the Silures—Wales, those damned Saxons called it. Typical of their arrogance, that they should name the ancient rulers of this country foreigners.
Before the Romans, the Silures, his people, had begun to enter the larger world of cities and trade. But when the Romans came, they went back to their forests. The low mountain meadows of their land offered rich summer grazing to cattle, sheep, and horses. The valleys were drowned deep in sometimes impenetrable forests. The tribes moved among them, clearing land to plant and then, as quickly, leaving when and if the Romans made too much of a nuisance of themselves.
The Romans demanded tribute. Not knowing much about the people they had no idea how much they could demand. As a result, they got almost nothing. And the Silures themselves organized their customs in such a way as to avoid the conquest and exploitation to which the other tribes had been subjected.
How they loved threes—and every Silurian had three identities: his family, his tribe, and his, or for that matter, her, warrior society.
Hawk of May, Gawain, was one of the people of the hawk, born, as it was thought, of the union of his mother with a hawk. There were others, many others.
Arthur the Bear. Morgana—yes, Morgana—an Owl. Cai, the Seal. Most belonged to and had been initiated into more than one society. They tied what should have been a very divided people into one, since the societies cut across class, family, tribes, and were purely adoptive organizations. And they accepted both women and men.
How the church hated that, and Uther had been more than once the object of sermons by churchmen who wanted him to deprive women of the right to bear arms. But he turned his face away from the idea. He had no desire to infuriate his people; and besides, more than once the fierce women of the Silures had been the difference between victory and defeat.
He drew Gawain aside.
“How many of the lords of the wild will entertain you in their dwellings?”
“All of them,” Gawain answered. “I am an oath man of the summer king. He is beloved. Morgana saw that they were all feasted.”
“Wise,” Uther whispered.
“None wiser,” Gawain said in agreement.
“Ride on ahead and spread the word.”
Gawain nodded.
“Ask that they hold themselves in readiness for my call.” Gawain nodded again.
“Caution them to do nothing without my word,” Uther continued.
“But of course I will take the head of that filthy necromancer and his leman, should I happen to stumble somehow upon them … but I cannot think I will be so lucky. The pair will know to keep well away from me or any loyal to me.”
Uther’s hand
closed so tightly on Gawain’s shoulder that the young man, strong as he was, flinched.
“I’m sorry. Pray excuse me,” he said to Gawain.
“Not at all,” Gawain answered.
“As for myself,” Uther told him, “I will go and speak to Morgana. I want that bastard Merlin dead! And she will know best how to accomplish that.”
“My lord,” Gawain said quietly to the torment he saw in Uther’s eyes, “I do not think they will kill him. I don’t think they would dare. When Vortigen was murdered, Merlin was sure the Saxons would prevail. But they didn’t. In fact, they were forced to flee in large numbers. What they need is a high king who will accommodate them; and thanks to your artifices, Arthur is the only heir.”
“How did you know that was deliberate?” Uther asked.
“Am I a fool?” Gawain whispered. “You forsook the queen’s bed and have not—since Arthur was fostered with Morgana—lain with a woman who could begin to claim the high kingship for her son. Pleasant ladies all, I’m sure, but very, very low-ranking women.”
Uther said, “Yes, every one of them. And I have endeavored not to get any of them with child. It is that, and that alone, that protects Arthur now. But God help the boy, it won’t protect him from the kind of pain those two devils can inflict on him. And are probably inflicting now.”
Again Gawain was forced to flinch by Uther’s grip. “My lord,” he said, “the Veneti call all along the coast to trade and get timber. Word from the lords of the wildwood might frighten the pair, if nothing else.”
“I give you leave to try,” Uther said. “It might help my son and make that brace of reptiles think twice before they commit the worst atrocities. Ride now, and may God go with you.”
NINE
WADED OUT INTO THE WATER TO CONFRONT the dragon. He was yet another kind, marked like an orca, almost blue-black on top and white beneath. His back was hard with a succession of dark plates, each with a spine, decorating him from nose to tail. His body was very slim, even slimmer than that of the black dragon’s. And his fangs were prominent, even with his mouth closed. They projected from his top jaw past the lower jaw and were visible against his white underbody.
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