That was when someone had come up behind her and hit her on the head.
Now she knew why ordinary folk avoided the forest; it was the home of bandits. And she knew what her fate was going to be. Only the strength of the hold the chieftain had over his men had kept her from that fate until now. He had decreed that they would wait until all the men were back from their errands—and then they would draw lots for their turns at her . . . .
Leonie was so terrified that she was beyond thought; she huddled like a witless rabbit inside her robe and prayed for death.
“What’s this?” the bandit chief said, loudly, startling her so that she raised her head out of the folds of her sleeves. She saw nothing at first; only the dark bulking shapes of men against the fire in their midst. He laughed, long and hard, as another of his men entered their little clearing, shoving someone in front of him.“By Satan’s arse! The woods are sprouting wenches!”
Elfrida caught her breath at the curse; so, these men were not “just” bandits—they were the worst kind of bandit, nobles gone beyond the law. Only one who was once a follower of the White Christ would have used his adversary’s name as an exclamation. No follower of the Old Way, either Moon- or Blood-path would have done so.
The brigand who had captured her shoved her over to land beside another girl—and once again she caught her breath, as her talisman-bag swung loose on its cord, and the other girl shrunk away, revealing the wooden beads and cross at the rope that served her as a belt. Worse and worse—the girl wore the robes of one who had vowed herself to the White Christ! There would be no help there . . . if she were not witless before she had been caught, she was probably frightened witless now. Even if she would accept help from the hands of a “pagan.”
Leonie tried not to show her hope. Another girl! Perhaps between the two of them, they could manage to win free!
But as the girl was shoved forward, to drop to the needles beside Leonie, something swung free of her robe to dangle over her chest. It was a little bag, on a rawhide thong.
And the bandit chief roared again, this time with disapproval, seizing the bag and breaking the thong with a single, cruelly hard tug of his hand. He tossed it out into the darkness and backhanded the outlaw who had brought the girl in.
“You witless bastard!” he roared. “You brought in a witch!” A witch?
Leonie shrunk away from her fellow captive. A witch? Blessed Jesu—this young woman would be just as pleased to see Leonie raped to death! She would probably call up one of her demons to help!
As the brigand who had been struck shouted and went for his chief’s throat, and the others gathered around, yelling encouragement and placing bets, she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and prayed. Blessed Mother of God! hear me. Angels of grace, defend us. Make them forget us for just a moment . . . .
As the brainless child started in fear, then pulled away, bowed her head, and began praying, Elfrida kept a heavy hand on her temper. Bad enough that she was going to die—and in a particularly horrible way—but to have to do it in such company!
But—suddenly the outlaws were fighting. One of them appeared to be the chief; the other the one who had caught her. And they were ignoring the two girls as if they had somehow forgotten their existence . . . .
Blessed Mother, hear me. Make it so.
The man had only tied her with a bit of leather, no stronger than the thong that had held her herb-bag. If she wriggled just right, bracing her tied hands against her feet, she could probably snap it.
She prayed, and pulled. And was rewarded with the welcome release of pressure as the thong snapped.
She brought her hands in front of her, hiding them in her tunic, and looked up quickly; the fight had involved a couple more of the bandits. She and the other girl were in the shadows now, for the fire had been obscured by the men standing or scuffling around it. If she crept away quickly and quietly—
No sooner thought than done. She started to crawl away, got as far as the edge of the firelight, then looked back.
The other girl was still huddled where she had been left, eyes closed. Too stupid or too frightened to take advantage of the opportunity to escape.
If Elfrida left her there, they probably wouldn’t try to recapture her. They’d have one girl still, and wouldn’t go hunting in the dark for the one that had gotten away . . . .
Elfrida muttered an oath, and crawled back.
Leonie huddled with the witch-girl under the shelter of a fallen tree, and they listened for the sounds of pursuit. She had been praying as hard as she could, eyes closed, when a painful tug on the twine binding her wrists had made her open her eyes.
“Well, come on!” the girl had said, tugging again. Leonie had not bothered to think about what the girl might be pulling her into, she had simply followed, crawling as best she could with her hands tied, then getting up and running when the girl did.
They had splashed through a stream, running along a moonlit path, until Leonie’s sides ached. Finally the girl had pulled her off the path and shoved her under the bulk of a fallen tree, into a little dug-out den she would never have guessed was there. From the musky smell, it had probably been made by a fox or badger. Leonie huddled in the dark, trying not to sob, concentrating on the pain in her side and not on the various fates the witch-girl could have planned for her.
Before too long, they heard shouts in the distance, but they never came very close. Leonie strained her ears, holding her breath, to try and judge how close their pursuers were, and jumped when the witch-girl put a hand on her.
“Don’t,” the girl whispered sharply. “You won’t be going far with your hands tied like that. Hold still! I’m not going to hurt you.”
Leonie stuttered something about demons, without thinking. The girl laughed.
“If I had a demon to come when I called, do you think I would have let a bastard like that lay hands on me?” Since there was no logical answer to that question, Leonie wisely kept quiet. The girl touched her hands, and then seized them; Leonie kept herself from pulling away, and a moment later, felt the girl sawing at her bonds with a bit of sharp rock. Every so often the rock cut into Leonie instead of the twine, but she bit her lip and kept quiet, gratitude increasing as each strand parted. “What were you doing out here, anyway?” the girl asked. “I thought they kept your kind mewed up like prize lambs.”
“I had a vision—” Leonie began, wondering if by her words and the retelling of her holy revelation, the witch-girl might actually be converted to Christianity. It happened that way all the time in the tales of the saints, after all . . . .
So while the girl sawed patiently at the bonds with the sharp end of the rock, Leonie told her everything, from the time she realized that something was wrong, to the moment the bandit took her captive. The girl stayed silent through all of it, and Leonie began to hope that she might bring the witch-girl to the Light and Life of Christ.
The girl waited until she had obviously come to the end, then laughed, unpleasantly. “Suppose, just suppose,” she said, “I were to tell you that the exact same vision was given to me? Only it isn’t some mystical cup that this land needs, it’s the Cauldron of Cerridwen, the ever-renewing, for the High King refuses to sacrifice himself to save his kingdom as the Holy Bargain demands and only the Cauldron can give the land the blessing of the Goddess.”
The last of the twine snapped as she finished, and Leonie pulled her hands away. “Then I would say that your vision is wrong, evil,” she retorted. “There is no goddess, only the Blessed Virgin—”
“Who is one face of the Goddess, who is Maiden, Mother and Wise One,” the girl interrupted, her words dripping acid. “Only a fool would fail to see that. And your White Christ is no more than the Sacrificed One in one of His many guises—it is the Cauldron the land needs, not your apocryphal Cup—”
“Your cauldron is some demon-thing,” Leonie replied, angrily. “Only the Grail—”
Whatever else she was going to say was lost, as the tree-tru
nk above them was riven into splinters by a bolt of lightning that blinded and deafened them both for a moment.
When they looked up, tears streaming from their eyes, it was to see something they both recognized as The Enemy.
Standing over them was a shape, outlined in a glow of its own. It was three times the height of a man, black and hairy like a bear, with the tips of its outstretched claws etched in fire. But it was not a bear, for it wore a leather corselet, and its head had the horns of a bull, the snout and tusks of a boar, dripping foam and saliva, and its eyes, glowing an evil red, were slitted like a goat’s.
Leonie screamed and froze. The witch-girl seized her bloody wrist, hauled her to her feet, and ran with her stumbling along behind.
The beast roared and followed after. They had not gotten more than forty paces down the road, when the witch-girl fell to the ground with a cry of pain, her hand slipping from Leonie’s wrist.
Her ankle—Leonie thought, but no more, for the beast was shambling towards them. She grabbed the girl’s arm and hauled her to her feet; draped her arm over her own shoulders, and dragged her erect. Up ahead there was moonlight shining down on something—perhaps a clearing, and perhaps the beast might fear the light—
She half-dragged, half-guided the witch-girl towards that promise of light, with the beast bellowing behind them. The thought crossed her mind that if she dropped the girl and left her, the beast would probably be content with the witch and would not chase after Leonie . . . .
No, she told herself, and stumbled onward.
They broke into the light, and Leonie looked up—
And sank to her knees in wonder.
Elfrida fell beside the other girl, half-blinded by tears of pain, and tried to get to her feet. The beast—she had to help Leonie up, they had to run—
Then she looked up.
And fell again to her knees, this time stricken not with pain, but with awe. And though she had never felt power before, she felt it now; humming through her, blood and bone, saw it in the vibration of the air, in the purity of the light streaming from the Cup—
The Cup held in the hand of a man, whose gentle, sad eyes told of the pain, not only of His own, but of the world’s, that for the sake of the world, He carried on His own shoulders.
Leonie wept, tears of mingled joy and fear—joy to be in the Presence of One who was all of Light and Love, and fear, that this One was She and not He—and the thing that she held, spilling over the Light of Love and Healing was Cauldron and not Cup.
I was wrong—she thought, helplessly.
Wrong? said a loving, laughing Voice. Or simply—limited in vision?
And in that moment, the Cauldron became a Cup, and the Lady became the Lord, Jesu—then changed again, to a man of strange, draped robes and slanted eyes, who held neither Cup nor Cauldron, but a cup-shaped Flower with a jeweled heart—a hawk-headed creature with a glowing stone in His hand—a black-skinned Woman with a bright Bird—
And then to another shape, and another, until her eyes were dazzled and her spirit dizzied, and she looked away, into the eyes of Elfrida. The witch-girl—Wise Girl whispered the Voice in her mind, and Quest-Companion—looked similarly dazzled, but the joy in her face must surely mirror Leonie’s. The girl offered her hand, and Leonie took it, and they turned again to face—
A Being of light, neither male nor female, and a dazzling Cup as large as a Cauldron, the veil covering it barely dimming its brilliance.
Come, the Being said, you have proved yourselves worthy.
Hand in hand, the two newest Grail Maidens rose, and followed the shining beacon into the Light.
It was inevitable that the Holy Grail anthology would spawn an Excalibur anthology. I kept promising to write the story and things got in the way . . . like other deadlines! But bless their hearts, they held a place for me, and here is the story itself. It’s not at all like the Grail story; in fact, it’s not a very heroic story, which may surprise some people.
Once and Future
Mercedes Lackey
Michael O’Murphy woke with the mother of all hangovers splitting his head in half, churning up his stomach like a winter storm off the Orkneys, and a companion in his bed.
What in Jaysus did I do last night?
The pain in his head began just above his eyes, wrapped around the sides, and met in the back. His stomach did not bear thinking about. His companion was long, cold, and unmoving, but very heavy.
I took a board to bed? Was I that hard up for a sheila? Michael, you’re slipping!
He was lying on his side, as always. The unknown object was at his back. At the moment it was no more identifiable than a hard presence along his spine, uncomfortable and unyielding. He wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to find out exactly what it was until he mentally retraced his steps of the previous evening. Granted, this was irrational, but a man with the mother of all hangovers is not a rational being.
The reason for his monumental drunk was clear enough in his mind; the pink slip from his job at the docks, presented to him by the foreman at the end of the day. That would be yesterday, Friday, if I haven’t slept the weekend through.
He wasn’t the only bloke cashiered yesterday; they’d laid off half the men at the shipyard. So it’s back on the dole, and thank God Almighty I didn’t get serious with that little bird I met on holiday. Last thing I need is a woman nagging at me for losing me job and it wasn’t even me own fault. Depression piled atop the splitting head and the foul stomach. Michael O’Murphy was not the sort of man who accepted the dole with any kind of grace other than ill.
He cracked his right eye open, winced at the stab of light that penetrated into his cranium, and squinted at the floor beside his bed.
Yes, there was the pink slip, crumpled into a wad, beside his boots—and two bottles of Jameson’s, one empty, the other half-full and frugally corked.
Holy Mary Mother of God. I don’t remember sharing out that often, so I must’ve drunk most of it myself. No wonder I feel like a walk through Purgatory.
He closed his eye again, and allowed the whiskey bottle to jog a few more memories loose. So, he’d been sacked, and half the boys with him. And they’d all decided to drown their sorrows together.
But not at a pub, and not at pub prices. You can’t get royally, roaring drunk at a pub unless you’ve got a royal allowance to match. So we all bought our bottles and met at Tommy’s place.
There’d been a half-formed notion to get shellacked there, but Tommy had a car, and Tommy had an idea. He’d seen some nonsense on the telly about “Iron Johns” or some such idiocy, over in America—
Said we was all downtrodden and “needed to get in touch with our inner selves”; swore that we had to get “empowered” to get back on our feet, and wanted to head out into the country—There’d been some talk about “male bonding” ceremonies, pounding drums, carrying on like a lot of Red Indians—and drinking of course. Tommy went on like it was some kind of communion; the rest of them had already started on their bottles before they got to Tommy’s, and at that point, a lot of pounding and dancing half-naked and drinking sounded like a fine idea. So off they went, crammed into Tommy’s aging Morris Minor with just enough room to get their bottles to their lips.
At some point they stopped and all piled out; Michael vaguely recalled a forest, which might well have been National Trust lands and it was a mercy they hadn’t been caught and hauled off to gaol. Tommy had gotten hold of a drum somewhere; it was in the boot with the rest of the booze. They all grabbed bottles and Tommy got the drum, and off they went into the trees like a daft May Day parade, howling and carrying on like bleeding loonies.
How Tommy made the fire—and why it hadn’t been seen, more to the point!—Michael had not a clue. He remembered a great deal of pounding on the drum, more howling, shouting and swearing at the bosses of the world, a lot of drinking, and some of the lads stripping off their shirts and capering about like so many monkeys. About then was when I got an itch for some
quiet. He and his bottles had stumbled off into the trees, following an elusive moonbeam, or so he thought he remembered. The singing and pounding had faded behind him, and in his memory the trees loomed the way they had when he was a nipper and everything seemed huge. They were like trees out of the old tales, as big as the one they call Robin Hood’s Oak in Sherwood. There was only one way to go since he didn’t even consider turning back, and that was to follow the path between them, and the fey bit of moonlight that lured him on.
Was there a mist? I think there was. Wait! That was when the real path appeared. There had been mist, a curious, blue mist. It had muffled everything, from the sounds of his own footsteps to the sounds of his mates back by the fire. Before too very long, he might have been the only human being alive in a forest as old as time and full of portentous silence.
He remembered that the trees thinned out at just about the point where he was going to give up his ramble and turn back. He had found himself on the shores of a lake. It was probably an ordinary enough pond by daylight, but last night, with the mist drifting over it and obscuring the farther shore, the utter and complete silence of the place, and the moonlight pouring down over everything and touching everything with silver, it had seemed . . . uncanny, a bit frightening, and not entirely in the real world at all.
He had stood there with a bottle in each hand, a monument to inebriation, held there more by inertia than anything else, he suspected. He could still see the place as he squeezed his eyes shut, as vividly as if he stood there at that moment. The water was like a sheet of plate glass over a dark and unimaginable void; the full moon hung just above the dark mass of the trees behind him, a great round Chinese lantern of a moon, and blue-white mist floated everywhere in wisps and thin scarves and great opaque billows. A curious boat rested by the bank not a meter from him, a rough-hewn thing apparently made from a whole tree-trunk and shaped with an axe. Not even the reeds around the boat at his feet moved in the breathless quiet.
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