Sword & Mythos

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

  “Dark Lady of battle.” He nodded. “A name worthy of a valkyrie. I chose you long ago, but I think you have also chosen Me.” Our eyes met, and I trembled at what I recognized in his gaze.

  Josh cleared his throat. “That’s all very inspiring, but what if we don’t come back? It will be like the Lost Colony, except that we’re leaving our stuff behind.”

  I looked at him. I saw the good heart and a soul that had not undergone the testing that armored my own.

  “Josh, you stay. If we don’t return, somebody has to tell them what happened. I order you,” I added, when he began to object, “knight to squire.” I was not his knight, but it was an appeal that would save his self-respect.

  “Yes, my lady. Though they won’t believe me,“ he muttered, but I could see the relief in his eyes.

  The passageway was cold. Near the entrance, we found Susan’s notebook, dropped where she had begun to move faster, compelled by that beat in the blood. I could feel it, too, but it came muted through the armor I had built around my soul.

  A few yards in, the tunnel diverged from the course of the stream and bored more directly into the hill. Walls and floor were smooth, as if some large object had ground off the irregularities as it passed. I found the surface slimed with something acrid and wet. I did not touch it again. From time to time, a side-branch forked off, but it was clear which way my friends had gone. The sound of water faded, but a deep chanting echoed unnervingly through the passageway. I could not identify the words.

  Beyond the third turning, we found bundles — furs, clothing, rusting knives, ornaments of silver or bronze, preserved by the dry cold. Treasured possessions had been dropped as if they had no more meaning. The archeologist in me longed to examine them, but the human trembled, understanding where the lost Greenlanders might have gone.

  Here beneath the rock I at last found darkness, but my companion seemed to carry a light of his own. I no longer recognized him as the man I had called “Harbard.” This was All-Father, Sig-Father, Val-Father, the enigmatic figure that had haunted my dreams. Some called him a god of madness, but there had been times when that madness was all that had kept me sane.

  That might be about to change. Another turn revealed a pale glow that illuminated without warming. I moved with care, but I could have shouted and the people in the cavern before me would not have heard. Dr. DuBois, Susan, Stamford, and all the rest of them shuddered and swayed in some obscene ecstasy, chanting words that hurt my ears. “Tornasuk” might have been among them and a phrase — Ph’nglui mglw’najh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. But the name I heard most often was “Yog-Sothoth ….”

  Within the whirl of light beyond them, a crystal about the size of an orange emitted an eerie glow. As one of the Canadians touched it, the light flared. His face contorted in a last reflex of sanity as he screamed and was consumed. The sphere exploded in a maelstrom of tumbling globes scintillating through a shimmering veil, manifesting and dematerializing in hideous alternation.

  Dr. DuBois and Susan were the next to go. Tendrils of brilliance snaked out from the curdling light to reel the others in. With each sacrifice, the evil illumination grew. “Yog-Sothoth … Yog-Sothoth!” they chanted and died.

  “What are they saying?” I whispered. “What is that thing?”

  “He has many names, some of them very similar to mine. You might say we are two faces of the same power, but he is a creature of the Outer Darkness and I chose long ago to bind my wyrd to that of Middle Earth.”

  Stamford was the last. His features were writhing as he fought the compulsion, but as he, too, passed into Yog-Sothoth’s embrace, his voice was silenced. And in that moment, the full weight of that monstrous consciousness focused on me ….

  I took a step forward, drawn by a light that was darkness, a desire that was the extremity of fear. The Being beyond the veil needed only a last spark of life to burst free. And the horror was that I wanted to give myself to that obscene embrace. I cast a desperate look back at my companion.

  “Bolverk! Bale-worker! Do not betray me!”

  “Valkyrie, you have a warrior’s will to fight and a woman’s will to survive. Use them!” He closed my fingers around the hard wood of his spear.

  A radiance blazed beside me that was, in its own way, as terrible as the one I faced. For a moment, the hunger that drew me lessened and I was able to turn away. The cavern reverberated with words in a dialect of Norse far older than anything I knew. Runes vibrated in my bones.

  Harbard’s body lay like an abandoned husk on the floor. What stood above it was the god as he walks in Asgard, a clean, clear light that pulsed against the foul illumination beyond. But while the voice of the far-crier shook the stone, I also heard him in my heart.

  “Spirit to spirit, I can keep the portal closed. Run! You must shut the Gate in the Middle World.”

  Weeping, I stumbled from the chamber, the spear clutched in my hand, and forced my shaking legs to move. I had passed the first turning and was just beginning to settle into my stride when, behind me, I heard a sound like something heavy being dragged over stone. A wave of stench followed.

  “Run, my long-legged battle maid! Run!”

  I ran on, the god’s command resounding through my brain, ran until light bloomed ahead and with it, a breath of sweet air. Now I could hear the rushing of the stream. I put on a burst of speed, rounded the last turn, and splashed through the water into the innocent light of day.

  My pursuer recoiled. In that moment of respite, I turned and brought up the spear.

  “Be thou forever shut, in Odin’s name!”

  With all the force that remained to me, I struck the surface of the stone. The rock face shattered with a roar like a dying god and the hill collapsed in a maelstrom of shards and spray. As the earth heaved, I was hurled outward and knew no more.

  When I opened my eyes, Josh was bending over me. I still gripped the splinters of Harbard’s walking stick. Our site and the hill behind it had become a pile of rubble, and the stream had disappeared. The sky was an ordinary summer blue. In the distance, I could hear the “chuk-chuk” of a helicopter and knew that the constable from Nuuk had come.

  They were very kind.

  Josh told them how the others had gone into the passageway. When I refused to speak, they decided I was in shock and did not press me. The area was deemed too unstable to search for bodies. Later, they decided to close it to mining, as well.

  Josh’s stone fragment sits now in a case in the National Museum, labeled, “Tornasuk cult. Date unknown.” The story of the lost archeologists has joined that of the Norse colonists as a Greenland mystery.

  When I recovered enough to inquire, I found that there was no entry for a man called “Harbard” in the records of the ministries.

  Could the god who took Harbard’s shape be imprisoned beneath that pile of stone? The old texts say that at Ragnarok, Odin will be devoured by the Wolf, not fall in battle with one of Ymir’s elder kin.

  I still have nightmares, but sometimes, he speaks to me in my dreams.

  THE SERPENTS OF ALBION

  BY ADRIAN CHAMBERLIN

  Bedevere rode into the sunrise, leaving Arthur alone with the slain warriors and the creature that had caused their deaths.

  The knight’s helm and mail armour flared gold in the rising sun, briefly hiding the scarlet gore of battle and bloodshed. It reminded Arthur of his brotherhood of knights’ former glory: how they were like shining gods riding to battle evildoers, to uphold the laws of Arthur’s kingdom and ensure the land prospered for all.

  The dream of Camelot had ended. This was the reality of Arthur’s reign: a charnel pit of twitching corpses, of man and horse bleeding their last together, of raptors gorging on the flesh of fallen warriors and flies secreting eggs into the flesh wounds of dead knights. The realization it was all over, that Albion would become chaos once more, pained Arthur more than the head wound from Mordred’s broadsword.

  Oh, Merlin. Did you not foresee this end?
Why did I not listen to you, old friend?

  He closed his eyes against the sun’s glare. He kept them shut, despite the tears that welled and demanded release. He didn’t want to see the departure of Excalibur: the sword that made him King, that united him with the land he had conquered, ruled, loved … and now lost.

  He cried out softly. A raven looked up from its feast of entrails. It flapped its wings once and then resumed its meal. Only the sinuous approach of the serpent along the churned mud, as inexorable as death, made the carrion bird fly from the corpse.

  Arthur’s head drooped. Bedevere had attempted to remove the King’s dented helm with its dragon circlet, but the steel was too deeply embedded into the skull. The crown of a warrior king: now a burden, one Arthur would wear until death.

  The snake extended its tongue, caressing the charnel air with relish. Arthur shifted, moved his stiffening body in an attempt to stave off death’s remorseless advance.

  Bedevere had fashioned a crude support for his king with blankets and saddlebags, but it gave little comfort; when Arthur’s vision clouded and light-headedness returned, he felt Bedevere had propped him against the moldering bones of long-fallen warriors, their skeletal fingers piercing his side for warm, fresh blood and sustenance. Then the spell passed and he realised the protrusions were nothing but the stirrups and pommel of the saddle, shifting as it sank into the churned mud of the battlefield.

  The hoofbeats of Bedevere’s mount — slow and glutinous as the destrier picked its way through the marshy ground of the blood-soaked battlefield — faded from hearing. Now only the buzzing of flies and the harsh cries of the gluttonous ravens filled Arthur’s ears.

  The snake’s sinuous approach reminded him of why this had come to pass.

  Men fight and die for an ideal, Arthur, Guinevere had once said. What glory is there in that? God does not approve; God hides his face on the battlefield.

  Arthur opened his eyes, wincing with the pain of bright, golden light from the mocking sun. Bedevere had departed from the plain of Camlan, now descending into the valley and, beyond that, to the lake where Excalibur’s creators — and, Arthur finally admitted to himself, its true owners — waited to reclaim the sword.

  He remembered Merlin’s disapproving glare at his words, I can conquer the world with this sword! But had there not been sadness in the gruff wizard’s eyes, also? Disapproval that the young king was more enraptured by the sword than the scabbard; disappointment that the chosen one delighted more in the destructive properties of the gift from the Lady of the Lake than its healing powers.

  But I listened to you, Merlin. I took your counsel, tempered my hunger for battle and glory with the mission to ensure the sword’s power served the common good. Were you not pleased as I grew to full manhood, that I did not make the same mistakes as my father?

  The tears flowed freely now, down Arthur’s blood-streaked cheeks and into his gore-soaked beard. He imagined they washed the blood away, that the gray of his whiskers was not visible to the newborn sun.

  An old fool, weeping for his loss. Oh, Merlin, I lost the greatest possession in the world. I have lost Camelot, the Brotherhood of the Round Table, the peace and security of Albion.

  His vision hazed and pain flared in his skull. He shifted, averting his eyes from the light, and felt the spear thrusts of warrior spirits from his backrest. He shivered, felt coldness steal into his body as his life fluid leaked away.

  Now the feelings of guilt, regret and pain at the betrayal subsided. Numbness, emotional as well as physical. The sight of the still, mangled corpses and motionless, broken bodies of the Brotherhood of the Round Table neither disturbed nor pained him. He no longer felt the hatred that had fueled his savage spear thrust into his bastard son’s abdomen. Like his knights, Mordred was still, at peace.

  Still. Motionless. Just as we were before the serpent caught the sun’s rays, forced Kay to unsheathe his sword and attempt to strike it.

  How ironic that a serpent had brought about another Fall of Man. Here on this plain, just as in Eden, a snake had unleashed a cataclysm. The parley had progressed well — Mordred was content with Arthur’s offer and it would buy the King time to replenish his forces to hold back the chaos Albion threatened to slip into.

  A flash of steel, quicksilver in the spring sunlight, and the message was clear to Mordred’s knights: betrayal.

  God hides his face on the battlefield.

  The serpent was now five paces away. Its sightless eyes and pale, translucent scales made Arthur frown. This was no adder, surely? In truth, it looked more like a worm freed from grave soil.

  The serpent’s head twisted to the corpse the raven had vacated. Arthur’s son and murderer, the usurper Mordred, lay in blood that was as black as his armor. The spear driven into the Pretender had seemingly spilled ichor onto the earth rather than blood, as though Mordred’s life fluid was a physical manifestation of the darkness that had possessed him. The serpent’s tongue flicked again, sensing the corruption in the air, and the snake shot forward like a lance: no longer a side-winding reptile but a sickly-white, otherworldly missile.

  Wrapped around the broken spear shaft, it writhed and turned inwards, widdershins, angling closer to the wound in Mordred’s abdomen. The blood darkened further, became a liquid blackness that sucked all trace of dawn’s sunlight. To Arthur’s tortured eyes, the very sky darkened, the sun hiding from the sight of the unholy act of resurrection.

  For Mordred now stirred, his muscular chest rising and falling as he learned to breathe again. The blackness of his armor was indistinguishable from the ichor that poured in great waves from his stomach wound. The gash undulated and formed new shapes, like the grinning, toothless maw of an ancient witch, or the leering smile of Morgana, who imparted her love of battlefield violence and chaos into her son. Arthur groaned with the memory of his beguilement, how Morgana had sowed her womb with his own seed.

  My only heir. A veritable serpent.

  Feeling returned to Arthur, one of revulsion, the sensation he was in the presence of something far more evil than his own son had been. What the serpent did next made him scream.

  But it was a cry that had no voice, tore from his inner being. It would be heard in only one place and only one individual could hear it.

  The serpent thrashed in the black void, a pale tongue in the mouth of chaos. Hissing became vocalised sounds, words uttered in a human, female voice: familiar and horrifying.

  “God hides his face on the battlefield.”

  Nimue’s harp strings no longer keep me from wakefulness. I have slept for too long. My rest has not eased my weariness; far from it, for I am more tired than when she first approached me. But now, I must rise once more, for Arthur has called.

  Ah, Nimue. How well you deceived me! You do truly know how to flatter an old man, how to play upon his heartstrings as you play upon your otherworldly harp! I forgot I have human leanings, human desires … human weaknesses.

  Vanity and lust … how proud I was of the tower I created for you. How my blood pulsed through my veins when I beheld your joy and childlike happiness when the waterfall froze and fragmented, the shards of ice smooth as glass so nary a join could be seen when my structure rose. A tower of dreams.

  The tower you imprisoned me in. Rather, the tower I allowed myself to be imprisoned in, for I was ready to rest. I believed my duty done, that Arthur was the one who would keep the Light shining on this humble little island: a beacon to keep the darkness and the Crawling Chaos at bay.

  And for a time, he did. But that is all mortal man has: a little time. Camelot, the brotherhood of the Round Table, the spirit of Albion … it has a finite lifespan. It is only immortal as a dream, an ideal to spur man to nobility and the Light … but Arthur has sown the seeds. His task is done, and his example will shine for future generations. It is time for him to rest, as I have done ….

  But I cannot whisper comforting words to him now. I cannot tell him not to fear the darkness, or the barge that will
ferry him to Avalon.

  His cry awoke me and now I am aware of the monster on the battlefield.

  Who is more foolish now, Nimue? Myself, for succumbing to your lies and enchantment? Or you, for your … forgive me for saying, your rather human arrogance and conceit? The serpent’s hissing that accompanied Arthur’s despair and horror — of course it is familiar! You disguised it well, but I know now the overture to your suite of dreams.

  Even now, I hear the lustrous chords, attempting to lull me back to my rest. Do not think I am not tempted, fair Nimue; your music has a beauty that would make even the Old Ones weep themselves into eternal slumber, to embrace your lullaby’s dark oblivion.

  But you forget my love for Arthur, the son I was unable to have. I hear his cries now and they pierce me, strike me to my very soul, in a way you cannot fathom. It is a human reaction and that is what you cannot understand, Nimue.

  Humanity.

  That is what stirred me from my slumber, made me realize the deadly enchantment I have been put under.

  But how do I escape? Truly, there is nothing more secure than a prison one has built himself.

  The ice-clear walls of my cell are warped, contorted into crazed angles that press inward everywhere I look, the product of an insane geometry of which only a sorcerer could conceive, that only a foul goddess of the night could use to her own ends.

  But I built them, so I can undo them. I have that power remaining, at least ….

  The harp’s strings are strident, no longer birthing the mellifluous tunes that bewitched me. Now they screech and hiss, just as the unearthly serpent that stalks Arthur.

  My eyes falter. I feel the desire for sleep press on me, forcing my eyelids shut. No more, Nimue. I will not rest now. I raise overgrown fingernails to my cheeks and press deeply, forcing through the blanket of thick, gray beard into wizened flesh beyond. I draw blood and the pain makes me alert, wide awake once more.