But I didn’t regret it when the five of us, three women and two dogs, fled out through a high arched entryway and along a broad causeway over a beautiful, shallow blue lake. Flowers, water lilies of every imaginable color, clustered along with hyacinths, iris, pickerelweed, and lotus, scattered among the sprays of many diverse fountains.
On reaching the end of the causeway, the two women darted into a garden. Here I lost my way because this was not a very correct and well-laid-out Roman garden but a magnificent wilderness of groves containing ornamental trees; forest groves with oak, elder, beech, and even pine. Interspersed among the trees was greensward surrounded by flower beds, ponds, streams, and even waterfalls.
I was flagging now, but I think so were my companions.
“How large is this?”
“No one knows,” the woman said. “It may continue forever. Some of the things pertaining to the king do go on forever. Or at least, so far that we poor humans cannot reach the end of them.”
Her hood had fallen back and I saw her face was lined and scarred as though she had once been beaten very badly. Her hair, once quite dark, had streaks of gray. As I watched, she unhooked the dog’s lead and let him run ahead of us into a glade of young pines filled with dappled sunlight. The girl behind me followed suit. Her hood had also fallen back, and I saw she was much younger than the one ahead. She was a lightly built redhead with green eyes and fair skin.
“They won’t go far,” the one ahead of me said.
“She hurt him. She really hurt him,” the young redhead exclaimed. “I felt it. You know I can feel him.”
“Fine!” the dark one said. “But let’s get her under wraps before he recovers. And don’t count any chickens, not only not before they hatch but not until they’re ready to lay eggs or crow. I’ve been part of too many failed attempts at undermining his power that I begin by being pessimistic.”
“But, Annin, there is a king, another king, who is said to have been favored by the Queen of the Dead. I keep hoping . . .”
“That’s it,” the older one, Annin, said. “Keep hoping . . . and be careful.”
“You will be Annin,” I said. “And may I ask your name?” I said to the redhead.
“Erika,” she said.
Then the clouds came down to earth. That’s the only way I can describe it. We walked through mist so thick that we could see nothing for a few moments, and when we emerged, we gazed down into a tree-filled valley. Beyond the valley, a fortress of gray stone seemed to spring from a crag. It was overgrown with creeping vines from which hung drooping clusters of violet flowers.
Almost instinctively I turned toward it.
“No,” Erika said, tugging at my arm. “That’s why we say this garden may go on forever. We keep to a few well-beaten paths. No one who ever descended into that valley and tried to reach that fortress has ever returned.”
“The worst of it,” Annin said, “is that we don’t know if that’s good or bad. But on balance, we think bad.”
I studied the fortress as well as I could from this distance and saw the windows were only black holes, half-covered by the crawling vines, and the towers were ruined, jagged, and roofless. I shivered a little, and we turned and entered an aisle of flowering shrubs that ended in a building that seemed to keep changing its shape as I tried to look at it.
“We live there,” Annin said, pointing.
I stopped. “That doesn’t look much better.”
“Wheeeeee. . . .” My unseen companion sounded delighted. “You can control this. It’s all in how you look at it.”
Annin paused. She picked up a stick and drew a diagram in a dusty spot under one of the bushes: two faces looking at each other on a chalice. I had seen such things before. Dugald’s people were interested in them and he had acquainted me with them.
“Either or neither,” I said. “The perception of the person looking at them makes the call. But they aren’t real. Those are lines on the ground. An optical illusion, if you like.”
“Not here they aren’t,” Annin said. “That’s what I meant when I said Bade might reverse the staircase. Among the towers, he controls perception. Here, we can. From time to time he fights us, trying to take control of our . . . dwellings, but so far, we have beaten him off. When you killed the lust-driven Tailogue, I knew you must be a sorceress of great power.”
I looked back at the door to their . . . dwelling and concentrated. From one point of view, it looked open; from another, closed.
“I see,” I said. I didn’t completely, but enough of the idea behind the . . . dwelling went home for me to function. In my mind, I closed the door.
“When we get there,” I said.
“Yes, that’s safest,” Annin said.
“Has this thing a name?” I asked Annin.
“Paradoxisus,” she said.
Sometime, somewhere, during our wild flight I found I was wearing a dress again. This was a long, white dalmatic with golden embroidery at the neck and hem. It felt like silk. Heavy, raw silk.
“She wasn’t wearing anything but her armor when we fled,” Erika said.
“Yes.” Annin spoke slowly. “And where is your sword?”
“I have a sort of friend,” I explained lamely. “Though I don’t see why she chose”—I looked down at the silk dress—“this particular style.”
“I’m not a she,” my companion said. “Properly speaking, I’m an it. But I kind of like she. You could use that.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Annin and Erika gave me the same sort of odd look I was beginning to get used to.
“You talk to it?” Annin asked.
“From time to time,” I said.
Annin lifted her head suddenly, her eyes closed. A second later, they opened and she looked afraid.
“The Tailogue are out. Bade has recovered from the blow she dealt him. Run!”
Luckily, we didn’t have far to go. I let Annin open the door. The dogs were waiting beside it and they plunged through it along with us. I never solved the internal geometry of the Paradoxisus, . . . the dwelling, as Annin put it. But then, I do not think its builders ever intended it to be solved. They generated the geometry to allow the inhabitants, or perhaps users of the Paradox, to go places they could not easily reach otherwise.
Inside, broad, shallow stairs converged on a stone circle with a star at the center; a star with many rays, each so constructed as to look three-dimensional. The rays moved as you looked at them, now seemingly constructed in high relief, but then they changed and appeared instead to be cut out of the rock and then somehow inlaid with silver.
“Whoosa,” my companion commented.
Staircase, staircases. Everywhere I looked I seemed to see another one. At first it seemed impossible to isolate one, but I got the trick of it. I counted ten, but then I found an eleventh.
“How many do you see?” Annin asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I count eleven, but I think I’ve spotted a twelfth.”
“You are indeed powerful,” Erika said. “I’ve never seen more than seven, and Annin can isolate only about ten. Sister mine, there is no telling what she could do with practice!”
“I think the star is a compass,” I said. “How many rays has it?”
“Good luck with that. If you look at it another way, you will find it has dark and bright rays. No one has ever been able to correctly count them,” Annin told me.
“However did you master this place?” I asked.
“We haven’t,” Erika said. “Only some of it. But enough to use it as a refuge against the king.”
“We believe,” Annin said, “that some of the places the stairs go may not exist any longer and that’s why we can’t reach them. Others, many others, are simply empty and dead, sort of like blind tunnels with a little something at the end. But they lead nowhere. Or rather, they touch places isolated even in their own worlds: the bottom of lakes, the tops of mountains, or deep caves in the earth. One goes to a river that nev
er, as far as we know, sees the sun. The cave goes on and on, and it is very beautiful, but no exploration party has ever been able to find a way out.”
The shadows at the top of one of the stairs moved. I saw birds with black and silver wings, and then a woman, and the birds were a pattern on a black and silver dress. The woman appeared to be crowned with the white roses of faery, but as she drew closer, the roses vanished and her hair was gray. Her eyes were silvered by blindness and she felt her way down the steps with a blackthorn staff.
“Annin! Erika! She defeated the Tailogue. I felt it. Has she come? I can feel that someone is with you.”
“Yes,” Annin said.
“Very well. Bring her. She must attend her deliberations.”
Annin and Erika ran up the stair toward the blind woman and I followed.
Lancelot and Arthur reached the swamp the next day. They were still talking.
“Doesn’t surprise me that Merlin lost control of the situation. He was always one to overreach himself,” Arthur said. “My father hated him for . . .” He found himself not willing to explain his childhood to Lancelot. “For various reasons. But Uther always said that he was the most astute political advisor he ever had. I don’t think Father ever completely followed his advice, because Merlin was too much a partisan of the southern landowners. They want to rule the roost, and he’s happy to aid and abet them in every way.”
“If you think he’s smart, you should hang around her for a while.”
“Your Lady of the Lake?”
“Yes. And she thinks my sister, Guinevere, is the key to the whole thing . . . your gaining the High Kingship.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t try too hard to get back. These people here need me,” Arthur said.
“So do your father and the people of Alba. Do you love my sister?”
Arthur paused. The ground was getting soggy, and looking ahead, he saw that soon the two of them would be wading in water up to their knees.
“I hate to say love,” Arthur said. “I hate the word. My mother used to say she loved me.”
“You don’t like your mother?” Lancelot asked.
“I would cheerfully consign my mother to the devil. But judging by what Merlin told you about her probable fate, it is to be hoped she is there already. No, I won’t use the word love about Guinevere. But I will say that I want her. I wanted her from the first moment I saw her on the quay at Tintigal. She was wearing dirty leather pants, a grimy shirt, and that magnificent red-gold hair was wild, blown by the sea wind. And yet somehow she managed without any of the artifice other women employ to be the loveliest creature I had ever seen. I wanted her then, I want her now. And I think I will always want her. In my bed, in my arms, seated next to me at the table and across from me at my councils of war. Riding beside me at the hunt and holding my hand when I die. I think that if I ever stop wanting her, I will be beyond wanting anything.”
“She is the Flower Bride of Alba,” Lancelot said.
“She will make me king in both worlds. I know that,” Arthur said. “And the horror of it is that unless she is successful in her quests, I may never see her again.”
“Oh, I think she’s been successful all right,” Lancelot said. “Both Merlin and the Lady thought so, and whatever you may say about both of them, neither of them is a fool.”
Bax trotted from around behind them and into the water. The two men followed.
“He did say a funny thing, though. He said we were her destiny. We, not just you.”
Arthur threw him a dark look. “Become her champion, if you like, but nothing more. So perhaps in some sort of way you are her destiny, but she is mine, and always will be while life lasts.”
The water between the trees was getting deeper, but Bax looked to be fairly good at finding shallow spots between the deeper pools.
“This swamp is supposed to be filled with traps and hazards,” Arthur said, looking around uneasily.
“Maybe that’s if you’re going out, escaping from the king. I bet he doesn’t care much if you’re going in. Yes, the entrance to a trap might be sort of easy,” Lancelot continued. “In fact, I think you might expect it to be.”
Several of the ravens sailed in and settled on a branch near Arthur’s face. “You command them,” he said to Lancelot.
“No command about it,” Lancelot said. “We have an agreement.”
“Oath birds?”
“Right,” Lancelot replied.
“Ask them to check the roads ahead.”
At his words, the birds took wing. They returned quickly.
One said, “We see no hazards.”
The second said, “By nightfall.”
The third cocked his head to one side, studied both men with one eye and then the other, and said, “Be careful.”
I followed my two companions up the stair. It led to . . . I don’t know. My first sight of it was sunlight on bleached marble. I did what I had done in the city: looked out on a landscape under a different sky. It didn’t seem real, but rather like the wall paintings I had seen in ruined Roman dwellings where Black Leg and I played as children.
Maeniel brought us to see them, wishing to accommodate Dugald’s desire that I learn about things Roman. It was not at all safe to poke around abandoned Roman ruins. They were the refuge of outlaws and brigands. But Dugald and Maeniel were tough enough to give pause to any who threatened us. And so we visited these places and he would sometimes reconstruct the life of Roman colonists for both Black Leg and myself.
Such a life seemed a great wonder to me. Remember, I was brought up in a one-room hut with a smoke hole in the roof, and the thought of having different rooms to eat, sleep, and bathe and even study was almost incomprehensible to me. Servants; no, we had no servants or slaves. Everyone pitched in and helped Kyra when she needed it. Outdoor plumbing was the norm. Black Leg and I used to fight over whose duty it was to dig the slit trench every week.
I remember looking at the wall paintings that depicted a life all but incomprehensible to me. I stretched out my hand and touched the picture of an ancient theater with stepwise seats leading down to a small stage. The image shimmered the way the reflection in a still pool does when something, a drop of water or a fallen leaf, troubles the surface.
I felt in my body, my mind, the appropriate displacement that would allow me to enter what to many others would simply be an image and no more.
How would I do it? I don’t know. How do I walk or breathe, or eat or run or think, or even remember? I simply know how. And for the first time, I understood my gift as a sorceress. I had an instinct for the passage between worlds.
I stepped through and the dog women followed me.
The little amphitheater was old and long abandoned. It wasn’t one of those massive arenas where gladiatorial matches or chariot races were held. This was a much smaller place where plays were performed, poetry recited, or musical entertainments went on. It was on a small island set in a deep, blue sea. I knew it must have been on an island because I could see the drowned remains of streets; temples, houses, and streets gleaming up through the blue-green water.
This amphitheater must have been on the highest point of the island, because it seemed to be all that remained of what must have been a fair-sized town. In the distance, to the east, on the horizon, I could see the outlines of a landmass.
But of what must have been here once, this was all that remained. There was a large number of people gathered here, both men and women. The blind woman—a priestess, I’m sure—stood on the stage. I walked down toward her, and I would have taken a seat among them, but Annin and Erika urged me toward the small stage where the blind woman stood.
I climbed the two steps up to the stage. All of the women were accompanied by dogs. They seemed decently dressed, but the men were a ragged, tough-looking bunch. They had few weapons. I saw only about a dozen knives, two swords; and though there were a lot of spears, most were the wooden variety.
Everyone, even the dogs, studied me cu
riously. The fear and curiosity that seemed to radiate from the audience called my armor, and I heard an audible gasp roll through the gathering as it flashed green against my fair skin.
“She is the one,” the blind woman said. “I know. I feel it.”
“Libane!” one of the men addressed her.
I knew the name. She was clad in a green mantle and rules womanly gifts. There is nothing she cannot teach her adherents to do.
“Libane, why are you so sure this time? The Dread King so far has laughed at our revolts. Yet you are so sure that she”—he pointed at me—“and the man . . . more than a man, less than a king, who comes . . . can free us.”
Another one of the men spoke up. “No one ever spent the night in the queen’s tower and emerged alive until he did. I was there when he cleansed their cattle and their bodies, setting his people free forever. He will speak law and knit up the division between men and women, between those the king allows some freedom and those who are treated like beasts.”
“Indeed she has shown herself to be mistress of the transit between worlds,” Annin said. “Otherwise, she would not be here.”
“He,” Libane added, “has withstood both the tower and the dark forest. How many others died in their toils?”
I had, I reflected, come to bring Arthur back home with me. My transit of worlds had been an accident, a simple necessity forced on me in my mission to rescue Arthur from his exile.
I sat on the Dragon Throne, one of the sacred queens of the first people to populate the White Isle. It was the duty of the queens to bring kings to the people. To lie with Arthur and make him high king was my duty. But I couldn’t tell these people what was in my heart. We needed him, but I could see they did, too.
I turned to Libane and I saw the green mask of the Danae on her face even as it was part of the armor. It was very like the moment I met my father. From a distance, I saw only a fat, red-faced man who looked as though he might be a figure of fun. But as I drew closer, the mighty warrior of the Danae was revealed to me.
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