The Hallowed Isle Book Four
Page 16
Ahead, indeed, a section had fallen. Carefully, Artor clambered downward until he stood on the springy turf. The slope fell away before him, rising again to a pair of outcrops in stark silhouette against the fading sky. In the cleft between them he saw the sudden spark of a fire and started towards it.
Any one of his men who ventured thus into hostile territory, without orders and unsupported, would have been mucking out stables for a week, but Cai and Gualchmai were no longer here to scold him. Silent through the dusk, the king made his way forward, summoning all the woodcraft Merlin had taught him to move unseen. And in truth he did not think it was an enemy, but some sheepherd who would not grudge a stranger the warmth of his Beltain fire.
That flame, burning in the lee of a sandstone boulder, was the only light remaining in a darkening world. Artor closed his cloak to hide his mail and stepped towards it, wondering what they could be burning to make the air smell so sweet, as if the open moorland had somehow gathered all the rich scents of a woodland spring. He blinked at shadows laced with whirling sparkles of brightness that fled away at his approach until there was only one shape by the fire. As he drew nearer it straightened, light shining on a tangle of golden hair and glowing on the folds of a cloak striped and chequered in spring green.
Guendivar. . . .
Artor stopped short, staring. A vision, he thought numbly, born of my need. But no image in his memory matched this face that was both older than he remembered and as fresh as the hawthorne flowers that wreathed her brow. Would a vision have mud clinging to the hem of her tunica and leaves caught in her hair?
She is real! He could not even imagine how she came to be here. A flash of heat and chill together pebbled his skin.
“I bring a Beltain blessing from Britannia to her king. . . .” Her voice trembled as if the anxieties of humanity warred with the magic that still starred her eyes. He swallowed, remembering what reason she had to be afraid.
“What right have you to give such a blessing, who have betrayed both Britannia and me?”
Her cheeks grew first red, then pale, but her voice was steady as she replied. “The right of a priestess of Brigantia, whose land this is. I have not betrayed her, and what I give I have the right to take away.”
“You have taken away my heart, and given another my bed and my throne!” Artor said bitterly, setting his hand on the hilt of his sword. “I should slay you where you stand!”
“Not your bed,” she said in a low voice, “empty though it has been. The blade you bear is a Sword of Justice, which would refuse to touch me. You would do better to ask what gifts I bestow.”
He let go of the pommel as if stung. His bed had been barren indeed, he thought in shame, but his soul was singing at the knowledge that Medraut had not lain with her there. “What are your gifts . . . Lady?” The words limped from his lips.
“Sovereignty. Potency. Power.”
Artor believed her. She had never been so beautiful arrayed in silk and gold as she was now, standing by the fire in her smudged gown. And in that moment he knew himself an empty husk, unfit to serve her.
“Guendivar. . . .” The anger that had strengthened his voice drained away. Throughout this war that fury had sustained him. He had nothing, now. “I have tried to hate you,” he said tiredly, “but whatever you have done, it was my sin and my failure that was the cause. Can you believe that little though I showed it, you have always had my love?”
“My dear—” she said with a tenderness that pierced his heart. “I have had your letters. Do you think I did not know? But you did not come, and I grew heartsick and confused, and did what I thought I must for the sake of the land. If there is blame, much of it must be mine.”
He stood before her with bowed head and empty hands. “I have lived by the sword for forty years, Guendivar, and I am tired. My peace is broken, and my people tear at each other like wolves. I have nothing left to give. . . .”
“Did I not say it?” she said softly. “The gifts are mine. I am the Tiernissa, the Queen. Come to me. . . .”
Step by unsteady step, he made his way around the fire. She reached up to unclasp the penannular brooch that pinned his cloak and began to unbuckle the belt that held his sword. He stopped her, glancing around him, calculating the distance back to the Wall.
“We are warded by sentinels more vigilant than any of your soldiers,” said Guendivar. “Take off your armor, Artor, and perhaps you will be able to see. . . .”
Piece by piece the king laid his garments aside, until he stood defenseless in that place where faith is the companion of despair. It did not matter whether he believed her. Love or death would be equally welcome, if they came in her arms. The queen had also thrown down her green mantle and unpinned the fibulae that held her gown, so that she stood dressed only in her hawthorne crown.
“Thus do I salute you, for you are the head of the people—” She stretched to kiss his brow.
Behind his closed eyes light flared, illuminating past and present so that he saw and understood the meanings and connections between all things.
Her hands moved down his shoulders and the blossoms of her crown brushed soft against his breast as her lips pressed the skin above his heart. “I salute you, for you are the protector of the nation—”
At the words, fire filled his breast, and a purifying protective tenderness that would dare all dangers, not from hatred, but for love.
Then Guendivar bent to his thighs, her fingers sliding softly along the track left by Melwas’ spear. He drew in a sharp breath as her lips touched his phallus and he felt it rise.
“I salute you, for you are the Lord of the Land—”
Artor clutched at her shoulders, shaken by the raw pulse of power that leaped from the earth to flare through every limb, his stiffened member straining against her hand.
She tipped her head back, gazing up at him. “Oh my beloved, come to me!”
No man living could have resisted that command. The queen drew him down beside the stone, her white thighs opening to enfold him, and in her arms the power that filled him found its rightful outlet at last.
Conquered and conqueror, giving and receiving, very swiftly Artor ceased to distinguish between Guendivar’s ecstasy and his own. And in the ultimate moment, when the entire essence of being was focused to a single point, even that blossomed in an expansion of awareness that included himself and Guendivar and the earth beneath them and all the hallowed isle.
Afterward, he and Guendivar lay beside the fire, wrapped in their cloaks against the chill they had not felt before. When her head rested thus, upon his shoulder, Artor knew there could be no wrong anywhere. If he had not been filled with joy, he could have wept for all the nights when they had lain separate in the royal bed.
“If we had a ship we could sail away to the Blessed Isles,” he murmured against her hair.
She shook her head a little, nestling closer. “I think we have run far enough, you and I. It is we who must bring a blessing to this Isle.”
“As you have given it to me. . . .” Artor smiled. “But what power brought you to me here?”
“Merlin took me from Medraut’s fort. God knows what tales they will be telling—they must think that Ninive and I vanished into the air!” Her laughter faded as she told the tale. “But it was the fair folk who brought me to this place, though I hardly expected the High King of Britannia to be wandering alone on the moor.”
“Not quite alone. There are something over four thousand men camped in the old fort—” He gestured towards the irregular line of the Wall, dark against the stars. “I had meant to pursue Medraut all the way to Fodreu, but now I do not know what I should do.”
“Stay here,” answered Guendivar, “where you have a source of supply and some protection. Medraut is raising the North against you—better to meet him on your own home ground.” She began to speak of what she had learned during her captivity concerning the strength of the enemy and Medraut’s plans.
“I suppose we should g
et up,” he said finally. “My men will be wondering what has become of me.”
“Need we go back quite yet?” Guendivar laughed a little, reaching up to kiss his ear.
To his delight, Artor’s body responded—he had wondered if their loving would be a reproduceable miracle. He kissed her, and matters proceeded from there, and this time, if their joining did not quite reach the earlier excesses of ecstasy, he was better able to appreciate the solid reality of the woman in his arms.
Merlin sat with eyes half-closed and his back against an oak tree, listening to his heart drum in his breast. Nearby, Ninive was building up the fire and preparing a framework of willow twigs to cook the string of trout she had caught in the stream. From time to time she would glance at him, frowning, but she had said no word.
She’s afraid to ask. . . he thought grimly. Well, that’s no wonder. What had begun as a shortness of breath on the journey through Pictland had become a general weakness, as if with every step the life within him was bleeding back into the soil. Three weeks had passed since Beltain, and they had scarcely gone the distance he used to run in a day.
He himself did not feel fear so much as amazement that the body which had endured so many years past the normal span of men was failing at last. It could have chosen a better moment to go, he thought then. But most men, he had heard, found themselves unready when their time came at last.
He had rescued Guendivar, and the faerie folk told him she was reunited with the king. Indeed, he had hardly needed telling, for the joy of their reunion had reverberated through the land. But the spirits spoke also of a mighty hosting in the land of the Pretani. He had dreamed of a fort above a river, where men fought and died. Soon, Artor would face his greatest battle, and Merlin would not be there.
When he closed his eyes, he saw the face of the daimon of his prophecies, wide-eyed with wisdom and ethereally fair. When he opened them, he saw Ninive, as bright of hair, but with fine skin browned by sun and wind, and anxiety clouding her dark eyes. She had gone back entirely to the dress of her mother’s people, a woolen skirt whose ragged fringe brushed her knees, and a skin cape pinned at the breast by a sharpened bone. Barefoot, she could fade into the woods like one of the folk of faerie. She knew the wildlands as he did, the perfect companion for his wanderings, but could she become something more?
“My lord, the fish is cooked—see how the flesh flakes off the bones.” Ninive knelt beside him, offering the trout on a dock leaf.
“I will try.” He smiled. He picked up fragments of the trout with a delicate touch.
“I am thinking,” said Ninive when they were done, “that if I were to leave food here for you, I could fetch help and bring you to some farmstead where you could rest. . . .”
He shook his head. “We have to go on.”
“Not all the way to the Wall!” she protested. “It would be harvest before we arrived, and you—” She broke off, looking away.
“Will likely not get there,” he finished for her. “Do you think I do not know?” The face she turned to him was anguished, and he stretched out a hand already thinner than it had been a week ago. “My little one, do you care so much for me?”
Ninive gestured around her. “You have given me back my soul!” She took his hand and pressed her forehead against it. With his other hand, very gently, he touched her hair.
“I am ninety years old and had begun to fear myself immortal. In truth, I am relieved to find it is not so. In the forest, when a creature grows too weak to hunt food, death comes soon. I would tell you to leave me here—”
“I would not do it!” she interrupted.
“But I must ask something harder. Great forces are gathering against the king, and I cannot be there. I have dreamed of a future that fills me with fear. I must use the time that is left to me so that something will survive.”
She stared at him, her eyes dark as forest pools. “What do you need me to do?”
“There is a place that I must find before Midsummer Day. It lies deep in the Forest of Caledon—” He gestured southward. “When we reach it, we will work a mighty magic.”
Beltain, or perhaps the queen, had brought in the summer. Even along the Wall, flowers bloomed and grass grew tall, and on the moors the heather, weighted with an emperor’s wealth of purple bloom, hummed with the song of bees. Now the days lengthened rapidly towards midsummer’s epiphany.
Artor made good use of the time. New messages had gone out across Britannia, proclaiming that king and queen were once more united, and calling the warriors to a great hosting at Vercovicium. At this season the demands of the fields kept many on their farmsteads, but each day, it seemed, another group of riders would come jogging along the Military Way that ran below the Wall.
“You see, they are still loyal,” said Guendivar, gazing down from the walkway of the fortress wall at the moving tapestry of men and horses below.
“It is your name that has brought them,” Artor replied, putting his arms around her. “They know that the sovereignty of Britannia is returned to me.”
She leaned against him, the warmth of his touch still filling her with wonder. It was now well into June, and the weather had turned bright and fair; the long northern dusk spread a veil of amethyst across the hills. In the evening peace, sounds carried clearly.
“What is that?” she asked, as a noise like distant thunder began to overwhelm the ordinary sounds of the camp below.
She felt Artor stiffen. He lifted his hand to shade his eyes from the westering sun, staring at the Military Way, where something was moving, dust boiling behind it in a plume. She turned to look up at him. Already the hard stare of the commander was replacing the tenderness in his eyes.
“A messenger,” he said grimly, “who rides at too headlong a pace to bear good news.”
Medraut had taken Luguvalium. The chieftains of the Selgovae, still resenting the taxes Artor had laid upon them a dozen years ago, had joined him in a swift drive southward, and Morcant Bulc of Dun Breatann, denying his father’s treaties, had joined them. The main body of the Picts had not yet appeared, but their most likely route would be eastward through the Votadini lands. Artor had been aware of the danger, and ordered Cunobelinus to stay where he was and defend Dun Eidyn. But if Medraut held one end of the Wall and the Picts the other, the king’s force would be caught in between.
The solution, obviously, was to attack Medraut first and destroy him. Artor got his men to Luguvalium in two days of hard marching and was preparing to attack the fort by the time Guendivar, following more slowly, caught up with him.
The wind carried a faint reek of something burning, and the air resounded with the yammering of crows. Guendivar gazed up at her husband, searching for words with which to say good-bye.
All her life, she had heard stories of Artor’s battles, but she had never before seen him armed for war. The gilded scales of his hauberk gleamed in the sunlight and his mantle was of the purple of emperors. The big black horse stamped and snorted as he reined it in outside the little church at the edge of the town where he had taken her.
“Stay here, my heart—” he said, leaning down to touch her hair. “If we destroy them here, I will come for you, but if they flee, we will be pursuing, and you will be safer behind us.” His shield was new, but the horse’s harness and Artor’s leather leg wrappings and the heavy wool tunic showed signs of hard wear.
“But how will I know—”
“If we win, I daresay someone will tell you.” He laughed, his teeth flashing in the close-cropped beard. It was threaded with silver, but his hair still grew strongly. Her hands clenched as she fought the desire to bury her fingers in its thick waves once more.
“And if we lose—” His face sobered. “You must stay hidden and make your way south somehow. Do not fail me, my lady, for if I fall, only you can pass on the sovereignty.”
“Do not say it!” she exclaimed. “I will not lose you now!”
“Guendivar . . . I will always be with you. . . .”
The queen stared after them, and only when the echo of hoofbeats on cobblestones had faded did she allow the tears to come.
All through that endless day she prayed, kneeling on the worn planking of the church’s floor, though she hardly knew which god it was to whom she addressed her prayers. About the middle of the afternoon, she heard a great clamor that gradually diminished until there were only a few dogs barking, and then, one by one, the voices of the people of the town.
Presently the old priest who served the church came back again.
“The king is safe, or at least he was an hour ago. But the Perjurer broke through his lines and fled with most of his men, and our army has gone after him, save for a detachment left under Prince Peretur to guard you and the town. Let us praise the Lord of Hosts, who gives victory!”
At night the Forest of Caledon was full of whispers; the wind continuing its conversation with the trees. Merlin felt the vibration through the trunk behind him, just as it thrummed through the shaft of the Spear at his side. Sitting so, his thoughts matched themselves to the long slow rhythms of the forest, and the rustle of leaf and twig became the words of a dialogue between the Goddess who lived in the earth and the God.
As the journey continued, the Druid understood them ever more clearly. By day he clung to the pony Ninive had brought for him, riding by balance. At night, when the girl lay breathing softly by the embers of their fire, Merlin became a tree, drawing from soil and sky the energy he needed to go on. But the earth drummed with distant hoofbeats and the wind rang with the crying of ravens, calling their kindred to a great killing, and he dared not succumb to the forest’s peace.