All of Camelot turned out to mourn King Lot and see him entombed at St. Stephen’s, even Archbishop Dubricius and all the clergyman of the countryside, for despite Lot’s stolid paganism and rebelliousness, he was remembered unanimously as a goodly man.
Only King Pellinore and his sons were noticeably absent.
Balin knew well why.
He had trusted King Pellinore and Sir Lamorak as good standing Christians to do right by King Lot and had left the defeated man in their care as he would have left the Christ child in the arms of the immaculate Mary and gone in bliss.
Though Arthur’s doubt in Balin had fled, no doubt in part due to Guinevere’s soft words in his ear, the other knights were still hardened against him. The pagans could not forget his killing of the Lady Lile, and despite Gawaine’s clemency, Agravaine perpetrated the story that he had treacherously slain Lot after securing his surrender. The Christians, too, seemed to believe this, likely at Lamorak’s urging.
So, in the midst of the finest fellowship in the world, Balin, finally counted as one of their number, found himself alone. Not even Bedivere or Griflet had any words for him anymore.
Their armor had been repaired and polished to a bright gleam for the occasion of Lot’s funeral, and they made a magnificent show. The Black Cross had been decked with white lilies by the clerics, and the white petals and emerald vines reflected in the mirrors of their harnesses so that each knight seemed to shine with supernatural light in the sun.
Arthur and the pallbearers stopped before the three black clad queens. Soredamor wailed and staggered toward her dead father with her arms outstretched, but her aunt Morgan caught her by the arm and drew her back.
Queen Morgause disengaged herself from her sister and the Queen of Norgales, and stepped forward quietly.
She lifted one hand and laid a white lily on her husband’s breast, then, taking Gareth gently by the shoulder, turned and walked into the church. Morgan followed, consoling the distraught Soredamor. The toddler Mordred had sat down to play in the dust and began to wail as he was forgotten, but the Queen of Norgales hushed him and held out her hand. He got to his feet, snuffling, but in control of himself, and wrapped his hand around her middle finger.
The pallbearers turned the body and waited for the Queen of Norgales, but she took two steps back toward the cross behind her.
Her meaning was plain. She had come to pay her respects to Lot, but she would not, perhaps could not, set foot in the church.
Gareth released his hold on his father’s body and crouched, opening his arms. Little Mordred smiled and scurried to him, giggling, his dark eyes wide and happy.
Arthur and Uriens bobbed their chins and they, Agravaine, and Gawaine bore the body of Lot in, Gareth setting his youngest brother on his shoulder and carrying him after.
The knights dismounted as a body and handed their reins to a line of squires. Then they shuffled into the church behind the corpse and its chief mourners.
As Balin passed the silent Queen of Norgales, he heard the squawking of crows and saw Merlin in his favorite form of the pied raven, Brych, disturb a murder of its black fellows into flapping exodus as he settled blasphemously on the left arm of the Black Cross above the Queen’s head.
Something in the angle of the view of the pied raven struck Balin as familiar, and he went into the church troubled, trying to call to mind a long-forgotten picture in his memory. He suddenly wished Brulen were here beside him.
He was once again cross with his brother, resentful of the secrets he kept, and that he had not stayed by his side, nor even bid him farewell in the parting.
Brulen’s assurance that Lot would not live through the battle had come back to him again and again since, as had Lot’s own last words to him:
In St. Stephen’s, where they will bury me…
How had they both been so sure?
But they both laid treachery at the feet of Arthur. Was not Pellinore to blame for Lot’s cowardly execution? Or Lamorak?
He couldn’t believe that Arthur had known anything about it. Surely there had been no secret edict calling for his demise.
What had Arthur to hide in Lot’s death?
In St. Stephen’s, where they will bury me, there hangs a certain painting of a serpent. Number its clutch and count the rebel kings. Then you will learn the High King’s secret shame.
Balin steeled himself as he entered the archway of the church.
He passed into the marble atrium and followed the body of Lot as it was advanced down the center isle of the nave toward the crossing, where a bier adorned with blooming flowers waited.
From the chancel, the choir’s voices rose like the praise of angels before the Throne and echoed high in the white dome above the transept intersection.
The Archbishop and his attending priests waited solemnly, majestic in his satin cape trimmed in ermine, tall in his miter.
As the pallbearers and family moved to the front, the knights began to split off into orderly rows. Balin found himself on the south end of the wide nave. He craned his neck to take in the opulent decorations of the altar. There was a richly finished rosewood cross with a carved Christ upon it. There were golden sconces and marble cherubs, and on the east wall behind the gleaming golden Tabernacle where the rising sun must blaze, a colossal depiction in stained glass of the radiantly haloed St. Stephen, all in white, holding aloft the bloody stones which had martyred him.
Yet wherever he looked, Balin saw no painting of a serpent.
The mass commenced, and Balin and the other congregants stood, and knelt, and responded. The pagans were easily marked. Like the grieving widow and children of Lot, they stood throughout the mass, unaware and uncaring of the observation of the ritual.
Arthur eulogized Lot, calling him a good king loyal to his own heart and cited his upstanding sons and daughter and the number of his mourners as proof against his damnation. Surely, Arthur argued, he was merely biding his justly allotted time in purgatory.
He then offered the congregation the opportunity to rise and speak of Lot if they were so acquainted.
Balin met Lot in the last moments of his life and had nothing to say about the man, though it seemed every other man and woman here did, and that the ceremony would go on for much longer than he had anticipated.
His bladder began to swell, and when even Sir Griflet deigned to rise and speak about the gallantry of the deceased he had observed from afar on the battlefield of Bedegraine two years ago, Balin took the opportunity to slip unnoticed from his place and go quietly out to the atrium, to gain the outside and perhaps the stand of trees behind the churchyard where he could relieve himself in private.
That was when he happened to glance up and see the vast fresco above the exit.
It was a strange thing to see decorating the house of God.
It was painted in a nightmarish style, inelegant and verging on blasphemy in its vivid and realistic depiction of a pale, naked male figure twisting, almost trussed like a sacrificial beast in his purple sheets, as an immense serpent coiled about his entire bed. The serpent’s great and hideous green head reared over the waking sleeper, its jaws open, fangs dripping yellow tears of poison which appeared to burst into flame wherever they touched the coverlet. The sleeper had a sword poised like a phallus aright from his body, set to impale the serpent through its head when the deadly jaws closed and killed him. Alongside the bed, an empty scabbard draped across a table beside a tipped chalice, which spilled red wine across the floor like blood.
The body of the snake wound twice around the bed and then continued out the bedchamber window. At the window stood a black garbed servant, tipping what looked like a nest that had been constructed on the sill. A strangely familiar two-headed eagle was diving out of the sky, enraged, and on the wall outside the window, archers could be seen aiming for it. Where had he seen such a creature before? He couldn’t place it. It had been an emblem on a banner. But whose?
From the nest four eggs were tumbling, down pa
st the body of the serpent, to splash into the crashing, foaming ocean below. Some of the eggs were cracked, and from one, a small, pale arm reached out imploringly. The tail of the great serpent emerged from the fourth egg, which was greater than the rest.
Cavorting demons with grimacing, terrible faces bordered the bottom of the fresco, as though they lay beneath the moat and foundation, and across the top, sorrowful archangels with bright, multicolored wings looked down from the moon dappled clouds.
Balin breathed, his heart clenched in fear at the sight of that terrible work. Surely this was the painting Lot had described. And the figure in the bed, he resembled Arthur more than a little. But what did it mean?
He did not know how long he stood transfixed by the work, before a hand touched his shoulder, breaking its spell.
CHAPTER TWO
As the bells tolled the commencement of Lot’s funeral and the last of the mourners passed into the church, the Queen of Norgales spoke, seemingly to the empty air, “You can come out now, grandson, and speak to me, if you please.”
“Don’t call me that, harridan,” said Merlin, stepping from behind the Black Cross. “We are not kin.”
“What shall I call you then? Lailoken? Myrrdin Wilt?”
Merlin shook his head.
“You’re fishing…Optima.”
She laughed and turned to face him, the black of her gown swirling like ink in water, whispering across the stones as she approached.
“As are you. No, Merlin, you will have to do better than that. Your god may show you the future, but it’s by the Devil that you knew the past. Your dear mentor, Blaise, estranged you from your true master in hell with his precious baptismal rite, and your rechristening cut you off from your true destiny. Now you are like an accursed horsefly, existing only in the moment, yet plagued by the knowledge of every future. Have you seen Camelot in ashes yet? Have you seen the skulls of those holy priests dashed once more against the Black Cross?”
“I have seen no future in which you win, Joan Go-Too’t.”
She wagged her finger as she passed him, walking casually into the churchyard.
“Try again.”
Merlin frowned behind his tangled beard, and she paused and looked over her shoulder.
“No? Nothing more from your books?”
“Mariana!” Merlin blurted in frustration.
She shook her head and kept walking, forcing him to follow.
“I buried my true name deep well before I ever summoned the spirit that fathered you, Merlin.”
It was true. Her true name and any power he might gain over her had thus far proved unattainable.
“Now tell me why you are here. Are you waiting for Morgan?” She giggled lightly. “She tells me a great deal about you.”
“To hell with Morgan La Fey.” Merlin spat. “I came to ask about Nimue.”
“Who?”
“You know very well who she is.”
“You mean the girl with the sword? Does she still have it?”
“You know she does not. Did you send her?”
The Queen of Norgales rested her hand on a weathered tombstone, the name rubbed away by years of rain and wind.
It was said that the spirits of the dead who lie in unmarked graves are restless, but what of one whose marker has been erased by time and the elements? Is their peace disturbed? Merlin wondered.
“Another of your little doves, Merlin? You do have something of your father in you after all.”
Merlin stared at her, reading her, then sighed.
“You did not. I can tell when you’re being enigmatic and when you don’t really have your hand in something.”
“Can you really? I have visited this Nimue. In dreams. I heard her crying in the night, and when she reached out for succor, when she turned in the witching hour to black arts to divine the cause of her sorrow, I followed the scent of her broken heart on the midnight wind and gave her the answer.”
“You told her Arthur was responsible for her lover’s death. You hid Balin from her.”
She curtsied.
“But you did not send her,” Merlin said thoughtfully.
“I gave her a nudge in the appropriate direction, the little starling,” said the Queen.
“To have all this power…” Merlin mused.
“…except over one’s only rival,” the Queen finished. She leaned across the headstone and spoke in a hushed whisper, conspiratorial. “We could tell each other our names, Merlin. It’s become wearisome, hasn’t it? We could end this long, long game, tip the board, forgo the clumsy pawns for once.”
She passed her wrinkled hand over the old grave.
In a few seconds, the dirt began to turn, and bony fingers strung with rotten sinew broke through the turf.
Merlin tapped the grave with the end of his staff. Immediately fresh green shoots sprang from the turned earth and grew over the weakly groping hand, the roots pulling it back down into the earth, until it was as though it had never been.
“What entertainment would our lives have then, your highness?”
She straightened and sighed.
“Until next time then, grandson,” she said, and walked into the trees beyond the churchyard.
***
Merlin watched her fade into the shade of the canopy, knew it was useless to follow her. She was his reason for being. She and King Agrippe had called upon the darkest powers, forged the most damning pacts to beget on his mother, Adhan, a scion of hell to counterbalance the Christ. But blessed Blaise had taken a page from the Queen’s own book and countered their plot, christened him by a new name at his birth, a name unknown even to Merlin, so that neither they nor any demon could have any power over the other. Blaise kept Merlin’s name locked in his own heart. The holy man was ever his conscience.
Now Merlin and the Queen struck at each other through intermediaries. She, through rogue sorcerers and enchantresses like Morgan La Fey, he through his shaky alliance with Avalon, but more via myriad kings and their errant knights. She had foiled his plans for Uther with Igraine, but he had turned her victory into Arthur. She had very nearly defeated all his plans with Morgause.
And how he had foiled that plot. Had Blaise known, it would have broken his heart, maybe tempted the old man to bind and destroy him.
She would not best him through Nimue and Balin, though. He had taken steps already to insure she would not. As for Balin, the doom of the Siege Perilous awaited him. Now he must only find Nimue and turn her from her wrath with the truth, perhaps convince her to return to Avalon, for her dogged persistence made her almost unpredictable.
Merlin could not afford to allow Nimue’s random, underhanded attacks at Arthur to go on. She was growing in power and could well fall to the wiles of the Queen, who would make her into more than a mere thorn in his side.
He turned and went to the church. Passing behind the Black Cross, when he gained the steps of St. Stephen’s, he was no longer Merlin, but the image of Preudom, the old painter and bell ringer, who was even now dozing in the belltower. The old man had trained himself to awaken at the Ite, missa est and perform his duty, but would not awaken for some time yet.
Merlin passed into the shadows of the vestibule and waited. When Balin stepped out of the church proper and examined the painting above the door, Merlin waited until he had taken it all in before putting his old, gnarled hand on the knight’s shoulder.
***
The old bell ringer bid him outside and Balin walked into the churchyard.
He was a completely hairless fellow, a feature which made him somehow unseemly. He was old, but wiry, as the bulge of his shoulders through his mantle attested. There was a roll to one of his eyes.
“You like my painting, sir knight?”
“I do not think it belongs in a church,” said Balin carefully, not wanting to offend.
The priest cackled.
“Nor do I! It was commissioned by the king himself, and he insisted on its placement in the vestibule. It is called
Somniamus Arturus. The Dream of Arthur. He described it to me in great detail. Even pointed out the place he wanted it, right over the door where you saw it.”
“But what does it mean?” Balin asked.
“I asked the very same of the King, and he said to me, ‘Brother Preudom, let it stand as a reminder to all who leave this hallowed sanctuary, that the Devil coils like a serpent, even in a good man’s shadow, ready to strike him when he is at his most vulnerable.’”
Balin chewed his lip.
“Is there any significance to the number of the eggs? Why does a child’s hand reach out from one of them? And why is one egg a serpent’s?”
Preudom grinned and held up his hands.
“I was only told what to paint, not the meaning behind every detail. It was a nightmare after all, and only a dreamer may truly understand the reason in his own dreams.”
Balin thought of the black clad figure at the window, dumping the nest into the waters. It did remind him of someone in particular.
“Or a wizard,” said Balin darkly. “Tell me, good Brother, where in Camelot can I find the enchanter, Merlin?”
“Ah,” said Preudom. “The Cambion comes and goes, Sir Balin. When he comes, he comes there,” said the bell ringer, pointing to the castle. “Where he goes, no man can say.”
Balin went to find Ironprow.
***
Merlin watched him go through Preudom’s eye, then flew ahead to the castle as the pied raven Balin had dubbed Brych.
Most of the servants were busy preparing Camelot for the wedding of Arthur and the Princess Guinevere, and the majority of the nobles were attending Lot’s funeral. Merlin leapt down unnoticed from the open window and became a kitchen boy.
***
Balin had to lead Ironprow to the stables himself, and he wandered the deserted halls of Camelot for some time before he found a harried looking young serving boy whose collar he had to grab to stay him.
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