p1b6fn7sdh1ln0g4v1pkvkuqim54

by A. A. Attanasio

  For Her, Lailoken reminds himself, he has become Myrddin. For Her, he wanders the burned land.

  And for Her, he exists at all. To acknowledge this,

  he sometimes squats in the rubble of a toppled shrine or charred temple and speaks aloud his story, as if by voicing his memory he touches Her—for She is his history, his reason for being, and when he talks of Her he must speak of himself, so that the telling holds them softly together.

  *

  I am the demon Lailoken. I am as old as time. Older,

  in fact, if truth were to be told. But truth, strict as it is, is a tricky thing. I see that now that I have had the privilege of living the truth from both sides. I was not always so privileged.

  I knew the truth before time as well as after the Big Bang, your age's ludicrous name for the stupendous event of creation. Before the beginning, where was everything? I will tell you in a word.

  Heaven.

  Before the universe began its aeonial expansion

  through the cold and dark of space, everything that is now existed as pure energy of infinite heat and infinite density.

  Does the word infinite actually mean anything to you?

  It does to me. You see, I was there, inside the

  infinite heat and infinite density of the All. And so were you, if truth were told. Now we're back to the truth, and that is tricky business. Tricky, because you don't remember, do you?

  There's the chief difference between mortals and

  demons. I remember. I remember, and I cannot forget what infinite joy there is inside the Inside of All. There, in the oneness of infinity, is everything, all at once, even nothing, the formlessness that brings forth all forms, divine

  emptiness, womb of being becoming everything all at once, even nothing. That nothing birthed everything, including you and me and the dark and burning ones and worlds and dreams. And all together in the nothing that is everything, it is heaven. And it is real. More real than the diaphanously spun web of atoms and molecules in the vacuum that

  weaves the illusion of material existence.

  I am ranting again. I can't help that. Nothing I can

  say about heaven, out here in the void, with the flung stars kindling their dim echo of the One Light, would make much sense, even though you were there with me and with all the others.

  Suffice to say, then, that heaven is everything we

  think it is—beautiful and whole. Why it fell apart the way it did, why there was a Big Bang at all, is another story, one not really suited for words, for it is the story of Her—and I don't want to get into that again. It is the story we demons tell among ourselves, grousing and complaining about the cold and the dark, arguing about what to do now that there is a now.

  We should make the best of it, since we can't go

  back.

  Or can we?

  That's another argument we have.

  I've reached the point where I don't care. I'll take it as it comes. For a long time, I was not so easy. Once, I flourished among the most insane of us.

  Panic had convinced me there was no way back -

  no way to return to the womb that birthed us into the void.

  The womb had stayed behind in the higher dimensions

  from which the Big Bang had exploded. We are alone

  without the Creatrix in the expanding darkness and

  dimming light.

  Mad with rage at all I had lost, I smashed every

  atom I found. In a stupid delirium, I lurched about bashing everything, sometimes my fellow demons. Our

  hopelessness was our madness.

  Other exiles had not given up hope of returning to

  heaven. They are the Fire Lords—angels as they are

  known by convention.

  The angels preserved somehow the memory of

  wholeness in a way that mocked our fury. They burned.

  Where we had accepted the frozen and lightless void into which we had been flung and had become as the vacuum, cold and dark, the angels burned. They refused to accept the emptiness. Instead, they clung to their scraps of infinite fire—they clung though by clinging they burned.

  We demons swarmed over the angels to comfort

  ourselves by their warmth—but their howls of agony

  maddened us further. We wanted them to shut up and burn silently for us or give up the fire they had carried from heaven and become as we were.

  Their fiery distress seemed unnecessary. Shouting

  brutally against the angels' screams, we tried to get the burning ones to let go of their fire. Some did. They still slink morosely through the starless tracts between the galaxies, stunned mindless from the trauma, burned-out.

  Most of the angels ignored our shouts and clung

  madly to their tiny pieces of heaven, screaming as they suffered. After a while, we stopped trying to warm

  ourselves by their pain and let them go. They rushed off, all of them blithering mad in every crazy direction.

  Later, we laughed to watch them groping for each other as the cold bit into them. A lot of them gave up their light then. They spiraled into the dark and withered away.

  Their geld, opaque husks drift anonymously through space to this day, still sleeping—or dead.

  No, not dead. I don't think any piece of Her can die.

  The Creatrix. Divine Woman. But the burned-out angels are as good as dead. The few burning ones who remained seized onto each other. They cleaved together in their burning and suffering, fending off cold reality. We laughed and laughed at them, chiding them to let the past go, to face reality as had we.

  Not that we had faced anything, not really. We hung

  stunned and stupid in the bitter, icy darkness. When we laughed at the gleaming struggles of the last burning ones, our laughter lashed out with black despair.

  The madness of demons is rage—the madness of

  angels, hope. They believe that in time the exploding universe will slow down, stop and contract back into itself, into heaven, older and wiser. And they hold this conviction in a universe whose expansion is accelerating!

  They are undaunted. They fervently believe that

  piecing together atoms and weaving molecules into bizarre creations offers a way home. With their organic creations, the angels will build machines to bend spacetime and open a portal out of the void into heaven.

  We couldn't see it. And here's the part we really

  found crazy: the angels cherish their creative ambition so strongly, they decided that, in the meantime, the memory of heaven would be enough! They stopped screaming.

  Instead of raging, they work.

  Oh, they work very hard. To this day, they

  encourage the freakish frenzy of organic forms despite our protests that they are creating suffering. Naturally, to us, they seem more insane than we are. We know we are crazy, we demons. Infuriated that they could so readily embrace our miserable fate as something creative made a jest of us, and we reviled them.

  Our war with them is famous. In every galaxy,

  around every sun, on every planet, we challenge them and wreak havoc with their weird creations. We have won time and again. Destruction, after all, is heir to creation.

  *

  Each time Lailoken kneels in prayer to Her and

  remembers his history, he rises stronger, and his quest continues for Ygrane's king, for his own destiny—and for Her.

  Ygrane travels spring to autumn in the forest valleys and along the bright breathing ocean. She visits the

  scattered communities of her people, delivering magical rinses that inspire the crops as well as cure the ills of animal and folk. Throughout Cymru, she is heartily

  welcomed, as much for her potent magic as her evocation of legendary times and their dark glory.

  In winter, she secludes herself in a fortress chosen

  from among those of Cymru's three chieftains. She visits a different warlord each year, favoring all, slighting none. Lot of the No
rth Isles, Urien of the Coast, Kyner of the Hills: She circulates among them, plying her magic for the

  benefit of each winter settlement.

  With Lot and Urien, traditional chiefs, the dark

  months allow for deep trance work. She walks outside her body for days at a time, making the three-day trek into the underworld to visit her gods, the Daoine Sid.

  Occasionally, on those rare days when her magical

  chores have not emptied her of all her strength, she

  searches for Myrddin and tries to encourage him in his search.

  In truth, she doubts the validity of his quest. Raglaw had aged terribly by the end of her life, and Ygrane fears that the crone was mad, her mind scalded from years of trespassing the Great Tree. The human body is not meant to conduct that much energy. Excited by the unforeseen arrival of the Dark Dweller, Raglaw's brain fevered what she wanted to see.

  Timewinds surge and eddy, and what is revealed

  oftentimes sinks and never appears again. No prophecy is forbidden—and none certain. So the crone always said in her saner days.

  For now, however, it is useful to the queen to keep

  the Dark Dweller roaming in other kingdoms. She has

  learned in earlier lifetimes to carry one heavy stick at a time or risk dropping them all. With Lailoken out of the way, she can focus better on her real task, mastering the

  unicorn.

  In her first winter after the solar beast's arrival, in Lot's subarctic realm, she learns to ride. The animal is calmer under the windy auroras and more patient with her clumsy efforts to communicate.

  She can feel the unicorn's flow of thoughts, a glossy aisle of light in the mind's dark, wide and stately as an ocean current, far too huge for her to read.

  Her own tiny thoughts are lost in a loud thrashing of emotions and worries, the surf noise of memories and

  associations slipstreaming far too rapidly for the unicorn to perceive. She is simply not heard, until her mind goes

  silent as a fox in soft snow.

  Then, the promise of the moon lifts her higher into

  the sky on the unicorn's muscular back. She pulls back, alarmed to see the winter earth far below, lit by starlight like a black sapphire.

  Each quiet thought is heard and fluidly obeyed by

  the unicorn. Stars fly like a blizzard, and they gallop out of the night and into the noon glare of foreign lands. In one day, they visit the massive, ruined temples of Egypt and the tundra monoliths where star magic first came to Earth.

  When spring returns she gives up unicorn riding to

  travel by horseback with her fiana, attending to a queen's communal responsibilities. By summer, she resides in one of the fortress cities of Cymru and spends time with her daughter.

  The child visits from Tintagel, which by age eight

  she avows to be her home. By nine, Morgeu has declared herself a Roman and wears her hair and dresses

  exclusively in the courtly style.

  Ygrane no longer tries to share her magic. Instead,

  the queen fan-crests her hair in the Roman style and wears tunicas whenever she is in the company of Morgeu. That seems to put the girl at ease, and for several summers they share the common pleasures of mothers and young

  daughters, playing traditional games and entertaining with the noble families of the land.

  By her eleventh year, Morgeu has already traveled

  with the duke to most of the splendid Roman cities in Armorica and the Loire. The timber mead halls and rock pile fortress-villages of Cymru have become far too

  provincial for her Roman tastes, and her visits only inspire sulking and moroseness.

  Ygrane is usually glad when winter sends the sullen

  child back to Tintagel. This winter, five years after the departure of her spirit reckoner, the queen is obliged to stay with Kyner at Viroconium. This religious zealot allows scant time for trance work, let alone unicorn riding. Virtually every day has been plotted for her by Kyner and his

  ministers, who are intent on impressing her with their dominion.

  Four hundred years ago, Viroconium, a flourishing

  market town of arched gateways and brownstone

  ramparts, served as a legionary garrison, a stone fist against the hill tribes of Kyner's ancestors. Ironically, in this winter of Anno Domini 472, the Christian chieftain proudly fêtes his Celtic queen in the town's baths with harp

  festivals and in the cobbled market squares with solstice fires and tree dances—and it is hard to tell whether Rome or Cymru has conquered here.

  At table and before the warm soft roar of the hearth, Kyner speaks forthrightly about the beauty and rightness of his faith. Sometimes Ygrane responds by reminding him of the old kingdom, a thousand years ago, when the Celts ruled all the land from these hills to the cedars of Persia. In those days, the Hebrew priests and Celtic Druids shared a secret knowledge about the coming of a world savior.

  Kyner is only politely interested in her histories of their people, and eventually she stops sharing and simply listens. She hears his ardor for something more than a blind heart and a blind mouth, which is all his past has offered. Apart from gracing the chieftain with superficial glamour, she cannot soothe this deep melancholy. His

  great-grandfathers beaten to submission by the Romans, his grandfathers and father assailed by sea wolves,

  murderous raiders from the sea, he has inherited the

  failure of their gods.

  Ancient magic means nothing to him, for that is

  merely the power in wic, the green marrow, the life-force that was not strong enough to fend off Romans, Picts, Jutes, and Saxons. Kyner requires a more powerful

  sorcery, strong enough to raise the dead. His faith is resurrection.

  Ygrane listens to him preach as snow flies across

  the tall windows and the hearthfire churns heat and light from the flesh of trees. Far below, the magnetic serpent big as the world grasps its black center and sings.

  *

  The following spring, Morgeu visits Ygrane for the

  last time. Her crinkled red hair radiating from her round head like a fiery nimbus, the duke's daughter stalks across the battlement esplanade of Segontium. Her green, floral-embroidered robes flap with the vigor of her defiant stride.

  Taller than when last Ygrane saw her, she possesses an intimidating physical presence—her mother's breadth of shoulder, her father's pugnacious jaw. She aims straight for Ygrane, who leans against the crenel of the parapet,

  gazing across the sun-hammered channel at the lilac

  silhouette of Mona.

  "Why will you not see my father?" Morgeu demands.

  Ygrane, wrapped in a dove-colored, shot-silk tunic

  and quilted cloak of muted violets, looks over her shoulder coolly. "Why should I see him?"

  "He demands it, and he is your husband," Morgeu answers disdainfully.

  "Have I not given him the best of my warriors to protect his coasts?"

  "Mother—" Morgeu levels a petulant stare. "He wants you."

  Ygrane turns back to her seascape. "He does not

  want me," she answers without emotion. "He wishes only to use me. Perhaps tonight he is bored with his whores?"

  Morgeu crosses to her side and peers angrily at her

  mother's profile, saffron with reflected sunlight. "If you will not fulfill your vow to him as wife, do you truly believe he will honor his vow to keep the Christian missionaries from our land?"

  Ygrane turns full about, her eyes aslant with anger.

  "If he can keep his head on his shoulders without my warriors, then let him send in his Roman priests. Those who have eyes to see know that you are the daughter of Ygrane and Gorlois. He has had me for a wife. My vow

  was fulfilled that wretched night. He'll not touch me again."

  "Withholding yourself from your husband is grounds for divorce among Romans, do not forget," Morgeu remarks imperiously.

 
"Do you think a Celt should trouble herself with Roman law?"

  Morgeu sweeps an arm toward the red pan-tiled

  roofs within the stone walls of Segontium. "How can you call yourself a Celt? You live as a Roman. Look at your dress, Mother, and the way you wear your hair."

  "I do as I please, Morgeu."

  "And it doesn't please you to be with my father—

  your own husband?"

  "Why do you care for what passes between your

  father and me?"

  Morgeu twists a coppery braid about a finger. "I want him to be happy. When I'm with him, he asks for you.

  He doesn't understand why you won't see him."

  Ygrane's face tightens. "A pretty story. You saw what he did to Raglaw."

  Morgeu studies her mother, the blond duskiness of

  her complexion and the strong chin. Her Celtic traits are unmistakable, yet she insists on wearing her hair tied up in the intricate way of the Romans, instead of free. A flare of anger sears through her. "How can you blame him when you yourself behave as a Roman?"

  "Morgeu, you make no sense, and your anger

  troubles me. Right now, as we speak, my warriors are out there on Mona, fighting side by side with your father's men.

  The pirate enclave that they are at this moment destroying has been ravaging the coasts—and your father's coast as well, needless to say. Some of my brave men will not be coming back tonight. They will have died saving Roman lives and keeping open Roman trade routes. And it will be

  for me to explain why to their families and dear ones.

  That's a precious enough offering to your father. It is the real and only reason he married me. He has gotten the best of me. He will have no more."

  Morgeu glares with stifled resentment.

  "Speak your heart, daughter," Ygrane offers, the flush of anger in her face dimming before Morgeu's

  distress. "Have I not always been open with you?"

  "Mother, I'm thirteen," Morgeu declares with a brittle edge. "I've been a woman these past three months. In little more than a year, I'll be as old as you when you married Father."

  "All this is true," Ygrane replies softly, and with a smile takes her daughter's chin in forefinger and thumb.

  "And it is equally true, you're becoming a beautiful woman."

  Morgeu steps back sharply. "Do not play with me. I know I am not beautiful. My eyes are tiny and my jaw