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by A. A. Attanasio

  And with a strong leader can become an island fortress, safe and secure in our own land from the madness that is murdering civilization."

  His body thrums with demonic energy loosed within

  him by the unicorn. "It can be done. I saw it. I saw the king."

  Merlinus decides to test this new visionary power,

  and he wills his eyes to fill with the sight. In a wind-rush, his vision bursts from the grove into sunlight. He flies rapidly downhill and across tilting slopes. Beneath him, a riotous abundance of flowers blurs by—buttercups,

  harebells, poppies—then the sunflash of a pond and a

  tangled bank of reeds and cattails.

  Serene as a breezy weed tuft, he sails past the

  toppled bullock cart. Men stack burlap-bundled fruit trees while others struggle to dismantle the broken axle. The ocean below the cliffs burns with horns of fire.

  He flits through a stand of birch trees, sunshine

  creaking among spindly shadows, and emerges in a

  meadow of rippling grass. The open field surges with

  horsemen from the coming generation, pennants flying, all emblazoned with emblems of Optima's faith: the Cross, the Lamb, the Cup, and the White Bird.

  A wild laugh of joy for this Christian future, for his mother's fulfillment, slashes through him. The mirage collapses to grains of sunlight in the wind. Long moments pass as he struggles to still his excited laughter. He remembers that his physical body lies unconscious in a grove of cypress. He drifts here as a ghost and must find his way back to the flesh Optima wove for him.

  Merlinus concentrates on the space of his being still frosty from the unicorn's touch. Laughter coils again, and he exerts all his might to suppress it. This time, the silhouettes of the next generation blur over him like cold sheets of mountain water, leaving him stunned in an

  aquatic landscape.

  Light trembles as though seen underwater.

  Shadows rise and fall in a seething profusion of seashine—

  and he understands that he is not seeing the future but the murky present immersed in the sky-wide stream of time.

  The shadows around him are living beings whose actions shape and define whatever future may yet be.

  Again, laughter assails him. How ludicrous seems

  this moment huge as the gaping sky, holding everything—

  everything! There, he sees a long-bearded old man,

  himself lying as if dead, one eyelid half-open, revealing scleral white. Brilliant filaments of gold energy tangle in the air between him and his body, connecting his astral self with his inert shape.

  Through the muted aqueous shine of the moment's

  enormity, other figures loom. The hulking black shapes of demons hover in the distance, mute as mountains. He

  recognizes the gruesome contortions of his old comrades.

  They do not see him, for demons lack the sight.

  Behind them, the Furor rises, his blue mantle the sky itself, his one Nordic eye pale as the moon. He, too, does not see the fugitive demon. His gaze is locked on a future far distant from this moment.

  Closer in the blue breathlessness of this vision

  strolls Uther Pendragon, blind to time as any man. He wanders through thoughts of what lies ahead while he

  steps over a deadfall birch, oblivious to the powers around him.

  Wray Vitki drifts in his shadow, carrying his own

  midnight, a man-shaped darkness etched with lizard glints of scales. No strong eye shines in him, either—mercifully, since his future is the Dragon's maw.

  Merlinus fights back the urgency to laugh, wickedly

  amused to see time itself as a dimension, an endlessly wide space occupied by all living things. Everywhere are forest creatures locked in spelled moments of eternity. He stares through their watery bodies, beyond the musical stairs of a descending brook, past the transparent veils of woods and hills to where people occupy their blind

  moments.

  The king's soldiers toil to fix their wagon's broken

  axle. Riochatus and his entourage arrive at Maridunum, a hive of activity locked still in this one blued moment, pennants warped in frozen wind, faces fixed in permanent flashes of expression.

  Layers of distance peel away before the wizard's

  penetrating stare, and he finds the unicorn on the far side of the city. It floats in calm among torn curtains of the forest wall, caught in midleap, absorbed in the moment's depth, lacking all future vision.

  Sweeping his stare across farther ranges, Merlinus

  searches for the queen. He finds Morgeu first. She huddles in an orange blur of torchlight inside a round, sunken ceremonial crypt. Serpent-coiled jasper columns encircle the deep vault and uphold a black dome nailed all over with human skulls. Lantern flames blaze inside them.

  Time moves here, slowly seeping into the future.

  Suspended by iron chains, censers of hammered

  bronze leak twirling vapors. These fumes drool upon the floor and crawl like viperous ghosts to the onyx base of a hideous statue. It is the same gruesome sculpture that the wizard confronted in the aedes shrine at Segontium—a naked, fang-faced woman sporting a skull-necklace and brandishing a bloody sword and a severed head.

  Morrigan—the Demon Queen.

  Morgeu lies prostrate before the statue of the

  dancing goddess, tightly gripping her bell-tasseled ankles.

  Naked, the young witch's big-boned, womanly body shines dead white as wax. Flickering, rippling skull fires stroke her like shadowy, skeletal fingers. She rolls about and props herself on her elbows, her small eyes gazing lovingly at the statue.

  "Ethiops—" she calls in a voice not her own.

  The snaky, spiritous voice is so familiar in its

  wickedness that it stabs Merlinus, transfixing him like a wind-tossed butterfly impaled upon a pine needle. Spider thread energies spin from the grisly statue and knot the brails of Lailoken's heart, holding him tightly within a frightful rapture.

  An eel-slick shadow separates from the stone figure.

  Upright and badged with blood clot reflections from the skull-lanterns, Ethiops descends from the mountain heights he shared with the Furor. He does not see Merlinus. His black bolts of eyes reflect Morgeu's pallid, awestricken face.

  Too well, Lailoken can imagine the revulsion the

  demon feels for this gutsack groveling before him—yet the sable translucence of his slinky body embraces the

  writhing witch.

  An irrepressible laugh at the depraved desperation

  of Ethiops grips Merlinus. The wizard strains to hold on to his vision, and the shocking scene jolts away.

  Morgeu is a weapon of the demons, he tells himself to douse his aching laughter and calm down instantly.

  Ahead of him, sitting on a centuries-soft floor of pine needle and beech leaf, Ygrane watches. The muffled light of frozen time does not disguise her intent stare. She gazes directly at him. Her translucent body opens like a drawn curtain of rain—and behind her, behind the clear mask of earth and rock that is the planet's crust, the

  Dragon watches. Its purple, ink-smoke eyes fill mountainous miles, alien in the dark effluvium of its being.

  Startled by this huge face, Merlinus loses his grip on himself, and a terrified laugh explodes inside him. His vision shatters—and in the instant of its vanishing, he sees that Ygrane is but a lure of the Dragon's grim intelligence.

  The Dragon empowers her magic to ensnare them all. The wizard distinctly sees its webwork of blue fire spun into the finest wires, spun and woven to entrap them all in this space of time.

  Azure threads radiate from the Dragon's fiery

  shadow, focus through the lens of Ygrane's body, and fan out across the world. The magic fibers weave knots around him. Uther, too, and the shadowy Wray Vitki shimmer with these cords of magic tightening about them.

  And the unicorn wears the long reins of the queen's

  power. S
he means to feed them all to the Dragon, for the braids of her magic tie each of them to the beast inside the planet.

  The queen herself is snared by the Dragon's web.

  Though she has protected the unicorn from sacrifice to the Dragon, she must struggle to assert her own will. The Sid's linkage with the world beast controls and traps her as well.

  Her green stare lingers as an afterimage in his

  strong eye. She watches with an intent that is clear, unwavering, and merciless.

  *

  Uther feels tiny as a furtive animal under the reeling draperies of ivy within this massive glade of oak. In this obscure wood, with its silent sunless galleries, rocky defiles, shoulder-high ferns, and rare, outraged slashes of spectral, smoky daylight, he feels free and unimportant.

  He thinks about his brother and the fabled obscurity

  of his own life's woods, where he must search for his soul in a tangle of political commitments and future battles.

  Foremost on his mind hovers the loveless marriage to

  come, a sacred union to a pagan woman he has never

  met.

  Garish green fire twinkles in the distance, and the

  king makes his way toward that, over gorm-covered, fallen behemoths, across stony beds of exhausted creeks, and through a maze of thorn-clogged underbrush. Thwacking his way with his short sword among veils of nettle, he emerges in a chamber of fuming cerulean, blue as the

  bottom of a shallow sea—a sky-bright arboreal well aswirl with rising mist.

  A small stone building sits among silver grasses and

  splotches of colorful snapdragons, foxgloves, and bryony.

  The king mistakes the squat, domed structure for a saint's sepulcher, a chapel. The lintel above the dolmen door has carved into it a Celtic cross—a cross laid atop a circle, an ancient symbol of the cosmic quadrants.

  Obviously grateful to have found a site of worship in the midst of this primeval terrain, a holy place where he can unburden his fears to God, he sheathes his sword and hurries through the spiritous mists. He genuflects at the doorway and enters.

  Inside, he pulls up short and bows his head

  apologetically. A tall, white-robed woman stands at an altar of undressed stone arranging wreaths of wildflowers. As she is alone, dressed simply for communion with her soul, and wears no emblem of her station, he greets her in Latin, as he would a fellow worshiper, "Christ be with you, sister."

  Ygrane turns about serenely, glamour radiating from

  her, creating a tranquil atmosphere. Informed by heralds of Uther's arrival in Cymru, she has been muttering magic, summoning him to meet her here in this shrine, so that they may spend their first moments of shared destiny

  alone. She recognizes him from the heralds' descriptions.

  His appearance does not surprise her, and she manages a smile as if at the young man's reverent mistake. "Welcome, stranger, to the temple of peace."

  Uther squints in the dim enclosure. "Is this not a chapel?" He takes in tau-cut patterns on the stone walls and, illuminated by sun shafts from the dome's slot

  windows, three linked circles hewn on the altar face. "You are not Christian?"

  "This is a Celtic temple," she says, and lets her gaze play over him in a nervous way, so that he can easily read her concern: He wears a sword and is Roman, and she

  foolishly alone. This is her first test of this man who would be her husband. Her years with Gorlois alert her to the faintest facial tics of sadistic interest.

  She sees none. Instead, the young king backs away

  as if from an open furnace door.

  "You speak Latin..." Uther's confusion pulls him away from her. He tries to understand who this beautiful woman is, alone in a secluded, pagan temple, and what she is about, standing among those wreaths of pliant ferns and starry bryony heaped at the altar.

  "I am—" She lifts her arms warily and turns her palms outward, revealing her simpleness. "I am a handmaiden of the queen—Ygrane of the Celts. We

  learned our Latin together— during her marriage to the duke of the Saxon Coast." She puts a pale hand on the altar. "I am come to beseech the spirit powers for their

  blessing of peace upon our union with the Britons."

  Realizing his blunder, Uther continues to step back,

  bowing his head apologetically. "Forgive me—I—I thought to pray to our Savior for the same peace ... to my Savior, that is—-Jesus— the Anointed One—Christ—"

  "I know of Jesus," Ygrane says through an amused but discreet smile. "The duke was a Christian, too."

  "Of course—" Uther puts a flustered hand to his brow. "I'm sorry to intrude. I leave you to your worship."

  As he steps backward into the bold sunlight, she

  sees him clearly—his quiet face and thoughtful eyes,

  wincing in the brightness, and the jet locks of his hair, all in disarray from his strenuous march through the thicket. He looks boyish in that revealing light. The troubling concern torquing his heart, the heavy doubt that has brought him here, shadows him as obvious as worry on a child's face.

  Ygrane's fears vanish in a surge of compassion.

  "Wait," she calls. "You are one of King Uther's party, are you not?"

  Uther nods. "Yes—I am with him."

  In his dusty vest, worn trousers, and scruffy boots,

  he looks like a common cavalryman, and the queen's eyes brighten knowingly. "You were the sorrow of the Saxons from what we've heard. Your archery and horses deeply astonished the enemy." She motions to the blossom-decked altar. "Will you come in and pray with me, then?"

  Uther shifts his weight backward.

  "Pray to your god, then," Ygrane says mildly. "If our people are to be allies, our gods should be allies, too." She returns her attention to her floral arrangement and speaks without looking at him. "From what I understand, your faith is a young one—or, rather, a stitching together of many an old one."

  "That's not true," Uther says, stepping into the temple, attracted to the one lure he cannot resist. "Jesus is God's only begotten Son. He came to die for our sins and make us worthy of heaven."

  Ygrane smiles mischievously at his umbrage and

  suppresses her mirth before facing him. "Do leave your sword outside, soldier. Please. This is a shrine to peace. I should have told you."

  Uther steps back outside and fumbles with his

  buckler. "You did—I'm sorry. However, you're mistaken about my faith. Jesus alone is the Son of God. There is no other."

  "I've offended you," Ygrane observes tauntingly.

  "Then it is I who am sorry. You see, our people are an ancient and proud race, and I take their knowledge for granted." She beckons him in and gestures to a niche-seat

  carved into the stone wall. "Water?" she asks, producing a red leather flagon and small withe basket from beside the altar. "Or a barley muffin?" When he declines with a small wave of his hand, she adds, "They have currants and black walnuts. They're the queen's favorite."

  Uther accepts one and nibbles at it with a courteous

  look of appreciation.

  "A thousand years ago," she says, sitting in the adjacent wall-seat, "my people ranged across all of Europe. Did you know that?"

  "Yes. You sacked the Eternal City eight hundred

  years ago," he says around a cheekful of muffin. "In fact, you were a threat to the Romans until they defeated you at Telamon 225 years before the birth of our—my Savior."

  "Indeed." She acknowledges his erudition with a smile. "You're knowledgeable for a soldier."

  "I—I studied to be a priest and learned some

  history," he mumbles and swallows. "And yourself-—you're quite knowledgeable for a handmaid."

  "The queen expects all her servants to read and

  know their history." She offers him the flagon of water. "Our ogham alphabet is as old as the Greeks'."

  "That is a heritage worthy of pride." He accepts the flagon and drinks.

  "You
must be as proud of your heritage to give up the priesthood and fight for your people," she notes.

  Uther's stare turns suddenly hard. "Unless we fight, we will lose everything," he answers brusquely. "The barbarians want this island for themselves, and they're determined to purge us." He passes the flagon back to her, and, noticing the look of deep concern in her large eyes, his gaze softens. "Of course, you know this wicked truth as well as I. That is why you are here. To pray for our alliance to win peace."

  "Can we win?" she asks him, searching his young face for some hint of hope.

  "We must." His whole body leans forward, poised, alert, looking almost afraid, she thinks. "We must win—for all that is holy—for your and my people."

  "I pray that your king is as determined."

  "He is determined to give his life," he says flatly, "if that is what it takes to win our land back from savagery. He will pay no less than his brother paid. That I know."

  "And you, soldier?" She peers at him intently, fascinated by his fervor. "Has your faith prepared you to give your life for our cause?"

  Uther sits back. "I am already dead," he whispers, and the cold that those words work in the queen raises her small hairs. "My whole family is dead—murdered by war

  and grief. I often feel as if I died with them." His knuckles glow in the half dark, gripping the leather pads of his knees. "That is why I came in here to pray—when I thought it was a chapel."

  "You came to pray for your family—" Ygrane speaks gently, lowering her eyes.

  He does not bother assuring her that his family is

  safe in heaven. He is alone on earth, in trespass of his faith. He had hoped to pray for the woman he must marry.

  "I actually came to pray for your queen," he admits, his head pressed back against the stone wall, gazing

  calmly into her querying stare. "I came to pray to Jesus that he might open her heart to him—that Uther and Ygrane

  might have the blessing of a Christian marriage."

  Ygrane sits upright. "I think your prayer will go unanswered, soldier. Ygrane is fierce in her faith. And, as I've told you, my people are an ancient one. Far more ancient than Rome."