"What is her faith?" Uther inquires, quietly. "Whom do the Celts worship?"
"It is the Celtic conviction that in every person there resides a soul," she answers musically, her head back, her proud eyes brighter it seems for the strong bones of her cheeks and jaw, "and in every soul an intelligence that may think either good or evil. And out of good comes life. And in every life, there is God."
"And evil?" he asks.
"There is no evil," she replies with a quiet smile,
"which is not a greater good."
Uther puts aside the muffin she has given him and
sits taller. The handmaid's sincerity moves him, and he feels contrite for deceiving her. "We should pray," he suggests, "to our separate gods."
He kneels at the altar, and she stands beside him.
They pray silently. Outside, birds simmer and the wind soughs from the dark gloom of the forest. Presently, Uther rises, and Ygrane touches his arm. "Thank you, soldier.
You are generous to honor my people's shrine with your prayer."
The queen withdraws her glamour and stands
before him as her simple self. She searches his face for signals of interest, wanting him to find her alluring, to balance her own attraction to him.
He does not look away or withdraw, and her heart
paces faster. Stepping closer, she looks for and sees carats of light brighten in his stare and by that glimmer reads his enticement and knows there will be intimacies.
The humble king's accepting gaze drives all doubt
from her, and she feels she can hide from this honorable
man no longer. He has fulfilled every expectation, and not even the immortal queen within her can find fault with him.
She lowers her head contritely. "I am Ygrane—queen of the Celts."
Uther sags for a moment under the weight of this
disclosure. A chill of embarrassment pierces him for
pretending to be other than himself. Then he rights himself, struck by the thunderbolt thought that this sincere and simple woman of elegance is his queen. "My lady—" he mutters, groping for how to explain himself.
"You are Uther Pendragon. I know."
"You know?" The olive hues of his face darken.
"I've known all along. I am sorry I was not
immediately forthright with you."
"You knew—and you did not tell me?" he asks without emotional violence, at once astonished and
curious. "You tricked me? Is that a Celtic custom?"
"No—" she says, her voice soft with guilt—"a personal weakness. I had to be sure you were not like my first husband."
"And have I satisfied your secret appraisal?" he taunts.
"Are you angry at me?"
"No." He steps closer, feeling the helplessness that has brought him to this pagan woman flowing toward
something happier. "I am not angry. I am actually glad enough to laugh. From everything I have heard of you, I expected some ... well, some mysterious—priestess."
"You mean to say, a sorceress? A witch?" Her eyes slant mockingly. "You are afraid of me?"
He makes no effort to hide his apprehension, his
sun-spun eyes wide with remembered fright. "I have heard such outlandish things—that you ride a unicorn and talk with elves. I have even heard that you once climbed the Saxons' Storm Tree to confront their god, the Furious One.
Rumors say you can ensorcell with a word. Am I
ensorcelled now?"
"How do you think I got you here, alone with me?"
Uther, thinking she jokes, laughs. "Where are your guards?"
"Nearby," she lies, and places her right hand on his, in a first approach to intimacy. "I am glad we have met without formalities—even if I did trick you."
He clasps her hand and feels firm, coarse skin. She
is strong. For a moment, he wonders if she is in fact a servant pretending to be queen. Then he catches her smile as she reads his sudden reservation.
"My hands are toughened from a lifetime of working with plants," she explains. "Not a queenly trait among
Romans, I know. If it offends you, I shall take care to wear gloves."
"No. Don't change. I want to know you for who you are." He shrugs with mock embarrassment. "I only hope you don't find my hands too soft."
With a laugh, she pushes him playfully, and
inadvertently shoves his wounded shoulder. He grimaces.
Surprised, she grasps his good arm. "You're hurt."
"A sour wound." He crouches to the wall-seat. The ruby throb of pain, constant and dull, which he has come to ignore, jangles now with anguish.
"Let me see," the queen demands, unlacing his vest.
His face gleams with cold sweat, and he closes his
eyes. "I'm under the care of a surgeon."
"A Roman surgeon," the queen huffs, gingerly tugging the vest aside. "Is it garlic paste and tar he's using? That's a favorite with your field doctors." She pulls down the sleeve of his tunic, exposing the red, swollen gash tightly sewn with strands of catgut. "You'll fever from this. You need a healer's unguent. You can have mine."
From her muffin basket, she retrieves a thumb-sized phial of blue glass.
"What is it?" Uther asks as Ygrane pours a resinous brown liquid over the black stitches and scalded flesh.
"Healer's balm." She gently daubs the ointment over the wound's puffy lips. "Oils of nettle, vervain, willow. It heals. All my servants carry it. These are wartimes."
He watches her nimbly apply the balm both to his
wound and to the inside fabric of the tunic where it will touch the wound, and his pulse quickens. "How is it that you, a queen, know so much of medicine?"
"Healing the people and the land is one of my prime responsibilities as queen," she answers, carefully lifting the sleeve of his tunic into place and closing his vest. "You will not fever now, I don't think. But if the wound was not properly cleaned, you may. Then you'll have to open the stitching."
"If that happens," he says, "I will send for you."
"We will be together again soon," she says, scrutinizing his young face, sating herself on all the small details she never saw in trance. She presses the phial into his hand. "Keep this. I will salve your wound with it again—
this very night—when we meet in Maridunum."
Warm as brandy, his gaze plays over her earnest
features. He commits to memory the strong breadth of her jaw, long Danaan nose, the faint petal fur of her skin, and those green eyes aslant. Tucking the phial into the vest pocket above his heart, he entreats, "Come with me to my
cortege. They are on the road beyond this copse. We will enter Maridunum together, you and I."
She watches him with clear, expressionless calm
that betrays none of her suppressed feeling. This
encounter has passed far better than she dared hope.
Love is possible—and that introduces new dangers and
more troubles into her life.
Myrddin, she cries to herself, you did your work too well. She needs time to fit these intimate possibilities to her wider and more dangerous life as queen.
"Let this first meeting be ours alone," she tells him, and steps back toward the altar, "before God."
"Yours or mine?"
"We will let our marriage figure that out." She smiles wearily. "If we are successful, we can debate this with our children. If we fail—well, the Saxons have their own idea of God."
The happy tremors in the king's heart still as he
accepts this truth. Numb-edged again from the pain and the facts of his fate, Uther turns on the threshold and places his hand over the blue phial in his vest pocket.
"Thank you."
He leaves casually, like an old friend reluctant to go, gathering sword and buckler from the door stoop, and
slowly striding through the silver grasses, stopping several times to wave before disappearing in the forest gloom.
&nbs
p; *
Deep in the afternoon, the brownstone walls of
Maridunum appear on the steep bluffs overlooking the
patch-work farmlands of the alluvial plains. The queen's unicorn pennant flies beside the wind sock of the British king's dragon. This signals the readiness of the Druids and the bishopric to formalize the union between their
monarchs.
Draped with colorful banners of intertwining dragons
and unicorns, the wooden gates stand wide, and cheering townspeople crowd the thoroughfare and the range,
swelling toward the gate at the sight of the approaching retinue.
Uther sits up taller in his saddle as he views the
ancient Roman fortress manned among the battlements by long-haired, mustached Celtic warriors. He draws rein for a moment where the path rounds the verge of the city's first defensive mounds, giving a wide prospect of the
surrounding countryside.
From the beatitude of his expression, all can see
how the beauty of this Latin-cultivated terrain grips him.
The land is set about with old stone pools, cobbled walls, cherry orchards, and groves of Italian plum. Tuscan sheep cropped to lawn the virid slopes. The farm compounds, irrigated by tidy canals among clay huts with thatched roofs and floral-carved sills and shutters, exhibit the euphony of parks.
A whisper of the Empire's paradisal age remains
here. The wild rays of late sun glint off stunted yet lithe olive trees gnarled like shrubs on the steep hillsides above shining fields.
"Uther!" a cry goes up from within the gateway crowd, and the people pull aside to allow the scarlet-robed bishop and his vanguard of cross-bearing clerics to pass out of the city and greet their king.
Uther nods for his men to advance, and the party
canters past gawking onlookers to the city threshold. The cavalry dismount and surround the king while Bishop
Riochatus approaches. He bears in his arms the purple mantle of an imperator and, atop that, the golden wreath in the manner of the Etruscan kings.
Shielded from view by the cavalry's horses, Uther
removes his riding gloves and vest and kneels for the high churchman's blessing. The archbishop hands the mantle and wreath to a cleric and lays his hands atop the king's head, muttering a prayer.
Merlinus stands well back and away from the
clerics, who he knows must disapprove of him. He still feels light-headed from what the sight revealed to him earlier in the day, and he leans heavily on his staff.
Unfurling the brails of his heart, he feels through the crowd for trouble. He detects none, only happy curiosity and awe among the assembly.
Wearing the golden wreath and purple mantle, Uther
enters Maridunum. The accompanying musicians brought
from Tintagel produce an imperial racket above the loud chanting of the clerics and the soldiers shouting, "Uther!
Uther! Uther!"
The mass of Celts gaup and giggle and make no
jubilant noise at all. To the king's appraisal, they seem a very different people than the crowd of Christians he encountered at the docks. These villagers, though they wear garments much like those seen throughout Europe—
tunics, hooded cloaks, gowns—have bowl-cut hair
glistening with nut oil, and many of the younger women are bare-breasted. The king takes no overt notice, nodding to the people graciously as he follows the bishop across the flower-strewn courtyard, past a wreath-bedecked dolphin-fountain, and up marble steps to the central mansio.
Merlinus, impressed by the pageantry, would like to
reach into Uther with his heartflow and experience what he is thinking, but the wizard is too busy searching the gaping multitudes for Morgeu and other threats.
There, among the mansio's fluted columns and
before the high, red-lacquered double doors where Gorlois killed Raglaw, Merlinus senses a deep stirring in his soul, as though inside his chest a whole field of grass shines with sunlight. Purposefully, he stands at the exact spot where Raglaw's head rolled to his feet. Her command to him has been fulfilled. He has found the intended king and delivered him here. The circle is complete.
"Merlinus," the king summons.
The wizard shoulders through the phalanx of
soldiers who flank the king protectively and steps to his side.
"Stand by me," he orders.
Riochatus, garbed in scarlet robes and conical cap,
and his clerics, with their brown Phrygian hoods drawn back from close-cropped heads, lead the way. As the tall red doors open, the bishop raises the cross-staff high.
Through the tall doors emerges a file of white-robed
men with large mustaches, long hair, and pentagonal
wooden shoes that clop loudly on the marble. These are the Celts' ruling caste, the Druids.
Merlinus scrutinizes their faces. They are not
unkindly, and his heartflow circulates among them,
informing him that none bear murderous thoughts or even ill will. They are politicians, elders from the clans and the chiefs' halls, shrewdly intent on preserving their social order, and he can hear their minds click and whir with the engines of their strategies.
Behind them comes the queen. At the first touch of
the wizard's heart's brails, Ygrane releases her glamour.
Merlinus' skull seems to open like a flower. His mind drifts as if a fragrance. Awareness feels bodiless again and yet firmly in his form, leaking about him as if a scent.
Clad in levels, like a dreamer lucid of the dream, he watches her coming toward them through the portico's
slanted light, through the robes of the sun.
The queen wears a close-bodied gwn that covers her from her collarbone to her ankles in blue velvet
trimmed in seed pearls and yellow sapphires. Her honey-colored hair, dressed for the occasion in many thin tresses, braids a gold-latticed tiara aglitter with amethysts, emeralds, and rubies.
With his heartflow, Merlinus tests each of the fiana who fan through the chamber and finds no wickedness in them. Curiosity and some jealous turmoil interfere slightly with their attentiveness to the queen's safety. Otherwise
they display no dangerous regard for the royal couple, and all bow their heads respectfully when the bishop
announces with stentorian authority: "Uther Pendragon, king of the Britons."
Dun Mane, chief of the Druids, bows curtly, throws
back the hood from his large, brindle-maned head, and proudly replies in Brythonic, "I present to you Ygrane, queen of the Celts."
Ygrane's elvish eyes widen mildly in greeting to the
king, and she offers both her hands. When Uther takes them in his firm grip, she says to him with a smile of construable friendship, "Will you have me for your queen?"
Uther's drawn face, pale as a leaf's underside until
this moment, darkens with a blush none present can miss.
"The fate of our people has reserved us for each other, my lady," he answers somewhat stiffly, then warmly adds through a cold frown, "We are blessed to have each other in these dire times. I will proudly stand by you, Ygrane, queen of the Celts—if you will have me for your king."
A searing light passes between the wizard and the
royal couple, and he swings his long face aside.
Peripherally, he catches a passing glance of an angel, registering only its sunny raiment and the awful calm in its large staring eyes.
Wincing blindly, Merlinus trawls his branded vision
across the chamber and observes that no one else has
seen the angel. He concentrates on his breathing to steady himself.
Ygrane, smiling and chatting softly with her consort, leads Uther into the high-beamed audience room, where a feast has been sumptuously laid out. Following the
reverent Druids and churchmen, the wizard takes his place at the main table. They sit on a wide portico looking out o
n the leavings of sunset—a rind of moon, crimson shreds of cloud, and the flare of the evening star.
Oysters, crayfish, salmon, and trout come to the
torchlit table on golden plates, alongside truffles, fruits, and crystal beakers of bright wines that cling in clear veils to their goblets. Harpists and fife players provide gentle, soothing strains while a score of tow-headed lads, their russet tunics merrily fringed with bells, serve and clear the numerous dishes.
The Druids, fluent in Latin, discourse amicably with
the churchmen about the mutual values of their faiths—the Peace, Love, and Justice of the Celts' moral philosophy coupled with the Charity that the Christians profess.
Diplomatically, none broach the subject of the churchmen's faith in a coming Apocalypse and final judgment, nor the Druids' certainty of the soul's migrations among all manner
of life-forms in its quest to know perfection through every suffering and joy.
At one point, warmed by wine, the hollow-cheeked
Riochatus inquires if Merlinus, the king's counsel and queen's emissary, is Christian or pagan. Merlinus frankly tells the table of his sainted mother, Optima, daughter of the late king of Cos, and how, impregnated by a demon, she birthed and baptized him—and he turns the question back on the bishop: "What am I then, holy father—son of a saint or a demon?"
Dun Mane intercedes to decree that only God can
decide Lailoken's place in creation, and Riochatus concurs.
God alone can judge so queer an issue as Merlinus.
The king and queen participate lightly, afraid of the potential enmity between their elders and careful not to disrupt the fragile skein of fate that has brought them together.
Merlinus glows with pleasure to see how happily
they have received each other, how warmly their gazes touch, and what hope shines in their young faces. At that moment, it seems inevitable to the wizard: Uther is the destinal king that Ygrane has abandoned her childhood joy to find—and Ygrane promises to be the caring soul that, until now, Uther could find only in Jesus.
Clearly, Merlinus believes, they have nothing to fear from the people in their midst. The angels have led them to each other. Only the demons can undo that—and the wizard is determined to use all his powers to thwart that dire possibility, no matter what malignity his foes may set against him.
p1b6fn7sdh1ln0g4v1pkvkuqim54 Page 27
