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by A. A. Attanasio

  His flight dips and slows, and he alights before the

  rime-fanged cavern of the dragon-magus. Sulfur flowers bloom yellow as forsythias among scorched gravel. From within, soft thunder breathes.

  The wizard calls boldly, "Wray Vitki—come forth!"

  A sizzling noise saws from the cave, a sound like

  voltage or splattering oil. It is the audible coiling of dragonscales. Two sulfurous lights brighten in the

  darkness, and the glaucous stare of the magus draws

  closer with thunderous, smoky swirls of chill breath.

  It stops at the threshold of darkness. Merlinus,

  standing in the subterranean starlight, sees only a

  behemoth shadow. Lit by the lamps of its eyes, a saurian grin bearing mongrel traits of human likeness hangs above him, a visage huge and horrid as a ritual mask.

  "Wray Vitki—I am Merlinus, wizard to the Aurelianus family. I have come to speak strength to you."

  The eyes of the dragon-magus flare and die back.

  Weak with age, his life only smolders. Even the rapture of trance has soured with weariness. All of him that has become as the Dragon wants to die and return to its origin.

  What remains of his humanity reaches out for Merlinus.

  Wray Vitki, mute as an adder, cannot speak, and

  Merlinus must feel the truth of him with his heartflow. Since his telepathic and energizing bond with Ambrosius was broken, Wray Vitki has lain in this cavern coiled around his weariness.

  "I will speak strength to you," Merlinus promises, "for I know you will use this power to serve Uther Pendragon, a king descended from your seed, father of the great king to come."

  Even as the sorcerer speaks the demonic words

  that infuse the dragon-magus with renewed vitality,

  Merlinus' own body-light dims and floats sullenly away. His physical body far away in Avalon summons him, and his wraith sails back through the field of ruins.

  Briefly, he spies the fiana and cavalry who

  accompanied Uther. They have fled the elk-king's palace and wander on horseback seeking a way to the sunlit

  world. As Merlinus drifts away, the slow riders in the elfin dreamtime melt into scalloped waves of heat.

  *

  The Furor lies down on the quilted meadows of the

  Cantii countryside. He listens a long time to the Dragon's heartbeat before the liquid rhythms lull him into trance.

  It is behavior such as this that has alienated him

  from many of the gods, including his good wife and his wicked brother. They shiver with disgust at the idea of pressing one's whole body against the slimy hide of the Dragon. It fills them with dread revulsion to think of the numerous parasites vigorously feeding in the hot ooze of Dragonflesh. They do not care what he tells them of

  Apocalypse; they will never willingly embrace the fetid beast.

  Long ago, during his exile in Middle Earth, the Furor learned to love the organic beings many of the other gods call parasites. He does not mind the encampments of

  tribes that pool in the dales and river valleys covered by his body. Indeed, he wants them to feed off him, to grow

  strong on his godly powers. In time, he will use their strength to conquer these islands.

  For now, he is content to dip into trance and into the dreams and frenzies of his storm raiders and berserker chiefs. He speaks through the runes of the raven priests and dances with Death's Angels, the warrior cult that dresses in the flayed skins of their enemies. He makes his presence felt among the people.

  In turn, through their tiny magic, he learns the tiny things he cannot see for the largeness of being a god. He hears about the queen of the Celts who rides the unicorn, and he remembers Ygrane, the bold adolescent witch, who once dared confront him in the Great Tree itself.

  If that had not been Ancestor Night and his head not

  splitting from the terrible strain he had exerted binding demons, he would have recognized instantly that she was working powerful magic against him. The Celts tricked him.

  He gave Ygrane the unicorn, and now she uses it against him. The magic rinses she makes from the unearthly

  energy of that beast defeat all the charms of his sorcerers and the battle luck of his warriors.

  He is pleased to learn that the demon Ethiops has used the devious queen's own daughter to capture her.

  Having exchanged gifts with Ygrane, the Furor cannot kill her or order her death without violating the sacred bonds of their tribal lineage. Ethiops, however, is unconstrained.

  The Furor lies comfortably on the green and turning

  Earth. His magic, slow to begin, eventually will fulfill itself.

  This he knows. The gods who trust him, who gave their life-force to him and now sleep on the Raven Branch, will wake to find themselves masters of these islands and of all the Abiding North. Not the mistress of the unicorn or her freak man-demon, the wizard Lailoken, or even the Fire Lords themselves can stop him, because he fights to save the Earth from abomination.

  Far off, in the rambling back lots of his trance, where the absurdities of dreams fringe on nightmare, the Furor keeps his memories of the future. Thermonuclear

  holocaust and global warming pollute his trance with

  cinder-world images: cities melted to stubs of rock, forests reduced to scabbed slurry, all land barren ash, and the oceans churning lifelessly under miasmal waves of heat where once there were gods and people.

  *

  The wizard's astral flight arrows toward the flaring

  spires of the elk-king's palace. Its walls flicker and seethe, trembling in the surging balance between form and

  shrieking shapelessness. Watching it breathe within its jeweled constraints of towers, barbicans, buttresses, and arches, Merlinus contemplates the credo he learned as a demon: all forms are illusions—only formlessness is real.

  Where angels shape forms and demons rail violently

  against the simulacra of created worlds, the unicorn who awaits him on Avalon has chosen neither to fight form nor to make any effort at all to deconstruct it. The unicorn and its breed choose simply to turn away.

  And Merlinus can go with them. With his demon

  power compacted to humansize and united to a unicorn, he knows he can slip through a black sun and return to

  heaven. He can turn his back on the whole burning

  universe with its drifts of starfire, planets barnacled with feverish life, lives aflame with the blood's hungers, sparking the mind's ambitions—all of it ripples of fire in the void, burning hotly for the moment, destined certainly to fade into the cold and the dark.

  Why not get out? he asks himself.

  The Storm Tree lifts its rootcoils like broad, silvered wings above the black horizon and seems to hold the

  whole of space as a crystal in its grasp. Facets glare red where the palace squeezes fire into the woven brilliance of parapets, turrets, steeples. Other branches clasp dark emptiness. The roots, like the brain's dendrites in their millions, enclose a luminous void, a vacant dimension of blazing shadows cast across the wasteland by the palace.

  This remains the wizard's dilemma: His supernatural

  greed rises above the Earth and snaggles the twisted

  branches of the Storm Tree, while his love of Optima has matured to his devotion to his king and queen: He wants it all, the heat of life under the cold sky and the glare of heaven beyond the abyss. This mythical tree uprooted in space, clawing for both depth and height, this is the image of his soul—and by its contradictory nature he knows he has attained his manhood.

  *

  "The soul is immortal," Someone Knows the Truth tells Uther Pendragon, "because it is a pattern of energy—

  information—imprinted in the very structure of creation."

  Uther wonders if this is meant as consolation, for he cannot stop worrying about Ygrane. As they hike among giant boulders, he only half listens to the voluble god, who glibly discusse
s the mysteries. When they arrive at the cave of the dragon-magus, the king looks for the shade of Ambrosius. They are alone.

  A harsh silica rasp sounds from within the cavern,

  and Merlinus hears the elk-king speak urgently. "He is coming. Now remember all I have said, young king. This magus cannot speak except to ghosts. He knows what you are thinking, what you are feeling. He will respond best to your deep emotions. And loyal as he is to your family, this magus has become more beast than man over the

  centuries. He can be temperamental. You must show

  dauntless command and decisiveness. What awe to see

  him this energetic! I do think that losing the ghost of your brother has renewed him with rageful energy. Be wary, Uther."

  Uther seems to pay the god no heed, his eyes firmly

  directed into the darkness of the lair. A long face comes forward out of the gloom. At the sight of it, Uther starts and backs away. The elk-king holds him firmly in place with his large hands.

  A chill wind gusts from the burrow and lifts ash

  flakes at the cave mouth into fumy tendrils. Accompanied by a dry stench of decay, the dragon-magus shuffles

  forward. The bone blue, glossy skull of the creature

  emerges, filling the whole cave entry with its curved horns,

  webbed ears, and widening grimace of drooping whiskers and serrated fangs—wholly inhuman.

  Yellow eyes, the very color of Uther's, only

  magnitudes brighter, watch alertly from within a majestic depth of socket and ledged browbone. Its silver-blue scales flimmer under crawling voltage, and the hair on Uther's head, as well as the elk-king's, fluffs.

  Folds of somnolent, hot earth smells shroud the air

  with the flicker of a purple, sibilant tongue. The tight braid coils tightly about Uther, squeezing his arms to his sides and swelling his chest as the writhing tip licks his startled face. The tongue slips off and flashes away, leaving behind a fragrance of turned sod and tule mist.

  The dragonhead sniffs ponderously over Uther, from

  his scattered raven's hair, across the ebony leather of his armor, to his dusty, blunt boots. Growling deep in the throat, like far-off thunder, Wray Vitki's abhorrent visage rises slowly, smoke sliding from his crooked, crusted nostrils and the grin-hooked hinges of its mouth.

  "Uther-r-r-r," the man-become-beast growls, gravelly as a river over an icy bed.

  Uther nods, fumbling to find his voice. The

  ponderous freight of the gruesome face stops rising and hangs above them, still as a monumental gargoyle.

  "Dauntless command," the elk-king whispers.

  "Decisiveness. Go on! Think on your woman, now."

  "Dracon Vitki!" Uther speaks in a big voice, full of all the urgency that rises in him at the thought of his bride.

  "Carry us to Ygrane."

  "R-r-ride!" Wray Vitki responds from deep in his congested throat, barely comprehensible. "R-r-ride to Ygr-r-rane!"

  With a stunning roar, the massive cope of the

  cavern opens. The mountainous carapace separates in

  sizzling jags of lightning, releasing furled auroras, bent-winged sheets of ruffled, rainbowed electrical flames.

  Hands pressed over his ears, Uther rises, with the

  elk-king behind him, the beast-lord's maned head thrown back in deaf laughter. They ride in Wray Vitki's massive hands as the ground itself lifts, spilling gravel and ash between gigantic webbed talons. Sweeping aside the

  cinders that blanket its sleep, the dragon-magus's firewings fan, and the enormous creature lifts into the nether night.

  *

  Alone in the disembodied place between worlds,

  Merlinus feels again much like a demon, touching many

  points in space at once: his tranced body in Avalon, the dragon-magus and Uther breezing like ghosts through the transparencies of rock and earth, and Ygrane...

  The thought of Ygrane fills the wizard with dread. He fears for her sanity. In the grip of Ethiops, she is prey to obliterating madness. He wants to free her, but he is a phantom she cannot see or hear.

  She does sense his presence anyway. She feels

  him as a draft of fright. Her soul reflects his fear when he approaches, and he realizes that to help her, he must radiate strength.

  To calm himself and evoke again his strongest

  energy, his purpose, he begins to speak. He knows she cannot hear him, so he talks to himself, to the demon Lailoken-the-man.

  *

  Through Optima I had become something other than

  a demon. I had become a man. The garment of flesh and bone that I wore she had knitted in her body. She was dead; even so, she was alive—in me, as me. If I had any love for her at all, I realized then, I would have to respect the life of this flesh and the spirit of her teachings.

  I buried Optima among the copper beeches.

  Afterward, I looked for the unicorn. It had slipped away into the primeval forest, and I slept that night atop her grave, hugging the earth. At dawn, I laundered my muddy

  cassock and bathed in the cold creek. Shivering violently, my flesh almost jumping off my bones, I hurried to the hovel and warmed myself by her hearth a last time.

  I took nothing with me when I left. The body Optima

  had made for me and the dun-colored hempen cassock

  and reed sandals were enough. I trudged across the

  meadow, downslope, toward the mortal kingdoms where

  my destiny lay.

  As I hobbled along, joints and muscles aching, the

  wild things watched me. Foxes and rabbits peered from the tall grass. Geese honked overhead on the flyway to the marshes. The day blazed gloriously—great toppling clouds, golden sunlight shining among the grassheads, coveys of birds chittering and spinning in the perfumed air—and I trod downcast, saddened that my mother could never

  again be here to enjoy this.

  On my way, I met a tall young man leaning against a

  granite outcrop with a gnarled wooden staff propped

  across his slender body. His bright hair stirred in the breeze like a crimson seaplant, and his long, tapered eyes shone green as the unicorn's.

  He was not mortal, I knew at once, though he wore the opulent garments of a mortal nobleman: a blue linen tunic embroidered with flowerets of gold, a silver-studded, red leather belt, and yellow boots.

  The stranger offered me the wooden staff he held.

  'Perhaps this will help you on your way, Grandfather,' he said in a voice as beautiful and dark as the gleaming spaces of evening. My rheumy eyes could not see him with great clarity, yet I knew then who he was.

  'You are Sid,' I surmised, though the sun shone

  radiantly and the Sid—the local elf-folk—have bodies too pale to be seen by daylight.

  A cunning smile hooked the corners of his thin lips.

  'You're right,' he said. 'I am Prince Bright Night of the Daoine Sid. King Someone Knows the Truth has sent me

  to welcome you to the land of our domain—and to offer you this gift.'

  'You know who I am?' I queried, still incredulous that the Sid would come to me in broad daylight.

  'Indeed.' His dimples sharpened with the cleverness

  of his smile. 'You are the demon Lailoken, tamed to mortal guise one year and one day ago by the Great Mother and Her holy servant Saint Optima. All the Sid know of you and your famous plight.'

  As a demon I had often worked with the elf-folk and

  their kith in the various lands I haunted. The Romans had Fauni, the Greeks Nereids, Egyptians Khepri, and

  Sumerians Abzu. I had toiled intimately with all of them to wage war against both mortals and their elfin rivals. They were useful allies in my renegade conflicts with the mortal kingdoms, because they lived longer than mortals.

  'Prince Bright Night,' I bowed my head deferentially, well aware of the vanity of the elf-folk. 'How is it that you are able to stand before me under the full weight of
the morning sun?'

  'Well might you ask, Grandfather Lailoken, well

  might you ask.' He pushed off from the granite outcrop and brandished the rugged staff. 'Do you know what I have here? It is the Stave of the Storm Tree. Its shadow is wide as a man and invisible—and in its shadow, the invisible is visible. Take it! It is a gift to you from the Daoine Sid.'

  A few years earlier, rousing the Goths to sack

  Rome, I had occasion to work with the Nordic elf-folk and their gods, the Aesir. I had toured their spirit realm, and they had shown me the Storm Tree, the Terrible One, the Mighty Pillar, Yggdrasil, that overspreads their world and binds the realms of their kingdom with the world of mortals and, below that, the chthonic Dragon.

  The power of that spirit tree was concentrated so

  densely that it rivaled the might of the angels. I remember shivering with awe before its lunatic complexity of roots, which seemed to swarm in a bottomless night, and its

  delirium of branch-work darkening the shore of a starry void into which it grasped across millennia. As a demon, I delighted in that shambling night. Now, as a man—I

  hesitated.

  'Prince—I am honored,' I said and took one step

  back. 'But how did the Sid come by a sacred rood

  belonging to the mighty Aesir?'

  'Stolen, of course,' Prince Bright Night answered

  with pride. 'By the might and cunning of our chief, King Someone Knows the Truth.' His long, mischievous eyes

  narrowed. 'You are not spurning a gift of the Daoine Sid, are you, old man?'

  'Not at all' I bowed again, as humbly low as my

  warped spine allowed. 'I only question my worthiness. I am, as you yourself say, tamed to mortal guise. Dare any

  mortal possess so powerful a gift?'

  'Come, come, Lailoken. You are no ordinary mortal.

  Saint Optima birthed you here in the domain of the Sid, and for a year and a day we have watched over your

  remarkable growth as though you were one of our own.

  And are you not? You have grown on our soil.'

  'My destiny is to work for good among mortals,' I

  replied with candor.

  'We would expect no less from the son of a saint.

  And now are we to debate what is good?' The prince's