by Judith Tarr
“I can do it,” Marric said. “Kyllan will help. You look after the boy.”
Roland nodded once, then forgot him. Bran was wandering in a black dream, muttering words that made no sense. Darkness was nested in him, feeding on his spirit.
Roland was a warrior, not a healer, but Merlin had taught him much; and somehow, just then, he knew what he should do. He ran hands down the gaunt and shivering body. As he did it, he called the light to him: light of fire, light of stars and moon. Light within, too, through the burning glass of the amulet. What it drew from, he did not know, nor at the moment did he care.
It was as if the moon had come down to fill his hands. He poured it out over the dying man.
Behind him, someone’s breath caught. He sat on his heels, rather surprised himself.
What the dark thing had taken, the light restored, slowly at first, then more swiftly. It was like rain on withered grass. The flesh returned to the bones. Awareness returned to the eyes, as Bran opened them, squinting at Roland. His voice was faint, but grew stronger with use. “Sir! Did I fall down? I don’t remember—”
“You drank enough ale to drown an ox,” Roland said, cuffing him very lightly. “Here, Cait has a posset for you. Drink it and sleep. You should be well enough by the time you wake.”
Bran was amenable to that gentle bullying. While they were all intent on him, Roland left them. He passed through Marric’s wards as they rose, a tightening on the surface of the skin, a shiver beneath it. He could almost see the shimmer of the wall the bogle had built about the camp.
Lord Huon was sitting by Marric’s fire, all alone, dressed plainly and squatting as easily as one of the villagers. He had found a bowl and was eating a helping of stew from the pot. “It’s good,” he said as Roland squatted beside him and filled another bowl. “What’s in it? Rabbit?”
“Mule, I think,” Roland said.
Huon choked only slightly, and went on eating. In the dark and firelight, the horns on his brow were almost clear: antlers in velvet, just short of their full growth. His eyes were as large and dark as a stag’s. Roland wondered if he would put on the full semblance, come the season, and go rutting after hinds in the wood.
It was not a worthy thought. He put it down and sat on it. Not without a blush, either—for he had run with the deer one autumn, and nearly been killed, too, when he challenged the king of stags. Merlin had sewn him together when he came crawling back, and carefully said nothing of young things’ folly.
“The man who was ill,” Huon said in the silence. “He’ll recover?”
Roland nodded.
“And the wards are up,” said Huon. “You took command well, there.”
Roland glanced at him. “Did I overstep myself?”
“I don’t think you can,” Huon said.
“My lord,” Roland said. “If I’ve given offense—”
“No,” Huon said. “Tomorrow, late in the day, we’ll come to Carbonek. If we’re allowed to pass.”
Roland raised his brows.
Huon raised his own. “Don’t tell me you don’t feel it.”
“The thing beneath us?”
“Yes. I’m holding it as best I can, but this many men and wildfolk, this close to the Grail—if we pass it, it well may rise up in back of us.”
Huon might not understand why Roland laughed, but Roland found the irony rather wonderful. “Give me the rearguard. I’ll hold it if it rises.”
Huon regarded him for a long moment: weighing, measuring. Roland sat quiet under the scrutiny. He had been judged before. He would pass, or he would not. He ate his bowl of stew and drank a cup of ale.
At last Huon said, “Do it, then. Take the bogle with you. My mages will go, and a company of my own guard.”
Roland inclined his head. That was generous. “May I choose the rest of the rearguard?”
“As you will,” Huon said.
Roland bowed where he sat, and rose. “I’d best get to it, then. Your mages, your guardsmen—”
“They will obey you,” said Huon.
Roland bowed again, a little more deeply, then went where he needed to go.
It was a rather motley company that gathered in the rear come morning: a hundred lordly men of Caer Sidi in silver armor with long green cloaks, mounted on grey horses; seven mages on white mules; and Roland’s recruits, his villagers in leather and old iron, with their spears and bows. The former rearguard, seasoned troops from Huon’s own lands, regarded them in some disdain, but they kept their chins up and their eyes forward.
Roland might have regretted his choice, seeing how raw these children were, but his heart had chosen for him. If it had chosen badly, he would pay whatever price was laid on him.
They broke camp and rode out just as the sun was rising over mountains that—surely they had not been there before?
If they had, he would not have seen them: they had marched for days in clouds and rain. The sky was clear blue this morning, the peaks distinct, the highest crowned with snow. On one of those foremost was the castle of the Grail. It was barely to be seen, veiled in wards, growing up out of the grey stone, but he knew it. He felt it. It sang to him, sweet beyond bearing, calling him back to it.
He could not let it distract him. The thing beneath the earth was stirring more strongly with the sun’s coming. He could feel the quiver underfoot before he mounted. The usually placid gelding skittered and snorted. Roland calmed him with a word and a hand on his neck. “Go on,” he said to the rearguard. “March and ride.”
They found the order he had given them: recruits first, then guardsmen, and mages scattered among the lot of them, sustaining wards and keeping watch. He brought up the rear, with Marric on his brown pony ambling alongside.
Roland saw Bran marching with the rest of his kin. He glanced at Marric.
“He doesn’t remember a thing,” Marric said. “We had a terrible time convincing him he’d been sick for a day—he kept insisting we must be playing a trick on him because he drank more than his share of the ale.”
“Did he?” Roland asked.
“He drank enough,” said Marric. “No one else was taken ill in the night. The wards held.”
“Good,” Roland said. “It will get worse, you know, when the enemy comes to Carbonek.”
“Then we’ll have to keep the wards up. They’ll have thought of that in the castle, I’m sure. The people there—they remember the last war. They’re not children as these are.”
“All of them?” Roland asked after a moment. “They all remember?”
“Most,” said Marric.
“And . . . the enchantresses? They, too?”
“All nine,” Marric said. He slanted a glance at Roland under the tilt of his brows. “The Grail sustains life far beyond mortal span, and these ladies are its guardians and keepers. They’ve served it since it came to Montsalvat.”
Roland had known that. And yet it was strange, to think of Sarissa as older than Merlin, older than the Grail-king. She seemed so young. She was young.
And why should that matter? She had lied to him. She had mistrusted him. He should not care that she had been alive since before the Temple fell in Jerusalem. Or that he, beside her, was less than an infant—he was an insect, the child of a day, born at sunrise and dead of age before the night fell.
The thing below was older far, and it was awake, swimming through earth and stone as if it were water. He thought of a great pike in a northern lake, a spear of bone and gleaming scales, hurtling toward its prey.
The sound of marching feet drew it. The wards barely turned it aside. It had been asleep a long, long time. It was hungry, famished near to death. It smelled their blood, hot and sweet, and the salt tang of their flesh.
“We’ll be bait,” Roland said to Marric, but loud enough for the rearmost ranks to hear. “Let the bulk of the army draw somewhat ahead. We’ll move slowly, but make a great deal of noise. Bring out the drums. Play the trumpets. Sing, shout, laugh.”
“That’s mad
,” Kyllan said. But he was grinning. He ran to one of the pack-mules and tugged open its pack, pulling out drums and pipes and a single, surprising small harp. Gwydion the smith took that.
Farther down the line, others did the same, and others past them, in a rippling wave. The lord’s guardsmen, between Roland and the villagers, slid eyes at him, but one of those nearest the rear lifted an ivory horn to his lips and blew a long exhilarating blast. Drums rattled and rumbled and boomed. Pipes skirled. Voices of men and women rose in a marching song out of old Rome. There was a strong rhythm in it, and a vaunting arrogance that made some of them laugh even as they sang.
The dragon in the earth lashed its tail. The ground trembled.
Laughter, Roland thought. More than marching feet, more than drums or pipes or horns or song, human merriment drew the thing—lured it, enraged it.
“Slower!” he called. “March slower. Laugh! Taunt this thing. Shower it with scorn.”
The lordly guardsmen were affronted. The villagers howled with delight.
The army was some distance away now, ascending a long slope to the summit of a hill. The van had already passed out of sight below. A broad stretch of white road lay open between.
Some of the boys from Greenwood had begun a dance in the grass by the road’s edge. It was a very bawdy dance, with much clutching of rears and waggling of anything lengthy that came to hand. One man brandished a sausage as great as a stallion’s rod, strutting with it thrust full out before him. As he danced he sang a long wicked paean on the subject of dragons, serpents, and the moistly pulsing caverns of the earth.
The earth swirled and roiled beneath his feet. Jagged knives of crystal flashed within it. Vast jaws snapped shut.
He died laughing. His fellows fled from the great gleaming thing that surged up out of the ground. It snapped, slashed. Some were not fast enough. They vanished in sprays of blood.
Roland’s gelding was beside himself with terror. Roland held him by sheer force of will, and drove him forward. The rearguard was holding, save only where the dragon was. And there, most had managed to escape, to dart out of its reach.
Their courage was holding. They fell back in a broad ring, spearmen foremost, archers behind, bows strung and arrows nocked. “Now!” cried Roland.
Fire leaped from his hand and from the hands of the mages scattered round the great circle. The arrows sprang into flame. In a single great swoop, they soared above the spearmen’s heads, touched the vault of heaven, bent down upon the dragon.
It was drowsy still, confused by the light, its maw full of still-warm flesh. And yet it was lethally fast. From its sides unfurled wide shimmering wings. The wind of them flattened the spearmen like a field of tall corn. The arrows whirled away.
The dragon struck, swift as a snake. It snatched arrows from the sky and men from the earth. It feasted on blood and fire.
It gleamed with a terrible beauty. It was all silver like the sheen of moon on water. Its eyes were moon-pale, swirling with slow fires. Its wings were the color of mist and smoke.
Claws dug into Roland’s shoulder, even through mail. Tarik deafened his ear with a shrill cat-screech.
Roland started violently, and staggered. His strength had drained away, turned all cold by those cold, cold eyes.
Fire burned over his heart. His hand came to rest above the amulet. The heat of it seared his palm, even through linen and leather and mail. He sucked in a breath of sunlit air. It seared his throat and lungs. Fire ran in his veins.
The mages were down or staggering, overcome by the dragon’s power. The villagers had drawn back perforce. The lord’s guardsmen rallied for the charge, mad and foolhardy and palpably futile, but what else were they to do?
This, Roland thought. He was perfectly calm.
He let the fire go. It left him in a roar of flame, a blaze of light. It fell on the dragon like a great burning mantle. It wrapped the thing close.
Scales of ice melted. Wings of mist vanished into air. Teeth of crystal, claws of diamond fell clattering to suddenly empty earth. And in the center of them all tumbled a coldly gleaming thing, a great white stone that had been the dragon’s heart. Fire lived in it, enclosed in it. Of the dragon’s body there was no sign, nor of the bodies of the men it had devoured.
Roland sagged on the gelding’s neck. His bones hurt. He was empty, scraped dry. Only the dimmest flicker of magic remained in him. Even the amulet was cold.
Victory. And half a dozen lives lost, men and women he had led and trained, who had fought as best they could against an enemy greater than any of them.
There would be many more dead before this war was over. Roland too, maybe, if that was God’s will. But not today. Not now. In this first battle of the war, the Grail’s people had won.
“May it always be so,” he said, or thought, or prayed.
CHAPTER 49
Lord Huon’s army marched in at evening, last of them all, but first to have met and engaged the enemy. News of the battle had run ahead, and not only through messengers. Sarissa had felt the dragon’s rising—felt the Grail wake to defend against it. One of Huon’s mages had been the instrument of that defense, said the messenger who paused by her hilltop before riding up to the castle.
That had been a great power—fire so fierce, so strong, that she had felt it in her own heart. She had not known there was such magic in the marches of the kingdom, though there were mages enough, and wildfolk, and creatures of earth and water and air. This was high magic, magic so white and pure and strong that it could wield the Grail itself.
It was not Lord Huon, who rode at the head of his army, resplendent in silver armor. It was none of the mages at his back. Nor certainly was it any of the troops, mounted or afoot, who rode and marched behind him. She did not see it at all, though she would have sworn on the Grail that she would know it if it passed before her.
Was it—could it be—?
No. It could not. He had not known fully what he was, nor had he seen the Grail. And he was long gone.
Still she searched as many faces as she could, as the army marched on past. There were pale faces enough, and straight black hair, and keen profiles—faces of old gods and heroes, stamped in their children both high and low. But none had the eyes of a falcon, bright and inhuman gold in a passably human face.
The rearguard was an odd and rather untidy mingling: princely horsemen in silver mail, and leather-armored common folk marching stoutly afoot, armed with spears and bows. They seemed much at ease with one another: they were singing as they came, first the footsoldiers, then the mounted warriors.
It was a contest, she gathered. They were singing a satire on the dragon’s slaying. One wild redheaded boy had a wicked turn of phrase. One of the armored knights, young and headlong, almost matched him.
Last of all rode an armored man on a bay gelding, and a—man?—on a brown pony.
Not a man. A bogle, dressed in well-worn mail and armed with a Roman shortsword, wearing a thin mask of human seeming over his quite inhuman self. He was grinning as he rode, taking clear pleasure in the satire. What his companion thought, she could not see: he was helmeted, and he rode in silence, light and erect in the gelding’s saddle.
No, she thought. Oh, no. That was not—but that seat on a horse, that straightness in the back and shoulders, that lift and turn of the head, as if in spite of itself, as he passed by the hill on which she stood—
“Roland.” That was not her voice. That was Turpin, forgotten beside her, leaving her side, running down the hill. “Roland! Roland, you devil’s get!”
She thought, with the distant clarity of pure shock, that he would ride on, oblivious. But he had halted at the hill’s foot. The bogle sat beside him on the shaggy brown pony, grinning as bogles could, from ear to sharply pointed ear. It was rather a disconcerting spectacle. The bogle had very sharp teeth, and there were very many of them.
“Marric,” Sarissa said. Not that other name, after all. She could not bring herself to say it.
The bogle rode up the slope of the hill. His grin had faded somewhat, but his eyes were wickedly bright. He paused just below her as she sat on the summit, and bowed low over his pony’s neck. “My lady,” he said with courtesy that he had learned on her hearth, long years ago.
“So,” she said. “You brought him back.”
“Someone had to,” Marric said.
She refused to weep. She dared not rail at the prodigal, whom she had not even looked directly at, yet, though his helmet was off and he was off his horse and Turpin was pounding him thunderously on the back. It was Roland, indeed: white face, long arched nose, yellow eyes. She could never forget that face, not if she lived another thousand years.
She was aware, dimly, that the rearguard had broken ranks. A good number of them were hanging about, staring at the big man in the monk’s robe and the finely woven mail. They must be wondering why he was weeping on their captain’s shoulder.
He did not do it for long. Were Roland’s eyes somewhat damp themselves? Sarissa could not have told. He was expressionless, drawn in tight, betraying nothing.
Wings beat overhead. A grey falcon came to rest on Roland’s armored shoulder. Tarik regarded her with a bright insolent stare. There could be no doubt of his opinion in the matter—or of where he had been, either.
He had chosen sides long ago. Sarissa met his stare with one as level and as unbending.
While she tarried on the hilltop, the Franks had come in their companies. They came in some semblance of order, but word had run like fire among them: that the Breton Count was alive and riding to the war.
Lord Huon’s villagers were swallowed up by that army of strangers. A surprising number clung to places near Roland. A few had let themselves be removed, pushed up the hill to Sarissa’s side. “What are they saying?” they demanded of Marric. “What are all those men saying?”
“That they thought he was dead,” Marric answered, “or gone forever. That they’re beyond glad he’s back. That—”
