Lot, chieftain of the north, took the point. Kyner and his Christian Celts followed, and the king rode in the middle with his elaborate retinue of elephants and carnival wagons. The summer rains seemed refreshing at first. By the second day, the old and ill-repaired Roman highways began to puddle, and progress slowed.
Morgeu recognized her opportunity. From within her wagon, she called upon the Furor to strike—and out of the fog-soaked forests his minions attacked. A Jutish warband descended howling and swinging battleaxes, savaging the Christians at the end of the long procession.
Kyner's horse-soldiers fended the assault with difficulty, for the Jutes advanced with the storm front. Lightning and driving rain disoriented the horses, and the attackers hacked at them with their axes. Riders fell under the flashing blades, and thunder carried away their cries. Many of the fierce warband slipped past the Celtic defenders to assail the wagons, and the shrieks of women and children joined the terrified screams of the horses.
Arthor charged through the sheets of rain, Excalibur spinning, intent on protecting the people of his clan. At the site of the attack, he beheld disemboweled and shrieking horses and overturned wagons and strewn bodies of unarmed Christians. The Jutes were gone. He glimpsed their shadows vanishing in the rainsmoke of the forest, and he rushed after.
Kyner, Cei, and Bedevere followed and found their king shoving through dense and sodden undergrowth, shouting curses at the Jutes. No sign of the enemy remained in the dark forest, and Arthor returned with the others to bury their dead.
"Ill luck," Kyner allowed after the funeral services.
The next day, as the rains continued, another attack ensued. Again, the Jutes arrived guided by Morgeu's magical bond with the Furor. Seizing that brief opportunity when the watchful Celtic outriders returned for replacements, the Jutes eluded the caravan's scouts. The rain thickened with the advance of the raiders. They descended from the forest with the brunt of the storm.
Amidst a tumult of lightning and thunder that dismayed the defenders' mounts, the Jutes hacked at chargers and dray mares alike. Wagons rocked and overturned. Berserk storm riders set upon the families that spilled out, hacking off the heads of children and adults alike and stabbing at everything that moved in the mud.
Someone Knows the Truth
Dagonet wandered helplessly through the forest of eternal twilight, shouting, "Mathter! Come back!" His cries vanished without echo. Silence radiated through the trees, where a river of fire crawled along the horizon.
Merlin heard Dagonet's despair and made no effort to return for him. The imperiled sanity of a dwarf must not impede this descent into the underworld. The wizard held Lord Monkey firmly in one hand and his staff in the other and advanced beneath the incendiary night.
Gorlois' soul had grown silent, despondent to find himself in a monkey's body among illusory shadows and the dream flames of the netherworld. Vaguely, he began to remember his death, and he knew that what awaited him offered little hope of salvation.
Ahead rose an incandescent palace of bunsen-blue pillars and fireball domes. Merlin paused to remove his conical hat in deference to the antlered god who dwelled here, Someone Knows the Truth.
Merlin muttered a small prayer to his mother, Saint Optima, and advanced with bold strides.
"Majesty!" he called and dropped to one knee.
A giant figure of a man with the head of an elk emerged from a blazing wall of the palace. "What are you doing here again, Lailoken?"
"Majesty, I have brought you a soul to dance to the Piper's music in the Happy Woods." Merlin held up the squirming monkey.
The elk face bent closer, sniffed, then retracted with a loud snort of disgust. "That is a Christian soul!"
"Not any Christian soul—Gorlois, the cruel Roman the Druids forced upon your priestess Ygrane.
"Ygrane is no more my priestess!" Someone Knows the Truth flared his nostrils. "She serves the nailed god now."
"Once she served you," Merlin said with all the deference he could muster. "And so has her son Arthor..."
"Say no more to me of Arthor." The elk king's brow creased angrily. "I gave to dwell inside him the soul of my best warrior, Cuchulain. I will do no more for him—another Christian. I am sick of these self-flagellating hypocrites of love who kill all who refuse their gory faith. These are the very ones who mock my horns and hooves and brand me a devil!"
"My lord! I mean no offense.
"Then, be gone!" the ancient god shouted, and the blast of his voice sent Merlin tumbling backward in a gust of cinders. The palace shaped like fire dwindled to darkness.
[]
Mother Mary, where is Merlin? I need him now to counter the evil of Morgeu. I am certain that her magic guides our enemies into our midst with such lethal accuracy. More than chance is at play here. This is that wicked woman's doing. I know it. And now I feel murder in my heart toward her. I thought I could forgive her for using my lust against me. But now, those I am sworn to protect—they die because of her magic. I need Merlin. I need Merlin to counter her iniquity or I know I will resort to the sword.
Breaking Magic
After the third lethal assault by the storm riders, Kyner suspected that magic worked against them. "Where is that damnable Merlin when we need him?" The chieftain lifted the bronze face mask of his rawhide helmet, revealing an enraged scowl. He shook his sturdy Bulgar saber at the slate sky. "That demon has abandoned us!"
King Arthor dismounted in the rain among the sprawled bodies of the dead. He knew each of the slain by name, for he had grown up among them in White Thorn. "The Jutes know precisely when to attack," he mumbled, removing his eagle-mask helmet and forcing himself to gaze upon the hacked corpses of his kith who had died under his protection. "Someone among us is signaling them. And there is only one here who has the magical skill to time these assaults with the storm surges."
Bedevere seized the king's arm as he moved to withdraw Excalibur from its makeshift sheath of fawnskin and horsehair. "Stay your hand, sire." He lifted the vizard of his plumed helmet, the better to hold the king with his calm, blue gaze. "You must act judiciously."
"That word again!" Arthor's upper lip pulled back to reveal his incisors. "Merlin used that word before he spelled me to silence at the festival gathering. If not for that spell, all now would know of Morgeu's evil ..."
"Hush, my lord!" Bedevere pressed close to the king. "Our alliance with Lot is uncertain as it is. Be politic. Be a king."
"No more of my kith will die by her enchantments!" Arthor swore angrily.
"Many more indeed will die if Lot abandons us here. Look about you!" Bedevere swung his one arm across a mordant vista of forested hills veiled in rain. "We are far from Camelot."
"Then what am I to do, Bedevere?"
"Be a king, my lord." The steward took Arthor's arm and led him away so that Cei, who had already gathered a burial detail of priests and soldiers, could attend to the dead. "Employ your wits and your faith. If you suspect Morgeu, then place her wagon in the midst of Kyner's column, where her family share the hazard. And pray. God has chosen you to lead us. Beseech His help, and surely He will hear you."
King Arthor did as his steward suggested. Overriding Lot's protests and situating Morgeu and her sons in unmarked wagons among Kyner's cavalcade. That did not deter the next assault, which came again under a rage of thunderheads and wild lightning.
This time, instead of charging to defend Kyner's train, Arthor lifted Excalibur's hilt upward, a symbol of his faith, and implored God's help in breaking the magic that guided his enemies.
For the first time in days, daggers of sunlight stabbed through the lowering clouds. The warband of Jutes, deprived of their storm cover, scattered in disarray, and Kyner and Cei led their cavalry among the fleeing enemy, sparing none.
The Singing Flower
Dagonet found Merlin unconscious in the crotch of a tree. Conical hat cocked askew and staff shattered to splinters, the wizard appeared broken. Lord Monkey sprawled limply atop h
im, and the dwarf gasped at the sight of his beloved animal limp as death. "Mathter! Oh my mathter! What hath become of you?"
Knocked free of the monkey by the blast of rage from Someone Knows the Truth, Gorlois' soul, giddy with the merriment of his disembodied state and the songful magic of faerieland, alighted upon a yellow jonquil and in his freedom began to sing:
Strange to be anywhere! Oh, strange to be anywhere! When we understand our shadows, all our life before us goes free of fear and doubt and care, oh free to go just anywhere!
Dagonet looked about at the forest that sieved a sky of ashes and western light—and among the magenta shadows spotted the source of the singing. The happy song lilted from a delicate, citrine flower sprouting among the leaf litter. He knelt beside it and wailed, "Wittle flowah, wittle flowah—can you help me? I am lotht in thith foretht dark—and my mathter ith dead!"
The jonquil continued to sing its joyous song. Dagonet heard such hope in its blissful voice that he felt certain the fragile blossom could help him. His thick fingers dug at the loamy earth around the flower and lifted it, roots and all, from the ground. He carried it to where Lord Monkey and Merlin lay propped in the tines of the slender tree upon which they had landed.
"Lithen, mathter! Lithen to the happy song and wake."
The joy of the song crowded time aside. Faeries lured by the singing flitted in the cinnabar air. Distracted by them, Dagonet stumbled upon the tree's roots bulging moss-slick from the ground, and he dropped the flower. Its rhizoid dirt, yellow petals, and bright pollen splashed over his chest and thighs and the unconscious bodies embraced by the tree.
Dagonet sneezed and fell backward, thudding to the ground. The singing stopped, and the faeries scattered. When the dwarf sat up, Merlin gazed out from behind Dagonet's freckle-splattered face. "What hath happened to me?" he groaned, holding his fleecy head in both stubby hands. "I don't belong in thith body!"
"Because I have displaced you, demon!" Merlin's body climbed down from the tree, grinning so wide his molars gleamed in the twilight. "My soul has taken your place!"
"Dagonet?" Merlin asked, staggering upright.
The monkey rushed into Merlin's arms and hugged him fiercely.
"Dagonet ith in the monkey!" the wizard realized and gaped in horror at the image of himself standing above. "And so, you are—"
"Damnation."
Wheel of Night
Gawain and Gareth sat with their mother beside a fire reduced to ash and purple embers. Dawn hovered an hour away, and the great wheel of night turned slowly on its world axle, carrying darkness and its flotsam of stars away from the gray prophecy of morning.
Birdnoise glinted in the dark trees, accompanied by the clink of harnesses from among the cropping horses.
All night, the boys had sat listening to their mother's stories of magic and gods. As the stars dimmed, they told her of the shirt of fire that King Arthor had displayed in the portal of Camelot. "Da says that the cold fire is the wizard Merlin's magic, meant to befuddle us," Gawain said.
"I saw a lord of the Annwn, mother," Gareth insisted. "He stood two heads taller than a man and with hair and eyes so bright, I could not see his face for the glare."
"The lords of the Annwn taught us the runes, long ago, when our people ranged across the known world to the very borders of Persia," Morgeu informed her sons. "Long before the nailed god, that was. Centuries before, when our gods, Old Elk Head and the pale people, walked among us. We honored the Annwn lords then in our bards' songs. Now these Lords of Fire champion the nailed god, the anointed one of the desert people. And our gods are exiled underground, in the hollow hills."
"Is Uncle Arthor a bad man?" Gareth asked. "The Lord of Fire touched him on his heart."
"Your uncle is a troubled young man, my sons." Morgeu passed a hand over the cooling embers, and live flames leaped from the ash. "The Annwn lords hope to control him and all our destinies. We have recourse to older gods and more ancient magic—as I have shown you in my stories. Our tradition is older than Rome. Why should we worship a gruesome god who slays his only son—a son who preached peace and love? That way lies treachery and madness—for any parent who slays his own betrays life."
"Then why does Da ride with Uncle and Lord Kyner, who worship the nailed god?" Gawain inquired. His inquisitive child face shone in the fire's jigging light.
"Politics." She smiled at her children with benign sadness. "Until we can strike an accord with the invading tribes, we need Uncle and Lord Kyner and all their Christian soldiers to fend off the invaders. Some day, I believe, we will have a Celtic king on the throne, and he will make peace with the north tribes and restore our gods to their rightful place in the World Tree. Then, there will be trade and sharing, instead of killing." Her smile brightened. "Perhaps one of you boys will be that king. And for that, you will need heart. That is why I tell you my stories of the old heroes, who battled dragons and fought giants and succeeded because they had largeness of heart." She gestured at the stars kindling in the dark. "Our world seems big, yet it is really very small indeed, just one mote among the froth of stars. Believe me, my sons, this world is tiny. It is the heart that is enormous."
[]
Mother Mary, Merlin has abandoned us. Or perhaps God has called him to other service. My trial approaches. Perhaps the wizard is wise to insist I face the northern clans on my own and win their fealty by merit and not magic. But know that I am scared and seek mercy for me from your Son and our Father. I have never seen such rough country—mountain ledges at the threshold of heaven and wild gorges like shafts to hell! Am I man enough to rule this bold land?
The Dolorous Wood
With mahouts to guide them, King Arthor and his stepbrother Cei rode one elephant and Lot and his sons, Gawain and Gareth, rode the other up low hills of scrub evergreen to a summit of high parkland that offered a vista of the north. Deer scattered before them, and a lumbering bear paused in its foraging to gaze from under the eaves of a primeval forest.
"There is the Dolorous Wood, young king," Lot intoned grimly, pointing to the bunched horizons of forest that climbed toward mountains misted blue with distance. The expanse of gorges, fens, and hollows masked many a fraudulent reckoning with ancient groves that sprouted directly from sheer stone walls and that crowded the adamantine depths of interlocked canyons.
The maze-like contours of the cliffs allowed only the most acute sunlight to penetrate the pits beneath these high mesas. Jammed together by the ice flows of prehistoric time, the sandstone ledges that reared above the dark, satanic ravines meandered in a giant whorl. "The Spiral Castle. That's what the clans here call the heights above these chasms. No enemy can penetrate them."
"Is this where you reign, Brother Lot?" Arthor asked in a voice soft with awe before this strange incongruence of wooded heights and fenland depths.
"No, Uncle!" Gawain laughed at the king's erroneous assumption. "This is wild country. Men lose themselves forever down there."
"It is here you will have to prove yourself if you hope to rule the clans of the north," Lot added. "Only the most adroit horseman can negotiate those treacherous trails—and only a horseman can hope to rout the brigands that hide in those forlorn holms."
"Routing brigands, is it?" Cei piped up, intrigued. "That's how Arthor and I grew up in the hills of Cymru. Saxon rovers infiltrated the hills and dells each spring. From the time we were the age of your boys, father took us with him to clear them out. Yea, Arthor?"
"Yea, Cei, we saw first blood on those forays," Arthor recalled. "But the dells of Cymru are veritable flatlands compared to what lies here before us!"
"That is your challenge, Arthor—if you still wish to call yourself king of the clans of the north." Lot's gray eyes shone like smoldering ash. "Take your elephants, boy, and ride back to Camelot. That's my counsel to you."
Arthor responded coolly, "Take me to the clan chiefs. I won't leave here without their pledges."
Lot shook his head ruefully. "Then your bones will
rest here until your Christian reckoning gathers them for judgment by your harsh God."
Kingdom Made of Twilight
Gorlois kicked at the leaf duff and flexed his arms, amazed to find himself inside Merlin's body. He removed his hat and ran giddy fingers over his head, feeling wispy hair and the dented skull beneath. A laugh like a crow's caw jumped from him. "Behold this man! I can laugh! I can dance!" His blue-leather sandals winked from under his midnight robes as he executed a deft jig, flapping his hat over his head.
Merlin gazed down forlornly at the squat body of the dwarf that he now occupied and plucked at his stained and sour-smelling jerkin of cracked leather. Lord Monkey mewled in his lap, Dagonet trapped in its small, round skull.
In despair, Merlin cast the monkey aside, leaped to his feet, and ran to retrieve the remnants of the broken jonquil that had sung with Gorlois' soul. Before his stubby legs could carry him the distance, a strong hand seized him by the back of his jerkin and lifted him into the air.
"Let me help you, little man." Gorlois croaked with more laughter. "You want this flower, don't you?" With his free hand, Gorlois snatched the shattered jonquil and dangled it just out of reach of the dwarf's arms. "This miracle flower that turned you to me and me to you and the dwarf to—that." He wagged the plant at the monkey and shook the last of its petals from its stem. Then, he crushed what remained in his fist. "Thank you, miracle flower. Now your work is done." He dropped the mashed roots and stem to the ground and pounded them into the earth with his heel. "There! Now that bloom is gone. And we are what we are!" His laughter nearly choked him.
The Wolf and the Crown (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 3) Page 5
