The Wolf and the Crown (The Perilous Order of Camelot Book 3)

by A. A. Attanasio

  Every few leagues, the king dispatched five of his men into the forests with instructions to join themselves to the ranks of the brigands they encountered. When Arthor approached the fastness of maroon stones, he entered the hillside woods alone, keeping at his back the long rays of the setting sun.

  He rode directly to a smudgy line of smoke rising among the trees and confronted a mongrel band of ragged and filthy warriors roasting a sheep. Face smudged, hair greased stiff as a porcupine's hackles, he appeared no different than they—a brutish youth, his stare galled and mad-looking.

  The reputation of Excalibur had not yet reached these hills, and when the boy drew the sword to fend the aggressive gang, the mirror-blue blade inspired fear but did not identify the hand that wielded it. "This sword fights with yours if you give me food."

  After two fierce attempts to take the beautiful weapon from the grimy lad resulted in a flayed cheek and a sliced ear among the assailants, they welcomed him to the fireside. Among the swag taken from travelers, which they proudly displayed, they showed him Cei's long sword.

  Arthor showed no emotion at the evidence of Cei's murder and ate sullenly of the roast mutton, his heart fisted in his chest.

  Seat of the Slain

  In the Storm Tree, minutes passed for days upon Middle Earth. The higher one climbed, the faster time flew below. And though Rex Mundi had only been among the spectral branches a short time, Merlin well knew that weeks had passed in Britain. Urgency gripped him to return to his king and help him fulfill his mission before the seasons turned again to summer and Arthor either produced the pledges of all the warlords and chieftains or relinquished his crown.

  Anxiously, Rex Mundi crossed the sere, burnt-looking plain of the Raven's Branch toward the mesa that held a giant, rusted throne. He climbed crevassed slopes among small trees black and bent and visited by ravens.

  Scabrous packs of dire wolves with crazed red eyes haunted the ravines of the mesa, guarding chalked skeletons of nameless others who had trespassed this way. The protective magic of the wizard's robes and hat kept the beasts distant and baying.

  Atop the mesa, pale dust lay in wind-rowed ribs that circled the corroded throne like ripple waves in water, healing over footfalls after each step. The air smelled of ash, sour and scorched. Overhead, evil stars burned in a violet sky.

  Thith ith thcary!

  Using scales of rust and corrosively pitted holes as footholds, Rex Mundi climbed onto the Seat of the Slain. Once seated, the cosmos arranged itself as a godlike hall. Galactic streamers raftered the starry cope of heaven. Stately columns of thermal clouds and lyre-strings of lightning defined encircling walls of indigo horizons. The Earth itself served as the great hall's floor, inlaid with divers-colored mosaics of desert, mountain, and river terrains framed by the hammered glimmer of the sea.

  "What you behold is but froth on the vastness of time," a voice crackled out of the air. "All of history lies hidden."

  Gweat godth!

  A crone in cobweb rags crouched beside Rex Mundi. Her skull face leered at him with goggling eyes. "Look at your lost homes, all of you."

  At her command, Lord Monkey witnessed again the sepia dark of the forest canopy where it had clung to milk-wet mother's fur. Dagonet glimpsed the poplar-spired villa in Arthorica where he ran playfully as a child with others his own height. Azael, Lailoken, and the Fire Lord faced again the white fire of all origins ...

  "Ah, Urd of the Norns!" Merlin greeted the Wyrd Sister, speaking quickly before his peek at heaven robbed him of all will to speak or live. He held a diamond before the crone's mummied face, and its blue chips of light glittered in her bulging eyes. "This is the gift I have brought you so that I might sit here and pay no heed to my past."

  With a cackled cry, she snatched the diamond from Rex Mundi's hirsute fingers and vanished, a wisp of ash drifting away with the howls the wolves relayed on the stony slopes.

  I gwew up in thplendor and love! I want to go back.

  "No one can go back, Dagonet," a gentle voice turned Rex Mundi's head. At his side on the giant iron throne sat a woman of astonishing beauty. Long hair pale as fresh cut wood and skin clear as arctic daylight, she gazed on him with eyes of winter-frost, her high cheeks haughty as the antelope's.

  Her raiment, sheer moonlight, revealed shadowed charms that brought Dagonet's voice into Rex Mundi's throat. "You are the motht beautiful woman my eyeth have ever theen! Who are you?"

  "I am a Norn—Verthandi, Wyrd Sister of present time." She brushed her cool fingers against Rex Mundi's ape-slanted brow, and her touch stroked alertness like harp-strings within him. "I can reveal to you where every demon cowers in the House of Fog and where every Fire Lord burns in the dark gulf. I can show you your boy king, Arthor, hunkering like a criminal in a dark wood of the Belgae, murder in his heart ...”

  In a Dark Wood

  Bedevere's plumed helmet, breastplates and buckler dished reflections of his campfire so brightly that the wildwood gang that rushed upon him out of the night forest struck him before he moved. The dazzling armor clanged emptily. The legate was nowhere to be found among the dark trees or in their branches. Arthor went with the gang when they reported this at the citadel of Cunetio.

  "Sound the longhorn," the gang leader shouted to the guard on the torchlit ramparts. "One of the king's men is loose in our woods. Sound the longhorn and run the manhunt."

  Moments later, a resounding blast sounded and echoed among the hills of the overcast night. Arthor rode with the manhunt. Wildwood gangs throughout the region crisscrossed the Roman roads and fanned through the forests. By dawn, they had not found Bedevere but many of their numbers had fallen, mysteriously slain, apparently murdered by their own comrades.

  Before the gates of Cunetio, the survivors gathered to ferret out their betrayers. There, among the carnelian shadows of early morning, Arthor tore away his rag tunic and exposed the leather cuirasse embossed with the regal dragon. With his first blow, he slew the brigand that wielded Cei's sword. And at Arthor's war cry, the score and ten of the king's men scattered among the brigands began their savage retribution.

  From the rootheld burrow where he had buried himself, Bedevere rose. The scimitar in his one arm flashed. Panicked brigands tried to flee, but the lethal swords of the king blocked every direction. Before the citadel could summon archers to the ramparts, the king's men dispersed into the forest leaving no survivors.

  Gorthyn had accepted King Arthor's terms of surrender by noon. With most of his wildwood gangs slaughtered, the hope of defending Cunetio against Arthor's encroaching forces had vanished. Happy to accept exile from Britain with his entire household, he opened the gates of the citadel. Arthor and his men escorted his train of wagons south, and along the way the two kings rode together.

  "You are a cunning adversary," said Gorthyn, a scar-faced man with thick shoulders and black hair pulled back and braided to a long rat's tail. "You defanged me quick enough. Had you more patience to wait for your army, you could have crushed me."

  "The people of Cunetio are under my protection," Arthor replied blandly. "My purpose is served by removing the malefactor from their midst."

  "Do not mistake me, brother king." Gorthyn's smile stretched straight back like a shark's and showed yellowed and missing teeth. "Your charity is not lost on me. One man's malefactor is another man's king. It has ever been thus."

  "Answer me this, then, Lord Gorthyn—one king to another." Arthor met Gorthyn's narrow, vexed stare. "You have thrived on the deaths of innocent wayfarers. Have you no fear of God?"

  Gorthyn's laugh startled his steed, and he had to struggle a moment to steady the animal. "I am no heretic, brother king. I am as true to God as you and know with confidence that I will receive my reward from His hand when I die, for I serve Him well." He nodded at the bare trees and frozen earth. "God has placed man in this world for the very purpose that malignity be set against him. Does not the Bible tell us this? We are fallen from grace, brother. Fallen before the god of v
engeance. And I—I am his wrath."

  Fata Morgana

  "Where are you taking me, daughter?" Gorlois asked from where he sat on the riding board next to Morgeu. He looked about at bare fields scalded by wind and shivered in the wool mantle that the enchantress had plucked from a dead guard lying at the city gate, bloodless as a hung pig. "And don't tell me again 'out of Londinium.' I know not how many days ago we departed that city, for each nightfall you plunge me into a dreamless and forgetful sleep. I have lost my sense of time."

  "I am protecting you, father." Morgeu held the reins in one hand and with the other patted his bony knee. Even through the black fabric of his trousers, she could feel his cold flesh. The spell she cast on him each night to hide him from the Furor was killing him.

  His soul, claimed by both the north god and her magic, could not remain much longer in this stolen body. "The Furor has marked your soul, and surely Lailoken is stalking you as well to reclaim his flesh. We must defy both gods and demons."

  "You have not answered my question, daughter."

  "The less I tell you, the less the Furor will know." Her small, black eyes scanned the brambly ditches of the broken highway for Wolf Warriors or wildwood gangs. "But know this—I possess the magic to take you back from the Furor. We are bound for a ceremonial place that I have prepared before coming for you."

  "Why must we travel with that—creature?" Gorlois glanced over his shoulder at the bed of loam that filled the tented wagon.

  "Terpillius is going to help us with my magic" A smile lifted one corner of her small lips. "He is instrumental in freeing you from this demon's flesh and placing you where you belong, in the body I am growing for you. It will be a beautiful operation. A vampyre who thrives on the blood of destroyed lives will help fit your life to my root-blood."

  "Will I be marked by the Furor?"

  "I doubt even the Furor can undo that." She sucked cold air through her teeth, remembering the disfigurement of her father's ghost that she had beheld in the north woods. "He drew your soul into the Storm Tree to reshape you so that you should serve his purpose best within Lailoken's body. But we will free you from this alien flesh and its servitude to the wrathful god."

  Gorlois turned sharply in his seat. "Will I lose my magic?"

  "Your magic is the power within the demon's body." She placed a hand over her womb. "I am making you a new body. You will not have the demon's strengths, but you will have your own mortal power."

  "I will be king."

  "You will be Britain's greatest king. After you drive the invaders from our island, you will take the fight to them, and you will rule from Caledonia to Aquitania." Morgeu snapped the reins and ran the wagon along a straight stretch of unbroken highway.

  Once, and recently, she had been willing to serve the Furor, to drive her anger hard against Arthor and Merlin. But now, the Furor threatened her child. She would not spare even this fierce god her wrath with her children at risk. "The Furor believes he will conquer this land with his brutal Saxons, wily Angles, and fierce Jutes and Picts. He is not the only one endowed with prophecy. I see a future where Celtic magic unites pagans to the nailed god and defies the Furor. Behold!"

  The shore of winter clouds above the forested hills built a mirage of elaborate castles—glass towers and stacked buildings immense as cliffs, highways uplifted on pylons, viaducts curving smooth as ribbons among the glass turrets of the future.

  Wyrd Sister

  Verthandi, in her raiment sheer as moonlight, pressed closer to Rex Mundi where they sat together on the Seat of the Slain. She touched him with an alpine perfume of windy heights. "If you will give me the Dragon's hoard in your pockets, I will show you all the wonders of the world as they are now. Do you want to see again where once you lived free, Lord Monkey?"

  The beast in Rex Mundi chittered with delight when the lovely Norn brushed the henna hackles from his ape-slanted brow. He pressed himself into the assembled body's dark, staring eyes, into a radiant vision—

  Sunlight pierced high galleries of looped vines and hanging air plants. Among shifting vapors and pale boles of immense trees, birds clicked and fretted. And where the light pierced, monkeys screeched, fighting over a squashed fruit.

  Encouraged by Lord Monkey's joy at the sight of his home, Dagonet boldly called from within the psychic interior of Rex Mundi—Let me thee again the gween land where I gwew to manhood!

  Verthandi's winter-frost eyes darkened sadly. "You would see again the grand manor where once you knew happiness, Dagonet. Ah. Since you departed and entrusted your family's estate to the care of your younger brothers and sister, the Wolf Warriors have come. What is now is no longer what was."

  The villa walls stood all but overgrown by black ivy, fluted columns smashed, mosaics bedight with rife weeds. Past cracked urns, Dagonet's vision entered a dusky interior of toppled bricks and a ceiling of plaster that hung like tattered cloth.

  I can thee no more! Take thith thad thight away from me!

  Azael seized Rex Mundi's tongue. "Show me God. We followed Her out here into the cold and dark—and we haven't seen Her since. The Fire Lords say She is still here. Then, where is She?"

  The Wyrd sister sighed, then pressed her lovely lips close to Rex Mundi's hairy ear and softly hummed a sad mountain song.

  In a ray of sunlight, a crowd of protozoans teemed. These transparent bodies swarmed through palatial halls of water. Their cilia beat together in ripples, excited by energies of Brownian motion.

  I don't underthtand what I'm theeing! What are theeth thingth?

  Azael griped, "They're hungry animals, you fool! Too tiny for your weak eyes to notice."

  "You see Her where She is now—at the dance," the Norn replied, miffed at the demon's anger. "She likes to dance."

  Before Azael could say more, Merlin seized Rex Mundi's tongue. "Show me Arthor. Show me the high king of Britain."

  Verthandi smiled and leaned closer, her pale hair covering the bestial face of Rex Mundi with a scent like a load of hay.

  []

  Mother Mary, my brother Cei is dead. My fear of Morgeu sent him on the hopeless mission that killed him. I should have allowed Lot to go, as he had requested. I should have been my brother's keeper. Alone at night in my tent, my face pressed in my pallet, I remember our child years together, when I bested that oaf at every endeavor—horsemanship, archery, swordplay, swimming, mathematics, languages, philosophy—everything. I galled him. That, I believe, is why Kyner insisted that I, a foundling, undertake every aspect of his son's training, so that I would goad the lug to compete all the more strenuously. Excelling satisfied my angry heart and soothed my embitterment at the low station to which I believed I had been born. Now, thinking how I smirked at his frustrated bouts of rage every time I overwhelmed him with my prowess, I weep for him. I have confessed this to no one, not even Kyner, whom I have seen crying in chapel for his lost son. I am not ashamed to tell you. You know my heart and its hungers. You know the shadows that trouble my mind with fear and doubt. And you know Cei, for all his faults, is worthy of a better love than mine.

  Riders of the North Wind

  King Arthor sat counseling with his commanders in a pavilion tent whose canvas walls buckled under the blustering wind. An open flap revealed frozen fields and a hoarfrost sky. Bonfires burned at wide intervals among the army's numerous tents, and smoke shredded and flew in wind-clawed shapes like furious black harpies.

  "We must go north," Urien declared. He sat, like the others, in a campaign chair covered with marten fur and set before a trestle table where scroll maps lay unfurled and tacked. "Though winter sweeps down upon us, so too do the north tribes. They have gotten around our Wall defenders by sailing across the waters of Bodotria and Ituna. What manner of crazed warriors are these?"

  "Riders of the North Wind," Lot said from where he slouched with his fist to his mustached mouth. Since hearing the report of Cei's death, he despaired for his wife. "They believe that the god of storms guides them with the wind a
nd protects them with hail and sleet. Winter is no obstacle to them."

  "But it is to us," Marcus spoke. "With Bors in Londinium, there is no large army in the north to reinforce us. We are alone."

  "That is why the raiders are bold." Urien opened several strips of messages from bird carriers and threw them on the table. "We have received frightful news from coast cities burned by sea raiders—Segedunum, Pons Aelius, Glanoventa, Alauna. And worse yet, calls for help from inland cities that are besieged by these Riders of the North Wind. Brocavum, Vindomora, Lavatrae and Braboniacum are all in dire jeopardy. We must go to their aid."

  "Why has Bors Bona taken his army south?" Lot grumbled. "He has opened the north to the invaders and forces us to engage them in winter. He expects us to be weakened by this campaign—or destroyed. That is why he has withheld his pledge. He allies with that oriental fop Syrax, who colludes with the Foederatus."

  "No, not Bors," Marcus said with a grim shake of his head. "I know the man. He vehemently hates the invaders and would never enter into alliance with them. My people in his court inform me that he took his army to Londinium to dissuade Syrax from capitulating to the Foederatus. Why he remains there, I do not know. We must turn our forces at once to the south, to Londinium."

  "No!" Urien's shoulder muscles bunched and his salt-blond hair covered his face as he leaned over the table and stabbed his finger onto the map of the highlands. "If we lose this, the Picts will hold high ground. The Saxons already have a foothold in the lowlands. Our enemies will squeeze us in a deadly vise. We must go north."

  Arthor looked to Kyner, who sat uncharacteristically silent in his chair. The evidence of Cei's death had left him hollowed, and he had said very little since. "What do you counsel, father?"

  Kyner did not budge, and his heavy voice sounded as if from far away, "The king protects the people."