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

by A. A. Attanasio

  Arthor nodded and stood. "We go north, into winter—and we will crush these Riders of the North Wind."

  Snow in Londinium

  As if in a polar dream, billowy snow fell upon Londinium. Severus Syrax, Count Platorius, and Bors Bona stood upon the high terrace of the governor's palace overlooking the River Tamesis. The gray water steamed in the frigid air.

  Rare woods burned in braziers atop tripods set upwind on the terrace so that wisps of fragrant warmth laved over the noblemen.

  "Several of my sentinels in the palace and on the highway leading out of the city have identified the woman who led the vampyre attack," Bors Bona announced. "Morgeu the Fey."

  "Nonsense." Count Platorius' prune-dark pouches beneath his cynical eyes looked even darker by contrast with his ruddy wind-burned cheeks. "Morgeu the Fey is blamed for every malediction in the land. Whenever the rain falls too heavily in Fenland or there is drought in the scrublands of the Atrebates, the farmers blame Morgeu the Fey."

  "My sentinels are not doltish farmers." Bors Bona looked fierce in his studded casque and brass breastplate. "They have seen Morgeu before. These sightings are independent and multiple. My men are not mistaken. Morgeu the Fey has stolen away Merlin."

  Platorius lifted a bushy eyebrow. "Are you not concerned, magister militum, that this warlord has posted his sentinels throughout Londinium?"

  "I was invited here—same as you." Bors Bona stepped close to Platorius, and though he was shorter he appeared larger.

  "I did not come with an army," the count sneered.

  "You do not have an army." Bors Bona's smoky breath snapped away in the wind. "Your miserable forces are volunteer reserves—yeomen who would rather farm than fight."

  "Enough." Severus Syrax stepped between the two men. The black curls that hung beneath his white fox-fur hat did not stir in the brisk wind, so laden were they with scented oil. "We dare not fight each other. We have terrible enemies arrayed against us. Until a season ago, Merlin served the upstart Arthor. That brutal boy wants no peace. Kyner's iron hammer scorns King Wesc's offer of trade with his tribes—commerce that not only would bring tranquility to this island but affluence as well. That is why Merlin has abandoned him and speaks now for the Foederatus."

  "At what price do we purchase this peace with the Foederatus?" Bors demanded. "Slavery? We are Christians. Will we have pagans for our masters?"

  "That is what Arthor would have us believe," Syrax countered. "He fears that we will accept King Wesc's offer and see that peaceful—and lucrative—trade is possible. That is why he sent Morgeu the Fey and her vampyres to snatch Merlin from us."

  "All know that Morgeu loathes Arthor." The count turned his leather collar against the blowing snow. "Why serve him now?"

  "Her husband, the pagan chieftain Lot, has given his pledge to Arthor," Syrax answered. "Morgeu, like any ambitious mother, thinks of her children—Gawain and Gareth. She will have them on the throne of Britain, all in good time. For them, she schemes and plots against us. We must stand together against her evil—and the evil of her cruel brother, Arthor."

  Sleet Den

  The tented wagon approached Verulamium in the driving snow. Morgeu turned the horses off Watling Street and drove them up a rutted road toward the hillcrest and the chapel she had restored to a shrine. "I sense someone awaiting you in the chapel," Gorlois said, his silver eyes half-lidded. "He is a dangerous man."

  "Hush, father." Morgeu snapped the reins, and the horses pulled harder on the slope. Across the gray landscape reverberated only the sound of the creaking of the axles, the chunting breaths of the beasts, and the slow hasping of their hocks in the snow. "You stay with the wagon. I will take care of this."

  They rocked to a stop before the chapel with its black stones laced in wind-driven snow. Morgeu climbed down and mounted the three iced steps to the shattered door. In the gloomy interior, rays of snow-dust cut fiery paths from holes in the ceiling and chinks in the stone walls, crisscrossing among the smashed pews. A large, big-shouldered man rose from where he had been crouching over a small splinter fire, warming himself.

  "Lady Morgeu—you have returned at last." The giant stepped closer, crunching underfoot the bones of hares he had trapped and eaten. "I am come to escort you safely back to your husband, Lord Lot."

  With wagging fingers, the enchantress clawed from the air the name of the intruder. "Cei, son of Kyner. Come closer to me. Yes, step toward me—closer ... "

  Cei advanced, and his third step met emptiness and plunged him into an abyss. As he fell forward, he glimpsed the near-liquid blur of Morgeu's round face, and her fiery voice branded his brain: "You dare collect me like baggage to be carried back to my owner! For that insolence, you fall, Cei, son of Kyner. You fall to Sleet Den, asylum of the wicked dead!"

  Morgeu threw furious laughter after him. Enraged at the very thought of being possessed, even by Lot, father of her children, her laughter curled to a shriek of exaltation to know she had damned Arthor's brother—another small retribution for the crime Merlin had committed against her unborn son.

  Cei plummeted into darkness, his eyes enormous against the blind depths, arms outflung, startled cry snatched from him in the rush of hot air. And snug inside his brain, Morgeu's voice continued, loud and inescapable as a thought: "The gates of Sleet Den open to the living only one day of the year—and not this day. So you must wait to enter Hela's asylum, wait until you die!"

  He struck spongy ground, breath knocked from him. Gasping to breathe, he hurled himself upright, and a putrid stench burned his mouth and lungs. He gaped about, terrified, aware from the feculent stink and ringing silence in which he could hear his blood running wild in his body that he had arrived at the soul's darkest destination.

  Horrid shapes emerged from the gloom, limned by a vague phosphorescence: Hunched human figures groped toward him, jaws dislocated, eyes vacant or cored with green shadows.

  Gates of iron bars set with sharp fins and tines stopped them, and they pressed tightly against this barrier, dimly seen, wholly silent, mute phantoms annealed to darkness so completely they seemed the very prefigurements of ultimate nothingness.

  The Snow Ranges

  A blizzard swallowed King Arthor's army. Flying snow driven like swarming bees stitched heaven and earth, and all direction vanished. The cavalry, battle wagons and troopers crammed into the forests, hoping to avoid the blistering winds. They found themselves in a faerie world of smeared and muted shapes and ponderous boughs that abruptly collapsed under icy burdens. Continuous flurries spun haloes round each thing.

  "This is the Furor's wrath," Lot groaned when the king called him for direction in the whitening blanks of the forest. "Pray to your God for help. No mortal soul can find a way through these snow ranges."

  Arthor heeded the north chieftain's advice and set the army's priests to rotation through a continuous Mass. Prayer seemed bereft of its effect, as though the swirling snow canceled supplication as remorselessly as it erased direction. Among the tossing treetops, an oceanic wind swept away the holy chants and the direful pleas of priests and king alike.

  Blessed with ample provisions, the army hunkered among the snowdrifted trees and wagons and struggled daily to keep their fires stoked. Sentinels, alert for Wolf Warriors, stamping in the sleety cold of the watch fires, baffled by the slither of white wind among the trees, cried alarms day and night. None heeded the husky shouts until metal clashed and wounded screams followed.

  Wolf Warriors harried the army, bursting out of the wild weather hackled in icicles, slaying unwary soldiers, and disappearing again into the ghost depths of the forest. The ground too hard for burial, the corpses of the honored dead lay frozen in crypts of snow, and the slain enemy burned on pyres in the bare fields downwind. Greasy smoke wardanced across the white world.

  "South, sire," Bedevere begged the king. "Abandon the north to this blight. Surely, the snow swallows our enemies as it has us. Turn your army south. We will slog slowly for sure, but that must be
better than squatting here while the wind buries us."

  "And where is south, Bedevere?" The king lifted the flap of his sagging tent with an explosion of snow-fire and faced into the smoking blizzard. "Where is any direction in this forsaken world?"

  Bedevere upheld a tailor's needle. "This has lain with loadstone—and now look." He pulled a splinter from the trestle table, affixed the needle, and set it afloat in a soapstone dish of snowmelt. Each time the steward spun the needle floating on the splinter, it aligned itself in the same direction. "It is called bait al-ibrah—'house of the needle'—by the Moors of Gujarat who use this to navigate their ships. It points always north."

  "Wondrous!" the king shouted and lifted a bright stare to Bedevere. "You are as astounding as Merlin! At dawn we break camp. Now that we know our direction, we will push on to save the cities of the north!"

  Messengers of the Dead

  The villagers of Verulamium witnessed green flames flickering on the hilltop where Morgeu the Fey had reclaimed their chapel for worship of Hela, goddess of the dead. The priests rocked censers and prayed. But no one dared intrude.

  The flares of green fire appeared nightly. In the vegetable cribs, onions sprouted green tendrils, veneria roots released feelers, barley grew hairy with rootlings, and chestnuts exploded into unshelled shoots as though spring had seeped into the dark places. Horses foaled in the ice wind, ewes dropped their lambs in the snow drifts. And, most strange, stacked firewood—the cut logs of oak, hazel, willow, poplar, and hawthorn—jutted twigs and bloomed with sugary blossoms.

  Morgeu's fertility magic overcame winter yet could not dislodge Gorlois soul from Merlin's body. Nightly, Terpillius rose from his bed of loam and joined Morgeu among her smoking thuribles and the lapsing green flames that flared from her wish-bringer plates.

  He curled up on her as she lay on the black draped altar beside the lanky long body that Gorlois occupied. With his hunger, he latched himself to the root-blood of her womb, his face pressed to her belly, his hands splayed over the chest of the wizard's form.

  The vampyre's efforts had no effect. Gorlois' soul could not be replevied from the flesh that had stolen him out of his daughter-mother's womb. Terpillius moaned with each gust of green fire that surged life-force through him from Morgeu to Gorlois.

  The soul of Gorlois frustrated him by refusing to budge. Merlin's body waited for the vampyre to feast—after the soul had been dislodged. And it would not move.

  Morgeu threw Terpillius off her and sat up with a squawk of defeat. "Why am I thwarted?"

  The vampyre slinked out of the temple as he did every night after failing the enchantress. The foiled efforts only whetted his hunger, and he slipped into the dark to pursue his need upon the midnight plain of other wanderers' journeys.

  Gorlois grew colder each day. He stopped speaking entirely and dwindled like a guttering spark in the chill flesh of the wizard. Eventually, on a February morning with snow blowing like feathers, the messengers of the dead came for him. The beauty of evil shone in their large eyes, not centered in darkness but in light caught like dew in faces thinner, harder than the living, and their rufous hair like streaks of sunset or smeared blood.

  "Get away!" Morgeu demanded. "He will not go with you."

  Come. He must come.

  With the silhouette of men, they stood unmoving in the bright doorway, their hands of time outheld. Come. He must—or in his stead we will take the souls of your two sons, who have been offered at the gates of the dead.

  Their long hands opened, and in their dark palms they held shining locks of hair shorn from the heads of Gawain and Gareth and given to Cei by Lot for safe passage.

  All That Is True

  "We have seen enough," Merlin spoke for Rex Mundi upon the ferrous and corroded Seat of the Slain. "I have for you a gift, beautiful Verthandi."

  "Show me no gift, Rex Mundi," the lovely woman spoke, her breath a waft from a spring morning. "I want all that you have of the Dragon's hoard—and in return I will show you all that is true. You will see everything that is as it is right now."

  "You are too kind," Merlin spoke swiftly before the others that shared his body could voice their desires. "We have lingered far too long in the Storm Tree. If the Furor finds us here, we are doomed."

  "The Furor is far from here at this time." Verthandi smiled and pressed herself through her moonshadow raiment against the lanky body of Rex Mundi. "See for yourself-—"

  The one-eyed god ambled through the fluorescent light of Home, several boughs of the World Tree below the Raven's Branch. Home—Asgard—lit by the shine of lunar vapors and starsmoke seethed warmly, its cedar rafters hung with hunting trophies—ponderous stag horns, wolf pelts, firesnake skins.

  Keeper of the Dusk Apples sauntered beside her lover. Her gold chains and tiffanies flowed against her lithe body. In her hand, she held a knife scabbard studded with the rubies and sapphires Rex Mundi had given her.

  The Furor's robust beard hid his smile of satisfaction, but his gray eye gleamed to behold the bejeweled gift. "And what will I tell my wife about this?"

  "Tell her what you will," Keeper of the Dusk Apples said in a voice low with desire and guided him toward the large oaken bed.

  We've theen enough! That gweat god fwightenth me.

  Rex Mundi pulled away from Verthandi's summer-scented hug.

  "Do not spurn me." The Norn brushed her flaxen hair from a frown. "Would you rather take memories from the Tyrant of the Past—or peek what might be from the Slave of the Future?"

  "My king needs me," Merlin spoke through Rex Mundi. "I cannot tarry here any longer."

  "Let me kiss your brow and wipe away all memory of kings." She whispered intimately. "Forget the past. You've lived long enough in two worlds at once."

  Merlin removed a diamond from his pocket and held it up to her between thumb and forefinger. "Take this as our tribute to your beauty."

  "My beauty needs no tribute but your devotion." She gently pushed his arm aside and nuzzled closer with the genital odor of damp forests. "I will show you secret things—the Dragon's lair, the Nine Queens, the lives of other worlds."

  The diamond in Merlin's grasp grew brighter, inflamed by the energy of the Fire Lord within Rex Mundi.

  At the sight of that, Verthandi fell silent. Her winter-frost eyes looked lonesome as a seal's, and she took the diamond and disappeared.

  Hell

  Cei wandered over scorched gravel that led among tarpaper sheds huddled in the gray pales of a gothic city. Smokestacks reared into a sky squalid with soot and fuming char. The gatekeepers with rufous hair and malevolently beautiful faces had taken from him the locks of hair entrusted to him by Lord Lot. In exchange for those talismans, they had led him here, to this city of malice.

  Alone, he crossed a yard of iron tracks and wooden ties laid atop the black gravel. He walked the iron to keep from stepping in pools of green sludge. The tracks curved into a tunnel stained by smoke. On one footstone stood carved the Roman numerals MCMLVII, and he questioned aloud, "One thousand, nine hundred and fifty-seven? By God's grace, what does that mark mean?" Other letters above it made no sense to him.

  "Gatekeepers!" he called to the rancid sky, where sheets of flame leaped from the chimneys. "Gatekeepers, I have wandered far enough. Take me back! Take me back to the Gates."

  No reply came. Bruised from his fall, befuddled by all he beheld, he began to cry. Across wintry Britain, he had trekked on foot, eluding brigands, trapping hares for food, and not once had he despaired. In battle, encircled by foes and the screams of dying men and wounded horses, he had not despaired. Here in this stony fastness, among broken slabs of concrete and gigantic trestles of black iron with cold lanterns shining red and green, he despaired for his sanity.

  He passed through a landscape of more rails occupied by large iron wagons on metal wheels, some of the wagons lettered with words he half discerned: Midland Railway.

  Smudged men in baggy garments and swinging tool boxes came crunchin
g over the gravel, and he hurried toward them, hailing them with a robust voice. They paid him no heed. When he reached to stop them, they passed through him as though he were smoke.

  Among leaning clapboard shacks beside a railway road, he found others—youths in denim trousers and short leather jerkins. They tied off their arms as if to tourniquet a spurting wound. But they displayed no wounds, only blue bruises in the crooks of their arms and a glass phial dangling, stuck to the flesh by a silver needle.

  He crouched among them, and one of the glassy-eyed boys saw him, rocked his tow-head anxiously, and muttered something in a foreign language. Cei tried to touch him, and his hand passed cleanly through the mumbling youth.

  The warrior walked on. He encountered sedge stiff as wire growing from cratered hardpan. He shoved through it, a phantom, a shade in these strange purlieus of hell. He crossed a dry clay gutter and wandered onto cinder paving that angled up behind gray, wooden homes of blackened planks and decayed facades. In windowcorners, he glimpsed people, though no one saw him or challenged his ghostly trespass.

  []

  Mother Mary, we are alone in a wasteland of ice and snow. Bedevere looks askance at me for using his unique sense of direction to push farther north, deeper into this frozen blight. I have trusted in God to protect us—and I know that is childish. God has exiled us from Eden to labor in pain through the fallen world. I have been arrogant to believe I could drive the invaders from the north—and now I despair. Mother Mary, please. Petition our Father. Ask your Son to petition our Father. We are suffering. I have blundered, and we are suffering!

  Spit Out the Moon

  The army's wagons stood frozen, axles iced, an agony to turn. Snow packed the spokes. The horses, cloaked in blankets and flanked by torchmen, struggled to move their loads through the smoking snow. Laboriously, by inches, the army found its way among the drifts of the forest.