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

by A. A. Attanasio

  That Thing You Dread

  The loss of Merlin signaled a drastic turn in the battle. Word that the tyrant's wizard had been slain spread swiftly through the ranks of storm troops. The berserkers that Merlin had sent fleeing in terror regrouped and attacked with renewed and vicious frenzy. The forces of the magister militum's army took heart from the fury of their Foederatus comrades and charged through the forests onto the plains of Camelot.

  Arthor had no choice but to summon Kyner and Cei before he broke the enemy's line. Above the pounding of shod hooves, their drums and pipes sounded, declaring their entry into the battle.

  Out of the hill forests to the north, Gorthyn arrived leading a full legion of Wolf Warriors—pagans bedecked in the skins of animals and pieces of uniforms ripped from the corpses of fallen Britons.

  To prevent a rout, the king had the trumpeters call for Marcus, and he emerged from Camelot with mounted lancers and archers. Soon a tumultuous confusion ranged across the open fields.

  Intent on breaking the wave of assailants, Arthor drove his company to the forest line. Kyner and Cei flailed at the enemy to either side, desperate to keep the Wolf Warriors from outflanking their king.

  Marcus prevailed in turning Gorthyn's attack. From the battlements of Camelot, Lot and Urien waved banners, urging the duke to turn back. Marcus would take no orders except from the king, and he plunged into the forest after Gorthyn. And there, another legion of Wolf Warriors lurked. Immediately, he was surrounded, and Lot and Urien had no choice but to quickly lead their forces onto the field, to extricate him.

  The screams of horses and men melled in the air under the scything hiss of arrows and slinged missiles. Everywhere, horses trampled the fallen or collapsed and lay fallen themselves and men scrambled over them. Arrows pinned soldiers to trees. Lanced bodies stood erect in death. Berserkers tore away helmets and scalped their victims alive as they thrashed beneath them.

  Arthor fought ruthlessly through this horror and had vehemently pushed his company into the forest, desperate to break through the line. There was no end to the enemy's depth. A third legion of Wolf Warriors whelmed through the underbrush.

  Raptor-mask uplifted exposing a grim face, Cei surged to the king's side. "We have forced ourselves to that thing you dread!"

  Arthor knew what he meant. The thing he most dreaded in battle was to find himself surrounded. His aggressive fighting style had frequently placed him in that position during his tenure as Kyner's warrior, and burdened with this reputation few warriors followed him into battle.

  At that time, only a warrior, he had felt no qualms about leaving those few fanatics who had dared joined him to fight their own way out. Now, as king, the realization that he had led his entire company into an indefensible position chilled him to the marrow.

  "Call for Urien and Lot!" he shouted above the screaming.

  Cei shook his head and signaled the trumpeter for a retreat. "They are with Marcus! He is caught as we are in the north forest!"

  Only then, as he, Bedevere, and Cei fought their way back toward Kyner's stance at the edge of the forest, did the king realize he had terribly miscalculated the strength of his opponent. Only then, among a wild frenzy of headlong horses and the death cries of his ruined ranks leaping around him, did he understand the battle was lost.

  Fields of Darkness

  Nightfall did not stall the fighting. Gorthyn torched the forest, and by this raging firelight his Wolf Warriors battered Camelot's defenders on the plains. A shift in the wind alone saved the king's men from immediate defeat. The churning smoke of the burning woods poured over the fields, and the flames ate into Gorthyn's lines, forcing him to pull away from the plains.

  "Fall back to Camelot!" Kyner bawled. "Fall back and negotiate with Syrax!"

  Arthor lifted his eagle-mask, his young face swollen with rage and tears. "No! No negotiations! They will tear down Camelot. We must fight them here—through the night!"

  The king ordered Marcus and Kyner to hold the plains with the remnants of their troops. And he dispatched Urien and Lot to protect the highway to Cold Kitchen while he and what remained of Cei's men pursued Gorthyn through the fiery wall of toppling trees and blazing brush into the smoldering forest.

  Unreal directions of smoke, haze, and spurts of flame baffled both Gorthyn and Arthor, and they circled each other blindly.

  Pale and dismembered bodies lay in the red shadows. Among the churning darkness of sifting smoke, corpses feathered with arrows mimed the reed grass and canes. The king's men stalked their enemy in small groups—and the enemy hunted them. The incessant crackle of the simmering woods, the gibbered calls of the dying, and the intermittent screaming of horses obscured hearing as deftly as the thick vapors and nocturnal shadows dimmed sight.

  Whenever opponents stumbled upon each other, the fighting convulsed with brutal brevity. Combatants lunged in and out of the dark. Weapons flashed and cries whisked away on the flying fumes.

  Occasionally, the wind brisked, and the forest flames flared, silhouetting a dark riot of assailants entangled in smoke. Then, the wind slimmed away, and blackness swept in, concocting anonymity once more.

  With frightful incongruence, the king's men confronted themselves, swords raised, deflected before the fatal instant by common cries.

  After midnight, the last of the flames faded entirely, and Gorthyn commanded his warriors to seek coveys and lurk in waiting. Shouts reeled out of the night where the king's men stumbled upon them. This obliged Arthor to call his soldiers together and return with them to the fields of darkness.

  "If we negotiate now," Kyner pleaded with his stepson as the king approached the chief's bonfire, "we may yet save what remains."

  Arthor removed his helmet and glowered at Kyner. "Syrax will not negotiate. He believes he has won."

  "Believes?" Cei queried sarcastically. "At dawn, his legions of Wolf Warriors will sweep over us and his regulars will march in to occupy Camelot."

  "You want to negotiate, too?" Arthor glared in surprise at his brawny stepbrother. "What hope is there in surrender?"

  "Much hope for the living," Kyner replied. "Must everyone die? We are defeated on the field but not yet before God or the Holy Father in Ravenna. The pope may yet intercede, for you are indisputably the rightful heir to Uther Pendragon."

  "No!" Arthor exploded. "I am king! God has made me king! God! And God can destroy me if He so wills. I will not surrender!"

  Kyner and Cei cringed and lowered their heads, sharing doomful looks.

  Seeing that, Arthor shook off his rage and frustration and reached out a gentle hand toward them. "Father—brother—" He spoke in a quieter voice but no less firmly. "Your optimism blinds you, Kyner." He accepted a flagon of water from Bedevere. "Think for a moment like our enemy. We will be put to death and those loyal to us enslaved. That is the Saxon way. And do not doubt for an instant that it is the Foederatus we fight here."

  "What do you propose?" Cei asked in a near-whisper, exhausted and frightened.

  "Rest." The king drank deeply, then spoke through his teeth. "Tomorrow we fight—we fight to the death."

  []

  Mother Mary! Mother Mary! Mother Mary! Mother Mary! Mother—Mother—Mother—Mother—Mother ...

  Locked in Nightmares

  Merlin lay comatose in the king's bed. Nothing the surgeons did to revive him worked, for his soul had lofted free of his physical form. Into the ether worlds, he drifted.

  He recognized warped space from his prior life as a demon: the day sky with its transparent blue auras like jumbled blocks of ice, the night with its cubes of onyx riddled with wormfires. He knew every path to all the possible heavens and hells. And yet, hard as he looked, he could not find the pathway back into his mortal body.

  The vastness of space ranged in every direction. Earth itself sparkled as a mote, a sand grain caught in a slow whirlpool of gravity, spinning inward toward the naked flame of the Sun. And the Sun, too, whirled in a vortex of suns, hundreds of billions o
f suns spinning in an incandescent pinwheel about a black core that swallowed all light.

  Into that blackness, angels and demons had fallen and never returned. Some claimed it was the way back to the origin, to the paradise of infinite energy where everything had begun. No one had ever returned to confirm that.

  He did not want to go that way. He wanted to return to Earth, to his human body, to his mortal destiny as the king's wizard. He could not find Earth among the immensity of emptiness and the scattering of stars. He was adrift again, as he had been during most of his existence as a demon.

  After the fiery explosion that had begun spacetime, that had flung him and the others free of the blissful unity that they had shared with Her, he had desponded of ever finding Her again. He had felt then as he felt now, tiny and adrift in an enormity of cold darkness.

  The light of the origin that he had clung to only burned sharper in the frigid vacuum, and he had let it go. Like so many of the others, he had let the light go and become dark and cold as the void itself.

  Now he sought the light. He sought the one particular light that was Sol and the infinitesimal particle that was the Earth. He could discern no direction in space. It all looked the same, the slow-curving blackness strewn with dark matter, gouts of dust and gas, smoldering here and there to starfields. He drifted. A long time he drifted alone, locked in nightmares of memory and fear.

  He remembered the long, long aeons of wandering through the void. At least then he had enjoyed the company of his fellow demons. When at last they had found worlds that the angels had built, they had enjoyed the opportunity to exert their despair, and they had raged exuberantly against the fragile things that the angels had fashioned.

  How many worlds had he destroyed? These memories of rage haunted him, and he wailed into the emptiness.

  All that soothed him was his memory that at last, on Earth, he had betrayed his fellow demons to become Saint Optima's son, to become one of the very fragile gutsacks they had despised. He had given himself to the angels, to the Fire Lords. And though that memory soothed him, it also inspired fear that he had lost that frail connection with the light, the original fire of creation.

  And he prayed, "Forgive me, forgive my arrogance! I stole Gorlois' soul as if I were God Herself. I tried to shape lives as though I had the light of the Fire Lords. I forgot that I had become a man and like all men can only reflect light. And my punishment—my torment—is that I have forsaken the light. I am again a demon!"

  The World Asunder

  Out of war-smoke rolling across the night fields of strewn dead, Ygrane and Morgeu, mired in blood and battlefield dirt, made their way to the gates of Camelot. Morgeu carried in her arms an infant gummed with birth-chrism.

  The guards hurried them on litters to Morgeu's suite, where a surgeon and attendants cleansed and dressed their wounds. Revived by steaming broths from the king's kitchen and root brews from the surgeon, Morgeu nursed her baby.

  Ygrane examined the infant, pleased to find him whole and unmarked by his frightful entry into the world or its unholy lineage. "What will you name him?" she asked, sitting at her daughter's bedside.

  "Mordred," Morgeu whispered and kissed the child's brow.

  "Such a dire name, daughter." Ygrane suppressed a shiver. "That is Brythonic for Mardoc, warlord of the Other World. You ken for him so a bloody destiny?"

  "Does his brutal birth not already bespeak the terror he will inspire?" Morgeu offered a grim smile. "In truth, I drew his name from my father's tongue: moror credere—slow of belief, for his soul was kept from him by those who had no faith of his worthiness to live. Yet, he is beautiful, isn't he, mother? He is worthy of all that Merlin strove so hard to keep from him—life and power."

  Ygrane knew that her daughter would not condone a baptism, even though the soul within Mordred had been a Christian soul when it had lived as Morgeu's father. To assuage her own sense of responsibility for the child's spiritual identity, she went to the war counsel chamber to find the Graal, by which she would bless the child.

  The Round Table stood empty. At the center, where the Graal had been placed by the king, no sign of it remained.

  Immediately, Ygrane sought Merlin, and found him unconscious in the king's bed. She laid a hand upon his bony breast and felt great distances: expanding shells of space, where light dissolved like smoking candles into black reefs of sooty clouds. The surgeon at her side shook his head and began mumbling about the liver's flux.

  Ygrane returned to Morgeu's tower suite and stood at the slot window, looking out upon the world asunder. Forests burned, turning the night scarlet. Armies clashed, and screams rose on the black wind into the starless night.

  The Graal was gone. Though inquiries had not yet begun, she already sensed that the sacred vessel had been removed by no thieves but a wider agency than mortals.

  She thought back across the many forewinters to that Christmas when the mysterious Sisters of Arimathea—the Nine Queens—had delivered the Graal to her and Uther. And she felt old in her bones.

  Night Wearing a Helmet

  Severus Syrax recognized victory in the confident, broad stride of Gorthyn as the scar-faced man entered the commanders' pavilion tent, helmet under his arm, bloodied hand clutching the sheathed sword at his thigh.

  "The tyrant is crushed," the magister militum greeted him. "That is what you've come to report, yes, Gorthyn? We've seen it already." His broadly smiling face looked beyond the brigand king, out the lifted awning to the red night.

  Flames flickered in the black silver of the River Amnis far below. "From up here, we saw it all," Syrax gloated. "The tyrant's foolish charge into the forest. The entrapment and destruction of his company. His warlords' armies shattered by your legions. Behold our glory!"

  Cold Kitchen burned, and on the river bluffs above the hamlet Camelot's pale walls reflected the flames like the bloody face of night wearing a helmet crested with stars and smoke. "By morning," Gorthyn boasted, "I will have Arthor's head on a stave—and his royal chaplet upon my head."

  "Your head?" Count Platorius queried from the fleece-draped chair where he sat watching war-smoke caress the stars. He looked meaningfully to Syrax. "Did I not foretell this avarice?"

  "Avarice?" Gorthyn slung his head forward, black-whiskered jaw tight as he glared at the magister militum. "I've won this title for myself. You have your wealth. This weasel has his noble lineage. I want mine. As of this night, I am high king."

  "Of course, Gorthyn." The radiance of Severus Syrax did not dim before the dark, hostile countenance. "I am pleased to call you sire. Under your protection, my trade affiliations will make you a wealthy king and this island a kingdom of abundance."

  "Syrax!" The count rose with an inflamed expression and a rebuke upon his tense lips that was never spoken.

  In a blurred motion, Gorthyn drew his sword and passed the grimy blade through Platorius' neck and between his vertebrae, lifting the head from his shoulders. Arterial blood splashed against the tent canvas, and the body crashed onto the chair, the lopped head fallen upside down in its lap. The eyes in their dark pouches stared with dismay.

  Syrax's smile curdled with horror.

  "Fear not, magister militum." Gorthyn sheathed his gory sword. "This king finds favor with you. Together we will make Britain a paradise."

  "Yes, yes—of a certainty." Syrax nodded vigorously. "Of course, we shall need to reward our Foederatus allies."

  Gorthyn stepped over to the map easels and smiled at their scribbled topographies. "There is plenty of land for all of them—the Jutes, Angles, Saxons—even the Picts and Scoti. Alas, these pagans have no love of the farm, the vineyard, or the orchard. They won't tend cattle or crawl into holes in the ground to extract ores. But then, we have the Britons and the Celts to do that now, don't we? I believe King Wesc will be delighted with this peace."

  Severus Syrax found his smile again. "Britain will be a most peaceable kingdom when you wear the gold chaplet—sire."

  Walk the
Distance

  Blood-slaked, Arthor and Bedevere stalked on foot through the cinderous waste of the burned forest. Smoky rays of dawn illuminated sprawled, leg-stiff horses and drifts of tangled corpses.

  The king had lost his helmet sometime during the dark predawn hours when the storm troops charged Camelot. He and his warriors had beaten them back into the smoldering forest and down the gorge slopes of the Amnis, only to be set upon by the combined forces of Syrax and Platorius.

  Arthor leaned on his shield and gawked about at the new-slain dead. He saw no sign of his other warriors. They had careened in wild combat into the darkness, and with the coming of day found themselves far from their king, engaged in strenuous battles for their own survival.

  Armed figures slouched out of the steaming haze, a mixed squadron of hostile warriors—Syrax's Britons in chain-mail tunics on raw-looking horses with wild eyes, accompanied by invaders in breeks fashioned out of human skin and belts woven from human hair and decorated with human jawbones.

  "This way, sire!" Bedevere grabbed the king's arm and pulled him toward a charred grove. "We'll elude them there."

  "I'll not elude them!" Arthor rasped and shook free of Bedevere's grasp. "I'll not flee in my own kingdom!"

  He lunged and brought Excalibur down on the skull of the nearest horse, felling it with one blow and goring the rider as he spilled forward. With a hoarse cry, Arthor spun among the barbarous company that charged him.

  Bearded and with teeth bared like feral dogs, the Wolf Warriors swung their axes, and the helmeted Britons thrust with their heavy swords, all eager for the prize of the tyrant's head and the glory that went with it.

  Bedevere slashed with his crimson scimitar, his back pressed to the king's. Together, they held the filthy, brutal lot at bay. Through the golden haze, more warriors assembled, drawn by excited shouts and whistles from the warband that had found the king. Soon a crowd milled among the burnt trunks and trampled shrubs of ash, yelling for blood.