Mordred, Bastard Son

by Douglas Clegg

  The artisans and our old poet, a Welsh Druid named Cian who remembered a thousand tales in his head, though he was blind and nearly deaf with age, re-enacted the discovery of the Lake by the old ones, and of the forest of Broceliande as a sacred sanctuary of our people. The lyre was played as a beautiful maiden sang of old heroes and the queens of the islands; more was sung of Avalon, those isles out to sea that were so hallowed that only those who were pure and brave could find them, and few ever left them once there.

  We were a mix of tribes in the Lake, but all of us had these Celtic ancestors, and the gods and goddesses of each tribe were celebrated that night for the hours of the day had been extended that we might not forget every blessing.

  The dancing began late. We had our reels, old country spins, and the old tribal dances of summer and planting, followed by the ritual bath within the lake itself, symbolizing the new energy of summer. Then the drinking and boasting began, the shows of athletic prowess; the elders went off to their clay pipes and their gathering-fire.

  You could smell the perfume of love among the shadows above the caverns as god and goddess mated within the forms of those who so chosen to call divinity into their bodies.

  I stumbled along the forest path, having watched a friend named Basquil press himself between the spreading thighs of a maiden whose face was hidden in shadow. His trousers half fell, revealing his thrusting buttocks as he entered her, both of them pressed down into the fern-bed.

  The dark forms of others became visible in the deepening shadows as they laughed and sang, running along woodland paths. I thought I saw my aunt Morgause with a youth, sitting out in the sheep’s meadow, their mouths locked together.

  The burning chariot of the sun was high and cast shadows that were deep among the woods. I could nearly believe in those elfin tribes who lured the unsuspecting into mischief. I had been warned of what Merlin called “those blasted elfin faerie revels of the superstitious mind… They invade the mind through scent and the invisible boundaries that exist in the world though men do not see them. They are energies of the forest that play with our minds when we come near these areas. Many are weak when near them, but the strong will resist this manipulation which is but the forces of the rock and water and air and flame.”

  And so I had one of those senses—that that elemental energy was near, for the light upon a forest path, edged with luxuriant ferns that grew nearly to my knees, seemed to shimmer as if that waving of air caused by fire. And I saw what I thought must be this elemental energy of which my master and teacher had spoken of—what others called faeries and elves and the goblin-kind.

  In that late light that would not turn dark for many hours, I saw my friend Lukat at the edge of the forest.

  I rubbed my eyes and looked again.

  He was at some distance, but the bright night sun of that sacred day brought his features and aspect perfectly to me. I called out to him, and wandered away from the music and dancing, a wineskin in my hand. “Lukat! Lukat!” I cried, but as I came to the spot, he had vanished—but not into thin air, for I saw him again, among the fern, mounting a white-and-brown mottled steed, very different from our horses in the paddock. He wore a dirty brown cloak, and now I was not sure this man was my friend. Would I even recognize Lukat, since he’d been gone two long years?

  And yet, I believed this was my friend, riding off down a slender path, ignoring my shouts.

  6

  The wine, the ale, the spinning reels and leaps of the midsummer festivities—or perhaps it had been the dreams I’d been having for many nights previous, where I had men of all kinds, every which way, in every formation imaginable.

  But whatever delirium was in me, I kept to the path, following the hoofprints in the sandy earth. I passed the grove, and saw those standing stones that had been hunters of the ancient days, and beneath them, the earth-swallowed Roman army that had come to slaughter our Druids and burn out trees. I felt as if these things were alive on this night, and I heard, at a distance, the hymns of the Druids and their attendant in beyond the grove. The forest burned with its life, and I felt touched by all of it.

  Midsummer’s Night has always been magick, and so it was that night after I had passed into manhood.

  I may have walked many leagues, though the midsummer sun had still not set below the trees but rather gave off that white light that seemed of the Otherworld itself.

  I tried in my heart to remember Lukat’s face, but the wine had blurred all memory, though it seemed as if I could remember the sweet smell of his skin, and the feeling of him near me—but his face had somehow been wiped from me as a damp cloth wipes a bowl clean.

  The path that the horse had taken seemed to come to an end in a bright green fern bed. I looked ahead, through the trees, and the forest began to open up again to a clearing. I continued walking, and as I did so, I took a sip from my wineskin, and then spat it out again, for I had too much of it.

  At the edge of the forest, I saw a stag, larger than any I had ever before seen, sleek and graceful. Upon his head, a crown of antlers that was like a forest itself. For just a moment I stood in awe of this creature.

  And then it bounded off across the ferns, deeper into the woods.

  As I stepped into the clearing, I began to recognize this place, and saw a familiar stream, though I had not been here in weeks. I took my shoes off and waded in the stream, feeling the cool of water as a blessing. I went along the stream as it broadened. Bunches of wild grass covered the muddy bank giving way to great tall reeds that nearly came to my shoulders.

  I turned my face to the sun above. Its warmth caused me to loosen my shirt.

  It was too hot. I removed my clothes entirely. No one was around. I felt free from everything that confined me. Open to the world itself.

  I decided to bathe there in the sunshine and cool off from the fever of the long day.

  I sat down in a pool that formed between three trees that had fallen into the stream just as it began to widen further and empty into a larger pool of water beyond the reeds.

  The water felt wonderful—chilly and clean.

  I lay down on my stomach, dipping my head beneath it so feel the sun on my back, and the water all around my face and that feeling of quiet beneath the surface.

  I recalled the painting of Cernunnos, his nakedness and the beauty of this world in my watery solitude.

  When I came up, I thought I heard someone muttering or groaning.

  I caught my breath. These might be the sounds of lust. Just thinking it made me feel hardness, which seemed its own magick.

  I climbed up to the bank of the stream and crouched low, moving among the reeds so as not to be seen, quietly as I could, for the mud beneath my bare feet made a sucking sound as I went.

  I parted the reeds, and saw the man.

  A stranger, yet not strange to me at all.

  7

  That hermit I had lusted after before, now spread out here as if waiting for me alone.

  His horse was tied up to a willow that leaned over the embankment of the widening stream.

  He lay across a flat rock, naked also, for I seemed to catch him most at his bath.

  His arms were tucked behind his head as a cushion. I had not ever before stared so much at a man’s naked form. But his organ was not the only thing that caught my eye, for his feet, which were long and tapered had a singular beauty, and his calves, too, and thighs, and even that way his ears did not seem to have lobes as mine did, but instead, curved to his scalp like perfect half-shells. He had become brown with the sun, and I felt that familiar arousal that only dreams had brought to me, or those furtive moments upon crawling into my bed to pleasure myself in lieu of losing that virginity which allowed Merlin to teach me the arts of the goddess, and more recently kept me from paying a terrible debt to the daughters of Namtareth.

  Without meaning to I had licked my lips, and my arousal had taken a physical form. He seemed to be dreaming, for he groaned and moaned and muttered, but his eyes d
id not open.

  This is a place of that elemental spirit, I thought. The rock and the water had brought up some gas to give me this vision. That’s all it must be, I thought. It is just what Merlin described when he warned me from the elementals that the priests of stars had described as “magnes”—the phantom of a man, of an elf-prince of great height and thick muscle with that fatal beauty given to just such a vision.

  And yet, I could not resist the pull of the elemental force.

  Feeling the shivery fear of the bold and foolish, I found myself moving forward, across the mud, from the reeds. Every few steps I stopped, crouching, hoping he would not open his eyes.

  It was as if I was in a trance, but his beauty drew me to him, and soon I stood over him, unaware that I blocked that late sunlight from him.

  I looked down at him, longing to touch his skin, just to feel the excitement, and even danger of the encounter.

  When I detected a fluttering of his eyelids, I quickly scurried back into the reeds. I felt ashamed for having intruded upon his private place, this long-limbed stranger with the body of a god. He looked upward toward the sun, shielding his eyes from it. Had he sensed my presence?

  Again, he closed his eyes.

  I glanced around the woods, but saw no one else there with him. I blushed as I watched him, ashamed of my interest, yet intensely curious. My mind played tricks on me, for I began wild imaginings of making love with him, rutting against the stone, in the water, even on horseback. He clearly was older, my senior by ten years, perhaps more, and this thought brought more heat to my flesh, for I began to imagine this man my teacher in the sexual arts.

  In my heart, even then, I promised that I would find a way to take this man as my own. I did not understand the machinery of love in my youth, but I knew of desire and longing.

  The longer I watched him, the more my eyes seemed to leave my skull and travel to his flesh, the more I began to lose any self-consciousness about my own nakedness and about the obvious arousal that I would not be able to hide should I stand upright and step out from the muddy reeds.

  He opened his eyes again and sat up, looking about as if he sensed me.

  Then he lay back and said aloud, “As you have watched me, so I have watched you.”

  He closed his eyes, and I felt my heart pounding. This was the first any man had invited me to come to him, and in such a way that I knew there was only one outcome.

  It terrified me.

  It excited me as nothing else might have.

  I wasn’t even sure if I could breathe.

  Slowly, I parted the reeds and took a step out in the mud, and then another. I stood there, full naked, fully aroused, and terrified of everything.

  He opened his eyes and gazed up into mine.

  He did not seem frightened of seeing me there. It was nearly as if he expected to find me. As if I had moved through the water of the Lady’s kingdom into a mirror-world—he reached up and took my hand and brought it to his lips, kissing it.

  His lips were warm on my hand, and his blue eyes seemed to shine with distant stars. I could not look away from him, and all my skin tingled with a feeling of ice and fire, burning and freezing. I tried then to tug away from his hand, but he drew me down to him, while raising up to meet me—to meet my face, my lips, and I felt that burning wetness of our lips, his over mine like a glove over the hand, mingling their waters, our tongues sparring like small blades, small delicious thick skin, moist; and sweet was his breath; I felt as if my mouth were engulfed in this man’s passion.

  I drew back from him, gasping. “I can’t do this. I can’t.”

  But he kissed me again and whispered to me of things that I longed to hear, of his loneliness in the forest, of watching me this past spring as I rode the horses or as I swam along the rivers and how he had wanted me though he did not dare come to me. Of how he had brought messages to the Druids on behalf of the kingdoms who still honored those priests, and how he had seen me sometimes, working shirtless in the field, planting the new crop, or when brought the geese up from the ponds with my trousers rolled up and my tunic half torn, and my hair in my eyes and mud all over my arms and legs. He told me of dreaming of me, and I whispered of the dreams I, too, had of him. He whispered, “There is a god who brings men together, and he has brought us here, like this, for one reason.”

  “The hunter,” I whispered.

  “The stag,” he murmured.

  “You are my stag,” I said, our breath mingling, our lips so close.

  “You are my hunter,” he whispered.

  His mouth again covered mine, like a glove slipped too easily on the hand. I was swept into that kiss. I melted against him, and felt the rightness of it as his sun-heated body, slick with sweat, pressed to mine. Our chests against each other, his strong arms bringing me closer into his body that I might not know where our flesh had ever been separate. Instinctively, I wrapped my legs across his thighs, and the long-pent-up nature of the gods let loose within me, though we did not enter each other then. It was without thought, without mind, without even my heart, for I felt animal, all creature of the woods, and I also felt the god within me rising up.

  I felt the madness I had seen in the horses as they mounted, in the rabbits, in the sheep in the meadow—I felt that call to the Lord of the Forest of mating and rutting and letting the lower regions of body perform their fire dance while the heart and the mind raced from one paradise to another of memory and dream and vision.

  It was madness what I did with this stranger, what I wanted to do with him, what I needed to do.

  I felt that rush of blood and of fire within me, in his arms, letting my body move as it would against his. He lifted me into his arms and held me.

  We went within each other, sharing our flesh and, I felt, more than that. He lifted me up, laughing, upon his horse, and he leapt on, cradling me in his arms, as we rode across an open meadow. The late sunlight grew dolorous in some way I could not understand, and this melancholy that occurs after the act of love took me over, as we held each other on horseback, naked, still, and it was as if I were in the arms of a centaur of those ancient legends, half-man, half-horse. I turned to face him, and our passions rose again as we went into that fiery place where lovers go when first discovering each other.

  Then we returned to that rock where we’d met, and I dismounted from his horse, and then he followed after, not wanting to let go of me, nor me of him. I had not even asked his name or why he lived in such a humble state, for it was as if the god of the sun kept to the shadows of trees and streams his whole life. We lay again, together, the discovery not yet done, the fire on my skin not yet burnt to ash.

  The midsummer sun was gone when I next looked up at the sky, and instead, the night was dark with stars and without moon, and we lay on that rock and his hands combed my hair as he spoke softly to me.

  I remembered a dream I had, just as I had this one, and in the dream, there was the rock, and the man, and the horse, and the water, and the reeds.

  “I dreamed of this,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “Of this beautiful stranger, come to me as a warrior of the old days, when no tunic covered us, when no barrier came between two lovers, whether of cloth or of stone. This young man I had seen before, in dreams and in the forest. I have broken a vow. I promised myself—and the goddess—that I would not ever be with man or woman again.”

  At his words, my throat grew dry, and the thudding ache of my head returned, I knew.

  The Anthea, those daughters of Namtareth.

  It was the dark of the moon that night.

  Midsummer’s Night. A night of sacred enchantment; a night of ritual and celebration.

  A night when that hammer god of the flesh, Sucellus, the great striker of the Earth, might move strangers into each other’s arms, into each other’s bodies.

  I had broken my vow to Merlin, for my studies in the Art of the goddess were not yet complete.

  This stranger and I had been loving each other, savori
ng the flesh and taste of each other for hours, though it had gone too fast. When I looked at him, he looked well loved, as the men of the caverns would say. He wore a smile of that unearthly sadness of him who has enjoyed and now sorrows for lack of it again.

  I wanted to remain with him forever, in that moment, to never let dawn come. Never let the obligations and duties to the world return. To freeze, as if in winter’s ice, that perfect place within the realm of time where his smile and eyes were for me alone; his arms and breath, his every inch; as if this were love itself, love-in-flesh, personified, the stag and hunter together.

  But in becoming a man that night, a man not in age—for I had already passed that path-stone—but in that erotic understanding that only arrives with the breaking from the bonds of innocence, new understandings enfolded me. I saw what I had lost, and I saw what I might lose.

  The debts of life had just begun, as they always do when innocence itself has passed into experience.

  I could not now forget that one debt of the Anthea and their goddess, Namtareth, whose predatory faces seemed to be in the night sky above me.