by Lavie Tidhar
‘No,’ Tyronoe says, ‘I side with Morgan. It’s time this shithole of a land was unified to serve us. And I am sick and tired of the pirates coming in from Eire-land. We need a human who could rein them in.’
‘Who gives a shit about Hibernia?’ Thitis demands. ‘These people scrabble in the mud like pigs and their druids smell of dog shit.’
‘You only say that seeing as they wouldn’t serve you,’ says Morgause.
Merlin sees Nimue, by the windows. She stares at the garden outside. So she is not committed yet, he thinks. He knows now what is happening. Just as the Council of Six is meeting Arthur to discuss arrangements, so does the Unseemly Court.
It’s all about power. It’s always about power.
He knows now why he’s been barred from this place.
They are deciding what to do about Arthur.
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with the current arrangement,’ Thitis says. The others look at her askance. She’s sided with the new arrivals, Hengist and Horsa. ‘Each to their own, and land enough for all. Sisters, we each of us have power. It’s good to share.’
‘You lying cunt,’ Morgause says, ‘we all know what you’re planning. To use your foreigners to conquer all the land.’
‘I thought you were against this Arthur!’ Thitis says.
‘The boy’s the bastard child of a worthless shit!’ Morgause explodes. ‘I will not have a son of Uther ruling Britain.’
‘Oh, fuck off, Morgause, you’re as plain as day,’ says Thitis. ‘You just want power for yourself and think King Lot or someone else may serve you better.’
Morgan smiles. ‘Sisters, sisters,’ she says. ‘We all want power. We are here to discuss how best to share it.’
‘You never liked sharing, Morgan,’ Thitis says.
The others laugh.
‘More minty water, ladies?’
‘Why not. And an incense burner please, Rodarchus darling. Do we still have that cannabis from Scythia?’
‘Yes, my lady.’
‘It’s primo stuff, sisters.’
‘Shall we adjourn, then?’
‘Let’s light up this shit.’
‘Oh, Merlin…’
‘Yes?’ He turns. It’s Morgan, materialising beside him.
‘You know you’re not allowed in the Sanctum Sanctorum.’
‘No men!’ someone shouts – Glitonea, maybe.
‘He’s hardly a man,’ someone says, and the others laugh.
‘You reek of fish,’ Morgan says. ‘Come on. We’ll talk, now you are here.’
She threads her arm through his. Out of doors and to the garden where it’s humid and the plants are odd. A giant centipede slithers underfoot and rubs itself against Merlin’s skin. He picks it up and strokes it. He’s missed the fauna found in Fairyland.
‘Put that disgusting thing down,’ Morgan says. She looks around, to check they’re undisturbed. ‘What happened?’
‘Someone tried to block my access,’ Merlin says. ‘They even sent that Grendel and his mum.’
‘Those fucking trolls.’
‘And Herne the Hunter.’
‘Has a tiny penis,’ Morgan says.
‘Yeah?’
‘Honest.’
‘He’s a dick. Anyway. Does our deal still stand? The court is yours and Arthur’s mine.’
‘Right now his “court” is spotty boys who scratch their balls and don’t smell right.’
‘And when they rule Britannia? Come on, Morgan. We have to lay the table before we’re served the feast.’
‘It must have been Morgause.’
‘What?’
‘Who sent them after you.’
‘What’s her game?’
‘She sees where things are heading and she wants to have the lot, not you or me.’
‘Well, she can fuck right off.’
Morgan frowns. ‘Don’t underestimate her. She’s a nasty piece of work and worse, she’s patient. She could be real trouble, now or down the road.’
‘Look, forget about her for a moment. None of this will matter if I can’t get Arthur arms to fight with.’
‘What were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking Nimue and her Lord of War show.’
‘I see…’
‘Morgan?’
‘Yes?’
‘You know anything about a star that fell from heaven?’
‘The Lapis Exilis? There is power in star stones… Is that why you ask?’
‘There was a comet in the skies years ago, when I was with Uther.’ He’s not sure he should tell her his suspicions. ‘It fell somewhere far, and all my searches came back empty.’
‘I don’t, but I will try to find out.’
He isn’t sure he should have told her. Now she knows what he suspects, what he hopes for. A source of power.
He doesn’t trust her and perhaps she’ll be a problem later down the road and, if so, he will deal with her then. For now they are allies – and he does need help.
‘I’ll speak to Nimue. But it will cost, both you and him.’
‘Doesn’t it always?’
‘I have to get back. The Unseemly Court’s about to get even more unseemly.’
‘Do you know how the decision will go?’
‘Merlin, darling. It’s every woman for herself in there, same as it ever was.’
‘Well, tell them our side will win.’
Morgan laughs. ‘I keep forgetting you’re half-human, Merlin. You’re always so invested. Haven’t you got it yet? The game’s the game! Let men war and murder for king and throne. But the land’s ours. Their souls are ours. Men come and go but we remain.’
‘By what right, Morgan?’
She laughs openly in his face. ‘No right,’ she says softly. ‘By force alone.’
‘Morgan—’
‘No, hush. It’s time for you to scoot, darling. I’ll send a raven with the time and place to meet. Till then, your boy-king needs you.’
She turns. She is so dazzling in that cold, cold land.
‘Mo—’
She clicks her fingers, and the world is gone.
He is standing in a drizzle, at the entrance to a cave.
Far in the distance, the screams of dying men, the clash of steel on steel in battle.
He sighs.
After a while he goes into the cave and starts to build a fire.
PART FIVE
THE LADY IN THE LAKE
32
No fires burn over the Castle Perilous where the lady Nimue makes her abode.
The castle towers over its barrier island. The island is black and tall, volcanic rock perhaps, some fire long ago quenched by the salt water. The castle looms against the sky, all tall and craggy and austere, the moon behind it shining so dramatically.
Beyond the lagoon lies the sea. The monstrous fish-cat, Cath Palug, stalks up on the black rocks to the castle. Her tale is a tragic one, she would tell anyone who’d listen; but there is no one here to care. She was once a black kitten who was drowned at sea; there she became half-fish and grew nightmarish; then she returned to land and massacred all the peoples of the isle of Mona until the shallows of the ocean ran red with their blood. Now she is old. That is her story in short.
She stalks up to the castle.
The cat sees many things. She purrs as she passes the silent guards, these spirits of once-fearsome warriors who vanished down the fairy paths. They stand erect and tall like statues, black helmets, black armour, black swords. Cath Palug slinks inside and down the whispering humid corridors where the hum of water is always present, where the drip-drip-drip of drops is always there. The Castle Perilous sings of water and its many forms. There is a storm forever present, raging over the castle and its island, and lightning flashes and provides illumination for the castle through the open windows. The cat hisses and tastes the air, electric, humid: a perfect storm.
‘Ah, there you are, pussycat,’ her mistress says. Nimue lifts her up and cuddles her. Cath Palug purr
s and butts her head into her mistress’s armpit. The lady laughs.
‘Where are you going, little kitty, pretty kitty?’ she says. ‘Come, see my new toy!’
Her mistress’s voice is so full of excitement and hope that the cat, for all that she desires the quiet and the dark of the seeing pools, relents. Nimue lowers her down and the cat follows the Lady of the Lake through the corridors of the Castle Perilous to the treasure room. There, there is a wide and deep pool with walls of marble, and ivy growing on the vanity Doric columns, which stand up holding nothing. The roof is artfully caved in and the moon, Sister Moon, shines down through it and casts the scene in a bewitching glow.
‘What is it, mistress?’ the cat says.
The mermaids rise up from the depths and frolic in the pool. They call to Cath Palug, ‘Hello, little kitten! My, haven’t you grown!’ and she yowls at them until they laugh.
The mermaids shout into the depths and Cath Palug can see dark shapes move lithely in the water, rising, carrying a present for Nimue. At last it breaks the surface and the mermaids hand it over. Nimue places the device lovingly on the floor and runs her fingers over it.
‘It’s magnificent!’ she says.
‘The sirenia of Greece found it for you, mistress,’ one mermaid says. ‘In a shipwreck off the coast of the isle of Antikythera. They swam across the Syrian Sea and traded it to the Gorgona who live beyond the Pillars of Hercules, who traded it to the fish-folk of the Sea of Atlantis, who traded it to us.’
‘But what is it?’ the cat says. She yawns. The nights are long in the Castle Perilous, and she craves the dark, and fish, and the glittering visions of the seeing pools.
Nimue crouches by the mechanism. It is a heavy piece of machine equipment, cogwheels and gears. Nimue runs her fingers over it, brushes mud from the intricate, interlocking wheels.
‘It is a sort of calculating engine,’ she says. ‘It calculates the moon’s motion across the skies. An astronomical device. Just think, cat! How useful it would be in war.’
‘In war, mistress?’
‘With this device one could call with accuracy the conditions of light and dark and when best to launch an attack. It even predicts eclipses! Oh, wouldn’t the little Merlin love this? He’s always going on about Greek science this and Greek science that.’
‘But why do you need a machine to predict the moon,’ says Cath Palug, confused, ‘when you can just talk to her?’
Her mistress laughs and strokes her scales and fur.
‘That magic is for us, cat, not for the men who shed blood in our honour. Oh, they think they do it for themselves, for pride and honour. But there is no honour and no pride in war. Just death and dying men shitting themselves, and entrails – you do like entrails, don’t you?’
Cath Palug licks her lips.
‘I thought as much. Their leaders know this – the ones who are drawn to power. This Arthur knows it. You think he cares who sheds the blood, who lives and dies at his command? He cares only that it is his commands that are obeyed, that on his word men live or die. It is a terrible drug, power, yet oh so wonderful…’ Nimue sighs. ‘Once you taste it you can never truly go back.’
The cat yawns. Nimue moves the mechanism, wheels interlock and spin, the moon above smiles down on the mermaids in the pool and on the Lady of the Lake and on her cat.
Cath Palug butts her head against her mistress’s shin, then slinks away. She follows the whisper of water along a canal and through more dark corridors hewn into the stone, where moisture coats the walls, until she comes into the Hall of Seeing.
No one usually comes here but her. Nimue, sometimes. But she grows bored more easily. Not Cath Palug. She could spend hours here, days sometimes.
The hall is very big and deep into the mountain. The floor is cool and wet and made of marble. Scattered all across the hall are pools of water, some shallow, some deep. As the cat prowls, blue lightning fizzles overhead as salamanders crawl along the ceiling. It lights the visions in the pools. The cat moves slowly, savouring the flickering images in each. At last she chooses, drawn to one or merely sleepy. She lies on her belly and lets her paw dangle into the pool. She stirs the water.
There.
Something is coming.
Horses and men.
Clippety-clippety-clippety-clopping, going round the bend.
33
The ravens sit on a branch together, chatting as the convoy passes down below.
One squawks, then falls, dead instantly, a polished rock smashed through his skull. The other ravens take flight in fright and anger.
Down below on the dirt road, Merlin chuckles.
‘Aren’t you a bit old for throwing rocks?’ Kay says.
Merlin, weighing a pocket full of stones, still smiles. ‘If you see a raven, kill it,’ he says. ‘They’re nothing if they aren’t natural spies.’
‘I like ravens,’ Kay says. ‘They’re highly intelligent, very social, and can even mimic the human voice.’
‘Well aren’t you a natural philosopher,’ Merlin says sourly.
The cat watches them go. How they bicker! And their king, he’s little more than a boy! In her time, so many of their ilk had come to try and claim her head and she had bested them all.
Well, not the wizard, perhaps. She had seen him before. Nasty, nasty! She hisses and the water eddies for a moment and the figures grow faint. At last the water’s still and she watches. It is later in the day (time flows differently here, in the Castle Perilous, which lies in the hinterland of the mortal world and the fae) and the men sit round a fire. Their horses graze nearby. The king has a retinue of young knights with him who sit apart, and clean their blades and stare into the dark beyond the trees and mutter to themselves and scratch and fart. They’re nothing but cheap hoodlums, country boys who tired of a future tilling earth and planting grain, back-breaking labour, the same meagre food day in, day out, the same tired faces, a drink of mead and beating up the wife on Saturn’s Day, and growing old, and weak, and dying back into the dirt from whence they came. They gave it up without a moment’s thought and joined the war to take the king’s coin.
In this Britannia, first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women – this is what they say, and laugh, and dream of big-bosomed girls and whisper of the Castle Perilous and mermaids – ‘Oh, I would fuck a mermaid!’ someone says, and laughs, and the cat hisses, ‘Fool! A mermaid’s like a shark, she grins to kill and she will chew you up to pulp and shit you out before you know you’re dead.’
But they do not hear Cath Palug, and she turns away from them in disgust.
‘The Six must pay,’ King Arthur says.
‘And pay they will,’ says Kay.
‘It won’t be easy—’ Merlin, and he turns his head from side to side, uncomfortably, as though there is a buzzing in his ears.
‘What is it, Merlin?’
‘I have the oddest feeling something’s listening.’
‘You always think someone is listening or watching,’ Kay says irritably, ‘it’s like a curse with you.’
‘Just because you think they do, it doesn’t mean they don’t,’ Merlin says, with unassailable logic.
‘Let them listen,’ Arthur says. ‘I want their heads, all six of them.’
‘And they want yours.’
‘I want their lands, their wives, their cattle and their fields.’
‘And I’d like one of those Egyptian staffs that turn into a snake, but we can’t always have what we want,’ Merlin says.
‘You’re in a funny mood,’ the king says, and gives him a dirty look.
‘We cannot attack the north beyond the Pictish wall without an army. And we cannot shake Leir loose of his ridings with one. This will be a long campaign, my king.’
‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
They fall to silence. The burning wood crackles in the fire. The night’s quiet is broken by an ungodly sound. The men startle.
‘What is that?’
It is an awful keening sound of loss and fury and despair. A monstrous call.
‘Oh, not again!’ says Merlin.
‘What is that, Merlin?’
Then they see it. Cath Palug leans over, interested. The creature bursts through the trees – hideous! Deformed! – it has too many mouths, too many tongues and teeth, and it is yowling, crying, warbling out an insane stream of wordless pain. Oh, Cath Palug likes this! She speaks this creature’s language, she knows what is it like to have been born unwanted and to be thrown away.
‘The Questing Beast,’ says Merlin sourly. The creature flails too many arms, the hoodlum knights reach for their swords but the creature swats them away and vanishes into the trees again. Behind it there’s a human cry, ‘Come back!’
A knight comes to their fire through the trees. He is bedraggled and unkempt, with long dirty locks of hair and a long dirty beard, and nails chewed down to the quick. He stares at them in confusion as Arthur’s young bodyguards finally draw their swords.
‘Err, hello,’ he says.
‘Pellinore,’ Merlin says. ‘It’s been a while.’
The knight turns to the wizard. ‘You?’ he says.
‘Me. The beast is gone, for now. Will you stay with us a while?’
Pellinore looks longingly at the fire. ‘You have sausages?’
Kay and Arthur exchange an amused glance. ‘We saw you once before, Sir Knight,’ King Arthur says. ‘I think we did, in passing.’
‘I do get around,’ Pellinore says. ‘It is the beast, you see. It keeps me busy. What sort of sausages?’
‘Auroch, and wild boar,’ Kay says. ‘With herbs and seasoning. They’re good.’
‘I could stay a little while…’
He sits beside the fire. Arthur motions to the guards. They step away and, cursing, return to their own encampment.
The knight feeds ferociously, like he’s not eaten in weeks. The juice runs down his cheeks and into his beard, where there are also twigs and leaves and what looks like a dead bee or two. His eyes are sunken, and he is a far cry from the hopeful young man Merlin remembers.
Merlin picks delicately at a small hard roll. He nibbles crumbs. Kay and Arthur each eat a sausage, and Kay adds more onto the flames. The sausages hiss and sizzle. Cath Palug licks her lips. She loves her mistress dearly but the fae for sustenance are drawn to power, not sausages.
