Dark Magicks

by Katharine Kerr

  Morning sun floods over him and eases his flesh. He sits on the wide stone sill and turns his face to the sky, where rain clouds are breaking apart and scudding away to the east. From the hill fort below him, the smell of wood smoke and baking bread, the stink of pigs and horse manure rise up like incense from an altar, dragging his attention down to the busy ward. Slip-sliding in the fresh mud, servants are hurrying back and forth with firewood and buckets of water. Grooms are leading horses to the water trough.

  Dressed in shirts without sleeves and loose breeches, a handful of men from Arthur’s warband stand in front of the stone keep; they are arguing about something so loudly that he can almost pick out their words. Two of them face off, raise fists, scream in such rage that they are no longer using words at all. With a shout Cei the seneschal comes running and thrusts himself in between the pair. Over the winter Cei has grown stout, and gray streaks his hair, but when one of the young cubs snarls at him, Cei grabs his arm, twists, and drops him to his knees to wallow in the mud. Howling with laughter the rest of the men disperse, and Cei walks off to the stables. The shamed man gets to his feet and slinks away.

  This summer the army will patrol the border and raid into Saison territory, but it will fight no battles. Peace hangs heavy on Camulodd. How long, Myrddin wonders, will be it be before Arthur’s men start feuding among themselves? The horsemen in his warband may grumble at Cei’s orders, but they obey him in the end, will step apart and make their apologies, then go about their day as friends.

  The noble lords, Arthur’s vassals and his comites both, listen to no one when honor cracks its blood-stained whip. In time, of course, the problem will solve itself. The demoralized Saison will find a new leader, mount a new army, and come ravaging once again into what is left of the province of Prydain. In the end, they will win. Years hence, certainly, but they will win. Myrddin would rather die tortured with hot irons than tell this truth to Arthur, but it weighs daily upon his soul.

  The dream. When Myrddin shuts his eyes, he can see the image of the white map, floating on the red field of his sun-struck eyelids. Did the dream indicate Saison, then, by those doll figures who studied the map? He opens his eyes and looks out over the stone walls of Camulodd. On this side, the east, the hill slopes sharply away to fields, pale gold with the ripening of the winter wheat, bound by the silver ribbon of the river. On the dream map lies a line shaped like the river’s turnings, but the rest of the marks mean little to him. Even as he tries to study them, the vision fades.

  With a shrug Myrddin leaves the window. If the dream carries a message, it will repeat itself. His long years of living on the border of the unseen world have taught him that. Dreams, visions, omens, the voices that at times speak to him from fires—he can only invite them into the seen world, not command them. At the moment, like any ordinary man, he is hungry, and the dream will have to wait until he has eaten breakfast.

  The year past Arthur ordered a banqueting hall built at Camulodd, round the back of the stone keep near the kitchen huts. Sunny with windows and bright with tapestries and banners, the long wooden room has proved so pleasant, especially in contrast to the dank chambers of the keep, that with spring the daily life of the hillfort has moved into it. On this particular morning, when Myrddin walks into the hall he finds the warleader himself lingering at the head of a long table. Unlike his men Arthur affects Roman dress in these days of victory, a simple tunic, sandals bound up his legs with thongs. A red short cloak drapes casually on the back of his chair. At his right hand sits Paulus, the priest who serves the chapel in the fort, dressed in drab brown. A gaunt little man, Paulus has a bald stripe shaved out of his hair from ear to ear.

  “Behold!” Paulus calls out. “Our last pagan!”

  Smiling at the familiar jest, Myrddin walks down the length of the hall to join them. From the windows near the beamed ceiling sunlight falls across the pale new wood of the walls and shimmers on the polished tables as if it were flames racing down the planks. The beams catch and burn like logs in a hearth as the roof gives way, crashing down in a spray of red cinders. Over the roar of fire there is screaming and Arthur’s familiar dark voice, saying, “What is it? What happened?”

  Myrddin realizes that he is lying on the floor of the banqueting hall with Arthur kneeling beside him. Ordinary sunlight streams in and picks out the grey in Arthur’s brown hair. His pale grey eyes are narrow with concern. When Myrddin raises a shaking hand to his own face, he touches something wet, slimy—his beard, soaked with spittle from the fit. Over Arthur’s shoulder Myrddin can see Paulus, watching him as the others are watching. He cannot see them, but he can feel their gaze.

  “Fetch me some mead!” Arthur calls to someone beyond Myrddin’s sight. “Don’t just stand around like dolts!”

  A servant appears with a goblet and stands holding it out as if he’s serving mass for some new god. Myrddin sets his elbows against the floor and tries to sit up, but he cannot move until Arthur slips a broad arm under his back and lifts him. The watchers persist. Eyes grow on the walls, faces form in the banners that hang overhead.

  “Saison magic,” Myrddin whispers. “Spying.”

  As if they have heard him, the eyes disappear. Myrddin smiles to himself. He has guessed correctly, and naming the threat has dragged it out of the shadows. He will be able to examine it rationally now, using the knowledge gained from working his own magic over the long years.

  The fainting fit, however, has left his body weak. Myrddin allows Arthur to fuss over him, suffers Paulus to pray over him, drinks a little mead and eats a little bread to soothe the fears of those who depend upon him to postpone their inevitable doom. Because Arthur wants so badly to help, Myrddin allows him and Cei to carry him up the long twisting stairs to his tower room, even though he would feel much safer on his own two feet. Servants follow with a pitcher of watered ale and a round loaf of bread in a basket. They mill around in his chamber until he loses patience.

  “I need not one thing more,” Myrddin snaps. “Now leave me! I can’t rest in all this noise.”

  The servants flee, and Cei follows. Myrddin can hear their clogs pounding like hooves all the way down the stone stairs. Arthur lingers for a moment in the doorway.

  “I truly am alive and all in one piece,” Myrddin says.

  “You gave me quite a scare.”

  “Did I? No need to worry. It was just a long message from Annwn.”

  As Arthur leaves, he pulls the heavy plank door shut behind him. Silence washes over Myrddin and carries him on a long wave out to the sea where his visions float, drifting on the tides of the unseen world.

  They are searching all over Prydain. In mists he sees them, men walking green meadows, searching for something. They are binding the earth with spells. He can see them pacing off distances with their heads bent, one arm raised, each step as slow and careful as if they picked their way through a bog. They are binding the earth with wires. He sees them driving in pegs all around the edges of a field, then lacing wires between them to mark off squares. What lies underneath? he wonders. Treasure, perhaps. Off to one side stands a man holding a long flat staff, banded black and white. Every now and then he shouts orders to those stringing the wires.

  When Myrddin wakes, sunlight streams in from the west window, telling him that he has lain in trance for half the day. He can feel their gaze still, the searchers, even though no more visions of eyes appear on the walls or ceiling. He sits up, slumping on the edge of the bed, his spotted hands dangling between his stick-thin legs. Had he ever been young? At times he wonders, simply because his youth lay so long ago. With a shake of his head for his own nonsense, he gets up and goes to his table to drink the ale-splashed water and eat some of the bread left there for him.

  Food steadies his mind. His knowledge that the fort is being watched becomes merely that, knowledge, no longer a cold prickling of the skin or a shudder between his shoulder blades. The Saison have magic of their own, though Paulus insists they derive its power from evil
spirits. If Paulus is correct, at some point the spirits will turn upon the sorcerers and enslave them, but until then, the magic feels dangerous enough. What, he wonders, are they searching for? Everyone knows where Arthur built his fortress. The warleader may prefer to call it a castrum, just as he likes to style himself dux bellorum instead of cadvridoc, but its doors stand as open as any Prydain lord’s squat dun for servants and flies, visitors and dogs, to wander freely in and out. If these searchers want to see Arthur, they can ride up like any other man.

  But their evil spirits, those daemones, as Paulus calls them—traveling any distance in the seen world lies beyond their powers, because they cannot cross running water, whether the mighty Tamesis or a trickling stream. They must follow paths in the unseen world, if their Saxon masters wish to send them upon errands of malice. This might well be what the map showed and what the silver wires mark out, a guide for the daemones through the unseen world, a secret road by which they may enter the heart of Camulodd and burst out upon Arthur.

  Myrddin tears the loaf of bread into chunks and takes one to the west window. He sits upon the sill and looks out. Here, on the gentle side of the hill, a little town has grown up outside the walls of Arthur’s dun, straggling down to the flat. Beyond it lie wheatfields, as gold as honey in the late afternoon light, stretching west to a sunset-tinged mist and far Dumnonia.

  In the gray cold fog blond men with woad-blue trousers are walking through fields. Cattle lift their heads as they pass, then return to their grazing. On top of a hill the men find a carved stone lying on its side. He can see them laughing as they kneel down beside it. With the side of his hand one man brushes away moss and dirt. These carved letters are plain enough: Drustan.

  So! Saison magic worked the curse against Arthur’s cousin that brought him and March to their doom. Myrddin returns to the seen world and realizes that he is leaning dangerously far out of the window, as if while in trance he craned his neck to see farther. Slowly, cautiously, he shifts his weight back, leans into the chamber, then stands up in safety. When he was young, the second sight never took him like this, wiping away the seen world and leading him into risk. In one hand he still holds the chunk of bread. He puts it back in the basket. Tonight he will need to travel into the unseen world, and food will only hinder his journey.

  Not long after sunset the moon rises past its full. Myrddin lies down on his bed and crosses his arms over his chest. In the silvery light upon his wall he can see the visions of the day parade past him: the papyrus map, the flames, the eyes, the wire-bound fields, Drustan’s stone. The mists and the moonlight blend together in his sight, then brighten.

  The figure kneels on bare ground in front of the stump of a broken stone wall. Myrddin knows immediately that he is a Sais, because his long blond hair hangs in two braids on either side of his face. He wears almost no clothing—a pair of torn woad-blue breeches, common among the Saison, and a dirty tunic, cut so short that it barely reaches past his waist. He is digging with some sort of tool like a tiny spade to make a trench along the base of the wall. In the hot sun the Sais pauses, laying down the tool and raising an arm to wipe his sweaty face on his sleeve. No—her face. In the vision the figure looks straight at him, and Myrddin realizes with cold shock that she is a woman.

  He lies awake again on his narrow bed in the tower room. The moon has risen past his window, the room is dark, but he has seen everything he needs to see. So, then, the rumors are true, that among the Saison, women too know lore and work spells. And what could she have been doing but setting in motion forces that would some day undermine Camulodd’s walls?

  As above, so below. As this, so that. As this wall, Camulodd’s wall.Water flows downhill in Lloegr just as it does in Prydain, and Saison magic will flow through the unseen world in an equally dependable fashion. The trench tells him everything he needs to know about this woman’s spell. First she made a little wall to stand in the place of Camulodd’s high wall. No doubt she has already walked round her stones three times by moonlight, this wicca woman, chanting the name of Arthur’s dun as she went. Perhaps she brought in a priest of their strange gods to kill an ox and let the blood drip over the wall while she called out Camulodd’s name. Now she digs under it to weaken the very souls of the rocks that anchor it to the earth.

  As this, so that. The eyes of her evil spirits are seeking Camulodd out. He has seen them peering from the banners in Arthur’s high hall; he has felt them watching him, Camulodd’s shield. Myrddin rises from his bed and smiles. He knows what he must do to thwart her magic. He will work spells of his own to blind those eyes. He will weave a shield to hide Camulodd forever from such treachery. As this, so that. In the wild forest he will rename himself Camulodd. He will take upon himself Camulodd’s very essence. He will become Camulodd. And in an ancient oak he will bind himself and Camulodd away, both hidden from the unseen world of spirits and daemones. Once Arthur dies, once the fort falls to its inevitable destiny, they will join him there, forever hidden from both worlds, the unseen and the seen.

  It will be a mighty spell, and his last.

  o~O~o

  “Damn!” Margaret Gruener sits back on her heels and throws her trowel to the ground. “That’s blown it.”

  In the sun her tee shirt is sticking to her back with sweat. Her long blond braids have fallen forward to dangle close to her face. She tosses them over her shoulders and stands up with a shake of her head and a swat at flies. England isn’t supposed to get so damned hot, she thinks. Scattered across the dig in this Somerset field, graduate students turn to look at her, and her colleague, Bob Harris, comes trotting over.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Maybe I am. Paleography isn’t my specialty after all, so let’s hope I’m misjudging its age. But I’ve cleared the dirt in front of the first tier of stonework, and I’ve found an inscription. Look.”

  With the toe of her heavy hiking boots she points at the culprit stone. Harris squats and pulls a camel’s hair brush out of his pocket. He wipes dirt from the long-buried words, squints at them sideways, then looks up at her. His eyes swim behind the thick lenses of his glasses, but she can read disappointment in the set of his shoulders. He gets up, shaking his head, and reaches into the pocket of his khaki shorts for his cigarettes.

  “It’s seventh century at the absolute earliest,” Harris says. “As you so cleverly remarked, damn! Whoever built this wall must have scavenged it from some Saxon relic.”

  Margaret swears, briefly, and walks a few steps away to get upwind of his smoke. He struggles with a box of matches, strikes one, and lights the cigarette with a couple of vigorous puffs.

  “I begin to think Alcock was right,” Harris goes on. “Maybe Cadbury Castle is the site, after all.”

  “I doubt it. To be honest, I’m beginning to doubt that Camelot ever really existed. If it did, it wouldn’t be so damned hard to find. For crying out loud, the man was famous even in his own time.”

  Harris shrugs and lets out a long exhalation of white smoke, curling upward in the sun and dissipating into the wind. Like the glory of men, Margaret thinks. Like the glory of King Arthur, gone forever into the empty sky. All at once she shudders, oddly cold, and rubs the back of her neck.

  “What’s wrong?” Harris says, spewing more smoke. “Geese walking on your grave?”

  “Maybe. It’s the oddest damn thing, but I feel like we’re being watched.”

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