Legacy: Arthurian Saga (121 page)

I moved cautiously sideways, towards
the rim of the gully. I had my free hand out, feeling my way. There
were bushes, and here and there saplings or young trees, rooted in
the rocks. My hand met smooth bark, gripped it, tested it. I moved
warily crabwise, over the edge. My eyes were still on that glimmer
of metal, the sword beyond the pit. The man was still there. My
groping foot slid down a sharp and muddy step, the rim of the
gully. A bramble snatched at it.

So did a man's hand. He had used my
own trick. He had slid quietly down the bank, flattened himself
there, and waited. Now he flung his whole weight, sharply, on my
foot and, caught off balance, I fell. His knife just missed me,
biting deep into the bank bare inches from my face as I pitched
down past him.

He had meant to send me crashing down
the rocky bank, to be broken and stunned on the rocks below, where
they could follow and finish me together. If he had been content
with this, he might have succeeded. But his lunge with the knife
shook his own balance, and besides, as he grabbed at me, instead of
resisting I went with him, stamping hard downwards at the grabbing
hand. My boot went into something soft; he grunted with pain, then
yelled something as my weight broke his grip, and, loosing whatever
hold he had, he went hurtling with me down the steep side of the
gully.

I had been falling the faster of the
two, and I landed first, halfway down, hard up against the stem of
a young pine. My attacker rolled after me in a crash of broken
bushes and a shower of stones. As he hurtled against me in a flying
tangle of limbs I braced myself to meet him. I flung myself over
him, clamping my body hard over his, clasping his arms with both of
mine and pinning him with my weight. I heard him cry out with pain.
One leg was doubled under him. He lashed out with the other, and I
felt a spur rake my leg through the soft leather of my boot. He
fought furiously, thrashing and twisting under me like a landed
fish. At any moment he would dislodge me from my purchase against
the pine, and we would fall together to the gully. I struggled to
hold him, and to get my dagger hand free. The other murderer had
heard us fall. He shouted something from the brink above, then I
could hear him letting himself down the slope towards us. He came
cautiously, but fast. Too fast. I shifted my grip on the man
beneath me, forcing my full weight down to hold his arms pinned. I
heard something crack; it sounded like a dead twig, but the fellow
screamed. I managed to drag my right hand from under him. My fist
was clamped round the dagger and the hilt had bitten into the
flesh. I lifted it. Some stray glimmer of moonlight touched his
eyes, a foot from mine; I could smell the fear and pain and hatred.
He gave a wild heave that nearly unseated me, wrenching his head
sideways from the coming blow. I reversed the dagger and struck
with all the strength of the shortened blow at the exposed neck,
just behind the ear.

The blow did not reach him. Something
-- a rock, a heavy billet of wood, hurled down from above -- struck
me hard on the point of the shoulder. My arm jerked out, useless,
paralyzed. The dagger spun away into the blackness. The other
murderer crashed down the last few feet through the bushes and
rocks above me. I heard his drawn sword scrape on stone. The moon
marked it as it whipped upwards to strike. I tried to wrench myself
clear of my opponent, but he clung close, teeth and all, grappling
like a hound, holding me there for that hacking sword to finish me.
It finished him. His companion jumped, and slashed downwards at the
place where, a second before, my exposed back had been, plain in
the moonlight. But I was already half free, and falling, my clothes
tearing from my opponent's grasp, and my fist bloody from his
teeth. It was his back that met the sword. It drove in. I heard the
metal grate on bone, then the screams covered the sound, and I was
free of him and half-sliding, half-falling, towards the noise of
the water.

A bush checked me, tore at me, let me
through. A bough whipped me across the throat. A net of brambles
ripped what was left of my clothing to ribbons. Then my hurtling
body hit a boulder, checked, lay breathless and half-stunned
against it for the two long moments it took to let me hear the
second murderer coming after me. Then with no warning but a sudden
gentle shift of earth the boulder went from under me and I fell
down the last sheer drop straight to the slab of rock over which
the icy water slid, racing, towards the edge of a deep
pool.

If I had fallen into the pool itself I
might not have been hurt. If I had struck one of the great boulders
where the water dashed and wrangled, I would probably have been
killed. But I fell into a shallow, a long flat stretch of rock
across which the water slid no more than a span deep, before
plunging on and down into the next of the forest pools. I landed on
my side, half-stunned and winded. The icy rush filled my mouth,
nose, eyes, weighing down my heavy clothes, dragging at my bruised
limbs. I was sliding with it along the greasy rock. My hands clawed
for a hold, slipped, missed, scraped with bending nails.

Beside me with a thud and splash that
shook the very rock, the second murderer landed, slipped, regained
his foothold in the rushing water, and for the second time swung
the sword high. It caught the moonlight. There were stars behind
it. A sword lying clear across the night sky, in a blaze of stars.
I took my hands from the rock, and the stream rolled me over to
face the sword. The water blinded me. The noise of the cascade
shook my bones apart. There was a flash like a shooting star, and
the sword came down. It was like a dream that repeated itself. Once
before I had sat near a fire in the forest, with the small dark
hill men waiting round me in a half circle, their eyes gleaming at
the edge of the firelight like the eyes of forest creatures. But
this fire they had lit themselves. In front of it my torn clothes
steamed, drying. Myself they had wrapped in their own cloaks;
sheepskins, smelling too reminiscently of their first owners, but
warm and dry. My bruises ached, and here and there a sharper pain
told me where some stroke, unfelt in the scrimmage, had gone home.
But my bones were whole.

I had not been unconscious long.
Beyond the circle of firelight lay the two dead men, and near them
a sharpened stake and a heavy club from which the blood had not yet
been wiped. One of the men was still cleaning his long knife in the
ground. Mab brought me a bowl of hot wine, with something pungent
overlying the taste of the grapes. I drank, sneezed, and pushed
myself up straight.

"Did you find their
horses?"

He nodded. "Over yonder. Your own is
lame."

"Yes. Tend him for me, will you? When
I get up to the shrine I'll send the servant down this way. He can
lead the lame one home. Bring me one of the others now, and get me
my clothes."

"They're still wet. It's barely ten
minutes since we got you out of the pool."

"No matter," I said, "I must go. Mab,
above here on the track there's a fallen tree, and a pit beside it.
Will you ask your people to clear the path before
morning?"

"They are there already.
Listen."

I heard it then, beyond the rush of
the stream and the crackling of the fire. Axe and mattock thudding,
above us in the forest. Mab met my eyes. "Will the new King ride
this way, then?"

"He may." I smiled. "How soon did you
hear?"

"One of our people came from the town
to tell us." He showed a gap of broken teeth. "Not by the gates you
locked, master...But we knew before that. Did you not see the
shooting star? It went across the heavens from end to end, crested
like a dragon and riding a trail of smoke. So we knew you would
come. But we were up beyond the Wolves' Road when the firedrake
ran, and we were almost too late. I am sorry."

"You came in time," I said. "I'm in
your debt for my life. I shan't forget it."

"I was in yours," he said. "Why did
you ride alone? You should have known there was danger."

"I knew there was death, but I wanted
no more deaths on my hands. Pain is another thing, and is soon
over." I got to my feet, stiffly. "If I'm ever to move again, Mab,
I must move now. My clothes?"

The clothes were wet still, a mass of
mud and rents. But apart from the sheepskins there was nothing
else; the hill people are small, and nothing of theirs would have
fitted me. I shrugged myself into what was left of my court
clothing, and took the bridle of a stolid brown horse from one of
the men. The wound in my thigh was bleeding again, and from the
feel of it there were splinters there. I got them to sling one of
the sheepskins over the saddle, and climbed gingerly on.

"Shall we come with you?" they asked
me.

I shook my head. "No. Stay and see the
road cleared. In the morning, if you wish, come to the shrine.
There will be a place there for you all."

The moonlit space at the forest's
center was as still as a painted picture, and as unreal as a
midnight dream. Moonlight edged the chapel roof and silvered the
furred tops of the surrounding pines. The doorway showed an oblong
of gold, where the nine lamps shone steadily round the altar. As I
rode softly round to the back the door opened there, and the
servant peered fearfully out. All was well, he told me; no one had
been by. But his eyes stretched wide when he saw the state I was
in, and he was obviously glad when I handed the bridle to him and
told him to leave me. Then I went in thankfully to the firelight to
tend my hurts and change my clothing. Slowly the silence seeped
back. A brush of soft wind over the treetops swept the last sound
of retreating hoofs away; it crept in through the chapel, thinning
the lamp flames and drawing thin lines of smoke which smelled like
sweet gums burning. Outside in the clearing the moon and stars
poured their rare light down. The god was here. I knelt before the
altar, emptying myself of mind and will, till through me I felt the
full tide of God's will flowing, and bearing me with it.

The night lay silver and quiet,
waiting for the torches and the trumpets.

11

They came at last. Lights and clamor
and the trampling of horses flowed nearer through the forest, till
the clearing was filled with flaring torchlight and excited voices.
I heard them through the waking sleep of vision, dim, echoing,
remote, like bells heard from the bottom of the sea. The leaders
had come forward. They paused in the doorway. Voices hushed, feet
shuffled. All they would see was the swept and empty chapel,
deserted but for one man standing facing them across the stone
altar. Round the altar the nine lamps still dealt their steady
glow, showing the carved stone sword and the legend MITHRAE
INVICTO, and lying across the top of the altar the sword itself,
unsheathed, bare on the bare stone.

"Put out the torches," I told them.
"There will be no need of them."

They obeyed me, then at my signal
pressed forward into the chapel.

The place was small, the throng of men
great. But the awe of the occasion prevailed; orders were given,
but subdued; soft commands which might have come from priests in
ritual rather than warriors recently in battle. There were no rites
to follow, but somehow men kept their places; kings and nobles and
kings' guards within the chapel, the press of lesser men outside in
the silent clearing and overflowing into the gloom of the forest
itself. There, they still had lights; the clearing was ringed with
light and sound where the horses waited and men stood with torches
ready; but forward under the open sky men came lightless and
weaponless, as beseemed them in the presence of God and their King.
And still, this one night of all the great nights, there was no
priest present; the only intermediary was myself, who had been used
by the driving god for thirty years, and brought at last to this
place.

At length all were assembled,
according to order and precedence. It was as if they had divided by
arrangement, or more likely by instinct. Outside, crowding the
steps, waited the little men from the hills; they do not willingly
come under a roof. Inside the chapel, to my right, stood Lot, King
of Lothian, with his group of friends and followers; to the left
Cador, and those who went with him. There were a hundred others,
perhaps more, crowded into that small and echoing space, but these
two, the white Boar of Cornwall, and the red Leopard of Lothian,
seemed to face one another balefully from either side of the altar,
with Ector four-square and watchful at the door between them. Then
Ector, with Cei behind him, brought Arthur forward, and after that
I saw no one but the boy.

The chapel swam with color and the
glint of jewels and gold. The air smelled cold and fragrant, of
pines and water and scented smoke. The rustle and murmuring of the
throng riled the air and sounded like the rustle of flames licking
through a pile of fuel, taking hold...

Flames from the nine lamps, flaring
and then dying; flames licking up the stone of the altar; flames
running along the blade of the sword until it glowed white hot. I
stretched my hands out over it, palms flat. The fire licked my
robe, blazing white from sleeve and finger, but where it touched,
it did not even singe. It was the icecold fire, the fire called by
a word out of the dark, with the searing heat at its heart, where
the sword lay. The sword lay in its flames as a jewel lies embedded
in white wool. Whoso taketh this sword...The runes danced along the
metal: the emeralds burned. The chapel was a dark globe with a
center of fire. The blaze from the altar threw my shadow upwards,
gigantic, into the vaulted roof. I heard my own voice, ringing
hollow from the vault like a voice in a dream.