The Hallowed Isle Book One Read online

  DEDICATION

  In Memoriam

  Paul Edwin Zimmer

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My special thanks to Heather Rose Jones, who took time off from her doctoral studies in Welsh philology to advise me on the mysteries of fifth-century British spelling. I would also like to thank Alexei Kondratiev for his suggestions regarding the origins of the Wild Man legend.

  I direct the reader to the work of C. Scott Littleton and Ann C. Thomas for more information on the Sarmatian origins of Excalibur. For those who would like an excellent historical overview of the Arthurian period, I recommend The Age of Arthur by John Morris, recently reprinted by Barnes & Noble.

  Through the fields of European literature, the Matter of Britain flows as a broad and noble stream. I offer this tributary with thanks and recognition to all those who have gone before.

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  I • CEREMONY OF THE SWORD

  II • THE WILD MAN

  III • THE RED DRAGON AND THE WHITE

  IV • THE FORGE

  V • THE NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES

  VI • THE DRAGON STAR

  VII • A HERITAGE OF POWER

  VII • THE SIGN OF THE BEAR

  IX • THE BIRDS OF BATTLE

  X • THE SWORD IN THE STONE

  PEOPLE AND PLACES

  ALSO BY DIANA L. PAXSON

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  THE FIRST LIVING THING WAS FIRE.

  Erupting from the silent womb of infinite space, it devoured all matter within its reach, grew, raging, and expelled bright showers of sparks to beget new flames. Fire lives still in the glowing heart of the world and in the sun that shines above. All green and growing things feed on that light; it burns in the red blood that pulses through each vein, and in death, all become food and fuel for other things.

  Fire is magic.

  Above the waving grasses of the steppe, light slashes through the heavens and a solitary tree explodes into flame. Chanting, men carry away the burning branches and fire the coals in their forge. Cunning ironsmiths, their magic is composed equally of skill and spells.

  Soon the hearth is ablaze, and in the trough, a lump of rock that fell from heaven begins to glow. It bubbles and cracks, flows out in a river of liquid fire to fill the mold. Once more it grows solid. Sparks fly as hammers beat out the hot iron bar into a shining wire. Again the metal is heated; glowing bundles of wire twining together, fire sparking furiously as the hammer strikes once more.

  Twined and twisted, cooled and heated, each particle in each rod is realigned until the mass is no longer iron but something more. As the earth was born out of a spinning star, the steel is born from the forgefire. From the whispering of the flames grow whispered spells; each hammer stroke beats out a complex rhythm; and the steel sings in triumph as its apotheosis nears.

  The mage-smiths’ chanting compels the steel to hold its shape, slim and deadly and beautiful. Their spells impress upon that shape its nature and its name. They cry out to their god, drawing down his power, precise and anxious lest their work be too weak to contain what comes.

  Again the bellows heave and the forge fire furiously glows. Again the blade is heated; the chant marks out the time, wise eyes watch the colors change, and now, with a cry, the steel is lifted. Its shining length seems to ripple as heat-shimmer blurs the air. The mage-smith wraps its tang in leather, and quenches the blade in the heartblood of a captive warrior, chosen for his courage on the field. Sheathed in that throbbing flesh, the sword drinks life. The blade is jerked free, and blood gushes onto the ground. The mage-smith raises it, and lightning sears the sky.

  Seven smiths alone know all the spells and secrets to make these blades, the seven mages of the Chalybes. Seven swords they have crafted, forged from star-steel, bearing in their hearts the war-god’s name. To seven sacred kings they are given, to deal death in the service of life.

  Fire is power.

  I

  CEREMONY OF THE SWORD

  A.D. 424—25

  BRITANNIA WAS BURNING.

  Artoria Argantel pulled her veil half across her face and took a careful breath, staring at the flames. She told herself that this one burning villa was not the world, but even the sun seemed afire in a molten sky, and blue smoke hazed the hills. Her cousin Maderun coughed painfully, then pulled the mantle that covered her bronze-brown hair down as if to shut out the sight of what had once been a prosperous estate. It was a smoldering ruin now, and another column of smoke beyond the hazel wood bore witness to the fate of the next farm along the road.

  “Lady, you must come away—” Junius Lupercus reached for her bridle rein. The mare danced nervously as Argantel pulled her back.

  “Not yet.” He was only doing his duty as captain of her escort, but he did not understand why she had to see.

  She stared at the bodies that lay sprawled on the trampled ground. The nearest had been an old man. Blood from a great gash in his crown stained his white hair, but he still clutched a legionary spatha and shield. A veteran, she thought, who had settled near the fort he once defended. She nudged the mare forward. Junius reached out once more to stop her, but she was already looking at the thing he had not wanted her to see.

  Behind the man a little girl, perhaps his granddaughter, stared sightlessly at the sky. The corpse of a red-haired barbarian lay across her bloodied thighs. At least the old soldier had avenged her before he himself was struck down.

  “Who did this?” Maderun asked in a shaking voice, putting back her veil.

  “Dalriadan raiders, come over from Hibernia,” Junius said grimly, pointing at the bloodstained length of checkered cloth. “They will have landed at Bremetennacum and raided northward.”

  “That’s where we met your ship—” said Argantel, her gaze moving from her cousin to the body of the little girl and back again. Maderun nodded, her eyes widening in comprehension.

  The captain grimaced. “You were lucky, my lady. Their ships have no comforts, but they are agile and swift. The boat that brought you here would have had no chance if they had caught her at sea.” He had evidently given up trying to spare them knowledge of danger.

  Maderun grew, if possible, more pale, and Argantel swallowed. At that moment, her cousin’s white face and gray eyes must be a mirror of her own. Barbarian raiders, whether from the Scottii or the tribes of Alba who had never come under the yoke of Rome, had been a fact of their lives for as long as they could remember. But for Argantel, learning her lessons among the priestesses of the Isle of Maidens, and for Maderun, safe in her father’s court at Maridunum, the attacks had been only a tale of terror.

  Until now.

  “They must be punished!” she exclaimed. “They cannot be more than a half day ahead of us! Go after them, Junius!”

  “And leave you undefended? I will not betray my oath to protect the Lady of the Lake, even at her command. Come, my lady, let me take you home—” He gestured northward. “There is nothing we can do here.”

  Home. . . . She peered through the smoke as if she could see through its filthy veils to the green mountains that rose beyond. No enemy had ever penetrated those forests and fells. Even the Romans had built no more than a guardpost there, and soon abandoned it. She closed her eyes, remembering the silver lake within its circle of sheltering heights and the treeclad island it protected. No raider would ever breach the Isle of Maidens’ sanctity. Then she looked at Junius once more and shook her head.

  “These people trusted us to defend them and we failed. I will not leave them for the wild beasts to devour
.” Argantel straightened in the saddle, drawing about her the aura of the high priestess as she held his gaze. “Lay them in the ashes of their home and pile more wood over them. If it can no longer shelter them, let it be their pyre.”

  She could feel his resistance, but her will compelled him. Even Maderun, watching at her side, eyed her uneasily, as if she could see that invisible mantling of power. It would not be surprising, thought Argantel. Maderun was untrained, but their mothers had been twins, the elder bound to become Lady of the Lake and carry on the family tradition on the druid isle, the younger married off to Carmelidus, the lord of Maridunum. Argantel’s hair was more red, and she was seven years older, but they looked enough alike to be sisters. She turned her awareness from the residue of fury and fear that hung like smoke in the air and fixed it on the girl.

  “Don’t fear,” she sent the thought on a wave of reassurance, “the ones who did this are nowhere near. I would know.” From Maderun she sensed astonishment, and then relief.

  “How could this happen?” her cousin said aloud. “How could God allow it?”

  Of course, thought Argantel, Maderun had been raised a Christian. But her question went beyond theology.

  “God, or the gods?” she said bitterly. “Your clerics say that these disasters are a punishment for our sins. But whatever evils the old man might have done, I cannot believe that little girl deserved such agony. The god of the Christians does not protect his worshippers, and the gods of Rome fled with the legions.”

  “Then who will you pray to?” exclaimed Maderun. “Who will give us justice now?”

  “I am sworn to serve the Lady who is the soul of this land,” said Argantel slowly. “But I think the time has come to wake a different power. By oath I am a priestess of the Goddess, but by blood I have the right to call on the God in the Sword. It is dangerous, but I will dare it. You have the right as well as I, Maderun. Will you stand with me?”

  Maderun gazed at the flames of the villa where the bodies of the folk who had lived there were burning. The firelight lent color to her cheeks, and glittered in the tears that filled her eyes. After a few moments she shivered and turned to Argantel again.

  “I have no training in such arts as you have learned, but I hope my courage is the equal of yours. In God’s name I swear that I will stand behind you, cousin, and do whatever I can to help defend our land.”

  Maderun reached out and Argantel took her hand. Where their flesh touched she felt a tingling, and then that odd shift in awareness that came when she directed her attention to the gods.

  “May the Holy Mother bless us,” she whispered, feeling Maderun’s wordless assent like an echo, “and bless Britannia!”

  The Sword stood upright in the altar stone. Sometimes, as a shift in the air fanned the flames of the tall torches set to either side, it would catch their light and refract a fiery flicker across the stone floor, as if something that lived within had momentarily awakened. Then it would become plain steel, a third of its length sunk into the stone, once more.

  With the patience of long practice, Argantel stood before it, as motionless as the Sword. Behind her, footsteps whispered on granite as the others filed in, the black-robed priestesses with their hair unbound, the girls they were training with heads wrapped tightly to protect them from the power. At her back she could feel the cold weight of Ebrdila’s glare, as if the older priestess would continue their argument by sheer weight of will.

  “You must not do this! Your mother was a greater priestess than you will ever be, and even she did not dare to awaken the Power that sleeps in this Sword! If I were High Priestess, I would never allow you to risk yourself, and the rest of us, this way!”

  “But you are not,” Argantel had replied. Not for want of trying—but when their Lady died, the priestesses had chosen her daughter to lead them. “And even if you were, by birth I am the Keeper of this blade.”

  “At least leave your cousin out of this. If he knew about this, her father’s wrath would strike us all!” It was capitulation, even if Ebrdila did not want to admit it.

  “Maderun has the right to be here. The Sword will recognize her and do her no harm. . . .”

  Looking across the stone at the younger woman, Argantel hoped that was true. Maderun had been garbed, like herself, in red. Beneath the fall of shining hair her features were pinched with strain, and her eyes flicked uneasily as each newcomer entered the House of the Sword. It was barely large enough for all of them, round, in the ancient fashion, but built of native granite instead of daub and wattle. The walls were low, but the roof timbers met almost thirty feet above her head.

  Argantel sent the other girl a pulse of wordless reassurance. Maderun’s gray gaze shifted from the Sword to her cousin, and she tried to smile.

  The priestess felt a pang of misgiving. She did not doubt her cousin’s courage, but she was increasingly aware of the girl’s vulnerability. Yet Maderun would have been shamed if Argantel had tried to exclude her now. And it had seemed to her that the God in the Sword might hear the voices of two who came of the blood of its keepers more clearly than one.

  As the women entered they moved deosil around the room, and that constant sunwise circling was altering the sense of watchful expectance which Argantel usually felt in this place to an active anticipation. This chamber needed no warding. Five centuries before, it had been hallowed by priestesses more powerful than any that she would ever know, when Roman legions destroyed the sanctuary on the isle of Mona and the last of the druid priesthood fled northward.

  In her grandmother’s time it had become something more than a ritual chamber. Her grandmother had brought them the Sword. And what, the priestess wondered, would the Sword bring to them? For fifty years the druids of the Isle of Maidens had preserved it. Each year they had dutifully honored the god who dwelt within. But this ritual was different. This was the first time Argantel had taken it upon herself to ask His aid.

  The torches flickered wildly as the great doors were closed. When they had stilled, the priestess nodded to Maderun, who began to sprinkle herbs from her basket across the coals in the brazier before her. In moments their pungent scent filled the room. Smoke spiraled lazily toward the thatching. Argantel took a deep breath, feeling the familiar lift and swing of awareness, as if her ordinary self were being pushed aside to let the persona of the priestess take control.

  Maderun’s eyes were already unfocused. The priestess smiled a little and reached out with her own awareness until she sensed the younger woman like a blaze of light before her. A little further, and she felt her cousin’s spirit awaken within her own. It was not the steady support of a trained priestess, but it was familiar, as though a forgotten piece of herself had just been found.

  She let her breath out slowly, releasing her own tension, listening as the other women began to sing. There were no words to it, only tones that built a bridge of ascending harmonies. Slowly she lifted her arms, compelling their attention.

  “Behold the Sword of War!” she cried. “God-steel, star-steel, cast flaming down from heaven to bury itself in earth’s womb. Spell-steel, forged by Kurdalagon, master of Chalybes’s magic. Neither breaking nor bending, neither rusting nor tarnished, this immortal blade we honor!”

  “By what right?” called Ebrdila from across the circle, her voice ringing with a sincerity that was more than ritual.

  “By right of birth and blood,” together, Argantel and Maderun replied. “We are the granddaughters of Rigantona daughter of Gutuator, who came to be high priestess on this holy isle, and of Artorius Hamicus Sarmatius, who was the last priest of the Sword. From the land of the Royal Scyths his fathers brought it, to guard as a holy trust until the time comes when it shall be wielded by a king once more.”

  “And when shall that king come?” asked one of the other priestesses.

  “The God of the Sword shall raise up a king to serve him when his people are in their greatest need,” Argantel answered. “And who can doubt our need now? The Eagles have f
lown, and Britannia’s enemies beset her from every side.” For a moment she smelled the reek of the burning villa in the smoke from the brazier and her breath caught in her throat.

  “It is so—” came the murmured answer. “Call upon the God of the Sword, and we will abide His will.”

  Maderun, who had been warned, shut her eyes. Argantel swallowed. The next part she did not like, but she had learned to do it. The high gods needed no sacrifice, but the power that lived in the Sword came from an older time. In a wicker cage at the base of the stone a red cock was waiting, victor of many a battle with other champions bred by the men whose fathers had defended Hadrian’s Wall. The priestess bent, murmuring, and slid open the door to the cage.

  The bird stared about fiercely, but it did not struggle as she drew it forth and held it high. A good sign, for its tattered comb bore witness to the cock’s fighting spirit, and the men who handled these birds were accustomed to wear gloves to protect them from sharp beaks and spurs.

  “So, my warrior, be still,” she murmured, stroking its feathers and feeling the rapid heartbeat gallop beneath her hand. “Here is a more noble death than the cock pit. You shall go undefeated to the god.”

  The cock’s beady eyes fixed on her own, and then, slowly, closed. Her own eyes stung with mingled exultation and pity, and for a moment she could not move. It would be sacrilege to bungle this, but the cook had made her kill chickens for the pot until she could do it with a merciful efficiency, saying no one should be allowed to eat meat who was not willing to take responsibility for the act that transformed it from living flesh to food. Then she took a quick breath, and twisted, holding tight to the twitching body as the hot blood sprayed across the gray stone.

  As the blood flowed she could feel the life leaving, first awareness, and then the energies of the body, and finally an indefinable change that left the cock lighter by more than the weight of its blood. But as the bird became a dead husk in her hands, the stone before her began to pulse with energy.