The Hallowed Isle Book One Page 10

  But instead it receded to his waist again. The lake bottom was rising. For a moment he stood undecided, but if he returned to the island now he would appear not only a failure but a fool. Perhaps the shadows of the forest would be deep enough to engulf him. Shivering, he pushed forward, and when he reached the shore he kept going, blundering blindly on.

  Several times during that night he fell, and lay for a time in mindless exhaustion. But always a moment would come when self-awareness returned, and the voices in his head would begin to accuse him once more. Then he would stagger to his feet and push onward. By the time dawn banished the darkness he had covered many miles. He burrowed into a tangle of vines then and sleep delivered him from his accusers at last.

  When he awoke, he was aware only of hunger. A heedless squirrel came within his reach, and he, who in all his life had killed only the cockerel he had offered to the god in the Sword, pounced on it and tore it to pieces, ripping off the pelt, crunching up flesh and bone. Wild onion grew nearby and he ate that too, and lapped water, wolf-fashion, from the stream. Then he began to move once more, south and westward, ever deeper into the hills.

  As day followed day, the voices grew fainter, and after a time he ceased to think in words at all. His body hardened and he no longer noticed the cold. The strange flapping things that covered his limbs became encumbrances, and he tore them off and threw them away. He became more clever at foraging for food, though he never found quite enough to satisfy his large frame.

  He saw deer, and once a thrown rock even brought one down. He smelled bear and avoided them, and became acquainted with beaver and badger and the wild pig and wolf that roamed these hills. One day he came upon a new creature, furred like a beast but standing upright in the rapids to snatch fish from the stream. As he approached it took fright and ran off, still on two legs, and he came down to the waterside to drink.

  The backwater was still. As he bent, something moved in its depths and he jumped back. Then, more cautious, he leaned over the water, and saw a creature covered with bristling hair. It strongly resembled the one that had run away.

  Wild Man. . . . A distant memory stirred of men dressed in garments tufted with colored yarn who ran shouting through the streets at festivals. And in that moment of clarity he understood of what blood he himself was come.

  Were there more than the one he had seen, and would they accept him among them? He sat back on his haunches, the realization that he was himself a beast making it possible, for the first time in weeks, to think like a man.

  Sunlight glanced blindingly from the water; he blinked and stilled, for someone was standing there. Not a Wild Man; it was a human woman’s form, veiled in shining hair. She turned and he saw a face he remembered from dreams. When she spoke it was the voice he had so often heard in his soul. Among human women, only Igierne had ever stirred his heart. But this being touched a place that lay deeper still.

  “It is so—you stand between the worlds of beast and man, and you can choose what you will be. You are a mule, and will have no offspring of your body, but if you return to humankind you will have a child of the spirit, and he will be the greatest of Britannia’s kings.”

  His throat worked as he struggled to form human words.

  “If I go, will you be with me?”

  “If you will open your heart,” she answered, “for I am the Bride of your Soul, and in truth I have never been far away.”

  The angle of the sun changed and the vision vanished. But he could still feel her presence. He waded into the river and began to scrub the dirt away. Then, when he was as clean as he could manage, he started out again, not back to the Isle of Maidens, but south, to Ambrosius Aurelianus and his brother Uthir, who were now the undisputed leaders of Britannia.

  VI

  THE DRAGON STAR

  A.D. 459

  “YOU HAVE SINNED AGAINST THE LORD OF HOSTS, AND THE DEVIL has sent his legions to chastise you!” The tattered sleeves of a robe that had once been white fluttered as the priest shook his fists against the sunset sky. “For your greed you are punished; for your faithlessness you are cast down. You have followed the heretic Pelagius, and thought that your own deeds could save you, and this is the result—rivers running with blood and a land in flames!” Spittle flew from parched lips as the priest brought down his arms.

  “It is true!” wailed the people. “We have sinned! We must flee this accursed land!”

  The tall figure at the edge of the crowd moved forward, leaning on his rowan staff. These days he called himself Merlin, the name that “son of Maderun,” misheard, had become. He did not trouble to correct it. Ambros had been a human name, and that man had died in the forest. It seemed fitting that he, who was not really a man, should bear what was not a real name.

  Merlin had come into the wayfarers’ encampment hoping for food and fire—this close to midsummer a day’s journey was long. Instead, he had found this haranguing cleric, whose whine made him want to turn back to the quiet of the hills.

  “You sought to cast out the devil Hengest, and as happened to the man from whom they cast out the devil, seven demons worse than the first one have invaded our land!” the priest was continuing.

  And that was true enough, for the German tribesmen who had hung back when Vortimer was battling Hengest to a standstill had come howling like wolves to tear at the poor bleeding carcass of Britannia once the way was opened by treachery. Aelle and his sons held the lands east of Sorviodunum, and the Jutes and Frisians had taken back all their old lands in Cantium and more. The walled cities of Londinium, Verulamium, Regnum and many others still held, but throughout the eastern half of the country the enemy ranged freely.

  “Should we have welcomed the Saxon?” asked someone, and a few people grimaced with what might have been laughter if they had not forgotten how.

  In truth, they were a sorry lot; even those who had fled with some of their wealth were worn and dirty. The skin on the priest’s face hung in folds, as if he had once been a much heavier man. Those whom Merlin passed edged aside, crossing themselves. He had become accustomed to that, for if they were tattered caricatures of their former prosperity, he had abandoned all its trappings, and now went barefoot, in a garment of deerskin, mantled with a wolf’s hide that he pinned with the curving tusk of a wild boar. But he knew how to veil his presence so that even those men who had been startled by his appearance in another moment forgot what they had seen.

  “Leave the land to the sea wolves, and may they have joy of it,” answered another. “We’ll make a new home in Armorica.”

  Many of his countrymen had done so already, following the men whom the Emperor Maximian had led away two generations before. War and plague had left Armorica nearly empty, and Riothamus, who ruled there now, welcomed the men of Britannia.

  “Will you leave the land to the wolves, or to those who still have the balls to fight for it?” A new voice cut through the babble of agreement.

  Merlin turned. Several horsemen had pulled up at the edge of the firelight. The speaker urged his mount a few steps forward, and they saw a big man with mouse-brown hair cut short in the Roman manner, a weatherstained crimson cavalry cloak wrapped over his mail.

  “Where are your sentries?” snapped the officer, or rather, the prince, for as he moved Merlin glimpsed at his throat a tore of gold. Three of the men at the outskirts of the crowd hung their heads. “We’d have caught you with your breeches down had we been Saxons!”

  “My lord, you have no right to talk to us this way!” the priest exclaimed.

  “Do I not?” The prince urged his horse through the crowd until he was almost on top of the cleric. “My brother and I were already safe in Armorica! You called us back to Britannia, promised to stand behind us if we would lead you. And now we are here, and when we start to plough a furrow, we don’t leave the job half done!” He made an obscene gesture that left no doubt of his meaning.

  Some of the men looked shamefaced, but others faced the prince with a mutinous glare.<
br />
  “God Himself has cursed this land. Who are we to fight against the will of God?”

  The prince glared in frustration. Clearly, if calling men cowards did not move them, he was at a loss for persuasions. Merlin smiled. He had met neither Aurelianus nor Uthir, but this must be the younger brother, for the emperor was said to be a man of some subtlety. One virtue they both had was energy. They had hunted Vitalinus down already and burned him in his tower.

  Then Uthir turned, and Merlin’s breath caught as memory overlaid that face with another, seen once in vision, with Igierne’s blue eyes.

  This was the man who would beget the Defender.

  Merlin surveyed him with new interest, searching for lines of character in the pleasant face, for a strength of will to match the powerful body. He saw endurance and determination there; it was the face of a good commander. But was there greatness? He could not tell, but then he had not seen the treachery in Hengest’s soul. His own judgment had proved lacking, and he could only trust the gods.

  “Blame God for the storm that drowns your crops, but not for the fear that makes you flee.” He allowed the power of his personality to blaze forth so that to the people, noticing him for the first time, it was as if he had appeared among them by magic. Even Uthir’s horse tossed its head in surprise and had to be reined down.

  “Rome protected you as a parent protects a growing child. But now Mother Rome is gone. Will you cling to her skirts when she can no longer even guard herself, or will you defend yourselves like men? Fleeing to Armorica will not save you—the barbarians are everywhere. If you do not stand together to fight them here you will have to do it later, in a foreign land.”

  “Who are you to condemn us?” someone cried.

  “I am no man’s son and no man’s father . . .” Merlin’s voice rang out through the darkness. “I have been a wolf on the hills and a stag in the meadow. . . . I soar with the eagle and root with the wild boar beneath the ground. I am the Wild Man of the woods and the prophet of Britannia, and my spirits tell me what is to come. . . .”

  “Prophesy the future, then!”

  “Why should I prophesy what logic can reveal?” Merlin asked contemptuously. “The mysteries of heaven cannot be revealed except where there is the most pressing need for them. If I were to utter them as an entertainment or where there is no necessity, the spirit which controls me would forsake me in the moment of need.”

  But as he drew breath to continue, he felt the dizzying shift in awareness that told him his daimon was awakening. His face must have changed then, for the man stood openmouthed as Merlin put the knowledge that was coming to him into words.

  “You would do better to search your own heart than to question me. Confess yourself to this whining priest while you can, for this much is given to me to say—neither here nor in Armorica can you evade your doom. This very night you shall stand before your God!”

  “You dare to curse—” the priest began, but Merlin’s gesture silenced him.

  “I neither curse nor bless. I only say what I see.” He turned back toward the prince.

  Sputtering, the heckler started toward him, fist raised. No man could say precisely what happened after, whether the fellow tripped and hit his head, or if he was felled by some invisible foe. But it was certain that when they lifted him up again he was dead and staring.

  “Sorcery!” came the whisper, but it was not a loud one, and no one raised a hand to stop Merlin as he continued to Uthir’s side.

  The prince had gone pale beneath his tan, but he was not one to waste an opportunity.

  “Death can strike you anywhere—” he said in a strong voice. “March with me, and if you die, at least it will be for something, not running away. Any man who can stiffen his rod to beget a child should be able to stiffen his spine enough to defend it. March with me, and your sons and your daughters will grow up free in their own land!”

  Uthir’s gaze met Merlin’s as the whispers became a babble of discussion. “I know you now. You were Vitalinus’s prophet. You will come with me to the emperor.”

  “I offer you my service.”

  “I hope you serve us better than you did him,” said Uthir, but mingled with the trouble in his eyes was a hope that had not been there before.

  North of Sorviodunum, the land rose to a broad plain. Even in more peaceful times it had been sparsely populated, and now it was nearly empty. But ghosts whispered on the wind. There were more ghosts now, thought Merlin, looking at the covered carts that the emperor’s men were driving up the track from the shrine. He could sense the spirits of the British princes hovering over those mingled fragments of ash and bone.

  Did Aurelianus understand what fulfilling this task, the first the emperor had asked, would cost Merlin? To other men, Sorviodunum, battle-scarred but bravely flaunting a few remnants of past glory, might be no different than any other place recaptured from the enemy; but for him, its population of dead was more numerous than the living, and more vivid, and the ghost of the man he himself had been was the most terrible of all.

  To come before the emperor in Sorviodunum was hard. To ride with him to the shrine on the edge of the plain where Hengest had slain the princes was harder still. About the round huts where the monks lived, a military camp was growing. They called it Ambrosiacum now, or Ambrosius’s hill.

  The Saxons had burned the thatched shelter above the bodies, and though the monks had chanted prayers over them, they had no cemetery. And so Aurelianus had decreed that the princes must have a monument. To create it was Merlin’s penance, and the first test of his wisdom.

  One of the riders in the lead lifted his lance, pointing. Uthir kicked his horse alongside Merlin’s.

  “Where is the place?”

  The shallow valley that the Abona had carved through the plain was falling away behind them. Ahead of them, grass and heath stretched away toward a line of hills, broken with occasional clumps of trees. Merlin pointed.

  “Do you see that lump, perhaps a mile from here? That is the first mound, though indeed, such ancient burials are scattered throughout the plain. But these form a line that points back to Sorviodunum, and extends northward up the backbone of Britannia. East to West, another line passes through the Giant’s Dance, and links it to the Isle of Glass, which is also a place of ancient power.”

  He had first come here with Maugantius during one of the Vor-Tigernus’s visits to Sorviodunum, when he was a child. The wide plain had frightened and exalted him then; it continued to do so now.

  “What did you tell my brother to get him to come here?” asked Uthir.

  Both of them glanced back at the horse-litter in which Ambrosius Aurelianus was following. The emperor was considerably older than his brother, and at times his joints pained him too greatly for riding to be easy. But there was nothing wrong with his mind.

  “I told him that this is the most important focus of power in this part of the island,” said Merlin. “The spirits whose bones are laid to rest in this place will join with those who were buried here in ancient days.”

  “Now, this is the border of Britannia,” said Uthir with a sigh. “We don’t even call ourselves Britons any longer, but Combrogi, the countrymen.” He was an interesting contrast to his brother. Both had been educated by Greek tutors, but Uthir, perhaps to distinguish himself from the emperor, had adopted the rough language of the soldiers he commanded.

  They rode on a little further, and Uthir stiffened in the saddle, pointing. “What is that?”

  Out of the grass dark shapes were rising. A few more steps and they became a circle of standing stones, linked uprights surrounding grouped trilithons. The Romans had built works of greater height and complexity, but never with such massive blocks of stone. Stark against the empty plain, the henge waited with a brooding power.

  “That is the Giant’s Dance.”

  As the days shortened toward Samhain the men labored, and when they were finished, the line of barrows was longer by one. Beneath it lay the remai
ns of the leaders of Britannia. On the eve of the Festival, Merlin commanded the workmen to build a circle of fires around the barrow and then to withdraw to the river, leaving the fires to burn through the night.

  “I will go to the stone circle and make the magic that will bind these spirits to the land.”

  “Do you have to go alone?” asked Uthir, and Merlin raised one eyebrow, for on such a night any other man would have covered himself with protective charms and huddled by the fire. “If not, I’ll go with you.”

  “As will I,” the emperor echoed him.

  Merlin bowed. He had not yet had much chance to know Aurelianus, but though the emperor’s body was not strong, it was from him that Uthir had gotten his strength of will. He could see already that if Vitalinus had possessed such a purity of purpose, and such ability to make men follow him, the Saxons would never have gained a foothold in Britannia.

  “For lesser men it would not be safe. But it is fitting that the kings who rule now should stand where the chieftains of ancient times held sway.”

  “Was this a druid temple?” Uthir had asked as they passed beneath the portal of stone.

  “A temple of sorts, but not made by the druids, though they learned some of its secrets. It was built before ever our people came to this land.”

  “Was it the Trojans, as some have said, or wise men from Egypt who taught the people how to raise these stones?” asked Aurelianus. Well-wrapped in cloaks against the chill, he sat throned on one of the fallen stones.

  “The traditions I was taught say it was neither,” answered Merlin. “The mages who built the stone circles came from the west, from a land of magic far across the sea. To Eriu they came and then to Britannia. It is from these isles that the knowledge was carried southward, all the way to the lands around the Middle Sea.”

  It was almost midnight. They looked across the grass to the fires that circled the mound, and then up at the starry radiance of the sky.