Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword of Avalon Read online

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, directing awareness to tap into the current of power that coursed beneath the surface of the soil. Across the great island it flowed, from the southern coast through the Henge and Carn Ava and thence northward all the way to the Ai-Siwanet lands. A lesser current connected the Henge to the Tor. She stood at a crossroad, invisible to the ordinary eye, and as she brought the power back up her spine, activated a third channel that linked Above and Below.

  “Sisters, are we gathered?” she called.

  “We are gathered!” came the reply.

  On this night they stood between life and death. The people of this isle had chosen their site well, and her other ancestors, fleeing the fall of the Sea Kingdoms, had done well to recognize the native wisdom, even those—or so said the legend—who had sought to appropriate the power of this place for their own ends. Anderle glanced toward the southern side of the Henge, where the sarsen stones that had formed the fallen segments of the ring lay scattered on the dead grass. At Avalon the story of how those stones had been knocked askew in a battle of magic between the priests of the Henge and of the Tor was taught to the senior adepts. It was said that after the conflict the survivors left the sarsens where they fell as a permanent warning to those who would misuse their power.

  And now, thought the priestess, they no longer had the craft to erect the fallen uprights and replace their lintels even if they would. The secret of shaping sound to make such magic had been lost in the generations that had passed since the stones were raised. But they still knew how to use the unique qualities of the Henge. When you were standing inside the circle, sound had a peculiar quality, a vibration that was not quite an echo. Voices seemed particularly clear.

  “Call upon those who now must make their passage!” she cried.

  Leka of the Dales was the first to move to the center and lift her hands. “Ultakhe son of Izora I call. You lost your life when the rocks of the sheepfold gave way before the flooding stream as you were trying to save the last of the lambs.”

  “Blessed be your life and blessed your passing,” chorused the priestesses.

  Anderle felt the vibrations of their voices passing through her, took another deep breath, and as she let it out, opened her mind to the spirit who had been called. In the darkness behind her eyelids she could see the glimmering outlines of the Stones, and the misty shape of the man, gazing about him in wonder. What was he seeing?

  “Ultakhe, hear me—” She sent out an inner call. “Your flesh is ashes, your spirit body unbound. Now comes the final sundering. Will you leave a part here to watch over your family and hold your memories?” She waited, and felt a strong assent. No doubt an echo of the man would haunt the scattered stones of that sheepfold. She hoped that his descendants would be able to rebuild it one day.

  “It is well. But now I call your higher soul, the Self that survives all changes.” At those words the image of the man grew brighter, but it was shifting, the bone structure altering, the scars and lines of care fading away. A succession of faces flickered across that countenance, combining at last into an image that was beyond race, beyond age, beyond gender, and yet unlike any other soul. “This is the face you had before you were born. Go into the west, Child of Light, to consider what you have learned in this lifetime, and to rest until the time is right for you to take a human body again.” Anderle could feel the flow of power intensify in the direction of the Tor. She turned in that direction, the arms of her spirit body lifting, releasing that bright spirit into the west.

  This was the task to which the Ti-Sahharin had called her, the wisdom brought from lost Atlantis, to ease the natural confusion of passing and speed the spirit beyond the circles of the world. There, it had been a deathbed ritual performed by a priest for an individual, but the Sacred Sisters of the Isle of the Mighty already gathered their dead when the harvest of the crops was done and called them to the Henge. Some early priest or priestess of Avalon had been inspired to guide the passing of the dead of all the tribes at once. The tribes called the goddess into whose keeping they consigned their dead Achimaiek, but it was Ni-Terat on whom Anderle called, the Dark Mother who cradled the seeds in the tomb of her womb through winter’s cold until it was time for them to be reborn.

  As she relaxed from that first effort, she heard Kaisa summoning the next spirit. “Hilmi son of Koucella. You raised three children to follow you, and died of the coughing sickness in your forty-fifth year.”

  “Blessed be your life and blessed your passing,” the others replied, and Anderle took another breath and prepared to receive the Ai-Utu man. The first spirit was always the most difficult, but with each successive calling it felt more natural to inhabit this space between the worlds. One after another, the priestesses summoned the spirits of those who had died during the past seven years.

  She recognized Saarin’s voice, harsh with pain. “Krifa daughter of Boujema, you died bearing your second child.”

  This woman had been beautiful, and Anderle was aware of a moment of regret, quickly suppressed, for a life cut off too soon.

  Shizuret lifted her hands. “Amruk son of Abrana, you were killed defending your farmstead from warriors from the Dales.”

  Even in her detached state Anderle could feel a chilling of the circle’s energy. Yet she knew this would not be the only one dead by violence. They were always the hardest to send onward. The ones who died of old age or sickness were generally glad to be free of the pain. But the fighters still hungered for vengeance. The spirit parts they left behind were all too eager to continue the war. But Amruk’s primary emotion was a great sadness, almost as hard to bear. With an effort she encompassed his spirit, and was rewarded when his darkness at last gave way to a luminous joy. She sighed, releasing him. As the white moon passed the zenith and began to arc westward the litany went on.

  Linne called, “Massine daughter of Izoran. You died at the age of seventy-seven, leaving behind six grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren.”

  This was a spirit matured and serene, already half transmuted to realization. As Massine moved on, the priestess warmed herself at her light.

  “Blessed be your life and blessed your passing.”

  “Kalinna daughter of Auris, you died after being raped by men of the Ai-Ushen.” That was Nuya’s voice, shaking with anger. Anderle wanted to tell her to stay calm—her grief would hold back the soul she was calling—but voice and vision were fixed upon an inner reality. Only the flow of power that linked above and below kept her upright, limbs locked, suspended between directions, between the worlds. Dimly she was aware of Linne’s soft voice, soothing and supporting, and gradually the image of the violated woman became clear and she too passed onward.

  The energies around her were beginning to shift. She could feel the moon low in the west; the air had the damp chill of the gray hour before dawn. Somewhere a bird chirped hopefully, then fell silent. But much more palpable was the emptiness of the spiritual sphere where once so many spirits had thronged. “Hurry,” her spirit cried. “Soon it will be day!”

  There was a pause; then Saarin spoke. “Barkhet son of Eilin, you died of cold and starvation while your mother wept, when you were only five years old. . . .”

  Anderle reached out to the small spirit, too intrigued by the strange place in which he found himself to move. “Come, little one, where you will be warm and well fed and dry. You had no time to learn much this time around. May you be reborn in a better time. Come now, it is time to rest—” As if he had been her own child, she took him in her arms and whirled him around, releasing him like a captive bird to seek the skies.

  “Blessed be your life and blessed your passing,” the priestesses sang, and in that moment light from without merged with the light within as the newborn sun shouldered up over the eastern rim of the world.

  As the darkness retreated, Anderle saw that sweep of shadow as the mantle of a mighty figure, the Crone Herself, in all her sere beauty and terror, gathering the scatter
ed spirits and shepherding them away. For a moment She looked back at Anderle, Her eyes luminous with love and sorrow.

  “Do not weep for those who are gone. Can you regret that I have taken them into My keeping, knowing that in time they will be reborn?”

  But Anderle could not forget the words with which the priestesses had mourned their dead. Whatever they had come into the world to be and do would not be completed now.

  “Forgive my sorrow. I see only the time that is given me. You see eternity . . .” she replied, remembering Irnana and Durrin. She had saved Mikantor, but who could tell if he would live to become a man?

  As daylight filled the circle, the other powers that had flowed through it began to sink back into the land. With them went the energy that had sustained Anderle. The image of the Goddess disappeared in a blaze of light. There was a moment in which inner and outer realities whirled dizzily, and then she was falling in a slow subsidence as if she had no bones. She felt the damp grass beneath her, Linne’s thin arms supporting her, and then she knew no more.

  WOODPECKER SHIFTED UNCOMFORTABLY ON the wooden bench, wondering if folding his mantle into a cushion would make sitting through the lesson easier on his skinny rear. He had been excited when word came that he and his brother were to join a dozen other youngsters as students at Avalon, but today the sun was shining, and he found himself longing for the freedom of the fens. He was not the only one to chafe at sitting in the stone room on a warm summer’s day.

  “I am sorry if I am boring you,” said Larel as Rouikhed stifled a yawn. He was a tall, big-nosed boy from the Dales who vied with Woodpecker for leadership in the children’s games.

  “Sorry, master. I did not sleep well last night,” the boy replied.

  “Nobody sleeps well—” complained Vole, another lad from the Lake Village. “He wake us up yelling!”

  “Did you have a nightmare?” Larel frowned. “It is true that children often have bad dreams, but sometimes such dreams hold seeds of truth.”

  “I suppose.” The boy hung his head. “I dreamed again about the flood that washed away my family’s farm. Every time it comes, I’m trying to find another way to save them, but it never works, and when I wake it’s like losing them all over again.”

  “I understand,” Larel said softly. “I know it does no good to tell you that there was nothing you could have done but die with them. I believe that you were saved for a reason, and when you find your work, those memories will fade.”

  “I know—but—” The boy looked up suddenly. “This dream was different. I stood on the hill, watching, and saw the floods spreading until they covered everything. It wasn’t only my own home—the whole world was being washed away. . . .”

  A whisper ran through the children, and Woodpecker wondered who else had had that dream.

  “What can we do?” Rouikhed wailed. “Is everything we know and love going to be destroyed?”

  For a moment Woodpecker glimpsed an answering panic on Larel’s face—did he too fear destruction, or only the prospect of dealing with a roomful of hysterical children? Then the young priest got himself under control.

  “Do you think we are the first to face disaster?” he asked sternly. He pointed to an image, its colors now faint with age, that adorned the plastered wall. “Have you ever really looked at this picture? Do it now! What do you see?”

  A dozen pairs of eyes obediently turned to the wall.

  “I always thought it was a mountain,” Tiri said finally. “With some kind of cloud on top.”

  “And more clouds around it—” added Vole.

  “I suppose they do look like clouds.” Larel sighed. “The image was clearer when I first heard the story, but the damp has blurred it. Listen now, for this is how the picture was explained to me. This peak”—he rose and traced the outline—“was called the Star Mountain, and it rose in the center of Ahtarrath, an island in a far southern sea. What you see above it is not cloud, but fire and ashes, and what you see around it are the engulfing waves of the sea.”

  “It doesn’t look much like it,” Tiri said absently.

  “What do you mean?” The priest’s voice sharpened.

  Tiri looked up in sudden confusion, blinked, and flushed a becoming pink. “I don’t know!” she exclaimed. “It just seemed . . . wrong to me.”

  “How could a mountain have fire?” Woodpecker asked quickly. “Did the forest burn?”

  “The way the story goes, everything burned. In those lands fires live beneath the earth, and the mountain exploded from within. Those who could reach their boats escaped and sought refuge in other lands.”

  “Like this one!” Tirilan smiled once more. “My mother told me that story when I was a little girl.”

  “Exactly. They had lost everything, and had to make a new life in a new land. But they survived and brought their wisdom to Avalon, and blended their blood and their magic with that of the Seven Tribes.”

  “But we will never match their wonders,” said Ganath wistfully. “We cannot even restore the glory of our own people. In the old days, they say, the kings of the Ai-Zir marshaled armies of men to move the great stones and everyone drank from beakers of worked gold.”

  “Nonetheless,” Larel said firmly, “they are our ancestors. If we do all we can to preserve the truth we’ve been given, I do not believe that the gods will allow our traditions to be entirely lost.” Larel finished on a ringing note, and Rouikhed managed a smile.

  “But he doesn’t say we all survive . . .” whispered Grebe.

  “I know,” murmured Woodpecker, but he was determined that whatever happened, he would live, and make sure that Tiri, and Grebe, and everyone he cared for lived too.

  “Do you think one life is all?” the priest challenged then.

  “What does it matter how many lives we’ve had if we can’t remember who we were and what we did before?” complained Analina, who came from the Ai-Utu lands, and thought herself sophisticated because she had helped her father deal with the traders who came from Tartessos to buy tin in Belerion.

  “My mother says that a trained priestess can help the soul remember who it really is when it journeys to the Otherworld,” Tiri put in then. “That’s what she went to the Henge to do last fall.”

  Ganath, who like Tiri was the child of a priestess, nodded. “My mother told me that when you are alive you only remember those other lives when you really need to know something you learned then.” He was a usually cheerful boy with a fine clear voice.

  “Sometimes I think I remember,” Vole said slowly. “Different for you—you been here all your life and heard things, so how could you tell? But some things I learn here, it’s more like remembering something I know before.”

  Woodpecker grimaced, remembering how he had echoed Tiri’s words in the Old Speech on the island of the Wild God. Had he been a priest of Avalon and known those words before? And then there was that Word that had banished the evil powers. Anderle and the others had asked him endless questions, but he could not even remember what the Word had sounded like, much less what it meant.

  But though he would not have admitted it to the other boys, if he had had another lifetime, he was pretty sure that in it he had known Tirilan. Though he had forgotten the Word that brought the thunder, he still remembered the solid warmth of her small hand.

  SIX

  Woodpecker feinted with his staff and felt the shock vibrate all the way up his arm as Larel blocked it. The staff was a priest’s weapon, but the boy had learned to respect the bruises it could leave when wielded by skillful hands. He ducked, slid a little on ground still squishy from the last rain, and recovered with a swift twist that brought him in under the young priest’s guard. Sheep kept the grass short in the field below the complex of buildings that he had come to think of as home. The youngsters in training took exercise here every day before the meal at noon.

  In the three years since he had come to live at the Tor, the boy had learned many things. This was one of his favorites, though
he wished that the staff had been a spear or a sword. Lady Anderle said that those who honed their spiritual skills required no physical weapons, but her magic had not saved Tirilan’s father.

  He sensed, rather than saw, the priest’s staff whirling toward him and struck upward to deflect it, transferring the impact’s energy to his own swing as he brought his weapon down and around to connect with Larel’s side. At the last moment he tried to pull the blow, but the meaty “thwack” as it connected made him wince, although not nearly so badly as it did Larel, who reeled back with a stifled cry.

  “Goddess! I think you’ve cracked a rib!” The priest grimaced as he felt along his side.

  “I’m sorry, Larel—” Woodpecker tried to look ashamed, when in reality his heart was thumping in triumph. This was the best blow he had ever gotten in. “I didn’t expect to hit you.” At least not so hard . . .

  “I suppose I should be proud of my teaching, if not of my skill,” Larel said ruefully. “Ow . . .” he said again as he bent to pick up his staff. “I had better ask Kiri to bind this. It won’t speed the healing, but it will remind me to be careful when I move.”

  Mist still drifted on the Lake, casting a ghostly veil across the trees, but as the sun rose, it was burning through the clouds. Woodpecker flushed as a brighter ray gleamed suddenly on Tiri’s fair hair. How long had she been watching him?

  “Shall I punish him for you?” she asked as Larel limped past.

  “As if you could!” grunted Woodpecker, and the other boys laughed. She stepped forward to meet him eye to eye. In the past year she had been growing until she was almost as tall as he, graceful as a swan, and as strong. “What, are you going to put a spell on me?”