Guen began to speak, low and soft. Her voice seemed to come from inside his head. If he opened his mouth, her words would form on his own tongue. “Listen, Lance. Soon these memories too will fade, and I’ll be mortal flesh, a leaf on the stream just like you. When you took my power, slew the dragon with your kiss, you took the force of the ocean and poured it into a narrow little glass.” Her grip tightened on his hand. “This body is weak. It sways and changes with the moon. Insatiable hungers go through it like fire. The dragon understands what she must do, but Guenyvre—all Guen feels is the force of her own desire. Take her back, Lance! Let her be part of the earth and the dragon again.”
“How can I?”
“You and she are one.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, God. You must. Feel her hand. You don’t even know which of the fingers are yours and which are hers.”
It was true. He opened his eyes. She had slithered off her stool and was kneeling in front of him. An eerie green glow was fading from her irises. She was just a distraught girl. She tore her hand free, flung her arms around his neck and began to kiss him fiercely, almost biting, as if she were trying to gnaw her way into his skin or out of her own. He gave a cry of fear: grabbed the hair at the back of her neck to pull her away, but to do her violence was beyond him.
The curtain of ivy swept back. Guenyvre froze in his arms. There stood the child Aedilthryd, a goblet of steaming liquid on a bronze tray in her hands, a stone water bottle hitched to her leather belt. Her face was devoid of expression. Her pale eyes glittered like frost. Behind her—so close that she must have summoned them, brought them, lured them here with God only knew what words—stood Drustan, Bors, and all three of the brothers from the Northern Isles. And stumbling up in their wake, pale with horror, only an instant but fatally too late, Guy and Coel.
Guy shoved his way to the front. He turned on the others like an enraged bear. “Get out of this, all of you! Get away.” He swung round to stare at Lance and Guen. Tears were streaming down his face. “Ah, no, Lance. Notyou.”
Chapter Twenty
Two guards stopped Lance at the door with crossed staves. He stepped back, the momentum of his run recoiling upon him. He knew the men. They part of Coel’s household: kindly, efficient, ordinary. They were looking at his feet, the air over his head, anything rather than meet his gaze. “Please,” Lance said. “I have to see him.”
“He’s in conference with the Merlin, sire. No-one is to disturb him.” The guard made another inspection of Lance’s boots. “I’m sorry.”
The passageway outside the debating hall was draughty. Two alcoves had been set into the walls to allow the night-watch some shelter. Lance made his way to the nearest and sank down on the bench. He could have dispatched Coel’s guards with one hand tied behind his back, but first he had to recoup his strength. Tremors were running through him, as if he and not poor Guen had been poured out of a vast dragon form and into a weak, cracked vessel. He drew one knee up to his chest. If he opened his mouth, nothing would come out of it except the name of his king—in rage, love, supplication, louder and louder until he brought the house down. He pressed his lips to the back of his hand.
“He’d do better to consult with me than that heathen sorcerer.”
The niche across the way was occupied. Lance hadn’t seen the priest huddled there. He blended with the stonework in his grey-brown robes. Lance had nothing against the lad, who looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders and no friendly earth on which to set it down. Suddenly, vividly, Lance remembered Father Tomas from Vindolanda, the human warmth that had underlain the old man’s bitterness. “Good morning,” he said, as civilly as he could. “The Merlin has always guided the king. But Arthur will listen to anyone who comes in good faith to advise him.”
The priest stared. Unlike the guards, he had no difficulty in meeting Lance’s eyes, and he did so coldly. “Good faith? Those words should burn your mouth.”
Lance uncurled. His hand was on the hilt of his sword before he could collect himself. “Your cloth protects you,” he growled. “If a man spoke to me so, he’d repent his words at the tip of this blade.”
“I am but a poor soldier of Christ, Sir Lancelot. I need no sword. You, however, are in sore want of repentance. Make your confession to me now, on this morning which is the day of our saviour’s birth! Your weak flesh has betrayed you, but your soul may yet be saved.”
Lance subsided onto the bench. The priest’s words were like a lead-weighted mesh. He’d thrown them well. Lance owed his confession to no-one but Art, but how easily the will could be drained from the weary and the sorrowful by such promises!Tell me, and in the name of God I’ll absolve you. I’ll take your crime away.
Nothing could do that. An old, bloody-minded instinct stirred in Lance, born of all the debates with Tomas by the Vindolanda fireside at night. “My soul and my weak, damned flesh are one and the same thing, priest. You can’t pull me out like a winkle from a shell. It’s not that easy—for either of us. And…” He paused, pushing a hand through his hair. “Since when did the solstice mark the birth of your god? I grew up with a Christian priest, and he’d come to our bonfires because he liked the warmth and all the food. But he never made such a claim.”
“You come from the wild moors. Your priest can have been little more than a farmhand.”
“On the contrary, he’d served at the shrine at Brocolitia, after Emperor Theodosius ordered the temple of Mithras there destroyed. As he constantly reminded us.”
“He was right to keep such honourable service in your minds. But he cannot have received the teaching from Rome that Christ was conceived at spring equinox, which fixes his birth at…”
“Winter solstice. Yes, I see. My father was a Roman soldier, and he and his comrades welcomed back the unconquered sun at this time, once the darkest night was done.”
“My teachers have warned me against such comparisons. Mithras,Sol Invictus—these are ancient demons, sent from the past to tempt men into their former bad ways.Christosis the only true child of the light reborn.”
Lance considered this. He was miserable enough that an argument—with anyone, about anything—felt like a blessed distraction. And poor Tomas had long ago thrown away his chances of creating a blind follower by teaching him—however reluctantly—to read. “I know a tale,” he said quietly, settling back onto the bench, “of a god who came to the earth in the form of a human child. The prophets who’d expected him called him the word-made-flesh, the son of man.”
“Be careful what you say, sire. Take care not to blaspheme.”
“The child taught in the temple when he was no more than twelve summers old, and his elders listened. He was baptized in the river Iarutana, which the Hebrews call Jordan, by a helper named Arup—Iochanan in their language, John in ours. And this Anup the baptist was slain, beheaded by their enemies. This god-child grew up—was put to death, and reborn at the equinox of spring.”
“You will tell me this is the story of one of your father’s demon gods, Ahura Mazda, Mithras or—”
“Neither. It’s the story of Osiris, who was ancient in the land of Egypt before Persian Mithras ever thought to slay his bull. Osiris was calledthe anointed one, and his story came to us through the Greeks, who translate that title asChristos.” He sat up, words coming to him with unaccustomed ease, as if Viviana herself had found her way inside him, or the ancient dragon’s fire. “Listen to me, priest. All faiths borrow and build upon what went before. Teach the people what you like. Lead whoever will follow you. But don’t steal their gods and their legends,thenturn upon them with cries of blasphemy for worshipping in their own old ways.”
The priest drew breath to reply. Lance wanted to close his eyes. This new faith would never allow the elder ones the last word. The day was lost, he knew, the lamps of learning being pinched out, snuffed or suffocated all over the dragon’s isle. And now that his burst of energy was past, he no longer cared.
