Arthur Imperator (9 page)

XVIII Obsidian

Guinevia
sat in Myrddin’s courtyard in a patch of bright sunshine and paid little attention to the familiar white Rat dozing opposite in a shaded corner. In the several months since she had been brought here from the old fort at Segontium, her body had healed, and her wounded mind was recovering too, helped by the time she was able to spend with her small son. He at least had survived unharmed the nightmares of her kidnap and abuse, and as her sleeping hours grew less troubled, she increasingly felt peace and ease, and the flow of her powers returning.

She
thought often of Arthur, who was back in Chester. He had brought her to Myrddin as the wizard had foreseen and left her with the baby’s nurse and Myrddin’s house slaves to be restored to health. Arthur, grim-faced and vengeful, buried what the ravens had left of his two murdered soldiers on a hilltop near the ambush site and hunted down Moel’s kin, taking them to Chester to be sold as slaves. He gave the silver they brought to the families of the two dead troopers and told them of the land they now owned that had once belonged to the clan of Moel. The brigand who guided them escaped while the Britons were burying their dead, and Arthur had no time to spare to hunt him down. Another time, he sighed. Maybe the gods willed it. 

In
the past few days, Guinevia had felt a returning interest in her magic, and had begun working with the dark sorcerer to learn more, and to increase her powers as a Druid and pagan witch. Because of her distance from Arthur, she had put focus on sending out her mind’s eye to distant places, in hopes of seeing her lover. Myrddin had encouraged her, and had tutored her in the technique. 

“First,
you must believe it is not wrong to succeed in this task,” he told her. “It is a gift from the gods, and it can be used for good or evil, but that is a choice only you can make. It is best done with a helper, someone to record what you say, and it is also good to do this in a quiet, calm place without distraction.”

Guinevia
learned to relax and somehow will her mind towards the person or place she wanted to view. Then she spoke aloud what she saw, sometimes sketching in charcoal on a thin shaving of wood, or on a piece of vellum. She learned to say exactly what she saw: ‘Large and green, leafy’ and not to interpret it at that stage as ‘tree’ or ‘bush.’ She found that with practice, she could feel the wind, smell the grasses and view a site from the vantage of an eagle, from above, or even to come close enough to see the grain of the wood in a piece of furniture.

Distance
was no boundary to her viewing, but although she heard natural sounds such as the soughing of the wind in the trees, she could not hear the words spoken by the people she sometimes saw. She was able to visit and view Arthur as he wrote on papers by rushlight, at his mensa in Chester. She saw the ruby ring on his finger, as richly red as a bubble of blood, and heard the crackle of the wood in the fire. Sometimes, as she viewed him, he would raise his head from his task and look intently around, seeking to see or hear something half-sensed. Once or twice, she saw his mouth move in speech, but she could not hear what he said.

As
she practised, her remote viewing became easier and she found that sometimes, especially if she put her impressions down as sketched images, she could send her mind abroad without assistance in recording the fleeting pictures she saw. It became a daily routine, to send her inner eye to Chester to view Arthur; to float it north into the land of the Picts to see how her father was, in his chieftain’s compound near the River Tay, or to send it across the Narrow Sea to look at the lost citadel of Bononia, where the Romans were again masters.

Myrddin
was impressed by his pupil’s ability to view afar, and produced some of the aids he used in his own work: a looking glass of highly-polished silver, made by Romans, a square of obsidian he said had come from a north country of ice and fire and spouting mountains, and a curious spiralling mirror whose back was coated in an amalgam of quicksilver.

He
handed Guinevia the obsidian and asked her to look into it. She viewed some smoky half-images that seemed to move.

“It’s
hard to tell,” she said.

The
sorcerer nodded. “Use this, watch until you feel drawn into it, then look into the obsidian.” The enchantress looked into the whirling black depths of the spiral mirror, and soon felt as if she were about to fall into a deep and wide cavern. Myrddin recognised the moment and pushed the obsidian slab before her. Her eyes slid into the glistening volcanic glass like a seal into water. Just as clearly as if she were present, she was viewing Arthur, pacing the parapet outside his chamber in Chester. She saw his cloak thrown back over his shoulder, clasped by his amber and silver jarl’s badge of office. He was tugging at his jaw, obviously deep in thought as he came towards his invisible, uncanny watcher. He came closer and closer, then vanished as if he’d walked right through her ghost, and Guinevia seemed to zoom back to the sun-speckled room where Myrddin was watching her. “You saw him,” he said flatly. “You have the gift.” It was a gods’ gift, he knew, that one day would save Britain.

She saw me, I found later, just after I had received word through Allectus’ spies that a strong Saxon force had established itself on the downlands south of Londinium. My problem was that it was late in the year. By the time I had raised enough of an army to tackle them, we would be in winter snows and frozen mud. In any case, I really did not have the force I needed, not until my cavalry was mounted and trained. We had not long before defeated the Romans in a desperately close battle, and only with an extraordinary coalition of the tribes gathered against their hated, voracious, onetime masters’ re-invasion. 

At
this time of year, the tribes were harvesting, and when that was done, they would be gathering the beasts for the seasonal slaughter and salting of those for which there was insufficient room in the byres, which could not be fed through the long winter. There was no national threat, those tribes would reason, and no sensible chieftain in the remote north or southwest would countenance sending his men to a faraway fight just to expel from the lands of the Cantii some fairly harmless settlers, as they would see them. Let the Cantii fight their own battles, would be the reaction, it’s only a bit of land.

I
sighed as I paced the parapet, the resting hounds raising their eyes from their paws each time I came near them. My choices were limited, and the best of them seemed to be to leave the Saxons alone for the winter while my cavalry was trained. Spring would be soon enough to take the horsemen to the killing fields, to face the fur-clad warriors with their fearful seax swords and double-bladed axes. I grieved for the new widows of the southeast and for the fresh-turned soil of the long graves there, where their menfolk rested, but I had to consider that even for war and battle, there is a season.

In Wales the weeks went by and Myrddin tutored his pupil Guinevia in the religious mysteries of the sacred oak and mistletoe, of potions to heal and poisons to kill, of the fungi that brought on prophetic dreams and of the solemn rites of human and animal sacrifice that made power flow through conduits like her silver pentagram ring.

“We
are all immortal,” he told her. “The gods view a sacrifice as receiving an honoured guest. It is not cruel, it is a respectful gift of a life to gods who will welcome the one you sacrifice. Important ceremonies require important gifts, and we often joyfully release our most favoured people, the sons and daughters of kings, to go early from this life to the feasting halls of the gods.

“In
turn,” the enchanter explained, “the gods send some of their power to us Druids, for we are the conduits between man and the afterlife. You need to create and open these channels to yourself,” he continued. “I will not always be here, and there is a great deal of work to do. As an adept, and my acolyte, you must be as powerful as possible, to help accomplish what we have to do.” 

Myrddin was speaking as the living incarnation of generations of Celtic power that stretched to Britain from faraway Dalmatia. His was the voice of Britain’s oldest deities, the gods of mountains, forests and rivers, and especially of the sea god Manannan mac Lir, who was Myrddin’s personal great deity. The sorcerer explained himself calmly, almost casually: “I am the son of no father. The old gods sent a demon to sire me on a king’s daughter so they could restore their hold on Britain. That was broken by these Christ-followers, which is a pity, because we would allow their new god to join our old ones, but they insist there can only be one deity. It’s why Rome has persecuted them for not recognizing their Augustus and it will only get worse.” 

Guinevia
nodded. She knew the Christ people were traitors because they said theirs was the only god, and refused to acknowledge the Augustus emperor as one, so furious Rome had killed their stubborn selves in thousands. She had heard of crucifixions, of men being thrown to beasts, of drownings, mutilations and burnings, but could not understand any of it. But there was a distraction.

Myrddin
told her: “An important man is coming, and will be here soon.” How he knew was beyond the knowledge of ordinary men, but he looked into the volcanic glass each day, and he saw the future, or the present that was still to come.

XIX Magi

Just
a few days later, an unusual group processed up the misty pass, dark-complected men, hawk-nosed and black-eyed, shivering despite their layers of fur and wool.

“They
are,” Myrddin said smug as always when his predictions came true, “men of Assyria, men from the birthplace of mankind.” And so they were, except for two of the party who had come even further than the legendary land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They were bronze-black men from the eastern shores of a great land south of Carthage, in Afri, called Ophir, or Saphir, a land of precious stones, much gold and a prized, scented wood called algum. Those two brought ivory and cedar wood as gifts, had tales of cats bigger than horses and of river horses that lived under water and could swallow a man. In their own land, they were great sorcerers, Myrddin knew, and they had come – a great compliment – to this small and misty northern island to confer with him.

Guinevia
was also honoured by them, as women held high rank in learning in the libraries of Aegyptus, and Myrddin had also made plain that she was his acolyte and prized pupil. In turn, as she healed, she learned some of their magic, and heard of the wonders they had seen, from the mountain-shaped gardens of Nineveh, which they said hung in the sky like clouds and were the great work of their king Sennacherib.

“To
see it, you must sail beyond the sunset,” they told her, a concept that made her marvel. There are, she asked timidly, lands beyond the sunset? The magi understood. We have come from a fine city called Ephesus, they told her gently, a place dedicated to the fertility goddess Artemis, and it is so famed that the harbour is always crowded with a hundred or more ships from all over, pilgrims who come to seek the goddess’ blessing. Travel, they explained was less dangerous, easier even, in the relative calms of what the Romans arrogantly called Our Sea, but which others called the Midland Sea. One day, you will travel on its calm waters and warm zephyrs and see the fine temples and palaces.

The
wise men spoke, too, of mystical things and practical things, of spells and potions and charms, of medicine and of long watercourses to bring rivers to cities, and a bronze screw that could raise that water hundreds of arm-spans high. They told of Sennacherib’s enormous palace, its steps studded with precious stones, its statues of alabaster and its roofs covered in gold leaf. They explained how, centuries before dung-stinking Rome had brought water to itself, the shining limestone city of Nineveh had channelled crystal-clear waters in aqueducts to every street. But the gods had not been kind. In one short day, they had shaken the city to rubble, collapsing great buildings, killing people, causing fires and plague. Now that fabled city of hanging gardens, gold and alabaster was ruined.

It
was, the magi said, their duty to find how to placate their gods, to collect the knowledge they needed to restore their civilization. So these scholars had travelled long, hard months to find the wise men who could help. In turn, they shared knowledge the Assyrians had learned of star patterns and readings, of times when the sun would be eaten by the moon, of tides and weather, omens and prophecies. They brought a bewildering mass of knowledge, some of it gleaned from ancient lore, some of it from far travels. They had met men who travelled the Silk Routes, which were a variety of travellers’ roads from the farthest lands of the East, even beyond the wood and rammed-earth wall that forms the boundary of the land of the imperial Qin dynasty. These travellers had exchanged knowledge and goods, so they had learned of a demon-defeating technique the Qinese called ‘exploding bamboo,’ or ‘baozhu’.

The
orientals who shared their secrets said their priests had known of this for several hundred years. By making a mix of kitchen ingredients and packing it into a bamboo tube, the package made a combustible fire dragon that could later be ignited to scare off ghosts and evil spirits in a shower of sparks and explosions. Myrddin was especially intrigued by this, and the wise men worked with him to detail those ingredients, salt petre, charcoal and sulphur, and their correct quantities so he could create some of the mix. The magician had an idea to build a flying chair with what he realized could be a new propellant, and vanished for days into his workroom. He took his experimenting outside soon after an incident when his bushy eyebrows were scorched off, and began a week of open air trials that sorely tested the calm of his flock of sheep.

Guinevia
had little interest in the smoking, fizzing, exploding fire drakes Myrddin created, but she talked at length with the visitors. She earned their respect as an adept practitioner of the art of divination by examining the entrails of a sacrifice, and the men from Nineveh and Assur told how their priests had created mazes to represent the entrails of animals. These were useful in divining medical problems, or to determine crop planting times, and their ancient library held texts of divination from centuries before, but their sacrifices were always of animals. Guinevia, a practitioner of hepatoscopy, or the art of reading entrails, was able to tell them how she had sacrificed human men and how their auguries differed from the animal ones of the Mesopotamians. 

She
told of the gross mule trader she had once had disembowelled and how the shape and position of his liver had matched exactly those of a hog, but his colon’s odd colour had warned of the near-death of her emperor, a precise omen she had never seen in an animal sacrifice.

“The
gods must have appreciated us sending a human to them,” she concluded, “and they spared my lord.” 

The
exchanges were valuable, and Guinevia soaked it up, but she retired nightly with her brain reeling. Dazed or not, she learned and retained and absorbed and quantified as the winter came on and Myrddin’s now-crowded house became a college of sorcerers. Happily for Guinevia, she had small Milo for comfort. He helped her both to heal from her ordeal and to fix in her mind what she had learned each day. In the evenings, when the braid-bearded men of the east put their foreheads close and talked with Myrddin, she would slip away to her small son and tell him what the day had brought. Her fierce determination to learn, to absorb this astonishing knowledge of a secretive priesthood drove out the painful memories, and recounting the day’s doings to small Milo clarified them in her agile mind. As the months passed, she had an astounding education put in front of her, and she retained it. 

Not
too long before, Guinevia had been a bruised and bloodied captive. Now, her powers were increased dramatically. She had become a potent sorceress who casually used small magics, and owned channels through which she could access some very powerful and elemental forces for good, or evil, too, should she choose that road. She had paid the high price of learning with the agony required of a full divine, and had been tempered in her own mental fires. Now, the time was coming for her to make the journey back to the fortress of her emperor to practise her dark arts. Whether she would use them for good or for ill, to take revenge on men like those who had tormented her was still in question. A thought flickered across her mind. One of those brutes who had abused her and threatened the life of her child was still alive. He had escaped when his village was sacked and his kin were sent into slavery. But he still lived, unpunished. In the once-clear mind of the sorceress from beyond the Wall of Hadrian, where memories are long and inherited feuds run deep, a dark stream now ran. And somewhere, a malicious demon stirred inside her.