The Broken Sword Page 17

  "No, no hospital," Taliesin managed at last. "And no police. Please. We'll just be on our way."

  The girl with the braids narrowed her eyes. "Where do you live?"

  "Well, er..."

  "You're street people, aren't you," she said flatly.

  The old man looked to Arthur for an explanation. "Homeless," the boy said. "She thinks we're homeless."

  "Hey, that's okay," the pockmarked young man said. "That's cool. We know where you're coming from."

  "You do?"

  "He means he understands," Arthur translated.

  "We sure do," the woman in braids said. "The cops aren't going to do a thing for you. And by the time a hospital gets around to treating you, you'll either be healed or in a coma."

  Taliesin brightened. "Ah. Well, that's settled, then. We'll be on our way. Thank you for your help."

  "You're coming with us," the woman said with finality.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Zack Diamond," the young man said, extending his hand. "This is Kate Marshall. We've got a place for you to stay if you need one. It's in Manhattan, but there's plenty of room, and it won't cost you anything." He flashed them a friendly grin. "But you'll have to pitch in with the chores. We all do at the Center."

  "The Center?" Taliesin asked.

  The skinny man with acne assumed a serious expression. "The Center for Cosmic Consciousness," he said importantly. "CCC for short."

  Arthur and Beatrice exchanged glances, trying hard not to laugh. "No, thanks," Arthur began. "We'd really better—"

  "We'd be delighted," Taliesin said.

  "The Center for Cosmic Consciousness," Arthur muttered as they followed their new acquaintances to the bus stop.

  "CCC for short," Beatrice added, giggling.

  "The ingratitude of youth," Taliesin pronounced loftily. "After what just happened, I should think you'd see that fate has sent us a lightning bolt of good fortune in those two helpful individuals."

  "But they think we're homeless," Arthur said.

  "They are quite correct."

  "But we're not destitute or anything. I mean, it's not as if we have to stay in some center."

  "Oh?"

  Arthur squinted at the old man. "You know what I'm saying." He cast a sidelong glance toward Beatrice. It was important, he knew, that no one guess who Taliesin really was, or what he could do. "Like the money in Morocco," he said out of the side of his mouth. "Maybe you could..." He spun little circles with his hand. "... come up with some money."

  "Just like that?" He laughed. "Good heavens, boy, what do you think I am, a wizard?"

  Arthur inhaled noisily. "It's just that after living in the storage area of a cargo ship, I was kind of hoping for a hotel room."

  "Mmmm," Beatrice mused. "A bath with bubbles in it. A feather pillow. Tea with scones..."

  "To be followed quickly by another visit from our violent friend, or someone just like him," Taliesin finished. "Whom do you suppose will be sent next time—a room service waiter with a stiletto under his napkin, or a chambermaid wearing shoes that shoot poisonous darts? Because without doubt, my greedy darlings, the fellow is already becoming acquainted with the city's major hotels."

  After a silence, Beatrice spoke. "He's right, Arthur. The man in Tangier knows we have the cup. He's not going to stop looking for us now."

  "Well, who's to say he's not watching us right this minute?" Arthur argued.

  "Oh, we're safe from him at the moment."

  "How do you know?"

  The old man put his hands on his hips. "Because there is a massive traffic jam three blocks away," he said, peeved. "Anyone going in that direction would be caught up in it."

  Beatrice's head snapped toward him. "How would you know that, Mr. Taliesin?"

  "Er..."

  "Yeah," Arthur said with feigned innocence, enjoying the old man's discomfort. "How would you know that?"

  "He saw it with his mind," Beatrice answered breathlessly. "That was it, wasn't it? You saw it..." She blinked slowly. "…when you walked through the fence..."

  Arthur and Taliesin looked at one another.

  "He didn't walk through any fence," Arthur insisted, trying to protect the old man's secret. "He came through the gate."

  "But there wasn't—"

  "Shhh," the old man said, touching her shoulder lightly. "I knew about the traffic jam because I could hear the noise from the automobiles."

  But Beatrice continued to stare at him, because she knew, in a place inside her so deep and forgotten that the knowledge was no more than the breeze created by a blade of grass bending, that Taliesin's feat had been real magic, and that she had taught it to him.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It took Taliesin years to master that first magic, born of stillness; and more to learn the others, for which he needed every resource of his mind and body.

  Through those years he came to love the Innocent more than he had ever loved anyone. Like a mother, he supposed, although he had never known the woman who had died giving him birth, and he doubted that most mothers would order their sons, as she had ordered him, to render service to the gods by engaging in copulation.

  "At Beltane, you will embody the reborn aspect of the god," she told him simply.

  Taliesin had been shocked. Beltane was a festival of drunkenness and licentiousness, hardly the sort of celebration one would expect from the disciplined druids on Mona. His memories of the event were of unruly peasants dancing in the streets, dancing, fighting with one another, and tumbling whatever girls happened to seize their attention. Since all rules of social conduct were suspended for Beltane and rape a normal part of the festivities, the only women who remained outside after the innocent morning maypole dressing and afternoon feasting were unsatisfied wives looking for a diversion from their husbands. The maidens, along with the grumbling prostitutes who could not hope to earn a penny on this day of free love, shut themselves in their chambers before nightfall and remained there until the following morning, when the peasants went home with throbbing heads and the innkeepers set to repairing their establishments. It was no wonder the saintly Christians, who balked even at the excesses of the Roman holy days, positively railed against Beltane.

  Taliesin himself had found it a rather pleasurable amusement once he was of an age to participate, but that was when he had been out in the world, not a seeker of enlightenment. Since his arrival on Mona, he had never held so much as a lustful thought toward the women who served the gods as he did... although he had, on occasion, found his mind wandering during the druids' processionals, when the shapeless gray shift he happened to walk behind would unexpectedly move with a fluidity and fullness that reminded him of his maleness.

  "Beltane?" he whispered hoarsely. "You celebrate Beltane here?"

  The Innocent laughed. "We invented Beltane, little bard. It is the ancient rite of spring, when the great earth mother becomes a maiden once more and renews her fertility by taking a husband. Of course, we no longer follow the old custom of sacrificing the husband at the end of one year. After the festivities, you will return to your life as a servant of the gods."

  "But... what will be expected of me?"

  "Nothing is expected. What happens is what the gods decree. Beltane is their time to speak."

  They did speak that year, although Taliesin was not to know it for decades to come.

  What the gods said to the island of Mona was goodbye.

  But that first May, when the streams bubbled with clean water and the apple blossoms blew across the island in fragrant blizzards, Taliesin could not imagine a place more favored by the gods.

  On the day of the Beltane celebration, he remained inside the cave of the Innocent, naked and in prayer, while the others carried out the long ritual: First, nine kinds of wood were gathered and dressed with wildflowers and straw ribbons for the great Beltane fire. These were arranged around the sacred circle, a ring of dark, lush grass growing in a clearing in the ancient forest of oaks which was at
the physical and spiritual heart of Mona. In the center of the circle was a wreath woven of every flowering plant and herb on the island, and suspended over it, held aloft by two thin ropes of woven grass, was the severed trunk of a young fir, stripped of all its branches and bark and covered with a white cloth to symbolize the body of the Earth's lover, who had lain dead through the cold winter.

  Each step of the ritual took hours, with incantations and offerings of salt, with chanting and song and the unceasing, six-word prayer for the earth which began with the Salutation to the Sun at dawn and was carried by one voice after another through every activity of the day:

  Mother bring us life from death

  In the cave of the Innocent, purified by fasting and water, Taliesin heard the prayer with every beat of his heart, heard it until it sang through his very blood. While the other druids took their meal of white asparagus and strawberry wine, a lone singer remained at the sacred circle to sing the endless prayer until sunset. Mother bring us life from death... Taliesin's lips moved with the words. His body felt numb, anesthetized by the droning plea. His mind, once full of questions about what would befall him in the sacred circle, was now quiet.

  He knew he would make love with a woman, if he was able; that much had been made clear to him. His questions revolved around how that would become a sacred act. Try as he might, he could not rid himself of the memories of Beltane as a tawdry display of people's basest inclinations. At one point he had even asked the Innocent to excuse him from the duty, but she had refused.

  "You fear you will enjoy the act of love," the Innocent said, without a trace of mirth.

  "The problem is, it wouldn't be love," he offered miserably. "I wouldn't even know the woman. It would be like... like tumbling with a whore. The pleasure would be for me as a man, nothing more." He hung his head. "I would insult the gods."

  "I told you that the gods would decree what would happen. It was they who selected you, not I. And I doubt that they would choose to be insulted by their chosen."

  "Do the gods speak through you?" Taliesin asked, trying to understand. It was the way all the petty kings thought—that their every wish was the decree of the highest deities. This was the kind of thinking that enabled them to wage war on lesser tribes for the sole purpose of increasing their treasuries. He had thought the Innocent above that.

  "Not through me," she explained softly. "They speak directly to me. It is my gift. It is why I am called the Innocent." She closed her opaque eyes. "And why I am blind."

  "Because you can see the gods themselves, but not their creations," Taliesin whispered.

  "That is so. And they have made it clear that it must be you who plants the seed of the future into the earth mother's body."

  He hesitated for a moment before speaking. "Will you tell me why?"

  The Innocent smiled sadly. "That is a burden I will not ask you to bear," she answered. "Go now, and let the gods unravel their plan in their own time."

  And so he waited in the sanctified cave hour after hour, listening to the prayer for the earth.

  Mother bring us life from death

  In time, he sensed the Innocent's presence coming nearer. She never made a sound when she moved, but so great was the strength of her aura that even with his eyes closed Taliesin could feel it, like the heat from the sun.

  She said nothing as she stood before him, offering a bowl filled with mushrooms. Taliesin recognized them. They were the tiny, disfigured earth-fruit that grew in rings in the forest—fairy rings, the country folk called them. On Mona, these mushrooms were sacred, and therefore never eaten by anyone except the Innocent during her times of solitude in the wilderness, when she lived alone and unsheltered in the elements and consumed no other food for the cycle of one moon. Now she was allowing him to feed on the gods' food.

  He knelt and ate them, one at a time, until the bowl was empty. Then the Innocent handed him a vessel filled with water. It was carved from alabaster, and so ancient that the hands that fashioned them had belonged to a race of men no longer extant, the small, dark people known as the Tuatha de Danaan, whose priests first uttered the ceaseless prayer to the earth mother in spring.

  When Taliesin had drunk its contents, the Innocent left without a word, and four druids came to paint his naked body with blue woad and anoint his eyelids with oil made fragrant with the essences of marigold, thyme, hollyhock, and grass. As they worked, they joined the lone voice outside in the prayer for the earth, transforming it from a pure tenor line to a broader spectrum of sound resonating with bass and baritone undertones.

  They led him outside. With each step he felt the effects of the mushrooms he had eaten take hold, sharpening his senses. The colors of the sunset pierced his eyes with an intensity that was almost painful after the long hours of darkness. His legs felt as if they were made of rubber and would bounce to the moon if he did not restrain them. With each breath he tasted the salt from the sea. And all around him, filling him utterly, was the prayer for the earth, now taken up by every voice, male and female, and loud as thunder.

  During the last moments of daylight, when the setting sun seemed to melt into the far horizon, the druids stepped one by one inside the circle, each clasping a stone knife. They stood before the dressed fir, the effigy of the dead god, to give him their blood. With a single stroke each man and woman, undifferentiated beneath the gray robe of the holy seeker, slashed open a vein and spattered blood upon the white cloth of the sacrificial fir until it was bright red and steaming with spilled life.

  The sun disappeared. Within minutes, the sky darkened. The first stars shone.

  Then the wood surrounding the sacred circle was set ablaze.

  It was time for the dead god to come to life.

  As Taliesin took the final steps of his journey to the flaming circle, he saw for the first time the woman who would receive his seed. She was naked, as he was, painted and oiled so that her skin shone with the luminescence of the moon. Her dark hair, crowned with a circlet of apple blossoms, hung loose in wild waves down her back. Her eyes were glassy, distant, but her gaze met his, and in that moment Taliesin ceased to be a human man. He was the god of the sky, come to pour lightning into the earth. His desire welled up like a rage inside him; he had to be restrained from running to her.

  As he struggled to break free, a drum began to beat. The rhythm was a palpable thing: Taliesin could see the air explode in bright bubbles with each blow of the mallet on the cloth-covered log. Around the great oaks, tendrils of life snaked like smoke. The trees were alive, and their essence welled up into the chant and the beating of the drum.

  In the middle of the circle, the blood-soaked trunk quivered as the grass ropes suspending it over the ground were pulled taut by the druids' stone knives. In another instant the ropes gave way and the tree descended through the wreath of flowers beneath it, penetrating like a phallus into the waiting earth.

  Taliesin's own manhood stood rigid. Sweat ran down his body. His limbs trembled. Then, through the heat of the fire, he saw the goddess moving toward him.

  With a cry of anguish, he tore himself away from his captors and walked through the flames to meet her.

  He took her in the sacred circle as the god, drunk with the new life that surged through his body. They fell on the ground in a rush of wild hunger, oblivious to the presence of the others who closed the circle around them, aware only of the chant that beat through their veins with the drumbeat, the chant that was the prayer for the earth.

  Mother bring us life from death

  Mother bring us life from death

  He rode the pliable earth goddess in a fury. Life in death... He was reborn, potent, whole, inexorable.

  Life from death

  Life from death

  With a shout of triumph, he poured his seed into her, clinging fast to her flesh, to the soft earth. To life.

  Mother bring us life from death…

  The chant swirled around him like petals on the breeze. He rose above them, spiralin
g higher, above the body that lay spent on the ground beside the limp form of a woman, above the music and the drumbeats. There was no time here, no sound, no imprisoning flesh.

  He was free.

  Life from death.

  It was the voice of the Innocent, but she spoke without sound, directly into his soul.

  "Am I dead?" he asked.

  We never die, little bard. Even though the trappings of our lives fall away to dust, yet we remain, as do the gods.

  Taliesin felt himself being lifted higher until he was soaring through space, surrounded by the limitless stars. He flew toward one, the brightest, until its light enveloped and blinded him. There, on its surface, he trembled amid mountains of clear crystal born of pure, airless light. For this was the resting place of the gods, and their power shook him like thunderbolts.

  Far in the distance, the blue world of the earth, his home, faded into darkness.

  "What have you done?" he whispered.

  It was the Innocent's voice that answered. "They are leaving us. The gods wish to die. And when they go, they will take their magic with them."

  Taliesin looked for her, but he knew that he was alone in this wild, cold place. "But you said we never die!" he shouted.

  "That is so," the Innocent said. Her voice faded away.

  "Wait! I don't understand!" He looked around helplessly. There was nothing here, nothing…

  Then he caught a glimpse of something inside one of the crystal mountains, something that glowed with a brilliance more exquisite than the star itself.

  With a thudding heart, he saw it was a man. Dressed in black, with a thin gold circlet around his forehead, Taliesin recognized him as the man who had appeared in the vision he had experienced at his brother's castle, the vision that had caused the bard to leave behind all he knew to come to Mona to serve the gods. The figure in the mountain stood perfectly still, holding aloft a magnificent sword.