The Broken Sword Page 27

  The black-robed men only stared at him, their expressions bewildered.

  Thanatos ran to the corpse, lifted an arm, and dropped it again with a shudder. "She's already cold!" he bellowed in a fury.

  Two of the magicians looked at one another. "Cold?" one asked diffidently, but Thanatos never heard him. Shrieking with rage, he ripped the Innocent's thin garments off her until her body lay naked, her withered little dugs of breasts hanging above the loose flesh of her belly, her arms and legs like sticks, her white hair streaming around her face, wispy as mist.

  "Witch!" he spat, drawing his dagger and thrusting it deep into her bowels for the first cut of the pentagram.

  Hesitantly, unsure of what to do, the priests formed a circle around the altar and began the chant for the rite of sacrifice which Thanatos performed with a vicious exactitude upon the body of the Innocent who had deprived the demon gods of her soul.

  On the way back, after they had set the fires, Thanatos did not speak or even look up from the dark water of the sea.

  Though Thanatos' ambitions never vaulted so high again, he lived for many more years. While forming new covens around Britain, he learned that the destruction of Mona had produced just the effect he had hoped for. Without the island at the heart of their religion and no member of the order qualified to succeed the Innocent, the druids slowly died as a spiritual force.

  There were occasional wanderers wearing the long gray robe of the old religion, but they came to be regarded as little more than beggars. After all, the druids had not touched the common people in any real way for years. Their magic was complex, and required years of study. They talked about the movement of the stars, and other things that were of no interest or use. While it was true that they had once given their blessings to tribes going into battle, there were now many holy men who were willing to enlist the aid of any number of new gods, from the Roman pantheon of deities to the Christians' merciful Father.

  In the decades following the massacre, there were other raids on the sacred groves throughout Britain and Gaul. It was all the same to Thanatos whether these places were burned by Christians or Romans or his own initiates or even rowdy youths with nothing else to occupy their time. What was interesting to him was that they were never rebuilt, and their inhabitants hardly mourned. Some ignorant mountain folk still set out offerings of food for the ancient ones, but for most of the people, the stories of the druids and their magic were little more than folk legends.

  At the age of seventy-three, Thanatos died of gout in Egypt, in his mistress' bed. He was a wealthy man, and left no heirs.

  The last sound he uttered was a scream.

  Down he fell, through a tunnel so dark that it caused him pain. He had no body—he perceived himself as a dim shape throbbing with sound, but a sound unlike anything he had ever heard. He in fact did not hear it, any more than he saw the darkness, but rather felt these conditions with some sense that he had never before used. Had his gods had lied to him, then, as the Innocent had warned? In exchange for his soul, they had promised him no retribution at the end of his mortal life. He had expected, when he closed his eyes for the last time, to enter the void outside the wheel of life, where he would rest without thought or pain or punishment. Instead, Thanatos found himself on a turbulent journey through what looked like what the Christians called Hell.

  Here he encountered all manner of beings, many of whom looked quite human, although he passed through them as easily as if they were made of dust. And when he did, he understood everything about each of them during the instant that their spirits met. One was a suicide who had killed her child at birth and then taken her own life in remorse. Another was a drunkard who craved a tankard of mead above all other things, even though he no longer possessed a body to drink it. He met the first man he had murdered, the leering old pederast, and one of his own initiates, who had died young in a fire.

  "What is this place?" he asked.

  "Why, it's home," the pederast explained as he wandered out of the tunnel and back into the village in Gaul where Thanatos had cut his throat with the blade of an ax. The man tried to speak with people on the street, showing them some wood carvings he had made, but the people walked right through him, unaware of his existence. The woman who had killed herself sat by a river, rocking the body of her drowned infant. The drunkard stood inside a tavern, his throat parched with thirst, futilely attempting to grasp the cup set before him. The initiate ran repeatedly out of a burning barn, his hair afire.

  But Thanatos continued through the tunnel. Floating shapes passed by, the spirits of the druids he had killed, bound by magic to this dark place, struggling to free themselves.

  "Mother, bring us life from death," they chanted, and still he did not understand what the words meant.

  Then he met the ancient gods themselves, vast pools of thought, deep as oceans, crackling with energy. A shriek rose from Thanatos' innermost core as he rushed through them, and he felt their mocking mirth.

  "You cannot harm me," he said. ''You are not my gods."

  "All gods are the same," they answered in colors, shades of blue and green. "We are channels to the source of All That Is."

  "Then why are you here, in this odious place?"

  "We are our own place," they answered, "complete in ourselves. You experience us because we have created you. Come into us now, and stay until it is time for us to create you again."

  Then he was swallowed, tumbled end over end into a void a thousand times darker than the blackness of the tunnel. In time he slowed, floating free, so much a part of the darkness that he could no longer discern where he ended and the void began.

  So the demon gods had not lied. He had found the void. And it was more terrible than the worst punishment that the human mind could invent.

  "Where are my gods?" he pleaded, his voice the merest vibration in the numbing space.

  He waited. For a year, or ten. Or a hundred, or a thousand. At last he heard an answer.

  "We are here," came a whisper from within him.

  When was he set free?

  No one had warned him that he would be leaving the void. Suddenly he was thrust upward—or downward, or sideways, he really had no idea—to slide through a warm, wet tube into a world he had nearly forgotten, and continued to forget. With the first inrush of air into his lungs, he lost all remembrance of Thanatos' life; by the time he was two weeks old, he had even forgotten the void.

  Only one idea remained with him, and in thirty-two years of his new life as Aubrey Katsuleris, it had never approached consciousness. Once, in a state of hypnosis during his teens, he had spoken the idea in a trance, but the therapist had utterly misunderstood. And once he had awakened from a nightmare screaming it. But it was not until now, when he stood in the magic circle with the Grail in his hand and Taliesin's memories in his mind, that he understood it completely, and was able to give voice to the prime directive of his life.

  "I will never go back there," he said aloud.

  Now it was within his power to fulfill that promise to himself. So long as he possessed the cup, he would never again have to languish in the nothingness of the void in which he had purchased a place at the cost of his soul.

  The Grail was in his hands now, throbbing with its great power, conferring its immortality to him with every beat of his heart, which would beat forever.

  Aubrey Katsuleris had, at last, beaten the demon gods themselves.

  Chapter Thirty

  Taliesin felt himself weakening. After his final, strong remembrance of the last time he saw Mona, his thoughts had loosened like thread on a spool, winding out of control. Mingling with his last horrible image of the Innocent were other thoughts—the vision at Beltane, when he saw Arthur as a king; the memory of the boy Arthur, when he pulled the sword out of the stone, both in that other life and in this one; the thought of Beatrice, who harbored the Innocent's soul, yet had not awakened enough to realize its power.

  Beatrice. At last Taliesin understood why t
he Innocent had come back. It was for Arthur, because the time of the millennium was drawing near.

  We shall all be back, she had said, the seekers, the ascended masters, the ones who have fallen on the path leading to the source. We shall all be alive at the same time.

  Of course. They were all here now, each soul poised to bring about a new era in the history of mankind, and they would be led by a great man, a king past and yet to be. Arthur, the man who was Taliesin's destiny, the fulcrum on which the lever of the gods would rise again.

  Only it seemed now that Arthur would not live to accomplish the task set before him.

  He would die before his time, just as before.

  In his lifetime, Arthur of Britain saw only one of his dreams, the unification of his country, realized. Granted, it was a big dream, and no one had ever accomplished so much before. Under Arthur, the tribal chiefs who had warred among themselves since men first walked upon the land drew together to live in peace and fight their enemies as a whole nation.

  But this was only the beginning of Arthur's vision. What he had wanted, what the petty kings under him found so shocking and unacceptable that they eventually splintered apart and brought about Arthur's death, was to stop fighting their enemies as well.

  The Saxons had been raiding Britain's coastline villages for decades. In the beginning of his reign Arthur, who was a brilliant military tactician, had led the petty kings and their soldiers in a series of counterstrikes that had effectively rid Britain of the foreign menace. The only Saxons who remained were those who had settled in the land they could not conquer, who had married British women and tried to set up small farms on raw land which had never been cleared.

  These were butchered regularly. The petty kings, now that they were at peace with one another, found their only outlet for the arts of war in the raiding of these Saxon farms. It did not matter that the heads of these homesteads were more often than not men who had lost an arm or a leg, or were otherwise too infirm to continue as warriors, or that their farms barely eked out an existence for the man and his family. It did not matter that many of them paid taxes to the nearest tribal chief, whether or not he owned the land on which the Saxons lived.

  The chieftains regarded these raids as sport, and objected strenuously when Arthur, as High King, asked in council that they stop.

  "How would you expect me to treat these savages?" roared Lot, king of Rheged, in whose vast tracts of wild land many of the Saxons had settled. "They have raided our coastlines—"

  "Not your coastlines," said King Cheneus of Dumnonia, whose lands occupied the southeastern shorelines of Britain. Rheged was to the far north and east, where the Saxon raiders even at the peak of their invasions, had rarely waged war. "It was not your people they murdered, nor your women they raped."

  "They do worse! They not only rape the women of my land, but take them to wife! They spawn their barbarian whelps right under my nose!"

  "Since we have banded together as one nation, the Saxons have not invaded us at all," Arthur explained patiently. "Those who remain in Britain have cleared wild land, and cultivated soil where once nothing except rocks existed."

  "And how long will it take these savages to attack us, their masters, so that they might clear yet more land for their brothers who wait across the sea, measuring the High King's weakness?"

  Arthur took a deep breath. "If you think it a weakness to ensure peace—"

  "At the cost of our land, yes!" King Lot bellowed, and the others pounded the table with their fists in agreement.

  "Look at Gaul!" one of the petty kings shouted. "Its kings have become nothing more than Roman whores! For four hundred years we fought the Romans, and we are a free people as a result. Would you have us give away that hard-fought freedom to a band of hulking savages?"

  "These Saxon farmers do not wish to impose their will upon us, as did the Romans," Arthur said. "They want only to join us, to become a part of Britain."

  "Bah!" Lot spat. "Let their foreign blood wet Britain's soil, for that is all it is good for."

  The others cheered their assent.

  Arthur waited, stone-faced, for the noise to die down before speaking. "Can you not see beyond the contents of your closed fists?" he asked tightly. "If we accept the Saxon farmers as countrymen, they will fight with us, when the time comes, to protect the land they have come to think of as their own. Instead of waiting each day, as we do, for the Saxons to rebuild their fleet and train new soldiers in preparation for a new wave of invasions, we can enlist our Saxon population to help us make treaties with them, establish trade—"

  "What do barbarians have worth trading for?" someone shouted. There was a general grumbling in the assembly. Several men spat on the floor.

  Arthur waved them down. "We know little about them," he said quietly. "But I have seen on the corpses of their slain leaders ornaments of silver fashioned with workmanship to rival the Celts'—"

  "Ornaments!" Lot exclaimed, his voice dripping with disdain. "Are we jewelers, then?" The kings all found this terribly amusing, sloshing the mead in their tankards and wiping their beards with their sleeves. "Their silver is worth nought to me, save for its weight when melted down."

  "Would you melt down their weapons, too?" Arthur argued. "For they are fine, as we have all seen. Perhaps they know more about metalworking than we do." The kings bristled at such a suggestion, but Arthur went on. "They may be knowledgeable in many areas where we are ignorant. They may produce wine, like the Romans—"

  "We do not need foreign wine," Lot said.

  "I would spit it from my mouth!" one of the kings vowed.

  "If it be made by the Saxons, it will taste like horse piss," the king of Dumnonia said, and the council swilled down more mead, to show their appreciation of their national drink.

  Arthur sat down, defeated. The kings were too drunk to continue the discussion.

  "I wish I could force them," Arthur said later to Taliesin. "Instead of killing one another year after year, we might all learn and profit from peace. And yet they will not listen."

  The Merlin put his hand on Arthur's shoulder. "War is the natural state of man," he said. "To ask your kings to do without war is to strip them of all they know."

  "They should know other things," the King said sullenly. "For all their talk about barbarians and savages, they behave little better than such themselves."

  "And so you see how miraculous it is that they will even consent to sit together at one table. The tribes these men represent have been fighting one another for more than a thousand years. Peace is a concept that takes time, Arthur. You cannot expect them to change so much overnight."

  "If we do not change soon, we can expect to be invaded again and again until, like a stag pursued by dogs, we are worn down by lesser men. That is already happening in Rome and, despite what my kings may say in their arrogance, the Romans are far superior to us in their knowledge of warfare."

  Taliesin poured them both a drink, trying to find a delicate way of framing what he had to say. "It is better, at times, for a leader to take his men along the long path to their destination, lest too many fall on the short one."

  Arthur looked up, annoyed. "What are you trying to tell me, Merlin?"

  "Only that it would be better to lose a few Saxon farmers than the throne of the High King."

  Arthur seemed stunned. "Do you think they would turn against me over this?"

  The old man shrugged. "You are not an absolute ruler. The petty kings must give their consent to any enterprise. If you insist in the face of their objections, it would not take much for these men to go back on their oaths of alliance and revert to a state of constant civil war—a state, I may add, in which they are quite comfortable."

  The King shook his head. "That is why we have no roads, no currency, and no trade with other nations."

  "One thing at a time, Arthur."

  "I do not wish to spend my life pandering to a pack of drunken louts!"

  "And yet you must, for i
f any of those drunken louts takes your place, all of your work will be undone."

  Taliesin had not known then how prophetic were his words.

  That day marked the beginning of the end for Arthur's dream of peace.

  The Saxon farmers and their families continued to be murdered in their fields for the amusement of their local lords until they abandoned their meager plots of land and took to living like fugitives in hidden colonies among the caves and forests, or adopted the life of highway brigands. And when the mainland Saxons once again attacked Britain, in larger and ever larger numbers, those who had attempted to carve out a new life for themselves on British soil felt not the slightest loyalty to the kings who had treated them worse than slaves. They gave their Saxon countrymen every assistance, from drawing detailed maps of Britain's interior to hiding whole battalions of soldiers along the inland routes. When the Saxon soldiers reached the great fortresses of the petty kings, they were joined by a waiting army of men whose greatest pleasure it was to join in the triumphant destruction of their former masters.

  "They are winning," Arthur told Taliesin in despair. "We can fight them on the shores, we can take back the strongholds of our nobles after the Saxons have taken the booty from them, but in the end our land will be lost to us."

  It was only then, when it was already too late, that Taliesin realized his folly in counseling peace with the petty kings rather than with the Saxons. For the kings, though they relished being able to make war with a foreign enemy again, had used the confusion created by the Saxon attacks to consolidate their own holdings as soon as the invaders left, raiding one another's lands as their ancestors had done. The greatest coup of this kind was accomplished by Lot of Rheged.

  When the king of Dumnonia and all his sons were killed in one fierce skirmish, Lot—who had maintained his own holdings by hiring a thousand German mercenaries—picked up the pieces of the fallen kingdom, marrying Dumnonia's queen so that he could lay legal claim to both the northern and southern extremes of Britain.