The Third Magic (15 page)

THE SECOND MAGIC

B
y the time Hal
and the others left Rapid City to find Arthur and bring him back to the fold, Taliesin was feeling ragged. He had Walked Through the Rock so many times in the past two days that he was no longer certain that he even had a body to dematerialize anymore.

Nevertheless, as he had no desire to remain surrounded by the loutish members of the press who were congregated there in such profusion, he knew he had to make one more effort.

As the reporter slogged after him, firing rude questions and generally making a nuisance of himself, Taliesin moved his hands in the ancient silent language of druid magic called Ogham, and tried to quiet his mind. That was the difficult part. His lessons with the Innocent had taken place on Mona, where silence was the norm and talk was discouraged. Here, in the middle of motorcars and cheap music from every doorway and people shouting everywhere, going into one's inner silence required all his powers of concentration.

Sinking, releasing, leaning farther into the magic as his hands moved in the untranslatable alphabet of Ogham, he prepared, first, to leave his body, and secondly, to maneuver the molecules of his body around the molecules of whatever obstacle he might encounter on his journey, and to do it all at the speed of thought.

He left his body easily. Most people who became druids knew how to do that before their twenty years of study even began. The second step was more delicate: It was the painstaking process of slowing his life force to the vibration of rock while concentrating, distilling his energy, directing the mass of moving atoms that was his body as if it were a handkerchief he were transporting telekinetically. Easy, easy, keep the mind clear, not the smallest fragment of thought must interfere with the process, right, move steadily through the rock, ignore the objects, clear, clear...

Brigid.

The name fell like an anvil on Taliesin's fragile transitional state. He came crashing into reality in the middle of the Oahe River, ten feet in front of a fifteen-ton barge filled with garbage.

The old man screamed; the barge struck him head-on at twenty-five knots. Within sixty seconds he lay floating in the jetsam in the wake of the vessel, quite dead.

"Good heavens," he said, looking aghast at his lifeless body as it drifted, surrounded by empty milk cartons and orange peelings, behind the garbage boat.

"Well, get it out of there," came the Innocent's voice.

Taliesin looked around in hopeful anticipation, but there was nothing to see. Without a body, he simply floated in the void between the worlds. "I say, I'm back in the Summer Country."

"It is the usual place for the dead," she said.

"Oh. Quite. Er, the body. Do you suppose it's—"

"Good as new," she said as Taliesin suddenly appeared, clothed in his old flesh and dressed in a dry robe of iridescent stars on a blue background.

"Why, thank you," he said, touching his head. "Barely a dent."

"It's just an earth suit," she explained. "Easily mended. Still, one should take proper care of one's things."

"Indeed," he said. "I became distracted. Most distressing."

"You should be long past that sort of mistake, Taliesin. How could you allow your concentration to break so utterly?"

"Oh, I don't know," he said, irritated at being chastised yet again by his teacher. "I was tired. I've had a busy day, and it was a difficult transfer. And ... Oh, yes. The name."

"What name?"

He cast about. "Brigid. Yes, that was what set me off. I remembered the name Arthur called when he was daydreaming—"

"I beg your pardon? You encroached on the boy's thoughts?"

"Well, I did have to find him," he waffled. "All right, yes, I did."

"You're worse than the worst parent," she said coldly. "No wonder he's left you. You take his future away from him, and then monitor his thoughts. For shame."

"Dash it all, I was only..." He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. "Never mind that," he said. "The point is, he was seeing Camelot before it was Camelot. He'd seen the same thing while he was with me. Except that in this new vision, a woman appeared. Someone I didn't know."

"Heaven forbid," the Innocent said dryly.

"But don't you see? There wasn't anyone named Brigid in Arthur Pendragon's life. Unless you count the ancient goddess Brigid, of course. But this wasn't a goddess. It was a flesh and blood person. A yellow-haired woman. And he knew her. He kissed her, Innocent."

"So?"

He hesitated. When he spoke, he did not meet her eyes. "So I would like to go there."

"Ah," she said. "Now I understand. You wish to learn the magic to take you to this place."

"This
time,"
he corrected.

"Yes," she said, smiling. "It's part of the Second Magic, you know."

"I know," he said, biting his lip.

"As I told you, Taliesin, the Second Magic springs from the first. You must become, you must believe, long before the creation can take place. First it is created in the mind. And so you must see it there."

"Yes," he said softly, his eyes closing.

"Do you see it?"

"I do. Perfectly."

"Good," the Innocent said. "Now create it for me."

His eyes opened, blinking. "But that's what I don't know how to do."

She looked dismayed. "Can you make it small?" she asked, holding out her cupped hand. "Like one of those pretty glass globes?"

He frowned. "Well, perhaps," he answered uncertainly. Then, straightening his shoulders and clearing his throat, he began.

Becoming very still, going into a place of profound concentration, the wizard called upon the elements to mix by his will in his hands, molecule by swirling molecule, a clear glass globe. "Careful," he whispered, fixing its reality in place, knowing that for a few moments, before his mind fully accepted the globe as existing, it might cease to be.

"Very good," the Innocent said sweetly. Then, with a casual wave of her hand, the globe grew beyond the dimensions of Taliesin's hand to encompass both of them and then slide beyond the horizon of a landscape filled with pine trees and boulders, where a castle of white limestone rose out of the morning mist.

"Good heavens!" Taliesin exclaimed. "Where are we?"

"Inside the globe."

Taliesin gave a small involuntary squeal of delight. "This is what I made?"

"Yes," she said. "This is the past you created."

"Look," the old man said, pointing in the distance. "There's the stronghold of King Leodegranz. He owns Camelot at the moment."

"Really?"

"It's an old graveyard," he said. "As I was telling Arthur..." He shielded his eyes and pointed toward a little rise in the distance. "I say, there's someone now." He dashed up ahead, panting and wheezing. "Blast it all, that's not the girl," he said.

The Innocent caught up with him. "The girl in Arthur's vision, you mean?"

"Yes. This one's got dark hair."

"Of course," the Innocent said. "That is Guenevere."

"What?"

"You created the past you wanted," she said softly. "I told you that was how it worked."

"Damn!" Taliesin looked out over the rolling green hills so full of promise. "It was a lovely time, though, wasn't it," he said, almost to himself. "A lovely, lovely time..."

THE SWORD IN THE STONE

Imbolc, The Festival of Brigid

February 2, 506 A.D.

G
uenevere walked quickly over
the frost-covered ground, her cape pulled tightly around her.

She had been coming to this spot since her childhood. It was her special sanctuary whenever she wanted to be alone, or not alone, or surrounded by magic. For there was real magic here.

Guenevere did not talk about it with her family, since they were followers of the New Religion, which frowned upon magic, and called it demonic. And among those who followed the old ways, there were few who took the magic seriously. Even the Great Sabbats like Imbolc, days once revered as times of high magic, had been degraded into little more than excuses for festivals. Indeed, it was now quite out of fashion even to admit one was religious.

Her father, King Leodegranz, took pride in being a modern man. Any talk about magic or the ancient gods was dismissed as foolish superstition.

Leodegranz hadn't always been so hard-headed. It had been he, in fact, more than his wife, who had taught Guenevere the stories of the fierce Celtic gods, making them seem so real that his young daughter could all but see them standing before her.

"And why not?" he would say, laughing, when his wife objected to his lurid tales of gods and goddesses changing the world through their magic.

"Because you make them seem like real people," she answered, only pretending to be annoyed.

"As well I should!" Leodegranz shouted. "For I do believe they were all real at one time, as real as you and I."

"Real people who could do magic?"

"Perhaps a little. Or maybe they were just clever. At any rate, they were remembered, and then the legends grew around them."

His wife really was shocked now. "The gods as real people! Such sacrilege!"

Leodegranz laughed. So did Guenevere, to please her father, but she remembered his words. The gods as people? Actual living people, who lived as we all did and suffered from the cold and wind and got knobby with old age? Was it possible? The wild, powerful deities of the Old Religion—Cerridwen, Arionhod, Gwion, Morrigan, perhaps even the Cailleach herself, real?

But then, Guenevere thought, how did they become gods?

She arrived at the place she had come to think of as her chapel. It was a copse of smooth grassland, roughly in the shape of a circle. In the middle of it was a huge rectangular boulder made of yellow rock. With a little imagination, one could think of it as a place where the ancients might have gathered to summon the gods and borrow their magic.

She had come to pray to Brigid, who was one of the great Triple goddesses, embodying the three aspects of woman: maiden, mother, and crone. Once the very soul of Celtic Britain, Brigid had suffered from the incursions of the Romans and, later, the Christians. Now, like many of the traditions that grew from ancient religious practices, the only vestige of Brigid's veneration was the festival of Imbolc, also called "Brigid's Day," in which all the nobles within a day's ride would gather to watch the goddess, in the form of a snake, emerge from the cold ground, thus signaling the beginning of the end of winter.

Of course, since even in those times England had almost no snakes, one small garter snake was prudently cared for year round for the express purpose of releasing it on Brigid's Day to the cheers and applause of the onlookers. If it was a fine day and the snake cast a shadow, then it was said that winter would be late in leaving; but if the day was overcast, those present—and freezing—would be heartened by the knowledge that spring would soon be coming. Either way, a boy from the kitchen was sent out as soon as the crowd dispersed for a day of stag hunting to locate the snake and put it back in its cage, to feed on pantry mice until the following year.

For the women, Brigid's Day held other fascinations. A pilgrimage was usually made to all the wells in the area, since on this day the water was supposed to be capable of healing sickness. A pitcher of water from one of the wells was brought inside the dwelling and used to cool fevers, cleanse wounds, and particularly to ease inflammations of the eye. In exchange, the women left bouquets of snowdrops, gathered in the morning, at the bases of the wells.

But for young girls, the most important part of Brigid's Day was the night before when, during sleep, one was supposed to dream of one's true love.

This was a tradition that bore no weight whatever with any women of the nobility, since they never had anything to say about whom they were to marry; but among the peasants, it was still common practice for girls to braid together the chunky, lopsided-looking rush crosses and then hang them by the hearth as prayers to Brigid to grant them a glimpse of their heart's desire while they slept.

Guenevere learned about it from one of the cooks, who showed her how to hold the straw and whisper the ancient prayers into the fragrant rushes.

"Will I see the man I'll marry?" the girl had asked excitedly the first time she made one of the crosses.

"Like as not," the cook had answered. "And if not this year or the next, keep asking of the Goddess to show you the face of your love, and you'll see it, this I promise."

"Did you see your husband's face, Cook?"

"Aye, that I did. And it was a right handsome face at the time, it was." She sighed. "Alas, he lived only twenty-four years."

Guenevere practiced sighing with her. She decided it felt very womanly.

Now, standing before the great yellow rock in the sacred clearing, she sighed again.

For the night before, as she slept beneath the rush crosses she had woven each year since the family cook had taught her how, the Goddess had indeed granted Guenevere a glimpse of her true love.

S
he had not recognized
him, although that was often the way with dreams. She would not even have recognized herself, except for the fact that she simply knew that she was both the dreamer and the one being dreamed about.

The dream had taken place on this very spot. She was sure of it, because she had seen the big yellow stone in her vision. She had run her hand over its smooth coolness and felt its power surging through her.

"Imbolc," she had whispered. In the old tongue of the Celts, it meant "in the belly," or the quickening of the year. On this day, spring let itself be felt. Beneath the snow bloomed the white flowers that signaled the promise of a new season of life. The world was pregnant, and spring was in her belly.

And the person whom Guenevere was in her dream had rejoiced with a sense of awe and reverence.

"Imbolc," Guenevere said again, trying to summon those same feelings. She smelled the sweetness of the air, the gentleness of the breeze, still cold but mild now, flowing in the wake of winter's passing. She knelt beside the yellow rock and touched it reverently. What came off them into her hands and body was a feeling of inexpressible bliss. Tears sprang to her eyes. She closed them.

And then he came to her. She was back in the dream, remembering with such intensity that it seemed to be occurring all over again, down to the last molecule of scent. He came, tousle-haired, grinning, filled with love for her.

His hands were fairly small, with long thin, fingers. They were the hands of an artist, even though they were callused and usually covered with burns from working with molten metal. These hands he held out to her in love, and she welcomed his embrace.

Then the dream had ended, abruptly and for no reason. Guenevere had awakened in the black of night, longing, longing for those hands that had held her so surely.

And then she remembered where she was, and who. She was the daughter of a noble, and therefore had no right to choose her own mate, or even to dream of him. Her father, Leodegranz, had already betrothed her, in fact.

The suitor he had selected was Prince Melwas of Orkney, a fairly handsome but decidedly stupid fellow from a region so far away that after her marriage to him, she would probably never see her home again. Orkney was cold and barren and windswept, and its inhabitants famous for their joyless taciturnity.

Guenevere's father had no wish to see her married to a man known universally as a dolt, but a bond linking the two kingdoms would have great advantages for Leodegranz. In addition to providing him with allies against the invading Saxons, such an association would strengthen both chiefs in any bid they made for the vast land holdings left by Uther Pendragon.

Uther had died some months earlier without leaving an heir, and the result had been almost immediate civil war. Each tribe made its own claims to the territory stretching from the southwestern shore of England inland to the place of the mysterious standing stones of the Giant's Dance. With Britain in such chaos, Leodegranz had no choice but to trade his only bargaining chip, his daughter, in order to survive during the coming years of tumult.

Since Guenevere understood this, it was with some guilt that she stood here now, in her sacred place, with the intention of invoking the ancient goddess Brigid. She simply could not marry Melwas, especially not after her dream. She had seen the face of the man she loved, and even though she had never met him—indeed, she was not even certain that he existed at all—she wanted no other man in her life.

Turning around slowly, her eyes closed, her hands raised in the ancient pose of supplication, she called out: "Brigid, great transformer, protector of women, you of the clear sight who has brought a vision of my true love to me, I call upon you to beg your help on this your day of greatest power...."

She did not know where the words came from. They just flowed out of her on a stream of emotion, resonating throughout her body and filling the sacred circle until the air was thick with magic.

"Bring my true love to me, you who are my mother and my friend. Make this a union that will harm none, but will bring joy and satisfaction to all, especially to my father, who has need of me...."

Just then she spied something shining in the brambles, shining so brightly that she was blinded by the flash of it. The thicket was very dense, and it was impossible even to see light behind it, so the sudden sparkle was more than mysterious. Momentarily forgetting her prayer, Guenevere picked up a stick and tried to part the thick thornbushes wide enough to get a better look at the gleaming thing behind it.

To her astonishment, the wiry branches cracked as if they were made of dry twigs. The stick in her hand, which was not particularly thick or heavy, chopped through them like the sharpest axe, until, standing before the object that had reflected such strong light, she dropped the stick and stood, awestruck, with trembling hands.

For before her, stuck into a piece of yellow rock just like the one that marked the middle of her circle, was a magnificent sword with a jeweled hilt and a blade that looked as if it had been made of pure starlight.

Backing up, feeling her heart beating wildly in her chest, she ran back to the castle to summon her father.

"L
ook!" she shouted, pointing
as she ran toward the thicket. A number of men followed behind, amused. It was unseemly for a gentlewoman to run so excitedly, but young Guenevere was so ardent that even her mother's stern admonitions meant nothing to her. "Hurry, Father!"

The noblemen with him had come for the hunt following the short ceremony of watching the snake dart out of its cage, and were in a jolly mood. "Ho, Leo!" one of them called behind him to the portly and puffing chieftain. "I'd say young Melwas had better practice his paces if he's to catch that daughter of yours on her wedding night!"

Leodegranz was not laughing. Inwardly he was blaming his wife for raising such a daughter as Guenevere, who would mortify her family for the sake of a girlish lark. It occurred to him that, demon that she was, she may even have done this as a protest against marrying Prince Melwas. He knew she hated the idea. An effigy, perhaps, Leodegranz thought with mounting apprehension. Oh, Gods, what would he do if Guenevere had set up a scarecrow in a field with some object that identified it as Melwas?

He felt his bowels loosening. That was what came of having an only child who was a daughter. She had been spoiled from the beginning. She had no respect—

The chieftain nearly tripped over the men in front of him, who had come to a sudden halt.

"By the gods!" someone said. It was Lot of Rheged, the most ambitious of the ten kings of Britain. Already his hand was reaching out as he moved as if in a trance through the thicket toward the gleaming sword.

"The thing's not yours by right," said old Cheneus, who was by far the oldest of the tribal chiefs. He had kept his head long enough for the hair on it to grow white by being not only a good warrior, but a fair negotiator as well. "It's Leodegranz's land we're on."

"Aye, mine and the Cailleach's," Leodegranz huffed. "These are the ancient graves of Camlod we're trodding upon. 'Tis the gods themselves placed that sword in the thicket."

"More than a thicket, Father," Guenevere said. "It's stuck into a great rock."

At this, all the men rushed forward into the brambles, heedless of the thorns. But again, the thicket broke to pieces with a touch. As the men moved through it, bits of thorn-bush and vine, dry as ash, flew about them in a virtual cloud.

Lot was in the lead, and broke into a run as he heard the others behind him. "It's no more than a sword," he said stoically, "and it'll go to him that takes it." With a small cry of triumph, he reached it, stumbling, and clasped both hands around its hilt.

But the sword did not budge. Lot tried again, grimacing, the veins in his neck standing out and he strained to remove it from the stone.

"This is someone's idea of a joke," he said irritably, drawing a dagger from its sheath around his waist and stabbing it roughly around the blade. "This is some kind of mortar, no doubt, with the sword placed inside it as a novelty. Is this your doing, Leodegranz?"

"It's not mortar," the chieftain answered. "Any fool can tell the difference between mortar and rock. And get that dagger away, Lot. You'll break the blasted sword."