Lady of Avalon (18 page)

“One other way to do what? Mother, what do you mean?”

Caillean sat back on her heels, eyes narrowing, for it seemed to her that this was something of which she too had once heard tales.

“A way to separate this Avalon in which you dwell from the rest of the human world. The Romans will see only the isle of Inis Witrin, where the Nazarenes have their church. But for you there will be a second Avalon, shifted just sufficiently so that its time will move along a different track, neither wholly in Faerie nor in the human world. To mortal sight, a mist will enfold it, which can only be passed by those who have been trained to shape the power.” Her shadowed gaze moved to Caillean. “Do you understand, Lady of Avalon? Are you willing to dare this working for the sake of those you love?”

“I am,” she said hoarsely, “even if it consumes me. I would dare more than this for the sake of the trust to which I am sworn.”

“This can only be done when the tides of power are cresting. If you wait until Midsummer, your enemies may come upon you, and I do not think that Gawen can last so long.”

“But the tides of Beltane are just beginning to ebb, and the rite that was celebrated here last night raised great power,” Caillean said swiftly. “We will do it now.”

It was very late before they were ready to begin. It would not be possible for them to transport the entire Vale of Avalon; even to affect the seven sacred islands was a task almost beyond imagining. Caillean had sent her people out in pairs, priest and priestess, to mark the points with fires kindled from the embers of the Beltane blaze. The others were gathered on the Tor.

At the moment when the stars stood still for midnight, Brannos stepped to the brow of the Tor, set his horn to his lips, and blew. His fingers might be too gnarled for the harp, but there was nothing wrong with his lungs. Softly at first, the horncall drifted out upon the shadowed air, gathering volume as if it were drawing strength from the night itself, filling the darkness with a music so profound that she thought an answering vibration must be echoing from the stars. Caillean felt her skin shiver with the chill of impending trance, and knew that what she was hearing was not entirely physical, for what sound produced by a human frame could fill the world? And by what senses of the flesh could it be perceived? What her spirit heard was the manifestation of the old Druid’s trained will.

She looked around the circle. They had repaired it as best they might, propping up the stones that were fallen and binding shattered pieces together, but tonight the real circle was built from human flesh and human spirit. The people of Avalon had been positioned around it, one circle inside and the other out, living extensions of the points of power that were the stones. The dance they had not had time for in the afternoon they would do now. Caillean signaled to Riannon to begin the music.

What she played was a stately, sprightly air, like a heron stalking through reeds, that had been old when the Druids came to this isle. The two lines of dancers began to move sunwise around the circle, separating to pass the stones, crossing between them, and, separating around the next, so that the stones were framed in meanders of light. Inward and out again, outward and in wove the dancers, the melody quickening with each circuit.

Caillean felt the flow of energy growing stronger, the visible light a manifestation of the power that was swirling around the perimeter of the circle. It wavered a little when it touched the broken stones, like water meeting a blockage in the bed of a stream. But water was mindless, following the path of least resistance. The determination of the dancers would carry this flow of force through.

As the dance moved faster, energy spun off from the circumference, thinning as it radiated outward. But the power that moved inward was contained, borne on by its own momentum in its own, slower swirl, a little uneven where the stones had been damaged, but strong.

The High Priestess sent a tendril of spirit downward, anchoring herself in the earth of the Tor. As many times as she had done this, there was always a moment of surprise when the power began to really flow.

The air within the circle was thickening. She blinked; stones and dancers were veiled by a rippling golden haze. Caillean lifted her hands to gather the light in. In a dimension just a breath away from this one, the Faerie Queen was waiting. If the Druids could raise enough power, and if Caillean was strong enough to focus it, the fairy woman could use it to draw Avalon between the worlds.

The energy rose in dizzying waves, the distortion from the broken stones increasing as it grew. Caillean struggled for balance, remembering a night when she had returned to the Tor across the waters during a storm, the boat leaping beneath them as Waterwalker struggled to bring her in. Friendly hands were waiting to pull them to shelter if only Caillean could toss the rope to shore. She had strained to do so, heaving the rope until she almost went over the side. But it had been a momentary easing of the wind that had saved them.

It was like that now. She staggered, buffeted by the surging energy, and could not regain her balance; she could gather the power, but she could not direct it away.

“Let go!”

Caillean did not know if the voice came from without or within. But she could not in any case have continued much longer. As the will that had sustained her faltered, the energy burst outward, and she fell.

“I’m sorry… I wasn’t strong enough…” Caillean knew she was babbling. She blinked, unsure whether she was conscious or this was all some dream. Gradually the world steadied. She was sitting with her back to the altar stone, pale faces swimming in and out of focus around her. “I’m sorry,” she said again, more strongly. “I didn’t mean to frighten you. Help me to stand.”

At least, she thought grimly as she looked around her, she had retained enough of her old discipline to ground the backlash of power herself instead of allowing it to devastate the circle. The others looked shaken, but they were all on their feet. She herself felt rather as if she had been trampled by a herd of horses, but the painful thumping of her heart was beginning to ease.

A stir from beyond the circle caught her attention. What were they doing? Four of the younger folk had gotten Gawen up on a litter and were bringing him into the circle of stones.

“It was his will, Lady,” said Ambios, with an intonation that added,
Even dying, he is the King…
They brought benches and laid the litter across them. The taut muscles of Gawen’s cheeks unclenched as the jolting stopped, and after a moment he opened his eyes.

Caillean looked down at him. “Why…?”

“To give you what help I may when you try again…” Gawen replied.

“Again?” Caillean shook her head. “I did all I knew…”

“We must try another way,” Sianna said then. “Did you not teach us the power of a triad in working such as this one? Three points are always much better balanced than one alone.”

“Do you mean myself and Gawen and you? Even to remain within the circle would be a danger to him. It would kill him to channel such power!”

“I will die anyway, of my wounds, or when the Romans come,” Gawen said quietly. “I have heard there is great magic in the death of a king. I think that, dying, I will yet have more power than I would have had in full health a week ago. You see, I now
remember
what I am, and who I have been. What life remains to me is a small price to pay for such a victory.”

“Does Sianna think so?” Caillean asked bitterly.

“This is the man I love…” Sianna’s voice wavered only a little. “How can I deny him? He has always been a king to me.”

“We will find each other again.” He looked up at her, and then at Caillean. “Did you yourself not teach us that this life is not all?”

Caillean met his gaze, feeling as if her very heart would crack. In this moment it was not only Gawen whom she was seeing clearly, but Sianna as well, and she knew that the spirit that shone through the girl’s eyes was one that she had sometimes loved, and sometimes fought, before.

“Be it so,” she said heavily. “We will take our risks together, then, for I think that we are all three bound into the same chain.” She straightened and looked at the others.

“If you also are still determined to dare this, then you must resume your places and stand with linked hands around the stones. But we will not dance this time. The damaged stones cannot anchor the energy. You must send it sunwise through your linked hands as we sing…”

Once more, silence fell upon the Tor. Taking a deep breath, Caillean rooted her being in the earth and began to vibrate the first note in the sacred chord. Softly at first it began, intensifying as more and more voices joined in, until Caillean began to
see
the vibrations as a haze in the air. After the note was established, she ceased to sing. Sianna and Gawen were silent also, but she could feel them using the sound to center and focus their energy.

That was encouraging, or perhaps it was only that she herself was now beginning to slide into a deeper state in which she could view all that occurred with a dispassionate eye. She deepened her focus, and began the second note in the chord.

As the harmony grew more complex, the hazy luminescence grew brighter. If the energy raised by the dancing had been more vigorous, this light appeared more stable. The more experienced Druids had taken their positions by the damaged stones, and their strength was balancing that of the others.

Once more Caillean gathered her own forces, and released the third note into the heavy air.

Surely, she thought as the higher voices of the younger women completed the chord, it must be working, for now she could discern in the glow a rainbow shimmer, which was gradually beginning its sunwise swirl. This was a power not to control but to ride, lifted gently by its strengthening flow. It only needed direction now.

“I sing the sacred stones of Avalon,” she intoned on a fourth note that was supported by the chord.

“I sing the circle of light and song…” Sianna echoed her.

“I sing the spirit that past pain is soaring…” Gawen’s voice was surprisingly strong.

“Holy the high place that holds us-”

“Grass on its slopes green growing-”

“Blossoms that blow on the wind-”

Voices chiming in sequence, they continued the incantation. In the rainbow light Caillean saw images of Avalon: mist veiling the pink gleam of the lake at sunrise, the silver-bright glitter of light at noon, shards of flame among the reedbeds at the close of day. They invoked the beauty of the Tor in the springtime, garlanded with apple blossom, in the green strength of summer, and veiled in the quiet grey mists of the fall. The song turned to green islands, to oak trees reaching skyward and the sweetness of berries guarded by briars.

There was none of the excitement of the first attempt, only a growing certainty that they were being lifted by the music. Steadily the power contained within the circle intensified, raying outward gradually to the perimeter of the territory the Druids had claimed. But the axis of the entire great and slowly turning wheel was the triad stationed at the altar stone. Caillean was aware of Sianna’s loving heart and Gawen’s brave soul, and of herself, moving beyond male or female to a wisdom that was both and neither, passing the focus from one to another as they sang.

And presently it began to seem to her that she could hear another voice, sweet with distance, a voice from the Otherworld. Its song was also of Avalon, but the beauties of which it sang were transcendent and eternal, belonging to that Avalon of the heart which exists between the worlds.

Nothing mortal could have resisted that calling. Caillean’s spirit fluttered like a fledgling seeking the skies. A tremor shook the ground; she swayed forward, clutching at the altar stone. The earth beneath her feet was no longer stable, but her link to the other two was a lifeline to which she clung as waves of vibration lifted her farther and farther from ordinary reality.

She could no longer see the stone or the circle, only her two companions, floating in a haze of light. She knew then that they were no longer in the body, for Gawen stood radiantly whole as he had been the night before, with Sianna by his side. Caillean reached out and they joined hands, and at the contact felt a momentary searing flare of power and then a great peace.

“It is accomplished…” said a voice above them. They looked up, and saw the Queen of Faerie as she is on the other side, shining with a splendor for which the beauty she sometimes wears among men is only a hint and a disguise.

“You have done well. There remains only the task of calling the clouds to hide the Isle of Avalon from the world. You, my children, should return to your bodies. It will be sufficient for the Lady of Avalon, who is accustomed to faring out of her body for longer, to bear witness, and learn the spell by which one may pass through those mists to the outer world.”

Caillean stepped away from the others. Sianna, smiling, began to turn, but Gawen shook his head.

“The cord that bound me to that form is broken.”

Sianna’s eyes widened. “You’re dead?”

Surprisingly, Gawen grinned. “Do I look dead? It’s only my body that has given up. Now I am free.”

And lost to me…,
thought Caillean.
Oh, my sweet boy, my son!
She started to reach out to him, then let her hands fall. He had gone beyond her now.

“Then I will stay here with you!” Sianna gripped him fiercely.