Lady of Avalon (22 page)

Moonlight brightened the eastern sky, but Dierna gazed straight up into a starry vastness into which one could fall upward forever. She was not here for her own pleasure, however. With an inner sigh she began to trace out the great constellations that rule the skies. Mortal sight could distinguish only the stars themselves, scattered in apparent confusion across the sky. But Dierna’s tranced spirit saw also the spectral shapes that gave the constellations their names.

High above, the Great Bear lumbered around the pole. As the night progressed, she would circle around to the west and drop toward the horizon again. The Bear was the heavenly analogue of the isles in the Vale of Avalon-observation of the other stars with which she shared the sky would tell Dierna what powers ruled the future that was coming into being now.

Her gaze moved southward to the constellation called the Eagle-was that, perhaps, the Eagle of Rome? It was bright, but not so radiant as the Dragon that coiled across the center of the sky. Nearby, the Virgin sat in untouched majesty. Dierna turned her head, searching for the steadier blaze of the wandering stars, and saw toward the northern edge of the western horizon the liquid shimmer of the Lady of Love, with the ruddy gleam of the war god’s planet close beside her.

Another ripple of color glimmered across the heavens; Dierna’s breath caught and she made herself breathe out again, knowing the herbs were taking her to a level where image and meaning were the same. Radiance flared from those two lights until she saw the god pursuing, the goddess radiant with surrender that was also a victory.

The key is love,
she thought;
love will be the magic that binds the warrior to our cause…
Her gaze, moving southward along the horizon, found the planet of the heavenly king.
But sovereignty sits in the south…
She blinked, her vision filled suddenly with images of marble columns, gilded porticoes, processions, and people-more people than she had ever seen gathered together at one time. Was this Rome? Her gaze swung wider; she saw the golden Eagles leading the Legions toward a white temple where a small figure draped in purple waited to welcome them.

It was magnificent, but alien. How should such folk as these care for the concerns of Britannia, away off at the end of the Empire?

Let the Eagle take care of his own! It is the Dragon we must summon to ward his people, as he has done before…
And even as she thought it, the starry Dragon became a rainbow serpent that uncoiled northward across the sky.

That opalescent splendor was overwhelming, and Dierna was swept, despite her discipline, into a maelstrom of visions that she could neither halt nor control. Colors became clouds, driving across a storm-scoured sea. Wind howled, so that hearing was as taxed as vision. The currents of force that guided her spirit when she journeyed over land were lost in this confusion of energies; it took all her strength to master the terror of the deeps, to force herself to stop fighting the storm and seek the rhythms underlying its dissonant harmonies.

Upon the surface of the sea ships tossed, even more vulnerable to the fury of the elements than she, for they were made of wooden planks and hempen ropes and crewed by creatures of flesh and bone. Her spirit sped on a gust of wind toward the largest, where she saw men heaving at oars. Tossed and turned as they were, they knew not where to seek a sheltering shore. Among that crew one man only stood unflinching, legs braced, swaying as the deck lurched and rolled. He was of middle height, round-headed and barrel-chested with fair hair plastered now to his skull by the rain. But, like the others, he peered anxiously across the waves.

Dierna willed her spirit upward, extending spirit-senses into the storm. She saw jutting sea cliffs at whose feet waves frothed among toothed stones. But beyond them was slack water. Through veils of rain she glimpsed the pale curve of a beach and the glimmer of lights on the shore.

Moved at first only by compassion, she sought the commander. But as she drew closer, she sensed the strength in him, and a spirit that would never be daunted. Was he the leader she was looking for?

She began to draw on the raw energy of the storm, building up a spirit-shape that even mortal eyes could see. Swathed in white, it walked upon the sea. One of the sailors shouted; in a moment they were all looking that way. Dierna willed a ghostly arm to move, pointing toward the land…

“There-can’t you see? There it goes-” The lookout shouted from his place at the prow. “A white lady, walking on the waves!”

Wind struck the water with a mighty hand, sweeping the waves and the fragile ships that rode them before it. The Dubris squadron had scattered. Marcus Aurelius Musaeus Carausius, their Admiral, braced himself against the sternpost of the
Hercules
and dashed spray from his eyes, trying to see.

“Hold fast,” came the voice of Aelius, who captained her. “Watch out for rocks, not froth on the sea!”

A swell as high as a house rose to starboard, smooth slope gleaming as the moon broke for a moment through the clouds. The deck of the liburnian tilted sharply, oars waving like the legs of an overturned beetle, but from the port side came the ominous crack of overstressed wood as oars, driven deeply into the water, caught and broke beneath the strain.

“Neptunus!” exclaimed the captain as the ship, shuddering, began to right herself once more. “Another gust like that and we’ll be under.”

Carausius nodded. They had not expected such a storm at this season. They had put out from Gesoriacum at dawn, expecting to cross the Channel at its narrowest point and make Dubris by nightfall. But they had not reckoned with this Hades-born gale. They were far to the west of where they should be, and only the gods could bring them safe to harbor now. The gods, or the spirit the steersman had seen. He peered at the sea. Was that a figure in white or a gleam of moonlight on the wave?

“Sir.” A dark shape staggered down the walkway, and Carausius recognized the hortator, the hammer he used to set the beat till clutched in his hand. “We’ve six oars smashed and two men with broken arms who cannot row.” The sailors were muttering, the note of panic sharpening their voices as spray sluiced over the benches.

“The gods have abandoned us!”

“No, they’ve sent us a guide!”

“Silence!” Carausius’ voice cut through the babble. He looked at the captain. Command of the squadron was his, if any of his ships survived, but the
Hercules
belonged to Aelius. “Captain,” he said softly, “the oars are no use in this sea, but we’ll need a balanced pull when it calms.” Aelius blinked; then understanding came into his eyes.

“Tell the foreman to shift men from the starboard benches to even the numbers, and run in the oars.”

Carausius looked once more at the sea. And for a moment then he saw what the officer at the prow had seen, the shape of a woman wrapped in white. She looked anguished, and surely it was not for herself, for her feet barely touched the waves. With a desperate entreaty, her eyes met his, and she motioned westward. Then a rising wave seemed to crash through her, and the image disappeared.

The Admiral blinked. If this were not some figment born of moonlight, he had seen a spirit, but not one that was evil, surely. In life, as in a dice game, a time came when a man had to chance all on a single throw. “Tell your helmsman to steer to port until we’re running before the wind.”

“We’ll go on the shoals if we do,” said the captain.

“Maybe, though I think we’re too far to the west for that danger. Even so, better to go aground than capsize, as we surely will if we’re struck by another such swell.” Carausius had been raised among the mud banks at the mouth of the Rhenus. The shoals of Belgica seemed friendly compared with this maddened sea.

The ship still bucked beneath him, but the change in course had brought a certain predictability to her motion. Now the waves, driven by the wind, were carrying her forward. Each time her prow slid downward he wondered if this time they would go under, but before they could founder the next wave would bring the ship up again, with seawater cascading from the figurehead and the weathered bronze of the ram beneath it like a waterfall.

“Steer to port a little farther,” he told the helmsman. The gods alone knew where they might be, but that glimpse of the moon had reoriented him to the directions, and if the apparition had not lied, they would find safety somewhere on the British shore.

The pitching grew a little less as they began to cut across the swells, though now and again a freak wave, cutting crosswise from the others, would break across the side. Half the sailors were bailing already. The ship would need the strength of her namesake to survive until dawn.

But, oddly enough, Carausius no longer felt afraid. When he was a child, an old wisewoman of his own people in the delta of the Rhenus had cast the sticks for him and pronounced him destined for greatness. To serve as admiral of a squadron had seemed achievement enough for a lad of the Menapii, who were one of the smaller German tribes. But if this vision brought them to safety, the implications could not be denied. Men whose birth was no better than his had risen to the purple, though never by command on the sea.

The Admiral stared over the waves.
Who are you? What do you want of me?
his spirit cried. But the white lady had disappeared. He saw only the wave crests, flattening at last as the storm passed them by.

Dierna returned to knowledge of herself a little before dawn. The moon had set, and heavy clouds were coming in from the southeast, blotting out the stars. The storm! She had not dreamed it, then. The storm was real and it was coming to challenge the land. A damp wind stirred her hair, and muscles grown stiff with stillness complained. Dierna shivered, feeling very much alone. But before she spoke to any other, she had to bring from the depths of her vision the images that must guide her decisions in the months to come. The movements of the stars she remembered clearly. But of her final vision there were only fragments-there had been a ship, tossing upon a wind-whipped sea, and there had been a man…

She turned to face the oncoming storm and lifted her hands.

“Goddess, keep him safe, whoever he may be,” she whispered in invocation.

The sun was just beginning to spark through the clouds above the Channel, glinting from brown puddles ashore and the grey waves of the sea, when a fisher lad of Clausentum, watching for the driftwood tossed up by the storm, stiffened and stared past the dim bulk of the Isle of Vectis toward the sea.

“A sail!” His cry was taken up by others. Folk gathered, pointing across the waves, where a square of salt-stained canvas grew steadily larger. Even ashore they had felt the strength of last night’s wind. How could any ship have lived in that sea?

“A liburnian,” said one, seeing the two men who sat at each oar.

“With an admiral aboard!” exclaimed another as a pennon went fluttering up the mast.

“By the tits of Amphitrite, that’s
Hercules
!” cried a trader, a big man who never let the rest of them forget that he was a naval twenty-year man. “I served as her helmsman the last two seasons out of Dubris before my enlistment ended. Carausius himself must be on board!”

“The one who outfought those two pirate keels a month ago?”

“The one who cares as much for keeping coin in our purses as for lining his own! I vow a lamb to whatever god has saved him,” breathed the trader. “His loss would have hurt us indeed!”

Slowly, the liburnian came about and began to beat around the bend of the Ictis, toward the wharves of Clausentum.

Traders and fisherfolk streamed down to the shore, and the folk of the village, awakened by the shouting, came after them.

The
Hercules
stayed run up on shore for most of a week, while the carpenters swarmed about her, healing her wounds. Clausentum was a busy port; and if repairs were not up to fleet standard, nonetheless her artisans knew their trade. Carausius took advantage of the opportunity to confer with the magistrates and whatever traders were in port at the time, seeking to find a pattern in the pirates’ raids. But it was noted that when he was not needed elsewhere he spent much of his time walking alone on the shore, and no man dared to ask him why he frowned.

Just before Midsummer, Carausius and the newly repaired
Hercules
set out, heading once more for Gesoriacum.

This time, the sea was as calm as glass.

In Avalon, the rituals of Midsummer were ancient; these customs had been old when the Druids first came to these lands. At the base of the Tor cattle lowed, scenting the fire the Druids had built for their blessing. Teleri was glad she had been assigned to sing with the other maidens around the other fire, the holy flame that had been kindled atop the hill.

She smoothed her white gown, admiring the grace with which Dierna cast incense on the flames. Everything the High Priestess did had such certainty-perhaps the word she wanted was “authority”-it came, she supposed, from a lifetime of practice. She herself had come so late to the service of the Mysteries, she found it hard to believe that she would ever be able to move so that everything she did seemed part of a spell.

Below, the cattle were being driven between the fires while the people cried out to the gods for blessings. Above, the litany was a recognition that all things, both light and darkness, must pass. The full moon waned and was swallowed by the night, only to be reborn as a sliver of light. The cycle of the sun took longer, but she knew that this moment, the longest day, was the beginning of its decline. And yet in the midst of midwinter’s darkness the sun would be reborn.