Lady of Avalon (28 page)

“There lies the difficulty,” answered Cerialis soberly. “It is hard enough to get my countrymen to look beyond the walls of their own cities, much less beyond our shores. As they see it, they have paid for protection, and should not have to pay again…”

Carausius closed his eyes; his head was pounding, as if someone were trying to split it in two. On one side, the responses drilled into him by twenty years in uniform railed against these provincials who did not understand that all the parts of the Empire depended on the strength of the whole. But the other, the self that had been born when the priestess spilled his blood on the soil, yammered that nothing, not even his oath to the Emperor, was as important as the safety of Britannia.

“I have done what I can to raise money, but by the means I have available there is little more to be gained.” Allectus’ voice seemed to come from a great distance.

“By the means available…” the Admiral repeated, an idea surfacing from his inner turmoil. If neither the Emperor nor the British princes would give in, then he had to find a third way. He raised himself on one elbow, looking at them somberly.

“The gods know I have tried to play by the rules! But if my duty requires me to bend them, then that is what I will have to do. When we take a ship, even the Emperor’s law allows me a portion of the plunder. From now on Britannia will receive a proportion of the spoils as well. I trust you, Allectus, to word our reports in a way that will…obscure what is going on.”

“One comes. Call the mists and send out the barge that will bring him to Avalon!”

Dierna draped her long veil over her head and shoulders. Her heart had begun to beat with unaccustomed excitement; she paused a moment, surprised it should be so, then took a deep breath and stepped out from the shadows of her house into the brightness of the summer’s day. She cast a critical eye over the priestesses who awaited her.

Crida, seeing the look, tossed her head. “Are you afraid we will not do you credit? Why are you so careful? It is only a Roman.”

“Not entirely,” answered the High Priestess. “He is a tribesman from a people not so different from our own, forced, like so many of our young men, into a Roman mold. And he is a man marked by the gods…”

Silenced, Crida covered her own face with her veil. Dierna nodded and led the way down the winding path. As they neared the shore, Ceridachos came out to meet her, dressed in all the Arch-Druid’s regalia, attended by Lewal, who had met their visitor before.

She wondered how the Tor would appear to the Admiral’s eyes. Over the years the first whitewashed wattle buildings had been replaced by stone, but they nestled against the side of the hill. Only the great Processional Way, with its paired pillars, had a majesty as mighty as the works of Rome, if different in kind. And the standing stones that crowned the Tor had been ancient when Rome was only a scattering of huts upon the seven hills.

The great barge of Avalon lay drawn up on the shore below the apple trees. It had been built in her mother’s time, large enough to carry horses as well as men, and it was paddled-not poled, like the smaller craft in which the marsh dwellers slipped through the reeds. Dierna stepped in and took her place in the prow, and at her word the boatmen pushed off and the barge slid silently across the mere. Before them, a bright haze glimmered on the water, veiling the far hills with gold. When they reached the middle of the lake, Dierna got to her feet, balancing with the ease of long practice, though indeed today the water was as smooth as a dancing floor.

She took a deep breath and lifted her hands, her fingers twitching as if she were spinning an invisible thread. The boatmen raised their paddles and the barge floated, waiting, on the threshold between the worlds. The spell that called the mists was woven in the mind, but it manifested in the outer world, linking one to the other by such movements as these. Her breath gathered power; she could feel the muscles of her throat begin to vibrate, though there was still no sound. Dierna closed her eyes, calling upon the Goddess within and gathering all her forces into one mighty act of will.

She felt the lurch of shifting levels and resisted the temptation to look, knowing that the instant between times was the most dangerous of all. In the years since the Lady Caillean had raised the barrier of mist to protect them, many priestesses had been taught this spell. But in every century there had been one or two who were sent out for their testing and disappeared, lost between the worlds, when they tried to part the mists to return.

Then a sudden damp cold swirled around her. Dierna opened her eyes, and saw grey water, and a blur of trees, and as the mists parted, the crimson cloak of the man who waited for her on the shore. Teleri was not with him. When they communicated through the Seeing bowl, the other woman had seemed to forgive her. Up to this moment, Dierna had hoped that she would come.

For a moment, her thought winged southwestward.
Teleri, I still love you. Don’t you understand? It was necessity, not I, that banished you from Avalon!

And Teleri, walking in her garden in the villa at Dubris, swayed, for a moment as dizzy as if she had been looking into the Seeing bowl. She stumbled to a stone seat and sat down upon it, and behind her closed eyelids she saw the Lake of Avalon. The image made her almost ill with longing.

Carausius is arriving there now,
she told herself.
He will sit by Dierna’s side, and perhaps she will allow him to climb the Holy Tor.

Had Teleri been wrong to decline the High Priestess’s invitation? As much as she had ever wanted to go to Avalon in the first place, she wished she could return. She had refused to go back, not because she no longer cared, but because she cared too much.

I wish them joy of one another!
Her fingers clenched in the folds of her gown.
As for me, if I ever return to Avalon, alive or dead, I will never leave it again…

“Behold the Vale of Avalon,” said Dierna as the barge passed through the mists once more and slid over the water toward the Tor. Carausius blinked and straightened, like a man emerging from a dream. The men of the escort, protesting, had been left behind to wait with the horses. But the priestess, accustomed to reading men’s features, had seen relief in their eyes and known that they too had heard tales of the holy isle. Even princes of the British royal houses were rarely allowed to tread this sacred soil. When there was need, the priestesses went out to them to bless the land.

It was not because Carausius was a man of rank and power in the Roman world that Dierna had extended this invitation, but because she had had a dream. It boded well for her purposes, she felt, that even at this season, when the demands on him were at their greatest, the Admiral had answered her call. But it was true that since Carausius had decided to use the profits from captured raiders to support his operations at the end of the preceding summer, things had gone well. The fleet had had an extremely successful season and had taken many rich prizes, whose profits were speeding the strengthening of the ships and the protection of the shore. Perhaps the enemy was too exhausted to trouble them.

Blue-robed priestesses stood beneath the apple trees with a line of Druids behind them. As the barge drew nearer, they began to sing.

“What are they saying?” asked Carausius, for the words were an ancient dialect of the British tongue.

“They hail the Defender, the Son of a Hundred Kings…”

He looked taken aback. “That is too much honor, if it is intended for me. My father poled a barge not unlike this one through the channels of the delta where the Rhenus flows into the northern sea.”

“The spirit has a royalty that transcends blood. But we will speak more of that another time,” she answered him.

The barge grounded and Carausius stepped out upon the shore. Crida came forward to offer him the cup of welcome, made of plain earthenware but filled with the clear, iron-tasting water of the holy well. Dierna was glad to see that, if her face showed any resentment, it was hidden by the veil.

Then she gave her guest into Lewal’s keeping, to be fed and shown around the buildings grouped at the foot of the Tor, while she led the priestesses back to their tasks. It was not until after the evening meal that they met once more.

“The Druid priesthood work their rituals on the Tor by daylight,” said Dierna as she led Carausius toward the Processional Way. “But by night it belongs to the priestesses.”

“The Romans say that Hecate rules the hours of darkness and the witches are her daughters, who use its shadow to hide deeds they dare not do by day,” he answered her.

“Do you think we are sorceresses?” The stone pillars that guarded the path were before them. She paused, looking back at him, and saw a tension in the tilt of his head and the line of his shoulders that had not been there before. “Well, there may be times, when the good of the land demands it, when that is true. But I promise I mean you no ill, nor shall I bind your will with any magic.”

He followed her between the pillars and stopped suddenly, blinking. “Perhaps you will not need to… There is magic enough here already to maze any man.”

Dierna held his troubled gaze. “So you
do
feel it! You are a brave man, Carausius. If you keep your nerve, the Tor will do you no harm. This much I will say-if my visions are truthful, you have walked this way before…”

He gave her a startled look, but climbed the rest of the way in silence. The moon, lacking only a day of her fullness, had risen above the hills and was climbing the eastern sky. They passed from darkness to light and back again as they circled the hill. By the time they reached the summit, the moon was sailing halfway up the heavens; the shadows of the ringstones stretched sharp and black across the circle, but the altar in the center was fully illuminated, and the silver vessel of water upon it shone as if lit from within.

“Lady, why have you brought me here?” His words were rough, but his voice trembled, and she knew that he was trying to control the very awareness he denied.

“Be still, Carausius,” she said softly, moving to the other side of the altar stone. “When you stand on your deck, do you not listen to the wind, and reach out to sense the mood of the sea? Be silent, and allow the stones to speak to you. You have seen Teleri look into the silver bowl, so you know it will do no harm. Now it is your turn.”

“Teleri was trained by you as a priestess,” he exclaimed. “I am a soldier, not a priest. I know nothing of spiritual things-any honor I have gained has been by using my wits and the strength of my arm.”

“You know more than you can remember!” retorted Dierna. “It is not like you to admit failure before you have tried. Gaze into the bowl, my lord”-her voice softened-“and tell me what you see…”

They stood facing each other while the moon rose higher, and if the time seemed long to him, to Dierna, accustomed to such vigils, it was a respite from the cares of the world. As the silence deepened, it came to her more and more strongly that in another time and place she had faced this man across an altar before.

Presently she saw him sway. He staggered forward, gripping the stone as he bent over the silver bowl. His head sank as if the water were drawing it. Dierna set her own hands over his, steadying him and balancing the power that pulsed through him with her own. She looked down at the bowl with the unfocused gaze of vision, and as the images began to form, knew that what she and Carausius were seeing was the same.

Moonlight shone on water; she looked on an island lapped by silver seas. Dierna had never seen it with her waking eyes, but she recognized the alternating rings of land and water, the rich fields near the sea and the ships in the inner harbor, and in the center an isle within an island, stepped and terraced and crowned with temples that gleamed pale in the moonlight. It was as great as the entire Vale of Avalon, but its contours, drawn larger, were those of the Holy Tor. It was the old land, mother of mysteries. Dierna knew that she was seeing the island from which the teachers of the Druids had fled, which now lay drowned beneath the sea.

Vision expanded; now she gazed upon the island from a terrace with a marble balustrade. A man stood beside her. Tattooed dragons twined the strong forearms that gripped the rail, and the royal diadem of the sun, its disk paled now with moonlight, gleamed on his brow. His hair was dark and his features were aquiline, but she knew the spirit that looked out of his eyes.

He turned to her and those eyes widened. “Heart of Flame!”

Uncalled and unexpected, Dierna felt her own need rise up in answer. He reached out to her, and suddenly the vision was swallowed by a flood of water that poured over them in a great wave.

Heart pounding, Dierna fought with a lifetime’s discipline to regain her composure. When she could see again, Carausius was on his hands and knees and the silver basin, overset, had spilled its waters in a shining stream across the stone. She hurried to his side.

“Breathe deeply,” she whispered, holding on to his shoulders until his shudders ceased. “Tell me-what did you see?”

“An island…in the moonlight…” He sat back on his haunches, rubbing his forearms, and looked up at her. “You were there, I think…” He shook his head. “And then there were other scenes. I was here!” He looked wildly around him. “There was fighting, and someone was trying to destroy the stones!” Frowning, he stared up at her. “It’s gone. I cannot remember anymore…”

Dierna sighed, wanting to take him in her arms as she had held that other one, so long ago. But it was not for her to tell him of the link between them, if he did not know. Indeed, she herself was not certain of the vision’s meaning, only of the emotion that had come with it. She had loved this man in another life-perhaps in more than one-and, thinking back over the time since their first meeting, she understood that she loved him still. She was a priestess, trained to control both heart and will, and even for the men who had fathered her children she had never felt more than respect and the passion of the ritual. How could she have been so blind?

“You were a sea king,” she said quietly, “long ago, in a land now passed away. Britannia’s bulwark has always been the sea. And here, some small part of that tradition survives. As for the stones…” She swallowed. “Long ago a man called Gawen died here defending them. He too was a sacred king. I do not know if you were he, or whether it is only that you, a warrior, have seen a vision of that fight. But I do believe that you have been reborn in order that you may serve once more as Britannia’s protector.”

“I am sworn to serve the Emperor…” Carausius said in a shaken voice. “Why has this been shown me? I am not a king.”

Dierna shrugged. “The title does not matter. Only the dedication, and you have made that already when you gave your blood to consecrate your fortress. Your soul is royal, sea lord, and bound to the Mysteries. And I think that a day is coming when you may have to choose whether or not to claim your destiny.”