Lucifer's Crown (41 page)

The heart's affection. The integrity of your soul
. She liked those ideas. She like his hand on her head, his fingers laced in her hair.

"Now. You have admitted you did wrong, and you have resolved never to do so again. But not until you ask for forgiveness, and forgive, can you be restored to the grace of God which you have been trying your hardest to reject, and yet which is there for you even so."

That subtle crackle was either the fire or the ramparts of her ego crumbling into dust.
Holy Spirit strong when my flesh is weak
—
from the world, the flesh and the Devil make me anew
—
when I open my heart to you ...
Heedless of her smudged and swollen face Maggie looked up at him. “I forgive Danny. I forgive Anthony. I forgive my poor pathetic self. God help me and take me back, yes."

Thomas extended his hand. “Come here."

She crawled to her feet. By turning sideways and folding her legs over his she managed to fit into the chair beside him. She worked her left arm behind his back and laid her head on his shoulder. Like a child with a parent. Like lover with lover.

On the hearth Dunstan stirred, stretched, and began to bathe himself. Each lick of his pink tongue sounded like a drop of water—the quality of mercy dropping as a gentle rain from heaven. Again tears welled from Maggie's eyes, not grief but gratitude. Thomas's thumb touched her cheeks, collecting the tears, and with them made the sign of the cross on her forehead. The dampness glowed hot and cold.

"In the Greek, the word ‘baptism’ means catharsis,” he told her.

"It would."

"
Ego te absolvo
. If you'll accept absolution from such as me."

"Oh, yes."

"
Pax domini sit semper tecum
."

The peace of God be with you always—in his first life the peace of God not only meant an actual kiss, it guaranteed a contract—when he'd come out of his vision at Old Sarum he'd given her the kiss of peace. She looked into his face, each eye lit by a tiny flame, the curve of his mouth no longer haughty as a Norman arch but soft as a Celtic hillside.
He's not going to...

Thomas kissed her mouth. Firmly, with a passion even more stirring for being controlled. Her breath stopped, then started again. She'd wanted to suckle the truth from his eloquent tongue. She'd needed to. And now she did, reveling in vanilla and cinnamon, incense and smoke. His lips and tongue were gentle, delicate, subtle. She kissed him back, giving him fervor for delicacy, and soaked pore by pore into his being.

When they at last separated she lay back against his shoulder in utter contentment. She'd been going about physical intimacy all wrong, she thought, throwing her body into the ring first and leaving mind, heart, and soul to play catch-up. And now, past hope, she'd fallen in love so deeply she wondered if she'd ever known the meaning of the word. Fallen for not only a priest, but a saint—which might be safer than falling for an ordinary man, but which also proved God wrote divine comedy.

Thomas murmured, “Her lips suck forth my soul."

"Shakespeare?"

"Marlowe. Dr. Faustus, inappropriately."

She smiled. “The love you take is equal to the love you make."

"Eliot?"

"The Beatles."

With a chuckle, Thomas pulled off his glasses and squinted at them. Maggie could see the smudges made by her skin on the glass. She offered him the wet, crumpled ball of his handkerchief, grimaced, took it back again. He shrugged and set the glasses down by the chair.

Dunstan scrutinized their intertwined limbs. Maybe he was sending an alarm through the Pearly Gates—got a backslider here, mobilize the seraphim. “You're not going to go off on a guilt trip?” she asked. “You know, put on a hair shirt and moan about Lancelot betraying his king for a woman?"

"For a queen,” Thomas corrected. “I cannot believe that acknowledging the power and mystery of the physical world with one kiss is a betrayal of any sort."

"Not like this it's not, no."

His smile deflated into a sigh. “I must confess myself to you as well, Maggie. I implied that I wanted to die. But now—now I want to live. Even if I were never to see you again, I would want to know that somewhere in this world you lived, joyful in the presence of God. For to me, Maggie, you are a pearl beyond price."

Maggie watched his lips forming the words she'd been dreading.

"But loving my life may well make its sacrifice all the more necessary. Because giving up something that has little value is no sacrifice...” His voice caught and broke.

She snugged her arms around him, willing her heart to beat in the same rhythm as his. “I love you. That's my penance, isn't it? Knowing that I might lose you just as I've found you."

"I'm sorry,” he returned, his breath tickling her temple, “that your love might bring you pain as well as redemption. Might. I don't know."

"I think we're going to have to pray not for a happy ending but for the right ending. As Eliot's Becket said..."

"...I have consented.” He cupped her face in his strong, capable, kind hand. He leaned forward so that his forehead touched hers. His lips moved an inch from her own, making Word and Flesh and Spirit into one. “Set me as a seal upon thy heart, for love is as strong as death."

"Yes,” Maggie said.

Dunstan slept. The flames died. Beyond the Word, the Lady had said, beyond the Blood, lay silence. But Maggie had never heard silence before. A rock thrown into the silence of this room would take a full minute to hit bottom. A minute in which eternities rose and flourished and passed away. A minute of infinite grace.

This is now.
Maggie lay back in Thomas's arms, secure in the peace of God which passed all understanding.
This is forever
.

Considering the long night of his own soul, Thomas thought, December twenty-first made an apt day of birth. He might have owed his name to that day being the feast day of St. Thomas, but the fact that this apostle was called Doubting Thomas was perhaps less than chance.

Rose contemplated the last morsel of her steak pie and pushed it away. “So Robin sent Ellen back into the ring with us, huh?"

"I wonder what else he's been up to recently?” Maggie emptied the teapot.

"Taking advantage of the season,” said Thomas. “A priest molesting the children of his parish, evangelist fund-raisers brought up on charges of embezzlement ... Well, one understands why even such intelligent individuals as Willie Armstrong choose atheism."

"Mick never called back to say what Willie wanted,” Rose said, “just that he'd left a message telling Mick to call him ASAP. Something about the Book, I guess, but I was hoping Mick would be here with us tonight."

"He'll be with us tomorrow,” Thomas told her. “For now, we must leave the lads to their own resources and God's help. Shall we go?"

The two women donned their coats, hats, gloves, and scarves like knights girding themselves for battle. Leaving the warmth of The Rifleman's Arms, they walked with Thomas into the foggy night.

The longest, darkest night of the year, he thought, a New Year's of a sort. He remembered spring lambs, midsummer poppies, a kingfisher above the Brue, deer on the stubble and curlews on the marsh. Now the Earth had once again completed its journey round the heavens, meting out the stages of existence. Of eternity. Of his life.

Once away from the orange glow of the street lamps, like candles guttering for lack of air, Thomas switched on his torch. The diffused light made the surrounding trees look like charcoal sketches on a gray background. The mud of the path muffled their footsteps. Another gate, and the trees ended. The path led gently upward, across an open field now concealed by the fog. At its far side they crossed a stile. “Here we are at the base of the Tor,” Thomas said.

"Weird,” said Rose. “You can feel it even though you can't see it."

Yes, the great conical upwelling of earth, a high place where earth and sky wed, loomed over them. “Like the Eildon Hills, the Tor is
locus terribilis
. As long as the relics are safe, Robin cannot tread this ground. But even at night his spies might could see us here, so this fog is an unexpected blessing."

"You specialize in following paths into obscurity,” said Maggie.

"I always find light at the end. Note the marker stone behind the bench.” Thomas climbed onto the first steep incline of the Tor proper. “The labyrinth may have been here since long before the birth of Our Lord, shaped from a hill by the same religious impulse that constructed such sacred sites as Avebury and Stonehenge. Then, like so many such things, it was forgotten until believers cared to search for it."

Rose's voice was muffled by her scarf. “Like the Zodiac?"

"The Glastonbury Zodiac is a product of recent wishful thinking rather than of ancient topographical features."

"Faith is a product of wishful thinking,” Maggie commented.

Thank God
, Thomas thought,
that the rebirth of her faith hasn't stilled her well-honed tongue
—whose felicities were of the flesh as well as the word.

"So when did
you
first figure out that the Tor is a three-dimensional labyrinth?” asked Rose.

"Soon after I bought Temple Manor. I'd viewed the hints in the Old Church in my original life, when rumor had it that the stone pavement contained some holy secret. Romano-British work, I thought, but parts of it could have been much older. It certainly suggested a pre-Christian geometrical awareness, even to my unenlightened mind.” Thomas paused. The fog distorted his perceptions, making the familiar path seem strange.

Ah, yes. “This way.” They moved off again. “A sixth century Greek, Hecataeus, wrote of a spiral temple here—perhaps to Apollo and his mother. And the Celtic myth of
Caer Sidi
tells of a spiral castle that guards the entrance to the Underworld."

"So after you met the Lady,” Maggie said, “you suspected there was an entrance to—well, to another dimension—here, too."

"To
Annwn
, the Welsh Underworld. Or
Tir nan Og
, the Otherworld, an island, as the Tor has often been during times of flood. When I arrived here during the latter part of the fourteenth century, I was obliged to conceal the Cup. Since the Story of the Grail is rooted in Celtic myth, where better than in Annwn?” Thomas's torch picked out the second marker stone. “Now we turn along the terrace. Slowly, the way can be both narrow and vertiginous."

The light of the torch picked out snowy patches, muddy spots, and broken and weathered grass. To the left the slope fell precipitously into nothingness. To the right the embankment rose just as precipitously upward into a darkly gleaming mist.

Here, at the precipitous east end of the Tor, the path kinked. Thomas was obliged to cast to and fro until he picked up the terrace again. They stepped carefully along the northern side of the hill and found themselves a short distance above the marker stone where they'd started. “First circuit."

"You haven't been back inside in six hundred years?” Maggie asked.

"I've threaded the labyrinth many times—some prayer is a laying on of hands, this is a laying on of feet—but I've never gone back inside, no.” Thomas led them down and then along the terrace immediately below the one they'd just traversed.

"Whoa!” Rose exclaimed. Maggie grabbed her hand, steadying her until she regained her footing.

"The path is uncertain here,” said Thomas. “We must stay inside the fence, even though the terrace is actually outside it. Have a care."

After a good twenty minutes of picking their way, they came out just above the bench and the lower marker stone. “Second circuit.” Thomas set a slow pace along the path at the very bottom of the slope, beside the fringe of the woods, at the perimeter of the labyrinth. At one point they had to divert back to the second path, the lower one disappearing into the surrounding fields, but before long they were back at the ascending route not far above the bench and the stone.

"That's three circuits.” Nothing like taking brisk exercise on a cold night—he could hear the breathing of the women mingled with his own. Beyond that the silence was profound, as though the town, the countryside, the world itself had disappeared behind the curtain of fog, not a wrack left behind. A faint scent of smoke hung on the air, but from what fires he couldn't say. “Shall we press on?"

He led the way upwards, past another stone and onto a path that meandered off to the right. The fog seemed a bit thinner here, less a curtain than a veil. That suggestion of rectangular solidity in the darkness above must be the tower at the peak of the Tor. “Excavations have shown a succession of forts atop the Tor, the last dating from Saxon times."

"Where else,” said Rose, “would you build ... Watch it!"

Maggie scrambled and grasped Thomas's coat. “Sorry."

"Feel free,” he told her, pulling her up by her arm. “Just a few more yards and we'll find another terrace ... Here we are."

Twice more he had to pause and consider his path. But still he felt his way onward. In due course they returned to the ascending route at the upper marker stone. “Four circuits,” he declared.

"Look,” Maggie said.

Through the mist appeared the softly glowing orb of the full moon. A hush lay over earth and heaven alike. The air itself seemed solid as glass.
Caer Sidi
, thought Thomas.
Caer Wydr
, the glass castle, yet another portal.
Ynys Witrin
, the Isle of Glass. The Isle of Avalon.

"The world in solemn stillness lay, to hear the angels sing,” Rose murmured.

Thomas smiled. “The circuits are shorter this high up. Come along."

They climbed the ascending route onto the shoulder of the hill and emerged from the last clinging tendrils of mist. Now the moon-circle appeared hard and bright, a window cut in the obsidian of night and adorned with a scattering of jewel-like stars. Billows of fog glistened in its light, shrouding house, street, automobile. Shrouding the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The top of the Tor was an island in time and space.

"Wow,” Rose said.