Avalon (36 page)

Somewhere down there, undisturbed for centuries, lay a prize worth all the world. Only two people alive knew its existence. Embries, that fatuous meddler, was the other one, and he did not know where to begin the search. But she knew, and this was her advantage.

Three times she had faced the self-righteous old fool, and three times he had escaped the fate he so richly deserved. This time, however, she would not fail, because this time she would not strike at him until the Lia Fail was in her grasp. Meanwhile, she would content herself with making Embries suffer by tormenting his precious puppet of a king. She would enjoy that almost as much as destroying the old fusspot himself.

Directly ahead, she could see the leading ridge of an upward-jutting plateau — a flat expanse, tilted like a table on wildly uneven legs. One glimpse of that distinctive shape rising from the sea’s dark heart and her own heart beat a little faster in recognition. “Llyonesse”… the word fairly resonated in her soul…
home
.

It was this area that had been causing the most excitement in the oceanographic community. The water here was shallower than anywhere else between Land’s End and the Scilly Isles, allowing scientists a reliable means of measuring the daily alteration in the depth of the seabed.

The region was well known in Cornish folklore. Legend had it that bells were sometimes heard beneath the waves; in more superstitious times, the sound was widely believed to presage violent storms or to herald the loss of a ship. There were tales of phantom lights luring the unwary to watery graves and men who were dragged to their deaths in the arms of beautiful maidens. Stories abounded of fishermen glimpsing fair cities under the billows: high walls, towers, paved roads, bridges, and splendid palaces.

Although no one could ever manage to locate these many-towered palaces once they had been seen, the tales nevertheless gained credence because, in times past, fisherfolk were known to have brought up many curious objects in their nets: small jars and shards of Greek-style amphorae, bits of shaped stone incised with odd markings, beads of black glass and pink coral, metal ingots shaped like twigs melted into clumps.

It was not melted ingots or amphorae which thrilled the marine scientists now, however; it was that the seabed did appear to be rising at a slow but significant rate. Should the trend continue, they estimated, the leading edge of the plateau would be high and dry in a little over six weeks.

Geologically speaking, upheavals and inundations off the Cornish coast were so commonplace as to hardly rate a mention. In fact, the whole southern half of the British mainland had been in and out of the sea several times in the ancient past. The famous white cliffs of Dover may tower three hundred feet above the waves at the moment, but schools of fish once swam over those same chalk cliffs, and doubtless would again.

All the same, the appearance of a new landmass in British waters had not happened in recorded history; thus, the scientific boffins were understandably excited. They were trying by all possible means to keep their excitement to themselves, however. Already the zone was getting too crowded with tourists; the British Oceanographic Trust did not need dozens of international research teams on site as well. So, for the time being, they were keeping their findings secret, allowing the sight-seers to content themselves watching the gaseous bubbles which erupted at unexpected intervals in various places around the area. Meanwhile, they were accumulating data and building a profile of the entire underwater region.

Moira’s own interests could not have been further from surveying or bubble spotting. For her, the resurgence of Llyonesse meant her long vigil was coming to an end. Soon she would possess again the power that had once made her name a byword for fear in five languages. When she took up that power, she would resume the name. Until then, it must sleep a little longer among the legends of an older time.

She gained the ridge, and continued on over the plateau, swimming with smooth, rhythmic strokes of her long legs. The upland rising beneath her appeared an ordinary example of the typical sea floor: a murky expanse of muddy sand supporting scattered bits of oceanic vegetation. Here and there, rocky outcrops broke the green-gray monotony, providing shelter for the fish and interest for the searching eye.

One such outcropping appealed to Moira more than the others, and it was to this one that she was instantly drawn. She swam down towards it, descending further into the silent blue-green half light. The rocks in this particular grouping were oddly uniform in size and shape and, on closer inspection, did seem to be slightly out of place with their aquatic surroundings. They were large — boulder sized — and roughly cubic, the edges blunted but still traceable, like great, shattered building blocks.

Reaching the stones, Moira swam around and over the heap, looking at the shapes; she put out her hands and touched the pockmarked surfaces of the nearest blocks. Rough and pitted though they were, the stones stirred her in unanticipated ways.

Resuming her search, she swam in a wide circle around the heap of stone, examining the seabed. On her second pass, she found what she was looking for: a slight, yet still identifiable, wrinkle in the mud of the seafloor. Little more than a pucker rising a few centimeters from the muck, it would not have been noticed by anyone who did not know it was there.

Once seen, however, the discoverer would have been struck by the unusually straight line of the thing. At this point, the casual explorer would have concluded that he had happened upon a man-made feature of some kind and, indeed, it looked more than anything like a cable, or pipeline, had been laid down; silt and mire had covered it in the intervening years, reducing it to a mere bump on the ocean floor.

However, had they followed the line of the supposed cable, as Moira did, the curious diver would have learned that it ran unswervingly east to west and that it gradually grew larger. As it grew — widening and thickening — the straight line became less coherent. Gaps appeared and blocky protrusions jutted up at angles.

Moira pursued the increasingly rough line across the plane of the tilting plateau, following its descent into deeper water until… all at once, the line ended in a cairnlike heap of jumbled stone. Directly ahead, she could see the darker blue of the void where the landmass shelved away as if carved off by the blow of an axe.

Her heart writhed in frustration. So close, so very close… but not yet.

She swam nearer and looked at the sloping edge of the plateau disappearing down and down into the inky blue darkness. She would have to wait until the uneasy seabed lifted the island higher before she could get her hands on the prize.
Patience
, she told herself.
You have waited so long already; you can wait a little while longer. What is time to you
?

Still, she could not bear to go back without at least touching one of the stones, making contact with the home she had lost so long ago. Glancing at her diving watch, she noted the time remaining on her air tank, and dove towards the heap.

She reached the top of the mound, thrilled by the uniform size and shape of the massive stones. Looking back the way she had come, she followed the straight and unbroken line. From her vantage point, it was clear what that line represented: the remnant of an enormous wall. And the mound of tumbled stone had once been a high tower on a corner of that wall.

An image of that wall and tower came into her mind’s eye, and she saw it as it once had been. The wall was not high, but it was broad and wider at the bottom than the top so that the wall face slanted inward as it rose. The breastwork at the top was a single solid rim of stone; there were no crenellations, only pyramidlike projections, roughly man-sized, at regular intervals along the top.

In all, there had been five towers — one at each of the four corners and one over the wide, iron-clad timber gate at the entrance. The towers were taller than the walls, rising above the squat solidity of the ramparts like long, tapering fingers. Slender windows, twelve in all, pierced each tower near the sharp-peaked roof, allowing light into the round upper rooms any time of the day.

Moving carefully over the cluttered heap of stone, Moira began searching among the individual blocks. She found a place where several larger stones had fallen together in such a way as to form a shallow cave. After first trying her weight against the massive blocks, she reached into the nylon bag at her belt, removed a small diving torch, and switched it on. She shined the torch into the hollow to make sure there were no nasty surprises inside, and then went in.

The floor of this hollow cavity was littered with broken stone. Holding the torch with one hand, she began turning the smaller pieces over, examining them and setting them aside. In this way, she dug down into the heap, exposing fresh stone to the light. After shifting a dozen or so broken pieces out of the way, the torch beam fell upon an altogether different shape: long and slender, and flared outward at either end.

She knew, even before the light found it, what she would see: a long serpentine rib, running the length of the fragment — like an artist’s representation of water as a stylized series of waves, each crest and trough exactly the same.

Moira stared at the simple design, her heart thudding with the shock of recognition. She reached out a gloved finger to trace the pattern, and saw the fragment restored: it was a piece of stone tracery which had formed the inner frame of one of the tower’s twelve windows. She saw this, and into her mind flashed the image of a golden-haired young woman gazing out to sea, her face illumined by the fiery brilliance of the westering sun. High above, the keening cry of seabirds filled the cloudless sky, circling, circling and diving; far below the wave-figured window, the fretful sea, red as blood in the dying light, dashed itself upon the rocks.

There in the underwater cavern, Moira crouched, cradling the fragment of shaped stone to her cold breast, remembering.

She heard again the sound that had filled her with such piercing longing: a young man singing; he was sitting on the cliff top in the flame-colored twilight, singing a song of love to an unknown lover. She held her breath as the shimmering notes of the harp quivered on the air, and Taliesin’s matchless voice rose like a graceful and effortless prayer towards the heavens.

Oh, the desire awakened by that voice was more powerful than anything she had ever known. She wanted to possess the object of that yearning, to own it, to worship it. But even as she felt her heart lifted on the first waves of desire, she knew it would forever remain beyond her. It belonged to a world she could not inhabit. Even as she listened, transfixed at her window, the first seeds of envy were sown. In time envy would turn to bitterness, and bitterness to hate. What Moira could not possess, she would destroy.

When at last she stirred, she placed the carved stone fragment into the net bag, secured it, and began her long swim back to the waiting boat.

It snowed on Christmas Eve, and the press pack, with homes and families of their own to go to, decamped quietly following the evening news so that when James pulled back the curtains in the morning it was to a brilliant field of pure, spotless, glittering white — and not a single journalist in sight.

He enjoyed a leisurely breakfast for a change — tea and toast by the fire in his sitting room, looking out on the snowy hills. He called Jenny to wish her a happy Christmas, but her aunt said she had gone to early chapel with her cousins. Accompanied by Rhys and Embries, he drove into town for the Christmas Day communion service at St. Margaret’s Reverend Orr was in good form, his sermon pithy and mercifully succinct. The congregation, agog at the King’s unexpected appearance — even though James had been attending the church for over twenty years — sang all the carols, and enjoyed mulled wine and mince pies with him following the service. Then it was back to the castle for a quick lunch, after which he and Rhys dressed for hiking and took a long walk up into the forest rising behind Blair Morven.

After days indoors, James found the silence amid the snow-covered pines refreshing and the sharp, nipping cold a genuine treat. Cal, Shona, Gavin, and the rest of the castle staff had been given as much of the holiday off as possible. By five o’clock, however, almost everyone had returned, with assorted relatives and sweethearts in tow.

James called them together and handed out a few small gifts, and raised a toast or two with Priddy’s eggnog — in anticipation of a sumptuous Christmas supper following the interview, should he live through it, whereupon he had to abandon the festivities to prepare for the ordeal. Embries, Rhys, and Cal departed with him, leaving the rest of the guests to fend for themselves. Lest anyone be tempted to sneak away, Shona had brought a television from her room and set it on a tea trolley so she could wheel out the TV and switch it on for everyone.

The sixteenth century great hall had been given over to the TV crew, where it was decided the interview would take place. While James received a light dusting of make-up in the anteroom next to the hall, Cal followed up on arrangements with the production crew; Rhys, ever watchful, quietly made the security rounds, checking everything twice; and Embries undertook to encourage James. “Just relax and be yourself. Let people get to know you, and you’ll be fine,” he said.

“I don’t know why I let everyone talk me into this. I’d rather wrestle alligators.”

“You have nothing to worry about. Jonathan Trent is as scrupulous as they come.”

“Why do I find that somewhat less than comforting, I wonder?”

“Don’t worry, James,” he coaxed. “You can trust him to be fair. I’d be very surprised if he took any cheap shots.”

“Great. You’ll be surprised, and I’ll look like an ass.”

“You’ve done your homework well,” Embries assured James. “Your mastery of the details is nothing less than remarkable. We’ve covered every contingency five times over. You’re going to be splendid. Really.”

James nodded glumly. A criminal going to the gallows, he felt, had more to be happy about; at least the condemned man didn’t have to endure endless postmortem discussions of his performance.