Dawn of Avalon (7 page)

I gave him the story of our escape from Vortigern’s fort. And I thought that I managed well enough at holding my voice steady, at keeping the lingering sliver of ice under my breastbone from entering my tone. But when I came to letting loose my arrow at Vortigern’s guard, the prisoner shocked me by putting a hand over mine.

“You had no other choice.” He spoke quietly, the blue eyes steady on mine, and all his energy and intensity of focus audible in the words. “No other choice but to stand there and die. You can’t blame yourself for choosing life.”

And then he drew back, took his hand from mine and looked away, as though shocked in his turn by the current of energy that had leapt between us at the touch. Or perhaps it was only I that had been caught by surprise; even after he had withdrawn the touch I felt the heat of his skin on mine. I was conscious, all at once, of how alone here we were.

I bent to take out the food I had brought. Handed him a slab of bread, which he tore into at once with ferocious, concentrated appetite.

“Have you—” I stopped. “Whether your visions show the true future or no, have you always been able to See as you do now?”

I thought for a moment he would not answer, or would choose to misunderstand. For a long moment he simply looked at me, muscles flickering along the grim line of his jaw. But then: “Always?” He gave a short, harsh bark of a laugh, eyes still bleak and hard. “I don’t know that, either. I’ve had this—this”—he sketched a brief, angry gesture in the air with one hand, finishing by spreading his palm out as though unable to find the word. “I’ve had this—whatever this is—since I woke in Vortigern’s prison cell three days ago. But before that, I don’t know. Before that, I don’t know anything at all.”

He glanced down at his own body, at the bruises that marked him, mottled purple and yellow across his chest and rib cage like lichens on one of the standing stones to the old gods. He laughed shortly again. “Vortigern could have peeled my skin off, inch by slow inch, and I still wouldn’t have been able to tell him what he wanted to know.”

He spoke more rapidly, now, as though he had tapped some inner welling of poison that must now gush until it ran dry. “I might as well have been born in Vortigern’s god-cursed fort. I’ve no memories from before. Not even my own name. I didn’t even recognize my own face when I saw it in the water you brought me to wash in on one of these past days.”

It was—oddly—hard to make myself touch him now. But I reached out and touched his head, running my fingers up beneath the fair hair. He hissed through his teeth when I found a place, just above and behind his ear: a hard knot of swelling, where he must have taken a fearsome blow, hard enough to crack the bone. But it had not bled, and he’d had so many other injuries besides this one that I had never found it before.

“I’ve heard of it happening.” My voice sounded as a whisper. “That a man may take a wound to the head and lose all memory of what he has been. Though not … not the other. That I’ve never heard of before.” His hair was smooth and fine beneath my fingers. I let my hand fall away. “Can you remember any family? Father or brothers? Or a wife?”

He shook his head. His eyes looked almost Sight-blinded as he stared at the braced earth that formed the opposite wall. But then his gaze cleared as he smoothed the hair back from his temples with both hands. “No.” He braced one hand against the space between his eyes. “I feel as though … as though I’ve been on my own, alone, a long time.” He gave another harsh laugh. “Though how do I know for certain? But I’ve no”—he raised one hand and let it fall, his gaze darkening as though he searched for the right word. “No memory of love or family, nor any feeling that I’ve left anyone behind, waiting and watching for my return. There’s only—”

He stopped, and was silent so long I thought he meant to stop speaking altogether. But then he said, muscles jumping again in his jaw, fingers curling as though he fought to keep from striking at something, “There’s only this nightmare that comes every time I shut my eyes. It’s all I remember of this past night. Walking through the dead and dying on a field of battle. And knowing that all of it—all the death and spilled guts and the stink of rotting bodies—is my doing. My fault. Knowing that I ought to be one of those lying dead in the mud. That I ought not be—”

“I know.” I remembered the nightmare vision I had shared during our escape. Grief and blood-soaked guilt, and no memory of anything besides. A warrior, a leader perhaps, who had stood against Vortigern and seen his war band crushed? There was, of a surety, no shortage of those. Though usually the gods had at least granted them a swift death with their men.

“It might be just that, though. A dream.”

“Just a dream.” His voice was rough. “I hope you lie better than that if Vortigern ever catches up with us. Still—” his voice changed, and his mouth twisted in a brief, wry smile. “Thank you for trying.” His hands clenched and he looked up at me. “I do mean that. Thank you. For that and for … what you did tonight. It was—” he stopped again, and I saw white dents appear at the corners of his mouth. “It was an act of courage. Even if I have no right to my life, you have saved it for me. But we both know that whatever else that vision is, it’s more than only a dream.”

“I—” I stopped and looked down at my own hands, Seeing for a brief instant myself in pale green and my brother Arthur, face flushed with drink. The tunnel walls seemed to press in closer; even the weight of my boy’s clothes seemed too much to bear on my skin.

I looked up at the prisoner again. “There must be a reason, though. A reason you’re still alive.”

A flash of something hard and bitter crossed his gaze. But then his eyes searched mine and he said, “You believe that?”

“I have to.”

He was silent a moment, eyes still on mine. Then he nodded once and looked away, gaze fixed on the opposite wall. “Maybe. Maybe it’s a punishment, then. What I See, now, instead of my own past. Maybe that’s why I was not allowed to die at Vortigern’s hand. It’s as though … as though I’m living time backwards. In the place where memory should be, I see instead … visions. Flashes. Call them whatever you like. But they’re always changing. Nothing is fixed. I look at Vortigern, and I see him screaming as he dies by fire.” The edges of his lips compressed. “Not that I’m likely to grieve over-much if that particular vision comes true. But”—he made the quick gesture of frustration again, raising one clenched hand and letting it fall. “But other times, I see him sitting on a throne, a bent old man, or dying at peace in a tapestried bed. I look at Vortigern’s guards, and I see them gulping ale and getting their miserable, starved looking slave girls with child—and sometimes I see the infants dying before they’re alive a full turning of the moon. Sometimes they live. But it all flows and shifts and changes like … like quicksand. I’ve no notion which visions are true. If any are.”

I watched him a moment, then said, my voice soft, “Do you see … have you seen any of your own future? Our future, after this?”

The muscles in his throat contracted as he swallowed, and he avoided my gaze. “Sometimes. Sometimes I see myself. Dying, by the sword, with these warrior’s marks still on me.” He gestured to the swirling spirals that covered his shoulders and chest. “Other times I’ve seen myself a white-haired old man with a harp, standing beside a king’s throne. But—” He stopped. Still, he didn’t look at me. “I look at you, and—I didn’t see it, at first. Not until you’d told me who you were, and then—”

He was staring at the tunnel’s earthen wall, and there was the same lost look about his gaze, fearless and yet exhausted beyond measure, as well. My fate, and yet now this man, too, had to bear the slithering premonition of it.

To hear me tell of it, it must sound as though I had Seen my own future in Gamma’s scrying bowl and decided I could do naught but sit like a terror-frozen hare, waiting for the jaws of destiny to close in. But that is not true.

 It was not merely one future I had seen, but many, branching like veins in a dried autumn leaf. I had seen myself running away, crossing the sea to Brittany on a leaking fishing vessel tossed by the storms. And my brother Arthur was wounded in battle. And without me, without a healer to tend him, he took fever and died. The petty kings and chieftains who had united under my father squabbled away what ground they had gained. And Britain fell to the Saxons, who ravaged and slaughtered their way across the land to the western sea.

I had seen myself locked away in a house of holy women. I had even seen myself murder the unborn son I was to bear Arthur with a purge of hemlock. In that future, I died, as well, bleeding my own life out along with the child. And without our child—the boy I would call Modred—to fight beside him, Arthur fell in battle and died, choking on mud and blood.

Future after future, but the tangled threads always unraveled to the same end: Without me, without our son, Arthur would die. Without Arthur, Britain would be utterly destroyed. One path, one future, I could chose, in which Arthur won a peace that lasted at least the span of a man’s life. In which Britain was battered, yet unbroken in the end.

Hate it as I might, I could not make it untrue. 

And whatever else, I knew at least that the future was no fault of this man’s, save that he was forced to stare down its maw whenever he looked into my face. 

I put my hand across his mouth and said, my voice soft, “I know. It’s all right. I know that, too.”

His lips were dry, his breath hot against the palm of my hand. But this time I scarcely felt the touch. I felt as though my own blood pulsed along the quivering lines of the Sight. The throb of something deep inside me was echoed a moment later by those same chiming currents I had heard before. Ancient as the oldest tale, or the presence I had felt within the rock at the end of the tunnel. Like a heartbeat of the earth itself, a voice that seemed to breath,
Yes. Go on
.
 This day is yours.

A part—a small part—of me stood back, astonished at what I did. But if I let this chance pass me by, when might another come? I had perhaps only this day, this one day to make mine. And after that, a road to walk that grew narrower with each passing turn of the moon.

And so I didn’t let myself hesitate, nor even think over-long. I took my hand away and leaned forward, touching my lips to his.

It was sweet, sweet as a mother’s lullaby or the first drenching rain of spring. For the first time since Gamma had died, I felt real warmth flood through me, and something hard and clenched inside my chest seemed to ease.

After the first moment, though, the prisoner drew back, hands firm but gentle on my shoulders to hold me away. “I’m not—” The dawn was truly breaking outside our shelter; I could see him more plainly now. His breath came quick and unsteady, but he gave another quick, wry twist of what was almost a smile. “At least I
hope
I am not the man to take advantage of a girl left without protection and on her own. I don’t—”

But I stopped him, laying a hand across his lips again. The circling currents seemed to brush, light as birds wings, against my skin. “Please.” I held his gaze. “You say you’ve been alone a long time—perhaps all your life. But here, right now, you don’t have to be.”

His jaw was stubbled with several days’ growth of beard, rough and prickling against my skin. He exhaled, just a brief burst of air. “You don’t know me.
 I
don’t know me. But I know I’m not—”

But I stopped him again. I felt as though I had crossed a bridge over a fast-moving current. Or been lifted up and set down, and not in quite the same place I had been before.

 I lifted one finger and traced the angular line of his brow, his jaw. “I know that you are not evil, whatever you may have done. I know that you have courage to face whatever comes. I know that you should not have to bear the burdens you now carry all on your own.”

He looked younger, now, seen as close as this, close enough that I could see tiny flecks of gold in the sea-blue of his eyes. He might perhaps be eighteen or nineteen, but no more, and no more than a few years older than I.

I swallowed to keep my voice from wavering. “You’ve seen yourself what the future holds for me. Please let me have this. Let me choose for myself now, with you.”

* * *

EVER SINCE GAMMA had shown me her vision in the scrying waters, I had felt, like the throb of open wounds, how much would have been different had I been the boy my father so craved, the boy I had now spent weeks pretending to be.

My mother would have lived and been hailed as queen. My brother Arthur would never have been born, and perhaps all the prophesies spoken of him would have been made over my cradle, instead. Who can know such things of a certainty? But betimes Arianrhod, mistress of fate and the silver wheel of the stars, seems a cruel goddess indeed.

And yet, that daybreak, I knew that I would never have traded places nor wished to be any other than I was. For in so doing I would have lost the wonder of that morning.

There is an old tale—I heard Gamma tell it once—of a maid of the Fair Folk, who fell in love with a human man and carried him away on a snow-white mare to live with her in the Otherworld. The Summerland, where there is no weariness, nor pain, nor sorrow, nor toil, but only day after day, perfect and unblemished as an endless strand of pearls.

And yet the maid’s human love sickened and pined there, for his old life in the human world. And in pity, she allowed him to return to his own home, his own kind. She rode back with him on the snow-white mare, and left him to a human life and human love. But as she turned back towards the veil between the Otherworld and this, she wept, and her tears fell onto the rocks and grass and soil where she rode.