CHAPTER TWO
In which Bradamant is introduced to a Naked Sorceress,
a Dead King and her Destiny
Bradamant lay motionless for some time before she could trust her balance enough to painfully rise to her feet. Though she was stunned and bruised her armor had protected her from all but a few scratches on her face. Astonished that nothing seemed to have been broken she wished that the bushes that had saved her had not been equipped with thorns, even if the quibble seemed a little mean. The chilly drizzle that drifted from the now-dark sky was more refreshing than annoying. The droplets seemed to condense directly onto her, as though her skin were a cold pane of glass. She rubbed the cool moisture into her face with her long, flexible fingers. She squeezed her eyes shut tightly then reopened them. She glanced up at the now-invisible rim from which she had fallen, but there was no sign of Pinabel, only a meandering ribbon of indigo sky. She recalled the words he had thrown after her and ticked off one more score for which the evil Maganza family must be held to account. Now that it was too late, of course, she realized why he had looked so familiar and damned herself for her slow wits. Lowering her gaze, she saw the source of the light she had seen from above: an open doorway carved into the base of the cliff about fifty feet away, from which streamed a meager, oleagenous glow. Having nothing else to do, she picked up her helmet from where it had fallen and went toward the light.
The door was little more than an irregular hole in the rock. It was barely discernable as something created by artifice; perhaps it was merely a natural opening improved by the hand of man. But what man? Who would live in such a place but a hermit or an outlaw? Bradamant drew her sword as she ducked through the low opening. As she stood erect and saw what lay within, she could not repress a gasp of surprise and then of awe. She replaced her sword and removed her helmet, for that seemed the proper thing to do upon entering a cathedral.
At first she had thought it a cavern of unprecedented proportions, a cavern of Gothic perpendicularity, a vast, solemn chamber, its vaulted ceiling supported by a forest of slender alabaster columns. But she quickly realized, with a shudder of superstitious awe, that the fluted columns and the elaborate ornamentation were manmade. Or perhaps, she thought with a shudder, demon-made. The beautifully multicolored walls, which she had assumed were mineral deposits and incrustations of crystals, were resolved into wonderfully-detailed mosaics, tapestries and paintings. She immediately crossed herself, not wanting to take any chances.
The scenes and figures on the walls, half-hidden in the darkness, assumed an eerie liveliness in the wavering light and shadows that she did not like at all. They were not, as she had first assumed, scenes and figures from the Bible or the lives of the saints. She recognized many of them as representations of the pagan gods of Greece and Rome—since her education was not so strictly ecclesiastical as to exclude the study of either history or the classics. She was modern-thinking enough to realize that, considered as parables, even pagan myths often contained worthwhile morals; that ethical truths can come in many guises. However, as she looked more closely at the murals and tapestries, it was becoming evident that their artists had not been particularly interested in moral or ethical lessons. Indeed, these works seemed to be limited so exclusively to the various permutations of carnal lovemaking as to be obsessive. She felt her face grow hot with indignation and righteous embarrassment. The various abductions and rapes committed by Jupiter seemed to be a popular subject; it did not much matter that Bradamant knew that the bull having its way with Europa or the swan with Leda were in fact Jupiter disguised: she knew bestiality when she saw it. The conjugations of Psyche and Eros were illustrated with an unblushing candor normally reserved for medical textbooks. As were the randy peccadilloes of the fauns, satyrs, nereids, dryads and nymphs, to say nothing of Pan’s joyous and indiscriminate coupling with a startling and unlikely variety of wild and domesticated animals. There were baldly frank Dionysian rituals and reveling, ithyphallic Seileni. There were superb copies—if they were copies—of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidus, to which the Greeks had devoted an altar in honor of its perfect beauty, and his Aphrodite of Delphi (whose model had been Phryne of Thespiae, notorious for having been accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and who was acquitted only after her lawyer bared her naked body to the court, revealing that she “was even more beautiful in the unseen parts.” Such beauty, declared the awestruck judges, could only be divine). Bradamant was shocked to see Jupiter’s unnatural love for Ganymede graphically illustrated as was Apollo’s affection for youthful Hyacinthus. A pornographic frieze was dedicated to Ovid’s Art of Love and there were murals from Pompeii that may have been originals for all Bradamant knew. One of them was a shockingly explicit Atalanta and Meleager; Bradamant was glad to recognize Atalanta—she had always felt a kinship with that tomboyish heroine—though she certainly disapproved of Atalanta’s present company and activity, which she believed must surely be the libelous invention of the artist. She even recognized gods and goddesses older than those of the Greeks and Romans. Isis was there and Cybele, and Liber (from whom derived the word “libertine”, so little more need be said about her), and neolithic mother goddesses, and Atum-Re and Osiris and the scented starry vault of the night-goddess Nut; there was Min of Coptos and the virgin goddess Ninlil (who had once mourned to her lover Enlil: “My vagina is too small; it knows not how to copulate! My lips are too small; they know not how to kiss!”). Inanna-Ishtar was there, singing, “My vulva is moist soil; who shall be my plowman?” There were also gods and goddesses she did not recognize, whom for no special reason she assumed to be products of the heathen East—of the pagan Hindoo perhaps, who knew no better, or maybe the strange deities that must haunt Zeilan, Cathay, Manji or black Ethiopia. Among them, though of course she did not know it, were the Great Goddess Danu, first among the bloodthirsty love goddesses of the Irish, whose voracious appetites did not distinguish between mortal or immortal, and Lady Grainne, whom Merlin the magician knew all too well, and wild-eyed Freyja who by some quirk of shadow and light seemed to be offering Bradamant her talismanic necklace, the erotic magic of which had been infused by the four dwarves Freyja had slept with. Nor did Bradamant recognize Amma-Sky-Father and Amma-Sky-Mother, the Djanggawul and their daughters the insatiable Wawilak sisters, Shotkaman-Agwi and Betman-Agwi, Sky-Father Rangi and Earth-Mother Papa, Xochipilli and Xochiquetzal and the voluptuously evil Tlazolteotl. She did not know that the mosaics, whose glittering tiles winked like the golden eyes of passionate reptiles, represented the most voluptuous scenes from The Perfumed Garden and The Arabian Nights. The sloe-eyed houris with wasp-waists and joyful melon-breasts, who indulged themselves with singularly gymnastic abandon with their eagle-faced, black-bearded lovers, became weirdly alive under the shifting light; it was a submarine scene, filled with languid, sinuous, shadow creatures. Bradamant fell into a kind of reverie, fascinated in much the same way one cannot avoid gaping at a bad accident, or perhaps as the doomed bird is mesmerized by the cobra’s slow metronome. The figures writhed before her eyes. The coarse stone glistened like coral or oiled flesh, the intertwining limbs supple and subtle as eels. The rhythm of the ponderous ballet began to invade her.
The dark, eagle-faced, black-bearded men reminded her of Rashid, they were very like Rashid, and she could hear someone singing and she was certain it was his voice:
She hath breasts like two globes of ivory,
like golden pomegranates, beautifully upright,
arched and rounded, firm as stone to the touch,
with nipples erect and outward jutting.
She hath thighs like unto pillars of alabaster,
and between them, there vaunts a secret place,
a sachet of musk, that swells, that throbs,
that is moist and avid.
Was the song about her? Was it really Rashid singing to her? Bradamant, a prude who had no real natural talent for prudery, a puritan by training and habit rather than disposition, found herself dizzied, disoriented, torn between lust and loathing, prurience and embarrassment. She was a devout Christian scarcely eight centuries removed from uncounted millennia of pagan barbarism. From her own unnatural repression, from her subconscious world of ancient dreams and myths and fantasies, sprang an unexpected eroticism; sublimated sexual emotions that were as irresistibly instinctual as they were denied bubbled, fizzed and frothed like a fermenting wine, as though someone had suddenly shaken a sparkling champagne. And she fought that, fought it like a drowning man fights that final, fatal inhalation of fishy brine. And in the act of that denial—which had lasted all two decades of her life—Bradamant was as obsessed with sex as was her church, which was in turn as obsessed with sex as no other church before it, as obsessed with sex as the Egyptians were obsessed with death. Her mouth was suddenly dry and she licked her lips with a leathery tongue. The thirst seemed to pass through the length of her body like a hot wind, as though she were threaded on a white-hot wire. She discovered a song piping in her brain and though she had never heard the words before, she sang them silently toward the dark mosaic knight whose eyes, even though only chips of obsidian, glinted and winked with understanding:
When I contemplate thy cheek,
Formed in the image of the moon,
O my love,
It is in truth the effect of divine grace
That I am contemplating.
The reply seemed to come in a thousand voices, as though all of the gods, goddesses, heroes and heroines paused in their juicy recreations, craned necks and squinted eyes and unentangled limbs to better see what so rare a thing this girl was, and spoke to her in unison as though raising a great cheer:
The soul that hath not experienced true love,
T’were better never born.
Its existence is but shame.
Be drunk with love, for love is all.
Outside the pleasures of love there is no way to God.
It was no dour Christian prayer she had just sung and its answer had come from no choir of saints—certainly not from the shriveled breast of Paul, in any case. Indeed, she thought, it sounded suspiciously pagan, perhaps something from that false holy book the heathens called the Koran, which she had always confused in her mind with the luxurious tales of The Arabian Nights. It was certainly the coarsest of blasphemies. But then, she considered, had not the wise King Solomon sung to his love: “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!”? She had been told by her old priest that Solomon’s lush, sweet, passionate song was in reality nothing more nor less than a description of Christ’s love for His Church, but she had found that difficult to believe. What did the priest imagine Christ could possibly have been thinking when He said—according to the priest’s argument—that the Church’s “two breasts are like two young roes that are twins”? No, she had decided, the Song was neither more nor less than what it was: a joyous—and openly honest—hymn to human sensuality and love. How it had ever become part of the Bible, she had no idea—an editorial lapse, she supposed—, but it had once filled her with a bursting warmth and longing she couldn’t understand and could not reconcile with the ascetic religion of her church. It had placed her in a quandary: the words must be Godly, for after all they were in His book, yet the feelings they engendered seemed anything but chaste. There seemed to be no purpose to them—no end, no moral—except that of simple sensuality, and that, she had been carefully taught, was quite wrong. She had done her best to simply forget the verses, but the damage had been done. “I am my beloved,” she thought as the words rushed back to her and her tongue and nostrils filled with the smell and taste of olives and pomegranates, myrrh and figs and lilies of the valley, “and my beloved is mine. I am my beloved and his desire is toward me. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.
“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city, in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not.”
Her virginity resisted the onslaught of that hot desert scirocco, intoxicating with the blood and musk of tawny animals. “Oh!” she raged, her fists clenching until her nails dug into her palms, a droplet of red welling around each point, “I am a garden inclosed! A spring shut up! A fountain sealed!”
The houris’ chubby, mosaic ankles were belled and the rhythmic, insistent jingling seemed to echo the pounding of Bradamant’s blood, which made her veins twitch like firehoses, her mutinous body throb to the unfamiliar harmony, resonating like a sympathetic drum. There was the scent of patchouli and sandlewood and jasmine. The air reeked of incense and musk.
There was soft music on the piccolo.
The flickering illumination whose inconstancy had animated the lifeless people of oil, tempera, glass and stone came from a flame that burned atop a low, drum-shaped altar in the center of the chamber. The flame was uncanny; it was greenish, soundless, rising ten or twelve feet into the air, wavering and twisting slowly, like a ship’s pennant, but with a sinuous deliberation that reminded Bradamant of a snake. She suddenly had the uncanny premonition that the flame was in fact alive, intelligent, and in a rush of backlogged guilt and religious fervency she dropped to her knees and began to pray, which seemed to be the safest thing to do whether she be in the domain of God or Satan. But as the first words were leaving her trembling lips, she saw that a figure was standing just behind the flame—or perhaps within the flame, for all she could tell. The green sheath poured over the pale body like absinthe, flowing silkenly up the long legs, curling over the ivory stomach and breasts, as a mountain stream reluctantly parts for the sleek and mossy stones in its bed, like the caressing and curious tongue of the serpent. The figure took two or three steps toward the knight, emerging from the flame that parted as harmlessly as a silk curtain, and stepped to the edge of the altar and looked down upon the armored girl kneeling on the floor. Bradamant saw to her amazement that the figure was a woman, as white and slender as a tallow candle. She was clothed only in the billowing aura of her pale, golden hair, in much the same way that a blazing brand is clothed in flame or a ship’s mast with St. Elmo’s fire. At first she thought herself victim of yet one more illusion wrought by the deceitful illumination. Then she decided that she must be in the presence of an angel, for nothing demonic would dare be so beautiful; nothing evil could possibly be so full of light and grace. Perhaps that was not golden hair that floated around her shoulders and arms; perhaps it was her wings. She shuddered; somehow Bradamant found the possibility of confronting an angel no less frightening than a demon would have been.
In the glare of the woman’s pure light, Bradamant saw that the orgy she had imagined was in reality only a collection of tattered, stained tapestries, sooty old paintings and cold, crude carvings. The chamber now seemed dark, dull, tawdry and chill and the great fire that had raged within her was banked so that the heat of not even a single coal was left to warm her. She remembered that brief touch of passion no more than one might awaken from a long illness and remember the fever dreams.
“Please rise, Bradamant of the Great Heart,” the faerie woman said pleasantly, in a voice not at all unlike an articulate cello. “Have no fear: you have been led here by the will of God. When I spoke last with the spirit of Merlin, the great magician prophesied that you’d be taking an unusual path in order to visit his holy relics. He wishes to reveal to you something of your future.”
“Pardon?” said Bradamant, not making any sense of what the woman was saying. “I beg your pardon. What is this place? Who are you?”
“Welcome to the Valley of Joyousness, sometimes known to others as the Valley of Delight.”
“It seems somewhat misnamed to me, if you’ll pardon me for saying so.”
“Of course I do. Admittedly it was not always the dreary place you see now. There was in all the world no rival for its beauty when Merlin and Vivian first saw it. They didn’t know whether it was lovelier in the daytime, or at night when the moon shimmered full into its shadowy depths, like milk splashing into a deep pewter vessel.
“This place is the work of Merlin. Surely you have heard of him? This is his holy tomb.”
“Of course I know who Merlin was.”
Everyone knew the story of King Arthur’s fabulous magician, advisor and seer—of how he had been cozened and entombed by the treacherous Vivian—what Bradamant didn’t understand was what his tomb was doing in Frankland, and said so.
“There was once a palace on this spot,” explained the luminous woman, patiently, “of unprecedented grandeur, erected by Merlin magically in a single day for the woman he thought he loved. This is all that remains.”
“Are you Vivian?”
“Good heavens, no!” she laughed, unoffended. “My name is Melissa, and I came from a country very far from here in order to consult the legendary wizard. I am myself a sorceress of no small ability, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, and I wanted Merlin’s opinion on a small but important detail of my craft. In any event, I discovered, through him, that you were soon to arrive, so I waited here a month longer than I originally intended, just in the hope that I would meet you.”
“Me? Why?” said Bradamant, thinking that perhaps she was in fact still lying, unconscious, at the foot of the cliff and that this impossible conversation was entirely the product of a fractured skull, a bruise on her brain. “Why am I so important that there’d be prophecies about me or that you’d hang around this lonely place waiting to see me? It’s nice enough, I suppose, in its way, but in all honesty I can’t imagine that Merlin could be very good company, all things considered.”
“You’re much too modest, Bradamant,” replied the sorceress, stepping down from the altar though it was much too high for the single step she appeared to take, “and you underestimate Merlin.”
Bradamant was only half-listening. There were two things she had just realized about the woman who now stood not three paces from her: the first was that she was taller than Bradamant and she disliked women who were taller than she, and the second was that the woman was completely nude. Bradamant had never before seen another human being unclothed, let alone another woman—indeed, she had never even seen herself unclothed—and she was speechless and distracted with mingled consternation, embarrassment and fascination.
“Will you come this way, please?” Melissa said, “I’ll try to answer your question, though the answer will not be a simple one.”
Bradamant, thought that, dream or not, this was an interesting adventure and since adventure was adventure after all, followed more or less eagerly. If she had been meant to come to harm in this place, the harm would surely have befallen her by now. She trailed the shimmering woman into the dark recesses of the chapel. The sorceress had need for neither lantern nor torch: her phosphorescence was sufficient. Bradamant looked with some jealousy at the sinuous figure that glided ahead of her, as graceful as a meridian of longitude, her lustrous buttocks like twin pearls, undulating as rhythmically as the reflection of the moon in a trembling pond, the impossibly long legs, like ivory spindles, like dagger blades white-hot from the forge, swinging like lazy pendulums—it made her feel gross and clumsy and carnal in her armor. She wished she could tell whether or not Melissa’s feet were touching the tiles; she feared that they did not.
They crossed what seemed to be the apse of the subterranean cathedral, though its soaring walls and vaulted ceiling were all but lost in the gloomy, silent darkness. Soon Bradamant became aware of another light, a lambency against which even the sorceress’ aura seemed like a painter’s feeble attempt to duplicate sunlight with coarse, opaque pigments. The source was a great block of marble, as large as a cottage, glowing like an ingot in an ironworker’s furnace. It illuminated the surrounding chamber and the towering statues that circled the block. These cyclopean figures supported the looming roof on their bent shoulders, leaning over the mausoleum like the curious, gloomy spectators surrounding an accident victim. They were the images of the great knights who had formed Arthur’s round table.
“This is the tomb,” said Melissa, “created by Vivian after she had placed Merlin into a sleep that was deeper than death itself. His uncorrupted body still lies within, as cold and stiff as that day the wicked Vivian ensorceled him, but she could not murder his spirit—that was beyond her powers—and it still lives on.”
The tomb was featureless save for a single iron door. It swung open noiselessly at their approach. The sorceress, without hesitation, passed through it. Bradamant, after a moment’s hesitation, a shudder of superstitious foreboding, followed. As soon as she crossed the threshold, she was surrounded by an impenetrable mist of light, a luminous, opaque fog, and heard a voice that she knew must be Merlin’s. It seemed to come from the air itself, from every direction indiscriminately.
Welcome, most noble Lady, and may your God favor your every desire.
“Thank you, my lord,” Bradamant replied, not knowing what else to say, but rightly believing that common courtesy was never inappropriate. She did not know where to look while speaking; the misty illumination was disorienting. She held her hand near her face; it was invisible. Nor was there was there any sign of Melissa. “It’s, ah, nice to be here.”
I’m glad you like it. I look forward to seeing it from your vantage some day. I understand Vivian did a fine job. How is the weather?
“Rather dreary, my lord. It was beginning to drizzle when I arrived.”
I can tell you that sounds wonderful to someone who has to be dusted every few decades. However, I’m wasting your valuable time with this idle chitchat. There’s something far more important that I must tell you.
“Tell me, my lord?”
You, indeed, my dear Bradamant, and here it is, ready or not: From your womb shall spring children destined to bring honor not only to Italia but to all mankind. Two perfect bloodlines, yours and Rashid’s, each having originated in ancient Troy, are to be blended within you to produce the greatest of all the dynasties that have ever existed between the Indus, the Tagus, the Ister and the Nile, between the Antarctic and the Great Bear. Your posterity will include marquises, dukes, popes and emperors. From you shall spring the hundreds of generals and thousands of dauntless knights who by sword and wit will reclaim for Italia all her vanquished honor. The Golden Age will again live, under the august, just and holy rulers who shall be your descendants. In order to bring about this edict, which has been proclaimed by Heaven itself, which from the beginning of time has decreed that you be Rashid’s wife, continue your way with courage, remembering always that nothing will prevent God’s will from being done.
“But Rashid is a paynim paladin, Lord Merlin, an unbeliever, and I am Christian. Even God must know that there will be certain difficulties.”
Turning such a great knight to your faith will be one of the keystones of Agramant’s downfall and the foundation of the Pax Charlemagne.
“I didn’t know that you were such an avid supporter of the Christian cause, Lord Merlin.”
Heaven forfend! It’s only my affection for Arthur that compels me to take the Christian side over the Moors, at least in this case. Were it not for the sake of his memory, I’d probably back the Druids, wherever they are now. But I can see that I have a reason even greater than posterity: your love for Rashid and his love for you.
“He loves me?” she whispered, her heart thrumming within her armored breast like a captive hummingbird.
Oh dear. You didn’t know? Well, I’m probably giving away too much, but . . .
“I hardly know what to say, my lord!”
I don’t suppose there is much that I expect you to say. Trust in your God, no matter how bad things may seem, and everything will turn out for the best. And, Bradamant, my dear . . .
“Yes, my lord?”
Well, I was just going to say, if you happen to be in the neighborhood again some time, stop by and say hello, will you?
“Of course, my lord!”
There was no reply; the light dimmed and Bradamant found that she was alone with Melissa, who was just closing a huge leather-bound volume. They were outside the tomb although Bradamant had no recollection of passing through the door. She was disappointed; she had looked forward to seeing what Merlin’s preserved body looked like. Was he like the mummies of the Egyptians or was he pickled, like an egg or a sausage?
“Did you have a nice visit?” the sorceress asked pleasantly.
“I suppose so. He gave me a prophecy.”
“I thought he would. You’re very fortunate, you know. I don’t think that Merlin has spoken to an outsider in a hundred years.”
“I know that I should feel more grateful than I do.”
“He must have spoken of your future.”
“He did,” Bradamant said. “But I don’t know who these people are he spoke of, these people I and my descendants are to bear. Who are these kings and queens and emperors and knights? Are they all to be so perfect, are there to be no villains, no traitors? What of my own fate and what of Rashid’s? What will become of him and me?”
“I can’t tell you any more than Merlin did,” the sorceress replied, “whatever that was. I’m more human than he is. Perhaps I wouldn’t even if I could. Besides, what would their names mean to you? They haven’t been born yet, nor their children nor their children’s children.”
“But what then of Rashid and me?”
“No. No, you should leave here with a sweetness in your memory and not complain if we refuse to make it bitter.”
Bradamant didn’t like that answer one little bit, but she saw that the woman was adamant and deferred the question to a more appropriate time.
“But why Rashid? I’ve only met him once and that was in the midst of a battle, and not a single time since, though I’ve tried hard enough. He was a heathen warrior, but he had lost his helmet and was being sorely pummeled by an unchivalrous knight who was taking cowardly advantage of Rashid’s handicap. I couldn’t allow that, of course, no matter that he was my enemy. I threw him my own helmet, to make the fight fair, with the result that I sustained a wound that almost killed me.”
“Yes,” replied Melissa, “Merlin told me you were ill for quite some time.”
“I nearly died, but it wasn’t from the wound itself but from an infection that didn’t set in until well after the battle. Although the blow had nearly knocked me senseless, I recovered my wits and what with one thing or another I had other business during that fracas and lost sight of Rashid. Afterward, I searched every inch of the battlefield for him, but I didn’t find him. I’ve never seen him since. I feared he was dead and it was almost more than I could bear.”
“No, he is very much alive, as you have so cleverly discovered. If you’d care to know, he also searched that same battlefield for you, also in vain.”
“Did he really?”
“Of course. What did you think?”
“I feel so foolish, speaking of these things. I’ve told no one else—no one; I couldn’t bear to. And I don’t know if it wasn’t wrong to do that, or if it’s wrong to feel as I do for a pagan. I don’t seem to know anything. Nothing in my experience or education seems to give me the right answers, to fit this situation, and I daren’t ask a priest. I know what he’d say and I believe that my father and brothers would say the same thing.”
“Nothing could be wrong,” said Melissa, “that will have so much good resulting from it.”
“I know that, but it doesn’t really matter. I love Rashid and I will have him; whether it be for the world’s good or ill is of little account to me.”
“And does such self-interest bother you so much?”
“I feel that it should.”
“That’s only your training and your religion speaking,” the sorceress replied. “You’ll come to your senses. At dawn we shall take the most direct road to the steel castle where Rashid is being kept prisoner. I’ll guide you through the forest and as far as the sea. I will point the way from there, but I can go no further.”