Aileron was nodding slowly, and Levon, and Ra-Tenniel’s eyes were bright with his agreement. Within his own heart Paul felt some deep eons-old force behind the Warrior’s words, and as he accepted them, grieving, he felt another thing: the pulsebeat of the God. It was true. It was a dance that was not to be denied. And it seemed that it was Arthur’s, after all.
“No,” said Guinevere.
Every eye went to her. In the windswept silence of that desolate place her beauty seemed to burn like some evening star brought among men, almost too fierce to look upon.
Motionless astride her horse, her hands twisted in its mane, she said, “Arthur, I will not lose you again like this. I could not bear it. Single combat is not why you were summoned, my love, it cannot be why. Camlann or no, this must not be your battle.”
His face, under the greying hair, had gone still. He said, “We are caught in a woven doom of no escape. You know I must go down to him.”
There were tears welling in her eyes. She did not speak, but slowly she shook her head back and forth in denial.
“Whose place is it, then, if not mine?” he asked, scarcely more than a whisper.
She lowered her head. Her hands moved in a little helpless, trapped gesture of despair.
And then, without looking up, she said, with sudden, terrible formality, “In this place and before these many people my name has been besmirched. I have need of one who will take this challenge upon himself and unmake it with his sword.”
And now she lifted her head, and now she turned. To the one who had been sitting quietly upon his horse, not speaking, not moving, waiting patiently for what he seemed to have known was coming. And Guinevere said: “Wilt thou, who hast been my champion so many times before, be so yet again? Wilt thou take this challenge in my name, my lord Lancelot?”
“Lady, I will,” he said.
“You can’t!” Paul exclaimed, his voice crashing into the stillness, unable to stop himself. “Jennifer, he’s wounded! Look at his palm—he can’t even hold a sword!” Beside him someone made a curious, breathless sound.
The three figures in the center of the circle ignored him. Completely. It was as if he hadn’t even spoken. There was another silence, laden with unsaid things, with so many layers of time. A stir of wind blew Jennifer’s hair back from her face.
Arthur said, “My lady, I have known too many things for too long to ever deny Lancelot’s claim to be your champion. Or that, healthy, he is far more worthy than I to face this foe. Even so, I will not allow it now. Not this time, my love. You have asked him, sorely wounded, to take this upon himself, not for your sake, or his, but for mine. You have not asked him in love.”
Guinevere’s head snapped back. Her green eyes went wide and then they blazed with a naked, dazzling anger. She shook her head, so fiercely that the tears flew off her face, and in the voice of a Queen, a voice that froze and bound them into the power of the grief it carried, she cried aloud, “Have I not, my lord? And shall you tell me so? Would you tear open my flesh that all men here might probe into my heart as Maugrim did?”
Arthur flinched, as if stunned by a blow, but she was not done. With icy, relentless fury she said, “What man, even you, my lord, dares in my presence to say whether I have spoken in love or no?”
“Guinevere—” Lancelot began, but quailed in his turn as her burning glance swung to him.
“Not a word!” she snapped. “Not from you or anyone else!”
Arthur had slipped down from his horse. He knelt before her, pain raw as a wound in his face. He opened his mouth to speak.
And in that moment, precisely then, Paul became aware of an absence and he remembered the slight, breathless sound at his elbow a moment before, a sound he’d ignored.
But there was no one beside him anymore. He turned, his heart lurching, and looked north, along the downward-sloping path to where Uathach waited on the stony plain.
He saw. And then he heard, they all heard, as a ringing cry rose up, echoing in the twilight air between the armies of Light and Dark:
“For the Black Boar!” he heard. They all heard. “For the honor of the Black Boar!”
And thus did Diarmuid dan Ailell take Uathach’s challenge upon himself, riding forth alone on the horse his brother had brought for him, his sword uplifted high, his fair hair lit by the sunset, as he raced toward the dance his bright soul would not deny.
He was a master, Dave knew. Having fought beside Diarmuid at the winter skirmish by the Latham and then at the wolf hunt in Leinanwood, he had reason to know what Aileron’s brother could do. And Dave’s heart—halfway to his own battle fury—leaped to see Diarmuid’s first swiftly angled engagement of the urgach.
And then, an instant later, battle frenzy gave way to chilled grief. Because he remembered Uathach too, from the bloody banks of the Adein in the first battle of Kevin’s spring. And in his mind, replayed more vividly than such a memory should ever have been, he saw Maugrim’s white-clad urgach swing his colossal sword in one scything blow from the slaug’s saddle that had cleaved through Barth and Navon, both: the babies in the wood.
He remembered Uathach, and now he saw him again, and the memory, however grim, was less than the reality, far less. By the light of the setting sun, in that wasteland between armies, Diarmuid and his quick, clever horse met, with a thunder of hooves and a grinding shock of blades, a foe that was too much more than mortal for a mortal man to face.
The urgach was too large, too uncannily swift despite his massive bulk. And he was shrewder than any such creature could ever have been had it not been altered in some way within the confines of Starkadh. Beyond all this, the slaug was a deadly terror in and of itself. Constantly ripping with its curved horn, seeking the flesh of Diarmuid’s horse, running on four legs and lashing out with the other two, it was too dangerous for Diarmuid to do much more than evade, for fear that his own mount would be gorged or trampled, leaving him helpless on the barren ground. And because he couldn’t work in close, his slim blade could scarcely reach Uathach—though Diarmuid was a perilously easy target for the urgach’s huge black sword.
Beside Dave, Levon dan Ivor’s face was white with affliction as he watched the drama below. Dave knew how desperately Levon had wanted the death of this creature, and how adamant Tore—who feared nothing else that Dave knew—had been in binding Levon by oath not to fight Uathach alone.
Not to do what Diarmuid was doing now.
And doing, despite the horror of what he faced, with a seemingly effortless grace that somehow had, woven within its movements, the unpredictable, scintillant wit of the man. So sudden were his stops and starts, his reversals of direction—the horse seeming an extension of his mind—that twice, within moments of each other, he managed to veer around the slaug’s horn to launch brilliant slashing blows at Uathach.
Who parried with a brutal indifference that almost broke the heart to see. And each time, his pounding counterstroke sent Diarmuid reeling in the saddle with the jarring impact of parrying it. Dave knew about that: he remembered his own first urgach battle, in the dark of Faelinn Grove. He had barely been able to lift his arm for two days after blocking one of those blows. And the beast he’d faced had been to Uathach as sleep was to death.
But Diarmuid was still in saddle, still probing for an opening with his sword, wheeling his gallant mount—so small beside the slaug—in arcs and half-circles, random and disorienting, calculated to the hairsbreadth edge of sword or destroying horn, seeking an angle, a way in, a gap to penetrate in the name of Light.
“Gods, he can ride!” Levon whispered, and Dave knew that there were no words of higher, more holy praise that a Dalrei could ever speak. And it was true, it was dazzlingly true; they were watching an exercise in glory as the sun sank into the west.