He taught her healing lore not even Marguase had known, secrets picked up as a boy in Constantinople, from healers he had known before Covianna's birth. And most valuable of all, she learned the greatest secret of alchemy, long sought by her tribe of master smiths, but never found. The simplicity of it set her to laughing softly in the darkness.
"To change lead—the basest dross—into gold," he murmured, nuzzling her breast, "all that is required is the philosopher's stone."
"What stone is that? Something found only in a far country? Worth more than all the gold in Rome?"
He chuckled. "No, nothing like that. The alchemist's fabled prize is no stone at all."
"No stone at all? But—"
He tapped her temple. "The philosopher's stone is the rock-solid knowledge of philosophy itself. What does philosophy teach a man to do? To look at the gross and ordinary world of clay, of lead and crass stupidity, and to see within each crass and stupid thing the shining sparks of divinity waiting to be set free. And how does one set them free? By seeing them in the first place and acknowledging their existence, through the philosopher's skill of symbolic sight. Any man can change 'lead' into the 'gold' of wisdom, does he but understand this one, profoundly powerful secret."
It was the source of Emrys Myrddin's power, Covianna realized with a wondrous opening to the possibilities it made suddenly real and shining. No wonder Myrddin had been revered as a prophet even as a child, when he had seen the world through his philosopher's eyes, trained by the best minds of the East. He had seen clearly where Vortigern's weakness and greed would lead both Vortigern and the entire Briton race—and had uttered his first profound "prophecy" in symbolic terms even a slack-brained fool like Vortigern could understand. Red dragon of Britain would fight white dragon of Saxony, and Vortigern was the inevitable loser.
The very utterance of the "prophecy" had been Vortigern's undoing, leading his own sons to betray him while uniting the people behind Ambrosius Aurelianus and his closest friend, Uthyr pen Dragon—chosen by the "dragon," by Emrys Myrddin himself, who had invented the "dragon" whole cloth to represent the whole of the British people. It was so delightfully simple, Covianna marveled that she had not seen it sooner. It was another mark of Myrddin's genius that he had shared the source of his power with no one, not even Artorius.
Until now.
And now it was her secret, as well.
There was not room in all of Britain for two powerful Druids to hold this same, volatile piece of information. She smiled, whispering into his ear and nibbling at his neck, and plotted and planned and smiled up into his trusting eyes. When the fortress walls were nearly complete and Myrddin's work essentially done, Covianna put those plans into action.
"I must leave for Glastenning Tor," she told him that night. "I have stayed longer than I should at Caer-Badonicus. I worry for my kinsmen's safety. I wish..." She allowed her voice to trail off forlornly.
"You wish what, my dearest heart?"
She brushed fingertips against his lips, drawing a deep shudder from him where he lay joined with her. "I wish that you would come to the Tor, for just a little while, even for a day, to overlook our defenses. Your advice would be worth so much, Myrddin, for you see with eyes other men do not possess. You see the strengths and weaknesses of a place, even as Artorius sees the strengths and weaknesses of an army. And you could personally collect from the smiths of my tribe our treasure trove of fine swords and spear points, made against just such a contingency and stored away at the Tor. You could see them safely back here, to arm the defenders of Caer-Badonicus with them."
"When the work is finished here..." he began.
"But there is nothing further here that needs your supervision. The walls are up, the cisterns roofed over and filled, the sluice gates and the decoys built, and the houses and cattle byres are going up at a grand pace. There is no reason, really, why you could not slip away for a day or two, to help my kinsmen prepare the Tor for invasion."
"An invasion which may never come..."
She frowned, converting the irritation into a look of worried fear. "There is no way to know that, for sure, and I would never forgive myself if I failed to do everything in my power to protect my kinsmen. Please say you'll come."
And he did, shuddering all the while.
They left at dawn, bidding farewell to King Melwas and King Cadorius as the rain continued to pour from leaden skies. "I'll not be gone more than a day or two," Myrddin assured them, "just long enough to see to the defense of the Tor's abbey and the townfolk at its feet. The runners coming in from Caer-Durnac assure us the Saxons are yet a week's march away, more than enough time for me to see to the Tor's defenses and return."
"God go with you, then," Cadorius clasped his arm, "and bless you for your help at Caer-Badonicus. Without you, we would have been lost, I fear. Come back to us as soon as you may."
Despite the steady rain and biting chill of the wind, Covianna enjoyed the ride home more than any other journey she could remember taking. It was perhaps twenty miles from Caer-Badonicus' windswept summit to Glastenning Tor, and considerably less than that from the Tor to the sea. Each day when the tides turned, the River Brue and the broad sweep of salt marshes meandering lazily along its low-slung, flood-prone banks, mile upon water-logged mile of them, filled up with brackish water flowing inland with a swirl of muddied currents.
With the tides and the filling of the marshes, the strange, upthrust jut of land known as Glastenning Tor rose up from the marshy lowlands, spending fully half of every day as an island, completely cut off from the rest of Britain despite nearly twenty miles between its shores and the sea. When the tidal marshes drained again, it spent the other half of its day as a high and dry hill firmly joined to the mainland once more, but surrounded by treacherous bogs, pools of brackish water, and long, landlocked oxbow lakes where saltwater fish swam in surprised dismay to find themselves cut off from the sea, easy prey to the thousands of waterfowl and wading birds and canny swamp foxes living in the marshlands.
The Tor never failed to inspire a ripple of awe down Covianna's spine. It was the Great Mother's teat, so the old stories ran, from which flowed the milky white spring dubbed Chalk Well. The whole of the Tor roared with underground water, buried rivers of it, pouring through deep caverns and spilling out into springs in a dozen or more places, here milky white, there blood-hued and iron-rich. Maps Covianna had been shown as a girl, learning from her elders the carefully hidden truths of the Tor, had revealed the great hill's sacred outlines in all their astonishing, mystical wonder. The Tor was the Mother, Her left breast jutting skyward where She lay on Her side, left leg outthrust in a long and elegant sweep ending in a perfectly formed human foot.
Her right leg was tucked up beneath Her, in the birthing position, with Her open birth canal spread wide, giving life to a little hillock just beyond Her sacred vulva, a hill which rose from the earth like an infant's head emerging from its Mother's womb. Bride's Mound, it was called, this infant's-head hill that was Covianna's actual birthplace. The Tor was beautiful and holy, filled with mystery, a place where Covianna's mothers and grandmothers had, for centuries, kept their greatest treasures and their sacred forges, down in the secret caverns, deep inside the body of Mother Brigit, who gave eternal birth to Virgin Bride. It was on Bride's Mound the smithies had built their reputations and their trade, not daring to profane the Mother's body with their anvils and hammers and glowing forges or the glass houses where Bride's silica-rich sands gave birth in turn to the lustrous glass for which the whole complex of hills and caverns had been named.