He glides among dogroses, daisy carpets, larkspur and rambling bryony.
Every direction seems strange — and wholly natural: Acres of blooms charge the air with woven scents of summer, luring blue and white butterflies that flit among the blossoms light as faerie. Thrushes perched on stalks sling their fluting melodies into the fragrant morning. Larks spin overhead. And a rabbit peeks from the bunched grass, a fox’s dream.
This gesture of beauty as a moment, this immediate illumination of the prismatic day, fixes him, disembodied and astonished, to a self. Himself.
Alert as the living, he asserts, I am Arthur Rex. Incorporeal yes — yet still a king.
His vibrancy rolls aside the obsidian blackness of memory. And he fitfully recalls the many years he had spent with his wizard discussing arcane matters.
That uncanny soul had informed him about the hammer of creation. In the Hand of God, it had smashed the smallest corpuscle of light upon the anvil of nothing — and the entire cosmos had exploded into existence!
He had listened with a fly’s horror of the spider to the demonic knowledge the wizard had shared. He struggles now to bring forward what that devil disguised as a man had told him about the afterlife.
“Merlin!” he calls.
The sky darkens, and the gloomy west glows like a forge. “Where are you, wizard?”
Quivering stars struggle brighter. A faint sibilance of voices crosses the thickening night. He can’t discern what they are saying, these idle voices flung into silence. They are not voices of things that breathe.
Ghosts.
Among the airiest whispers, he recognizes a tormented memory.
Guinevere.
Simply hearing her hushed voice, the deepest night trembles inside him, and memories of wrathful jealousy and murderous reprisal wrench the love he still feels for her.
Anguish carries him swiftly toward a black horizon before hurtling to stillness — thrusting him all at once before her, his wife, as she had looked when she had forsaken him for Lancelot.
Guinevere pearls out of the dark. Icon in death of her pagan namesake, White Phantom, the queen’s specter advances among fluorescent streamers of fog.
Arthur Rex understands that he has entered the dreaming. Merlin had often spoken to him of the unfathomable depths of creation where One Mind dreams into being all things, physical and ethereal. Only now, as a wraith, does he accept the wizard’s revelation. He is in a dream. And it is not his own.
Ringlets of blonde hair shine in the twilight like a dragon’s hoard of spun gold spilling over Guinevere’s proud shoulders. The lucent glow of her hair silhouettes comely limbs and slender torso through a gown of voile fabric thin as mist.
Throughout their marriage, her feline figure had brought him to the margin of his senses, where artless desire foams up and deranges thinking.
No different now.
Incorporeal and unreal to himself, desire blazes anyway – until he meets her stare. Her indigo eyes challenge him, violet eyes of the sky’s deepest swept silences.
She does not recognize him at once. He is a shadow from her dim life in a physical existence where all is temporary. She resents this intrusion on her sacred labors. Among the sapphire palaces of the bornless, she has made herself useful.
How useless is this memory from long ago? She doesn’t want to know. But timeless, tireless intelligence has made the decision and delivered her here before this vaguely familiar wraith on his way to somewhere else.
Arthur quails. The gorgon intensity in his wife’s stare makes a mask of her famous beauty. Oceanic fathoms of vibrant power thrum from beyond the moment, intensifying.
Guinevere’s svelte apparition flares like spume across the dark, into the invisible, before some prodigious hidden order gathers her threads and filaments of thinning light and reshapes her suzerain loveliness to stand naked before him.
Arthur’s ghost takes an involuntary step forward, peering to see if this is truly his Guinevere. Voice strained, he whispers her pillow name, “Petal.”
A flicker of sorrow for what she glimpses in him touches her voice, “Big Bear.”
The intimacy of their pet names from another life sets them apart yet together, on a fragile bridge, in a luminous moment shared in darkness.
“Why are you here, Big Bear?”
Arthur stares at her, silent. The sound of her endearment has jarred him. He steps back to assess the startling encounter.
Winter twilight casts opal shadows across feathery grass and thorn hedges of a disarrayed garden. Mists swirl upon an unfelt wind. Stars, impossibly bright, big as snowflakes, shine in patterns long forgotten since before the age of ice. Their diffuse starlight softly illuminates vaporous phantoms wandering oblique paths through the air.
Arthur discerns old comrades in the swift shadows, horsemen bearing swords in battlesmoke — an ursine profile of Kyner, his tribal father, burly even as a shade — and there, the magnificent neck and muscular shoulders of Llamrei his beloved warhorse!
In the far distance, under cinnabar streaks of sunset, lordly towers glow with last light. Camelot’s pennants and banners barter with the wind.
The turbulent brume parts, and Guinevere is before him again, much closer, much older, her marvelous violet eyes gazing from out the folds of a benevolent crone’s face.
He appears to her in purple tunic and crimson-thewed sandals. His slim, floriate crown hovers ghostly over his head, a gleam of gold borrowed from the twilight. Though he doesn’t see it, he knows it’s there.
“You are new among the waking dead,” the old woman observes.
“Merlin unearthed me.”
“He is Satan’s own. I warned you.”
She had. But he had paid no heed. More neglect. The memory of it resurfaces his pain, the betrayal that haunts him even in the hereafter.
“You broke our oath,” he says, voice low, hoarse with longing and reproach. “I loved you, and you—”
“I lived,” she interrupts, her voice steady but not unkind. “Arthur, you bound me to a world I did not choose. I was never meant to be a queen of courts and knights. My spirit was born of the old ways, the watercourse rhythms of the land, the unseen forces that whisper and howl in the flow. I gave you what I could, for the sake of our two tribes, but I could not give you my soul.”
Arthur’s ghost flickers. His form shifts with his rage and sorrow. Far into the basilisk grotto of himself, among burbling mudpots of resentment, he enters a geode cavern where mirroring facets of dark amethyst reflect many times over the pinched features of his only progeny – Mordred, pallid and angular, his rigid stare black as bore holes.
The king speaks to the crone in a voice from the back of that cave, “You bore no children. Your barren womb let my regal line die with me.”
Guinevere’s gaze meets his, steady as heartbreak. “I did not want your children.”
Silence. The words cut sharper than any blade. A breathless wraith, Arthur’s breath is the wind itself, sweeping him empty of any presence other than umbrageous sorrow.
The White Phantom does not relent. Years as an astral priestess of the wyrd, alert in the dreaming, exploring the crooked paths beyond death, she has learned a great deal about the human soul and its volume. “You were a warrior, always at battle, always lost in the tides of conquest and duty. I saw the weight upon you, the wounding burden of your destiny, and I knew — I would not bring a child into that. But I was not barren.”
Arthur’s ghost goes still. Desperate to believe he misunderstood, he asks, “You bore children?”
Her expression softens, touched with caring for those earthly lives. “Lancelot’s. A boy and a girl. Reared far from the ruin of Camelot, nurtured in lands where swords did not dictate their fate. Lands your battles had made peaceful. So long ago now. They and their grandchildren’s grandchildren — shades.”
A tempest roars through Arthur, his spirit ablaze with emotion. “I was your husband!”
Guinevere does not flinch. Whatever of her could survive has, and she speaks from the remains of her mortal heart, “You were my king. My duty. My tragedy.”
Arthur stands in silence, his breath coming in slow, aching shudders — until the beguilement of memory snaps. I have no breath.
He dilates again into the blue peace of a wraith adrift in the dreaming. And he wants to know: “Why did Merlin call me forth? Why am I here so long after I fell in battle?”
The crone’s staunch expression shifts, compresses to a frown. The weight of greater truths settles upon her from out of the hidden intelligence. “Arthur, you did not die at Camlann.”
He remembers being dead.
Before he can protest, Guinevere reveals, “Your body thrives on Avalon. The nine wyrd queens took you there and healed your wounds.”
Perplexed, he peers at her against the platinum night. “If I’m not dead, what am I?”
“You are a witness.” Far off lightning throbs in the crone’s eyes. “You are the pledge that spans ten thousand years of rule by kings. The angels set you on the Isle of Apples with the queens. You are there to observe the world — and by observation shape times to come.” The wisps of her eyebrows lift. “You sat there for two centuries, Arthur. Do you not remember?”
The wraith’s mind blinks, snaps closed on nothing. Emptiness.
Guinevere sees from his soft expression he does not remember.
Of course not, she realizes, recognizing the nature of this wraith: “You are the living imprint of the king’s life in the earth.” The aged face looms close, cracked and lacquered by time. “Merlin drew you up from the soil where your blood spilled. And when he summoned you, your body on Avalon lost its soul.”
“I understand,” the king mumbles, reaching back to the beginnings of his courage as a sovereign, when the first harvests came in from the tilled battlefields, those crofts he had fertilized and sanctified with blood to secure the realm. “King and land share one destiny.”
“Yes. When the wizard raised you out of the earth and into the dreaming, your bond with your physical self ended – and your flesh woke from its seraphic trance. This day, your body wanders Avalon aimlessly, without wit or humors.”
“Merlin must restore me.”
“If he can save himself.” Her aged face closes to a scowl. “The angels are coming to destroy him. Merlin broke their holy design on Avalon when he conjured you. They will incinerate the wizard and drive his demon Lailoken into the abyss.” Her scowl deepens. “Then they will seize you. You will burn in their grasp! You will burn long and long after they return you to the dirt, cauterized of freedom. Until then, your body wanders soullessly upon the Isle of Apples. And you — you are neither dead nor truly alive.”
Arthur riddles into mist. “What have I become?”
“A memory. A shadow.” Her doted speech is gentle now. “But you can be whole again. If you find your way to Avalon before the angels find you.”
His voice clenches, “And Merlin?”
“Merlin ages backward, his power unraveling. He seeks to efface all traces of your time with him — Excalibur, the Round Table, Camelot itself. You, as well. He would cast you into the void, beyond the reach of necromancers.”
Arthur’s ghost knows she speaks the truth — and trembles.
The shriveled specter of Guinevere steps closer, her presence a balm, her voice darker, a whisper of the earth’s. “Then find your way to Avalon. Find the queens — and your flesh. Become whole.”
The wraith of Arthur frets, “What life for me on Avalon — even if I beat heaven and hell to get there?” They both know, only wild-eyed saints and the mad have returned from the Isle of Apples.
“A pause.” The wise crone crinkles a smile. “Avalon is a between-place where you will strive with queens and angels to make peace on earth more plausible than war.”
“Me?” He levels a knowing look at the frail specter of his wife. “For all my moral understanding — my passion for justice and common equality among the people — I tried to burn you at the stake for loving another man.”
“You were a bear then,” she allows with a grim nod. “And now?”
Arthur stares into eyes clear as the lavender light after a storm, seeing not the woman he once knew but a secret of the world. He reaches for her, defiant of mystery and fear.
His hand passes through the haze of her form. His hope for connection becomes merely a gesture of the selfsame humanity they once shared.
“Petal…”
A girlish smile rises out of a timeworn face. “Big Bear.”
The shifting mist erases Guinevere’s phantom, leaving Arthur alone beneath the cold stars.