And in that moment, the Cauldron became a Cup, and the Lady became the Lord, Jesu—then changed again, to a man of strange, draped robes and slanted eyes, who held neither Cup nor Cauldron, but a cup-shaped Flower with a jeweled heart—a hawk-headed creature with a glowing stone in His hand—a black-skinned Woman with a bright Bird—
And then to another shape, and another, until her eyes were dazzled and her spirit dizzied, and she looked away, into the eyes of Elfrida. The witch-girl—Wise Girl whispered the Voice in her mind, and Quest-Companion—looked similarly dazzled, but the joy in her face must surely mirror Leonie’s. The girl offered her hand, and Leonie took it, and they turned again to face—
A Being of light, neither male nor female, and a dazzling Cup as large as a Cauldron, the veil covering it barely dimming its brilliance.
Come, the Being said, you have proved yourselves worthy.
Hand in hand, the two newest Grail Maidens rose, and followed the shining beacon into the Light.
Once and Future
It was inevitable that the Holy Grail anthology would spawn an Excalibur anthology. I kept promising to write the story and things got in the way . . . like other deadlines! But bless their hearts, they held a place for me, and here is the story itself. It’s not at all like the Grail story; in fact, it’s not a very heroic story, which may surprise some people.
Michael O’Murphy woke with the mother of all hangovers splitting his head in half, churning up his stomach like a winter storm off the Orkneys, and a companion in his bed.
What in Jaysus did I do last night?
The pain in his head began just above his eyes, wrapped around the sides, and met in the back. His stomach did not bear thinking about. His companion was long, cold, and unmoving, but very heavy.
I took a board to bed? Was I that hard up for a sheila? Michael, you’re slipping!
He was lying on his side, as always. The unknown object was at his back. At the moment it was no more identifiable than a hard presence along his spine, uncomfortable and unyielding. He wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to find out exactly what it was until he mentally retraced his steps of the previous evening. Granted, this was irrational, but a man with the mother of all hangovers is not a rational being.
The reason for his monumental drunk was clear enough in his mind; the pink slip from his job at the docks, presented to him by the foreman at the end of the day. That would be yesterday, Friday, if I haven’t slept the weekend through.
He wasn’t the only bloke cashiered yesterday; they’d laid off half the men at the shipyard. So it’s back on the dole, and thank God Almighty I didn’t get serious with that little bird I met on holiday. Last thing I need is a woman nagging at me for losing me job and it wasn’t even me own fault. Depression piled atop the splitting head and the foul stomach. Michael O’Murphy was not the sort of man who accepted the dole with any kind of grace other than ill.
He cracked his right eye open, winced at the stab of light that penetrated into his cranium, and squinted at the floor beside his bed.
Yes, there was the pink slip, crumpled into a wad, beside his boots—and two bottles of Jameson’s, one empty, the other half full and frugally corked.
Holy Mary Mother of God. I don’t remember sharing out that often, so I must’ve drunk most of it myself. No wonder I feel like a walk through Purgatory.
He closed his eye again, and allowed the whiskey bottle to jog a few more memories loose. So, he’d been sacked, and half the boys with him. And they’d all decided to drown their sorrows together.
But not at a pub, and not at pub prices. You can’t get royally, roaring drunk at a pub unless you’ve got a royal allowance to match. So we all bought our bottles and met at Tommy’s place.
There’d been a half-formed notion to get shellacked there, but Tommy had a car, and Tommy had an idea. He’d seen some nonsense on the telly about “Iron Johns” or some such idiocy, over in America—
Said we was all downtrodden and “needed to get in touch with our inner selves”; swore that we had to get “empowered” to get back on our feet, and wanted to head out into the country— There’d been some talk about “male bonding” ceremonies, pounding drums, carrying on like a lot of Red Indians—and drinking of course. Tommy went on like it was some kind of communion; the rest of them had already started on their bottles before they got to Tommy’s, and at that point, a lot of pounding and dancing half-naked and drinking sounded like a fine idea. So off they went, crammed into Tommy’s aging Morris Minor with just enough room to get their bottles to their lips.
At some point they stopped and all piled out; Michael vaguely recalled a forest, which might well have been National Trust lands and it was a mercy they hadn’t been caught and hauled off to gaol. Tommy had gotten hold of a drum somewhere; it was in the boot with the rest of the booze. They all grabbed bottles and Tommy got the drum, and off they went into the trees like a daft May Day parade, howling and carrying on like bleeding loonies.
How Tommy made the fire—and why it hadn’t been seen, more to the point!—Michael had not a clue. He remembered a great deal of pounding on the drum, more howling, shouting and swearing at the bosses of the world, a lot of drinking, and some of the lads stripping off their shirts and capering about like so many monkeys. About then was when I got an itch for some quiet. He and his bottles had stumbled off into the trees, following an elusive moonbeam, or so he thought he remembered. The singing and pounding had faded behind him, and in his memory the trees loomed the way they had when he was a nipper and everything seemed huge. They were like trees out of the old tales, as big as the one they call Robin Hood’s Oak in Sherwood. There was only one way to go since he didn’t even consider turning back, and that was to follow the path between them, and the fey bit of moonlight that lured him on.
Was there a mist? I think there was. Wait! That was when the real path appeared. There had been mist, a curious, blue mist. It had muffled everything, from the sounds of his own footsteps to the sounds of his mates back by the fire. Before too very long, he might have been the only human being alive in a forest as old as time and full of portentous silence.
He remembered that the trees thinned out at just about the point where he was going to give up his ramble and turn back. He had found himself on the shores of a lake. It was probably an ordinary enough pond by daylight, but last night, with the mist drifting over it and obscuring the farther shore, the utter and complete silence of the place, and the moonlight pouring down over everything and touching everything with silver, it had seemed . . . uncanny, a bit frightening, and not entirely in the real world at all.
He had stood there with a bottle in each hand, a monument to inebriation, held there more by inertia than anything else, he suspected. He could still see the place as he squeezed his eyes shut, as vividly as if he stood there at that moment. The water was like a sheet of plate glass over a dark and unimaginable void; the full moon hung just above the dark mass of the trees behind him, a great round Chinese lantern of a moon, and blue-white mist floated everywhere in wisps and thin scarves and great opaque billows. A curious boat rested by the bank not a meter from him, a rough-hewn thing apparently made from a whole tree-trunk and shaped with an axe. Not even the reeds around the boat at his feet moved in the breathless quiet.