Indeed, it was soon universally agreed that it was only when it came to fighting with the sword that he would have to graciously accept a second placing. For in this class, as expected, as the crowds had witnessed many times before, the king ruled supreme, moving up effortlessly through the rankings towards the tournament’s final confrontation.
No one could fain surprise when the king and the good knight were the ones matched against each other in this last test of skill.
It drew the crowds from miles around for, though the king was expected to win, through his possession of the Prophet, everyone wondered if a knight famed for ingeniously overcoming other magical instruments – the Helm of Hector, Socrates’ Shield, the Lance of Longinus – might also work out a way to at least delay the magical blade’s victory.
As according to custom, king and knight knelt and bowed before each other, vowing on their honour and on the blessing of their swords that they would fight only with good grace and fairness, allowing no use of foul play or treachery to taint their hearts.
Even as they rose to their feet, however, the king dishonourably launched himself forward, striking the good knight so fierce-fully hard across the top of his helm that it would have instantly felled a lesser man. As it was, the knight’s helmet was severely dented, and he wavered unsteadily on his feet, rendering him unable to avoid a second and third blow, each as aggressively unforgiving as the first.
The crowd gasped in dismay and surprise: was it the king or his sword who was so in awe of this knight that he sought to strike out first, even to the loss of his honour?
‘Forgive me,’ the king cried, his visor still raised and unprepared for the fight, ‘my sword’s suddenly cursed! I can hardly hold it back from striking you a death blow!’
Even as he complained that he was powerless to prevent the frenzied onslaught, ever more pummelling blows rained down on the beleaguered knight, his shield shattering beneath the relentless strikes, his armour battered out of shape.
‘Run,’ the king warned him. ‘Run for your life!’
‘On my honour, I can’t flee!’ the knight spat back from a bloodied mouth. ‘But I will yield! I offer you my sword!’
‘Then I offer you mine…’ the king hollered back above the cacophony of steel thrashing steel.
Those amongst the crowd fortunate enough to hear this declaration sighed with relief: if the king cast aside his sword, this instrument of merciless cruelty, this whole charade of a fair fight would swiftly draw to an end.
For what had they perceived to be happening before them?
Why, of course, they saw only a poor, harassed knight, fighting justly for his honour. And so their hearts had gone out to him.
The treachery residing within the knight’s own heart was naturally forever veiled to them.
In many ways, this was surprising, for rather than attempting to hide his malice from the king’s sword (as many a previous knight had fruitlessly tried) the knight had let his hatred clearly sing out: he meant to murder the king, make the sword his own – and then who could possibly resist him?
The knight had observed that as the king grew weary in his earlier battles, his weakened arms slowed the actions of even this remarkable sword.
And what would weary the king more than having to struggle against the actions of a sword trying its best to protect him? A sword celebrated as an instrument of mercy, and therefore ultimately incapable of killing even a man wishing to murder the king!
And now the king was foolishly prepared to throw aside the only thing able to protect him!
The sword’s dilemma caused it to tremble with fear and anguish for the king, a fierce pulsation that, like an irresistible charge of static, froze the king’s fingers around its handle.
It feared and felt anguish, too, for the hatred in the hearts of the people.
The very same people who had once admired his actions of mercy now loathed and cursed him, little realising it was a blessing that their king was still alive.
Incapable of ignoring the intense hatred of the crowd for treachery, for dishonourable acts, the sword drew on and absorbed into itself that incredible animosity, making it its own; absolving them of the responsibility for what must happen, what they indeed secretly wanted, for they had of course unknowingly chosen the wrong object of hatred
The Prophet must endure shame and scorn for their sake.
Unable to throw the Prophet aside, the king instead plunged the blade deep into the treacherous knight’s heart; a heart so completely pierced, it gasped in surprise that its deeply ingrained guile had been discovered and expunged.
And the crowd wailed in horror, tearing every hair from their heads, raining insults on their Prophet, who was now completely without honour.
They see only the death of a man.
They don’t perceive a king saved.
If someone will forever remain deaf to what you hear, blind to what you see, then how can you possibly show them what they are missing? I would hear and I would be heard.
And so the Prophet and the truths he knew off, the truths he would have hoped to reveal to them, were lost to them. I would be pierced and I would pierce.
‘Our sword is broken,’ the people wailed miserably. ‘It no longer has a heart! It has lost all sense!’
They were partially right. They were partially wrong.
The sword still retained its heart.
But it was one pierced and hurt by those who should have adored it.
*
Chapter 20
As the city docked alongside the kingdom of Asher, the sea was calm, more mirror-like than the prince had ever seen it.
Here his horse was not his own, but a good one nevertheless, one that was more than adequate for enabling him to safely and swiftly travel through this land of valleys, so unlike his own land of hills.
There were many similarities to his own kingdom, however, such that the lands almost mirrored each other, as he found in his many conversations with the people he came across as he travelled towards the land’s capital and heart.
The kingdom had suffered for so long for lack of an heir. Just as their princess had to keep her lords under control and ranged against each other with promises of marriage and thereby kingship, her mother the queen had similarly had to rule the land through the exact same system of promises, none of which she had any intention of honouring.
‘Yet if there was no marriage,’ the prince had curiously asked on first being told this, ‘then how was your princess born?’
‘It’s said a fairy king fathered her,’ came the reply. ‘Unfortunately, he was called away to his own kingdom, promising to return within a matter of weeks; alas, how was anyone to know that what passes for mere days in the land of fairy is a lifetime in ours?’
On at last arriving at the princess’s palace, the prince announced that he was here to return the precious stone stolen from their kingdom by one of his father’s knights.
‘A precious stone?’ the princess said with a suspicious frown when she granted the prince audience. ‘I know of no stolen stone: is this just some suitor’s ploy, ensuring you’re introduced to me?’
‘Ploy?’ the prince responded innocently.
‘A ruse to help you work your way into my heart, just as my many other suitors come with promises of allegiance, of undying love.’
‘I have no such things to offer, my lady,’ the prince admitted, even though he had indeed been struck by the princess’s remarkably pure beauty. ‘I apologise, my lady,’ he continued, ‘if I was wrong in presuming your kingdom lacked a precious stone that ensured its stability.’
‘How could a mere stone be held responsible for maintaining a kingdom’s stability?’
‘I…I had heard that your kingdom suffered misfortune–’
‘You’re sure you’re not here to offer me your hand in marriage,’ the princess snapped scornfully, ‘to alleviate my kingdom’s misfortune of lacking a male heir?’
‘My
lady, my own kingdom long suffered such a misfortune–’
‘Ah, so you do see it as a misfortune! A misfortune that I was born, rather than some prince who would bring peace and light to a previously endarkened land!’
‘I meant only…only that…’
The prince stumbled on his words.
What had he meant? Wasn’t the princess right in her interpretation of what he had intended to say?
‘You may know a great deal about your kingdom, but obviously little about mine,’ the princess declared contemptuously. ‘If my mother the late queen had exited her private birth chambers announcing her son and heir, she might as well have also announced our deaths: it wouldn’t have thwarted the ambitions of Mother’s suitors so much as turned their hearts to murder, for any promise of marriage and kingship would have vanished.’
The prince bowed his head in shame and supplication.
‘I beg your forgiveness, my lady. With your permission, I’ll take my leave immediately, for I have many stones I have to return–’
‘Wait!’ The princess held up a hand, stopping him from turning around. ‘As you turned away your riding cloak swung aside, offering me a glimpse of your breastplate for the first time – might I please take a closer look, my lord?’
‘These are the stones I have to return,’ the prince explained, drawing his cloak aside to reveal the glittering gems inlaid within his breastplate.
The princess stared with interest at the glittering rainbow-hued jasper.
‘I wonder…’ she said curiously as she graciously moved towards a balcony overlooking her lands.
Standing alongside the princess on the balcony, the princess marvelled at how far it was possible to see from here.
The princess’s lands of deep and gorgeously rolling valleys gave way to the rising of a range of steep mountains, ones stretching so high into the cloud-studded sky that they were topped with a covering of glistening snow – such that it was hardly possible to see where one realm began and the other ended.
‘Those are my lands too, the land of Naphtali,’ the princess stated without any hint of a boast or pride, ‘though much of it remains inaccessible to me, lying on the other side of the mountain and beyond an ancient and impregnable great wall. No one living knows what lies beyond the wall, yet I had noticed that something had changed there, only to content myself that I was merely imagining it: or that what I could always previously see there was now hidden to me in a concealing mist–’
She exhaled deeply as a rainbow abruptly appeared above the highest mountain peak, the bases of each seemingly linked, the rich colours curling up into the sky, the myriad hues mirrored in both the glistening snow and the reflective undersides of the scudding clouds.
‘It’s there again!’ the princess sighed elatedly, turning to look back at the prince. ‘How did you–’
The prince was grasping the inlaid jasper as if about to wrench it free. When he brought his hand away from the jewel, however, it firmly remained there.
‘The intention to return it always seems enough to replace it,’ the prince explained with an embarrassed, shy smile, having noticed the princess’s puzzled frown.
‘It seems, my lord, that I’ve misjudged your heart,’ the princess apologised. ‘In return, I offer you my blessing to travel freely and unhindered through the lands under my control: and should you manage to overcome the wall, I also offer you this further blessing for you to recite if you seek concealment:
‘My love in the heart of the man who thinks of me,
‘My love in the mouth of the man who speaks of me,
‘My love in the eye that sees me,
‘My love in the ear that hears me.’
The prince didn’t recognise the words, yet he knew the melody.
For he had heard it once before: sung by his sister, when she had seemed to appear out of nowhere alongside him.
*
Chapter 21
A room within the palace was provided for the prince, while his horse was most comfortably stabled amongst the freshest hay.
The prince’s bed was sumptuous and large, yet seemed to him to move whenever he lay down upon it, an illusion caused no doubt by the many bright mirrors that lined not only the walls but even the ceiling and floor. Truly, not even the great Solomon had possessed such a remarkably wonderful bed, for its frame of wood and precious metals was wrought with all manner of symbols.
As he lay there naked that night, the door to his room opened.
The princess demurely entered, bearing a cup of the finest pinks and reds the prince had ever seen. Like him, she was naked, yet emanated neither shame not lust.
For the briefest of moments, the prince fooled himself into thinking he saw the white pearl he sought amongst the layered pinks of this most wondrous of cups: but when he looked closer, he saw that it was the glistening of a pure darkness extending back and back towards the very beginnings of the universe.
This was not one of the stones he had set out to seek, he realised: and yet he was entranced by it completely, as if it were indeed the most precious object he could ever hope to find.
‘This is the cup,’ the princess whispered huskily, approaching the prince’s bed, ‘that both changes and transforms. It is the Cup of Love: and as such, it can be can be either a blessing or a curse, a Spring of Memory or a Cup of Forgetting, a cup of eternal life or the poison of eternal death: and it is the one who drinks who makes it either one or the other. The question is, Prince Argaret, do you take the risk, do you drink: or do you refuse, and live only the half-life of the foolish and dammed?’
‘I drink, my love,’ the prince replied, bringing his lips towards the lips of that most glorious cup, ‘I take you in, as if you were my very soul!’
*
The prince wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to drink.
The only thing lying within the cup was that precious jewel of supreme darkness.
As his lips embraced the cup’s lips, however, the darkness quickened, flowed, as if transforming into something far more fluid. It swirled like a dark, embittered gall. It glistened, as if with the light of many stars.
‘Whatever veiled darkness exists within your soul,’ the princess whispered in warning, ‘this will embrace: if there’s little there for it to become one with, then it will eventually envelop and contain the darkness it finds there; but if there’s a great deal of concealed darkness to contend with, then I fear the darkness will envelop us.’
As the darkness swum down Prince Argaret’s throat, he stared into the darkness of the princess’s eyes, seeing himself reflected there, as if revealed within the brightest of mirrors.
He swum in that darkness, as if dazed, drunk. Within those darkest waters of love, they merged, entwined, curled and coiled around and about each other. And when separateness becomes serpentine, it ceases to be, and can only become as one; becomes strangely unaware of presence, of he and she, and is truly only ‘I’.
He was as one with her, their bodies having ceased to exist within the darkness, there now being no male, no female: indeed it was impossible to say who had been the male, who the female, as they both brought to the union what the other lacked.
She had brought his missing jewel, he its all-embracing setting.
They marvelled to each other’s touch for, of course, s/he had rolling mounds where s/he had none, s/he had embracing valleys where s/he had none, and vice-versa and versa-vice.
It is from the darkness – of pitch, coal, tar, oil – that the greatest flames might arise, given the right spark. And so it was from this darkness, given the heat of union, the glow of love.
I would eat and I would be eaten, the flame whispered amorously.
At first it was a flickering, a dance of hot flames. Then an enflaming of the darkness, then an inferno, burning all that was material, all that was flesh, away.
And beneath flesh lies souls with no surface, no boundaries. And spiritually, two become entwined.
&
nbsp; *
Chapter 22
‘We lay together as any man and woman would,’ the Princess Lorica announced to the gathered assembly the next morning. ‘A future king begetting a future king: and so the future of our kingdom is assured, with only the most treacherous of souls refusing to accept this.’
Within the cup, a flame glowed, brighter than any red, erupting from the sheer blackness of the purest, darkest agate as if it were the finest of coals. Before the eruption of the light of love, the glow within the cup had been nothing more than the shimmering light of a precious stone; but now it was a bright and shinning light, inextinguishable accept by those who had lit and now maintained it.
Cupping the flame in her hand, the princess placed it against the heart of the prince, saying, ‘This is its new home, the Cup of your Heart: never let it falter or die, for it is the most precious bloom of all to me, and as such you can water it with your love.’
The prince felt the flame burn within his heart, yet he knew it was a flame that would wound him the more it faltered.
Within his breastplate, a precious stone of the purest black agate had appeared alongside the one of amber.
‘It is one of the gems you needed to collect,’ the princess gasped happily. ‘And perhaps I know of another you need: the gold veined topaz that sparkles upon your symbol of a shattered crown.’
*
Chapter 23
The Mirror of Angels
If any group of people have been most sorely misunderstood, it is the alchemists.
It has falsely come down to us in stories and legends that they sought only to transmute lead into gold, as if seeking nothing but material wealth; when in truth they sought the transformation of man himself, man transmuted into his heavenly image while remaining here on Earth.
The successful transformation of lead into gold was regarded as nothing more than a proof that they were close to discovering the Philosopher’s Stone.
And yet – the proposition that a base metal like lead might be changed into purest gold is ideal for gaining the support of avaricious kings.