Legacy: Arthurian Saga (122 page)

"Take up the sword, he who
dares."

Movement, and men's voices, full of
dread. Then Cador: "That is the sword. I would know it anywhere. I
saw it in his hand, full of light. It is his, God witness it. I
would not touch it if Merlin himself bade me."

There were cries of, "Nor I, nor I,"
and then, "Let the King take it up, let the High King show us
Macsen's sword."

Then finally, alone, Lot's voice,
gruffly: "Yes. Let him take it. I have seen, by God's death, I have
seen. If it is his indeed, then God is with him, and it is not for
me."

Arthur came slowly forward. Behind him
the place was dim, the crowd shrunk back into darkness, the shuffle
and murmur of their presence no more than the breeze in the forest
trees outside. Here between us, the white light blazed and the
blade shivered. The darkness flashed and sparkled, a crystal cave
of vision, crowded and whirling with bright images. A white stag,
collared with gold. A shooting star, dragon-shaped, and trailing
fire. A king, restless and desirous, with a dragon of red gold
shimmering on the wall behind him. A woman, white-robed and
queenly, and behind her in the shadows a sword standing in an altar
like a cross. A circle of vast linked stones standing on a windy
plain with a king's grave at its center. A child, handed into my
arms on a winter night. A grail, shrouded in moldering cloth,
hidden in a dark vault. A young king, crowned. He looked at me
through the pulse and flash of vision. For him, they were flames
only, flames which might burn, or not; that was for me. He waited,
not doubtful, nor blindly trusting; waiting only.

"Come," I said gently. "It is
yours."

He put his hand through the white
blaze of fire and the hilt slid cool into the grip for which, a
hundred and a hundred years before, it had been made.

Lot was the first to kneel. I suppose
he had most need. Arthur raised him, speaking without either
rancour or cordiality; the words of a sovereign lord who is able to
see past a present wrong to a coming good.

"I could not find it in me, Lot of
Lothian, to quarrel with any man this day, least of all my sister's
lord. You shall see that your doubts of me were groundless, and you
and your sons after you will help me guard and hold Britain as she
should be held."

To Cador he said simply: "Until I get
myself another heir, Cador of Cornwall, you are he."

To Ector he spoke long and quietly, so
that no man could hear save they two, and when he raised him,
kissed him.

Thereafter for a long span of time he
stood by the altar, as men knelt before him and swore loyalty on
the hilt of the sword. To each one he spoke, directly as a boy, and
grandly as a king. Between his hands, held like a cross, Caliburn
shone with his own light only, but the altar with its nine dead
lamps was dark.

As each man took his oath and pledged
himself, he withdrew, and the chapel slowly emptied. As it grew
quieter, the encircling forest filled with life and expectation and
noise, where they crowded, clamorously excited now, waiting for
their sworn King. They were bringing up the horses out of the wood,
and the clearing filled with torchlight and trampling and the
jingling of accoutrements.

Last of all Mab and the men of the
hills withdrew, and save for the bodyguard ranged back against the
shadowed wall, the King and I were alone.

Stiffly, for pain still locked my
bones, I came round the altar till I stood before him. He was
almost as tall as I. The eyes that looked back at me might have
been my own.I knelt in front of him and put out my hands for his.
But he cried out at that, and pulled me to my feet, and kissed
me.

"You do not kneel to me. Not
you."

"You are High King, and I am your
servant."

"What of it? The sword was yours, and
we two know it. It doesn't matter what you call yourself, my
servant, cousin, father, what you will -- you are Merlin, and I'm
nothing without you beside me." He laughed then, naturally, the
grandeur of the occasion fitting him as easily as the hilt had
fitted his hand. "What became of your state robe? Only you could
have worn that dreadful old thing on such an occasion. I shall give
you a robe of gold tissue, embroidered with stars, as befits your
position. Will you wear it for me?"

"Not even for you."

He smiled. "Then come as you are.
You'll ride down with me now, won't you?"

"Later. When you have time to look
round for me, you will find that I am beside you. Listen, they are
ready to take you to your place. It's time to go."

I went with him to the
door. The torches still tossed flaring, though the moon had set
long since and the last of the stars had died into a morning sky.
Golden and tranquil, the light grew. They had brought the white
stallion up to the steps. When Arthur made to mount they would not
let him, but Cador and Lot and half a dozen petty kings lifted him
between them to the saddle, and at last men's hopes and joy rang up
into the pines in a great shout. So they raised to be king Arthur
the young. I carried the nine lamps out of the chapel. Come
daylight, I would take them where they now belonged, up to the
caves of the hollow hills, where their gods had gone. Of the nine,
all had been overturned, the oil spilled unburned along the floor.
With them
lay the stone bowl, shattered,
and a pile of dust and crumbled fragments where the cold fire | had
struck. When I swept these away, with the oil that had soaked into
them, it could be seen that the carving had gone from the front of
the altar. These were the fragments that I held, caked with oil.
All that was left of the carving on the altar's face was the hilt
of the sword, and a word.

I swept and cleaned the place and made
it fair again. I moved slowly, like an old man. I still remember
how my body ached, and how at length, when I knelt again, my sight
blurred and darkened as if still blind with vision, or with
tears.

The tears showed me the altar now,
bare of the nine-fold light that had pleasured the old, small gods;
bare of the soldier's sword and the name of the soldiers' god. All
it held now was the hilt of the carved sword standing in the stone
like a cross, and the letters still deep and distinct above it. TO
HIM UNCONQUERED.

The Last Enchantment by
Mary Stewart

The Last
Enchantment

Copyright 2009 Mary
Stewart

All rights reserved. No part of this
book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic,
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any
information storage retrieval system without the written permission
of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in
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Because of the dynamic nature of the
Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may
have changed since publication and may no longer be
valid.

This is a work of fiction. All of the
characters, names, incidents, places, organizations, and dialogue
in this novel are either the products of the author's imagination
or are used fictitiously.

BOOK I Dunpeldyr

Not every king would care to start his
reign with the wholesale massacre of children. This is what they
whisper of Arthur, even though in other ways he is held up as the
type itself of the noble ruler, the protector alike of high and
lowly.

It is harder to kill a whisper than
even a shouted calumny. Besides, in the minds of simple men, to
whom the High King is the ruler of their lives, and the dispenser
of all fates, Arthur would be held accountable for all that
happened in his realm, evil and good alike, from a resounding
victory in the battlefield to a bad rain-storm or a barren
flock.

So, although a witch plotted the
massacre, and another king gave the order for it, and though I
myself tried to shoulder the blame, the murmur still persists: that
in the first year of his reign Arthur the High King had his troops
seek out and destroy some score of newly born babies in hope of
catching in that bloody net one single boy-child, his bastard by
incest with his half-sister Morgause.

Calumny, I have called it, and it
would be good to be able to declare openly that the story is a lie.
But it is not quite that. It is a lie that he ordered the
slaughter; but his sin was the first cause of it, and though it
would never have occurred to him to murder innocent children, it is
true that he wanted his own child killed.

So it is just that some of the blame
should rest on him; just, too, that some of it should cling to me.
For I, Merlin, who am accounted a man of power and vision, had
waited idly by while the dangerous child was engendered, and the
tragic term set to the peace and freedom which Arthur could win for
his people. I can bear the blame, for now I am beyond men's
judgment, but Arthur is still young enough to feel the sting of the
story, and be haunted by thoughts of atonement; and when it
happened he was younger still, in all the first white-and-golden
flush of victory and kingship, held up on the love of the people,
the acclamation of the soldiers, and the blaze of mystery that
surrounded the drawing of the sword from the stone.

It happened like this. King Uther
Pendragon lay with his army at Luguvallium in the northern kingdom
of Rheged, where he was to face a massive Saxon attack under the
brothers Colgrim and Badulf, grandsons of Hengist. The young
Arthur, still little more than a boy, was brought to this, his
first field, by his foster-father Count Ector of Galava, who
presented him to the King. Arthur had been kept in ignorance of his
royal birth and parentage, and Uther, though he had kept himself
informed of the boy's growth and progress, had never once seen him
since he was born. This because, during the wild night of love when
Uther had lain with Ygraine, then the wife of Gorlois, Duke of
Cornwall and Uther's most faithful commander, the old duke himself
had been killed. His death, though no fault of Uther's, weighed so
heavily on the King that he swore never to claim for his own any
child born of that night's guilty love. In due course

Arthur had been handed to me to rear,
and this I had done, at a far remove from both King and Queen. But
there had been no other son born to them, and at last King Uther,
who had ailed for some time, and who knew the danger of the Saxon
threat he faced at Luguvallium, was forced to send for the boy, to
acknowledge him publicly as his heir and present him to the
assembled nobles and petty kings.

But before he could do so, the Saxons
attacked. Uther, though too sick to ride at the head of the troops,
took the field in a litter, with Cador, Duke of Cornwall, in
command of the right, and on the left King Coel of Rheged, with Caw
of Strathclyde and other leaders from the north. Only Lot, King of
Lothian and Orkney, failed to take the field. King Lot, a powerful
king but a doubtful ally, held his men in reserve, to throw them
into the fight where and when they should be needed. It was said
that he held back deliberately in the hope that Uther's army would
be destroyed, and that in the event the kingdom might fall to him.
If so, his hopes were defeated. When, in the fierce fighting around
the King's litter in the center of the field, young Arthur's sword
broke in his hand, King Uther threw to his hand his own royal
sword, and with it (as men understood it) the leadership of the
kingdom. After that he lay back in his litter and watched the boy,
ablaze like some comet of victory, lead an attack that put the
Saxons to rout.