The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (11 page)

I pushed off heaps of earth, tons of earth.  Tore away the roots and branches that had overgrown me and into me and through me.

How had so much of Earth fallen on me in just one night?  All these tons of dirt and branch and leaf?  These foot-thick roots from which I pulled my legs?  Or what world-cycle was this?

Morgause spurred her frightened horse toward me, her lifeguards galloping up, shouting for her to stand clear, crying, “Let us at this beast from the earth, Queen!”

Their spears and throwing axes clattered off my time-rotted armor beneath the cloak that was beneath the bark of the tree that had become me.

I shook away the dust of years.  Had I slept so long?  Had so much of the world passed me by?

“What age is this, Queen?” I cried.  “Have I missed Arthur and Camelot?”

“Great gods, the monster speaks!” said Morgause, laughing again.

“Take off its head, Stepmother!” shouted Gawain.

I whispered her soul-name.  That stopped her killing blow.

She rode near to me, furious with energy and sudden anger.  “What beast knows my secret name?”

“Another woman,” I said, “who knows too much and would rather know nothing at all but she must…”

“Oh, stop babbling like a merlin,” said Morgause.  “I’ve no patience for magicians’ cant or for half-trees that claim to be half-women.”

She leveled her greatsword on my neck and said, “Nothing human can sleep ten years in the dirt and spring up to name a princess of Camelot.  Say what you want from me, monster, or I’ll separate your liver and heart and we’ll see if you can dream another ten years without them.”

I keened in despair.  “Have I been here in the ground ten years?” I cried.  “What of my king?”

“That’s the story of this unholy piece of ground,” Morgause said, spitting on the Earth.  “Ten years past and ten more, a merlin lies here dreaming the death of Camelot.”

“Am I Merlin?  Is that me?”

“How should I know?” she said.  “Merlins are buried in every hill and hollow.  With an absurd legend to go with each one.  Merlins bore me even more then their lying stories.”

The boy Gawain, cowering behind his stepmother’s horse, said, “Who’s to say you’re the merlin of this story or another merlin or no merlin at all?”

Morgause thrust her red sword at my throat. .“Are you a demon?  Go on, tell me before I kill you.”

“Demon?” cried the boy.

“I am Brynn, knight and lady.”

Morgause laughed.  I had never heard the old queen laugh but here was the bright sound of a young woman laughing in surprised joy.

“Of course you’re named ‘Brynn,’” she said.  “It means ‘hill’ and here you lie like a merlin in your hill.”

She snorted a laugh, another sound I’d never heard from the old queen.

“Every other village yokel, boy or girl, is named ‘Brynn’ in hopes one of them will bring a merlin’s favor on the struggling Britons,” she said, angry again.  “But nothing helps us against the Pagans, and Arthur barely can.  Now, ‘Hill,’ name your father, line, and station before I snap off your head.”

There was no answer I could give that she would understand.

I said, “I’m a merlin.”

Morgause whooped a laugh.  “The perfect fool’s answer!”

She let her frightened horse dance around me as she plucked at my rotting cloak with her sword point.

She stopped her horse and leaned down toward me and said, in a furious calm, “Are you only a merlin or the Great Merlin for whom the king waits?  I have to know to get the killing temptation out of me.”

“I’m a merlin who awaits a merlin,” I said.

She looked down into the rooty grave from which the tree that had been me had leaped up to frighten Gawain.  She was puzzled, as she should have been.

I gazed down into the root-pit yearning for this moment to pass deeper into the past or the future to let me see there the body of the merlin who had lain in that same place for the previous ten years so I could kick him awake and ask him what I must do.

Morgause turned her face from the grave to me and said, “Have I anything to fear from you, Lady Merlin Two Swords?”

I was startled to hear her ask such a preposterous question of any merlin but said, “Not from me, Queen, nor any Briton.”

“All merlins are liars and scoundrels,” she said, “but you seem to me a special breed of liar and scoundrel.  Perhaps because you’re a woman in this world’s cycle when all of us expected a man.  Perhaps because you’re still mostly tree and I love trees for my sword’s biting practice.”

Morgause, in her armor and silks and with the greatsword in her hand, jumped down from her horse and got close to look into my face.  “What do I see in you that’s getting younger faster than I age?” she asked, startled.

“Younger?  I’m the oldest woman in the world and getting older.”

“‘What’s older than Merlin and younger?’” said Gawain, still behind his stepmother’s horse.

That riddle may be fresh in this boy’s time but it was antique and tiresome in mine.

Morgause answered when I did not, “‘That which is a minute from its own death as nothing can be older than the dead.’”

Queen and prince laughed together at the stale joke.

I watched with sudden fascination as I saw her and the boy grow younger at the speed I felt himself aging.

She, looking at me, must see me slide backward toward youth as she felt herself age toward death.

Morgause said in a commanding whisper, “There is in you, Lady Merlin, a vigor I want to steal before I grow old.  Shake off your roots and bark and give me your blood-kiss and with it the secret of youth.”

The queen’s lifeguards clamped their hands over the boy’s eyes and led away Gawain, shouting.

Morgause pulled me into the trees away from the grave.

“Are these merlin oaks here and is this holy mistletoe?” she said.

“These are ordinary trees,” I said, “and that’s ordinary moss.”

“No Druidical copse?  No place for blood rites?  You’re out of time, Merlin, if you don’t see the truth I see.”

“What truth?”

“In Arthur’s age, these things are what I want them to be.”

The trees and life-sucking moss became merlin oaks and mistletoe around me, frightening me for the witchly power I remembered in the old woman this young queen would become.

Bands of red, green, and white sprayed through the branches from the backward tracking sun.  The Earth exhaled into my face a thick and luminous fog as though the Moon buried there in daytime had freed some part of its silver light to come up to cushion a merlin and a witch.

Beyond the trees, I could hear the cries of the boy:  “Stepmother!  Stepmother!”

They transformed in my ears to “Morgause!  Morgause!”

Queen Morgause!
I heard her say or thought I heard or the sound came out of the atmosphere.  Then I heard my own soul-name, or thought it was mine, as she lay back on her bed of moonlight and fog, the colored sun first red then green and white on her Roman armor.

She flung aside my two scabbarded swords and my black armor and said in a voice that was mist, love, and fright, “Merlin, you too are what I please you to be.  Be a man again!  Come to me.”

In that bower of dream oaks and red-berried mistletoe, she in her gilt armor and I in my rotted jerkin, Morgause possessed me in a high howling ecstasy like the cries of barbarian women on a battlefield.

It was only the wane-to-wax of the Moon that told me she had left me alone and asleep at last.

Time!

How many eons had I slept again in the Earth?  What was Morgause now – child or infant or unborn dream?

“Our quest!” she said in evaporating words heard through my earth-plugged ears in my burial hill.  “Save Arthur from
me!
”

Awake again!  But awake when?

I shoved off more tons of accumulated dirt and leaves and scrambled from the tree copse to the old grave from which I had leapt as a merlin oak so many hours or eons ago.

The burial hole was full and overgrown, stone cairns and crosses stacked around it to protect unwary passersby from the merlin snoring there.  Was I still in that hole or was I here digging into the grave with my bare hands?

A giant face, clotted dirt in eyes and mouth and peaked ears, said to me in an old man’s voice like a cracking bough, “I’ve waited!”

The creature was strange and revolting and beautiful.  It coiled up out of the grave, spat in its hands and washed its face, and parted its forked beard.

“I’m the merlin heart fed to you by Lucan.  I am the Great Merlin.  Name me!”

He rose up nine feet tall, fierce-faced, forked beard, shaggy hair striped white.  His Druid’s robe of thirteen patches of bright cloth reeked of mold, fungus, unclean mushrooms.  Glitter on his fingers, nose, and ears of rings made of coins from Jerusalem, Carthage, Delphi, and Atlantis.  Behind his shoulder was the dream laughter and image of a sphinx.

Frightened and satisfied, I said, “You’re the merlin soul-named Kaermerdin!”

“You’ve named me!”

The merlin shrank to human size.  His sphinx laughed once more and vanished.  The merlin now was as withered and ragged as a village beggar whom boys whip across the fields.

“You possess me,” he said, “as I possess you.”

“You possess me?”

“I do.  I’ve lived many times.  I made the fog for Uther’s rape of Igerne to make Arthur.  I stole the child to raise to the power to draw the sword from the stone.  I’m pieces of you now and you ought to know it.”

“Of me!”

“That heart of yours” – the creature tapped the armor over my heart – “is partly mine.  You ate my own heart when Galabes first fed you.  Your liver is full of all my thoughts.  The spleen, too.  In every other vital organ, a bit of me is there.  You’re my daughter as you were Lucan’s and are Arthur’s child.  Listen to me!”

The still-shrinking creature looked up to the passing of the sun in its backward orbit and of the Moon and of the sun again and said, “Merlin has lived twelve-times-twelve lives with you the newest of our line.  You have in you the spirits of all who preceded you.  None of them achieved the quest.  None made Arthur the perfect king to recreate the world.  You must!”

I cowered from the shrinking creature.  “Why must
I?
” I cried.

The little monster shouted in twelve-times-twelve voices, “To free to die that part of me that’s you!  Give us peace. Free us from these dreary cycles of existence.  Win, and no more pass us on to the next and the next and the next merlin.  And no one will follow
you
to pass
you
on through so many more weary lives!”

“Must I live so long?”

“If you fail, we all must live the misery of your failure.  Succeed and we all die, happy in victory.”

“Great Father Merlin!”  I fell to my knees before the monster who now was barely eye-to-eye with me when I was on my knees.  “What am I to do?”

“Show me the sword.”

Great Merlin put out his hand to take Excalibur.  He could not close his fingers on the hilt.

“The sword won’t have me!  It won’t accept being taken by the Great Merlin!”

He pointed one hand one toward Earth, one toward Heaven and shouted, “Is this my reward? That midway through life I meet she who succeeds me with the sword of the age yet I can’t hold it and die?”

He looked up at the sun in its continuous backward track and waited for a reply.  There was none.

“Silence!” he cried in anguish.  “Is that my answer?”

I said, “Great lords, do you speak to the sun?”

I had in my hands the World Sword that denied itself to the Great Merlin who was brother to all the powers of the universe.  With this sword, what could I accomplish or become?

“Greed!” said the Great Merlin, reading the thought in my liver.  He swelled from a midget to his nine foot height.  Behind his shoulder was the shadow image of the laughing sphinx.

“Greed,” he said, “is the destruction of the merlin, our only sin.  Everything in the world is ours.  We have only to take it.  We have no need to be greedy for more than everything.”

He and his sphinx began to shrivel into the grave.

“But her sword,” tittered the sphinx, “won’t kill Saxons in her dreams!”

The Great Merlin groaned.  The sphinx laughed.  Both withered to bone dust.

I said to the closing grave, “Tell me what to do!”

Arms thrust up from the earth, past snaking roots and hopping spiders, and clutched me screaming, dragging me into the grave beneath the suffocating dust, the chest-crushing stones, the plants whose roots sought my eyes and ears and nose to suck my life juices, to enwrap the sword.

I heard behind my shoulder the laughter of a sphinx and a merlin’s breath warm on my ear, saying, “Become!”

“Become what?” I cried, suffocating, struggling to get out, subsiding into dreaming death.

“Become all of us!”

The sphinx in its tittering voice said, “Tell us the name of the sword!”

Excalibur!
the sword replied.

The sphinx vanished.

The Great Merlin’s arms withered to atomos around my chest.

The creature and his sphinx drifted away into the future.  I drifted into the past.

“Sobeit!” the Earth said around me and around Excalibur.

We dreamed together of Arthur and Camelot.

“But what am I to do?” I cried out.

* * *

“Does this earth talk?” said a girl, startled, crossing my grave.

Her voice woke me.

I looked up out of the dirt as though I lay beneath a glass coffin lid.  Unlike Morgause, whom I had seen how many years ago, this woman wore no armor.  She wore Persian silk and bangles of Jerusalem coins.

She was alive in a more civilized era, I thought with delight, before the endless Saxon wars.  She was alive in an age when Arthur’s peace was like the old
pax romana,
perfect and everywhere.  When universities were stuffed with dozens of books and even more scholars.  When a girl could dance fearless on a merlin’s grave.

But the young man for whom she danced would not take her invitation.

“Can this ground really speak?” he said, puzzled.

He was as beautiful and dressed as beautifully as the girl.  This was their countryside picnic, two slaves holding their feast, but he had a gladius in a jeweled scabbard on his belt.

The young man kneeled above me.  I saw him as a fish looking up from clear water sees a fisherman looking down from his boat.  The youth put his ear to my grave and listened into the earth.

“What did it say?” he said to the girl.  It was a casual command but a command.

The girl laughed.  “It said, ‘What am I to do now?’”

“It said
that?
”

“I’ve told you, Mordred.”

I trembled with excitement and fear.  I looked up at Mordred! Arthur’s bastard son out of Morgause.  The sin put on the high king by trickery so poisonous that Mordred, heir to Camelot and Orkney, led the Saxon kings against Arthur and plunged his own sword into the High King to win Guenevere for Lancelot already dead on that same battlefield and to conquer the ruins of Camelot for himself.

Was this the moment for which I had made Excalibur?  To thrust the blade out of this grave through the ear now listening for my dream shout?

I looked at the girl – her veil open, summer sweat on her forehead, her eyes, skin, and hair all golds and blues.  Was this sweet beauty the queen – Guenevere, child of Cator, Duke of Brittany, who had brought as dowry the Round Table made for her father by the Great Merlin?

“Is that Guenevere the whore up there?” I cried in rage.

Mordred staggered back from the grave.

The girl said, “You heard it, too?”

But she laughed, that sound also blue and gold to my ears.

“What brave soul is buried there to so frighten the great Prince Mordred?” she teased.

Mordred said to her, in grim fury, “I bear frights other men die to hear.  I’ve scars that to see them cause strong men to weep.  Nothing frightens me.”

“I’ve wept for your scars, too,” she said, no more merriment in her voice.

She kneeled on the grave and put her ear to the earth.  I nearly screamed as I felt a welling of surprise merlinic love for her as Arthur’s queen.  If it were she who was Guenevere and ruined Camelot, how could I love her?  No, I should kill this monster of adultery!

Then I thought in fresh horror,
Drive the World Sword through her woman’s heart, this queen who loves Arthur?  How can I do that?

She said to Mordred, disappointed, “Nothing more to hear.”

“You heard something before,” Mordred said.

He dragged the two slaves from their picnic, each with a shovel.

“Before I kill you, say your name!” I said to the girl.

“It speaks again!”  She put her ear to the grave, curious.

Confess your name,
I wanted to warn her,
and the merlin in this grave will kill you, Guenevere!

“It thinks me the queen,” the girl said, rising, confused.

“Say your name!” I shouted.

“I hear it!” cried a slave.

The slaves flung down their shovels and ran back to the picnic.

“What did it say to you?” said Mordred, hot and demanding.

He pulled the scabbard from his gladius and straddled the grave to stab the blade into my dirt.

“No!” the girl said to him.  She went to her knees an arm’s reach above my chest and looked down into the grave as though looking into my eyes.

She said to my grave, “My name is Flavia, child of Agravain Hard Hand of the Round Table.”

“Flavia!  Oh, perfect Flavia!  Then I won’t have to kill your beauty!”

“Would you kill me?” Flavia cried.

She ran from my grave.

Mordred shouted his war cry and drove his gladius into the earth, plunging it through soil transparent to me, driving it down until I saw the metal point coming at me seeking heart and liver, steel courageous against the demons that protect the dead.

I shouted when the metal cut searing into my body that I thought already dead.

The girl cowered from my shout with her cringing slaves.

Mordred stabbed and gouged and dug at the grave in a lip-lathering fury.

“There’s nothing here!” he cried.  “No bone, no iron.  Nothing that can speak!”

“What did it say to you, Lady?” a slave asked Flavia.

“It mistook me for the queen.”

“Ill-omened,” whispered the slave.  “If Guenevere suspects an empty grave calls you queen, you must run for your life, Mistress!”

“Queen after Guenevere?” said Mordred.  He stopped hacking at my grave.

“She’s a bitterly jealous queen,” the slave whispered to Flavia, cowering from Mordred, “with more jealous friends – like
him
.”

Mordred shouted at the slave, “Go!”

The slaves fled, crying, “Lady, come with us!”

“But what have I done?” Flavia cried.

Mordred stood on my grave watching Flavia, ghastly calculation coming into his face.

Flavia cowered from him, saying, “I’ve done nothing against the queen.”

Mordred watched her narrowly.

I watched him.

“A piece of earth spoke to me and I reported what it said,” Flavia cried.  “You asked me.  The guilt is yours, too.”

“This grave,” said Mordred, “said you were to be queen?”

“It asked me if I’m the queen.  No more than that.  What’s going to happen to me?”

“What does it mean?” Mordred shouted at her.

“Is this the lesson of love you promised me?” Flavia said, backing from Mordred, putting up her silk-covered arm for defense.

He took one great stalking step toward her.

“No, this is your lesson of life in Camelot,” he said, raising his gladius.

“My father’s the Hard Hand – he’ll revenge me!” she screamed.

“I’ll kill him, too.  Another traitor to my dear queen almost-mother and my dearer throne.”

He gripped the gladius to stab it through her.

She was transfixed with terror.

I shouted, “Halt, Murderer!”

Mordred started.

“Even the dirt cries out against you!” said Flavia.

I shoved myself up out of my grave, sweeping Excalibur from under my cloak, swelling to the nine foot size of the Great Merlin I had become, rising over Mordred and Flavia.