The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (18 page)

I said out of my gloomy corner, “Uther!  For the making of a fog and the making of a son, I claim this boy from you to raise up as a Druid prince.”

Uther said, “What do I want with a second son when I’ve my pendragon in the first boy?  Take him when you will.”

“Not yet!” said Igerne from the blood and sweat of her birthing bed.  “Healing Jesu had his Twelve.  I’ll keep the child his first twelve years.”

Uther said, “Do whatever you want, Wife, but make Merlin his tutor until you give him up.”

Igerne said to me, “Be his tutor and slave, Old Woman.  But you’ll make him a Christian, not a Druid, lord and prince.”

“A Christian prince?” I said, too giddied by the moment to care what sort of prince Arthur should be so long as I could make him the magian king for Camelot.  “I’ll make myself a Christian to make him a Christian prince!  When do I get him?”

“When Fate appoints,” said Igerne, sly and bitter but content.  She drew little Morgause to her side on her sweaty bed and slept.

I looked at Morgause, half-sister to Arthur, and she gazed at me, as unafraid as a witch provoking a merlin.  I saw Mordred in her face.

* * *

In the Julian Year 5208 and of our Lord 495

The day Arthur was born, a nameless sword appeared driven into the Brutus stone.  It could not be pulled out.  This magic or miracle had no meaning anyone could interpret.  A meaningless miracle is a terrifying thing.

Strange cries were heard on King Uther’s palace battlements.  The monument to Winged Victory at Verulamium shattered.  All the crucifixes set up on the king’s way fell down with their corpses.  A lion ate a lesser knight and, in Wales, a river ran red in a season when there were no battles.

Men and women cried to merlins to name the sword, paid Druids to entrance, hounded witches from the undergrowth, prayed with Christian priests to Christian saints, finger-read in old books, but no one could discover the blade’s name, origin or meaning.  None connected the sword with the new prince Arthur who was never intended to be king.

After a time, as with all things that frighten humans, the sword ceased to be such a terror and became merely a worrisome curiosity.

Worry, too, faded and the sword was ignored, except on the highest feast days when the stone was cleared for the Druids and Christians and the Pendragon made live offerings there.  Then the sword, by its self-made place at the center of the stone, took attention and caused people to wonder at its purpose in the world.  But, ceremonies done, people forgot the sword.  Moss and lichen overgrew it.  Only occasionally would sunlight spark through its foliage and gleam on the unrusting metal.

At sunset, I found Uther in his armor squatting brooding on the Brutus stone, one arm, greaved and finger-ringed, slung around the mossy hilt of the sword.

“Mother and Princess!” Uther gasped.  “I wish to Hell you wouldn’t just pop out of the air the way you do.  It unsettles me.”

I squatted on the stone beside him.  “Why this gloom, King?”

“Have you lost age again, Old Woman?  You seem less gray every time you come to chide me about something.  It’s so dreary being reminded I’m running toward death while you’re running toward birth.  It frightens me and I’m the great Uther immune to fear.”

“What frightens you tonight, oh, fearless king?”

“This stupid sword in the stone.”

He slapped the blade with his greaved forearm.  The sword made no sound.

“What is the awful thing?  A toy for Gwynn and Pluto or maybe Satan?  Lord God Jesu, there are so many frights in this awful world, why do I have to spend my last night with this one?”

“That’s your heavy battle armor you have on and your prize greatsword across your back,” I said.  “What demons do you expect to fight here, Morrigu herself?”

“Been talking to the elves, damn them, though I’m not quite drunk enough to see them.”

Uther peered into the brush looking for invisible elves.

“They’re all over the place and whispering against me,” he said.  “I’ve got to armor up when talking to them.”

“I think you’re drunk enough to see them.  Look closer.”

“Of course I’m drunk enough.  What fool goes into battle not drunk?”

Uther shoved across to me a skin of beer.

“Not your prize Burgundia, Mother Merlin, but good enough to pickle your lady guts for death.”

I drank the beer, sour from its half-cured hide.  It was as bad as Uther predicted.

I looked out across the fields and trees filling with evening.  “Where’s your army?”

“You don’t see them with your fabulous ‘all-seeing eye?’”

“I see them.  Not with a third eye but with my remembrance of the future.  A ragtag, a skin-and-bones, a poor pickings for the crows army.”

“Do you see my lifeguard elves and fairies out there?”

“No.”

“Betrayed again!” said Uther.  “Damn them all.  Never trust an elf or fairy, Merlin.”

“What do you expect from their kind?”

“An answer to what this sword is.”  He banged the sword again.  It made no sound.

“Tell me, Old Mother, Old Fright, Old Beast, Old Nasty, Old Whatever else I could think of if I could think of it now, was this blade sent into the world to cut me out of life?”

“You’re not half drunk enough for battle,” I said.  “Have more of this rancid beer.”

“Best advice you ever gave me.  You’re a merlin after my own whatever.”

Uther drank and wiped his mouth with his red beard, looked at the wet beard and began to weep.

“What barbarian slave hangs this glory from his shield tomorrow?” he cried.

“The sword isn’t here to sever you from life, King.”

Uther was startled.  “Then what’s it for?”

“It waits for a hand.”

Uther looked at his unringed sword hand.  He put his hand on the sword’s pommel and pulled himself upright.

“Is mine the hand?” he asked.

“Try the sword.”

Uther hauled on the blade jammed into the Brutus stone.  It would not come for him.

He sat and we drank more beer.

“I’ve tried that sword a hundred times on a hundred nights, when no one could see me fail,” he said.  “The gaudy thing doesn’t love me.”

“It’s not meant for you.”

“For who?  I’m the most important creature in this world.  Who else out there could displace me?  Who could displace Uther the Ultimate Dragon?”

Uther finished the beer and kicked the skin off the stone.

“Oh, yes,” he said.  “One little inbred Saxon peasant with a lucky sling shot could displace me.”

“Why this mood tonight?  You almost seem human.”

“Am I ordinarily less than human?”

“More than human.”

“I’m the British Goliath!” he roared.  Uther howled his war cry.

He parted his leather war skirt that had been stiffened in brine and pissed over the side of the rock of the race.

He tasted the stink of his piss and said, “Tomorrow’s a good day for a fight, Old Fartess.  When I feel the urge, I’ll lead that rag-and-bones army to search for the Saxon king.  I’ll find him and crush him, as I usually do.”

“Or so the chronicles will record.”

“It’s all the same.  What does the next cycle care about us?  My arms are ready, my knights crazed with blood-lust, my peasants and serfs whipped into a frenzy of fright as much for being slung from my crucifixes as for Saxon knives.  The instant is perfect for battle.”

Then Uther said, “It’s the king who’s unready.”

“Or unwilling?”

“Yes, yes, oh, yes, unwilling.”

“‘Uther the Unwilling?’  Want me to carve that on your tomb in gold inlay?”

Uther laughed and jostled me.  “What times we’ve had, Merlin!  You gave me Helen the Trojan!  I saw Achilles, crossed swords with Hercules, voyaged with Jason!  What are the legends of Cleopatra, Alexander, and Caesar to me who has known them in their drunken fits, puking their guts out for fright and bad camp food, running howling with their troops from Persian arrows and one little green asp?”

“What are they indeed compared to you, Lord Uther?”

“Compared to me, they’re less than the dirt in their stone-cold caskets!”

“I’ll tell you the truth now,” I said.

“Tonight of all nights you’re going to tell me the truth?” said Uther.  “Don’t do that.  I don’t want to hear any truths tonight.”

“You never actually met them.”

Uther was stunned.  “I spent a year of nights in Cleopatra’s bed and she was a ghost?  Alex and Julie, too, and I had to fight to keep them out of
my
bed?”

“Ghosts,” I said.  “Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.”

“You deceived me!  My Lady Merlin deceived me,” Uther said, even gloomier.

Then he laughed, suddenly and explosively.

“But why tell me now?”

“In this mood of yours, before battle, it’s pointless to continue the lie.”

“What beautiful lies!  Helen, too?  All her nights of love a fraud?  That business on a rock reaching up into Olympus with all the birds chittering and the leering gorgon?”

“Helen, too.  And the gorgon.”

“Ayyy!  That gorgon was my kind of monster.  I dreamed we damaged an amphora of your Burgundia by ourselves and sacked a couple of Saxon villages barehanded.  I’m sorry I never really met him.  Or her, was it?  Whichever.”

Uther glanced sharply at me and I said for him what was on his mind.

“Yes, and your best night of nights, with the love goddess Venus, too.”

Uther groaned in a beery breath.

“But she was even less real than Helen,” I said, “as Venus is just a figment of some Greek rock-cutter’s diseased imagination.”

“What disease!  What perfection!”

We squatted silent on the stone, watching the last of sunset.

“This blade sings at sunset,” Uther said, pitching a pebble down the side of the rock.

“It sings?” I said, startled.

“Listen to it.”

As the last of day withdrew and night’s chill crept over the rock of the race, the sword began to vibrate.

“Sometimes it speaks clearly,” Uther said.

I listened but the sword would not sing for me.

“What does it sometimes say?” I asked the king.

“A very strange and foreign word – ‘Excalibur.’”

Hearing its soul-name, the sword trembled.

“It does that, too, if you repeat whatever it says.”

“Does it say more?” I said.

“A sword that speaks one word is a wonder but you want it to recite
The Antigone?
”

We and the sword were silent again.

Uther and I watched the king’s servants light a fire at the base of the rock to warm themselves.

“I’m full of my aches and pains tonight,” Uther said.  “Old war wounds.  My three brown teeth.  That ache in my lungs I’ve had since I was a child when my father put me down a well to steal the treasure that made him Duke of Usk.  My knees hurt from clinging to too many horses and women.  There’s the old burning in my nether parts – was your dream Helen clean, do you think?  Could an old Trojan have had the Roman sickness?”

Uther laughed and said, “Entertain me, Merlin.  Tell me the future.”

“What part of it do you want to know?”

Uther was surprised.  “After all these years saying no, tonight you’ll foretell for me?”

“It’s a special night.”

“My last?”

“Is that the future you want told?”

“It’s as much as I care to hear.  No, no.  Give me the future a few days ahead.  Who rules in Britain on whatever day that is after the next one?”

“A British king.”

“Me?”

“You know you’re going to die tomorrow.”

“Ayyy!”  Uther wept into his beard.

When he ran out of tears, he said, “Who’s elected king after me?”

“Too many men and women will rule here after you.”

“But are they my blood?”

“Gurthrygen will be king.”

“A second King David, my son!  After him?”

“The day after tomorrow is all you asked for.”

“Tell a dead man the truth, Sweet Lady.”

“A Solomon follows your David.”

“My son king.  His son elected after him.  And his son, too?  Then my sons will grant me Christian immortality in this world.  It makes the leaving of life less hard.  No more good news?”

“The news is, good or bad, if the world continues as it has in all past cycles, your line will extinct itself in forty years, Britain will wither into the Welsh and Cornish mountains to become some hideous thing part Briton, part Saxon, its character and language lost, the preciousness of this time and place forgotten, green fields gone, hawks vanished, no more British sun gleaming on British spear points or the birth-howls of new warrior men and women.”