The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (20 page)

I led the queen cutting an alley through the Saxons.  She grabbed up Uther’s severed head and bundled it in her mail skirt.  Her lifeguards rummaged through the stew pots to select Uther’s limbs and body pieces.  We hacked apart the Pagan priests and made the Sign of the Cross before we hacked apart the Saxon Christian priests.  We smashed down Saxon princes and princesses and stabbed out of the eyes of their knights and warlords.

In our berserker frenzy, we cut our way not back to safety but through to the Saxon king with his startled underkings.  We made these princes fight back-to-back beneath their barbaric ensigns, screaming out their gargling war cries and weeping for the wounds queen, merlin, and the Cornishmen gave them.

Igerne put her greatsword to the Saxon king’s throat to flick off his head but I had in me a merlinic rage to kill the killer of my king.  I shoved Igerne aside.  I swung my battle ax, driving the blade through the king’s shield and upraised sword, through his breastplate and into the earth between the Saxon king’s boots.

I drew no blood.  I did him no damage.  But I saw manic terror in his savage face and that always is the best of all wounds to inflict on an enemy.

We’ll not kill you today when we must lose this battle,
I said to the Saxon king in his soul’s language,
but I’ll leave you to Artyr and victory!

“What does she say?  What does she say?” cried the king to his startled minions.  “Someone translate this monster!”

I swung Pagan Eater to cut a way out through the Saxon horde for Igerne and her lifeguards.  We fought back to the pavilion.  Gurthrygen with his war band was in battle there, the wandering cannibal priests having discovered Arthur, a tasty treat in silver child’s armor.

Gurthrygen defended his brother with sword and chain.  His war band fought with hammers and stakes, nailing writhing Saxons to British soil before nailing out their eyes and livers.  I joined them, gleefully hacking and battering in a dreamy frenzy.

The whole battle seemed fantasy.  Uther’s cycle had closed and Uther was in the Underworld sweatily explaining himself to Pluto and Gwynn.  I was Upworld killing Pagans with the ease of butchery.  Both of us were doing our parts to bring in the age of Arthur.

The sun reached zenith in a shower of sparks.  Both armies sprawled exhausted on the slaughter-field, their fighting given up.  Those among the wounded who were able crept away from Morrigu’s darting war ravens and in fear of Morgana’s throat-cutting elves.

The grassland, hills, and hidden places were heaped with broken armor, forested with driven arrows and spears, strewn with anonymous hands, heads, feet, brains, and livers.  It had been a happy and glorious slaughter for everyone, except those for whom this cycle of life had closed.

Peasants from both armies robbed the dead to make themselves rich enough to buy a few cows.  Inferior knights robbed the dead of superior armor to elevate themselves.  By afternoon, half the remaining British army was dressed in Saxon armor and half the Saxon army in British armor and there were no cow-less peasants alive on either side.

Both armies marched away from the field bedraggled and groaning for bruises but thinking it a rich morning’s work.

I trudged beside the wagon that carried the pieces of the dead king, Uther’s head rolling about until I padded it with his arm and leg.

Igerne from her horse said to me, “That’s enough sentiment for a rapist and murderer, Old Woman.  Come with me to plan Gurthrygen’s election as king.”

“You don’t need my help.  I know Gurthrygen’s story already.  He’s his father.”

“But a more Christian prince, surely, and damn him if he isn’t.”  Igerne spat on the ruins of her husband.

She leaned down from her saddle to say, quietly, “Listen to me, Lady Merlin.  When Uther made love to me, every time he made love to me, there always was a third present.  You.”

“Me?” I said, startled.

“I wouldn’t have the king who killed my love-husband without your breathing on me your love dusts to cloud my mind and give me the dream image that Uther was my loving murdered Gorlois.”

“You know that?” I said.

“I didn’t until little Morgause told me.”

“Six years old and she knows too much,” I said.

“But do you know this, have you seen it in your backwards life?  To despise Uther, I took his first son as my lover, my stepson Gurthrygen.”

“Great gods!”

“Then I came to love him.  Which is why I’ll make him king.  That’s why you’ll help me.”

“Only for a payment, Queen.”

“You always want treasure, don’t you? You do nothing out of Christian charity?”

“I’m a Druid.  I don’t know what you mean.”

“What do you want, Old Thief?”

“Give me Arthur.”

“I promised you’d have him in his twelfth year.”

“That’s too late, Queen.  I know the fate of little brothers when an older brother is chosen king.  Give Arthur to me now.”

Igerne was suspicious.  “What’ll you make of him?”

“The man he was born to be.”

“To rival Gurthrygen?”

“Never that.”

“You frighten me, Merlin.  I want your oath that Gurthrygen will stay king for life or I’ll fling Arthur to the Saxons.”

“I can agree to that.”

“Arthur will never rival Gurthrygen for the crown?  That’s what you’re telling me?  Swear by all the too many gods, Merlin.  Especially your filthy Druid idols, by Beli Mawr or Bendigeidfran or whatever.  Swear it!”

“Agreed and happily.  I swear it by any and all gods you want.”

“Then take the little fool.  He’s a disappointment to us all.  We need warrior-princes in Britain, not voiceless imbeciles like him.  I was going to drown him, anyway, like a cat in a sack.”

Igerne spurred her horse to the head of the column, pebbles kicked up by its hooves clattering on my stone armor.

I found Arthur sitting in the back of a wagon loaded with Saxon treasure looted from the battlefield.  The field itself had been abandoned to the encroachments of the Saxons.  This treasure was all the triumph Igerne could show the population.

I silenced my complaining shield by covering it with a rag.  I dumped shield and stone armor in the wagon.  Pagan Eater, too, bloody and chipped as it was and matted with Saxon yellow hair.  I kept Urien over my back.

I sat beside the boy who was flapping his sweaty clothes to air the battle-stink.  We dangled our feet over the side.

I said to Arthur in his soul’s voice,
When will you speak to me?

Do you love me?
the boy replied.

I’m here for love,
I said. 
Will you be my son as your father was my son?

My father’s dead?

He’s dead.

My mother?

She’s forgotten you.  But I never will.  I’ve loved you a thousand years, Artyr.  You’re my son, my father, and my heart’s king.

“Be my mother!” said the boy, his first spoken words.

He wept against my chest.

We had chosen one another.  The golden age was about to begin.

That night Uther’s broken pieces were exhibited to the people at Londinium, old King Ludd’s capital, and Gurthrygen was lifted on the Pendragon shield and presented to the crowd as the newly elected king of the Britons.  Though why they chose a pointless backwater like Londinium, full of beggars and thieves, for the election, I still can’t say.

Gurthrygen’s election was sped by Igerne’s discreet poisoning and less discreet bribery.  More, it was done promptly by the elders to have a berserker king to lead a refreshed army against the next Saxon assault.  Let Gurthrygen do that, he was war-clever but expendable.  He would buy the elders the time to quarrel and choose among themselves the true ruler of dying Britain.

The kingdom left to Gurthrygen was just half that of his father.  Uther’s kingdom had been half what he had inherited from King Ambrosius, poisoned by the Saxons.  Britain now ran from York to Londinium, arched north of Caleva, south along the Cornish border to the Narrow Sea and through Wales to the northern territories and Hadrian’s Wall.  It was a pinched country of people who felt pinched.

But the boy Gurthrygen proved a surprisingly good general and survived his first battle.  Complex Alexandrian strategies didn’t interest him.  He believed in screaming frontal assaults.  He also believed in setting fire to the woods behind his own army to encourage it to attack the enemy frontally.

Gurthrygen survived his first battle and the battle after that.  His victories stunned the Saxon onslaught and equally stunned the electors, each of whom wanted to be king in his place.

At last, with victories everywhere and his spear decorated with the yellow-braided heads of Saxon princes and princesses, Gurthrygen rode his war chariot through Ludd’s capital, taking his Triumph.  The old men and women electors ground their yellow teeth and were forced to wait for his happy death before any of them could be king or queen.

* * *

During these months, three-year-old Arthur and I lived apart from the world of rugged greed, tramping the summer forests that ordinary men and women dare not enter for the spooks and howls that infest them, the two of us living wild and free.

I in my soul’s voice taught the boy the names of the trees and animals, taught him to swim and climb, to run down foxes and deer, to sleep wrapped in a merlin’s cloak woven from forest scraps, a leaf-bristling cloak that made the boy invisible to the wild creatures he, in his child’s pleasure, sought to caress.

When we skirted Saxon villages and camps, the Saxons threw dung at us.  When we skirted British villages and camps, the Britons threw rocks and howled insults.  In our private no man’s land, Arthur with Merlin’s soul-voice in his ears learned at last to speak.

He said, stuttering, “M-m-mother Merlin, am I to be k-k-king?”

“Why ask that?”

“What good is a p-p-prince if he won’t be king?”

I had to laugh.  He was right, eternally right.

But I said, “In these harsh days of Saxon wars and frightened kings, that kind of logic can lose you your head.”

“But am I to
be
king?”

“No, you
are
a king.”

“So where’s my k-k-kingdom?”

“When you’re fifteen, you’ll find manhood, crown, and country, believe me.”

“Is that a merlin’s prophecy?” said the three-year-old.

I laughed again.  “What elf taught you so much of the world in so few years that you can accuse me of prophecy?”

The boy was silent.

I saw that Arthur, a child after all, did not understand me.

I took the puzzled boy in my arms.  “I’m a merlin without prophetic powers.  I’m not a magician, conjurer, seer or trickster.  I’m the merlin who lives life backward.  My past is your future.  That’s how I know what’s to come.  I’ve lived it already.  Or most of it.”

“You know I’m a king?”

“The whole Earth knows it too and waits for you.”

Arthur was startled.  “Earth waits for an imbecile king?”

“Who calls you an imbecile?”

“My mother the queen.”

“Then it’s an imbecile Earth and happy to have you!”

The boy clutched to me.  “You are my Mother Merlin,” he cried, “and my mother.”

I wept.

I had come into this merlin’s life from a childhood that was brutal and cold.  I had lived a thousand years of love and hate.  But only here, with an outlawed boy covered in leaves, did I feel love begin to draw out of me patience, courage, kindness, and honor.

I understood, from the depths of all my many other selves, that every child is a king or queen in the power it has to make any man or woman into a loving human being.  Because a child’s love is freely granted.  Like God’s grace, it is unearned, falling on the good and the bad, with the power to recreate everyone it touches.

Here was a child who was air-starved at birth and who may never have the cunning and power to become the king I had to make of him.  A stuttering, frightened child condemned as an imbecile by his own mother.

But if this child did nothing more than love me and take my love in turn, then my thousand years of suffering quest were worth the cost.

I now knew that it is love that completes a merlin.

With Arthur’s loving kiss, I was made a whole creature.

I was happy at last.  All the one hundred forty-four of me could have peace.

* * *

Oh, my, but the British memory is short.  In the few months since Gurthrygen became king, the legend of Lady Merlin’s vast power and wealth diminished.  The elders, conniving for their own advancement, forgot a disappeared rival and her fosterling, Prince Arthur.  Children forgot my patched cloak they once shrieked happy to tug.  Palace retainers held over from Uther’s time swept out my vacant apartments and gave them to Gurthrygen’s Spanish concubines.  No one wanted to think of me again.  Or of Arthur.

There were many other merlins in the land doing wonders.  A merlin who is not there to make a miracle at holy seasons or cause the Christian priests to howl against him is not a merlin worth remembering.  I was not worth remembrance.

There were, of course, strange and appetizing rumors about a thing called Merlin’s Well.  There, if a man or woman were patient enough and fast, he or she could see treasure materialize at the bottom of a hole in the ground and steal a bit before old Lady Merlin came to carry it away.  But it was months and years between manifestations and to steal from even a forgotten merlin was a frightful idea.

This night the camp at the treasure well was derelicts and battered survivors of the two years past Battle of Badon Hill where King Uther was slaughtered.  They were peasants, failed knights, and strange antiques who may have been magicians or witches or slaves abandoned in the forest to die of old age, all of them huddled under tarps by meager fires, dreaming of golden wonders.

Five-year-old Arthur and I tramped out of the forest to the treasure well.  I was dressed in my now-ragged twelve-part cloak, rank with worms and mud.  Arthur was in his cloak of woven leaves.

Neither of us was armed but around us, stirring the long grass and sending night-nesting birds fluttering up, came two breezes like outriders of invisible power.  The watchers by the pit ran away to stare at us from behind trees.

Arthur looked into the well.  He spoke in his soul-voice, a voice that did not stutter,
Is this it, Mother Merlin, all the Old World’s treasure for us?

There was nothing in the well.

“Better,” I said.  “It’s the foundation stones of a city.”

What city?

“The city to be built by King Arthur.  Look!”

At the pit’s bottom, a flash of gold and silver! Turquoise! Ruby! Rattle of coins from Carthage, Jerusalem, Mali, Atlantis!

Arthur jumped into the pit to drip pretty things between his fingers, the jewels and coins clattering on silver shields, golden urns, enameled shoes, inlaid swords.  Arms and armor, toys, spoons, cups, the crops and whips of kings and pharaohs, of queens and empresses, exotic and rich.

Arthur chose for himself a child’s silver shield, mirror-sharp, and I saw in it an image of myself that was a stranger to me.  In spirit, I was a thousand years old but in body I was now scarcely sixty.  Less!  And growing younger faster than Arthur aged.  Soon I would youthen to the ignorant fourteen-year-old slave girl I had been when Fate captured me to become Merlin.

I’d lived a thousand years this way and that but now I had so little time left to do so much!  Age was fading from me.  My gray hair was speckling with red.  The body that had been old but tough and lean as a worn boot sole was swelling with hot, new blood.  Fresh color in my cheeks!

I cheered. Arthur started and stuttered.

The derelicts in the trees cried out in fright.

I jumped into the well, luxuriating in the richness of new life, dressing myself in plumes and silks until Arthur laughed his stuttering laugh, frightening away the derelicts now crowding the wellhead to gawk down at us swimming in treasure.

I climbed out of the well and fell laughing on the grass.  It seemed sweeter-smelling grass now that I was sliding away from old age.  I could hear spiders skitter between the blades.  Worms dig through the earth.  I saw the clouds in the night sky like the swirling faces of all the merlins who had preceded me.  I loved them all!

I listened to the wind.  Smelled the air.  It was like sea salt and campfire smoke, cow dung, the smell of people bustling through a city street  The breeze smelled of everything everywhere, of life’s richness, and it was wonderful.

I was joyously happy.

I dressed Arthur in a child’s toy armor and thought once more of an untested sword and an untested merlin who had been sent into this age to create the perfect king.  How fragile was that hope!  How frightening for the world that a reluctant merlin and a stuttering boy should carry this huge burden.  How absurd.  How perfect in its absurdity.  How perfect.

Deep night, and it was time to begin my great work.

From among the treasures in the well, I chose for myself gaudy rich chains, bright fabrics, colored bows for my reddening hair.  I dressed Arthur as my prince-heir in the green and white checks that Morgause had chosen as Lady Merlin’s arms.

I called out to the kings and queens, peasants and slaves, who had lived in this era and had died into Pluto’s hands but whom I had killed out of Hades.  They came to me on horseback and wagons, bowing before the merlin who had stolen them from Death.

I raised the boy over my head and shouted, “I have him who will be Arthur!”

The risen dead cheered and battered their swords on their shields.  They bundled up the well’s treasure, heaped it in their wagons and followed me through the night to the Brutus stone.

Excalibur was a sliver of white flashing from the stone through the overgrowth of vine and leaf.

I tore away the leaves clinging to the sword.

I said to Arthur in his soul’s voice,
Draw the sword – prove you’re the king!

Arthur gripped the sword and pulled.

It would not move.

I was stunned.  “Again!” I cried.

Excalibur refused to come at Arthur’s command.

I put my hand over Arthur’s on the grip.

“Pull, pull, all the gods damn you if you can’t draw the sword!” I shouted at the boy.

The sword would not draw.

Panicked rage filled me and I howled.  A thousand years of misery preparing for this moment and this boy was not to be Arthur after all!

Even a day-old infant Arthur should draw the sword from the stone.  Who was this child called “Arthur?”  Where was the real Arthur?  How could he be found?

Soundless lightning zipped across the rock and bit the sword.  The risen princes and ladies quailed.  I wrapped the terrified boy in his leafy cloak and watched the Moon rise and stop in its course.

Bats ceased to flit.  Night birds stopped their calling.  The rush of water beneath the earth became silent.  The old moss and vines I’d ripped from the sword opened on the sheen of the White Druid.

He put out his hands to touch the boy in blessing.

“Old Monster!” I shouted at the Druid, filling with merlinic rage, “what fraud have you done me this time?”

I raised Arthur by his green and white checked jerkin, the boy wriggling and shouting.

“I gave you what you made,” said the Druid.

“This creature can’t draw the sword from the stone.  He’s nothing!  I could crush the life out of him now and it would mean nothing to the world.”

“Mother!” cried the terrified boy.

“Is he Arthur Pendragon?” said the Druid.

“That’s what he’s called.”

“Then he must be the larval Arthur.”

I looked at the boy I held at arm’s length for my sudden repulsion of him.

“The larval stage?” I said.

“There’s no magic in a child but what you teach him, Merlin.  He’s legend only when he’s the perfect man who’ll become the perfect king.  Now,” said the Druid, easing Arthur out of my hands and to safety on the rock, petting him to calm his fright, “he’s a
boy
named Arthur, not a
king
named Arthur.”