The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (21 page)

“He’s a miracle I must make?”

“You made the sword.  You made yourself.  Now make the king.”

“I thought it was born into him.  I thought, by the gods, I thought keeping him alive to draw the sword was enough!”

“He’s nothing until you make him something,” said the Druid, his gleam fading into the moss again growing over the sword.

“You gave life to Excalibur when you gave it a quest,” whispered the moss.  “Give life to Arthur.  Give him his quest!”

The Moon shifted and night resumed its creep and bark, its creak, slap, dart of bat, slither of snake, slip of time.

Arthur clung to my knees and wept out his terror of me.  I wept with him.  We wept together until the terror left us.

* * *

Ten years later, in hot manic joy, I threw open the gates to my villa and invited in to a manhood feast the world that Lady Merlin had excluded while a boy grew to become a man of fifteen.

I stood in the vestibulum to welcome my guests, my peaked ear-points freshly gilded, the checkered shield with its ancient hideous faces and the gleaming sword Urien hung on the wall behind me, and shouted, “Welcome!” to my vassal kings and queens.

“Welcome!” to peasants and hermits.

“Welcome!” even to the road-wanderers, objects of rightful suspicion, carriers of plague and leprosy.

“Welcome!” to King Gurthrygen and his suspicious dukes.

“How much younger are you nowdays, Old Beast?” cried the king.  “In another ten years, we’ll meet at the same age and you’ll be beautiful enough to concubine for me!”

“Welcome!” to Igerne, the queen mother and the king’s lover and also Gurthrygen’s queen, startled and jealous of my freshening youthfulness.

“Have you lost weight,” she said, “or is it just the false light?”

“Welcome!” to Princess Morgause, three years older than Arthur, beautiful and witchly.

“How could your hair have become more pendragonishly red than mine, Lady Merlin, or is that another charm-cast lie of yours?” she said.  “Oh, of course it is.”

“Welcome!” to the toadying Christian and Druid priests and to the Gallic princes allied to the king against the Saxons, Picts, Scots, and, now, the Irish.

“Welcome!” I said, closing my villa gates to lock them all in with Arthur and me.

“Welcome!” I said at last to an end to the frights that had haunted me these ten years as I protected Arthur from his brother the king, from Igerne his mother, from the jealous elders and all other threats.

“Show me my son the prince.  Which one is he?” Igerne said to me, eyeing my young pages and squires.  She wore over her tunica a silver cross.  Her holy crosses had grown larger as her queenly crimes had grown more monstrous.

I pointed to the most beautiful of my once-dead vassal princes and said, “That one there.  The tallest and strongest, with Uther’s red hair.”

“I mark him,” Igerne said, gesturing to her entourage.

“Will you meet him?”

“I mothered him.  Why should I meet him?  Let’s to meat.”

Igerne led into the villa where I had staged the feast in Trojan style with men and women eating in separate rooms in the spirit of the Trojan Games I had called to celebrate Arthur’s coming of age.  The Romans and Gauls kept to the separate order of the sexes but the barbaric Britons paid no attention to form and jumbled their sexes all together.

After Igerne had gone into the crowd, I looked across the feasting party to see the tall, red-haired prince I had designated as Arthur stumble and fall.  Blood sprayed on the plaster wall behind him.  My vassal had returned to the Prince of the Dead from whom I had stolen him.

I gestured to a lackey to scrub the wall and carry away the corpse with the queen’s knife stuck in its back.

The king was there with me now, already nearly drunk.  “Lady Merlin!” Gurthrygen cried.  “A dozen years without your company seems a dozen lifetimes.  Come back to court, won’t you?”

“Why would you want me near you at court?”

“You wenched and rioted with the old man when you were a man in the last cycle.  Do the same with me, even if you are a woman these days.  I want to see a lady merlin tumbling in my bed with a bevy of court ladies.”

Gurthrygen vomited his drunk beside my boots.

“Besides,” he said, “I’m lord of just a few last fiefs of Britons squeezed between the Saxons and the Irish Sea and I need you.”

“You win battles.  What more does a king need to do to be unsqueezed?”

“Yes, yes, I can win anything that takes winning with steel,” said Gurthrygen.  “But how do I fight against those old men and women?  The eldermen! The elderwomen!  The dragon dukes and elvish duchesses! The passed-over princes from distant corners of my kingdom who command so few soldiers but so much prestige they can unseat a king if they band together. 
E pluribus unum
, you know, or whatever it was my father used to say.”

Gurthrygen was weary and frightened.

“You’ve the queen,” I said.  “She’s an army in herself.”

“My witch queen.  My stepmother wife.  My murderous bedmate.  An old bitch more weary of war and politics than I.  I wish to God she’d cut my throat and let me cut hers and we could drift into Hades and make love there forever and forget this awful world of kings and conniving.”

“You sound like your father on his last night before death,” I said.

“Do I?” said Gurthrygen, more frightened.  “But have you heard the latest outrage from the council of elders?  When they realized none of them would ever steal the throne from me, they thought of that old sword in the stone.  Can you believe it?”

The king stopped, distracted by his own unhappy thoughts.

“What about the sword?” I said.

“It’s not rusted after all these years, do you know that? Overgrown with moss and lichen but not a speck of rust.  Not even dust.  Or spit.  I spit on it and the gob won’t stick.  It’s got magic or it’s Christ-given or it’s a Druid curse…”

“What do the elders want with the sword?”

“Greed and jealousy!” Gurthrygen cried.  “They’ve poisoned the crown for anyone who’d want it by making no ruler safe on his throne.”

He clutched my party robe.

“It’s marvelous.  I have to love the whole preposterous idea.  They claim they’ve found the sword’s secret.  Imagine that?  Only one nominated by the Christian God or Fate or whatever else to be ruler of Britain can draw the sword from the stone!”

I laughed.  The plan was perfect.  Since no one could pull the sword from the rock, no one could lawfully claim the throne.  Every king or queen could be shoved aside by anyone calling himself Regent for the high-king-to-come who would draw the sword.  Politics would became chaos and murder.  A perfect revenge for the elders’ failure to make themselves all kings of Britain.

“I’ve held onto the throne because I never lose battles,” said Gurthrygen.  “How can the elders hope to remove me in my triumphs by demanding I test the sword?”

“Lose a battle and you lose your…”

“Crown with my head in it,” said the king, miserably.  “No one wins forever.”

But Gurthrygen might, at least until I had Arthur ready to be king.

What Gurthrygen could not win from the Saxons by steel, he got from them by bribery.  Using money earned by selling yellow-haired Saxon slaves to Rome, Africa, and Asia.  Distant places where he bought better cutting edges and harder armors to smash more Saxon armies to gather up more yellow-haired slaves to sell.

Gurthrygen’s fault was his straight-ahead style of war-making.  He rebuilt the Island’s cavalry – the Lizards of his father’s time – and sent them swooping headlong into the Saxons beneath British arrow-showers.  The Lizards scattered and slaughtered Saxons but then reined up to loot and rape, which is what warriors do.  The Saxons turned and fell on them and hacked the Lizards to pieces.  What Gurthrygen won by this strategy, he promptly lost and had to win again.

Even after these ten years of hard fighting during which the Saxon onslaught was blunted and scattered, we still had the same old problem.  There was an endless supply of Saxons across the Narrow Sea but a dwindling supply of Britons.

Let Gurthrygen lose the next battle and he would be called by the elders to prove himself the god-chosen king of the Britons by pulling the sword from the stone.  Fail and his reign would be finished, a dangerous prospect for my plans for Arthur.

Gurthrygen said, with a sudden, sharp cunning, “Where are these Trojan games you promised us, Merlin, when I meet my littlest brother?”

“Your only surviving sibling,” I said.

“Morgause our sister lives, and too bad.  She nags me like a saint nags a sinner to restore Cornwall to her from Arthur.”

“She’s not Igerne’s child from Uther,” I said.  “She’s no threat to your crown.”

“Strange how all of my queen’s children from my father have died,” said Gurthrygen, “all the little ones after Arthur.”

He laughed, making an unpleasant sound.

“Show me Arthur.”

I said, “There, that red-haired boy in the boxing square.”

“Behind all the blood on his face?  He has the heart to take a beating like that?”

“I’ll stop the game and have him presented to you.”

“Later, later.  I’ll knight him or whatever Igerne tells me to do with him as he’s her brat.  She’s afraid of life in Hell, you know.  She buys bigger crosses at bigger holy places.  Each dead baby, another cross.  What a strange world.”

The king went inside my villa to feast.

The red-haired boxer won his match and was cheered through the crowd.  At the entrance to the athlete’s baths, I watched the boy slump down dead, blood running away from him.

“Twice dead,” I said to this one in benediction.  I put a Greek coin in the boy’s mouth to pay his ferry price across the Styx to Hades, from which I had brought him back to life once before.

I went in to the meal ahead of the parade of servants carrying trays of stuffed and re-feathered peacocks and gilt boars, the crowd cheering the food, wine splashing, songs rising, the boxing matches infecting the crowd to its own boxing, men with lances but no horses jousting across the tables, princesses at daggers’ point for the joy of letting blood.  Your everyday barbaric feast.

Beyond it all, ranged somberly against a far wall, were the advisors to the king, the last of the Old Romans left in Britain, arrogant, astonished at what they watched here, envious.

I cheered and toasted everyone with wine, mead, ale, and began the feast with Minoan bull dancers in the festival hall, a mock Roman century on maneuver outside the windows, lyre players, drunken poets, dicing, wrestling, tightrope walking elephants, and, finally, the cracking open of a great amphora of prized Raetian wine, the favorite of Augustus the god.

Gurthrygen called, “Lady Merlin, bring me my brother!  Let me knight him now while I’m still sober enough to stand!”

“Is there an Arthur alive in this world to bring?” said Igerne.

“Did you kill him, too?” the king said to her.

“Here he is,” I said, presenting a boy in Roman armor.

Gurthrygen and Igerne looked at the boy, astonished.

The queen said, “Merlin!  Who was that boy you showed me in the yard?”

“This is he.”

“Oh, no, this one’s not nearly so tall and handsome.  He’s hair’s barely red!”

“Then you mistook another for him.”

“So did I,” said Gurthrygen, drunk and fierce.  “Never mind, someone bring me a sword.”

Igerne gave him her gladius.

The king performed an amazing drunken falling fumble and drove the sword between the chinks of the boy’s armor.

The boy fell down dead.  I had lost to Pluto yet another prince whom I had saved out of death.

My servants opened the boy’s helmet and I put an obolos in his mouth for his ferry ride.

Igerne said, “Do you have a bag of those coins with you always, Merlin?”

She laughed a hideous, shrieking howl.

Those few in the crowd who had seen the stabbing of the boy in Roman armor and who had not been dead before were appalled at the murder and more appalled at their queen’s laughter.

I said, “What awful error, I mean my own.”

“This isn’t the right boy either?” said the king.  “I should’ve guessed.”

He yanked the gladius from the boy’s body.

“Is it this one, instead?”  Drunken Gurthrygen stabbed the sword at another armored figure who fell, returned to Hades.

“But that’s a woman!” said Igerne.

The king, in the chaos of dancing elephants and wrestling Greeks, shouted, “Do I kill them all, Merlin, every young man in your household, to find my brother?”

Gurthrygen staggered through the crowd with his bloody sword, searching for Arthur, people of all ages fleeing from him.

“Stop him, Queen,” I said to Igerne.

“Spoil his sport?  Never.”  The queen shouted to a servant, “Where’s my meat?”

Meat was brought.  Igerne drove her arms to the elbows into a pot of mutton to choose the joint she wanted.