The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (22 page)

“I promised you Arthur would never displace Gurthrygen,” I said to her.  “But if your son-husband finds him, there’ll be a new king in Britain tonight.”

“Not without drawing the stone’s sword,” she said, mouth filled with blackened sheep fat.

“But Arthur will kill the king ahead of his time!” I said.

That interested her enough to stop her chewing meat.  “Tell me when, Merlin, and don’t play Greek with me.”

“At the third crossing of his sword with Arthur.”

She threw mutton at me.  “Liar, fiend, demon.  Where do you get your prophetic power, Merlin, from a twisted liver or ingrown toenail?  Or is it something you find in the nightshade you chew in some ghastly Druid rite?  Tell me, I’m almost a witch and have a technical curiosity.  Where’s wine?”

Igerne snatched a wine cup from a woman’s mouth, drank it down, and threw the cup into the tumult of feasters.

She said, “No one stops Mighty Gurthrygen drunk, not even a Saxon army.  That’s how he wins victories.  He’s that much his father, damn them both, though that’s all he has of the old man, and too bad.  Go stop him yourself, Merlin, and prove you’re a wonder-worker.”

I shoved into the crowd, searching the feast rooms by calling to Arthur in his soul’s voice.  Arthur was not there.  But I found Gurthrygen, happy and flailing through the feast, forgetting the murder he wanted to make.

He slapped his gladius broad-bladed on a woman’s rump to make her shout and himself laugh.  She was an acolyte of Saturn, drunk and streaming incense, waving her green branches.  They ran through the crowd together, whipping partygoers with the branches, herding them all into an orgy.  I left the king to his innocent play.

I stood with the Old Romans guzzling my Raetian wine, watching their sullen greed and hot jealousy for everything they saw, watching the sly arrogance of their superior Roman blood.

“Is a god’s wine sufficient to your high taste?” I asked them.

“This wine?” said a Roman, startled from enjoying the wine into remembering to sneer around the feast room at everything and everyone not Roman.

“Raetian was the favorite of Augustus the god,” I said, sweetly.  “Are you scorning the old emperor?”

The man choked out of his sneer.

I gave him more Raetian to pour down his throat to clear the blockage.

He was Rufus Maximus, the self-proclaimed First Roman of Britain, the king’s senior civil and military advisor.  Disfigured by a complete and Caesarian baldness which he covered with a wig frightful as a giant, head-sucking spider.

“Oh, well!” Rufus said, still with a nasal arrogance.  “It is better on second taste, especially as it was favored by a god-on-Earth.”

“Some ages have a surplus of gods,” said a half-drunken Roman.

“This age has too few,” said another Roman, glowering into his wine cup.

“Fewer still in this damp country,” said the first.

“I’ve prayed to them all and gotten nothing,” said the glowering Roman.  “I should become a Druid.  Their prayers are answered.”

“Druids only pray for blood,” said the First Roman, “and you can make that anywhere yourself.”

“See what I mean?”

“Pray to the king,” I said, gesturing at Gurthrygen pouring a pot of mead on his head and cheering.  “He’s so like a god…”

The glowering Roman looked at me, startled, and said, “But we have prayed to him.  We asked his permission to leave this sinking pesthole for Rome.”

“To abandon us half-human provincials?” I said.

“To return to our families,” said Rufus.  “Rome calls to our pure blood.”

“But your king refuses us,” said the glowering Roman.

“This is good wine, after all!” said another Roman, half drunk, clutching the wall to hold himself upright.

“I’ve a cellar full of it for you,” I said.

“Of Raetian?” cried all the Romans.

“Of whatever you can imagine.”

“Ah, but you’re the ‘Great Lady Merlin,’” said Rufus, “who lives backwards through time, growing younger as we mortals grow older.”  Rufus snickered at the preposterousness of the idea.  “You stole all the treasure out of Hell, they say, and I’m drunk enough to believe them, after drinking our godly and expensive wine.”

“The treasure I want tonight is you,” I said to the Romans.  “I’ll see you home.  I’ll send you there rich.  Give me a price for you to stick to the king for three more years.”

The Romans were startled out of their drunken arrogance.

“Why should we do that?” said Rufus.

“Because I have to keep this king on his throne for three years more and can’t do it myself with everything else I must do.”

The glowering Roman said, “Look there, the queen keeps him nicely on her throne.”

We all looked at the queen across the room, taunting the tightrope-walking elephants with a spear, shouting for drink for the elephant Gurthrygen in a chair was riding like a war horse.

Rufus said, “Why three years, Lady?”

“To hold back the Saxon conquest until I finish training Arthur.”

“You mean train him to steal the crown?  Even you half-human provincials must think that treason.”

“Train him to
be
the crown.”

“You talk like a Greek, all geometry and riddles,” said the glowering Roman.

But Rufus said, “You think we can do that for you?”  He almost laughed.  “Look at us – we aren’t battle-leaders.  We’re clerks to an illiterate king who can’t count to twenty without taking off gloves and boots.  We’re his treasurers, scribes, spies, confessors, torturers.  That one” – he pointed at a Roman on his knees retching out his greedy guts – “is a tax collector.  That over there, a chronicler.  This here is the king’s master singer, and thankfully the king has a pathetically bad ear.  We want off this benighted island because we are clerks who can count.  We count more Saxons in this world than Britons.  Be reasonable, Lady Merlin, don’t offer us anything rich enough to make us agree to stay.”

“Prop the king upright for three years while I season Arthur.  I’ll send you all to Rome not as sea-soaked rats escaping this sinking ship but as princes with caravans of wealth and milk-white Saxon concubines.”

“I prefer Icelandic boys,” cried a drunken Roman.  “I’d stay for them…”

“Will you stay, Lord Rufus?” I said to him.

“The others are useless to you without me,” he said.  This wasn’t arrogance but fact.  He was Gurthrygen’s First Roman.

“We’ll have to have a written contract,” Rufus said.  “And some treasure now as sweetener…”

I took a dozen heavy rings from my fingers.  “Spread these on your cakes for honey, my Romans” –
my
was intentional – “and lap from Merlin’s Well when you want more.”

They gawked at the rings I handed around.

Rufus clutched a glittering glitter in his fist and said, “Remember my name, Princess – Rufus Maximus, late colonel of the Ninth Legion, family estates in Tuscany and Cornwall, the Emperor’s tribe is mine.  I’m your vassal for three years.  I will remember you.”

“So shall we all!” cried the other Romans.

Done!  Gurthrygen would survive to preserve the kingdom until Arthur was ready to draw the sword from its stone.  I was content.

I went happily through the crowd searching for Arthur until out of the mob rose the image of a birthing baby, a new prince just made, with the face of Mordred.

Mordred’s face!  I ran howling from the feast rooms into my gardens, past the love makers sweaty in the warm night air, the mobs shoving dogs to fight chained bears, the fountains of colored water, and shouted, “Arthur! Arthur!”

Morgause popped up startled from behind a bush.  She dripped long red hair and the sweat of a powerful struggle.  Her skin was grass-stained.  Burrs and flower petals.  She was eighteen and more beautiful than her mother, the king’s first, forgotten wife.

She held torn silks to her bare bosom.  She was frightened.

Merlin!
she said in her soul’s voice.  Or was it her spoken voice?  I in my panic could not tell.

“Merlin,” she said aloud, “I’ve taken back Cornwall…”

She was proud and frightened, too young to know the full witchly power I read in her face, ignorant of the future to know the horror she had committed.

“My Arthur!” I cried, tearing my hair in merlinic rage.

Morgause cowered from me, weeping and shouting.

The boy-man Arthur jumped to us feet from behind the bush and shoved in front of Morgause to protect her against me.

He, too, dripped long red hair and sweat and gleamed with fresh pride.  He was as naked and magnificent as Young Hercules.  Taller than other man-boys.  Shoulders broad and chest deep from practice with sword, shield, mace, chain, ax.  Eyes keen for teasing meaning from a page, a broken blade of grass on a trail or a hawk’s dive into a forest.

He also had a quick and woman-appealing grace he did not yet recognize.

“I’m his love-wife now,” Morgause said with vengeful pride.  “Or so much his wife as my mother was his father’ wife the night you helped a king make a prince on a duchess.”

“But she’s your half-sister, Arthur,” I cried.  “She’ll birth a monster with you!”

She’ll birth Mordred!
I wanted to say.

“Half is only half,” he said, “like you’re half my mother.”

I drew my knife.

“Kill me,” Morgause challenged me, “and kill Arthur’s son!”

“My son?” said Arthur.

Arthur commanded, “Hold!” and the knife I was slashing toward Morgause’s throat melted in my hand.

“We’ve made a boy, Arthur,” she said, slapping her flat belly.  “A new Pendragon.”

“How can you know it?” I cried, clutching in my fist the goo of my melted knife.

Could she be witch enough to know what she’d made?

Morgause shivered in her frightful self-possession and pride in her power.

“We’ve made a prince,” she said, “who is doubly royal because he is doubly Uther.  He will be Duke Cornwall after Arthur and no one will dispute his title.  I’ve recovered the duchy robbed from me by Arthur when he was born.”

She wrapped herself in her torn silks, smirking as elegantly as a princess in ceremonial stola.

I was astonished at her cruel calculation.  Horrified by her selfish stupidity.  Frightened by what the witch might try next.

“I have to kill her, Arthur,” I said.  “I have to kill the embryo in her.  You have to let me kill them both.”

Morgause trembled with fright but said, “You can’t!  You’re Merlin but you’re Arthur’s merlin.  You can’t kill me without his permission.”

I shook from my hand the last goo of my ruined knife.  What had happened to me that I couldn’t resist the command of boy-man Arthur?  Is this what growing younger would do to me – each day rob me of a fragment more of my merlinic power until there was nothing left but me?

I wanted to scream and did, in my soul’s voice, rattling the dead in their tombs and bringing screams from the merlin heads on my checkered shield hung on a wall in the villa.

“You’re the greatest fool ever born, Arthur,” I said.  “Stab her stomach.  Kill the embryo in her.  It’s Mordred in there, traitor to the future!”

Arthur said, sounding too much like the Arthur I wanted him to be, “That’s my son in her.  I want him.”

“You’re a boy.  Why do you want to make another boy?  Kill it and go find a better woman for your wife.  Make a prince on her.”

“I can’t do that,” said Arthur with a determination that sounded to me too much like stupidity.

“Your father could and did often enough,” I said.

“The British Saturn,” said Morgause, spitting at Uther’s memory.

And then I understood the boy I thought I had understood all the years of his life.  Arthur was a parent-less child.  I was his foster mother but I was not blood.  His natural mother despised him for an imbecile.  His father was dead before Arthur could know him.  Arthur was a drift in the universe and would not give up any child he had made.

What I saw very practically as a blood-tie that ought to be broken to save the future Arthur saw as a love-tie he’d never cut.

I understood but I screamed in frustration and rage, my screams matching Morgause’s fright-screams as she fled through the garden to her lifeguards.

I sank spent, sweating, weak, trembling, panting to the ground.

Naked Arthur was beside me with a sword.

“Don’t try again to kill her, Mother,” he said.  “Swear it out into the world.”

“She’s made Mordred,” I said to him.

“What’s ‘Mordred?’”

“Your son, you imbecile.  Nemesis!  What’s happened to me?  Where’s my strength?”

“Why should I fear my own child?”

“Mordred’s destiny is to kill you and destroy Camelot.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe me?”

Arthur stabbed his sword into the earth and squatted beside me.  I realized he had in his hand a souvenir scrap of Morgause’s sex-stained silk tunica.

“She loves me,” he said, simply.  “How could she love me and birth my killer?”

“Are you really that stupid?  Fate never changes.”

“Fate never changes,” Arthur said, “but the future does.”

He got up, found his clothes in the brush, pulled his sword out of the dirt, and strode toward the feasting hall.

“Hold,” I said to him.  Come with me to the Brutus stone.”

“No more hauling on that sword again.  I’ve tried a thousand times.  It doesn’t want me.”

“Once more.  Today, when you’ve become a man and made your own son.  Test Fate and the future.”

We crossed Britain in a moment and climbed the stone.

Arthur threw aside his sword and the fragment of Morgause’s silk.  He spat on his hands, gripped Excalibur’s hilt and pulled.

I looked into the sky for a descent of angels, a bolt of lightning, Thor’s hammering.  But nothing happened up there.

Nothing happened down here, either.

“See?” said Arthur.  “The stupid thing won’t come out.  It won’t have me as its lord.”

The resistant sword drove me to a dog-howling, raving rage.  The young Hercules had seen this rage many times before in our lives together.  He waited out my howls.

Then he said, “Perhaps, Mother, I’m Arthur but not your Arthur?  Then I’m free to keep Morgause for my wife and the boy for my son.  Sounds good to me.”

But for me it was as though Arthur were demonstrating an ignorance too close to his original baby stupidity.  I searched frantically through my hundred and forty-four lives for a solution to this incomplete Arthur and could find none.

Arthur took my hand and we returned to the feasting party.  To the mock combats in which Arthur made himself champion, cheerily lopping off heads and hands even with the wooden show swords, happy to use all his battle-practice in splashing human blood at last.

Late in the festivities of the third day, when the king and queen had drunk and eaten and puked and drunk again and were too weak to try kill Arthur, I presented Arthur to his brother the king.

A tottering Gurthrygen knighted the boy with the traditional mail-gloved slap that knocked him down.  The king called the boy bleeding in the mud a warrior-prince before stepping over him to shout for more wine.

The queen kissed her son full on the lips but she was too drunk to try to kill him with the daggers hidden in her silks.

The feast guests took a week recovering before straggling homeward.

I spent the feast’s last days in a hole in the ground, singing over burning incense, shouting threats at all the too-many gods, sunken into my grave with the burden of my failure.  What was I to do for Arthur?  How was I to do it?  Could I do it as I withered in power?

* * *

When the villa returned to its normal life, I crawled out of the pit, had myself bathed, oiled, and dressed, and went into the stables where Arthur and his slaves were singing bawdy songs as they saddled and packed six horses.

“A hero needs seven horses to go through the world,” I said to him.

“Perhaps I’m no hero, after all, Mother.  I can’t pull the sword.  Perhaps I’m just me.”

“You can never be just you.”

“There’s my problem, isn’t it?”

Arthur swung into his saddle.

“I want to be an everyday champion, Mother.  With an everyday war band for drinking.  An ordinary castle for my wife and son.  A sword that’s true but not epic.  That’s what I want.  I don’t want to be Arthur.”

Arthur let his slaves laugh with him.

I could not laugh.  I could not answer him.  The days in the pit breathing incense and cursing the gods had given me no clue what to do next.

I said, “Where are you going with this immense pack train, Sir Not-Arthur?”

“To find Morgause and take my son when he’s born.  I’ll raise him as you raised me.  He’ll love me and I’ll love him.  That guarantees he’s never a threat to me.  Love will lift the curse of hate that Uther made in making me.”

I was startled. “That’s better-thought than I expected from a Not-Arthur.”

“I think your Arthur is in another cycle of life, Mother, not this one.”

“You’re the one, you have to be.”

“I want to be an ordinary human creature.  No crown, no kingdom.  No ‘Camelot,’ whatever that could be. Relieve me of becoming a hero, Mother.  Let me live my own life.”

“But this is an age for heroes.  Who has a choice?”

“Then it’s an age of fools.  Dandling my son on my knee in the sunshine beats going through the world in harness ready to kill and be killed.  I’ve had blood enough already.”

What could I say to that?

“The die is not cast but shaken,” I said.  “You’re as good a clay as any I’ve used before.  Come back to me with wife and son and you’ll still make my Arthur.”

“I’ll come back, Mother, but not for Camelot.  Will you bless me?”

I blessed him and his journey.

I walked out of the villa beside Arthur’s horse, his small pack train and slaves clattering along behind us.

I said, “Bring me your son.  Let me bless him, too, beneath my checkered shield and sword, for his protection.”

In my soul’s hearing was the distant howl of the shield with its one hundred forty-four grotesques, all shouting,
Yes, bring us Mordred.  Let us put our hands on Mordred!

* * *

I dismissed my vassals, servants, and slaves and closed up my villa.  I sat on my throne beneath the checkered shield and Urien hung on the wall.  I waited alone for Arthur.  A year.  Until I saw a lone rider galloping toward me trailing a cloud of sweat and sand as though he were a human comet streaking beneath the sky.

Arthur.  Alone.  He had lost his slaves, his pack train, most of his armor.  The sword in his hand, black with other men’s blood, was broken.

He galloped the horse to its death, the carcass driving itself into the ground and flinging Arthur into my dusty courtyard.  He lay there in a weeping, hating fury, in a misery of pain and failure.

He crawled through the dirt until he gathered the strength to walk.  Then he ran banging through villa doors to find me on my throne in the auditorium.

Arthur cried, “Great gods, Mother, how could you be so much younger in just a year?”

“It’s you!” I said, speaking in the unfamiliar voice of a much younger woman.  “My life is measured against yours.  Refuse to be the hero, refuse Camelot and all you have is an ordinary span of days and so do I.”

Arthur howled laughing out of his misery.

The faces on the shield above my throne hissed at him.

He spat at them.  He threw his bloody, broken sword clattering on the painted floor.

“Where’s your son?” I said to him.

The shield held its breath in tooth-grinding anticipation.

“You know where he is,” Arthur said.  “You know everything.  Or so you told me all my life.”

“I don’t know this piece of the future.  You’ve put us in a place I never lived.”

“Shaken the dice but not cast them, have I?” Arthur said in fury.

“Where’s Mordred?”

“She still has my son in her belly.  My son!  Twelve months and he’s still in there.  Can you believe it?”