The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (23 page)

The shield screamed.  I waved it silent.

“She’s a witch,” I said, “and who knows a witch’s time for simmering out a monster.”

Arthur kicked the broken sword across the floor.  “Give me a sword worthy of a champion, Mother.  Don’t offer me that absurdity I can’t pull from the rock.  Give me an army to storm Orkney Castle and take my son!”

“Is that where she’s gone to birth the boy?”

“Yes, oh, yes, my love-wife has gone to marry Prince Lot, for Jesu’s sake.  A Norwayman! A pagan! A cutthroat!”

Now I laughed.  “A fitting man to rear a Mordred.  This, at least, is like the old chronicles.  But we can’t allow it if you’re to build Camelot.”

“Oh, shut up about ‘Camelot.’”

“You can’t take the boy as you are.”

“Give me a good sword,” said Arthur.  “Give me Urien and a fair army with the sun at my back and I’ll rob Mordred from any prince or princess in Earth, Heaven or Hell.”

“You fool, Lot’s the son of a Norway witch.  He has all of Norway to call for his army.  He’s far beyond you.  With Morgause he joins his strength to the power of a Pendragon witch and a princess who can call her old Duchy Cornwall to fight you.  What have you got against all that?  Your broken sword?”

Arthur shouted in frustration.  “How do I take my son?  Tell me!”

“Become king.”

“No, no, no, you’re twisting me to your own…”

“Listen to your mother, boy.  You need all the power of a British king to drag Mordred out of Lot’s Orkney Castle.”

Arthur stood there, silent and stunned.  I was right and he knew it.

“Sobeit,” he said, hushed and appalled.  “I’ll become king.”

The shield screamed in joy.  I threw a cloth over the shield’s faces to silence them.

“You need to be more than Britain,” I said.  “You need an Empire of the North to fight Lot and Morgause.  You need Brittany and Gaul.  You need the Near Islands of Iceland and Ireland.  Collect all the shivering Northerners who use sword and ax to warm their bones.  Build this empire and you have the power to capture your son.  You might also destroy the filthy Saxons along the way.  And slap together a few bricks for Camelot.”

“It’s still ‘Camelot’ with you, isn’t it, Mother?”

“It’s always Arthur with me,” I said.  “Only a merlin can make an Arthur, but only an Arthur can make Camelot.”

“Mordred and Camelot,” Arthur said.  “Sobeit.”

“Sobeit,” I said.

The contract had been spoken out into the world.

Weary Arthur slouched in a chair.  He was bruised and nicked.  Slapped dust out of his clothes.  Kicked off his worn boots.

I shouted to slaves who weren’t there to bring Arthur food and wine.  The slaves, huddled away in some distant part of the world, brought it all.  Arthur tore at the meat and bread and sloshed the wine down his throat.

“I’ll need your greatest magic, Mother, if I’m to steal the kingdom and build an empire.”

I measured the internal residue of time left me and said, “I’m half a merlin now.  A woman who’s becoming a girl.  I’m weaker every day and more forgetful of the future.  But each atomos of power left me is yours.  If we move quickly.”

If we move quickly to build Camelot, I wanted to say.

Arthur burped after his meal.  “So how do I become king?  Cut my brother’s throat in his sleep as he’d cut mine or pour poison down his ears?  God, that’s awful to think about.”

“Kill him?  No, serve him.  Make yourself the indispensable prince, the man all others will shout for as king when Gurthrygen shuffles off to Annwn.”

“That’s too long to wait!”

“You’ve wasted a year in fruitless warfare to capture your son.  Now spend a year in sly maneuver to capture a throne and build an empire.”

Arthur rubbed his hands over his weary face.  “All right, all right.  Where do I begin?”

“With your greatest enemy.  Always start there.  Serve her.  Make her your chief conspirator for the throne.  She stole Gurthrygen’s election for him.  She’ll do the same for you.”

“The queen my mother?  I’m to serve the woman who wants me dead?”

After two weeks’ march through freshening spring, Arthur and I, breathing out road dust, faces blackened by the sun, sweat streaming from beneath our mail, our armor bundled on our pack animals but our swords slung over our backs, rode up to Calleva Atrebatum where the king was in residence for the opening of the war-fighting season.

A dozen miles to the southeast were the grim Saxons yearning to stampede out of their new Kingdom of Wessex and rob more of Britain.

The city was surrounded by a meandering wall first laid by the tribe of Atrebates and raised up by Romans with their bricks.  From a hilltop, we could see over the wall to the checkerboard street plan invented by Alexander for the cities of Asia Minor.  We saw poking up over the city the crucifixes of a half dozen Christian temples and the heads of statues of Jupiter Greatest and Best, Venus, and Mars.  Smoke rose in streamers from Druid altars.  We heard over the city hubbub drifting to us on our hill the screeches of sacrificial victims.

One thousand people lived here, the largest town Arthur had seen since he was three years old and was given to me by the queen.  He was astonished at its beauty, its flags and banners, bells, trumpets, clattering commotion, fury of talk, and animal howls.  He gawked at the churned up street mud through which our horses struggled.  At the gleaming white walls of the Theater of Marcellus.  He sucked in the exotic smells of caravans from Africa and Asia.  All of it was wonderful to Arthur, the country boy prince.

For me, Calleva was inferior to the castled city of the old queen Morgause I had served in another life.  There was no grand castrum in Calleva and, beyond the tombs of the Roman dead lining the high road into town, only broad green fields with walled but otherwise defenseless villas.  Everything here was at peace and willfully ignoring the Saxon menace over the horizon.

Despite fresh war every spring, British life had achieved a kind of normality under King Gurthrygen and Queen Igerne.  The Saxon tide had ebbed.  The murderous pressure driving the Britons from their villages toward the tangled mountains of Wales and the West had eased.  The land was reasonably administered by Gurthrygen’s ministers and priests.  It was as fairly policed by his lieutenants as it was in Uther’s day.  His Roman advisors guaranteed a level of bribery and corruption that insured the rule of the wealthiest and most ruthless, something which always makes for efficient if sometimes bloody government.

We had a kind of peace, too.  A peace of mutual exhaustion.  It was the fruit of Uther’s victorious defeat at Badon Hill, where only war-weariness prevented the Saxons from stewing all our army and grabbing all of Britain.  Now ordinary men and women worried more about sorcery, brewing their pease porridge, and cutting new plows than they did about Saxons.

Of course, just as the Britons fattened in the sunshine of temporary peace, so too did the Saxons of Essex, Wessex, and Sussex, the Angles in their Angleland, and the Jutes, plus the Scots, Picts, and Irish always ready to fall on us.

We rode into the West Gate and hailed the gatekeeper, who showed us the town plan, interrogated us for gossip, and ushered us onto a city street with brick and plaster buildings, beasts and half-naked children running before us, vendors shouting their wares, slaves being dragged up alleys, shrines to all the varied gods and the grand St. John Lateran cathedral, nearly thirty Roman feet long and ten wide with white walls, two red tile roofs, and a crucifix on a basilica, its first brick laid by the Emperor Constantine with his own hands.

We followed the caravans into the forum and its crowded marketplace.  Crossed the paving where gladiatorial contests were judged.  Passed beneath the two-storied walls and double red roofs of the buildings that enclosed the forum.  Rode up to the colonnades where municipal officials sat at their desks.

We spotted the alcove that belonged to the king in state, his lifeguards rowdy out front, townswomen flirting with his captains, and there we found Gurthrygen, weary, haggard, half drunk.

“Arthur, Little Brother!” the king shouted, pushing out of his throng, hugging Arthur and then me, looking again at me and saying, “Which sister are you, for the gods’ sake?  I thought Igerne had exterminated all her brats but Arthur.”

“I’m Merlin, King.”

“Great God!  So young and a beauty?  So much red hair?  Of course you are, aren’t you?  A generation younger than when I saw you last!”

Gurthrygen threw an arm over Arthur’s shoulders to steady himself as he shoved his face and the stink of stale wine into my face.

“What happened that time suddenly sped backwards so fast for you, Young Lady Merlin?  You’re no longer a frightening hag with hair like gray fire and eyes like snakes ready to spit.  You’re a beauty I want to get Biblical with…”

The king turned away to vomit out his load of wine.

He wiped his mouth and looked from me to Arthur and back.  Frightened realization came into his face.  “So Arthur’s hour has come, has it?  The future’s here at last?  I can take my happy leave from this miserable cycle, damn it all?”

The king gave me a slap on the rump and said, “Oh, well.  Have a drink with a dead man, my sweet Lady Merlin!  You, Arthur?”

I sipped from the king’s wine-pot but Arthur drank fully.  Too fully.  Because he was afraid of his murderous king-brother.

Gurthrygen slumped into his chair under the colonnade, glaring around at his war band, at Rufus and his other pet Romans, his Christian bishops and Druid priests, Norwayan and Icelandic vassal princes, all the other ragtag of his court.  They stared back at him, watchful, waiting, sullen.

“Which of you hideous trash would pour poison in my ear tonight to become lord of Britain?” Gurthrygen shouted.

The appalled and conniving watchers recoiled.

“Each would,” said the king, grimly.

He said to Arthur, “But they’d have to kill you first, Little Brother.  Your surviving me would make them tremble in fright on their throne.  Stay alive, Arthur, and keep me alive.”

Gurthrygen shook his head to settle the wine still sloshing in his brain.  “Give me your lady companion, Arthur, your brother-king wants your sister-mother tonight.”

Wine sloshed the other way in the king’s brain and he forgot he wanted me.

He was surprised to find Arthur and me standing there with him.

“What are you doing here, Brother?” he said to Arthur.

“We’ve come to join the queen.”

“The queen?  Oh, yes.  She’s what I most fear for myself.”

Gurthrygen began to weep.

“Sweet Lady!” he cried to me.  “I haven’t killed half the men I want to kill or bedded half the women.  Must I die now?”

The king puked more wine.  He shouted, “Bring me mead to clean my bowels!  Someone take them to the queen…”

A slave led us across a mosaic floor into the lady chapel, the quietest room away from the marketplace.

There, on a bed of pillows before the Chi-Rho altar with its silver crucifix and holy images, surrounded by her women and some half-breasted Amazon lifeguards, was Queen Igerne, graying hair flung out on the pillows, drooling blood.

She saw Arthur and screamed, “What fresh Hell is this?  Why aren’t you dead?”

* * *

Arthur went to his knees by the queen’s bed, his mail smoking dust.  I stood in the door to watch a scene that had to be pathetic and awful to work.  Arthur offered the queen his bare sword hand and said, “We’ve come to offer our services to my mother our Lady Queen.”

Igerne choked out blood, her face astonished, appalled, frightened equally of Arthur, Merlin, and Death.

She said, barely audibly, to her entourage, “Leave me!...leave me…with my son…and this bizarre…young…lady merlin.”

All left but her Amazons, watching me with narrow-eyed ferocity.

Igerne said, “Who’s…that beautiful…little murderer…with you, Arthur?”

“Mother Merlin.”

“Lady Merlin?”  Igerne squinted to stare at me.  “This…Venus in Arms?...is the old hag…your foster mother?...where are her wrinkles…her old crooked back…gods, are…the children’s stories…true?...look at her!...a reborn…Druid princess…unChristian!...polluting my dying hour...”

“I’m becoming what time wants me to be,” I said to her, “and so are you.”

Her face went paler.  “You speak in…even more…confused riddles, Old Mother!...‘Mother?’…better I call you…‘daughter!’…but I drowned…all my daughters…”

Igerne wiped blood from her mouth and said to her surgeon hiding behind the Amazons, “What sort of tonic is this you bring me?” she said to him in a rush of words.  “Can the horrid sight…of Arthur with this absurd…child-merlin save my life?”

The surgeon in medical regalia and gold torque, his robe spattered with Igerne’s blood, shoved past the Amazons to say, “It can, Queen, yes, it can.  Such surprises are known to call a woman back from death.  But a daughter such as this beautiful monster?”  The surgeon spat at Arthur because he was afraid to spit at a merlin.  “I doubt it.”

Igerne almost laughed.  “Too loyal to his mistress…to know safety lies in…bending his neck…to Prince Arthur…and his pet merlin…”

The panicked surgeon fled.

Igerne threw out her arms and grabbed Arthur, smearing him with her blood.  “A true knight…can raise the dead...why can’t a true knight…cure them before they die?...cure me, Arthur…my loving little boy...save me!...Prince Arthur Merlin Pendragon, save your mother!”

The one-breasted Amazons broke Igerne’s grip on her son and eased her back to her pillows.  She coughed blood drooling down her chin.

“I’m more afraid…of this death…than any I’ve made…terrified of Satan and Jesu…together…wondering if Morrigu and Pluto…should have had…my prayers…all these years…instead...”

She put a hand on her heart, rings clattering on the dagger slung between her breasts.  “Touching you has made me better.  I feel it inside!”

“The spitting merely cleared blood from your lungs, Queen,” I said.

“Is that a merlin’s verdict or a surgeon’s?  I ought to kill you for the lie!”

She struggled to unharness the dagger from the scabbard at her breast.  She fell back on her pillows exhausted by the effort.

Igerne closed her eyes and said, “What good use…can I make of…a prince…and his merlin…before I die?”

“Confirm me in my lands, Queen,” Arthur said.

“Arthur and Morgause…have no conversation…but of Cornwall,” she said, dreamily from behind her closed eyes.  “Yes, yes…I confirm your duchy…someone write it down...put the ducal…crown…on your shield…then go confirm yourself…”

“How does he ‘confirm himself?’” I said.

“Go take Cornwall,” the queen said.

“But it’s mine,” said Arthur.

“It’s mine,” said Igerne, “until I die…then it’s your legacy…from Uther…if you can hold it…against Morgause…and persuade…the Cornish barbarians…to have you…”

She laughed and choked.

“Where’s my…pet bishop?...I’m ready to die…”

“You sent him out, Queen,” said an Amazon.

“Call the fool back…bring my crowns...”

A gray-faced bishop came into the lady chapel with a strongbox.  He wore three crucifixes of different metals and colors.

“The only man…in the kingdom…who thinks three breastplates…not armor enough…against the Demon!” Igerne said.

“Tell us, Dunwallo…Lord Bishop of York…my child Morgause…has seduced Orkney’s…Prince Lot…and will marry the fool…even though…he’s her…dead sister Anna’s husband…and father of Gawain…Anna’s only surviving pup…is that sin enough…to pollute her mother’s…chance…to escape Hell?”

“Sins of the children are not visited on the parents, Queen,” Dunwallo said.

“They should be…oh, they should be,” said Igerne.  “We made the monsters they are…”

The queen rummaged among her crowns in the strongbox.

“What, Bishop…of the souls…of my children I’ve killed?...are they waiting for me…beyond the veil…to torture me with fire?”

“They are, Queen, unless you are riven with remorse and repent.”

“Throw him out!” Igerne said to her Amazons.  “Bring me…a Druid bishop…with better answers…”

She wept and bled over her crowns.

“Take this one.”  She flung at Arthur a gold circlet with five points and five rubies.  “Good enough for a queen…it will suit a duke’s head...”

She closed her eyes again and fell into a chest-bubbling sleep.

We kept vigil with her through the night.  She slept and raved, slept and coughed, and slept.

At morning’s first light, her breathing improved.

She sat up, startled to be alive.  She called for bread and oil, for the king, for women to wash her feet and hands and to lime yellow her graying hair.

Gurthrygen crept into the lady chapel.

“Like a Pagan slithering before the Almighty,” she said to him.

“Better, I think?” Gurthrygen said.

“Where were you while I was dying?”

“Weeping in the next room.”

“Wenching in the next room, my Lord of Venus the Diseased.”