The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (26 page)

“You haven’t much hope for us?” I said.

“I’m a herald.  I see everything.  We’re doomed if a horse is our best champion.”

I stirred the coals and gave her meat.  She ate like a beast fallen on prey.

I read the woman’s phalerae, torquis, and scars.  They said this herald had been in five battles for Gurthrygen and won honors in each.

“Forget this nonsense,” the herald said, flicking the badges.  “They’re for victories even more incompetent than anything old Pyrrhus won.”

She finished the meat and ate some fowl, delicately wiping finger grease on the grass between courses.

“I want a champion to serve, Lady Merlin.  You know this Arthur?”

“I know him.”

“I’ve heard all this nonsense he’ll remake the world into a ‘camelot.’  But he doesn’t look to me as tall as a hero ought to be.  He’s thin, beardless, and impulsive.  More boy than man.  Not nearly so impressive as his fame.”

“Does he have fame?” I said.

“He always had fame.  If for no other reason than the king and queen wanted to kill him.  Anything like his father?”

“He wants to be.”

“Uther’s impulses in war and love cost us half of Britain.  I suppose that’s ambition enough to expect from a boy.  But when does he grow up?”

“Who are you to be this rude about my lord?” I said, irritated.

“He can’t draw the sword from the stone.  I’ll be as rude as I want.”

I laughed.  “You open your mouth and whatever you please comes out.  You’ve courage or you’re an idiot.”

“A courageous idiot adrift in the wrong world.”

“Who
are
you?”

“Percival.”

“But that’s a man’s name.”

“Only in the Latin pronunciation.”

“You’ve also a certain fame, even here in Cornwall,” I said.

“I cut off heads easily enough but what’s that?”

“The skill of a champion.”

She said, gloomy, “I’m a champion who needs a champion or I’m nothing.”

“Let yours be Arthur.”

Percival looked down the forest track where Arthur had ridden into a freshening evening.  “What’s in his mind?”

“To be king.”

“Everyone wants to be a king.  That’s a cheap and useless ambition.”

Percival was unhappy.  She threw down the bone she had been breaking to suck out the marrow.  She held out her hands to a slave to wipe off the grease.  She was a woman of fine etiquette.

“What more ambition should he have?” I said.

“To be king of this!” said Percival, slapping her breastplate.  “Lord of this!”  She slapped her sword in its scabbard.  “Prince of his own liver of thought.  Master of the heart that heats and cools his spirit.  Lord of himself.”

“Oh, I see,” I said, disappointed.  “You’re more of a child than Arthur.”

Percival drew her dagger and said from across the campfire, “Is that irony or insult, Lady?  I’ve none of the finer senses, which is why I can do the things I do.”

“Cut off heads?”

“Stab holes in those who sneer at me.”

“Then the dour Bishop of York would be pleased to enroll you as a good Christian knight.”

“I certainly am that,” she said, still holding the dagger.  “Or was that more irony?”

“A Christian knight?  No family gods, no household images?  Just the Hero Jesu and that’s all for you?”

“Is this insult?”

“No, surprise.  I haven’t met a true one-godder since I was converted by Igerne for Arthur’s sake.  More or less converted.  I suppose you want to be first to see the invisible Holy Grail?”

“I might not stab holes in you, after all.”

“Why not?”

“Because you make me want to laugh at myself, I’m such a pompous ass!”

She tried to laugh.  It didn’t work.

“Ah, well,” Percival said, putting away her dagger.  “You almost made a miracle there.  Are you really the old hag Merlin who lives backwards?”

“I’m less a merlin every day, damn me.”

“I never realized old could be so young.”

“And getting younger and more forgetful every day,” I said.  “That’s why I need to surround Arthur with the best of knights.  I need you.”

“You know I can’t tell irony from insult, right?”

I put my hand into the fire, reaching across to her.

“Arthur has to be your champion,” I said, “if you’re to make anything of yourself in this life cycle.  Join us.”

“Is that what you see in my future, Merlin?”

“It’s the future for us all.”

She clutched my hand in the flame.

We held together until our skin sizzled.

“Now,” Percival said, “let’s go find Arthur’s bought army and see if it can fight Saxons as well as it can bribe Cornishmen.”

* * *

After three wandering weeks, Arthur, led by Percival the herald, with me and the army in tow, found the king at Kaerlindcoit, south of York, and found his new queen.  She was a Saxon.

The woman was immense and immensely blonde, fed fat on the bones of Britons, I presumed.  She was immensely proud and refused to speak in public any but her gabbling Saxon language.  Long-braided.  Heavily breastplated, the metal molded to fit gigantic breasts.  She towered over the tall Gurthrygen, sneering down at the Britons around him, shouting barbaric oaths no one could understand.

“Son, brother, what?” she demanded in her limited British when she saw Arthur.

“Brother,” Gurthrygen said to her.  His voice was weak and he was haggard, worn thin by thirteen years of kingship and by howling after his queen’s Saxon cousins ravaging his country.

She stroked Arthur’s face as a cannibal assessing a human meal.

“No beard!” she cried.

Then she kissed Arthur on the mouth in the British style but made it an enveloping, breath-sucking, cannibal kiss.

“Keep!” she cried to her husband.

“Lord God, what can that mean?” Gurthrygen said to me.

“Keep Arthur as your first duke, King,” I said, translating the word.

Rufus, Bedivere, Kay, and Percival were beside me, ready to draw blades and stab away from Arthur this monster kissing queen.

“He’ll be that,” said the king, “if he’s as good conquering Saxons as Cornish rabble.”

Arthur said to his brother, “What in Hell’s name are you doing with a paynim queen?”

“She’s suddenly a Christian,” Gurthrygen said, “or so the Bishop of York claims.  He made her one somehow.”

“Miracles are easy,” said the gray-faced Bishop Dunwallo of York, rattling his three metal crucifixes, “when the alternative is to be skewered on the queen’s spear.”  He shivered remembering the moment.

“But who is she?” Arthur said to the king.

“They call her ‘Ronwen’ in their filthy language, which can pass for her name.  But, by Jesu, she’s herself an army against the Saxons…”

“But she’s one of them!”

“There are good Saxons and there are bad Saxons, Brother…”

“But they’re all Saxons,” said Arthur.

Gurthrygen laughed and shook Arthur, rattling his brother’s armor.  The sick king was still powerful enough to shake a man like a boy, the old ax-swinging muscle hard on the bone.

“Little Brother, my Saxons will whip their Saxons.  She’s the sister of Horst, their self-proclaimed chief duke or some such.  While you dallied in Cornwall, I beat the Picts.  I drove them into Scots-land.  Horst’s Saxons did my fighting and dying for me there.  We’re all family now.”

“In payment, you gave them Kent,” said Percival.

“What’s Kent?” said the king.  “They would’ve taken it anyway.  These Saxons are very Roman that way.”

“But they built a castle there,” said Rufus.

“They call it ‘Castrum Corrigiae,’” said Gurthrygen.  “How these barbarians love that Latin sound!  ‘Kaercauei’ is its proper name.”

“To have a castle is to command a country, Brother,” Arthur said.  “You’ve thrown away another piece of what little remains to Britain.”

Gurthrygen subsided weakly onto his throne, Ronwen watching him closely.

“Let their damned longships scrape any coast and it’s theirs, don’t you know?” said the king.  “When the blood brothers Horst and Hengist first put their dirty Saxon toes in Kentish surf, they owned it.  I confirmed what I couldn’t change.”

“Is that kingship?” cried Arthur.

“It is these days.  It’s called ‘survival.’”

Ronwen and her Saxon retinue, drinking horns in hand, shouted, “Laverd king, was heil!”

“Good God, what’s that mean?” said Arthur.

“‘Lord king, good health,’” said Gurthrygen.  “A sweet sentiment for a dying man.  They shout it every time they take their filthy beer.”

The king shouted back at the Saxons, “Was heil to you, you silly murdering farts!”

Ronwen kissed the king, leaving beer foam on his cheek.  She shouted to her Saxons, “Drinc heil!” and drank off her horn.

“Was heil!” shouted more Saxons, going for the next round.

Ronwen pulled Arthur aside by his hair and mouth-kissed him again.  “Meet later!  Kiss later!  Love later!” she said to him.

“Good God,” said Arthur.

Gurthrygen said, in a desperation I’d never before heard from a British king, “It’s York, Brother.  Gone!  The other damned Saxons took it.”

He rapped his knuckles on the three huge metal crucifixes Dunwallo wore like three holy breastplates and said, “They left old Dunwallo without his see.  ‘Dunwallo the Seatless,’ we call him now.”

The Bishop rattled his crucifixes in protest.

“He ran like a dog when Hengist and his barbarians climbed over the walls of his palace,” said the king, laughing.

Dunwallo rattled his crucifixes in fury.

“This Hengist, King,” I said, “is blood brother to your wife’s brother?”

“The same.  Making our wars in the nature of a family feud since I, a true Christian prince, can’t also marry Hengist’s sister, though I’d like to as she’s small and shapely and better with a war club than I, but I haven’t another Kent to give away to buy her.”

“Promise them Ireland, that’s cheap enough,” I said.  “You don’t own it and can’t give it away and they’re all barbarians over there, anyway.”

Gurthrygen laughed.  “The Saxons have promised
me
to Ireland.  It’s a world full of promises.”

Arthur and I stamped our boots free of mud before we followed the king into the town-house that was his makeshift royal hall in Kaerlindcoit.

“What do you want me to do for you, Brother?” Arthur said to the king.

“Rest your army a few days.  Soothe their tired feet.  Feed them.  Resting and feeding are half of good generalship.  I’ve an army of four thousand besieging York.  Go up there, join them, take York from Hengist.  My four and your six thousand ought to do it, even if you have to storm the walls.  We’ll worry about Colgrin when we must.”

“Who’s Colgrin?”

“Ah, yes.  You’ve been out west, Arthur.  Nobody out there bothers to pass on the news.  Colgrin is their over-duke or king, however you translate their Saxon gabble.”

Gurthrygen slumped into the only chair in the room.  His Spanish whores brought him cold water.  He rubbed it into the black sacks of weariness around his eyes.  He gestured to Arthur’s war band and his own, his retainers, his pet Romans, all those already crowded into the little room, to crowd nearer.

He said from his simple, borrowed chair as though he said it from a throne, “Arthur, Brother, from York battle onward you are my
dux bellorum
and first general of the kingdom.  You are my nominee for election to the throne if I die too soon.”

Dunwallo mumbled a prayer and we all shouted, “Sobeit!”

Arthur leaned down for Gurthrygen’s kiss.

“Of course,” said the king, “you must ratify the title in drawing that sword stuck in the Brutus stone.”

The king’s war band jeered.  Arthur’s cheered.  But it was left to me to ask the king the critical questions:

“Where’s your brother-in-law Horst?”

“In Scots-land, killing blue-faces.  That’s as far as I could send him from York.”

“Where’s Colgrin?”

“On his way from Saxonia.  In longships.  With a scant thirty thousand warriors.”

“Thirty thousand?” I cried.  “The Island will sink under all their weight!”

“Wrong,” said the king, “because you’ll think of something, Lady Merlin.”

In the Julian Year 5209 and of Our Lord 496

It was
hora prima
before the six thousand warriors of Arthur’s army of Cornwall began their straggle up the road to York, dragging their spears in the dust, kicking their pack animals, groaning out their hangovers, passing through the cloudy incense of the seatless Bishop of York and beneath the crosses that lined the road with the writhing bodies of deserters from the king’s army that already had gone this way.

There but for the grace of God!
each warrior thought.

Arthur, driving them on with slaps from the flat of his sword, his war band howling around the army like dogs driving sheep, said to me, “Aristotle was right.  Nothing in Nature moves unless it’s pushed.  Drive them on, Mother.  On, on!”

We tramped through sun and rain, and sun again and rain again, until the van halted for midday meal.  About the time the middle of the army arrived where the van had made its meat fires and crap holes, the van had moved on.  The center burned its meat over the coals the van had left.  Then the center moved on and the tail used the same fires.  The army inch-wormed this way to York.

Everyone yearned to be back in safe Kaerlindcoit or, better, in their distant Cornish villages.  But who knew how to find home from this far north country?

Everyone dreaded the coming battle with the cannibal giants from Saxonia.  But happy Arthur with his tiny war band and the sneering Romans in gaudy armors hooted and howled hungry for combat, flapping their spear feathers as they raced their horses north, clattering swords on shields to frighten the villages they passed, boasting how they would carve the souls out of every Saxon they met on the field.

Arthur jumped off his horse to piss against a tree.  I stood guard with Urien and the screaming shield.

“I’ve thirteen battles to fight, Mother,” he said.  “Then this misery of war is over and I’ll have my son and my orchard.  But how do I count them?”

“Thirteen?  Who told you that?  I don’t remember thirteen battles.”

“You don’t remember much anymore,” Arthur said, lacing up and swinging into his saddle.  “You’re nearly my age now and you’ve forgotten too much.  It’s thirteen before I die.  I saw it in a dream last night.”

I was frightened.  The boy was receiving revelations but not through me.

I hastily counted up the past and said, “You fought thirteen battles in Cornwall…”

“Skirmishes.  Brawls.  Maybe two real battles.”

“Then what makes a battle?”

“The size of the army you lead and the size of the prize.  York will be my third or maybe fourth or second.  We have to hurry things along or Mordred will be a man before I take him from Morgause and too big to dandle on my knee in my orchard.”

He laughed.  I couldn’t.

“I’ll count your battles for you,” I said.

I’d count them my way to make Camelot come the quicker.

* * *

At last, after six days’ march, we howled down on some wandering Saxon scavengers who threw their spears at us and ran into the forest to cower there like blue-faced Scots.

“Can we count this as a battle?” I cried to Arthur, sweating for the jolly exercise, my horse thrashing through the trees snapping at the fleeing Saxons.

Arthur and I, the van ahead of the van, broke out of the trees and saw the yellow stone walls of York beyond a field of tents, meat-smoke, and war rubble.

This magnificent yellow city was the greatest power of the North.  Nearly a country unto itself with its princes and princesses intermarried with the kingly families of Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Orkney.

Beneath the walls were the camps and catapults of Gurthrygen’s siege army.  Soldiers stopped flinging rotted cattle over the walls to gawk at us two newcomers.

The Saxons on the walls jeered and fired arrows that fell short of us.  The Saxons bared their rumps at us.  They flung over the walls the bones of the York men and women they had stewed for insult.

Slowly, first by wandering pairs and then in marching scores, the Cornish 6,000 came into the field behind us.  The siege army cheered.  The Saxons covered their rumps, strapped their shields over their cloaks, and wasted no more arrows.

“Where’s your captain?” Bedivere shouted to the siege soldiers.

“Here I am.”

A boy wiped mud from the sword he had been using to fell trees and held it up.  “I hold the sword of the lord general my father who was sent by the king to make siege.”

“Where’s your father?” said Bedivere.

“Those were his bones just dumped over the city wall.  I’m Lucan.  Who are you?”

Between Arthur and me was the tie of blood and hope but between this boy Lucan and the girl-slave who had been Brynn was the tie of parent and child.  It was more than I could bear to see the boy who would become the man Galabes who would choose me to become Merlin to create Arthur.

I jumped off my horse, threw out my arms to the boy, shouted, “I’m Merlin!” and kissed him.

Lucan was startled.

“Young beauty,” he cried, “you can’t be the hag Merlin!”

“Great gods,” laughed Percival.  “Is our Lady in love with this boy?”

Lucan wiped my kiss from his lips.

“We bring your new battle commander,” Bedivere said to Lucan, snatching up Arthur’s red dragon shield with ducal crown.

Lucan was startled again.  “Lord Duke of Cornwall, the king’s brother?  I’d be happier to have his Cornish army than another glory-greedy prince.”

Bedivere gestured at the trees out of which came the army.

Lucan cheered and in his joy kissed me again.  A quick, boyish kiss.

Arthur clapped his ducal crown on his conical helmet and Lucan was startled one last time.

Lucan grabbed Arthur’s hand.  “I’ve kissed only one man’s hand, Duke – my father’s when he slapped me and made me knight and his lieutenant in this battle.  Show me you’re champion in Britain, show me there’s one champion left to this unhappy country, and the only reward I’ll claim from you is the ground I need to stand on to fight back to back with Arthur!”

He kissed Arthur’s hand.

“You’ve a boy’s romantic heart,” Arthur said to him, “but you’ve made a man’s job of York.  Fight with me in this and become my comrade for life.”

Impatient Rufus in his saddle said, “Too many kisses, too little killing.  Look there.”

The Saxons lined the city rampart with a score of York women and began to lop off their heads like reapers in harvest time, heads spilling down among the besiegers who shouted and ran from the walls.

The Saxons jeered, jeering themselves hoarse.  Then they sat on the ramparts with legs hanging down, shields drawn up to their eyes, watching the Cornish 6,000 fill the field through the last of the day.

Night.  The army set out bonfires to attract its tail, still far down the road, and to guide in stragglers and foragers.  The night was full of shouts for “Meat!” “Wine!” “Priests!” from the Britons and choral jeering from the Saxons on the city walls.  The jeers were in incomprehensible Saxon and equally incomprehensible bad Latin, so we took no offense.

Duke Arthur and I, in full jangling array of steel, leather, gold, and silk, made rounds of the campfires, cheering on the warriors, joining in their boasts and songs, clapping swords on shields in toast, praying with the priests and Druids, supervising installations of catapults and onagers, overseeing the cutting of battering rams and the manufacture of huge leather shields to fend off boiling oil.  By the dead part of night, we were exhausted and the army at last was put to bed.

Rufus came into Arthur’s tent decorated with its ducal horse tail banners.  He took off his ugly wig, massaged his bald head, and said, “We’ll have good battle tomorrow.”

Rufus used a finger to lick salt from the food plate Arthur held.  “I can’t buy this city for you as I bought half of Cornwall, Arthur.  I sent in ransomers.  They came back as pieces flung over the walls.”

“Whyever would Hengist want to keep this dreary cold place?” said Arthur.

“Hengist is a man of dreary cold Saxon forests, there’s your answer.  He means to keep York as his capital after he divides Britain between himself and Horst.”

“Where’s Colgrin?”

“Coming,” Rufus said.

“Still coming?” I said.  “He’s the slowest man on Earth.”

“Can we kill this little army in York without a time-wasting siege before we face Colgrin?” said Arthur, yawning.

“You’ll have to,” Rufus said, “because you can’t ‘kill’ them united.”

“That would make a battle fit for epic and saga, wouldn’t it?” said Arthur, pulling off his boots and throwing himself on his bed.

“A battle fit for Greek poetry,” said Rufus, “and as unbelievable as all those other Greek tales.  What’re you doing, Duke?”

“Going to sleep.”  Arthur snuggled under his furs.

“Now?  With dawn and the battle two hours away?”

“No time to sleep when the killing starts.”

Arthur rolled over and began to snore.

“The boy-duke has his logic,” Rufus said to me.

I went out of the tent with Rufus.  It was spring everywhere else in the world but here.  Cold and a threat of ice.  Rufus clapped the wig on his head and wrapped his cloak against the chill.

“Tell me what you think tomorrow will be,” I said.

“Cornwall was a brawl.  York is war.”

Rufus shivered, only half from the cold.

“Tomorrow will tell us if we follow a champion or a fool, Princess.  When war begins, the terror of it stops the blood in a man’s veins.  If he can make that cold blood move again, he’s a hero.  If he can’t, then he’s only human and he’s going to die and us with him.  In disgrace because we followed the fool.”

Rufus bundled tighter against the cold.

He said, “But one battle’s only one battle.  What will Arthur do about Horst?”

“He’s Gurthrygen’s worry.”

“I hope not!  Giving away Kent to Horst, what a stupidity.  Now Horst wants to be the king’s first minister.”

“A Saxon chief minister?”

“We’ve a Saxon queen,” said Rufus.  “Why not?  He wants the king to confirm him as the ‘British Duke of Kent.’”

“I can puke!”

“I heard the story from Brittany, so it must be true,” said the Roman.  “They lie less over there.”

“Does Arthur know this?”

“I told him.  As I told him Brittany’s king prepares to follow the Saxon furrow across the sea to invade us.  To recover Britain for ‘true Britons,’ as he claims.”

“What did Arthur say?”

“Our boy-duke believes himself a hero.  You raised him that way, Lady.  Civil war, Breton invasion, invasion out of Sax-land, Scots, Picts, Irish.  It’s all epic for him.  It’s what a hero craves to keep himself a hero, isn’t it?  You damn British think too much like the Greeks.”

“Trojans,” I said.  “We come from Trojans.”

“Just as dull-witted.  Look how they ended.”

We squatted by a sentry’s campfire to warm ourselves.

“It’s all too much!” I said.  “How’s Arthur to put it all right?”

Rufus thought a moment and said, “You really aren’t much of a merlin anymore, are you?  You can’t ‘see’ anything ahead, can you?”

“Not much.”

Rufus rubbed his hands in the fire’s heat.  “There’s more.”

“More trouble?” I cried.

“More of the things that must worry kings.  Because they’re more important than kings or war.”

“What’s more important than kings and war?”

“The old forests are dying.”

“We’re to talk of trees and muck?” I said.

“I see people eating peacocks because there’s no pork.  Pork is every man’s staple, not peacocks.  No forests means no acorns means no pigs.”

I thought about that.

“Where do you buy pepper these days?”

“Who cares?  Salt is enough for any man or woman.”

“There’s no more pepper because the spice merchants in China have drained every gold coin out of our world.  When did you last see the emperor’s face on metal?”

“The world is coming to an end because we can’t feed pigs or buy pepper?”  I laughed.  “Don’t be comical, Roman, you Romans don’t do comedy well.”

“Not merely here in Britain.  Rome, too.  Europa.  All the world.  The gold is going out of everywhere, acorns, too, or the equivalent.”

I sat there confused and shivering.

Rufus said, studying me, “No, you’re not much of a merlin anymore.  Beautiful, yes, but too little magic.  And less liver of thought than we must have from you.”

We squatted there staring into the campfire, glum and desperate together.

At last, Rufus said, “Can Arthur make Camelot?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

* * *