The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (30 page)

“Help me make him the king of Camelot,” I said.

“‘Camelot,’ again?” said Kay in scorn

“Why not Camelot?” said Bedivere.  “What do we have now?  A ruined army, a wrecked country, invasion everywhere, and a hero who’s not a hero.  Show us the road to Camelot, Lady, and we’ll follow.”

“There it is.”

I gestured across Britain to the Brutus stone and the old sword that stuck from it.  Even at this distance, we all saw the sword’s secret gleam.

“My God,” said Kay.  “Can Arthur draw the sword?”

“We’ll meet you there, Lady,” said Bedivere, starting off through the trees.

Kay turned back toward Kaerlindcoit and York.  “I’ll collect Percival and Lucan and follow.”

Arthur was left with me.

I kicked him to his feet.  Not very motherly, perhaps.  But he deserved to be kicked.

“What will you do with me now?” he said.

“That!” I said.

We were there now, staring up at the sword jutting from the Brutus stone.

“This!” I said.

Around us was the Festival of the Sword, with Gurthrygen and his Saxon queen Ronwen seated on the stone.  The sword freshly cleansed.  Two dozen warriors gathered below the rock, hot to try to draw the blade and become king.

I was dressed in my gaudy-colored, thirteen part merlin’s cloak.  Arthur was still in the near-naked filth of a defeated warrior skulking among forest-haunts.

Bedivere and Kay were with us.  Percival and Lucan.  Fresh and eager and hoping against hope that Arthur could haul out the sword to become Arthur.

I climbed the stone to sit in my chair under the screaming shield.  Dunwallo the Seatless put himself beside me.  The Druid priests took their places.  The elders who would choose the king circled the sword to watch for tricks and magic.

I watched Arthur through the heavy clouds of Christian incense as he waited, furious and agitated, to take his turn at the sword.  He was too dirty and hangdog to be recognized as Prince Arthur by the excited crowd, and he was too sunk in his shame to announce his name.

I watched him measuring the chances of the other waiting knights and ladies – Briton and Brittany-men, Welsh, Roman, Kentish exile, Icelander, Dane, Norwaymen, Gaul, Spaniard, and Saxon.  Each tried the sword.  Each failed, to a chorus of cheers and jeers from the festival crowd.  Each collapsed with hands bloodied in the work.

Before each was shoved off the stone by an impatient elder, failed men and women kicked the sword in rage, cursed it, screamed against the too-many gods and goddesses, argued – as anyone on this Island will – that the sword was cursed, the rules unfair, Druids had fired weakening magic at them, that anyone who could take and hold the throne should have it and to Hell with this obscene, unChristian Rite of the Sword.

After the warriors, rich women and beggar men, magicians, scoundrels, humpbacked beasts, princesses, antique lords, muddy-fisted peasants, and anyone else who could climbed up the rock try the sword.  All these failed, too.

The youngest of the jealous elders tried and failed and skulked away, gloating that if she with all her high blood and family honor could not draw the sword, neither could anyone else.

Now, driven to mad fury by their frustration, the failed aspirants charged the sword, swinging clubs to break it, heaving boulders to smash it.  They screamed threats at Gurthrygen and Ronwen, at the elders, at the onlookers who jeered them.

Horst Duke of Kent and his lifeguards, using clubs and whips, flung all this mob off the Brutus stone, hurling the wildest of them off the stone to break their necks at the feet of the clustered Bishops of York, London, and Caerleon, who prayed over them before kicking dirt in their dead faces.

The eldermen and elderwomen shouted down all protests.  They had invented the challenge of the sword to undermine the king but it had not worked because no one could draw the sword.

At last, King Gurthrygen leaned down to Arthur, last of the queue, unrecognizable in muck and leaves.  “You, Sir Mud, you’re welcome to try the sword that makes men kings.   Come, try.  Then I can go to my tent and my concubines and some better wine than this muck.”  Gurthrygen emptied his wine cup down the side of the stone and farted.

He barely watched as muddy Arthur climbed the rock.  But he saw me watching Arthur and he gestured to Horst.

Horst said to Arthur, “Name yourself, sir or peasant, and your tribe, station, and lord, if any would claim a latrine-leaving like you.”

The drunken, reveling crowd below the stone laughed.

“You’ll know me soon enough, Saxon,” Arthur said.

At that, the crowd turned its many heads toward Arthur, shouting, “Draw the sword, boy!” and “Use it to cut out his Saxon half-soul!”

The giant Horst bent far down to look into Arthur’s muddy face.  “Go ahead.  Draw the sword.  Let me test it on my scramasax.”  He rattled his weapon in its scabbard.  “Hold.  Do I know these eyes?  Have I seen them beneath a visor?”

Gurthrygen roused himself.  “Give us your name, man.”

“I’ll give you my country first.  Cornwall.”

A surprised cheer from the crowd.  No Cornishman had tried the sword today.

“Your station?” said the king.

Arthur gripped the sword jammed into the stone of the race.  “Duke.” said Arthur.

Gurthrygen leaped to his feet.

“Now I know the eyes!”  Horst drew his scramasax.

The crowd shouted, “Arthur!  It’s Arthur!  The Pendragon!”

“Great God, are they calling this little disaster a hero?” Gurthrygen cried.

Queen Ronwen said, “This fool who launched a thousand hopes and sank them all?  They want him king?  Every Briton’s an idiot!”

Britons cheered.

Saxons jeered.

“Draw the blade, Arthur,” Horst said, raising his scramasax.  “It’s all to stop me from making you a memory of Arthur.”

Saxons cheered.

Britons jeered.

Arthur set his feet to draw the sword.

In the crowd’s silence, I searched for signs of a miracle.  Afternoon wind died.  Birds stopped flapping across the sky.  Burrowing animals ceased to burrow.  Vipers to slither.  Spiders to spin. The sky was slate and wet but its rain hung suspended in air.

This was the moment that would begin the making of Camelot.

Arthur glanced at me and it was as though I were looking at me through Arthur’s eyes.

I said to myself and to Arthur, in my soul’s voice,
Draw the sword, Artyr!

Arthur shouted at Horst, staggering him and the crowd, “If a Saxon death craves me, it can take me!  But if this sword has a stronger claim, then it must make me king!”

Britons and Saxons cheered.

Arthur hauled on the sword’s hilt.

The sword sang
Excalibur!
but it would not draw.

I howled like a dying dog.

Arthur wept.

Horst shouted his war cry and swung down his scramasax.

It was the king, without armor, mail or the use of his gold Irish sword, who stopped Duke Horst with a fist in the face, a knee in the groin, an elbow in the throat and then, taking the scramasax from the Saxon’s hand, driving its butt between the giant’s blue eyes.  Horst’s many yellow braids flew up like a score of pleading hands.  The giant went down, down, down the front of the Brutus stone, hitting the earth at the feet of Dunwallo with the sound of a dead horse falling on a battlefield.

“Did I kill my brother-in-law?” Gurthrygen said, looking down the stone.  “I curse myself for it in advance to win by remorse the forgiveness of any watching Saxon god.”

Dunwallo with his three crosses used a gilt sword to turn over the Saxon.  “You’re safe from sin.  The monster’s alive.”

Horst’s lifeguards confirmed the diagnosis with a kick that made their duke groan.  They hauled him off to his blue silk pavilion.

Ronwen said in Latin, “That’s the Saxon who thought he’d take this Island because its inhabitants are shrunken little beasts without honor.  So much for Saxonia!”  She spat after her brother.

Britons cheered her and then were puzzled to have cheered their Saxon queen, so they cheered her again.

Ronwen was startled.  She in her blond hugeness glared the crowd silent.

Arthur on his knees by the sword beat his head on the stone of the race.

Ronwen said, “Arthur mourns like an Egyptian.  Tell him to get up or to cut his belly.  I despise him.”  She spat twice on Arthur.

The crowd jeered her.  She spat at the crowd.

I felt pity and hate:  Pity for myself for a thousand years’ wasted work.  Hate for Arthur, my failure.

Gurthrygen said, in a despair that startled me, “Is this wretched creature what you’ve chosen as king after me, Merlin?”

I shouted at the sky and the universe, “Tell me what to do with this creature!”

The sky rained on me.  Cold thumping droplets cased in ice tore my face.

Ronwen spat up into the sky.

She said to Gurthrygen, “Who’s this stranger who thinks she can call on Heaven to help her?”

“The Lady Merlin.”

“The Old Woman?  Don’t be a fool.  This is a maiden.  Probably a virgin.  Let’s sacrifice her – we’ve run out of other things to try to save this wretched Island.”

“It’s a dreadful old story,” Gurthrygen said.  “Princess Merlin lives backward in time.  We age to death while she youthens to an embryo.  This is she…”

“You’re half-wit to believe that,” said Ronwen.  “She’s a conjurer with a painted face.”

Ronwen rubbed her big hands on my face.  Nothing smeared.  She stared in fright at the fingers that had touched an old-young woman’s cheeks.  But she said, “You Britons are children believe this nonsense.  You’re fit to be Christians.”

“You don’t believe what you see?” said the king.

“I believe in the scramasax and that I’m to be queen of Camelot.”

“Camelot?” said startled Gurthrygen.

Ronwen went down the rain-slick stone to the king’s pavilion.

I wiped cold rain and hot tears from my own face and dragged Arthur after her, the rain washing the mud and blood from his face.  Arthur huddled away in a corner of the tent, wailing miserably.

Ronwen heaped herself on a bed of pillows, no British chair large enough to hold her.

The Spanish concubines stripped off the king’s toga, laid him on his shield-bed with mink bedding, and oiled his body still wounded and bruised from the battle at Kaerlindcoit months ago.  He trembled with fever and infection.  In the lamplight, his eyes were yellow and red.  But he was still a man of power and intelligence.

Perhaps, I thought, I can change allegiance and make an Arthur from a Gurthrygen?

The king, as though reading my mind, said, “Not that, Merlin, but heal me of the fever of life.  Do that and please your king.”

“Britain needs you,” Ronwen said from her pillows.

“Do I need a Britain full of shivering whelps like that?”  Gurthrygen spat at his brother huddled weeping in his corner.

Gurthrygen shoved aside his concubines and sat up naked.  “Look at me, Merlin.  I’m a shivering old man.  I’m thirty-one at New Year’s and a wreck so filled with pus and fever that I dream terrors.  Lord God, the nightmares I dream!  A death hounded across Hell can’t be worse than this life I’m living.”

Ronwen rapped her knuckles on her breastplate.  “Shut up, weak man, everyone’s listening.”

“Look what Fate has given me for a queen,” said Gurthrygen.  “I’d rather have married her brother. He has some gentleness in him.  I know your Romans have kept alive and on the throne to buy time for the education of ‘King Arthur.’  I know I’m a slave King David but to what?  Is that stupid beast dripping tears in his wine really our Solomon?”

“I can make you Arthur in his place,” I said.

Ronwen cried, “Do it!  Make me queen of Camelot!”

Gurthrygen’s fever-eyes goggled at me.  “Would you do that to me?  Me a ruined man ready to die and you, what, a merlin who’s outlived her powers because she’s becoming a child?  Damn you for thinking of making me Arthur!”

* * *

“Let’s all decide what to do about Arthur,” said the king.  Gurthrygen shouted out the tent door, “Rufus!  Bedivere, Kay, Percival, Lucan!”

They came in.  Gurthrygen sat naked on his shield-bed as his concubines scraped clean his pus-oozing wounds.  “What do I do with Little Brother who can’t manage to become king?”

I started to speak.

“No, no, Merlin,” said Gurthrygen.  “In a lifetime shaping this blockhead, what’ve you given me but one more berserker for my legions?  We need better to win Fortune’s smile for the Island.  What do you suggest, Ronwen?”

“I don’t love him anymore,” she said.  “Feed him to Colgrin.”

“One option,” said Gurthrygen.  “A very Saxon solution.  But, no, I won’t send a Pendragon into the stew pots.”

“We don’t eat people,” said Ronwen. “Only pretty little princes.”

She laughed.

No one listening was sure that was a joke.

Gurthrygen said to Bedivere, “You, Old One-Arm, what do you say?”

“I speak for Arthur’s war band.  Give us our chief.  He’s an embarrassment to us but he’s ours.  If we have to live in the forest on berries and rats, it’ll be enough for us to be together with him.”

“A very British option and I say, No,” said the king.  “I won’t give up your swords.  Forget the merry life of a bandit in the forest.  Rufus, what do I do?”

“Use him against the new invader, the Brittany-men.”

“No more battle for him!  He’s a hero at winning fights but losing the land he fights for.”

“Make him surrender first,” said Rufus.  “Give him to King Hoel as a vassal prince.  Marry him to some Breton duchess.  Promise Hoel the chance of Arthur’s half-Breton offspring being elected king of Britain in the murky future.  Make Hoel your chief ally against the Saxons.”

“Who can promise election?” said the king.

“Do it anyway.”

“And pay my debts like a Greek?”

“That’s right – never,” said Rufus.

Gurthrygen said to me, “It’s a cheap alternative.  With the advantage it gets Arthur out of Britain.  It appeals to me.  What do you say, Lady Merlin.  Do I send him across the Narrow Sea to cast up on some innocent Breton maid?”

“Hoel has no daughters,” I said.  “He’s run through a score of wives but he’s made no girl children.”

“He has a brother, more skinflint than Hoel, if that can be imagined,” said Kay, “with brats of all kinds.”

“Cator, Duke of Brittany, my father’s old vassal?” said Gurthrygen.  “He must be an antique now.  What spawn could he have near Arthur’s age?”

“He has a round dozen daughters, all ages,” said Bedivere, “out of four wives, all Gauls, dangerously clever, and lovely and roundly round as Breton cows.”

“You’d marry me to a cow?” Arthur cried, this new fright ending his lamentations.

Ronwen said, curious, “Do cow-women appeal to you Britons?”

Bedivere said, “Each is fat enough to sink a longship but they’ve a strange habit of growing thin in marriage before getting pregnant.  They’re wonders at pregnancy.  They form centuries of children for their husbands.  They also make men rich.  It’s a phenomenon passed down to them from Cator’s mother, who started the type.”

“He has one unmarried daughter Arthur’s age,” said Percival.  “She might even be a virgin.”

One-armed Bedivere flushed with embarrassment.

“Tell us about her, Bedivere,” Ronwen said.

He was silent.

Gurthrygen laughed and said, “I see this Breton cow-daughter has the Gallic charm.  She blessed Bedivere with a single smile when I sent him to Brittany on embassy.  He was in love with her for weeks after.  Until he met another woman who smiled at him.”

We laughed.  Bedivere flushed again.

“This isn’t a cow-woman?” said Ronwen.

“Oh, she’s as fat, no, fatter than her sisters,” said Gurthrygen.  “But she has a beauty of face and character that transforms men’s minds from thoughts of righteous combat to gentle love.  Or so Bedivere’s experience told us all.”

“That must be Guenevere,” said Lucan.

We looked at young Lucan who had been silent to that moment.  We saw that he too loved her, a woman he knew only by gossip.

“Born on a golden round table to satisfy her father’s dream,” said Bedivere.  “Merlin made the table.”

The king said, “Is this part of the future you’ve already lived, Lady Merlin?   What’ve you got to tell us about it?”

“I can’t remember any of it,” I cried, and I couldn’t.

“Insubordinate!” shouted Ronwen.  “When the king commands, you obey, Fortuneteller.”

“Not in Britain,” Gurthrygen said to her with a weary sigh.

The king said to Arthur, “Get over to Brittany or to wherever in Britain Hoel’s army may be.  Offer yourself up as my sacrificial lamb to marry the Lady Guenevere.  Secure Brittany’s protection for Britain.  Go do something useful for me, at last.”

“Good God, don’t marry me to some hideous foreigner, Brother, please!” Arthur cried.

Ronwen said, “Better to marry him to me after you’re dead, Husband.  I can make any man a king.  He and I will build Camelot together.”

“I want a Breton cow for him, my loving Queen, so I can have lots of little cow-lets to dandle on my knees in my dotage.”

Gurthrygen said to Arthur, “No arguments.  Go vassal yourself to Cator in any role but warrior.  Because you’d lose him so much blood-treasure he’d cut your throat.  Bring back his Guenevere.”

Arthur cried, “Lie with a half-breed Gallic-Breton?  Make children on her?  What could they look like – blue-faced and three-eyed, bow-legged, sagging-rumped, hairy nosed?  Is that the Fate of Uther’s blood?  Brother, you can’t do this to me!”

Kay said, “There is a problem here, King.”

“Thank you, Lord Jesu,” Arthur cried.  “What’s the problem?”

“The lady is hand fasted to a Frankish prince.  Lancelot, son of Vivien of the convent of the Ladies of Lake Avalon.”

“This is the Lancelot women say makes Homer’s Paris look like a Cyclops?” said Ronwen, brightly alert.

“It is, Queen,” said Kay.  “What he can’t win by his looks he takes with his war club.  His holy mother won’t let him draw blood.  He fights with a club like a priest.”

Gurthrygen said to Arthur, “Your first duty, after vassaling yourself to Hoel and Cator, is to unfasten the lady from Lancelot.  Make her your duchess.  Don’t come home without her.”

“Brother,” Arthur cried, “have some mercy on me!”

“What mercy did you have for me and my kingdom, oh great killer of Britons?” said the king.  “Go away, get it done.  Bring me a cow-duchess.  I want a dozen cow-let grandchildren before I die.”

Gurthrygen said, “Young Lady Merlin, you too.  Out of my kingdom!  Bedivere, Kay, Lucan, Percival, out, out!  Return to me with your shields or on them.  Better, return to me with the Lady Guenevere on your shields, and peace with Brittany.  Oh, and a spare army to help me fight the Saxons.”

* * *

I stood with Arthur and his war band at the quay where the square-sailed longship rose and fell on splashing water.  It had the king’s standard lashed between the ears of its dragon-beak prow.  We looked across the Narrow Sea to Europa.  The hills on that distant shore were gray and blue, darker smudges separating smudgy cold sea and smudgy rain-sky.  Arthur said, “My son is in the north but everything I do drives me south, south, south.  Now both all of Britain and the Narrow Sea stand between me and Mordred.  I want my son!”

There was no cheer I could offer Arthur.  Because the future for us both in a pesthole like Brittany seemed grim to me.

Rain fell.  The ocean splashed us.  Wonderful.  Arthur and I with his war band shivered in the cold.

A king’s lieutenant rode up and said, “Disarm, Knights.  It’s the judgement of King Gurthrygen.  You won’t go into Brittany to start a war with Hoel and Cator that the king has to finish.”