The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (31 page)

“We need our weapons.  There’re pirates in the sea!” said Percival.

“And dragons and sprites and King Neptune himself,” said Bedivere.

“Whine for your lives with them but you won’t leave Britain armed,” said the lieutenant.

The lieutenant’s slaves dumped our arms and armor in a cart and trundled it all away.

Sailors shouted for the war band to jump into the longship as they hauled up the sail.  We jumped onto the deck like breaking our last tie with Britain.

Arthur burst out in fury, “Is this part of your plan for Camelot, Mother?  Force me to bed a Breton with garlic between her breasts and farts like the rotted fish paste she eats?”

“I still have faith you can do it,” I said, hearing the bitter lie in my own voice. 
Who else is there?
I thought in despair.

Arthur looked north, sudden tears in a fierce face.  “I’ll win through.  By all the gods, I’ll do it.  To have my son!”

“There’s no Camelot without Excalibur,” I said, speaking aloud a thought I should have kept silent.

“Is that what the sword is called?” said Arthur.  “There’s another name to curse in my prayers.”

The longship’s dragon-beak bit into the sea and sent a surge of water crashing across the deck, drenching us all.  The sail banged as it filled and shoved the vessel into another sea-biting and another washing of the decks.

The half-drowned war band shouted in fright.  They threw themselves at my knees, crying, “Protect and preserve us, Lady Merlin!”

“You preserve and protect Arthur,” I said.

“We will!” they cried, “if you save us from the sea!”

“But make no wars in Brittany.  No raids for treasure.  No kidnapped lovers.  You swore to the king to keep peace.”

Calculation ran across their wet faces.  Even terrified and at sea, they craved the greedy, barbaric joy of plundering a foreign place.

“
We
swore nothing like that,” said Bedivere.

“Nor will we swear it to you,” said Percival.

“If Arthur can’t fight,” Kay said, “we’ll fight for him.”

Lucan rattled his purse.  “What gold loses, steel buys.”

I still could command a merlinic trick or two.  I flung my rain-heavy cloak over the four men and they shrank under its weight.  Arthur pulled off the cloak.  Bedivere, Kay, Percival, and Lucan were shriveled to creatures smaller than elves and more horrible to look at than gnomes.

They were knee-high to Arthur, ugly, hairy, so shrunk within their skins that the flesh of full-size men draped from their miniature bodies like limp sails from yardarms.  Sagged and stretched faces.  Beards and mustaches drooped to the ground.  Their brave liveries absurd on them now.

They turned to each other and screamed.

“Put them back the way they were!” cried Arthur.

“When we splash onto Britain again, they’ll remake themselves,” I said.

“A year like this?” piped the war band in chorus.

“What language is that?” said Arthur.  “Is it any language at all?”

The ship’s captain called from the stern of the rising and falling deck.  “Duke and Princess, put yourselves in the cabin to keep dry, and all your ugly pets!  We run before a gale!”

The dragon-beak cut through the cream of incoming breakers and the ship sped out for the long journey across to Europa.

The gnomes ceased their piping howls and growls.  They wrapped themselves in their excess skin like wrapping on togas and fled to the gunwales to vomit over into the sea.

Arthur and I stood staring back at Britain until the Island, after many hours, vanished into a gloom of sea-rain and cloud.  I could no longer see Britain through the storm even with my soul’s vision.  That too had begun to fail me.

I was now less than half the merlin I had been when I took a lonely and miserable boy to raise as Arthur.  But it was beautiful to be young again.  To feel clean health, hot blood in my veins, my loins’ hunger for a man and their surprise desire for the making of children, a home, and rich fields.  I had the life-energy to live as I had lived with the rogue Uther, chasing across Britain for love and danger. The surge of freshening life!

What I lost in magic power I won in Earthly power – a body strong and hard, a spirit proud, a singlemindedness of existence that needed no Roman doublethink to find my way in life.

I cheered!  I put my face into the sea’s storm and cheered, startling the sailors and Arthur and the vomity war band.

I had forgotten I must kill Mordred to save Camelot.  One youth slaughtering another.  Pitiful and awful.  And too terrible to think about when I felt so young and alive.

* * *

After a day and a night crossing the Narrow Sea – becalmed, stormed at, snapped at by sea demons, and howled at by Neptune, freight cast overboard to prevent capsizing, the sail torn away, half the ship’s crew drowned in the hold or swept overboard – we cast up on Europa’s shore.

We tumbled out of the longship to grab handfuls of Brittany and to pray aloud to every god and goddess for our safe-coming.  And the hope we could learn to fly home and never take ship again.

The captain said, “No rougher a crossing than usual, Duke and Princess.  A few more crew swept overboard than usual.  But I saved you and half the cargo.  I’m a rich man again!”

The warrior gnomes clustered around the captain and cried in their piping voices, “Let us bite off his toes, Arthur!”

“What do they say, these your beastly pets?” said the captain, watching the little creatures flap their excess flesh at him.

Arthur and I picked up the war band like babies dripping fat and trudged up the beach toward the town that lived on the flotsam thrown up by the sea.  Townspeople looked out at us from their houses with regret that these two richly dressed princes had landed whole rather than in more easily scavenged bits and pieces of silk and gold.

The town had columned temples and a checkerboard Roman street plan but the gold and silver had been stripped from the great buildings and paint rain-washed from statues.  The sewer had backed up.  Only the cross on the basilica gleamed with fresh gilding, a gift to the only god Brittany now feared.

“Who are you?” shouted a townswoman with a chain of office, using a sword as a cane as she limped toward us across the wet gravel shore.

She was dressed in trousers, skirts, and cloak so heavy they made her look round and fat as a Breton cow.  She spoke Breton.  That was close enough to true language for us to understand her.  But she rolled her Rs in that awful Breton manner.

Four men-at-arms came running from the town, struggling to haul on their armor and weapons.

“I’m Arthur Duke of Cornwall,” said Arthur.

“Ah, the other half of Brittany!” said the townswoman.

“I’m on embassy from Gurthrygen King of Britain to Duke Cator.”

“And you, Lady?” the townswoman said to me.

“Merlin, Princess of Britain, foster mother to Arthur.”

“Delightful and absurd!  You look like brother and sister to me.  But who knows what hideous barbarisms you Britons practice?”

She looked at the war band in our arms.  “Are those lamentable creatures apes?  I’ve heard of apes.  Never wanted see them.  Don’t want to look at them now.”

One-armed Bedivere slavered to bite her.  The others held back Percival from jumping at her.

The unfrightened townswoman rattled her gold chain of office at the war band, like shaking at them a battle chain.

“I suppose you want a cart to the palace and every courtesy?” she said.  “It’s the last courtesy you’ll have here.  Two shipwrecked princes without a coin and their lamentable pet apes?  Nothing can please our Lord Duke more than seeing all your flat and hungry bellies.”

The four men-at-arms finally arrived from the town, adjusting sword belts, fitting on shields and horned helmets.  “Any reason not to take you for ransom?” they said to us.

“We have a safe conduct from King Hoel,” Arthur said.

The men-at-arms shrugged shoulders as Bretons and Gauls do, turned away and trudged back toward town, pulling off helmets, shields, and sword belts, muttering disappointment.

Bedivere lunged and bit through the townswoman’s dangling gold chain.  The woman ran into the town howling for a cart and horse for us.

We clattered out of town in the cart and up the muddy path to the ducal palace.  Castle Conan – “Caerconan” in Breton – rose from its muddy fields and even more muddy ditch.  Its man-made hill dribbled into the ditch.  Its great stones were cracked.  Banners sagged.  Sewage yellow-striped the battlements from privies jutting over the moat – no expenditure here for a Roman running water system.  The whole place seemed to sag into the mud around it.

Cator’s mark over the main gate – a blue-fanged gorgon hauling a crucifix – stared out toward the Narrow Sea as though hoping for escape to any happier place.  This was the castle of the duke who out-famed his King Hoel for stinginess.

The palace was a villa of cracked red roof tiles and walls not whitewashed in a generation.  In the auditorium was a plain chair that had replaced his grandfather’s gilt throne which Duke Cator had sold.  Above the chair was the immense, round, golden table on which Guenevere had been born.  It hung from the wall like a mammoth shield, glittering through the palace gloom.

Duke Cator limped across the room, dressed like a mendicant in old Roman clothes, putting on his many chains of office, clapping on his emerald ducal crown, seeking beneath his rags for the vestment of stained yellow silk with his blue gorgon mark and pulling it out over his other clothes to identify himself.

He sat in the plain chair and pulled off the crown and chains he had just put on.  Threw them into a strongbox held by an old, mustached slave woman in ragged hood and cloak.  Tucked away his gorgon silk.  Looked at Arthur and me with his old man’s eyes.  He was at least fifty years old, desiccated from the happy fatness of middle-age to a hard core of antique bone and muscle.

The only item of his clothing that was burnished clean was his gladius, the better to keep whatever treasure he had in this beggar’s palace.

“Cator,” he said, introducing himself, rolling the R.  “Who and what are you all?”

He gestured at the gnomes clutching around them their sheets of extra flesh.  “What horrid monsters are these?”

“I’m Arthur…”

“So I was told to expect.”

“My…”

“Ghastly little things,” Cator said of the war band.  “Captured them yourself in Farther China, I suppose, in some misadventure absurdly over-reported to make you a hero, Prince Arthur?”

“None of that, Duke…”

“I prefer simple men and women with simple tastes and simple stories.  This heroic age isn’t for me.  I’m a very unheroic man.”

“So Gurthrygen tells me…”

“Money, lucre, denarii, ‘emperors,’ even Saxon pennies – those are the heroes I love.  Have you any of them for me?”

“I brought you this letter from the king…”

“A parchment gift? Is that all?  Gurthrygen’s a mean man.”

Cator snatched the letter from Arthur and said to me, off-hand, “Who are you, girl?”

“You know me, Duke.  I’m Merlin.”

Cator was stunned.  “This beautiful young girl is Merlin? 
My
Merlin?  The old, snake-bearded monster who made my Round Table?”

Cator was half out of his chair in surprise and fright, crushing the king’s letter in his hands.

“But Merlin,” he cried, “was ancient when I knew her!  You’re a beauty worth m’bedding!  Or I could sell you to the Romans for a few coins to ease m’poverty.”

“What you see is what I’ve come to be for this cycle…” I said.

“Never believed your story.  Who could believe it?  It’s preposterous.  Living backwards in time?  Posh!  Kiss me, Beauty!”

Cator threw out his arms to me.  His kiss was firm, winey, and disgustingly lascivious.

The mustached slave woman with the strongbox uncrinkled the king’s letter and read it aloud:  “‘To Cator, Duke of the Bretons, Gurthrygen, King-Emperor of all the Britons, greeting…’”

The duke kissed me again, and twice more, and shouted to the slave, “Oh, get to the meat of it!”

The slave woman read, “‘Make something useful of my Little Brother…’”

“How long’s he inflicted on my m’poverty?” Cator cried.

“One year, Duke,” the slave read.  “So the king says here.”

“What’m I to do with you?” Cator said to Arthur and me.  “Two more mouths to feed and I’m a poorish man.  Your four little pets can eat with the dogs.  That won’t cost me much.  But look at you, Arthur!  A big man who craves his bloody beef and warm ale.  And you, Beauty,” he said to me, “who ought to crave
me
but probably wants her own share of beef and beer.  Or expensive Raetian wine.  Great God, I remember your slurping hunger for Raetian!  Why couldn’t Gurthrygen have sent me two of his withered little Romans who eat acorns and die in the first winter chill?  He means you to eat me out of m’fortune!”