The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (45 page)

We were alone.

I felt wonderful going to battle again beside my Arthur.

He said, startling me, “Tell me if we’re to win this battle today, Mother.”

“You’ve seen the Book of Weird – you win everything forever.”

“I’ve seen the Saxon Weird, not British Fate.  Tell me my Fate.”

“What can I tell you?  Nothing!  I’m a girl now, younger than you.  The merlin in me is almost emptied out.  I’m good only for carrying a sword and spear in my king’s army…”

I wanted to weep in sudden misery.

“Am I the king to build Camelot?  Tell me that, at least.”

“You’re the man who
must
build Camelot.”

“Answers and no answers,” Arthur said, with a bitter laugh.

I said, with a young woman’s earnestness, “I tell you, Arthur, people for a thousand years ahead will say, ‘If Arthur marches with me, I can march through all the evils of the world unbeaten!’”

“You can see that far ahead?” he said with a laugh.  “You have that much merlin left in you?”

True!  I could see nothing ahead but what I hoped to dream.

I said, “You are Arthur who has Excalibur, the Round Table, and Guenevere.  What else do you need to make Camelot?”

“My sons.”

“Gawain and Mordred,” I said, the last name sounding strangely bitter to me.

I pushed away my puzzlement in a young woman’s natural excitement for the battle ahead.

Arthur saw my joy and rattled his feathered spear on his shield and shouted “Camelot!” until battle hunger came into his face.

I rapped my Brittany greatsword on the screaming shield, shouting, “Camelot!”

We charged through the trees to break out into rolling fields across which came the immense surge of the Saxon horde shouted on by Duke Horst, possessor of the battle ax called The Morgengrabe he believed would make him king of Britain.

Behind us the British army, paltry compared to Horst’s numbers, scrambled out of the trees to gawk across at the vast enemy formations.

Arthur gave his warriors the usual before-battle feast of cold meat to gnaw and Raetian wine to suck down.  Our own skirmishers jeered at and drove away the first Saxon rovers.  But they came close enough to report to Horst we were a swarm of fighting men and women and not merely dust devils or Horst’s drunken hallucination.  We waited for happy combat.

After the sun had passed zenith, the vanguard of Horst’s army swarmed up the last rising ground toward us and stopped.  The Saxon army surged up behind it as if the vanguard were a scorpion drawing in its stinging tail.

A single arrow arced out of the Saxon horde.  It rose silently into the blue and rainless sky, rolled over and fell with a heavy gasp into the dirt beside Arthur’s war horse.  Llamrei crushed the arrow with its hoof, looked toward the Saxons, and shrieked its war cry.

Saxon war horses screamed their cries in return.

Our war horses had chosen the hour of battle.

The Saxon army rolled forward, dragged toward combat by its eager horses.

My shield looked out on the Saxon tens of thousands against our handful of warriors and screamed its panic, making the Saxon vanguard stagger in shock.

I raised my spear to attack.

“Let them come to us, let them come!” Arthur shouted to his army.  “Let them wear themselves out coming to us.  The slaughter will be easier.”

“Walk your horse,” he said to me.  “Shake out your battle-stiffness, Mother.  Then we’ll fight them.”

Impatient as I was, I did as Arthur ordered.  I let my horse stamp about the dusty field.  I chased away Saxon skirmishers for exercise.  I shook out my shield arm.  I re-settled my armor.  I tested the quick slide of the Brittany greatsword in its fleece scabbard.

When I got bored with all that, which was soon, I walked my horse back to Arthur and said, “I don’t suppose it’s time to fight, my King?”

“Are you that ready, Girl Warrior?” Arthur said, laughing.

“I’m always ready!” I cried.

“Here, cross steel with me and let’s make battle.”

We crossed swords overhead and the army cheered us, shouting, “Hero Jesu, protect us all!”

I said, in the old pagan prayer, “If Annwn craves us, Annwn must have us.  But if Camelot’s claim is stronger, we’ll live forever!”

“A good half-Christian prayer,” said Arthur.

“I’m only a good half-Christian.”

We shouted our war cries.

Our horses screamed fury.

Arthur slapped shut his helmet Goswhit with its red dragon crown.

I settled my screaming shield.

We attacked.

The Saxons howled in surprise and wonder to see two lone knights charging into their vast horde.

But out of the trees behind us – to Saxon eyes as though materialized from shadow and dust – came the first battle line of the army of the Britons.

Banners and pennants, chanting priests with smoke pots, cavalry clattering and flinging their spears.  Feathers and streamers, horned helmets, glistening gilt on steel, infantry howling Latin curses, maces and axes.  A furious rising cloud of British arrows fired and spears machine-thrown.

A confusion of attack so broad, so deep, so sudden from the black woods that Horst’s sixty thousand Saxons howled in terror, their battle line staggering, their captains forced to push them from behind with spear points.

Arthur and I sank into the body of the Saxon horde like needles into a pustule, lancing and spurting blood, hacking and throwing up into the air cut heads and arms, smashing shields, cutting Saxons from shoulder to girdlestead, breaking Saxon armor, breaking their battle axes and spears, breaking all swords swung against us.

We and our gouging, biting, hoof-stabbing war horses made a whirlwind confusion of feathers and split armor and faces, metal and Saxons all mashed together until the Saxons began to fall back from the two berserkers and from the sword Excalibur that seemed to extend and extend and extend to reach any warrior it chose, cutting out whole squads and centuries of warriors, gutting divisions, slaughtering princes and warrior queens, overturning cannibal stew pots, cutting apart pagan priests as they groveled in the mud to make false signs of the Cross to beg “Mercy!  Spare!” in their shabby British.

Now the army of the Britons howled down onto the Saxons, the Round Tablers streaming feathers and the sweat of a furious thrill, their blades and spear points sun-gleaming, each Tabler screaming for the glory to be first to carve out the life of Duke Horst.

The armies collided with the huge shouted crash of a hundred thousand fighters running into each other breastplate to breastplate, the impact so tremendous that men and women and horses were flung into the air, the lead ranks plowed under by the following ranks, and the armies attacked each other uphill over the writhing bodies of their own half-dead comrades.

“Horst!” Arthur shouted.

“Lord Duke,” I shouted, “come face King Arthur!”

Morgengrabe!
sang Excalibur.

There was Horst mounted on a gilt horse among his battle captains with his blue battle flags and his carts of slaves and treasure plundered from a score of British towns and villas.

He had a gilt helmet pushed back on his head, his yellow braids knitted with gold ribbons, and his breastplate and shield were gold-inlaid.  He and his horse was yellow and immense.  He gleamed hot in the rays of the afternoon sun as though he were himself a second sun put down on Earth to scorch Britain and incinerate its king.

“I am what you see, Arthur King!” he said.  “The burner of your world!”

Horst spat at Arthur.

“I have here” – he hauled up an immense battle ax – “the tool that gives me the crown you have on your helmet.  This,” he said, weighing the battle ax in both hands, “is The Morgengrabe.”

The ax said,
Morgengrabe!

Excalibur!
said the World Sword.

Horst, in battle-frenzy, slapped shut his gilt helmet and shouted to his captains, “Let one army slaughter and the other be slaughtered!  None of it matters.  The real battle, my captains, is here!”

Horst swung the battle ax and chopped off the head of Arthur’s war horse.

Llamrei stood, headless and loyal, until Arthur had leaped with sword, spears, and the shield Pridwen onto the ground.  Then the horse collapsed.

Horst swung the ax again and beheaded my horse.  The animal fell without waiting, me in my armor crashing onto the mailed feet of Horst’s captains.

Horst, to even the combat, sheared off the head of his own golden horse and slid down its spine as the dead animal reared and fell over.

“Now, Little King and Merlin Fraud,” Horst said, advancing on Arthur hauling me to my feet, “you both die!”

The Saxon captains swarmed behind their duke, stabbing at us with their spears, throwing clubs and stones, slashing at us with scramasaxes.

We shielded off all these petty blows in a racketing of metal and stone on shields, my shield screaming in agony and Pridwen’s eagle, battered and torn, glinting a Saxon god’s forbidding eye at the frightened Saxon captains.

Horst swung The Morgengrabe and shattered the unbreakable Pridwen, flinging Arthur to sprawl in the dust.  Before Horst could backswing on Arthur, I drove the Brittany greatsword shattering through his breastplate and shoved him sprawling back on his captains’ spear points.  He howled and the captains screamed in terror.

This greater uproar in the midst of the uproar of battle attracted the Saxon horde.  It turned in on itself to bite at the two of us.

That turning attracted the Round Tablers – Bedivere, Kay, Percival, Lucan, and blind Dubric with Lancelot.  They swarmed into the center of the fight within a fight, drawing their divisions with them.  They threw off the in-turning Saxon centuries.  They stabbed the captains shoving their duke in his shattered breastplate and The Morgengrabe toward Arthur.

Until it was Lancelot who stood alone between Horst with Morgengrabe and staggering, shield-less Arthur.

“Duke!” Lancelot said to Horst.  “Know me – Lancelot son of Vivien, Lady of the Lake and witch-princess of the Franks.  I’m the blood of Clovis – his throne is to be mine.  Kill me and you kill a proto-king and create eternal war with the Franks.”

Lancelot wiped battle mire from his priestly war club and said, “Say, Duke, what you will do.”

“This, Lancelot Son of the Witch!”

Horst raised his battle ax over his head and brought it down, shattering through Lancelot’s shield, splitting his helmet, cracking open Lancelot’s breastplate as a turtle’s shell is split for cooking.

Lancelot stood looking down at his split body.  He raised his war club and in doing that pulled himself apart.  His two pieces fell to either side of Horst.

“Feed my Morgengrabe another puny Round Tabler!” Horst roared.

“Try me, Duke,” Bedivere said.  “My old gristle is tougher to cut.”

“Come, One Arm,” Horst said, “let me balance you up!”

Horst hacked off Bedivere’s sword arm before Bedivere could raise his blade.  He cut off the stub of Bedivere’s lost arm and with it Bedivere’s shield.  He cut off Bedivere’s legs and then cut off his head before Bedivere could fall into the muck and blood that had been Lancelot.

“Feed The Morgengrabe again!” Horst roared above the howl and screech of battle.

Percival and Kay came at him together, one slashing low, the other high.  Horst shouted his surprise and used the huge ax in a forward and backward motion that no other axman was strong enough to manage.

He cut apart Percival and Kay, emptying out their lungs and hearts.  He laughed, grinding their livers with the last of their thoughts beneath his boot.

Horst leered down at Arthur and me from his huge height and said, “Come, Boy King and Druid Girl, feed The Morgengrabe another of these sorry Round Table knights.  Raise my taste for blood – make me hungrier to kill you two!”

Lucan was there in his black armor and mire-covered shield.  “Try me next, Saxon!”

“Easily!”  Horst swung down the ax.  It clattered across Lucan’s bloody shield and drove itself into the mud.

Horst shouted in surprised frustration.  He attacked again, swinging, thrusting with the ax, parrying Lucan’s sword, feinting to turn aside Lucan’s shield.

Lucan pricked Horst with his sword point, knicked him through his armor, cut off a boot toe.  That’s all he could do around the swinging Morgengrabe.

The Morgengrabe shattered Lucan’s black sword.

Lucan leaped inside the ax’s swing to drive a splinter of sword past the cheek guards into Horst’s face.  The giant screamed in pain and rage.

Horst drove on in fury, swinging The Morgengrabe to slip-slide across Lucan’s shield.  Sunlight sparked through the shield’s mire covering.  Horst reached out to rub away the bloody muck.

“Great Thor, the shield is glass!” he cried.  “I cooked your father’s heart in my stew pot on the ramparts of York.  He had no shield like this or I would’ve taken it!  What glass stands against The Morgengrabe?”

“This kind,” said Lucan, wiping from the shield more battle mire.

There in the clear glass was a prophecy in the moving image of a king full of love and honor in his peaceful country preserved by a round table of knights.

I’d never before seen that image on the shield.  It had come there out of the shield’s own power.

“That’s Camelot!” Horst shrieked in rage, swinging The Morgengrabe across the top of the glass, using the shield as a boy will use a pond off which to skip a stone.

The ax skipped off the shield’s rim and went through Lucan’s neck and flicked off his head.

Lucan’s body jerked backwards, throwing the shield toward Arthur.

Arthur shook off the ruins of Pridwen and hauled on the glass shield.

No longer was the glass an image of a peaceable kingdom.  Now it was the image of Thor’s eagle, spitting and flashing, of Camelot driven to war.

Arthur, behind the glass shield, Excalibur in his hand, swung in to attack Horst.

I was there beside him with the Brittany greatsword.

The Saxon captains huddled behind their duke fell back, howling pagan prayers, crossing themselves in poor imitation of their Christian victims at the stew pots.

“Victory to Thor!” Horst shrieked, driving The Morgengrabe full force into Thor’s eagle on the glass shield.

The impact did not break the glass but drove Arthur to his knees, struggling in the mud and blood to jump up for a counterattack.

Horst lifted The Morgengrabe for the killing blow.  But the fright of smashing the battle ax once more into Thor’s eagle on the glass shield made him stagger.

I drove Guenevere’s greatsword through Horst’s shattered breastplate and through his bone cage and shoved out his white spine.

But the giant did not die.

He shrieked in pain and swung the ax sideways at me.  The flat of it crushed my armor and flung me into the muck.

He raised The Morgengrabe again.