The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (46 page)

“Can’t this man die?” I shouted, my greatsword stuck through his chest.

My shield cried, “Save us, Arthur!” and “Use us, Merlin!”

I hauled up the checkered shield and huddled beneath it.

The shield screamed in horror as The Morgengrabe bit into it, smashing faces, spewing shield-blood, calling out the piteous wails of the wounded merlin faces and the frenzied hate of the battle-hungry faces.

“Arthur!” I cried.

Arthur still on his knees in the sucking blood-mud swung Excalibur in a hurried upward blow, cutting through Horst’s armor and helmet, sending their pieces whipping out over the top of the battle, and throwing Horst off his attack on me.

I staggered upright, blood dripping from my shield, the faces screaming for vengeance, spitting and spewing.  The Saxon captains in their terror attacked the faces individually but I cut away the Saxons with the Brittany greatsword I dragged out of Horst.

I drove the captains back, back, back into the cutting blades of the British army and the last of the Round Table, of Rufus, King Lot, and blind Dubric with his last sons leading him through the fight.

Dying Horst turned himself toward Arthur again, the giant moving with the deliberation of a grist stone.  Panting for breath, sweat running from his face, his braids thick with other men’s blood.  His armor was shattered and hung from him in bits.  His chest was bared and gushing blood from my sword’s plunge into him.

Horst sucked in air, let out more blood, and raised The Morgengrabe.

“Arthur!” he roared.  “Welcome to Hell!”

Arthur threw aside the glass shield and took Excalibur in a two-handed grip.

Morgengrabe!
said the battle ax.

Excalibur!
said the sword.

The ax blade and sword blade crashed together driving a shiver running across the field of battle like an earthquake.  Warriors who were stabbing swords into other warriors and warriors who were being stabbed stopped, suspended in their living and dying.

The Morgengrabe cracked, its metal pieces falling on either side of Arthur as Lancelot’s pieces had fallen on either side of Horst.  The pieces fell into the mud as cold and dead as unsouled metal.

“Thor!  Traitor!” Horst shrieked at the sky.

Excalibur snapped off the Saxon’s head, braids bobbing, and flung the head arcing out over the battle.

Horst’s head in its dying whisper said, “Colgrin follows me as my revenge…”

* * *

The Saxon army dissolved like a foul mist vanishing in clean morning sunshine.

British cavalry broke cheering from the army to spear Saxons fleeing eastward across the horizon, the Saxons howling, “Colgrin! Save us!”

The British infantry continued its stolid slaughter in merry manner, tramping forward over the enemy corpses it had just made to fall on the last hard nubs of Saxon resistance and crush them out with shouts of delight.

Steaming King Lot shoved his way barehanded through the turmoil, his armor and weapons shattered and lost, mud and blood on his face, clearing a path for Guenevere and Arthur’s sons and the Round Table carried by the last surviving knights of the war band.

Lot wept gazing at the Morgengrabe-cut pieces of Lancelot, Bedivere, Kay, Percival, and Lucan and said, “These were the best of the Britons.  Is this the end of Camelot?”

I wiped battle mire from the Table.  The insignias of Lancelot, Bedivere, Kay, Percival, and Lucan had shrunk into unreadable haze.

“They’re lost to Camelot,” I said.

I could not remember if this was what was to happen in the future but it had happened.

Evening!

I was startled to see it come so soon, the blackness rising out of the west to color the eastern sky.  That seemed wrong, too.  Where was the usual source of evening?

“Are we between-times, Lady Merlin?” said Guenevere, unfrightened by the wrong evening sky.

“We are,” I said.

She drew her gladius.  “Then anything can happen, my Druid Princess, can’t it?”

“It can, Queen.”

She took her shield from the two infants who held it for her, from Mordred and Gawain, and said, “Then let it come to me.”

She faced west toward the gathering gloom, Arthur’s frightened children huddled behind her.

Arthur said to me, “Clear the dead.”

Dead layered the Earth like wilted weeds.  I swept them into a mountain pile.

“Make the funeral fire,” Arthur said to Lot.

Lot made flame with a touch of his steaming hand.  The mountain of dead flashed all over fire and became dust on the cold wind blowing out of the west.

“Lay the Round Table for a victory feast,” Arthur said to Hadrian the Lesser.

Hadrian piled up meat and fish.

“Give them beer,” Arthur said.

“For Britons?” said Hadrian.

“For whoever feasts at my Table after.”

After what, Pendragon?
I said, and so did the spirits of all the dead around us.

“After this!” said Arthur.

He pointed west into the unnatural darkening of the sky, where a sun that was not golden but black sank away into the Western Ocean.

But it was not the onslaught of night that shadowed the day.

Colgrin’s arrowstorm blackened the sky from the horizon, his machine-flung spears and stones, his slung Greek fire, all of it making the sky like the inside of a coffin lid streaked by unearthly lightning.

Colgrin’s three hundred thousand came running below the night they had created.

Arthur’s army, victorious but spent, battle-bruised, unfed, unwatered, armor broken and spears shattered, swords knicked, shields cracked, looked west and groaned a sound that sent a shiver through the arrowflight driving down on them.

Then they made no more sound as the first arrows drove into them, pinning them writhing on the Earth, holding them for the second and third and fourth flights to rivet them over and over to the ground, men and women, horses and wagons, only the Round Table deflecting the arrowfall and making a space for Arthur, Guenevere, and the last of the knights to sit at their own funeral meal Arthur had made for them, waiting with me for the end of the world.

“Here comes all the evil of the world,” said Lot, watching the in-swarming cannibal horde.

“Oh, my sons!” Guenevere cried.

Hadrian the Lesser wiped clean his battle ax and said, “I forgive you, Arthur, for murdering me.”

The arrowstorm shattered down on Hadrian and he was smashed.

I threw up my battered shield, its faces raging in fright, and deflected the arrowstorm from Guenevere and the two princes.

“Have you forgotten Mordred?” said the queen.

“I’ve forgotten everything and I’m happy for it,” I said, feeling in my veins and heart the surge of one last battle-lust innocent of anything but fighting for Camelot.

Arthur kissed Guenevere and his children.

He slung Lucan’s glass shield across his back to shield off the arrowfall.  He kneeled before me.  “Mother Merlin, bless me one last time.”

I now was much younger than Arthur but I cried, in the voice of the old woman who first cuddled a lost, frightened boy on the back of an ox cart, “My son!”

Arthur rose and drew Excalibur from its fleece.

Camelot!
said the sword.

“Brothers and Sisters!” Arthur shouted across the battlefield to his knights and warriors living and dead.

“Arthur!” they shouted back, the battered living spitting out blood and the dead healing themselves.

“Join me in one more fight and live forever!”

Knights and army cheered.

Arthur swung Excalibur toward the west, glittering and hissing, the steel driving into the Saxon horde to seek and cut out its lord.

I hauled out the Brittany greatsword and grabbed up the screaming shield.

Three hundred thousand Saxons ran toward us beneath their arrowstorm, cheering for victory.

Out of the Saxon horde, towering like the smoke of all burning Britain, roiled the image of Colgrin.

Arthur and I shouted, “Colgrin!  We welcome you to Hell!”

We ran forward into the night and into the enemy horde.

After the end of the world, a child woke beneath the last down-whistling swarms of Saxon arrows and the diving howls of the war ravens.

Around her in the night, barely seeable, were tripping heaps of metal and bone slippery with slaughtered flesh.  Her trembling hand gripped the Earth and the blood on it, clutching the souls of the dead who, at this place, had shouted grim “Peace!” as their hearts and throats were cut in defense of Arthur and Camelot.

The blood whispered to her, “Hail, Lady Merlin!  Make us live again to fight again!”

“‘Merlin?’” the child said, feeling her girl’s cheeks and her body naked of the battle-armor stripped from her in the fighting.

Was she still the Druid of legend, the one-hundred-forty-fifth of her kind, the Greatest Merlin?  Or was she nothing at all, merely a dead spirit stumbling around Earth until the Lord Pluto found her to pluck away to Hades or Hell or both?

She heard across the night with its reek of blood and the choking cries of the dying the wail of Roman flutes.

“Arthur!” she cried.

Night parted, showing Morrigu’s cackling ravens pecking out the eyes of the half-dead.  Showing Saxon women robbing the dead and the undead.

The girl stumbled to the muddy shore of the River Cam.  She saw a great oar-less galley hung with black silk, with torches like comets, with a funeral bed laid on the Round Table.

There lay young Arthur, stripped of mail and the Pendragon helmet, holding a silver crucifix.  The witch-princess Vivien of the Lake stood over him.  Guenevere with the glass shield and Mordred and Gawain huddled beside the bier, weeping.

Guenevere motioned to the girl to keep silence.  “The spell is cast,” she whispered.

“Spare him!  Spare me my king!” the girl cried.

A cold wind swept across the water.  The galley’s black sail boomed, filling.  The ship drifted away toward gloom.

“Where do you take my king?” the child shouted.

“To Avalon,” Vivien said.

She put into the king’s mouth a silver coin to pay his soul’s journey to paradise.

“It’s done,” she said.

The galley faded into blackness.

Arthur’s spirit created itself out of the atomos of air, standing whole and clean on the lake water.

“Here, Mother Merlin,” he said to the girl, putting Excalibur into the girl’s hands.  “Keep my sword.  Wait for me.”

The king’s atomos scattered.

The child was alone on the muddy lakeshore, the World Sword in her hands.

“How bitterly lonely,” the girl cried to Excalibur, “to be just us two against the world!”

“We are three.”

The girl turned at the sound of the voice, swinging out the sword she was barely strong enough to hold.  “Who speaks?” she cried.

“I do,” said the White Druid, rising out of the black river water.

“Traitor!” the girl shouted, filling with hate, fear, rage, and confusion.  “I’ve lived a hundred and forty-five lives for you, Old Fraud, creating Arthurs and Camelots.  None of them had the power to stand against the world’s evil.  You’ve betrayed me – life’s all betrayal!”

Out of her weeping misery, the girl shouted, “Let me kill you.  Let me kill myself!”

She raised Excalibur.

“But there’s no more life – the world is done,” said the Druid.  “Look around you.  The cogs that drive the sun across the planet have stopped.  Time is over.  There’s no time left to kill or be killed.”

The girl looked across the dead flat river, the unmoving trees, the silent land, the battle-corpses of too many thousands that had ceased to drip and rot.

She cried, “Jesu!  Gwynn!  Accept my soul!” and shoved Excalibur into her heart.

But she could not die.

She swung the sword at the White Druid, shouting, “Spirit of scorn, I’ll torment you as you’ve tormented me so many lifetimes!”

The White Druid staggered and fell to hands and knees on the black surface of the river.  Blood came out of him in silver streams.  He clapped his hands to his wound to cure himself of death and sank into the water, saying, “I pity you, Greatest Merlin.”

“Pity me?” the girl cried, furious, sloshing into the water after the Druid.  “Then free me of Camelot!  Let me die!”

The Druid was gone.

She heard from out of the atomos of water bumping each to the next across all the distance from Avalon,
You’ve failed and must live again!

Black night, black river, black war-field around her, all withered together into a uniform emptiness without up or down, left or right, good or not-good, timeless, empty of life and hope.

The girl shouted into it, “If I must try one more time, then give me a better place to begin!”

The water said, “Start time, Lady Merlin – live again!”

She felt the hot breath of demons laughing behind her shoulder.

She waited with Excalibur for whatever was to come next.

Nothing came.

The cycle of the world could not change.  The move-less cogs that propel the sun around the planet had stuck the age here on this battlefield after the moment of Merlin’s failure.  After the fall of Camelot.  After the death of the High King.

But Merlin the girl still waited, with all of a child’s hope and hunger, staring across the bleak landscape, until she had to cry out, “Is there no relief for me from Fate?”

Fate said nothing.

“It’s too hard! Too cruel!” she cried.

Night and silence.

“Is there no other merlin to save the world?”

No answer.

Then she groaned, once more, as she had one hundred and forty-five times before, “I accept!”

Still no change in the world.  Time could not begin.

The child Merlin swung Excalibur, the sword’s gleam lighting a stone on a hilltop in a copse of oak trees.
  Arthur!
said the sword.

Dawn sun made a beacon of white through the black-blood sky.  Morning followed bright and sudden, rushing over the land, waking birds to titter and breezes to stir.

Merlin heard down the wooded slope of the hill the ribald shouts of men and women at joust, the happy cheers of children.  She pushed back the leaves and saw the battlers there dressed like Roman provincials, whacking each other with swords and shields, shouting half-Roman oaths.

What country is this? she nearly cried out.  Not Wales or Cornwall – no diving falcons, no black mountains, no green hills and healing mist.

This was a rich and rolling country, thickly wooded, full of summer.  Not some cold corner of the Britain into which the Saxon horde had shoved the remnants of the Britons after the fall of Camelot.

No!  This was Britain before the Saxons.  Happy, ignorant, barbarian Britain.  Still too distant from the center of the world to feel the age teetering toward anarchy in the prolonged dying of Mother Rome.

She heard a voice nearby and saw a young knight in patched armor.

“Arthur!” the young man shouted.  “Find me a sword!”

“Yes, Brother,” said a boy, and he went through the crowd and the trees bawling for the loan of a sword.

The boy came up the hill and saluted the merlin standing by the sacrificial stone.  “Hail, Young Mother Merlin!” he said, “give me your sword.”

Here was the start of a new cycle!  Of new hope!

More, it was the start of a new love.  Arthur, who had loved Guenevere who would betray him and loved his sons who could betray him, had taught Merlin to love, too.

To love in dream and desperation that one woman, one man could change the world by love.

That is the key to Camelot.

I drew Excalibur from its fleece scabbard and said to the blade and the boy, “Here’s your Destiny!”

I drove the sword hissing into the stone.

The great cogs that drive the sun across the planet bit into each other and the world began to turn.

Artyr,
I said, calling Arthur by his soul-name,
come, draw this sword.

The End

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