The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (8 page)

The wind in the citadel stopped its whine.  The first chill of autumn came into the forge.  I waited.

I heard footsteps on the stone stairs leading to my forge.

They were not the easy strides of a youth.  Nor were they the labored climb of an old man.  They were the measured steps of a man in his prime, young, strong, unafraid.  Of a champion.

The squire who climbed over the threshold into my forge was no longer a squire.  He had been knighted by the king and had in his hand the spurs as proof.  He tossed them aside.  He was glorious.  Young, magnificent, beautiful.  Dressed in linens and silks bright with gold thread.  A silver dagger under his wide belt.  But his boots were the heavy boots of a fighting man, or of a man who toils in the heat and hazard of a forge making swords.

The knight said to me, “Is that my sword?”

He was so beautiful he made the tips of my ears itch.

He took the blade from my lap.  “Your third try, Lady,” he said.  “Is it any good?”

“By the Rule of three,” I said, “it’s a perfection.”

“It’s light enough,” he said, weighing the blade with a hissing slash through the air.  “Plenty of spring and balance.  But has it any power?”

He swung the blade and slashed apart a dozen leather aprons hanging from pegs on the wall.  He cut through a dozen layers of iron mail hung from a wall, sending the shattered rings tumbling and clattering over the stone floor.  He drove the sword point-first into a proofing breastplate and shattered it.  He hacked apart a brave test shield with a single backhand stroke.  With delicacy and style, he cut the throat of a demon painted on a test helmet and then hacked the helmet in two with a light return blow.

He said, marveling, “Great lords, Lady Brynn, this is the most magnificent blade I’ve ever held!”

He stopped his play at cutting air and slicing dead armor and said, “But can it cut an anvil?”

“Test it,” I said.

“By the Rule, this is the last test.  I break this sword and there’s nothing more in life or eternity for you or me or that fool Galabes who chose you.”

“Jesu, is that true?” I cried.

“It is in this cycle of the world.  This sword must triumph, Lady, or we will never know how to make the world-commanding sword that brings us back our king.  Have you named this sword?”

“I can’t name it until it’s proofed, you know that.”

“Name it now, before the final test, if you and I and the world are to have any chance to save ourselves.”

“Then I name it ‘Urien,’ for the one privileged to come before.”

The sword had its soul-name.

“To come before what?” said the prince.

“Before the even greater sword that will call the High King back to us.”

“Urien!” said the knight, addressing the sword.  “The world will end or live in this one stroke.  Decide!”

He swung the sword and crashed it into the stolid anvil.

The blade sank into the heavy iron and stuck.

Urien did not shatter.  Did not break.  Did not scream.

The sword drove through the anvil without making a wound, like a knife sinking into a Roman custard, until its tip beaked out of the solid block of metal.

“Great God,” said the prince.  “What monstrous thing have you made, Lady?”

“Draw the sword.”

Llew hauled on the hilt.  The blade would not draw out of the iron.

“It can’t be pulled!” cried the prince.

He braced his foot against the anvil and hauled again.  Still no movement.

“What use is a sword in an anvil?” he cried.

I shoved him aside, put out my hand toward the sword’s hilt, and spoke the sword’s soul-name:  “Urien!”

The sword rose from the anvil into my hand.

“What have you made?” said the prince, greed sparking in his eyes.

I thrust the sword toward the gong in the vaulted ceiling.  The charge from the blade slapped the gong and it rang once to announce the birth of the mightiest of battle swords.

Prince Llew, rapidly graying and withering into old age as stiffening winter wind howled across the forge, said, “Can you make more, Lady?  More with this kind of power?  What did you do to make this sword?”

“I burnt the merlin of the last cycle and ate alive his spirit,” I said.

“This is a Druid blade?  A few merlin ashes in your mouth and you make a wonder like this?  Where do I eat these ashes?”

“A Druid blade cut by Arthur’s daughter at the song of the gnome,” I said.

“Only you can make another?”

“I’ll make one more and no more.”

“But the fortunes we could reap with this wonder!” cried the prince, greed flashing in his cataracting eyes.  “The kingdoms we could conquer!  The Saxon hordes we could slaughter!  Make a thousand, Lady, make…”

“One more,” I said.  “Made with my perfect rods of steel and bars of iron there, in that wine-frozen trough.  The sword that’s been waiting in spirit for me to forge.”

“Just one more?” said the withering prince, groaning, kicking at the stone trough with the frozen metal inside.  “But we can be emperor and empress of all the sprawling Earth with just a dozen swords like Urien.”

“It’s not half the sword you promised me my first day at the forge.”

“What’s incomplete about this wonder?” cried the prince, stabbing the sword into the anvil again.  I drew it out for him.

“It cuts but it will not reach out to my enemies.”

“I promised you a reaching sword and you’ll have it.  But I can’t make a sword that will cleave anvils without a cut and stick into them until a wizard of your power calls it to come out.  A mouthful of Druid ash is enough?”

Llew made to swing the sword again to drive it into the iron block but I took the blade from him as a parent must take a toy from a boisterous child.

“Then make my reaching sword for me,” I said.

“Oh, I can,” said the prince.  “I’ll give your sword power to stretch across a dozen battlefields.  You give the sword the power to cut anvils without wounding them.  Our powers combined can make a blade to sweep the Saxons out of this world, to make us gods on Earth...”

“But what’s the promise of power without the soul-name to bring my sword alive?” I said.

That stopped Prince Llew’s greedy dreams.

“But the perfect name is everything,” he cried.  “The name is the power.  The name is life.  Haven’t you chosen a name?”

“Where do I find this perfect name?”

“Dream,” said the prince.  “Where else?  Dream the name that can draw the sword to the High King and the king to the sword to open a new world.”

Withered Prince Llew flung his leathers and furs onto the hot coals of the forge and bundled himself there for his winter’s dreaming.  He – the squire, the knight, the withered old man – became ash.

I threw a blanket over his ashes to keep them from blowing away across the world.

With my anvil-stabbing sword across my knees, I squatted as guardian beside my steel pieces in the stone trough.  There I waited vigil, dreaming through winter.  Waiting for spring and the perfect dream name for the perfect sword I was to make.

* * *

I dreamed that I stepped out of time and into the momentary world.

Into a storm of night beside the Brutus stone.  The foundation rock of Britain given us by Troy drips with blood.  Overhead, howling war ravens and whistling arrow swarms.  Around me, vaguely seeable, tripping heaps of metal and shattered bone slippery with slaughtered flesh.

My trembling hand reaches out for the blood on the stone to clutch the souls of the dead who had shouted grim “Peace!” as their hearts and throats were cut in defense of the stone of the race.

I taste it.  The blood of Britons!

The blood speaks to me, crying, “Hail, Lady Merlin!”

“Merlin?”
I cry.

I feel my face age.  I feel two writhing, hissing snakes thrust out of my cheeks into a merlin’s forked beard.  I feel the rusty armor beneath my merlin’s robe of thirteen patches.  I feel the peaking of my ears.  Jesu and Gwynn, am I become the old Druid of legend?

I am soul-frightened of the name the blood of the Britons calls me.

I see in my dreaming eye the scores of lives that throbbed out on this rock fighting the Saxon hordes.

But what strange bright armor do these warriors wear?  There’s none so fine in my own age.  What griffins and pentangles are these on their shields?  I can name none of these warriors because none was alive in my day except in legend.

What is this awful place of dying?
I nearly cry aloud.

I hear the words as though shouted into my brain from a distance by another voice that no more belongs to me than does my hand still clutching at the British heart-blood dripping from the Brutus stone.

All is different here, all is strange.  But I have my sword Urien slung over my back.

Across the night with its reek of blood and choking cries of dying I hear the wail of Roman flutes, a hollow sound so terrible and true.

There is just one man for whom those flutes will cry on any field – the High King Arthur.

This horrible place of dying is Camlann!

This awful moment is the end of the world.

Night parts.  The arrowstorm descends around me riveting to earth Arthur’s men and Arthur’s horses, their screams like a rending of the great cloth of the black sky.  A sky pricked by the glittering eyes of the heartless godlets who make the world a misery for men and women.

I see Arthur’s legions trampled by barbarians, Saxon axmen cutting down swordsmen, Britons disarmed using their shields to batter Saxon princes before the Britons are crushed beneath the next howling downflight of arrows and spears.  By barbarian horse charges.  The hellish shrieking of Saxon women falling upon the half-dead Britons to scalp and castrate them and strip their armor to fortify the Saxon horde.

I see Bedivere – Great Jesu, it’s the greatest hero of the Round Table himself! – clamp his hand over his death wound and shout for strength to the spirits of his sword and shield and, standing with his greatsword as brace, raise up the headless Lucan from the dead and clap his head and helmet on his shoulders.

I cry, “Mercy!” for the hideous cut throat of Lucan and for the evil wounds inflicted on his black armor and glass shield.

The two crippled knights stagger toward the sound of the flutes and dying Arthur.

I ate the ashes of the merlin of the last cycle.  Am I to be recreated a merlin?  Is that why I’m here at this moment of disaster?  To haul out my Urien and drive the Saxon horde from Arthur’s near-ruined army and preserve the king who can keep Eden for the Britons?

I draw Urien and sweep away Morrigu’s ravens darting to peck out my eyes.  I run into the Saxon horde berserk with desperation to save the world.  I cut heads and arms and chop though iron and steel.

Each swing of Urien causes the blade to grow until at its most immense length it swoops through the pagan horde by troops, by regiments, by divisions.

I stand in the center of the Saxon army whipping the blade around my head, seeing it bite through Saxon armor and helmet as easily as it bites through anvils, cutting necks by scores, hacking open ribs in hundreds, through legs, through horse and shield, through ax blade, through spear.  My Urien can kill armies, tribes, nations.

I’ll have it kill the world to save Arthur!

Exhausted with killing, I stand in a lather of sweat, my hissing, snaky beard sweat-matted to my old armor.

I hold out the huge sword for the Saxons to run themselves upon.

It is now I see I have killed no one.  The barbarians run through my blade as through phantom steel.  Urien passes through their chests but their hearts still beat.  Through their necks and they keep their heads.  They scream their hideous gabbling Saxon war cries and overrun Urien stretched the length of their army’s front and they fall upon the Britons and mangle and slaughter them.

“What sword have I made that betrays Arthur in his need?” I cry.

I drive the blade into the Earth, searing the soil, mud and blood steaming and gouting from the Earth’s wound, the earth thrown back from the gouge polluted with a rubble of metal and stone weapons and the broken bones of all the armies of every kind that fought on this field from the hurling out from Eden of Adam and Eve.

I stumble away from the traitor sword, spitting at it, cursing it.  I shout into the warstorm of night, “Woden!  Jesu!  Mithras!  What will you do with me?  My sword betrays the world!”

I hear the flutes.

I stumble across the wreck of battle walking on all those cut off legs and heads and broken shields of my countrymen, so thick is the ruin, shoving aside Morrigu’s biting ravens and the thieving Saxon and weeping British women.

I come to the muck of the lakeshore.  Across this black water is Avalon and the promise of peace for the wounded king.

I see a great oar-less galley hung with black silk, torches like comets, and a Roman funeral bed.  There lies gray-bearded Arthur, stripped of mail and winged helmet, holding a silver crucifix and a holy Jupiter stone.