The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (9 page)

Morgan le Fey, the black-haired Queen of Elves, standing at Arthur’s head motions me, weeping and raging, to silence.

“The spell is cast,” she whispers.

“Spare him, Morgana!  Spare me my father-king!”

Cold wind sweeps across the lake.  The galley’s black sail booms in filling.  The ship drifts away toward gloom.

“Where do you take my king?” a voice cries.

I see Sir Lucan with Bedivere beside him, Bedivere leaning dying on his greatsword.

“To Avalon,” Morgana says.

“Spare him!” cries Bedivere.

We all see her put into the king’s mouth an obolos to pay his soul’s journey to Paradise.

“It’s done!” she says.

The galley fades into blackness.

Bedivere has a second sword in his hand, a scimitar.  “Only for love of Arthur do I return Caliburn to the Lady of the Lake.”

He throws Arthur’s great battle sword Caliburn into night’s blackness.  Out of the water, a flash of white.  A woman’s hand thrusts up to catch the sword and haul it down into the lake.

Lucan cries, “How lonely it is just us two against the world!”

“We are three!” I say to them.  “A trinity to make the world whole again.”

Lucan turns to the sound of my voice.  “What speaks to me?”

“I don’t see anything,” says Bedivere.

“I speak,” I say. “Brynn, the king’s last daughter.”

“Witch!  Druid!  Satan!” Lucan cries.  “Make yourself physical.  Let me kill the monster that laughs to mourn King Arthur!”

“There’s nothing there,” says Bedivere, “because there’s no more world.  The world is done.”

Bedivere shouts to Jesu and to Gwynn to take his soul and drops heavily into the black water, dying in the lake in which he buried Caliburn and over which Arthur traveled to his tomb.

“By St. Mary,” I say to Lucan, “don’t you leave me, too.  Don’t abandon Britain!”

Lucan says to the blank air from which he heard my cry, “Spirit of Scorn, I’ll seek you in the next dead days, seek you to torment you as you torment me now.”

He staggers and falls to hands and knees.  I see the blood still coming out of his neck wound.  Cured of death by Bedivere, delivered once more into the world as the last of the Round Table, Lucan is still a mortal man chopped and bruised by battle, weary to be the last of his kind left alive, stunned to be the man on whom falls the whole burden of regaining Camelot for Britain.

I put out my arms to comfort him and hear from out of the atomos of water bumping each to the next across all the distance from Avalon, “You’ve failed, Merlin, and must live again!”

I see in the water the reflection of the White Druid striding on the lake, black streaks of tears diminishing the silver gleam of his face and forked beard.

The Druid says to me, “Why have you stopped time in this ghastly place?  You must live again.  Find Arthur.  Teach him to be a holy king.  Grant men his justice.”

I hear come out of myself another voice that is not mine but a part of me, the male voice of the merlin who preceded me in this quest, the merlin of the last cycle, a voice terrifying to find living inside me:  “If I must try one more time, give me to remember all that’s gone before.”

“I can’t give you remembrance,” says the Druid, “but in Arthur’s youth I’ll make you wise.”

“How will you make me wise?” I cry in my own voice.

“I’ll make you old.  Start time, Lady Merlin.  Live again.  Awaken!”

The Druid’s silver face flashes out and he’s gone from the night.

Black night, black lake, black war-field.

All around me is a uniform emptiness without up or down, left or right, good or not-good.

I stagger away from the water and the special emptiness that marks the absence of the eye-piercing vision of the White Druid.  I stumble across the dead, slapping away the ravens sniping at my hissing, snaky beard.  I weep in bitterness and rage.

Am I to be Merlin?  Must it fall to me to dig out of his dreaming hollow hill the purest king since Adam and Holy Jesu?  Or will failure blast me into the hollow spaces between the stars to drift and grieve forever?

But I cry out into the world, “I accept!”

There can be no other merlin to save the world but me, with my power to fashion the world sword for Arthur.

I stumble along through the black-blood night and the last arrowfall, following Urien’s distant beacon of gleaming white.  I grip the hilt to lift the sword from the Earth into which I’d driven it.  Urien sword will not come.

“You’re the sword I made,” I say.  “You’ll come at my command.”

But Urien refuses to draw.

I hear it whisper a single alien word, speaking from its soul to mine.

“What language is that?  What’s that word?” I say, astonished to have heard the word like a bite of lightning in my soul.

I realize with dreamy fright that the glowing sword I’d stabbed into the battle mire is no longer Urien.  It has become another sword.  The world sword.

Excalibur!
the sword says to me.

Here, here is the sword of justice whose spirit existed with the Hero Jesu before the making of all other things.

I stand stunned to hear the name.  But as hungry to hear it again as a desperate lover yearns to hear a sweetheart’s whispered name over and over.

My hand reaching for the sword handle cannot close around the hilt.

I know in my dream this sword will not come alive and draw from the mud until I give it a life’s quest.

“Seek Arthur!” I say to Excalibur.  “Bring him back to us.  Make him the pure king.”

Excalibur!
shouts the sword.

The sword rises from the Earth into my hand and I step back into time.

“Wake!” shouted Prince Llew.  “The moment’s here.  I can see it in your closed eyes, Lady!”

The gnome, curled up high in the vaulted ceiling of the citadel, rapped the gong once for the first day of spring and the beginning of the swordmaking season.  The sound echoed out over the valley, hurrying on the knights and ladies already scrambling up the mountainside to demand their swords.

It was my nineteenth birthday though what do years mean to me now?

I woke still squatting in vigil beside the stone trough that held the iron bars and steel rods meant to make the greatest sword in the world.  The metal shimmered through the thawing wine bath.

The young man nearly nose to nose with me and shouting, “Wake!  Wake!” was the beautiful Prince Llew, clean-limbed, clean-cheeked, and filled with boyish energy.

He was ready to smelt and hammer great swords with me in this wind-howling forge.  Prepared to age with his work through the season until he returned to withered old age and then ash on his bed of coals.  Hungry now to read my winter dreaming.

“What did you see in your dreams?” he cried.

“I’m to be Merlin,” I said.

“All the lords!”

I reached my hands cracking through the crusty ice on the wine trough and hauled out the bars and rods.

“This,” I said, “will be Arthur’s sword.”

Llew shouted to his apprentices and slaves climbing into the citadel, “Fire!  Charcoal!  Bellows!  Hammers!  Ring the gong again!  We have the world sword to make!”

The warrior lords and ladies raising their tents on the mountain slope heard the unaccustomed second bang of the gong and knew that a great sword was about to be born.  They cheered and roared, their howls muffling the gong’s echo among the mountain peaks.

I still had Urien across my knees.  I stabbed the sword into the stone wall.  Let it be the hanger for my tools.

The prince and I hauled on our leather aprons, gloves, and boots.  We drove up the fire in the forge.  We fed it and encouraged it.  We prayed over it every incantation of every language and god, even the filthy Woden for who knows from which god comes the gravest power in a sword?

By late afternoon, the fire in the coals had settled to a searing yellow-white, pumped by the bellows and the wind howling through the citadel.  Llew and I, awash in our sweat, shoved the bars and rods into the fire and watched them spit off the last of the wine bath, hissing and glowing.

It was a marvel to see the fierce fire detach itself from the coals and sink into the bars and rods.  To see the components of the sword absorb the spirit of fire.  To watch the iron suck heat so much out of the coals that the slaves at the bellows had to pump furiously and the wind to howl more wildly to keep the spitting fire alive.

At last the prince cried, “Now!” and we hauled the bars and rods out of the fire.

All of us, slaves and prince and merlin, hammered the gleaming hot metal, slaking off the last impurities and the threats of visiting demons.  We hammered the bars into five long, rectangular bars of steely iron.  We welded them together with heavy hammer blows on the yellow iron, the blows clattering in rhythm like a wagon wheel on a stony Roman road.

The gnome, curled in at the peak of the ceiling, sang the twisting song.  We gripped the welded yellow bar with tongs at each end and twisted sun-wise to flake out the last corruption in the iron and to give the metal its spring strength.

We worked again on another welding of another set of five iron bars, heating and hammering and twisting, but turning this bar anti-sun-wise for a balancing of strength in the heart of the sword.

We did it all again and again until we had a by the Rule three broad iron bars with their complex in and out spiraling twists of power.  We hammered and twisted another set of three.

We hammered out the heavy iron core of the blade, hammering to the rhythm dictated by the singing gnome.

At last, nearing evening and the promise of a full Moon, we had the pieces of the sword’s core ready – the two composite bars of steely iron to wrap around the heavy, springy core of pure iron that would be the spine and heart of the sword.

“The Moon!” cried the prince.

A full Moon, shining in silver, burst up over the valley.  From the downslope tents I heard a howl of fright and then a moan of hunger like a cry for us to continue the making of the sword.

We all were scorched, pocked with spark burns, sweated out, battered by our massive labors.  But none shouted for quarter, none wanted to stop.

Prince Llew shoved the two thick bars of twisted steel into the fire and the single bar of springy iron.  They glowed into instant heat.  I hauled them out with tongs, laying them on the anvil.  A layer of steely iron first, then the layer of pure iron, finally another layer of steely iron in a composite of brave metals.

We returned to the fierce, rhythmic hammering and welded them all together.  We hammered them flat and long to make the breadth and length of the sword.

The prince grabbed up the half-made blade and thrust it into fire again, driving up the heat in the metal until the color was a fierce gleaming gold.  He shouted a prayer and hauled the blade out of the fire and drove it into the quenching bath of water from the Afon mixed with Mosella wine.

The water and wine burst up out of the stone quenching trough, steaming and spattering us all, but the raw blade had been made hard.  Hard but too brittle to swing against a Saxon skull.

The prince shoved the blade into the fire again and watched it glow through the colors of heat until he measured with his eye the correct shade of yellow-orange.  He dragged it out of the forge and slid it hissing into a tempering bath of oil.

The oil did not steam and splash as had the water and wine.  It soothed the steel as the blade sank into it.  Giving the steel flexibility and keenness of edge to add to the power of the quenched iron core.

“There it is,” said Prince Llew, withdrawing the blade from the tempering bath and holding it up by its narrow tang.

It was flattened metal in the general shape and outline of a sword blade but without a sword’s keen character.

I took the rough blade from the prince and found it gone bitter cold, like an icy wind promising sharp pain.  I brought out the cutting tools and there, beneath the icy Moon and the flaming torches, in the howling wind of the citadel, began to cut and grind the sword, shaping it long and thick from tang to point, grinding and polishing into it two great cutting edges.

In the first gleam of morning, I held up the blade to catch the early sun.  Light flickered and shouted from the sword.

“Quickly,” I said to the slaves and apprentices, “make the furniture for the hilt, carve out the pommel, build the scabbard and hangers!”

By noon all was done.

The sword lay on its stone worktable like a living thing, throbbing with heart’s blood, each movement of an interior vein make the surface metal glitter in the sunshine.

The slaves and apprentices cheered their own work.

The gnome in the vault sang its victory song.

“Toll the gong,” said the prince.

The gnome rang the gong.

The tents straggling down the mountain slope went silent at the sound.  An even greater thing than the making of the sword was about to happen.

“Peace to you all,” the prince said to his retainers.  “Leave us for the naming.”

They all, the gnome with them, fled the citadel and stood in a far field staring back at us in the citadel’s howling wind, waiting for the wonder of the naming of so fabulous a sword.

“Will it stretch to kill the king’s enemies?” I asked Prince Llew.

“It will.  I had my hands on it and it will.”

Llew took up the sword and swung it around his head to test its balance and hissing power.  The glory of it made him cheer.  He threw a rag of silk into the air and let it drift over the blade.  The blade cut the rag by the silk’s own weight.

He swung the blade into the window through which howled a morning wind.  The blade thrust out to skewer a flower across the valley and bring it back to us in the citadel.

The flower smelled of the happen return of spring and the promise of Arthur king once more.

The prince, with regret, handed me the blade and said, “But will it cut anvils?”

“It will,” I said.  “I had my hands on it and it will.”

I laid the sword’s edge on the anvil and, by the sword’s own weight, it sank into the iron and stuck fast.

“Draw it out,” said the prince.

I put my hand on the hilt and hauled but the sword would not draw.

The prince keened in agony.

I held out my hand toward the sword’s hilt.

The sword and I said together,
“Excalibur!”

The sword rose out of the anvil into my hand.

“All my lords!” said the prince.  “Is that its name?  What kind of word is that?  What language?  By the Hero Jesu, did you make a Druid sword?”

“This is,” I said, watching the blade flash out light reflected from the sun, “the greatest battle sword for the greatest king to win the world back for us!”

“‘Excalibur,’” whispered the prince.  “Even the sound has power.”

A mild spring wind ran across the forge like wondering sigh, kissing past Excalibur.

“What’s happening?” cried the prince, startled at the change in wind.

The black hound Caval was there with us.

“So soon?” Llew said to the hound.  “Not yet, no, not yet!  Let me marvel at this sword until I die again before the Lady takes it away.”

The hound was silent in its reply.

“What does he want you to do?” the prince said to me.

“Quest to find the king.”

“The High King’s been dead nineteen years.  Leave him dead another season.  That’s so short a time, really, Lady Merlin.  Let me sit here and marvel at this perfect sword...”

I shoved the blade into its new-made fleece scabbard.

The prince groaned.

I shook out my hair sweated to my head in the forge’s heat.  I stripped and bathed in the quenching bath of Afon’s water.  I rubbed myself with oil from the tempering bath.  I pulled on my finest rags.  Pulled on my worn boots.

I pulled on mail.  I pulled Urien out of the stone wall in which it had waited for me and slung it on a belt over my back.  I slung Excalibur in its scabbard there, too.

I hauled down an undamaged proofing shield from the wall.  I put on an unmarked iron helmet and pushed it onto the back of my head to kiss the prince farewell.

The rush of the spring breeze stopped in the citadel.

The prince said, “You wouldn’t consider leaving me the lesser of your two swords so I could make myself at least a little emperor in this harsh world?  With Excalibur, why do you need Urien?”

“For myself,” I said, “to defend Arthur until he’s ready to be king.”

“What do you mean?  Won’t that happen now?  You find his hollow hill and slice it open it and give him the sword and he’s lord again, right?”

“He’s not Arthur until he learns to be Arthur,” I said.

“You’re going to teach him?” said the prince, startled.  “You, as ignorant as you are, can raise up a high king?”

“I’m desperately ignorant.  But I was chosen merlin for this task and I’ll learn the world it to teach the truth to Arthur.”

“How will you do that?”

“I’m waiting for Fate to tell me.”

“Oh, my,” Prince Llew said.  “I see now this world’s cycle with you at its fulcrum is going to be all chaos and lunacy.  I need your brave sword to survive another season.  Give me Urien.”

The gnome had crawled into the high vault of the ceiling and began to sing of a future too perfect to risk for a prince’s fear.

“Oh, sobeit,” said Llew.

“Sobeit,” I said.

He kissed me farewell.  It was a young man’s hungry kiss and an old man’s desperate kiss, both anxious for life.

I grabbed up my travel packs and blanket-cloak.

“Now find the man to kill and temper the sword in his blood,” said the prince.

Great gods, I’d forgotten that.

“He’s waiting for you,” said the prince.

* * *

I went down the mountain trail out of the citadel, past the tents of those seeking blades from Prince Llew, all of them marveling at the light gleaming through the scabbard on my back.  I climbed down past steaming hermit caves, each old man and woman shouting blessings at me.  I heard behind me the soft tread of Caval, as though the hound were herding me toward something fierce and strange.

I turned to face the beast but it was not there.  Only its silence was left behind.

I climbed down into the valley as the first gray of evening spread across the road leading south to Cornwall, Carbonek Castle, and old Queen Morgause.  That was the only direction I knew in which to search for the High King to give him the sword that would bring him back to life.