by Dave Duncan
We drank our final toast of the night to “The once and future king.”
By the second sunset after that, I was home again. Lovise gave me a worried look, but did not verbally compare me to a corpse of any vintage. Instead she showed me four spells that she had selected from our black magic collection in the crypt. I read them through with growing revulsion. Each one seemed worse than the last, and the fourth made my flesh creep. I had confiscated it from the Sons of Satan, and they had possessed nothing worse. It was short and infinitely vicious.
“This one?” I said, looking up. “The others are all too long to expect two amateurs to manage.”
“I thought so,” she said. “If that does not ruin him, I can’t imagine what will.”
“We’ll have to write out the parts before William and his friend arrive.” If his friend declined to cooperate, we would have to find another fifth voice.
My dear, lovable wife smiled grimly. “I already did. We just have to proofread them against the original.”
William arrived about an hour later, accompanied by a man he introduced merely as Rolf, which I was certain was not his real name. He was in his early twenties, younger than I had expected, and must have been strikingly handsome before Lord John’s thugs worked him over. Now he was lacking half his teeth, his nose was twisted, and he walked with a cane, as I do. That damage alone would have justified his hatred of the prince, even without the subsequent rape of his wife. He assured me that he was eager to help with my project.
“It must be done at midnight,” I explained. “If you are not too weary from your journey, I can send for my son and we can chant the spell tonight. It won’t take very long.”
“And what will it do to the subject?” William asked.
“That is not specified, but it will be both fatal and humiliating.”
Again, I recalled Lord John warning me in Winchester that one day I would be enlisted by Satan. Now it was happening and I might rue the consequences through all eternity. I considered that John himself had long preceded me.
At midnight, in the crypt, lit by the spooky light of only five candles, we assembled at the points of a pentagram that Lars chalked on the paving for us, and we sang the enchantment. We had already read it over five or six times—backward, as is usual in rehearsal.
It was written in a version of Parisian French, but the spell itself was much older, translated from Old Norse. I could have guessed that from the content, and Lovise could tell from the curious word order. We five, who all liked to think of ourselves as good Christians, solemnly beseeched the mischief god Loki to wrack shameful destruction on John Plantagenet, Count of Mortain. As I had predicted, the invocation did not take long, and I felt acceptance like peals of divine laughter, mingled with an upsurge of personal shame.
Judging by a complete lack of comment, the others felt much the same. Lars set to work with a mop and a bucket that he had arranged beforehand, washing away the pentagram. Lovise took up a candle and led the way upstairs. We burned our song sheets in the fireplace.
“How long until it acts?” Rolf asked.
“Impossible to say,” I said. “But I am sure we will hear when it does.”
Personally, I expected news of a shipwreck or a fall from a horse, but two days later Oxford buzzed with word from Dorset that Lord John, indulging in his beloved sport of hunting, had somehow managed to get bitten by a rabid fox. The details of the encounter were never entirely clear, but I did admire Loki’s panache. John died about three weeks later, insane and convulsive.
So we had cleansed the world of a great evil. But two days after the state funeral—which I naturally attended—Lars, Lovise, and I began carrying all the black magic scrolls and grimoires up from the crypt, and methodically burning them. Now we need never be tempted to use any of them in future. Knowing how animate some of those spells could be, we made sure that not a single page survived. The last to burn was the Myrddin Wyllt. I was very happy to watch it go.
epilogue
in March of the following year, King Richard stepped ashore in England, a free man at last. He had himself crowned again in Winchester Cathedral, but Philip was creating trouble in France without any help from the late and unlamented John, so Richard wasted little time in crossing the Narrow Sea yet again. In the five years remaining to him, he busied himself in his dukedoms and counties, and never returned to his kingdom.
Within a month of John’s death, Arthurian supporters in Brittany had smuggled Dowager Duchess Constance, together with her daughter and her six-year-old son, out of France, and brought them safe to England, for there was now no denying that young Arthur would be his uncle’s heir presumptive until such time as Queen Berengaria produced a son. She never did, and Richard died at Chalus-Chabrol in April, 1199, in the manner I had foreseen. I had never tried to warn him of my vision. He had never sent for me or consulted me. Our last glimpses of each other had been on Christmas Day in Dürnstein Castle.
At his own request, the Duke of Brittany, then aged twelve, was crowned as Arthur II in Winchester, not Westminster as was customary. Winchester was renowned as an Arthurian town.
Archbishop Walter Hubert of Canterbury was appointed regent until the new king should came of age, two years later. Much to my surprise, Regent Hubert left me in the office of enchanter general, but I believe this was at the insistence of the king himself, who is much taken with the exploits of his great namesake. He always addresses me as “Merlin.”
If he continues to reign as well as he has done these last five years, he will be well remembered and England can expect many more kings of his name in the future.
reality check
yes, there really was a Prince Arthur, posthumous son of Geoffrey, Duke of Brittany, and thus grandson of King Henry II of England. He was born on 29 March, 1187, and died in early April, 1203, while a prisoner of King John. The manner of his death is unknown, although there were rumors that John killed him personally in a drunken rage. As there had been fighting between their factions, John may have staged a secret trial and convicted him of treason. Arthur’s sister Eleanor was another victim ofJohn’s savagery—she may have been starved to death in Corfe Castle, in Dorset. These disappearances did not improve the king’s already odoriferous reputation.
The scene where William Marshal and Archbishop Hubert decided Richard’s succession is taken from the historical record, but personally I do not believe it. Richard had had several days to contemplate his coming death, and would have named his own successor.
There is a strong modern belief that Richard was homosexual. This might explain his lack of children, but I prefer my theory of sterility. If his sexual behavior had been unorthodox, then surely Philip would have added that to his catalog of accusations?
John was even nastier than I have represented him, and likely insane by our standards. He repeatedly broke the chivalric standards of the day, which held that commoners didn’t matter but members of the nobility could only be killed in battle. If captured, they must be ransomed or at worst held captive indefinitely. On one occasion John sent twenty-two high-rank prisoners across to England and had them starved to death. Eventually the earls and barons rebelled and forced him to sign the Magna Carta,affirming some “rights” they claimed, or made up. As he always did, John soon broke his word, and then the barons colluded with the king of France, who sent his son over with an army and a very nebulous claim on the English throne. John died before the issue was settled, so the barons then evicted the French and did homage to John’s son, Henry III, who reined for 56 years.
There is a curious parallel here between John Lackland and the last of his Plantagenet line, King Richard III, the one who was recently dug out of a parking lot in Leicester. John was believed to have killed a niece and nephew, and Richard two nephews, “the princes in the Tower.” In both cases, England seems to have reacted with abhorrence and eventually revolution. In both cases, foreign armies invaded. Richard died in battle, and John of eating too many lampr
eys. I have long wondered who cooked the lampreys, and was tempted to have Durwin do so, until Prince Arthur walked on stage and suggested a better ending. (Richard III lost to Henry VII, the first Tudor king, who named his firstborn Arthur. That Arthur didn’t live long enough to reign either.)
More than half the characters mentioned were real people, although my descriptions of their appearances are mostly fictional. If you take out Durwin and his doings, the storyline sticks very close to history, even in many details. The first inspiration for this book came when I read of William Marshal being sent from France to Winchester to inform Queen Eleanor of her husband’s death. When he arrived (with injured leg) she already knew. That is possible in real world terms, but it reads better as magic. I appropriated to Durwin several other historical details, such as the caravan ambush at Tell al-Khuwialifia. Yes, Richard would have sent spies out, but fiction is tidier than fact. And there were two shipwrecks.
Christians in the Middle Ages were religious to a degree rarely professed today. Relics of saints were more precious than gold. I tried to make Durwin seem devout, but not obsessively so. Thus he felt justified in murdering Lord John because, when he became king, he would lose most of the Angevin lands in France and alienate the barons so much that they would force him to sign a charter limiting the powers of the monarchy. To a patriotic subject like Durwin, these failures would have seemed catastrophic. Ironically, although John was undoubtedly a sadistic tyrant, by our standards the loss of the French domains was an improvement, because it made ruling England a full-time job and forced the nobles to choose between their French and English lands. And the Magna Carta is honored today as the first tentative step toward democracy, parliamentary government, and the notion of human rights.
Life was short in the Middle Ages. Kings came of age at fourteen, youths of sixteen led armies, and girls were allowed to marry at twelve. At forty-eight, Durwin would have been an old man. Saladin died in 1193, Leopold of Austria in 1194 (of gangrene after crushing his foot in a tournament), Emperor Henry VI in 1197 (of fever contracted during his reconquest of Sicily), and Richard I in 1199, as related above. Historically, John then ruled until 1216.
As in the earlier books of this series, all the towns and villages mentioned are genuine and still survive, although much has changed. Only Pipewell has disappeared; it remains a name on a map—pronounced “Pipwell” by the locals.
acknowledgments
i have used (and in some cases abused) the books listed below. I am especially grateful to David Boyle’s The Troubadour’s Song, which I discovered by accident after I had begun writing my story, and which I recommend as not just fine history, but as a great true-life adventure story. Boyle has researched King Richard’s itinerary from the Holy Land until his capture in Vienna, so I am indebted to him for many of the details.
Asbridge, Thomas The Crusades
Boyle, David The Troubadour’s Song
Duby, Georges William Marshal
Gillingham, John Richard I
McLynn, Frank Lionheart & Lackland
Miller, David Richard the Lionheart: The Mighty Crusader
Morris, Marc King John, Treachery and Tyranny in Medieval England
Seward, Desmond The Demon’s Brood, A History of the Plantagenet Dynasty
Warren, W.L. Henry II
Weir, Alison Eleanor of Aquitaine
(also) Britain’s Royal Families
about the author
Dave Duncan was a prolific writer of fantasy and science fiction, best known for his fantasy series, especially The Seventh Sword, A Man of His Word, and The King’s Blades. He was both a founding and an honorary lifetime member of SF Canada, and an inductee of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. His books have been translated into fifteen languages.
Dave and his wife Janet, his in-house editor and partner for fifty-seven years, lived in Victoria, British Columbia. They had three children and four grandchildren. Dave passed away in October 2018. Merlin Redux is one of the last novels he finished.
