by Maples, Kit
One silenced the other. “That’s the princess, fool!”
The lady in her Equestrian robe, white and purple-edged, with a king’s ransom of gold around her throat, bowed before me, her stone goddess. Her hair was jet. Her eyes drawn to Egyptian points at the corners of her face. Her name was Cordelia.
Her maids made the holocaust for her in a brass bowl at my booted feet. The burning incense filled the exercise room with a gagging sweetness. I could smell it!
I stood rigid on my pedestal but trembling in my soul, joyous to realize I could see and smell and hear again.
The centurions in their spear closet watched the praying princess with surprise and lust until one whispered to the other in fright, “We can’t be caught watching this. Let’s get out of here.”
“Look at her,” said his comrade, “she’s more beautiful than any woman can be. Perfect black hair. Skin like a mother’s cream. Her rump, oh, her rump when she bows! I love her, I love her!”
The centurion clapped his hand on his comrade’s mouth. The ear-clogging incense, the sight-filling smoke, the prayer trance prevented the princess from knowing they were there. But I knew. I knew too much and I knew it all and I half-dreamed in my incense-made erotic haze, staring through into the cabinet at the young centurions in their beauty, dreaming them naked and mine! Joy again, I was coming alive to all the delights of the world.
But Cordelia’s maids were not entranced. Behind her back, they opened the spear cabinet and whispered to the young men, “Get away. She’ll kill you!”
“Let us out – help us have her!” said the centurions.
“Oh, don’t be so stupid,” they said to the soldiers. The maids hurried the young men down into the baths for hiding. But I could hear them even there. The maids fell on the soldiers. The frightened men gave them their best. All of them howled and shivered and thrashed until they had exhausted themselves and fallen asleep on the stones of the bath.
Something like morning tiptoed through the high windows of the baths. The maids abandoned the soldiers and crept upstairs to their prayer-entranced mistress. Cordelia was wrapped her in silks at my feet. They carried her to her morning bed.
Full morning now. The door to the exercise room banged opened and the place filled with the bustle of officers fresh from bed and breakfast, calling to their slaves for bath water, oil, “Box me!” and “Match me at spear-chucking!”
The two young centurions, who had had an excess of exercise with the maids, hobbled past me out the door into dusty Jerusalem.
I waited impatiently through the boring routine of the day curious to see what new, bizarre wonders these Romans might bring their new love goddess.
Until evening when more women came to pray before me, to burn incense, to engage in wild sex rites with male slaves, all in an effort to bring out the sexual powers of their defeated husbands who devoted too much energy to soldiering for their caesar and too little to soldiering their wives.
I wanted to laugh at the immense stupidity of these trivial human creatures!
After weeks of women’s prayers, after observing rituals so twisted and lascivious I could feel a growing sexual hunger in my stony self – another returning delight! – the Moon fell in eclipse and the exercise room was abandoned.
No one came to pray to me. No one came to writhe on the stone floor in ecstasy. All the Romans crowded their temples to pray furiously for the deliverance of the Moon.
It was then a man came alone into the darkened exercise room. Even in his simple white bath robe, he had the bearing of a general. I’d seen him here before. His name was Plautus.
He was fierce and hard. He had as bitter a control over himself as he exercised over his officers and troops. He was a man devoted to Rome and its legions and had stopped up his devotion to anything else.
I knew him to be the husband of the Princess Cordelia with the Egyptian-painted eyes.
Plautus stared at me watching him out of the eye slits of my helmet. “So you are alive in there,” he said in his voice of command. “I see the glitter in your eyes. Good enough.”
I was startled anyone might recognize I was coming back to life. But I was pleased to have proof of what was happening to me.
The general stirred up a holocaust in a brass bowl and put it at my feet. The smoking incense was bitter. He dribbled holy oil on my boots. He rang a tiny gong. He did all this as though he were completing a military checklist for prayer.
“My wife, the princess,” Plautus began, speaking to me as harshly as a general speaking to the least of his Legionaries. He stopped himself. He forced a change in his tone. He said, as familiarly as a general might speak to a goddess, “My wife prays to you every night for a child but nothing’s come of all her prayers.”
She prays to me for a child? I thought. Is that why she frolics here every night with a different slave?
“What’s a Roman man without a son?” he said. “What’s a Roman woman without a baby? Somewhere back in my ancestry is a god of the old Etruscans, so my grandmother insists. But that little strain of godliness in me has done me no good.”
The general made a laugh as bitter at his burning incense.
“It must not have been a god of rooting husbandry because we can’t make a baby. My wife’s prayers to you have failed. So I’ll try mine. Let’s see, Goddess, what you can do for this.”
He unwrapped and threw aside his bath robe. He was spectacularly naked.
I quivered with surprised hunger. Surprised that my stone could be hungry. More surprised to feel myself coming quicker into life looking at his nakedness.
The general shouted a Latin sex-incantation that came to my ears as Branwynn!
I had not heard that word in a stony lifetime. But my soul-name, even mispronounced and accidentally said, called me out of my frozen confusion.
In my armor, with Urien across my back, I jumped down from the pedestal and reached for the man.
Plautus shouted in fright, “Great gods, do prayers really bring dreams like this?”
He grabbed for the gladius that was not belted around his waist because he was thoroughly and wonderfully naked.
I pushed off my helmet and flung away my armor and sword. I tied my snaky, hissing beard around his waist and settled onto him, the general shouting and struggling and succumbing.
I made the first love I had made in this direction of time and it was like flinging open a last heavy door into renewed life.
In the morning, when the young centurions came in for their exercise, they found their naked general not very much like the fierce general of their experience. He was seated at the foot of my pedestal, me returned to stone, the general eating a breakfast fig with bread.
“You, there,” the general said to them. “Carry this goddess to my house. It gives me good dreams. I want it.”
The young men, astonished to find they could lift me in my stone armor, carried me through the winding streets of Jerusalem to their general’s villa.
“What’s this doing here?” said Cordelia with the Egyptian eyes.
The general had me set in the alcove once reserved for Jupiter.
“How can you put that there?” said the princess. “It’s sacrilege!”
“Pray with me before the goddess,” the general commanded.
They prayed, in a wild thrashing of hunger and debauchery.
A baby came to them.
They were happy. They believed I’d worked a miracle when all I’d done was loosen the general’s fanatic grip on himself to allow his natural power to flow. It had done me no good. I’d returned to stone. But I now had an idea how to return myself to Britain in time to find Arthur.
Cordelia and Plautus filled up their days with more happy prayers to me, rolling and struggling on their couches or beds or on the stone floor, seeking more babies. They got them. They believed I had made the babies for them.
Human creatures are such fools in their superstitions. But some of their gaggle of ducklings seemed to m
e to share some marks with Arthur’s ancestors. I was amused – what pleasure it was to feel amusement! – to remember the old legend that Arthur’s bloodline was founded by a god on a Roman princess. Could these two be his most ancient parents?
Their hunger and delight in their children was wonderful to see. It made in me an even greater hunger to burst out of my stone to work the miracle of baby Arthur.
The general and the princess prayed for even more babies until their new holiness spread through the city. Until gossip spread that general and princess were devoted to a bizarre love goddess not on the list of Roman-permitted gods. Until mockery spread. Until the general was scorned by his officers and the princess scorned by the officers’ wives. Until Plautus and Cordelia were recalled in disgrace to Rome.
The general and his princess sailed for Rome content with their babies and with me to help them make more. I rocked in my padding and secure ropes in the belly of the ship as we crossed the Central Sea, planning how make my stony way to Britain using these two people, determined to make it happen in time for Arthur.
* * *
Hot light from white marble woke me. I had been asleep. I could sleep! Another marvel of life returning to me.
I gazed out of a room across a balcony and plane trees and there was Rome, beautiful and corrupt, glittering, all-powerful, capital of a world soon to die.
For a Briton, this was the belly of the beast that had conquered, massacred, and civilized its Province of Britannia, and the parent who abandoned its child to the knives of the Saxons.
“Is the Emperor sending you to useless Britannia?” the princess said to the general, despair in her voice.
“He is, damn me.”
I’m to Britain! I wanted to shout but still could not.
“You’ll have to make something of it or we’re ruined,” said Cordelia. “We’ve a legion of babies to support…”
“Yes, yes, I’ll make something of it,” said Plautus. “I don’t know what, but something.”
“You’ve a better chance there than in Palestine.”
“Trading eternal dust for eternal rain?”
“Think of this,” she said. “Britannia is too far from Rome for anyone to hear of a mistake or two, or care.”
“My only mistake was being distracted by this baby-making monster and forgetting I had legions to command.”
The general in his frustration rapped my stony boots. He was startled they did not rap. My boots were becoming leather again.
“You have babies now,” said Cordelia. “You’re a man who won’t be forgotten…”
“Yes,” he said, happily. “My sons and daughters.”
“Now tell me the bad news,” Cordelia said.
“Commodus wants me there in the new year.”
“So soon? How will I prepare everything?”
“He’s given me command of the Sixth Legion at York.”
Cordelia shivered. “Could he send you any farther or colder and still be inside the empire?”
“Thank the gods it’s not moldy Londinium.”
“At least the sun shines there once or twice a year,” Cordelia said. “It never shines in York. When will you leave?”
“Not me alone. He wants you out of Rome, as well.”
“Why me? You’re the soldier, you go. The wife stays behind. That’s how it’s done.”
“Your family’s too rich for the Emperor’s comfort and you’ve made too many babies to increase its power. It’s exile for you in the cold north as much as for me. We take all the babies.”
“I want to scream!” said Cordelia.
“Don’t. The Emperor has a listener in every wall of this house.”
Plautus felt the material of the shield slung over my back beside Urien. “This feels smooth as glass,” he said. “I thought this thing was stone…”
“How long?” Cordelia said. “It can’t be long. Please don’t tell me it’s long.”
“One year. No more. Then he promises to bring us back to shake the chill from our bones and prove ourselves happy to be his slaves. He might grant me Spain.”
“Spain! Spain is treasure, Husband, and sun. It’s perfection. It’s power. Britannia is the world’s end. Are you sure he will he call us back?”
“I won’t give him reason not to. I’ll scatter and crucify every Briton I can catch. I’ll burn their filthy villages and skewer their nasty battle hounds. I’ll be on that little island the horror the Emperor is in the rest of the world. One recall is enough in a soldier’s career. I won’t let it happen again.”
Plautus examined the greatsword slung over my back. “I never noticed how like metal this thing is.”
“Two generations ago,” said Cordelia, “a man could go to Britannia the exiled lord of a roughshod legion and come back Emperor…”
“Those were the days!” said Plautus.
“Now, the empire crumbles at the edges,” she said, “and an obese and obscene monster squats on the throne who sends a man of your quality out of the civilized world…”
Plautus took down my scabbarded sword. “Why, this is a real blade! Why did I never notice it before?”
Cordelia, startled, drew Urien from its fleece. “The ancients decorated their statues with battle trophies, didn’t they?”
“But that’s the finest blade I’ve ever seen!” said the general. “What’s the metal of it? So many years in the baths and no rust! Who puts such an expensive thing on a monument?”
“Her first dream lovers, I suppose,” said Cordelia.
She tried to peer through the eye slits of my helmet to see my eyes but jumped back, saying, “Are those hanging snakes alive? Did they move?”
Plautus was still examining my armor. “This is still stone, but all the rest of it…”
Calculation came into Cordelia’s face. “Listen to me, Husband. This snaky monster is exactly the pornographic wonder to appeal to the Emperor. It can buy us out of British exile.”
“You’d give our love goddess to Commodus? The thing that made us our babies?”
“And cost us your command and my position. Yes, I’ll trade it for life in Rome.”
Cordelia flung Urien in its scabbard across my back, pulled on her own cloak and hood, and said, “I’ll go find Commodus.” She was gone.
Plautus whispered, “Branwynn,” surprising me that he remembered a secret word he had used only once before. “Come down.”
My soul-name broke me from stone bondage.
I tested arms, legs, neck. Sound flesh again! Sounder for the hearing of my soul-name. I in my stone armor, wood and iron shield, and scabbarded Urien jumped down from my pedestal.
“I’m losing you to the Emperor,” Plautus said. “Give me your dream sweetness once more so I can continue to have the baby-making power.”
I was a merlin coming out of a coma of generations. I was five hundred, a thousand years old. Or perhaps just twenty years old, depending on the direction of time. I flung back my helmet on a merlin’s ageless face, a forked beard of two snapping snakes, and a flow of pendragon red hair. I felt fresh, powerful, ready.
“You’re more beautiful than I remembered from that first and only time,” said Plautus, clutching me.
Then he said, startling me, “Love will make you whole, Merlin. Love me again.”
The general, the hard man who would burn Britons and their hounds for the Emperor’s favor, the man who craved to make legions of babies, had given me the key to returning to life.
I pulled off my armor and flung the general on a couch. The breeze through the open window brought in to us the spicy scents of the city, of trees and dust, the calls of street vendors and beggars, shouts of soldiers and happily arguing men and women, the odor of horse dung. I gave Plautus the power he craved. He gave me freedom.
When we were done and he was asleep in his snores, I stood naked in the window, feeling the city on my skin the way any other creature might feel the breeze, tasting with my skin each atomos of air. I could name the
district from which it came, the lungs that had last inhaled it, the meat spice that flavored it, the insects that buzzed past it. Each atomos had a color and a sound and these vibrated on the surface of my flesh the way wood smoke tingles the skin of ordinary men and women and brings up dreams and hope.
I felt fully alive now, my interior turmoils beaten down. I felt a great sucking out of me of misery and despair, as though a piece of my soul were being hauled across centuries toward that future place where I yearned to be with Arthur.
I felt love and hope filling the emptiness in me and bringing me out of stone and away from the frights and confusions of all the merlins gone before me. I was the empress of merlins. I was ready to begin the creation of the Arthur who would make a new world.
I no longer needed Plautus and Cordelia to take me as a statue to Britain. I was Merlin. I would get there on the wind, following the trail across time left by my soul drawn to Camelot.
A breeze blew across garden and balcony and into the room, billowing the silk curtains, and left a streak of silver in the air.
“What now, old beast?” I said to the White Druid.
“What an amazing monster you are, Lady Merlin,” he said. “How many times have I offered love to a merlin and not even the greatest of your greedy ancestors took it.”
The White Druid, silver eyes and forked beard, spread his arms, saying, “Now you’ll become!”
“Become, yes, but must I be so old?” I cried, watching my flesh wither and my red hair string out gray to below my knees. I had become the all-knowing antique promised me before I was reborn a merlin.
“Make me just a little younger,” I pleaded. “A century or two!”
But the White Druid flashed out, leaving behind in the air a whispered command, Live again!
Chapter 10 – The Screaming Shield
From my window in Rome, and despite my eyes dimmed by centuries, I looked with my soul across three hundred years toward Arthur and saw the rolling boil of history, the fright and wonder of humankind, of its marvels, witches, monsters, and delights.
I saw the Emperor Commodus strangled by his favorite mistress, Cordelia, and a worse monster rise to the throne to be murdered and many more greedy men and women kill for the privilege to be slaughtered beneath the diadem of a caesar.
