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

by Maples, Kit

  I saw vicious stupidity and arrogant ignorance that made me despise the ordinary run of men and women and their paltry history. I despised the killing, raping Goths, the Syrian women greedy to be emperors, Rome martyring Christians, Franks invading Spain with slaughter and without mercy, Alemanni overrunning and torching the beauties of Italy, newer and wilder Goths sacking holy Athens.

  I saw the antique world collapse under the ash of burnt bodies and cities with only a diseased and tottering Rome struggling to light a way into the new world for an idiot, miserable humanity.

  But there were wonders to see, as well, things strange to find existing in this horror of time. Such as the pulley, screw, and cogwheel. The great Cologne bridge. Rome’s thousandth year birthday party. The wondrous new Baths of Caracalla. The division of the Empire into West and East to save some of civilization from the barbarian invasions.

  When these wonders made me begin to hope for humankind, I saw Persians destroy the world’s oldest Christian kingdom, Armenia, and Saxon tribes giddy in lust for rich British land. I saw Picts and Scots break through Hadrian’s Wall, Huns sweep through Russia to Burgundia, the Visigoths crush Rome and Rome begin its cowardly evacuation of Britain. I saw Rome and Constantinople turn Christian. Then I saw Emperor Julian revive paganism. I saw the building of Ravenna Cathedral and the outlawing of the pagan Olympic Games.

  All human history was a dizzy back and forth. A confusion, reversion, revision, and thrusting. A horror with a sweaty glory in its constant striving.

  I began to concentrate on this curious seesaw of Life. If I saw Alaric sack Rome and the Huns, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths fill Europa, usurping Rome’s power, I also saw the saints Augustine and Patrick, and the marvelous rebuilding of Londinium out Ludd’s flea-infested shantytown.

  Then history closed in on a complete horror. I saw Saxons, Jutes, and Angles fight onto the Island of Britain, driving Picts and Scots into the far north and driving out the last Roman legions. I saw the hideous Battle of Crayford where the Roman-Britons were crushed by Hengist and surrendered the whole of Kent to the Jutes. I saw the final destruction of Rome’s empire and the execution of Romulus Augustus, its last idiot emperor, and his replacement with a Saxon “King of Italy.”

  Saxons were everywhere in this dying world. At last, when the Saxons finally learned to wear shirts, they overwhelmed Roman Gaul and cut the final link between Rome and Britain. The Island of Britain was cast adrift and alone. Saxons made a kingdom in Britain called Sussex and Sussex stole Pevensey port to welcome in more Saxon thieves. These new marauders called themselves West Saxons and built the Kingdom of Wessex.

  Then it was the year Arthur was to be born, and I felt myself centuries younger.

  * * *

  The New World Begins

  In this year, I arrived in Brittany in sparkling power, sweeping over the good, green land like a monster of wealth and destiny, holder of all the world’s knowledge, master of the future because I had lived it a thousand backward-forward years.

  I yearned to cross the Narrow Sea to Britain for Arthur’s birth but Fate’s moment was not ready for me. I had to fit myself into the age.

  I displaced the inferior Phyllis Merlin of Brittany who had held my place in time to that moment. I made her young body a captive in my old carcass to suck her youthful vigor. I left her soul to cower away from my careless power, hovering somewhere near my toes.

  Whatever childish magic Phyllis practiced before I arrived I absorbed into myself and my legend. Then I did greater things. I won for myself a place in the court of Duke Cator, chief vassal of Uther Pendragon on this side of the Narrow Sea and lord of Brittany with his brother King Hoel, by quelling an earthquake at Paris.

  It was simple enough. Any common trickster could do it. Even Phyllis. I drained a lake to reveal a dream of two battling dragons and found a village superstitious enough to pacify them by throwing them gold coins – which I had Cator mint, to his greedy profit and immense satisfaction.

  Child’s play that confirmed for me the greed, stupidity, and credulousness of ordinary human beings and the superiority of all merlins, even those as feeble as Phyllis.

  For Cator, I made the Round Table.

  The duke sleeping beside his pregnant wife woke crying in the night for a merlin and for his Brittany greatsword, rolling his Rs in that awful way of the Bretons, saying, “I dreamt of a girl-child in a circle of gold, Lady Merlin. Why dream of princesses when I need a prince?”

  He prodded his wife’s belly with the sword point, the woman recoiling in terror.

  “Is that a useless female in you, Wife? Shall I carve it out of you so we can try for better?”

  The woman screamed.

  I said, “You read the dream well, Cator. Your duchy goes to the female line. They’ll marry it off to Burgundy.”

  “Great God, better to the Huns!”

  Cator raised his sword to kill wife and embryo.

  I said, “Kill them, if you must, but you don’t want to make any mistakes.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Every dream has a meaning to be satisfied.”

  “Does it?” said the Duke. “I have to satisfy a dream instead of the other way ‘round? The Duke a slave to his own fantasy? You never told me that before and I don’t like it. Wait! Who’s speaking? Are you Phyllis Merlin or that monster who’s infested her?”

  “I’m the monster,” I said. “I am Merlin.”

  “I suppose you are, though you look and sound like my Phyllis, all throaty and sexy, despite that irritating beard of snakes.”

  “Feed this fantasy and you can save your throne for any prince you want to create on any woman you choose.”

  “But I only want the woman I have, Merlin. I’m fool enough to love her, I know, but I mean here no harm, except to keep her married to me and producing a prince a year to follow in my name.”

  “Then do what the dream demands. Let this girl baby be born into a circle of gold.”

  “A gilt cell? How do I afford that, for the God’s sake, I’m a poor man!”

  “Make her cell a dowry.”

  “Dowry?” Cator thought about that. “Be cheaper to kill them both.”

  By now the Duchess had grabbed up her shield and sword and called out a surround of her personal lifeguards.

  So Cator gave the whole thing more thought and said, “What sort of dowry?”

  “A circle,” I said. “A round table leafed in gold to be given to the baby’s betrothed when she’s of age. Birth her on the table to make it hers.”

  “Sounds a little bizarre, even for a merlin. When do babies get born on tables? Out back in the horse shed is the proper place to sop up all that blood.”

  “Your dream wants it.”

  “I suppose I could make a table cheap enough if I gild just the edge.”

  “I’ll make it for you,” I said.

  “Then I know it’ll be immense and expensive!” Cator groaned.

  “For two hundred knights, with arms enameled at each sitting place.”

  “There aren’t so many knights in Brittany!”

  “The prince this princess marries will command two hundred as his war band and thousands more for his army. He’ll become a king, the greatest the world has seen.”

  “Great God, what news! All m’debts forgiven!”

  Cator threw down his greatsword and rushed weeping into his wife’s arms.

  I looked at those two huddled around the half-made Guenevere and thought how simple it is to manipulate ordinary men and women. Teach them to throw coins at dream dragons or dream of kings in the family line and they’ll do whatever a merlin could want. Who needs to be a magician to command this world of fools?

  Guenevere’s gestating told me it was time to make for the Pendragons’ castle and Arthur. I stripped off the body and rags of Phyllis Merlin of Brittany and returned the corpus to its bewildered and terrified owner.

  I swept across the Narrow Sea into Britain. It was for me not homecoming bu
t arrival in a new and unmade world, a world I had come to create.

  In Britain I succeeded to the part of my British predecessor, the Great Merlin. For King Uther he had made the breathing out of the fog that carried Uther across to Duke Gorlois’ castle to make Arthur on Igerne.

  The Great Merlin had lived ten years in the last cycle of life as Uther’s favorite holy man, drinking companion, war-comrade, and womanizer. But I had eaten him alive in a burning tree. Now I became everything he had been by displacing him.

  With the treasure purses I had carried unused those many centuries when I had been a stone idol, I bought myself the grand Roman villa of a princess, the costume, horses, and retainers of a knight, and the frightful twelve-patch cloak and skullcap of a merlin. I gilded the peaked tips of my ears to show my high merlinic rank.

  I never cared for the traditional merlin’s forked beard on my woman’s face, especially in the shape of my two snapping snakes. So I abolished the tradition and sent the snakes screaming away into a void.

  All I kept from my previous lives was the old stone armor from my statue-self, the glass shield Lucan bequeathed me after I killed him, the anvil-cutting Urien I made with Prince Llew, and the howls and gibbers of all my predecessors locked up inside me.

  I shoved myself into red-bearded Uther’s court and, nine months after saving the embryo Guenevere from her father’s sword, witnessed the birth of the Hero.

  Arthur came out from between Igerne’s thighs red-haired, gripping a warrior’s blood in both fists, but silent.

  Could my Arthur be stillborn? I nearly screamed, seeing my thousand years of life wasted, my hundred and forty-four selves driven to live again.

  But Uther’s half-pagan knights standing around the birthing bed saw the blood in Arthur’s tiny grip and banged their swords on their shields in joy for this proof of a fighting prince. They shouted the Pendragon war cry and flung the naked infant onto a cold metal shield and the child breathed.

  “Alive!” I shouted to my previous selves. We all cheered and howled, filling the birthing chamber with a massed roar.

  Uther’s war band fell back from me in startled fright, drawing swords and clubs.

  But how many counts of time had the infant suffered without air in the birthing canal? Had that little suffocation injured his power to reason and conspire?

  I grabbed the child from the shield, wrapping it in the warming clothes, and breathed into its face my own respiration, saying in my soul’s voice, We live again, Artyr. Be the king. Become Arthur Eternal!

  The child squawled!

  I shouted and danced with the infant in my arms, singing songs in languages not heard in the kingdom since the first merlin created herself. I made of the child and me such a hideous, whirling spectacle – antique monster and fresh princeling – that the warriors cried out, “Pull the king’s newborn from her grisly hands!”

  But the king said, “Merlin, I think you’re happier for this child than I am. It’s only a spare son and will never be king.”

  I sang a lullaby in a language from another life and put the peaceful infant to Igerne’s breast, feeding the pap into the baby’s searching mouth. I covered mother and child with ermine.

  I receded to a corner of the room and let myself nearly vanish in the smoke and shadow that clung there. I quelled the sparkle of firelight on the gems sewn into my thirteen part cloak. I watched in silence the knights and ladies who watched the king and the infant with quick, slitted eyes. I decided which of them to murder for Arthur’s safety.

  The older brother, Gurthrygen, who would be king, stalked in. He was a boy of twelve, blood-son of Uther and the Pendragon’s first woman, whose name no one remembered. He pledged to protect his sibling. I believed his earnest young face and marked him off my murder list. But what man become king protects any brother who might make civil war on him? So I slipped Gurthrygen to my provisional list.

  Behind this prince came three year old Morgause, stepchild of Uther and blood-child of Duchess Igerne and Duke Gorlois whom Uther had cuckolded and killed. By Arthur’s birth, Morgause was displaced from any claim to the Duchy of Cornwall that had been her father’s and now belonged to her mother and should have become hers. Arthur would have it now and she would get the leavings from his table.

  Morgause pledged fealty to Arthur as incoherently as any child and as worthlessly promised to protect the infant who had stolen her rich future.

  I laughed out of my shadows at all this hypocrisy and potential murder. The warriors cowered to hear my laugh.

  I said out of my gloomy corner, “Uther! For the making of a fog and the making of a son, I claim this boy from you to raise up as a Druid prince.”

  Uther said, “What do I want with a second son when I’ve my pendragon in the first boy? Take him when you will.”

  “Not yet!” said Igerne from the blood and sweat of her birthing bed. “Healing Jesu had his Twelve. I’ll keep the child his first twelve years.”

  Uther said, “Do whatever you want, Wife, but make Merlin his tutor until you give him up.”

  Igerne said to me, “Be his tutor and slave, Old Woman. But you’ll make him a Christian, not a Druid, lord and prince.”

  “A Christian prince?” I said, too giddied by the moment to care what sort of prince Arthur should be so long as I could make him the magian king for Camelot. “I’ll make myself a Christian to make him a Christian prince! When do I get him?”

  “When Fate appoints,” said Igerne, sly and bitter but content. She drew little Morgause to her side on her sweaty bed and slept.

  I looked at Morgause, half-sister to Arthur, and she gazed at me, as unafraid as a witch provoking a merlin. I saw Mordred in her face.

  * * *

  In the Julian Year 5208 and of our Lord 495

  The day Arthur was born, a nameless sword appeared driven into the Brutus stone. It could not be pulled out. This magic or miracle had no meaning anyone could interpret. A meaningless miracle is a terrifying thing.

  Strange cries were heard on King Uther’s palace battlements. The monument to Winged Victory at Verulamium shattered. All the crucifixes set up on the king’s way fell down with their corpses. A lion ate a lesser knight and, in Wales, a river ran red in a season when there were no battles.

  Men and women cried to merlins to name the sword, paid Druids to entrance, hounded witches from the undergrowth, prayed with Christian priests to Christian saints, finger-read in old books, but no one could discover the blade’s name, origin or meaning. None connected the sword with the new prince Arthur who was never intended to be king.

  After a time, as with all things that frighten humans, the sword ceased to be such a terror and became merely a worrisome curiosity.

  Worry, too, faded and the sword was ignored, except on the highest feast days when the stone was cleared for the Druids and Christians and the Pendragon made live offerings there. Then the sword, by its self-made place at the center of the stone, took attention and caused people to wonder at its purpose in the world. But, ceremonies done, people forgot the sword. Moss and lichen overgrew it. Only occasionally would sunlight spark through its foliage and gleam on the unrusting metal.

  At sunset, I found Uther in his armor squatting brooding on the Brutus stone, one arm, greaved and finger-ringed, slung around the mossy hilt of the sword.

  “Mother and Princess!” Uther gasped. “I wish to Hell you wouldn’t just pop out of the air the way you do. It unsettles me.”

  I squatted on the stone beside him. “Why this gloom, King?”

  “Have you lost age again, Old Woman? You seem less gray every time you come to chide me about something. It’s so dreary being reminded I’m running toward death while you’re running toward birth. It frightens me and I’m the great Uther immune to fear.”

  “What frightens you tonight, oh, fearless king?”

  “This stupid sword in the stone.”

  He slapped the blade with his greaved forearm. The sword made no sound.

&nb
sp; “What is the awful thing? A toy for Gwynn and Pluto or maybe Satan? Lord God Jesu, there are so many frights in this awful world, why do I have to spend my last night with this one?”

  “That’s your heavy battle armor you have on and your prize greatsword across your back,” I said. “What demons do you expect to fight here, Morrigu herself?”

  “Been talking to the elves, damn them, though I’m not quite drunk enough to see them.”

  Uther peered into the brush looking for invisible elves.

  “They’re all over the place and whispering against me,” he said. “I’ve got to armor up when talking to them.”

  “I think you’re drunk enough to see them. Look closer.”

  “Of course I’m drunk enough. What fool goes into battle not drunk?”

  Uther shoved across to me a skin of beer.

  “Not your prize Burgundia, Mother Merlin, but good enough to pickle your lady guts for death.”

  I drank the beer, sour from its half-cured hide. It was as bad as Uther predicted.

  I looked out across the fields and trees filling with evening. “Where’s your army?”

  “You don’t see them with your fabulous ‘all-seeing eye?’”

  “I see them. Not with a third eye but with my remembrance of the future. A ragtag, a skin-and-bones, a poor pickings for the crows army.”

  “Do you see my lifeguard elves and fairies out there?”

  “No.”

  “Betrayed again!” said Uther. “Damn them all. Never trust an elf or fairy, Merlin.”

  “What do you expect from their kind?”

  “An answer to what this sword is.” He banged the sword again. It made no sound.

  “Tell me, Old Mother, Old Fright, Old Beast, Old Nasty, Old Whatever else I could think of if I could think of it now, was this blade sent into the world to cut me out of life?”

  “You’re not half drunk enough for battle,” I said. “Have more of this rancid beer.”