by Maples, Kit
I laughed. The plan was perfect. Since no one could pull the sword from the rock, no one could lawfully claim the throne. Every king or queen could be shoved aside by anyone calling himself Regent for the high-king-to-come who would draw the sword. Politics would became chaos and murder. A perfect revenge for the elders’ failure to make themselves all kings of Britain.
“I’ve held onto the throne because I never lose battles,” said Gurthrygen. “How can the elders hope to remove me in my triumphs by demanding I test the sword?”
“Lose a battle and you lose your…”
“Crown with my head in it,” said the king, miserably. “No one wins forever.”
But Gurthrygen might, at least until I had Arthur ready to be king.
What Gurthrygen could not win from the Saxons by steel, he got from them by bribery. Using money earned by selling yellow-haired Saxon slaves to Rome, Africa, and Asia. Distant places where he bought better cutting edges and harder armors to smash more Saxon armies to gather up more yellow-haired slaves to sell.
Gurthrygen’s fault was his straight-ahead style of war-making. He rebuilt the Island’s cavalry – the Lizards of his father’s time – and sent them swooping headlong into the Saxons beneath British arrow-showers. The Lizards scattered and slaughtered Saxons but then reined up to loot and rape, which is what warriors do. The Saxons turned and fell on them and hacked the Lizards to pieces. What Gurthrygen won by this strategy, he promptly lost and had to win again.
Even after these ten years of hard fighting during which the Saxon onslaught was blunted and scattered, we still had the same old problem. There was an endless supply of Saxons across the Narrow Sea but a dwindling supply of Britons.
Let Gurthrygen lose the next battle and he would be called by the elders to prove himself the god-chosen king of the Britons by pulling the sword from the stone. Fail and his reign would be finished, a dangerous prospect for my plans for Arthur.
Gurthrygen said, with a sudden, sharp cunning, “Where are these Trojan games you promised us, Merlin, when I meet my littlest brother?”
“Your only surviving sibling,” I said.
“Morgause our sister lives, and too bad. She nags me like a saint nags a sinner to restore Cornwall to her from Arthur.”
“She’s not Igerne’s child from Uther,” I said. “She’s no threat to your crown.”
“Strange how all of my queen’s children from my father have died,” said Gurthrygen, “all the little ones after Arthur.”
He laughed, making an unpleasant sound.
“Show me Arthur.”
I said, “There, that red-haired boy in the boxing square.”
“Behind all the blood on his face? He has the heart to take a beating like that?”
“I’ll stop the game and have him presented to you.”
“Later, later. I’ll knight him or whatever Igerne tells me to do with him as he’s her brat. She’s afraid of life in Hell, you know. She buys bigger crosses at bigger holy places. Each dead baby, another cross. What a strange world.”
The king went inside my villa to feast.
The red-haired boxer won his match and was cheered through the crowd. At the entrance to the athlete’s baths, I watched the boy slump down dead, blood running away from him.
“Twice dead,” I said to this one in benediction. I put a Greek coin in the boy’s mouth to pay his ferry price across the Styx to Hades, from which I had brought him back to life once before.
I went in to the meal ahead of the parade of servants carrying trays of stuffed and re-feathered peacocks and gilt boars, the crowd cheering the food, wine splashing, songs rising, the boxing matches infecting the crowd to its own boxing, men with lances but no horses jousting across the tables, princesses at daggers’ point for the joy of letting blood. Your everyday barbaric feast.
Beyond it all, ranged somberly against a far wall, were the advisors to the king, the last of the Old Romans left in Britain, arrogant, astonished at what they watched here, envious.
I cheered and toasted everyone with wine, mead, ale, and began the feast with Minoan bull dancers in the festival hall, a mock Roman century on maneuver outside the windows, lyre players, drunken poets, dicing, wrestling, tightrope walking elephants, and, finally, the cracking open of a great amphora of prized Raetian wine, the favorite of Augustus the god.
Gurthrygen called, “Lady Merlin, bring me my brother! Let me knight him now while I’m still sober enough to stand!”
“Is there an Arthur alive in this world to bring?” said Igerne.
“Did you kill him, too?” the king said to her.
“Here he is,” I said, presenting a boy in Roman armor.
Gurthrygen and Igerne looked at the boy, astonished.
The queen said, “Merlin! Who was that boy you showed me in the yard?”
“This is he.”
“Oh, no, this one’s not nearly so tall and handsome. He’s hair’s barely red!”
“Then you mistook another for him.”
“So did I,” said Gurthrygen, drunk and fierce. “Never mind, someone bring me a sword.”
Igerne gave him her gladius.
The king performed an amazing drunken falling fumble and drove the sword between the chinks of the boy’s armor.
The boy fell down dead. I had lost to Pluto yet another prince whom I had saved out of death.
My servants opened the boy’s helmet and I put an obolos in his mouth for his ferry ride.
Igerne said, “Do you have a bag of those coins with you always, Merlin?”
She laughed a hideous, shrieking howl.
Those few in the crowd who had seen the stabbing of the boy in Roman armor and who had not been dead before were appalled at the murder and more appalled at their queen’s laughter.
I said, “What awful error, I mean my own.”
“This isn’t the right boy either?” said the king. “I should’ve guessed.”
He yanked the gladius from the boy’s body.
“Is it this one, instead?” Drunken Gurthrygen stabbed the sword at another armored figure who fell, returned to Hades.
“But that’s a woman!” said Igerne.
The king, in the chaos of dancing elephants and wrestling Greeks, shouted, “Do I kill them all, Merlin, every young man in your household, to find my brother?”
Gurthrygen staggered through the crowd with his bloody sword, searching for Arthur, people of all ages fleeing from him.
“Stop him, Queen,” I said to Igerne.
“Spoil his sport? Never.” The queen shouted to a servant, “Where’s my meat?”
Meat was brought. Igerne drove her arms to the elbows into a pot of mutton to choose the joint she wanted.
“I promised you Arthur would never displace Gurthrygen,” I said to her. “But if your son-husband finds him, there’ll be a new king in Britain tonight.”
“Not without drawing the stone’s sword,” she said, mouth filled with blackened sheep fat.
“But Arthur will kill the king ahead of his time!” I said.
That interested her enough to stop her chewing meat. “Tell me when, Merlin, and don’t play Greek with me.”
“At the third crossing of his sword with Arthur.”
She threw mutton at me. “Liar, fiend, demon. Where do you get your prophetic power, Merlin, from a twisted liver or ingrown toenail? Or is it something you find in the nightshade you chew in some ghastly Druid rite? Tell me, I’m almost a witch and have a technical curiosity. Where’s wine?”
Igerne snatched a wine cup from a woman’s mouth, drank it down, and threw the cup into the tumult of feasters.
She said, “No one stops Mighty Gurthrygen drunk, not even a Saxon army. That’s how he wins victories. He’s that much his father, damn them both, though that’s all he has of the old man, and too bad. Go stop him yourself, Merlin, and prove you’re a wonder-worker.”
I shoved into the crowd, searching the feast rooms by calling to Arthur in his soul’s voice. Arthur was not the
re. But I found Gurthrygen, happy and flailing through the feast, forgetting the murder he wanted to make.
He slapped his gladius broad-bladed on a woman’s rump to make her shout and himself laugh. She was an acolyte of Saturn, drunk and streaming incense, waving her green branches. They ran through the crowd together, whipping partygoers with the branches, herding them all into an orgy. I left the king to his innocent play.
I stood with the Old Romans guzzling my Raetian wine, watching their sullen greed and hot jealousy for everything they saw, watching the sly arrogance of their superior Roman blood.
“Is a god’s wine sufficient to your high taste?” I asked them.
“This wine?” said a Roman, startled from enjoying the wine into remembering to sneer around the feast room at everything and everyone not Roman.
“Raetian was the favorite of Augustus the god,” I said, sweetly. “Are you scorning the old emperor?”
The man choked out of his sneer.
I gave him more Raetian to pour down his throat to clear the blockage.
He was Rufus Maximus, the self-proclaimed First Roman of Britain, the king’s senior civil and military advisor. Disfigured by a complete and Caesarian baldness which he covered with a wig frightful as a giant, head-sucking spider.
“Oh, well!” Rufus said, still with a nasal arrogance. “It is better on second taste, especially as it was favored by a god-on-Earth.”
“Some ages have a surplus of gods,” said a half-drunken Roman.
“This age has too few,” said another Roman, glowering into his wine cup.
“Fewer still in this damp country,” said the first.
“I’ve prayed to them all and gotten nothing,” said the glowering Roman. “I should become a Druid. Their prayers are answered.”
“Druids only pray for blood,” said the First Roman, “and you can make that anywhere yourself.”
“See what I mean?”
“Pray to the king,” I said, gesturing at Gurthrygen pouring a pot of mead on his head and cheering. “He’s so like a god…”
The glowering Roman looked at me, startled, and said, “But we have prayed to him. We asked his permission to leave this sinking pesthole for Rome.”
“To abandon us half-human provincials?” I said.
“To return to our families,” said Rufus. “Rome calls to our pure blood.”
“But your king refuses us,” said the glowering Roman.
“This is good wine, after all!” said another Roman, half drunk, clutching the wall to hold himself upright.
“I’ve a cellar full of it for you,” I said.
“Of Raetian?” cried all the Romans.
“Of whatever you can imagine.”
“Ah, but you’re the ‘Great Lady Merlin,’” said Rufus, “who lives backwards through time, growing younger as we mortals grow older.” Rufus snickered at the preposterousness of the idea. “You stole all the treasure out of Hell, they say, and I’m drunk enough to believe them, after drinking our godly and expensive wine.”
“The treasure I want tonight is you,” I said to the Romans. “I’ll see you home. I’ll send you there rich. Give me a price for you to stick to the king for three more years.”
The Romans were startled out of their drunken arrogance.
“Why should we do that?” said Rufus.
“Because I have to keep this king on his throne for three years more and can’t do it myself with everything else I must do.”
The glowering Roman said, “Look there, the queen keeps him nicely on her throne.”
We all looked at the queen across the room, taunting the tightrope-walking elephants with a spear, shouting for drink for the elephant Gurthrygen in a chair was riding like a war horse.
Rufus said, “Why three years, Lady?”
“To hold back the Saxon conquest until I finish training Arthur.”
“You mean train him to steal the crown? Even you half-human provincials must think that treason.”
“Train him to be the crown.”
“You talk like a Greek, all geometry and riddles,” said the glowering Roman.
But Rufus said, “You think we can do that for you?” He almost laughed. “Look at us – we aren’t battle-leaders. We’re clerks to an illiterate king who can’t count to twenty without taking off gloves and boots. We’re his treasurers, scribes, spies, confessors, torturers. That one” – he pointed at a Roman on his knees retching out his greedy guts – “is a tax collector. That over there, a chronicler. This here is the king’s master singer, and thankfully the king has a pathetically bad ear. We want off this benighted island because we are clerks who can count. We count more Saxons in this world than Britons. Be reasonable, Lady Merlin, don’t offer us anything rich enough to make us agree to stay.”
“Prop the king upright for three years while I season Arthur. I’ll send you all to Rome not as sea-soaked rats escaping this sinking ship but as princes with caravans of wealth and milk-white Saxon concubines.”
“I prefer Icelandic boys,” cried a drunken Roman. “I’d stay for them…”
“Will you stay, Lord Rufus?” I said to him.
“The others are useless to you without me,” he said. This wasn’t arrogance but fact. He was Gurthrygen’s First Roman.
“We’ll have to have a written contract,” Rufus said. “And some treasure now as sweetener…”
I took a dozen heavy rings from my fingers. “Spread these on your cakes for honey, my Romans” – my was intentional – “and lap from Merlin’s Well when you want more.”
They gawked at the rings I handed around.
Rufus clutched a glittering glitter in his fist and said, “Remember my name, Princess – Rufus Maximus, late colonel of the Ninth Legion, family estates in Tuscany and Cornwall, the Emperor’s tribe is mine. I’m your vassal for three years. I will remember you.”
“So shall we all!” cried the other Romans.
Done! Gurthrygen would survive to preserve the kingdom until Arthur was ready to draw the sword from its stone. I was content.
I went happily through the crowd searching for Arthur until out of the mob rose the image of a birthing baby, a new prince just made, with the face of Mordred.
Chapter 2 – The Birth of Death
Mordred’s face! I ran howling from the feast rooms into my gardens, past the love makers sweaty in the warm night air, the mobs shoving dogs to fight chained bears, the fountains of colored water, and shouted, “Arthur! Arthur!”
Morgause popped up startled from behind a bush. She dripped long red hair and the sweat of a powerful struggle. Her skin was grass-stained. Burrs and flower petals. She was eighteen and more beautiful than her mother, the king’s first, forgotten wife.
She held torn silks to her bare bosom. She was frightened.
Merlin! she said in her soul’s voice. Or was it her spoken voice? I in my panic could not tell.
“Merlin,” she said aloud, “I’ve taken back Cornwall…”
She was proud and frightened, too young to know the full witchly power I read in her face, ignorant of the future to know the horror she had committed.
“My Arthur!” I cried, tearing my hair in merlinic rage.
Morgause cowered from me, weeping and shouting.
The boy-man Arthur jumped to us feet from behind the bush and shoved in front of Morgause to protect her against me.
He, too, dripped long red hair and sweat and gleamed with fresh pride. He was as naked and magnificent as Young Hercules. Taller than other man-boys. Shoulders broad and chest deep from practice with sword, shield, mace, chain, ax. Eyes keen for teasing meaning from a page, a broken blade of grass on a trail or a hawk’s dive into a forest.
He also had a quick and woman-appealing grace he did not yet recognize.
“I’m his love-wife now,” Morgause said with vengeful pride. “Or so much his wife as my mother was his father’ wife the night you helped a king make a prince on a duchess.”
“But she’s
your half-sister, Arthur,” I cried. “She’ll birth a monster with you!”
She’ll birth Mordred! I wanted to say.
“Half is only half,” he said, “like you’re half my mother.”
I drew my knife.
“Kill me,” Morgause challenged me, “and kill Arthur’s son!”
“My son?” said Arthur.
Arthur commanded, “Hold!” and the knife I was slashing toward Morgause’s throat melted in my hand.
“We’ve made a boy, Arthur,” she said, slapping her flat belly. “A new Pendragon.”
“How can you know it?” I cried, clutching in my fist the goo of my melted knife.
Could she be witch enough to know what she’d made?
Morgause shivered in her frightful self-possession and pride in her power.
“We’ve made a prince,” she said, “who is doubly royal because he is doubly Uther. He will be Duke Cornwall after Arthur and no one will dispute his title. I’ve recovered the duchy robbed from me by Arthur when he was born.”
She wrapped herself in her torn silks, smirking as elegantly as a princess in ceremonial stola.
I was astonished at her cruel calculation. Horrified by her selfish stupidity. Frightened by what the witch might try next.
“I have to kill her, Arthur,” I said. “I have to kill the embryo in her. You have to let me kill them both.”
Morgause trembled with fright but said, “You can’t! You’re Merlin but you’re Arthur’s merlin. You can’t kill me without his permission.”
I shook from my hand the last goo of my ruined knife. What had happened to me that I couldn’t resist the command of boy-man Arthur? Is this what growing younger would do to me – each day rob me of a fragment more of my merlinic power until there was nothing left but me?
I wanted to scream and did, in my soul’s voice, rattling the dead in their tombs and bringing screams from the merlin heads on my checkered shield hung on a wall in the villa.
“You’re the greatest fool ever born, Arthur,” I said. “Stab her stomach. Kill the embryo in her. It’s Mordred in there, traitor to the future!”
Arthur said, sounding too much like the Arthur I wanted him to be, “That’s my son in her. I want him.”
