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

by Maples, Kit

  “You’re a boy. Why do you want to make another boy? Kill it and go find a better woman for your wife. Make a prince on her.”

  “I can’t do that,” said Arthur with a determination that sounded to me too much like stupidity.

  “Your father could and did often enough,” I said.

  “The British Saturn,” said Morgause, spitting at Uther’s memory.

  And then I understood the boy I thought I had understood all the years of his life. Arthur was a parent-less child. I was his foster mother but I was not blood. His natural mother despised him for an imbecile. His father was dead before Arthur could know him. Arthur was a drift in the universe and would not give up any child he had made.

  What I saw very practically as a blood-tie that ought to be broken to save the future Arthur saw as a love-tie he’d never cut.

  I understood but I screamed in frustration and rage, my screams matching Morgause’s fright-screams as she fled through the garden to her lifeguards.

  I sank spent, sweating, weak, trembling, panting to the ground.

  Naked Arthur was beside me with a sword.

  “Don’t try again to kill her, Mother,” he said. “Swear it out into the world.”

  “She’s made Mordred,” I said to him.

  “What’s ‘Mordred?’”

  “Your son, you imbecile. Nemesis! What’s happened to me? Where’s my strength?”

  “Why should I fear my own child?”

  “Mordred’s destiny is to kill you and destroy Camelot.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Arthur stabbed his sword into the earth and squatted beside me. I realized he had in his hand a souvenir scrap of Morgause’s sex-stained silk tunica.

  “She loves me,” he said, simply. “How could she love me and birth my killer?”

  “Are you really that stupid? Fate never changes.”

  “Fate never changes,” Arthur said, “but the future does.”

  He got up, found his clothes in the brush, pulled his sword out of the dirt, and strode toward the feasting hall.

  “Hold,” I said to him. Come with me to the Brutus stone.”

  “No more hauling on that sword again. I’ve tried a thousand times. It doesn’t want me.”

  “Once more. Today, when you’ve become a man and made your own son. Test Fate and the future.”

  We crossed Britain in a moment and climbed the stone.

  Arthur threw aside his sword and the fragment of Morgause’s silk. He spat on his hands, gripped Excalibur’s hilt and pulled.

  I looked into the sky for a descent of angels, a bolt of lightning, Thor’s hammering. But nothing happened up there.

  Nothing happened down here, either.

  “See?” said Arthur. “The stupid thing won’t come out. It won’t have me as its lord.”

  The resistant sword drove me to a dog-howling, raving rage. The young Hercules had seen this rage many times before in our lives together. He waited out my howls.

  Then he said, “Perhaps, Mother, I’m Arthur but not your Arthur? Then I’m free to keep Morgause for my wife and the boy for my son. Sounds good to me.”

  But for me it was as though Arthur were demonstrating an ignorance too close to his original baby stupidity. I searched frantically through my hundred and forty-four lives for a solution to this incomplete Arthur and could find none.

  Arthur took my hand and we returned to the feasting party. To the mock combats in which Arthur made himself champion, cheerily lopping off heads and hands even with the wooden show swords, happy to use all his battle-practice in splashing human blood at last.

  Late in the festivities of the third day, when the king and queen had drunk and eaten and puked and drunk again and were too weak to try kill Arthur, I presented Arthur to his brother the king.

  A tottering Gurthrygen knighted the boy with the traditional mail-gloved slap that knocked him down. The king called the boy bleeding in the mud a warrior-prince before stepping over him to shout for more wine.

  The queen kissed her son full on the lips but she was too drunk to try to kill him with the daggers hidden in her silks.

  The feast guests took a week recovering before straggling homeward.

  I spent the feast’s last days in a hole in the ground, singing over burning incense, shouting threats at all the too-many gods, sunken into my grave with the burden of my failure. What was I to do for Arthur? How was I to do it? Could I do it as I withered in power?

  * * *

  When the villa returned to its normal life, I crawled out of the pit, had myself bathed, oiled, and dressed, and went into the stables where Arthur and his slaves were singing bawdy songs as they saddled and packed six horses.

  “A hero needs seven horses to go through the world,” I said to him.

  “Perhaps I’m no hero, after all, Mother. I can’t pull the sword. Perhaps I’m just me.”

  “You can never be just you.”

  “There’s my problem, isn’t it?”

  Arthur swung into his saddle.

  “I want to be an everyday champion, Mother. With an everyday war band for drinking. An ordinary castle for my wife and son. A sword that’s true but not epic. That’s what I want. I don’t want to be Arthur.”

  Arthur let his slaves laugh with him.

  I could not laugh. I could not answer him. The days in the pit breathing incense and cursing the gods had given me no clue what to do next.

  I said, “Where are you going with this immense pack train, Sir Not-Arthur?”

  “To find Morgause and take my son when he’s born. I’ll raise him as you raised me. He’ll love me and I’ll love him. That guarantees he’s never a threat to me. Love will lift the curse of hate that Uther made in making me.”

  I was startled. “That’s better-thought than I expected from a Not-Arthur.”

  “I think your Arthur is in another cycle of life, Mother, not this one.”

  “You’re the one, you have to be.”

  “I want to be an ordinary human creature. No crown, no kingdom. No ‘Camelot,’ whatever that could be. Relieve me of becoming a hero, Mother. Let me live my own life.”

  “But this is an age for heroes. Who has a choice?”

  “Then it’s an age of fools. Dandling my son on my knee in the sunshine beats going through the world in harness ready to kill and be killed. I’ve had blood enough already.”

  What could I say to that?

  “The die is not cast but shaken,” I said. “You’re as good a clay as any I’ve used before. Come back to me with wife and son and you’ll still make my Arthur.”

  “I’ll come back, Mother, but not for Camelot. Will you bless me?”

  I blessed him and his journey.

  I walked out of the villa beside Arthur’s horse, his small pack train and slaves clattering along behind us.

  I said, “Bring me your son. Let me bless him, too, beneath my checkered shield and sword, for his protection.”

  In my soul’s hearing was the distant howl of the shield with its one hundred forty-four grotesques, all shouting, Yes, bring us Mordred. Let us put our hands on Mordred!

  * * *

  I dismissed my vassals, servants, and slaves and closed up my villa. I sat on my throne beneath the checkered shield and Urien hung on the wall. I waited alone for Arthur. A year. Until I saw a lone rider galloping toward me trailing a cloud of sweat and sand as though he were a human comet streaking beneath the sky.

  Arthur. Alone. He had lost his slaves, his pack train, most of his armor. The sword in his hand, black with other men’s blood, was broken.

  He galloped the horse to its death, the carcass driving itself into the ground and flinging Arthur into my dusty courtyard. He lay there in a weeping, hating fury, in a misery of pain and failure.

  He crawled through the dirt until he gathered the strength to walk. Then he ran banging through villa doors to find me on my throne in the auditorium.

&
nbsp; Arthur cried, “Great gods, Mother, how could you be so much younger in just a year?”

  “It’s you!” I said, speaking in the unfamiliar voice of a much younger woman. “My life is measured against yours. Refuse to be the hero, refuse Camelot and all you have is an ordinary span of days and so do I.”

  Arthur howled laughing out of his misery.

  The faces on the shield above my throne hissed at him.

  He spat at them. He threw his bloody, broken sword clattering on the painted floor.

  “Where’s your son?” I said to him.

  The shield held its breath in tooth-grinding anticipation.

  “You know where he is,” Arthur said. “You know everything. Or so you told me all my life.”

  “I don’t know this piece of the future. You’ve put us in a place I never lived.”

  “Shaken the dice but not cast them, have I?” Arthur said in fury.

  “Where’s Mordred?”

  “She still has my son in her belly. My son! Twelve months and he’s still in there. Can you believe it?”

  The shield screamed. I waved it silent.

  “She’s a witch,” I said, “and who knows a witch’s time for simmering out a monster.”

  Arthur kicked the broken sword across the floor. “Give me a sword worthy of a champion, Mother. Don’t offer me that absurdity I can’t pull from the rock. Give me an army to storm Orkney Castle and take my son!”

  “Is that where she’s gone to birth the boy?”

  “Yes, oh, yes, my love-wife has gone to marry Prince Lot, for Jesu’s sake. A Norwayman! A pagan! A cutthroat!”

  Now I laughed. “A fitting man to rear a Mordred. This, at least, is like the old chronicles. But we can’t allow it if you’re to build Camelot.”

  “Oh, shut up about ‘Camelot.’”

  “You can’t take the boy as you are.”

  “Give me a good sword,” said Arthur. “Give me Urien and a fair army with the sun at my back and I’ll rob Mordred from any prince or princess in Earth, Heaven or Hell.”

  “You fool, Lot’s the son of a Norway witch. He has all of Norway to call for his army. He’s far beyond you. With Morgause he joins his strength to the power of a Pendragon witch and a princess who can call her old Duchy Cornwall to fight you. What have you got against all that? Your broken sword?”

  Arthur shouted in frustration. “How do I take my son? Tell me!”

  “Become king.”

  “No, no, no, you’re twisting me to your own…”

  “Listen to your mother, boy. You need all the power of a British king to drag Mordred out of Lot’s Orkney Castle.”

  Arthur stood there, silent and stunned. I was right and he knew it.

  “Sobeit,” he said, hushed and appalled. “I’ll become king.”

  The shield screamed in joy. I threw a cloth over the shield’s faces to silence them.

  “You need to be more than Britain,” I said. “You need an Empire of the North to fight Lot and Morgause. You need Brittany and Gaul. You need the Near Islands of Iceland and Ireland. Collect all the shivering Northerners who use sword and ax to warm their bones. Build this empire and you have the power to capture your son. You might also destroy the filthy Saxons along the way. And slap together a few bricks for Camelot.”

  “It’s still ‘Camelot’ with you, isn’t it, Mother?”

  “It’s always Arthur with me,” I said. “Only a merlin can make an Arthur, but only an Arthur can make Camelot.”

  “Mordred and Camelot,” Arthur said. “Sobeit.”

  “Sobeit,” I said.

  The contract had been spoken out into the world.

  Weary Arthur slouched in a chair. He was bruised and nicked. Slapped dust out of his clothes. Kicked off his worn boots.

  I shouted to slaves who weren’t there to bring Arthur food and wine. The slaves, huddled away in some distant part of the world, brought it all. Arthur tore at the meat and bread and sloshed the wine down his throat.

  “I’ll need your greatest magic, Mother, if I’m to steal the kingdom and build an empire.”

  I measured the internal residue of time left me and said, “I’m half a merlin now. A woman who’s becoming a girl. I’m weaker every day and more forgetful of the future. But each atomos of power left me is yours. If we move quickly.”

  If we move quickly to build Camelot, I wanted to say.

  Arthur burped after his meal. “So how do I become king? Cut my brother’s throat in his sleep as he’d cut mine or pour poison down his ears? God, that’s awful to think about.”

  “Kill him? No, serve him. Make yourself the indispensable prince, the man all others will shout for as king when Gurthrygen shuffles off to Annwn.”

  “That’s too long to wait!”

  “You’ve wasted a year in fruitless warfare to capture your son. Now spend a year in sly maneuver to capture a throne and build an empire.”

  Arthur rubbed his hands over his weary face. “All right, all right. Where do I begin?”

  “With your greatest enemy. Always start there. Serve her. Make her your chief conspirator for the throne. She stole Gurthrygen’s election for him. She’ll do the same for you.”

  “The queen my mother? I’m to serve the woman who wants me dead?”

  Chapter 3 – Gurthrygen the Undying

  After two weeks’ march through freshening spring, Arthur and I, breathing out road dust, faces blackened by the sun, sweat streaming from beneath our mail, our armor bundled on our pack animals but our swords slung over our backs, rode up to Calleva Atrebatum where the king was in residence for the opening of the war-fighting season.

  A dozen miles to the southeast were the grim Saxons yearning to stampede out of their new Kingdom of Wessex and rob more of Britain.

  The city was surrounded by a meandering wall first laid by the tribe of Atrebates and raised up by Romans with their bricks. From a hilltop, we could see over the wall to the checkerboard street plan invented by Alexander for the cities of Asia Minor. We saw poking up over the city the crucifixes of a half dozen Christian temples and the heads of statues of Jupiter Greatest and Best, Venus, and Mars. Smoke rose in streamers from Druid altars. We heard over the city hubbub drifting to us on our hill the screeches of sacrificial victims.

  One thousand people lived here, the largest town Arthur had seen since he was three years old and was given to me by the queen. He was astonished at its beauty, its flags and banners, bells, trumpets, clattering commotion, fury of talk, and animal howls. He gawked at the churned up street mud through which our horses struggled. At the gleaming white walls of the Theater of Marcellus. He sucked in the exotic smells of caravans from Africa and Asia. All of it was wonderful to Arthur, the country boy prince.

  For me, Calleva was inferior to the castled city of the old queen Morgause I had served in another life. There was no grand castrum in Calleva and, beyond the tombs of the Roman dead lining the high road into town, only broad green fields with walled but otherwise defenseless villas. Everything here was at peace and willfully ignoring the Saxon menace over the horizon.

  Despite fresh war every spring, British life had achieved a kind of normality under King Gurthrygen and Queen Igerne. The Saxon tide had ebbed. The murderous pressure driving the Britons from their villages toward the tangled mountains of Wales and the West had eased. The land was reasonably administered by Gurthrygen’s ministers and priests. It was as fairly policed by his lieutenants as it was in Uther’s day. His Roman advisors guaranteed a level of bribery and corruption that insured the rule of the wealthiest and most ruthless, something which always makes for efficient if sometimes bloody government.

  We had a kind of peace, too. A peace of mutual exhaustion. It was the fruit of Uther’s victorious defeat at Badon Hill, where only war-weariness prevented the Saxons from stewing all our army and grabbing all of Britain. Now ordinary men and women worried more about sorcery, brewing their pease porridge, and cutting new plows than they did about Saxons.

/>   Of course, just as the Britons fattened in the sunshine of temporary peace, so too did the Saxons of Essex, Wessex, and Sussex, the Angles in their Angleland, and the Jutes, plus the Scots, Picts, and Irish always ready to fall on us.

  We rode into the West Gate and hailed the gatekeeper, who showed us the town plan, interrogated us for gossip, and ushered us onto a city street with brick and plaster buildings, beasts and half-naked children running before us, vendors shouting their wares, slaves being dragged up alleys, shrines to all the varied gods and the grand St. John Lateran cathedral, nearly thirty Roman feet long and ten wide with white walls, two red tile roofs, and a crucifix on a basilica, its first brick laid by the Emperor Constantine with his own hands.

  We followed the caravans into the forum and its crowded marketplace. Crossed the paving where gladiatorial contests were judged. Passed beneath the two-storied walls and double red roofs of the buildings that enclosed the forum. Rode up to the colonnades where municipal officials sat at their desks.

  We spotted the alcove that belonged to the king in state, his lifeguards rowdy out front, townswomen flirting with his captains, and there we found Gurthrygen, weary, haggard, half drunk.

  “Arthur, Little Brother!” the king shouted, pushing out of his throng, hugging Arthur and then me, looking again at me and saying, “Which sister are you, for the gods’ sake? I thought Igerne had exterminated all her brats but Arthur.”

  “I’m Merlin, King.”

  “Great God! So young and a beauty? So much red hair? Of course you are, aren’t you? A generation younger than when I saw you last!”

  Gurthrygen threw an arm over Arthur’s shoulders to steady himself as he shoved his face and the stink of stale wine into my face.

  “What happened that time suddenly sped backwards so fast for you, Young Lady Merlin? You’re no longer a frightening hag with hair like gray fire and eyes like snakes ready to spit. You’re a beauty I want to get Biblical with…”

  The king turned away to vomit out his load of wine.

  He wiped his mouth and looked from me to Arthur and back. Frightened realization came into his face. “So Arthur’s hour has come, has it? The future’s here at last? I can take my happy leave from this miserable cycle, damn it all?”