by Maples, Kit
Dunwallo with his three crosses used a gilt sword to turn over the Saxon. “You’re safe from sin. The monster’s alive.”
Horst’s lifeguards confirmed the diagnosis with a kick that made their duke groan. They hauled him off to his blue silk pavilion.
Ronwen said in Latin, “That’s the Saxon who thought he’d take this Island because its inhabitants are shrunken little beasts without honor. So much for Saxonia!” She spat after her brother.
Britons cheered her and then were puzzled to have cheered their Saxon queen, so they cheered her again.
Ronwen was startled. She in her blond hugeness glared the crowd silent.
Arthur on his knees by the sword beat his head on the stone of the race.
Ronwen said, “Arthur mourns like an Egyptian. Tell him to get up or to cut his belly. I despise him.” She spat twice on Arthur.
The crowd jeered her. She spat at the crowd.
I felt pity and hate: Pity for myself for a thousand years’ wasted work. Hate for Arthur, my failure.
Gurthrygen said, in a despair that startled me, “Is this wretched creature what you’ve chosen as king after me, Merlin?”
I shouted at the sky and the universe, “Tell me what to do with this creature!”
The sky rained on me. Cold thumping droplets cased in ice tore my face.
Ronwen spat up into the sky.
She said to Gurthrygen, “Who’s this stranger who thinks she can call on Heaven to help her?”
“The Lady Merlin.”
“The Old Woman? Don’t be a fool. This is a maiden. Probably a virgin. Let’s sacrifice her – we’ve run out of other things to try to save this wretched Island.”
“It’s a dreadful old story,” Gurthrygen said. “Princess Merlin lives backward in time. We age to death while she youthens to an embryo. This is she…”
“You’re half-wit to believe that,” said Ronwen. “She’s a conjurer with a painted face.”
Ronwen rubbed her big hands on my face. Nothing smeared. She stared in fright at the fingers that had touched an old-young woman’s cheeks. But she said, “You Britons are children believe this nonsense. You’re fit to be Christians.”
“You don’t believe what you see?” said the king.
“I believe in the scramasax and that I’m to be queen of Camelot.”
“Camelot?” said startled Gurthrygen.
Ronwen went down the rain-slick stone to the king’s pavilion.
I wiped cold rain and hot tears from my own face and dragged Arthur after her, the rain washing the mud and blood from his face. Arthur huddled away in a corner of the tent, wailing miserably.
Ronwen heaped herself on a bed of pillows, no British chair large enough to hold her.
The Spanish concubines stripped off the king’s toga, laid him on his shield-bed with mink bedding, and oiled his body still wounded and bruised from the battle at Kaerlindcoit months ago. He trembled with fever and infection. In the lamplight, his eyes were yellow and red. But he was still a man of power and intelligence.
Perhaps, I thought, I can change allegiance and make an Arthur from a Gurthrygen?
The king, as though reading my mind, said, “Not that, Merlin, but heal me of the fever of life. Do that and please your king.”
“Britain needs you,” Ronwen said from her pillows.
“Do I need a Britain full of shivering whelps like that?” Gurthrygen spat at his brother huddled weeping in his corner.
Gurthrygen shoved aside his concubines and sat up naked. “Look at me, Merlin. I’m a shivering old man. I’m thirty-one at New Year’s and a wreck so filled with pus and fever that I dream terrors. Lord God, the nightmares I dream! A death hounded across Hell can’t be worse than this life I’m living.”
Ronwen rapped her knuckles on her breastplate. “Shut up, weak man, everyone’s listening.”
“Look what Fate has given me for a queen,” said Gurthrygen. “I’d rather have married her brother. He has some gentleness in him. I know your Romans have kept alive and on the throne to buy time for the education of ‘King Arthur.’ I know I’m a slave King David but to what? Is that stupid beast dripping tears in his wine really our Solomon?”
“I can make you Arthur in his place,” I said.
Ronwen cried, “Do it! Make me queen of Camelot!”
Gurthrygen’s fever-eyes goggled at me. “Would you do that to me? Me a ruined man ready to die and you, what, a merlin who’s outlived her powers because she’s becoming a child? Damn you for thinking of making me Arthur!”
* * *
“Let’s all decide what to do about Arthur,” said the king. Gurthrygen shouted out the tent door, “Rufus! Bedivere, Kay, Percival, Lucan!”
They came in. Gurthrygen sat naked on his shield-bed as his concubines scraped clean his pus-oozing wounds. “What do I do with Little Brother who can’t manage to become king?”
I started to speak.
“No, no, Merlin,” said Gurthrygen. “In a lifetime shaping this blockhead, what’ve you given me but one more berserker for my legions? We need better to win Fortune’s smile for the Island. What do you suggest, Ronwen?”
“I don’t love him anymore,” she said. “Feed him to Colgrin.”
“One option,” said Gurthrygen. “A very Saxon solution. But, no, I won’t send a Pendragon into the stew pots.”
“We don’t eat people,” said Ronwen. “Only pretty little princes.”
She laughed.
No one listening was sure that was a joke.
Gurthrygen said to Bedivere, “You, Old One-Arm, what do you say?”
“I speak for Arthur’s war band. Give us our chief. He’s an embarrassment to us but he’s ours. If we have to live in the forest on berries and rats, it’ll be enough for us to be together with him.”
“A very British option and I say, No,” said the king. “I won’t give up your swords. Forget the merry life of a bandit in the forest. Rufus, what do I do?”
“Use him against the new invader, the Brittany-men.”
“No more battle for him! He’s a hero at winning fights but losing the land he fights for.”
“Make him surrender first,” said Rufus. “Give him to King Hoel as a vassal prince. Marry him to some Breton duchess. Promise Hoel the chance of Arthur’s half-Breton offspring being elected king of Britain in the murky future. Make Hoel your chief ally against the Saxons.”
“Who can promise election?” said the king.
“Do it anyway.”
“And pay my debts like a Greek?”
“That’s right – never,” said Rufus.
Gurthrygen said to me, “It’s a cheap alternative. With the advantage it gets Arthur out of Britain. It appeals to me. What do you say, Lady Merlin. Do I send him across the Narrow Sea to cast up on some innocent Breton maid?”
“Hoel has no daughters,” I said. “He’s run through a score of wives but he’s made no girl children.”
“He has a brother, more skinflint than Hoel, if that can be imagined,” said Kay, “with brats of all kinds.”
“Cator, Duke of Brittany, my father’s old vassal?” said Gurthrygen. “He must be an antique now. What spawn could he have near Arthur’s age?”
“He has a round dozen daughters, all ages,” said Bedivere, “out of four wives, all Gauls, dangerously clever, and lovely and roundly round as Breton cows.”
“You’d marry me to a cow?” Arthur cried, this new fright ending his lamentations.
Ronwen said, curious, “Do cow-women appeal to you Britons?”
Bedivere said, “Each is fat enough to sink a longship but they’ve a strange habit of growing thin in marriage before getting pregnant. They’re wonders at pregnancy. They form centuries of children for their husbands. They also make men rich. It’s a phenomenon passed down to them from Cator’s mother, who started the type.”
“He has one unmarried daughter Arthur’s age,” said Percival. “She might even be a virgin.”
One-armed Bediv
ere flushed with embarrassment.
“Tell us about her, Bedivere,” Ronwen said.
He was silent.
Gurthrygen laughed and said, “I see this Breton cow-daughter has the Gallic charm. She blessed Bedivere with a single smile when I sent him to Brittany on embassy. He was in love with her for weeks after. Until he met another woman who smiled at him.”
We laughed. Bedivere flushed again.
“This isn’t a cow-woman?” said Ronwen.
“Oh, she’s as fat, no, fatter than her sisters,” said Gurthrygen. “But she has a beauty of face and character that transforms men’s minds from thoughts of righteous combat to gentle love. Or so Bedivere’s experience told us all.”
“That must be Guenevere,” said Lucan.
We looked at young Lucan who had been silent to that moment. We saw that he too loved her, a woman he knew only by gossip.
“Born on a golden round table to satisfy her father’s dream,” said Bedivere. “Merlin made the table.”
The king said, “Is this part of the future you’ve already lived, Lady Merlin? What’ve you got to tell us about it?”
“I can’t remember any of it,” I cried, and I couldn’t.
“Insubordinate!” shouted Ronwen. “When the king commands, you obey, Fortuneteller.”
“Not in Britain,” Gurthrygen said to her with a weary sigh.
The king said to Arthur, “Get over to Brittany or to wherever in Britain Hoel’s army may be. Offer yourself up as my sacrificial lamb to marry the Lady Guenevere. Secure Brittany’s protection for Britain. Go do something useful for me, at last.”
“Good God, don’t marry me to some hideous foreigner, Brother, please!” Arthur cried.
Ronwen said, “Better to marry him to me after you’re dead, Husband. I can make any man a king. He and I will build Camelot together.”
“I want a Breton cow for him, my loving Queen, so I can have lots of little cow-lets to dandle on my knees in my dotage.”
Gurthrygen said to Arthur, “No arguments. Go vassal yourself to Cator in any role but warrior. Because you’d lose him so much blood-treasure he’d cut your throat. Bring back his Guenevere.”
Arthur cried, “Lie with a half-breed Gallic-Breton? Make children on her? What could they look like – blue-faced and three-eyed, bow-legged, sagging-rumped, hairy nosed? Is that the Fate of Uther’s blood? Brother, you can’t do this to me!”
Kay said, “There is a problem here, King.”
“Thank you, Lord Jesu,” Arthur cried. “What’s the problem?”
“The lady is hand fasted to a Frankish prince. Lancelot, son of Vivien of the convent of the Ladies of Lake Avalon.”
“This is the Lancelot women say makes Homer’s Paris look like a Cyclops?” said Ronwen, brightly alert.
“It is, Queen,” said Kay. “What he can’t win by his looks he takes with his war club. His holy mother won’t let him draw blood. He fights with a club like a priest.”
Gurthrygen said to Arthur, “Your first duty, after vassaling yourself to Hoel and Cator, is to unfasten the lady from Lancelot. Make her your duchess. Don’t come home without her.”
“Brother,” Arthur cried, “have some mercy on me!”
“What mercy did you have for me and my kingdom, oh great killer of Britons?” said the king. “Go away, get it done. Bring me a cow-duchess. I want a dozen cow-let grandchildren before I die.”
Gurthrygen said, “Young Lady Merlin, you too. Out of my kingdom! Bedivere, Kay, Lucan, Percival, out, out! Return to me with your shields or on them. Better, return to me with the Lady Guenevere on your shields, and peace with Brittany. Oh, and a spare army to help me fight the Saxons.”
* * *
I stood with Arthur and his war band at the quay where the square-sailed longship rose and fell on splashing water. It had the king’s standard lashed between the ears of its dragon-beak prow. We looked across the Narrow Sea to Europa. The hills on that distant shore were gray and blue, darker smudges separating smudgy cold sea and smudgy rain-sky. Arthur said, “My son is in the north but everything I do drives me south, south, south. Now both all of Britain and the Narrow Sea stand between me and Mordred. I want my son!”
There was no cheer I could offer Arthur. Because the future for us both in a pesthole like Brittany seemed grim to me.
Rain fell. The ocean splashed us. Wonderful. Arthur and I with his war band shivered in the cold.
A king’s lieutenant rode up and said, “Disarm, Knights. It’s the judgement of King Gurthrygen. You won’t go into Brittany to start a war with Hoel and Cator that the king has to finish.”
“We need our weapons. There’re pirates in the sea!” said Percival.
“And dragons and sprites and King Neptune himself,” said Bedivere.
“Whine for your lives with them but you won’t leave Britain armed,” said the lieutenant.
The lieutenant’s slaves dumped our arms and armor in a cart and trundled it all away.
Sailors shouted for the war band to jump into the longship as they hauled up the sail. We jumped onto the deck like breaking our last tie with Britain.
Arthur burst out in fury, “Is this part of your plan for Camelot, Mother? Force me to bed a Breton with garlic between her breasts and farts like the rotted fish paste she eats?”
“I still have faith you can do it,” I said, hearing the bitter lie in my own voice. Who else is there? I thought in despair.
Arthur looked north, sudden tears in a fierce face. “I’ll win through. By all the gods, I’ll do it. To have my son!”
“There’s no Camelot without Excalibur,” I said, speaking aloud a thought I should have kept silent.
“Is that what the sword is called?” said Arthur. “There’s another name to curse in my prayers.”
The longship’s dragon-beak bit into the sea and sent a surge of water crashing across the deck, drenching us all. The sail banged as it filled and shoved the vessel into another sea-biting and another washing of the decks.
The half-drowned war band shouted in fright. They threw themselves at my knees, crying, “Protect and preserve us, Lady Merlin!”
“You preserve and protect Arthur,” I said.
“We will!” they cried, “if you save us from the sea!”
“But make no wars in Brittany. No raids for treasure. No kidnapped lovers. You swore to the king to keep peace.”
Calculation ran across their wet faces. Even terrified and at sea, they craved the greedy, barbaric joy of plundering a foreign place.
“We swore nothing like that,” said Bedivere.
“Nor will we swear it to you,” said Percival.
“If Arthur can’t fight,” Kay said, “we’ll fight for him.”
Lucan rattled his purse. “What gold loses, steel buys.”
I still could command a merlinic trick or two. I flung my rain-heavy cloak over the four men and they shrank under its weight. Arthur pulled off the cloak. Bedivere, Kay, Percival, and Lucan were shriveled to creatures smaller than elves and more horrible to look at than gnomes.
They were knee-high to Arthur, ugly, hairy, so shrunk within their skins that the flesh of full-size men draped from their miniature bodies like limp sails from yardarms. Sagged and stretched faces. Beards and mustaches drooped to the ground. Their brave liveries absurd on them now.
They turned to each other and screamed.
“Put them back the way they were!” cried Arthur.
“When we splash onto Britain again, they’ll remake themselves,” I said.
“A year like this?” piped the war band in chorus.
“What language is that?” said Arthur. “Is it any language at all?”
The ship’s captain called from the stern of the rising and falling deck. “Duke and Princess, put yourselves in the cabin to keep dry, and all your ugly pets! We run before a gale!”
The dragon-beak cut through the cream of incoming breakers and the ship sped out for the long journey across to Europa.
Arthur and I stood staring back at Britain until the Island, after many hours, vanished into a gloom of sea-rain and cloud. I could no longer see Britain through the storm even with my soul’s vision. That too had begun to fail me.
I was now less than half the merlin I had been when I took a lonely and miserable boy to raise as Arthur. But it was beautiful to be young again. To feel clean health, hot blood in my veins, my loins’ hunger for a man and their surprise desire for the making of children, a home, and rich fields. I had the life-energy to live as I had lived with the rogue Uther, chasing across Britain for love and danger. The surge of freshening life!
What I lost in magic power I won in Earthly power – a body strong and hard, a spirit proud, a singlemindedness of existence that needed no Roman doublethink to find my way in life.
I cheered! I put my face into the sea’s storm and cheered, startling the sailors and Arthur and the vomity war band.
I had forgotten I must kill Mordred to save Camelot. One youth slaughtering another. Pitiful and awful. And too terrible to think about when I felt so young and alive.
* * *
After a day and a night crossing the Narrow Sea – becalmed, stormed at, snapped at by sea demons, and howled at by Neptune, freight cast overboard to prevent capsizing, the sail torn away, half the ship’s crew drowned in the hold or swept overboard – we cast up on Europa’s shore.
We tumbled out of the longship to grab handfuls of Brittany and to pray aloud to every god and goddess for our safe-coming. And the hope we could learn to fly home and never take ship again.
The captain said, “No rougher a crossing than usual, Duke and Princess. A few more crew swept overboard than usual. But I saved you and half the cargo. I’m a rich man again!”
The warrior gnomes clustered around the captain and cried in their piping voices, “Let us bite off his toes, Arthur!”
“What do they say, these your beastly pets?” said the captain, watching the little creatures flap their excess flesh at him.
