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

by Maples, Kit

  “I’m thinking of Camelot now.”

  “But there’s no money in Camelot, Duke,” said Phyllis.

  “Sometimes a dream is worth a penny,” said Cator. “Sometimes it’s worth the dream.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” said Phyllis “Money is your only policy.”

  She whispered to me, “What have you done to him?”

  “Nothing,” I said, as puzzled as she. “I barely have the power to cross a continent in an afternoon anymore.”

  Cator shoved aside the plate with his thin lunch and leaned across to Arthur.

  “Prince,” he said, “will you make Camelot with my Guenevere?”

  “I want my son,” Arthur said. “I have to make myself king of Britain to take him out of Orkney castle. What comes after, I don’t know. I don’t care. My merlin-mother doesn’t know – she can’t remember the future anymore.”

  “I know your merlin-mother,” Cator said. “You’re a fool to doubt anything she decides to do. No matter how weak she may become, she remains the greatest merlin of the age.”

  Cator said, with a surprise earnestness, “Tell me, boy, did you try the sword in the stone?”

  “It refuses to come to me.”

  Cator thought about that, staring at Arthur as though measuring him.

  Then Cator turned to me and said, “Lady Merlin, is this your Arthur?”

  “He’s the one I chose.”

  Cator stared again at Arthur.

  “But is he the one to make Camelot?”

  “He has to be,” I said. “I can’t live this life again.”

  Phyllis cut in, “What about Lancelot, Duke? If Arthur takes Guenevere to make Camelot, he opens a war between Britain and the Franks and us...”

  “What’re the Franks?” said Cator. “Boys in silver plate. Look at Lancelot, smell him. I’ve roses that cloy less.”

  “His mother’s Vivien of the Lake...”

  “Ah, yes. Does she still witch, d’you think?”

  “Not there in her nunnery…”

  “Then we have to keep her there.”

  “How do we do that?” said Phyllis, exasperated. “How do we reshape the whole world around a dream of Camelot?”

  “I don’t know,” Cator said. “I only know the dream.”

  Cator said to me, “What does the boy lack?”

  “I’m too young to remember!” I cried.

  I felt desperate. I felt a failure. I felt I ought to cut my throat. I wanted to strangle the White Druid. I wanted to…

  “You made a bad bargain at the beginning of it all, Merlin,” Cator said. “But you applied your old woman’s wisdom well in raising up a warrior with an independent mind and a hunger to give and receive love.”

  Arthur reached across the food table to put his hand on mine. His unexpected touch was like the thrill of answered prayer. It made me weep in a mother’s happiness.

  Arthur said, “You were a good mother to a boy thrown away by his own parents. The sword won’t have me and I’m not Camelot, but I love you, Mother.”

  Cator and Phyllis watched all this in surprised silence.

  Cator said to Phyllis, “What d’you think, any chance we can teach him to pull the sword stuck in that ugly stone?”

  “It violates all your policy, Duke...”

  “He has to do it. Merlin’s made half a king. You and I have to make the other half.”

  Cator kicked Arthur under the table. “Eating’s over, boy. Leave some scraps for m’servants. Get off that bench.”

  “What am I do?” said Arthur, startled.

  “Go administer m’holdings. Be m’warden. Find Guenevere. Make her love you instead of Lancelot. That’s the only way to win her that won’t start a war with the sweet-smelling Franks. They’re stupidly sentimental about true love. Love excuses everything for them. Out, out! Take your horrid little pets with you.”

  Arthur fled to the door with his skin-flapping war band.

  “Hold!” shouted Cator.

  The duke waited, listening.

  A trumpet blast outside.

  Cator said, “The perfumed Frank!”

  Phyllis said, “Let’s see how your new policy appeals to Sir Lancelot and his human-roasting comrades.”

  * * *

  Naked girl heralds strewing rose petals ran into the auditorium shouting, “Lancelot! Lancelot! Prince of the Franks!”

  Lancelot entered – black hair limed at its tips, jangling earrings, glistening gilt armor, a long mustache twined with blue ribbons in honor of Cator’s blue-fanged gorgon, and perhaps in the meaning of Lancelot’s hunger to eat up Cator’s Guenevere.

  Lancelot bowed on all sides, Cator’s impoverished court gaping at his rich and gaudy entrance.

  Cator seized the young man and lifted him as though weighing the value of his armor’s gilding, then led the breath-gasping young man to a chair by the ducal throne.

  “That,” said Cator, gesturing at Arthur and his midget war band, “is Arthur, Duke of Cornwall and brother to Gurthrygen, with his ghastly pets. This other’s Princess Merlin.”

  Lancelot’s blue eyes turned from Arthur glaring at him to me. The eyes goggled. He cried, “What a beauty! How can she be a merlin? Where’s the forked beard?”

  “Well, there you have it,” said Cator to me.

  Yes, I had it. Lancelot was a gorgeous idiot.

  His eyes were as beautiful as any I had seen in depictions of the Madonna. But as though a door had been shut behind them. They let out the illuminating light of seeing but not the light of soul.

  I said in my soul’s voice, to test him, Tell me your soul-name, Lancelot.

  No reply. Answer enough.

  Cator said to Lancelot, “Arthur wants Guenevere. Gurthrygen sent him to take her. What do you think of that? Worth a good brawl this afternoon? Some cheap entertainment?”

  “She’s mine,” Lancelot said, simply and unperturbed.

  “She is by the rules of love,” said the duke. “But not by the rules of rank. A king outranks your mother huddling in her convent.”

  “She’s mine,” Lancelot said again.

  “But Arthur’s her own blood and you aren’t,” said Cator. “Makes a difference, don’t you see?”

  “Let me stroke Arthur with my war club and let out some of that cousinly blood,” said Lancelot. “That will end the problem.”

  Lancelot put out his hand. A slave leaped to put into it his gilt war club.

  Cator gazed at the rich war club with lascivious and covetous eyes.

  “Much as I’d like to see that heaving mass of gold in action,” he said, “Gurthrygen wants Guenevere to keep peace between the two Britains.”

  “Peace?” said Lancelot, as though that were an alien concept.

  “But there is a solution,” said Cator.

  “She’s mine,” said Lancelot. “That’s the only solution.”

  “I’ve made Arthur the Warden of Brittany.”

  “Does that mean when I marry Guenevere I inherit him with the duchy?” said Lancelot.

  “Or the reverse,” I said.

  “The reverse what?” Lancelot said to me.

  Oh, yes, thick as the shine off his war club.

  Cator said, “I make you Count of the Borderlands.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Defender of Brittany against the Huns, Burgundians, Franks, and other barbarians.”

  “Defender of Brittany against the Franks? You mean against myself?” Lancelot was confused. “What sort of division of your territory is that?”

  “It keeps you from killing one another and creating a new war for me to sort out,” said the duke.

  “How does it do that?” said Lancelot.

  “Arthur administers m’holdings and proves himself worthy of Guenevere by making me rich. Lancelot defends m’borders against the barbarians and proves himself worthy of Guenevere. I choose the man who proves himself better at the task I give him. Otherwise, you two wander off home and I look elsewher
e for a prince for the girl.”

  “Where is elsewhere?” said Lancelot, glancing around as though he couldn’t conceive of a world beyond what he could see.

  “The counts of Flanders yearn to be dukes. There are kings in Norway and Denmark who hunger for a hot-blooded southern girl. There’s still some sort of emperor in Rome…”

  “He’s an unwashed Goth!” cried Lancelot.

  “Or I could find her a god among the Greeks. They have plenty to choose from…”

  “Give her to the Greeks?” cried Lancelot.

  “Or the Turks.”

  Lancelot shouted in despair. He tossed his golden war club to a slave.

  “If you won’t let me crush out his brains, Duke, I’ll have to agree, damn me and damn you and damn everyone else. When is the contest finished and I get the girl?”

  “One year,” said Cator.

  I could see Lancelot puzzling over the length of a year. “Twelve full Moons,” I told him.

  “That long? Why, I’ll be nearly middle-aged! Nineteen, at least, or maybe twenty-two.”

  Arthur, impatient with this beautiful dunce, said to Cator, “Lord Duke, let’s begin the contest now.”

  “Go ahead,” said Cator, curious to see how Arthur would begin.

  Arthur said to Phyllis Merlin, “Bring me Menw Spellcaster and Gwrhyr Interpreter of Tongues.”

  Cator shouted, “Those’re m’secret servants! How do you know those names?”

  “They just came to my mouth when I had to have names to say,” said Arthur.

  Here was another surprise for me, but one that might compensate for my own failing power.

  Menw the Spellcaster and Gwrhyr the Interpreter of Tongues came into the auditorium, summoned by Phyllis in her soul-voice.

  The Spellcaster had an old man’s sneering face on a boy’s body. He wore the gold torque of a prince and drapes of multicolored silks gaudy as a Syrian woman’s dress. He had only one eye, in the center of his face. He saw Arthur. The sneer became fright.

  He threw himself on the stones and crawled to Arthur, weeping, not raising his face from the dirty floor until he kissed Arthur’s booted toes.

  Menw cried, “Lord King Camelot, make me your servant!”

  “Hey, hey,” said the duke, “I own that slave!”

  “Want me to smash out his traitor’s brains?” said Lancelot, reaching for his golden club.

  Gwrhyr the Interpreter was a Gallograecian woman with a British man’s name. Dressed in hodgepodge clothes assembled from all the kingdoms through which she had traveled to Brittany. Her name, her clothes, the ceremonial scars on her face, and the jewelry that hung from her ears, nose, arms, ankles, cheeks, and lips were a summary of dying Roman civilization.

  She kicked the Spellcaster. “He’s an emotional man, Prince Arthur. You’ll find me cooler but equally loyal. Make me your servant, too.”

  Cator cried, “I own that woman, too!”

  “I can crush her skull, as well,” said Lancelot.

  “Oh, shut up, you murdering fool,” said Cator.

  “We’re no more yours, Duke,” said Gwrhyr, yanking off her slave torque and throwing it at Cator’s feet.

  She bowed to Arthur. “If Menw calls you ‘king,’ then I must, too. Hail, King Camelot.”

  “Hey, hey!” the duke cried to Phyllis. “You’re my merlin and first minister. Do something before I lose all my slaves and servants!”

  “Your Camelot dream has stolen the first bits of your duchy, Duke,” she said with laughing irony. “Be happy.”

  Lancelot raised his war club. “Let me smash out her merlin’s lying heart and you’ll hear it thumping in my hand as proof of her fraud.”

  The four midget monsters hauling their sheets of skin lined up between Phyllis and Lancelot.

  “What’s this, Arthur? Your little pets mean to fight me?” Lancelot laughed, juggling his war club.

  Bedivere cried, “Arthur! Let us tear apart his sinews and eat out his liver!”

  “What do they say?” said Cator.

  The Interpreter cried, “Great Healing Jesu, these apes…”

  “Are beyond ordinary human understanding,” I cut in.

  Gwrhyr said, “Yes, Lady Merlin, if that’s your interpretation.”

  Menw cried out, “The Hawk! The Bull! The Rose! The Glass Shield!” and, still on his knees before Arthur, bowed to each of the war band as he named their emblems.

  “Do these creatures have arms?” Cator said.

  “It’s a conspiracy of lunatics,” said Lancelot. “Let me club them all...”

  “You think Arthur and m’slaves conspire with his pet apes?” Cator said to Lancelot. “You’re more absurd than they.”

  The duke shouted at both princes, “Out of m’sight, out, out, both of you! Guards, throw them into the street!”

  The lifeguards heaved Arthur and Lancelot into the sewage runnel scooped out of the dirt road that ran past the ducal palace.

  “Get to work, idiots – you’ve duties for me!” Cator slammed shut the great palace door.

  Arthur, angry, clutched a fistful of fly-hopping shit. “I’ll build this barbarian some good Roman sewerage. That’s worth a Breton princess.”

  “Can you really perform such wonders?” said Lancelot, sneering. He flicked undesirable solids from his gold-threaded tunic and spat to clean his golden war club. “For me, I’ll kill a hundred pagans and use their skulls for an altar to whatever god Cator fears most. That will win me a dozen loving Gueneveres.”

  “Only a dozen?” said Arthur.

  Lancelot swung his war club.

  Arthur jumped to his feet and with his midget war band ran jeering through the castle alleys, Lancelot howling after them.

  * * *

  Arthur made ready to dig his sewers, rebuilding the original Roman sewerage of Duke Cator’s palace, but how to do it? He was trained to be a spare prince, not an engineer. So Arthur and I with the Spellcaster and the scar-faced Gwrhyr ransacked the duke’s moldy library – copper tubes filled with rotting parchments and chewing insects – to find a few good reference sheets on Roman engineering.

  The sheets were in Latin and Greek, since the Romans never did anything but fight without consulting the Greeks first. Then we realized that sketches, clay pipes, and digging dirt weren’t our real problem. Money to pay for it was. Where did Duke Cator find his coin?

  Arthur and his frightening tiny war band cornered the bishop, priests, and underpriests and got church plate and gems in return for useless promises of riches and glory in Island Britain when Arthur became king.

  Then I said, “Where do you find workers enough in this poor duchy?”

  Arthur bought two slaves from a wandering Roman slave-seller. One was an engineer and the other a tile maker.

  He hired a hundred and fifty peasant workers out of the rural starvation in which Cator kept them.

  Cator was stunned. “But who tills m’fields?”

  “They’ll do both,” Arthur said. “They’re peasants. They can do it all.”

  Cator joined me in watching Arthur at his work. Arthur sent laborers with picks and shovels into the silted quagmire beneath the palace-villa. They dug out ages of muck and shored and backfilled collapsing latrine walls.

  It was wretched work, full of danger and disease. Peasants fell out dying, groaning with exhaustion, screaming that demons infested the old sewers. Some ran away, pursued by demons only they could see, or wanted to see so they could return to the comparative ease of country agriculture.

  Arthur jumped into the muck with his slaves, a prince digging alongside them, crazed with excitement to fight the earth and its demons, to push forward the work. It was an amazing thing to see.

  When Arthur came out of the sewers, dripping, sweating, shaking with hunger and weariness, Phyllis Merlin took him into her chamber.

  Her place reeked of incense of flowers blooming in the wrong season. She stripped and cleaned Arthur, oiled him, made merlinic love to him. Powered him up f
or more digging labor and, to my surprise, for library research.

  Cator’s rotting library taught Arthur Roman engineering and management, how to doctor and drive his laborers, how to keep accounts and bear the responsibilities of a lord for a hundred and fifty working men and their families. Families that seemed to stretch forever across farm fields into the forest-haunts of madmen and lepers. He learned to be lord to all of them, to be their priest, judge, and taskmaster.

  He was exhausted with the labor of learning but each night he woke at the second watch, rolled away from Phyllis’ arms thrown over him in her sleep, and picked up the antique plans to read them by moonlight.

  That was rarely enough. Often he went into the sewer at midnight to work alone, measuring and calculating. His war band clustered on the ledges, unhappy about their chief’s peculiar choice of professions, but lifting out the baskets of filth he raked aside to do his measurements.

  That night, on the floor above them, with a lamp, Cator and I stood watching Arthur and his midget warriors. Cator gagged at the foul smell and said, “What compels you to do this awful work, Arthur? You’re a knight and prince wasting yourself doing common arithmetic in a sewer!”

  “This buys me Guenevere.”

  “Holy gods, man, how can you know she’s worth all this awfulness?”

  Cator, in the light of the guttering lamp, waited for his answer.

  But Arthur replied to me in his soul-voice, When do I see my fabled Guenevere?

  When you learn her soul-name, I said.

  “What are you two saying?” Cator cried. “I can hear you thinking!”

  Arthur said to me, Do I learn it before the soul-name of my own son? Tell me her soul-name, Mother!

  Ask her yourself, I said.

  I gave Arthur a dream – I could still do that – of the Lady Convent where Cator stored his stock of unmarried daughters. He had just one left in store.

  On a rock above a garden valley, a sweet breeze, trees whose branches swept in the wind like the long hair of maidens, a breeze sighing like girls waiting for lovers, was a young woman with nun-chaperones.

  She shimmered in and out of focus but it was clear she had Cator’s black eyes. Good Celtic red hair mixed with blond Breton and Gallic. And she was as roundly round as a Breton cow.