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

by Maples, Kit

  Arthur cried aloud, “I couldn’t lift her into my bed!”

  “What’s he say?” Cator cried.

  Arthur searched the unfocused dream face staring back at him.

  Tell me her soul-name, Mother. Show me her face!

  Ask her, I said.

  Arthur with his soul’s voice called to her.

  Guenevere started, staring out of her shimmer at him as though she were looking into another world.

  Then the dream collapsed – I couldn’t sustain it longer – and she was gone.

  Arthur moaned in despair in the sewer mud.

  “What’s the matter with the boy?” Cator said to me.

  “He thinks he’s seen the future.”

  “Poor fool.”

  Arthur slept in exhaustion and in the slime, drifting in and out of his own merlinic dreams until, to my surprise, Guenevere’s black eyes came through his dreams searching for him.

  She said to him, Are you the Arthur who’s come for me? Speak your soul-name to me. Become my Husband now!

  I hauled Arthur out of his dream before he could speak his soul-name and give away power over his spirit to a woman he did not know.

  He goggled at me out of his mud, like a startled and confused drunk, part of him still adrift after a woman he suddenly loved, and cried, “Mother! Is she Camelot?”

  * * *

  Now the sewerage work and his dream of Guenevere gripped Arthur like a fever.

  It was not enough that he retiled the conduit walls and re-sloped the sewer floors. He dug more and faster sewer lines. Drained them into the silted moat. Refitted the castle latrines for use and routed fresh water through the system to continually flush away effluvium, Roman-style. He re-dug the moat and diverted river water into it to keep it sweet and free of the night pollutions of fog, moat sprites, and demons. It all seemed done but it was not.

  The sewerage system was ready to inaugurate. Cator looked down at the first urine – his own – spewing from an out pipe into the moat and cried, “We’ll call a festival to celebrate my new sewers! Have everyone piss into your pots, Arthur, to make a glorious fountain of urine. See to it. You lead the dancing.”

  “I’m not finished,” Arthur said. “I’m barely begun.”

  Arthur replaced the decayed stone of the castle’s curtain wall, refacing and patching it. “Or,” he told the duke, “the wall will tumble into the new moat, the water’s that much heavier than the stone.”

  “Water heavier than stone?” cried the duke. “So learn the proper spell to keep them in balance, man. Have your merlin do it for you. Think of the expense to me of all that new stone!”

  Arthur in his fury turned to repairing the battle gate. That led to reconstructing the ramparts and towers. Then the wall forts. Until Cator in his despair for his emptying treasury said to me, “Can’t you teach him something as simple as one wretched little spell to do all this, Lady Merlin? Noah built his ark cheaper than Arthur patching up a few old stones. I want a regal king for my daughter, not a common laborer with crap on his hands, for the God’s sake.”

  Arthur ignored the duke’s complaints and I had to, as well. What I could not make in Arthur, Arthur was making in himself.

  He came to do everything in a manic fever. At meal-eating, he was madly fast and methodical, a dripless perfection, his knife licked clean at each bite, the little finger on his left hand always neatly raised and spice-coated.

  He read old parchments in Latin and Greek with the speed of two men reading, often two documents at once in different languages, stumbling through references in Hebrew and Persian, skipping from one subject and scroll to another in a fevered anxiety to learn.

  He drank down each bottle he was given to put himself instantly drunk to save time.

  He slept in a dead stillness that was a fury of its own.

  With Phyllis Merlin, he made love in a frenzy from which she spared herself only by abandoning her body to him and drifting in spirit above them to watch the spectacle he made of sex.

  The higher education that I, in our forest romps, had not given Arthur to read in boyhood from the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, and Romans, he read now in Cator’s library. He read aloud to his bored war band tracts on vegetable-growing, stone-quarrying, the making of writing-brushes.

  They took more interest in hearing the bawdy theories of Epicure. The plays of Euripides and Sophocles. Arian on Alexander. Caesar’s war commentaries. But they cowered behind their chairs when Arthur read Galen’s horror of modern medicine and the frightening moral complexities of Aristotle.

  In the duke’s library, Arthur and I received messengers from Bedivere’s four wives in the Duchy of Cornwall, from Kay’s principality, from Percival’s queen-mother, and from Lucan’s city of York. We read these messages to the war band who were too small to hold the parchments themselves. On their behalf, we returned their instructions to the messengers gawking in revulsion and puzzlement at Arthur’s gibbering pet apes, astonished that the younger brother of the mighty king of the Britons took counsel with midget monsters.

  When Arthur had rebuilt the castle from its bowels to its skin, he turned his sweaty efforts to the duke’s villa-palace and its hovel-like outbuildings. But Duke Cator cried, “Stay all this! Make the celebration of my good new sewers before you lay another brick. I’ll choose between you and Lancelot for Guenevere and marry off the girl before your frenzy of building and Lancelot’s frenzy of slaughter impoverish me in glory.”

  “Yes, a grand festival!” Arthur cried.

  “No, no, no!” said the duke, horrified to realize Arthur was about to undertake another vast enterprise to threaten the ducal treasury.

  Arthur searched Brittany for Greek and Syrian dancers, for Raetian wine to make the drunk, for elephants to walk the tightropes, jugglers and conjurers, Spaniards to acrobat with bulls. He learned to lead the dance in the Greek style, naked and masked, as Cator had commanded. He exercised with the Greek and Syrian dancers until dance became for Arthur the same sort of feverish labor as castle-building.

  * * *

  Afternoon, near eleventh hour, sunset not far off. I stood with sweaty Arthur and his laborers on the palace-villa’s red tile roof, Arthur gripping work plans, a roll of new-found engineering holy writ stuck behind his ear, his chief dancers pirouetting around him describing new gestures and forms for inclusion in the festival dances.

  The mania that had gripped Arthur all these months suddenly went still in him. He gazed into the sea-mist gathering on the far hills, light thickening over the brown and green land and a river glittering through trees. He saw there a dirt road, a man leading an ox. He heard the creak of wheels and thud of hooves. Peasants in their fields. Scent of burning wood and spices. Call of birds.

  What was he seeing out there I could not see?

  “What do you see there, Arthur?” I said.

  I looked with Arthur’s eyes and was startled to see it, too. Camelot!

  The wonderful premonition vanished for us both.

  “Why do I feel a free man here in Brittany, Mother? Why do I hate the idea of returning to my own country when my indenture to Cator is done?”

  “Take Brittany with you in Guenevere...

  In his new life frenzy, Arthur had taken up Cator’s interrupting habit. He cut in on me and said, “I love her in my dreams. How can that happen?”

  “She has Cator’s sly blood in her veins...”

  “More than that. In my dreams, she is Camelot. She’ll make me a double duke, of Cornwall and Brittany. That’s power enough to become king of Britain. It leads to Orkney and Mordred,” he said, bitter yearning in his voice though the name was grim and awful to me.

  “She’ll dowry me an army to destroy Orkney,” he said. “That’s what I want from her. I’ll put her in my palace with my son Mordred and found a dynasty for Camelot. That’s in my dream.”

  “You dream of dynasties like a pharaoh?” I said, startled. Even I in my best old age hadn’t hoped for so much from Arthur.<
br />
  Just put me within throat-cutting reach of Mordred, I thought, so I can preserve your dream for the world!

  I felt a sudden shock. As though dream lightning struck my soul.

  I saw Arthur’s peace across the land. I saw him in his family. I saw him with his son on his knee.

  I felt a surprising and bitter dread in what I had to do, and even more unexpected hope I would not have to do it.

  Was hope a symptom of the draining away of my merlinic power? Or was it the unexpected return to me of the sympathetic human heart I’d ignored all my merlin’s years?

  Chapter 2 – The Prize

  Arthur moved through Cator’s festival celebrating his rebuilt Caerconan castle like a general through an overmatched enemy, shoving slave-troops here and there to haul meat-wine-bread, driving the whores back to their appointed quarters, whipping on the dancing elephants, bribing naked Greeks to leapfrog with King Hoel’s savage bears, slapping sword on shield for attention to the speeches, bards, and musicians, leading cheers and jeers, stamping out fires set in the beds and throwing down straw to hide Cator’s best new mosaic floors from his king-brother’s covetousness.

  When hysteria and drunkenness were at their peak and enough of the guests had vomited out their first courses to make room for the next, Cator shouted, “Your dance, Arthur!”

  Torches and burnished shields for mirrors threw beams of blue and yellow light onto the platform where Duke Cator kept his high chair. Arthur and his Greek and Syrian dancers jumped out of the curtains, naked and masked, causing the audience to gasp at Arthur in the lead role of Mercury – painted gold and red, garish and godly, gold wings on his ankles and bangles strung on his groin hairs.

  They danced in the stabs of light from the shields, the crowd cheering and howling.

  The dance was bizarre and violent, sexy, greedy, drunk and dreamy. And yet there was an odd tenderness to it, an understanding forgiveness, a nearly Christian charity for the half-barbarians who watched, creating a hot tension within the frolic.

  A drunken princess dragged off the stage a beautiful Syrian to pour wine down his throat and beg him for love. He agreed and the goggling audience turned heads back and forth between that performance and Arthur’s.

  At the moment of the dance’s highest power, caught up in the rhythmic magic Arthur had created, half-drunk myself, astonished that my foster-son had the skill and wit to make the dance he had created, heated with pride, I cheered and threw the dancers a dozen bottles of Cator’s best wine in his finest Roman glass, measure for measure more valuable than gold or steel.

  Cator shouted in fright for his possessions. We the audience laughed at his terror. Drunken warriors howled for glass-smashing as the bottles flickered and sparked in the light, sending out bitter blue and yellow tendrils.

  The audience surged around the stage as, one by one in the frenzy of the dance, Arthur urging them on in song, the Greeks and Syrians smashed their bottles, splashing wine into the crowd, and Cator screamed for his loss.

  Cator’s lifeguards hauled the dancers off-stage, beating and trampling them, and the dance was finished.

  Arthur alone remained with the terrified musicians and the last two samples of finest Roman glass.

  He wheeled his arms anti-sun-wise, moving faster and faster, the light reflecting from the bottles he held like sharp-edged bits of broken glass thrown into the eyes of the audience. Faster, faster, until the audience began to pant with anxiety for him.

  The lifeguards made to prod him with their spears but a puzzled Lancelot hauled out his golden war club and shoved them back.

  The crowd shouted in its soul’s voice, Make us your country, Arthur! We are your war band!

  The lights were smothered! The dance done!

  In the black and silent hall, I heard men and women weep in the darkness for the vision of Camelot Arthur had given them.

  Lifeguards rattled their spear butts on the floor, anxious for orders.

  Cator shouted, “Light! Light the torches!”

  Lancelot stood on stage, confused and gawking around at the crowd cheering Arthur’s name.

  He shouted to Cator, “Does he win Guenevere with an obscene dance?”

  Lancelot swung his club at Arthur.

  Arthur-Mercury danced around each of Lancelot’s swings and thrusts, feints, drives, and hacks, making a ballet of barbarian and civilized man, of violence against hope, until Lancelot was exhausted, streaming sweat, barely able to hold up his war club.

  He sucked in air for one more smashing club-fall. Arthur parried with the bottle in his hand. The sound of the club on the glass was like steel on stone, like the shattering of an earthquake.

  Lancelot’s club broke like splintered glass, its fragments flying toward the audience before the pieces vanished in air.

  Lancelot stood there stunned. “He beat me – me, the greatest warrior of the age – wine bottle against war club! You must be a god, Arthur, or a merlin!”

  Lancelot groaned hugely, “Great Lord Jesu, what have I done in fighting this man?”

  “The choice is made,” Arthur said to Duke Cator.

  “I believe it is,” said Lancelot.

  “I say it is!” said Cator. “Guenevere’s yours, Arthur.”

  “Arthur, are we brothers in Camelot?” cried Lancelot.

  “He can’t be!” I shouted, remembering the disaster to come in Lancelot’s seduction of Guenevere the Queen. “He’s not in the Chronicles, Arthur. Leave him out.”

  “I’ll follow you to the ends of the flat Earth!” Lancelot said to Arthur.

  “Would you,” I said, “or merely to Guenevere’s bed?”

  “What are you saying, Mother?” Arthur said.

  “To the ends of the Earth, Arthur, and call you a fool all the way for leading me there. What better friend than that?”

  Lancelot threw himself to his knees and put Arthur’s foot on his head. “My Lord King, I’m your warrior every day of your life in this world and in all worlds that follow!”

  Cator kicked Lancelot. “Don’t call him ‘king,’ you fool, there’s a living king in Britain and he’s a jealous, war-making bastard.”

  “Merlin!” cried Cator to me, horror in his face. “Have you just created your damned ‘King Camelot’ on my territory?”

  “I can’t believe it’s happening this way, Duke…”

  “How could anything surprise you, you’re a damn merlin?”

  “Arthur’s making the new world, one I lived but can barely remember...”

  “Stop him, stop him!” shouted Cator in a fury of fright. “Gurthrygen hears the boy’s kinged himself and he’ll be over with fire and sword and smash up my beautiful castle.”

  “I can’t stop him now,” I said. “He’s doing what Arthur was born to do…”

  “Must we all be smashed to pieces while he does it?” cried the Duke.

  “Where’s my Guenevere?” said Arthur.

  Despair flashed out of Cator’s face and the sudden glow of salvation filled it.

  “You won’t find her here, Prince,” he said with satisfaction. “You’ve won the girl but you haven’t won me.”

  “I find her,” said Arthur, throwing off his Mercury mask and pulling a cloak over his nakedness.

  Arthur went banging through the doors of the villa shouting for Guenevere, Cator’s servants running after him crying alarm. He grabbed up sword and shield and hammered away Cator’s lifeguards. He smashed in walls. He hacked down the garden. He stampeded the horses. He drove out of his way the dogs, pigs, and chickens. But he could not find her.

  “Mother Merlin!” he shouted. “Do your magic. Find my woman!”

  But it was Cator who answered him.

  “Arthur, Duke, Prince, King Camelot, whatever else you are, you’ve won m’daughter because she tells me that in a dream she came to love you. And because Lady Merlin remembers I’ll die in poverty and damned by the future if I don’t give her up to you. But first you have to accept my dowry and do ev
ery other thing a father-in-law demands.”

  Cator hauled Arthur into the auditorium to the great gold round table that hung over the ducal throne.

  It was only now, looking close up, that I saw the table had become badged all over with the enameled arms of two hundred knights, none of their names clear enough to read in the lamp smoke.

  “That table is the dream,” said Cator, “and the dream is your Guenevere.”

  Cator held up his ducal ring. “Finish rebuilding m’castles and towns…”

  “The towns, too?” cried Arthur.

  “And do it before you year’s indenture is up, and I give you this ring to inherit my duchy when I’m dead and Guenevere to be your queen of Camelot.”

  * * *

  At the closing of a manic year of Arthur’s blistering hard work, Caerconan was finished, all the surrounding towns refurbished, and Duke Cator lived in a splendor and sanitation the envy of every other prince in Europa. His knights gleamed. His peasants were well-fed and their livestock healthy. The village by the shore at the castle’s foot was rich from plundering more than the usual number of castaways and flotsam.

  Arthur had made the duchy wealthy and strong. Lancelot had kept the Huns and Burgundians away, and his presence in the territory turned away the Franks.

  No longer did the blue-fanged gorgon carved over the castle’s battle gate seem to yearn to fly north to Britain for a full belly and peace.

  On a morning white and blue with calm water stretching across the Narrow Sea to the chalky cliffs of Britain, Phyllis Merlin and I stood on the quay with Arthur and his four shrunken comrades. The incense of Cator’s bishops and priests curled around us bitter and hot, insuring a safer passage home than the half-drowned wreck of a passage we had coming over.

  Sailors scrambled to prepare Cator’s oared galley ship, feeding the slaves at the oarlocks, checking the sail and the lines.

  Despite his successes, Arthur was dressed in only his second suit of clothes since he had come to Brittany, and that plain and cheap, in keeping with Cator’s miserliness to his vassals and servants.