by Maples, Kit
“I won’t take him, King. You’ll gift him to me.”
Menw Spellcaster, standing by the Table but not touching it, said to Guenevere, trembling with the excitement and horror of what she had seen, “It’s a conjurer’s trick to raise the dead, Lady, I’ve seen it a hundred times.”
“Even a man burning in fire with his head cut off?”
“I’ve done it myself.”
Menw pointed to Lot steaming through the clothes the war band threw over him. “But King Lot wasn’t stolen out of Annwn. He was grabbed from the Between Worlds.”
“You mean he’s still dying?”
Guenevere caught in her hands some of the steam rising from Lot and watched it dissipate.
“He’s still burning,” she said.
“Until the moment he’s allowed to die.”
Chapter 4 – Stealing Mordred
In the Julian Year 5211 and of Our Lord 498
Steaming Lot led into the palace and the auditorium where a merlin oak grew, shading a dais with triple altar and triple thrones. Queen Morgause and the boy Mordred, now nearly four years old, huddled beneath the protection of the holy tree, their bishops and crucifixes. Morgause’s long red hair was braided with beads cut from the Orkney Jupiter stone for more protection. The boy, armored in steel silver-gilt, had a tiny gladius in his hand. He had Arthur’s face and Uther’s hair. He had the beauty I was coming to see in every child. I was surprised at him and in myself.
Mordred raised his sword to stab at Arthur and said, “Are you the terrible Merlin?”
“I’m your blood-father, boy. I’m Arthur.”
Lot said, “He is your father.”
The trembling boy kneeled before Arthur, offering his gladius and his bare neck.
Morgause cried in terror, “Arthur, don’t kill him!”
Arthur pulled the boy toward him, clapping Mordred’s breastplate to his, the steel harness saving the boy from Arthur’s loving warrior hug.
Arthur kissed the boy, feeling the hair that was Uther’s hair and the skin that was Morgause’s, testing the child’s muscle and bone, talking in a delirium of love that had waited four years to express itself. Until he had convinced Mordred that this rough-shaved young man reeking of battle-sweat and mud was a father who loved him.
Mordred hugged his father and wept for loving him at last. It was something I nearly rejoiced to see.
But the child was Mordred.
Lot said, “You have the boy. Now what, Arthur?”
“You’ve given him my son?” Morgause cried.
“I’m his comrade now and he’s my lord,” Lot said.
Lot put a steaming hand toward her. “You, my Queen-Wife, are his comrade with me, and all our house.”
She drew back from his hot hand. “Lords, what’s he done to you?”
“Killed me in single combat but hauled me from my pyre.”
“You still burn!” Morgause cried.
“Until the day I die a death fighting in Arthur’s war band.”
“Arthur, you bastard,” Morgause said. “You rob my duchy of Cornwall, you steal my son, and now you thieve my kingdom!”
Morgause put a dagger between her breasts. “Kill me. Drive it into me. Reopen the wound you opened in making Mordred. Kill me, Brother!”
Guenevere said, in her Breton accent full of rolling Rs that made the words sound even more dreadful, “I’ll kill her for you, Arthur.”
She turned her gladius to use its hilt to hammer the dagger into Morgause.
Morgause turned the dagger toward Guenevere. “Name yourself, woman.”
“Guenevere, daughter of Cator.”
“Ah, the brat born on the Round Table. Then you may have a power to match mine as a witch. But have you the arm of a Pendragon?”
Morgause stabbed with the dagger. Guenevere knocked it aside with her gladius. Morgause spun and thrust again and again, from each quarter, high and low. Guenevere hammered forward in the Breton style of no quarter, no prisoners, no retreat, and no surrender.
I watched at the confusion of Fate’s bringing to blood two women with the power to destroy Camelot. Let them kill each other, I thought, and spare the future.
Arthur with a shield on each arm shoved between them to throw them back. But the battle-frenzy was on them. Morgause and Guenevere attacked each other over him, hacking their weapons into his shields, trampling him, driving him down beneath them for Bedivere and Lucan to drag him away.
Lot shouted, “Hold! Stand, I say!”
He swung down his Orkney greatsword to shatter the hard earth between them but they would not stop.
Where was this fight in the old Chronicles? Where in my dwindling memory of the future? I understood nothing anymore. Everything was so unlike what I expected to remember of it. These people were doing whatever they pleased and all the books of Fate be damned. How could I shape Camelot out of this mess of selfish, squabbling, loving, hating human creatures?
In my horror and confusion, I shouted, Hold! in my soul’s voice.
The sun stopped its spin around the Earth.
Arthur, Guenevere, and all the others stopped in mid-stab, frozen.
I flung my cloak over them and shrank them below the size I’d shrunken the war band when we sailed for Brittany. I made them the size of bumble-bees and scooped them up in both hands.
Here was my Arthur, a warrior-general, a duke’s steward, an engineer-doctor-conjurer-mason-accountant-prince. Lover of Phyllis Merlin, Queen Morgause, and Princess Guenevere. Chief of a war band, maker of something close to miracles, new master of the Round Table. The boy-man chosen by Fate to be lord ruler of a New Troy. But transfixed in love for the son who would wreck Camelot and become a regicide and parricide.
Here beside him was Guenevere with her Round Table and her Lancelot. She was far more clever and sweetly hard than the Gueneveres I could remember in any previous cycle of life, and too violent. Her Lancelot was so much more beautiful, vain, dull, and loyal than any of his predecessors, and the queen far too ready to be seduced by him.
Clustered on this finger of my hand was Arthur’s war band, as wild and barbaric as any warriors for Queen Boadicea fighting the First Caesar. Duke Bedivere, one-armed and black-eyed with the ancestral Spanish blood of Cornwall. The lady-herald Percival, a champion in search of a greater champion. Kay, whose head Arthur had cut off but not cut off to help Kay keep honor with his dead Roman princess. And Lucan, the boy Duke of York, who, in the last life cycle, became the beggar-knight Galabes who made me a merlin against my will.
With these were Arthur’s half-sister, love-wife, and witch Morgause and her husband, the ever-steaming King Lot.
Last was Mordred.
Here in my open hand were the human creatures with the power to make all the joys and all the failures of this age. I could end this life cycle by closing my fist and crushing the life out of them. Or I could consider them Fate’s strange seeds planted for a new world and leave them free to wend their chaotic way toward Camelot.
I used a spurt of dwindling power to whip across the land into a night where life was still, quiet, unmoving. Where the pulse of each leaf was slowed. The darktime saw of insects a dreamy hum rather than chitter and chirp.
I pushed back moss and holy mistletoe and went into the gloom under the trees to a toadstool of light on the forest floor. The toadstool spoke to me.
“Again, Merlin, again?” said the voice of the White Druid, soul-weary.
“Speak to me, Old Traitor. I’m weakening faster than the age progresses. And what an age! What a confusion it’s made of itself! None of these” – I scattered out the people I had in hand – “has the character to make Camelot. Certainly not Arthur, in love with the son who’ll murder him and Camelot together. Look at them all – imperfect, riotous monsters!”
The toy-like humans pranced and preened and squabbled around the toadstool of light on the forest floor.
“What am I to do?” I said.
“Do?” cried the Whit
e Druid growing out of the light, silver rage in his eyes. “You’ve plagued me twelve-times-twelve lives and still can’t put the world right? What a fool you are!”
The White Druid squatted down to examine my toy people, a strange wonder in his face. “Oh, my lords, I see you’ve made an Age of Love, Merlin! You’ve never done that before.” He gawked at me in surprise.
“I what?”
“Look at these toys. You’ve created a Guenevere for everyone to love. She loves everyone but too freely. You’ve made a loving Arthur who loves the son who will kill him. You’ve made a Lancelot – what kind of stupid Lancelot is this one? – who loves his prince more than the prince’s wife he’s always seduced. You’ve made a loving witch-mother in Morgause, a loving foster father in Lot. Look at all these others driven by love into loyalty with one another. Is this your path to Camelot, Merlin? Love instead of conquest?”
How many lives had I lived and how many combinations had I tried to create Camelot and I’d never tried love?
“Yet you don’t love any of them but Arthur,” said the White Druid.
“He’s my work,” I said. “The man wielding the World Sword to remake the world. Why should I love anyone else?”
“Love this one, too,” said the old Druid.
He tapped the tiny figure of Mordred. The murderous child gazed up at me.
“That’s unnatural!” I cried.
The Druid fled from me, shrinking into the toadstool of light on the forest floor, and was gone.
“Wait!” I said to the speck of light. “Do you mean even Mordred could have a place in Camelot?”
The light said nothing.
I wanted to stamp this speck of light and crush it out of the universe.
I tore my clothes in a rabid, howling rage, the air around me shivering cold and hot, until I had reduced myself to a naked, sweating exhaustion, confused, wild, lost.
It was then the tiny figure of Arthur, standing on a leaf, said into my soul, Branwynn, I’ll draw the sword from the stone if you give me my son in peace.
I cried, He’s the fiend who destroys the world! I’ll make you another and better son, a boy with any name but ‘Mordred’…
The sword, said Arthur, for the boy.
I howled a merlinic howl of frustration and anguish that shook the trees and drove falcons scattering in terror across the sky.
Do it now! I cried. Do it now!
* * *
Slaves sweeping from the Brutus stone a year’s debris of animal sacrifice, leaves, and dust looked up startled as I swept onto the rock, my hands full of toy princes. I jumbled my toys out onto the stone beside the gleaming sword and they grew to full human size. The slaves threw down their straw brooms and ran howling for the trees.
I said, “Draw the sword, Arthur, and I give you Mordred!”
I scanned the horizon and saw along a far road the first caravans of celebrants coming for the annual sword-drawing ceremony.
Knights and ladies seemed to spill out of the shivering air, each taking a place appointed by etiquette. The eldermen and elderwomen materialized on their chairs. The long-dying King Gurthrygen lay wheezing on his litter near the sword, with his Saxon Queen Ronwen’s hand on his sweaty forehead and his First Roman Rufus Maximus at his feet, a hand holding his wig in place in the wind. Duke Horst and the three bishops of the Island scrambled up onto the stone and grabbed stools for sitting.
Jumbled below the rock waiting to test the sword were all the leading knights and lady-knights of the country surrounded by a mob of food-hawkers and on-lookers, by itinerant priests for bizarre cults, jostling Saxons anxious for their lord Horst to maneuver his way onto the British throne, and by Bretons, Icelanders, Norwaymen, Gauls, Irish, and Danes. Every one of them hungering to be the Britain-prince who would be king.
Hot noonday sun stirred the reptile blood in Gurthrygen and he wheezed, “Arthur! Let me kiss you.”
The king gave a kiss cold and weak, a dying man’s kiss.
“Take away my pain of living, Brother,” he whispered to Arthur. “Draw the sword. Let me die.”
Horst laughed, saying, “Let the young fool try the sword. It waits for Colgrin. He’s the next lord of Britain and the world, he and his three hundred thousand.”
Gurthrygen reached out from his litter to clutch the hilt of the sword stuck in the Brutus stone. “If three hundred thousand together can pull this, then Colgrin’s welcome to it.”
“You don’t believe he can?” said Horst.
“He can conquer my kingdom but he can’t be its king without drawing this sword.”
A child’s sweet Latin came anonymous from the crowd, speaking out of a hollow place in the air, saying, “Is all my power in my three hundred thousand?”
Men and women screamed and ran from the empty place where the voice spoke. Horst and Ronwen cowered on the stone. Gurthrygen’s lifeguards threw down their weapons and ran.
Into the empty place, Colgrin arrived, a giant withered to the monster size of an ordinary Saxon, his chest tattoos inlaid with gold and rubies, his hair yellow, his eyes colorless.
He was on the stone.
He was beside the sword.
He said to the blade, “Sword of Britain, do you see me now?”
He spread his feet, wrapped his red-clawed hands around the hilt of the sword, and shouted a prayer to Thor in his gargling Saxon.
He hauled on the sword.
The blade would not draw.
He tried again, shouting prayers to Christian and Roman gods this time, crying the names of the defunct gods and goddesses of Greece and Egypt, howling the magic words of a dozen nations, promising human sacrifice, the slaughter of every beast in every field, the burning of kingdoms, razing of continents.
But the sword would not draw.
Colgrin shouted in rage and clapped crooked hands to make thunder in empty air. Falcons dropped dead out of the sky. Colgrin went up into the air in a bloody spout and was gone.
Gurthrygen, out of his litter and clutching the stone-stuck sword to steady himself, cried, “Merlin! What can save us from that?”
I put Arthur’s hands on the sword hilt.
The frightened crowd raised a thin cheer of hope.
The elders groaned and leaned out of their chairs to watch, dragging beards and beads on the stone.
Arthur’s war band with Guenevere, Morgause, and Mordred began a prayer chant.
Arthur hauled on the sword, cheering himself.
It would not draw.
“What do I do to win this sword, Mother?” he cried.
Gurthrygen on his litter groaned, “Child-Merlin, damn you, how much longer must I live to save the throne for this wretched failure? Let me die.”
Knights and ladies swarmed up onto the rock and pushed Arthur aside to try the blade. Bedivere bulled through the swarming crowd, fisting aside men and women, shouting, “The blade’s Arthur’s! Get back, back. Why waste your energy on what will never be yours? Don’t stain it with your touch. It belongs to Arthur. Back, you diseased beasts, back!”
“How is it his,” cried a warrior-princess, “when it won’t draw for him?” She hauled on the sword but could not move it.
Arthur in his misery squatted at the edge of the Brutus stone as though ready to throw himself to the ground and die.
I heard the sword speak to him in its soul’s voice. Excalibur! it said.
Arthur leaped to his feet, misery gone, surprised hope in his face.
Guenevere said to the king, “What do we do with Arthur now?”
Ronwen said, “Throw him to the dogs or the Scots, Husband.”
Horst said, “He’s a good enough prince to be a Saxon warlord. Gift him to Colgrin and you might save your throat, King.”
Gurthrygen said to Horst, “I’ve married your stinking tribe but I don’t make human sacrifices to it, except myself.”
The king turned to me and said, “Take him to the monastery at Fleem. The silent monks. Shove him in a cell there. Shut hi
m up and shut him up.”
The hope Excalibur had put into Arthur fled. “To exile?” he cried. “Brother, no!”
“Fleem will make you a saint or a rogue. When you’re one or the other, come try the sword again. Maybe then I can die.”
“What about me?” cried Guenevere. “I’m betrothed to him.”
“I’ll store you with all the other surplus princesses of the kingdom in the Convent of the Ladies of Lake Avalon.”
“Cage me there?” Guenevere cried, appalled.
Lancelot pushed through the crowd. “My mother’s there. I’ll stand your guard until the king brings you back to Arthur.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “that begins another disaster even before Camelot is made…”
“Leave them all, all, to their private stupidities, Lady Merlin,” said the king. “They’ll have them anyway.”
“But Mordred and Lancelot are the destroyers of…”
“I know all the myths you believe, Child. I also know nothing you want is real until Arthur draws the sword. Leave these human creatures to be human creatures for a span of time. Then you can try again to reorder the world as you want. After Arthur draws the sword.”
Gurthrygen said to his court and the crowd, “You’re all dismissed. Go away.”
He said to me, “Dismiss us, too, Lady.”
* * *
I took the king and me out of ourselves. We squatted in spirit at the edge of the Brutus stone, watching the human chaos around us. Lancelot bickered with Ronwen. Guenevere wept to be condemned to a lady convent. The war band stared gloomily at their war chief crumpled in despair of exile. Horst and his Saxons jeered at each Briton who tried and failed to draw the sword. The Romans watched it all, arrogant and quick-eyed.
“Have I given you everything you want?” Gurthrygen said to me.
“You’ve put him in a monkery, King. You’ve shoved Guenevere and Lancelot into the same bed. How is that giving me what I want?”
“Where else but Fleem to frighten off British and Saxon knives hunting for the man who’s to be the next king?” said Gurthrygen. “Every monk at Fleem is a furious old warrior sentenced there by some forgotten prince. They’ll protect my brother for you. As for Guenevere and Lancelot, let them love. That will end Arthur’s love for her now and spare you the mess she’d make of your Camelot.”
