by Maples, Kit
Guenevere motioned to the girl to keep silence. “The spell is cast,” she whispered.
“Spare him! Spare me my king!” the girl cried.
A cold wind swept across the water. The galley’s black sail boomed, filling. The ship drifted away toward gloom.
“Where do you take my king?” the child shouted.
“To Avalon,” Vivien said.
She put into the king’s mouth a silver coin to pay his soul’s journey to paradise.
“It’s done,” she said.
The galley faded into blackness.
Arthur’s spirit created itself out of the atomos of air, standing whole and clean on the lake water.
“Here, Mother Merlin,” he said to the girl, putting Excalibur into the girl’s hands. “Keep my sword. Wait for me.”
The king’s atomos scattered.
The child was alone on the muddy lakeshore, the World Sword in her hands.
“How bitterly lonely,” the girl cried to Excalibur, “to be just us two against the world!”
“We are three.”
The girl turned at the sound of the voice, swinging out the sword she was barely strong enough to hold. “Who speaks?” she cried.
“I do,” said the White Druid, rising out of the black river water.
“Traitor!” the girl shouted, filling with hate, fear, rage, and confusion. “I’ve lived a hundred and forty-five lives for you, Old Fraud, creating Arthurs and Camelots. None of them had the power to stand against the world’s evil. You’ve betrayed me – life’s all betrayal!”
Out of her weeping misery, the girl shouted, “Let me kill you. Let me kill myself!”
She raised Excalibur.
“But there’s no more life – the world is done,” said the Druid. “Look around you. The cogs that drive the sun across the planet have stopped. Time is over. There’s no time left to kill or be killed.”
The girl looked across the dead flat river, the unmoving trees, the silent land, the battle-corpses of too many thousands that had ceased to drip and rot.
She cried, “Jesu! Gwynn! Accept my soul!” and shoved Excalibur into her heart.
But she could not die.
She swung the sword at the White Druid, shouting, “Spirit of scorn, I’ll torment you as you’ve tormented me so many lifetimes!”
The White Druid staggered and fell to hands and knees on the black surface of the river. Blood came out of him in silver streams. He clapped his hands to his wound to cure himself of death and sank into the water, saying, “I pity you, Greatest Merlin.”
“Pity me?” the girl cried, furious, sloshing into the water after the Druid. “Then free me of Camelot! Let me die!”
The Druid was gone.
She heard from out of the atomos of water bumping each to the next across all the distance from Avalon, You’ve failed and must live again!
Black night, black river, black war-field around her, all withered together into a uniform emptiness without up or down, left or right, good or not-good, timeless, empty of life and hope.
The girl shouted into it, “If I must try one more time, then give me a better place to begin!”
The water said, “Start time, Lady Merlin – live again!”
She felt the hot breath of demons laughing behind her shoulder.
She waited with Excalibur for whatever was to come next.
Nothing came.
The cycle of the world could not change. The move-less cogs that propel the sun around the planet had stuck the age here on this battlefield after the moment of Merlin’s failure. After the fall of Camelot. After the death of the High King.
But Merlin the girl still waited, with all of a child’s hope and hunger, staring across the bleak landscape, until she had to cry out, “Is there no relief for me from Fate?”
Fate said nothing.
“It’s too hard! Too cruel!” she cried.
Night and silence.
“Is there no other merlin to save the world?”
No answer.
Then she groaned, once more, as she had one hundred and forty-five times before, “I accept!”
Still no change in the world. Time could not begin.
The child Merlin swung Excalibur, the sword’s gleam lighting a stone on a hilltop in a copse of oak trees. Arthur! said the sword.
Dawn sun made a beacon of white through the black-blood sky. Morning followed bright and sudden, rushing over the land, waking birds to titter and breezes to stir.
Merlin heard down the wooded slope of the hill the ribald shouts of men and women at joust, the happy cheers of children. She pushed back the leaves and saw the battlers there dressed like Roman provincials, whacking each other with swords and shields, shouting half-Roman oaths.
What country is this? she nearly cried out. Not Wales or Cornwall – no diving falcons, no black mountains, no green hills and healing mist.
This was a rich and rolling country, thickly wooded, full of summer. Not some cold corner of the Britain into which the Saxon horde had shoved the remnants of the Britons after the fall of Camelot.
No! This was Britain before the Saxons. Happy, ignorant, barbarian Britain. Still too distant from the center of the world to feel the age teetering toward anarchy in the prolonged dying of Mother Rome.
She heard a voice nearby and saw a young knight in patched armor.
“Arthur!” the young man shouted. “Find me a sword!”
“Yes, Brother,” said a boy, and he went through the crowd and the trees bawling for the loan of a sword.
The boy came up the hill and saluted the merlin standing by the sacrificial stone. “Hail, Young Mother Merlin!” he said, “give me your sword.”
Here was the start of a new cycle! Of new hope!
More, it was the start of a new love. Arthur, who had loved Guenevere who would betray him and loved his sons who could betray him, had taught Merlin to love, too.
To love in dream and desperation that one woman, one man could change the world by love.
That is the key to Camelot.
I drew Excalibur from its fleece scabbard and said to the blade and the boy, “Here’s your Destiny!”
I drove the sword hissing into the stone.
The great cogs that drive the sun across the planet bit into each other and the world began to turn.
Artyr, I said, calling Arthur by his soul-name, come, draw this sword.
The End
For more by Kit Maples, visit http://amzn.to/1lZstpm
