by Paula Guran
She saw a dog tied to a lamppost, panting and uncomfortable in the heat, and the girl said, “Poor thing.” She gave it water.
The elevator was out of service. The elevator there was always out of service. Halfway up the stairs she saw a hooker, with a swollen face, who stared up at her with yellow eyes. “Here,” said the girl. She gave the hooker the apple.
She went up to the dealer’s floor and she knocked on the door three times. The dealer opened the door and stared at her and said nothing. She showed him the twenty-dollar bill.
Then she said, “Look at the state of this place,” and she bustled in.
“Don’t you ever clean up in here? Where are your cleaning supplies?” The dealer shrugged. Then he pointed to a closet. The girl opened it and found a broom and a rag. She filled the bathroom sink with water and she began to clean the place.
When the rooms were cleaner, the girl said, “Give me the stuff for my mother.”
He went into the bedroom, came back with a plastic bag. The girl pocketed the bag and walked down the stairs.
“Lady,” said the hooker. “The apple was good. But I’m hurting real bad. You got anything?”
The girl said, “It’s for my mother.”
“Please?”
“You poor thing.”
The girl hesitated, then she gave her the packet. “I’m sure my stepmother will understand,” she said.
She left the building. As she passed, the dog said, “You shine like a diamond, girl.”
She got home. Her mother was waiting in the front room. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“I’m sorry,” said the girl. Diamonds dropped from her lips, rattled across the floor.
Her stepmother hit her.
“Ow!” said the girl, a ruby red cry of pain, and a ruby fell from her mouth.
Her stepmother fell to her knees, picked up the jewels. “Pretty,” she said. “Did you steal them?”
The girl shook her head, scared to speak.
“Do you have any more in there?”
The girl shook her head, mouth tightly closed.
The stepmother took the girl’s tender arm between her finger and her thumb and pinched as hard as she could, squeezed until the tears glistened in the girl’s eyes, but she said nothing. So her stepmother locked the girl in her windowless bedroom, so she could not get away.
The woman took the diamonds and the ruby to Al’s Pawn and Gun, on the corner, where Al gave her five hundred dollars no questions asked.
Then she sent her other daughter off to buy drugs for her.
The girl was selfish. She saw the dog panting in the sun, and, once she was certain that it was chained up and could not follow, she kicked at it. She pushed past the hooker on the stair. She reached the dealer’s apartment and knocked on the door. He looked at her, and she handed him the twenty without speaking. On her way back down, the hooker on the stair said, “Please . . . ?” but the girl did not even slow.
“Bitch!” called the hooker.
“Snake,” said the dog, when she passed it on the sidewalk.
Back home, the girl took out the drugs, then opened her mouth to say, “Here,” to her mother. A small frog, brightly colored, slipped from her lips. It leapt from her arm to the wall, where it hung and stared at them unblinking.
“Oh my god,” said the girl. “That’s just disgusting.” Five more colored tree frogs, and one small red, black, and yellow-banded snake.
“Black against red,” said the girl. “Is that poisonous?” (Three more tree frogs, a cane toad, a small, blind white snake, and a baby iguana.) She backed away from them.
Her mother, who was not afraid of snakes or of anything, kicked at the banded snake, which bit her leg. The woman screamed and flailed, and her daughter also began to scream, a long loud scream that fell from her lips as a healthy adult python.
The girl, the first girl, whose name was Amanda, heard the screams and then the silence but she could do nothing to find out what was happening.
She knocked on the door. No one opened it. No one said anything. The only sounds she could hear were rustlings, as if of something huge and legless slipping across the carpet.
When Amanda got hungry, too hungry for words, she began to speak.
“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,” she began. “Thou foster child of Silence and slow Time . . .”
She spoke, although the words were choking her.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know . . .” A final sapphire clicked across the wooden floor of Amanda’s closet room.
The silence was absolute.
Neil Gaiman is a New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books for adults and children, including the novels Neverwhere, Stardust, American Gods, Anansi Boys, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book; and the Sandman series of graphic novels. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is his most recent novel for adults. His latest collection of short fiction, Trigger Warning, and The View from the Cheap Seats: A Collection of Introductions, Essays, and Assorted Writings were published last year. He is the recipient of numerous literary honors, including the Locus and Hugo Awards and the Newbery and Carnegie Medals. Born and raised in England, Gaiman now lives in a house in some woods somewhere in New York State.
Arthurian fiction can sometimes be considered “legend”—if it has somewhat “believable” qualities and at least the perception of historicity—but when Merlin and his wizardry are part of the story, we are in the realm of the wonder tale. Here we have a delightfully alternative version of a historically quite unmagical queen made fantastical because Merlin enters her world.
The Queen and the Cambion
Richard Bowes
1.
“Silly Billy, the Sailor King,” some called King William IV of Great Britain. But never, of course, to his royal face. Then it was always “Yes, sire,” and “As your majesty wishes!”
Because certain adults responsible for her care didn’t watch their words in front of a child, the king’s young niece and heir to his throne heard such things said. It angered her.
Princess Victoria liked her uncle and knew that King William IV always treated her as nicely as a boozy, confused former sea captain of a monarch could be expected to, and much of the time rather better.
Often when she greeted him, he would lean forward, slip a secret gift into her hands, and whisper something like, “Discovered this in the late king your grandfather’s desk at Windsor.”
These generally were small items, trinkets, jewels, mementos, long-ago tributes from minor potentates that he’d found in the huge half-used royal palaces, stuck in his pocket, and as often as not remembered to give to his niece.
The one she found most fascinating was a piece of very ancient parchment that someone had pressed under glass hundreds of years before. This came into her possession one day when she was twelve as King William passed Victoria and her governess on his way to the royal coach.
His Britannic Majesty paused and said in her ear, “It’s a spell, little cub. Put your paw in mine.”
Victoria felt something in her hand and slipped it into a pouch under her cloak while the Sailor King lurched by as though he was walking the quarterdeck of a ship in rough water. “Every ruler of this island has had it and many of us have invoked it,” he mumbled while climbing the carriage steps.
She followed him. “To use in times of great danger to Britain?” she whispered.
He leaned out the window. “Or on a day of doldrums and no wind in the sails,” he roared as if she was up in a crow’s nest, his face red as semi-rare roast beef. “You’ll be the monarch and damn all who’d say you no.”
Victoria didn’t take the gift from under her cloak until she was quite alone in the library of the dark and dreary palace at Kensington. It was where she lived under the intense care of her mother the widowed Duchess of Kent, a German lady, and Sir John Conroy, a handsome enough Irish army officer of good family.
The duchess had appointed Conroy comptroller of her household. Between them they tried to make sure the princess had no independence at all. Victoria really only got out of their sight when King Billy summoned her to the Royal Court.
Nobody at Kensington ever used the library. She went to the far end of that long room lined with portraits of the obscure daughters and younger sons of various British kings, many with their plump consorts and empty-eyed children. Victoria pushed aside a full-length curtain and in the waning daylight looked at the page.
She deciphered a bit of the script and discovered words in Latin that she knew. She saw the name Arturus, which made her gasp. Other words just seemed to be a collection of letters.
Then for fear that someone was coming she hid it away behind a shelf full of books of sermons by long-dead clergymen. It was where she kept some other secret possessions, for she was allowed very little privacy.
She knew the pronunciation for the Latin. By copying several of the other words and showing them to her language tutor, she discovered they were Welsh.
Her music teacher, born in Wales, taught her some pronunciation but became too curious about a few of the words she showed him. Victoria then sought out the old stable master who spoke the language, including some of the ancient tongue, and could read and write a bit.
He was honored and kept her secret when the princess practiced with him. One evening when she had learned all the words and her guardians were busy, Victoria went to the library, took out the page, and slowly read it aloud.
She wasn’t quite finished when a silver light shone on the dusty shelves and paintings. Before her was a mountaintop with the sun shining through clouds. In the air, heading her way, sailed a man who rode the wind as another might a horse.
In his hand was a black staff topped with a dragon’s head. His gray cloak and robes showed the golden moon in all its phases. His white hair and beard whipped about as the wind brought him to the mountaintop.
At the moment he alighted he noticed Victoria. A look of such vexation came over his face that she stumbled on the words and couldn’t immediately repeat them. He and the mountaintop faded from her sight. She, however, remembered what she’d seen.
Victoria was no scholar. But the library at Kensington Palace did contain certain old volumes and she read all she could find about Arthur and especially about Merlin.
An observant child like Victoria knew John Conroy was more than the duchess’s comptroller. She understood it was his idea to keep her isolated and to have her every move watched. From an early age she knew why.
She heard her uncle tell someone in confidence but with a voice that could carry over wind, waves, and cannon fire, “The mad old man, my father, King George that was, had a coach load and more of us sons. But in the event, only my brother Kent before he died produced an heir, fair, square, and legitimate. So the little girl over there stands to inherit the crown when I go under.”
If the king did “go under” before she was eighteen, Victoria knew, her mother would be regent. The Duchess of Kent would control her daughter and the Royal Court, and Conroy would control the duchess.
In the winter before her eighteenth birthday, five years after he gave her the spell, King William became very ill. But even in sickness, he remembered what the duchess and Conroy were up to. And though his condition was grave, he resolutely refused to die.
On May 24, 1837, Victoria would become eighteen. On May 22 the king was in a coma and the duchess and her comptroller had a plan.
From a window of the library at Kensington Palace Victoria saw carriages drive up through a mid-spring drizzle, saw figures in black emerge. She recognized men Conroy knew: several hungry attorneys, a minor cabinet minister, a rural justice, the secretary of a bishop who believed he should have been an archbishop. They gathered in Conroy’s offices downstairs.
Because the servants were loyal, the princess knew that a document had been prepared in which Victoria would cite her own youth and foolishness and beg that her mother (and her mother’s “wise advisor”) be regent until she was twenty-one.
Even those who admired Victoria would not have said the princess was brilliant, but neither was she dull or naïve. She knew how much damage the conspirators would be able to do in three years of regency. She might never become free. All they needed was her signature.
Understanding what was afoot, Victoria went to the shelf where the manuscript page was hidden. She wondered if she was entitled to do this before she was actually the monarch and if the old wizard would be as angry as the last time.
Victoria heard footsteps on the stairs. She looked at the pictures of her obscure and forgotten ancestors all exiled to the library and made her choice.
The door at the other end of the library opened. The duchess and Conroy entered with half a dozen very solemn men.
“My dearest daughter, we have been trying to decide how best to protect you,” said her mother.
By the light of three candles Victoria stood firm and recited the Latin, rolled out the Welsh syllables the way she’d been taught.
Duchess and accomplice exchanged glances. Madness was commonplace in the British dynasty. George III had been so mad that a regent had been appointed.
They started toward Victoria, then stopped and stared. She turned and saw what they did—a great stone hall lit by shafts of sun through tall windows. The light fell on figures including a big man crowned and sitting on a throne.
Victoria saw again the tall figure in robes adorned with golden moons in all their phases. In his hand was the black staff topped with a dragon’s head. This time his hair and beard were iron gray, not white. He shot the king a look of intense irritation. The king avoided his stare and seemed a bit amused.
Merlin strode out of the court at Camelot and the royal hall vanished behind him. Under his breath he muttered, “A curse upon the day I was so addled as to make any oath to serve at the beck and call of every halfwit or lunatic who planted a royal behind on the throne of Britain.”
Then he realized who had summoned him to this dim and dusty place, and his face softened just a bit. Not a monarch yet to judge by her attire. But soon enough she would be.
Victoria gestured toward the people gaping at him. Merlin was accustomed to those who tried to seize power using bloody axes, not pieces of paper. But a wizard understands the cooing of the dove, the howl of the wolf, and the usurper’s greed.
He leveled his staff and blue flames leaped forth.
The documents Conroy held caught fire, and he dropped them. The red wig on one attorney and the ruffled cuffs of the bishop’s secretary also ignited. Since none of them would ever admit to having been there none would ever have to describe how they fled, the men snuffing out flames, barely pausing to let the duchess go first.
When they were gone, Merlin erased the fire with a casual wave. Easy enough, he thought. Nothing like Hastings or the Battle of Britain. Shortly he’d be back in Camelot giving the king a piece of his mind.
“Lord Merlin . . .” the young princess began, “We thank you.”
A wizard understands a bee and a queen equally. And both can understand a wizard. Merlin spoke and she heard the word “Majesty” in her head. He dropped to one knee and kissed her hand. For young Victoria this was their first meeting. For Merlin it was not.
Time was a path that crossed itself again and again and memory could be prophecy. Later in her life, earlier in his, this queen would summon him.
He had a certain affection for her. But in his lifetime he’d already served all four of the Richards, five or six of the Henrys, the first Elizabeth, the ever-tiresome Ethelred, Saxon Harold, Norman William, and a dozen others.
He waited for her to dismiss him. But Victoria said in a rush of words, “I read that you are a cambion born of Princess Gwenddydd by the incubus Albercanix. She became a nun after your birth.” The princess was enthralled.
Merlin met her gaze, gave the quick smile a busy adult has for a child. One trick th
at always distracted monarchs was to show how they came to have power over such a one as he.
The wizard waved his hand and Victoria saw the scene after Mount Badon, the great victory which made Arthur king of Britain. That day Merlin ensorcelled seven Saxon wizards, Arthur slew seven Saxon kings, and may well have saved his sorcerer’s life.
For this princess Merlin mostly hid the gore away. He showed her Arthur and himself younger, flushed with victory and many cups of celebratory mead as in gratitude the wizard granted the king any wish within his power to give.
“Neither of us knew much law so it wasn’t well thought out,” he explained, and showed himself swearing an oath to come forevermore to the aid of any monarch of Britain who summoned him. “But my time is precious and must not be wasted,” he told her.
Even this mild version left Victoria round-eyed with wonder, as was Merlin’s intent. For certain monarchs his message could be so clear and terrifying that Richard III had gone to his death on Bosworth Field and Charles I had let his head be whacked off without trying to summon him.
For a moment wizard and princess listened and smiled at the sounds downstairs of carriages fleeing into the night.
He bowed, asked if there was anything more she desired. When she could think of nothing he bowed once more, stepped backward through the bookshelves and the wall of Kensington Palace.
She watched as the great hall of the castle with its knights and king appeared and swallowed up Merlin.
2.
“I am ruled by our young queen and happily so, as is every man of fair mind in this land,” said Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first prime minister.
And for a brief time that was true.
Melbourne could be a bit of a wizard, producing parliamentary majorities out of nothing, or making them disappear without a trace. A few years into young Victoria’s reign, gossip held she was in the palm of his hand.
