Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold

by Paula Guran

  In fact she found him charming, but with her mother left behind at Kensington Palace and John Conroy exiled to the Continent, the headstrong young queen was led by no one.

  The dusty castles and palaces in London and Windsor were lately the haunts of drunken and sometimes-deranged kings. She opened them up and gathered visiting European princes and her own young equerries and ladies-in-waiting for late-night feasts and dances.

  Then Lord Melbourne explained to her that the people of Britain were unhappy with their monarch. “The time has come,” he said, “for you to find a husband, produce an heir, and ensure stability. The choice of a groom will be yours, an opportunity and a peril. Like every marriage.”

  Victoria’s first reaction was anger. But she knew that few women of any rank got to choose their husbands. Her choices were wide. The eligible princes of Europe paraded through Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.

  Victoria and the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia danced the wild mazurka. Young equerries of her staff had her picture on lockets next to their hearts in the hope that she might decide to marry into her nobility and select one of them.

  The nation was fascinated with its legendary past and so was its queen. She dreamed of sending the candidates on quests, having them do great deeds. But she knew that wasn’t possible.

  Victoria’s resentment of the task made her unable to decide among the candidates. Naturally, everyone grew impatient—the potential grooms, the government, and the people of England.

  As the situation worsened, the queen considered invoking Merlin, but she felt intimidated. Then Melbourne himself said the future of Britain hung on her decision. She thought this surely was a moment to summon the wizard.

  One evening in her private chambers she drew out the parchment and ran through the invocation. Immediately the light of the oil lamps in her room was drowned by sunlight shining on ocean waves, pouring through windows of clearest glass into a room blue as the sea around it.

  Despite his robes with the golden moon in all its phases, it took her a few moments to recognize the tall figure with dark hair and beard standing over a giant tortoise that rested on an oaken table.

  Victoria watched fascinated as he stopped what he was doing and said good-bye effusively but quickly to a figure with liquid green eyes and saucy silver back flippers. The Sea King’s Daughter and her palace disappeared as he strode into Victoria’s private drawing room.

  Merlin in the full flush of his wizardry had just murmured, “Gryphons and Guilfoils, marjoram and unicorn mange, the heart of Diana’s own rabbit soaked in the blood of hummingbirds from the Emperor’s gardens in far Cathay . . .”

  Then he’d felt the summons, turned, seen Victoria, and lost track of the spell he was working. But a summons when it came had to be obeyed.

  It could originate at any point in the long history of Britain’s monarchy from the Battle of Badon on. And each caught him at a moment in his life when he was deep into weaving magic and casting spells. At his most powerful he was at his most vulnerable.

  He stepped out of a place where each drinking cup had a name and every chair an ancestry into a room with walls covered by images of flowers and pictures of bloodless people. The floor was choked with furniture and every single surface was covered with myriad small objects.

  Merlin had encountered Victoria when he was just a youth and she was middle-aged. That meeting would, of course, not have happened to her yet.

  Now in her private apartments at Windsor Palace he knelt before Victoria, whose expression was full of curiosity about the tortoise, the palace, the creature with the flippers, and him.

  But what she said was, “I brought you here because my prime minister and my people have decided I must marry for the good of Britain. I need your help to make the right decision.”

  And he told her as patiently as he could, “In the palace of the Sea King’s Daughter, as an act of charity I was working a spell to restore the zest of life to an ancient tortoise. It houses within itself the soul of Archimedes, the great mage of legendary times. This is the sort of favor I hope someone might someday perform if I ever needed it.

  “It was all about to come together: ingredients at hand, incantation memorized, pentagrams and quarter-circles drawn, the tortoise staring up with hope in its eyes.”

  She sat amazed by this and by the man, dark-bearded and thirty years younger than when she’d seen him a few years before.

  Victoria dreamed of turning her kingdom into a kind of Camelot, a land of castles, enchanted woods, knights in armor, and maidens under sleeping spells floating down rivers. She looked at Merlin now and thought of how perfectly he would fit into such a world.

  Merlin understood. He was young, vain, and used to being wanted. He found himself liking her, but memories of the complications and quarrels after an extended tumble with Elizabeth I reminded him how unwise such liaisons could be.

  His interest at that moment was getting back as quickly as possible to the life he’d had to leave.

  Victoria watched him stand at the floor-length windows and stare out into the night. When he gestured, one window blew open.

  Any wizard is a performer and Merlin intended to bedazzle her. He held out his right arm, candlelight danced, and a bird appeared. The shadow of a raptor rested on his wrist and seemed to flicker like a flame.

  Merlin had summoned a questing spirit, the ghost of the Lord of Hawks. He whistled a single note and it became solid, all angry, unblinking eyes and savage beak.

  The wizard filled a clear crystal bowl with water and said, “Your majesty, give me the name of a suitor.”

  She named the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia. Merlin held the hawk near the bowl which was so clear that the water seemed to float in air. He whispered the grand duke’s name and looked at the surface of the water. On it he saw Alexander’s fate, a winter scene with blood on the snow. An anarchist had hurled the bomb that tore the Tsar apart.

  Merlin knew Victoria was not a vicious soul. If she saw this particular piece of the future it would be hard for her to keep it a secret from the Tsar-to-be.

  And it was best not to upset the balance of the world. Undoing that would require more magic than he had.

  So he looked at the young queen and shook his head—this one was not suitable. She looked but he had already cleared away the image.

  “Who is your majesty’s next suitor?”

  Victoria spoke the name, Merlin relayed it to his medium, and the image of a mildly retarded prince of Savoy floated in the bowl. He shook his head, she looked relieved, and they ran through some more European royalty.

  Merlin knew the man he was looking for, the one she actually had married.

  He’d seen pictures galore at that time in her future and his past when he’d been summoned by this queen.

  She stared at Merlin as she smiled and said, “Lord Alfred Paget.” This was the most dashing of her young courtiers. A royal equerry of excellent family, he made no secret of his romantic love for his queen.

  She in turn was charmed and more than a bit taken with Paget. He would be her choice if she decided to marry one not of royal birth.

  But Merlin knew that wasn’t the name he was looking for. When an image floated on the water, it actually made Merlin grin. He let Victoria see the once dashing Paget fat, self-satisfied, and seventy years old.

  “Oh dear. This will not do!” she said with a horrified expression. Then she and the wizard laughed.

  This search for a husband was far more pleasant than much of what he did in service to the Badon oath. Merlin had seen an unfaithful royal princess killed in Paris by flashing lights and a willful, runaway machine. He had visited a distant time when the king of Britain was not much more than a picture that moved.

  Victoria gave the name and title of Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. A glance at the face floating on the water was all Merlin needed. This was the one he’d been waiting for.

  Albert would die long before Victoria did and she
would mourn him for the rest of her life. A hardier husband might be in order. But Albert was the one she was destined to marry and that was how it would be.

  The image floating in the bowl was flattering. Merlin invited the queen to look, indicated his approval, and congratulated her.

  His task done, Merlin prepared to leave. Victoria realized this and looked stricken.

  Anyone, be they human or cambion, enjoys being found attractive. And to have won the heart of a queen was better still. Merlin bowed deeply to the monarch and wished her great happiness in her marriage.

  As he strode out of her presence, Victoria saw the tortoise that contained the soul of Archimedes and the sun dancing on the waves outside the palace and the lovely daughter of the one who rules the tides.

  The queen noted every detail and wondered if her kingdom could ever contain anything so beautiful. She wrote a letter to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha as she thought of Merlin.

  3.

  “Twenty-five years into her reign, her majesty has abandoned her responsibilities.”

  “Since poor Prince Albert died, I hear she wears nothing but mourning clothes . . .”

  “The processes of government demand the public presence of a monarch.”

  “. . . and talks to the trees at Windsor Palace, like her daft grandfather did . . .”

  “No one in her royal household, her government, and especially her family dares to broach the subject to her.”

  “. . . curtsies to them trees as well, I got told.”

  Isolated as a monarch is, Victoria heard the nonsense her people were saying. She knew they said she talked to her late husband as she walked the halls of Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle, of Balmoral in Scotland and Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.

  And here they were right, sometimes she did. More than anything else, what she had lost with the death of the man to whom she’d been married for twenty years was the one person in Britain who could speak to her as an equal. She still spoke to him, but there was no reply. She felt utterly alone.

  At Osborne House after a day with little warmth in the sun she stood at a window with a wind coming in from the sea and thought of Merlin.

  Indeed with its graceful Italianate lines, fountains, and views of the water, Osborne was Victoria’s attempt to evoke the glimpses she’d caught of the palace of the Sea King’s Daughter. She envied that royal family as she did no other.

  In the years of her marriage she had sometimes remembered the handsome wizard of their last meeting and always with a pang of guilt. It almost felt as if she had betrayed the marriage. In her widowhood, though, she thought about him more often.

  That evening at Osborne, Victoria demanded she be completely alone in her private apartments. The queen debated with herself as to whether this was a time of danger to the crown or, as her uncle had said, a day of doldrums and no wind in the sails.

  Victoria finally decided it was a good deal of both. She took the glass-bound page out of its hiding place and read the summons aloud. Immediately she saw half-naked people in savage garb looking up at a huge picture that moved. It showed some kind of carriage without horses racing down a dark, smooth road.

  As monarch of a forward-looking nation, the queen had been shown zoetropes and magic lanterns. This appeared far more like real life, except that it moved too fast. Her royal train was always an express and its engine could attain speeds of almost fifty miles an hour. But that was as nothing to what this machine seemed to do.

  A man, who looked familiar, like a distant cousin perhaps, sat in it smiling. “In this driver’s seat everyone is a king,” he said.

  The queen couldn’t know that she’d just had a glimpse of a distant successor.

  In the year 2159 King Henry X had on a permanent loop in his offices what he called “My Agincourt.” The great triumph of his reign was being named spokesperson for Chang’an/Ford/Honda, the world’s mightiest automaker.

  Victoria saw that the people who had been looking up at the image were now frozen, staring at a figure running straight toward her.

  This one had long dark hair but no sign of a beard, was tall but not quite as tall as the Merlin she remembered. He looked very young. Instead of robes he wore what Victoria identified as some form of men’s underclothes, a thing about which she made a point of knowing nothing. As he stepped into her room she saw emblazoned on the shirt the lion and the unicorn, the royal crest, directly over his heart.

  Victoria had sons and she placed this boy as sixteen at most. She stared at him and said, “You’re just a child. Who are you? Where are your proper clothes? And how did you get here?”

  Merlin, after a moment of surprise, looked this small woman in black directly in the eyes, which none had done since Albert. Victoria heard him say,

  “I am Merlin, the cambion of Albercanix and Gwenddydd. I was apprenticed to Galapas, the Hermit of the Crystal Cave, a disagreeable old tyrant. “One morning, running through my spells, I found myself summoned by Henry X, king of Britain. I was working a great magic on his courtiers when you called me here.”

  He glanced down at the soft clothes and shoes which still puzzled him. “And this is the livery of that king.” He seemed confused.

  When the young wizard first arrived in 2159, King Henry peered at him over a glass and said, “Not what I expected. Just curious as to whether this old piece of parchment actually worked—needed something to remind myself and others of the old mystique of royalty. Perhaps you could turn a few advertising people into mice. It’ll teach them to respect me and the monarchy in its last days.”

  Victoria saw in this confused, gangling lad the man she’d encountered. The queen realized that King Arthur and the Badon Oath were well in his future and that he didn’t understand what had happened to him. It occurred to her that the child of a demon and a princess who became a nun might be as separate and alone as she was.

  “Your attire simply won’t do,” she said.

  Merlin discovered that unlike King Henry this monarch was greatly respected. All the servants deferred to her and some courtiers were even afraid.

  The queen had a trusted footman and pageboy dress this stranger in clothes her sons had outgrown. Merlin hated the infinite buttons and hooks, the itching flannel and stiff boots.

  Victoria passed him off as a young visiting kinsman, “From the Anhalt-Latvia cousins.”

  Merlin remembered King Henry, so full of strange potions and drinks he sometimes had trouble standing and often couldn’t remember who Merlin was.

  The young wizard had tried not to show how bedazzled he was by the magic of that court, lights that came and went with the wave of a hand, cold air that seeped out of walls to cool a kingdom where it was always hot outdoors, unseen musicians who beat drums, sang, played harps of incredible variety through the day and night without tiring.

  The king’s entourage was so amazed by Merlin’s spells of invisibility and the way he could turn them into frogs and back into courtiers that they lost any interest in their monarch and flocked around him.

  They persuaded Merlin to surrender his own rough robes and gave him shorts, T-shirts, and soft shoes like everyone else in the kingdom. He had never worn clothes with legs or felt fabric as light.

  All he knew for certain was that he didn’t want to return to the Crystal Cave and the Hermit. He spent some amazing days and light-filled nights in the court of 2159.

  Victoria, everyone agreed, seemed more cheerful since the appearance of her strange relative. The two of them took walks together and he showed her nixies riding in on the morning waves and sprites dancing by moonlight. He turned her pug dog into a trained bear and turned it back again.

  Merlin didn’t understand this world in which palaces and castles all looked utterly indefensible, ruins had been built just to be ruins, and the queen’s knights seemed an unlikely band of warriors without a missing eye or gouged-out nose among them.

  On their walks Victoria sometimes ran on about wanting to create
a court full of art and poetry like King Arthur at Camelot. It amazed her that he understood none of this. So she told him the bits and pieces she had learned over the years about the Badon Oath and Arthur’s kingdom. The young mage was fascinated.

  Once she made Merlin sit through a chamber music concert and talked afterward about “The melodies of the wonderful Herr Mendelssohn to whom I could listen forever.” He told her about the court of her descendent Henry X where invisible musicians played all day and all night.

  He could have told her more about the future of her kingdom, but out of respect and even affection he never much mentioned her descendant. Never described seeing King Henry in a false crown, armor, and broadsword quaff “Royal English Ale” from a horn cup and signify his approval. Never said how he’d sampled the ale and found it so vile he spat it out. When he finished that endorsement, the king had turned and seen the shocked expression on young Merlin’s face. He said, “I’m the last, you know. I’m preserved in so many formats that they’ll never need another king for their ads. I’ve no children that I know of and no one is interested in succeeding me. I’m sorry I let you see all this.” He started to cry great drunken tears.

  Merlin walked away as quickly as he could. He strode into the room where his majesty’s greatest promotional moments played on a screen. He didn’t know where he was going but he headed for a door and the blazing-hot outdoors.

  When some of his majesty’s courtiers tried to stop him he froze them in place with a spell. At that moment of his magic Victoria’s summons rescued him.

  For that and her stories he would always be grateful. But he was young, male, and a wizard and this was a queen’s court with many young women attached to it.

  Merlin had a fine rumpus of a rendezvous in a linen closet with an apprentice maid of the wardrobe and another more leisurely meeting with a young lady-in-waiting in her chamber.

  Spells to blank the memories of passersby didn’t quite dispel the stories. The queen steadfastly refused to hear this gossip.