King Arthur's Sister in Washington's Court

by Kim Iverson Headlee

  An anguished grimace contorted his face. “This thrice-curst battle proves England is done with me. For more than a score of years, I gave unto her my utmost. It was not enough.”

  I laid a hand on his breastplate, over his heart. “Your utmost was, is, and ever shall be enough. May God strengthen your body, your heart, and your spirit, Arthur my king and my beloved brother, and may He guide you safely beyond.”

  He barely had enough time to nod and prepare to meet Mordred’s blade. I snapped my fingers to conjure a suit of armor over Ambrose’s body—noting to retrieve his pistol after the fray and throw it down the nearest well; no sense in allowing that bit of twenty-first-century lunacy to be introduced into the sixth—and dived under the table.

  The spell shattered. The warriors clashed. The objects of peace fell.

  Accidentally I jostled Bishop Gildas, who was too busy stammering out prayers to pay me any heed. In the off chance that two pray-ers might prove more effective than one, I added my fervent pleas to the bishop’s.

  Nothing worked.

  “Alas this unhappy day!” I heard Arthur exclaim as Excalibur chimed in the performance of its deadly work.

  Men screamed and collapsed with fearsome clatters of arms and armor, the survivors screamed in triumph, more challenges belled out and were just as loudly accepted, and the battle surged outside the tent to envelop the armies, heralded by the blaring of trumpets and horns upon both sides.

  Thousands more men would die, kingdoms would fall, famine and pestilence and poverty and chaos would ravage the land; I foresaw everything as clearly as if it were unfolding before my very eyes, even though I could see nothing from beneath that camp table except the bloodied and cooling bodies of Ambrose and the first few fallen knights. And it was all. My. Fault.

  My fault for having dragged Ambrose here, my fault for failing to prevent the knights from fighting, my fault for not having dealt with Ambrose in that future time, my fault for being such a poor sister to Arthur in this one; obsessed with my zeal to exact revenge, I had traveled forward with the intent of destroying the Yankee’s world…but in the end, I had destroyed mine.

  In the Yankee’s chronicle, an adder had started this battle. Any other day, I might have named that sly serpent Ambrose; in sooth the adder was me. To quote a poet whose birth lay a thousand years distant, “O, I am fortune’s fool!” I could imagine Fortuna enjoying a grand sardonic laugh at my expense.

  Never mind Launcelot and Guenever and Mordred and Gawaine and everyone else whose lust, treason, avarice, and bellicose natures had labored toward crafting this last battlefield. Had I lived up to being “Morgan the Wise,” I could have headed off all those issues years ago by effecting real solutions rather than being the nexus of gridlock in perpetuating the problem. I chose vengeance over wisdom and led us all to the edge of ruin, to the very point where one naked—if well-intentioned and justified—sword could topple us into the abyss.

  The way down was very long, very steep, and very, very dark.

  Crushed under this burden of guilt, I hugged knees to chest, threw back my head, and uttered a piercing wail that burst, unabated, from the bowels of my soul. I did not know I could make such a chilling noise, and it frightened me,—the more so because I sat powerless to stop it even to inhale until it had played out its entire wretched breadth.

  Chapter XLIII:

  The Battle on the Salisbury Plain

  THE DAY ARTHUR fought Mordred on the Salisbury Plain was the worst day imaginable. If you have ever suffered the misfortune of fighting in a war—not dropping bombs from on high, or pushing a button to launch mass destruction, or “flying a desk,” or directing armies from the safety of a command bunker—but have looked your enemy in the eye, seen his murderous intent, and killed him before he could kill you, only then can you imagine what I witnessed. If not, then words cannot possibly suffice, but for the sake of completeness, I shall have a go.

  I stayed inside the parlay tent. Since none of the soldiers who had been posted outside knew of my presence, and since every other able body—including Bishop Gildas—had vacated it, there remained no need for anyone to enter. If someone chancing a glance in the tent’s direction thought it odd that the candles were still burning within, they were too engrossed with the gruesome task of kill-or-be-killed to pay that anomaly any mind. I invoked a light-scattering spell to diffuse shadows my figure might cast against the tent’s sides; due to my most recent magical failures, I was not altogether certain that would shield me from discovery, but it proved effective enough.

  I needed to remain hidden until the moment when my original self had departed this world sometime after the battle. I was not certain of the precise time but was forced to, as people will begin saying some fifteen centuries hence, “wing it,” which in my case consisted of alternately working to update this chronicle and peering outside to assess the battle’s progress.

  The vista was a sea of corpses, men and horses mainly, with a few of Arthur’s favored fighting hounds lying scattered here and there, some still grasping a limb or other chunk of flesh in their frozen jaws. That was the worst of it—the severed limbs and heads; whole corpses are far easier to behold, for they might not in fact be dead, but could at any moment rise up, dust themselves, bind their bloodied flesh, and move on. Where the body appears intact, one can always hope.

  Upon further reflection and observation, I must correct myself. The maimed are the worst to bear, for no healing arts in heaven or on earth can help them, and their cries and pleas and moans grow fainter as their lifeblood ebbs until they achieve blessed silence.

  This is my day: scribble some words, watch the armies shove each other this way and that, leaving more dead in their wake like terrible huge death factories, grieve for the sheer waste of it all, and scribble some more. The carnage robbed me of hunger, and my thirst I slaked from a dropped wineskin in the tent, though I was feeling as dry as the bishop’s parchment upon which I was writing before I could force myself to partake, because the wine’s color was blood-red. I could not drink it without gagging.

  As afternoon surrendered to evening, the active sounds of fighting diminished, and I doused all but one of the candles to prevent my discovery by some battle-mad survivor bent upon obliterating all living beings in his path. Hunkered beneath my cloak, cradling the last light, I continued writing and grieving.

  Night has fallen. The moon has not yet risen, and combat has ceased. Not even the night creatures have mustered the courage to bestir themselves. I do not blame them.

  If I strain just so, I can hear the almost-dead. They are not moaning or crying or pleading for help. To a man, they are calling my name, and, to a man, they are accusing me. I do not blame them, either.

  Yes, I am most likely going mad. Slowly, moment by moment, drop by drop, like blood from a nicked artery, mad. Lapped to the lips in corpses, every last mother’s son of whom blames me and me alone for his untimely and brutal and senseless death, who on earth—or in heaven or hell, for that matter—would not?

  The madness of grief is a wearying business. My arms feel like leaden clubs. Of my legs I feel nothing, having been cramped in the same pose for ever so many hours as the night creeps on and on, reluctantly, as if it knows that the coming day will be the most wretched in the history of time,—past, present, or future.

  I know I should sleep, must sleep, to conserve my strength and renew my mind and perhaps lend whatever help I may, come dawn, even if it is only to assist the dying into oblivion. I have killed many a man in my lifetime, even a man not yet born, and for many reasons; but this would be the most valid reason of all—the kindest, in any event.

  I must have slept, for it is lighter now, the harsh orange light of decrepit afternoon, and I swelter underneath this cloak. No, I have not lit myself on fire; the candle burned itself out as I dozed. I have woken because the ground shakes—a mounted company approaches! It must be the escort of my original self (have I mentioned, lately, how much I despise time travel?),
for I do not recall having seen any other mounted parties when I arrived the first time.

  Time! Time to rise up, shake loose the webs of despair binding my brow and blinding my eyes, and see if I can yet resurrect a ray of hope from this dark disaster! Fortune’s fool I may be, but I am also King Arthur’s sister, the Queen of Gore: healer, sorceress, and a force with which Fortuna must reckon.

  Let the record end here.

  Chapter XLIV:

  A Postscript by the Scribe

  I, QUEEN MORGAN’S scribe, must finish the writing of her tale in the discharge of my final oath to my sovereign lady. When at last I bestirred me to look up from the reading thereof, the raft that had been built by cause of her command was departed, as was the queen and her brother the king, and there was no agreement among the queen’s retainers as to whence they had gone. Some said she had borne King Arthur to the chapel of a nearby hermitage for to be buried; others, that she would hie him to Avalon for to heal him of his grievous wound. One man reported the queen’s final words to be thus: “Pray for thy rightful liege lord, King Arthur, and for his humble servant and sister, that I might with the aid of the Lord God help Arthur to become the Once and Future King.” No other person laid claim to hearing these words, but he who reported them is a man of high intelligence and blameless character and so, as mysterious as this utterance may seem to any who read it, I have included it.

  Upon this sole fact everyone did agree: that King Arthur was yet alive as he lay upon the raft, his wounded head cradled upon Queen Morgan’s lap as she stroked it with her hands and bathed it with her tears. Of all her retainers, she chose but three ladies to escort her and her royal brother on this dolorous voyage.

  Not knowing what else to do, those that remained and I repaired to Castle Gore for to await tidings.

  Into the midst of this terrible time of waiting came a visitor, a comely young woman with pale yellow hair and a shrimp-colored dress that seemed like a lone light of heaven compared with the black garments we each of us wore in deference to our departed monarchs. ’Twas the queen she sought. Being he who knew most regarding our sovereign lady’s final moments among us, I received the lady, who was a stranger to mine eyes and yet not to my mind, and I revealed to her that which I have already written herein.

  “Alas, have I arrived too late, then?”

  “So it would seem, Lady Clarice,” I replied. “A fortnight and more hath passed with no word from our queen. Thou art well come to share our vigil in Castle Gore. An thou be the queen’s sometime companion, she shall not be wroth to see thee, methinks.”

  She pondered these words and said, “I thank thee most kindly, but nay. An the queen be yet about her work for to heal King Arthur—and of a cert she must be thus engaged, else she would have returned ere now—then I must needs depart unto my…demesnes.” In her dexter hand she held a small object. ’Twas fashioned of the same fey metal that bound Queen Morgan’s chronicle; easily could I espy this likeness, for the chronicle lay upon the table before me. Of a sudden, Lady Clarice asked, “Good scribe, may I crave a boon of thee?”

  “An it lie within my power to grant thee, aye, my lady.”

  “I should like to take Queen Morgan’s history and guard it against the day of her return. It wouldst lie unmolested, e’en for centuries, an that be the queen’s will.”

  Of late it had become an especial concern of mine for to find safe stowage for this precious royal tome; brigands were become ever so much bolder in the absence of sovereigns to hold their destructive evil at bay. I asked, “Art a sorceress, then, that thou canst do such a thing?”

  “Queen Morgan’s apprentice,” she said lightly.

  Though the queen never had retained an apprentice of my acquaintance, of a sudden my feeble and grief-smitten wits cleared as I recalled my reading of Queen Morgan’s chronicle and Lady Clarice’s doings therein. ’Twas never wise to cross a practitioner of the magical arts, regardless of the practitioner’s rank. I granted Lady Clarice my consent on the condition that she permit me a day for to finish my work upon the chronicle, to which she agreed.

  “For time,” she replied with a smile as mysterious as the midnight sky, “be ever my ally.”

  It seemed to me good, right, and proper to allow the Lady Clarice’s strange words to number among the last recorded herein.

  THE END OF THE MANUSCRIPT

  Final P.S. by C.C.

  DAWN BROKE AS he laid the Manuscript aside. I watched the cheap bleacher seats lighten by degrees—many degrees—awaiting his response. There would be a game this evening, but only a fraction of those seats and not many more throughout the rest of the ballpark would be filled. Here the crashed global economy was to blame. Most teams were just scraping by these days, and only because the players loved the game so much that they’d agreed to have their salaries slashed. This I knew because we’d discussed it when he had recruited me (owing to my medieval expertise and to my association with President Hinton for procuring another of Ambrose’s time-folding devices) to find her. But I had failed. Maybe she’d cast some sort of magical shielding; I don’t know. After leaving Castle Gore, I sailed that damned river from one end to the other, stopping at every village and hut that had a dock, but no one knew—or claimed to know—a thing about any vessel bearing two royals and three attendants. She was my friend, too, and my failure hurt like hell.

  He sat in her chair, behind her desk, in her office by right of his being appointed owner by unanimous assent of the other owners in her absence, fingers steepled, his gaze aimed at some arbitrary point past their apex. At last he said, so softly I could barely hear him—

  “Please forgive me.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Carter?”

  When he smiled at me, I could see at once why Morgan had been so smitten by him. “It’s Sandy, please.” His visage turned serious. “I need her, Clarice. Yes, so does the team, and God knows the world could do with someone like King Arthur to put everything right again, but I sent you to bring Morgan back for me. I put you into danger for selfish reasons, and I am so very sorry. I hope you can forgive me.”

  “It was my choice, I had the expertise, and I was aware of the risks—and I know what you two meant to each other—so I don’t see that there’s anything to forgive. I wish I could have—”

  I broke off because the time-folding device, which I had been (yeah, stupidly, but there you have it) clutching all the while he was reading the Manuscript, had begun growing warm again—I mean, much warmer than my hand alone could have done. My heart lurched; I thought I’d somehow activated it.

  Its light was flashing green, rather than red.

  Sandy, who’d been staring at me slack-jawed, as if I’d sprouted a third arm, said:

  “Hurry, pull it off!”

  “I can’t! It’s already bonded.” A thought occurred, a possibility I hadn’t considered, and I felt calmness wash over me. “Either I’m about to disappear again, or—”

  When the flash passed and my eyesight cleared, I was still standing inside the private office of the owner of the London Knights baseball team. Sandy was still behind its desk, though he had risen from the chair and was grinning broadly, a grin I knew wasn’t meant for me.

  Behind me, a dear, familiar, female voice said:

  “Arthur, I have ever so much to explain to thee…”

  “Arthur, I have ever so much to explain to thee…”

  THE END

  …for now.

  About the Ghost’s Writer

  MY TYPICAL BIO—where I live, the contents of my menagerie, my previous publication credits, and that sort of thing—may be found in those other novels, and I thank you for having a look at them. Originally I had not intended to include a bio in King Arthur’s Sister in Washington’s Court (KASIWC); Twain didn’t in any of his novels, at least not in the strictest sense, and I stood prepared to honor that tradition. But my husband, whom I lovingly dub The Critics’ Critic, suggested that I write about how KASIWC came to be. He knows the stor
y; he lived it with me, to the extent that any human companion of an artisan can ever experience what’s happening in those secret tortured corridors. I have respected and followed his literary advice for more than a quarter century; thus, now you shall know the story too.

  In mid-2007, after my (now ex-) literary agent sent a blanket message to his client list stating that he had just met a publisher at BookExpo America who was actively seeking sequels to nineteenth-century authors’ works, I got the green light to develop a sequel to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, providing that I updated my story for the twenty-first century. Ecstatic, I dived right in. As near as I could tell, no one had ever published a sequel to any of Twain’s novels; the closest in recent memory was an unfinished short story around which an organization ran a competition for writers to submit their endings. And the timing couldn’t have been more perfect: I would finish the book in a year, which would give the publisher the typical two years to push it into the retail channels, just in time for the one hundredth anniversary of Mark Twain’s death on April 21, 2010.

  After about fifty pages, however, the thought struck me: who the hell did I think I was, trying to emulate the father of American literature, for heaven’s sake?

  That lone doubt stopped me…for three years. Not just this project either, but all of my fiction projects. If “writer’s block” has a dictionary entry, there’s where you’ll find my photo.