Orion and King Arthur

by Ben Bova

  I stretched out on the pallet and thought of my beloved Anya. She had taken human form in many placetimes to be with me. She and I had faced the alien Set in the time of the dinosaurs. We had lived together for a brief interlude of happiness in the beautiful wooded glades of Paradise.

  Always Aten pulled us apart, insanely jealous of her love for me. Yet time and again Anya had found me, helped me, loved me no matter where and when I had been sent by the Golden One.

  I closed my eyes and pictured her perfect face, those fathomless silver-gray eyes that held all of eternity, her raven-black hair cascading like a river of onyx past her alabaster shoulders. She was a warrior goddess, a proud and courageous Athena, the only one of the Creators who dared to oppose Aten openly.

  Suddenly a fireball of light blasted my senses, a glare of golden radiance so bright that I flung my arms across my eyes.

  “I know your thoughts, creature.”

  I was no longer at Amesbury fort. I had been wrenched out of that point in spacetime, translated into a vastly different place, the ageless realm of the Creators.

  I could feel the brilliance of his presence. Aten, the Golden One, the self-styled god who created me.

  “Get up, Orion,” the Golden One commanded. “Stand before your Creator.”

  Like an automaton I climbed slowly to my feet, my arms still covering my eyes, shielding them from his blazing splendor. The radiance burned my flesh, seared into the marrow of my bones.

  “Put your hands down, Orion, and face the glory of your master,” he said, his voice sneering at me.

  I did as he commanded. I had no choice. It was as if I were a mere puppet and he controlled my limbs, my entire body, even the beating of my heart.

  It was like staring into the sun. The glare was overpowering, a physical force that made my knees buckle and forced my eyes to squint painfully. After what seemed like an eternity the blinding radiance contracted, compressed itself, and took on human form. My eyes, watering with pain, beheld Aten, the Golden One who had created me.

  He was glorious to look upon. Wearing splendid robes of gold and gleaming white, Aten looked every inch the god he pretended to be. To the ancient Greeks he was Apollo; to the first Egyptians he was Aten the sun god who gave them light and life. I first knew him as Ormazd, the fire god of Zoroaster in ancient Persia.

  I loathed him. Aten or Apollo or whatever he chose to call himself, he was an egomaniac who schemed endlessly to control all of the spacetime continuum. But he is no more a god than I am. He—and the other Creators—are humans from the far future, or rather, what humans have evolved into: men and women of incredible knowledge and power, able to travel through time and space as easily as young Arthur rides a horse across a grassy meadow.

  He had sent me to be with Arthur in the darkness of an era where a few brave men were trying to stem the tide of barbarism that was destroying civilization all across the old Roman world.

  I looked into Aten’s haughty leonine eyes, gleaming with vast plans for manipulating the spacetime continuum, glittering with what may have been madness.

  “You hate me, Orion? Me, who created you? Who has revived you from death countless times? How ungrateful you are, creature. How unappreciative.” He laughed at me.

  “You can read my thoughts,” I said tightly, “but you cannot control them.”

  “That makes no difference, worm. You will obey me, now and forever.”

  “Why should I?”

  “You have no choice,” he said.

  I remembered differently. “I disobeyed you at Troy,” I told him. “I refused to annihilate the Neandertals, back in the Ice Age.”

  His flawlessly handsome face set into a hard scowl. “Yes, and you came close to unraveling the entire fabric of spacetime. It cost me much labor to rebuild the continuum, Orion.”

  “And you have cost me much pain.”

  “That is nothing compared to the agonies you will suffer if you dare to resist my commands again. Final death, Orion. Death without revival. Oblivion. But much pain first. An infinity of pain.”

  “I will not murder Arthur,” I said.

  Almost he smiled. “That may not be necessary, creature. There are plenty of Saxons available for killing him. Your task is merely to stand aside and let it happen.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I won’t.”

  He laughed again. “Yes, you will, Orion. When the moment comes you will do as I command. Just as you assassinated the High Khan of the Mongols.”

  I blinked with the memory. Ogatai. He had befriended me, made me his companion, his trusted aide—just as young Arthur has.

  “You can’t make me—”

  But I was in the darkness and stench of the stable again, alone in the night. The Golden One had played his little game with me and sent me back to Arthur’s placetime.

  Alone, I lay back on the brittle straw once again. Why had Aten sent me here? What schemes was he weaving about Arthur and these barbarian invaders of Britain?

  Anya. She was the only one who could help me. She loved me, and I loved her with a passion that spanned the centuries and millennia, a love that reached out to the stars themselves.

  Yet I could not find her that night, could not reach her. I called to her silently, searched out with my mind through the dark cold night. No response. Nothing but the aching emptiness of infinity, the lonely void of nothingness. It was as if she no longer existed, as if she never had existed and was merely a dream of my imagination.

  No, I told myself. Anya is real. She loves me. If she doesn’t answer my plea it’s because Aten is blocking my efforts, keeping us apart.

  I strove with every atom of my being to translate myself to the timeless refuge of the Creators, far in the future of Arthur’s world. To no avail. I strained until perspiration soaked every inch of my body, but I remained in this smelly, dank, unlit stable.

  Exhausted, I fell into sleep. And dreamed of Alexander.

  4

  The crown prince of Macedonia, son of doughty Philip II, Alexander was also young and impetuous when I knew him. Proud and ambitious, driven by his cruel mother, Olympias, young Alexander learned battle tactics—and the strategies of war—from his masterful father, Philip.

  In my dream I was at Alexander’s side once again as he led the cavalry at the epic battle of Chaeronea. We galloped across the field toward the Athenian foot soldiers, thrusting and slashing at their hoplites in a wild melee of dust and blood, screams of triumph and agony filling the air. I felt the horse beneath me pounding across the corpse-littered plain and strained mightily to rein him in, hold him back, as I slashed with my sword at the soldiers milling about us.

  Alexander pushed ahead on old Ox-Head, his favorite steed, wading through the Athenian infantry, nearly sliding off his mount while jamming his spear into a screaming hoplite. Clutching my mount between my knees, I urged the horse on through the wildly surging tumult until I was beside Alexander, protecting his unshielded right side. Together we drove through the scattering Athenians, then began the grim task of riding down the fleeing hoplites and slaughtering them to the last man.

  5

  My eyes snapped open. It was still dark, well before dawn. Why did I dream of Alexander? Of all the lives I have led, of all the deaths that I have known, why did I dream this night of Alexander and the Macedonian cavalry?

  “Find the answer, Sarmatian,” whispered an invisible voice. A woman’s voice. Anya!

  I sat up on the pallet, ignoring the cold wind that sliced through the rickety slats of the stable, disregarding the smell and the snuffling of the drowsing horses.

  Sarmatian. Anya called me a Sarmatian. I remembered that I had claimed to be a Sarmatian when I had first found myself at Amesbury, begging a skeptical Sir Bors for a place in Arthur’s service.

  Sarmatian.

  I sat on the pallet wondering until daylight slanted through the cracks in the stable wall. I washed at the horse trough, drawing the usual laughs and jeers from the other squires a
nd churls.

  “You washed yesterday, Orion! Aren’t you afraid you’ll drown yourself?” laughed one of them.

  “He washes every morning,” called another, already at work shoveling in the manure pile. “He wants to smell pretty for the girls.”

  There were no women in Amesbury fort. All the women and children and old men of the region had been moved farther inland to be safe from the Saxons. If the fort fell, they would be defenseless.

  “Don’t you know that washing makes you weak, Orion? You’re scrubbing all your strength away!”

  They laughed uproariously. It was the only relief they had from the tension. We all knew that there was an army of Saxons and other invaders just outside our gate, a barbarian army that was growing with every passing day.

  Ignoring their jibes, I walked across the dung-dotted courtyard to the timbered tower of the fort. The guard recognized me and let me pass unchallenged. Instead of going to Arthur’s quarters, however, I climbed the creaking wooden stairs to Merlin’s tower-top aerie.

  There was no door at the top of the stairs. The entire top level of the tower was a single open area, roofed over with heavy beams of rough-hewn logs. It was a misty autumn morning, dank and chill. On a clear day, I knew, from up at this height you could see almost to the waters of the Solent and the Isle of Wight.

  Merlin was standing at the low wall, staring out across the fog-shrouded camp of the barbarians, his back to me. His possessions were meager: a table that held several manuscript rolls, a few unmatched chairs, a couple of chests, a few blankets for a sleeping roll. Nothing more.

  “What do you want, Orion?” he asked, without turning to look at me.

  “How did you know it was me?” I asked.

  He shrugged his frail shoulders. “Who else could it be?”

  That puzzled me. He had a reputation as a wizard, a magician who could cast spells and foresee the future. Yet, as he finally turned to face me, all I saw was a wizened old man in a stained wrinkled robe of patched homespun with a long dirty white beard and thin, lank hair falling past his shoulders; both beard and hair were knotted and filthy.

  “I need your help,” I said.

  “Yes, I know,” he replied as he walked slowly, arthritically, toward his table.

  “Then you know what I am about to ask.”

  “Naturally.” He slowly sank his emaciated frame into the cushion-covered chair.

  I stood before the table and folded my arms across my chest. I wore only a thin tunic, scant proof against the frosty autumn morning, but I have always been able to keep my body heat from radiating away and to step up my metabolic rate when I have to, burning off fat stored in the body’s tissues to keep me warm.

  “Sit down, Orion,” said Merlin. “It hurts my neck to have to crane up to see your eyes.”

  As I sat, I said, “Can you help me, then?”

  “Naturally,” he repeated.

  “Well, then?”

  He stared at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. Old though he may have been, there was a gleam of intelligence, of curiosity, in his gray-green eyes.

  Slowly, a smile spread across his wrinkled face. “You are playing a game with me, Orion.”

  “And you with me, sir,” I answered.

  “Must I ask you what your problem is?”

  “You implied that you already knew.”

  His smile broadened. “Ah, yes. That is part of a wizard’s kit, you see. Allow the supplicant to believe that you know everything, and the supplicant will believe whatever you tell him.”

  I grinned back at him and recalled, somehow, that psychiatrists in a future civilization would use the same trick on their patients.

  “So tell me truly, Orion, why do you seek my help?”

  “I can’t remember my past,” I said. “I can’t remember anything from before the first day I came to Amesbury and met Arthur.”

  He leaned forward, all eager attention now. “Nothing at all?”

  “Only my name, and the idea that I am a Sarmatian, whatever that is.”

  “You don’t even know what a Sarmatian is?”

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  Merlin steepled his fingers. They were long and bony, the backs of his hands veined in blue.

  “The Sarmatians were a warrior tribe from far to the east, somewhere in Asia,” Merlin told me. “Many of them joined the Roman legions, where they served as cavalry. They were great horsemen, great fighters.”

  “Were?” I probed.

  “They left when the legions departed Britain. I had assumed that you were one of them who had stayed behind, deserted the legions.”

  “You thought me a deserter?”

  “Bors did, as soon as you told him you were a Sarmatian. That is why he was so suspicious of you at first.”

  Nodding with newfound understanding, I asked, “Tell me more about the Sarmatians.”

  Merlin leaned his head back, raised his eyes to the beamed ceiling. “They were fine metalworkers. They claimed to have invented chain mail, and something else … I can’t quite recall what it was.”

  “Chain mail is a great advantage.”

  “Yes, we have our smith working night and day to produce more.”

  “They came from Asia, you say?”

  “So I remember.”

  Merlin spent much of the morning asking me questions about myself, questions I could not answer. Aten always erased my memories before sending me on a new mission. He said he provided me with only enough information to perform my task. Yet on more than one mission I fought through his mental blocks and recalled things he would have preferred I did not know.

  But on that chill, foggy morning I could remember nothing beyond my first moments at Amesbury fort. A young serving boy brought up a tray of bread and a few scraps of cheese with thin, bitter beer for our breakfast. I realized that even with the fort besieged and our food supply dwindling, Merlin had better rations than the knights and squires down in the courtyard, despite his frail frame.

  A horn blast ended our conversation. Arthur was calling all his men together. I got up from the chair before Merlin’s table and took my leave as politely as I could.

  As I got to the stairs leading down, the old man called out to me. “Orion! I remember the other thing that the Sarmatians are reputed to have invented.”

  “And what is that?” I asked.

  “Some sort of footgear to help a man get up onto his horse. I believe they called it a stirrup.”

  Stirrups, I thought. Yes.

  “Oh, and one thing more. A device that they fixed to the heels of their boots, to prick their mounts.”

  Spurs.

  6

  All that day I thought about stirrups and spurs, two simple and obvious-seeming inventions. Yet they were obvious only in hindsight, as most great inventions are.

  Arthur and the other knights had neither stirrups nor spurs. When they rode into battle they had to rein in their horses or the first shock of impact with their spears would knock them out of their saddles. Often a knight went down with his victim when he forgot to slow his mount. Even in Alexander’s day, I remembered, we had to be careful to stay on our mounts as we speared footmen. It was the same using our swords. A mounted warrior had to grip his steed tightly with his knees if he wanted to remain mounted while he slashed at the enemy with his sword.

  But with stirrups a man could stay in the saddle despite a smashing impact. And with spurs he could goad his steed into a flat-out gallop. Instead of wading into the enemy so slowly that they could eventually swarm us under, we could charge into them like a thunderbolt, crash through their formation, then wheel around and charge again.

  As the sun was setting I went to the blacksmith. He was a big, ham-fisted, hairy man with bulging muscles and little patience for what seemed like a harebrained idea.

  “I’ve got all I can do to make the chain mail that my lord Arthur is demanding,” he said in a loud, barking voice. Wiping sweat from his b
row with a meaty forearm, he went on, “I don’t have time to make some trinkets for you.”

  “Very well,” I replied. “I’ll make them for myself.”

  “Not until the dinner horn sounds,” he said petulantly. “I’ve got to work this forge until then.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  For the next few hours I watched the brawny blacksmith and his young apprentices forging chain mail links, heating the metal in their fire while two of the lads wearily pumped the bellows that kept the coals hot, hammering the links into shape, quenching them in a bucket of water with a steaming hiss. It was hot work, but it was simple enough for me to learn how to do it merely by watching them.

  The dinner horn sounded at last and the blacksmith took his grudging leave.

  “If you steal or break anything,” he warned with a growl, “I’ll snap your spine for you.”

  He was big enough to do it, if I let him.

  I stripped off my tunic and, clad only in my drawers and the dagger that Odysseos had given me at Troy, strapped to my thigh, I began forging a pair of stirrups.

  They were lopsided and certainly no things of beauty, but I admired them nonetheless. Forging a pair of spurs was easier, especially since I did not want them to be so sharp that they would draw blood. They were nothing elaborate, merely slightly curved spikes of iron.

  When I went to my pallet that night I was physically tired from the hard labor but emotionally eager to try my new creations in the morning. I looked forward to a good night’s sleep.

  But no sooner had I closed my eyes than I found myself standing on the shore of a fog-shrouded lake. The moon ducked in and out of scudding clouds. I was wearing a full robe of chain mail with a light linen tunic over it, my sword buckled at my hip.

  I remembered this lake. It was where I had brought Arthur so that Anya could give him Excalibur.

  I looked out across the water, silvered by the moonlight, expecting to see the fortress of stainless metal arising from the lake’s depths as it had then. Nothing. The waves lapped softly against the muddy shore, a nightingale sang its achingly sweet song somewhere back among the trees.