by Ben Bova
Reluctantly, they allowed me to take the two youths who were still alive and able to walk. I walked with them, after giving my downed horse a merciful thrust through the heart.
3
The knights and squires roared with approval when the kitchen wagons creaked into camp. Arthur, though, sat grimly on a fallen log as I explained to him what happened. Bors, standing to one side with his burly arms folded across his chest, looked ready to hang both prisoners.
At last Arthur turned to the two wounded youths. One of them had been stabbed in the arm, the other’s face was swollen on one side, where a kitchen churl had banged him with a skillet.
The youths sank to their knees before Arthur. He wore only a plain rough tunic over his chain mail, but Excalibur gleamed in its jeweled scabbard by his side, and it was clear to them that this young warrior with the soft brown beard and sad amber eyes was a man of authority, even though Arthur was not that many years older than they.
“Why do you attack us?” Arthur demanded. “We are fighting the invaders to protect you. Is this the thanks you give?”
“Hunger, my lord,” answered the smaller of the two. His voice cracked, whether from puberty or fear I could not tell.
“Our village is in ruins,” the older one said, a smoldering trace of resentment in his deeper voice. “You have much; we have nothing.”
“You have a dozen dead friends,” Bors growled, “if Orion’s story is to be believed.”
“Two of them were our brothers,” replied the younger one, his face downcast.
Arthur shook his head. “Orion, find Kay. Tell him to send these two back to their village, or what’s left of it. Let each of them take as much food as they can carry.”
Bors’ eyes popped. He started to object, but Arthur forestalled him with an upraised hand.
“We are not your enemies,” he told the youths. “War has ravaged the land. We are trying to drive out the invaders so that we can all live in peace once again.”
I took the prisoners to Kay and explained Arthur’s decision. Kay looked dubious, reluctant, but he piled both youths’ arms with food from the nearest wagon. The boys scampered away, despite their wounds, staggering slightly under their loads.
As I watched them disappear into the snowy darkness, I thought that Arthur knew how to be a king. If he lived long enough, he might indeed bring peace to this troubled land.
4
I wrapped myself in a thick, rough blanket and leaned my back against one of the yew trees. I had volunteered to stand watch because I need little sleep. Another of the superior abilities that Aten had given me. He had built me to be a warrior, with all the strength and bloodlust that a killer requires. Yet I was sick of killing, tired of the endless wheel of death and blood.
The piercing cold of the winter night began to seep through the blanket. Without consciously thinking of it, I clamped down on the blood vessels close to my skin, to keep my body’s interior warmth from escaping. Still, the bitter cold and the wet flakes of snow chilled me. I unbuckled my sword and leaned it against the trunk of the tree. I could feel the dagger that Odysseos had given me, ages ago at Troy, pressing iron cold against my thigh where I kept it strapped beneath my tunic.
All I really cared for was Anya, the gray-eyed goddess whom the ancient Greeks knew as Athena. She was the only one among the Creators who truly cared for the human beings that her fellow Creators used as puppets. I loved Anya, a desperate, foolish passion that roused the jealousy of Aten, that egomaniac. She loved me, too. As impossible as it seems, this goddess, this Creator, loved me just as I loved her. Time after time, in the frozen wastes of the Ice Age and the temperate Paradise of the Neolithic, in the Macedonia of Alexander the Great and the far-flung interstellar empire of the Fourth Millennium, Anya had loved me and tried to protect me from the cruel whims of Aten and the other Creators.
As I sat in the cold, snowy woods, with the campfires dying down to smoldering ashes, I thought of Anya. Aten and the other Creators tried to keep us apart, but she had come to me here, in Arthur’s time. She had helped me. Arthur called her the Lady of the Lake. I knew her to be my love.
I saw a glow deep in the woods, just a tiny pinpoint of light but it didn’t flicker as a fire would. It was as steady as a shining star. And growing brighter.
I jumped to my feet, the blanket falling from my shoulders. Snow was still sifting silently through the night; the green branches of yews were decked with white, bending under the growing weight of the snow.
And the light was getting brighter, coming closer.
Anya! I hoped. Could it be her?
“Not your precious Anya,” called a deeply resonant male voice. “She has no time for you now.”
He stepped out from the trees and I could see that it was the Creator who called himself Hades. He was tall and broad of shoulder, cloaked in a magnificent mantle as black as infinite space, threaded with finest traceries of blood red. His hair and close-cropped beard were dark, his eyes darker still, like polished onyx.
“I understand that Arthur misses his old mentor, Merlin,” said Hades.
Merlin was in reality Hades, appearing in disguise to guide Arthur in his youth. Aten and most of the other Creators wanted Arthur killed, so he could not interfere with their grandiose plans for a barbarian empire that would keep humankind enslaved for millennia. Hades had opposed them originally, but now was moving toward their camp.
“You swore that you wouldn’t interfere.”
Hades smiled cruelly. “A promise made to a creature? How will you keep me to it, Orion? You can’t even move your fingertips.”
It was true. I stood frozen like a block of ice, totally under his control.
“But you can feel pain,” Hades said.
Suddenly my chest constricted in white-hot agony. I couldn’t cry out, couldn’t even breathe. My legs were too weak to hold me up. I toppled like a felled tree onto the cold snowy ground.
Hades bent low and whispered to me. “Merlin will see Arthur one more time, Orion, whether you like it or not. At the castle of his foster father, Ector. Make certain that Arthur goes there, Orion. Elsewise, this little pang I’ve given you will feel like a love tap.”
The pain ebbed. I lay gasping on the snowy ground as Hades drew himself up to his full height and turned away, laughing softly to himself.
Rage filled me. Despite the lingering pain I lunged at his retreating back, whipping out Odysseos’ dagger as I leaped. I hit his body with a satisfying thud and we both fell to the ground. Before he could think I had the dagger’s point under his chin. His eyes went wide as I pressed it deep enough to draw blood.
“Once you take human form you, too, can feel pain,” I snarled. “You can feel death.”
And then he was gone. Vanished. I lay alone on the wet cold snow, my dagger in hand, my anger melting into helpless frustration. I drove the dagger into the snow hard enough to penetrate the frozen ground beneath.
“That was foolhardy, Orion.”
I turned over onto my back and Anya stood above me, splendid in white fur that reached to her booted feet. A hint of a smile curved her beautiful lips slightly. Her gray eyes were serious, though, almost solemn.
“You cannot kill a Creator, Orion,” she said calmly. “You know that.”
Scrambling to my feet, I replied, “I can frighten him, though. The terror in his eyes was worth the pain he inflicted on me.”
Anya shook her head like a schoolteacher disappointed with her pupil. “Orion, my love, no matter how they provoke you, you must remember that many lives are at stake here. You must think of Arthur and all the others you have sworn to help and protect.”
I nodded meekly. “Hades intends to see Arthur in his guise as Merlin.”
“At Ector’s castle, I know,” she replied.
“Is it a trap?” I asked. “Do they intend to assassinate Arthur there?”
“No,” Anya replied. “But it will be a test. Both you and Arthur will face a test that will be crucial to the unfolding of
this line of spacetime.”
“At Ector’s castle.”
“Yes. In Wales. Up in the mountains.”
“But we’re heading south, for Cadbury. The High King is ill. Dying.”
“You must bring Arthur to Wales, Orion. To the country where he grew up as a boy.”
“And the High King?”
“Trust me, Orion.” Anya’s image was fading, flickering in the dim light of the fading campfires.
“Don’t leave me!”
“I must, my darling. I don’t want to, but I must.” She became as dim and misty as a ghost.
“Wait! Please!”
“There is too much for me to do, Orion. I cannot stay.”
She faded into nothingness, leaving me standing in the snow with my dagger in one hand and my heart as empty as the distant-most stretches of outer space.
Why? I raged to myself. Why can’t we be together? The Creators manipulate space and time as easily as you or I walk across a room. Why can’t Anya be with me? How can she truly love me when we’re kept apart?
Then, in the deepest cavern of my mind I heard Aten’s sneering laughter. It is he who keeps us apart, I realized. Him and his fellow Creators. My fists clenched and I longed for the day when I would destroy them all.
5
It wasn’t difficult to get Arthur to move into the mountains of Wales. Obviously we were not going to outrun the winter; snow and biting gales swept over us, day after day.
“We used to go sledding down these hills, Kay and I,” Arthur was saying, smiling happily for the first time in many weeks. “We’d steal shields from the armory hall and ride them in the snow.”
It was a bright, clear morning when we saw Ector’s castle standing atop a steep hill, its watchtower silhouetted against the crisp blue sky. The storms had moved away, the air was bitingly cold but as clear as polished crystal. Arthur trotted up ahead, Lancelot and Arthur’s foster brother, Kay, at his side, men and horses puffing steamy clouds of breath into the cold morning. I stayed slightly behind them, as a properly humble squire should. But I scanned the woods on either side of the climbing trail, alert for danger.
Ector was Arthur’s foster father. Merlin had brought the infant to him, and Ector had raised Arthur to be the strong young man he was now, with his own son, Kay, as Arthur’s playmate and brother. None of us knew who Arthur’s true father was, although Ambrosius had accepted the youth as his own nephew, knighted him, and made him his Dux Bellorum, battle leader.
All the scheming politics and blood-soaked battles seemed far from Arthur’s mind as he spurred his mount up the final turn of the trail that ended at the castle gate. Like many of the castles of this dark age, Ector’s castle Wroxeter stood near the ruins of a Roman city, Viroconium. We had passed the city, down in the valley below: its crumbling dark stone walls had awed Arthur’s knights, even frightened some of them.
“No human hands could have built such walls,” I heard someone mutter behind me. “This must have been the work of giants.”
“Or wizards,” half whispered another voice.
I merely shook my head. Ordinary men had built those stone walls. Other ordinary men had put the town to the torch, gutted its stately homes and public edifices, hauled away many of the stones for their own buildings.
Part of Ector’s castle was stone, I saw. The base of its outer wall was a haphazard collection of stones scavenged from the Roman town. Atop it was a stout wooden palisade, with a slightly tilting wooden watchtower flanking the main gate. Very few castles were entirely built of stone at this time. Morganna’s keep in Berenicia was stone, although the other buildings inside its walls were wood and even wattle. The High King’s headquarters at Cadbury was the wonder of its age: walls, buildings, towers, even the stables were solid stone.
As Arthur and his retinue came up to the castle gate, a helmeted head appeared at the tower top and called, “Who approaches the castle of Sir Ector?”
Sir Kay stood in his stirrups and proclaimed, “His son, Sir Kay, with his foster brother, Arthur, Dux Bellorum to the High King.”
It took no small time, but eventually a wizened, white-bearded face appeared at the tower’s top. “Kay? And Arthur? Have my boys truly come home?”
“Yes, Father!” Arthur shouted happily. “I’ve come home.”
6
Ector appeared overjoyed to see his son and foster son once again. He welcomed us personally as we rode through the castle gate and dismounted onto the snow-covered packed earth of the courtyard. Arthur towered over the old man, but he stooped down and embraced his foster father with all the warmth of a son’s love.
Friar Samson insisted on offering a mass of thanksgiving for our safe arrival at Wroxeter castle; we had little choice but to participate there in the cold morning, heads bowed in pious respect. All the other knights knelt on the snowy ground, together with most of the squires. I stood to one side, watching to make certain no one knifed Arthur while he prayed.
At last the knights were shown to quarters in the stoutly timbered, largest structure of the castle, each attended by one squire. Arthur chose me to accompany him, for which I was grateful. All the others of the army had to camp outside the castle’s main wall.
As soon as we were settled a page appeared at Arthur’s open door and announced that Sir Ector would receive Arthur and his knights in the great hall, downstairs.
Ector’s great hall was not as big as I had expected, although it was well timbered and its earthen floor pounded smooth and swept clean. The old man sat in a high-backed wooden chair next to the enormous fireplace that covered one entire wall of the room. Big enough for half a dozen men to sit in, the fireplace had only a meager fire crackling in it, sending gray smoke up the wide stone chimney.
Ector’s wrinkled, white-bearded face was wreathed in smiles. “Tonight we will feast,” he said in a high, piping voice as Arthur strode up to him. “But now, I have a surprise for you!”
He turned in his chair toward a curtained doorway. Merlin stepped through.
He appeared older than Ector, with a beard the color of ashes that ran all the way down to his belt and long white hair that flowed past his shoulders. He looked newly scrubbed and combed; often enough I had seen him as mangy as a bedraggled alley cat. This day he wore a handsome long robe of midnight blue decked with glittering stars that fell in soft folds down to the floor. Its hem was richly trimmed with fur, as was its collar and the cuffs of the wide sleeves. Despite his seeming years he stood erect and walked with a purposeful stride to stand beside Ector’s chair. I could see his eyes clearly beneath their shaggy gray brows: they were the eyes of Hades, black and glittering like two chips of flint.
“Merlin!” Arthur exclaimed, sheer joy on his face. “They told me you had disappeared.”
In a soft, quavering voice that matched his graybeard’s disguise, Merlin replied, “I left Cadbury castle to meet you here, Arthur.”
“You must have flown like the hawk of your namesake,” Arthur said, awed.
Merlin replied archly, “I did not walk that long distance, true enough.”
“But how did you know I’d be here?” Arthur gaped. “I didn’t decide to come here myself until—” Then he stopped, grinning foolishly. “Oh. Of course. You knew it all along, didn’t you?”
Merlin/Hades smiled benignly. But his eyes remained cold, remorseless. He glanced at me, and my blood turned to ice.
Is he here to assassinate Arthur? I wondered. And if he is, how could I possibly stop him?
7
That night Ector feasted Arthur and his knights. Sir Kay sat at one side of the old man, Arthur on the other. The wine was thin and slightly sour, but nobody seemed to mind. Mead and beer were there in abundance. Soon the men were throwing chunks of meat and even whole chickens across the table, laughing uproariously with each greasy-fingered toss, each spill of a mug across the planks of the long table.
I sat down among the other squires, far from the roaring blaze in the fireplace and the no
isy, brawling men. I could never get drunk. My metabolism burned off alcohol almost as quickly as I could swallow the stuff. It made me warm enough to perspire heavily, though, despite my distance from the fireplace.
I noticed that Lancelot touched nothing but water, although he ate as heartily as any of the others. Gawain, Bors, and even Kay got uproariously drunk. I could have knifed all of them, I thought, before any of them realized what was happening. Arthur, though, remained sober enough. And so did Ector, although he laughed wheezingly at the knights’ antics so hard I thought he would choke.
Merlin did not attend the feast. I thought I knew why. The rowdy merriment of mere mortals probably disgusted him. So be it, I thought, noticing that pinch-faced Friar Samson also was not present, and probably for much the same reason.
By the time the fire had gone down to smoldering, smoky ashes and most of the knights were snoring, their heads lolling on their shoulders or resting peacefully on the beer-soaked planks of the long table, Ector turned to Arthur and whispered something in his ear. He glanced smilingly at his son Kay, snoring loudly at his other side. Ector got up from his chair and Arthur got to his feet and followed his foster father out of the hall.
I moved silently behind them, intent on protecting Arthur from any attempt on his life.
Ector led Arthur up a stairway and into what appeared to be his private quarters. It was a low-ceilinged room with a single window, closed with wooden shutters against the night winds. A large canopied bed stood to one side, mussed and unmade. Across the room was a trestle table and several chairs.
I stood in the doorway as Ector gestured Arthur to one of the chairs.
The old man glanced at me, then said, “Arthur, what I have to tell you is for your ears only.”
“Orion is more than my squire, Father,” replied Arthur. “I have no secrets from him.”
Ector’s white brows rose, but he shrugged and said to me, “Shut the door, then, and stand there.”
“Yes, my lord,” I said.
But no sooner had I shut it than I heard a scratching on the other side of the door. Not a knock. Scratching. Just as the ancient Egyptians and Trojans did.
