Merlin's Last Days

by Greg Krehbiel

  “Didn’t Merlin say that?”

  “I suppose so,” he admitted.

  “But why are you so sure you’re going to die?” Marianne asked. She wasn’t frightened, either by his talk about dying, or about some battle that will apparently take place in the past. She wasn’t sure what to make of it all, and at this point Merrell’s story sounded like a dream or an elaborate delusion.

  “Perhaps you’ll understand if you have more visions,” he said. “My path has been set from my birth, and from time to time I get glimpses of what’s to come. What I see is somewhat like your experience, although you’ll always see the past.”

  “And you see the future?” she asked.

  “I see and hear many things,” he said. “But right now I’m hungry. How about dinner?”

  At the word “dinner,” Marianne realized that she was hungry as well, and as she got out of bed and dressed she wondered if she was really hungry, or if there was some bond between them that allowed her to share Merlin’s hunger. She also wondered if he was a hypnotist. She found the thought both shocking and oddly comforting.

  A few minutes later they were walking down the tree-lined road on which most of the faculty housing was built. Marianne wondered if Merrell would ask her to walk separately, or somehow disguise their involvement, but he took her hand and they walked down the sidewalk like a couple of sophomore sweethearts.

  “There’s one thing I still don’t understand,” Marianne said.

  “Only one?” Merlin chided. “I envy you.”

  “With all the success you’ve had in archeology, what are you doing working at St. Andrew’s?”

  “Don’t you like your school?” he kidded.

  “I’ve read about the digs you’ve done. It’s … legendary stuff. You could be at Oxford or something.”

  “No. Field work and academic work are two different things, and my views are too far outside the mainstream. I’m regarded in the profession as a very lucky crackpot.”

  “But you’re right, and you can prove it.”

  “Proof?” he almost laughed. “There’s very little proof in archeology.” He paused for a moment to think.

  “Consider this,” he said. “You’re deep in Welsh country, and you find a Roman spear in a cave. What does the spear mean? Did a Roman legion make their way that far into Wales? Did a Welsh fighter carry the thing back after an attack somewhere else? Or is the spear really Roman at all? Perhaps a Welsh smith imitated the style. The ‘facts’ of archeology can lend themselves to a lot of different interpretations, so what matters is the theory you develop to stitch it all together.”

  “And what’s your theory? Why are you such a crackpot?”

  “Not only do I believe in a historic Arthur,” he explained, “which most historians sneer at, but I think he’s the second-most important figure in history.”

  “Of course you believe in Arthur,” she said, squeezing his hand. “But … why do you mention that? Is part of your mission to prove that Arthur was real?”

  “No,” he scoffed. “My mission is entirely in the past. I don’t care what happens in this world, or what my contemporaries believe, which is part of my answer to your question. I’m able to keep spirit and body together with the royalties I make from my ‘crackpot’ books and lectures, and the relatively meager salary I get from this school you’re so proud of, but my life’s purpose is bound to the king. It doesn’t matter what happens here and now.”

  “Thanks,” she said in a pouty voice. “So I’m just a pleasant distraction?”

  “We’ll see,” he said, as if the significance of her role was a trivial matter he had no time for.

  She wasn’t sure what she expected out of Merlin, or Merrell, or whatever she was supposed to call him, but she didn’t like the idea that her life wasn’t important.

  “Who’s number one?” she asked. “In history, I mean.”

  “Christ, of course,” he said in a dismissive tone. “Modern historians have little idea what was going on in those days. Without Arthur, Christianity would have been destroyed in England and Ireland, which would have had extreme ramifications in all of Europe.”

  “Why do you care about Christianity?” she asked. “You don’t seem like a very pious man to me.”

  “Me?” Merrell laughed. “No, I’m the son of the devil, as you may have heard.” He said it with a smirk as if the whole story was part of a long con. “I don’t believe in the devil, or in Christ for that matter, but I believe very deeply in Christianity. And if you knew anything about the alternatives we face, you would too.”

  “Christianity is patriarchal nonsense based on fairy tales,” Marianne objected.

  Merlin shook his head as if he was dealing with an obstinate child.

  “There is one, and only one truth that will prevent the world from descending into chaos, and that is the conviction that each human life is intrinsically valuable. Christianity is the only way to get there, and this patriarchy you despise is its only hope.”

  Marianne felt like objecting, but she was sure Merrell has his arguments rehearsed and prepared, and religion wasn’t something she spent much time worrying about any more. She didn’t care about Merrell’s religious or historical views. She wanted to know why she was having these visions, and what she should do about it.

  * * *

  Across campus in the dorm the students called Uganda West, Paul Atubo sat down heavily in the padded chair next to the one desk in his small dorm room, then he put his head in his hands. His roommate Ian knew Paul’s moods well enough. He moved the red ribbon to mark his page, set his worn, leather-bound Bible down on the bed and waited.

  “There is a crisis coming, brother,” Paul said a minute later, quietly through his fingers. “I can feel it in my spirit.”

  Ian almost laughed.

  “What exactly does that mean?” he asked. “And coming from you? Has Phyllis finally worn you down?”

  “Be serious, brother,” Paul rebuked as he looked up with a fire in his eyes. “I don’t understand it myself, but I am sure of it. As sure as I am of this book,” he said, touching the Bible on the desk.

  “What happened?” Ian asked, sitting up on the bed.

  Paul took a minute and collected himself. He breathed deeply, sighed, and then looked at Ian, almost sadly.

  “I was walking across campus an hour ago and I saw an older man, probably one of the faculty, walking hand in hand with a student. I recognized her from one of my classes, but I can’t remember which one. She’s an attractive girl, but there was something about her.”

  “There’s something about every girl with you,” Ian chided. “We’ve talked about this, Paul. It will be your undoing.”

  “I’ve been chaste for months, brother,” Paul said, dismissively, “but you mistake my meaning. I admit that my attention was on the girl. I thought she was sleep-walking. But when I looked at the man with her, my heart stopped and I felt a pain in my chest. I knew I looked upon the devil’s own.”

  “What does that even mean?” Ian persisted, barely suppressing his mirth. Paul tried very hard to play the part of the serious, scholarly Anglican who avoided all the emotional rigmarole of the more “charismatic” Christians on campus. This was very uncharacteristic.

  “How can you get a …what should I call it? A ‘message’ like that,” Ian asked, “just from looking at someone? You sound like our friends who are always going on about ‘words of knowledge.’”

  “I can’t explain it, my brother,” Paul said with dismay. “I just knew it. Like the way you see someone far off and you know who they are, or the way you wake up and realize you’re late without looking at a clock. You just know.”

  “So some professor is fornicating with a student,” Ian said. “It’s not headline news.”

  “This is not some trivial sin of the flesh,” Paul said seriously. “There is spiritual warfare going on. I don’t know what it is, and it scares me, but now I know why we are here in America, brother. This is o
ur purpose.”

  “Keeping professors’ lecherous hands off the better-looking students?”

  “No,” Paul said sharply. “It’s much deeper than that?”

  “So what do we do?” Ian asked.

  “First, we pray,” Paul replied. “Then I have to speak with that woman.”

  “You shouldn’t do that alone, Paul,” Ian warned. “Remember that business about ‘near occasions of sin.’”

  Paul acted as if he didn’t hear Ian. He opened his Book of Common Prayer, started pacing the small room and recited.

  “We implore thy grace and protection for the ensuing day. Keep us temperate in all things, and diligent in our several callings. Grant us patience under our afflictions. Give us grace to be just and upright in all our dealings; quiet and peaceable; full of compassion; and ready to do good to all men, …”

  * * *

  Half way through his steak, Merlin excused himself to take a call. Marianne saw him pull a brand new iPhone 6s out of his pocket, and it made her smile. What must it be like to live a dual life, half in the 6th century, where they don’t even have running water, and half in the 21st, where everyone has a computer in their pocket? The idea that the Merlin of legend was talking on a smart phone seemed like too much.

  She shook her head and looked away, then nibbled at her potato to pass the time. But when she caught Merrell looking at her across the room, she felt the unmistakable feeling of a vision coming on. The room started to blur. She had the presence of mind to lean back against the side of the booth in case she passed out.

  Merlin was sitting in his mother’s lap. He looked to be about eight years old, Marianne thought. Merlin’s mother was sitting on a day bed, dressed in a very loose gown. Her breasts were exposed, and Merlin’s face was pressed against them. His mother was caressing his cheek very tenderly, and making some odd motion with her free hand above and behind his head, where he couldn’t see.

  Marianne’s heart started beating faster and her palms began to sweat. Once again, she wasn’t sure where her feelings ended and where the feelings of the people in her vision began. Was she aroused by this scene, or was she sensing Merlin? Or, God forbid, Merlin’s mother?

  Mother and son sat like that for some minutes, and then Merlin kissed his mother on the lips. Marianne shuddered, and immediately awoke from her trance.

  Merrell was already sitting at the table, sipping a glass of wine and watching her closely.

  “Good God, Merlin,” she said. “Did you have sex with your mother?”

  “No,” he said quietly, without emotion. “But we did have a physically intimate relationship.”

  Despite all the crazy things he has been telling her, Marianne had no reason to doubt Merrell until that moment. Somehow she knew that what he was saying was false, but not a lie.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, trying to catch up with her own thoughts. “Were you abused?”

  “Heavens no,” he said. “My mother loved me very deeply, but she ….” He paused, and glanced around the restaurant for a moment, then looked back at her seriously. “The human family is bigger and stranger than an American college girl can imagine, and my mother was unlike any woman you have ever met. She claimed to be the last of a very old order that predated Christianity, or the Greeks, or anything you would regard as remotely civilized. I haven’t been able to trace it, but I also have no reason to doubt her. In any event, her people had different norms about … many things. Some of them would offend you.”

  In the back of her mind, Marianne felt something like a half a vision. A waking vision, or just an impression. It was as if she could sense some form of manipulation going on between Merlin and his mother. Something that Merlin didn’t know about. Even now.

  “What about you? Does it bother you?” she asked.

  Merlin laughed.

  “That’s a very interesting question,” he said. “And very modern. No doubt a boy’s relationship with his mother affects him in many ways, but to the modern mind, anything outside our sense of the normal must cause some kind of trauma, and leave scars.

  “No, it doesn’t bother me,” he continued, shaking his head, “and if you go on having these visions, you’re going to have to loosen up a little. You’ll see things that will shock you – far more than anything about my mother and me. Life in England in the 6th century was far stranger than you suspect.”

  “How do you know what I suspect?” she said, somewhat harshly. She was tired of his superior attitude, but she also felt some sympathy for him, as if his mother had put a dark spot on his soul.

  “You’re a women’s studies major, Marianne,” Merrell said with a frown.

  “And that means?” she jabbed.

  “It means that your head is full of modern silliness that has next to no basis in reality. Not even in this reality,” he gestured to their surroundings, “and certainly not in the world you’ve entered.”

  “That’s a very arrogant thing to say.” Even if your mother messed with your head. She was feeling less and less sympathetic.

  “Think whatever you like,” he said. “I don’t answer to Arthur Pendragon. I certainly don’t answer to you.”

  Marianne felt a rush of heat rise to her face, but she looked down at her plate and started to pick at her baked potato again. His words stung, and she resented them, but she also suspected there was some truth in them. She had been startled by the variety of human experiences in her introduction to anthropology class. What did she really know about the way other humans lived, even today, much less in different centuries and on different continents?

  “It’s funny,” Merrell continued. “Your liberal education teaches you that other cultural norms are just as valid as your own, but as soon as you’re faced with one you start judging.”

  “I wasn’t judging you,” she apologized.

  “So ‘Good heavens, Merlin’ was just an ordinary exclamation?”

  “Okay, it surprised me. And yes, it did bother me.”

  “Of course it did,” he said. “Everyone wants to seem tolerant and open-minded, but it’s perfectly normal to react negatively to things that are different. Don’t worry. I understand.”

  “Where is your mother now?”

  “In a coma in some nursing home, if she’s still alive.”

  “Wow,” Marianne said. “What happened between the two of you?”

  Merrell shook his head and looked away for a moment. He noticed the waiter, so he drained his wine and held out the empty glass.

  “Like most such things,” he said, turning back to Marianne, “any attempt to explain it won’t do the story justice, but it goes back to Arthur. Like everything with me. Most people don’t realize how crucial he was to history, and my mother and I were on opposite sides. She wanted him to fail. I wanted him to succeed.”

  “But he did fail. I mean, the real Arthur, in this world,” Marianne said. “He lost some big battle and that was the end, right?”

  Merrell smiled. “I suppose I can’t expect a modern college student to know the truth about a man that history doesn’t even believe in. No, he didn’t fail, but he didn’t succeed either. Arthur restored Roman rule to Britain and gave hope to the Christians and to the remaining civilized people. If there had been no Arthur, the pagans would have overrun all that remained of Christianity in England and Ireland. All of Patrick’s work would have been wiped away. And without Ireland, Christianity might not have survived in Europe.”

  “My father read some crazy book about how the Irish saved civilization,” Marianne said. “I think that might have been the first time in his life he was proud of being Irish.”

  “I know the book,” Merrell said. “It underestimates the story. But anyway, back to my mother. She wished the pagans had not only defeated Arthur, but discredited him, destroyed the hope he created in Britain, and then burned it all down.”

  “And this disagreement about the past was that important? It seems like something you could agree to disagree about. Esp
ecially with your mother.”

  “Perhaps so, for any other family,” Merrell said. “But you have to remember, the past isn’t just a story for me.”

  Or for me, it seems, Marianne thought.

  “So, … does this relate in any way to what you were telling me before, about … bathing together and all that? I don’t feel as if I’m getting the picture here.”

  “It ties together like this. Arthur was a devout Christian and believed in chastity and sexual restraint. My mother – probably not unlike some of your teachers and fellow students – hated all that. For my mother and me, there was no taboo on nakedness or touch between us, because ‘that was the way with her people,’ as she explained it. And she, not my father, told me how my body worked. Wet dreams and masturbation and all the struggles of the adolescent boy.”