King of the Scepter'd Isle (Song of Earth)

by Coney, Michael G.

  “It’s beautiful here,” said the Princess quietly.

  “It’s … it’s more than that.” Excitedly Fang squeezed her hand. “It’s part of the old gnomedom, Princess!”

  Then she recognized it too. “Only the trees come and go. The land stays the same. It’s still our home, Fang.”

  And it was. The flat, smooth granite bore familiar markings: ancient glacial furrows that spanned a million happen-tracks, and here—Fang pulled away moss and tightly rooted grass clumps—yes, here was the old insect racetrack, the little rocky knob marking the starting line. And there was the mound where the starter stood. …

  The sound of cheering gnomes echoed through Fang’s memory lobe.

  “Remember Jumbo John?” asked the Princess, and Fang smiled.

  It had been a busy meeting with gnomes from all over the forest attending, and the insect racing had been fast and exciting. Vast quantities of hazelnuts had been won and lost. Bitter disputes had erupted, to be forgotten within minutes. Much beer had been drunk.

  Finally it was time for the last race of the day, which by tradition was the most prestigious. The rubber joes were the cream of the crop. Some of them had never raced before but had been bred and trained in secret, brought to a peak for this one race, after which they would probably go to stud.

  The crowd fell silent. All bets had been placed. The owners stood at the starting line. They carried boxes containing their rubber joes, and thorn-tipped hawthorn twigs as goads. Now was the moment when the sleekest, speediest insects of the season would be revealed.

  The marshals cleared the track, paying special attention to Clubfoot Trimble, who had once stepped on a speeding joe inches before the finishing line. Although he maintained it was an accident, investigation by the Race Committee uncovered a large quantity of hazelnuts wagered by Clubfoot on the subsequent winner, which up to the time of the accident had been running a poor second.

  The six proud owners held their boxes in their left hands, their goads in their right. Arriving late came a seventh, the Miggot of One, striding through the crowd bearing his box in both hands, an unpleasant smile on his pointed features.

  The starter gave the traditional cry: “Display your steeds!”

  The owners tipped out the contents of their boxes. Six mettlesome joes fell to the forest floor and began to run in impatient circles, guided by their owners’ goads. The Miggot, who knew how to time an entrance, tipped his box last. His smile intensified into a leer of triumph. The seventh joe fell to the ground. The crowd gasped in awe.

  The Miggot’s steed was the most monstrous rubber joe ever known to gnome or man. It stood tall on innumerable powerful legs. Its size has since been compared to the nine-banded armadillo. Its feelers resembled the antlers of an elk. Although humans know the rubber joe as a mere wood louse or sow bug, in kikihuahua legend the Miggot’s insect stands alone as a superb example of a much-maligned species.

  It did, however, strain the gnomes’ credulity. There were shouts of suspicion. King Bison was called upon to adjudicate.

  “That is no more a genuine joe,” said a contestant, “than my rabbit, Loppy. It’s a creation of the Sharan. The Miggot has abused his trust. I demand this creature be disqualified and that the Miggot be censured!”

  The Miggot had been growing steadily pinker with outrage. This was not the first time such an accusation had been made. Clubfoot once, on the official occasion of a Memorizing meeting, had alleged that another member of the Miggot’s stable, Strider, was an offspring of the Sharan’s womb. If it hadn’t been for the Miggot’s love of winning, he would long ago have quit the racing game in disgust.

  With a squeal of fury he flung himself at the complainant and began to batter at him with his fists. This happened a week after the gnomes had learned Fang’s sexual apothegm, when the side effects had not been fully realized. Violence was still regarded as aberrant behavior, and the Miggot’s opponent fled, convinced he’d been attacked by an insane gnome.

  The Miggot stood foursquare over his rubber joe. “I give my word,” he said breathlessly, “that this joe is genuine, bred by myself from a strain I discovered west of the tidal flats. Jumbo John has never known the Sharan’s womb. To suggest otherwise is to deny everything we gnomes stand for!”

  With this patriotic, if somewhat baffling, statement, he knelt and applied his goad experimentally to the rear of Jumbo John. The joe broke into a sprint.

  Amid mutters of apology from all concerned, the starter cried, “Apply your goads!” Caught unawares, the Miggot’s opponents stabbed belatedly at their steeds. The race was in progress.

  Jumbo John strode powerfully away from his adversaries, opening a widening gap. The smaller joes trailed behind, prodded mercilessly by their owners. The spectators yelled encouragement. After the initial confusion, much of the wealth of Mara Zion had quickly been placed on the broad back of Jumbo John. The Miggot’s joe moved well ahead of the field and seemed to have the race in his pocket.

  Then the unexpected occurred. Jumbo John stopped and looked around thoughtfully, waving his feelers. The Miggot applied the goad. Jumbo John assumed a crouching attitude. He seemed to be trying to sit down, so far as it is possible for a wood louse to do so. The crowd screamed. The Miggot invoked the Sword of Agni. Jumbo John stayed put, and the rest of the field closed the gap.

  Then a stream of tiny rubber joes emerged from beneath Jumbo John, who began to list like a sinking ship. Reddening with temper, the Miggot attacked Jumbo John’s rear end with the goad. Certain members of the audience, to whom motherhood was sacrosanct, fell upon the Miggot. A tide of tiny joes spread across the racecourse. The other runners, reaching them, stopped dead.

  “Abandon the race!” somebody shouted, and others took up the cry. The situation was embarrassing and shameful. Jumbo John lay on his side, twitching, a few of his legs still making token running gestures. Tiny joes continued to emerge. He must have been full of them. It was an indictment of the whole sport of rubber-joe racing. The Miggot, abashed, stepped back, the hands of the spectators still upon him.

  Then a murmur of excitement from a section of the crowd signaled a new development. The first wave of Jumbo John’s young was approaching the finishing line. Jumbo John himself rolled over on his back, an empty shell with legs around the edge. All movement ceased. The Miggot, mentally assembling rules and precedents, watched in growing triumph as Jumbo John’s offspring swarmed over the line.

  The crowd was in an uproar. Eventually the marshals restored some semblance of order, and the gnomes waited for King Bison, Chairman of the Race Committee, to give a ruling.

  Bison, however, had prudently crept off home. …

  Fang shook his head, dispelling the memory of a clearing crowded with gnomes, and the happy days he’d known.

  “Whatever did happen in the end?” asked the Princess. “I took the children home because of the foul language. People were still arguing when I left.”

  “Oh, they ran the race again. They ruled that although a part of Jumbo John had crossed the line first, the rest of him hadn’t. A joe has to be completely over the line to win. Somebody from the other end of the forest won, I think. The Miggot was furious. He sold his stud to Wal o’ the Bottle on the spot and swore never to race again.”

  They got to their feet and walked across the clearing in silence, but it was no longer the silence of despair. Gnomedom was still all around them, sleeping, just waiting to be awakened. “All it needs is gnomes,” said Fang at last. “And they’re the same gnomes as they used to be. Lady Duck, Bison, Clubfoot Trimble, Pong, and all our friends. Just think, Princess, our bodies have only aged two years in the bat. All the Mara Zion gnomes can come here, and gnomedom can be as good as it ever was!”

  He burst into a gnomish song of joy that sent the birds skittering from the trees and caused the forest animals to stop dead in their tracks and look around fearfully, thinking they heard the roaring of a new and terrible predator.

  The boat slid towar
d the blackness of the distant shore, and the rowers bent to their oars in unison; a rhythm like a lullaby. She was sleepy and cold, but there was no discomfort in the cold. He lay beside her as the dark shore approached.

  “Nyneve.”

  She opened her eyes. The black shore receded and there was brightness all around. Morgan le Fay watched her impassively.

  “Wake up, Nyneve. We have work to do. The time is near. The ifalong has dwindled to a thread. We’re together now, Nyneve, working toward a common goal.”

  “What you’re trying to say is you were wrong.”

  “I’m saying that a single happentrack now stretches from us to the crucial event. I see no possibility of a branching. We cannot fail, but have identical objectives and identical methods of approach.”

  “And you were bloody well wrong.”

  “It now appears,” agreed Morgan coldly, “that there would have been little point in eliminating the humans. The Tin Mothers have done it for us.”

  “As I foretold they would.”

  “It was an inspired projection.”

  “Actually,” admitted Nyneve with a grin, “it was Avalona’s inspired projection. She knew the Tin Mothers were inevitable, and she knew the gnomes were the only people who could handle them.”

  “It’s good to have Avalona out of the way. She was a real pain. Much better to have a Dedo who speaks my language in Mara Zion. You have drinks in this place?”

  “Mead,” said Nyneve, fetching a bottle and two glasses.

  “And I expect you had wheat germ and goat’s milk for breakfast,” said Morgan sarcastically. “Ah, well, a glass of mead is better than nothing. What are you doing for a man these days?”

  “Oh, you know, this and that.” Nyneve had important work to do, and she would rather Morgan wasn’t around when she did it. She waited with ill-concealed impatience for the Dedo to finish her drink. Once the door closed behind her visitor, she ran to the corner of the room and pulled aside a curtain.

  He was still asleep, his breathing deep and slow, his arms folded across his chest. The color had returned to his face. She bent and kissed his lips, and found them warm.

  He opened his eyes.

  His eyes regarded her without surprise. “How did the battle go?” he asked.

  “That’s all in the past now. It doesn’t matter.”

  He winced at a memory. “I was wounded. I thought I was going to die. You nursed me. Of course. I remember now.”

  “Just lie still for a while. You’ve been asleep for a long time.”

  “Guinevere.” A look of real sorrow came over his face. “She went off with Mordred. How could she do that?”

  “I think she was under a spell.”

  “Perhaps if I went to see her …?”

  “Forget her.” Annoyed, Nyneve said brutally, “She’s been dead for thirty thousand years. There! You had to know sometime.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s because I lied to you when I put you to sleep. A long, long time has gone by. You’ll find out.”

  “Well, hello!” The voice of Morgan came from behind. “So this is what you do for a man! The kingly fellow who tupped me at the tournament, no less. Well, here’s a little wake-up gift for him!”

  And, laughing, she tossed Excalibur onto the bed.

  “King Arthur?” said Adam wonderingly. “The King Arthur? Of the Round Table and all that?”

  “That’s right,” said Arthur, a little bemused himself, still trying to come to terms with the passage of years and the apelike humans that surrounded him.

  “Look at Excalibur,” said Fang. “See, it has the name on the blade.” It had been one of the happiest moments of Fang’s life when Nyneve and Arthur had walked into the village. He couldn’t understand why Nyneve still looked so young but was sure she would explain everything in time.

  “All those legends …” murmured Adam. “The Tin Mothers often use their screens to show us human history. They even show us stuff that happened before they came—they say they copied it from a computer called the Rainbow, in the dome. But they never show us anything about the Age of Chivalry. They say it’s not in our best interests to watch violence.”

  “So how do you know the stories?” asked Fang.

  “Oh, traveling storytellers. Word of mouth, handed down over generations. They say the True Humans spread the first stories, from ancient history they got from the Rainbow. But the Tin Mothers suppress all that, just like they suppressed the truth about our origins. …”He looked at Arthur closely, then smiled. “You’re fooling us, aren’t you? You can’t be Arthur. He was supposed to have been killed at Camlann, thousands of years ago.”

  “Wounded,” said Nyneve. “I nursed him, and then put him to sleep.”

  “For all that time?”

  “It wasn’t any different from what happens to the True Humans in the dome.”

  “Cryogenics,” said Adam. “We’ve heard of it. But it wasn’t invented in those days.”

  The human and the Dedo fought a brief battle in Nyneve, and the human won. “I invented cryogenics,” she said boldly. “I have certain powers.” Surely there’s no harm in telling them that much. After all, she reasoned, according to the most likely ifalong, these people won’t be around much longer. …

  Adam was still smiling. “If you say so.”

  “Nyneve used to travel around with Merlin,” Fang said, feeling the need to defend Nyneve’s credibility, “telling people stories about the Age of Chivalry.”

  “Merlin? Merlin wasn’t real, surely?”

  “Of course he was,” said Nyneve. “His sister, Avalona, was my foster mother. I lived in the forest with them both.”

  “The only True Human in the forest now is a weird woman the children talk about called Blackberry Nan. I’ve never seen her, but they swear she exists.”

  Nyneve laughed. “That sounds like me in one of my disguises. I’m not a True Human, though. There is a difference.”

  “You’ll have to forgive us. This all sounds unlikely. All the same”—Adam’s gaze returned to the convincing figure of Arthur: tall, obviously True Human, red-haired, with Excalibur at his hip—”they must have been wonderful times.”

  Arthur merely smiled.

  “Can you tell us about them?” asked Marc, more willing to believe than his father. There were enthusiastic cries of encouragement from the younger Swingers.

  “Nyneve is the storyteller,” said Fang. “She can put pictures into your head.”

  “If you like,” said Nyneve.

  For an hour she held the Swingers in an enchanted state while they relived the glorious Age of Chivalry, the battles and the tournaments, the clash of swords and the thunder of hooves, bright banners, bright metal and bright blood, yells of triumph and of agony, the smell of feasting and of death. The Swingers sat in the trees, on the grass, on the roof of the schoolhouse, experiencing it with all their senses.

  Arthur smiled quietly to himself, remembering what it was really like.

  Afah left after a few moments and walked quietly away into the forest, sick to his stomach. Fang, the Princess, and the Miggot stayed until Nyneve had finished; a little horrified, a little disgusted, but very much aware of the effect of the story on its human audience.

  When it was all over, Adam said quietly, “Perhaps now we have our means of stirring up the True Humans.”

  20

  THE DOME AT CAMELOT

  THE TASK FORCE SET OFF AT DAWN.

  They had decided to travel in the guise of itinerant performers, keeping the identity of the kikihuahuas as a trump card to be revealed if needed. They took one packhorse on which the gnomes and Afah sat, ready to slip into the saddlebags at a moment’s notice. Adam and Marc took turns leading the horse, and Nyneve, Arthur, Morgan le Fay, and Sally walked ahead. The sky was clear, the last stars fading.

  “I smell disaster,” said the Miggot, nursing a pounding headache due to overindulgence in cider the previous night.


  “Everything’s fine!” said the Princess gaily. The gnomes carried packets of bread and cheese, with small flasks of beer hung from their belts. Fang was already eating. By the time they reached the fringes of the forest, the sun was brightening the ground in little patches as though an artist had flicked his brush around, and even the Miggot began to cheer up. It was good to be back on Earth.

  The feeling did not last long. “Look!” said Adam. “The bastards meant what they said about closing off the moor.”

  A Tin Mother stood motionless and erect on the open ground before them.

  “It’s standing guard,” said the Princess. “It’s guarding the moors against trespassers like us.”

  “It’s our servant, remember,” Fang pointed out.

  The Miggot’s gloom returned as he scanned the landscape. “The moors look different,” he said. “It’s all changed.” He pointed to an immense silver crescent cutting into the sky. “That must be the dome they talk about. And look, they’ve built rock walls all over the moor. In my day a gnome could run for miles and never see a sign of giantish habitation.”

  “They’re very old walls, Miggot,” said Fang. “Most of them have fallen down.”

  “It’ll never be the same. Nothing ever is. My Cousin Hal used to have a saying: ‘Things get worse.’ He called it Hal’s Law. He said it was a universal truth, like entropy.”

  “We’ll be able to see Pentor soon,” said the Princess brightly. “That’ll be nice. It’ll bring back happy memories of Hal for you, Miggot.”

  “I have no happy memories of Hal.”

  “Better slip into the saddlebags now,” Nyneve warned them. “We don’t want that Tin Mother to see you. There’s no point in revealing our hand yet.”

  The robot gave no acknowledgment of their presence, however. Sally tapped it but it stared woodenly over her head, not moving. She kicked it. Nothing happened.