Hero is a Four Letter Word

by J. M. Frey

  The people in the stands around him blasted their disproval of his inaction into short, obnoxious trumpets and the sound filled the grounds with the angry buzz of disturbed hornets. They looked at him with such eager expectation, and Arthur had no idea how to give them what they wanted. He had always feared not being able to satisfy his subjects, but their now gazes were positively hungry. Arthur wondered what could be at stake should he fail this test that would make them so desperate.

  A golden club sat in the middle of the tourney field. It was cup-shaped and large, with a great ball cradled between the carven swaths of its base. Arthur knew it was not the Grail. Beyond that, he had no idea why it might be significant, and his ignorance annoyed him as much as the anxiety in the audience’s eyes ate away at his confidence.

  A sharp cry woke him and he was chagrined to discover that once more it had come from him. Imagine, King Arthur, the strongest arm at the Round Table and the firmest of grip on the crown, unable to contain his own whimpers. Or bowels, for that matter. He shifted once in the darkness, but no tell-tale dampness announced its presence and he sighed. He was getting better at controlling that, at least.

  When his mother came into the room a few minutes later with his bottle, Arthur peered up at her from his crib and said, “I’m sorry, Mother.”

  “Babies are like ink cartridges; low capacity and need to be refilled often,” his mother said with a strained smile. There were dark smudges under her eyes and Arthur felt so guilty that he couldn’t help the involuntary squirm.

  “I didn’t mean the night feedings, though I appreciate that, too,” Arthur admitted, waving his hands happily at the bottle as his mother held it in his direction. She didn’t like to pick him up to feed him anymore. Arthur missed the feel of the beat of her heart next to his cheek, the soft warm milk-and-rose-water-smell she had, the gentleness of her long fingers on the back of his neck, but he didn’t dare say as much. He felt he was imposing on the poor woman enough. “I meant for … well … everything else.”

  His mother let him latch onto the plastic nipple of the bottle and stayed silent as he sucked. The formula didn’t taste as wonderful as the breast milk had, but the fake bottle also wasn’t giving him strangely twisted feelings of both young security and old lasciviousness.

  When he was done, his mother rubbed his full belly in gentle circles until the little burp of swallowed air bubbled out of his mouth. Kaye had always outdone him at banquets, but Arthur was becoming increasingly impressed with his own manful belches.

  Normally after the bottle, Arthur’s mother left his nursery immediately. She was never inattentive or neglectful, not after that first time, but she wasn’t comfortable around her son, either. He left himself drift back in the direction of sleep. If she wanted to watch him do so, he was happy enough to oblige.

  “Why don’t you talk to me as much as your father?”

  Arthur blinked his way back towards consciousness and debated what his answer should be, or if indeed he should answer at all. But then, he never had been all that good at keeping his mouth shut when he should have – the sword in his back in the middle of a battlefield from the man who should have been his heir was proof enough of that.

  “It seemed to make you happy,” Arthur replied softly.

  His mother jerked back, then leaned over the rail of the cradle and pressed her lips to his forehead. “I have a son who is healthy and content. I am happy.”

  “Then why do you look so sad all the time?” Arthur asked as she pulled away. Her eyes were sparkling again, like she was about to cry, ready to prove him right.

  “I didn’t ask to have a son who is the reborn Rightwise King of All England,” his mother said softly.

  “I didn’t ask to be reborn,” Arthur replied softly. “So I guess we both got the short end of that stick.”

  “I’m scared,” she admitted. “I’m scared of what this means for the world. I’m scared that you’re going to be hurt. That you’re going to die.”

  Arthur kicked his feet for a few moments, looking up in the darkness at his mother’s sad, dark eyes, the halo of woolly sheep that circled her head obliviously.

  “What’s your name?” Arthur asked.

  “Evangeline,” she said. “My friends call me Iggy.”

  Arthur tried to smile, but all he managed was a gummy lip purse. “Iggy,” he said. “I’m scared too, Iggy.”

  She put down the bottle and picked up her son and sat with him in the rocking chair and cuddled him close. “I’ll protect you, for as long as I can,” she whispered into the faint reddish wisps of his hair. “And I guess you should call me ‘Mummy.’”

  “Do you want me to?”

  Iggy pulled Arthur away from her stomach and met his eyes seriously.

  “Yes,” she said softly, and smiled. It was tentative, but it also felt like a victory, if only a very small one.

  “Very well,” Arthur sighed, content for the moment. “Mummy.”

  She pulled him close again and rocked him slightly. She hummed a snatch of a lullaby that Arthur was surprised to realize he remembered from his first childhood. Then she told him a soft, sad story about the Lady of the Lake. Arthur didn’t have the heart to point out to her that he already knew this story with a bit more familiarity than he really would have liked, considering how it ended.

  Every night for the next few weeks, Arthur dreamt of the tourney grounds and the golden cup and the buzzing, expectant, hungry eyes of his audience. There were other knights with him. Though they, like him, wore new faces, he knew them for Owain, and Cai, Gwalchmai, Peredur, the golden Geraint, the frightened Trystan, bold Bedwyr, Cilhwch, Edeyrn, Cynon, and even that bastard Lancelot. They, like him, wore the flimsy white uniform quartered with red bands, the ineffectual shin armour, and the shoes with spiked bottoms. Opposite them stood other knights in fierce red, Mordred at their head with his customary, bloody smirk. Between them stood the gold cup, the new grail for which Arthur had realized across the course of his nightly dreams they fought on this flat, green battlefield.

  “If you can make this kick,” Lancelot said behind his shoulder, “it’s ours. The whole world.”

  “No pressure, then,” adult Arthur said in his dream. And then he began to run towards Mordred and the strange limp net that hung like a shredded battle flag behind him.

  He could feel himself wind up for something, to make some sort of move, felt his focus narrow to a single prick of white and black that lay stark against the lush green grass.

  But then he woke.

  Again.

  He resisted the childish urge to howl in frustration.

  “A babysitter?” Arthur said dubiously from his quilt on the living room floor. Those fantastic little woolly sheep were dangling above his head, suspended on a yellow plastic frame patterned with dragons. He loved those sheep – they were so entertaining. He tore his attention away to attempt to raise an eyebrow askance.

  “You forget, your majesty,” his father said kindly, “you can’t even sit up on your own yet.”

  Arthur, who couldn’t exactly prove the statement wrong, said grudgingly, “Okay. I guess. Enjoy your night out, Dad, Mum.”

  “Thanks, darling,” his mother said, and smiled. It was one of those real smiles, one of the ones where she realized that maybe everything was going to be okay and that her life hadn’t turned out all strange and terrifying. She was smiling like that more often, lately, and Arthur was proud of himself to be part of why that kind of smile was ending up there.

  Then the doorbell rang. His mother went to answer and his father gave him the thumbs up. Arthur tried to roll his eyes. Then he tried not to think about what they might be doing out alone tonight. And then he tried not to think about what it would be like to have a sibling.

  The young girl came in ahead of his mum, blonde and probably about fourteen or so. Arthur wasn’t so good at estimating people’s ages any more – back in his first life, this girl would have been a woman already, preparing to marry or p
erhaps with children of her own. In this life, kids this age seemed stuck in a strange limbo between childhood and adulthood, irresponsible and yet filled with a coltish sexuality and raging libido that had no direction, and instead exploded all over the media.

  There was something different about this one, though. Something in her that Arthur had never seen in the hundreds that were splashed all over the television that he watched with his father while cuddled on his tummy, or that his mother read about from the tabloids to help Arthur get sleepy enough for his naps. Her eyes looked old. Her bearing was comfortable, as if she completely inhabited her skin, was used to being in there.

  It wasn’t until his mum had kissed him on the cheek and reminded him quietly that normal babies didn’t speak in fully articulate sentences, his parents had left, and the girl had come to sit on the floor beside him and tweaked his toes that Arthur finally clicked.

  “Merlin?” Arthur squawked.

  The girl scowled, a little wrinkle forming between her eyebrows that Arthur knew quite well. “What the hell do you think, your majesty?” she said, and though her voice was high and sweet, the old sorcerer’s tone hadn’t changed at all in the few thousand years since the king had last been chastised by Merlin. It very clearly said: you are my king and I respect you and love you in a brotherly way, but by all the dragons that once roamed Albion, are you a frigging idiot. “It’s not as if I planned this. The universe and Albion chose, not me. Besides,” she said, and took a moment to pop her hideously pink bubble gum with an obnoxious snap, “You should see Lancelot.”

  “Ugly?”

  “Very.”

  “Awesome,” Arthur said, trying out one of the new words that the people around here seemed to like so much. “I hope his vanity is wounded. About time.” Arthur, understandably, had little love for a man who poached other people’s queens.

  Merlin snorted indelicately.

  “Well,” Arthur conceded, waving his chubby toes in her direction, then put them in his mouth because, well, he could. Around his toes he added: “I guess I don’t feel so cheated after all.”

  Merlin looked at her wristwatch, snapped her gum again, and said, “The football final is on. Mind if we watch?”

  “Football?” Arthur asked. “I don’t know football. Is it a sport?”

  Merlin snorted again, that mannish sound that was so wrong coming from lips slick with gloss. “It’s a religion. This is a nation obsessed, your majesty. Even you won’t resist for long.”

  Merlin propped Arthur up on her lap and Arthur leaned back into the warmth of her stomach and the reassuring patter of her heart. He watched with interest as Merlin explained the rules, and the work and passion the various nations of the world invested in the FIFA tournament.

  It wasn’t until partway through the second half that Arthur realized that while he had never watched football before, he recognized the pitch and the stadium. And when the game was over and the blokes in orange were declared the tourney winners, Arthur immediately recognized the golden cup being hoisted aloft.

  “The saviour of Albion, indeed,” he murmured.

  Merlin just snapped her gum.

  Another Four Letter Word

  by J.M. Frey

  Funerals, Jennet decides, both literally and metaphorically suck.

  Metaphorically in all the ways they talk about in entitled poems, and empty hymns, and useless novels about vast open spaces and disillusioned young men with something to prove. Literally, because when they lower her father’s coffin into the cold, damp earth, it feels like she’s about to be pulled down on top of it.

  It had only ever been the two of them. Jen and David against the world. Happiest pair that ever was. Strong. Defying all the stereotypes of men who can’t care, can’t nurture, can’t mother. Father and daughter, powerful together.

  And now separated forever.

  Jennet clutches a slim ash tree, leans close to it and does her best to breathe wet, chill, cemetery air; to remain upright; to not pitch nose-first into her Da’s grave. She has no mother, no uncle, no brothers or sisters to hold her upright, help her stand firm. Only Mrs. MacDonald, the cook and housekeeper, hovers beside her elbow but does not touch. They don’t have a close enough relationship for that, but if Jen was pressed, she’d have said that the woman was the closest thing to a female role model she’d grown up with. Her father hadn’t believed in governesses. Too Victorian, he’d thought.

  When she’s invited to speak about the deceased, Jen just shakes her head, fingers digging into the bark. Mr. Coldwell, the only other servant and the man who was chauffer, mechanic, valet and friend to her father, steps up instead. He pulls a folded card from his breast pocket, clearly anticipating that Jen’s grief would make her mute and the task would fall to him. That is the nice thing about Mr. Coldwell: he is so good at anticipating when he would be needed.

  Jennet listens with half an ear, the rain on the leaf mold and the canopy above them too much of a hindrance to her sorrow-soaked brain to catch all Mr. Coldwell’s words. When he’s done, he presses the card between Jen’s fingers. Mrs. MacDonald takes it, tucks it into her small black purse, and Jen is absurdly grateful that it will be kept safe. She wants to read it, but she can’t worry about keeping track of it just now.

  Then the priest is calling her forward, and she goes on shaking legs, the heels of her pumps sinking into the wet grass. He presses a clump of soil into her hands and she steps to the edge of the wound in the world and opens her fingers. It lands with a wet plop right about where her father’s face would be.

  She stumbles back, horrified with the visual, and covers her own face with her soil-streaked hands. The rain is freezing, sharp fingers against the back of her neck. Mrs. MacDonald touches her shoulder, and that’s it, that’s all Jen can take. Enough.

  She turns and flees back to the house, leaving mud and rainwater in her wake like fairy-story breadcrumbs. She shuts herself up in the close, quietness of her Da’s en suite shower stall. The pouf still smells of his cologne body wash, fills her nose with the scent of warm, gripping hugs she will never have again, and she crumples against the tiles and weeps, and weeps, and weeps.

  Despite the large house and the land surrounding it, Carterhaugh Estate isn’t wealthy. Nor is it really an estate. Jennet and her Da were not part of the peerage, never mind that the people of the nearby Selkirk call them “Lord” and “Lady” out of respect, and Jennet herself draws only a modest stipend from the family trust.

  The house itself is two stories above ground and one below that comprises the pantry and kitchens with big dug-out windows. She and her father had apartments in the upper part of the house at the front, and there are two guest rooms and a study at the back. The ground floor is home to the formal dining room, the informal breakfast room, a sitting room that her father had filled with cleverly hidden electronics like a television and a sound system, two servant’s quarters occupied by Mrs. MacDonald and Mr. Coldwell when they aren’t in the mood to head back to their homes in Selkirk, and their shared bathroom. The house was old enough and well cared for enough to qualify for heritage status with the government, but that would mean needing to put in some cash for the restorations, and frankly they just don’t have the money.

  As the only surviving blood kin to the Lord of Carterhaugh, Jennet is entailed the manor, the grounds, and a hundred acres of farmland which has been rented by the same family for the last three generations. Jennet inherits very little beyond the trust, the interest on which pays the salaries of Mr. Coldwell and Mrs. Macdonald, and for their consumables. The money from the farming tenants goes towards the upkeep of the house, and Jennet’s admittedly modest lifestyle. Jen doesn’t work, per se, but she does sit on the board of several of the local chartities, arts centres, and business associations.

  Included in the manor’s grounds is a triangular plain crisscrossed with famous, so-called fairy circles, and just enough forest to get lost in. The forest borders both the Yarrow and the Ettrick, inhabits the fork
where the two tributaries come together and head off as one to the far away North Sea.

  From the window seat of her apartment, Jennet can see a doe with her fawn grazing along the edge of the lawn, sticking close to the trees. Her father’s grave is on the other side of the house, hidden behind the crumbling family chapel, and she is absurdly thankful that it isn’t visible from her sitting room.

  She’s fled here after a day full of long, painful discussion and even more heart-breaking choices. She watches the deer and clutches a cup of tea and does her best to empty her mind. But even mother nature, it seems, is determined to not let her hide away from the thought of children.

  The truth of it is this: Jennet can afford to remain at Carterhaugh, could probably live on the trust and the entail indefinitely, but the question has become – who will get it after? Who will Jennet name as her heir?

  A few decades ago, Carterhaugh was open to tourists, like the grand houses of the Historical Trust used to do in the old days. There once were parts of the house that were staged, but so few people came out to the manor that they had repurposed the spare rooms as Jennet’s nursery and her Da’s study when she’d been small. With no wee ones in house and the building aging at a rate that is beginning to outpace the living’s ability to keep up the repairs, perhaps it is time, Mr. Coldwell floats as the three of them huddle over a pot of tea on the rough scullion’s table in the kitchen, to revisit the idea of turning the east wing into a bed and breakfast?

  They could hire a part-time maid from the village to take care of the bedrooms, Mrs. MacDonald could do the cooking, Mr. Coldwell could pick up visitors from the train station in the old Model T that he has meticulously restored, and Jennet could play hostess? The only down side is, of course, that Jennet isn’t sure she could smile that much around strangers. She wouldn’t mind it so much if she could just avoid that part of the house, but of course part of the draw is going to be getting to interact with the Lady Carterhaugh herself. To take brandy in the sitting room, tour the ornamental and kitchen gardens, perhaps go for a horseback ride around the boundaries of the forest.