The Book of Mordred

by Vivian Vande Velde

  And Galen was three-quarters of the way down the stairs.

  Mordred switched the blade to his left hand.

  Galen jumped the last step, and Alayna stepped in between, her own sword raised. She said, "I don't know what Halbert did to you, but you have gone far enough." Galen. Galen! Are you still in there? she thought. If he didn't recognize Mordred, surely he must recognize her.

  "Alayna, get out of the way," Mordred gasped, but he was breathing hard, his sword held clumsily in his left hand.

  She said, "Mordred, be quiet. And get Kiera out of here." She was searching deep into Galen's clear blue eyes as she spoke, and she saw nothing there that she recognized. Her voice shook. "If you don't back away, I will kill you," she warned her brother. Back away. Back away. She could never kill Galen.

  The man before her smiled, a smile more reminiscent of Halbert's than her brother's.

  His sword came down hard on hers, momentarily numbing her arm to the shoulder.

  She slid her sword down and then circled it to the left, but Galen—or what remained of him in this body—could remember old Ned's lessons as well as she, and he was there to block.

  "Momma!" Kiera cried.

  "Get back!" Out of the corner of her eye she saw Kiera's small form running toward her, her disheveled braids streaming behind. "Get back!"

  Mordred was able to intercept her. He grabbed her with his good arm and held her out of the range of the slashing swords. But at the moment Alayna's eyes hovered on them, Galen reached in.

  Alayna flinched, her body bending sideways; she felt the pressure of the blow on her ribs, protected only by the leather jerkin. It knocked all the air out of her, but despite the pain, the hit had been a glancing one.

  She jabbed, hoping Galen would take it as a feint, but he must have seen her shift balance, and recognized it for the real thing in time to prevent her making contact.

  "This is madness, Galen," she gasped, though obviously Galen was beyond rationality. "Halbert is dead."

  She was giving ground, using valuable breath to try reason on someone who was no longer there.

  They had made a half circle of the room, and now over Galen's shoulder she could again sense, without focusing on them, Kiera and Mordred.

  Her feet settled into something vaguely slippery, which scattered. The wizard's remains.

  Her arms ached—she had gone into the easier but less agile two-handed stance—and she had a pain in her side, whether from Galen's one hit or from her own ragged panting she couldn't tell. Galen, she realized, was going to kill her. After that, it would take him no time at all to finish Mordred. And then what would he do to Kiera? "Halbert is dead!" she told him in gasps. "You don't need Kiera. He did."

  But with the wizard dead, there was no way to loosen the hold of his spell on Galen.

  She tried to move in, but Galen was much stronger, much faster, much better. Any moment she would make a fatal error or he would simply overpower her. There was only one thing she could do.

  Pretending to be distracted, she dropped her sword arm. "Kiera!" she screamed, though Kiera hadn't moved. "Get back!"

  Galen moved in for the kill, and stepped into her suddenly uplifted sword.

  His expression, dying, was neither pain nor anger, but bewilderment. She remembered a time as children, when they'd been walking across a frozen pond, and she had started to slip, and he reached to help her. Just as suddenly, she had regained her balance, but he had fallen before even knowing his feet were no longer under him. That was the expression he wore now in death.

  Alayna put her hands on her knees and took great, rattling breaths. The bloody sword dropped from her fingers. But in that position, she could see Galen's face too closely, so she straightened.

  Mordred was on his knees, his good arm still around Kiera, his face even paler than hers.

  "Momma!" Kiera called, and Mordred let her go.

  Alayna took deep breaths of Kiera's fresh clean smell, trying to block out the scents of leather, sweat, and blood. "Oh, Kiera," she murmured.

  She had thought there were no tears left in her, but she had been wrong.

  PART II

  Nimue

  CHAPTER 1

  "Sitting around waiting is a waste of time," Merlin had once told Nimue. "Waiting is helped along if one is doing something productive while one is waiting."

  On the particular occasion when Merlin had told her that, he was referring to waiting for a horse to be shod, and what they did while waiting was to visit various shops in the market district, and what they ended up buying was a dozen tiny silver bells that Nimue had sewn onto a ribbon, which she had given to her niece to attach to her new baby's cradle.

  But Merlin's advice was often more than it originally seemed—except, sometimes it was less. For all Nimue knew, he might have been trying to teach her something about horseshoes or markets or babies. Or he might not have been trying to teach her anything at all.

  Still, it was by trying to be productive while waiting that—five years now since Merlin was gone—she came to be traveling from village to village, offering her knowledge of herbs and medicines, woven together with a small dollop of magic, to folk too poor to go to the bigger towns to be bled by a doctor.

  And that was how, specifically, she came to be in the small town of St. George of the Hills, at Reynard's tavern. Most everyone from the town—eventually during the course of a day—passed through there, and Nimue thought it would be a fine place to learn if there were any who needed the services of midwife, herbalist, or apprentice magician.

  "Nothing that I've heard tell of" said Dolph, the young man who last year had married Reynard and Yolande's daughter, Romola.

  "Oh," Nimue said with a sigh, for she had walked all morning, her feet hurt, and her stomach was as empty as her purse. This was late enough in the spring that she could find wild strawberries and dandelions which, enhanced by magic, would make a meal. Her magic wasn't strong enough to make it a good meal, but she would never starve.

  "Why not wait and see," Dolph suggested. "Sit down, have a drink."

  Nimue's throat constricted as Dolph poured a tankard of very tempting, sweet-smelling mead. She shook her head.

  "I don't think we ever paid you for taking care of that toothache Reynard had last spring," Dolph said.

  "Oh, but you did," Nimue told him.

  Reynard, who was right there, said nothing.

  "No, no," Dolph insisted, "I'm sure we didn't. Did we, Romola?"

  "Definitely not," Romola called from the table at which she was serving.

  "We'd remember if we did," said Yolande.

  Reynard shook his head or nodded it at the appropriate times.

  "Thank you," Nimue told them. "That's very kind of all of you."

  Dolph winked as he handed her the drink, but she suspected he didn't mean it the way many men would have, for her blond hair and green eyes and fair features. Nimue saw he only had eyes for Romola, and he would have been as kind to any hungry, thirsty stranger.

  Romola brought her a platter of meat and bread to choose from, but Nimue had hardly taken a few mouthfuls when the door crashed open with a splintering of wood.

  Two knights strode into the room, naked swords in their hands, surveying the scene: fewer than a dozen customers, Dolph just straightening up from the barrel that held the mead, Romola and Yolande waiting on tables. Reynard had just gone downstairs to where the barrels were stored.

  Oh no, Nimue thought. She didn't know what this was about, but Oh no. On their armor was painted a bold red phoenix, but though she had no idea whose emblem that was, there was obviously something very wrong with the world that knights should be breaking down a door they could have just as easily swung open.

  For a moment, no one said anything. Then one of the customers, sounding more surprised than challenging said, "Hey."

  And one of the knights swung his sword and took off the man's head.

  Nimue heard the two distinctive thuds as first head, th
en body, struck the floor. She had certainly seen people die before, of illness and injuries neither her herbs nor her bit of magic could cure. But she had never before seen anyone killed.

  Perhaps the first thing Merlin had taught Nimue, and certainly the point he had repeated most vigorously, was that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This was a law of something he called physics, which Nimue gathered was going to be invented in the seventeenth century by a man called Newton. Merlin said it applied equally well to magic as to apples.

  Nimue wasn't very good at history—and particularly at history that hadn't happened yet. But she did understand magic. She understood what he meant when he said you couldn't pull a rabbit out of a hat, so to speak, without knowing exactly where that rabbit was going to come from and what were the likely consequences of its disappearance from Point A and subsequent reappearance at Point B. It was damn irresponsible, Merlin used to say, not to take into consideration such things as ethics, spatiotemporal complications, and transmogrificational effects on the sub-etheral plane.

  "Not to mention probable damage to the hat," Nimue had pointed out once. But Merlin had gone into one of his foot-stampmg, beard-pulling tantrums, and she hadn't brought the subject up again.

  Nimue weighed all these problems. She was so busy weighing, she was unable to move even when one of the knights kicked the bench out of his way and shoved Yolande hard enough to cause the innkeepers big wife to fall.

  In the stunned silence that followed, everyone at the inn could make out the sound of Reynard running up the stairs—no doubt he had heard the commotion from the cellar—and the knight moved farther into the room, toward the cellar door, raising his sword.

  "No!" Nimue cried, though actions or words sometimes could have as far-reaching and unexpected effects as magic, and though she was well within his striking range.

  In this case, the result was the knight grabbed Nimue, digging metal-sheathed fingers into her shoulder.

  Time seemed to stop.

  Reynard hesitated in the doorway. By chance—or by Nimue's hasty wish for his well-being—he was beyond sword's reach, though probably he had not as yet even seen the sword. He was obviously taking in other matters: his wife sprawled on the floor and the decapitated customer.

  Nimue was fervently hoping that her wish for Reynards well-being couldn't somehow cause something worse to happen; and, simultaneously, she was hoping that her hoping wasn't actually another wish that she'd have to keep track of and worry about later.

  The other seven or eight customers stood or sat motionless, most with their eyes downcast and their faces purposely dull lest the knight holding Nimue take offense. The second knight hadn't stopped in the common room but continued toward the back wing, where the overnight rooms were. Now there was a loud crash. Apparently he was searching for something, and apparently his method of search was to kick over the furniture and then throw it against the walls. As everyone waited to see if Reynard was going to get himself killed, there came a ripping noise—a mattress slashed.

  Reynard finally saw the knight whose hand gripped Nimue's shoulder. He took a step back, and time seemed to catch up with itself.

  The knight obviously dismissed the thought of him—a peasant who had come to his senses, and not worth dirtying ones sword on. But then he did something which, for Nimue at least, was totally unexpected. He flung her away, sending her crashing into one of the unoccupied tables.

  Nimue stayed where she landed. Her known affiliation with Merlin, and the strange rumors about his disappearance and her role in that, had resulted in several unpleasant episodes. Shed had trouble with people whom Merlin had helped—who assumed she was a treacherous witch who had murdered him; and she'd had trouble with those who didn't care what had happened to Merlin but thought they had spotted in her an easy opportunity for power. Coupled with her good looks—it would be coyness to pretend she was unaware of the effect her appearance had on men—all of this had made her assume that the destruction at the mn was somehow related to her.

  But apparently she had just been another fixture in the way, like the stools and the innkeeper's wife. The knight reached beyond her and grabbed Dolph.

  Romola dropped the tray she had been carrying. Tankards of ale splashed over the dirt floor, filling the air with their bitter smell. The knight dragged Dolph outside.

  Dolph? Nimue thought.

  She had never thought of herself as being quick, but she was still the first to reach the door. She was jostled as the others risked the remaining knight's displeasure by crowding to see what was going on.

  Any thought that the sweet-natured, pasty-faced Dolph had somehow crossed these knights dissolved as soon as she looked outdoors. All the way down the street of St. George, doors to shops and homes had been kicked in. She heard cries and moans and knew that more than two knights had swooped down on the town, and that more than the one customer at the inn had been killed.

  Nimue started to form a wish that would freeze the knights in their tracks.

  But if they were unable to move, then surely the townspeople would set on them in retaliation for the deaths and damage already done. And then either she would have to watch the knights be slaughtered, or shed have to release them. If she released them, of course they'd fight back and kill more townspeople. On the other hand, if the knights were killed, wouldn't somebody come looking for them? And then wouldn't there be more knights, more destruction?

  Nimue hesitated, as—she had to admit to herself—she often did.

  Any wish or action she might have started would have been interrupted anyway by the return of the second of the two knights who'd entered the inn. Back in the common room, he pushed through the customers and was suddenly behind her. He gave a shove that caused her to stagger forward, out into the street.

  With him, the knight dragged the boy whom Reynard had taken in three summers ago to help clean the rooms and stables and to run errands. She didn't know his name. Perhaps even the innkeeper himself didn't know or could no longer remember, for everyone just called him Boy. The lad, who couldn't have been more than sixteen, was simple-minded and generally fearful of folk, and he was being pulled out of the inn with his head tucked under the knight's arm.

  Down the street another knight pulled at the village's young wainwright, who had hold of a large wagon wheel which he had jammed sideways into the doorway of his shop. The knight made to twist the youth and therefore the wheel around, but the youth managed to keep the wheel caught in the door frame.

  Angrily the knight gave such a great yank that the wheel wrenched free, and knight and wainwright tumbled into the street. Though the wainwright landed on top, he didn't take advantage of his position, but only bent over his hand and moaned, which probably meant at least some of the fingers were broken.

  Boys, Nimue thought, as the image of what she was seeing finally sank in. They're rounding up very young men and older boys.

  Behind her, Romola pushed through the door of the inn, trailing her parents behind. Yolande and Reynard, recognizing the hopelessness of the situation, were clinging to her, trying to keep her from compounding the family's loss by getting herself killed. But Romola was all flying fists and elbows, and she shouted obscenities into the street where now the only other sounds were the stifled whimpers of grief. One of the knights—Nimue counted quickly, there were twelve—one of the knights glanced in her direction with a scowl. But then one of the inn's regular customers finally came to the innkeeper's aid and helped drag Romola out of view.

  Others, too, were retreating, turning their backs on family and neighbors before more harm came of it. A few were distraught or foolhardy enough to lean out of windows, or to peek around doorways. But even a crowd could do little against twelve armored knights.

  Nimue found herself alone on the street with the knights and their captives. She took a step—not back into the inn but behind the huge barrel that identified Reynard's establishment.

  Crouching, she rubbed th
e plain gold band of Merlin's ring that she wore on one thumb and tried to concentrate. Who were these knights who bore the symbol of the twice-born phoenix, that immortal bird revitalized by its own funeral pyre? And why had they gathered together seven of the youths of St. George?

  No, six.

  Even as she watched, one of them must have been deemed unacceptable. The knight who seemed to be in charge of this raid had grabbed a strapping peasant boy by his loose shirt and pulled him in for a closer look, then pushed him away hard enough to cause him to bounce off the wall of one of the shops. The youth stayed where he landed—unhurt, Nimue guessed, but fearful enough to be content to leave well enough alone.

  In the long days of barbarism between the retreat of the Roman legions and King Arthur's formation of a united Britain, there had been times that groups of mercenaries or knights could settle on abducting a town's maidens as an afternoon's diversion. But since before Nimue's birth, Arthur had declared that the peasants were not to be considered fair game, and she couldn't imagine anyone crossing his code lightly.

  And not young maidens, her mind kept repeating, young men.

  The serf who had been rejected was trying to crawl away without attracting notice. He passed by Nimue's barrel and glanced at her. A purple birthmark stood out prominently on his pale face.

  Nimue took another look at those who had been chosen. They ranged in age from about fifteen to no more than twenty-three or twenty-four. And they were all nicely featured, even down to Reynard's Boy. Half-wit that he was, it didn't show in his face, as it did in some.

  Where? she mouthed at the young man with the birthmark. Where were the knights from? Where were they taking their captives? She didn't have time to ask all that needed asking.

  No matter. The young man didn't know or was too intent on escaping before they could change their minds. He shook his head and kept on crawling.

  How could she make a reasoned decision on a course of action if she didn't even know what was going on?

  She closed her eyes. Oh, Merlin, help me. But, of course Merlin wasn't there, as he wouldn't be now for she-wasn't-sure-how-long.