The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (12 page)

The reverse-running sunlight gleamed to a dawning yellow on my blade.  The steel and the sun together were too beautiful not to use in killing this monster.

I thrust the sword into Mordred, the blade seeking the blood-heart of the bastard prince.

Instead of piercing his soul, Excalibur drove through Mordred’s arm and hand and into the steel of Mordred’s gladius blade and together the two swords cut into the breast of the girl and into her heart and burst it open.

Flavia died crying, “Mother!  Father!” with Mordred’s sword in her body and the ghost of Excalibur there, too.

The sword that would not kill dream Saxons killed a living Briton.

I howled in fury.  I swung Excalibur through Mordred’s body, slicing flesh and bone.  But the murderer would not fall to bits.

Mordred stood staring down at my grave, feeling nothing, sensing nothing as Excalibur sliced through him.

He heard only the rolling anguished cry that came from me.

Mordred looked into the sky for thunderclouds and saw there no evidence of any Pagan gods watching him.

“Then it’s a merlin down there,” he said to my grave.  “But what’re you to a power like me?”

He laughed a bitter, biting laughter.

With Flavia’s veil, he wiped her blood from his gladius.

Mordred crouched by my grave and said, “Who’s in this hole?  Not the Great Merlin, surely.  No, whatever monster lies here is too weak to be him.  But I’ll kill it anyway and scatter its atomos.”

Mordred grabbed up a shovel and dug into the grave until he uncovered the marks of my corpse.

I saw myself as he saw me – a layer of dust and scrap in dark earth, a red stain marking the place Excalibur had lain rusting in hands.

Mordred kicked at my scraps and said, “Not enough dust to punish.  Too bad.”

He flung aside the shovel in disgust.

“Have I missed my moment in time again?” I cried aloud.

“What moment?” Mordred said to my dust, startled.  “Who’s there?”

He snatched up the shovel as his weapon.

“Have I wasted my purpose?” I howled.

He was startled again.  “Can you have a purpose, Old Monster?”

Mordred drove the shovel into my grave to scatter my dust in the wind.

I heard funeral weeping.  Mordred heard the same.

“Who weeps here on this empty hill?” he and I cried together.

Was it me weeping for the waste of my Fate, for the twelve-times-twelve lives I had failed?

The roaring sound of a hundred and forty-four weepers!

Mordred jumped away from the grave.  “What’s here?” he cried in terror.  He hauled up shovel and gladius to defend himself.

The lamentations stopped.

A murderous rage shook me, gripping heart and liver, life and thought.  I shouted, “When I come into the world, I’ll seek you out, Prince.  I’ll kill you.  However I find you, I’ll kill you.  If you’re lord king of Camelot or an infant in swaddling, I’ll kill you for the evil you will do.”

“How can old dust speak?” cried Mordred.

He drove his gladius into my open grave.

“Nothing there!” he said, hauling up dirt and worms on the tip of his blade.

I saw the fright go out of him.

“I’m a fool to hear you, Old Bones,” he said.

Mordred laughed, hugging his gladius to his chest.

He shouted, “I’m Arthur’s blood, prince of Camelot, the next Pendragon!  What’ve I to fear in all the wide world?  Let the world fear
me!
”

He picked up a shard of my bone like the browned and crumbling bark of a dead tree.  He broke it in his fingers, letting its dust shower into my grave.

“Here, Old Monster,” he said to my dust, “I gift you a maiden for your eternity’s play.”

He threw Flavia’s corpse into the grave.

“One toy more or less, what’s she to me?  If Lancelot has the queen for his tart, I’ve the blood – the crown will come to me in the time I make it come.”

Mordred kneeled over my bone fragments and over the corpse of the girl.  He dipped his fingers in her wound, dabbed the blood on my bone-shards and waited for the change.  Nothing happened.

“What, a virgin’s blood can’t bring you back to life, Old Horror?  Then science is wrong!  Or perhaps you’re too foul to be restored by ordinary means.  Sobeit and I’m glad of it.”

Mordred shoveled earth over Flavia and me.

“But I’ll come back, Old Bones, to dig you up to burn your ruins on Pluto’s altar so there’s no chance you’ll ever trouble me again.”

Mordred stamped the earth flat over my grave.

“Now I’ve one more toy to crush,” he said, as much to himself as to me.  “Agravain Hard Hand.  I’ll kill her father to free me of his dagger in my back.”

Mordred ran away to his horse and was gone.

* * *

I in my grave wept for the girl who lay on my dust and splinters, the suffocating earth around us both.  I wept for myself gone to atomos too soon to save Arthur and Camelot.  Wept for the sword that would never feel Arthur’s grip.  Wept even for Urien rusting in its crumbled scabbard on my back.  Wept for not knowing what I was to do.

The girl opened her eyes and looked into mine.  What eyes had I?  Where could she find eyes in my scattered dust?

Branwynn,
she said to me – an alien word I recognized as my soul-name, with the power to draw together my atomos, shaping them into body and soul.

“Branwynn, I love you for your pity of me.”

“What kind of thing are you to live in death?” I cried through the dirt clogging my mouth.

“I live through death as do you, Mother Merlin.”

She glanced up through the grassy earth at the trees above us, the road with carts and horses, a knight passing on foot and, beyond, the glittering spires of Camelot, pennants and crosses, music, books, laughing children, teasing ladies, and the throbbing jewel that made it all alive – Arthur on his throne.

It was so wonderful I tried to gather together my atomos to leap out of my grave to join this perfect world.

But she said, “I’ve no yearning to return to Camelot and I cannot take you there.”

“Take me there?” I cried.  “Take me!” I shouted.

“You’ll join me there soon enough in your death-dream.”

“I’m dead already.  When do I dream of Camelot?”

“What’s time to me to care?” she said, content.  “What’s time at all?”

“Who are you?” I cried.

She took my hand – in calling my soul-name she had assembled enough of my dust to make a hand to grasp.

“I’m the virgin sent to fetch you to
Artyr,
” she said, using his soul-name.

I held her hand and clutched to myself the red dust of Excalibur.

We sank through the Earth, drifting through stone until I heard through the mud in my ears the feasting horns! The cheers for a champion!  The merry clash of wine cups!

I put my face to a glassy wall misted with chill and looked into a cavern beneath a hollow hill.  In there was a palace of colored glass and exhalations of mist.  A great hall where light from all angles threw onto the cheering crowd a Greek prism of red, blue, yellow, and green.

Arthur reclined on his Roman bed howling a toast from his wine-filled helmet.  He was deep-chested from a life of sword and shield.  His beard trimmed short.  His hair the Pendragon red he shared with his half-sister Morgause.  He was unarmed and dressed in the purple-edged white toga of his Roman rank, his library of the only twelve books saved from the fire of Alexandria as a prop under his elbow.

Around him were his champions – Percival, Kay, Bedivere, Lucan, and the other two hundred of the Round Table.  The gold Table was hung above the throne, immense and brooding.

Guenevere was there among the princesses of Camelot but Morgause was not.  I saw Lancelot with his mother, the Lady of the Lake.  Mordred with his Druidic witches.  All the chief soldiers of Arthur’s last army.  Plus the temple priests and priestesses of half-mad pagan gods and of Jupiter, Mars, and Bellona.  All of them the men, women, and children dead at Camlann or in the Saxon sack of Camelot after Arthur was slaughtered by Mordred.

“What is this place?” I said to Flavia.

“Annwn – the Otherworld.  Pluto’s Endless Empire.”

Flavia started, turning away.  “My new lover calls me.”

“Who in this place can be your lover?”

“The Lord Pluto.”

Flavia drifted away into a shimmer.

I was no longer staring into the palace through its glass walls but I was there, in the middle of the wild revelry of Arthur’s dead knights, drunk with my own happiness.

I pushed through the mob to the throne, shouting in joy, “Arthur!  King!”

The King said to me, “Ah, there you are!  Have you come at last, Mother Merlin, or is this one more shattered dream?”

I climbed up beside Arthur lying on his throne.  The King was not a man but the image of a man.  He was color and light.  A conjunction of the many-colored rays of light focused through the glass walls onto this spot.

I put my hands into his light and cried in agony, “Fraud!  Deceit!  Lies!”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said the King.  “And no.  We here are subjects of the lord of the dead.  I’m king of the shadows of Camelot until you make me live again.”

A shifting of light and one-armed Bedivere appeared.  “Have you brought the sword?”

I put out my hands still rotten in death.  In them was the last rust of Excalibur.

“Has everything I’ve done come to this?” I cried.

I dropped the rust and clapped hands to my face to weep but I had no face.

Arthur pulled his toga hem away from the falling rust and said, “Bedivere, has she made the sword?”

“That’s it, King.”

“But has she named it?”

“She’s named it ‘Excalibur,’ King.”

“‘Daughter of Caliburn!’”

Arthur reached to pick up the rust.

“Hold, King,” said Bedivere, now beside me.

Another shift of light brought two hundred Round Tablers clustering around us.

Bedivere said, “The sword is not for you to touch, Arthur.”

“The World Sword is mine,” said the King.  “Its spirit was made for me before the beginning of the world.”

“But not in this dead life.”

“Galahad!” Arthur shouted.

The pure knight who, alone of the Table, was granted a vision of the Holy Grail appeared in a shift of light between Arthur and the fallen rust.

“Pick up my sword.”

Galahad put his hands into the rust and picked up the gleaming blade.

The sword sang
Excalibur!

“Is it time to live again?” cried Galahad.

“Not yet,” said Arthur.  He called, “Lucan!”

Lucan was there, in a shift of black light.

“She’s made my sword, Lucan,” Arthur said, “but has she made herself?”

“I?  Make myself?” I said.

Lucan said to me, “Have you made yourself the merlin to save a kingdom and a king or must we all wait dreaming here for more ages to pass before we can ride out of death into life?”

“You’ve made me all I can be,” I said to my foster father.  “Tell me what more I’m to do and I’ll do it!”

“Make the quest,” said Lucan.

“What quest?”

“Become!” said Arthur.

The glitter faded that was king and throne, revel and revelers.

The sounds of feasting drifted away.

I was alone in a forgotten cavern in Hades.

“How do I become?” I cried to the emptiness.

“I’m with you,” a voice said out of the gloom.

“Who’s there?”

Artyr.

“The King – my father?”

“Look at us!”

Darkness rolled back.  I was on flat, desolate land beneath a sky whose rain never touched Earth to create flowers and birds.  Around the horizon were the pillars and plinths of a monstrous henge.  From each of the stones walked a man.  Each man was Arthur.  Twelve-times-twelve Arthurs.  All the history of Arthurs.

“These many lives I’ve lived and am,” said the King.  “These many times I’ve failed to become what you must make me!”

He was gone.

Once more from the stones came human figures.  These were not identical.  They were Druids and magicians, Greek philosophers and Arab princes, but of all sizes, shapes, and colors.  Warrior magi, African lords, book-scholars, men and women, able and crippled, horrific and beautiful.

“These many times,” they cried in their many voices, “we’ve failed to become the merlin who can make the king!”

The merlins stood ranked around me, breathing on me their fetid breath, men and women parting their forked beards and snaky hair.  They pointed to Earth and Heaven, shouting, “Free us to die!”