The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (15 page)

She shouted “Long life!” for Uther and Princess Merlin and ran to prostrate herself beside the king’s chariot.

Uther slouched in his Greek armor on his chariot and said to her, “Get up out of the dust, woman, remember your rank.  Nice tits!”

He said to me, “Hail, Mother Merlin!”

Uther waved his parade past us into the town.

“Another day, Old Mother,” he said, weary.  “Another Triumph.  Another rag-tag of prisoners.”  He gestured at the blue men.  “What’ll you give me for their hearts and livers or do you want ‘em flayed and minced in the customary manner of Druids?”

“I want nothing of them at all,” I said, feeling a burst of merlinic impatience.  “Move your damn silly parade out of my way.  It blocks the road for my carts.”

“Where are you going that takes precedence over chatting with me the High King?”

“To find a clock, a rock, and a prince.”

“You riddle as much as the damned Saxons.  What clock?”

“Any clock.  To tell me what year this is.”

“Then I’m your clock, Mother.  It’s the twelfth year of my kingship.  The only rock you could want is the Brutus stone over there” – he gestured toward the boulder flanked by altars – “but what prince is more valuable than ten minutes spent with me?”

I looked over at the huge, flat-topped sacrificial stone, so much more massive than the little rock Morgause had scavenged for the remnants of the Britons in my days as slave in Carbonek Castle.

Here with this perfect stone must be the point of beginning for my mission and my quest.  But what would this violent king do with Arthur if he believed Merlin would groom Arthur as king ahead of all his older son-princes?

I said, “I’ll name the prince when I see him, Uther.”

The king laughed, his oiled red beard clapping stiffly on his breastplate, a sound like the slapping of sword on shield that begins battles.

“How’s it you alone in all humanity don’t fear the chief dragon and slaughterer of the Scots?  I could have off your head and tits and nether parts” – Uther clapped his own groin as he laughed again, then scratched it through the fringed leather skirt – “and feed your liver to the ravens, a Promethean end for a withered old fraud like you.”

“Is that what I am, a fraud?”

I looked into the faces of the passing centurions searching for a young man named Arthur.

“What else?” Uther said.  “Every time I meet you I see a different Merlin.  One day young, another old.  Yesterday on the road I met you as fresh and pretty as a girl, your snaky beard scarcely grown.  Today you’re the grandmother of yourself.  I tell you, Lady, it’s tiresome and confusing.  I barely know what world and time I live in and can’t figure yours.”

Which of my former selves had Uther seen on the road yesterday?

“Yet you recognize me.  How’s that?” I said.

“I also think I see you in shadows, spiraling hawks, and in my wine puke.  A couple of years ago I saw you in a book.  That’s when I gave up learning to read.”

Uther shifted the contents of his undergarments.

“Still, when all this jolly killing’s stopped, I might try reading again.  I like the pictures.”

“Why not trust your generals to finish the Scots so you can study your picture books, King?”

“Is that Roman sarcasm or British irony?  I never know the difference and forget to laugh.”

Uther pissed off the back of his chariot.

“But the Scots?” he said.  “What’re they?  Naked savages whose hearts’re so obsessed with wood-loneliness they’re driven to attack humans.  No, what I fear is our bringing the Saxons into the country.”

“Then get them out.”

“I bring them in for my son.”

“For Arthur?” I said, surprised.

“The baby of the litter?  No, no, he’ll never be king.  The oldest one, Gurthrygen.  He’s king after me.  His power in the land’s to be founded on Saxon mercenaries who’ll die for Britons against the Scots.  But after they’ve killed all the Scots, who stands between the Saxons and us?”

“Arthur,” I said.

“Make me laugh!  You love the little fool but he’s scarcely better fit for a warlord than to play with his mother’s tits.  You did that, transforming him into birds and things so he’d learn the ‘greater lessons’ of life.  Wish you’d make me into ten men so I could screw ten princesses at once, that’s what I wish.  Can you do that for me, Mother?”

“Did I do it for Arthur?” I said, the Brynn in me astonished to hear that the legends of Arthur’s youth were true.

“Have you forgotten again?” Uther said.

“I’m not sure which way in life I’m headed at the moment.”

“Ah, that dreary nonsense again.  ‘Toward womb or tomb, which way, which way?’ moans my merlin.”

Uther dropped with a thud to sit on the edge of his chariot and gazed at me with a fierce, appraising eye.  I saw him suddenly startled.

He said, “Hadn’t occurred to me you might not be fully aware of how you live your life, Mother.  What a fright you are.  What’s the idiot Arthur to do with anything?”

“I measure my life against Arthur’s.  Show me the boy and let me see which way he ages.  Then I’ll know which way I’m going.  Better, introduce me to Mordred.”

“Who?”

“A prince hereafter.”

“More foretelling?”  Uther stamped his boots in the dirt, suddenly impatient.  “Other people chatter about those who live or have lived.  Merlin talks to me about people who haven’t yet lived.  Or may never live, for all I know.  What a bore.  But remember the old times, Old Woman, when we went through the world together in search of dragons and sexy things?  What happened to all the dragons?  Or the damned elves and fairies, for that?  I haven’t seen one in years.”

“I can’t remember what’s still to come for me,” I said.

“You mean our past?” Uther said, even more startled.  “You don’t remember what we did, what we drank, the riots we made?”

“It hasn’t yet happened to me.”

“You see?” cried Uther.  “Even the simplest conversation with you is a trial.  You can’t mean you don’t remember Igerne and the fog you made me that carried horse and king into her husband’s castle for me to make Arthur on her, though I had no idea he would happen?”

“I know the story.”

“Everyone does!  I tell it often enough, to the woman’s chagrin.  A great story.  But you don’t remember it because even though we did it together it hasn’t yet happened for you in your future-past or whatever?”

Uther gave up on the conversation.  He pointed to the miscellaneous kings and queens I had collected from Annwn.  “Who’re these princes?”

“My vassals.”

“But your servants are wind, shadow, and fear, you always tell me.  What do you want with – Great God, I know some of these people! – they’re all dead!”

Uther grabbed for his battle sword.  “Are you Merlin?” he cried.  “Or the Devil herself?”

“I’m Merlin, King.  These aren’t walking dead but live princes I stole from Pluto.”

The sun circled in the sky and began a backward course.  I cried, or thought I cried, “Is this the wrong time after all?  Where else have I to go?”

“What do you say?” said Uther, becoming blown dust.

“What of us, Mother Merlin?” said my kings, queens, and slaves.

“To your palaces and huts, go!  Live!  Wait for my call!”

“When shall we hear it?” they cried, slipping away in time.

“When I come into your epochs, I’ll call for you!”

“We wait!” they said, vanishing.

* * *

I was left on the road by the Brutus stone with my carts of treasure that, because they did not live, had no need to shift in time away from me.

Dust evaporated from the dirt road that devolved toward good Roman stone.  The British village by the road melted toward an antique villa and spa.  I was moving too quickly into the past.  Let this moment pass, fail now to plant Excalibur in Arthur’s future, and I would fail my quest and I and all the merlins before me would have to live again.

Out of me came the groans of their voices and my own cry of desperation.

I climbed the Brutus stone.  There, on its sacrificial plane, I drew the World Sword.  It sang
Excalibur!
– the song I first heard in my youth so many lifetimes ago when Galabes-Lucan shattered his own black sword on this stone.

I thrust the sword into the sky and time stopped.  The sun ceased its backward tracking across heaven.  Plants ceased to grow, men and women to fight and love.  Birds were fixed in their places in the air.

I felt the sudden hot breath of demons laughing behind my shoulder, waiting, whispering, “Try again, Merlin, or fail and live again!”

I saw the Great Merlin’s sphinx that said, “Win, Merlin, save us all!”

I saw the Lord Pluto welling out of the depths of stopped time, saying, “Succeed, Merlin, and die – I’ve a slave chain for you in my kingdom!”

I screamed fright and rage.  The hand holding the sword in the sky, keeping time in check, trembled, a shivering that cut open the sky and let down onto Earth the cold blackness of the universe and the demons that live in the space between the stars.  They danced madly around the Merlin who could not make up her mind.

Was this the true moment and the true place to begin making Arthur?  I did not know!

The sword spoke to me.  It said, “Accept!”

“What do I accept?” I cried with a hundred and forty-four voices, terrifying away the demons dancing on the holy stone.

I looked up at Excalibur thrust into the swirling blood-black sky.

“Accept it all,” said Excalibur, “because there is no other merlin who can save the world!”

I drove the blade higher into the darkness.  It gleamed a radiant white that set the dancing demons to chittering in terror.

“I accept my Fate!” I cried.

The demons howled, writhing and dancing in the roiling black air, lacerating themselves with their claws and fangs, streaming blue and yellow blood, molting off their shells and lacey wings, gouging out their own eyes.

The whiteness of the sword banged out a shock of light and air, sweeping the monsters back up their funnel of boiling black cloud into the chill space between the stars.

Here was Britain again, purified of evil.  It was daylight, green and cheery, quaint and quiet, simple.  The perfect moment for the birth into the world of the Sword of Justice.

I looked around for laughing sphinxes and mocking Plutos.  There were none.

But, in the play of light, the soft breeze, the rustle of leaves, the spinning dust motes from the road below, I saw shimmers of British saints and antique heroes.

“With Excalibur, Arthur will make Camelot,” they said to me, “and redeem us all!”

Sunshine gleamed hot on the Brutus stone and seared the rock to whiteness.  I set the blade point into this fresh purity.  So equal were the radiance of stone and sword that, where they touched, I could not mark one from the other.  The blade in my hands trembled, desperate to come alive, hungry to hear its quest said out into the world.

“Seek Arthur!” I said to Excalibur.  “Make him the pure king!”

Excalibur!
said the sword.

The blade sank half its length into the stone and time began.

I had planted the World Sword and now, with time once more backward-reeling, I had to find the boy Arthur, join his time, and create the man who could draw Excalibur from the rock.

I ran to my treasure caravan and hastily buried my riches.  As time passed, drawing me backward, each pile of gold and jewels I dumped into the hole disappeared, swept away to await my return to that special time.  I mined Arthur’s future with the treasure I had stolen from Hell.

I kept a perfect Greek armor and closed helmet, a merlin’s princely chain of office, a dozen very fat purses of gold and jewels, and the greatsword Urien.

I was Lady Merlin, knight and princess, ready to cut my way through the world to create in Arthur the perfect king.

I was happy. I was Merlin and I was happy.

I dreamed my joy as I waited for time to cease its backward passage, for the moment of arrival at Arthur’s beginning.  But the city I saw rising around me was not Uther’s capital but Jerusalem and then not Jerusalem but barren desert, and Arthur’s grandfather was two thousand generations from being born.  What had happened to me?

I had no Excalibur to stop the backward rush of time.  I was being driven into the past toward the point of the making of the world and beyond.  Would I have to trek back all that dreary time to Arthur’s day?  To hike back to Britain from the first atomos would exhaust my powers.  What would I have left for making Arthur?

Within me was the jostle and panic of my hundred and forty-four predecessors, all howling to get out of me, crying to their too many gods for salvation, weeping for Lucan’s mistake in choosing a fool named Brynn as the next of their composite breed.

I had learned from them but I had not learned to take power over them.  They rioted in me as though my bowels and liver, brains, vessels, heart, and lungs were in civil war.  They churned and twisted my soul and body, driving my worry to fright and that to terror and then to panic.

Reverse the reversal of time!
the merlins cried inside me.

I shouted, “Life!” and quieted the merlins.

“Life!” I shouted to all the cosmic powers that drove me through time.

“I swear by the Triune God, by Woden, by Mithras, by Mother Don, by all the Elves and Fairies – by Morgana herself if she lives!  Put me into Time – I’m chosen to create Arthur for the world and I’ll make him now!”

Time reversed beside a sudden wall in Jerusalem.

I moved through life in the right direction and at the right speed.

I and my merlins howled in relief.

Night.  No Moon.  A sheen of stars.  The stone wall was massive and huge.  Each stone had a border cut around its margin.  That told me – or told one of my previous selves – the name of the wall:  “Solomon’s Temple!” we said aloud.

We knew where I was and now we knew directions through the city and out of it toward the Island of Britain.  Good!

But
when
was I – in the age of David or of Jesu?  Was the Hero dying on his Cross tonight or were the streets filled with brave Maccabees fighting Romans?

In my Greek armor, my snaky beard snapping below my helmet, with Urien, the glass shield, and the treasure bags slung over my back, we merlins made along the wall measuring it with my hands until I came to its end.

Here it was broken, half-buried in rubble and earth, and that told us the time:  I was in Roman Jerusalem after the destruction of the temple.  Jesu was dead and risen and the Christian world begun that would give birth to Camelot.  The epic had started! And Merlin only had to travel across five hundred years and all of Europa to find Arthur in his cradle.

I cheered!

Various merlins in me also cheered.  Others gnashed their fangs in rage.  More battered me from inside, howling anger.  Others mocked and sneered.  Hate, rage, love, hope, despair – all flashed from my liver to my heart:

Kill yourself, you failure!

Eat out the heart of the Roman commander!

Sweep across time to Britain – begin Arthur tonight!

Stay here – become a godling!

Make the world worship us!

Kill to show our godly justice!

Make Camelot here, at the foot of the Temple!

Become the Wizard-Queen of Earth!

I filled with a freezing confusion of battling merlins.  I began to stiffen, the churning riot in me making me leather-stiff, wood-hard, stone.  We dreamed chaos and horror, then rigid nothingness.  The freezing of too much confusion, too many merlins, too many arguments, and no understanding in me of how to control them all.

I became stone.

Morning light.  Roman soldiers found us.

“Yoy, what god’s this statue?” they cried.

An evocati said to me, “What god are you, left here like rubbish in the middle of the city with no true believers to squat at your feet?”

He laughed and opened his leather skirt to piss on my stony feet, me too stiff to slap him away with Urien frozen in stone across my back.

The evocati stopped his pissing when a common soldier said, “This goddess is a warrior princess, don’t you know?  You’re committing sacrilege, you fool.”

“What?” cried the evocati.

“Look at her,” said the soldier.  “Carved like that, those great tits and ass, that monster sword slung across her back.  The helmet’s down or we could see her face and know.  But something so magnificent must be the war goddess Bellona, sister to Mars and Vulcan.  You’ve offended every soldier’s favorite deities!”

The evocati was too frightened to piss more.

“No, she’s Sekhmet or Athena!” said another soldier.

“If that armor were metal, I’d kill her for it, it’s so fine,” said one more.

“Bring it to the centurion,” said the evocati.

“Lift this mountain?”

“Fetch slaves.  These people hauled stone for the pyramids.  They can move this ugly beast.”

“Look at that forked beard or are those snakes hanging down?  What Greek ever wore such a chin?”

“That Greek called Medusa.”

“Naw, she’s Egyptian, one of their more unpleasant gods.  Hathor, maybe.”

“Or Persian?  Her tits aren’t Roman or Greek.  The Persians fill out like that.”

“I could be frightened if she’s Ahriman, their God of Darkness and Despair.”

“That’s a man-god.  She’s a woman.”

A soldier said, musing, “She has the shoulders of a goddess who knows too well that long sword slung over her back.”

“Look at her treasure bags!”

“A robber goddess, then.”

“Aren’t they all?  Bring her,” said the evocati.

The soldiers tested the statue’s heft.

“We can lift this!  What stone could be so light?”

The evocati tested the stone with a kick to my greaves.  No pain for me.

He examined the damaged area.  “Oh, it’s a mummy, damn it all.  Dragged here from Karnak.  Some benighted pharaoh-queen.”

“She’d have to be a Greek pharaoh.”

The soldiers laughed.

“Do you mean a Ptolemy?” said the evocati.  “Does that mean, Boot-brain, that you think she could be a sister to Cleopatra who was lover to Caesar who was uncle to Augustus who’s lord over all the Earth and over your wretched insulting tongue?”

“It was a poor joke!  I’m an uneducated man.  How can I be expected to know all these godly connections?”

“Shut up, all of you, and bring the god,” said the evocati, “to the damned educated centurion.”

The centurion examined me and said to the evocati, “She’s the idol of some bizarre new cult.  They set her up for worship.  You happen along.  Frighten them away.  That’s the story.”

“Plenty of cults in this godsforsaken land,” said the evocati.  “Mithraists, Manicheans, Zoroastrians, Ahrimanists, Weeping Catters, animists, Hedonists, Epicureans, Stoics, Pythagoreans, all in competition with the right thinkers.”

“Meaning we Jovians?”

“And Martians.  Shall I put this old monster in the women’s baths?” said the evocati.

“She’s a soldier.  Put her in the officers’ exercise hall in The Antonia.”

There, in the great stone fortress, I was heaped on a pedestal in the swirling stink of sweat and perfume.  Steam boiled up from the baths below.  The walls were thick with racks of spears, whips, belts, shields, boxing gloves, heavy balls, all the sporting equipment of a legion’s officers.

Before I had passed a Roman generation as a silent pet there in exercise rooms, dust clogging my eyes open behind the slits of my battle helmet, my statue ceased to be a thing of wonder to the young officers and became a fixture of the place.

For the merlins in me, this little passage of time was trivial, their arguments monumental.  But to me it was a misery of delay.  Time was passing in the right direction at last but so laboriously slowly!  To wait out the next five hundred years to reach Arthur’s time would be a misery.  What guarantee had I that I could overcome all the merlins in me and shake off this rigid stone to step back into life at the right moment?

I wanted to weep.  To kill the merlins in me.  I wanted to scream but I could not.  I wanted to condemn the White Druid into the hands of the wrong gods.

At last and in my despair over the riot inside me, I came to understand that only I could carry all the merlins together back to Britain because only I had the power to be alive in this cycle of the world.

The rioting merlins in me understood, as well, and began to subside in their squabbles.

With this revelation, the dust clogging my eyes blasted away and I could see again, a self-made miracle.

I looked through the helmet slits into the centurions’ exercise room.  Watched young centurions age and wither at their exercises and saw younger men take their places.  These too began to wither with age, disease, and battle wounds and, in their turn, were replaced.  Their replacements withered and those after them and after them.

This would go on and on to the end of the world cycle if I did not free myself from stone.  I had no idea how to do it.  No White Druid here to guide me.

But now I heard the Druid’s message – Life is a story of hope and despair but, for a courageous merlin, of opportunity, if she will only act.

I began to separate myself from my predecessors.  They howled and hated me for it.  But, over the next generations of Roman centurions in their baths, the old merlins succumbed, battered down and weakened by my determination.

Until they surrendered to me all their powers and knowledge of time forward and backward.  Until anything I may choose to do was not an act in consultation with all my former selves but was of myself alone.  Until I had subsumed all of them into me.

I began to feel my stony flesh slowly transform toward a merlin’s living lights and liver.

Finally, in the reign of the Emperor Commodus, a young centurion said the first words I could hear through my half-stone ears:  “Look at this old warrior beast,” he said, “with the hips and high tits of a whore!”

I hear
! I wanted to shout in happiness.

He slung his gladius from my outthrust breasts.  More centurions did the same.

“What cult is hers?” said another young centurion.  “If I could wrestle with more like her, I’ll join!”

The young men laughed.

An older officer said, “It’s a newish cult, begun when a lady warrior strayed in here and froze up at the sight of all our naked wonders.  And there she is.”

The others laughed but a young centurion said, “So the stories are true.  When we’re out and the exercise room is closed, the women of the garrison sneak in here to pray to her.”

“To do what?” said another young centurion.

“Oh,” said the older officer, “to burn incense at her feet for the greater power this old girl can grant them in the conjugal bed.”

The young men laughed.

“Laugh,” said the older officer, “but I’ve seen centurions younger than you lot doing the same and with a frenzy.”  He went downstairs to the baths.

Two young centurions exchanged a lascivious glance.

When the evening’s exercise was done and all the officers had left the room and the baths, these two young men hid themselves in a spear cabinet and waited.  After hours of yawning boredom, I saw the door to the room open.  A lady and maids entered.  The young centurions giggled in their hiding place.  I could hear them with my perfecting ears.

One silenced the other.  “That’s the princess, fool!”

The lady in her Equestrian robe, white and purple-edged, with a king’s ransom of gold around her throat, bowed before me, her stone goddess.  Her hair was jet.  Her eyes drawn to Egyptian points at the corners of her face.  Her name was Cordelia.

Her maids made the holocaust for her in a brass bowl at my booted feet.  The burning incense filled the exercise room with a gagging sweetness.  I could smell it!

I stood rigid on my pedestal but trembling in my soul, joyous to realize I could see and smell and hear again.