The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (27 page)

Gloomy dawn.  Too many clouds, too little light, but enough to see the gaudy Saxon shields lining the parapets of York.  Behind those shields gleamed spear points and metal helmets, painted and feathered.  Steam rising from pots of boiling oil.

I stood in the chill, muddy field measuring the enemy and watching Bedivere ride beneath the city wall, jeering up at the barbarians, inspecting damage done the wall by Lucan’s siege engines.

“Name your crap-stinking prince!” a Saxon herald called down to him, in fair Latin.

“Arthur!” shouted Bedivere.

“Arthur who and what?”

“Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, Duke of Cornwall and Dux Bellorum to King Gurthrygen.”

Across the field, at Arthur’s tent, Kay raised Arthur’s red dragon shield for the city to see.

The Saxon herald called, “Is a boy all that Britain can send against Hengist, a veritable god of battles?”

“Apparently,” said Bedivere as, with his spear, he tested a broken stone in the wall.  It fell out of the yellow wall and shattered at his horse’s feet.

The herald and the Saxons behind their shields watched this destruction of the first stone in their protection.

Bedivere stabbed out more cracked stones, the Saxons watching him and assessing what he assessed.

The herald shouted down grotesque insults.  The Saxon warriors jeered.

Bedivere said, “Send out your speakers, Herald.  Arthur will hear them.  Or blow your war horns and let the slaughter begin.”

Bedivere slung his shield across his back and galloped away from York and the spears flung after him.

Morning sun rose into the gray clouds, making a deeper gloom.  Arthur’s army ate its grain paste breakfast, strapped on its armor, pissed, wandered the fields bored and kicking clods, waiting for enough sunlight to fight.  All of them gloomy at the prospect of attacking such a massively fortified city.  Arthur and his war band lounged around his tent, drinking the army’s best wine, waiting for the Saxons to decide what to do next, in accord with the protocol of siege.

A shout from the walls.  The herald was there, holding up Duke Hengist’s shield.  Beside him he had a woman in bright silks, and her executioner.

Percival said, “Jesu, will they murder another Briton?”

He took a hollow reed from his packs and used that to focus his eye on the woman.

“Look at the sign on her breast,” he said.  “The Orkney red raven!”

I grabbed the reed and sighted but it was Arthur who identified her:  “Morgause!”

Morgause had in her arms a boy two years old.

Arthur cried, “My son!”

“Mordred?” I was too stunned to believe my luck!  “She’s got Mordred?”

That name was for me like the sudden sleeptime seizing of my soul by a demon.  I was fire.  I was rage.  I was a merlin gone mad.  I leaped onto my horse and ran the beast toward the city wall, shield-less, sword-less, helmet-less, shouting to the Saxons, in Latin, “Cut her down!  Kill the child!  Kill the child!”

The Saxon herald said, in passable Latin, “What a bloody-minded lot, you Britons.  I want to trade her for advantage and you say kill her?”

“Drop me the child!  Give him to me!  Or throw it into your stew pots!”

The Saxons rattled their shields in protest at this barbaric suggestion, though they would have eaten the full-grown mother.

Bedivere and Kay, in armor and with my checkered shield, rode up, cursing me for a fool.

Bedivere cried, “Are you mad, Lady?”

“That child’s Mordred!” I shouted.

“Harness!” Bedivere said, throwing me my shield.

“Is that Arthur?  Who’s shield is that?” said the herald, puzzled.

“It’s Princess Merlin,” Bedivere said.

“Is she worth any sort of ransom, do you know?”

Kay banged sword on shield.  “If you want to come down to take her, she’s worth half the kingdom to
you.
”

“I’d happily come down to neuter you, Sir Loudmouth, but Duke Hengist likes his jaw-jaw before war-war.  He’s a civilized man that way.”

I cried with the voices of all the merlins in me, “Kill the child or make war now!”

“What a voice you have when you use it!” said Kay, hauling back on his startled horse.

The herald was appalled.  “That’s the strangest suggestion I’ve ever heard before a battle.  Get away, get away, you barbarians!”

Arthur blew his calling horn.  Bedivere and Kay took my reins and led me galloping back to the command tent, me raving in voices, panicked and out of myself with blood-hunger, the child Mordred an horrific image in my eyes and liver.

Arthur shouted at me, “I won’t cut you down, Mother, but lose yourself in my army.  Out of my sight!  Lose your life today or tomorrow I hunt you like vermin and cut out your murderous soul…”

“That child is Mordred!” I cried, the killing fever in me, sweat bursting from my face.

“He’s my son and damn your myth and memory.”

Arthur turned his back on me.

“That child’s your assassin!  He’s the destroyer of Camelot!  Are you too blinded by your power to make one wretched baby you can’t see what everyone else must plainly see?”

“See what?” said Kay, Bedivere, and Percival together.

Arthur went into his tent.

Sweating, slavering, mad with fury, I shouted, “Sobeit, Lord of Fools!”

I threw down my gaudy checkered shield naming me Arthur’s comrade-in-arms.

I jerked around my horse and galloped to my tent.  I unwrapped my original colors, arms, and armors – the stone armor of my days as a love idol, the glass shield awarded me by Sir Lucan the moment I killed him, and the greatsword Urien.

I called to my slaves to strap on my harness.  Pulled on my stone helmet.  Grabbed up war club, ax, spears, and daggers.  Swung onto my black stallion.  Strapped on Lucan’s glass shield.

I raised Urien to flash in a shaft of sunlight cutting through the clouds and galloped through the army to the city wall shouting my war cry.

I shouted up to the Saxon herald, using Latin, “Merlin calls to Hengist, the mindless lord of a half-wit race, the hellhound come to end all that makes life worth living, the infection of Earth soon to be an affliction of Hell because Princess Merlin is going to send him there, to come out to single combat for possession of Morgause and her child!”

The herald said, “You don’t want us to stew them, after all, Lady Lunatic?  Why in Hell would the duke agree to fight a merlin?”

“Because the child’s worth more to me than York.  Hengist kills me and the city’s safe.  Or I kill Hengist and take away the child and the city is safe.”

“Safe from Princess Merlin?”

The Saxons on the wall howled laughter.

But the puzzled herald said, “Who is one lady-knight to frighten us?”

I drove anvil-cutting Urien into the city wall and shattered a stone.  The rubble interior of the wall dripped out like blood from a body.  The wall cracked and began to slump away.

“Hold, hold, please, Princess Stone Killer, I’ll find the duke!”  The herald ran off.

Morgause said from the rampart, “I see you, Merlin, you’re here to kill my child.”

“Yes, I’ll kill him!  I’ll kill you, I’ll kill him, I’ll kill anything I must.  I’ll scour the country killing to clear the way for Arthur to be lord of Camelot.”

“You’re slave to an absurd dream.  You’re a fool or mad.”

“I’m daughter of a king, daughter of a slave, daughter of a beggar.  I lived a thousand years and a hundred and forty-four lives.  I’m the chosen woman to kill the enemies of Camelot. I’ll kill Mordred, mad or fool!”

Morgause said, “I’m safer here among my enemies than with my countrymen if a monster like you is their champion.”

“You’re a witch well-seated among cannibals,” I said to her.  “You betrayed Camelot.  I’ll kill you, too!”

Hengist leaped atop the rampart, a huge man with blond-braided hair and blue eyes.  He wore a gilt breastplate over mink and ermine.  The tails of a red silk tunic hung below his sword belt.  Battle scars – the Saxon torquis and phalerae – gleamed on every part of his body not armored or furred.  Where his face was not scarred, it was tattooed white.

He dropped on his rump on the wall, hitting the battlement like a millstone crashing down.  He dangled his bare feet over the wall.

Hengist said to me, “Why shouldn’t I have my archers staple you to your five foot of Yorkish mud, Briton?  Or is it only four foot you’d need as you’re such a puny race.”

He tossed me the massive beef joint he had been gnawing.

“Eat some Saxon feed, Briton.  Grow big enough for me to kill you without shame.”

I shielded off the joint, the meat banging on the glass shield like an iron spear point on steel.

Saxons howled and jeered.

I chopped Urien into the wall, breaking more stones.  More rubble fill poured out of the wall.

“What’s he doing?” Hengist shouted.  “Bring the magicians and fools!”

The herald brought them.  They howled and danced on the rampart and pissed down at me.

I hacked at the wall, shattering more yellow stones, rubble gushing out, a crack running up the slumping wall to the parapet on which Hengist sat, breaking open beneath him, wanting to tumble him out of York and onto the hungry point of my sword.

“Come down, you Saxon beast!” I shouted.  “Fight me or I chop down this wall and every house and warrior between us until I skewer you as you cower behind your last cannibal pot!”

“Now we’re cannibals?” cried Hengist to his warriors, too startled to shift from Latin to Saxon.  “Woden, this woman is unbelievably mad!”

He threw a spear.  I shielded it off with a sound like a joint of meat hitting steel.

The Saxons did not jeer this time.

“Shoot arrows at her!” cried Hengist.  “Thousands of them!”

A war horn’s cry.

I turned to see the army of the Britons massing to charge across the muddy field, slings and catapults primed, archers stripped to the waist for hot work, Arthur with his knights and the boy Lucan with his lieutenants running across the field for the joy of a sweaty foot race into combat.

Was it York Arthur attacked or me?  No more time!

I shouted my war cry, clapped shut my stone helmet and galloped my horse into the wall, Urien leading.  The sword shattered the rampart, driving open the crack running up to separate Morgause and Mordred from Hengist.

The Saxons on the upper wall tumbled out of the city and were riveted to earth by the first blast of British archery, feathered shafts howling – not whistling as in the hunt – until they scorched through Saxon steel and fur and into Saxon flesh.

Those wounded who survived the first volley howled agony and terror until seeing the second storm-blast coming down on them.  They shrieked like blue-faced Scots.  Before the arrowfall stabbed their meat and bones to silence.

Arrows shattered wall stones, squeezed through cracks and arrow slits, overshot the parapet and hissed across the city, each one seeking a pagan soul.

Through the arrowstorm hurtled heavy catapult stones and giant onager spears, Greek fire, the last dead cattle, campfire coals, anything the artillerymen could drag to their weapons.

Flung boulders beat in the walls, buckling them, widening the crack I’d made with Urien, and bounced along the parapet crushing out Saxon lives, ricocheting through city streets grinding down fleeing warriors who still had in their bellies the boiled flesh of Britons.

Beneath this storm Arthur’s army charged, screaming victory cries.

I was the first through the wall-breach.  It was move through after Hengist, Morgause, and Mordred or let myself be crushed by Arthur’s charge or skewered on Arthur’s spear.

I rode into York trampling Saxons, slapping aside their weapons, kicking them away from clutching and stabbing my legs, my black war horse tearing off their faces, biting out their bellies, snapping their limbs with his iron-shod hooves.

“Morgause!” I shouted.  “Mordred!”

I was berserk with fury to find them, beating my way down narrow city streets, caving in house fronts with Urien, slaughtering any man or woman without a British cast of face.

I fought across brooks and sewage runnels in the cobbled streets, past ale houses and meat houses, the shrines to the too-many gods and goddesses that infest the North, and onto the last city rampart, kicking over into the mud to suffocate the mercy-howling Saxons I’d chased there.

Beyond the city wall and out in the next field was another army.

“Great Jesu!” I groaned, too breathless from battle to shout it.  “Must I kill another army to kill Mordred?”

Morgause and the baby ran out of the gate below me in a heaving chariot with a war band of Orkneymen.

They churned through mud galloping toward the distant army.  The army with the white flag and red raven crest of Lot, Morgause’s husband, twice brother-in-law to Arthur.  Beside Lot’s flag was a gold fighting standard and tied to it with Orkney red ribbons was the crown of the kings of Orkney.  Lot had made himself king and Morgause was his queen.

Arthur was there beside me now, on foot, having run through the city to do his killing, bits of people splashed on his armor, war-craze still in his face.

He shouted across to Lot, “Bring in your army, King!  Let’s crush the Saxons between us!”

Lot, riding out from his forces to hail his wife and Mordred, shouted, “I have what you want, Arthur, and you have what I want.  Neither of us shall give the other his want!”

Arthur banged his chipped sword on the parapet stones and said to me, “Call to him!  Tell him that to join me now is to be forgiven all sins if we crush the Saxons today.”

I wiped Saxon muck and mire from my face and from Urien.  “Know me now, Arthur.”

“Merlin!” he cried.

“See me kill Mordred!”

I was young and furious, full of nimble energy, and leaped my horse off the city wall, shield-arm and sword-arm outstretched, shouting my war cry, my black war horse shrieking its death cry.

We hit the mud below and tumbled over and were upright, both astonished to be alive, battle-craze in us both, and galloped after Morgause huddling away into King Lot’s army.

I shouted to King Lot, “I’m the woman who broke the walls of York!  Give me your army to break or give me Mordred!”

Lot wheeled his war horse, closed his helmet with its red-winged crown, drew his greatsword, and charged me.

“Break me, Merlin, if you can – I’m the wall of my army!” he cried.