The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (39 page)

It was dawn before I, with waning powers and my screaming shield, could bring myself and Herald Percival to the hilltop occupied by Kay overlooking the abbey and monastery of Fleem.

Kay raised his feathered spear and shouted, “God’s welcome!”

I looked at the man, weathered down through a year’s exposure to a hard nub of a warrior, his armor so burnished I could see in it my own young woman’s face and my glossy red hair, three fat braids of it falling below my waist. I was moving toward age eighteen. Time is a traitor no matter in which direction.

We saw now the dust trails of two bands riding in from opposite corners of the Island – Bedivere from Cornwall and Lucan from York, with their followers.  When we were all gathered on the ridgeline, after kisses and shouts and wine, we sat down to gaze at the monastery in the valley below, watchers at a never-before-seen spectacle.

“It’s noon,” Bedivere said, wiping off his wine sweat, the sun hot on his armor.

Falcons dived and shrieked over the monastery.  The hour bell rang for meal and speaking.  Monks tramped in from the fields to their soup buckets.

Arthur came up our hill, leaving the abbot watching him from the field.  He walked through the orchards, tasting the season’s first fruit.  He scuffed the earth to test it for moistness.  Kicked aside an offending rock.

He stripped off the last of his monkish clothes, kicked away his monk’s sandals.  All he wore was a crude wooden crucifix on his chest and a leather pack slung over one shoulder.

Sudden rain.  Arthur put out his arms and let it rinse from him his monkish life.

The two slaves Arthur had brought into the monastery drove a cart out of a shed and followed him.  On the cart was the Round Table, gleaming gold, bright as a new sun captured and brought to Earth.

Arthur said to his war band, “Are you all still my loving brothers-and-sisters-in-arms?”

“We are,” cried Bedivere.  “In war and peace or whatever else you want.”

“And you, Mother?” he said, laughing at my youthful eighteen years, now so much younger than he.

I kissed him, weeping for the loss of my son to adulthood, to a throne, to a desperately hard age.

He wiped my tears and whispered, in his soul’s voice,
To the last moment you are with me, I am your son.

Then he said aloud, “Here they come.”

My soul-vision no longer could see the distance Arthur saw.

“Who comes?” I said.

“My sons!”

Guenevere in her Brittany armor galloped her horse leading a cart with the boy Mordred – five years old – and the infant Gawain.  Lancelot drove the cart, his black hair spiked and streaked lime-yellow, ready for combat.  Behind them rode Guenevere’s lifeguards and servants.

Arthur said ran down from the hilltop with his war band behind him.

Guenevere reined up her horse outside of spear-throwing distance, for the protection of Arthur’s sons, and shouted, “Are you now the man to draw the sword from the stone?”

“You know I am,” said Arthur.

“Then I’ll make you my husband.”

“Marry me on the Brutus stone and I’ll make you a queen!” said Arthur, cheering.

“It’s enough you make Camelot,” she said.

Guenevere drew her gladius from its fleeced scabbard and guided her horse to me.  She said from her saddle, “But what’s Camelot if you kill my babies, Mother Merlin?”

In all my previous lives, I’d never before heard that question from any Guenevere.  I was stunned to hear it now.  But it forced out of me a true thing I had barely recognized in myself:

“Once I knew everything that came next and knew what I would do,” I said in surprised anguish.  “I know so little now.  I don’t know who I’ll kill or who I won’t.”

“You’re a child, Merlin,” Guenevere said.  “You look like a child, you speak like a child.  But do you dream with a child’s good heart?  That’s what I have to know.  Are you the merlin to help Arthur make Camelot or a baby-killing monster to create a twisted and bloody place, instead?”

I cried, “I don’t know!  I’m so different a woman than I thought I’d be.”

“An ordinary woman?  Not an extraordinary merlin?”

“I don’t even know that.  I grow younger, wisdom flies away.  Memory of the future vanishes.  I have so few scattered bits of knowing left to me.”

Tears spurted out of me unexpected and surprising.

Guenevere said, startled, “No, I see you can’t kill my children now. You’re not merlin enough.  Not bitter enough.”

She put away her gladius.

Then she said, with queenly harshness, “Oh, wipe your face, Old Mother.  Armor up.  The die is cast.  Arthur is Fate’s child now.  There’s only thing more for you to do.  Tell me how to help him draw the sword?”

“If I knew I’d do it myself!”

* * *

“Each of you, to your kingdoms and duchies, go!” Arthur said to his war band.  “Meet me at the Brutus stone with your armies.  I’ll draw the sword, marry my queen, and we begin cleansing Britain of the Saxons.”

The war band cheered and Arthur flung them – surprised warriors, horses, all – across Britain and into their petty states.

Only Lancelot remained behind.  “What shall I do, Arthur?  Bring on my Franks?”

Arthur hauled on his armor and leaped into the saddle of his war horse.  “I put my bride, sons, servants, and the Round Table into your protection, Lancelot.  Follow my track.  I go to find the king.  Merlin, ride with me.”

Arthur’s horse bolted east and took him vanishing into the forest.  I galloped along his trail.

Somewhere near evening, after following Arthur’s hectic search for King Gurthrygen through the east, south, middle, and north parts of the Island, I caught up with Arthur sitting cross-legged on the back of his lathered horse, an animal startled to have crossed and re-crossed the Island in a day, looking into a name-lost town that once had been in the heart of Britain but now straddled the Saxon frontier.

The town was abandoned by its people.  But out of it stuck flags and pennants of king and army.

Arthur said, “Great God, Mother, I was at Fleem barely a year.  Look how much of Britain the Saxons robbed in that time!”

Arthur swept his hand around the horizon to call up images of the human tidal waves from Saxonia crashing again and again on Britain, spreading pools of people that expanded and overflowed with the next wave.  They colonized the north up to the walls of York in one wave, poured homesteading families into the south in another, drove Britons from Londinium and scores of other cities and towns in the next.

Now the wave surged across the whole Island toward Arthur’s Cornwall.

The Saxon sea had created a new moon-shaped Saxon Britain from York through Londinium and the south to the Cornish borderlands, the Saxons squeezing the Britons toward the west and Wales and finally out of their own Island to drown in the Irish Sea.

On the west side of the town, in territory still British, was the mammoth Brutus stone, huge and melancholy, waiting, brooding.

Sacking had been flung over the sword stuck in the stone.  The sword’s light glowed through the cloth.

We found King Gurthrygen sprawled on a bed of furs layered on his shield, attended by Queen Ronwen, Duke Horst, Bishop Dunwallo, the eldermen and elderwomen, and by his Spanish concubines and Romans, Rufus Maximus among them.

The king’s retainers packed into the small the room were startled when the dying king sat up in his bed to grip Arthur and me in a warrior’s hug, the king crying, “Brother!  Mother Merlin!”

Doubly startled to see Mother Merlin was younger than her foster son Duke Arthur, her cheeks bright with young energy and her eye anxious for battle-riot.

“I’m dying at last,” wheezed the king, happy.  “Merlin, tell me we’ve made ourselves a King Camelot.”

“He’s made himself,” I said.

Gurthrygen gasped a cheer.  He said to his concubines, “Carry me to the stone.”

They hoisted Gurthrygen on a litter of spears and shields and we all hauled him to the stone.

“Morgause brought the stone here ahead of the Saxon hordes,” said Gurthrygen, gasping for breath.  “For a year she’s carried it wandering across the Island to keep it safe.  She’ll have to carry it forever if there’s no Camelot.”

The concubines laid the king on his shield beside the sacking that covered the sword.  Ronwen, Horst, and the elders crowded around the sword to ward off cheating magic.

“Here it is, Arthur,” Gurthrygen said to his brother, barely able to speak.  “Draw the sword.  Become king.”

Gurthrygen hauled off the sacking

Excalibur flashed a light piercing and demanding, coloring the gathering evening gloom.

“Draw the sword,” I said to Arthur.

A shiver rose from the stone, mixing the colors of grass, air, and overpassing birds.  But it was not a shiver from the stone or the sword.  It was a shiver of terror from the ordinary people clustering around the stone.

I looked around for the old miracle of stopped time.  But there was no miraculous stopping as I’d seen at previous trials of the sword.  Birds flew past, insects chirped, fish swam, snakes slithered, the Saxons clanged their cannibal stew pots on their side of the border.  It was an ordinary evening with an ordinary sinking sun.

In that evening stood a glowing sword stabbed into a rock.

Arthur put his hand on the sword’s hilt.

Behind the crowd surrounding the stone, all Britain shoved in as witness.  The whole panorama of Roman and Celtic history from the fall of Troy, with all its princes and fools, queens, witches, Christians and Druids, emperors, shoemakers, farmers, soldiers.  All of them and all of their history looking toward Arthur with his hand on the sword’s hilt.  Without this moment there would be no British future in which to remember all these past generations.  There would be no generations more.

Arthur, cowed by this frightful responsibility, staggered back from the sword.

The crowd groaned and howled.

Arthur threw out his hand toward the sword and said, “Excalibur, I am Arthur.”

The sword sang,
Excalibur!
and rose from the stone into his hand.

I saw something like a happy, red-haired boy leap from Gurthrygen’s body and say, “Kiss me goodbye, Brother.”  Arthur kissed the boy.  The boy ran down the stone and into Annwn.  The king was dead.

The oldest of the elders, a warrior blind and bitter, let his four sons lead him to Arthur.  He clapped on Arthur the crown still wet with Gurthrygen’s dying sweat.

“Elected!” the elder shouted.  “By God!”

Arthur took the queen’s circlet from Ronwen’s head.  “Who marries me to Guenevere?”

“I, of course, King,” said Dunwallo the Seatless.  “You are king and queen, husband and wife, father and mother of Britain, forever!”  He made the Sign.  “Now go kill Saxons.”

Arthur crowned his queen and the crowd cheered.

His war band threw themselves before him, each putting Arthur’s foot on his head, shouting fealty to his new king.  Other warrior princes and princesses, vagabond knights, and soldiers did the same, weeping and terrified Saxons among them.

The disbelieving Horst gawked at the unmarked stone surface from which Arthur had drawn the sword.  Then he and Ronwen relented and, with spitting Saxon oaths, pledged to Arthur.

Rufus beside me said, “We had a bargain, Lady Merlin, for money, not for a hopeless dream.”

“You kept the king alive until I had Arthur ready.  You’ve done your job.  I’ll pay you off and you’re free to go.”

I brought Rufus and his Romans to the treasure in Merlin’s Well.  The dawning new age opened the well once more.  The Romans dived in swimming through treasure, staggering their pack animals with gold and jewels.  They led their treasure train south toward the Narrow Sea and far-distant Rome.

Rufus stood with me watching his countrymen tramp south into the night.

“Has our moldy Britain infected your hot southern soul and you can’t leave us after all, Roman?” I said to him.

He poured his share of treasure down the well.

I was astonished.

We watched the moment pass and time seal the Earth over it.

“It won’t open again in this life cycle,” I said.

“Sometimes,” Rufus said, “a dream is enough.”

* * *

We burned Gurthrygen’s corpse on the Brutus stone over the place where Excalibur had stood so many years.  The pyre wood flashed all over white, as white as Excalibur’s glow, and spat into space the last remains of King Gurthrygen.

When the pyre had burnt down to hot ash, I stirred the ashes to send its dust onto the wind.  There in the wind I found a scabbard for Excalibur, fleece-lined for silent speed.

“Here,” I said to Arthur, “is a parting gift from the man who preserved Britain for Camelot.”

The sword hissed its name as Arthur shoved it into the scabbard.