King of the Scepter'd Isle (Song of Earth) (14 page)

“I wish you were so coordinated in battle. Ah, Mador,” he said, greeting the knight. “None the worse for your adventure, I hope?”

“No thanks to these murderous villains.” Sir Mador carried his helmet. His face was flushed; little streams of sweat disappeared into his coarse beard like tributaries into a mangrove swamp. “With your permission I’ll order the soldiers to march them to the castle. A bloody good flogging and a year or two in the dungeons will do wonders for their sense of loyalty.”

“There is some cause for belief,” said the Baron carefully, “that these men were the fortunate agents of Divine Intervention.”

“They were what?”

“It is possible they were possessed by the Lord.”

“What bloody lord, for Christ’s sake? Are you telling me they were in the pay of someone?”

“You misunderstand me. I mean the Lord thy God.”

“What in hell has God got against
me?
”

The Baron began to lose patience. “Will you stop asking questions, Mador? How else can you explain their action? No command was given. It was as though a Voice had spoken simultaneously into every man’s mind.”

“So what shall we do, canonize them? I’ve never heard such bloody nonsense in my life. They saw me up there, so they loosed off their bows. It’s as simple as that. It was a moment of
utter irresponsibility, illustrating the difference between peasants and gentlemen. Nothing more. And they must be punished for it. Give them into my hands, Baron.”

“You and I must talk in private, Mador. This is not the proper place for our conversation.” The Baron began to walk away.

“What I have to say,” shouted Mador, “the whole bloody world may hear, for all I care! You, Baron, are a pathetic weakling. You’re not fit to govern a rabbit warren! You’re scared of these peasants because there are so many of them. So you try to tell me the good Lord’s against me.” His expression was becoming crazed. He lowered his voice to a sinister whisper. “Well, let me tell you something. I’m a Frenchman. I happen to know God’s on
my
side. Always has been, always will be. So what do you have to say to that, Baron Menheniot?”

The Baron replied coldly, “They shot at you because you looked like a prize idiot up there, Mador, and I don’t blame them. Does that satisfy you? Now get off my land. Go back to France and your bloody Porte, wherever it is! I hereby strip you of your title of Knight of the Southern Realm. You’re no knight for me!”

The departure of Mador brought the tournament to an end. The Baron resumed his seat on the platform for the prizegiving. Queen Margawse bestowed the prize on Arthur: a great shield ornamented with a complex coat of arms, and a moist kiss from her rather thick lips. Nyneve watched closely, but the kiss showed no sign of lengthening into a passionate embrace. The crackle of electricity was mercifully absent. Arthur lifted the shield and displayed it to the crowd.

“Arthur! Arthur!” they roared. Then they rushed forward and seized him, and lifted him onto their shoulders. “To the Stone!” someone cried. “Take him to the Stone!”

“The local hero,” observed the Baron to Nyneve, with quiet sarcasm. “Well, there’s nothing like a good anticlimax to knock a hero off his pedestal. You’ll be coming to the Stone, of course, Nyneve? You won’t want to miss this.”

She looked at
him with wide-eyed innocence. “Didn’t I tell you luck was on his side, Baron?”

“Well, I’m going to check the Sword first, just to make sure his luck doesn’t get any assistance from his allies.” His gaze traveled over her face, taking in the dark and lustrous hair, the bright eyes; and his expression changed. His gaze dropped to the round breasts pushing at the pleated bodice, and he said quietly, “You’ll come to the castle with me afterward?”

“To tell you stories? We don’t need stories anymore. We have a real Arthur.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, I don’t know about
that
.” She glanced at him mischievously. “My place is beside my lord Arthur, don’t you think?”

“Come on.” He drew her to her feet. “We don’t want to miss the fun. Your place is with Arthur if he proves to be your lord by pulling the Sword from the Stone. But if he fails, you have no lord but me, Nyneve.” He laughed and slapped her bottom playfully. “Get moving, minx. I’m an impatient man.”

Accompanied by Queen Margawse, Morgan le Fay and other notables, they followed the crowd into the forest.

The story of Arthur and the Sword in the Stone has been told in many different ways—as many ways as there are happentracks, which are infinite. Many of the stories place the Stone in an ancient city such as London. Some—religions being influential in those days before real knowledge put a name to a God—set the Stone in a cathedral and fashioned it of polished black marble. And the Sword was a beautiful thing, as beautiful as Excalibur, polished and jeweled and glittering.

And the people are highborn and noble; and the Archbishop of Canterbury is there. There is a Sir Ector, and a Sir Kay, come to a great tournament attended by a multitude of knights and lords. And there is a small conceit inserted for the delight of the listeners: that Arthur came across the Sword by accident
(imagine that!) and drew it from the Stone without witnesses, and nobody believed him. So he did it again in front of the assembled notables. Then they knelt before him and called him King.

And it was Christmas.

Since there are infinite happentracks, it must have happened like that somewhere, somewhen. But that is not the way it happened here. On this happentrack it happened like this:

They gathered in a glade in the little-known forest of Mara Zion, a great mob of rough peasants with their yelling children and their jugs of beer and mead; and a failed bear. There was an Ector there, and a Kay, but somehow they had never achieved any eminence. The Stone was a roughly hewn chunk of granite and the Sword was a crude thing of hammered iron.

But to the onlookers the Sword was a thing of wonder, because they had all heard Nyneve relate the legend.

The Baron—the only person there who conceivably could be called a noble—stepped up to the Stone and laid his hands on the Sword. The crowd quieted, and adults shushed their children. The Baron spoke, and his exact words have been recreated by computer and entered into human history.

“Right, you fools, let’s get this thing over with. Here’s the Stone and this is the Sword.” He braced his feet against the Stone and tugged vigorously. The Sword remained firmly fixed. “And if anyone can pull the sword out, they can be King of England and the rest of Europe, too, so far as I’m concerned. By now you’ve all had a try and failed, thanks be to the Lord. But now here’s another pretender, another Arthur. He’s better than most, I’ll say that for him. Arthur!”

Arthur stepped forward, accompanied by Nyneve. “Good luck, Arthur!” cried Nyneve, and kissed him on the cheek.

“Arthur! Arthur!” shouted the crowd.

Arthur took hold of the Sword and drew it easily from the Stone.

The Baron’s mouth dropped loosely agape. There was a moment of
total silence in the glade. Arthur lifted the Sword in both hands and held it over his head. Nyneve’s tiny sigh was clearly audible.

Then the crowd went wild. They rushed forward, seized Arthur, and hoisted him shoulder-high. Nyneve found herself lifted, too, carried next to Arthur on a bobbing sea of heads. Somehow the Baron became airborne, too, waving his arms for support. Like a tidal bore, the mob surged through the forest.

“I thought they were supposed to kneel before me!” Arthur shouted to Nyneve.

“This is much more fun, isn’t it?”

“How in hell did you do it?” the Baron yelled to Arthur.

He shrugged, ducking as he was borne beneath a low-branched oak. “Believe me, I’ll never know!”

And the crowd bore them on, through the forest to the village, to a night when Menheniot and Mara Zion joined in celebration. The legends tell that England rejoiced, but the legends have been shaped by later technology. In truth, all this happened in a tiny corner of England, and the rest of the country had not the slightest idea what was going on.

F
ANG COULD
TOUCH EVERY PART OF THE TINY ROCK
-walled chamber from where he stood. Apart from a narrow thread of light coming from the roof, it was dark. A cool breeze blew, bringing with it a scent of ferns, moist soil, and mole droppings from the tunnel behind him, venting through the hole in the roof. It seemed to Fang there was another smell: of the hardworking and sweaty little people who had hollowed the chamber within this granite boulder. The smell of the Accursed Gnomes.

“Fang?”

“Is that you, Princess?”

She crawled from the tunnel into the chamber, breathless. “They’re on their way. The Miggot just got back from the tournament.” There wasn’t much room, so she put her arms around him from behind.

They considered the situation in silence for a moment.

“How long have we got?” asked Fang eventually.

“Oh … probably long enough.” The Princess’s hands slid down to Fang’s waist, and her fingers began deftly to unfasten his belt.

“Some of the gnomes have been looking at me strangely lately,” said Fang hesitantly. “I’ve seen them doing it. And the women have a funny look in their eyes when they look at you, Princess.”

“They’re just jealous because I’m your girl, Fang. You’re a very attractive
and distinguished gnome. And you’re our leader. Step out of your pants, will you?”

“But the men look at me oddly too.”

The Princess, busy peeling off her many layers of gnomish clothing, didn’t reply.

“It’s because of
this
kind of thing, I think,” said Fang. “You have to admit we do
this
an awful lot. The other gnomes hardly ever do it. We’re disgraceful and perverted gnomes, Princess, and the Great Grasshopper will punish us.”

“Fortunately the Great Grasshopper can’t see us.”

“My father used to tell me his eyes were everywhere.”

“Are you trying to tell me you don’t
want
to do it?” asked the Princess with some asperity.

“I’m just saying that gnomedom doesn’t approve, and since I’m gnomedom’s leader, I should bow to the wishes of my followers. At least we should try to cut down on it.”

“What’s the use of being a leader, Fang, if you can’t do as you like? And anyway, we’re alone here. The others have no idea what we’re doing.”

“They can guess,” said Fang sadly.

“But they’ll guess, anyway, whether we do it or not.”

It was a pity, thought Fang, that such a simple and enjoyable thing as sex could be the object of such disgust and condemnation. Not for the first time he wondered why this should be, and he remembered something the Princess once said to him. “I wonder if perhaps sex is naturally enjoyable, but our creators put a mental block in us and stopped us all from enjoying it. Because they were scared that if we did enjoy it, we’d fill the whole world with gnomes and there’d be no room for anything else.” After a pause Fang said in relieved tones, “You’re absolutely right, Princess. We’re the victims of circumstance and the filthy minds of others. Now let me turn around slowly, darling. I don’t want to bang my head on this thing in the roof.”

“We must both be careful, Fang. After all, now that I’m preg—”

A roaring voice boomed through the chamber, cutting her short. “Right, you
fools, let’s get this over with! Here’s the Stone and this is the Sword!”

And the chamber shuddered, reverberating to the ringing clash of metal on rock.

“It’s the Baron!” squeaked Fang. “By the Sword of Agni, this is it!”

“Stay calm, Fang. Oh, my God, what are we going to do?”

“W-wait. We haven’t heard the signal yet!”

“I’ve forgotten what the signal is!”

“So have I! Oh, Princess, I’ve betrayed Nyneve’s trust!”

Meanwhile the deep human voice had ceased, and with it the clash of metal. From a thousand throats the gnomes heard the cry of “Arthur! Arthur!”

“That’s it!” cried Fang. “That’s the signal! I have to pull out the peg!” He reached up and took hold of the end of the great Sword where it projected down into the chamber. There was a thick oak peg pushed through a hole near the end of the blade, to prevent the Sword being drawn from the Stone before its time. He tugged frantically at it. “I can’t get it out! Oh, Princess, I can’t shift it!”

“Twizzle it around a bit. It probably got a groove in it when the other giants tried to pull it out.”

“Arthur! Arthur!”

“It’s coming. … There! It’s done. We’ve done it, Princess!”

And this time the metal sang as it slipped out of the groove in the Stone. A shaft of light replaced the blade in the chamber. Fang sank to the ground, spent. The Princess regarded him critically.

“Better get your pants on, Fang,” she said. “Nyneve and the others will be expecting us.”

“Oh, yes.” Fang drew a deep breath and let it out in a shuddering sigh. “That’s it, then. We’ve done it.” His brow furrowed as he tried to recollect something. “What was that you said?”

“Get your pants on?”

“No, before that. Wait a moment.” He riffled back through his perfect
memory. “You said, ‘After all, now that I’m preg—’ Then the Baron started shouting.”

The Princess flushed. Though her genes often betrayed her, her upbringing had been normal for a gnome. “We’re going to have a baby, Fang.”

“We are?” He stared at her for a moment. “Are we really?”

“I’m sure we are, darling.”

“How long have you been, uh, preg?”

“Probably since that first time in my old burrow. You were a very virile gnome that night, Fang.”

Fang felt tears of joy stinging his eyes, so he grabbed the Princess and held her close, burying his face in her hair. A leader must not betray weakness. They stood like that for a long time, while the sounds of human presence drifted away from the Stone.

“What the hell is going on here?” rasped an unpleasant voice. “Why are you standing up against each other like that?”

“Hello, Miggot,” said Fang. “We were just coming.”

“It bloody well looks like it. We were wondering where the hell you were. Nyneve is waiting to thank you.”