Waving Excalibur on high, Arthur urged his mount forward against a gaggle of barbarian warriors who stood naked but armed with swords and axes. I pulled up alongside him and we sliced the lives out of those men, their blood spurting as they screamed their death agonies.
But still more were coming at us, roaring with anger and battle lust. The
first shock of our surprise attack had quickly worn off and now they were hot for our blood. They seemed to grow out of the very ground, no matter how many we killed still more rose against us. We waded into them as they swarmed around us, pulling men off their mounts, pulling down the horses themselves. Men and beasts alike screamed as the barbarians hacked them to bloody pieces.
The knights
fared better than the lightly armed squires, but even they were being hard pressed by the teeming, swarming barbarians. Arthur and I weaved a sphere of death with our swords. Anyone who dared to come within reach of our blades died swiftly.
But still more of the barbarians rushed at us, assailing us like swarms of wasps, surging like the tide of the sea.
“We’ve got to get back!” Bors shouted.
“Their whole army is aroused now.”
“Yes,” Arthur agreed. “Sound the retreat.”
The squire who served as bugler put his ram’s horn to his lips and blew mightily. We turned back toward the fort, fighting and hacking our way through the maddened barbarians. The Saxons made no effort to climb the hill and get through the guarded gate; they were content to drive us out of their camp.
3
We were tired
and dispirited as we alit from our mounts. Eleven of our number were gone, nine squires and two knights. Each of us was spattered with blood, mostly Saxon, although almost every one of us had been nicked or wounded.
Except for Arthur. He was untouched and still brimming with excitement.
“How many did we kill, do you think?” he asked.
“How many did we lose?” Bors countered.
Merlin watched us
from the parapet as we dismounted wearily and helped the wounded off their horses. Several of the men groaned with pain. Many of the young squires were white faced with shock or loss of blood.
“Well, you had your moment of glory,” Bors said sourly. “It didn’t do us much good, did it?”
Arthur did not argue against him. Bors was an experienced fighter. Arthur had been named commander of this fort
because he was the High King’s adopted nephew, and he knew it. The Saxons and their barbarian allies were still encamped around the base of the hill. There were fewer of them, yes, but still more than enough to take the fort when they finally decided to attack.
At last Arthur said, “We’d better get some sleep. No sense standing here until dawn.”
Arthur and the others headed wearily for the timbered
tower at the far end of the wall. I went to the stables, where my pallet of straw awaited me amidst the steaming, sweating horses. The heat of their bodies kept the wooden shelter warm despite the breeze that whistled through its slats. I automatically tuned down my sense of smell; the stables and horse grounds were not the most sweetly fragrant areas of the fort.
I stretched out on the pallet
and thought of my beloved Anya. She had taken human form in many placetimes to be with me. She and I had faced the alien Set in the time of the dinosaurs. We had lived together for a brief interlude of happiness in the beautiful wooded glades of Paradise.
Always Aten pulled us apart, insanely jealous of her love for me. Yet time and again Anya had found me, helped me, loved me no matter where
and when I had been sent by the Golden One.
I closed my eyes and pictured her perfect face, those fathomless silver-gray eyes that held all of eternity, her raven-black hair cascading like a river of onyx past her alabaster shoulders. She was a warrior goddess, a proud and courageous Athena, the only one of the Creators who dared to oppose Aten openly.
Suddenly a fireball of light blasted my
senses, a glare of golden radiance so bright that I flung my arms across my eyes.
“I know your thoughts, creature.”
I was no longer at Amesbury fort. I had been wrenched out of that point in spacetime, translated into a vastly different place, the ageless realm of the Creators.
I could
feel
the brilliance of his presence. Aten, the Golden One, the self-styled god who created me.
“Get up, Orion,”
the Golden One commanded. “Stand before your Creator.”
Like an automaton I climbed slowly to my feet, my arms still covering my eyes, shielding them from his blazing splendor. The radiance burned my flesh, seared into the marrow of my bones.
“Put your hands down, Orion, and face the glory of your master,” he said, his voice sneering at me.
I did as he commanded. I had no choice. It was as if
I were a mere puppet and he controlled my limbs, my entire body, even the beating of my heart.
It was like staring into the sun. The glare was overpowering, a physical force that made my knees buckle and forced my eyes to squint painfully. After what seemed like an eternity the blinding radiance contracted, compressed itself, and took on human form. My eyes, watering with pain, beheld Aten, the
Golden One who had created me.
He was glorious to look upon. Wearing splendid robes of gold and gleaming white, Aten looked every inch the god he pretended to be. To the ancient Greeks he was Apollo; to the first Egyptians he was Aten the sun god who gave them light and life. I first knew him as Ormazd, the fire god of Zoroaster in ancient Persia.
I loathed him. Aten or Apollo or whatever he
chose to call himself, he was an egomaniac who schemed endlessly to control all of the spacetime continuum. But he is no more a god than I am. He—and the other Creators—are humans from the far future, or rather, what humans have evolved into: men and women of incredible knowledge and power, able to travel through time and space as easily as young Arthur rides a horse across a grassy meadow.
He had sent me to be with Arthur in the darkness of an era where a few brave men were trying to stem the tide of barbarism that was destroying civilization all across the old Roman world.
I looked into Aten’s haughty leonine eyes, gleaming with vast plans for manipulating the spacetime continuum, glittering with what may have been madness.
“You hate me, Orion? Me, who created you? Who has revived
you from death countless times? How ungrateful you are, creature. How unappreciative.” He laughed at me.
“You can read my thoughts,” I said tightly, “but you cannot control them.”
“That makes no difference, worm. You will obey me, now and forever.”
“Why should I?”
“You have no choice,” he said.
I remembered differently. “I disobeyed you at Troy,” I told him. “I refused to annihilate the Neandertals,
back in the Ice Age.”
His flawlessly handsome face set into a hard scowl. “Yes, and you came close to unraveling the entire fabric of spacetime. It cost me much labor to rebuild the continuum, Orion.”
“And you have cost me much pain.”
“That is nothing compared to the agonies you will suffer if you dare to resist my commands again. Final death, Orion. Death without revival. Oblivion. But much
pain first. An infinity of pain.”
“I will not murder Arthur,” I said.
Almost he smiled. “That may not be necessary, creature. There are plenty of Saxons available for killing him. Your task is merely to stand aside and let it happen.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I won’t.”
He laughed again. “Yes, you will, Orion. When the moment comes you will do as I command. Just as you assassinated the High Khan
of the Mongols.”
I blinked with the memory. Ogatai. He had befriended me, made me his companion, his trusted aide—just as young Arthur has.
“You can’t make me—”
But I was in the darkness and stench of the stable again, alone in the night. The Golden One had played his little game with me and sent me back to Arthur’s placetime.
Alone, I lay back on the brittle straw once again. Why had Aten
sent me here? What schemes was he weaving about Arthur and these barbarian invaders of Britain?
Anya. She was the only one who could help me. She loved me, and I loved her with a passion that spanned the centuries and millennia, a love that reached out to the stars themselves.
Yet I could not find her that night, could not reach her. I called to her silently, searched out with my mind through
the dark cold night. No response. Nothing but the aching emptiness of infinity, the lonely void of nothingness. It was as if she no longer existed, as if she never had existed and was merely a dream of my imagination.
No, I told myself. Anya is real. She loves me. If she doesn’t answer my plea it’s because Aten is blocking my efforts, keeping us apart.
I strove with every atom of my being to
translate myself to the timeless refuge of the Creators, far in the future of Arthur’s world. To no avail. I strained until perspiration soaked every inch of my body, but I remained in this smelly, dank, unlit stable.
Exhausted, I fell into sleep. And dreamed of Alexander.
4
The crown prince of Macedonia, son of doughty Philip II, Alexander was also young and impetuous when I knew him. Proud
and ambitious, driven by his cruel mother, Olympias, young Alexander learned battle tactics—and the strategies of war—from his masterful father, Philip.
In my dream I was at Alexander’s side once again as he led the cavalry at the epic battle of Chaeronea. We galloped across the field toward the Athenian foot soldiers, thrusting and slashing at their hoplites in a wild melee of dust and blood,
screams of triumph and agony filling the air. I felt the horse beneath me pounding across the corpse-littered plain and strained mightily to rein him in, hold him back, as I slashed with my sword at the soldiers milling about us.
Alexander pushed ahead on old Ox-Head, his favorite steed, wading through the Athenian infantry, nearly sliding off his mount while jamming his spear into a screaming
hoplite. Clutching my mount between my knees, I urged the horse on through the wildly surging tumult until I was beside Alexander, protecting his unshielded right side. Together we drove through the scattering Athenians, then began the grim task of riding down the fleeing hoplites and slaughtering them to the last man.
5
My eyes snapped open. It was still dark, well before dawn. Why did I dream
of Alexander? Of all the lives I have led, of all the deaths that I have known, why did I dream this night of Alexander and the Macedonian cavalry?
“Find the answer, Sarmatian,” whispered an invisible voice. A woman’s voice. Anya!
I sat up on the pallet, ignoring the cold wind that sliced through the rickety slats of the stable, disregarding the smell and the snuffling of the drowsing horses.
Sarmatian. Anya called me a Sarmatian. I remembered that I had claimed to be a Sarmatian when I had first found myself at Amesbury, begging a skeptical Sir Bors for a place in Arthur’s service.
Sarmatian.
I sat on the pallet wondering until daylight slanted through the cracks in the stable wall. I washed at the horse trough, drawing the usual laughs and jeers from the other squires and churls.
“You washed yesterday, Orion! Aren’t you afraid you’ll drown yourself?” laughed one of them.
“He washes every morning,” called another, already at work shoveling in the manure pile. “He wants to smell pretty for the girls.”
There were no women in Amesbury fort. All the women and children and old men of the region had been moved farther inland to be safe from the Saxons. If the fort fell, they
would be defenseless.
“Don’t you know that washing makes you weak, Orion? You’re scrubbing all your strength away!”
They laughed uproariously. It was the only relief they had from the tension. We all knew that there was an army of Saxons and other invaders just outside our gate, a barbarian army that was growing with every passing day.
Ignoring their jibes, I walked across the dung-dotted courtyard
to the timbered tower of the fort. The guard recognized me and let me pass unchallenged. Instead of going to Arthur’s quarters, however, I climbed the creaking wooden stairs to Merlin’s tower-top aerie.
There was no door at the top of the stairs. The entire top level of the tower was a single open area, roofed over with heavy beams of rough-hewn logs. It was a misty autumn morning, dank and chill.
On a clear day, I knew, from up at this height you could see almost to the waters of the Solent and the Isle of Wight.
Merlin was standing at the low wall, staring out across the fog-shrouded camp of the barbarians, his back to me. His possessions were meager: a table that held several manuscript rolls, a few unmatched chairs, a couple of chests, a few blankets for a sleeping roll. Nothing more.
“What do you want, Orion?” he asked, without turning to look at me.
“How did you know it was me?” I asked.
He shrugged his frail shoulders. “Who else could it be?”
That puzzled me. He had a reputation as a wizard, a magician who could cast spells and foresee the future. Yet, as he finally turned to face me, all I saw was a wizened old man in a stained wrinkled robe of patched homespun with
a long dirty white beard and thin, lank hair falling past his shoulders; both beard and hair were knotted and filthy.
“I need your help,” I said.
“Yes, I know,” he replied as he walked slowly, arthritically, toward his table.
“Then you know what I am about to ask.”
“Naturally.” He slowly sank his emaciated frame into the cushion-covered chair.
I stood before the table and folded my arms across
my chest. I wore only a thin tunic, scant proof against the frosty autumn morning, but I have always been able to keep my body heat from radiating away and to step up my metabolic rate when I have to, burning off fat stored in the body’s tissues to keep me warm.
“Sit down, Orion,” said Merlin. “It hurts my neck to have to crane up to see your eyes.”
As I sat, I said, “Can you help me, then?”
“Naturally,” he repeated.
“Well, then?”