The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (24 page)

“Your foul temper’s returned.  You must be better.”

“That will be the last thing to leave my corpus and you know it.”

Igerne gestured at Arthur and me.  “As my newest and loyalest vassals, these two stood with me through the night when my king-son-husband could not, weeping as he was with his concubines.”

“They wept, too!”

“Wept in fury to argue which of them would be first to rob my corpse!”

Igerne ate her morning bread dipped in mare’s milk.  “Where’s the garlic?  That’s what my lungs need.”  Slaves brought it in globes.  She ate it like apples.

Igerne said to her husband, “I’ve confirmed Arthur in Cornwall.”

Arthur spun the crown on a finger as proof.

“You can keep it,” Gurthrygen said to his brother.  “May you be happy with that filthy country of traitors.”

Igerne said, “They’ll keep him too busy to cause you mischief.  They’ll keep him out of our part of Britain until I die.”

“Then I’ll think of something else for him,” said the king.

“Have you learned to think?” said the queen.  “Then think of this.  He’s the last male issue of Uther Pendragon.  I killed all the other children.  The glory of Uther’s blood will persuade the electors to choose him king after you.”

“Why not Morgause?  She was born first…”

“She’s a witch, you fool.  They’d elect a merlin sooner.”

“What about that damned sword in its stone?”

“That’s our insurance Arthur won’t try to shove you off your throne.”

Arthur clapped his ducal crown over the hilt of his sword in its scabbard.  “I can wait,” he said.

Gurthrygen and Igerne said together, “Can you?”

Igerne said, “Until you can draw the sword, you support the king by never coming near him again.  The crown comes to you next, so let Gurthrygen enjoy what he has without worry.  Let
me
enjoy my own crown in peace, which is what I really want.”

“Seems to me,” said Arthur, “you’d be smarter to kill me.”

“We tried,” said Igerne.  “But your merlin got in our way.”

“She always will,” I said.

Igerne felt her mouth with the back of her hand.  No blood.  She cried, “Slaves, take me to the baths!  Send my pet Dunwallo.  I need his prayers, lots of prayers and incense.  I’d have him sacrifice blue-painted virgins to save me if I could find any virgins in this benighted land.  More garlic!”

Slaves carried out the queen on a litter.

Gurthrygen, left alone with Arthur and me, said, “Do you really want Cornwall, Brother?”

“It’s mine.”

“Oh, it’s yours, if you can keep it.”

The king slouched down on Igerne’s blood-spattered bed and rubbed his weary face with his battle-blunted hands.

“Everything in Britain is in rebellion against everything else, Brother, Cornwall no less than any other pestilential corner of the Island.  I fight the Pagan hordes and the Britons, too.  Every duke and kinglet is my rival.  Every knight and ex-Legionary is their rival.  Every peasant has his rival, and every slave.  We’re all good Romans on this island, hating and killing one another before he try to kill the barbarians smashing in the gates.”

He gazed out the open window.  A bird darted past, like something that was not there becoming there and vanishing again.  Like life and kingship.  The king stared into the blankness the bird had left.

“The country’s going to its atomos,” he said.  “Saxons steal bits from the south and east.  Scots, Picts, and Irish take bites from north and west.  Norwayans, Gauls, Romans.  Even the Bretons, our loving bastard cousins across the Narrow Sea, bite us.  Britain’s crumbling to a thousand clan-kingdoms.  Cities die.  Country villas turn to dust.  In a year, we’ll be howling naked through the trees like a Scot!”

The king got to his feet and leaned in toward Arthur.  “But do you know what really worries me, Brother?  Sewerage pipes!  The Romans put them down and they’re rotting away and the water’s gone bad everywhere and plague spreads.  Money!  I never have enough of it to build bridges or bribe country princes to plant food for eating instead of saffron to sell abroad for fortunes.  Babies!  I can’t get enough of them to refill the dwindling population, much less my army.  Not to mention enough of nails for horseshoes, leather and brine for armor, chickens for my peasants after the Saxons eat their pigs and burn their hovels.”

Gurthrygen suddenly looked old and spent.  He pulled Arthur down beside him on the queen’s bloody bed.

“There’s so much you have to learn to be a king, Arthur.  It’s more than war and political adultery.  It’s bookkeeping, for Jesu’s sake.  You have to learn to count past twenty, believe me!  It’s counting soldiers, counting their shoes, counting the sheaves of wheat that make their bread, counting the villages that grow the sheaves, counting the peasants and the animals that feed them, counting the loss of children by disease, of women by overwork, the days of rain and sun, the amphorae of bad Greek and good Italian wine and the gold coins that go out of the kingdom to pay for them.  It’s the gold coins going out that most worry me.  It’s counting the oh-so-many priests of the all-too-many gods, counting and balancing rival warlords and landowners, weighing justice among Romans, Britons, strangers, and all the mixtures in between.  It’s the wearisome worry counting-counting-counting the too many stones that pop up out of the ground in a freeze year and counting the too few edible frogs born in a dry year.  Or the too many foxes that ravage the fields or too few hawks to give too little sport to warriors who will kill anything for pleasure, and what warriors kill best is the livelihood of the nation.”

The king rubbed an anxious hand across his face.  “I tell you, Brother, you might pull the sword and become king.  But to stay king you better remake my sorry government like Boadicea’s old war bands that ruled before the Caesars came here, when life was simple and pure.  Keep away from modern government.  Keep away from all counting!  Let your merlin do that.  Kill any Roman who wants to give you ‘advice.’  What he means to teach you is Complication, something to sap the liver of a king.  I haven’t time to teach you any of that, and damn me for it.  You’ll have to learn it in Cornwall on your own.  You’ll have to learn it to survive.  I could weep for you!”

Gurthrygen threw an arm over Arthur’s shoulder and said, earnestly, “That, Brother, is what must worry you out there among the Cornishmen.  They’re the most bloody-minded of the old Spanish Celts.  Let them live as they please and have what they want, which is women in charge and everyone playing those awful bagpipes.  Give them that and they’ll stick to you until they’ve sucked you dry.  Which is as much as any prince can hope from his people.  And when you’re a dry husk and they rebel, shove the lovely Lady Merlin into the fight ahead of you and run.”

I laughed.  What else could I do?  Gurthrygen’s was a marvelous speech, the first honest words I’d heard from any king in too many of my lives.

“You’ve just had an education in kingship, Arthur,” I said.  “Remember it.”

“We’ll leave for Cornwall this hour,” said Arthur.

Gurthrygen clutched Arthur’s sword hand.  “I’ve tried to kill you, Brother, but now that I have you with me, even as the queen’s vassal, even as duke of far Cornwall, I’ll love you as a brother and fellow prince.  Because you alive terrifies my enemies.”

The king pointed to me.  “What terrifies me is this one.”

“Me?” I said.

“You and your fantastic dream of ‘Camelot.’  I see those fine, freshening tits, the firm legs, and the tight waist, despite your mail and greaves.  The perfect girlish fingers.  The soft and tender face.  Has too much youth and youth’s stupidity infected you, Lady Merlin?  Will you have the strength to guide Arthur through what has to come next?”

“What comes next?” I said.

“You know it.  All the universe falls on his head when he becomes king.”

Arthur got up from the bench and saluted Gurthrygen.  He and I went to the door to leave.

Gurthrygen said, “Bring me a gift when you return.”

“What could you want?” said Arthur.

“Some comfort for an old, old man of twenty-nine envious of your youth.”

“I’ll bring a bag of Cornish soil to rest your old feet upon.”

* * *

In the lady chapel’s anteroom, we found a gossiping gaggle of Romans.  Rufus Maximus, the king’s First Roman, hideously toupeed and in Roman in toga with the purple trim of an Equestrian, broke from the group and said, with his usual nasal arrogance, “I’m Rufus Maximus, Prince Arthur.  What message does my Lady Merlin send to me by you?”

“Ask her yourself,” said Arthur.

Rufus turned to me, not believing.  “You, girl, are Lady Merlin?  You could be your daughter!”

He leaned in to study my face, more astonished Romans leaning over his shoulder to stare with him.

“Mars and Jupiter, I believe you
are
Merlin,” said Rufus, a fright crossing his face.  “So the children’s stories are true?  You age the wrong way through life!”

The other Romans hissed and gibbered at each other, marveling and terrified. Rufus waved them out of the anteroom.  They were happy to get away from me.

Rufus bowed before me, laughing at himself in frightened astonishment at a Roman’s bowing before an alien of any rank.

“For two years, Princess Merlin, I’ve kept our contract to preserve the king.  What do you want from me now, Lady?”

“A soldier’s job.”

Light flashed in Rufus’ face.  The old colonel of the Ninth Legion cried, “No more clerking with ink on my fingers?  No more counting sheep and sheaves?  You want me to fight?  To command your legions?  Yes, Lady, yes!”

Rufus shouted for slaves to bring bread and oil.  Meat and wine.  Trestle tables and benches.  Not so grand accommodation as the lounging dining style of the Romans, but it was the British style and suited me better.

“I saw a slave painting a crown on your shield, Prince Arthur,” Rufus said, giddy with delight, shoving food into his face.  “A ducal crown over your red dragon.  I knew that meant fighting.  I prayed you’d come to me, Lady Merlin.  I’m an old man.  Nearly forty!  But I’ve plenty of fight in me.  I’ll conquer Cornwall as easily as a slave paints the crown on your shield, Prince.  Tell me that’s what you want!”

I said to the Roman, “How do you propose we three take Cornwall?”

“Why, make ourselves an army, how else?”

“As easy as that?” said Arthur.

“Making armies is never easy.” Rufus spat out a meat bone and reached for a pot of wine.  “Unless a champion attracts them.”

“Arthur is our champion,” I said.

Rufus gave Arthur a Roman sizing up.  “He’s too young and light-bodied to be a champion, Princess.  Isn’t there a British Goliath to recruit?  We call him our general and shove him out front…”

“What makes me a champion is my son,” said Arthur.

“What son?”

“Mordred.”

Rufus stopped his eating.  He put down his wine cup.  “Morgause’s boy.  Two years old now?  In Prince Lot’s castle of Orkney.  It will take half the world’s armies to pry him out of there.”

“Only all of Britain and the Near Islands,” I said.

Rufus said, “That’s work for a champion, all right.”

He said to me, “Princess, we have a contract.  One year is left.  I won’t give you more than that.  I’m hungry for Rome and home.  But tell me where we find our soldiers for just one year’s campaigning?  The king’s gathered up every able-bodied man and boy for another invasion of Westsaxland.  Not a dozen peasant brats remain to be hired or bought or enslaved into our army.”

“Ask Arthur, not me,” I said.

“Well, Prince, tell me where we find our army.”

“We’ll make an army as we ride,” said Arthur.

“Out of what?”

“Cornishmen.”

“The people you mean to conquer?  Why would Cornwall flock to the son of the man who killed their greatest duke and raped his wife to produce you, the bastard prince?”

“I don’t know,” Arthur said.  “But they will.”

We three rode down the Roman road toward Isca in the unknowable heart of Cornwall, our swords in our hands.

Beyond Isca, if we survived that far, it was another equal distance to Tintagel Castle where Arthur had been conceived on Igerne.  Tintagel was the seat of the dukes of Cornwall at the edge of the Western Sea.  Arthur had to have it to become Cornwall.  We had with us twenty men-at-arms, ex-Legionaries and lifeguards in the households of the ex-colonel Rufus Maximus and his fellow accountants for the king.  They were good warriors but hirelings.

The road was slick with mud and moss, poorly maintained after the last Roman legion had abandoned it for Italy.  Cornwall was green, thick, sprouting, bright, and chirping with birds.  The sky ran blue, gray, and white as the weather changed with speed known only on Island Britain.

At last we crossed no man’s land into Cornwall Proper.  Sudden sunlight, darting falcons, roe to shoot!  We were like a happy hunting party now, all good fellowship and clattering bows, arrows, and spears.  Fresh meat to gnaw over a spitting campfire.  Cold stream water to drink.  Sleep under a brush lean-to.

For Arthur and me, it called up happy memories of Arthur’s childhood when we dressed in forest leaves and ran wild through the trees.  For me it also recalled the grim and bitter days of my own youth as the slave-child Brynn, shivering in a blanket weighed by snow outside Galabes’ cave.  For Rufus, the old colonel, it was joy to be out of his counting house and on campaign once again, even if his total force amounted to twenty mercenaries, Arthur, and me.

Two days across the border, traveling now in full armor, banners and pennants flapping, Arthur’s wooden standard – the red dragon crowned by Cornwall – leading our cavalcade, we found an old warrior beside the road.

He was mummy-shriveled.  In antique Legionary uniform now far too large for him – burnished iron and bronze scales, a leather skirt, and caligas.  He had not unsheathed his gladius.  He ate garlic globes as he leaned against a standard he had stabbed into the earth – it was of a hawk in flight, Cornish blue on silver, the mark of a lord no one in our party could name.

“Hail, whatever you are, Old Sack of Rust,” I said to him, halting our caravan.

Pack animals edged to the roadside to look at the old man and wince back from his fetid garlic stink.

“Hail to you, too, lady whoever you may be, and a more polite greeting you won’t find in Cornwall.  I’m Hadrian.  Blame my mother for the Roman name, not me.  Hadrian the Much the Lesser, I’m called, when I’m called at all by my master.”

“Who’s that?” said Rufus.

“Civica Cerealis.”

Hadrian offered the Roman a bite of his garlic as he looked from my tribunicial uniform to Arthur’s.

“Brother-sister-captains-in-arms, I see, with too much Pendragon red in the hair.”

“So you’ve good eyes?” said Arthur.

“I see a few things when I must,” said Hadrian.  “One of you is the promised usurper duke.  Pardon me for saying ‘usurper’ but my master dictates all my words.  Surely you wouldn’t treat this poor messenger as the dirty Greeks would?”

Hadrian still leaned lazily against his standard, but I saw a readiness to fight come into the old man.

“What a Cornish bumpkin you are,” said Rufus, laughing.  “You can see we aren’t Greeks but Romans and Roman citizens.”

“Far worse!  The Greeks only steal everything.  The Romans steal so much more.”

Hadrian returned to eating his garlic.

He said, “Which of you is that worthless pig Arthur?”

“I am,” said Arthur.

Hadrian spat at him.

“Pardon me, but my master ordered me to spit.”

Arthur said, “Spit again, if he so ordered you.”

“He told me to spit but not how many times.”

“Once is enough then, should we say?”

“If it satisfies etiquette, oh Worthless Pig.”

Rufus drew his gladius.  “Enough comedy, old fool.  One more insult and I cut off your head.”

I said to Rufus, “Stay.  I spoke to him first.  I’m responsible for his safety.”

“What does your barbaric hospitality mean to me?” said the Roman.

“It means a lot to this Cornishman,” said Hadrian.

Rufus sheathed his gladius.  “Where’s your exalted master, Hadrian the Much the Lesser?”

“Over there.  Behind those trees.  In a natural amphitheater called the Shell of Venus.”

Hadrian uprooted his master’s standard and led out from the road.

“Follow along,” he said, “and we’ll decide who’s duke in Cornwall in a few heartbeats.”

Arthur said, “What’s in the Shell?”

“Twenty times your twenty men-at-arms and every Cornish dragonets, kinglet, duke, duchess, underduke, underduchess, and a confusion of princes and princesses.  All our local potentates amassed for election or war, whichever seems most amusing.”

Rufus shouted to the mercenaries to arm themselves for heavy combat, leave the pack train on the road, form for battle.

The mercenaries emptied the pack animals of extra weapons and shields, tightened their bowstrings, loosened their swords in their scabbards, and let their horses plow across the ground behind Hadrian, riding with their weapons ready.

Arthur and I took the van along a dirt path freshly cut through trees.

“This is an ambush, Arthur,” Rufus said.

“Not at all,” said Hadrian, plodding in front.  “My Lord Civica Cerealis craves fair combat or fair election, whichever promises more fun.”

Arthur said, “What entertainment is an election?”

“All in how it’s done, Lord Pig, pardon again.”

Hadrian led to the rim of the Shell, a huge grassy sinkhole with stone chairs for Cornish warriors, Amazons, and ex-Legionaries.  Four hundred of them.

“With an army this size,” said Arthur, “I could take Orkney Castle and my son in a day!”

Arthur shouted his barbaric war cry, stunning Rufus and his Christian-Romans, and rode down into the Shell beneath the Cornish fighters.  I went howling after him, Urien in my hand.

The Cornishmen began their own cacophony of war cries.

Rufus held his men-at-arms on the ridgeline in a wedge to ride down cutting through Cornishmen to save Arthur and me.  But the surrounding Cornishmen did not attack.

They sat on their stone seats shouting insults and jeers, clattering bizarre inward-curving swords – the falcata – on their gleaming helmets, waggling their horned helmets, Amazons beating their single breasts, and all of them flinging pebbles and feces at Arthur and me.

Armored men standing on their stones near enough pissed on Arthur as he rode past.  Women in armor flung at him cups of their own urine.

But all these Cornish were dressed in an impoverished confusion of rags and armors, Roman, Cornish, Illyrian, Syrian, African.  Shields named men and women descended from Corinth or Troy, Carthage, Sparta, Rome before the Romans.  All in keeping with these black-eyed people with the hard faces of Spain and its wild Celts.  They claimed cousins in Ireland, Scotland, and other exotic places, and their loyalties outside Britain made them the thorn in the side of every British ruler.

“Who’s lord of this confusion?” I shouted at the crowding warriors.  “Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, Duke of Cornwall,” – a howling jeer rose from the crowd – “calls on whoever is lord to meet him here.  He challenges Civica Cerealis to come out!”

The jeers stopped.

A little one-armed man came down into the amphitheater followed by a veiled girl dressed in a Cornishwoman’s blue toga.  The toga was edged with Equestrian stripes in silver.

The one-armed man was dressed for single battle but his smooth Cornish helmet was shoved back on his head, opening his face to a strike.  The stub of his left arm was strapped with a small target with the blue falcon insignia Hadrian carried.  He had a curved falcata slung from his belt and a dozen throwing daggers under his buckler.

Hadrian Lesser announced, “Here is Lord Civica Cerealis, Duke of Battles, Prince of Isca, Citizen of Rome, and so forth and so on!”

Arthur and I hailed him with a fisted salute.

Civica nodded and waited for Hadrian to continue the introductions.

Hadrian cried, “Here stands Prince Arthur Pendragon, self-supposed Duke of Cornwall, the pig, as you have told me to say, Lord, and his pathetic rabble war band led by this unnamed but very pretty lady-knight.”

“I’m Merlin,” I said.

“Not a happy thing to hear,” said Civica, “that my enemies include a wizard more myth than human.  You are so beautiful, Lady, I could love you.  But this one, this Arthur,” – Civica gestured at Arthur without looking at him – “what’s he to you, Princess Merlin?”

“My foster son.”

“Great Caesar!”  Civica turned black eyes and unshaved face to Arthur.  “That impresses me more than your Pendragon bloodline, Prince.  I wonder what Fate expects me to do next?”

“What would you expect to do when meeting your lord duke?” Arthur said.

“Cut his throat and steal his boots.  Or kiss his boots and steal his Lady Merlin.  Whichever seems most profitable.  You want Cornwall and we” – he waved at the four hundred – “won’t give it to you.  Unless, of course, you prove yourself our duke.”

Arthur drew his sword.  “Send out your champion.”

“Here she is.”

Civica unveiled the girl.  She was dark-eyed, with Spanish sunlight in her cheeks.  She simpered delightfully.

Arthur cried, “I could love a woman like that!”

“So could we all.  So should we all.”

Civica shouted to the four hundred, “It’s a love-match, then!” and they cheered.

I was appalled and cried, “Arthur’s to fight a girl-child?”

“What’s it matter if he cuts out the heart of a male or a female champion so long as he cuts out someone’s heart to prove he’s our duke?” said Civica.

Arthur dropped off his horse before the girl, his sword drawn, baffled, unwilling to hack her apart.

“You’ll battle plenty enough of her kind between now and death,” said Civica.  “Start with this one.  Let’s see you lop off an arm or a leg on the road to her heart.”

Civica climbed up to his gilt stone chair in the amphitheater.

The four hundred began a rhythmic chant, urging on the fight.

Rufus and his men gawked down from the high rim of the sinkhole.

Arthur said to me, “Do I kill this girl, Mother?”

I jumped down beside him.  “What else is there to do?” I said.  “These mad Cornishmen want a blood sacrifice.  Give it to them.  Be glad they don’t ask you to eat her beating heart like a Saxon.”

“What a shame to kill her,” said Arthur, “but anything for Cornwall, I suppose.”

Arthur flicked his sword into her breast.

The girl spouted blood.  It hissed out of her like a wail of trumpets.

She fell over dead.

“She didn’t put up much of a fight for a Cornish champion,” Arthur said.

There was a strange waiting silence from the four hundred watchers.

Arthur wiped his sword on her silks.

The girl’s blood ceased to run.  No more trumpets calls.

“Have I warned you about miracles?” said Civica.

His Cornish warriors cheered and jeered and went silent.

I shoved Arthur aside and put Urien’s sword point on the dead girl’s throat.  “Tell us about miracles, Duke.”

“I own a miracle.  A shamefully unChristian sort of thing to own.  But handy.”

“Tell us about it before I come up there to divide your liver from your soul,” I said to him.

“Good speeching!” the warriors cried.

Civica said, “A miracle, Prince and Princess, is an aberration of the natural order.  It can be good or bad, a saintly visitation or a monster.  Who’s to say but I suppose one man’s saint is another’s monster and
vice versa
, as the contemptible Romans put it.”

A frightened Hadrian, beside Arthur and me, shouted, “Duke, let me out of here!”

“Come sit at my feet where it’s safe, Lesser Hadrian,” said Civica.

Rufus shouted from the rim of the Shell.

“Who’s that up there?” said Civica, looking across the amphitheater.

“Rufus Maximus of the household of Gurthrygen King of Britain!” shouted the Roman.

“Rufus the thief, the publican, spreader of the tax disease?” cried Civica.

“Those tribunes are in my protection and therefore in the protection of the king,” Rufus shouted.  “If your ‘miracle’ or horde scratches my little princes, I’ll have your scalp on my shield by sunset.”

The four hundred howled, “More good speeching!”

Civica said to Rufus, “My companions have no intent but to watch Arthur contest my champion who is, for the moment, dead.  But I invite you to join him in the fracas, Roman.  All of you, come down and fight beside your precious prince.”

Arthur said, “Stay out, Rufus.  I’ll kill this champion myself.  I’ll re-kill her a dozen times, if that’s the law of ‘miracles.’”