The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (33 page)

“Where is elsewhere?” said Lancelot, glancing around as though he couldn’t conceive of a world beyond what he could see.

“The counts of Flanders yearn to be dukes.  There are kings in Norway and Denmark who hunger for a hot-blooded southern girl.  There’s still some sort of emperor in Rome…”

“He’s an unwashed Goth!” cried Lancelot.

“Or I could find her a god among the Greeks.  They have plenty to choose from…”

“Give her to the Greeks?” cried Lancelot.

“Or the Turks.”

Lancelot shouted in despair.  He tossed his golden war club to a slave.

“If you won’t let me crush out his brains, Duke, I’ll have to agree, damn me and damn you and damn everyone else.  When is the contest finished and I get the girl?”

“One year,” said Cator.

I could see Lancelot puzzling over the length of a year.  “Twelve full Moons,” I told him.

“That long?  Why, I’ll be nearly middle-aged!  Nineteen, at least, or maybe twenty-two.”

Arthur, impatient with this beautiful dunce, said to Cator, “Lord Duke, let’s begin the contest now.”

“Go ahead,” said Cator, curious to see how Arthur would begin.

Arthur said to Phyllis Merlin, “Bring me Menw Spellcaster and Gwrhyr Interpreter of Tongues.”

Cator shouted, “Those’re m’secret servants!  How do you know those names?”

“They just came to my mouth when I had to have names to say,” said Arthur.

Here was another surprise for me, but one that might compensate for my own failing power.

Menw the Spellcaster and Gwrhyr the Interpreter of Tongues came into the auditorium, summoned by Phyllis in her soul-voice.

The Spellcaster had an old man’s sneering face on a boy’s body.  He wore the gold torque of a prince and drapes of multicolored silks gaudy as a Syrian woman’s dress.  He had only one eye, in the center of his face.  He saw Arthur.  The sneer became fright.

He threw himself on the stones and crawled to Arthur, weeping, not raising his face from the dirty floor until he kissed Arthur’s booted toes.

Menw cried, “Lord King Camelot, make me your servant!”

“Hey, hey,” said the duke, “I own that slave!”

“Want me to smash out his traitor’s brains?” said Lancelot, reaching for his golden club.

Gwrhyr the Interpreter was a Gallograecian woman with a British man’s name.  Dressed in hodgepodge clothes assembled from all the kingdoms through which she had traveled to Brittany.  Her name, her clothes, the ceremonial scars on her face, and the jewelry that hung from her ears, nose, arms, ankles, cheeks, and lips were a summary of dying Roman civilization.

She kicked the Spellcaster.  “He’s an emotional man, Prince Arthur.  You’ll find me cooler but equally loyal.  Make me your servant, too.”

Cator cried, “I own that woman, too!”

“I can crush her skull, as well,” said Lancelot.

“Oh, shut up, you murdering fool,” said Cator.

“We’re no more yours, Duke,” said Gwrhyr, yanking off her slave torque and throwing it at Cator’s feet.

She bowed to Arthur.  “If Menw calls you ‘king,’ then I must, too.  Hail, King Camelot.”

“Hey, hey!” the duke cried to Phyllis.  “You’re my merlin and first minister.  Do something before I lose all my slaves and servants!”

“Your Camelot dream has stolen the first bits of your duchy, Duke,” she said with laughing irony.  “Be happy.”

Lancelot raised his war club.  “Let me smash out her merlin’s lying heart and you’ll hear it thumping in my hand as proof of her fraud.”

The four midget monsters hauling their sheets of skin lined up between Phyllis and Lancelot.

“What’s this, Arthur?  Your little pets mean to fight me?”  Lancelot laughed, juggling his war club.

Bedivere cried, “Arthur!  Let us tear apart his sinews and eat out his liver!”

“What do they say?” said Cator.

The Interpreter cried, “Great Healing Jesu, these apes…”

“Are beyond ordinary human understanding,” I cut in.

Gwrhyr said, “Yes, Lady Merlin, if that’s your interpretation.”

Menw cried out, “The Hawk!  The Bull!  The Rose!  The Glass Shield!” and, still on his knees before Arthur, bowed to each of the war band as he named their emblems.

“Do these creatures have arms?” Cator said.

“It’s a conspiracy of lunatics,” said Lancelot.  “Let me club them all...”

“You think Arthur and m’slaves conspire with his pet apes?” Cator said to Lancelot.  “You’re more absurd than they.”

The duke shouted at both princes, “Out of m’sight, out, out, both of you!  Guards, throw them into the street!”

The lifeguards heaved Arthur and Lancelot into the sewage runnel scooped out of the dirt road that ran past the ducal palace.

“Get to work, idiots – you’ve duties for me!”  Cator slammed shut the great palace door.

Arthur, angry, clutched a fistful of fly-hopping shit.  “I’ll build this barbarian some good Roman sewerage.  That’s worth a Breton princess.”

“Can you really perform such wonders?” said Lancelot, sneering.  He flicked undesirable solids from his gold-threaded tunic and spat to clean his golden war club.  “For me, I’ll kill a hundred pagans and use their skulls for an altar to whatever god Cator fears most.  That will win me a dozen loving Gueneveres.”

“Only a dozen?” said Arthur.

Lancelot swung his war club.

Arthur jumped to his feet and with his midget war band ran jeering through the castle alleys, Lancelot howling after them.

* * *

Arthur made ready to dig his sewers, rebuilding the original Roman sewerage of Duke Cator’s palace, but how to do it?  He was trained to be a spare prince, not an engineer.  So Arthur and I with the Spellcaster and the scar-faced Gwrhyr ransacked the duke’s moldy library – copper tubes filled with rotting parchments and chewing insects – to find a few good reference sheets on Roman engineering.

The sheets were in Latin and Greek, since the Romans never did anything but fight without consulting the Greeks first.  Then we realized that sketches, clay pipes, and digging dirt weren’t our real problem.  Money to pay for it was.  Where did Duke Cator find his coin?

Arthur and his frightening tiny war band cornered the bishop, priests, and underpriests and got church plate and gems in return for useless promises of riches and glory in Island Britain when Arthur became king.

Then I said, “Where do you find workers enough in this poor duchy?”

Arthur bought two slaves from a wandering Roman slave-seller.  One was an engineer and the other a tile maker.

He hired a hundred and fifty peasant workers out of the rural starvation in which Cator kept them.

Cator was stunned.  “But who tills m’fields?”

“They’ll do both,” Arthur said.  “They’re peasants.  They can do it all.”

Cator joined me in watching Arthur at his work.  Arthur sent laborers with picks and shovels into the silted quagmire beneath the palace-villa.  They dug out ages of muck and shored and backfilled collapsing latrine walls.

It was wretched work, full of danger and disease.  Peasants fell out dying, groaning with exhaustion, screaming that demons infested the old sewers.  Some ran away, pursued by demons only they could see, or wanted to see so they could return to the comparative ease of country agriculture.

Arthur jumped into the muck with his slaves, a prince digging alongside them, crazed with excitement to fight the earth and its demons, to push forward the work.  It was an amazing thing to see.

When Arthur came out of the sewers, dripping, sweating, shaking with hunger and weariness, Phyllis Merlin took him into her chamber.

Her place reeked of incense of flowers blooming in the wrong season.  She stripped and cleaned Arthur, oiled him, made merlinic love to him.  Powered him up for more digging labor and, to my surprise, for library research.

Cator’s rotting library taught Arthur Roman engineering and management, how to doctor and drive his laborers, how to keep accounts and bear the responsibilities of a lord for a hundred and fifty working men and their families.  Families that seemed to stretch forever across farm fields into the forest-haunts of madmen and lepers.  He learned to be lord to all of them, to be their priest, judge, and taskmaster.

He was exhausted with the labor of learning but each night he woke at the second watch, rolled away from Phyllis’ arms thrown over him in her sleep, and picked up the antique plans to read them by moonlight.

That was rarely enough.  Often he went into the sewer at midnight to work alone, measuring and calculating.  His war band clustered on the ledges, unhappy about their chief’s peculiar choice of professions, but lifting out the baskets of filth he raked aside to do his measurements.

That night, on the floor above them, with a lamp, Cator and I stood watching Arthur and his midget warriors.  Cator gagged at the foul smell and said, “What compels you to do this awful work, Arthur?  You’re a knight and prince wasting yourself doing common arithmetic in a sewer!”

“This buys me Guenevere.”

“Holy gods, man, how can you know she’s worth all this awfulness?”

Cator, in the light of the guttering lamp, waited for his answer.

But Arthur replied to me in his soul-voice,
When do I see my fabled Guenevere?

When you learn her soul-name,
I said.

“What are you two saying?” Cator cried.  “I can hear you thinking!”

Arthur said to me,
Do I learn it before the soul-name of my own son?  Tell me her soul-name, Mother!

Ask her yourself,
I said.

I gave Arthur a dream – I could still do that – of the Lady Convent where Cator stored his stock of unmarried daughters.  He had just one left in store.

On a rock above a garden valley, a sweet breeze, trees whose branches swept in the wind like the long hair of maidens, a breeze sighing like girls waiting for lovers, was a young woman with nun-chaperones.

She shimmered in and out of focus but it was clear she had Cator’s black eyes.  Good Celtic red hair mixed with blond Breton and Gallic.  And she was as roundly round as a Breton cow.

Arthur cried aloud, “I couldn’t lift her into my bed!”

“What’s he say?” Cator cried.

Arthur searched the unfocused dream face staring back at him.

Tell me her soul-name, Mother.  Show me her face!

Ask her,
I said.

Arthur with his soul’s voice called to her.

Guenevere started, staring out of her shimmer at him as though she were looking into another world.

Then the dream collapsed – I couldn’t sustain it longer – and she was gone.

Arthur moaned in despair in the sewer mud.

“What’s the matter with the boy?” Cator said to me.

“He thinks he’s seen the future.”

“Poor fool.”

Arthur slept in exhaustion and in the slime, drifting in and out of his own merlinic dreams until, to my surprise, Guenevere’s black eyes came through his dreams searching for him.

She said to him,
Are you the Arthur who’s come for me?  Speak your soul-name to me.  Become my Husband now!

I hauled Arthur out of his dream before he could speak his soul-name and give away power over his spirit to a woman he did not know.

He goggled at me out of his mud, like a startled and confused drunk, part of him still adrift after a woman he suddenly loved, and cried, “Mother!  Is she Camelot?”

* * *

Now the sewerage work and his dream of Guenevere gripped Arthur like a fever.

It was not enough that he retiled the conduit walls and re-sloped the sewer floors.  He dug more and faster sewer lines.  Drained them into the silted moat.  Refitted the castle latrines for use and routed fresh water through the system to continually flush away effluvium, Roman-style.  He re-dug the moat and diverted river water into it to keep it sweet and free of the night pollutions of fog, moat sprites, and demons.  It all seemed done but it was not.

The sewerage system was ready to inaugurate.  Cator looked down at the first urine – his own – spewing from an out pipe into the moat and cried, “We’ll call a festival to celebrate my new sewers!  Have everyone piss into your pots, Arthur, to make a glorious fountain of urine.  See to it.  You lead the dancing.”

“I’m not finished,” Arthur said.  “I’m barely begun.”

Arthur replaced the decayed stone of the castle’s curtain wall, refacing and patching it.  “Or,” he told the duke, “the wall will tumble into the new moat, the water’s that much heavier than the stone.”

“Water heavier than stone?” cried the duke.  “So learn the proper spell to keep them in balance, man.  Have your merlin do it for you.  Think of the expense to me of all that new stone!”

Arthur in his fury turned to repairing the battle gate.  That led to reconstructing the ramparts and towers.  Then the wall forts.  Until Cator in his despair for his emptying treasury said to me, “Can’t you teach him something as simple as one wretched little spell to do all this, Lady Merlin?  Noah built his ark cheaper than Arthur patching up a few old stones.  I want a regal king for my daughter, not a common laborer with crap on his hands, for the God’s sake.”