The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy) (43 page)

“Harder to know what to do if we find him gone.”

In my deepening youth and feeble understanding, Arthur seemed a poet to me.

Lancelot galloped upslope, shouting, “They’ve gone!  The Saxons are gone!”

He jumped off his horse and landed on his feet, sword and shield in his hands.  He was delirious with joy.

“I see their dust trailing south,” said Lancelot.  “To the Isle of Thanet, to their longships and the sea, say their stragglers, hauling their heart-broken duke with them.”

No hope for more happy battle today,
I thought, suddenly discontent.  But the army clustering around cheered.

Arthur passed the ale horn and called for Bedivere.  “Tell them to take my shield Pridwen and paint Thor’s eagle on its face, over Dunwallo’s red cross.”

“A Saxon eagle on Arthur’s shield?” I said, appalled, wiping ale from my chin.  “Lord God, what for?”

Bedivere laughed at me and said, “Why, ‘Old Mother,’ to celebrate yesterday’s victory over fifty thousand Saxons.”

Lancelot, joining our gruel feast off Arthur’s shield, said, “In Saxon, ‘Ar-thur’ is ‘Thor’s Eagle.’  Let the Pagans see their god each time they stroke the king’s shield with their battle axes and they’ll tremble for it.”

I laughed.  “What a delicious cruelty!”

“Just brave enough for a king whose victories are too near defeats,” said Rufus.

Arthur gathered his sleeping sons into his arms.  “We’ll celebrate Christmas in York this year, my sons,” he said to them.

“That’s most of a year away,” I said.

“That’s when I’ll be crowned emperor of the whole Island.”

“You’ll conquer the Saxons in less than a year?”

Arthur put down his sons and went to his horse.  “We go west.”

“What do we do in the west?” I said.

“Have you really become as simple as you sound, Mother?” said Arthur.

“I probably have.”

“Duke Horst has gone west to brother himself to the Picts and Scots.  He’s gathering a hundred thousand blue-faced murderers.  With his battle ax Morgengrabe he’ll make himself their king instead of me.  Let’s go fight him.”

Arthur drew Excalibur from the stone into which he had driven it, got on his war horse and galloped west.

Bedivere and Lucan came up the hill.  “Are we to follow him, Lady Merlin? Is it to be eternal warfare for us?”

“Until Arthur finds his Camelot,” I said, leaping onto my horse.  “Or wherever his wandering, conquering spirit leads him.”

I cheered and galloped merrily after Arthur.

* * *

The weeks Arthur rode west, carrying Excalibur lighting the road for his army or riding with his sons on his knees, were like the gathering-in of the nation.  Warriors, peasant-fighters, and refugees with a hundred Island languages and accents came out of the countryside to join the army.  The aboriginal kings and queens of the territories through which we passed sent Arthur emissaries with gifts of swords and knights.  Antique Roman counts sent him retired Legionaries to stiffen the army.

Vagabond knights and the adventurous sons of foreign kings hailed him their chief and begged Arthur to read the Round Table for their insignia and take them into his war band.  Some others were sent by lords and ladies who believed it better to ally themselves with rather than against a prince who held the World Sword.

Arthur accepted them all but it was my task as his merlin to separate the honest from the rogues and traitors.

I hauled a weathered fighter to Arthur squatting at his noonday campfire, eating venison and debating with Rufus the meaning of an old Roman map.  For Rome, maps were state secrets and this one was written in a code beyond Rufus’ experience.

“Here’s a natural traitor I won’t have in your party, Arthur,” I said, shoving the man into a squat across the fire from the king.

“Name yourself,” Arthur said to the man.

“I’m Fyfas, itinerant trainer of gladiators.  Give me meat, King.”

Arthur tossed him a chunk of his own meat.

“Fyfas who learned his craft under the First Caesar, by the gray in your beard,” I said.

“Nearly, Lady Girl Whoever You Are.”

Fyfas ate with manners as nice as Percival’s, wiping his hands on the grass between bites.

“What’s wrong with him?” Arthur said to me.  “He has a strong sword arm.  Why should I lose even one of those?”

“An eagle spoke to me, King,” Fyfas said, speaking for himself.

Rufus said, “When do eagles speak to ordinary men?”

“That eagle spoke to me,” Fyfas said, gesturing at Arthur’s shield painted with Thor’s eagle.  “It told me a message for its king.”

“Why doesn’t Arthur’s shield speak to Arthur,” I said, “rather than you?”

“Don’t ask me.  I’m just an ignorant old gladiator.”

“What’s the message?” said Arthur.

“Give me ale, King.”

Fyfas drank and said, “You’re invited to a place called ‘the crooked glen.’”

“What’s there?” I said.

“A wrecked village,” said Fyfas.  “It was a flashing sort of speaking-seeing dream.  I didn’t get much of it.”

Fyfas said to Arthur, alarmed, “I’m only the messenger, King, you aren’t going to treat me like a Greek, are you?”

“No crucifixion for you,” Arthur said, distracted.

He shouted, “Merlin!”

“King!” I said, startled, “I’m here!”

“What’s ‘crooked glen’ in the old language of the Giants who raised the stone henges?”

I kicked Fyfas.  “What does it mean?  You’re a countryman here…”

Rufus got up shouting.  “Great God, it means ‘Camelot!’”

“Camelot!” said Arthur.  “Are we so near?”

“There,” Fyfas said, pointing south.  “Across the frontier.  In Cornwall.”

Arthur grabbed up Rufus’ parchment map.  “Is it here, on the River Cam?” he said to Fyfas.

Fyfas goggled at the map, a category of thing he had never seen before.  Illiterate Fyfas sweated and strained to read to read the map’s coded scratchings as though he had to save his life.

“Of course it’s not there,” I said.  “It can’t be anywhere there.”

“Why not?” said Rufus.

“It’s too near!  It’s never been anywhere this near in any of the last life cycles.”

“You’ve lived before?’ said Fyfas, even more astonished at me than at the map.

“Don’t be a fool, Mother,” Arthur said.

“This girl is your
mother?
” cried Fyfas, goggling.

Arthur said to me, “What’s consistency to Fate?”

Gods, I hadn’t thought of that!

Rufus said, in sudden excitement, “Camelot’s there!  A dozen miles or a thousand miles close to us.  We can have it, Arthur.  The promised city, the perfect future.  You can make the land of milk and honey in Cornwall!”

Rufus grabbed Fyfas by his flea-hopping jerkin.  “Remember your dream, Gladiator.  Point us in the direction of ‘Crooked Glen.’”

“How can I do that?  I can barely remember the dream!”

Rufus shoved Arthur’s eagle shield into Fyfas’ arms.  “Let it speak to you again, Gladiator” – Rufus pricked his gladius into Fyfas’ throat – “or I’ll flick off your head and kick it brainless into Hell.”

“King!” Fyfas cried.  “Save a Briton from a filthy Roman!”

“If a painted eagle can speak to you,” Arthur said, “it can lead you to Camelot.”

“Can it?” I said.

“Lead on, Gladiator,” Arthur said.  “We’ll follow.”

“But it’s not speaking to me now!”

Rufus kicked Fyfas toward Cornwall.  “Lead out!” shouted the Roman.

Arthur said to me, desperate with sudden hunger for Camelot, “Mother, can you see him taking us there?”

“I see nothing anymore!” I cried, grieving for my stupidity that expanded like a cloud blotting the sun.  “But anything’s possible in this strange time.  Nothing needs to be what I remember.”

“Perfect Druidic gibberish,” Rufus said in his fury.  “We’ll follow the Gladiator.  Let’s go!”

Arthur hauled Excalibur from the stone in which he had stabbed it, hacking apart the stone in his anger, Fyfas screeching in terror seeing it done.

“Nothing is clear anymore,” said Arthur.  “Nothing is sure.  Life is all confusion and desperation.  I could march the army into Cornwall and wander forever behind this fool Fyfas while Colgrin eats up my Island.  What do I do, Merlin?  How do I know what to do?”

The blood-lust of a warrior princess surged high in me but I had no answer for him.

“Brothers!” Arthur cried to the Round Tablers.  “We follow this fool to Camelot!”

Rufus kicked Fyfas toward Cornwall and the old gladiator ran toward Camelot, Arthur and the army following.

Guenevere clutched me aside and said, “Is that really where it’s to be, in gloomy Cornwall?”

I drew the Brittany greatsword she had given me.  I tested the blade’s edge on my thumb and drew blood to suck.  That satisfied my rising blood-lust and I could say to the queen, “Who knows, who cares? Arthur’s chosen this moment to begin Camelot and the moment’s too beautiful to lose.”

I whipped the sword overhead and shouted my war cry until the battle-craze came into me.  The two young princes, Mordred and Gawain, driven by my joy war-cried with me.

I ran howling after Arthur, the boy-princes chasing howling after me.  I forgot for a moment I had to kill one of them.  Which one?

Arthur led us trampling across half of Cornwall in a day, leading on in a sweating fury, cursing the sun – that seemed to all others virtually to stand still – for moving too quickly across the sky, eating up Arthur’s search-time.

He shouted when he saw the River Cam as though merely seeing was
vini, vidi, vici.
  He shouted again when he spotted the stone amphitheater outside a village called At the Crooked Glen.  He led us running across the Cam river water.  He was the first to see the hideous ruin the Saxons had made of the village.

Weeping, he used Excalibur to dig out of the rubble the two hundred dead villagers, to overturn the charred house timbers, to cut graves for the mothers and children, for the warrior-townsmen who had been caught unprepared.

His army, weeping around him, worked alongside their king, all of us moving with a speed faster than the speed of day’s treacherous close.

By the hour to build campfires and roast meat, we had undone the horror we had found there.  Every one of the inhabitants of the village had been interred in sanctified ground.  All the death-goods appropriate to Christians had been buried with them.  A great stone king’s cross had been carved and raised over their graves.

Arthur, muddy Excalibur across his knees, hung in a chair by the campfire shivering with evening chill on his sweat.  He clutched a Saxon arrow in his fist.  He gazed through evening gloom at the village of At the Crooked Glen.  It still reeked of burnt thatch and the dead.

“Bishop,” Arthur said to Dunwallo with his three jangling crucifixes, “go in there with your incense and clear away the poison of the place.  Exorcise the Saxon evil and reconsecrate it for Britain.”

Bedivere and Percival, with horses, shields, spears, and Saxon scalps, rode with Dunwallo through the wreckage.

“Rufus,” Arthur said, “dig defenses, feed the army, put it to bed.”

“Already begun, King.”

“My good Roman,” said Arthur.

He said to Fyfas, “No more eagle-dreams?  Good.  I don’t want to answer another dream of yours if it looks like this.”

Arthur said, “Come with me, Mother.”

I grabbed up my greatsword and followed Arthur and Excalibur across the fresh graves to Guenevere in her pavilion.  The Round Table was there, upright in its cart, reflecting the bronze gleam of her campfire onto Mordred and Gawain gnawing a meat bone.  Hadrian the Lesser squatted on guard at the pavilion entrance.

Lancelot was with the queen.

Arthur said to him, “What do you think of the night?”

Lancelot watched clouds rush across the stars.  “Fair and foul and fair again.  No rain.  Clear and cold tomorrow.  A good day for fighting.”

“What does your cavalry say?  Lucan, where’s Lucan?”

“Still out there with the forest-haunts,” Lancelot said, “and a score of Breton horsemen looking for stray Saxons to kill.”

“Bring him to me when he comes in.  I want his report.”

Arthur dismissed Lancelot and the Frank went away.

Guenevere was surprised.  “What’s this sudden lack of courtesy to a brother-hero, Husband?”

“Was that what I did?”

“You know it.”

“I’ll call him to me later.  We’ll drink to each other later, when warriors in the cold pit of night think death-thoughts and become afraid.”

“Are you ever afraid?” I said, young enough to be startled by the idea of a worried warrior-king.

“You made me out of mud and blood, Mother.  There’s got to be some kind of fear in such ordinary materials.”

“But not in a king, surely!”

“Did you ever see my brother afraid?”

“Gurthrygen was no Arthur.”

“I suppose I’ll have to be Arthur,” he said.

“You
are
Arthur,” said Guenevere.

But she kissed her own crucifix with its splinter of the True Cross to be sure.

Guenevere said to me, “You, half-saved, half-damned, mother-princess-Druid-warrior-idiot-child, give me your hand.”

She clapped Arthur’s hand with our two and said, “Here is Lady Merlin, the last woman of the Old Age, of the time before Arthur, an age of fright and courage when steel had to be the measure of any man or woman.  Be yourself a man of the Old Age in the battles to come, Arthur.  But when you’ve won, throw off the Old Age – throw off all merlins! – and create the new world we’ve been promised.  Make Camelot!”

Arthur turned to his two sons gazing up at him from their meat bone.

“I’ve made Camelot already, and here they are.”

He kissed his sons.

He kissed his wife.

He kissed me his mother now younger than he.

All those kisses drove out of him the misery he had seen in the wrecked village of Crooked Bend.

“Come, Merlin,” he said, “let’s cut the first brick for Camelot.”

We went into the wrecked village.  We found Dunwallo with his smoking censor driving away the Saxon evil.  We saw Fyfas the dream-seer searching the rubble for a new dream.  Bedivere and Percival standing guard.

The first of dawn sprayed light on the ruins and shoved away the last of the bitter smoke stink.  Arthur kneeled to use Excalibur to cut a block of earth and shape it with his hands into a brick.

“Which direction?” he said to the bishop.

“Lay its axis east and west, King, from Jerusalem to the Western Ocean.”

He did that.

“Fire!’ he cried to the sun.  “Bake this brick.  Build Camelot on it!”

He saw my astonishment at what he’d done.  “What do you see here, Mother?”

“My king playing in the mud!”

“No, no.  Look with my eyes,” he said.

I did.  I saw a shimmering view as though seeing with an antique merlin’s eyes fading out to spiritual blindness.  I saw around me the jumping up of stone walls, the tumbling down of hanging gardens, the eruption of monumental crosses, the clatter by of bronzed youths in gleaming chariots.

I jumped through all this sudden wonder, I dived and swerved, spun, danced, yipped, and ran to save myself from up thrusting stone, from downfalling heaps of flowers, from hordes of elegant perfumed women and healthy children scurrying through paved streets.

I smelled good baking, hot meat, raw fields.  I tasted the dust sweeping up from the grain fields, heard the zip and hiss of honey bees hunting clover.

I heard the snap of flags and banners and saw there, rising up, up beyond the basilicas and the red tile roofs, the still-growing palace of the king, gold-roofed, bright with the colored livery of soldiers marching on the battlements, with towers and heavy gates and a line of cheery townspeople eager to greet their loving king at sunrise.

“Is this fabulous place Camelot?” I cried, gawking at the dream as I walked through the streets with Dunwallo and Fyfas, all of us dreaming with Arthur.

The bishop in his amazement dragged his censor on the ground behind him, spilling smoke and coals.  But the gladiator had out his gladius.  We wandered into colleges and temples, into markets.  We measured the astonishing thickness of the town wall, the amazing fatness of the hens and pigs, the sturdy muscle of the children.

There was no disease, no misery, no bad government.  The priests were humble.  The dukes and princesses honorable.  There were suites in the palace for Morgause and Mordred, for Guenevere and Gawain, and an immense roofless hall for the Round Table, its two hundred knights and their chief seated there in sunshine.

I could not recognize the two hundred of them but they were glorious warriors with a tempered battle-lust in their faces and a generous spirit for all the world.

I said to Arthur, “Have you really made all this just now?”

When I spoke the words, Camelot shrank away, stone walls shriveling, hanging gardens thinning to nothingness, all sucked into the single brick that Arthur had cut and laid in the ruins of the village.  Gone! And with it the fruit of my hundred and forty-four lifetimes.

I wanted to scream for the sweet dream’s loss and weep for joy at its promise.

“It’s made in spirit,” Arthur said to me.  “It takes only the winning of my last battles to gift me time and treasure to convert dream to stone and leaf.”

Dunwallo turned his gaping face to Arthur.  “How many battles have you left?”

“Nine.”

“Nine more of these horrors?” said the bishop.

“Does your horoscope promise you just so many battles, King?” said Fyfas, startled.

“I was promised in a dream thirteen battles.  I’ve fought four of them.”

“I hadn’t heard any of that,” said Fyfas.

“What could hearing it mean to you?” I said, drawing my greatsword.  “Who are you, Gladiator?”

Fyfas cringed behind his shield.  “I discovered your Camelot, King, you can’t let this girl-monster kill me!”

Dunwallo hauled out his war club and said, “Name yourself, Gladiator, by tribe and nation or I smash out your brains.”

Fyfas said to Arthur, “You said we’d finish the year in York, King.  Show me the battles between here and York.  Let me see them, King, let me see your dream.”

“
You
show them to me,” Arthur said.  “Any man who can speak to painted eagles can show a king his dreams.”

Fyfas said, in a king’s voice, “Let’s look at them together in the Book of Weird.”

“Great Jesu, this gladiator is a Saxon,” cried Dunwallo, swinging his club.

“Turn the page quick, Lady Merlin,” said Fyfas, putting on me colorless eyes in a newly yellow-furred face.

* * *

I reached out with my hand into the emptiness between the atomos of night and touched the cold book of the Saxon Weird.  The page turned.

We all – Arthur, Guenevere, Dunwallo, Hadrian, impatient Fyfas – crowded around the book to see Arthur tomorrow slaughtering Horst’s army and shattering the great battle ax Morgengrabe.

Shouting hoots of victory as we gawked at the page, we watched Arthur drive the remnants of Horst’s Saxons north to huddle in misery in Dumbarton Castle.  Sending Lancelot’s Breton horsemen to drive off the relieving Picts and to chase them across cold water onto the islands in Loch Lomond there to starve out the winter.  Then Arthur shattering the Dumbarton wall and routing the Saxons.

Until he found them reinforced by Gillamour the Irish king.  Slaughtering Gillamour’s Irish until his own priests came barefoot to throw themselves at Arthur’s knees begging him not to exterminate so many fellow Christians.

So Arthur sold his Scots captives as slaves to the Picts and his Pict captives as slaves to the Scots and deported the ruined Irish to their own island beyond the fog.

“Is that the end of it all?” cried Fyfas, startled, angry, impatient.  “Let’s hurry along the year!”

Fyfas turned the next page of Weird himself.

There was Arthur again, now sailing after treacherous Gillamour to slaughter the revenge-hungry but naked Irish army that now invaded Wales in support of Colgrin’s marauding Saxons.  Hauling Gillamour in chains behind his victory chariot.

Sailing to Iceland to cut the arms off King Doldavius the Goth who had sent ships to transport more Saxons across the Narrow Sea to Colgrin.  Swearing the armless king into the Round Table and taking the homage of his vassal, Queen Guavasius of Outer Orkney, and her horde of warrior-princesses.

All this nearby slaughter bought Arthur a few months’ respite from Colgrin’s pressure.  He used his captured wealth to make the first building of Camelot and to assign each prince at the Table as underking for a region of the Island.

Now there was justice and peace in Britain.  Abroad, there was fright of Arthur the British Terror, and that made a profound peace in the seas surrounding the Island.

But once more Arthur was sailing to war – to win for King Lot of Orkney his grandfather’s place on Norway’s throne and so cut off another support for the Saxon invasions.  In their battle-fury, Arthur’s army spilled into Denmark and he took that place, too.

Now he was on Europa’s soil and attacking the Gauls, capturing Paris, Aquitaine, and Gascony, and granting the Duchy of Neustria to Bedivere who loved the warmth of the north coast of the Franks.

Leading a convoy of great ships up the Usk to Caerleon, the richest city of the Island, to crown himself and Guenevere Emperor and Empress of Europa and to call together a Great Army of the North to quash at last the arrogance of the Rome that had abandoned the North to the depredations of the Saxons.

Marching through Europa, gathering in the kingdoms of the world, Arthur conquered everywhere, killing the kings of Flanders, Boulogne, Spain, Babylon, Libya, Bithnyia, killing four earls and three barons of the various Gauls, killing twelve Senators and one Emperor of Rome, creating for himself a Northern Empire of sixty kingdoms, putting his own candidate on the throne of the Caesars.

And ending this fabulous year in York to celebrate the Christmas feast in a church destroyed by the Saxons but rebuilt by Lucan for Bishop Dunwallo.