Arthur Rex: Volume One

by J A Cummings

  “If you’re not going to eat with me, you don’t have to stay,” the king said. “It’s a little strange having you stand there like that.”

  Brastias shook his head at himself. “Of course… Come, Griflet. Let’s get some food for ourselves.”

  The two knights left, the younger of them looking at Arthur over his shoulder one last time before he exited. The king sighed. He wondered if they were going to react this way every time he was injured, and he sincerely hoped that they wouldn’t. He had the feeling that there would be many injuries in his future.

  Ysmon pulled Lancelot behind him from faery circle to faery circle, using them to travel rapidly over the Fey Lands. The boy’s head was spinning from the rapidly changing scenery, and he nearly lost his balance when they finally stopped moving. The wood nymph looked at him with a broad grin.

  “Well done. Most humans vomit after that sort of thing.” He continued pulling him along. “This way. Your training has to start.”

  “Training in what, sir?” he asked.

  Ysmon laughed. “In everything.”

  Lancelot followed through the thick underbrush with some difficulty. It seemed to him that the twigs and branches were alive and purposely grabbing at his ankles, trying to trip him and prevent him from moving forward. Ysmon, meanwhile, passed without the least hesitation, almost as if the plants weren’t there. Lancelot decided that it must have been because Ysmon was a nymph, and as he had seen with his mother, nymphs just had a way about them of making the impossible become possible.

  Thinking of Nyneve made his heart heavy. He didn’t know what he had done to lose her love. He couldn’t think of any misbehavior or error on his part that had made her turn from him, but he still stung from her rejection. He was deeply sorry for whatever it was that he had done, and he hoped that somehow, someday, he would have the chance to rectify his mistake.

  Ysmon looked back at him. “Keep up, little man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He tried his best. Ysmon still reached their destination far ahead of him, and he turned to wait for Lancelot to emerge from the forest into the meadow beyond. In the meadow were a centaur, three satyrs and another wood nymph. They all looked bored and impatient, and Lancelot swallowed hard, convinced he would be punished for keeping them waiting.

  “Finally,” the centaur said when the two of them emerged from the wood. “I thought you had gotten lost.”

  “I remember my way to Manawydan’s palace,” Ysmon said lightly.

  “I don’t,” the tallest of the satyrs said. “They won’t let me near now that the Ladies are of age.” He sniffed. “I can smell them on you.”

  “Calm down, Hekrin,” Ysmon counseled. “You’ll scare the boy.”

  The centaur turned his golden eyes onto Lancelot. He snorted. “Doesn’t look like much.”

  “No,” Ysmon agreed. “But he’s ours to train until he’s sixteen.”

  One of the satyrs grabbed himself lewdly, which alarmed Lancelot. “In every way?”

  “So I’m told.”

  The satyrs laughed in happiness and congratulated one another.

  The centaur said, “Well, I can teach any wood nymph to fight, but a human? What if he’s too weak?”

  “I’m told he’s special.” Ysmon’s voice was tinged with sarcasm. “I guess we’ll find out how special he is in good time.”

  Lancelot felt his mouth go dry with fear. He forced his face to stay impassive and he held his position at Ysmon’s side, facing them straightforwardly. Whatever was to come, he would endure it. It was a test, he was certain.

  He would not fail.

  Morgana lay on her back on the bed, watching the shadows play on the ceiling as her older sister cooked up another of her endless potions. The broch smelled thickly of her brews, but it was not unpleasant. One of Morgana’s hands was on her abdomen, and the other was behind her head.

  “Is it true that our father was actually royal?”

  Morgause nodded. “He was. He was the grandson of the king of all Dumnonia, the one who lost his lands and his life to the Roman invaders.”

  “And Uther Pendragon was Roman.”

  “Yes.” She came to Morgana with a ladle. “Smell this. Too spicy?”

  She sniffed the concoction in the ladle’s bowl, and grimaced. “Too sour.”

  “Your nose is broken. There’s nothing sour in this.”

  “It smells like piss.”

  Morgause clicked her tongue. “Elegant. What language for a queen to use.”

  Morgana shrugged. “I don’t care.” She settled back onto the pillow of her hand. “So...through our father, we are the rightful heirs of Britannia.”

  “Of Dumnonia. We are the last of the royal Dumnonian line that hasn’t been sullied by Roman blood.” She bent over her cauldron. “Maybe I need more hemlock…”

  “If you put any more hemlock in it, it will just be poison, and then you’ll have to start over,” Morgana warned.

  Morgause sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Was mother royal?”

  “Is mother royal,” she corrected. “Mother is still alive.”

  “For all the good she does, she might as well be dead.”

  “Ungrateful wretch.” Morgause dragged the cauldron to the door and tossed the contents out onto the ground, where it hissed and steamed. She came back in and hung the pot back up on the fire hook. She filled it with water from a bucket in the corner. “Back to the beginning...”

  “Is mother royal?” she repeated her question, amending it to her sister’s liking.

  “Our mother’s line is also royalty, from the Cornovii. She was the daughter of the last true chieftain, before the position was lost to the Roman family from Gaul along with Viroconium.”

  She stroked her abdomen absently, showing all of the habits of motherhood even if she had none of the feeling. “She has a brother…”

  “Marcus Cornovus,” she nodded. “He rules Cornwall now.”

  “Our uncle.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Would he help us to repulse the Romans from Britannia if we made it worth his time?”

  Morgause laughed. “You can’t push the Romans out! Those that could leave have already gone, and those who stayed are so intermarried and intermingled that you can’t remove them without decimating the population.”

  Morgana shrugged. “So we decimate the population. We end up with something purer in the end.”

  Her sister poured cow’s blood into the cauldron and brought the mixture to a boil. “There is nothing pure about people, Morgana, not bloodlines and not intentions. The sooner you learn that the better off we’ll all be.”

  “I have pure intentions.”

  “Oh, really? Worshipping a demon is pure?” Morgause mocked.

  “It’s not worship,” she defended. “It’s a business arrangement. And he will give me the strength I need to take Britannia back for the Britons... and only the Britons.”

  “I think that’s the new High King’s intention, too.”

  She scowled. “The bastard usurper, you mean. He has no right to that crown or to the title of High King.”

  “Merlin and his sword in the stone said otherwise. You saw as well as I did that nobody else could pull it out.” She put her hands on her hips. “Where did I put those fish scales?”

  “Merlin is a liar and a cheat.” She sat up, suddenly aflame with anger. “Oh, I want to take that false enchanter and tear all of his power away, to drain it right out of him and leave him helpless in some field somewhere…”

  Morgause laughed loudly. “That will never happen! He is too strong for you, little sister. I admire your ambition, but you should set your sights lower.”

  She left the bed and started pacing through the broch. “I want to destroy him for everything he did to our mother. It’s his fault that Uther was ever able to rape her. He is responsible, and he will pay...and the brat of that union? Foul seed! I will tear him from the earth!” Her sister watc
hed her ranting with a frown, but she did not intrude. Morgana railed on. “I hate him, and I will hate him until the day I die. He only exists because of our mother’s suffering, and he needs to be destroyed. He is a stain.”

  “I’m not happy with how he came to be, either, but the fact remains that he’s here and he’s the proclaimed High King,” Morgause pointed out. “If he stands to the Saxons and to Lot, he will stand to everything, and we will be forced to deal with him. I suggest that you prepare yourself for that eventuality.”

  Morgana tossed her hair. “You have so little faith in your Norseman?”

  “I have done divinations about Arthur. He is destined to do amazing things, and he is no normal man.” She hesitated, then revealed, “I believe he is part divine.”

  Her sister stared at her as if she had lost her mind. “What are you talking about?”

  “You heard me.”

  “That is utter nonsense. What god?” Morgana demanded.

  “I’m not -” Her sister took a step toward her, and Morgause reconsidered. “I believe he is the descendant of the Horned One.”

  “Cernunnos, or Satan?”

  “Is there a difference?” she laughed.

  Morgana was insulted. “Of course there’s a difference, you nit.” She crossed her arms. “What makes you think that he’s from that god?”

  She turned away. “I told you. I did divinations.”

  Morgana tilted her head. “What did you see?”

  “I saw a bear bowing to a stag.” Morgause looked at her. “Arthur is the bear. I have seen this in many other divinations about him. He always appears as the bear.”

  “And the stag? Is Cernunnos the only stag there is?”

  “He is the only white stag with huge antlers and majestic power that I’ve seen.”

  Morgana was clearly not convinced. “Maybe you just ate a bad berry before you slept that night. Maybe it was just a dream.”

  “It wasn’t a dream. It was divination with the keek stane.” She held up the stone in question, a piece of rock with a hole through its middle that had been formed by the dripping of water over many years. She had it tied to a cord that hung around her neck. “Aeonghus, one of my husband’s men, taught me about it. You look through the stone in the center and what you see is true.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Says the girl who conjured a demon without knowing what she was doing and signed her soul away on the first request,” she said sharply. She dropped the stane and went back to her brewing.

  “You don’t think Lot will kill Arthur, do you?”

  “No.” She looked down into the cauldron. “I think it will be the other way around.”

  Guinevere left the castle at Cameliard when the moon was high, slipping out in the moonlight to the cool welcome of the river. She could swim down the river all the way to the sea from here, and sometimes she was tempted to do exactly that. She knew, though, that if she tried to leave, she would shame the Fey King, and he would just return her here… or somewhere infinitely worse.

  She untied the laces on her shift and let it fall around her ankles. The smoke in the hall had been ravaging her senses all night, and her throat still burned with it. It was almost as uncomfortable as the incense smoke from the night when Danu had chosen her to be the vessel of Sovereignty for this century. She wished sometimes that she had never been Selected.

  Once a century, the Fey King brought female offerings to the feet of the goddess Danu, and once a century, one of those females was selected to be the walking avatar of Danu’s queenship, the living embodiment of the Goddess’s oneness with the land. Guinevere had been certain that her twin sister Guinemara would win the position. After all, Guinemara wanted it desperately, and that had to count for something. Guinevere herself had dreaded being Selected and tried to escape the Goddess’s notice. Naturally, because of her reluctance, she had been the one chosen.

  She had mourned for hours that night. In her bones, straight down to her soul, she knew that being chosen as Sovereignty was the first step toward her doom. She was a sea nymph and the daughter of the god Manawydan, and as such should have been immortal. Now that she was Sovereignty, she feared that she would not survive her century, and there would be nobody left to bridge the distance between the Goddess and mankind. It was a terrible fate, and she expected that she would see momentous and horrid things before her time was done.

  She had been on dry land for too long, she thought. It made her melancholy. She sighed and stepped into the river, her white feet disappearing into the cold water. Her black hair, now free of its jeweled net and golden pins, hung past her hips and floated among the ripples as she submerged herself.

  Guinevere had been fortunate when Leodegrance had been chosen as her guardian. He was a good man, and through him, she had learned that humans could be kind and gentle. She had heard stories in his hall, though, that humans were also apt to be harsh and hateful, given to violence and evil. It made her tremble to think of all of the things that humanity was capable of doing, hurtful and destructive things that rarely happened among sea nymphs. Humans could sometimes be so unnatural.

  She swam to the bottom of the river and her gills, normally tightly closed and invisible on the sides of her neck, opened up. The delicate red lace of the membranes floated and trembled as she returned at last to her natural element. The water soothed her senses and eased the burning in her throat. She lay on the bottom of the river in the fine-grained silt and closed her eyes.

  Guinevere had been dreaming lately about a boy with black curls and sky-blue eyes. He was as beautiful as starlight, strong and young and full of promise, with a straight nose, a strong jaw and soft, full lips that looked made for kissing. She thought she might have seen him in Cameliard once, but when she’d looked again, he was gone. She wondered if he was real, or if he was someone her mind had created to help her deal with her loneliness.

  As the only fey creature for miles around, she was filled with urges and needs that none of the humans around her understood. They were so removed from the land, these humans, so severed from the flow of energy in the natural world. They lived in their buildings of stone and their warriors encased themselves in metal as if they feared the touch of the living world. It made her incredibly sad to see how humans chose to leave the inheritance of wildness behind with every step they took.

  She heard the pulse of the earth beneath her. She felt the rushing energy in the water as it flowed around her. She would never understand why some of the women at court were so afraid of the wilderness, and why they never ventured outside the walls of their cities. It was tragic to live such a small and frightened life, she thought. She wanted to be bold, to live with bravery and enthusiasm and passion. She was immortal and she would have time. These humans had lives that were so tragically short, and it was doubly sad that they spent the little time they had being afraid of what would never hurt them. Only in the wilderness could her heart truly beat, and she believed the same was true of humans, if only they would allow themselves to feel it.

  She felt sleepy, and her dreams were calling to her again. She decided to rest here in the water where she belonged. It would be so much more comforting than the dry bed in the castle that was covered in furs and blankets. The water would heal the parts of her that ached from too much time on land. As she drifted off, she wondered if she would dream about her blue-eyed boy. She hoped she would.

  Arthur was awakened in the night by Griflet coming quietly into his tent and lying down beside him. He opened his eyes and looked at his friend, who was watching him with a strange, soft look on his face. The moonlight streamed through the tent flap and shone through the thin fabric of the pavilion walls, illuminating everything in a soft and dreamlike white-blue glow. It made even the most mundane objects seem ennobled, and it made his young friend look ghostly and beautiful.

  “Are you all right?” Arthur asked, his voice barely more than a breath.

  Griflet put his hand on Arthur’s face
. The king looked up at him, confused but aware that something important was going on.

  Finally, the young knight answered. “We almost lost you.”

  He smiled. “No, you didn’t. I’m fine. I never came close to being seriously hurt.”

  “You did. You didn’t even know. Your back was turned.” He looked haunted, and Arthur took the hand that was cupping his cheek and held it tight. “There was a man with a crossbow aimed at you, at the back of your head, and he was going to shoot you. I couldn’t… I couldn’t let that happen. I had to stop that from happening. I …”

  Arthur pulled Griflet into his arms and held him, and the young knight dissolved into tears. He comforted him while he cried, and he understood. Quietly, he said, “It was the first time you killed a man.” Griflet nodded against his chest, wordless. “You saved my life. How can I ever thank you? How can I repay you?”

  “Don’t die.”

  He smiled and ran a hand through his friend’s hair. “I can agree to that.”

  “You’re the only person who’s ever really cared about me,” Griflet whispered, his lips against Arthur’s skin. “I can’t lose you. Promise me you won’t leave me.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  Griflet wiped the heel of his hand across his eyes and said, “You must think I’m very weak.”

  “Not at all. I would never think that. If killing another man isn’t enough to make a person weep, I don’t know what is.” He rubbed his hand over his friend’s back to comfort him. “Don’t ever believe I’ll think ill of you for having feelings.”

  “I’m not much of a knight, blubbering like this…”

  “I think it makes you a fine knight,” Arthur told him. “A knight without a conscience is just a bully in armor. I think it’s a virtue.”

  Griflet stayed quiet for a long while, and they lay together in silence until they both started to doze. It was more comfortable than Arthur cared to admit.