by Mike Ashley
Merlin’s father was the Devil. All knew how Merlin had been engendered. Most folk supposed that, in so far as he adhered to any creed, it was a personal blending of Christianity and the Old Religion. Few, if any, guessed how loyally the mage kept faith with his true sire.
Yet perhaps even his great faith was imperfect. Today, as always, the mirror remained dark.
Sighing, the mage turned to his basin and spoke the words that would let him see young Arthur’s dream for himself. Laying the king’s description together with the motions and twitching of the imagery, Merlin was able not only to see, but almost to feel, what the dreamer had felt.
The water’s surface showed the scene as through the dreamer’s vision, as if a lad newly burgeoned from childhood to manhood gazed down along his own proud and lusty young body as it lay naked on a silken-covered bed. But something moved at the right side of the belly. A tiny pink thing wiggled up, like the tip of a finger protruding out of the warm flesh. For a moment he watched it with a calm and delightful quickening of the heart, wondering if God was treating him as another Adam, fashioning him a bedfellow out of one of his own ribs. He felt just enough pain to know that whatever the thing was, it was indeed piercing through his own skin.
But something was not as it should have been. His bedfellow was not to become one whom he would have chosen. Like the bulbous root of some scabrous plant, the pink worm crawled forth, waving its little head, and somehow grew within the space of a few heartbeats to monstrous size – a dragon, a beast with gaping jaws and bulging eyes. It snapped at the king – once, twice, and again. He lay shuddering, unsure whether he were frozen with fear or with some mortal wound. Blood smeared everything in the chamber. Was it his own blood?
The monster reared up, swelled to even greater size, and burst the walls. They lay in ruins about the king’s bed, while the sky opened a tempest upon him. By turning his head this way and that, he could see his entire realm of Britain stretching out to every side; and he watched, weeping as the monstrous worm tore through city and hamlet, ravaging everything, dividing the land with raging rivers of blood on which bodies and bits of bodies bobbed like helpless gobbets of foam.
Merlin snapped his fingers to end the review, and sat back. “Yes. The worm was indeed myself. So something in the boy’s soul thinks of me as a danger.”
Turning, he addressed the dark mirror. “But young Arthur’s mind still belongs to me, to mold as Thou, Father, willest. How easily – indeed, how eagerly! – he swallowed my reading of that worm as a child of his own begetting.” The mage chuckled. “Even though it seemed to issue from the side of his flank, and in no way from that proud new procreative member. There lay my ally, in the vanity of flowering lust romping like a young stallion among his subjects’ fields, taking mare after mare, whether commoner or gentlewoman, wherever his fancy may light, and reading every acceptance, no matter how trembling, as joy in finding herself the king’s chosen. Uther’s son, indeed!” Merlin had always encouraged that lust, knowing well how much he could make of it. “The difficulty,” he mused, “ought to have lain in persuading him that the worm truly issued from his own insides, that it did not simply pierce the skin to wax fat for its work upon his blood. Again, his pride helped me. Each man is the center of his own universe – how much easier for my boy king to see everything as issuing from himself than to see me as anything other than his wise old mentor and truest counselor!
“And see, Father, what I have made of this in Thy honor. Have I not put it into our little king’s mind, believing the dragon of his dream to be his own seed, to forestall the danger by putting to death every babe that might be of his planting? And how tell them apart?” The mage’s heart swelled in happy anticipation of some reward for a task well done. “At most, Arthur has not yet actually lain with more than a score of gentlewomen and perhaps thrice that number of commoners. But he does not remember half, even of the gentlewomen, by name, nor could he recognize most of them by face, scattered as they are throughout his lands and the lands of his allies. Thus, to be safe, he has no other choice but to have them all slain – all children born since first he began to exercise his manhood!”
Merlin laughed aloud for pure joy. “The realm will be rent! Strife and blood unending to Thy honor! Is not the martyrdom of a few years’ worth of holy innocents small price to pay for the wars of vengeance they will bring? For war it will be indeed. My arts will keep enough men loyal to Arthur for a balance of forces as long as we desire it, and then, with Thy help, we shall end it by crowning him anew as high king of all Britain.
“And more, far more. Even beyond the short delights of war, we will have our king’s very soul! The story of Oedipus he has never heard, but that of King Herod he knows well. What Christian does not? Now see: by slaughtering all these babes, he makes himself a second Herod – he commits the most mortal of mortal sins, saving only that one which cannot be named – he damns his own soul into Thy keeping forever! Father, does this not redeem me for my errors with Le Fay? As soon as Arthur becomes Herod, even if Dame Morgan should succeed in robbing us of his earthly services, we have still gained his soul for Thy eternity!”
Trembling slightly from the pure depth of his emotion, the mage sat back and gazed steadily into his mirror for many minutes. It remained blank, unmoving and seemingly unmoved.
At last, with a sigh, he turned and looked again into his bowl of water. This time, seeing the king’s present condition, the mage sprang to his feet in alarm. Arthur had three with him – he must have sent for them in Merlin’s absence – his foster-father Sir Ector, foster-brother and seneschal Sir Kay, and, most dangerous of all, his “high saint,” Bishop Dubric.
To seek their advice – did the boy think of throwing so grave a matter as this before his full council in open session? Merlin lost no time in making his way back up to the king’s chamber.
Pressing through the ever-crowded antechamber, opening the king’s door and striding in, as none save Mage Merlin could ever do, he found them arguing hotly. “Father!” thought Merlin. “I should not have left him alone long enough to summon them. At least he is arguing against all three of them – but why, therefore, did he summon them? I give Thee thanks that Arthur’s High Saint is never likely to ally his heavenly powers with Dame Morgan’s earthly ones.”
Even as this thought formed itself in his brain, he heard the bishop urge the boy king, “Before you commit any such sin against God and nature, send for your good queen mother and consult with her.”
The queen mother – Ygraine, Morgan’s mother as well as Arthur’s. “My liege Lord,” the necromancer said quickly.
Arthur looked up, relief spreading over his face, which was haggard beyond its years, as he saw Merlin. “I will speak again with my mage,” he declared. “Alone!”
“Artus!” Sir Kay exclaimed. “For the love of God, listen to us for once! Send for—”
“I am the king!” Arthur shouted, standing up and hurling his wine goblet across the room to smash against the far wall. “All of you, go! I am the king! I will consult with my great mage! Alone! GO!”
Mournfully, old Sir Ector laid one hand on his son Kay’s shoulder and drew him from the room. Dubric followed, turning at the door to lock his gaze with that of his adversary.
Merlin did not flinch. Let the high saint suspect what he would, he could prove nothing against the mage.
Sighing, Dubric made the Sign of the Cross at Arthur and Merlin, uttering a prayer that God guide their deliberations. Long practised in outward appearances, Merlin bowed his head, rejecting the blessing only in his heart. Any stranger glancing upon the scene would have named Arthur alone, by the doubt and turmoil in his face, as a potential rebel against his bishop.
Dubric left. At a gesture from Arthur, one of the servitors outside pulled the heavy door shut.
Alone with his mage, the king slumped down into his chair and buried his face in his hands. “Merlin, Merlin, what am I to do? All of them – all of them – stand against what y
ou say must be done.”
“Beware of Kay. Has he not tried once already to wrest the throne from you, falsely claiming that he himself had drawn the sword from its anvil and rock? And Sir Ector is Kay’s father by blood, yours only by fostering.”
“No! They love me as true father, true brother. And Bishop Dubric says the sin of it would outweigh any earthly gain.”
“Your Grace. For all intents and purposes, our holy bishop dwells already in the other world. He scatters his counsels abroad as if he were advising angels how to prosper among angels, not as if he understood what men must do to survive among men.”
“They call me Herod. Merlin, I am Herod!”
“My liege, there is no comparison. Herod tried to murder God’s son and true anointed, rebelling against God’s will. But you are your God’s anointed king of Britain, seeking only to preserve your true realm from a serpent of your own illicit begetting.”
Folding his arms upon the table, Arthur laid his head down on them and sobbed.
Merlin pressed what he hoped was his best advantage. “Your Grace knows how the realm suffered when folk thought that Uther Pendragon had died without leaving an heir. How they rent the land, every petty king and duke gathering his little alliances and waging war upon all the others, how among them they crushed and bled the common people. Would you wish such another storm to break upon us through your own weakness? To see a child unworthy to have sprung from your loins rise up and attempt to wrest the realm from you, unlawfully, disloyally, and unfilially, loosing upon your hapless realm all the horrors of your evil dream?”
“I will . . . I will send for Dame Ygraine!”
“Your mother,” said the mage, “is a great and noble lady. But she is still woman, and thinks rather with her heart than with her head.”
“I WILL send for my mother! I am the king!”
“We know without summoning her what she will advise, and that her advice, if followed, will result in the dread fulfilment of Your Grace’s dream.”
“Nevertheless, I will send for her.”
Seeing the collapse of his plan if the godly Dame Ygraine, who had every reason to hate Mage Merlin, should add her voice to those of Dubric, Ector, and Kay, the necromancer risked a dangerous stroke. “Did she not refuse to hear of harming her babe, even at that time when she mistakenly but sincerely believed you to be the very seed of Hell, the offspring of an incubus? No, my liege, if we would save your realm, we must think as strong and politic statesmen, not as worldly-foolish clerks or weak and heartbound women.”
“Leave me,” said Arthur. When Merlin did not at once obey him, the young man stood, struck the table with his fist, and repeated his words in a shout. “LEAVE ME! I will weigh these things in my own soul and give you my decision when I am ready. I AM THE KING!”
Merlin left him, returning to the antechamber but waiting apart from Ector, Kay, and Dubric, as befit his ancient, solitary, mystic, and powerful wisdom. From time to time he glanced at them, as if in sad and beneficent patience. The servitors who came to offer refreshment to the other three kept well distant from Mage Merlin, but he scarcely noticed them, wrapped as he was in his own deep thoughts.
He could not have allowed Dame Ygraine near her son, any more than he could have allowed her youngest daughter Morgan, whose name he had so resplendently blackened at court as to erase – he hoped – his early mistakes of first leaving her alive and later actually teaching her magic in hopes of winning her for his father. Either of those two women, his enemies both, might have guessed that he himself was the serpent of Arthur’s dream. He wondered if any of the three men yonder could have suggested it to the boy . . . but Dubric, caught up in the ideals of glorious celibacy, seemed unlikely to see beyond Merlin’s own earthier explanation; Dubric would simply have denied that the dream had any true meaning at all, not sought for an alternative explanation to Merlin’s. And the necromancer judged that the imaginations of Ector and his son were limited.
Nevertheless, those two had done nothing to stifle their fosterling’s troublesome native goodness. Merlin wondered if he might have found a more suitable foster father, some richly wicked baron . . . but such a man might either have struck the child dead in rage or malice, or else hardened him beyond Merlin’s own molding. No: already past his prime, Sir Ector had asked few questions; and Arthur had had, not a whole household of healthy Christian brothers and sisters, but only the single foster-sibling to influence his youth. A sheltered, unambitious, and familial upbringing, carefully selected to leave the boy king malleable to Merlin’s kindly counsel.
True, Kay had unexpectedly given some slight trouble, whether truly hoping for the crown himself, or longsightedly attempting to shield a silly little brother, or caught in the human muddle of both motivations at once. Merlin had turned that neatly to his advantage, painting young Arthur in saintly colors while at the same time discrediting Kay and limiting his influence over the new king. And, meanwhile, even High Saint Dubric appeared to accept the plausible lie that Merlin had done all this for Arthur’s own safety, as if High King Uther had lacked power to protect his own child, as if it were not among the foremost duties of any king to give his people an acknowledged and visible heir, as if a half-grown boy, all unprepared and untaught in kingcraft, could unite a torn realm by being thrust suddenly, by dint of a disputed miracle, upon the throne . . .
For two years and more Merlin had held sway over his new little king. But still he feared that unfortunate milky strain in the lad. Until now, the work of quelling the inevitable rebellions of those who refused to accept Merlin’s sword-in-the-stone test and the delights of discovering manhood had occupied Arthur’s time. This evil dream provided the necromancer his first real opportunity to test the lad’s suitability as a tool for the Devil’s work.
Sirs Ector and Kay fretted. High Saint Dubric for the most part kept his eyes closed in prayer. Secretly as anxious as any of them could be, yet allowing none of it to show, Merlin waited, outwardly calm as stone.
At last Arthur shouted for the door to be opened and one page to come in. After a moment, the page returned with a summons for Bishop Dubric, Mage Merlin, Sir Ector, and Sir Kay, those four alone, to enter the king’s presence. They went, Merlin smoothly maneuvering himself to take the lead even over Dubric.
If Arthur had looked haggard two hours ago, he looked even more so now – pale, drawn, and old with an age void of wisdom. Merlin’s heart rejoiced.
Bishop Dubric opened his mouth, but Arthur raised one hand.
“I am the king,” he said. “You are but my advisers. I have already listened to all of you, and I have made my decision, Now hear it in silence.
“For the safety and welfare of my people,” the king went on quickly, “the monster of my dream must be destroyed. Yet it is unheard of that a commoner should challenge a throne, so no baby whose mother is below the rank of gentlewoman shall be touched. Also, weighing all your advice, I have decided that we need fear no female, so sons only shall be taken. Thirdly, my dream fell on the eve of May Day, and I interpret this as meaning that I have nothing to fear from any son born in any other month than May. Lastly, this dream must surely refer to a danger already in existence, so no child to be born after the month of May in this present year shall be concerned.
“Thus, every son born during the month of May to any gentlewoman or noblewoman presents the gravest danger to my kingdom. But we ourselves must not shed their blood. Therefore, I am sending my loyal men out to every corner of the realm to gather up these children. They will all be put into a ship, and it shall be treated as a Ship of Fools, set adrift upon the sea . . . and if, in God’s great mercy, it should find its way to any city on the coast, wherein I hold court, the babies shall be my wards and prisoners for the rest of their lives. And if it fails to find port, may God have mercy on their poor little souls.”
“God have mercy upon thy soul!” cried Bishop Dubric. “For the moment you issue any such foul command, you risk your own eternal damnation.”
Strangely calm in his grief, the young man gazed back at the bishop. “I have already risked it. Knowing that you would still raise your protests, I have sent the order secretly by my loyal knight Sir Ulfius, through secret passages. On the first day of June, holy Father, I will shrive myself and attempt to cleanse my soul with whatever penances you think good. But the people of my realm must be spared the horrors my dream warned me of.”
By the first day of June, Merlin comforted himself, the realm would already be in revolt, suffering some of those very horrors, and Arthur laying aside his promise of confession and penance in the press of putting down that new rebellion. Nevertheless, the mage knew his victory for partial at best. As soon as he decently could, he retired from the royal presence to seek his own secret chamber.
There, closeted once again with the dark mirror, he sought out how to make the best of matters. “Even as our Divine Enemy must make use of imperfect human clay, Father, so must Thou. In large part, I have failed. The lad has excluded as many as he could find excuses to exclude, and he has given all the rest some very slight chance. This chance I can destroy with a word to Sir Ulfius, my tool since Uther’s days. He will soon see the need for holes in the hull of Arthur’s Ship of Fools. But Arthur’s own intention gives them a chance.
“Yet for all that he has made himself Herod in his own eyes, as in the eyes of every good Christian in his realm, even of those who remain loyal to him. There is still hope that I can do somewhat with this boy to Thy honor.
“And, while he knows the story of Herod, he does not know that of Oedipus. I will take steps at once to ensure that at least one child survives the shipwreck to come. The latest child born to Morgawse, King Lot’s wife . . . Yes, perfect! Arthur may have fathered it as easily as Lot, and Dame Morgawse is Morgan le Fay’s own sister and therefore Arthur’s, though neither of them knew it when they tumbled together, thanks to my longsightedness in delaying the revelation of Arthur’s parentage. The ideal son to carry out his Oedipal destiny and work his father’s downfall in spite of all Arthur’s precautions! Yes . . . Lot and Morgawse must not know at once that their son survives, or Lot might hesitate to join the rebels. But I will take steps to insure that son’s corruption to our cause, even should I not be able to sow the final seeds myself. Father . . . Father, are you pleased with my efforts?”