by Mike Ashley
“Because she’s my daughter, you dumbfuck!”
Shocked, Merlin said, “When—”
Shikra put an arm around my waist, laid her head on my shoulder, smiled. “She’s seventeen,” I said. “But I only found out a year ago.”
We drove unchallenged through the main gate, and headed back into town. Then I remembered there was nothing there for me anymore, cut across the median strip and headed out for the airport. Time to go somewhere. I snapped on the radio, tuned it to XPN and turned up the volume. Wagner’s valkyries soared and swooped low over my soul, dead meat cast down for their judgment.
Merlin was just charming the pants off his great-granddaughter. It shamed reason how he made her blush, so soon after trying to slice her open. “—make you Empress,” he was saying.
“Shit, I’m not political. I’m some kind of anarchist, if anything.”
“You’ll outgrow that,” he said. “Tell me, sweet child, this dream of your father’s – do you share it?”
“Well, I ain’t here for the food.”
“Then we’ll save your world for you.” He laughed that enormously confident laugh of his that says that nothing is impossible, not if you have the skills and the cunning and the will to use them. “The three of us together.”
Listening to their cheery prattle, I felt so vile and corrupt. The world is sick beyond salvation; I’ve seen the projections. People aren’t going to give up their cars and factories, their VCRs and Styrofoam-packaged hamburgers. No one, not Merlin himself, can pull off that kind of miracle. But I said nothing. When I die and am called to account, I will not be found wanting. “Mordred did his devoir” – even Malory gave me that. I did everything but dig up Merlin, and then I did that too. Because even if the world can’t be saved, we have to try. We have to try.
I floored the accelerator.
For the sake of the children, we must act as if there is hope, though we know there is not. We are under an obligation to do our mortal best, and will not be freed from that obligation while we yet live. We will never be freed until that day when heaven, like some vast and unimaginable mall, opens her legs to receive us all.
1 Merlin is known to have been active during the so-called Wessex period of the Bronze Age, ca. 2500 BC, when the major formations at Stonehenge, Woodhenge and Badon’s Ring were constructed. Many talismanic objects survive from this period, including the carved and patterned long (or marrow) bones of elk.
2 The reference is clearly to Cornwall, in the south-west of the island, but “Gorlodubnos” (Gorlois of familiar legend) is a strange appellation for this part of post-Roman Britain. “Blackwolf” was the tribal sign.
3 There are numerous locations claimed for “Igraine’s Maze” – from Tintagel in Cornwall to Vercovicium on Hadrian’s Wall. The labyrinthine structure is likely to have been of drystone walls erected along a turf-maze pattern, without foundations, and would have been easily dismantled by local farmers in the Middle Ages.
4 St Albans, north of London, UK. The Roman town was sacked and burned by the huge army of the Celtic Queen Boudicca (Boadicea) in AD 60. After her defeat by the Romans, under Suetonius, Boudicca is reputed to have been interred alive with her two daughters on the hill above the burned town, where the Abbey now stands.
5 The reference is to Knossos on Crete. The true Labyrinth, of Minotaur fame, seems to be located below Phaistos, in central Crete, and is as yet unexcavated. The present-day Knossos (by Iraklion) is one of several “false labyrinths”, built during the fifth millennium BC, but is likely to have been the site used by King Minos (ca. 1450 BC) to imprison the inventor Daedalus, well away from the imprisoned Minotaur at Phaistos. Elsewhere, Merlin refers to “four echoes” of the Labyrinth on Crete.
6 Ratchet and pawl.