The Broken Sword

by Molly Cochran

  Then, on the heels of the civil war and the Saxons, came the plague.

  It was called the Yellow Plague because of the color of its victims after death. Thousands dropped from the disease, their skin bubbling with yellow lesions, their bodies wasted; but by then, no one was counting the dead any longer.

  Queen Morgause became infected. When her once-beautiful face grew hideous and misshapen and her luxuriant hair fell out by handfuls, one of her physicians suggested a treatment of warm salt water to heal her pustule-covered skin. For this she traveled to the ruined Roman city of Aquae Sulis with a contingent of royal guards, whom she ordered to repair one of the old public baths for her use. Here she spent her days trying to soak away the vile odor of her sores while she exhorted the demon gods to restore her beauty.

  Some people who lived in the debris of the city's fallen stone buildings came out of curiosity to see the woman who called herself a queen. Most of them had the plague themselves. After a brief scuffle with the soldiers who had been ordered to guard her, they poured inside the ruined building to squat along the sides of the large tiled pool.

  "Guard!" she shouted. "Where is my guard?"

  The onlookers pointed at her, cackling. A woman found her cloak, made of velvet, and rubbed it over her face until someone cut her with a knife for the garment.

  "Don't touch my things, do you hear me, you filthy offal!" Morgause tried to pull herself out of the bath, but the crowd pushed her back in. Someone threw a rat at her. It clawed her chest, drawing blood and pus down her body before it fell in the water and drowned.

  "I am the Queen of Britain!" Morgause screamed. "Don't you understand, I am your queen!"

  Another rat swam toward her. The crowd was amused. Several children scurried outside to find more.

  It didn't take long; rats were the only things in Aquae Sulis that were not in short supply.

  "Guard! I command you to attend me! Guard!"

  "They're dead, poppet," a woman said, shaking her head sweetly.

  "Those what didn't ride off," another added.

  The children returned shrieking with glee, holding fat, squirming rats which they flung into the water. Morgause was the only other object in the pool, and the vermin all rushed toward her.

  Screaming, she slapped them away. The spectators surrounding the pool laughed at the naked woman bobbing up and down in the water trying to force the creatures away. They splashed to propel the rats back toward her, cheering them on.

  "Go get her, Whip! Attaboy!"

  "Mine's named Lightning. See how fast he's going?"

  "Well, let's give old Lightning a hand, eh? There you go—the wave'll push him."

  "Hey! You're drowning Whip! Quit it!" Soon everyone was soaked, the water churning white under their busy hands, the domed building echoing with coarse laughter.

  Morgause looked at their faces in despair. These people were the dregs of the world. She did not want to die here, among such creatures.

  Yet these, these ugly, mindless animals, this wreckage of humanity, were what now populated the land that she ruled. There was no more civilization. There was no law. There were no boundaries, no ethics, no order, no aspirations for a better world. There were only these grinning, lice-covered ghouls.

  These were her people.

  "I am your queen," she whispered.

  When she finally understood the truth of her words, she sank beneath the surface of the water and breathed it in. She convulsed once, twice. Her eyes bulged out. She swallowed her tongue.

  I wish to rule Britain, she had told Thanatos. All of it.

  Her last thought was that her wish had come true.

  "Looks like Whip's dead," someone said.

  "Where's the lady?"

  Some time after they had all left, Morgause's body floated to the surface. It spun idly around the pool for a while, then came to rest in a corner, with the bloated carcasses of the rats.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The dark gods had won.

  When Taliesin had seen enough of what they had done to his country, to the people whose wild purity had once repelled the mighty Roman legions, he bade farewell to Nimue and traveled on foot to the hill country of Wales where he had spent his boyhood, there to perform his final task as the Merlin.

  It was Nimue who had given him the idea for it. Isn't everything possible? she had asked in her patience-stretching way while the two of them were taking Arthur's body to Mona.

  She had been right, of course; everything was possible, if one knew how to accomplish what needed to be done.

  In this case, what was required was the Merlin's very life, and even that might not be enough.

  But he would try.

  For you, my King. Those had been Galahad's last words. Let them he mine, too. Merlin thought. I shall make this magic for you, and for the forgotten gods who made you.

  Taliesin did not wish to die on Mona. It would have been unfitting to lay his lowly bones beside those of the Innocent and the King. He chose instead a cave on the Welsh mainland, near a stream just above the shrine of the ancient god Mithras. He had been there before, on the night he had first heard the music of the druids wafting on the wind from Mona.

  There would be no more music, he knew, and no old gods to bring him the visions he had seen in his youth. But there was still magic here—enough, at least, to ready him for the long journey into eternity.

  He began by picking the mushrooms which had been sacred to the druids. No one ate them now, and they grew in profusion all over the countryside. He painted his body with woad and anointed his eyelids with fragrant oil, just as he had for the ritual of Beltane so many years ago.

  Then he fasted. From one full moon to the next, he took nothing into his body except water from a nearby stream. He sat naked outside the cave for every moment of that time while the rain purified him and the wind scrubbed clean his soul. Like a toad, he luxuriated in the warm sun when it came. The cold he welcomed as well, shivering with life like a new blade of grass. He watched the moon wane and wax while the stars beyond it travelled in their endless voyage, their light burning hotter than fire through the void of space.

  Among those who chanced to see him—a few superstitious old people still brought offerings to Mithras at his derelict shrine—some thought Taliesin to be the god himself, with his blue-stained body and his windblown white hair. Others recognized him as the King's great sorcerer, who had spirited away Arthur's body to an enchanted island where a fairy queen would watch over it until the High King's spirit returned to call him back to the world.

  "The Merlin has gone mad," they whispered, staring at the grizzled old hermit who sat naked and unblinking before them.

  Perhaps they were right. He knew he was changing, although he was uncertain as to what he was in the process of becoming.

  He had been transformed once before, during his early years on Mona, from an ordinary man into an initiate into the mysteries. He had never thought about what state of being lay beyond that, but whatever it was, he was experiencing it. Light might best describe how he felt. Light—weightless, insubstantial, luminescent, fragmentary. He felt as if he were made of moonbeams; his emotions were in a constant state of detached, unwarranted joy. He danced in the high grass, his spindly limbs strutting gaily. He sang loud and clearly the bawdy ballads he had learned in his youth. He spent hour after hour looking at stars through the spaces between his splayed fingers.

  When the moon sat full again in the sky, he bathed by its glow in the cold water of the stream. "Gods of my spirit," he called out at the top of his voice. "Gods of the earth and the universe, thank you!" He ducked his head beneath the bracing, fast-flowing stream and came up sputtering and laughing. "Thank you for giving me so much pain and so much ecstasy. This life has been a glorious gift. Thank you!"

  Then he went into the cave and walled the entrance closed with rock. He lit a single candle and ate the mushrooms, one by one, until the bowl was empty.

  In the candle's
flame he saw Arthur die again, but this time his heart did not break with the sight, for it was beyond breaking. With the eyes of the ancient ones he watched Lugh fall, and Kay and Gawain. He saw the other Knights of the Round Table as they met their fates, going each to the Summer Country of the dead.

  Agravaine and Geraint Lightfoot, returning from their failed Quest, were captured by Lot's men and tortured, the skin flayed from their bodies as a mob cheered. Dry Lips was also captured. He was taken to Rheged and imprisoned there, but cheated Lot out of a third execution by selling a gold ring to a guard in exchange for a dagger, which he plunged into his own heart.

  Bedwyr, the young Master of Horse, went back to his family's estates, only to find they had been confiscated during the civil war which raged for decades after Arthur's death. Bedwyr died defending the turnip field of one of his former tenant farmers during a raid by some of Lot's soldiers looking for sport.

  After hearing of the outcome at the Battle of Camlan, Curoi MacDaire headed back toward Ireland, but was waylaid by thieves. He bled to death by the side of a road.

  Tristan, the beautiful one, found his way home to his family's lands in the northeast where, through careful politics and heavy bribes, his father had managed to keep an uneasy peace with the new king. Seeking to keep his son out of Lot's reach, he sent Tristan to Ireland by sea as the escort of a young noblewoman named Iseult, who was betrothed to one of the Irish kings. Tristan accomplished his mission, but drowned on the voyage home.

  Gareth Beaumains, called Fairhands, entered a monastery. He succumbed three years later to the plague.

  Launcelot died a madman in the land of the Picts, unable to serve the King to whom he had sworn his lifelong allegiance, yet unable to forgive himself for deserting that King. After years of living like a beast in the forest, he ran to the top of a high cliff one morning in summer and hurled himself onto the boulders below.

  And Galahad. Galahad had been the first of them. And the best.

  Gone, all gone.

  "For now, perhaps," Merlin said softly. He held out his arms to gather in the forces of energy inside the cave. Then, clearing his mind of thought, he shot that energy out again.

  The crystals within the limestone walls glowed faintly. Their color dimmed as the wizard drew their power from them once again, and brightened as he released it. Each time he sent the cave's energy back the power grew stronger, augmented by Merlin's own life force. And each time it returned to him, the cave's living spirit brought with it more of the power of All That Is.

  The power came from the rock of the cave and from the trees beyond it, from the green grass and the soil and the air; from the sun and moon and streaking comets and galaxies too far distant to see. From the black void of space it came, crackling through his bony fingers. From beyond the void, from places too dense and secret to belong even to the universe, and to other places yet deeper, reaching, reaching past the gods, past time, past being, reaching to the source itself, energy without matter, infinity, nothingness, All.

  Reaching to the Mother.

  "Mother, bring us life from death," the Merlin prayed.

  The cave glowed with white light. It burned him blind; it turned his body to ash. His soul was all that was left, glowing with the light and dispersed into it.

  Pure spirit now, Merlin traveled to the realm of the dead, to the Summer Country where long ago a fisherman had told him he had seen a city made of glass. Merlin had not believed him then, but he saw it now, a city not of glass but of dreams made real. And before his eyes which were not his eyes but something else, as the Innocent had tried to explain, a perception of the soul, the city became a field of flowers, a shining lake, a planet of exotic beauty, a grandmother's lap, an angel's enfolding wings. There was music here, and silence, and joy in the sky like a rainbow.

  The fisherman's soul passed through him with perfect understanding. So did the spirit of his father, Ambrosius, and his brother Uther. He experienced the essence of his mother and his old nurse and the druid priestess on whom he had fathered a child after the rite of Beltane. The child was lost, doomed to the dark regions, but Thanatos would cheat his gods and live once more, and the Merlin would know him.

  He ranged through the realm of the dead, searching for the Innocent, before he realized that this place, wonderful as it was, served merely as an entranceway to somewhere else. It led to dimensions where his primitive soul could not venture. The Innocent was an ascended master, and between the lives of her choosing, she rested with her own kind.

  Merlin possessed no magic strong enough to find her, but she had taught him enough to complete his task alone. Reaching out with tentacles of thought, he plucked the spirits of eleven men who had served King Arthur—Launcelot and Kay, Gawain and Bedwyr and Dry Lips, Tristan, Agravaine, Geraint, MacDaire, Lugh, Fairhands—and placed them into a vision of Camelot which he constructed on the infinite plains of the Summer Country. When they were in place, he found Galahad, whose shining soul had led him to the Holy Grail in the service of his King.

  "You, faithful one, shall protect him in time to come," Merlin said, the words pouring into a silver thread from his spirit. That thread would forever connect Galahad to his King.

  He was filled with warmth. A thousand jumbled memories buzzed through him—a boy in the forest, the sword in the stone, the building of Camelot, the marriage to Guenevere... It was Arthur's soul, entering his own. Arthur, who had waited so long to be born, and who would have to wait again.

  "Your time will come once more," he said, catching the silver thread emanating from Galahad’s spirit as he spoke. "Perhaps then, your light will not shine alone in the darkness."

  He bound the King and the pure knight together with the thread so that they would never be parted, not in the life to come, nor the ones after that. "It may take a while. You both have lessons to learn. But Arthur the King will live again, and Galahad shall ride by his side."

  "And you?" Arthur asked. "What of you, old friend?"

  Merlin felt himself disintegrating. The magic was leaving him. "I cannot chart my own fate, my King. That is for a power greater than mine. But the love I bear you has no end. No end …"

  "No end," he spoke into the flickering candle's light.

  It was burned nearly to the end. He was back in the cave, his body wrinkled and white with age, but alive.

  The task he had set for himself was done. The last task, the Merlin's final service to the King. Now he could die in peace.

  The candle guttered and went out. In the darkness, the old man lay down upon his back and closed his eyes.

  Then the crystals in the wall began to glow. Through the wall of rock came the form of an animal. It was a she-wolf, its blind eyes filled with light.

  "Master," he said, feeling his heart leap. "Have you come to lead me to the Summer Country?"

  But you only came back a moment ago. Do you not remember the way?

  "You saw me?"

  Certainly. I was beside you most of the time.

  "I looked for you there."

  Yes, but you do not yet know how to see the ethereal things.

  "With the perception of the soul."

  Indeed. It must he developed. But you've made a good start.

  The wolf lay down beside him. Its fur felt warm against his bare skin. "Was I right to do what I did?" he asked, stroking the thick pelt. "To put the knights away on their own plane, to tell Arthur?"

  It was the will of the gods that you help them.

  "I thought the gods were dead."

  Am I dead?

  "Well, yes and no... I don't know how to answer that."

  Ah, she said.

  "Are you a god?"

  You can see for yourself that I am a wolf.

  "Then how..." Taliesin sighed. "I never could get you to answer me directly," he grumbled.

  The Innocent laughed, her voice as lilting and gay as he remembered. Sleep, she said. I will awaken you when it is time.

  "Am I not to die, then?"
/>
  Death, life, waking and dreaming, the black in the white… Have you not yet learned that it is all the same?

  "Oh, bother with you."

  The wolf licked his face. You have done well, little bard.

  He harrumphed and turned on his side. His eyes brimmed with tears of joy.

  He had done well.

  Filled with hope, with a heart as light as a child's, he slept.

  PART FIVE

  THE LEGACY

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  "Thanatos!" the dark magicians chanted. The ritual was almost complete.

  "Help me," Kate moaned, coming to in agony. She raised her arms. They dripped with blood from the wound in her belly. "Oh, God, help me."

  The cuts Aubrey had made were deep; the segments of the pentagram his knife had drawn were already shrinking, pulling away from one another.

  "Thanatos!"

  He held the knife high over her.

  "Please kill me," she whispered.

  "Yes," he answered, his eyes gleaming. "Yes, my darling. I will." He bent low to kiss her lips. Then with one massive swoop, he thrust the blade into the center of the pentagram and up, deep into her heart.

  Kate shuddered once, then was gone.

  Taliesin closed his eyes in pity. His tears fell onto the dirt floor, and he had not the strength to wipe them away.

  "Thanatos!" the priests boomed. "The power is yours!"

  Using the ceremonial knife, Aubrey opened Kate's mouth wide. From it issued a vapor dark as woodsmoke. "Take the spirit of the sacrificed one, O demon gods," he intoned. "Use it to destroy the last of your enemies."

  Slowly the magician withdrew the blade and pointed it toward Taliesin. The foul vapor trailed after the knife, then snaked of its own will in a circle around the old man.

  Taliesin felt himself choking, strangling on the thickening vine of Kate's tainted spirit. Images of the druid priestesses hanging from Mona's charred oaks spun dizzily in his mind. Kate was one of them now, one of the dead whose souls had been taken by magic, twisted into evil by the magician named Thanatos and his dark gods.