by Maples, Kit
Yet it was not death that separated the living from these other worlds but birth.
So I continued to live against the ordinary course of time. Cause and effect were reversed for me. This seemed normal because I knew that life is all a cycle, the future as fixed as the past unless a hero changes it.
But, in all this crisscrossing of time, where should I begin to put the future right?
Dawn crept over the grim field of Camlann. The corpses had been picked clean by Saxons, Britons, elves, fairies, and rats. The barbarians had set their stew pots in the carnage and heaped into the pots the brains, offal, and thinking livers of Arthur’s dead. Saxon women whooped a bizarre song for their giant naked king to dance as he spattered himself with British blood and juggled British skulls.
I turned away from this horrid scene, stirring my own inner stew of terror and Saxon-hate. So that when I was challenged by Saxon guards drunk on their mead, I in my rage beat them with the British bones they had been gnawing and left them as the last victims of Camlann and their unholy war for possession of the golden Empire of the Britons.
But I was wrong. This battlefield was not Camlann at its end. Time was running backwards for me. I was a witness of the morning after the second day of battle, not the fatal third. Arthur was alive! The Round Table stood united!
I looked across the field toward the sound of brass trumpets and saw – Great Jupiter! – the glittering passage of Arthur and two hundred of the Table, flags and pennants, scalps and ladies’ ribbons on shields, winged helmets, horses hooves sparking on the arrowheads left in the sod from yesterday’s battle.
Arthur with his red dragon and eagle shield that was frightful to the superstitious Saxons. The scimitar Caliburn on his buckler. The world was whole and for one day more still belonged to Arthur and Camelot and I was part of it!
I ran across to Arthur and cheered.
Arthur hailed me, laughing out of his battle fatigue, “Father-Mother Merlin, which sex are you today? What do you say – will Camelot be Saxon or Briton tomorrow?”
The king dropped down from his saddle as a man exhausted and bone-bruised by the banging on his armor and shield of Saxon battle axes.
“Whoever since the lying Greeks thought to fight a battle of three days, Mother Merlin?” he said. “We’re making a glittering page in the Chronicles, aren’t we? If we survive to write them.”
Arthur leaned against his war horse Llamrei and said, “Merlin, damn you, old woman, tell me what happens tomorrow!”
I clutched around my rusted armor and rotted Urien, and the gleaming Excalibur, the old woolen battle cloak I had taken from Lucan’s body in the future, and eagerly looked at this man who was my blood-father dead in my own time.
The high king was a small man compared to the Saxon king but taller than any other Briton I’d known. He was broad-shouldered from a lifetime swinging sword and club. His face had a beauty that was manly and feminine – the face of the heroic Crucified Jesu and of the Virgin Mary who looked out at Arthur from the inside of his shield.
His face also had the character of an Old Roman, the mark of his bloodline that had begun, so legend said, between a god and a Roman princess.
Arthur clutched my snaky beard, saying, “I’m desperately old, Mother, forty-three in the spring. Nearly the oldest man in my kingdom. Certainly older than my merlin who grows younger and more beautiful as I wither. My son’s with the Saxons. My queen and her lover by their sin have poisoned my army. What’s to become of Camelot? Tell me!”
I felt a welling of despair for this damaged hero. But this Arthur’s world would go on to the end of its cycle. I had no power over it. I would have no power for any Arthur until I learned the key to allow me to change the future.
“My king!” I cried, but Arthur was swept from me, backwards in time, sliding down the road away from Camlann and toward Camelot from which he had marched to battle.
I found myself marching in the crowd of camp followers.
“Is this backwards confusion to be my life forever?” I cried in despair.
“Ignore the old fool,” a woman said to another.
This woman thought she was marching to Camlann when I saw her walking backwards to Camelot.
She said to her companion, “Old Merlin forgets this is the world into which she was born!”
The women laughed and told the joke to more.
I trudged in the dust, the pebbles thrown at me by the women tapping on the armor under my cloak. None dared drive me away – not with two battle swords slung over my back – but none loved a merlin. Who loves the witch who foretells the poisoned future?
Hope and despair! I stepped out of the march and spread myself on the warm earth to watch the sun go from sunset to sunrise and the Moon from wane to wax. What was I to do in this place and in this backward time?
I had made the World Sword for Arthur but how was I to discover the merlin in me who could save Camelot?
At brightening sunset I heard the words, “Stand clear of that patch of ground, boy! Something wicked’s buried there.”
I opened my eyes. A princess with bound red hair and the green hex in her eyes that drives off demons. No crown but a jeweled cloth band around her forehead. Veil open. She wore a silver gilt Roman breastplate over her silk skirts. Her horse snorted and backed from where I lay on the earth.
I saw the boy, her son, with the Orkney red raven crest on his tunic. This was Gawain! The warrior who would fight the Green Knight and die at Camlann with Arthur’s war band.
From that I knew the young woman to be King Lot’s wife, half-sister of Arthur, and in my own childhood at Carbonek the crazed witch-queen Morgause.
I got up startled by her youth and beauty, the contrast of her red and green on white, and the gleaming purity of her armor.
The boy pissing against the tree that was me screamed seeing a merlin oak leap up. Seeing me leap up.
The young Queen Morgause shouted her war cry and drew her Orkney greatsword with its hissing red blade.
I felt myself like a woman buried alive!
Where was I? What was I?
What had I become? A tree, again?
What could I become?
I sneezed out tree dust.
Morgause laughed. The boy fled from me to his mother.
I pushed off heaps of earth, tons of earth. Tore away the roots and branches that had overgrown me and into me and through me.
How had so much of Earth fallen on me in just one night? All these tons of dirt and branch and leaf? These foot-thick roots from which I pulled my legs? Or what world-cycle was this?
Morgause spurred her frightened horse toward me, her lifeguards galloping up, shouting for her to stand clear, crying, “Let us at this beast from the earth, Queen!”
Their spears and throwing axes clattered off my time-rotted armor beneath the cloak that was beneath the bark of the tree that had become me.
I shook away the dust of years. Had I slept so long? Had so much of the world passed me by?
“What age is this, Queen?” I cried. “Have I missed Arthur and Camelot?”
“Great gods, the monster speaks!” said Morgause, laughing again.
“Take off its head, Stepmother!” shouted Gawain.
I whispered her soul-name. That stopped her killing blow.
She rode near to me, furious with energy and sudden anger. “What beast knows my secret name?”
“Another woman,” I said, “who knows too much and would rather know nothing at all but she must…”
“Oh, stop babbling like a merlin,” said Morgause. “I’ve no patience for magicians’ cant or for half-trees that claim to be half-women.”
She leveled her greatsword on my neck and said, “Nothing human can sleep ten years in the dirt and spring up to name a princess of Camelot. Say what you want from me, monster, or I’ll separate your liver and heart and we’ll see if you can dream another ten years without them.”
I keened in despair. “Have I been here in
the ground ten years?” I cried. “What of my king?”
“That’s the story of this unholy piece of ground,” Morgause said, spitting on the Earth. “Ten years past and ten more, a merlin lies here dreaming the death of Camelot.”
“Am I Merlin? Is that me?”
“How should I know?” she said. “Merlins are buried in every hill and hollow. With an absurd legend to go with each one. Merlins bore me even more then their lying stories.”
The boy Gawain, cowering behind his stepmother’s horse, said, “Who’s to say you’re the merlin of this story or another merlin or no merlin at all?”
Morgause thrust her red sword at my throat. .“Are you a demon? Go on, tell me before I kill you.”
“Demon?” cried the boy.
“I am Brynn, knight and lady.”
Morgause laughed. I had never heard the old queen laugh but here was the bright sound of a young woman laughing in surprised joy.
“Of course you’re named ‘Brynn,’” she said. “It means ‘hill’ and here you lie like a merlin in your hill.”
She snorted a laugh, another sound I’d never heard from the old queen.
“Every other village yokel, boy or girl, is named ‘Brynn’ in hopes one of them will bring a merlin’s favor on the struggling Britons,” she said, angry again. “But nothing helps us against the Pagans, and Arthur barely can. Now, ‘Hill,’ name your father, line, and station before I snap off your head.”
There was no answer I could give that she would understand.
I said, “I’m a merlin.”
Morgause whooped a laugh. “The perfect fool’s answer!”
She let her frightened horse dance around me as she plucked at my rotting cloak with her sword point.
She stopped her horse and leaned down toward me and said, in a furious calm, “Are you only a merlin or the Great Merlin for whom the king waits? I have to know to get the killing temptation out of me.”
“I’m a merlin who awaits a merlin,” I said.
She looked down into the rooty grave from which the tree that had been me had leaped up to frighten Gawain. She was puzzled, as she should have been.
I gazed down into the root-pit yearning for this moment to pass deeper into the past or the future to let me see there the body of the merlin who had lain in that same place for the previous ten years so I could kick him awake and ask him what I must do.
Morgause turned her face from the grave to me and said, “Have I anything to fear from you, Lady Merlin Two Swords?”
I was startled to hear her ask such a preposterous question of any merlin but said, “Not from me, Queen, nor any Briton.”
“All merlins are liars and scoundrels,” she said, “but you seem to me a special breed of liar and scoundrel. Perhaps because you’re a woman in this world’s cycle when all of us expected a man. Perhaps because you’re still mostly tree and I love trees for my sword’s biting practice.”
Morgause, in her armor and silks and with the greatsword in her hand, jumped down from her horse and got close to look into my face. “What do I see in you that’s getting younger faster than I age?” she asked, startled.
“Younger? I’m the oldest woman in the world and getting older.”
“‘What’s older than Merlin and younger?’” said Gawain, still behind his stepmother’s horse.
That riddle may be fresh in this boy’s time but it was antique and tiresome in mine.
Morgause answered when I did not, “‘That which is a minute from its own death as nothing can be older than the dead.’”
Queen and prince laughed together at the stale joke.
I watched with sudden fascination as I saw her and the boy grow younger at the speed I felt himself aging.
She, looking at me, must see me slide backward toward youth as she felt herself age toward death.
Morgause said in a commanding whisper, “There is in you, Lady Merlin, a vigor I want to steal before I grow old. Shake off your roots and bark and give me your blood-kiss and with it the secret of youth.”
The queen’s lifeguards clamped their hands over the boy’s eyes and led away Gawain, shouting.
Morgause pulled me into the trees away from the grave.
“Are these merlin oaks here and is this holy mistletoe?” she said.
“These are ordinary trees,” I said, “and that’s ordinary moss.”
“No Druidical copse? No place for blood rites? You’re out of time, Merlin, if you don’t see the truth I see.”
“What truth?”
“In Arthur’s age, these things are what I want them to be.”
The trees and life-sucking moss became merlin oaks and mistletoe around me, frightening me for the witchly power I remembered in the old woman this young queen would become.
Bands of red, green, and white sprayed through the branches from the backward tracking sun. The Earth exhaled into my face a thick and luminous fog as though the Moon buried there in daytime had freed some part of its silver light to come up to cushion a merlin and a witch.
Beyond the trees, I could hear the cries of the boy: “Stepmother! Stepmother!”
They transformed in my ears to “Morgause! Morgause!”
Queen Morgause! I heard her say or thought I heard or the sound came out of the atmosphere. Then I heard my own soul-name, or thought it was mine, as she lay back on her bed of moonlight and fog, the colored sun first red then green and white on her Roman armor.
She flung aside my two scabbarded swords and my black armor and said in a voice that was mist, love, and fright, “Merlin, you too are what I please you to be. Be a man again! Come to me.”
In that bower of dream oaks and red-berried mistletoe, she in her gilt armor and I in my rotted jerkin, Morgause possessed me in a high howling ecstasy like the cries of barbarian women on a battlefield.
It was only the wane-to-wax of the Moon that told me she had left me alone and asleep at last.
Time!
How many eons had I slept again in the Earth? What was Morgause now – child or infant or unborn dream?
“Our quest!” she said in evaporating words heard through my earth-plugged ears in my burial hill. “Save Arthur from me!”
Chapter 6 – The Quest
Awake again! But awake when?
I shoved off more tons of accumulated dirt and leaves and scrambled from the tree copse to the old grave from which I had leapt as a merlin oak so many hours or eons ago.
The burial hole was full and overgrown, stone cairns and crosses stacked around it to protect unwary passersby from the merlin snoring there. Was I still in that hole or was I here digging into the grave with my bare hands?
A giant face, clotted dirt in eyes and mouth and peaked ears, said to me in an old man’s voice like a cracking bough, “I’ve waited!”
The creature was strange and revolting and beautiful. It coiled up out of the grave, spat in its hands and washed its face, and parted its forked beard.
“I’m the merlin heart fed to you by Lucan. I am the Great Merlin. Name me!”
He rose up nine feet tall, fierce-faced, forked beard, shaggy hair striped white. His Druid’s robe of thirteen patches of bright cloth reeked of mold, fungus, unclean mushrooms. Glitter on his fingers, nose, and ears of rings made of coins from Jerusalem, Carthage, Delphi, and Atlantis. Behind his shoulder was the dream laughter and image of a sphinx.
Frightened and satisfied, I said, “You’re the merlin soul-named Kaermerdin!”
“You’ve named me!”
The merlin shrank to human size. His sphinx laughed once more and vanished. The merlin now was as withered and ragged as a village beggar whom boys whip across the fields.
“You possess me,” he said, “as I possess you.”
“You possess me?”
“I do. I’ve lived many times. I made the fog for Uther’s rape of Igerne to make Arthur. I stole the child to raise to the power to draw the sword from the stone. I’m pieces of you now and you ought to know it.”
“Of me!”
“That heart of yours” – the creature tapped the armor over my heart – “is partly mine. You ate my own heart when Galabes first fed you. Your liver is full of all my thoughts. The spleen, too. In every other vital organ, a bit of me is there. You’re my daughter as you were Lucan’s and are Arthur’s child. Listen to me!”
The still-shrinking creature looked up to the passing of the sun in its backward orbit and of the Moon and of the sun again and said, “Merlin has lived twelve-times-twelve lives with you the newest of our line. You have in you the spirits of all who preceded you. None of them achieved the quest. None made Arthur the perfect king to recreate the world. You must!”
I cowered from the shrinking creature. “Why must I?” I cried.
The little monster shouted in twelve-times-twelve voices, “To free to die that part of me that’s you! Give us peace. Free us from these dreary cycles of existence. Win, and no more pass us on to the next and the next and the next merlin. And no one will follow you to pass you on through so many more weary lives!”
“Must I live so long?”
“If you fail, we all must live the misery of your failure. Succeed and we all die, happy in victory.”
“Great Father Merlin!” I fell to my knees before the monster who now was barely eye-to-eye with me when I was on my knees. “What am I to do?”
“Show me the sword.”
Great Merlin put out his hand to take Excalibur. He could not close his fingers on the hilt.
“The sword won’t have me! It won’t accept being taken by the Great Merlin!”
He pointed one hand one toward Earth, one toward Heaven and shouted, “Is this my reward? That midway through life I meet she who succeeds me with the sword of the age yet I can’t hold it and die?”
He looked up at the sun in its continuous backward track and waited for a reply. There was none.
“Silence!” he cried in anguish. “Is that my answer?”
I said, “Great lords, do you speak to the sun?”
I had in my hands the World Sword that denied itself to the Great Merlin who was brother to all the powers of the universe. With this sword, what could I accomplish or become?