by Maples, Kit
“Best advice you ever gave me. You’re a merlin after my own whatever.”
Uther drank and wiped his mouth with his red beard, looked at the wet beard and began to weep.
“What barbarian slave hangs this glory from his shield tomorrow?” he cried.
“The sword isn’t here to sever you from life, King.”
Uther was startled. “Then what’s it for?”
“It waits for a hand.”
Uther looked at his unringed sword hand. He put his hand on the sword’s pommel and pulled himself upright.
“Is mine the hand?” he asked.
“Try the sword.”
Uther hauled on the blade jammed into the Brutus stone. It would not come for him.
He sat and we drank more beer.
“I’ve tried that sword a hundred times on a hundred nights, when no one could see me fail,” he said. “The gaudy thing doesn’t love me.”
“It’s not meant for you.”
“For who? I’m the most important creature in this world. Who else out there could displace me? Who could displace Uther the Ultimate Dragon?”
Uther finished the beer and kicked the skin off the stone.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “One little inbred Saxon peasant with a lucky sling shot could displace me.”
“Why this mood tonight? You almost seem human.”
“Am I ordinarily less than human?”
“More than human.”
“I’m the British Goliath!” he roared. Uther howled his war cry.
He parted his leather war skirt that had been stiffened in brine and pissed over the side of the rock of the race.
He tasted the stink of his piss and said, “Tomorrow’s a good day for a fight, Old Fartess. When I feel the urge, I’ll lead that rag-and-bones army to search for the Saxon king. I’ll find him and crush him, as I usually do.”
“Or so the chronicles will record.”
“It’s all the same. What does the next cycle care about us? My arms are ready, my knights crazed with blood-lust, my peasants and serfs whipped into a frenzy of fright as much for being slung from my crucifixes as for Saxon knives. The instant is perfect for battle.”
Then Uther said, “It’s the king who’s unready.”
“Or unwilling?”
“Yes, yes, oh, yes, unwilling.”
“‘Uther the Unwilling?’ Want me to carve that on your tomb in gold inlay?”
Uther laughed and jostled me. “What times we’ve had, Merlin! You gave me Helen the Trojan! I saw Achilles, crossed swords with Hercules, voyaged with Jason! What are the legends of Cleopatra, Alexander, and Caesar to me who has known them in their drunken fits, puking their guts out for fright and bad camp food, running howling with their troops from Persian arrows and one little green asp?”
“What are they indeed compared to you, Lord Uther?”
“Compared to me, they’re less than the dirt in their stone-cold caskets!”
“I’ll tell you the truth now,” I said.
“Tonight of all nights you’re going to tell me the truth?” said Uther. “Don’t do that. I don’t want to hear any truths tonight.”
“You never actually met them.”
Uther was stunned. “I spent a year of nights in Cleopatra’s bed and she was a ghost? Alex and Julie, too, and I had to fight to keep them out of my bed?”
“Ghosts,” I said. “Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.”
“You deceived me! My Lady Merlin deceived me,” Uther said, even gloomier.
Then he laughed, suddenly and explosively.
“But why tell me now?”
“In this mood of yours, before battle, it’s pointless to continue the lie.”
“What beautiful lies! Helen, too? All her nights of love a fraud? That business on a rock reaching up into Olympus with all the birds chittering and the leering gorgon?”
“Helen, too. And the gorgon.”
“Ayyy! That gorgon was my kind of monster. I dreamed we damaged an amphora of your Burgundia by ourselves and sacked a couple of Saxon villages barehanded. I’m sorry I never really met him. Or her, was it? Whichever.”
Uther glanced sharply at me and I said for him what was on his mind.
“Yes, and your best night of nights, with the love goddess Venus, too.”
Uther groaned in a beery breath.
“But she was even less real than Helen,” I said, “as Venus is just a figment of some Greek rock-cutter’s diseased imagination.”
“What disease! What perfection!”
We squatted silent on the stone, watching the last of sunset.
“This blade sings at sunset,” Uther said, pitching a pebble down the side of the rock.
“It sings?” I said, startled.
“Listen to it.”
As the last of day withdrew and night’s chill crept over the rock of the race, the sword began to vibrate.
“Sometimes it speaks clearly,” Uther said.
I listened but the sword would not sing for me.
“What does it sometimes say?” I asked the king.
“A very strange and foreign word – ‘Excalibur.’”
Hearing its soul-name, the sword trembled.
“It does that, too, if you repeat whatever it says.”
“Does it say more?” I said.
“A sword that speaks one word is a wonder but you want it to recite The Antigone?”
We and the sword were silent again.
Uther and I watched the king’s servants light a fire at the base of the rock to warm themselves.
“I’m full of my aches and pains tonight,” Uther said. “Old war wounds. My three brown teeth. That ache in my lungs I’ve had since I was a child when my father put me down a well to steal the treasure that made him Duke of Usk. My knees hurt from clinging to too many horses and women. There’s the old burning in my nether parts – was your dream Helen clean, do you think? Could an old Trojan have had the Roman sickness?”
Uther laughed and said, “Entertain me, Merlin. Tell me the future.”
“What part of it do you want to know?”
Uther was surprised. “After all these years saying no, tonight you’ll foretell for me?”
“It’s a special night.”
“My last?”
“Is that the future you want told?”
“It’s as much as I care to hear. No, no. Give me the future a few days ahead. Who rules in Britain on whatever day that is after the next one?”
“A British king.”
“Me?”
“You know you’re going to die tomorrow.”
“Ayyy!” Uther wept into his beard.
When he ran out of tears, he said, “Who’s elected king after me?”
“Too many men and women will rule here after you.”
“But are they my blood?”
“Gurthrygen will be king.”
“A second King David, my son! After him?”
“The day after tomorrow is all you asked for.”
“Tell a dead man the truth, Sweet Lady.”
“A Solomon follows your David.”
“My son king. His son elected after him. And his son, too? Then my sons will grant me Christian immortality in this world. It makes the leaving of life less hard. No more good news?”
“The news is, good or bad, if the world continues as it has in all past cycles, your line will extinct itself in forty years, Britain will wither into the Welsh and Cornish mountains to become some hideous thing part Briton, part Saxon, its character and language lost, the preciousness of this time and place forgotten, green fields gone, hawks vanished, no more British sun gleaming on British spear points or the birth-howls of new warrior men and women.”
“Stop!” Uther cried. “All that happens if I lose this fight? Then I won’t fight! I’ll sit the day here. Let the Saxons come to me. On this stone I can kill them by legions.”
“It happens whether you fight or not. It’s the Fate of this cycle of life.”
“Nothing can be done?”
“I’m here to do what can be done.”
“You? A merlin, a fraud-Christian, a monster of time, a baby-eating, blood-sucking Druid? You will save the world?”
“Not I but the things I create,” I said.
“What things?”
“Better not to tell you. You’d destroy them.”
“I’d make them tools to fight the Saxons tomorrow! To break the Saxon Weird on the British Fate.”
“That’s right, you’d waste them.”
“You won’t save me, old friend? Is it because one time I tried to shove my hands up your skirts?”
“One time? A hundred! But I’ve only one mission and you aren’t it.”
“You’ve never loved me as I’ve loved you, Old Woman!” Uther cried. He began to weep again.
He was suddenly drunker than before, more cunning and dangerous.
“Oh, you’re fond of me, I know,” he said, “but it was never love.”
I was startled. Had I, and all the merlins in me, lived a lifetime with this half-Romanized savage not to see that Uther loved antique and wrinkled me, along with all the other women he loved?
“My love is saved for someone else,” I said.
“Now I know I’ll die!”
Uther wept into his beard in high fashion.
“I’ve given you all I could,” I said.
Uther grunted, almost a laugh.
“Strange,” he said, “but my father said the same to me before I cut his throat and took his ducal crown.”
He looked at me as though measuring my throat.
Then he said, “Oh, Hell, give your love to pretty Arthur. He’ll have little else in life after I’m gone. Three years old and hasn’t spoken a word or pissed on target once. Too long in the birth canal without air, I suppose. He’s a born fool and needs his own merlin to teach him how to squat and crap. What I wanted and waited for and expected from you is what you give so freely to pathetic idiots like Arthur – the power of a merlin to become a bird or bear to dodge and destroy my enemies.”
He began to weep again.
“Bless my ragman’s army for my sake, Merlin!” he cried. “Let it smash the Saxons! Drive the Pagans back to their dank Saxon forests!”
“You’re stupid with beer.”
“It’s a fair request. If you were a Christian, you’d be a saint. If a Saxon, Thor. I name you my god, Merlin. Here, I prostrate myself before you” – he did, face down on the stone – “and pray that you make loaves and fishes of my army.”
“Make what?”
“A multitude! An army fit for Joshua and forget the trumpets.”
I said nothing. What’s the point of saying anything sensible to a drunk?
“Is that it?” the king cried. “My goddess answers my prayer by not answering? Do I go unblessed into battle?”
“You do.”
Uther got up and drew his greatsword.
“This was made from the metals of three heroic swords that my fathers broke in battle for the emperors. It has an antique charm in it that, the sword claims, makes it a merlin-eater. Have you heard the story?”
“I’m hearing it now. It amazes me that you, who love to repeat stories to the utter boredom of everyone else, never told me this one before.”
“I saved telling it for a moment like this.”
With the sword’s point, Uther flicked open my cloak and put the point over my heart. “This merlin-eater can pluck you from life and your mission. Do you believe me?”
“I believe what the sword can or can’t do isn’t what you want to tell me.”
“Come with me to battle, Merlin.”
“I’m bred on battles. Why would I quail from one more?”
“Because this time you see the fruit of a lifetime without love. You see me die.”
“I’ll come but not in your war band.”
“I don’t ask that. I’ll demand it of every one of them, of course, they’ll all die if I die. Uther Pendragon won’t fall into Annwn without a company of warriors to prove his worth to Gwynn. Wear your stone armor, Lady.”
“It’s going to be that sort of a brawl?”
“You’ll be happy to wear it tomorrow. Carry the two-handed ax they call Pagan Eater. But leave your glass shield in your tent. Hey, you may love me yet for what I give you.”
Uther scraped back the ivy that covered part of the Brutus stone and pulled out a shield wrapped in rag.
“Morgause made this for you. Six years old and a lover of arms and armor. She dreams of nothing but slaughter. A fine British princess!”
I unwrapped the shield in the moonlight. Round and heavy, laminated wood, the iron hand-boss a red heart, the field one hundred and forty-four green and white checks.
“Morgause made me this?” I cried.
“She’s invented your arms, Princess Merlin,” Uther said, buffing the shield, pleased with his daughter’s handiwork. “You’ve had nothing to identify yourself in battle except that old glass shield which no one can see.”
He saw the checked shield tremble in my hands.
Uther said, “Has Morgause discovered your secret?”
“I’ve thousands of secrets!”
“Then has she revealed hers to you?”
“What does she say is the meaning of all these signs?”
“It’s simple enough for a child to read. The heart is the love-god you’ve always told us you were in some absurd previous and unChristian existence. The green and white checks are from her dreams.”
“What dream?”
“I don’t read her dreams. That’s for your kind.”
“So it was only a dream?”
I read the blank face of the checked shield and laughed.
“I’ll finish her fantasy,” I said.
I wiped night-mist from the shield, each brush of my hand birthing from the checks the bulging faces of my predecessor merlins, faces of all shapes and colors, of warriors, princes, scholars, men and women, able and crippled, horrific and beautiful.
The faces cried out from the shield, “These many times we’ve failed to become the merlin who can make the king! Free us to die!”
Uther recoiled gagging from their fetid breath, raising his sword to strike them. “All gods, what are these things?”
“These,” I said, “are all the merlins before me.”
“That many? How they stink, the dirty beasts.”
“They’re inferior merlins, even the greatest of them” – I tweaked the nose of the Great Merlin – “a thousand times lesser in power and knowledge than I, but they kept me in stone a thousand years, the bastards.”
“What’re you going to do with them?”
“Wear them into battle,” I said.
The shield screamed in terror.
Chapter 11 – The King Dies
False dawn. Icy cold. Uther went through the shivering forest using his greatsword to slap awake his captains. Who slapped awake their sergeants. Who slapped awake their knights. Who slapped awake the peasants dozing after a night trembling in fright of this dawn.
With Urien slung over my back, I tramped behind Uther, both of us grinding and clattering in mail and armor and with all the extra spears, knives, and clubs we carried. I had the ax Pagan Eater slung across my stone breastplate, my stone helmet pushed back on my head, my reddening gray hair braided with green and white ribbons. My checkered shield wept aloud for its sufferings to come.
Uther’s army surged forward through damp forest, scratching butts, complaining, pissing, digging roots for breakfast, kicking out campfires, carrying hot wands to warm their hands enough to close around ax handles and sword hilts.
At the forest’s edge was yellow-morning-and-green-field Britain where dawn’s frost had dripped away.
“I have to weep for leaving this beautiful place!” Uther said to me.
So he wept, wiping tears with his beard.
His war band closed around him in winged helmets, Roman
armor, Syrian swords, heart-of-oak war hammers, breastplates decorated with holly and mistletoe, jangling chains of charmed coins from Jerusalem and Carthage, flowers behind their ears, bearskins draped over their shoulders.
Uther lied to them – he always lied to them before battle and they never remembered his lies after their victories – saying, “See me weep for the Saxon women who will howl to their puny gods for the souls of their menfolk tonight!”
His war band roared a cheer, slapping their swords on their shields, the clatter in the dank trees terrifying the peasant soldiers.
The cheering knights surged out of the forest into the morning-lit grassland and looked around for the enemy.
“No Saxons?” Uther said to me. “Is this some wonderful surprise you’ve made for me, Old Lady?”
“There are always Saxons in this world,” I said.
“Then I’ve time for strategy. Alexandrian, wouldn’t you say?”
“It’s hard to say without knowing where the enemy is.”
“But you’d know.”
“I remember.”
“Small difference, Princess Merlin,” said a warlord. “Point us at them and we’ll kill them!”
When I said nothing, Uther said to me, “Are you counting away my last heartbeats to clear the world for the wonders to come after me?”
“You surprise me, King, for understanding anything at all. But for understanding me now, I’d make you a god in the next life.”
“Can you do that?” Uther asked, urgent and earnest.
“I’ve enemies in the Underworld,” I said. “Better if you pretend you don’t know me there.”
“We’ve all enemies in Hell.”
“Mine is their prince.”
“Pluto? What a beast you are! A lifetime in my employ and I know nothing at all about you, except that you grow younger every day. What did you do to him?”
“Robbed his treasure and stole princes out of death.”
“Yes, yes, I remember that,” Uther said. “Or I ought to remember it, in the past or the future or somewhere.”
He pointed with his greatsword down the line of his army, past peasants kicking clods and staring at singing birds, toward a pavilion at the forest edge in the shelter of Badon Hill. “I have a little magic of my own, Merlin, and it’s in that tent. I brought Igerne and her brat Arthur.”