by Maples, Kit
At last, with victories everywhere and his spear decorated with the yellow-braided heads of Saxon princes and princesses, Gurthrygen rode his war chariot through Ludd’s capital, taking his Triumph. The old men and women electors ground their yellow teeth and were forced to wait for his happy death before any of them could be king or queen.
* * *
During these months, three-year-old Arthur and I lived apart from the world of rugged greed, tramping the summer forests that ordinary men and women dare not enter for the spooks and howls that infest them, the two of us living wild and free.
I in my soul’s voice taught the boy the names of the trees and animals, taught him to swim and climb, to run down foxes and deer, to sleep wrapped in a merlin’s cloak woven from forest scraps, a leaf-bristling cloak that made the boy invisible to the wild creatures he, in his child’s pleasure, sought to caress.
When we skirted Saxon villages and camps, the Saxons threw dung at us. When we skirted British villages and camps, the Britons threw rocks and howled insults. In our private no man’s land, Arthur with Merlin’s soul-voice in his ears learned at last to speak.
He said, stuttering, “M-m-mother Merlin, am I to be k-k-king?”
“Why ask that?”
“What good is a p-p-prince if he won’t be king?”
I had to laugh. He was right, eternally right.
But I said, “In these harsh days of Saxon wars and frightened kings, that kind of logic can lose you your head.”
“But am I to be king?”
“No, you are a king.”
“So where’s my k-k-kingdom?”
“When you’re fifteen, you’ll find manhood, crown, and country, believe me.”
“Is that a merlin’s prophecy?” said the three-year-old.
I laughed again. “What elf taught you so much of the world in so few years that you can accuse me of prophecy?”
The boy was silent.
I saw that Arthur, a child after all, did not understand me.
I took the puzzled boy in my arms. “I’m a merlin without prophetic powers. I’m not a magician, conjurer, seer or trickster. I’m the merlin who lives life backward. My past is your future. That’s how I know what’s to come. I’ve lived it already. Or most of it.”
“You know I’m a king?”
“The whole Earth knows it too and waits for you.”
Arthur was startled. “Earth waits for an imbecile king?”
“Who calls you an imbecile?”
“My mother the queen.”
“Then it’s an imbecile Earth and happy to have you!”
The boy clutched to me. “You are my Mother Merlin,” he cried, “and my mother.”
I wept.
I had come into this merlin’s life from a childhood that was brutal and cold. I had lived a thousand years of love and hate. But only here, with an outlawed boy covered in leaves, did I feel love begin to draw out of me patience, courage, kindness, and honor.
I understood, from the depths of all my many other selves, that every child is a king or queen in the power it has to make any man or woman into a loving human being. Because a child’s love is freely granted. Like God’s grace, it is unearned, falling on the good and the bad, with the power to recreate everyone it touches.
Here was a child who was air-starved at birth and who may never have the cunning and power to become the king I had to make of him. A stuttering, frightened child condemned as an imbecile by his own mother.
But if this child did nothing more than love me and take my love in turn, then my thousand years of suffering quest were worth the cost.
I now knew that it is love that completes a merlin.
With Arthur’s loving kiss, I was made a whole creature.
I was happy at last. All the one hundred forty-four of me could have peace.
* * *
Oh, my, but the British memory is short. In the few months since Gurthrygen became king, the legend of Lady Merlin’s vast power and wealth diminished. The elders, conniving for their own advancement, forgot a disappeared rival and her fosterling, Prince Arthur. Children forgot my patched cloak they once shrieked happy to tug. Palace retainers held over from Uther’s time swept out my vacant apartments and gave them to Gurthrygen’s Spanish concubines. No one wanted to think of me again. Or of Arthur.
There were many other merlins in the land doing wonders. A merlin who is not there to make a miracle at holy seasons or cause the Christian priests to howl against him is not a merlin worth remembering. I was not worth remembrance.
There were, of course, strange and appetizing rumors about a thing called Merlin’s Well. There, if a man or woman were patient enough and fast, he or she could see treasure materialize at the bottom of a hole in the ground and steal a bit before old Lady Merlin came to carry it away. But it was months and years between manifestations and to steal from even a forgotten merlin was a frightful idea.
This night the camp at the treasure well was derelicts and battered survivors of the two years past Battle of Badon Hill where King Uther was slaughtered. They were peasants, failed knights, and strange antiques who may have been magicians or witches or slaves abandoned in the forest to die of old age, all of them huddled under tarps by meager fires, dreaming of golden wonders.
Five-year-old Arthur and I tramped out of the forest to the treasure well. I was dressed in my now-ragged twelve-part cloak, rank with worms and mud. Arthur was in his cloak of woven leaves.
Neither of us was armed but around us, stirring the long grass and sending night-nesting birds fluttering up, came two breezes like outriders of invisible power. The watchers by the pit ran away to stare at us from behind trees.
Arthur looked into the well. He spoke in his soul-voice, a voice that did not stutter, Is this it, Mother Merlin, all the Old World’s treasure for us?
There was nothing in the well.
“Better,” I said. “It’s the foundation stones of a city.”
What city?
“The city to be built by King Arthur. Look!”
At the pit’s bottom, a flash of gold and silver! Turquoise! Ruby! Rattle of coins from Carthage, Jerusalem, Mali, Atlantis!
Arthur jumped into the pit to drip pretty things between his fingers, the jewels and coins clattering on silver shields, golden urns, enameled shoes, inlaid swords. Arms and armor, toys, spoons, cups, the crops and whips of kings and pharaohs, of queens and empresses, exotic and rich.
Arthur chose for himself a child’s silver shield, mirror-sharp, and I saw in it an image of myself that was a stranger to me. In spirit, I was a thousand years old but in body I was now scarcely sixty. Less! And growing younger faster than Arthur aged. Soon I would youthen to the ignorant fourteen-year-old slave girl I had been when Fate captured me to become Merlin.
I’d lived a thousand years this way and that but now I had so little time left to do so much! Age was fading from me. My gray hair was speckling with red. The body that had been old but tough and lean as a worn boot sole was swelling with hot, new blood. Fresh color in my cheeks!
I cheered. Arthur started and stuttered.
The derelicts in the trees cried out in fright.
I jumped into the well, luxuriating in the richness of new life, dressing myself in plumes and silks until Arthur laughed his stuttering laugh, frightening away the derelicts now crowding the wellhead to gawk down at us swimming in treasure.
I climbed out of the well and fell laughing on the grass. It seemed sweeter-smelling grass now that I was sliding away from old age. I could hear spiders skitter between the blades. Worms dig through the earth. I saw the clouds in the night sky like the swirling faces of all the merlins who had preceded me. I loved them all!
I listened to the wind. Smelled the air. It was like sea salt and campfire smoke, cow dung, the smell of people bustling through a city street The breeze smelled of everything everywhere, of life’s richness, and it was wonderful.
I was joyously happy.
I dress
ed Arthur in a child’s toy armor and thought once more of an untested sword and an untested merlin who had been sent into this age to create the perfect king. How fragile was that hope! How frightening for the world that a reluctant merlin and a stuttering boy should carry this huge burden. How absurd. How perfect in its absurdity. How perfect.
Deep night, and it was time to begin my great work.
From among the treasures in the well, I chose for myself gaudy rich chains, bright fabrics, colored bows for my reddening hair. I dressed Arthur as my prince-heir in the green and white checks that Morgause had chosen as Lady Merlin’s arms.
I called out to the kings and queens, peasants and slaves, who had lived in this era and had died into Pluto’s hands but whom I had killed out of Hades. They came to me on horseback and wagons, bowing before the merlin who had stolen them from Death.
I raised the boy over my head and shouted, “I have him who will be Arthur!”
The risen dead cheered and battered their swords on their shields. They bundled up the well’s treasure, heaped it in their wagons and followed me through the night to the Brutus stone.
Excalibur was a sliver of white flashing from the stone through the overgrowth of vine and leaf.
I tore away the leaves clinging to the sword.
I said to Arthur in his soul’s voice, Draw the sword – prove you’re the king!
Arthur gripped the sword and pulled.
It would not move.
I was stunned. “Again!” I cried.
Excalibur refused to come at Arthur’s command.
I put my hand over Arthur’s on the grip.
“Pull, pull, all the gods damn you if you can’t draw the sword!” I shouted at the boy.
The sword would not draw.
Panicked rage filled me and I howled. A thousand years of misery preparing for this moment and this boy was not to be Arthur after all!
Even a day-old infant Arthur should draw the sword from the stone. Who was this child called “Arthur?” Where was the real Arthur? How could he be found?
Soundless lightning zipped across the rock and bit the sword. The risen princes and ladies quailed. I wrapped the terrified boy in his leafy cloak and watched the Moon rise and stop in its course.
Bats ceased to flit. Night birds stopped their calling. The rush of water beneath the earth became silent. The old moss and vines I’d ripped from the sword opened on the sheen of the White Druid.
He put out his hands to touch the boy in blessing.
“Old Monster!” I shouted at the Druid, filling with merlinic rage, “what fraud have you done me this time?”
I raised Arthur by his green and white checked jerkin, the boy wriggling and shouting.
“I gave you what you made,” said the Druid.
“This creature can’t draw the sword from the stone. He’s nothing! I could crush the life out of him now and it would mean nothing to the world.”
“Mother!” cried the terrified boy.
“Is he Arthur Pendragon?” said the Druid.
“That’s what he’s called.”
“Then he must be the larval Arthur.”
I looked at the boy I held at arm’s length for my sudden repulsion of him.
“The larval stage?” I said.
“There’s no magic in a child but what you teach him, Merlin. He’s legend only when he’s the perfect man who’ll become the perfect king. Now,” said the Druid, easing Arthur out of my hands and to safety on the rock, petting him to calm his fright, “he’s a boy named Arthur, not a king named Arthur.”
“He’s a miracle I must make?”
“You made the sword. You made yourself. Now make the king.”
“I thought it was born into him. I thought, by the gods, I thought keeping him alive to draw the sword was enough!”
“He’s nothing until you make him something,” said the Druid, his gleam fading into the moss again growing over the sword.
“You gave life to Excalibur when you gave it a quest,” whispered the moss. “Give life to Arthur. Give him his quest!”
The Moon shifted and night resumed its creep and bark, its creak, slap, dart of bat, slither of snake, slip of time.
Arthur clung to my knees and wept out his terror of me. I wept with him. We wept together until the terror left us.
* * *
Ten years later, in hot manic joy, I threw open the gates to my villa and invited in to a manhood feast the world that Lady Merlin had excluded while a boy grew to become a man of fifteen.
I stood in the vestibulum to welcome my guests, my peaked ear-points freshly gilded, the checkered shield with its ancient hideous faces and the gleaming sword Urien hung on the wall behind me, and shouted, “Welcome!” to my vassal kings and queens.
“Welcome!” to peasants and hermits.
“Welcome!” even to the road-wanderers, objects of rightful suspicion, carriers of plague and leprosy.
“Welcome!” to King Gurthrygen and his suspicious dukes.
“How much younger are you nowdays, Old Beast?” cried the king. “In another ten years, we’ll meet at the same age and you’ll be beautiful enough to concubine for me!”
“Welcome!” to Igerne, the queen mother and the king’s lover and also Gurthrygen’s queen, startled and jealous of my freshening youthfulness.
“Have you lost weight,” she said, “or is it just the false light?”
“Welcome!” to Princess Morgause, three years older than Arthur, beautiful and witchly.
“How could your hair have become more pendragonishly red than mine, Lady Merlin, or is that another charm-cast lie of yours?” she said. “Oh, of course it is.”
“Welcome!” to the toadying Christian and Druid priests and to the Gallic princes allied to the king against the Saxons, Picts, Scots, and, now, the Irish.
“Welcome!” I said, closing my villa gates to lock them all in with Arthur and me.
“Welcome!” I said at last to an end to the frights that had haunted me these ten years as I protected Arthur from his brother the king, from Igerne his mother, from the jealous elders and all other threats.
“Show me my son the prince. Which one is he?” Igerne said to me, eyeing my young pages and squires. She wore over her tunica a silver cross. Her holy crosses had grown larger as her queenly crimes had grown more monstrous.
I pointed to the most beautiful of my once-dead vassal princes and said, “That one there. The tallest and strongest, with Uther’s red hair.”
“I mark him,” Igerne said, gesturing to her entourage.
“Will you meet him?”
“I mothered him. Why should I meet him? Let’s to meat.”
Igerne led into the villa where I had staged the feast in Trojan style with men and women eating in separate rooms in the spirit of the Trojan Games I had called to celebrate Arthur’s coming of age. The Romans and Gauls kept to the separate order of the sexes but the barbaric Britons paid no attention to form and jumbled their sexes all together.
After Igerne had gone into the crowd, I looked across the feasting party to see the tall, red-haired prince I had designated as Arthur stumble and fall. Blood sprayed on the plaster wall behind him. My vassal had returned to the Prince of the Dead from whom I had stolen him.
I gestured to a lackey to scrub the wall and carry away the corpse with the queen’s knife stuck in its back.
The king was there with me now, already nearly drunk. “Lady Merlin!” Gurthrygen cried. “A dozen years without your company seems a dozen lifetimes. Come back to court, won’t you?”
“Why would you want me near you at court?”
“You wenched and rioted with the old man when you were a man in the last cycle. Do the same with me, even if you are a woman these days. I want to see a lady merlin tumbling in my bed with a bevy of court ladies.”
Gurthrygen vomited his drunk beside my boots.
“Besides,” he said, “I’m lord of just a few last fiefs of Britons squeezed between the Saxons an
d the Irish Sea and I need you.”
“You win battles. What more does a king need to do to be unsqueezed?”
“Yes, yes, I can win anything that takes winning with steel,” said Gurthrygen. “But how do I fight against those old men and women? The eldermen! The elderwomen! The dragon dukes and elvish duchesses! The passed-over princes from distant corners of my kingdom who command so few soldiers but so much prestige they can unseat a king if they band together. E pluribus unum, you know, or whatever it was my father used to say.”
Gurthrygen was weary and frightened.
“You’ve the queen,” I said. “She’s an army in herself.”
“My witch queen. My stepmother wife. My murderous bedmate. An old bitch more weary of war and politics than I. I wish to God she’d cut my throat and let me cut hers and we could drift into Hades and make love there forever and forget this awful world of kings and conniving.”
“You sound like your father on his last night before death,” I said.
“Do I?” said Gurthrygen, more frightened. “But have you heard the latest outrage from the council of elders? When they realized none of them would ever steal the throne from me, they thought of that old sword in the stone. Can you believe it?”
The king stopped, distracted by his own unhappy thoughts.
“What about the sword?” I said.
“It’s not rusted after all these years, do you know that? Overgrown with moss and lichen but not a speck of rust. Not even dust. Or spit. I spit on it and the gob won’t stick. It’s got magic or it’s Christ-given or it’s a Druid curse…”
“What do the elders want with the sword?”
“Greed and jealousy!” Gurthrygen cried. “They’ve poisoned the crown for anyone who’d want it by making no ruler safe on his throne.”
He clutched my party robe.
“It’s marvelous. I have to love the whole preposterous idea. They claim they’ve found the sword’s secret. Imagine that? Only one nominated by the Christian God or Fate or whatever else to be ruler of Britain can draw the sword from the stone!”