by Maples, Kit
“I heard it when I spoke it,” Arthur said.
“You named me in my soul-name. I was Cei to my mother. Only she and I know the word. You’ve made me your blood, Prince, and mine yours.”
Kay clutched and kissed Arthur.
What had happened here? Kay was alive with his throat cut. Arthur was a saint or a demon. Or a better trickster than I’d trained him to be. Was this the Arthur I had made?
Rufus whispered to me, “I’ve seen a thousand magician’s tricks but never one as convincing as that. How did he do it, Lady?”
Yes, how did he do it?
* * *
Three months later. Spring. A spring afternoon of shifting sun and cloud, passing rain, heat, steam in the forest depths. Arthur and I sprawled in ragged hunting clothes beneath a tree to drowse. Bedivere and Kay lounged in the saddles of their horses, listening for game. They spurred away after a roebuck, Kay nocking an arrow in his bowstring and Bedivere raising a spear. Rufus with his Romans was at Isca or Tintagel or points between, collecting Arthur’s first tax as lord of Cornwall. The army – grown now to nearly 6,000 men and women, almost a legion – was fed and rested, re-armed, re-armored, and ready to fight again.
A herald rode up, her helmet thrown back on her head, streaming sweat and a tangle of red hair. I knew her knife-scarred cheek but not her name. Her face was smeared with mud and campfire smoke. She was middle-aged, twenty-five, and too old for a herald’s hard-riding chores. But she knew all the geography of the Island and could speak all its civilized languages.
“Give me water,” she said, panting with exhaustion.
She jumped off her horse and landed on both feet, shield on one arm, helmet slung from the other. I handed her the waterskin.
The herald drank and said, “I read your arms, Lady Merlin,” – she gestured toward my checkered shield slung from my grazing horse – “so tell me where to find your master, Duke Arthur.”
“I’m Arthur,” Arthur said, slumped against a tree.
The herald was surprised. “Champion of Cornwall and just past seventeen?”
“Sobeit.”
“I’ve an urgent message from the king.”
“Recite it,” said Arthur.
“‘Gurthrygen, King-Emperor of the Britons, son of Uther Pendragon, to his brother, Arthur, Lord Duke of Cornwall, et cetera, et cetera’ – pardon the Latin shortcuts but the king is a wordy bastard.”
“Get on with your shortcuts,” said Arthur.
“‘My love to you, et cetera, and all the related formalities, et cetera’ – in many ways, ‘et cetera’ is the king’s favorite unspoken Latin.”
“So it hears,” I said, laughing at this herald’s endless urgent message.
“After the last ‘et cetera’ the king resumes with ‘I say in the plainest sorrow that the Queen Igerne, your mother and my stepmother-wife, is dead.’”
Arthur jumped up. “Tell us the rest of it, quick!”
“‘I call you back to me with your army to spearhead a great attack on the Saxons before they know the strategic loss I’ve suffered in the death of the Queen. For all the love you bear me, or should, and the unity of our blood from Uther, I call on you…’”
Arthur ran to his horse, leaped on, and hauled up shield and spear.
“Where’s the king?” he shouted at the herald.
“At Londinium when I left him,” she said.
Arthur blew his calling horn. A crash and clatter in the forest and the outrush of lifeguards. A replying horn halloo from Kay and Bedivere.
He shouted to me, “Go fetch the army!”
“Fetch the army? It’ll take a week to sober them for the saddle!”
“In a week we’ll parade through Ludd-town beating our drums with Saxons bones. Bring the army to follow my track.”
Arthur wheeled his horse and galloped northeast.
The herald gawked after him, saying, “Is he going to gallop across Cornwall?”
“All the way to Londinium,” I said.
“Then that’s a Pegasus he rides. At least I’ve met one real champion in Cornwall. Too bad he’s just a horse.”
The herald squatted by the campfire and said, “Give me to eat before we fall upon the Saxons and murder them all behind their steel shields.”
“You haven’t much hope for us?” I said.
“I’m a herald. I see everything. We’re doomed if a horse is our best champion.”
I stirred the coals and gave her meat. She ate like a beast fallen on prey.
I read the woman’s phalerae, torquis, and scars. They said this herald had been in five battles for Gurthrygen and won honors in each.
“Forget this nonsense,” the herald said, flicking the badges. “They’re for victories even more incompetent than anything old Pyrrhus won.”
She finished the meat and ate some fowl, delicately wiping finger grease on the grass between courses.
“I want a champion to serve, Lady Merlin. You know this Arthur?”
“I know him.”
“I’ve heard all this nonsense he’ll remake the world into a ‘camelot.’ But he doesn’t look to me as tall as a hero ought to be. He’s thin, beardless, and impulsive. More boy than man. Not nearly so impressive as his fame.”
“Does he have fame?” I said.
“He always had fame. If for no other reason than the king and queen wanted to kill him. Anything like his father?”
“He wants to be.”
“Uther’s impulses in war and love cost us half of Britain. I suppose that’s ambition enough to expect from a boy. But when does he grow up?”
“Who are you to be this rude about my lord?” I said, irritated.
“He can’t draw the sword from the stone. I’ll be as rude as I want.”
I laughed. “You open your mouth and whatever you please comes out. You’ve courage or you’re an idiot.”
“A courageous idiot adrift in the wrong world.”
“Who are you?”
“Percival.”
“But that’s a man’s name.”
“Only in the Latin pronunciation.”
“You’ve also a certain fame, even here in Cornwall,” I said.
“I cut off heads easily enough but what’s that?”
“The skill of a champion.”
She said, gloomy, “I’m a champion who needs a champion or I’m nothing.”
“Let yours be Arthur.”
Percival looked down the forest track where Arthur had ridden into a freshening evening. “What’s in his mind?”
“To be king.”
“Everyone wants to be a king. That’s a cheap and useless ambition.”
Percival was unhappy. She threw down the bone she had been breaking to suck out the marrow. She held out her hands to a slave to wipe off the grease. She was a woman of fine etiquette.
“What more ambition should he have?” I said.
“To be king of this!” said Percival, slapping her breastplate. “Lord of this!” She slapped her sword in its scabbard. “Prince of his own liver of thought. Master of the heart that heats and cools his spirit. Lord of himself.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, disappointed. “You’re more of a child than Arthur.”
Percival drew her dagger and said from across the campfire, “Is that irony or insult, Lady? I’ve none of the finer senses, which is why I can do the things I do.”
“Cut off heads?”
“Stab holes in those who sneer at me.”
“Then the dour Bishop of York would be pleased to enroll you as a good Christian knight.”
“I certainly am that,” she said, still holding the dagger. “Or was that more irony?”
“A Christian knight? No family gods, no household images? Just the Hero Jesu and that’s all for you?”
“Is this insult?”
“No, surprise. I haven’t met a true one-godder since I was converted by Igerne for Arthur’s sake. More or less converted. I suppose you want to be first to see the invis
ible Holy Grail?”
“I might not stab holes in you, after all.”
“Why not?”
“Because you make me want to laugh at myself, I’m such a pompous ass!”
She tried to laugh. It didn’t work.
“Ah, well,” Percival said, putting away her dagger. “You almost made a miracle there. Are you really the old hag Merlin who lives backwards?”
“I’m less a merlin every day, damn me.”
“I never realized old could be so young.”
“And getting younger and more forgetful every day,” I said. “That’s why I need to surround Arthur with the best of knights. I need you.”
“You know I can’t tell irony from insult, right?”
I put my hand into the fire, reaching across to her.
“Arthur has to be your champion,” I said, “if you’re to make anything of yourself in this life cycle. Join us.”
“Is that what you see in my future, Merlin?”
“It’s the future for us all.”
She clutched my hand in the flame.
We held together until our skin sizzled.
“Now,” Percival said, “let’s go find Arthur’s bought army and see if it can fight Saxons as well as it can bribe Cornishmen.”
* * *
After three wandering weeks, Arthur, led by Percival the herald, with me and the army in tow, found the king at Kaerlindcoit, south of York, and found his new queen. She was a Saxon.
The woman was immense and immensely blonde, fed fat on the bones of Britons, I presumed. She was immensely proud and refused to speak in public any but her gabbling Saxon language. Long-braided. Heavily breastplated, the metal molded to fit gigantic breasts. She towered over the tall Gurthrygen, sneering down at the Britons around him, shouting barbaric oaths no one could understand.
“Son, brother, what?” she demanded in her limited British when she saw Arthur.
“Brother,” Gurthrygen said to her. His voice was weak and he was haggard, worn thin by thirteen years of kingship and by howling after his queen’s Saxon cousins ravaging his country.
She stroked Arthur’s face as a cannibal assessing a human meal.
“No beard!” she cried.
Then she kissed Arthur on the mouth in the British style but made it an enveloping, breath-sucking, cannibal kiss.
“Keep!” she cried to her husband.
“Lord God, what can that mean?” Gurthrygen said to me.
“Keep Arthur as your first duke, King,” I said, translating the word.
Rufus, Bedivere, Kay, and Percival were beside me, ready to draw blades and stab away from Arthur this monster kissing queen.
“He’ll be that,” said the king, “if he’s as good conquering Saxons as Cornish rabble.”
Arthur said to his brother, “What in Hell’s name are you doing with a paynim queen?”
“She’s suddenly a Christian,” Gurthrygen said, “or so the Bishop of York claims. He made her one somehow.”
“Miracles are easy,” said the gray-faced Bishop Dunwallo of York, rattling his three metal crucifixes, “when the alternative is to be skewered on the queen’s spear.” He shivered remembering the moment.
“But who is she?” Arthur said to the king.
“They call her ‘Ronwen’ in their filthy language, which can pass for her name. But, by Jesu, she’s herself an army against the Saxons…”
“But she’s one of them!”
“There are good Saxons and there are bad Saxons, Brother…”
“But they’re all Saxons,” said Arthur.
Gurthrygen laughed and shook Arthur, rattling his brother’s armor. The sick king was still powerful enough to shake a man like a boy, the old ax-swinging muscle hard on the bone.
“Little Brother, my Saxons will whip their Saxons. She’s the sister of Horst, their self-proclaimed chief duke or some such. While you dallied in Cornwall, I beat the Picts. I drove them into Scots-land. Horst’s Saxons did my fighting and dying for me there. We’re all family now.”
“In payment, you gave them Kent,” said Percival.
“What’s Kent?” said the king. “They would’ve taken it anyway. These Saxons are very Roman that way.”
“But they built a castle there,” said Rufus.
“They call it ‘Castrum Corrigiae,’” said Gurthrygen. “How these barbarians love that Latin sound! ‘Kaercauei’ is its proper name.”
“To have a castle is to command a country, Brother,” Arthur said. “You’ve thrown away another piece of what little remains to Britain.”
Gurthrygen subsided weakly onto his throne, Ronwen watching him closely.
“Let their damned longships scrape any coast and it’s theirs, don’t you know?” said the king. “When the blood brothers Horst and Hengist first put their dirty Saxon toes in Kentish surf, they owned it. I confirmed what I couldn’t change.”
“Is that kingship?” cried Arthur.
“It is these days. It’s called ‘survival.’”
Ronwen and her Saxon retinue, drinking horns in hand, shouted, “Laverd king, was heil!”
“Good God, what’s that mean?” said Arthur.
“‘Lord king, good health,’” said Gurthrygen. “A sweet sentiment for a dying man. They shout it every time they take their filthy beer.”
The king shouted back at the Saxons, “Was heil to you, you silly murdering farts!”
Ronwen kissed the king, leaving beer foam on his cheek. She shouted to her Saxons, “Drinc heil!” and drank off her horn.
“Was heil!” shouted more Saxons, going for the next round.
Ronwen pulled Arthur aside by his hair and mouth-kissed him again. “Meet later! Kiss later! Love later!” she said to him.
“Good God,” said Arthur.
Gurthrygen said, in a desperation I’d never before heard from a British king, “It’s York, Brother. Gone! The other damned Saxons took it.”
He rapped his knuckles on the three huge metal crucifixes Dunwallo wore like three holy breastplates and said, “They left old Dunwallo without his see. ‘Dunwallo the Seatless,’ we call him now.”
The Bishop rattled his crucifixes in protest.
“He ran like a dog when Hengist and his barbarians climbed over the walls of his palace,” said the king, laughing.
Dunwallo rattled his crucifixes in fury.
“This Hengist, King,” I said, “is blood brother to your wife’s brother?”
“The same. Making our wars in the nature of a family feud since I, a true Christian prince, can’t also marry Hengist’s sister, though I’d like to as she’s small and shapely and better with a war club than I, but I haven’t another Kent to give away to buy her.”
“Promise them Ireland, that’s cheap enough,” I said. “You don’t own it and can’t give it away and they’re all barbarians over there, anyway.”
Gurthrygen laughed. “The Saxons have promised me to Ireland. It’s a world full of promises.”
Arthur and I stamped our boots free of mud before we followed the king into the town-house that was his makeshift royal hall in Kaerlindcoit.
“What do you want me to do for you, Brother?” Arthur said to the king.
“Rest your army a few days. Soothe their tired feet. Feed them. Resting and feeding are half of good generalship. I’ve an army of four thousand besieging York. Go up there, join them, take York from Hengist. My four and your six thousand ought to do it, even if you have to storm the walls. We’ll worry about Colgrin when we must.”
“Who’s Colgrin?”
“Ah, yes. You’ve been out west, Arthur. Nobody out there bothers to pass on the news. Colgrin is their over-duke or king, however you translate their Saxon gabble.”
Gurthrygen slumped into the only chair in the room. His Spanish whores brought him cold water. He rubbed it into the black sacks of weariness around his eyes. He gestured to Arthur’s war band and his own, his retainers, his pet Romans, all those already crowded into the little room,
to crowd nearer.
He said from his simple, borrowed chair as though he said it from a throne, “Arthur, Brother, from York battle onward you are my dux bellorum and first general of the kingdom. You are my nominee for election to the throne if I die too soon.”
Dunwallo mumbled a prayer and we all shouted, “Sobeit!”
Arthur leaned down for Gurthrygen’s kiss.
“Of course,” said the king, “you must ratify the title in drawing that sword stuck in the Brutus stone.”
The king’s war band jeered. Arthur’s cheered. But it was left to me to ask the king the critical questions:
“Where’s your brother-in-law Horst?”
“In Scots-land, killing blue-faces. That’s as far as I could send him from York.”
“Where’s Colgrin?”
“On his way from Saxonia. In longships. With a scant thirty thousand warriors.”
“Thirty thousand?” I cried. “The Island will sink under all their weight!”
“Wrong,” said the king, “because you’ll think of something, Lady Merlin.”
Chapter 6 – Kaerlindcoit
In the Julian Year 5209 and of Our Lord 496
It was hora prima before the six thousand warriors of Arthur’s army of Cornwall began their straggle up the road to York, dragging their spears in the dust, kicking their pack animals, groaning out their hangovers, passing through the cloudy incense of the seatless Bishop of York and beneath the crosses that lined the road with the writhing bodies of deserters from the king’s army that already had gone this way.
There but for the grace of God! each warrior thought.
Arthur, driving them on with slaps from the flat of his sword, his war band howling around the army like dogs driving sheep, said to me, “Aristotle was right. Nothing in Nature moves unless it’s pushed. Drive them on, Mother. On, on!”
We tramped through sun and rain, and sun again and rain again, until the van halted for midday meal. About the time the middle of the army arrived where the van had made its meat fires and crap holes, the van had moved on. The center burned its meat over the coals the van had left. Then the center moved on and the tail used the same fires. The army inch-wormed this way to York.