The Sword and The Quest: Lady Merlin's Saga (Epic Fantasy)

by Maples, Kit

  “This island is too light to hold ten legions of giants like yourself,” said Arthur. “You better get off it before we all sink into the sea.”

  “I like that!” said the herald, laughing.

  “Oh, he means just a tenth that number, Duke,” said Bedivere to Arthur, “as everyone knows Saxons can’t count past fingers and toes.”

  “Even better!” The herald laughed again.

  “Who else do you promise us for sport?” said Kay.

  No more laughter from the Saxon.

  He said, in a different and strained voice, “Colgrin comes.”

  “Who or what is ‘Colgrin?’” said Percival.

  The herald said, “You all think yourselves the mighty, Saxon-killing princes and princesses of Britain, don’t you? But I tell you are about to be displaced. We all are about to be displaced. Colgrin comes next.”

  “Is he another of those Saxon gods that never learned to wash their own rumps?” cried Bedivere, laughing.

  “Nearly that,” said the herald, grimly.

  Arthur said, “What’s his title?”

  “What title can you give the thing he is?” said the Saxon. “It’s Colgrin with his hundred-thousands who will sweep this beautiful land clean of you pitiful lumps and probably clean of us, too, and give it over to his own strange race of humans.”

  The Saxon gazed around at the silent Britons.

  “No more jokes?” he asked. “Have I converted you to terror? Oh, yes, I nearly forgot to give you our terms.”

  The herald rose up in his saddle to make this speech formal. He straightened the blue silk hiding the badge on his breastplate

  “Duke Horst says, ‘To keep us from killing you all, give us a little piece of land.’”

  “How little?” said Arthur.

  “Humber to Caithness with York.”

  “You’ve the southeast of what was our grandfathers’ kingdom,” said Arthur, “and now you want the northeast, too?”

  “‘Yes,’ says Duke Horst, ‘and then we can all be Britons together and stand against Colgrin.’”

  “Tell your duke he can have the whole Island when he drives a spear through each of our hearts!”

  “I told him you’d say that. You gaudy-mouthed, mother-cagers couldn’t say less. Too bad. Now Colgrin will kill us all.”

  The Saxon saluted Arthur with his spear. “Good battle to you, Duke!”

  He yanked off the blue silk over his breastplate. There were his arms naming him Duke Horst.

  He spun his horse around and bolted across the field toward his army.

  “Give me a bow!” Arthur shouted.

  Chapter 8 – The Saxon Hordes

  Arthur nocked a first arrow and fired at Horst, the Saxon army cheering their duke’s galloping escape from us. Before the first arrow made half the distance to Horst, Arthur had fired a second and a third. Fifteen arrows in the minute Horst galloped through the mud, the arrows falling around him like Thor’s bolts. Horst whacked them away with his sword, caught them on his shield, laughed to hear them bang off his armor. Until four of them drove one after the other into his horse, riveting the animal from head to tail, and the giant Saxon went down over his thrashing, dying mount.

  But Horst had reached his vanguard. The Saxons closed around their prince, raising their shields in the Turtle to save him from Arthur’s arrow-rain.

  Rufus on the walls of York began firing arrows and stones into the flank of the advancing Saxons, killing them in dozens as the great stones bounced and ricocheted among them.

  Bedivere shouted for the cavalry and took them howling – feathers whipping, spear points glittering – around the far flank of the Saxons to make Mark Antony’s famous pincer.

  Arthur, Kay, Percival, and Lucan led the foot warriors forward to cut out the heart of the Saxon force pinched by Bedivere.

  Arthur ran hauling my wheeled cage, shouting encouragement to his warriors, arrows falling around him and shielding them off, spears falling around him and cutting them apart in flight, cutting and stabbing yellow-haired giants until they swirled around him in a ghastly dying dance, spilling their guts on his boots, heads rolling across his path, their scalps torn off and flung into the air for any Briton to staple to his shield.

  I in my cage dodged arrows and sword blows until Lucan was beside me, fighting behind the glass shield.

  I said, “Lucan, give me a sword! Let me die with steel in my hands!”

  Lucan sliced the arm off a Saxon and flung to me the dead hand holding the single-edged scramasax.

  “Let the slaughter begin!” I shouted, happy war-craze coming over me.

  I fought Saxons through the bars of my cage as I was dragged along behind Arthur, me collecting axes and spears, shield, helmet, breastplate until I was armed and dressed and looked like a Saxon in my cage and Britons attacked me, too, and I fought them off through cage bars.

  Lucan and I fought side-by-side with the same fury we had, in a future life cycle, fought one another.

  Rufus with his Romans rode through the melee, swinging a massive battle ax made for cutting down Saxons, shielding off leaping giants.

  He shouted to Arthur, “The army’s spent! We shouldn’t have accepted a second battle today!”

  “We’ve begun, we’ll finish!” cried Arthur.

  “Then fall back on the city, Duke! Take siege to heal our bruises!”

  Arthur pointed across the field. “How do I fall back through that?”

  The bulk of the Saxon army had wandered between Arthur and York.

  To the north, the Orkney army had drawn up out of arrow range to watch and wait, ready to fall on whichever army survived and so claim York for Orkney.

  Somewhere toward the coast were the sixty thousand, or six thousand, men and women of Dukes Cheldric and Baldaf, promising a third great battle today.

  “We’re winning glory today, Arthur!” Bedivere cried, wading through combat, swinging his mace one-handed.

  “Glory is victory,” Percival said from her saddle, arrows clattering on her shield, pinning it, until the weight of them was too much. She threw off the shield and called to a slave for a fresh target.

  Rufus said, “Victory for Britain is survival of this army, Duke. Retreat to York!”

  Kay, his body bruised and his armor battered, weary, leaned on his sword and cried, “Gurthrygen never made a fight like this, Arthur! You’re the truer son of Uther. Let me hail you Pendragon!”

  Kay saluted with his sword and fainted with exhaustion into the mud.

  Rufus said, “There’s my argument, Arthur.”

  Arthur shouted to his calling horns, “Fall back on York! Fall back!”

  The horns blew until the battle-frenzied Britons understood them and began a grudging retreat to the city walls.

  It was then, with the Saxons caught between the wings of the British army and with Arthur’s vanguard thrust deep into the Saxon middle, that Horst, flapping his blue silk, turned away his war horse and began the stampede of Saxons, Scots, and Picts back into the forest from which they had come.

  The Britons stopped their retreat to the city, cheered, and ran after the Saxons.

  Rufus shouted, “Fall back! Back! It’s a fraud!”

  Arthur, hauling my cage, said, “We’ll double their trick by killing them with their backs turned!”

  He ran ahead, dragging the cage, swinging his sword to shatter the shields the Saxons had swung over their backs.

  He ran into the forest and met another enemy – the dark. In the forest gloom, the Saxons in their natural environment turned on the Britons and slaughtered them, heaving their corpses up into the tree tops, breaking their shields around tree trunks, trampling their broken weapons into the roots.

  With a wild shout the Saxons hurled Arthur and his army out of the forest, Britons groveling in surprise in the bloody mud, Arthur railing at them, tramping around their lines hauling my cage, slapping them into order, his war band doing the same, until I said, “Burn them.”
<
br />   “Are you still alive in there?” Arthur cried, not turning to see me.

  “Fire the woods,” I said. “Burn them all!”

  Arthur slapped his sword on the cage. “Silence, dead woman!” But he called to his war band, “Torch the woods!”

  Flames rose up like a new York of yellower walls, towered with black smoke, red sparks for banners.

  Out of the crack and fall of trees came the satisfying screams of burning Saxons. They ran out, helmets melting down their faces, bodies on fire, feet blackened. Arthur’s army killed them, singing and jeering, drinking ale and wine, calling for meat and bread, the Saxon-raped women of York coming out to cheer on the fire and drive their knives into the wounded.

  In the north, the banners of the Orkney army dipped shuddering at the sight. The Orkneymen drew away across the hills, homeward, trembling with horror at what they had seen Arthur do to his enemies.

  * * *

  Nightfall. Was it night already?

  The forest was burnt back. Stubs of trees hung with the skeletons of Saxon giants. The promised arrival of the sixty thousand, or six thousand or six, under Cheldric and Baldaf was still just a promise.

  The Britons were exhausted and happily drunk. York was saved.

  Arthur, worn and chilled with the day’s sweats and still hauling my cage, kicked through the ashes to search for the big bones of Duke Horst.

  Behind a last wall of flame they saw too many Saxons on horseback and foot with good arms and armor, unmailed to move faster, run out of the forest toward the south, the blue-silk banner of Duke Horst in their lead, Horst himself riding a fresh, spark-spitting, iron-hooved war horse.

  He turned to Arthur across the flames that separated them and fired Arthur a salute – the Roman insult with the middle finger – and rode south.

  Arthur shouted in fury.

  Rufus said, wearily, “We have to march again.”

  Arthur in his rage screamed, “You told me before to fall back! Now the army’s dead tired and dead drunk and it must fall back on York but you say go on. Are you insane, Roman?”

  “What I said an hour ago was in another age, Arthur. Horst moves south. He’s running for Kaerlindcoit.”

  “Gurthrygen’s there with his army. He can keep the town.”

  “The king’s ‘army’ is two thousand warriors. Horst has the force to take the city and the king and Britain in his first charge. We have to march south.”

  Arthur leaned heavily on his shield furred with broken arrow shafts. He said, in the voice of exhaustion, “Am I to fight thirteen battles before the week’s out?”

  “You may have to if you want to be king of anything still called ‘Britain.’”

  Bedivere, Kay, Percival, and the boy Lucan rode up with a war horse for Arthur.

  “Unchain yourself,” Bedivere said to him. “Leave the cage.”

  “No,” said Arthur, “we’re chained together until one of us dies. Lucan, stay here. Hold the city.”

  Lucan saluted the duke and me in my cage and, glass shield over his back, rode out of the heaped ashes to call the remnants of his father’s army back to York.

  Arthur turned his war horse south, tugging my wheeled cage behind. “To Kaerlindcoit,” he said. “And more battle.”

  Our fight-battered army, drunk and exhausted, stumbled south through the night, following the jeers and taunts of the rearguard of the Saxon army ahead of us marching toward Kaerlindcoit.

  * * *

  “Great Jesu, what’ve they done?” cried Kay, waking me in my cage.

  It was not dawn but it looked like dawn. The fourth watch of the night. The southern sky as bright as though the sun had chosen to rise there.

  Scouts came out of the trees to shout, “They’ve torched the city, Duke Arthur! Horst burned the king as you burned Horst!”

  Arthur, dragging my cage, galloped into the town. It was a jumble of burnt timbers, smoke-stinking wattle, and the crack-bang of heat-shattered roof tiles. The dead were everywhere – Saxons thrown down beside Britons, women and children, boy-warriors, girl-warriors. How had Horst done so much horror with Arthur at his heels?

  “Stand and name yourself!” a warrior cried, rising from an ash heap, tears streaking through to the blood on his cheeks.

  The warrior held up the emerald-studded greatsword Uther had stolen from an Irish king, its gilt blade honed through to the steel. He stood ready to fight Arthur’s army single-handed. But the language he had used was our own.

  “Are you Briton or Saxon?” Arthur said, hauling out his sword. “Name yourself and your tribe!”

  “Gurthrygen the King. Who or what are you?”

  Arthur wiped battle mire from his own face. “Arthur your brother!” he cried.

  He tried to leap from his saddle with shield and sword to land on his feet but in his exhaustion fell floundering at the king’s feet, dragging my cage with him.

  “Oh, get up, you fool.” Gurthrygen whacked Arthur upright with the flat of his sword. “Is caging them up how you keep your war band loyal?” He slapped his blade on my cage.

  “My enemy-foster mother,” said Arthur, “who wants to kill my son.”

  “Our mother-queen Igerne killed most of her sons. Why shouldn’t Lady Merlin kill a few grandsons? What other merry men and women do you bring me?”

  “The army of the Britons, the victors of York.”

  Five hundred warriors straggled out of the dawn gloom, each as bedraggled and ash-faced as Gurthrygen.

  “Is this ruination my army?” The king was astonished and horrified.

  “Bedivere, where’s the army?” Arthur cried.

  “This is it, Duke, five centuries of us and lucky to have so many standing.”

  “What of my six thousand?” said Gurthrygen.

  “Some left wounded with Lucan at York, King,” said Bedivere. “Two thousand more straggling through the forest behind us.”

  Kay said, “I counted more hundreds fleeing away home after the first battle to avoid the second. Others fled from the second to avoid this third.”

  Percival, weaving in her saddle from exhaustion, said in her best herald’s voice, “We may be few, King and Duke, but we are the hard nub of the Island, proud and victorious...”

  She fell out of her saddle and snored in the mud.

  Gurthrygen used his boot to turn Percival’s face out of the slime so she would not drown.

  The king turned limping through ruined Kaerlindcoit, using the Irish sword as a crutch. “The Saxons torched the villas, the old Legionary fortress, the cathedral, such as it was, a pathetic thing, and rode through the flames like salamanders rejuvenating, shouting, ‘Thus Arthur burned us, so we burn Gurthrygen!’ Is that what you did, Brother, you burnt him? Good for you!”

  Gurthrygen helped Arthur haul along my wheeled cage. “I’ve decided to give Horst the first ministership of the kingdom anyway.”

  “For killing my thousands?” cried Arthur.

  “For survival,” said the king. “The first rule of kingship.”

  We came to the last line of town rubble where the king’s war band sprawled unmoving in the dirt like living dead. Beyond were farm fields churned to mud by horse hooves. Beyond that, a glitter of spear points moved hectic in the far trees. Another Saxon army readying to fight us.

  The king said to his calling horns, “Sound. Call in Duke Horst.”

  Arthur cried, “Is this surrender?”

  “It’s survival. Didn’t I tell you that? Horst wants Britain from Humber to Caithness and I’ll give it to him. If I don’t end this fighting before seeding-time, the whole North will starve. I want him my ally against the even wilder Saxons out there.”

  “But I’ve beaten him! Let me lead my five hundred against him and I’ll scorch his bones again to prove it!”

  Arthur shouted for his hagard’s army to assemble around him.

  “Look there.” Gurthrygen pointed to the southeast and another glitter of spear points. Another army marching in good order, a S
axon army that had some of Roman good order in it.

  Arthur’s warriors cried out in surprise and fright.

  “There come Cheldric and Baldaf with six thousand or maybe sixty thousand fresh fighters,” said the king.

  I spoke from my cage: “They’re marching north.”

  Kay smelled the air. “You’re right, Lady, they’re not stopping here.”

  The king leaned heavily on his gilt Irish sword. “They’re going north to occupy Humber to Caithness and clear it of Scots and Picts. We can thank them for that, for narrowing our list of enemies to just the damned Saxons.”

  “So I did break the Saxon power at York,” Arthur said. “Why else would they march by like sheep, no banners, no threats?”

  “Because down there, coming up from the Narrow Sea, is another invader fresher than these Saxons.”

  “King Hoel!” said Kay. “With his Brittany-men.”

  Gurthrygen said, “I’m going to have to give him a piece of the Island, too.”

  “Not my Cornwall?” said Arthur.

  “That’s what he wants.”

  “Let him fight me to take it!”

  “Go fight him,” said the king. “Your five centuries against his five legions.”

  “Is that what he has?”

  “It is, and King Hoel can count better than the Saxons.”

  “How far away is he?” said Bedivere.

  “Just far enough to let the Saxons slaughter us so he can take the Island with only them to fight. He’s a canny old monster who won’t spend a coin or a life more than he must to buy what he wants.”

  Horst with his blue silk flag and his war band rode out of the trees toward us, their horses’ hooves kicking up clods of mud. They stopped mid-field and shouted across for Arthur.

  Kay said, surprised, “He calls to fight Arthur but not the king?”

  “I can’t fight him,” said Gurthrygen, “he’s my damned brother-in-law.”

  The king sat in a chair brought him by his Spanish concubines.

  Gurthrygen said, “Go out there, Brother, as my champion. Take your war band. Kill the bastard. Then I don’t have to make him my chief minister. I’ll give you the job. I’ll give you a wife, too. A niece out of King Hoel’s Brittany. They’re all fat and pretty and ready with a sword. That way I’ll make all my enemies my brothers and maybe Britain will survive.”