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

by Maples, Kit

  * * *

  Arthur, pulling me in my cage, rode with his war band across the field to meet Duke Horst. The Saxons were as battered as we, dressed in bent and scabbed armor, oozing wounds, groaning for their bruises.

  Horst had brushed the muck from his braids, beard, and shrubby eyebrows and had made his yellow head a magnificence above dented breastplate splotched green and red. But his shield arm trembled with its black bruises.

  Behind him across the field, two thousand weary Saxons watched silent, unhappy for more battle, hoping this fight among champions would bring peace, at least in this corner of the Island. Behind us, five hundred tattered Britons watched and hoped the same.

  Horst said to Arthur, in Latin, “I see you dress your caged mother like a pagan, in the bloody rags of her slaughtered enemies. What fright next from you awful Britons?”

  I, in the Saxon armor I had taken from those I killed at York, clattered my scramasax on the iron bars and said, “Let me ought and I’ll cut your throat, Saxon swine!”

  “I don’t take challenges from slaves or magicians,” said Horst.

  “Nor do I allow my prisoners to challenge knights,” said Arthur. He rattled my chain for silence.

  Horst said, “I’ve lost my blood brother Hengist.”

  “Killed, I hope, on a British spear point?” said Arthur.

  “No, merely lost. I’ve lost him before. He crawls home eventually. You wouldn’t have seen him since York?”

  “To see him would be to cut out his soul.”

  “How gentle is Latin in the mouth of a Briton!”

  Horst eased the armor that pinched his bruised shield arm and grunted.

  “Still, Hengist is my blood brother. Unlike you barbarians, I’m obliged to inquire about my relations. How is my sister Ronwen, your newest queen?”

  “When I last saw her, she offered me a kingdom,” said Arthur.

  Horst was startled. “Which one?”

  “This one.”

  Horst stared off across the muddy field toward the glittering spear points of Baldaf and Cheldric’s army marching north to take peaceful possession of all the land Horst and Hengist had fought to take for themselves.

  “If I could marry my sister, I would,” he said. “She can make any man king of anything. She’s all that’s holding up your pathetic Gurthrygen. But it’s forbidden, isn’t it? So bitterly limiting to be a Christian.”

  “You’re a Christian?” said Arthur, startled.

  “The world is suddenly so full of them it seemed best for all of us” – Horst waved back toward his army peeking out of the trees – “to become Christian. Why antagonize strange gods? Thor understands that religion is politics and politics is war and there are plenty of gods for everyone. It’s the age we live in.”

  Arthur said, “You talk like my father.”

  “Uther Pendragon had a Saxon heart. That made him a hard man for us to defeat in battle.”

  Horst crossed himself in Uther’s memory and spat to the west wind.

  Arthur said, “Shall we fight?”

  “I suppose we must.”

  “Let me out of this cage, Arthur,” I said. “Don’t let them kill me in a box.”

  Horst said to Arthur, “She is your mother, and very beautiful and young. Let her die with a sword in her hand.”

  “Only as a courtesy to you,” Arthur said.

  He kicked open the gate on my cage.

  “To repay your courtesy,” Horst said, “I’ll mark you for my war band. Hear me!” he shouted to his war band. “Kill Arthur first! No toying with him. Make it quick. Save the merlin alive for me.”

  The two war bands backed their horses away from the meeting, leaving me alone in the mud by my cage in the center of the field. They wheeled horses and galloped at each other, shouting war cries, flinging spears, and firing arrows. The two war bands smashed together, spilling horse brains and hacking off helmets and heads.

  I was in the middle of it all, spears and arrows tacking into the mud around me, bodies falling, horses stampeding. I felt hot and young and greedy for everything. I felt myself filling with a surging hunger to fight! To win!

  I grabbed up a Saxon shield and stalked across the mud in front of Arthur’s war horse, slaughtering Saxons, cutting Arthur’s path to Horst, cutting apart Horst’s war band, flinging heads up into the air and sending arms still clutching axes whip-whip-whipping over the battlefield.

  Arthur’s horse went down and I pulled Arthur out of the mud and sprawled bodies. We cut through to Horst with his double-edged battle ax. We howled and raised shields to take his blow and counterblow, our shields splintering in our faces.

  Horst’s ax broke our swords and chopped the helmets from our heads. He howled his barbaric war cry as he raised his weapon for one-blow-kills-two.

  I was beaten. Arthur was beaten. We were going to die.

  * * *

  The stink of dead horses and dying men woke me. Blackness. Blood seeping past my face. Mud closed my eyes. I moved to wipe it away and could not. Mud pinned me. I was covered in mud. Buried in it! A slim pocket of air to breathe and that polluted with the stench of battle-kills.

  I struggled to draw arms under my chest and to push up out of the mire. I broke free and saw the curving riot of good British cavalry charging through the Saxon horde, kicking out streams of mud that buried warriors the cavalry did not cut down.

  The sky burst with rain making the day gloom toward night.

  Why wasn’t I dead. What had happened? Was Arthur alive?

  I pulled myself out of the mud. I grabbed a sword and used it for shovel to turn over the mire. I uncovered Saxons half-dead and finished them. Found drowning horses and pulled them free. Yanked up a fragment of blue silk and thought it Horst’s banner and drove the blade into the muck hoping to spear a duke’s vitals. Just mud.

  I threw aside the blade and with my hands swam digging through the fly-hopping mire until I found Arthur and pulled him free, his broken sword in his hand, gasping and sucking air.

  Arthur gawked across the field at the careening cavalrymen and their huge horses, gleaming armor undented, swinging the battle back toward the ashes of Kaerlindcoit.

  “What army’s that?” he cried. “What’s happened?”

  “Those big mounts are Breton-bred,” I said. “It’s King Hoel’s army.”

  “Have we him to fight, too? Give me another sword!”

  “Your fight’s over,” I said. “Horst beat us. King Hoel beat us both and saved our lives…”

  “No fight’s over until I’ve won it. Bedivere! Kay!”

  Bedivere and Kay limped across a bridge of corpses. They were battered and bleeding. Their weapons and armor wrecked. Blood oozed from Bedivere’s arm stub.

  They gazed at Arthur in the mud with changed faces, as men who no longer believed in a hero.

  I said to them, “Bring him.”

  They hauled Arthur from the mud, boots popping free, and dragged him toward the trees.

  “What forest’s this?” said Bedivere.

  “Caledon,” I said.

  “Caledon rages with haunts,” Kay whispered. “Famous even in Cornwall!”

  Bedivere drew his dagger to threaten invisible spirits.

  They threw Arthur on the forest floor. They weren’t gentle about it.

  The sound of battle was muted in here. Stray arrows rattled through tree tops and broke, their bits fluttering down past us.

  The two knights stared at their duke as men who wished they had another master.

  Arthur put his muddy hands to his face and wept. “Have I lost everything?”

  “You lost enough,” said Bedivere. “Four thousand of my Cornishmen in two days’ fighting!”

  Bedivere stripped off Arthur’s armor and washed him with spit and rain.

  Kay pulled off his own armor to prepare for what we would have to do next – run.

  I threw my ruined Saxon armor into dead leaves. “What’s left of the army? Did they fall back on Ka
erlindcoit for Gurthrygen to use them?”

  “None left standing after King Hoel’s cavalry rode us all down, Saxon and Briton alike,” said Bedivere.

  “There were centuries more still drifting down from York,” said Kay. “Gurthrygen must’ve gathered them to fight for the town.”

  I slumped down against the root of a great tree. So much had gone wrong so fast. How was I to put it all together again with no memory of future to know what to do?

  This Arthur was a hero, yes, but like a Greek hero, without the sense to know anything but brawling.

  He was no general. He had no brains for strategy or calculation. He couldn’t weigh risk and reward. He had wasted and destroyed the military strength of the Island. He was not the Arthur to make Camelot. His failure would send me back to the misery of trying this all over again.

  Great gods, how could I make him the Arthur I had to have?

  I wanted to scream and I did.

  Bedivere squatted down to get eye-to-eye with me slumped against the tree. “What now, Lady Merlin? Have you any memory of the future to tell us what to do with this boy?”

  I was young and furious for life but ignorant of all the things I had to know.

  I felt myself filling with merlinic rage at myself.

  Bedivere saw it in my face and said, “Save it for the Saxons, Lady. Tell us what we need to do.”

  I managed to control my inner fury to say, “We leave this battle to the king!”

  “To save the kingdom without us?” cried Arthur.

  “Shut up,” Kay said to him. “You’ve cost us half the army and won us nothing. You’ve done more than the Saxons to lose us Britain.”

  Kay saluted me. “What do we do with Arthur and Britain, Lady Merlin?”

  “What else can we do?” I said. “Leave Britain to the king who’s fought fourteen years to keep her. Gurthrygen has wiles none of us has learned. He’ll give away what he must, sell what he can, steal back more, fight when he has to, run when it’s fit, bed Saxon queens, and marry his dukes to Brittany princesses. Give him Rufus Maximus to guide him, if Rufus hasn’t already slunk back to the king. That one Roman is worth a dozen Arthurs like this one.”

  One-armed Bedivere pulled Arthur to his feet by the nape of his tunic and shook him like a cat with a rat. “This Arthur is all we’ve got. We’ll have to make something of him.”

  “Help me make him the king of Camelot,” I said.

  “‘Camelot,’ again?” said Kay in scorn

  “Why not Camelot?” said Bedivere. “What do we have now? A ruined army, a wrecked country, invasion everywhere, and a hero who’s not a hero. Show us the road to Camelot, Lady, and we’ll follow.”

  “There it is.”

  I gestured across Britain to the Brutus stone and the old sword that stuck from it. Even at this distance, we all saw the sword’s secret gleam.

  “My God,” said Kay. “Can Arthur draw the sword?”

  “We’ll meet you there, Lady,” said Bedivere, starting off through the trees.

  Kay turned back toward Kaerlindcoit and York. “I’ll collect Percival and Lucan and follow.”

  Arthur was left with me.

  I kicked him to his feet. Not very motherly, perhaps. But he deserved to be kicked.

  “What will you do with me now?” he said.

  “That!” I said.

  We were there now, staring up at the sword jutting from the Brutus stone.

  “This!” I said.

  Around us was the Festival of the Sword, with Gurthrygen and his Saxon queen Ronwen seated on the stone. The sword freshly cleansed. Two dozen warriors gathered below the rock, hot to try to draw the blade and become king.

  I was dressed in my gaudy-colored, thirteen part merlin’s cloak. Arthur was still in the near-naked filth of a defeated warrior skulking among forest-haunts.

  Bedivere and Kay were with us. Percival and Lucan. Fresh and eager and hoping against hope that Arthur could haul out the sword to become Arthur.

  I climbed the stone to sit in my chair under the screaming shield. Dunwallo the Seatless put himself beside me. The Druid priests took their places. The elders who would choose the king circled the sword to watch for tricks and magic.

  I watched Arthur through the heavy clouds of Christian incense as he waited, furious and agitated, to take his turn at the sword. He was too dirty and hangdog to be recognized as Prince Arthur by the excited crowd, and he was too sunk in his shame to announce his name.

  I watched him measuring the chances of the other waiting knights and ladies – Briton and Brittany-men, Welsh, Roman, Kentish exile, Icelander, Dane, Norwaymen, Gaul, Spaniard, and Saxon. Each tried the sword. Each failed, to a chorus of cheers and jeers from the festival crowd. Each collapsed with hands bloodied in the work.

  Before each was shoved off the stone by an impatient elder, failed men and women kicked the sword in rage, cursed it, screamed against the too-many gods and goddesses, argued – as anyone on this Island will – that the sword was cursed, the rules unfair, Druids had fired weakening magic at them, that anyone who could take and hold the throne should have it and to Hell with this obscene, unChristian Rite of the Sword.

  After the warriors, rich women and beggar men, magicians, scoundrels, humpbacked beasts, princesses, antique lords, muddy-fisted peasants, and anyone else who could climbed up the rock try the sword. All these failed, too.

  The youngest of the jealous elders tried and failed and skulked away, gloating that if she with all her high blood and family honor could not draw the sword, neither could anyone else.

  Now, driven to mad fury by their frustration, the failed aspirants charged the sword, swinging clubs to break it, heaving boulders to smash it. They screamed threats at Gurthrygen and Ronwen, at the elders, at the onlookers who jeered them.

  Horst Duke of Kent and his lifeguards, using clubs and whips, flung all this mob off the Brutus stone, hurling the wildest of them off the stone to break their necks at the feet of the clustered Bishops of York, London, and Caerleon, who prayed over them before kicking dirt in their dead faces.

  The eldermen and elderwomen shouted down all protests. They had invented the challenge of the sword to undermine the king but it had not worked because no one could draw the sword.

  At last, King Gurthrygen leaned down to Arthur, last of the queue, unrecognizable in muck and leaves. “You, Sir Mud, you’re welcome to try the sword that makes men kings. Come, try. Then I can go to my tent and my concubines and some better wine than this muck.” Gurthrygen emptied his wine cup down the side of the stone and farted.

  He barely watched as muddy Arthur climbed the rock. But he saw me watching Arthur and he gestured to Horst.

  Horst said to Arthur, “Name yourself, sir or peasant, and your tribe, station, and lord, if any would claim a latrine-leaving like you.”

  The drunken, reveling crowd below the stone laughed.

  “You’ll know me soon enough, Saxon,” Arthur said.

  At that, the crowd turned its many heads toward Arthur, shouting, “Draw the sword, boy!” and “Use it to cut out his Saxon half-soul!”

  The giant Horst bent far down to look into Arthur’s muddy face. “Go ahead. Draw the sword. Let me test it on my scramasax.” He rattled his weapon in its scabbard. “Hold. Do I know these eyes? Have I seen them beneath a visor?”

  Gurthrygen roused himself. “Give us your name, man.”

  “I’ll give you my country first. Cornwall.”

  A surprised cheer from the crowd. No Cornishman had tried the sword today.

  “Your station?” said the king.

  Arthur gripped the sword jammed into the stone of the race. “Duke.” said Arthur.

  Gurthrygen leaped to his feet.

  “Now I know the eyes!” Horst drew his scramasax.

  The crowd shouted, “Arthur! It’s Arthur! The Pendragon!”

  “Great God, are they calling this little disaster a hero?” Gurthrygen cried.

  Queen Ronwen said, “This
fool who launched a thousand hopes and sank them all? They want him king? Every Briton’s an idiot!”

  Britons cheered.

  Saxons jeered.

  “Draw the blade, Arthur,” Horst said, raising his scramasax. “It’s all to stop me from making you a memory of Arthur.”

  Saxons cheered.

  Britons jeered.

  Arthur set his feet to draw the sword.

  In the crowd’s silence, I searched for signs of a miracle. Afternoon wind died. Birds stopped flapping across the sky. Burrowing animals ceased to burrow. Vipers to slither. Spiders to spin. The sky was slate and wet but its rain hung suspended in air.

  This was the moment that would begin the making of Camelot.

  Arthur glanced at me and it was as though I were looking at me through Arthur’s eyes.

  I said to myself and to Arthur, in my soul’s voice, Draw the sword, Artyr!

  Arthur shouted at Horst, staggering him and the crowd, “If a Saxon death craves me, it can take me! But if this sword has a stronger claim, then it must make me king!”

  Britons and Saxons cheered.

  Arthur hauled on the sword’s hilt.

  The sword sang Excalibur! but it would not draw.

  I howled like a dying dog.

  Arthur wept.

  Horst shouted his war cry and swung down his scramasax.

  Chapter 9 – Guenevere

  It was the king, without armor, mail or the use of his gold Irish sword, who stopped Duke Horst with a fist in the face, a knee in the groin, an elbow in the throat and then, taking the scramasax from the Saxon’s hand, driving its butt between the giant’s blue eyes. Horst’s many yellow braids flew up like a score of pleading hands. The giant went down, down, down the front of the Brutus stone, hitting the earth at the feet of Dunwallo with the sound of a dead horse falling on a battlefield.

  “Did I kill my brother-in-law?” Gurthrygen said, looking down the stone. “I curse myself for it in advance to win by remorse the forgiveness of any watching Saxon god.”