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

by Maples, Kit

  Arthur and I picked up the war band like babies dripping fat and trudged up the beach toward the town that lived on the flotsam thrown up by the sea. Townspeople looked out at us from their houses with regret that these two richly dressed princes had landed whole rather than in more easily scavenged bits and pieces of silk and gold.

  The town had columned temples and a checkerboard Roman street plan but the gold and silver had been stripped from the great buildings and paint rain-washed from statues. The sewer had backed up. Only the cross on the basilica gleamed with fresh gilding, a gift to the only god Brittany now feared.

  “Who are you?” shouted a townswoman with a chain of office, using a sword as a cane as she limped toward us across the wet gravel shore.

  She was dressed in trousers, skirts, and cloak so heavy they made her look round and fat as a Breton cow. She spoke Breton. That was close enough to true language for us to understand her. But she rolled her Rs in that awful Breton manner.

  Four men-at-arms came running from the town, struggling to haul on their armor and weapons.

  “I’m Arthur Duke of Cornwall,” said Arthur.

  “Ah, the other half of Brittany!” said the townswoman.

  “I’m on embassy from Gurthrygen King of Britain to Duke Cator.”

  “And you, Lady?” the townswoman said to me.

  “Merlin, Princess of Britain, foster mother to Arthur.”

  “Delightful and absurd! You look like brother and sister to me. But who knows what hideous barbarisms you Britons practice?”

  She looked at the war band in our arms. “Are those lamentable creatures apes? I’ve heard of apes. Never wanted see them. Don’t want to look at them now.”

  One-armed Bedivere slavered to bite her. The others held back Percival from jumping at her.

  The unfrightened townswoman rattled her gold chain of office at the war band, like shaking at them a battle chain.

  “I suppose you want a cart to the palace and every courtesy?” she said. “It’s the last courtesy you’ll have here. Two shipwrecked princes without a coin and their lamentable pet apes? Nothing can please our Lord Duke more than seeing all your flat and hungry bellies.”

  The four men-at-arms finally arrived from the town, adjusting sword belts, fitting on shields and horned helmets. “Any reason not to take you for ransom?” they said to us.

  “We have a safe conduct from King Hoel,” Arthur said.

  The men-at-arms shrugged shoulders as Bretons and Gauls do, turned away and trudged back toward town, pulling off helmets, shields, and sword belts, muttering disappointment.

  Bedivere lunged and bit through the townswoman’s dangling gold chain. The woman ran into the town howling for a cart and horse for us.

  We clattered out of town in the cart and up the muddy path to the ducal palace. Castle Conan – “Caerconan” in Breton – rose from its muddy fields and even more muddy ditch. Its man-made hill dribbled into the ditch. Its great stones were cracked. Banners sagged. Sewage yellow-striped the battlements from privies jutting over the moat – no expenditure here for a Roman running water system. The whole place seemed to sag into the mud around it.

  Cator’s mark over the main gate – a blue-fanged gorgon hauling a crucifix – stared out toward the Narrow Sea as though hoping for escape to any happier place. This was the castle of the duke who out-famed his King Hoel for stinginess.

  The palace was a villa of cracked red roof tiles and walls not whitewashed in a generation. In the auditorium was a plain chair that had replaced his grandfather’s gilt throne which Duke Cator had sold. Above the chair was the immense, round, golden table on which Guenevere had been born. It hung from the wall like a mammoth shield, glittering through the palace gloom.

  Duke Cator limped across the room, dressed like a mendicant in old Roman clothes, putting on his many chains of office, clapping on his emerald ducal crown, seeking beneath his rags for the vestment of stained yellow silk with his blue gorgon mark and pulling it out over his other clothes to identify himself.

  He sat in the plain chair and pulled off the crown and chains he had just put on. Threw them into a strongbox held by an old, mustached slave woman in ragged hood and cloak. Tucked away his gorgon silk. Looked at Arthur and me with his old man’s eyes. He was at least fifty years old, desiccated from the happy fatness of middle-age to a hard core of antique bone and muscle.

  The only item of his clothing that was burnished clean was his gladius, the better to keep whatever treasure he had in this beggar’s palace.

  “Cator,” he said, introducing himself, rolling the R. “Who and what are you all?”

  He gestured at the gnomes clutching around them their sheets of extra flesh. “What horrid monsters are these?”

  “I’m Arthur…”

  “So I was told to expect.”

  “My…”

  “Ghastly little things,” Cator said of the war band. “Captured them yourself in Farther China, I suppose, in some misadventure absurdly over-reported to make you a hero, Prince Arthur?”

  “None of that, Duke…”

  “I prefer simple men and women with simple tastes and simple stories. This heroic age isn’t for me. I’m a very unheroic man.”

  “So Gurthrygen tells me…”

  “Money, lucre, denarii, ‘emperors,’ even Saxon pennies – those are the heroes I love. Have you any of them for me?”

  “I brought you this letter from the king…”

  “A parchment gift? Is that all? Gurthrygen’s a mean man.”

  Cator snatched the letter from Arthur and said to me, off-hand, “Who are you, girl?”

  “You know me, Duke. I’m Merlin.”

  Cator was stunned. “This beautiful young girl is Merlin? My Merlin? The old, snake-bearded monster who made my Round Table?”

  Cator was half out of his chair in surprise and fright, crushing the king’s letter in his hands.

  “But Merlin,” he cried, “was ancient when I knew her! You’re a beauty worth m’bedding! Or I could sell you to the Romans for a few coins to ease m’poverty.”

  “What you see is what I’ve come to be for this cycle…” I said.

  “Never believed your story. Who could believe it? It’s preposterous. Living backwards in time? Posh! Kiss me, Beauty!”

  Cator threw out his arms to me. His kiss was firm, winey, and disgustingly lascivious.

  The mustached slave woman with the strongbox uncrinkled the king’s letter and read it aloud: “‘To Cator, Duke of the Bretons, Gurthrygen, King-Emperor of all the Britons, greeting…’”

  The duke kissed me again, and twice more, and shouted to the slave, “Oh, get to the meat of it!”

  The slave woman read, “‘Make something useful of my Little Brother…’”

  “How long’s he inflicted on my m’poverty?” Cator cried.

  “One year, Duke,” the slave read. “So the king says here.”

  “What’m I to do with you?” Cator said to Arthur and me. “Two more mouths to feed and I’m a poorish man. Your four little pets can eat with the dogs. That won’t cost me much. But look at you, Arthur! A big man who craves his bloody beef and warm ale. And you, Beauty,” he said to me, “who ought to crave me but probably wants her own share of beef and beer. Or expensive Raetian wine. Great God, I remember your slurping hunger for Raetian! Why couldn’t Gurthrygen have sent me two of his withered little Romans who eat acorns and die in the first winter chill? He means you to eat me out of m’fortune!”

  The slave said, “Send them to kill Burgundians and Huns, Duke. That’s a use for them…”

  “Yes! Where’re your weapons?”

  “We’re all under oath not to make war,” Arthur said.

  “All? You mean your pet apes have taken the oath, too?”

  Bedivere, Kay, Percival, and Lucan cried, in tiny, squeaky voices, “Not us!”

  “What do they say?” Cator said to his slave.

  “They’re speaking ape, Duke, who knows what apes say?
”

  “Will they frighten the dogs at their feed, you think?”

  “Do those beasts eat dogs?” the slave said to Arthur.

  “They’ll eat anything given them,” Arthur said.

  “I eat dog m’self,” Cator said, “but not the hunting hounds.”

  He worked his jaws remembering the sweetness of dog.

  “Would’ve been pleasant,” Cator said, “had Gurthrygen also sent me one of his fat pigs to encourage me to take you on.”

  The slave woman said around her sagging mustaches, “Give Arthur to me, Duke…”

  “What do you want with him?”

  “Give a prince to a slave?” Arthur cried.

  Cator said, “This’s no slave.”

  “But look how she’s dressed…”

  “No worse than I. This’s m’merlin and first minister.”

  “This slave is your minister? Are you a Turk with a mustache?”

  Cator said to the slave-minister, “Take him. He’s too stupid for me to want in m’own company for a year.”

  “Remember, Cator,” I said, “he’s brother to a king and can be elected king himself…”

  “Yes, yes, that’s right, Lady Beauty! I suddenly feel a near enthusiasm for the boy.”

  A trumpet blast outside, the shout and bustle of an arriving entourage.

  Cator shouted, happy, “M’prince!”

  He craned to look through the doorway.

  “You remember our new policy?” the slave-minister said to Cator.

  “I remember every word you say like I remember where every one of m’coins is buried. I’m a dog with a bone he won’t lose.”

  Cator shoved aside Arthur and me and crossed the room to a young warrior who clanked and glittered as he entered in full gaudy display. He was in buffed mail, double string of pearls rattling on his painted breastplate, a gorgon-faced helmet shoved back on his head, his long black hair limed yellow at the tips and braided with gold rings, his ungloved fighting hand stretching out to bring to his lips for a kiss a bit of the rotting fabric Cator wore.

  “Who’s this wonder?” Arthur said, goggling.

  “Lancelot,” said the slave-minister. “Would-be king of the Gauls. No, pardon, merely king of one Gallic tribe, the virgin-slaughtering Franks. But nonetheless a tasty match for one of Cator’s brood.”

  “For Guenevere?” I said.

  “That’s the trend of current policy.”

  The four gnomes gnashed their teeth. “Arthur, free us to eat him alive!”

  “What do they say, your pets?” the slave-minister said to Arthur.

  She put a withered hand on Arthur’s arm, whispering, “I’ll let you lose no more British territory here.”

  Hers was a chill hand, its cold penetrating the rain-wet wool of Arthur’s sleeve and making such a charge of surprise in Arthur’s flesh that I felt it, too.

  In the minister’s office, scribes, counters, and lackeys fled from stools and tables, abandoning coin boxes, rich silk bolts, and wax tablets of accounts as though a gale preceding the minister had hurled them out of the office.

  The minister herded the four gnomes into a cabinet and locked them there.

  “Who are you?” Arthur said.

  “Hail, Mother Merlin,” the minister said to me, dropping to her knees and kissing the floor at my feet, her mustaches slapping my boot toes.

  Arthur gawked. “When have I ever had a slave do that for me?”

  The old woman pulled cloak and hood from white hair woven with Cator-blue ribbons. She began to undrape a palla, the indoor garment of those who preserved Roman styles. She pulled off the palla to reveal a woman’s linen tunica and took off that to show a young woman’s body beneath the withered old head.

  Hers was a body round and cream-white as promised by the rumor of Breton women, but not much cow-like. It held a coldness that burnt to Arthur’s sudden, compulsive touch.

  She said to Arthur, “Eratosthenes measured the roundness of the world with a stick and a shadow at Alexandria – 28,700 Roman miles around, he said.”

  “What’s that to me?” said Arthur, suddenly hungry for her.

  She said to me, “Shall I measure Arthur now, in a different way but with the same tools, Greatest Merlin?”

  “Hail, Phyllis Merlin,” I said to her, “old friend.”

  “This is Phyllis Merlin?” Arthur cried. “The beautiful magus you infested to create the Round Table to save Guenevere from her murdering father?”

  Phyllis said to Arthur, “Your Mother Merlin knew me a lifetime ago and now I’ll know you, Arthur. I’m going to train the brute out of you and the king into you. We’ll start with this.”

  She shoved Arthur onto her counting table, among spilling coins, sliding silks, and tumbling account books.

  Arthur shouted when he realized he would have the pleasure of one small conquest after so much failure.

  He deserved his moment of success. Misery was to follow. That much I remembered of his future.

  BOOK III – I MAKE CAMELOT

  Chapter 1 – Caerconan Castle

  In the Julian Year 5210 and of Our Lord 497

  “What are you good for besides skewering things?” Cator said to Arthur.

  We were at table in the dusty main hall. The food served was worse than the cheapest peasant fare in Britain – raw vegetables and gruel, no meat. I sat on the bench between Cator and smirking Phyllis Merlin. Arthur sat across with his “pets,” each of them grabbing for fallen scraps.

  “I’ve given you a day’s leisure to recover from your crossing the Narrow Sea,” Cator said to Arthur. “You’ve eaten m’eatables, ridden m’rideables, dallied with m’dalliables, and dawdled with m’merlin. But you’ve done me no service yet. What do you propose doing for me while I fatten you at my expense?”

  “I’ve an answer,” I said for Arthur.

  Bedivere lurked too near Cator’s knee, waiting for fallen food. Cator kicked him away as he would a cat.

  “Let me hear it,” Cator said to me.

  “Give over the administration of the duchy to Arthur…”

  “To a half-fledged youth?”

  “It will fledge him…”

  “Is this what Gurthrygen sent you to ask of me? To abandon my duchy to his half-wit little brother?”

  “Gurthrygen,” Phyllis said to Cator, “is a man never without a dozen motives for any act…”

  “Yes, yes, clever enough to be a Roman and damn him for it,” said Cator.

  “If he hadn’t a Saxon wife,” Phyllis said, “we might’ve sent him one of your daughters to buy peace…”

  “Hold! What are you trying to put into my mind, Trickster? Everyone knows all m’brats are parricides the way they lap up m’treasure.”

  “Your brother Hoel has no children,” Phylllis said. “The issue of Arthur and Guenevere…”

  “M’grandbrats!”

  “Would be ruler of the ‘Kingdom of Britain and Brittany,’” I said.

  Cator goggled around at us. “There’s a way to pay m’debts!”

  “And to accrue a few more besides,” said Cator’s bishop from across the room, where he sat in lonely gloom on the hard chair assigned to him.

  The duke squinted at the bishop in his red toga, bright chains, and crucifix as though the duke had never before seen the man who claimed to be his chief moneylender. The bishop shriveled in despair for the return of his money.

  Cator glanced at the others of his court – his magicians and musicians, his ministers, generals, sycophants, concubines, and slaves. From all of them he had borrowed money. For each of them he gave the same vacant glance that said, Who could you be? and, What money do you claim I owe you? They shriveled, too.

  “To marry one daughter into Britain with Duke Arthur,” said Cator, “and another into Frankish Gaul for Sir Lancelot would produce an empire to pay m’debts. I could accrue more debt!”

  Phyllis Merlin said, “Marrying one daughter here and another there is always fair policy…”


  “Only ‘fair?’” said the Duke.

  “Considering you’ve only one marriageable daughter left…”

  “Oh, well, yes.”

  “Considering the Franks are not all of Gaul and the Britons not all of Britain…”

  “Should I find Guenevere a Saxon husband, instead?” said Cator, suddenly dreaming of Saxon silver pennies piled up in his treasury.

  “It’s becoming a Saxon world, Duke…”

  “Is he” – Cator gestured at Arthur – “really going to make this ‘Camelot’ kingdom?”

  “That’s his Fate,” I said. I hope, I should have added.

  “Well, the Frank’s a better candidate for marriage,” said Cator. “He dresses like a prince. Plenty of coin in his purse. His mother’s rich in her convent where she’s not likely to spend much that I want. But look at Arthur here in his beggar’s rags!”

  Arthur said, “What I stand up in is all I own this side of the Narrow Sea, Duke…”

  “I pity Gurthrygen,” said the duke. “What a shameful thing to have a ragged display like you for a brother.”

  “You’re no better dressed…”

  “I’m in m’own duchy! Who cares how I dress here?”

  “I’ve seen you in these same rags in Rome,” said Phyllis.

  “Among foreigners! Who cares how I dress there?”

  Cator prodded Arthur with a dirty boot toe. “You’re not a bad fellow but not so jolly a companion as your father. He knew how to drink and wench! You’ve Celtic heat in your veins, all right. Merlin Phyllis gave me every sweaty detail of her interview with you last night.”

  Arthur flushed. Phyllis smirked.

  “But when Uther and I were your age, Arthur, we went through the world together mad with hunger for human meat to test our steel blades and maidens to test our more steely…”

  The duke stopped and stared at Arthur. “Wrong! Good thing you’re not at all like your old man if you marry my Guenevere.”

  Phyllis said, “The policy is, Lord Duke…”

  “Policy, policy! Must you always remind me of m’policy?”

  “The policy is we marry Guinevere to Lancelot and onto the throne of Clovis to have peace with the Franks…”