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

by Maples, Kit

  Villagers pushed near Arthur to shout for his farewell blessing and the customary sprinkling of coins. Cator had granted Arthur a few copper pieces for this ceremony. Arthur scattered them as liberally as he could.

  After a year kicking him away from his table where he fought for scraps with the dogs, Cator reached down to stroke Bedivere’s sagging skin flaps as he might pet a melting dog.

  “I’ll miss these beasts,” he said to Arthur. “They have a hideous charm.”

  Bedivere growled.

  Cator said to his bishop, “Do these midget apes have any of the higher sensitivities, do you think?”

  The bishop started. “You mean as humans do?”

  “Such as the love of money?”

  The duke took a tiny gold coin from his purse and tossed it in the air for Bedivere to catch, which he did, his skin flailing around him as he leaped to do it. The coin was the size of Bedivere’s eye.

  The duke ruffled Bedivere’s beard and said, “Keep it, little beast.”

  The bishop – unhappy creditor to the duke – gasped at this bizarre expenditure.

  “Well, maybe not,” said the duke, snatching back the coin.

  But Cator shouted to a slave to bring Bedivere and the others a fresh joint of raw meat to gnaw on their passage home, and settled them on the galley’s deck like puppies at a bone.

  A trumpet’s call from Caerconan’s battlements!

  Wailing flutes, banging drums, the high voices of a priestly choir.

  Out of the battle gate came the procession bringing Guenevere to Arthur.

  Guenevere sprawled on a decorated cart with draped curtains that flapped as the cart jogged, giving glimpses of her immense size. Her hugely fat ladies and her personal lifeguards followed.

  Behind Guenevere’s cart was another hauling the immense, golden Round Table with its still unreadable enameled markings naming the two hundred knights who would sit at the table.

  Wind rose, the tide trembled to go out, the ship’s captain shouted to the crowd, “Neptune calls us to sail!”

  Arthur watching Guenevere’s closed cart said to me, sudden fright in his voice, “Is this truly the woman who can help me make Camelot, Mother?”

  Phyllis Merlin laughed and said, “Of course she is. She’s fat enough to brood-sow thousands. She can be the queen-mother of any new world you want to make.”

  But I was astonished at Arthur’s last-minute wedding terror and took his trembling hands. I said to him, “You’re no longer the thoughtless boy who brought four apes into Brittany and bedded a merlin to ease the shame of failure. But you’re not yet the man for Camelot.”

  “How do I become him?” said Arthur, even more frightened.

  “Wait. Watch. Laugh. Then act.”

  Arthur cried out in anguish, “I got better answers from the wind that never told me anything!”

  “The wind is up!” cried the galley captain. “We go!”

  Phyllis bowed to me and said, “Goodbye, Greatest Merlin.”

  She said to Arthur, “Goodbye, my loving Arthur King of Camelot.” She kissed him and vanished into the watching crowd.

  Arthur’s war band clustering at my knees whimpered in their little voices for relief.

  “Return!” I said.

  Bedivere, Kay, Percival, and Lucan burst up through their heaps of skin until they filled out their flesh, ripping apart their tiny clothes, the villagers tumbling howling away from them in fright.

  Lancelot hauled clothes from his packs to cover their sudden nakedness, the war band jigging and shouting for happiness. They cheered their freedom and jeered at me.

  I lifted the immense Round Table into the ship, lashing it to the mast.

  A sea breeze swept across the face of the table and Arthur squinted up at the two hundred badges enameled there.

  “I read Bedivere’s blue and silver eagle there!” he cried. “Kay’s bull. Percival’s rose. Lucan’s glass shield!”

  The war band cheered.

  “Nothing more. Not one more badge is clear to me. Mother, am I to be master of this table I can’t read?”

  “Wait,” I said. “Watch. Laugh. Then act.”

  Percival said, “This young woman, beautiful as she is, makes no sense at all. Good thing she’s a merlin and no one ever understands a merlin or we’d have to throw her overboard.”

  Another trumpet’s blast and here was Guenevere’s cart with her father beside it.

  Cator pulled back the cart’s drapery. The woman inside filled the cart’s bed side to side and head to foot. Guenevere was beautiful and immensely fat with a face strangely lean.

  She lay sprawled against a silver-gray pillow, her red-yellow hair done up on top of her head in old Roman style. Her huge black eyes were heavily outlined in kohl. They did not blink once she put them on Arthur, as though she were comparing the real Arthur to the figure in her dreams.

  Guenevere was dressed in all the personal wealth she could carry out of Caerconan: Layers of silks and jewels. Her fingernails, toenails, and cheeks gilded. Between her breasts, a crucifix made of wood from the True Cross set so heavily in gold it hauled down her head and shoulders.

  Slung from a wrist chain, she had a tiny gold cage with her horoscope on parchment and a chip of her father’s Jupiter stone. On the back of each hand and the top of each foot – and these, strangely, were not fat-bloated things – she had a crucifix tattoo thickly painted in silver. Around her immense bosom and hips, a Chinese silk wrapping painted with trees.

  I could see throbbing in Arthur a sudden hunger for all that glittering fatness. It was comic and frightening to see a young man so suddenly possessed by a woman he had only met in his dreams.

  Arthur put his face into the salty sea wind to cool his passion to allow him to finish this parting ceremony without a display of the howling barbarity of lovemaking building in him.

  Guenevere said from her cart, in a voice sweet and throaty, “Come to me, Husband!”

  She threw out her fat arms to Arthur.

  “Oh, yes!” he cried, jumping into her cart, hauling down the curtains.

  “Mate with me now. Be furious! Be good.”

  “We sail!” howled the ship’s captain.

  Music and chorus, feverish and loud to cover the wild shouts from behind the cart’s drapery. Cheers from the quay urging them on. Duke Cator’s last advice bawled to his daughter.

  We hauled the cart aboard. The beak-prow of the longship bit into the Narrow Sea. We plunged away from Brittany and across toward Britain.

  What happened on Guenevere’s bed-cart was not merely between prince and princess but about the foundation of Camelot. Without shame, I put my private eye through the curtains and saw Arthur undress his lean-faced, fat wife.

  With each pull away of drapery in Guenevere’s clothing, Arthur uncovered heaps of gold and silver in bangles, coins, and beads sewn into the cloth wrapped around her body. Gems and pearls on threads of gold tied around her. Gold dust in her long hair. Silver leaf glued to her skin. Emeralds and rubies dotted up her arms and legs.

  Arthur gasped with the excitement of his discoveries. Here was the secret passed to Guenevere and her sisters by their grandmother. The secret that made the dukes of Brittany rich men. The secret why all the duke’s thin-faced daughters were massive as Breton cows.

  I laughed, surprised not to remember the fraud but happy to rediscover it.

  Arthur howled victory at his discovery. His love-rage increased as he excavated through silk and fortune to find Guenevere’s naked leanness.

  He heard my laughter and said in his soul’s voice, Go away, Mother! and I did, to give him the freedom to create on Guenevere an heir to Camelot to replace the monster Mordred.

  Arthur and Guenevere crossed the Narrow Sea abed.

  * * *

  We sailed into fog dense as a wool blanket flung over the world and dark as night. The sea ran heavy and black beside the ship’s railings. Sound of oars cracking. A howl of panic from the oar deck below. S
harp pleas to sailors’ gods. Then a rising shriek of wind. The ship’s captain tied himself in the bow, with torch and drinking horn, to squint ahead into the fog, searching for the island of Britain.

  The shudder and jerk of the oared galley ship roused Arthur and Guenevere, slated and drowsing on their bed-cart. The huge Round Table, rising up strapped to the mast, creaked and tottered and flashed in a sudden shaft of afternoon light piercing the fog. The golden light splashed on Guenevere and Arthur and woke them.

  Guenevere’s silver-gray pillow roused, making sailors scream, but it was her wolfhound, not a pillow. The huge dog shoved Arthur out of bed to stand barefoot and half-naked on the wet deck. He was drunk and delirious on Guenevere and barely noticed the fog or the sea or the broken oars carried away on the storm or his war band puking over the side of the ship and shouting for the relief of sudden death.

  Lancelot groaned, “Long life Arthur long life, Guenevere,” and vomited into the wind.

  The others moaned a dutiful cheer and hung their heads over the side.

  I went among them, kicking their rumps, shouting, “Pretend to be heroes, you cowards of the sea! Stare Neptune in the face!”

  I laughed hugely, laughing for the achievement of the mating of Arthur and Guenevere and for the bringing of us three to Britain and the beginning of the final great work to make Camelot.

  Menw the Spellcaster thrust his one-eyed face into the bed-cart, sniffed the air, and cried to Guenevere, “But you’re not pregnant with Arthur’s heir!” and withdrew.

  Gwrhyr Interpreter blew down the deck, her costume of silk rags and leather flags flapping like burst sails, and cried in a mix of the languages of Britain, Brittany, and Rome, “Hail, the new world, if we live to see it!”

  I ran to catch her before the wind flung her into the sea.

  The Round Table smacked against the cracking mast and the ship trembled.

  The rowers screamed, “Lady Merlin, save us!”

  The ship’s captain cried, “Still the waters, great Merlin, or throw the Table overboard before we drown!”

  He drank a toast from his drinking horn to quell the demons biting at his courage. Then he was blasted out of the ropes holding him in the bow, a splash of black sea taking his place on the planks, and flung through the broken, jutting oars. He flailed screaming in the sea.

  Then he stood up, holding beach sand in his fists, crying, “Praise God and Lady Merlin! Land!”

  The rowers’ screams stopped, waiting.

  The longship ran aground, its keel scraping stones and sand, grinding on the bones of the ten thousand who have drowned in the oceans, slithering forward on the backs of fish and water sprites.

  The ship’s beaked prow drove into the sand and the stern rose out of the water, flinging those on deck onto Britain, Guenevere in her bed-cart flung after them, the cart landing on its wheels, Guenevere’s nakedness covered by her obedient wolfhound.

  The Round Table rolled up the sand like a giant’s coin, curving and curving until it fell flat.

  Half-naked Arthur landed on his bare feet, sword and shield in his hands, scrambling away from the howling wreckage of the ship as it crumpled around its prow, spilling out slaves, sailors, ladies, and lifeguards, all screaming and flailing.

  Sudden hot afternoon sunlight cut through the fog and drove it away, showing me the wrecked galley ship upended in the beach, the drunken captain in water to his waist, the war band on their knees praying to their gods in thanksgiving, the ladies and lifeguards sprawled on their faces cursing Fate, Guenevere and her silver wolfhound peeping out of her upright bed-cart, and Arthur shouting a cry of “Victory!” over the sea.

  So this is how Camelot begins? I thought. Fair enough!

  Bedivere licked beach sand and said, “This doesn’t taste of my Cornwall. Where are we?”

  “We’re too far east,” said Kay. “Smell the wind’s easterliness.”

  I sniffed the air. “It’s Sax-land!”

  Lancelot said, “Then they stink like Huns. I smell them.” He gestured inland through a break in the high white cliffs at saw armored horsemen there, gawking back at us, the wind bringing us their Saxon stink.

  We scooped up swords and shields from the ship’s wreckage and turned to face them. The horsemen wheeled and bolted. We jeered to keep our teeth from chattering in our wet cold.

  We with Guenevere ran up to the place where the horsemen had stood. The soggy sailors, slaves, ship’s captain, and Guenevere’s ladies and lifeguards puffed up behind us.

  The horsemen were gone. Nothing to be seen out there in that vast expanse but green and perfect Britain. And a tent in the trees with a blue and silver standard.

  Bedivere shouted at the tent, “Come out, Perjurer! Face Bedivere whose ensign you’ve robbed!”

  Hadrian the Much the Lesser, in his antique Legionary uniform far too large for his desiccated body, poked his head out of the tent, chewing garlic globes.

  “Hail to you, Lord Prince of Sand Lickers,” he said to Bedivere. “Where have you been this long year, leaving me here in this awful hot south-land?”

  Bedivere shouted his pleasure and shoved the old man around the circle of Arthur’s companions to introduce him. Guenevere recoiled from his garlic kiss. Hadrian, offended, the princess in his arms, said to Bedivere, “Is she a princess I must coddle or can I crush the life out of her now, Duke?”

  “She’s to be my wife and your queen,” Arthur said.

  “Then hail to you, Lady!”

  Hadrian kneeled to throw his arms around her calves and kiss her muddy knees.

  “And a more polite greeting you won’t find in all of Cornwall,” said Hadrian.

  “What do I do with this rancid conquest?” Guenevere said, appalled.

  “Take me as your lifeguard, Lady. I’m a Christian, if that suits my mistress, and a famous insulter of a prince named Arthur. I need your protection from his heartless rage.”

  “This creature is preposterous!” she said, with a heavier rolling of all her Breton Rs.

  “He stood here a year in the heart of Sax-land waiting for us,” Bedivere said. “Show me a knight who’s done anything like that in epic and legend.”

  She said, “Then you’re my man.”

  “I’ll start now as your lifeguard.”

  Hadrian pointed east toward the forest. Spear points glittered in the shadows. Dust rose from the trees. Many hoof beats in the rhythm of a cavalry charge.

  “There,” said Hadrian, “comes Colgrin, with his three hundred thousand cannibals.”

  “Nonsense,” I said. “I don’t remember any of that.”

  “But what do you remember, Young Mother,” said Arthur.

  “This child is your mother?” said Hadrian, stunned. “She remembers the future?”

  My weakening merlin’s eye would not give me the image I needed of Colgrin and his hordes, but I said, “Three hundred thousand Saxons on this little corner of the island would tip us all into the sea.”

  “You said his name is Colgrin?” said the ship’s captain.

  He and his sailors ran yipping to the beach to grab flotsam and jump into the Narrow Sea to splash home to Brittany. They would rather risk Neptune’s drowning tentacles than Colgrin. The hopeless naked slaves stayed with Arthur but moaned in terror.

  “Arm!” Arthur shouted.

  Bedivere and Lancelot kicked down the pavilion in which Hadrian had kept watch. Weapons, arms, and armor were there for them all, burnished and oiled. More for Guenevere, Menw, and Gwrhyr. More still to rearm Guenevere’s lifeguards and ladies. Clubs and knives for the slaves. Dry clothes and boots.

  “Everything but a horse!” cried Lancelot. “Where are the war horses?”

  Hadrian waved a hand and stallions galloped out of a meadow, saddled and ready to run. More hauled carts.

  “You’re a conjurer among many other powers?” Guenevere said to Hadrian.

  Hadrian dragged himself into a saddle. “No, Lady, just an old man who must plan ahead
if he’s to survive in a young man’s world. That’s my magic.”

  We strapped on armor, slung swords over our backs, grabbed up shields and spears. Lucan had his glass shield. One-eyed Menw clapped on a one-eyed helmet. I strapped on my screaming shield, its faces hissing and spitting at me. We leaped onto horses.

  Guenevere, armored and armed, breastplate rattling with her treasure chains, said, “My hoard, Arthur!” and drove her horse down to the sand, Lancelot running alongside, to recover the riches she had left there in the surf, bundled in her clothing.

  Bedivere, Menw, and I lifted the immense Round Table onto a horse cart.

  Colgrin’s thousands came out of the trees, fresh sunlight sparking on their helmets and making pools of black shadow for their eyes.

  “How could there be so many pagans in all the world?” cried Lucan, slapping his sword on his glass shield to drive out his fright.

  The galley slaves fled screaming into the trees.

  We the war band on stamping, anxious horses jeered the Saxon vanguard.

  Guenevere galloped up from the beach, Lancelot running alongside. He was sea-stained, sand-covered, his long black hair sweat-matted. But he was still beautiful as he jumped – shield in one hand, sword in the other – onto a war horse.

  Guenevere took the lead, her treasure sacks banging on the flanks of her horse, as we stampeded west and north away from the Saxons, whooping with the joy of fast horse and cannibals in pursuit.

  The galley slaves leaped from their forest hideouts to run alongside. What else could they do? They grabbed up branches for clubs and rocks for axes and were ready to fight for their lives.

  The first volley of Saxon arrows howled down around us, driving into the earth with a speed that made them seem to sprout from the dirt like quills from a hedgehog.

  Slaves, ladies, and lifeguards were stapled to the ground, screaming in terror and pain.

  Arthur hauled up his shield and charged his horse across the rear of our party, catching the next killing arrowfall on his shield. He shook off the shield heavy for its burden of arrows and called for another and caught the next volley, and another shield for the next, as the war band whipped on the terrified slaves and howled for Guenevere to speed the gallop.