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

by Maples, Kit

  The king whacked Excalibur with his fist and said, “Besides, look at your embryo ‘king of Camelot.’ Arthur is a killer in silk and velum that wants a soul. If he can’t find one at Fleem, then he’s not the Arthur you want for Camelot.”

  “Maybe you’re a cleverer man than I’ve ever given you credit,” I said.

  “Maybe I’m a star that flares brightest before death,” wheezed the king. “Bring him back to me a man with a soul, Merlin. Bring him back to me a king. Let me flare out.”

  * * *

  At the south-bound turning of the road, on a hilltop, Bedivere stopped our cavalcade and the Round Table on its cart. Rain that had hung suspended in the sky fell in sheets in a distant field and ran toward us. We saw the monastery of Fleem down there, as tightly walled as an old Legionary castrum. Here is where we would exile Arthur.

  We pulled rain hoods over our heads and cloaks over armor, furled banners and flags, and tightened the sacking on the supply carts and the massive Round Table. I, pitying my screaming shield, wrapped it in cloth.

  But I was young enough to enjoy a cold rain after so many years as an antique huddling away from cold and wet. I opened my hood to let the water stab my face.

  Guenevere beside me, in the privacy of the rain and her hood, said, “Do you know me? Hear my soul’s name – I’m Guanhumara.”

  “Lord God, why tell me that? I haven’t asked for it.”

  “Because I call on you to command you, Branwynn.”

  I used my horse to shove Guenevere’s horse off the road and into the trees and greater privacy.

  “Speak to me,” I said.

  “I’m pregnant with a prince.”

  “A Pendragon?”

  “He will be a Pendragon.”

  “But is he Arthur’s?”

  “You’ll tell him it is.”

  “Let me hear its name, damn you.”

  “I’ve named it Gawain.”

  “Lancelot’s bastard!”

  I put my dagger against her belly. It was a scene I’d lived before, watching Duke Cator ready to cut Guenevere from her mother’s belly the night I invented the Round Table.

  “Do it, Brave Baby Killer,” Guenevere said, “and pervert this cycle. You’ve no love for me or Gawain. You’ve no love for anyone but Arthur…”

  “Gawain!” I said, the name filling me with sudden hope.

  I saw a hundred histories of the Hero Gawain, in all the lives that merlins had lived. But history was becoming faint, drifting past memory into loss as I grew younger.

  Yet every memory leaves a residue of hope. I put away the dagger. I leaned from the saddle to put ear to her stomach to listen to the fetal song.

  Yes, here was the making of Gawain! The last and the best of the Round Table. The bastard prince, the perfect knight, the counterweight to Mordred. The only adventurer at the Table to touch the Holy Grail. Arthur’s true and loyal son filled up with Lancelot’s traitor’s blood.

  I wept. I clutched her belly against my ear to listen to the gurgling embryo and wept. So much had gone so wrong, so much of this age was so far out of my control. The hope of having a Gawain to support Arthur was delicious joy to me.

  “Arthur!” I shouted. “She’s making your son!”

  Chapter 5 – The Monastery of Fleem

  Late in the afternoon, after the rain had come and gone many times, after the drunken howling hilltop celebration for the new-made Pendragon prince, Guenevere and Lancelot led their party, staggering in their saddles with drunken exhaustion, south toward the Lady Convent at Avalon. Arthur watched them go and I watched Arthur. He had in his face the same love-yearning for Guenevere and Gawain that he carried for Mordred.

  Here was a man more happy to father a family than to rule a kingdom. Give him a gaggle of babies, I thought, and he’ll sink into his orchards and never dream of Camelot.

  Now, approaching my own new youth, I felt pity for Arthur for what I must take from him to create the perfect king.

  Our cavalcade carried on downhill through sun and rain, Arthur watching toward the south as though he might still see his pregnant Guenevere gone away across the horizon.

  Arthur raised an olive branch of peace to a silent monk standing outpost to the monastery. The monk waved us through into a world of brilliant sunshine and a silence so severe even the bees sucking at flowers were soundless.

  “Where will you all go?” Arthur said to his companions.

  Bedivere said, “Call to me in my country when you’re a free man again, Arthur. I’ve a palace, four marriages, and a fortress to repair after our holiday in Brittany. Another civil war to crush. A usurper to crucify. Saxons to harry out of my private lands. Plenty to do. Call me, but not soon!”

  Bedivere slapped his horse toward the south and distant Cornwall.

  Lucan said, “I’m to York, Brother, to purify my city. To drive out all the infesting Saxons, Picts, and Scots the king’s let in. Send me your call. But give me time.”

  He kissed Arthur and turned north with his retinue, Menw and Gwyrhr among them, self-assigned to Lucan’s authority.

  “I return to the king as his herald,” Percival said. “You can find me there.” She turned east.

  Kay said, “I’m a mercenary with no castle and wife to command me and no land of my own. I claim that hilltop for me” – he flung his spear the long distance to prong into the hilltop – “and there I’ll stay until your call.”

  I said to Arthur, “I’m to my villa to hold the world steady for your return. Come back to me the man who can draw the sword and let’s make Camelot.”

  Arthur gazed across at the monastery buildings. “Exile here among voiceless priests! Who can make a hero out of that?”

  He rode away toward the stables, two slaves driving the cart with the Round Table.

  I joined Kay on the hilltop to make the first night’s vigil. A swirling breeze turned the feathers on our spears, bringing with it from the monastery a priestly choir chant, and then silence.

  I took myself to dust and went away home on the wind.

  * * *

  I assembled myself out of the air at the edge of my lands. I was exhausted. I had done too many conjurer’s tricks and wasted too many of my failing resources. I trotted horse across my land taking the cheers of serfs and vassals, feeling the sunshine on my clean, young face and the surging power of fresh blood in my arms and legs.

  The joy of youth made in me a surprise resurgence of my merlin’s powers and I saw with my soul’s eye Arthur at Fleem.

  He was bathed and shaved and with good oil on his body. Dressed in the rough wool habit of a silent monk. Standing in the abbot’s quarters – plain plaster walls, the drifting scent of incense and sweet peas. The abbot wore a gilt crucifix made from a dagger. They stood together over an opened holy text, both as still as frozen. Silent.

  A bell rang.

  The abbot said, suddenly, “We’ve an hour to speak. Who are you? Be quick.”

  “Arthur Pendragon…”

  “Duke of Cornwall. King’s brother. Peacemaker with Brittany. Hero-fool of York battle. Father of something off an Orkney witch. Go on, go on, speak! We’ve just one hour in twenty-four to speak. Say something, anything. Something new. Delight me!”

  Scullions rushed into the room with leather buckets of barley soup.

  “What, no meat?” cried the abbot. “No peas?”

  A scullion fished with his fingers through the abbot’s bucket to find the meat drowned on the bottom. The abbot sniffed it.

  “Not salted, for Jesu’s sake, not in this season? Could this be game?”

  “It could be the answer to a prayer, Abbot Father,” said the boy.

  “Venison?” said the abbot, balling the meat and stuffing it into his mouth, drooling grease and soup.

  The scullions cried in unison, “The health of Jesu to you both,” and exited.

  “Shame!” cried the abbot, chewing his meat. “All tastes the same out of our kitchens. Wish I had some fish paste ripe a
s fresh farts to flavor it.”

  He spat gristle onto the rushes matting the floor. A dog lurched from under the reading table and snapped it up.

  “Talk to me quick, Duke, fill up the hour with new words. What does the king want me to give you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what you’re supposed to want?” said the abbot, baffled.

  “I want to be king.”

  “Don’t we all?”

  The abbot sat behind his desk and picked venison from his teeth with the dagger-crucifix.

  “I don’t often train kings. I shape souls and kings rarely have them. Those that do get them damned to Hell pretty quick. Why should I bother with yours?”

  “Merlin chose me for Camelot.”

  It was the hour of speech but the abbot could not speak.

  “So it’s true,” the abbot gasped. “Merlin is making Camelot!”

  He lapsed into silence again.

  He burst out, “Sobeit! You’ll have to learn everything at once. An hour a day of speech is not much time but you’ll take your teaching directly from me, the greatest of all masters of the truth, in the Hero Jesu, the Triune God, the Lord of Creation, a few of the still-living demigods of the old cycle before Christus, and I’ll teach you to hate the Demon with a passion you’d ordinarily reserve only for a betraying lover. Welcome to the Order of the Silent Brothers. How many silent decades do I have with you?”

  “Merlin will call me when my time’s up,” Arthur said.

  “Then let’s begin in a frenzy. Your first lesson. The Lord God made Heaven and Earth, Adam and Eve, Lucifer and Pharaoh, but he made the First Caesar and Queen Boadicea, too, and transported the Trojans to Britain after the fall of Troy. There, that’s all the ancient history worth knowing. Forget Alexander and Pythagoras and all those other Greek egomaniacs.

  “Now, of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, the four elements of life, the greatest force is Wind. It is the animating power of all things Earthly, the World Soul made physical. That’s as much as any king needs to know about the mystery of Wind.

  “As for Time,” said the abbot, “what has been, is, and will be again and so on to the same nonexistence of all things that existed before the Great Jesu invented the world. Heaven’s in there somewhere but who knows where? That, not our favored Pelagianism, is the only heretic mystery I want you to learn from me.

  “Now to Justice as taught in the holy texts. A good king makes three kinds of justice in his kingdom, in accord with the Rule of three. Justice to Britons, meaning Christians. Justice to foreigners, meaning lesser Christians. Justice to Pagans, meaning Saxons, whom you simply kill…”

  The bell rang and all speech stopped in the monastery, the abbot clapping shut his mouth in mid-sentence.

  Arthur shouted in his soul’s voice, Mother, what have you done to me?

  * * *

  Muddy spring faded into dusty summer around me as I sat on my villa’s throne below the screaming shield slung on the wall, but I ignored it all. I saw only Arthur in his silent monkery with its abbot desperate for each day’s single hour of chattering education.

  I watched Arthur bored at the endless rounds of prayer commanded by bells and the rising and setting of the sun, bored at the constant reading of dull Latin texts, the copying of books, the gardening, the husbandry, the rebuilding of monastery walls, the selling of eggs in markets, and the making and over-drinking of the monks’ beer.

  Bored until he came to realize the sum total of the lives of most men and women is routine and boredom and stumbling discontent pierced only occasionally by surprise delight.

  I watched him in his loneliness, without Guenevere and Mordred, as he listened to the silence that was everywhere around him in the monastery. The silence was a creature of its own and heavy-weighing, except for the relieving chunk of the monks’ digging tools and the wheeze of wind.

  Until he realized loneliness and silence can be balm for human pain, and there is too much pain and too little silence in the world of ordinary people.

  I watched him in the library startled by the beauty of what he read in forgotten texts Greek, Egyptian, and Persian. I watched him standing in the observatory tower stunned by the beauty of the night sky or gazing across fallow fields under bright sunshine and passing rain, dreaming.

  But dreaming of what? I was so much less a merlin now I could not say.

  I watched him howl with joy when he and the monks in the fields, stripped nearly naked at their work under a burning sun, heard Kay on his far hilltop smash sword against shield as warning. I saw the monk on lookout run through the fields gesticulating wildly in place of speech.

  Arthur and the monks with him cheered without speaking as they unslung their war clubs and ran in frightening silence, like tongue-less men, toward the blue-faced Scots raiders, smashed them and drove them back into their dank forests.

  I saw Arthur trail the monks back to their fields, sweating and happy for a change in the plodding daily routine. Until he realized the terror and pain of ordinary women and men for holding onto their small bits of life.

  I watched Arthur there in the field marveling at this new understanding, at all he now understood about ordinary life, about the needs, hungers, and frights of the everyday people who fill up every kingdom of the Earth and who are too often ignored by heroes and kings.

  Of the need to look within himself and to measure himself against the uses of life to become what he had to become.

  Even at my distance from the monastery, I could hear the irritating tintinnabulation of the bell marking the speaking hour. I saw a flash of Arthur’s impatience for what he knew came next. I saw the abbot wipe battle mire from his war club and rush to Arthur, desperate to continue the conversation interrupted the day before, as all their previous conversations had been interrupted, by the silence bell.

  Passing rain rinsed battle-dust from Arthur and washed impatience from his face. After piling up so much understanding of so many ordinary things, of learning to measure himself, Arthur now realized that affectionate conversation is at the heart of all human creatures, and must be for their king, as well.

  The abbot saw all this, as well, and was too startled to speak.

  Arthur said to him, with sudden affection for the talk-hungry man, “You’ve taught me all I can learn here, Father Abbot, more than enough for any king.”

  Arthur tossed aside his working tools and his war club, clasped the abbot in farewell, and climbed the hilltop toward Kay’s lookout.

  Here, now and at last, was the whole Arthur.

  I shouted my victory cry but it came out as weeping joy.

  He was the king I wanted but he was not the king I expected.

  He was a better man.

  Arthur heard my happy weeping. He looked out at me from across Britain.

  He said, Do you feel it, too, Merlin?

  Then he said aloud into the world, “The age has begun to change. I feel the vibrations of it beneath my feet. Camelot is coming near. Every day merlins are evaporating from the Earth, sucked away into the cold emptiness between the stars. The age is coming when we won’t need them. You too must leave this world, Mother. I will be desperately unhappy without you but I’ve finished myself and you can go. You must go.”

  Chapter 6 – The Brutus Stone

  It was dawn before I, with waning powers and my screaming shield, could bring myself and Herald Percival to the hilltop occupied by Kay overlooking the abbey and monastery of Fleem.

  Kay raised his feathered spear and shouted, “God’s welcome!”

  I looked at the man, weathered down through a year’s exposure to a hard nub of a warrior, his armor so burnished I could see in it my own young woman’s face and my glossy red hair, three fat braids of it falling below my waist. I was moving toward age eighteen. Time is a traitor no matter in which direction.

  We saw now the dust trails of two bands riding in from opposite corners of the Island – Bedivere from Cornwall and Lucan from York
, with their followers. When we were all gathered on the ridgeline, after kisses and shouts and wine, we sat down to gaze at the monastery in the valley below, watchers at a never-before-seen spectacle.

  “It’s noon,” Bedivere said, wiping off his wine sweat, the sun hot on his armor.

  Falcons dived and shrieked over the monastery. The hour bell rang for meal and speaking. Monks tramped in from the fields to their soup buckets.

  Arthur came up our hill, leaving the abbot watching him from the field. He walked through the orchards, tasting the season’s first fruit. He scuffed the earth to test it for moistness. Kicked aside an offending rock.

  He stripped off the last of his monkish clothes, kicked away his monk’s sandals. All he wore was a crude wooden crucifix on his chest and a leather pack slung over one shoulder.

  Sudden rain. Arthur put out his arms and let it rinse from him his monkish life.

  The two slaves Arthur had brought into the monastery drove a cart out of a shed and followed him. On the cart was the Round Table, gleaming gold, bright as a new sun captured and brought to Earth.

  Arthur said to his war band, “Are you all still my loving brothers-and-sisters-in-arms?”

  “We are,” cried Bedivere. “In war and peace or whatever else you want.”

  “And you, Mother?” he said, laughing at my youthful eighteen years, now so much younger than he.

  I kissed him, weeping for the loss of my son to adulthood, to a throne, to a desperately hard age.

  He wiped my tears and whispered, in his soul’s voice, To the last moment you are with me, I am your son.

  Then he said aloud, “Here they come.”

  My soul-vision no longer could see the distance Arthur saw.

  “Who comes?” I said.