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

by Maples, Kit

  I called Dunwallo the Seatless for blessings on the marching centuries. He wrapped his rosary chain around his war club for a more perfect weapon and waded into the Saxon army, shouting absolution for all Britons dying today.

  Dubric’s three remaining sons tied themselves to their father to steer him in the fighting, the old man shaking his feathered spears and shouting insults in Saxon.

  Rufus, running alongside me, cried, “I’d begun to think him too much a man and too little a prince to be a king. I was wrong!”

  Rufus banged his gladius on his shield and shouted his war cry.

  An eagle swooped over the battle line, croaked at Arthur, and darted up into the white-blue and suddenly rainless sky.

  “What did it tell you, King?” warriors cried.

  “‘Victory!’” Arthur shouted.

  He whipped Excalibur overhead and the sword sang its name.

  The army cheered again and charged into Cheldric’s startled vanguard.

  Hack and smash. Cut down the scouts. Cut down the trees that hid the next uprunning Saxons. The Breton and York cavalry riding down the enemy’s flanks cutting up refugees staggering out of battle. Swing Excalibur in looping arcs, letting the lengthening steel reach out to cut through forest and field until Excalibur opened a hole like a funnel into the center of Cheldric’s legions. The Britons poured down the funnel, hacking and clubbing left and right, shoving deeper into the mass of unhappy Saxons disorganized in stumbling over the trees Excalibur felled.

  Arthur’s war band hacked through flesh and metal to find the enemy prince to kill him. But Cheldric could not be found and killed, and the forest-gloomy Saxons threw the Britons back into the open field.

  Saxons scrambled for higher ground and there formed wedges to defend all sides.

  “What kind of battle formation is that?” Arthur cried.

  “Something too intelligently new for a Cheldric,” said Rufus.

  My screaming shield said out of the clatter of blows it was taking, “Look there, Merlin and Arthur!”

  The Saxons raised a battle standard higher than Cheldric’s standard. It was a simple emblem of an unknown animal rampant.

  “Is that Colgrin’s mark?” I said.

  “Must I fight him today, too?” cried Arthur.

  “No,” said Rufus, grimly, “because Cheldric’s fifty thousand alone can carry this battle all day and night and still not have all his troops assembled on the field when we at dawn are dead.”

  Bedivere and Kay, battered black and blue, dragging a wreckage of shields and armors, staggered to Arthur to report, Bedivere saying, “Cheldric has the greatest warriors of Saxonia with him and too many more pouring in from the forest.”

  “How many have I lost?” said Arthur.

  “Half of every century.”

  “Too bad so many men must die to train a king in war,” said Rufus, fiercely.

  “What would you have me do, Roman?” said Arthur.

  “Be Scipio at Zama again.”

  “With this remnant of an army?”

  “You’ve your full cavalry. Send Lancelot and Lucan around the flanks as Scipio did. Draw off the Saxon cavalry – far, far off, too far to return to the fight in time.”

  “In time for what?”

  “For night.”

  “It’s scarcely hora duodecima. You expect us to fight another two hours?” said Arthur.

  “I expect us to fight through duodecima tomorrow if we don’t finish it now.”

  “No battle was ever fought that long!”

  “No king has ever before made a miracle in Britain, Arthur, but look what you’ve done – you have Britons who love nothing more than fighting other Britons fighting side-by-side for Britain.”

  Arthur shouted, “Trumpets, call to me Lancelot and Lucan!”

  He gave them his orders and they clattered away to peel the cavalry from Cheldric’s army.

  “Now,” Arthur said, wiping bloody battle mire from Excalibur, “I’ll follow Scipio’s formula into the direct assault.”

  “Be more subtle,” Rufus said. “You haven’t a tenth of the army or the quality of Scipio’s legions, so be Marc Antony. Better, be Uther being Marc Antony! Send your legions in howling berserk rage up the center to kill Cheldric quickly while your flanks pincer in on him.”

  Arthur shouted his orders and ran cutting into the Saxon battle line, the British army following, haggard, starved but cheering for their king and for themselves.

  Arthur led us running up the high ground onto Cheldric’s command hill with such momentum that we surged over the enemy’s half-dug earthworks to trample the Saxons and stab down their war horses, throwing up the cumbering logs and branches of the fortress, and flinging Saxons off the hill and onto peasant spikes and skewers waiting for them in the valley below.

  We found Cheldric at his stewpots raising burnt British bones as offerings to his pagan gods, his chief generals clustered around him drinking their sour beer, slapping the rumps of immense concubines and drunkenly cheering on their lieutenants leading the fight.

  Arthur with Excalibur and I with the Brittany greatsword cheered our war cries and rioted among the generals until we were gaudy with their blood and Arthur’s red dragon helmet was clotted with enemy flesh.

  Cheldric cried in his gabbling Saxon, “Thor, save me!”

  Arthur chopped down Cheldric’s standard and it was like lancing a boil. The Saxon poison ran away from the battlefield in all directions.

  Britons cheered for sport in chasing Saxons to cut them down from behind.

  Cheldric raised his double headed battle ax and cried in bad Latin, “I’m less easy to chop than my standard, Prince, name yourself before you die!”

  “Arthur, King of the Britons!”

  “I am Cheldric, King of Britain!”

  Cheldric slapped closed his helmet and swung the battle ax. It crashed into unbreakable Pridwen and rebounded, throwing Cheldric off balance, startling him into a cowardly scream.

  Arthur swung Excalibur to cut out the ground from under Cheldric’s feet and the immense Saxon fell, tumbling downhill with his battle ax, spilling Saxon warriors, Arthur stalking him, shielding off Saxons, slashing them with Excalibur, carving an avenue through the battle to Duke Cheldric.

  “‘Lord King of Britain,’” Arthur said to him, “I’ll give you seven feet of British soil as your kingdom or a bit more as you’re bigger than any ordinary cannibal. But first I’ll carve out of your bowels the blood and bones of the Britons on whom you’ve feasted!”

  “I yield!” Cheldric threw away his broken battle ax and threw himself at Arthur’s feet, arms out as though crucified.

  Cheldric, hugging Arthur’s knees and weeping trails through the British blood on his face, cried, “Make me your prince, Great King, I’ll serve you against the Saxons! I’ve fifty thousand warriors for you!”

  I said, “Can you count, Pagan? The fields and forest are full of slaughter. The Britons are stamping across Saxon corpses to cut off their sword arms so they won’t have the use of them in Paradise.”

  With their duke surrendered, thousands of Saxons threw down their weapons and fled. More thousands cowered beneath the heaped dead praying for night so they could creep away home.

  Cheldric cried, “Spare me, King, for my wives and babes. Or you can have them, if you want.”

  Bedivere pried Cheldric’s arms from around Arthur’s knees.

  “Let me cut off his head and prong it on your standard for Saxons to know their true Weird, Arthur,” Bedivere said.

  Night fell, startling Bedivere out of his plan.

  A streak of stars appeared – the Milky Way running toward the Moon.

  Arthur jerked Cheldric’s head up to look at the streaming stars. “Do you believe as we do that every light up there is a soul departing Earth for the Moon?”

  “The Moon?” said Cheldric. “Yes, yes, that makes sense!”

  “Not Valhalla?”

  “Whatever you say, Merciful Ki
ng.”

  “Screw off every toe and finger,” said Arthur to Rufus.

  “Screw them off?” cried Cheldric. “Oh, pity me, all you gods. Do we really have to do this, King? I’ll be a Christian. I’m ready to convert!”

  Cheldric began to scream even before Rufus applied his Roman screws and twists.

  “Next, we’ll hook your ears to horsetails and pull your head open,” Arthur to Cheldric “and fill your skull with brine and the worms that eat the dead in their graves. So we can give you the benefit of being one of those stars swarming toward the Moon.”

  Cheldric cried out of his pain, “Great gods, I’ll become a Christian just like you! A pacifist. I’ll be the slave to scour your latrines!”

  We heard the Britons camped among the dead began a victory songfest despite the ullaloo of weeping Saxon women scouring the field. We heard the night ravens sent by Morrigu to peck off hands to carry away across Britain to their flesh-hungry broods.

  “My poor army!” Cheldric moaned. “Oh, poor me!”

  “Screw off his arms and legs, too,” Arthur said to Rufus.

  “No need, holy King!” cried Cheldric. “I’m a defeated man. An instant Christian. I feel Holy Jesu in my soul already. I’m a true soldier of King Arthur! Show me a cross to kiss or sacrificial blood to drink and I’m your most loyal duke. I’m your vassal duke to the end of time. I’d throw myself at your feet, Dear Merciful King and Emperor of my Soul, if your pet Roman hadn’t just crippled all my fingers and toes.”

  “A kiss is enough.”

  “A kiss!” cried Cheldric, suddenly terrified of the magic permanence and soul-tearing threat of a promise sealed with a kiss.

  “Kiss or die,” said Rufus, readying his leg-tearing tools.

  Cheldric kissed Arthur.

  “Say it out into the world,” said Arthur.

  “Seal a kiss with words?” said Cheldric, even more terrified at the power of a world-spoken oath. But he shouted, “I am vassal to Lord Arthur forever!”

  “To the end of life?” said Rufus, clattering and snapping his tools.

  “To the end,” said Cheldric, now completely defeated.

  He stared in gloom across the battlefield at the body-robbers and the wailing women figured against flaming torchlight.

  Arthur said to him, “Get out of my country. Take your last Saxons and go.”

  “Go where?” said Cheldric, astonished. “I’m oathed to you forever. I have no place to go. I’m an outlaw to the Saxons. My own army will kill me for a traitor! Better if you’d taken my wives and babes from me than my country.”

  “Go back to the grim forest muck from which you crawled,” said Arthur, “or I’ll have my Roman screw off every part of you to feed the pigs.”

  Cheldric hobbled away hastily, howling for the few warriors still loyal to him to carry him home to Saxonia.

  * * *

  The Round Tablers reorganized and rearmed Arthur’s army from the weapons, armors, and arrows of slaughtered Saxons. We waited out the night on the high ground. Night faded. Victory singing and ale-drinking ceased. Every warrior squatted at his station, ready, watching. Dawn ran up out of the distant forest. No Saxons came running out of the trees with it. All Cheldric’s army had fled away.

  Arthur said, “Lancelot, take half the cavalry and scour the woods for Saxons. Be quick.”

  Arthur turned from the dawn sun and led to the camp where Guenevere had stationed herself with her lifeguards and Arthur’s sons.

  I followed him, not thinking anything. Startled that I had not been thinking, I tried to think. I wondered what I should be thinking. But I dreamed of the clean chill of dawn and the hope of blood-bursting combat in the hours ahead. Of the glory to follow drinking and cheering around a campfire made of Saxon bones.

  Arthur pulled back the cart’s cowhide covering the boys, the queen awake and armed beside them. He kissed each of them.

  “Here,” he said to me, “is your Camelot, Mother.”

  “Them?” I said. “This?” I said, trying to goose my liver into understanding.

  “You talk like a Moses who never saw the Promised Land,” Guenevere said to me.

  Arthur squatted by a campfire where Bretons had begun their morning gruel. He and I ate the paste hot from a corner of his shield, Arthur eating daintily with the spoon hung among the fringe of his leather skirt and me with my fingers in the old-fashioned way.

  I said, “What do we do if Lancelot finds Cheldric’s army still out there?”

  “Harder to know what to do if we find him gone.”

  In my deepening youth and feeble understanding, Arthur seemed a poet to me.

  Lancelot galloped upslope, shouting, “They’ve gone! The Saxons are gone!”

  He jumped off his horse and landed on his feet, sword and shield in his hands. He was delirious with joy.

  “I see their dust trailing south,” said Lancelot. “To the Isle of Thanet, to their longships and the sea, say their stragglers, hauling their heart-broken duke with them.”

  No hope for more happy battle today, I thought, suddenly discontent. But the army clustering around cheered.

  Arthur passed the ale horn and called for Bedivere. “Tell them to take my shield Pridwen and paint Thor’s eagle on its face, over Dunwallo’s red cross.”

  “A Saxon eagle on Arthur’s shield?” I said, appalled, wiping ale from my chin. “Lord God, what for?”

  Bedivere laughed at me and said, “Why, ‘Old Mother,’ to celebrate yesterday’s victory over fifty thousand Saxons.”

  Lancelot, joining our gruel feast off Arthur’s shield, said, “In Saxon, ‘Ar-thur’ is ‘Thor’s Eagle.’ Let the Pagans see their god each time they stroke the king’s shield with their battle axes and they’ll tremble for it.”

  I laughed. “What a delicious cruelty!”

  “Just brave enough for a king whose victories are too near defeats,” said Rufus.

  Arthur gathered his sleeping sons into his arms. “We’ll celebrate Christmas in York this year, my sons,” he said to them.

  “That’s most of a year away,” I said.

  “That’s when I’ll be crowned emperor of the whole Island.”

  “You’ll conquer the Saxons in less than a year?”

  Arthur put down his sons and went to his horse. “We go west.”

  “What do we do in the west?” I said.

  “Have you really become as simple as you sound, Mother?” said Arthur.

  “I probably have.”

  “Duke Horst has gone west to brother himself to the Picts and Scots. He’s gathering a hundred thousand blue-faced murderers. With his battle ax Morgengrabe he’ll make himself their king instead of me. Let’s go fight him.”

  Arthur drew Excalibur from the stone into which he had driven it, got on his war horse and galloped west.

  Bedivere and Lucan came up the hill. “Are we to follow him, Lady Merlin? Is it to be eternal warfare for us?”

  “Until Arthur finds his Camelot,” I said, leaping onto my horse. “Or wherever his wandering, conquering spirit leads him.”

  I cheered and galloped merrily after Arthur.

  * * *

  The weeks Arthur rode west, carrying Excalibur lighting the road for his army or riding with his sons on his knees, were like the gathering-in of the nation. Warriors, peasant-fighters, and refugees with a hundred Island languages and accents came out of the countryside to join the army. The aboriginal kings and queens of the territories through which we passed sent Arthur emissaries with gifts of swords and knights. Antique Roman counts sent him retired Legionaries to stiffen the army.

  Vagabond knights and the adventurous sons of foreign kings hailed him their chief and begged Arthur to read the Round Table for their insignia and take them into his war band. Some others were sent by lords and ladies who believed it better to ally themselves with rather than against a prince who held the World Sword.

  Arthur accepted them all but it was my task as his merlin to separate the hones
t from the rogues and traitors.

  I hauled a weathered fighter to Arthur squatting at his noonday campfire, eating venison and debating with Rufus the meaning of an old Roman map. For Rome, maps were state secrets and this one was written in a code beyond Rufus’ experience.

  “Here’s a natural traitor I won’t have in your party, Arthur,” I said, shoving the man into a squat across the fire from the king.

  “Name yourself,” Arthur said to the man.

  “I’m Fyfas, itinerant trainer of gladiators. Give me meat, King.”

  Arthur tossed him a chunk of his own meat.

  “Fyfas who learned his craft under the First Caesar, by the gray in your beard,” I said.

  “Nearly, Lady Girl Whoever You Are.”

  Fyfas ate with manners as nice as Percival’s, wiping his hands on the grass between bites.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Arthur said to me. “He has a strong sword arm. Why should I lose even one of those?”

  “An eagle spoke to me, King,” Fyfas said, speaking for himself.

  Rufus said, “When do eagles speak to ordinary men?”

  “That eagle spoke to me,” Fyfas said, gesturing at Arthur’s shield painted with Thor’s eagle. “It told me a message for its king.”

  “Why doesn’t Arthur’s shield speak to Arthur,” I said, “rather than you?”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m just an ignorant old gladiator.”

  “What’s the message?” said Arthur.

  “Give me ale, King.”

  Fyfas drank and said, “You’re invited to a place called ‘the crooked glen.’”

  “What’s there?” I said.

  “A wrecked village,” said Fyfas. “It was a flashing sort of speaking-seeing dream. I didn’t get much of it.”

  Fyfas said to Arthur, alarmed, “I’m only the messenger, King, you aren’t going to treat me like a Greek, are you?”

  “No crucifixion for you,” Arthur said, distracted.

  He shouted, “Merlin!”

  “King!” I said, startled, “I’m here!”

  “What’s ‘crooked glen’ in the old language of the Giants who raised the stone henges?”

  I kicked Fyfas. “What does it mean? You’re a countryman here…”