by Ben Bova
His blow shattered my shield. It simply cracked apart, half of it flying off into the crowd, the other half hanging useless from my arm. The force of the blow staggered me; my whole arm went numb. My own swing bounced harmlessly off his shield.
“Ha!” he roared, rushing toward me as I stumbled back.
I ducked beneath his swing and wedged my sword against the inside of his shield. Then I jabbed the point of the blade into his ribs. There was little force in my thrust, and the blade slid harmlessly against his chain mail.
But for the first time in our fight, Ogier backed up. The crowd went “Ooh!”
For a moment we stood facing each other, chests heaving, arms heavy. I tossed away the remnant of my shield. Past Ogier’s imposing form I could see Morganna smiling.
“So you’re ready to fight now?” he taunted me.
I said nothing, waiting for his next attack.
He sprang at me with another powerful overhand swing. I gripped my sword in both hands and parried his blade with a mighty clang that rang off the courtyard walls. The force of his blow buckled my knees, but I managed to back away and regain my balance.
Ogier came forward with still another overhand cut. This time I dodged it and swung two-handed at the haft of his blade, close to the hilt. My blow ripped the sword from his hand; it went spinning through the air and landed on the ground a good ten feet from where we stood.
The courtyard fell absolutely silent. Ogier stood for an instant, staring down at his sword on the dusty ground. Then he looked at me. I saw what was in his eyes. He realized that I could have just as easily taken off his hand, severed it at the wrist.
I stepped back and allowed him to pick up his sword. He hefted it, as if testing to see if it were still whole and sharp. Then he advanced upon me again, but not so wildly this time. Now he was grimly determined to finish me off.
Holding his shield before him, Ogier moved warily toward me, swishing his sword in swift circles over his head. The shield covered him from knees to eyes. He was taking no chances against me now.
I backed away for several steps, thinking rapidly, trying to find a weakness, an opening. From another life I remembered a martial arts instructor urging me, “Your enemy cannot strike without exposing himself to a counterstrike. Be alert. Be prepared. Use your enemy’s strength to conquer him.”
Suddenly Ogier roared like a bull and charged at me, ready to use his shield as a battering ram. I dropped to the ground and took his legs out from under him with a rolling block. He fell like a giant oak tree, landing facedown on his shield.
I planted one foot on his sword arm and knelt my other leg on the small of his back. Ripping off his golden-crowned helmet, I pointed my sword at the nape of his neck.
“Yield, my lord,” I shouted, “or I shall be obliged to cut off your head.”
Ogier had no desire to lose his head. “I yield,” he said, his voice quavering.
7
We were not completely out of danger. That night Ogier feasted us, and Lancelot had to accept the plaudits of one and all as an invincible champion. He looked embarrassed, which everyone took to be humility, the kind of modesty that becomes a true knight.
We dared not eat anything except the sizzling meat of the boar that we saw being roasted on a huge spit in the great hall’s fireplace. Nor would any of Arthur’s men drink anything except water, by his command. He’d had enough of poison.
Ogier ate and drank mightily, but he seemed to have aged twenty years since the morning. He looked thinner, slower, his eyes red-rimmed and watery. Have Aten and Aphrodite already removed whatever it was that made the old Dane so youthful? I wondered.
He agreed good-naturedly that he would return to Denmark and never darken Britain’s shores again.
“If you have knights like young Lancelot in your service,” he said to Arthur as they sat side by side at the long dining table, “then I will keep my army in Denmark and harry the Frisians and Saxons there.”
Arthur smiled graciously. I thought that Ogier’s harrying would only lead to more Frisians and Saxons crossing the sea to Britain, but I was satisfied that the Danes would not invade.
Morganna sat at Ogier’s other side, smiling mysteriously through the entire evening. That worried me. She did not appear to be angry or frustrated that her plot to kill Arthur had failed. She smiled like the Sphinx, like someone who is willing to wait for long ages to accomplish her goal.
The next morning, as we were ready to saddle up and leave Bernicia for the long trek back to Cadbury castle, Morganna came into the sun-drenched courtyard to say farewell to Arthur. Several of her ladies accompanied her.
“Will you go to Denmark with your husband?” Arthur asked bluntly.
Again that Sphinx-like smile. “No, I will stay here. This is my home, not some rude swamp across the sea.”
“But what of Ogier, then?”
“What of him?” she replied carelessly. “He is old and will die soon. He serves me no purpose anymore.”
Arthur shook his head. Then he fixed Morganna with a hard stare. “You wanted to see me killed.”
“I will dance on your grave one day, Arthur.”
He seemed more saddened than alarmed. “What have I done to earn such hatred?”
Morganna smiled again and beckoned to one of her waiting ladies. The woman bore an infant, asleep in a bundle of swaddling clothes.
“This is what you’ve done,” said Morganna, taking the baby in her arms.
Arthur gaped at the child.
“He is your son, Arthur. I will raise him to hate you as much as I do.”
“But Morganna,” he pleaded, “you mustn’t—”
“I will, Arthur. He will know that you are his father and he will hate you with every fiber of his being.”
Arthur simply stared at her, uncomprehending, bewildered.
“I’ve named him Modred,” she said, her smile turning truly evil. “He will be the instrument of your doom.”
Yes, I thought. Aphrodite and Aten and the other Creators would not rest until they had destroyed Arthur. They had all the time they needed to put their hateful plans into action. Could I protect Arthur all through those long years?
I vowed that I would.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Wroxeter and Cameliard
1
As we left Bernicia and threaded our way back through Hadrian’s Wall, a messenger from Cadbury castle galloped breathlessly to us. The news from the south was not good. The High King, Ambrosius Aurelianus, had fallen ill. And Merlin had disappeared.
After trouncing the wild tribes of the north and staving off an invasion threatened by the Danes in Bernicia, we were heading south again, seeking to escape the worst of the long, cold, wet, and dreary northern winter.
Arthur seemed more upset about Merlin’s disappearance than Ambrosius’ illness.
“He told me in my dream that he was leaving me,” Arthur muttered as the two of us clopped along the Roman road, well ahead of all the others.
I rode alongside him, and saw the worry that etched his youthful face.
“I need him, Orion,” he said. “How can I get along without his advice, his guidance?”
Knowing that Merlin was actually one of the Creators, meddling in the affairs of mortals in this placetime, I replied, “Perhaps, my lord, he knows that you are now able to make your own decisions, that you no longer need his guidance.”
“But—”
“Perhaps this is Merlin’s way of telling you that you can stand on your own feet now.”
Arthur shook his head. “I wish I could believe that, Orion.”
“Believe it, my lord,” I said, “because it is true.”
Southward we plodded: knights, squires, footmen, churls, and camp followers, long lines of men mounted and afoot, of horses and oxcarts, slowly winding our way through the bare trees and brown hills of the empty countryside toward the warmer clime of the south and Ambrosius’ great stone castle at Cadbury.
Tw
ice we were attacked, not by invading barbarians but by our own Celtic people, brigands who fell upon small groups of our men when they were foraging or hunting, isolated from the main column.
Lancelot was leading a small hunting party, scouring the hilly countryside for game to bring back to the cook pots, when bandits tried to ambush us. Arthur had commanded me to go with Lancelot because I had gained a reputation as a good hunter. My namesake, Orion, was famed as a hunter. We were afoot, looking for signs of deer, when they came screaming fiercely out of the woods, armed with swords and staves.
One of the squires went down while the others ran back toward Lancelot, who already had his sword in hand. The youngest of Arthur’s knights, barely old enough to have the wisp of a beard starting on his chin, Lancelot must have looked like an inexperienced boy to the bandits. What a mistake!
He stood his ground, without shield or helmet, as the squires ran back toward him. I stood at his side, grasping my own sword, every nerve in my body tingling with the anticipation of battle. I had been created to be a warrior, and my senses speeded up whenever needed for the fight.
But there was no need for that this day. Lancelot waited until the bandits were almost upon him, then drove forward like a hurricane of death. Almost faster than my eyes could follow he cut down the first two brigands that reached him. His sword was a blur as he hacked the life out of two more. Four of them tried to circle behind him, but I slashed the arm off one of them and the others turned and ran.
It was all finished in a few heartbeats. Lancelot stood among the corpses, his sword dripping blood, not even breathing hard.
Arthur was not happy with our report.
“Britons attacked you?” he asked Lancelot.
“Aye, my lord. Hungry men, from the looks of them. God knows this countryside has been picked bare. There isn’t a deer or even a boar anywhere around here.”
Arthur rubbed his bearded chin. “If they’re starving they’ll attack again. We’ll have to be on our guard each step of the way.”
2
Lean, gray-faced Friar Samson rode beside Arthur each morning, praising his victories as God’s will and urging Arthur to cleanse the land of the pagan invaders. Arthur listened respectfully, even though Samson could become pompous in his pronouncements. On the morning after still another bandit attack, after patiently listening to Samson’s droning lecture, Arthur asked the priest to see to the souls of the footmen trudging along the trail behind us.
The friar’s gaunt face flashed anger for a moment, then he meekly bowed his tonsured head and turn his horse back away from the knights. Samson looked nothing like his namesake: he was almost painfully thin, and his withered body was as bent and twisted as a man twice his age.
Gawain trotted up beside Arthur. “Had enough of piety for one cold morning, eh?”
Arthur said nothing.
“Why so downcast?” asked Gawain, riding alongside Arthur. “Those bandits were nothing more than a pack of knaves, Britons or no.”
“Hungry knaves,” Arthur replied glumly. “Look at the land around us.”
I could see what he meant. For many days we had ridden through devastation. Since the Romans had abandoned Britain, barbaric invaders from across the seas had invaded the island, burning, raping, looting, killing. Towns that had once been peaceful and prosperous were now blackened with fire, abandoned, their people flown or dead. Farm fields stood bleak and fallow, abandoned by peasant and lord alike. The land lay gray and barren, crushed by the endless raiding and looting.
The countryside was so bare that Arthur had to split his army into four separate columns as we worked our way southward, so that we could find some fodder for our mounts. The foragers came back to camp each night with meager pickings; many days they found nothing at all. Even I, mighty hunter that I had been created to be, could find only an occasional half-starved rabbit. Deer and larger game had long since been devoured.
What was even worse than the invading Saxons and Jutes and Angles was the fact that each petty Celtic king made war against the kings around him. Where once they had given at least a nominal obeisance to Ambrosius Aurelianus as High King, now they fought each other while the invading barbarians established their own kingdoms along the coasts.
“I had thought to drive out the barbarians,” Arthur said so softly that I—riding behind him as a squire should—could barely hear his somber voice.
“We will,” said Gawain lightly. “Next spring, once the weather clears.”
“And who will till the fields?” Arthur asked bitterly. “Who will build new houses? Who will make the land green and prosperous again?”
Gawain laughed. “That’s peasants’ work, not fit for a knight to dirty his hands with.”
Gawain spurred his mount and trotted up ahead, to where Lancelot was riding point, alert now for ambushers along the trail, leaving Arthur to plod along in somber silence.
“I wish Merlin were here,” he muttered, more to himself than me.
“You don’t need Merlin anymore, my lord,” I said, nosing my mount to trot alongside him on his right, the side that would be unprotected by his shield in battle.
“Perhaps not,” he said, with a rueful smile. “But I’d feel better if he were here.”
We would not beat the winter, I realized. Later in the day it began to snow softly, quietly, as the pale sun dipped low behind the silver-gray clouds that had blanketed the sky all afternoon. Silently the wet flakes drifted down through the calm, cold air, frigid as death. I have never liked snow, not since I had been killed by a cave bear in the bone-cracking cold of the Ice Age, many lifetimes ago.
“We’ll have to camp up there,” Arthur said, standing in his stirrups and pointing to a grove of deeply green yews off to the side of the trail. The woods climbed up the slope of the hills. A good place for an ambush, I thought.
That evening we were attacked again. Most of the knights and squires were dismounted, huddled around meager fires, shivering in their jerkins and cloaks as they waited for the evening meal.
“Where’s the cook wagons?” Sir Bors growled. “They should be here by now.”
Arthur turned to me. “Find them and hurry them here, Orion.”
With an obedient nod I replied, “Yes, my lord.”
Yet I did not like to leave Arthur’s side. I knew that Aten and others among the Creators were plotting his death, and I had vowed to protect the young Dux Bellorum.
Ambrosius was dying, if the word from the south could be believed. Many among the knights were already muttering among themselves that Arthur should be the next king. That is why Aten wanted him killed.
I rode my tired steed through the dark, snowy evening, searching for the kitchen train that should have caught up with the main body of our column an hour ago.
I saw the flicker of flames through the black boles of the leafless trees. Urging my mount forward, I began to hear the shouts and curses of men fighting. And dying.
The kitchen wagons were strung along the trail, two of them ablaze, churls and cooks desperately trying to defend themselves against men attacking from both sides of the trail. Most of the kitchen workers were huddled beneath the wagons, a few on their roofs, fighting with knives and meat hooks, swinging heavy iron pots like clubs, using whatever they could lay their hands on as weapons.
My senses shifting into overdrive, I drew my sword and spurred my horse into a charge. I saw that the attackers were hardly better armed than their victims. They looked to be young men, boys even, fighting with staves and hunting knives for the most part. A few of them had bows, and they were standing off to the far side of the trail, trying to pick off the men fighting from atop the wagons.
With the loudest, most ferocious yell I could muster I charged the bowmen. They whirled to face me. To my hyperalert senses their movements seemed sluggish, listless, like men moving through molasses. In the lurid light of the flaming wagons I saw their eyes widen as I charged at them. Two of them pulled arrows from the quivers at the
ir hips and began to pull their bow strings back.
They both got off their shots before I could reach them. I saw the arrows floating lazily through the snowy air, spinning as they flew. I had neither shield nor helmet with me, even my coat of chain mail lay bundled in the pack behind my saddle. The first arrow I flicked away with my sword but the second hit my horse in the neck. I felt him stumble as I swung one leg over the saddle and leaped to the ground a scant few feet in front of the bowmen.
They were all nocking arrows, but they were far too slow to save themselves. I slashed into them, my sword ripping the nearest one into a geysering fountain of blood. The next one fell, his head severed from his shoulders, and the others dropped their bows and ran.
I turned to the footmen battling the kitchen help hand to hand. They were totally unprepared for a swordsman, and I was no ordinary fighter. Within minutes they were running, howling, into the snow-filled night.
The men who had ducked under the wagons scrambled out now and got to their feet. Friar Samson was among them, his rough homespun robe caked with snow and dirt.
“God has sent us a deliverer!” he cried. Despite his frail body he spoke with a voice powerful enough to fill a cathedral. “On your knees, all of you, and give thanks!”
I said nothing, but I thought of Aten and the other self-styled gods. If Samson knew that they were deciding his fate, playing with the human race the way mortals play at chess, I wonder what he would think of his God?
Once up from their knees, the kitchen men turned into fierce warriors now that the enemy was beaten, and began to cheerfully slit the throats of the poor fools who lay in the snow wounded and too weak to defend themselves. Friar Samson ignored the slaughter, but I stopped them, yanking one of the butchers off the back of a screaming, crying boy who could have been no more than twelve or thirteen.
“We’ll march these prisoners back to Arthur,” I commanded. “Let him decide their fate.”